When you move your home or business, you file a change of address card, inform your friends and customers, etc., so they can find you.

It's the same on the Internet.

When redesigning a website or even just moving to a new address (domain name, URL), steps need to be taken so you can still be found.

Especially, so that Google can find you.

There is a recommended way to do this called a 301 redirect. Google specifically says that this will preserve existing search engine rankings.

It applies on a page by page basis, which is why it matters in a redesign. If you are changing any page names, Google, directories and anyone who has bookmarked pages of your site need to know so someone trying to go to page A arrives at the new Page B.

But how long does the process take?

When you first move a website or change a page name, no one knows about it, including Google. Your 301 redirects send someone to the new page or domain names.

But how long before the dust settles and Google knows all the new page names and sends people directly to them?

We have done several tests on this, moving websites of several hundred pages from one URL to another, and at the same time changing at least some page names.

With this large a change, each time, it took about 2 months for the process to complete.

Now Google has confirmed our results in this new video from Matt Cutts:

When I change domains, how long should I leave the redirects in place?

One point Matt makes which we found essential: Monitor the switchover.

You periodically check rankings, to see if your old or new page names or domain name are ranking. You regularly search for "site:{domain name}" to see all the pages Google is indexing, to see which domain or page names are showing up.

Over time you'll see both of these gradually switch from old to new. If any pages don't seem to be switching over, you can investigate (as Matt did, you may find you missed redirecting some pages).

You could leave your 301 redirect code up forever, because possibly there are links still out there to your old domain or page names. Definitely you should try and get any links changed that are valuable (either because of page rank or because they are sending traffic to your site).

Otherwise, once the process is complete, you can delete the 301 redirects.

My recent post on "The First Question" reminds me that there is a natural tension between Sales and Marketing. This often breaks out into downright antagonism.

Sales complains that Marketing is generating lousy quality leads. Marketing complains that Sales are wasting their leads.

The truth is that Marketing has the job of generating ENOUGH quality leads for Sales. Of course ideally ALL leads it generates are instant closes, but let's get real.

There is always going to be a percentage of low quality leads amongst the total leads produced. Of course Sales is stuck sorting out the good from the bad.

It is true, the percentage of poor quality leads can make marketing a liability. Either by the amount of time Sales has to spend sorting them out, or because of money wasted generating lousy leads.

What you don't want is to throw out the baby with the bath water. Would you throw out half your quality leads in order to get rid of the great majority of poor quality leads? Would you throw out 20%?

Think about it.

This is a great article because of all the links, all in one place, for good, solid, basic SEO information.

What is SEO / Search Engine Optimization

No endorsement intended that it is 100% reliable, but a good place to start to learn the subject.

So you want to do some marketing.

Whether it is doing a website, launching TV commercials, designing a logo or anything else, there is a first question that dominates how you go about it.

That question is:

DO YOU HAVE A GOING CONCERN?

Actually that is really only half the question. It is really, "Do you have a going concern which can provide information to guide your marketing?

The reason most startups fail (figures vary but range as high as 95%) is not so much a lack of finance as a lack of information.

The most critical things to know are

Who would buy my products or services?

How can I reach them?

and

What can I say that will interest them?

IF your business is operating and at least staying afloat, you probably already know or can make an intelligent guess at the answers. Even if you are doing no marketing at all, you are getting customers somehow. A little thought and homework will tell you what your customers are like, what they want, and so on.

Even if you are jumping ship from a former employer to go into business for yourself, you know how they are getting customers.

Otherwise you are just in the dark, guessing.

That would suggest some serious market research before you invest a whole pile of money and maybe two years of your life into a project doomed to failure.

We get calls every day from people who have a great idea for a new business but no experience or knowledge of it.

Do you know what the single best predictor of success in a new small business is?

It is having grown up in a family that owned and ran a small business.

Think about it.

The first big thing ANY marketing has to do is get someone to notice that you are trying to communicate to them.

That's why beautiful (and often partially dressed) women are used.

That's why commercials are louder than programs.

Almost every new idea in marketing is devoted to that notion - not to better informing consumers or anything else.

There's a danger though. The gimmick you use to get people's attention can become the message to a point where no one even notices or remembers what you are trying to sell or why they should want it.

Case in point:

"What's a Twitter Bomb?" "No Clue."

A great ad campaign going on right now, all over sports radio and TV. Very memorable.

What are they selling? It was probably my 50th time hearing the ad - and TRYING to find out what it was about - before I realized that the campaign is for diet Mountain Dew. I think.

That's what I mean by distractive marketing - marketing that distracts the listener or viewer from your message.

Think in terms of getting people to notice you are talking. You have to do that. But think about how to make it organic to your message.

Otherwise the only thing they may remember is the cute punch line or the hopping frogs.

Though Yahoo Search is now powered by Bing, they are doing things on their own. They just rolled out "Search Direct" which is their answer to "Google Instant".

Unfortunately, Google Instant on a test works better:

Yahoo Search Direct Vs. Google Instant

Bing has gained ground against Google in recent months mainly through publicity, advertising and shoving it down people's throats.

Google still has 65% of the U.S. search market. That's down about 2%. Whoopee.

In my opinion, the "other" search engines contribute mainly in one way: Google knows they can't rest but have to keep working - hard - at improving.

So you think if you just had enough money, you could hire a famous respected big agency to do your advertising, and you'll live happily ever after?

The CEO of Groupon, says they depended too much on CP&B (currently the most respected agency on the planet) in developing their Super Bowl ads:

Groupon CEO: We Placed Too Much Trust

Here's a lengthy but very funny and very accurate article on the history of the New York Times trying to make money online.

Leaky New York Time Paywall

The short answer: they are clueless.

Newspapers and magazines COULD succeed online. They've just never figured it out.

I suppose at some point, some of them will save themselves from complete failure.

Mostly it points out the continued evolution of media and therefore the continued evolution of advertising.

Advertising dollars will go where the eyes and ears go.

The pace is astounding. New technology is advancing, new applications are being developed, and features added at a mad rate.

How is one to keep up?

I spend easily an hour a day just trying to keep up with things that directly impact my business.

Some of these things are sure winners you probably never heard of even though they are just around the corner.

Probably 2 years from now you'll be using NFC like you were born with it.

That's Near Field Communication, a technology that cell phone manufacturers are starting to include in their handsets. It enables devices to detect other devices nearby (within feet, or inches).

It could enable credit card payment by waving your cell phone near an in-store NFC device. Or personalized advertising that is served up as you pass by (a la Minority Report).

That's just ONE example.

Stay tuned folks.

The Future is Now.

I reported a couple of months ago, distinct progress in the war on spam.

Now Microsoft has announced taking down a single spam network responsible for an estimated 39% of all email spam in the world.

Taking Down Botnets: Microsoft and the Rustock Botnet

There is no scarcity of scumbags in the world. But so many good, smart people have an interest in making the Internet a better, safer place.

Pretty good perspective on how far Google has come, and perhaps - where they might go in the future. It largely applies to other search engines too.

25 Things I Hate About Google, Revisited 5 Years Later:

50% of the things I hoped to have fixed were. And I’m pretty happy about that. Here’s hoping that fixing the other half won’t take a further five years.

One driving factor in the browser wars I didn't mention yet is LOAD SPEED - how fast does a page load.

All of the browsers have made major strides in the last year or two in speeding up how fast websites load. They've made this a priority over many other things they could have been working on.

Why?

People don't like having to wait.

So one reason people switch browsers or download a newer version is to speed up their browsing experience.

At this time all the major browsers run much faster, but it brings up a key point on the other end of the equation:

The quality of your website hosting.

There are five big factors on how fast a page loads:

1. The speed of your Internet connection (the ACTUAL not theoretical speed. Cable is a party line, the more people on your "loop" are doing things, the more your connection slows down).

2. The browser.

3. Have you visited this same site recently (because browsers save portions of the page in their temporary storage, called a cache, to speed up load time).

4. The page weight - meaning how many Kilobytes or Megabytes have to be loaded for that page, as well as some other factors.

5. THE QUALITY OF THE HOSTING

This last is a huge hidden factor that can just completely kill the effectiveness of your website.

There's a reason cheap hosting plans are cheap. The company typically loads up their servers with hundreds or even thousands of websites, all competing for server resources.

You know what happens when you try and run too many programs all at once on your computer? Same thing.

We have seen a website where #1-4 above were no issue at all, yet take 15 seconds to load a page.

Who is going to wait for that?

Internet Explorer and Safari have always depended on the fact that they came automatically installed on a new computer or Operating System upgrade.

More recently, Microsoft has tried to shove IE down people's throats by forcing upgrades to IE8 as part of their automatic update service.

Someone had to go out of their way to install, then set as a default, another browser.

Microsoft and Apple's general approach seems to be to make IE and Safari just good enough so people don't bother.

The fact that Firefox and now, Chrome have seen their market share rise, rise, and continue to rise, makes it obvious that people like them.

There are a few reasons for switching:

1. They are cool and all your friends are using them. Don't underestimate the importance of this factor. I am sure there are places where people wouldn't be caught dead using IE.

2. Security. Reports I've seen indicate Chrome to be the most secure, IE (surprise) the least.

3. Features. For example Tabs have been around for a few years and are now completely standard in browsers. The fact that IE was slow in rolling out this capability undoubtedly contributed to a loss of market share.

4. Support for new technology. For example, the image type of choice for the web has for some years now been .png (not .jpg). But IE was slow in fully implementing support for them. Again, lost market share.

Apple mobile platforms (iPhones and iPads) will not support Flash. Yet Flash is THE technology for motion on the web at this time. This undoubtedly leads to some portion of people buying Android and other (non-Apple) mobile Operating System devices.

The newest web technologies, WebGL, HTML5 and CSS3, promise great things such as spectacular 3D capability. They are just starting to roll out and most browsers don't support them or don't fully support them.

You can see examples of this at Firefox's demo website. IF you are using one of the latest browsers, Firefox 4 (just out of Beta) or Chrome 9.

So you have the chicken-or-egg situation where developers won't use them, but then there's no reason to have a browser that supports them.

Except that is a tale that has played out many times.

In the end the new technology wins. The only question is how fast.

The hidden factor in this is how fast new versions of browser roll out. At one end of the spectrum, Internet Explorer is running on about a 3 year cycle. That means they are always 3 years behind the times, compared to Chrome which is rolling out major versions about every 3 months. Firefox is next fastest and Safari in 3rd place.

Microsoft is now frantically rolling out IE9 (and trying to kill off IE6) but they've got a different motivation - they are trying to keep the momentum going for Bing (which has been gaining some market share on Google recently).

How does it all shake out? I just see Chrome and Firefox continuing to gain market share. The days of IE's domination are not just over - they are long gone.

And that is a GOOD thing.

There's a war going on out there.

For those who don't follow this kind of thing, a few years ago, Internet Explorer (IE) was king, with close to a 90% market share.

(Before that, of course, was Netscape, but we won't talk about that).

The only real competition was Apple's Safari which their computers used, but that was a low percentage since Apple's market share has always been small.

But for a few years now, Firefox (FF) has been nibbling away at IE's market share. In some areas and industries FF is giving IE a run for its money.

More recently, Google's Chrome browser has been rapidly gaining market share.

So far this year, 38% of visitors to FastF's website are using IE, 29% Firefox, 18% Safari, 14% Chrome. A variety of other browsers add up to less than 2%.

So why is this and where is it all going?

What is the turf on which The Browser Wars are being fought?

Stay tuned....

Signs that Google's "Instant Previews" is very popular:

1. Google now is offering Instant Previews of videos, and

2. has taken Instant Previews for Mobile out of Beta

Google Blog - This Week in Search

The other announcement this week is a blockbuster:

3. You can now individually block sites and they will never show up in your searches again.

So much for Blekko.

Here's another example of the kind of thing Local / Mobile can do for us.

Google Maps Navigation added a feature this week to automatically route around traffic jams in real-time.

You've Got Better Things To Do

Marissa Mayer is in charge of Local at Google. At a conference this week she described the effects of this: Google calculated that it has saved its users 2 years of time every day since launch, in aggregate. That’s $250,000 in fuel costs saved because people aren’t sitting in traffic, Mayer said.

Unfortunately Google Maps Navigation is only available for Android phones at this time.

The problem with the Internet is anyone can say anything and claim to have Proof or claim to be an Authority.

Certainly in Internet Marketing, it ain't necessarily so.

Here are the main sources we rely on for information in this arena:

Google Webmaster Central

Official Google Blog

Matt Cutts (Google Spokesman) Blog

Webmaster World

Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Land

Note that this doesn't mean the information on these is 100% reliable. But at least these sites rarely get way off the rails.

Anyone who has worked at all in SEO knows that it is helpful having your most important keyword or words in your domain name (website address).

That is because the search engines give some credit for that in ranking a website. Logical, since you may be looking for that specific website.

Plus it certainly makes it clear what the website is about. It is pretty hard to argue that a website called "IdahoPotatoes.com" is about California Tomatoes.

Now Google has stated - for the second time - that they are considering reducing the amount of value they place on that.

If you are heavily depending on your domain name to drive your rankings and therefore traffic to your website - be warned.

How Important is it to have Keywords in a Domain Name?

Incidentally the video gives a very simple and useful explanation of domain names in branding. Not bad coming from an engineer - Matt Cutts - not a marketing guy.

Two announcements in the last day show the explosion of Location Based Services.

This is only the start.

First of all, Foursquare now has a recommendation engine in their newly release version 3.0. So you can see what is nearby that is recommended by your friends and others:

Foursquare 3.0 Has Arrived

I predict that will be very popular.

Now a new startup, Domo, let's you connect with nearby strangers on Facebook with shared interests:

Say Hi to Facebook Strangers

It's new, but this is the direction we are heading in, as by end of this year, half the cell phones in the U.S. will be smartphones (with GPS location capability in nearly all cases).

Link building is the action of getting other websites to link to yours.

This was the original Google breakthrough: if an important site says you're important, than you are important. IF what the linking site says you are about, agrees with what you say you are about.

Once upon a time - and to some people still - these "inbound links" were of greatest importance in getting search engine rankings.

Now they are often marginal in importance as per Google they only contribute about 20% to your rankings.

And getting GOOD inbound links is a lot of work.

But it is important as a part of your overall Internet Marketing program, if a long-range one. And there are situations where it becomes critical to, say, getting from #4 to #2 or #1 on a key ranking.

To get you started, here are a couple of articles with some pretty good strategies for link building:

Link Building Part 1

Link Building Part 2

Mobile ads 60% of the online market by 2015?

PC's obsolete?

Only 10% of traditional media (print) to survive?

I'd say predictions like these are more than a little out-there but certainly highlights the explosive growth of mobile usage:

Big Trends Emerging

mobile devices, which make location implicit in all online activities, have nudged personal computers onto the same track to oblivion as microcomputers and mainframes,

So if Google is the best there is, how do they do it?

Here's one clue.

"A Google spokesperson gave us this statement about the test:

'At any given time we are running 50-200 search experiments. We run more than 6,000 search experiments in a given year.'"

Since they report about 400 changes per year, that also means they are rejecting as much as over 90% of their ideas (perhaps several experiments are sometimes implemented in one update).

Takeaways?

1. Google takes a scientific approach to Search. Remember from school, the scientific method? Form a hypothesis, predict a result, run a test and see if your test confirms the predicted result?

2. They work hard at it.

Again, I'm not saying Google is perfect.

Nor does Google claim to be. In fact (obviously) running 6000 experiments a year pretty much proves they don't think they are perfect nor do they believe there is no room for improvement.

But Bing, Blekko, and others nobody-ever-heard-of use advertising and PR to try and gain market share.

Which do you want to win the Search Wars?

I'm in the Marketing business myself, but marketing and publicity are for spreading the word on great products and service. Not to be used instead of.

I know some of you probably think I'm a Google Apologist, or to put it another way, that I'm in the tank for Google.

I don't think Google search is perfect.

But everyone who is criticizing and complaining about Google - okay, you do better.

Show me. Put your money where your mouth is.

Yahoo threw in the towel. Ask gave up.

Bing increased its market share spending $100 million dollars on advertising, and taking advantage of the bad publicity on Google. Are they doing a better job on Search? They might be in a few niches, but overall, no question about it, Google is their equal or better in most areas.

The truth is that Google owns 2/3 of all searches and CONTINUES to do so, despite the fact that no one has Google as their search engine without choosing it - unlike Bing which is the default search engine for every Windows computer sold.

And Google isn't advertising on TV.

Now what does that tell you?

Don't miss the fact that it isn't just the rise of smartphones that is driving the widespread creation of mobile- and LBS (Location Based Services) friendly applications.

There's tablets which are really oversized smart phones.

First there was the iPad. Now a whole host of competitors are leaping into the market and today, Apple is releasing the iPad 2 (with a likely 2-1/2 or 3 still to come this year).

A niche that was once going to be filled by "Netbooks" (small cheap stripped down laptops) has been completely taken over, and they all run on mobile platforms such as Apple's iOS, Google's Android, and others.

They are so functional and light that for many people, they've made laptops completely unnecessary.

Look for this market only to grow.

While Facebook has made a lot of changes over the last months, most of these have had to do with the user interface rather than how Facebook relates to the rest of the Internet universe.

That's changing and this is clearly a smart move on their part.

Startups and big players alike have been launching applications right, left and center to connect with Facebook, use it or infringe on its territory.

Now in the last couple of days Facebook has released serious upgrades to its "like" button and comments functionalities.

Watch for more things like this, especially for more mobile and LBS (Location Based Services) friendly features.

Everyone (well, a very large number of people) uses iStockPhoto for stock imagery.

It's a great source because they have millions of photos, you know you'll be able to use them without worrying about copyright issues, and they are inexpensive.

However, they can be spotty. For example it is hard to find good photos of anyone over about 40.

There are other stock photo sources that can fill in some blanks, though if they have anything iStockPhoto doesn't, they are probably a lot more expensive.

Of course very specialized photos you aren't going to find from stock sources. Like before-and-after photos of dental work.

On the flip side, there are some usable sources for free photos.

For example, NASA has a large stock of photography which they specify you can use.

Here's a sample photo and their usage notice:

Discovery Blasting Off