Category Archive: SEO

Jun
07
2010

CNN Bashing Google and BP regarding this oil spill?

June 7, 2010

I tell you, sometimes it’s amazing just how a message can totally be twisted and turned depending on who you hear it from.

I wonder if there is politics involved in this search engine dilemma regarding the oil spill. I mean, let’s consider this video from CNN. Talk about ignorance on their part, we we’re suppose to trust their opinions. This is wrong on their part and when you listen to this video and break it down, they are doing exactly what they are accusing others of doing. WHAT?!!

CNN’s Own Incompetence and Blame

Ok, so there’s this video on their site that went live a few hours ago.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2010/06/06/nr.bp.ad.space.cnn?hpt=Sbin

CNN Suggests Google and BP are sharing money and laughs to control information to the American Public

During this video, CNN’s discusses several times on how BP is spending money to basically monopolize the search results and ‘push’ other stuff down. It discusses how this company is spending an unknown amount of money per day and how companies like Google are actually accepting this money, and in turn ‘placing’ them on the top of the search results almost inconspicuously in a very litely shaded area, at the top.

In turn, CNN discusses how they are controling the information by canabilizing the information on their site, in turn controlling the truth.

In other words, BP, Google, Yahoo and Bing are all in this for profit and deliver only skewed information to the public. That’s exactly the message I got delivered from this video. Thank You CNN for the TRUTH.

I’m not here to defend BP. They are merely conducting a PR campaign and providing information. I checked out their site. It’s skewed in their favor, discussing all of their wonderful clean up efforts. They provide government links to sites about the beaches and wildlife. Not bad. It’s still slanted.

Let’s take a look at this BP ad that is supposedly providing skewed, monopolistic information about the oil spill.

CNN – Are you REALLY suggesting this when we EASILY can get the information you can only find a moron expert to ‘estimate’?

YUP, that’s it. BP is really trying hard to buy it’s way into controlling the online media and push down the truth, as CNN has suggested. No, it’s clearly deceptive here in their messaging why their site is skewed in their favor. They are telling us that their site is about them, how they are helping. Whether they really are or aren’t is the question here CNN, it’s their message. To them, they believe they are helping and being transparent.

So, CNN says that they have no idea how much BP is spending per day. Some so called expert estimates it could be at least $10,000 per day. What? Is that really a lot?

According to SpyFu.com, an online tool us marketers use to gain competitive information, tells me exactly what BP is spending on a daily basis for their ENTIRE online campaign. Granted, this isn’t 100% accurate, but provides data from May 2010. Wow, CNN is WAY, WAY, WAY off, like around 500% over projected! Come on.

So, you know anything about Pay Per Click Advertising? That top spot, for a search of [oil spill] ANYONE can buy, for CHEAP! It’s not like BP is making a large PR push to monopolize the Internet searches. I checked.

It’s $1.66 for that keyword according to Spyfu.com. Come on, I pay more per click for [courier service] than that with my national Same Day Delivery company.

CNN – Don’t Call the Kettle Black

So, as CNN discusses, this is wrong for BP to do this, and eluding to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Let’s consider what was not discussed during this segment.

Pay Per Click yields about 20% of the traffic, compare to Google’s integrated mainstream organic results. NO ONE CAN PAY for ORGANIC Results. The TOP results are NEWS. 80% of the traffic will click one of those results.

Next, BP’s top position in PPC will enjoy sharing some of that 20%, and experts such as Howie Jacobson, author of Adwords for Dummies, has indicated that the top PPC spot doesn’t always outclick spot #2 or #3.

So how much is BP really putting forward here?

Don’t Be Evil

I mean Google’s moto, DON’T BE EVIL and their recent exit in China indicated they would never, ever, ever allow for any company to skew their search engine, for no amount of money, ever. They built their business on a model that offered organic, unbias, democratic results.

Bottom line is that the evidence is clear that CNN is the culprit of skewing the data and has in fact shot themselves in the foot by suggesting other’s are doing it, and in the very discussions they themselves only tell you what they think is important to create a controversial story. Nothing new. Just unethical, that’s all.

Alright, so again I’m not happy with BP here, but come on CNN. This isn’t about them buying their way up on the search engines to skew the American public about the truth, this is about CNN playing a pity party with the American population and limiting the information to pursuade the population into believing their is a collaborative corruption here, in turn portraying a message that other’s such as Google have veared away from what is simply right.

Come on guys. Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, CNN.

Don’t Be Evil. Tell the Truth. This is SO not News Worthy when the entire truth is told.

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Jun
05
2010

The Secret to Local Internet Marketing on Google’s Local Business Results

by Administrator

June 5, 2010

Almost every single week, one my students reach out to me and ask about that special little secret to ranking in the Local Business Results.

Now I’m providing some local content for Dan Thies and Leslie Rohde from SEO BrainTrust, and sure enough, their students was the same secret sauce.

Whether someone emails me, sends me a tweet, raises their hand while I’m on stage or one of our client from our Algonquin Web Development company, I get asked….what’s the secret?

Well, if you know anything about ranking a website on the Internet, it’s a process called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A search engine looks a several factors, likely in the hundreds, to prioritize all the web pages it indexes. So, SEO is a skill that has many, many school of thoughts. You see, this special search engine never tells what they are looking for. So, us so called SEO experts learn the secrets and test and deploy.

Bottom line, to rank a website consistently on top you need inbound links and decent website. In the simplest form, the more high quality links you have with relevant, high quality content, the higher you’ll rank. Period. No money exchanged, no favorites, just a democratic ranking from Google based on what it thinks is value-added.

Now if you’re searching for [Chicago pizza delivery], in the last year on Google you’ve noticed a little map show up and shows you local businesses around your area. These results are called the local business results.

The BIG difference here is WHAT Google is ranking. They are not ranking website, but rather businesses. So how does Google decide what business should be shown when there is only a possible of 10 spots? We all know there are more than 10 pizza companies in Chicago worthy of being on this page.

So what’s the secret for the Local Business Results?

There is none! Really, no secret. The answer has been present even before the Internet existed. The answer is no different than what ranks webpages. No, it’s not links.

It’s a quality business that people are happy to recommend that provide a value-added product or service to the appropriate audience located in the right place for the largest target audience.
WHAT?

Alright. Imagine this. You’re an attorney in Edmonton, Canada. You hand your business card out to every car at the West Edmonton Mall. You hand out 1000. It takes you 3 hours.

The following week you attend the local chamber of commerce event and hand out 30 cards and you spend 3 hours networking.

Imagine now that each card you hand out is a like a link to your website. So in these two separate scenarios you have 1000 links or 30 links.

Now, in both of these scenarios and consider the success of this attorney in the real world, it’s likely that they’ll win or earn more business from the chamber event. The key here is networking. People don’t just buy attorney services and keep the attorney’s card for when they need. It’s a horrible way to market their business.

So, quality marketing is the secret? Well, I guess.

You see, that attorney is exposing themselves in different areas, the mall, the chamber, meetings. The attorney provides answers to questions, and the closer the answers are to helping solve their client’s problems, the better they’ll do.

I call this transparency and exposure. Therefore, the great transparency and exposure on the Internet yields higher rankings.

So the questions is, how does a business expose themselves and provide transparency on the Internet in order for the search engines to favor their business and rank it?

This one is simple.

Citations and Reviews.

A citations is merely a reference or mention of said business.
A review is merely a digital form of word of mouth..

Therefore the more the business is discussed and referenced, the higher it’ll do.

But it’s not just any review or citation. The authority and trust assigned to those reviews and citations make the difference, just like how 30 links can out rank 1000.

You need to have citations and reviews from highly trusted local and theme related sources.

If you want to learn more, whether you’re a business owner or online consultant, visit my online education portal for Local Marketing Education. Opt in for the free report and browse the site for a lot of free information.

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Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/the-secret-to-local-internet-marketing-on-googles-local-business-results/

May
19
2010

Top 10 Ways to Implement a Local Internet Marketing Strategy

by Administrator

May 19, 2010

1. Consistent Listings Of Contact Information
All of your contact information should be present in several different places on the internet, this is called a citation, and should always be consistent. On places like your contact page, you should have your complete address, business name and phone number. Preferably you should also have it listed several other places and include links back to your website. For example the business below provides local web development services in suburban Chicago and this is their citation.

Algonquin Web Development
200 N. Harrison Street #106
Algonquin, IL 60102
Phone: 1-847-594-7488

2. A Solid Plan
Like any other type of marketing, if you’re trying to get success online, you need to take the time to build yourself a comprehensive marketing plan, especially including the tips in this list, and then stick with those plans over the long term.

3. Marketing with Email
As most experienced marketers know, the money is in the list. Building a strong email list is one of the most profitable ways to promote your business online.

4. Remember To Claim Your Business Listing
When you have a listing with a major search engine, you need to claim your listings. Use www.getlisted.org to find if your listings have already been claimed.

5. Gain Business Reviews
There are a lot of businesses online, and the only way that you can really get yours to stand out is to establish some trust with your company. Getting customers and visitors to review your site is a great way to do that.

6. Don’t Forget About On The Page SEO
We know that the web has become a place where off site optimization factors and marketing are growing in importance, but it is still important to not overlook the on page factors.

7. The Off Page Optimization
That being said about onsite factors; don’t forget about the offsite either. One of the things that you need to recognize is that building links for SEO purposes is at least as much, if not more, about quality over quantity.

8. Paid Search Advertising
In most search engines, there is a method in which you can pay for advertising, where every time someone clicks on a link based on your keywords, you will be a few cents. This can be a cost effective way to drive traffic to your site.

9. Social Media
If you haven’t heard about Facebook and Twitter, you’ve probably been living under a rock. The social media sites allow you to build relationships with your customers, something you shouldn’t overlook.

10. Video Marketing
All it takes is one video to go viral on YouTube, and you can draw incredible attention to your site.

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Nov
16
2009

Making Sure Your Local Business Squidoo Lens Has Value

by Administrator

November 16, 2009

When people start promoting a local business on the internet, there are a lot of mistakes that they can make if they’re not careful. One of the worst of these is creating content that is really just a straight up advertisement for their products. People coming from the local business world often have problems with this, because when advertising a local business off line – you need to advertise! However, once you move your business on the internet, you need to take a different approach, or even hire an Internet Marketing Agency.

When you first start creating sites and pages to promote your own site, one of the first that you’ll probably tackle is a Squidoo lens. That Squidoo lens is an example of a local courier service company creating value for their industry and yet not promoting their company extensively. This is, in its most basic form, simply a page on a give topic. The important distinction about a lens that you need to make is that you don’t want to make it about your site itself. That’s an advertisement, and won’t be successful. Instead, you need to think of the lens supporting your site.

This means that when someone pays a visit to your Squidoo lens, they shouldn’t be bombarded with things telling them how great your site is, or links pointing to your site. Instead, they should find something that actually provides them with information that they want. The sites on the internet that do the worst today are those that don’t actually provide their visitors with anything useful.

The key to a successful Squidoo lens is finding a way to attract more readers, and to get one time readers to come back again and again. That means that you need to write valuable content, and that you need to update your content regularly. So just what is valuable content?

The best content always answers a question. This means that whenever someone is looking for a website on a given topic, they are doing so because they want information of some kind. You need to be the one to provide that information, and it should be on a topic that is related to your business.

A good example of this would be a small local courier business. If you sell same day delivery service, don’t create a lens that just says what your company does. Instead, you could create a lens that tells people how to choose the best same day courier. Or you could create one which provides tips on how to utilize a same day courier to improve customer satisfaction. You want to be sure to give information that actually means something to the client, not which is just an empty place for you to advertise your business and stuff with keywords

3 comments

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Oct
30
2009

Local Search Marketing

by Administrator

October 30, 2009

Local Search Marketing is the process of a local business who wants to acquire new customers utilizing strategic placement within the search engines.

Therefore, local search marketing is comprised of placing such local business in three separate areas of the search engine results page (SERP). These three areas are:

Paid. as in PPC or Adwords in the case of Google.
Organic. These are the mainstream results.
Local Business Results (LBR). This is when Google or Yahoo! shows the map of the physical location of the company.

Here’s a nice post on SEO vs PPC. Here’s a post on Local Business Results and Citations.

In order to place a local business in any of these area requires a specific skill set. Just like how different how a carpenter, plumber, electrician and artitect are require to build a home, to position a website in any of these areas require a different skill.

These skills are differents sets of online marketing skills. There are experts in each field of Local Search Marketing.

For example, being good at the paid results means you can double the traffic and cut the costs by 50%, from the numbers Google gives you. Perhaps the skills for LBR including knowing that citations are the driver along with public opinion. This skill is leaning more towards creativity than science. SEO, or organic, on the other hand, is a highly misleading concept today. Too many people chase the algorithm rather then focus on marketing, creating transparency and exposure.

I suggest you opt-in for our free report the help demystify the components of Local Search Marketing. If you chose, watch our 90 second video before opting-in at our Local Marketing Education portal. If you own or manage a local business and are interested in learning more, I suggest you get our free assessment of your campaign at my local internet marketing company.

1 comment

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Oct
09
2009

Buyer Beware of Fake SEO Practices

by Administrator

October 9, 2009

An effective SEO campaign can help drive valuable traffic to your site where visitors will see the merits of what you have to offer whether information, products or services. It is important to gain a good working understanding of just what SEO is to protect yourself from the many unscrupulous fakes who will offer you the world in exchange for your hard-earned cash. Although there exist some very talented SEO professionals with valuable advice and services, many people seek to take advantage of your passionate need to be a successful online entrepreneur and will prey upon this to “steal” your money. What they typically offer is a “dog and pony” show imparting an illusion of success without really offering anything of value.

Get Some Know How Now

Use the very same search engines you hope will successfully lead people to you to find valuable online information about effective SEO practices. Many website owners don’t have a clue about what SEO is or what it possibly does. Take the time to investigate the ins and outs of SEO practices so you gain the correct information when looking to hire a professional to help improve your website performance. There are many resources online that can provide a third-party view about SEO so you can make an informed decision when hiring someone.

Learn the Questions to Ask

Just like you would do when interviewing anyone to do a job for you, ask the right questions. Don’t leave it totally up to the prospective SEO company to “tell” you why they should be hired. With a little SEO knowledge of your own, you’ll know enough to ask questions that will help make a decision. These should include:

What are some successful SEO campaigns you’ve conducted?
Do you have your own website or blog site?
Can you list your website development skills?
What methods do you use to measure effective results?

Legitimate Services Offered

A professional SEO company or individual will offer a number of services included in a one-for-all service fee that should include:

Free Consultation
Website review
Design or redesign services
Content review and inclusion
Available SEO training
Internet marketing

What Are the Danger Signs?

Some unscrupulous characters will use a lot of web speak to impress you with their apparent knowledge and expertise to provide you high search engine ranking. The first time you hear the word “Guaranteed,” walk away. There is no such thing as “Guaranteed Page Ranking.” There are, however, a variety of scam techniques that are used to convince you that they are effectively working on your behalf. Some of these warning “lights” include:

Offering to sell you keywords
Using “shadow” domains or “doorway” pages that, supposedly, will act as an effective intro to your site. They don’t. But you’ll get charged for their creation and use.
Search engine ranking on useless search words – be aware that some supposed SEO experts will show you effective page rankings for useless search words that no one uses in your niche area.
Shows you “search engine results” that are actually paid for advertisements that can appear on any of a number of results pages for a given keyword. These are not organic search results which happen through the relevant relationship a search word will have with a particular web page.
Watch out for any unsolicited email that looks as if the company has done a thorough examination on your website and wants to give you a helping hand. Often these emails are worded like:

“Congratulations on your new website. Now is the time to get your No. 1 Search Engine ranking, so click here!”

Make sure the company you are looking to hire has a website. If it doesn’t, this is a clear sign of danger. If it does, check to see where it ranks. Obviously, they should be capable of doing for themselves what they claim they can do for you.
Check for comparative pricing. Some of these offers, while legitimate, are being re-sold where your contact is actually an affiliate charging a “larger” fee and then passing the work on to a knowing professional. Eliminate the middleman by asking who does the work and how it gets done.

Know What SEO Can Accomplish

Understand that there is a good deal of work involved when seeking to improve a website’s search ranking. An SEO expert will evaluate your website making recommendations for a plan to implement that will make the site more search engine friendly. These SEO activities will include the use of keywords in titles and tags as well as making sure all images have the “ALT” description filled in. Other techniques include use of original, informative and useful content as opposed to using duplicate copy plagiarized from another site. Ultimately, through effective practices employed by a legitimate SEO professional, your website should begin to obtain a better ranking and more traffic.

Know What Are Reasonable Expectations

Just as there are thousands of money-making opportunities all over the Internet that make outlandish claims about gaining wealth with little or no, effort, so exists a great amount of SEO offerings that make similar claims about improving your web traffic. Since you now know that it takes considerable efforts employing different activities across substantial time to improve search rankings, do not believe any quick results are possible when looking at different SEO services. That old adage about something appearing too good to be true is, well, true. A responsible SEO company or individual will present an evaluation with an action plan that will appear reasonable and not provide any fast fixes promising outlandish claims. The only quick aspect the other guys are looking for is how fast they can get you to part with your money.

If Fooled

In the event you believe you may have been duped by a fake SEO offering, file a complaint with the state attorney general or through the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

4 comments

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May
04
2009

Google Local under Scrutiny

by Administrator

May 4, 2009

Since Google has introduced local business results into the mainstream results, along with several other results, we are seeing how Google is greating a strong SERP with blended results. We now see shopping results, local business results, videos, standard organic and PPC in the SERP. For the most part, each of these components use a different algorithm.

While a locally based offline business with a desire to find business using the Internet has several options on which methods to deploy resources, it is almost impossible for a small company to deploy every tactic. In fact, it would be merely impossible. We do know however that the search engines drive more traffic to a website than all other mediums combined. Therefore understanding Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is critical. As I always have discussed, I recommend three methods in order to increase visibility in the SERPs. These are

Efforts in the Organic Results (SEO)
Efforts towards Local Business Results (the map)
Efforts towards PPC (Google Adwords)

Google’s Local Business Results are playing havoc for thousands of small businesses around the globe. This algo is as strong as the organic algo were in 2002. It sucks! There are so many challenges being faced with business’ records being combined, including wrong addresses, phone numbers and simply wrong data.

There is also a challenge with what Google is trying to do. Every local industry is different and has different business models. The transportation industry is getting horrible results in the local listings because locally based transportation companies servicing a major metropolitan area is typically located in the suburbs. Google is looking for addresses in the city, yielding the wrong results. The Florist industry has been hijacked by spammers, who have blackmailed local florists for cash to give them their results back. The locksmith industry has been spammed with thieves, claiming to be locksmiths and stealing your keys to your home and vehicles.

Last week while discussing the nightmare in the Local Business Listings with another local SEOer from a San Fransisco Web Design and Local SEO firm owner, Miriam Ellis, I learned and concluded that the Local Results efforts being put forth by Google is simply a little premature. It’s a mess! It’s no secret that Americans are using Google to find local businesses. It’s no secret a web surfer will click on either an organic listing, local listing or paid listing. We know exactly how to market ourselves to achieve rankings in the organic and paid listings, however local is still up in the air. We do know a lot about that and in MLBO you’ll find the strategies that do work, however there are a lot of changes happening daily at Google and there are still a lot of problems at Google. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about ethical companies trying to market themselves. We determined several scenarios with local businesses that may appear spamming to the search engines, yet be completely ethical, moral marketing strategies.

I also want to point you to a fantastic interview among 20 expert local business marketer regarding Local Search Ranking Factors. Check it out, a lot of what you read is included in MLBO however and inline with my teachings, it’s just this is coming from another source.

Interview with 20 experts

All in all, I stand firm that SEM is marketing. Regardless if today some strategies may come off as spammy for the local results, move forward with your strategies if you feel what you are doing is ethical in the offline world. Google will shake itself out and determine what is ethical and moral and I believe Google will get this right.

4 comments

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Apr
28
2009

Local SEO is Bullshit! SEO is all Blackhat!

by Administrator

April 28, 2009

Sometimes I like to be devil’s advocate and stir the pot. Since releasing MLBO, I have been getting amazing feedback, success stories and a lot of interest. I haven’t made a penny from it, yet I find myself immersing myself in my greatest passion, learning and teaching. I’m about to teach one of my philosophies that I’ve danced around with. I know many will agree with me, however many will disagree with me and I’m hoping to create controversy. I will add that I am not the first by any stretch of the imagination to write about this controversial topic.

Local SEO will not exist in a few years

OK, local SEO, is Local Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer. I no longer call myself an SEOer. I’m an Internet Marketer. I do not ‘optimize’ a site for the search engines. I market a website using the Internet.

Is White Hat SEO just sugar coated Black Hat?

Alright, so the question of black hat and white hat rise. My clients hire me to get their site to #1. Some don’t care how I do it. Others buy my philosophies. I study black hat techniques and I can in fact play a game like Howie Schwartz. These techniques are used to dupe the search engines and simply won’t last for a sustainable business. Mom taught me, if you’re going to do something, do it right. Black Hat works, just won’t forever.

So what is black hat? Keyword stuffing, duh. What about optimizing a keyword into the H1 Tag? Enhancing the Title tag? Keyword Density? Keyword Proximity? Internal Linking with proper anchor text? I can argue that each, and every one of the above mentioned concepts is black hat, if you are using them for search engine purposes and NOT for an enhanced user experience.

On-The-Page SEO shouldn’t have a list, just quality Design and Marketing

What about validating your code? Using CSS over tables? Optimal use of flash and java? We know the search engines like certain standards, so we employ them. What about a dedicated IP, shared hosting, slow sites? Large pages? No alt tags on images? Large image sizes? These are among many factors that need to be considered when an SEOer gets to work. And this stuff only represents about 30% of your rankings weight, I haven’t touched on outside factors yet!

Point is, if you are top of your game for designing, and coding, you’ll know or will know enough to hire a quality developer who goes by the book. Your site should validate! You should reduce the size of your images! Tables are sloppy way of programming! Flash was designed to be a movie, NOT a entire website! It’s obvious to me, the search engines want a well built website using the technology the way is was meant to be used. As far as keywords, page design, content, it also makes sense. For example, you would not want to come back to this blog if new content never came in. So, the more fresh content I have, the more I’m favored by Google. Sure, you need to know what keywords people are using to find your site and put those keywords on your pages, but this isn’t optimizing a page for the search engines, this is marketing and understanding your audience, speaking their jargon. It so happens the search engines understand this and place value on those pages, and in turn we SEOers have reversed engineered the Search Engines and rarely have I found educations that says…UHM, lets just focus on proper marketing.

Don’t look for links, that’s not what SEO is about

So what about off the page stuff, that other 70%? It’s all about links, right? Of course it is. So I’m taught to analyse competitors links, in fact I teach strategies. I value links, spend efforts on the links that favor the most PR. I have people posting on forums, blogs, directories, writting articles, doing video. How shameful of me. Wait, sure, if we reversed engineers that this works, then deploy it, but in fact, I’m creating transparency and exposure in the most democratic medium we’ve ever seen. It’s no different than my local business by handing out flyers, business cards, attending trade shows and chamber meetings. Speaking at local events and getting involved with the school and churches. Transparency and Exposure. Sure, I also focus my time on the exposure that yields the highest traffic, like in the days selling cellular phones, it was the mall, not the park. If I wanted to meet womyn, it was the bar and to create trust and authority to pick up the woman, I brought my ‘player’ friends, not the geeks that I enjoyed spending time with chewing the fat on about computers.

The point is I learned sales and marketing at a young age and I’ve now realised that absolutly everything I do on the Internet can be related to my old school world. Links are merely endorsements and relationships. Like marketing my businesses in the old school world, it took time and hard work. I walked the pavement, knocked on doors, picked up the phone and made sure I played in places I needed to be, it wasn’t the park accross the street. It was those crazy early breakfast meetings at the chamber of commerce accross town, but it brought business.

SEO is Merely Quality Marketing

Alright, so I threw either water or fuel on the fire here. I’m saying that everything you do on the Internet to promote your business, local or online, if you’re going to long term growth, forget about 99% of the SEO noise you read about. Don’t worry about this or that. Close your eyes and ask yourself if what you are doing enhances either

The visitor of your site
The democratic value of the Internet

If you can answer yes to one of those truthfully, then chances are it’s something the search engines have already recongnized and have built into their algo.

If the answer is no, then chances are it’s black hat and don’t do it. It might work today and I challenge anyone on the Internet to this philosophy. There is nothing you can do to your website that doesn’t answer Yes to any of those and is a sustainable strategy to SEO.

Don’t hire your carpenter to sell your house

If feel sorry for all those web developers looking for work, studying SEO and calling themselves experts. They better learn marketing, or they’ll be out of business soon. I AM an Internet Marketer, not SEO guru.

Disclaimer: Notice the link at the top, Internet Marketing Guru? That’s a internal link on this post to help the search engine follow a link to my homepage, which is a keyword I begun optimizing for. So I’m contradicting myself. Of course I am. Read this post again and you’ll notice I’m not. That link sends people to a page about and Internet marketing. I live by a self fullfilling prophecy, act as if. There is no trickery here, just marketing. Keep your head focused on proper marketing and rankings will follow.

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Apr
23
2009

Google Keyword Tool Showing Local Results alongside Global Volumes

by Administrator

April 23, 2009

Unannounced in the last 48 hours, I have discovered that Google has made some changes to their free keyword tool.

They have added Local Search Volume for keyword searches. Google is making big changes this year in local search, since some claim 70% of all Internet searches in the USA are now for local businesses.

google keyword tool showing local results

As discussed last week, when searching for a terms such as [courier service], Google is incorporating Local results into its mainstream results. Now, as a extension to my predicted huge changes in Local Search at Google in 2009, Google is providing Local Search Volume results along side their Global Search Volume.

My philosophies are like Google, fire then aim. They are notrorious for having product infinitily in beta (Gmail anyone?!!). Their Local Search is still easily manipulatple, like SEO was in 2001. The local results located in mainstream results are still very quirky. They will get better quick though, Local Search is huge.

As far as their search volume showing in the keyword tool, this is also very quirky. Oddly, they have replaced the column formerly as ‘last month results’ with ‘local search volume results’. The Global Search volume column is formerly the average monthly volume for the last twelve months. Now, from my testing, both columns are showing the same numbers as the two columns last week. This would lead one to believe that perhaps they have only changed the headers on the columns! I doubt this is the case. Those numbers are quirky to begin with.

I have not wrapped my head around the numbers yet and there is little explaining exactly what they mean. There are still a large number of questions pertaining to what is Local versus what is a Global search. Try searching ‘dentist’ and you get local results. Maybe I am researching the definition of dentist, how dentist education, dentistry methodologies, blah blah. Google provides a variety of these results, including local dentists. The keyword tool has the same challenges, we have no idea of relevancy and how Google determines the relevance for a local search.

The big learning point here is that Google is evidently making huge changes to their search engines to accomodate local searches. I really believe now that I was ahead of the curve studying local search back in 2005.

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Apr
09
2009

Mobile Marketing for Local Small Business

by Administrator

April 9, 2009

Small Business Mobile Marketing

Recently on one of my social sites, a member asked my opinions about mobile marketing for the locally based business. While this is not intended to be a complete article, I am going to provide my opinions and resources to my community. While I also felt this should be for my private paying readers, I have decided to make this public because there is some great information all small businesses should know about.

Mobile Marketing for Local Businesses is the future. Not Internet Marketing, Mobile Marketing. Here’s some facts.

1.4 B Internet Users
4B wireless subscribers worldwide
Facebook has 600k new subscribers per day, increasing login rate through mobile devices
3B SMS users worldwide.
USA lags.
400M worldwide accesses mobile web.
44M in the USA

A friend of mine, Kim Dushinski is author of a published book and is an expert on Mobile Marketing, recently gave these facts to the System Seminar attendees, a large International Internet Marketing conference. Here is her site. Mobile Marketing. Her site is packed with resources and recommendations for this type of marketing. I will only endorse what she endorses.

Make your site available to the mobile market now. Even if you don’t start promoting for years, get your desired domains now. Buy your Mobile Domain now! Buy your .mobi domain at this link here. Get a .mobi domain the same as your site, add a simple plug in so it can be viewed.

There is a best practices guide you should read.

Mobile Marketing Best Practices

Here is a wordpress plug in to make your wordpress blog Mobile friendly.

Mobile WordPress Plugin

As far as SEO for mobile, the game is developing. Here’s some quick info.

97.5% of the market share for mobile search goes to, you got it, Google.
Shorter time to find stuff.
Different Algorithm and their main search.

Today, SEO is pretty simple for Mobile Marketing. Here are some quick tips for Mobile SEO, or mSEO.

Have an Error Free Site
Mobile, Free Content
Mobile Links

Google has a Mobile Keyword Tool, finally! You need to log into your Mobile adWords Campaign to use it. Can’t show you a link, sorry!

Things to look out for in the future for Mobile Marketing, according to Kim!

Microsoft Tags
Mobile Affiliate Programs
Android (Google’s Phone)
eBooks on Mobile Marketing
Mobile Social Media Marketing (mSMM)
Local Mobile Search (this is it guys)
Mobile Social Bookmarking
mCommerce

Just think of the marketing implications to this. Geo based, opt-in marketing? Targeted marketing based on the demographics of the phone users plus their location. This is just sick! (this is a positive thing, for those old skool readers!).

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