Posted on January 29, 2012 by Cindy Wilson
It's an update!
Enhancements or Detractions
Most businesses work hard for their customers. We aim to make our clients happy with the products and services we provide. This means we sometimes make exceptions, work extra hours to meet deadlines or provide extra personal time and training. But overall, we try to be consistent in what we do and when we have to make a change to a policy or procedure, we let our clients know about it.
Google doesn’t seem to work that way. We are amazed at how often tools, procedures and functionality just change without any notice. Sometimes it’s for the better such as the Google Ad Preview Tool discussed in a previous blog post. But most of the time, the change provides less functionality and just makes us frustrated. Within just the past few weeks, here are just a few of the different changes we’ve noticed:
Read the rest of this article »
Posted on December 22, 2011 by Cindy Wilson
If you advertise using Google AdWords, you want to know where your ad will be positioned and how it looks on the search results page. Typing your keyword into Google Search will allow you to do this. However there is a “cost” associated with this action, even when you don’t click on your ad. If you look at the page showing your ad, you generate an impression for your ad. When impressions go up but the number of clicks doesn’t, it reduces your Click-Through-Rate (CTR). A reduced CTR negatively impacts your Quality Score, which can cause Google to raise your Cost Per Click. But if you click on your ad, in order to improve your CTR, then you will have to pay for that click.
As an advertiser, you also may want to see how your ads appear in different locations, such as other parts of the country, or even in a different country.
In either situation, the best way to see your ad is to use a free tool that Google provides; an online tool aptly named the Google Ad Preview Tool. This tool allows you to “search for your ad just like you would on a regular Google search results page, without accruing any impressions.”
Read the rest of this article »
Posted on December 4, 2011 by Hans Riemer
For Google's eye only!
One of the most important things a Web Analytics tool can tell you is the keywords people are typing to find your website on the search engines. Lately, however, Google has been blocking significant portions of that data, ostensibly for privacy reasons.
To see what we mean, here’s an example of keywords as a traffic source. You can do this yourself in your own Web Analytics account. These instructions are for the new user interface in Google Analytics but instructions for the old user interface are also provided in parentheses, if appropriate.
- Log in to your account (and then click View Report).
- Select Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic (Select Traffic Sources > Keywords and then select “non-paid” just below the graph).
- Scan down the list of keywords that brought non-paid traffic to your website. You may need to expand past the first 10 that are shown by default. You are looking for a keyword called “not provided.”
In the actual example shown below, Organic Search brought 4,810 visits over a 30-day period. Of those 4,810 visits, the #1 keyword was “not provided” which brought 1,110 visits.
Read the rest of this article »
Posted on October 14, 2011 by Cindy Wilson
We recently received an email warning us about the new top level domain xxx, which will have general availability as of December, 2011. The email recommended that we hurry during the “Sunrise B” time period and register the xxx domain for our trademark so that others couldn’t use it.
Currently, you can register your domain name with a number of different extensions. The common ones in the US are .com, .org, .net, etc. Companies outside the US generally use the country abbreviation. As of December, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which regulates the internet’s naming system, is making available a new extension xxx for the adult entertainment industry. The time before the general availability has been named the Sunrise period where companies may protect their trademarks by choosing to reserve their name from being registered. This means that if we don’t reserve the domain name market-vantage.xxx, someone else may register it instead.
We have put together an evaluation to help you decide what is best for your company. Here are some specific points we looked at to determine an answer:
Read the rest of this article »
Posted on September 28, 2011 by Darryl Delong
In previous blog posts we’ve discussed the importance of website design and content on search. However, there are certain publishing platforms you can use to build and maintain your website, that come with SEO benefits. WordPress is one of those platforms. In addition to the fact that it is free open-source code, there are numerous themes, plugins and widgets to help you give your site the look and feel you want. Just as important, building a site in WordPress, including the plugins, has many SEO benefits. Below we have listed just a few of these benefits, including any necessary changes:
Posting and Updating Content is easy to do with WordPress.
By now you’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king”, but having to depend on a webmaster each time you want to post content pages to your website can be expensive. With WordPress you don’t have to outsource the task of adding a new blog post or page to your website. You can handle this task by logging into your WordPress control panel and using the WordPress built-in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. If you can update a Word document then, chances are, you can update a WordPress blog post or page. Adding content to your WordPress site is as easy as typing it, or copying it from an external source, adding a page title and hitting the publish button.
With the WYSIWYG editor you can easily SEO your content by adding keyword-rich page titles, headlines, hyperlinks to other internal pages, H1 or H2 tags, bolding text and more.
Read the rest of this article »
Take a few minutes to increase visibility for your business!
Google Places is a significant and free way to advertise your local business. Unfortunately, many business owners are not taking advantage of this valuable tool. We want to help you set up a Google Places listing so you can make the most of this great opportunity!
We previously wrote a couple of articles entitled “Improve Google Places Ranking With These 5 Optimization Tips” and “What Are Google Tags and How Should You Use Them To Enhance Your Local Business Listing”. These were both intended for people who already had listings and just focused on a few of the features for Google Places.
Download our FREE step-by-step illustrated Google Places SEO guide intended for people who have never set up a local business listing or need additional explanation on some of the specific fields.
Learn more…
Posted on August 4, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Who wants the worst website award?
In our previous post about the Google Panda update, we mentioned that inbound links, while still very important, are not weighted as heavily as a ranking signal as they were previously. What has gained in importance is website quality and user experience. As far as inbound links are concerned, they are still extremely important as a ranking signal but Panda now enables Google to analyze links more carefully. Unnatural linking patterns are now more likely to harm your rankings than before Panda.
Let’s talk about website quality and user experience. Imagine that you’re Google and you want to present only the best sites at the top of the search results. But how do you rate website quality via software? Quality is really something best left to a human being, or many human beings, to gauge.
For several years, Google has provided the public with a dizzying array of “free” tools and applications. These include Google Search (a tool so ubiquitous that it has become a verb), Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar and lately a number of social apps including the Google +1 button.
Google doesn’t charge for these applications. However, we all know that the popularity of Google Search is what drives Google’s core revenue business, namely, keyword sponsorships via AdWords. If everyone switched to a different search engine overnight, Google would lose 2/3 of its AdWords revenue. (The other 1/3 is derived from AdWords clicks on non-search related websites, which Google calls the Display Network.)
Read the rest of this article »
Posted on June 28, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Where did my website go?
Over the past couple of years, there’s been a sharp increase in complaints about poor quality websites showing up at the top of Google’s search results. In response, Google issued a software update, known as Panda, on February 23, 2011. The fundamental goal of the Panda Update was to downgrade the rank of websites that didn’t offer users unique, valuable information. One website that was mentioned in this regard was eHow.com, which offers many thousands of how-to guides, and has sometimes been referred to as an example of a “content farm.”
Panda had a powerful effect, banishing many formerly top-ranking sites to second-class status and elevating other, previously lesser known sites, to the top of the rankings. It didn’t have as significant an impact on eHow as Google wanted, so a subsequent release of Panda was made in April.
Panda is the latest escalation in the war between Google, which wants to rank websites by quality and usefulness, and people who want their website to appear at the top of Google’s search results for certain keywords whether they deserve to or not.
Read the rest of this article »
Posted on June 14, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Personal Search Results
Last week, someone emailed me a link to a YouTube video that was recorded at a TED conference. In it, Eli Pariser makes a presentation about “Filter Bubbles” in which he demonstrates how our online behavior causes information providers to “filter” what we’re shown, with the result that we tend to see and hear only what they perceive we want to see and hear. He presents a compelling case and it’s worth the investment of nine minutes to watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s
Eli, you may recall, is the former executive director of MoveOn.org, which means that I probably don’t share most of his political views, though I do understand his concern about the rapid growth of personalized news search results. However, I’m not so worried about personalized advertising and search results.
Recently, Time Magazine started showing up in my mailbox each week, which was puzzling because I knew I hadn’t subscribed. Then came Rolling Stone. Nobody has claimed credit, although I’ve made some discreet inquiries to several acquaintances and friends to try to identify my anonymous benefactor.
My hypothesis is that someone who knows me is trying to burst a self-imposed Filter Bubble,
Read the rest of this article »
Posted on May 19, 2011 by Hans Riemer
Would you build your house with a Faulty foundation?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a call that went something like this: “Hi, we just had our website completely redesigned and now that it’s live, we’d like the site to get more traffic from the search engines. Can you help?”
Of course we can help. But frankly, the correct answer is, “I wish you’d talked to me before you launched the new site.”
It’s a fact that most sites suffer a drop in traffic right after a re-build. Why? Most sites have search rank and traffic for at least SOME non-branded keywords before the rebuild. What often happens next is that they still show up in the same place in the organic search results for a while, but anyone clicking on the listing will land on a 404 error – Page Not Found because the content that Google was pointing to is now located at a new URL which Google doesn’t know about yet.
Read the rest of this article »
