Simple. Watch this SEO / Blog video from Google directly. Have you considered a blog?
What do you think?
Well, probably unofficially so, but - if you need a great place to start for SEO blogs, you need to look at what Guy Kawasaki and his team have put together.
It covers many more things than just SEO (search engine optimization).
Here’s are some good websites and blogs to start looking at:
http://social-media.alltop.com/
Enjoy the weekend guys!
In today’s economically depressed climate, many retailers are feeling the affects of limited consumer spending first hand. Online retailers, in particular, have been offering sales, special deals, and promotions in an effort to attract buyers, and are expected to increase their efforts as the 2009 holiday season approaches.
But what about those consumers who don’t have or use credit cards and/or debit cards? Believe it or not, there are quite a lot of them, about 72 million in fact, according to eBillme.com. Ebillme is trying to capitalize on this demographic by offering them the option to pay for their online purchases in cash.
How does this work?
Through the site’s “walk-in” payment option can purchase items online from 840 different ecommerce sites, and then pay for their purchases in cash at one of Ebillme’s payment locations. Once payment is confirmed, the merchant is notified, and the product is sent.
If this service catches on, more online retailers may have to rethink the types of payment options that they offer their customers, and expand these options accordingly.
While paying in cash for online purchases may allow customers to take advantage of special online deals, critics also point out that it may also be time-consuming and confusing for some “cash only” customers who are, according to eBillme CEO Marwan Forzley, primarily seniors or recent immigrants without access to banking.
It’s a well-known fact that people love to share their opinions with others, whether in response to a question, an issue, or to the opinions of someone else. If you’ve never experimented with adding polls to your website or blog before, here are five reasons why you should give it a try:
1. Polls Are Easy: Sites like PollDaddy.Com allow you to create an account and customize and upload interactive polls to your site for free.
2. Polls Let You Know What’s Important: The topics and opinions that the visitors to your site comment on and vote on the most provide you with instant insight into the types of products, topics, and information that might appeal to them in the future.
3. Polls Encourage Repeat Visits: After someone votes, they will want to check back in to see whether others voted the same way that they did, and to see if there are any other polls for them to vote in.
4. Polls Help With Site Design: Polls are eye catching and add a professional look and feel to a site.
5. Polls Are Fun: This goes without saying—who can resist a poll?
Try adding a poll to your website or blog today and see for yourself.
We all know that the Internet has everything—and we do mean everything that anyone could ever want to read about, see, or purchase. But how do people find what they are looking for on the Internet? And what kind of crazy stuff are they really searching for? Many sites and articles are devoted solely to cataloging just this sort of information.
Here are some strange search terms that people used to find www.tenerlife-training.net a news cycling blog, according to a blog post by the site’s owner:
• “sea snake santa”
• “eggbeater review candy”
• “purple kettle”
Who knows what motivates people in their quest for information? A Google search for “strangest Internet search queries” lead us to the following top results for certain terms:
For the search term “Google is”
• “your friend”
• “taking over the world”
• “watching you”
For the search term “what is”
• “what is Twitter?”
• “what is my IP address?”
• “what is love?”
• “what is a short sale?”
And finally, for the search term “news is”
• “news is free”
• “news is a verb”
• “news is actually manufactured in a complex social process.”
• “news is people”
So to recap, whether you’re searching for a purple kettle, a sea snake Santa, the definition of news, or answers to existential questions about life, love, and your IP address, the Internet is clearly the place to go.
Whether you are working with an Internet marketing company or on your own, it is important to make sure that your Internet marketing efforts succeed. Just as there are many Internet marketing tricks that you should try, there are also a lot of Internet marketing mistakes that you should try to avoid. This article will discuss some of the most common Internet marketing mistakes and how you can avoid them.
A great looking website goes a long way towards attracting the attention of visitors, but if you website contains graphics that take a long time to load, you will be losing potential customers before they even see your main page. When in doubt, opt for a faster loading web page over one that contains flashy graphics and animation. Many companies make the mistake of assuming that the way that their website looks is more important than how it functions, when in reality, the key to success is to find a balance of both.
Marketing special offers and sales on your site is a great way to drum up customers for you business. If you don’t keep your marketing efforts up to date, however, then your website will become stale and boring. Marketing is an ongoing effort. Going along with this, many businesses incorrectly assume that if they are marketing online, they can stop their offline marketing efforts. Successful marketing of a website include offline, as well as online marketing efforts.
People use search engines everyday to find information that they need, but if your website isn’t listed with the major search engines, the chances of anyone finding you are slim to none. Take the time to manually submit your site to search engines. If you aren’t sure how to do this, contact a professional Internet marketing company for help.
If you are trying to get your site visitors to sign up for a free account or to subscribe to a mailing list, keep the information that you collect from them to a minimum. Studies show that each question that you ask aside from their name and address costs you up to 15% of potential customers.
When it comes to Internet marketing, remember to use common sense and whenever possible, enlist the help of an Internet marketing company or Internet marketing professional. They will be able to take an expert look at your website and help you identify the issues that may be preventing you from reaching the top of the search engine results for your target keywords.
Just in case you don’t think that using the same, easy to guess password for all of your online accounts won’t come back to haunt you, think again.
Last week, the website TechCrunch.com, reported that a Twitter account containing confidential Twitter documents had been hacked into, and the documents had been published online. Now, the hacker himself, known as Hacker Croll, has revealed to Tech Crunch that he used “Hotmail’s inactive account feature.” to accomplish the hack.
According to Hacker Croll, he was able to access the Twitter account of an employee of Twitter by researching the employee online in order to gain information that would help him to guess their Gmail account password. This helped the hacker to ascertain that the Twitter account was also associated with a Hotmail account, which was currently inactive, but he was able to reset the account and specify a password of his own.
ComputerWorld.Com reports that Twitter is now threatening legal action against some of the sites, including TechCrunch, that have published the stolen documents, but that legal experts were not sure if this would actually succeed.
With so much personal information being stored online nowadays, it only makes sense to take extra security measures when it comes to passwords. So if your password for everything is something that is easy to guess, i.e. your birthday, middle name, or child’s name, you owe it to yourself to consider changing it to something more secure.
No one wants to turn away business, but sometimes it is necessary in order to avoid big problems and hassles in the future. Here are five red flags to be on the lookout for when potential SEO clients approach you.
1. Their website is brand new and/or it needs too much work, and client doesn’t understand work versus cost versus return: ask yourself if the time investment is worth it in this case, especially if there are significant problems with their site that will need to be fixed before any real SEO work can be completed.
2. Their expectations are much too high: Do they want to get to the first page of Google. . . in a month? Do they seem to think that you have some magic SEO wand that you can wave to get them instant results? If so, beware. . .
3. They are resistant to making the changes that you recommend and to new ideas in general: If they don’t want to listen to your ideas and defer to your experience in the initial consultation phase, expect this to be a recurring trend.
4. Their website deals with controversial subject matter (this is relative of course, but if you are uncomfortable working with websites that deal with illegal topics, hate themes, porn, etc. than this should be a red flag). It’s the “other” white meat: PPC = Pills, Porn, Casino
5. They don’t want to do any work themselves: in other words, they assume that you will take over the marketing, maintenance, and generally run every aspect of their website for them once they sign with you.
When it comes to choosing SEO clients, trust your instincts and don’t be afraid to say no when necessary—you’ll be glad that you did. Don’t just go for the money!
You know that those embarrassing vacation photos that you posted on your social profile page last year may come back to haunt you, which is why you went back in later and deleted them. Problem solved, right? Maybe not.
A recent Cambridge University study, photos deleted from photo sharing sites such as Facebook were still available thirty days later.
According to the BBC, sites like Facebook store photos in one place and their main page in another, which can account for a delay from the time that you delete a photo to actual photo deletion. Seven of the sixteen sites tested, including Facebook, failed the test.
Facebook allegedly denies the findings of the study, telling CNN.com that “when a user deletes a photo from Facebook, it is removed from our servers immediately.”
Whether the findings of the study are accurate or not, studies like these serve as a warning to anyone who posts photos online—make sure that you aren’t posting anything that would embarrass you if your co-workers, clients, relatives, friends, or potential employers saw it.
As you know, many search engines ignore JavaScript, and therefore won’t follow the links at your site. If you use flash or images for site maps and links you will have the same problem. The use of NOSCRIPT can be applied, but used with care.
Sitemap Programs with Google
Here’s what to do:
Create a text site map that lists all the web pages. Place a plain text link to the site map on the index page.
Search engines check the beginning of a page for sitemaps. A site map won’t be found if it’s at the end of a long page. Place the site map link at the top of the index page.
Since you have more than the baseline 30+ pages, use Google’s site maps tool. This allows you to submit a list of all URLs to the Google search engine.
Create and account here https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login and get started. Google’s webmaster tools provide you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google friendly.
Scan your site with this free tool and build your sitemap.xml file: http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp. Place that file in the root of your site. (ex: mysite.com/sitemap.xml)
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Thousands of Pages
Since you may have thousands of pages, and only see a few pages indexed, a site map program will definitely be worthwhile. Some companies spend a lot of money on PPC campaigns, realizing that SEO solutions can help them immensely. You should build a search engine friendly crawling environment by building a keyword rich site map. You would allow the major search engines to quickly find and index the pages, thus increasing the index counts at Google and other search engines.
Time to Ramp up
Initially, this will take a long time. You may see your conversions increase weekly, albeit slowly. Then, after a period of time, several months likely, you should see conversions increase to hundreds or thousands per week on a sizable web site. If your site is fairly new, Google places it in what they call the Google sandbox. It is done to make sure you do not spam and it is a valid site. For new web sites you won’t rank high for many months – from two to five months. You will still gain from providing a clean site navigation with good content and backlinks. Tip: Make sure when you register a domain to apply with at least 5 years exclusivity. It shows you are serious (to the search engines).
Next Steps
Natural SEO and link building is still very valid – and building incoming links is always critical, especially when the engines have not yet indexed your page. You should go out soliciting high quality inbound links with the combination of deep interior links from niche sites and top-level links from directories. Additionally you may consider looking at URL and filenames page titles and metadata set ups. The site map configuration, the on page content and internal site linking. Google uses the site maps program and Yahoo still has the site Explorer program at: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
