This week, in person and in writing, Gord was tearing into the Canadian business community for its poor record on adopting online advertising and especially search visibility tactics. This is juxtaposed with the Canadian people’s world-leading Internet usage. This theme’s been rolling now for a couple of years, statistically speaking, thanks to reports from companies like comScore, and now buttressed by survey research being disseminated by companies like Yahoo. In terms of quiet rants, it’s been out there since 2001 or so, since some of us began seeing the post-bubble surge of quiet interest in search as the most cost-effective direct marketing and public relations tool going… by our US-based clients, who moved quickly on the opportunity and kept us all busy with work. (It didn’t hurt that our dollar was very low, so we were low-cost providers who otherwise looked, quacked, and smelled like American consultants.)

Full story at WebProNews >>>

If you want to buy golf equipment for your golf vacations, you would fare better if you order everything from your golf shoes to bags, from reliable golf sites. This holds true for baseball as well as tennis.

Here is a layman’s quickie overview of how Google uses some of this data to rank sites and what small business owners can do.

In the most basic form, browsers do a keyword search on a search engine and a list of results. Browses click on one of the results, and a timer starts. If the browser comes back to the search results very quickly, it can be inferred that the browser didn’t find what they wanted and that information (site, keyword and a de-merit point) is factored into the ranking algorithms along with all the other factors.

The opposite is also true, where a browser clicks on a search result and then (apparently) finds what they want, which is inferred from the fact that they don’t return immediately to the SERPs page.

This is somewhat of a faulty assumption as all kinds of things could happen to explain why a browser didn’t return to the SERPs, but it does say something.

This is quite an over-simplified and general explanation but it does give a basic understanding of how this works.

What it means for website owners is clear:

1) You aren’t going to rank for keywords that aren’t relevant to your content. Now more than ever.
2) Make sure your site is what browsers are expecting to find. If you site doesn’t look like an adventure tourism site or an art gallery site, browsers will hit the back button.
2) The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Poorer. The sites that best serve the results that browsers are looking for will rise higher and the sites that don’t will sink to the bottom (other things being equal).

This gives a very clear message to website owners that is the same as ever — specialize in your niche and give visitors relevant content.

Beyond a simple timer, Google is very likely using much more intensive data in the same way. Google loves data and are one fo the few companies that really knows how to use it. Google’s free Analytics service collects massive amounts of data on keywords browsers use and how visitors interact with websites and many speculate this data is also being used.

Clearly though, Google is obsessed with visitor experience and so should every web site owner. Sign up for Google Analytics and watch how your visitors are interacting with your site and where they are clicking.

Not only will you increase your conversion rate, but help your search rankings as well.

From an antivirus software to other categories like 3d software, you can download software of all sizes if your cheap web hosting stands true to its word. Then cingular wireless has also contributed majorly to this. Now you don’t have to get the unreliable mobile phone software only because your hosting does not allow that size.

Spammers are trying to get links to their website by posting comments on Blogs to increase their link popularity. Whether the search engines actually pay attention and count the links from blogs is highly questionable. Almost certainly Google excludes these links, but MSN may count them and Yahoo probably counts a few of them.

Why do they keep doing it if they all get blocked?
Obviously nobody is checking or they would see right away their comments aren’t being posted. If they aren’t checking that probably means they aren’t doing it themselves and they can’t be paying whoever they have making the posts very much.

Looks like freelancers in China, Russia or India.

Submitting to Google local search is free and ranking is easy.

A recent study by comScore found:

63 percent of U.S. Internet users (or approximately 109 million people) performed a local search online in July, a 43-percent increase versus July of 2005.

Not only is local search increasing fast, the people that perform local searches are highly attractive to web merchants:

During the second quarter of 2006, 47 percent of local searchers visited a local merchant as a result of their search behavior, while 41 percent made contact offline. More than one-third (37 percent) made contact online as a result of conducting a local area search.

During the second quarter of 2006, 47 percent of local searchers visited a local merchant as a result of their search behavior, while 41 percent made contact offline. More than one-third (37 percent) made contact online as a result of conducting a local area search.

Why local search?
Local Search has been growing for a while and the reasons behind it make sense. If I am looking for a local merchant, or service, a website gives me a much richer experience than a yellow pages ad.

In addition, the only option a yellow pages ad gives me is to call, which I may not be prepared to do because I want to browse and check out other merchants first.

Combined with a marketing campaign targeting location keywords, you can get twice the real estate on the front page!

Something I have been noticing recently is sites jump in and out of the rankings for no apparent reason. Reading one of my favorities blogs recently BlueHatSEO, I found an article which goes into all the gory details of how Google handles fresh content.

Similar to BlueHatSEO, my sites would disappear completely from the Search Results, then appear a week or so later. I watched this several times, and the disappear/re-appear schedule was exactly in sync with the Google’s Cache date.

So what is going on here in plain language?

Google loves fresh content, but not too fresh it seems. And it gets more complicated. To understand that we have to look at some of the factors Google uses in ranking sites. Google uses the history of your site as one component in the ranking algorithm. Things like how long your site has been online, and how often it has been updated, and how big the updates have been, on average since the first day. As well, the history of other sites in your sector are analyzed and their update history and frequency are compared to your history.

All of this goes into the mix of several hundred factors that are used to assign rank. So, for example, if your site is never updated, and suddently you start updating every week, and the other sites in your sector are only updated every 3 months, then Google of course notices and your site is penalized. Once the next index cycle comes around, all of the averages have normalized to some extent and your site goes right back to where it was.

OK, so what to do? Here are some tips and guidelines to staying just fresh enough:

1) Look at your competition and see if you can find out how often they update. I just realized I was updating every week, after few updates over the last year, and my competition are all old sites that almost never update. Generally I am #3 for my target keywords, but I kept getting penalized for a week or so then back to #3 — all because my update schedule is out of sync with my competitors.

2) Work to a schedule of updates and stick to it. First, as in #1, figure out how often your competitors are updating and use that as your starting point. Next, work out a plan to gradually move toward more frequent updates, keeping the averages in mind. If everyone else is updating every 3 months, say, then start off with every 3 months, then every 2 then every month.

If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. You don’t have to do it yourself though, and can easily hire a freelance writer or hire a blog writer.

4) Consider other ways of using content besides updates. If everyone else in the top 10 is updating every 3 months, why work harder? Content can be used in dozens of ways. Use your content for syndication, or for email followup. Set up an auto responder that sends out 10 tips about _____, or a series of articles followed by a special promotional offer.

Organic and PPC

Media Post’s Search Insider recently did a great article on the advantages and dis-advantages of Organic Search vs. Pay Per Click

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=54507

Thanks to cingular wireless, we can enjoy all internet services while sitting in our porch and placing our wireless router with the phone. This has been largely made possible by the efficient service of midphase. There are antivirus firewall software arrangements too because of the chat software in our systems, increasing risk of viral threats. Reliable names should be purchased like microsoft office software and only the genuine copy.

Several webmasters, who have around 200 unique visitors per day, complained that they were making nothing from their sites. The commonly held view of traffic and profitability is that you need thousands or tens of thousands of visitors to make money online.

Here is a short list of some of the factors that go into making a website profitable.


1. Product price. If you are selling a service for $3000 – $5000 and you are a one person business, then you will need less traffic and fewer sales. If you are selling a CD for $10, then you are going to need a lot of traffic and sales.

2. Not all traffic is equal. The value of traffic depends on where it comes from and what the browsers expectations are. Generally search engine traffic is better than traffic from links, though there are exceptions. Browsers following highly targeted links from micro-niche sites can produce a very high conversions and sales.

Of the search engines, Google is generally seen as the most valuable, but it all depends on your product. A high ranking on Yahoo is very valuable as well. My experience with MSN is the browsers tend to want free stuff, rather than buying right away. Which is by no means a wasted effort — a specific marketing plan can be designed to capitalize on MSN traffic and free give-aways.

In some subject areas, especially technical and web related, syndicated articles drive a small amount of traffic which converts like crazy. In other areas, the results are very poor.

3. Conversion Rate This is the really big one which will boost your business day in and day out. Given 100 people that visit your website, how many browsers, convert in to customers? If you can increase the conversion rate, even by a small amount, it is money in your pocket everyday.

Recommended places to learn about Increasing your Conversion Rate:

101 Ways to increase conversion — This is a great primer for getting started.

Marketing Experiments Journal — This is a great resource with free workshops, certification programs, and archived workshops.

Future Now Inc. — These guys are the Conversion Gurus!

For certifications like 642-661 and 70-526, getting 70-529 before is a good idea. However, doing 70-547 as well as 70-551 will ensure one’s admission into the University of Phoenix.

Those are unfortunately the facts of life. Probably you can get some traffic from MSN and Yahoo in 4 – 6 months, but generally the traffic from Yahoo and MSN doesn’t convert as well.

So, what can small business owners do in the meantime, without a big budget, that will increase their visibility?

Here are a few suggestions:

1) Make sure your offline customers know about your website. Publish your URL everywhere.

2) Offer discounts to offline customers when they order online.

3) Who are the leaders in your niche online? Draw up a list and make sure they know about your site. Offer to exchange links, articles, or content. If they have forums or blogs, participate in the discussion.

4) Write articles and publish them everywhere. Use content syndication sites, as well as contacting webmasters and offering them ‘free’ content with a link back to you.

5) Contact friends, customers, suppliers (anybody) and make sure they know about your site and/or link to your new site.

6) Submit your content to social bookmarking sites. Do a search for “Social Bookmarking List” and open accounts and submit your content.
If you use a creditcard and are stuck in a debt problem, solving it by the way of credit card consolidation is not valid solution. Give priority to free business cards that comes at deals like fixed rate mortgages. Believe in timely investments like medical insurance. Abstain from giving into whims to just having a look at homes for sale when you know that you cannot afford it.

Webmasters try anything

Cooking the Search Engine Books

What the Search Engines want

The search engines make their money from advertising in the search results. To get browsers and keep them loyal and satisfied, the search engines must provide search results (SERPS) that are relevant to the keywords browsers use.

If you do a search on Google and don’t find what you want, or worse find all sorts of sites that are totally irrelevant to your search, you will try out another search engine, who will then make money by advertising to you.

If you want to rank for a keyword phrase, the best thing to do is build a site that is relevant to that keyword. The sites that do well are the sites that specialize and one thing very well.

Links

Links are important! Think about links as ‘knowing someone.’ A link from another site to your site means they ‘know’ you. Then think about your circle of friends — All the people that you know, have a link from you to them. Among your circle of friends, there is likely one person that everyone knows, or one person that has the most links pointing to them.

The analogy can be carried further. Most people have a circle of friends in a certain area, like fishing, hiking, work, cars, motorcycles or something like that. Within the fishing circle of friends say, there will be one or several people that stand out as people that everyone knows, and knows everyone. The are the ‘most linked’ in the fishing circle, because all the other people that know/link to them are interested in fishing.

Thinking about the web for a minute, if you know that all the people that know so-and-so are interested in fishing, then it is highly likely that so-and-so is also interested in fishing.

This is the kind of analysis that the search engines are doing with your site and sites that link to your site. You will be ranking high for fishing if you are linked to/known by the most people/websites.

Content
Like links, content is very important. In order to give browsers relevant results to their search, the search engines want original content, written by experts in their niche ( or micro-niche) that is updated frequently.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Part of the scoring system or algorithm the search engines use to rank sites is the content of the webpages on your site, also on on-page factors. This includes things like how many times your keywords phrase appears on the page, where on the page, the directory structure of your website and many other factors. Also of importance are related terms to your keyword phrase. For example, on a TV website, you would expect to find other related words such as news, schedule, etc.

Bad Boy Techniques – also called Black Hat. The search engines are machines which are very clever, but at the end of day, they can be fooled. There are a range of techniques and methods of spoofing the search engines to increase your rank. In general though, the techniques that spoof the search engines, only last so long, the search engines catch on, and the site is penalized or banned completely, and the site owner is back to square one.

There are professional people who launch numerous sites, get banned, launch more, get banned, on and on. Unless you are prepared to prepared to ride this kind of roller coaster, Black Hat and spoofing the search engines isn’t recommended for small businesses.

The Future of Search. The web is constantly changing and evolving. Once of the most interesting developments is Social Bookmarking sites. Here are some previous posts about Social Bookmarking and Web2.0:

From Web1 to Web2

Web2.0 and Social Bookmarking for Small Business