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Interesting new study.
If you leave out searches for restaurants, bars and clubs, who searches for local businesses?
The general answer: EVERYBODY.
There is essentially no difference between age groups for example. That's right, 65+ users are just as likely as 20-somethings to do local searches.
The ONLY significant variation is income and education levels. The higher the income, the higher the educational level, the more likely someone will do local searches. There's about a 50% increase from lowest to highest.
Here's the original article on this:
Local Businesses Other Than Restaurants Bars and Clubs
The first spam email was from 1978. That was before the Internet actually existed, it went out on ARPANET, the Internet's predecessor.
And the battle was on.
The wondrous thing is the continued creativity in inventing new ways to spam, but I have a point to make.
What is the opposite of spam?
In my humble opinion, it is quality. What is the essence of spam, after all, but that it is especially low quality advertising.
Now look at some of the greatest successes of the Internet era:
Google, a way to get more exactly the results from your searches that you were looking for.
Apple: Music players, phones, tablets with more capabilities, better looking and more user friendly than anyone would have imagined.
Facebook: A better way to keep up with your friends and acquaintances.
Twitter: A superior way to keep up with who and what in the universe you are interested in, in the most efficient way.
Look at that and tell me what direction do you think you should go with your Internet marketing?
Go for lots of low-quality links or a few really good ones?
Tons of mass-produced web content or well-written, well thought out and accurate articles that really answer people's questions?
A word to the wise is sufficient.
First reports prior to Thanksgiving had online spending up 14% over last year:
U.S. Online Holiday Shopping Already Up 14 Percent
Now reports have Black Friday sales up more than 1/4 over last year:
Black Friday online sales jump 26 percent
This is good.
I'm sometimes asked if you can do something about a domain that uses your name, your company or product name or something similar. The answer is usually no, but there are exceptions.
Here's the basic rules - with a classic violation (source: Google Goes After YouTube Domain Typo Squatter):
the three primary criterion are “identical or confusingly similar to a trademark” (check), “owner has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name” (check), and “domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith”
This by the way, is not handled in court, but through the procedures of ICANN, the international organization that controls domain name registrations.
There's no disputing that reviews have become tremendously important. They build credibility, give you exposure and help improve search engine rankings - all in one go.
But how do you get reviews?
You have to have a system and that system has to be based on one key fact: Reviews is a numbers game.
It has been reported that 90% of all reviews are done by only 6% of customers.
How are you going to find those 6%? There's nothing that makes them noticeably different. They aren't more enthusiastic.
No, if you want to get 10 reviews, that just means you need to ask 125 people. So you have to have a system that makes it easy for you to ask lots of people to do reviews for you. THEN you can win the reviews game.
The amount of money spent purchasing online has been increasing at a double-digit rate, year after year, even during the recession.
That is still a small percentage of all retail purchasing.
But the other part of the equation - online to offline - also has continued to increase. These are the instances where someone researches online before going in-store to make a purchase.
Now Forrester Research- certainly one of the most reputable research firms out there - is estimating that by 2014, over half of all purchases will be influenced by online research.
That's just two years from now.
Still think your website and search rankings aren't important?
I've written previously about this.
Here's a great article on Mashable, making the same points, backed up with statistics:
If you need proof that data is king at Google, look no further than In the Plex [the new book about Google]. The word “data” appears in Levy’s book approximately 319 times. “Design,” on the other hand, appears fewer than 60 times.
The word “design” and its variations appears in the Steve Jobs biography 432 times. The word “data” appears just 26 times in the book.
I love it.
Google has just rolled out their biggest algorithm change in years.
Maybe their biggest change ever.
The change per Google affects 35% of all searches. While they make hundreds of changes every year, most of them affect a tiny percentage of searches. The Panda update early this year was huge, and it affected something like 12% of searches.
The change is a major upgrade in how Google handles freshness as a ranking factor.
There is a big difference between one search and another, in how important newness of information is.
Reports on breaking news, freshness is key. General content, it could be a minor issue - information years old could be just as good as something from yesterday.
This algorithm update recognizes these differences to a much greater degree than ever previously.
One way Google will recognize freshness is simply how recently a site has been updated in its index. Of course, Google will re-index a page when it crawls it and finds it has changed. But Google crawls some sites more often than others.
A major factor in how often Google crawls a site is how much traffic it gets. Heavily trafficked sites that change regularly are going to be crawled more often. The average site may get fully crawled every three weeks. Some sites get updated in Google's index minutes after a change.
So this is the first time that Google has acknowledged that traffic volume can affect rankings.
We'll have to see how much difference this makes in rankings. But anyone with a website needs to pay attention to this. It is huge. Big. Important.
Humongous.
Matt Cutts, Google's web spam spokesperson, has recorded a new, 8 minute video:
Google's Definitive Cloaking Video
Cloaking is ANYTHING done to show Google a different view of a website, than it shows a visitor.
There are many ways of doing this. They are all "black hat" violations of Google's guidelines. This is high-risk behavior that will get a site penalized or even banned.
Don't do them. If someone promises you great rankings fast, and it involves cloaking, Just Say No.
Once upon a time, Internet Explorer so dominated the world of browsers as to sprout lawsuits and government intervention, world-wide.
No more.
IE (all versions) is now used in less than 50% of all website traffic in the world:
Internet Explorer's Share of Web Traffic
Other fascinating information in this article: Mobile (smartphone) and tablet (iPad) traffic is now at 6%. Rising, but still a small fraction of traffic to most websites and in most industries.
And Safari (the browser on IPhones and iPads) is responsible for almost 2/3 of that.
One of the big trends of recent years is personalization of search.
Google especially has been working intensively on this.
What you see in a search result may be different than someone else doing the same search from right next door.
There has been a lot of talk about that meaning "the end of search as we know it."
That kind of thing comes up all the time, every time Google makes an important change, but it is always greatly exaggerated.
A new interview with a Google staff member makes this very clear in regards to personalization:
"In fact only small changes are made to a results page based on personalization."
There is also new information in this interview about exactly what Google does and doesn't do, and also making a clear distinction between personalization and what Google calls "context."
How Google Does Personalization
Read it!
Just how big is Google in the Internet world?
Possibly the best measure is digital ad revenues.
Google controls 46% - almost HALF of all online spending for ads.
Yahoo is number two, at less than a quarter of that.
(Credit: BusinessInsider.com)
Sometimes you might get the idea that Google doesn't like Search Engine Optimization, is even trying to put SEO companies out of business.
Not so.
Google lead software engineer Matt Cutts recorded a video:
Does Google Consider SEO Spam?
He even promotes hiring SEO companies "one you can trust".
You might call it "Google Loves SEO."
Here's a followup on an article I wrote in June.
IF someone is looking online for a local business, there are several ways they can look:
Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo)
Other Portals (A lot of the good general portals these days are run by periodicals. Here we have the likes of TBO.com and PinellasLife.com).
Local Search (Google Maps, AOL Local).
Internet Yellow Pages
Other (directories like CitySearch)
So what are the numbers? The first two categories add up to 74%. It's too bad these aren't broken down but they confirm the numbers we see working with various clients.
Search is king. All the hype from the Internet Yellow Pages sites is smoke and mirrors. They are a minor element.
In order of importance for local businesses, it is:
Google organic search
Google AdWords (pay-per-click)
Bing/Yahoo organic and paid search
Everything else.
And everything else is down in the weeds, less than 10%.
See the original report: Local Search Evolved
Everything else includes Map (local) listings, other directories, Yellow Pages sites, inbound links (in most cases), social media (Facebook, etc.) most of the time, and anything else that comes along and is supposed to be the greatest invention since sliced bread.
There are cases where social media is important. Sometimes search situations make click ads more important than organic search.
There are cases where certain inbound links can deliver large amounts of valued traffic, but mostly they are valuable for helping your organic search rankings.
Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.
There's a new study that sheds light on HOW people do local searches.
Do they put in a geographical location if they are looking for a plumber? Or do they just search for "plumber"?
And if they DO put in a location, is it the city, zip code, neighborhood, street?
This is a very good article. One reason I say that is because what they are reporting agrees exactly with our experience with various clients, in various localities and various industries. They even get this right: In different areas and in different industries, the search pattern varies.
How Users Search for Local Businesses
No surprise, the most common geographical search terms are the city or town. The biggest surprise to me was how much people use zip codes in their searches. This study found zips used 3/4 as often as city or town name. I would have guessed it was way less than half.
And, just in case you thought this wasn't important, 59% of those surveyed use Google to search for a local business at least monthly.
52% of Google searches result in a click-through to a listing on the page.
Bing's percentage is only half of that, 26%:
Bing vs Google Home Page Numbers
Another recent study says it all:
Monthly searches on Bing for "Google": 110 million.
Monthly searches on Google for "Bing": 5 million.
There is a lot of talk going on now, about how Google is not only monopolistic but anti-competitive.
Even Google admits that it is "monopolistic" - meaning it dominates the search engine business, big-time. Actually over the last year or two, thanks mainly to a big advertising push by Microsoft, Google's share has dropped a bit, running right around 65% of US searches currently.
There has also been a big push by Microsoft, other search engines, directories and the like, and various governments, to claim that Google uses their monopoly position to give themselves an advantage with their other products (news, YouTube, etc.).
Bull-pucky.
These competitors formed an organization Fair Search that produced a lengthy white paper. It's full of misleading, false and distorted information. This article by Danny Sullivan makes it real clear:
Does The FairSearch White Paper On Google Being Anticompetitive Hold Up?.
The Japanese have a saying "Business is War" and Google definitely has its enemies. I don't blame them for trying.
But It doesn't make me love or want to use them.
If Microsoft wants to beat out Google, they should get smarter. It worked for Google back when they had 5 staff and were dealing with the likes of Alta Vista and Yahoo and AOL dominating the Internet.
Google has created a new YouTube Channel,
justanswersofficial
This goes along with a new microsite,
Google Answers
This is promotional material on the virtues of running Google AdWords (paid, click ads). But it is all informative and can help take the mystery out of a very complex subject.
Recommended.
Is your marketing effective?
With most forms of marketing it is difficult to track the connection between an ad, offer or website, and the phone call or other contact that indicates success.
There have been many solutions but none of them are perfect.
Nowhere is this more of a problem than in tracking where a phone call comes from. Was it a response to a direct mail piece, advertisement or an online search?
You can ask the caller, but you don't always get a clear answer, and staff are often nervous about pressing a new prospect.
One solution available for websites is call tracking - where a unique phone number on the website shows that calls to that number came from the website. Services offered often include recording of the calls so that you can evaluate how good a job staff are doing of handling calls.
However, there are serious issues with this approach. Not the least of them is that they create issues with Google. You now have multiple phones instead of a single number for your branding. And if you ever stop the service, the phone number stops working.
Here's a good article on the subject, and at least the possibility of a better solution in the future (and what happened to the "click to call" fad of a couple years ago):
Call Tracking Without Call Numbers
In the long run it pays to make nice with Google. Play by their rules.
If you don't, you are likely to get penalized, even blacklisted.
What then?
All is not lost. If you suspect you have a problem, the first step is to look over Google's rules and your website, and see if you are violating them - or if perhaps you have a technical problem with the way your site is built.
Google's Webmaster Guidelines covers the possibilities in detail.
Once you've addressed that, make and submit a new site map to Google. But also, use the new "Fetch as Googlebot" and submit feature (both of these are in Webmaster Tools). This can materially speed up your site being re-indexed by Google. Within a few days you'll see if changes you've made, have helped.
If you want to know if your site is blacklisted, set up a click ad campaign. That will quickly tell you if your ad is disapproved because your site doesn't meet Google's guidelines.
If there still seems to be a problem, it's time to ask Google if you have a problem - or maybe you just need to do more work. Use their "reconsideration request" form, discussed in this article (with a link to the form).
There's also a new video that talks about the reconsideration process in detail.
Even though Google doesn't publish everything about how they rank websites - they do work hard to be as transparent as they can be. There is really no mystery to what it takes to succeed on the Internet.
Yahoo is now powered by Microsoft. They keep firing CEOs and Chief Technology Officers, but no joy:
Why Carol Bartz Was Fired as CEO of Yahoo
Microsoft is frantically trying to do a better job of imitating Google (and failing) while financing shady legal attacks on Google:
Court Tosses Out Ridiculous Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google
Meanwhile, Google has a "search anthropologist" who is in charge of "Search Quality and User Happiness" and gets interviewed about how to be a happier Google user:
12 Ways To Be More Search Savvy
Any questions?
Followers of this blog know that I'm missionary on the subject of delivering the best possible visitor experience.
Why put all that effort into SEO or money into buying paid clicks only to blow off your visitors with confusing navigation, unanswered questions, or a host of other errors?
Now here's a brilliant article that gives a great top down view of the subject. Don't neglect to follow the links, it's a short course in HALF of what it takes to make the Internet work (yes, you still have to get visitors to your site).
SEO Smackdown
I've commented many times on how running click ad campaigns is not for amateurs.
Do you know what the biggest money wasting mistake people make, trying to run their own campaigns?
They run Display as well as Search ads.
Display are the ads that appear on other people's websites. Search are the ads that appear on search engine results pages.
It only takes a few clicks to select which of these your ads appear on. But there's nothing on the screen that tells you one key fact:
These two types of ads are WORLDS apart.
Just think about this: Your search ads are ONLY displayed when someone is actively looking for what you are selling.
Display ads are exactly like traditional advertising. If you are selling something golf related, you advertise in Golf magazines or in the sports section of the newspaper. It is the same online.
So only a TINY fraction of people seeing your display ad are actually prospects.
Since you only pay if someone clicks, you can say, "what's the difference?"
Just one little thing. No one reads a magazine ad and then accidentally telephones the advertiser.
Yet It takes exactly ONE click to get charged for a visit to your website.
Now with that as an introduction, the AVERAGE percentage of clicks on display ads for Google fell last year from 0.1% to 0.09%. Just to make the math clear, that is less than one click out of every 1000 ad displays.
Do you think one person in a thousand might accidentally click on a particular ad on the screen? I know I do sometimes.
Let me be perfectly clear. 90% of the time we do not run display ads for our clients. Even though they are cheap, 9 times out of 10 they aren't cheap enough.
Great article here talking about the subject of fake reviews, good and bad:
In a Race to Out-Rave, 5-Star Web Reviews Go for $5
Reviews will undoubtedly continue to grow in importance. We know that Google gives quantity of positive reviews importance in determining how high your Place Page (map listing) shows on the Search Results page.
There's not much you can do about fake reviews. The best answer continues to be to get tons of positive reviews from your customers.
A client of ours was concerned about negative publicity on the Internet for his business. His company does about 6000 jobs a year. If just 5% of those customers go online and do positive reviews, that's 300 positive reviews a year.
What do you think the average person would think, if they saw that, along with a few negatives?
Exactly.
Yesterday, Google rolled out expanded sitelinks.
Sitelinks are the extra links to interior pages of a website, you sometimes see below the main listing.
They appear most of the time, when it is clear, or very likely, that you are looking for one exact specific result.
If you are searching for "Joe's Plumbing", Google expects you are looking for the website of a company near you with that name.
To speed things up they give you these extra links so you can go directly to directions, pricing, ordering page, or whatever look like the most important and relevant pages in the site.
Now they are showing as many as 12 such links, they are providing a short snippet of info on that link, not just the link, and they are showing them more often.
Here's Google's official announcement, with a short history of the subject: The Evolution of Sitelinks.
Until a few years ago, Apple and Google were not in competition at all.
Now, mostly because Google keeps doing more and more things, they are increasingly competitors.
Here's the latest: Google bought Motorola's cell phone business. That puts them into direct competition with Apple's iPhone business.
So now they are competing on browsers, computers (at least theoretically, with Google's Chromebooks), mobile operating systems, cell phones.
All we need is for Apple to go into the Search business.
Try to Understand Them.
Work at understanding where Google is coming from.
Try thinking like they think.
Do the things that would make you happy if you were Google.
They are very secretive about their algorithms.
But they are VERY open and vocal about their philosophy and what they are trying to do with their Search rankings and results.
So read what Google staff themselves are saying on their blogs, and take that as gospel in directing your efforts.
Sure, it may be more work. On the other hand, you won't disappear from ALL search results the next time Google catches on to what you are doing, or makes an algorithm change.
That's how we work. The result? We have sites we haven't touched in three years that still dominate search rankings in their industry.
Two of the biggest, most successful companies in the world, both giants of the Internet, represent two very different approaches to business, technology, and innovation.
I find this fascinating. It proves there is no single company philosophy, approach or culture that is the best.
Apple is about style, must-have features and user interface. They take products that already exist - the personal computer, smart phone, tablet, mp3 player - and do them so much better than anyone else as to blow away the competition.
Steve Jobs has stated they don't do market research because they are doing things people don't know they will want. They are much about "bolt from the blue", viral-buzz-spreading, gotta-have-it technology.
The Mac, iPod, iPhone, IPad, iTunes - the story is repeated again and again. Great styling, brilliant marketing, intuitive and intelligent interface, features nobody knew they were missing - that is the Apple brand.
Google is all about engineering and iterative improvements. They don't come out with big splash products. They pick up where others left off and make them better, and better, and better until there is no comparison.
They are all about market research in the sense of test and measure. They test thousands of possible changes every year.
Only about one in 20 makes the grade. Many of the more than 400 changes Google makes in their search algorithms every year, are tiny.
But every year a few are big, as are a few of their new products, changes in user interfaces and features. and they add up and leave everyone else playing catchup.
You could say Google's ambition is to be boring. I mean, other than confirmed Google Watchers like me, who gets excited about something Google does? And yet most people use Google products every day, and in preference to the competition - whether that is YouTube for videos, Google Search, AdWords for click ads, Android for phones (which has now passed Apple for smart phone market share), or the fast-rising Chrome for browsers.
Two different approaches.
Both work.
That itself is very interesting, but the reason they both work is the same: They both deliver superior value to the consumer.
SEOMoz, one of the major sites for us SEO types, has a wonderful page where they seek to track major changes by Google.
Google Algorithm Change History
It's pretty instructive from a couple of angles. For one, you can see the recurring theme of overcoming the tricks used to make low-quality sites rank high. For another you can see the increase in sophistication over the years in what Google is doing.
Finally, back in late 2009 when Caffeine was rolled out, I predicted that Google would be making major changes at a much faster pace. And sure enough you can see that in the change from typically two major changes per year, to six listed in 2010 and nine already so far in 2011.
You've probably seen QR codes - the square scanning codes showing up more and more, in ads and elsewhere. You can scan them with your smart phone and click through directly to a web page.
Even the Post Office has gotten in on the act. They are currently running a Special, 3% off postage on mailings that include QR codes. I'm not making that up. The Post Office!
So maybe it it is time to pay attention. We've found two important ways to use them:
1. You can use them in any and all advertising (including window signage), with a click through to your website. This works best if it clicks through to a discount offer. But regardless, a recent study has found that you need to put a caption on the code. Tell people what it is - "scan for a discount" "scan to visit our website".
2. With reviews more important than ever, you can put a QR code for your Google Place page on handouts or mailings to your customers, to encourage and make it easier for them to do reviews and ratings. You can even put it on a page on your website.
This is something that is not going away, it is only going to keep getting more popular.
I confess: I'm a Google lover.
It isn't "love is blind." I know they aren't perfect.
But they try, and in comparison to everyone else, they usually come out on top.
(Not always. I do use an iPhone, not Android.)
Take Google AdWords vs. Microsoft AdCenter - the two big players in click ads. Google owns about a 2/3 market share in the U.S., Microsoft almost all the rest.
When you compare the two services, most of the time it is either "Microsoft is as good as Google because they are imitating what Google does" or "Microsoft isn't as good because they are doing something differently from Google."
AdCenter's procedure for setting up agency access to a client account is so weird and counter-intuitive - and obscure even to their own people - that it took 3 weeks, about 6 phone calls, a chat and probably a dozen emails to get it straight. It requires two different logins, one to accept the invitation to manage, and another to actually manage the account.
Why?
A recent article says that AdCenter has now achieved near parity with AdWords as far as cost of clicks for comparable searches. I don't find that to be the case. With our clients, Microsoft ads are consistently much cheaper. So on that basis it is worthwhile to run AdCenter ads.
I also find the potential clicks are way less than 1/2 that of Google's. Since Google's tools for campaign management are superior, our typical process is to set up and fine-tune campaigns in AdWords, then set up a duplicate campaign in AdCenter and fine-tune it for differences.
Microsoft is losing billions of dollars on click ads. Google of course wants Microsoft to stay in business, because if they fold, then Google really is a monopoly and governments will come down on them like a ton of bricks.
What will happen?
Say tuned.
You can play a role in fighting back against dangerous and illegal websites and unfair competition.
Google has long had a mechanism for reporting violators. Now they've souped it up.
Article on the announcement:
Google’s Spam Report Page Gets “Biggest Refresh” In Years
You have to have a Google account to make a report, but then you can report a wide range of issues including paid links, inappropriate content, infected pages, copyright violations, as well as "webspam". Webspam is any effort to trick Google into giving high rankings.
You don't have to just take these things. You can fight back.
I've seen several studies claiming that the #1 organic search position gets more than 30% of all the clicks on the page.
I never believed it (and said so) because it didn't match our experience for ANY of our clients.
I'm talking actual numbers, across a wide range of industries, and national as well as local search.
Consistently, we find #1 or #2 gives a nice bump over being lower on page 1. The top half of page 1 is definitely better than the bottom of page 1. And being lower than page 1? Fuhgeddaboudit!
A new study supports these numbers. The Value of Organic Search Rankings.
Per this study, #1 got 18% of clicks, #2 gets 10%, going down from 7% at #3 to only about 1% for #10.
The big lesson here is to fight the battles you can win. Being #18 for the most competitive term in your industry will get you less traffic than being #1 or #2 for a term that gets less than 1/10th the traffic.
Sure, go for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But that is often a long-term strategy.
Short term, fight the fights you can win.
Google has been under a lot of pressure from governments lately.
One change they've made recently, probably in response, is to stop "stealing" reviews.
For some time now, Google Places (the map/ local listings) has shown content from review sites such as Yelp, Demand Force and others, as though it were their own.
This led to complaints on the part of some of these sites that Google was stealing their content, thus making it unnecessary for someone to visit their site.
That is no longer the case. Google now shows links to these sites and the number of reviews, but the only reviews it actually shows on the Place Page - and the only ratings - are those entered directly into Google.
These reviews are of great importance to Place Page optimization (getting your local listing to rank well), as well as to SEO in general (since Place Page ranking strongly affects the rankings of combined local and organic listings).
Add this into the mix. This is a huge positive in getting your listings clicked on - actual quoted positive reviews directly on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
Any company that has been depending on third party review sites needs to get a strategy going, to get their happy customers to go onto Google to add reviews.
Just in case there is any question about it, this is HUGE for local search.
A new study found that Bing versus Google usage is heavily dependent on choice of browser.
75% of Bing users are on versions of Internet Explorer.
In related news, another study found that Internet Explorer users have a lower IQ than other browser users.
No, really.
Links:
Bing Users Are From Internet Explorer; Google Users From Firefox, Chrome & Safari
Are Internet Explorer Users Dumb (CNN)
Google has the unlucky task of trying to police the legions of hackers, spammers and bad-hats trying to game (trick) them into granting high rankings.
Google can and does penalize websites for violations.
It also can (and does) blacklist sites so that they are completely removed from their index - meaning they won't show up in searches. Period.
How do you know if you are suffering a penalty or have been blacklisted?
The short answer is, you probably don't.
Unless you read about it on the front page of the New York Times (as happened to several sites in the last year, including J.C. Penney's website).
Nevertheless, there is a direction to go if you suspect there is a problem.
Here's a new article - an interview with one of the Google staff that work in the area. Google isn't always very talkative about things. This provides more information on the subject than we've ever had before:
New Clarity on Reconsideration Requests
Read it.
Google continues to make changes at a fantastic pace.
A huge piece of news, In the last few weeks they launched Google+ (their latest Facebook competitor). That is still being tested and rolled out. Will they succeed this time? We'll see.
One thing that has now become routine, Google's Panda algorithm change is now being updated monthly. These h are designed to help Google do a better job of sorting out the wheat from the chaff - the quality websites from those that try to LOOK like legitimate sites but are full of garbage, low-quality content.
Article on the subject:
Official: Google Panda 2.3 Update Is Live
Since it is possible for any website to be affected by these changes, you definitely need to pay attention to your rankings, and traffic to your site, and to work continuously at improving.
Here's the latest from Pew Internet on usage:
Gadget Ownership Among American Adults
35% of U.S. adults now own a smart phone. That is RAPIDLY increasing. 83% of adults have cell phones.
Virtually identical percentages own desktop and laptop computers. Not much over 50%, so it is clear a LOT of people use only a laptop as their main computer. Based on trends that is about to cross, in a few years probably twice as many people will own laptops (meaning a lot fewer will own desktop computers).
In short - to quote The Who - America is "Going Mobile."
If Internet marketing is at all important to you, this is a trend you need to pay attention to.
It is widely understood that reviews are of high importance.
Having many reviews will increase the position of your Local listing on Google.
People routinely use reviews to help evaluate a product or company.
There are many known instances of loading up competitors listings with phony bad reviews.
So an important part of any Internet Marketing strategy is to work on getting reviews posted on Google Places and elsewhere, AND to monitor your presence on the Web.
Automated review selection by search engines can lead to some horrifying results.
Here's a good article on the subject (additional info in the comments).
When Google Review Clippings Go Horribly Wrong
New reports indicate that usage of Facebook is down in the U.S. and Canada.
There were claims that this isn't accurate, it just represented a change in the way statistics were collected.
Me, I think it is not only real, but it is the first sign that Facebook has in fact peaked and all those predictions of Facebook taking over the world, may be just a tad overblown.
To a habitual Internet watcher like me, it's a no brainer.
Last year everyone had to get on Facebook because everyone else was. Inevitably a large number of those people found out that now they were there, they had no use for it. Nothing about it was interesting.
A lot of the promise has been defeated by bad execution and policy on Facebook's part. Example: Despite continued reports of how wonderful they are, Facebook ads are of very limited utility. For our clientele, Google AdWords are 10x as useful. Privacy issues, random changes in the user interface, spam problems - all are discouraging to users.
What does the future bear for FB? It will remain a force. Probably drift down slowly in usage / membership in the US and Canada while continuing to grow in some other parts of the world. Beyond that it really depends on Facebook.
Are they going to get more on the ball?
A few days ago I posted some key rules for email broadcasts.
I wanted to expand on one of these (quoting myself):
5. Unsubscribe. Very easy unsubscribe, at bottom of the screen. In most cases, they now offer a "partial unsubscribe" such as to receive emails less often, or on fewer topics.
In sales and marketing, if you ever offer people only two choices "yes" or "no" you are going to lose a large number of "maybes" that could become "yesses" with a little work.
This comes up all the time. Example: If the only way to contact someone from your website is a single contact form, the visitor is given only one choice. Communicate that way, or don't communicate at all. What if they want to communicate, but just not in that way?
Don't brush this off as a minor point.
This is VERY common situation.
One of them, which is huge, is email subscriptions. If a person only has a choice of subscribing or not subscribing, you are likely to lose them over anything they don't like.
That can be too many emails, emails on subjects they aren't interested in, other things.
The answer which has become increasingly common is to let people modify their subscription without unsubscribing. You can let them specify how often they want to receive emails (maybe they don't want weekly emails, but monthly is fine). You can let them specify which subjects they want newsletters on.
Of course you have to have an email program that supports these choices.
I just unsubscribed from one newsletter because it wasn't sufficiently fine-grained. Yes, it offered options. But one of them WASN'T to stop receiving advertising only emails. It wasn't worth it to me to be barraged with advertisements for things I wasn't interested in, to get the occasional interesting article.
Think about it.
Google has launched the "+1" button - their answer to Facebook's "like" button.
Will this fare better than Google's previous Social efforts (like Buzz, which flew like a lead balloon)?
We'll see.
In the meantime here are a couple of the best articles about it:
10+ Points About Google +1
It's Here: Google +1 Button for Websites
and Google's official announcement:
The +1 Button for Websites
There were literally hundreds of new things - expected and unexpected - in Apple's announcements the other day at its annual WWDC developer's conference.
There was a lot about iOS5 - the soon-arriving next version of Apple's Operating System for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch. A lot of nice improvements, which do not, sad to say, include support for Flash.
Probably the most significant announcement, which extends far beyond mobile platforms, is iCloud.
You've probably heard the word "Cloud". It's a big buzz word that has at least two very different meanings. I'll discuss "Cloud Hosting" in another post.
In Apple's case, it refers to any service or capability that is platform independent. Meaning you can access the same service, flies or applications from different computers or devices. Often this just refers to what is known as "SaaS" - Software as a Service, meaning you subscribe with a monthly or yearly fee, and access the program on the Internet through a login. That would be instead of buying and installing it on your computer.
The huge big deal about iCloud is it is completely invisible to the user. It is built in at the application level.
You'll be able to access your iTunes on different devices. And they will know what you were last doing on another device. So you could be listening on your iPhone to a tune, walk into your house and pick up where you left off on your computer without any effort on your part.
As Steve Jobs said repeatedly in talking about this at the conference, "It just works."
This continues the long-term philosophy of Apple of making things easy for users, and leapfrogs Apple over Google and others in this area.
Article about the announcement:
It Just Works
But I still want Flash on my iPhone.
Here's another inevitable instance of making things easier in the world of Social Media.
Since tweets are limited to 140 characters, you pretty much need to shorten a URL if you are posting a link.
Hence the rise of URL shorteners such as bit.ly and goo.gl.
Twitter now does it automatically. Not only that, it will show your tweeps the destination URL. Which solves this issue.
Here's the full rundown on it:
Twitter Adds Automatic Shortening for URLs
Will the next version of Apple's mobile operating system, support Flash?
I don't know.
Apparently Adobe and Apple have buried the hatchet. But, nowhere in the article does it say anything about Apple changing their mind:
Adobe CEO Has No Beef
19 out of the top 20 cell phone manufacturers support Flash. Can Steve Jobs hold out? You betcha!
On the other hand, Steve Jobs is not forever....
How long does it take a typical visitor to complete a purchase?
For low-priced items, is purchase on first visit usual?
This study finds even for an item under $10, it is still on average a 21 hour cycle. That rises to 25 hours for $50 to $100 purchases.
Size Does Matter
So that means even a $10 purchase usually takes two visits (most of the article's conclusions are bogus).
"Re-marketing" is becoming huge - promotion specifically addressed to someone who has been to a website but didn't purchase.
Think about how you can apply this to your site, whether an online store or not.
When Google started heavily rolling out personalization, people started writing articles that it was the end of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). There's even a new book on it, The Filter Bubble.
How can you optimize a site when everyone is seeing different results?
What do rankings even mean in such a world?
Of course that was vastly overblown. There is only one situation where Google serves up vastly different results: If it looks like you are searching for something local.
In that case, even if you don't include a location in your search phrase, Google will assume it and serve up results at least partially based on your location.
Search for "plumber" and chances are you're looking for someone nearby (though you might just want to know what a plumber does or be looking for a photo of one). That presents no issues for optimization at all, if you are optimizing a local plumber's website.
There are some other differences for sure. For example, In your usual browser, and especially if you are logged into a Google account, your own website is likely to show artificially high in searches. Google knows you're more likely to click onto your own site.
But mostly the differences are rather small, one or two differences in rank depending on who or where you are.
Google's Chairman, Eric Schmidt made the same point recently:
"The differences are pretty small, he said, saying the personalization aspects are a small component of the rankings. “I think that’s a little bit of an overstatement to make a point,” he said.
(Quoted in this article.)
Many times I've cautioned you against imitating what Big Brands do in their advertising.
It's true, marketing at the small business level is very different. But there is one area where you can reliably do the same things the Big Guys are doing, and win:
Email Marketing.
It's worthwhile subscribing to some of these just for tips. Newegg, Omaha Steaks, Groupon are some examples of companies whose email broadcasts are a model of "How to Do it."
Here are some points to look at. Some of them apply only to promotional broadcasts, if yours are primarily informational, use what does apply.
1. Subject Line. These are always very well thought-out, to create interest. Usually they offer a discount. They also avoid certain words that trigger spam filters (you can Google that).
2. Layout. Simple but eye-catching. No more than two columns. A relatively narrow width, so even if you can't see the whole thing in your preview pane, you can see the meat of it. and of course, it matches the branding of the website.
3. Use of Imagery. They are big on imagery without depending on it - since many people will not see the images until they click to download them.
4. Links. LOTS of links you can click on to go to their website. Even if they all go to the home page, they seem to offer different things.
5. Unsubscribe. Very easy unsubscribe, at bottom of the screen. In most cases, they now offer a "partial unsubscribe" such as to receive emails less often, or on fewer topics.
and of course....
6. Message Continuation. When you arrive on the website, the offer or item in the email is right in front of you, in the same words as the email.
A primary use has emerged for Twitter (NOT as a marketing or PR tool).
It's for keeping up on what's happening.
Marketing in general is a very fast moving field and Internet Marketing evolves so rapidly it is a real challenge to keep up. With a few Twitter follows, I'm sure nothing is passing me by.
Here are the key Twitter accounts for me (in no particular order):
1. @SEngineLand - SearchEngineLand is one of the two or three best and most reliable sources of information on the world of search.
2. @SEWatch - Search Engine Watch - Another top source for What's Happening with Google and the gang, plus (usually) reliable advice.
3. @Mashable - "Social Media News and Web Tips" - one of the giants of the Internet with a huge following.
4. @TechCrunch - A good source on Bleeding Edge start-ups, technology and data.
5. @PewInternet - Always insightful, sometimes stunning survey information on usage, habits, etc.
6. @Google - Official Google Twitter feed. Important announcements will appear here.
7. @MattCutts - Google's main spokesperson for Search.
Now that is only seven - and between them, they keep me at least 90% informed on what is happening in Search, Social Media, the world of Mobile, and other aspects of Internet Marketing.
Not bad.
FB now gets more page views than Google.
That makes it a tremendously appealing target for marketers.
How to make it work is the big question.
Answers ARE emerging. But don't expect the dust to settle for a while.
If marketing through FB interests you, here's a new report to help guide your experimentation:
Facebook Traffic vs. Website Traffic
It IS experimenting, you know. So don't just do something and forget about it. Do something, monitor statistics, tinker with it, throw it out and start over if needed.
Facebook, the New Marketing Frontier.
I've written before on the perils of do-it-yourself click ad (Google AdWords) campaigns.
You can easily waste a lot of money that way. In fact I regularly talk to people who have wasted a lot of money to discover this is not an amateur activity.
The same can be said for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
There is a lot to know, tools needed for research, and a considerable time commitment to develop high search engine rankings.
Even if trying to do that yourself doesn't waste a lot of money - it can waste months with little result. And as has been said, time is money.
Marketing is such an intangible. You can't touch it, and it is often hard to make the connection between sales and marketing.
Plus there are legions of con artists and amateurs promising the moon and delivering.... less.
It's easy to conclude that Internet Marketing is not a profession, requiring study, practice, know-how and thought.
It is and it does.
Don't believe me. But do remember: I told you so.
FastF has won new awards for two of our websites.
GQ Concrete Design and Med Peds Docs of Sarasota both won 2011 Graphic Design USA American Web Awards.
Congratulations to our designer Pat Floyd!
Two reasons black hat SEO (trying to trick Google) is living dangerously:
It is easier than ever to report someone and get Google to take action.
Magazines and newspapers like the New York Times are in competition to expose violators.
Of course there is the third reason, sooner or later Google's algorithm changes will catch up with you. But you could make a lot of hay in the meantime.
Here's an article that is opposed to reporting on competitors:
The Coming Tide of SEO Tattletales
I disagree. There's too much money at stake, and without proactive efforts, someone could survive a long time just under the radar screen.
The only method of disadvantaging bad practices, that stands a chance of really discouraging them, is if SEOs police the industry themselves.
The author of this article is concerned about negatively affecting the reputation of the SEO industry.
Apparently he hasn't noticed that the reputation of our industry is right now somewhere between that of Congress and Bernie Madoff.
If we all get busy, we just might stand a chance to clean up our industry and start to build some trust amongst prospective clients.
Here's instructions and a link for reporting:
Reporting Spam
SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) like to talk about "Conversion Optimization."
In short, increasing the percentage of visitors to the website who become customers (online stores) or otherwise take action.
Of course calling it "conversion optimization" makes it sound like SEO whereas this is a completely different subject.
But, more people these days recognize that it is not enough to get a visitor to your website. What happens when they get there? And SEOs are jumping on the bandwagon.
Used to be the subject was LPO (Landing Page Optimization) which only dealt with the one page your visitors arrived on.
I have a fundamental beef with these terms. Oh yes, I appreciate the idea built-in to them that these are measurable. Higher percentages = better.
But I still think it is missing the elephant in the room.
Which is that the subject is really "The Visitor Experience."
That is an organic whole of everything the visitor sees, thinks and experiences as they go through your website - which ideally adds up to sales.
Think in terms of improving the visitor's experience of your website. You'll get rising numbers AND you will avoid a lot of stupid errors.
Put yourself in the visitors' shoes, look at your bounce rates and you can SEE what the problem is. Bad experience = visitors jumping overboard.
You see my point?
People often comment on the main menu navigation on our website. It is designed to be different, unique and yet functional. That was very carefully calibrated to be edgy yet obvious.
Stepping away from the usual in navigation schemes is dangerous.
People have expectations on where to find your menu and what it will look like.
As soon as you do something different, you run the risk that you may completely lose your visitor. Because they didn't immediately see how to navigate the site, they are gone.
Here's a collection of unusual navigation schema that prove my point.
26 Websites With Unusual Navigation
Different? Innovative? Yes.
Fun? Creative? Interesting? You bet!
And yet almost all of them should be considered complete failures because they are going to confuse the visitor.
Make the menu fit the look of the website, make it interesting and appropriate.
But satisfy your visitors' expectations. To do otherwise is to operate at your peril.
If you aren't on page one of a search result, pretty much you are nowhere. Only a tiny percentage of searches ever go onto page two.
It takes a very important, high-volume search term to make being on page two do much. There are situations (with tremendously high-volume search terms) where even being lower than page two can keep a small business afloat.
But mostly, page one is the Holy Grail you are seeking.
How much difference does your position on page one make?
Generally, the higher the position the better. Except organic listings are more clicked on than paid listings - by a wide margin, in most cases usually 3 or 4 to 1.
Beyond that, it gets controversial. I've seen a lot of studies I don't believe.
Here's one that could be true. In a new study, the number 2 paid position got more attention than the #1 position, and the #3 got as much as the #1 spot.
Amazing. But still - does that translate into more clicks? The study doesn't say.
On the other hand I've seen multiple studies claiming that the #1 spot in organic listings gets around 1/3 of ALL clicks.
I don't believe it. We've seen too many results that indicate the drop-off as you go down the page is way more gradual than that.
Absolutely this kind of number is going to be true IN CERTAIN SEARCHES.
But let's take the situation that most people are in. A small or medium-sized business, selling something locally or in a niche market, where the competition is other small and medium-sized businesses.
That's WAY different than someone searching for a certain brand name or company. Or who is looking for information, not looking to buy something.
With nearly all of our clientele, we see a gradual rise of traffic to the site as they move up the rankings from bottom of page one, to top half, to a #2 or #1 position.
Of course it is better to be #1. Keep working at it until you get there.
All I'm saying is if you are #6 on an important high-volume search term, take a win. It is probably generating you a lot of valuable visitors to your site.
A year ago, Twitter was all the buzz. At that time it was really only useful as a marketing tool for celebrities.
Things have changed.
It has now reached a point where it is a useful tool for SOME (a small percentage of businesses).
What makes it useful is it is a low-friction method of spreading ideas. Short, so fast reading. A couple of clicks to forward it to your followers.
But it only works in situations and with ideas interesting enough to spread virally.
Market penetration is still only about 9% of US Internet users, so you see the limitations.
Nevertheless, it is worth exploring.
When you do, you need to know how to go about it. Twitter has been around long enough now so there's a good understanding of what to do and what not.
An excellent write-up (click on the links especially the one on a perfect tweet, for more specifics):
40 Tried and Tested Twitter Tips
Happy tweeting.
Google has many official blogs devoted to different subjects and markets.
Oddly enough, they've had no blog specifically on Search.
Welcome to the new Google Blog, Inside Search.
Every time search habits are studied, they find 3 or 4 times as many people click on organic listings as on click ads. This despite the fact that click ads are the very first listings to appear.
There are two main reasons for this:
1. The click ads show less information (just fewer words). That gives a searcher less basis for deciding what to click on.
This has been reinforced even more by the appearance of "integrated place pages" for local listings. The map listing and organic search listing appear together, often with a thumbnail and a red balloon. You get one giant result that grabs the lion's share of visitors' eyeballs.
2. Most people know you can purchase position with click ads, but have to earn your position in organic listings. They have learned to trust Google because the high ranking organic results tend to deliver what they are looking for. That isn't always the case with paid ads.
Last month Google launched Instant Previews for click ads. Meaning you can now see a preview of the page you will be taken to, BEFORE you click.
As this article explains, it gives searchers a better opportunity to scree click ads. That potentially increases click through rates - IF the landing page has an appropriate and professional look and content:
A Game Change for Landing Pages
And, in fact, we have seen Click Through Rates (CTR) rising for many of our click ad campaigns.
Will click ads achieve complete equality with organic listings? I doubt it. But this can help.
Have an online store?
If you DON'T have free shipping, you're missing a good bet.
Customers like it. It simplifies purchasing and seems like a discount (even though they know that the shipping charge is built into the item price).
Amazon, by far the largest online retailer (more than 10% of all online sales in North America) gives free shipping on almost all orders (just spend $25).
Is free shipping common? How about almost 50%:
Almost Half of All Online Orders Now Include Free Shipping
Consider it.
Here's one of the biggest proofs that the Internet is continuing to change.
Netflix is now responsible for a higher percentage of Internet usage than any other source, in North America - almost 30%. With other streaming entertainment sources, plus file sharing, they account for 2/3 of all traffic.
For a comparison, all web browsing only totals 1/6th of all traffic volume. That's less than half of what it was, percentage-wise, in 2009.
You can safely assume the amount of traffic from web browsing has increased. So total traffic volume has probably tripled in less than two years.
What does this mean?
Traffic limitations on accounts - meaning you are going to pay extra to your monthly Internet Service Provider if you are watching a lot of movies online.
Continued work on Internet infrastructure to handle the volume. That particularly includes higher speed connections to homes.
Anyone out there still on dial-up?
(Here's the article I got these figures from): Netflix Largest Internet Traffic
Google has, for months now, been putting a heavy emphasis on quality of search results.
They've even gone so far as to announce an algorithm change at the time it was made (the so-called "Panda" update).
Now Google's head of Search Quality, Amit Singhal, has written a blog post giving a detailed series of questions to ask yourself. He of course states these aren't Google's algorithm signals. They are something even more valuable.
A guide to what Google thinks makes quality content, quality:
More Guidance on Building High-Quality Sites
The essence of "White-Hat" SEO is to try and work WITH Google and how it thinks. If you do that, over time, as Google improves its algorithms, your rankings will tend to improve or at worst maintain.
And if you are having ranking problems, this list is a good place to start.
See how you stack up against them.
According to the most recent study, 57% of your visitors will be gone if it takes 3 seconds tor your page to load.
There can be many reasons for a slow load time.
Here's a nice service. Plug in a URL and it'll tell you how long it took to load the page. Click on "waterfall chart" and you'll see exactly what on the page is taking so long. Mouseover a slow time and get more details on why that element took so long to load. Then you can do something about it.
Test How Fast A Webpage Loads
You can test in different browsers and from different locations. At this time it doesn't have the newly released versions of browsers, but you can test on the most widely used ones.
That also give a great comparison of which browsers are fast and which slow.
Google states they use some 200 different "signals" or factors in their algorithm computation that determines your search engine rankings.
Of course they don't say what they all are - though some they have stated, some are obvious and some have been figured out by the large crowd of us professional Google Watchers out there.
Here are a couple of efforts to compile a complete list. They are from two of the best websites where professionals hang out, the lists don't agree, and there are DEFINITELY things on these lists that just aren't true.
Yes, the lists aren't new (both date from late 2009), but things haven't changed THAT much.
So keep on guessing folks....
200 Parameters in Google Algorithm
What Are the 200 Variables?
How fast does Google update its results?
That depends.
For the average website, about 3 weeks typically is enough for Google to have re-crawled and indexed your entire site.
For news, it is vastly different.
Here's an excellent report on how Google responded to the news of Bin Laden's death (and a comparison to how it operated 10 years ago):
Google & The Death of Osama Bin Laden
Quite a difference.
Pew Internet has released a chart showing Internet usage for various purposes, for each age group.
The results are pretty revealing.
For example, there's pretty much no difference in usage for buying products. Ages 18-64, run 60-69%. Then it drops off a bit, but even 74+ it is over 50%.
The popularity of using the Internet for health info is stunning, getting the 3rd highest percentage of usage in every age group. This is in the 80-89% range up to age 64, then drops off but still above 50% for those over 74.
The most dramatic (and obvious) differences? Percentages who listen to music and who IM drop like a stone as the groups get older (except 65-73 year-olds are more likely to IM than 56-64 year-olds for some reason).
Here's the entire chart:
Generations 2010: What Different Generations Do Online
The reason I keep writing about social, local and mobile issues is because there is so much action on them right now.
And a lot of that "action" is buzz being created by marketers. Sure a lot of it is "real" but a lot of it isn't.
One area where it mostly ISN'T real - as we've repeatedly said - is in using social media to drive sales.
There's a new study that supports that, with a great analogy:
If you go with the theory that you should market where the people are, then you should be running off to market during church services.
Buying things from retailers is maybe 10th on the list of things they want to do on Facebook.
Here are some more recent statistics on how people are using smart phones.
Google: 50 Percent Of Those Exposed To Mobile Ads Took Action
In short: Lots.
Here's a direct link to Google's YouTube video report:
Understanding Smart Phone Consumers
Here's a great short history of the war between Google and Spammers, showing action and response over the last 10+ years.
Google Told You So
And their conclusion is the same as mine (my article from one year ago).
Basically, the war is over. Spammers can't keep up.
Of course that is an exaggeration but it is also good news for legitimate businesses.
Most of you can compete for online business.
IF you understand marketing and the Internet and IF you take intelligent steps over time.
In the vast majority of cases, Internet Marketing is never going to be a "Get Rich Quick" proposition.
But it IS a game you can win.
The first test a website has to pass is getting visitors to stick.
This is reflected in a statistic called "bounce rate" which usually means just the percentage of visitors who leave the site without clicking through to a second page.
It reflects both the quality of the site and the quality of the visitors.
It's a judgement factor what an acceptable bounce rate is for a particular entry page.
This article asks what is certainly a rhetorical question:
Should Your Paid Search Account Care About Bounce Rates?
Because of course, any time you pay for a click, and that person bounces, you wasted your money.
Of course there is such a thing as reality and you are never going to get 100% of visitors to stick - let alone convert and purchase or become leads.
It is an intelligent article but some of these numbers, we consider eyebrow raisers:
20% or less is amazing
20-30% is fantastic
40-60% is fairly common
60-70% is common for keywords that are a bit ambiguous (TV Sets, Laptop)
70% or higher – something needs to be fixed
In most situations we consider in most situations, anything over 40% is a red flag and serious evidence of work needed.
No matter what your bounce rate, it can be improved. But it's true, it isn't always the most important thing to be working on. If your bounce rate is under 40%, almost always you should be more concerned about increasing time-on-site, conversions, or just flat out increasing the amount of traffic to the site.
While this is a promotional video, it provides a rare look inside a Google Data Center and answers some questions about them.
Google's Secretive Data Centers
High tech, as you would expect.
Here are some eye-opening up-to-the-minute statistics on the value of showing well on local searches on smart phones.
The short answer: Very valuable indeed.
43 Percent Walk Through The Door
And "2011 The Year of Mobile" is just getting started.
(Heaviest usage as expected is for dining, followed by entertainment and retail.)
The latest Gold Rush is of course to Social Media - Facebook, Twitter and the like.
Are these moneymakers?
This article attempts to make a convincing case that the answer is "YES":
Why Walmart Spent $300 Million
It has links to two supporting articles. The anchor text makes it look like these are studies showing the rise of Social Commerce. They are just more assertions with no statistics to back them up.
Here's the REAL study:
Search Sends More & Better Traffic
The study is for mainly entertainment related sites, where if anything, you'd expect Social to play a bigger role.
So the real answer is:
Sometimes, maybe for you, and maybe in the future.
As we keep saying, check out Social Media, try them out, see if you can make them work for you. Don't EXPECT them to be huge or to save your bacon.
And pay attention to what is going on. The Future is coming at us awfully fast, in the digital world. There will be new things tomorrow....
Google has quietly rolled out a series of small but useful enhancements to Search:
Instant Preview now supports Flash for MOST previews.
If you have Quick Scroll installed (either as a Chrome extension or as part of Google Toolbar) you can click on a highlighted area within an Instant Preview to go directly to that section of the page.
Instant Previews can now be used on mobile devices, Android tablets, iPads and the Opera browser.
Previews support additional result types, including .doc and .ppt files; and video results now have a playable interface.
"Dictionary" has been added to the left-panel. It'll serve up definitions, examples of the word in context from news, related phrases, synonyms and more. One click on the translation tool then brings you to Google Translate.
Good stuff.
Two excellent articles about website content.
Toward Content Quality
Make Your Content Make A Difference
Read, Listen to the Wisdom.
Internet Advertising spends rose to an estimated $26 Billion in 2010, after dropping (for the first time since its been tracked) in 2009
IAB: 2010 Online Advertising Worth $26 Billion, Search 46 Percent
Spending on Search was $12 Billion, up from $10 Billion.
We can confidently expect that trend to continue, as Google changes on Local search in the Fall of 2010, cemented the necessity of using Click Ads to supplement Organic Search in very many cases.
Display ads was the other big winner, no surprise.
Notice email advertising is down by 1/3 and all but gone in terms of share of budget.
Chrome really got the Browser War action going with its fast cycle time, literally 6 weeks to new versions.
Firefox has responded to this releasing version 4 but now also has sped up their cycle, as this article makes clear:
Mozilla Introduces Aurora
Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 9 and is pushing it out to consumers right now, but also is already making noise about IE10.
Only Apple is sleeping in this area. Safari 5 is now 10 months old and there is not even a peep about a version 6.
What's up with that? I'm sure their reasoning is, if you are using an Apple computer, you are using Safari, and no one is going to decide to buy or not buy one based on the browser.
And they just aren't trying to push Safari further into the PC world for the inverse reason: No one is going to decide to switch to Apple because they loved the Safari browser experience.
You know what? I think they're right.
If you are into Internet Marketing at all, you've probably asked yourself that question.
Google spokesman Matt Cutts gives a good answer:
How would a non-optimized site outrank a site which has done SEO?
A great overview of what rankings are about and the limitations of traditional site SEO.
National Search also has its wrinkles.
There are two main points:
1. When competing nationally, you often REALLY have to pick your fights. There are search terms where you'd need a 100,000 page website to show up on page one on a Google search. So you look for "The Sweet Spot" - the search terms on the fringes which don't have anything like as much traffic, but they are relevant, and it is realistic to show up on page one with a reasonable effort.
THEN you start working on moving those high on Page One and to get the next more competitive terms ranking.
2. There are many subjects where you are competing against local businesses, and that is a tough row to hoe. Google has flat out stated if you aren't located in the local area, you aren't going to show up in a local search (where someone includes a location in their search phrase, or Google assumes it because many people searching on the term would be looking for a local business).
Of course there are few absolutes in Search, and this isn't one of them. But with any truly competitive search phrase, it may be monumentally hard.
Do a search for "water damage Tampa" and not one business located outside Tampa Bay shows up on Page One. And believe me, the Service Magic and Switchboard.com's of the world would kill to rank for a term like that.
In fact you have to get well onto Page Two before the first such shows up, and that is Yahoo Local. So these national companies are stuck doing advertising to drive traffic, and running expensive click ads.
Since Google made its major changes to Local Search last fall, websites like those have just fallen clean off the organic Search map.
So it goes back to #1 - find less competitive search terms, where you can pick and win a fight against local companies if that is vital to your effort.
Of course "pick your fight" can apply to local companies as well, but it is MUCH rarer.
Its no surprise to chronic Internet watchers. Differences between age groups are disappearing in many areas of Internet usage.
Read the report:
Generations Online in 2010
Some strikingly accurate reasons why you need to pay attention to the Local Data out there on you:
6 Reasons Why Local Data Will Rule in 2011
Notice it refers to Social and Mobile. SoMoLo = the intersection of Social, Mobile and Local = the hottest space in the marketing world right now.
Bing's market share is now over 30% of U.S. search, a continued trend which this article ascribes to possibly Bing being superior. Except the stats they quote show nothing of the sort. We have a different idea:
Browser Wars and Search Engines
Browser Wars (Part 2)
Exactly as I predicted, Microsoft is now rolling out IE9 as an automatic update. Millions of people will suddenly find that a) they are now using IE9, and b) their default search engine is Bing. Many of them will leave it at that.
Bing has announced a new "Business Portal" - essentially its version of Google Places. Is this anything more than a rebranding? We'll see.
Meanwhile, Google fires back with better handling of penalty situations, and now incorporating user site blocking information into its algorithms.
Stay tuned folks. I know where I'm betting my money.
Here's an amazingly thorough write-up on how Google's Autocomplete (search suggestion) feature works. From Danny Sullivan, one of the most respected of Google Watchers:
How Google Instant's Autocomplete Suggestions Work
Google is fond of saying that all you really need to do for SEO is have great content.
Except of course that isn't really true, as many videos and articles from Google themselves point out.
Yes, you need fresh, original, relevant content to rank well.
But there are three other categories of issues that do affect rankings to a greater or lesser degree.
Inbound links is one.
A second could be called signals - the clues that Google looks to cue it in as to what a page is about. That is the title tag, use of bolds and underlines, internal links, headlines and sub-heads, and the like.
The third is purely technical matters. There are many such. But the first rule is, if you have great content and a large enough website, you should look into possible technical issues that may be confusing Google, making your site hard to read, or giving it the wrong idea.
Of course the most extreme example of that is building a site all in Flash. You just aren't going to rank well.
Material buried in sub-directories, many links deep from the home page, is just not going to be considered important. Google now considers blog pages to be much less important than other pages on a website, all other things being equal.
Failure to use 301 redirects when you redo a website, can cost you rankings for months while Google gets it all sorted out.
Google can be confused by finding the same page under several different URLs. This can be a problem with dynamically generated pages. Google has written quite a bit on this subject and offered up more than one remedy such a the "canonical" tag. So they must think this is important.
One specific instance of this is www versus non-www versions of URLs. Usually no big deal. But if doing a site:{domain name} gives much different results depending on whether you include the "www" then you are probably dealing with such a technical issue and better deal with it (most easily probably by rewriting the non-www version using "mod rewrite" (if you are lucky enough to be on a Unix server).
Sorry for getting a bit technical there. If you need to deal with these issues, you can find lots of detailed information online, and plenty of people who know how to handle them.
The main thing to know is this (quoting myself for emphasis):
If you have great content and a large enough website, you should look into possible technical issues that may be confusing Google, making your site hard to read, or giving it the wrong idea.
We spent the last two days discussing two more difficult local search situations, where you are probably going to end up spending money on click ads to close a gap. Not every goal in organic search is realistically achievable.
But there are a large number of situations where you can completely dominate your territory in local search.
Sometimes that involves a lot of work and building a very large site.
Sometimes it is easy.
There are really only a few major factors:
1. A single, or a small number of location names that everyone uses to describe the area.
2A. A limited amount of competition within that area, for what you sell or offer, OR
2B. People are willing to travel the entire geographical area for what you sell or offer.
The classic situation where this doesn't work is the dentist in a large metropolitan area. There are hundreds of dentists, and people rarely will travel more than 5 or 10 miles from home or work for a dentist.
A counter-example is a hardwood flooring company. There may be hundreds of them in a large geographical area, but people don't care that much where you are located, since you come to their home anyway.
This is not a black and white situation but shades of gray. The more your search situation is in the direction of this scenario, the more possible, even easy, domination becomes.
What's YOUR local search situation?
Just how important is site speed?
VERY important.
Take a look at this infographic.
THREE SECONDS and over half of them are gone.
There are many contributing factors to page load time. In my experience, the single most common problem is cheap hosting services.
This is NOT a place to save money.
Some of these statistics are simply unbelievable:
12 Mind-Blowing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know
1. 78% of Internet users conduct product research online.
4. 40% of US smartphone owners compare prices on their mobile device while in-store, shopping for an item.
7. 84% of 25-34 year-olds have left a favorite website because of intrusive or irrelevant advertising.
Read 'em all.
If you are in a metropolitan area consisting of one large city, or a bunch of small cities, selling a product or service for which people will not travel far, and with lots of competition - you have a tough situation.
Tampa Bay has a population of 3 million people. The city of Tampa itself only has about 300,000. Many smaller cities may have only 10 or 20,000. So people by default put "Tampa:" or "Tampa Bay" into their searches. The same might apply on a search for most anything in Chicago.
What is Google to make of such a search? It knows that someone probably isn't going to travel very far for a dentist. So if you search for "dentist Tampa" or "Dentist Chicago" it is going to give preference to dentists located near downtown Tampa or downtown Chicago.
That makes it very difficult for a dentist in, say, Clearwater, to compete on organic search.
The solution is to find all the smaller location identifiers. These can be a zip code, area code, name of a smaller town or neighborhood, even a street name.
The reason is that many people if they see no one nearby showing up in the search results, will hit the back button and narrow their search term.
Make sure you dominate for every one of these.
Don't neglect the major area identifier. Do all you can to rank for that. But make sure you dominate on the narrower location terms. Then also use click ads if economically feasible for the wider area.
That's what works right now. The fact is that when Google changes their algorithm, it can change people's search habits. People are learning to get more specific on their search locations in certain situations, but that is very much in the works - and some will never learn.
About six months ago, Google made major changes in how it deals with local search situations. People are still in process of changing their search habits as a result.
Two new browser releases are off to a fast start. Firefox 4 (with 50 million downloads so far) and Internet Explorer 9 (market share already over 3%).
As we've discussed one of the big questions is how that will affect search engine usage.
Here's a very interesting report on exactly that:
Battle of the Browsers: Impacting Search Share
No surprise, Chrome users are highly likely to use Google. And no surprise, of the various browsers, IE users are lest likely to use Google.
But a majority of even IE users search on Google.
IE users even search on Yahoo more than they do on Bing.
Pitiful.
As promised, here is the first installment on different local search situations.
First situation: You are located in a rural, small town or ex-urban area, and your customers come from the surrounding area.
If there is only one town of any size in the area., chances are people will put that town name into their searches. Another possibility is to search on the County name or some other geographical identifier (such as a Valley name), or possibly an area code.
This is the easy one. You only have one or two geographical identifiers to work with. If you asked a resident of the area how they would describe where they are located, that's the answer to how people search, right there.
Optimize for that one or those couple of locators and you'll usually be in business.
The only hazard is the area may be fragmented with a bunch of small towns of similar size. In that case you may be need to run click ads (run in your entire service area) to pick up some searches.
Internet Marketing divides sharply into Local and National (or International).
Are you selling your goods or services to EVERYONE or just in your area?
But not all Local is equal to all other Local.
We can distinguish at least three different situations which require significantly different approaches.
That is because of the way Google operates these days (since last fall's changes), and because of people's search habits.
The first is the significant preference Google gives to how close a business is to the searcher. Including assuming they are looking for someone nearby in many cases, even when they don't include a location in their search phrase.
The second is, what locations DO searchers put in for a search. That depends on the area, and it depends on the search. People will cheerfullly travel much farther for some purchases than for others.
When you add all that up it breaks down about like this:
1. If you are in a small town or rural area, not near a major metropolitan area, that dictates one approach.
2. If you are in a metropolitan area consisting of one large city, or many small cities, selling a product or service for which people will probably not travel some distance, and with lots of competition, the approach is quite different.
3. Other situations require a third approach.
Think about that, and we'll get into the details starting tomorrow....
For years we've been lecturing on the importance of addressing the Two Big Things in Internet Marketing:
1. Getting the right visitors in volume to your site.
2. Delivering the right visitor experience once they get there.
This isn't exactly rocket science, is it? And yet we were a lone voice in the wilderness. There were the SEO evangelists - Rankings as God. The SEM experts - skip the rest, do more and better click ads.
Of course both paid at least glancing attention to Landing Pages. No mention of what happens once they get past the home page.
Then you had Useability Experts. Not Visitor Experience, or User Experience mind you. Useability. {Shudder}
Last year you started hearing the occasional article, that maybe you should pay attention to CONVERSIONS (results) rather than to Rankings or Unique Visitors or whatever metric.
Please people. It isn't that hard to understand.
Get lots of real prospects to your website.
On every page of your website, fan their interest, build trust, encourage and make action easy.
If you do that, the Internet will work for you.
To whatever extent that isn't occurring, there's your unrealized potential.
Have at it.
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.
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.
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.
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
In case there was any doubt about the spread of mobile Internet usage, here's a video showing the spread of Android smart phones and tablets, from 2008 to now.
It would be interesting to see a similar graph for Apple's iOS.
Global Android Activations
Besides, it's a cool video.
And then there's the CEO of Google, in this video, talking about how much faster mobile usage is growing - faster than even they predicted:
Mobile Growing Faster Than All Our Predictions
This generally excellent article covers issues to address when redesigning a website, in regards to Search Engine Optimizatiion:
8 Necessary SEO Steps During A Website Redesign
It does omit how to do redirects so you don't lose your existing rankings - a subject which is thoroughly covered in Google Webmaster material (see: 301 redirects).
Usually people pay attention to NONE of these factors, because neither the client nor the designer understands SEO.
At best that is a big waster of time and money since a lot of this takes no or little extra effort.
Done later it can be a major pain, even requiring a complete additional redo or rebuild of the site.
The hunt for top search engine rankings is only a small part of Internet Marketing.
Of course that's what people (clients) have heard of and want. And should have.
But what about such not-so-subtle factors as "What happens once they arrive on my site?" and "Is anyone really searching on those terms?"
They can easily make the difference between complete failure and spectacular success.
Here's an excellent article on the subject:
I'm Ranking So Where's My Traffic?
Pay attention class.
Google announced yesterday a major update to their search algorithm.
This is interesting in part because they usually do NOT make announcements of such, and if they ever talk about them, it is usually well after the fact.
However, there has been a LOT of talk about search quality recently - much of it critical of Google.
In recent weeks Google has done a lot on this. Some of it talk (explaining things, talking about what they are up to, attacking Bing).
They also penalized three major websites - J.C. Penney, Forbes, and Overstock.com - for cheating.
They added a feature to their Chrome browser that lets you blacklist a site for your own searches - and reports on it to Google.
Now they've announced "a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries" "to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful."
The complete announcement:
Finding More High Quality Sites in Search
I think we are getting the message they are serious about improving Search Quality.
Do you tweet?
That's the verb used to describe the action of communicating on Twitter, usually described as a "micro-blogging" service.
A what?
Let's make this real simple. A short intro to Twitter, currently used by 8% of Americans, and rising.
I'm going to assume you know what email is.
So imagine your emails were limited to 140 characters and that instead of sending an email to one or more specific people, they were broadcast to the universe.
People can then find your tweets in one of several ways:
1. People who have elected to "Follow" you, will automatically see your tweets when they are logged into Twitter. Recent tweets from everyone you are following are displayed in chronological order, most recent at the top.
2. People will "re-tweet" tweets they like or want to spread. So if someone you are following re-tweets a tweet, you'll see it too. Re-tweeting is as easy as pushing a button, so that makes Twitter a great tool for virality.
3. You can search for tweets from or referring to a particular Tweeter, by name (identified with a "@" symbol, like @billgates).
4. You can search for tweets by subject if the tweets use "hashtags" which start with a "#" (hash mark). So tweets often use hashtags to "tag" a tweet as to what it is about.
Got it?
Not for everyone. But useful (or fun) for many.
A wonderful graphic illustration at how slow Microsoft is in upgrading Internet Explorer, compared to all other major browsers.
Modern Browsers SHIP
As a result IE is always at least a year or two behind everyone else.
This holds up the widespread implementation of new and better web technologies.
It also continues to erode IE's market share.
What, if anything, is Microsoft going to do about it?
No, I'm not talking about Civil Rights.
Social media such as Twitter, Facebook are as valuable as they are easily used - and that means integration with many other programs, devices, and applications.
Companies are frantically busy producing newer, better integrated versions of their software to deal with this. Even though market penetration for most social networking programs is still low (Twitter is in use by only 8% of the U.S. market), Facebook is huge.
And everyone expects the whole Social area to just keep growing.
Plus, Social reaches a lot of the prized Innovators, Early Adopter types - not to speak of a younger crowd in general.
So no surprise that just yesterday, both Firefox and Google rolled out significant upgrades to their Social Media capabilities.
Announcements:
An Update To Google Social Search
Mozilla Makes Firefox More Social
Watch for this trend to continue.
In the last few days there have been articles on Forbes.com and J.C.Penney getting in trouble with Google for cheating.
In a new short video, Google's spokesman for Search Quality, Matt Cutts explains in some detail, how to get into trouble with Google - and how to get out of it.
If giant companies like these can get in trouble, you might want to exercise a little caution when someone knocks on your door and promises you great rankings overnight for $99.
It's not that I'm trying to drum up business.
It's just I keep having the same experience over and over again.
Someone is trying to run their own click ad campaign.
We are contracted to manage their Internet Marketing. As part of the process, we review and take over managing their click ad campaign (Google AdWords, or Bing's equivalent).
We discover that they are wasting LARGE portions of their spend (as much as 90%).
AdWords is complicated, there are all sorts of options, and default settings don't necessarily produce good results.
If you must do it yourself:
1. Start with a small spend (daily budget limit).
2. Revisit the campaign every few days. Study the statistics. Think about what the numbers mean. Explore the options.
3. Do the Google AdWords professional training program online. You'll find out about all those nooks and crannies like the four different match types, Display versus Search, the different ways of specifying where geographically your ad will run, etc.
4. Plan on taking months just to find out if it will be cost effective for you.
Discouraging?
Reality.
Click ad campaigns are a VALUABLE part of many Internet Marketing Programs.
They aren't for amateurs.
Sorry to have to be the one to break it to you....
"Black Hat" Search Engine Optimization is any method of trying to trick Google into giving high rankings.
Mostly this falls into two categories:
1. Showing Google something different than you show visitors to the site. This is called "cloaking" and there are many ways of doing so. Google knows all of them.
2. Setting up links to a site to make it look like the site is popular, when that isn't really the case - for example by buying links.
It has long been known - and stated by Google - that these can lead to Google dropping your rankings drastically or even removing your site completely from its index.
Now a new video gives more information on this subject - as to when and how Google implements penalties (both automatically through its algorithms, and manually). And also how to escape from Google Hell.
The bottom line? It isn't worth it (trying to trick Google in the first place)..
2011 is the year of mobile.
Per Google:
By the end of 2011, an estimated one billion people around the world will be connected to the mobile web and 50% of all Americans will own a smartphone. Because of the explosion of web-enabled mobile devices, mobile usage is now on a hockey-stick trajectory: searches on smartphones and tablets have increased by 4x in the last year
15% of all searches are now from mobile devices.
Got it?
All the fuss about Google versus Bing, Blekko "The Third Search Engine", search quality issues, and now a major New York Times article on black-hat SEO from, of all companies, J.C. Penney.
So Google or Bing, is that the question?
I don't think so. A recent article trashing Google trashes Bing even worse. And while Bing has its fans, Bing is clearly playing catch-up with Google on, for example, personalization and handling of local searches.
To really frame the debate, you really need to divide Search into at least four spheres:
1. Informational. In most areas, Google does fabulously well on information searches. Bing does well too.
2. Local commercial. Google has put an enormous amount of work into this area over the last year and is mainly doing a fine job of it. Bing does well but clearly not as well.
3. Niche commercial. If you are looking to buy something in a niche market, again, Google and Bing both do well (and their results are very similar).
4. National commercial. This is really where all the discussion and criticism comes in. If you are doing a search for an online store or other non-localized items, such as for major consumer items, results vary. Why?
Too Much Money. There are millions, billions of dollars at stake in the results on organic search for the kind of search terms that get millions of searches each month - and from people looking to buy something.
Take health related searches for example. Health care is 12% of the U.S. economy, trillions of dollars a year. What's it worth to own a top ranking on a term like, say "natural asthma cure"?
The same impulses that lead to a Bernie Madoff lead to many companies investing large sums into various trickery to try and dominate rankings for terms like these.
What's the solution?
It is really questionable whether there is any ultimate solution, but certainly there are trends, and I believe that for this last category, the trend is towards other solutions than Search.
When I'm looking for a book, I don't Google it. I go on Amazon.
What many people know about making the Internet work, is Search Engine Rankings - appearing at the top on Google.
There are a lot of other factors and rankings are really only about 25% of it.
Here's an article, a bit of a rant on the subject. It exaggerates greatly, but it makes a key point: top rankings for WHAT SEARCH TERM or TERMS?
It's easy to get top rankings for terms no one is searching for.
Excuse Me While I Have a Ranking Report Rant
From both ends - the Internet Marketer, and as a user of the web - URL Shorteners like goo.gl and bit.ly should carry a mental warning label "Use With Caution."
As a user, you should be aware that a URL shortener can hide a link to what would otherwise be obviously a spammy or dangerous site to visit. So click with caution, have your anti-virus software up-to-date, and be prepared to hit your back button.
For the same reason, these URL shortened links are increasingly being blocked. Meaning if you have such a link on a web page, or in an email, it may not be a functional link at the other end.
The thing is, there is no good reason to use a URL shortener except where characters are at a real premium.
And that means on Twitter, where they are indeed useful.
Otherwise, they may be cute, but pointless at best.
Internet, like Dog Years, run about 7 to 1 human year. Three years is a generation. 10 is a lifetime.
So, the most visited site on the Internet, Facebook, is 7 years old today - or 49 Internet Years.
And if you think that's the exception, Live.com goes back to 1994, if you trace its history to the first public Microsoft website.
And that's the oldest of the 13 most visited websites in the world.
Yahoo also dates to 1994, Yahoo's Japanese site to 2000
Amazon.com was started in 1995.
Google was started in 1998.
QQ (Chinese instant messaging service) in 1998
Blogger 1999
Blogspot in 2000
Baidu (Chinese search engine) in 2000
Wikipedia 2001
YouTube in 2005.
Twitter in 2006
How will it look in another generation (3 years)?
Different.
When it comes to commerce, to a very large degree, mobile = local.
The reverse isn't true.
Only a small percentage of browsing and purchasing online are done on mobile platforms - iPhones and other smart phones, iPads and other tablets.
That is still true when it comes to local businesses, but the percentage is MUCH higher.
Someone looking for a restaurant is much more likely to be on their cell phone, than someone looking for a new supplier of steel I-beams.
In some cases the percentage becomes more than small. That particularly is true for what is called "LBS" - Location Based Services (Facebook check-in, Google maps, etc.).
Yelp - the review / recommendatons / check-in service - reports 35% of their visits are from mobile browsers.
I've been saying this forever it seems, months. This is the year of mobile.
Social Media in their early life are a lot like Multi-Level Marketing. Or a Ponzi scheme for that matter.
Their exponential growth depends a lot on people's spreading the word that they are growing like mad.
At some point reality meets the road. That happens one of two ways. Corruption / fraud / mismanagement / criminality take it down. Or it just fails to deliver.
The best of them meet the challenge, mature, and enter a new phase. But most organizations don't meet the challenge.
MySpace is almost gone. News Corp. is having a fire sale trying to unload it. It couldn't be sustained just by musicians looking for audiences, plus pre-teen girls pretending to be 16.
Now everyone is on Facebook.
But the chinks are starting to show, and I hope Zuck and company are paying attention.
Click-through rates for Facebook ads are declining. Criminals and sharks of all sorts are hacking accounts, finding creative ways to lie, cheat, steal and deceive.
After explosive growth for months in my number of friends, that has slowed WAY down. And guess what?
I'm spending much less time on FB now. I'm on to the Next Big Thing.
Twitter is SO interesting.
Google has proven that Bing steals search results from Google.
After releasing the proof of this, Bing responded by a) denying it; b) saying "of course we do, but it is not big deal"; and c) calling Google names.
Search Engine Land's original article
Google Blog Post
Microsoft response
And the best of all, back and forth tweets between the Internet Giants:
TechCrunch posts tweets
It is very usual to need more pages on a website, sometimes a LOT more pages for the search engines.
This leaves most website owners scratching their heads over material to come up with.
Never fear, we have some hints for you:
How to Write When You Have Nothing to Write About
Often, we write articles for our clients, though on more technical subjects or ones specific to their business, the client is going to at least come up with the information.
If you think about it, what Google shows in its listings (what is called the SERP or Search Engine Results Page) is your ad.
Just like any ad, it has to catch a prospect's eye and interest them enough to look further. In this case, to click on the link and go to your website.
A key part of this is the two lines of description between the title and the URL links. This is called the "snippet" and it is mostly, but not completely, under your control.
Most of the time, Google takes it from what is called the "meta description tag" which is a behind the scenes piece of code, an instruction to the search engines rather than something displayed on your web page.
In fact it is one of the few such pieces of "invisible" information Google pays much attention to these days.
Anyone handling Internet Marketing needs to know how to edit write and change these tags. Any program for website building is SEO-unfriendly, if it doesn't allow you to change individual description tags. or makes it difficult to do so.
But Google doesn't always use the description tag for the snippet. Here's a good introduction to the subject:
Why Won't Google Use My META Description?
Asking about this is a good way to find out if an SEO (Search Engine Optimization company or person) is competent or a faker. Any real SEO is into the subject in a big way.
I've written several times on how different marketing is between a small company and a giant corporation like Coca-Cola.
There are two basic reasons: Budget and reputation. Coca-Cola can (and has) literally spend millions of dollars on a product planned to fail, just so they can position a competition product where they want it. And everyone has heard of Coke (and already has an opinion on it).
Internet Marketing is also very different depending on company size.
Office Depot doesn't need to buy click ads or optimize their website. Everyone knows who they are and what they sell.
Another angle on this is there are many areas online where you can't compete.
Don't try and start a business selling a new and better cola drink.
And don't try and start a website that is a new and better version of WebMD or Groupon or Amazon.
You don't have enough money.
There are also thousands of smaller companies and industries that are still way too big for the typical small business to compete online. I'm talking to you if you have, say, less than 100 employees.
The good news is there are zillions of niches where you CAN compete and get rich. If you have an existing business, you are almost surely already in one of these.
A big part of all marketing is picking fights you can win.
This isn't always obvious. Many businesses can use expert help. It takes homework, and frequently testing over a period of possibly several months to work out.
The Display URL is the website address visible in a click ad. The actual destination URL isn't necessarily the same (though it can't be too different to be acceptable to Google).
Up until now you could capitalize your display URL as you wished, for emphasis, easy remembering or to clearly communicate what the URL means.
www.FastF.com
That's no longer true:
www.fastf.com
You can, however, still capitalize the page name if you are sending someone to an interior page. So all is not lost:
www.fastf.com/Website-Design-Portfolio
This is NOT a popular change. We'll see if it sticks.
Launched in October amongst great fanfare, "The Third Search Engine" is continuing to get publicity.
But is it getting users?
Does it work?
Like Bing, Blekko realized if they were going to compete with Google, they had to do something different.
Oh yes, and better.
Blekko is different, it adds a more current social media dimension to search with the use of tags generated by yourself and friends. The idea is since such a high percentage of sites are spam, garbage, instead of trying to filter those out, let's instead select out the actual best sites.
Not a bad idea in theory. It might in fact find a niche in very heavily spammed subjects, if Google doesn't find a way to cope with them.
So far? Well, I looked at the visits from a client site that had almost 25,000 visitors in the last 30 days. Guess how many visits came from Blekko?
Zero. None. Zip. Bupkus.
I think they have a ways to go....
In a new post to Google's official blog, Matt Cutts speaks frankly about quality issues with search and Google's efforts to deal with it.
Google search and search engine spam
Take heed. Pay attention not just to quantity, but quality of content in 2011.
Because Google will.
Matt Cutts replies with specifics on duplicate content
Now, think about it like a search engine who has come across the following situation:
- Two pages appear to have roughly the same content
- Page B has a subset of page A’s content
- Page A was published before page B
- Both pages use images from page A’s domain.
When it comes time to rank the two pages, which one do you put first? If you are a user, which page would you like to see at the top of your search results? How would you feel if you were site A?
The entire thread (link goes to Matt's comments):
How Does Google Look at Duplicate Content?
Inevitably, someone wasn't just going to sit back and wait for the battle between Steve Jobs and Adobe over Flash, to play out.
The Skyfire browser is an app available for $2.99 for iPhones, will shortly be available for iPads as well.
They convert videos on their server and send you a readable (HTML5) version of the video.
Only works for Flash videos, not games or applications, and only for those videos already converted and on their servers - which is a lot, and increasing.
Stay tuned folks.
Google has shuffled their top executives with the two founders, Sergey Bring and Larry Page, and their long-tme CEO, Eric Schmidt, having different (and clearly delineated) roles in leading the company.
What does this mean? Clearly they have no intention of getting old and stale.
How Larry Page’s Google Will Function
Expect no slowdown in the pace of innovation from them.
Many people don't own their own website - and don't know it.
Ownership means owning the domain name - your website address.
That is done by registering the address with a "domain registrar" - a company authorized directly or indirectly by ICANN, the international organization that handles such issues.
But in many cases a website designer handles the registration for a client and charges them for it yearly. And usually they don't make it clear to the client that in fact they (the designer) actually owns their domain.
They do provide a service, but they also make a nice little profit. But the main point is, if you don't control your own domain name, your website could disappear or be changed without your okay, and there would be very little you could do about it.
Getting control of your own website domain is usually easy, takes a few days and is inexpensive (like $7.49). But we've recently seen a client have to pay $2,000 to get ownership of their domain name.
It's worth paying attention to.
Like the old joke "I can't be out of money, I still have checks", you wouldn't think the Internet could run out of addresses.
Not only is it, it is imminent. As in, this year.
Actual Interrnet addresses - called IP (for Internet Protocol) addresses - are a series of 4 numbers, each between 0 and 255, and separated by dots (for example 192.168.0.1). There are a lot of these numbers but they are getting used up very fast mostly due to the increasing number of Internet connected devices.
Increases the number of IP addresses one person may be using.
What's the solution? This has been predicted for years and a new protocol, IPv6, was developed, which allows for 6 numbers.
Making all computers and programs work with IPv6 is a lot of work, but its been a work in progress for a few years.
Now the first major test of IPv6 is scheduled for June 8th:
World IPv6 Day
Participants include Google, Facebook, and Yahoo amongst many others. You don't need to do anything to prepare, but be aware there is a slight chance (estimated at one in 2000) you may have problems.
The massive rate of change Google engaged in for a full year has slowed down.
Just in relation to Search, 2010 brought us Caffeine, May Day, Instant Search, integrated Place pages and a host of other monumental changes.
The last of those was in October and since then, things have been (relatively) quiet.
We can use the break.
Frankly, we are all still finding out all the consequences of some of those later changes.
You probably see them every day. Someone promising to get you top search engine rankings with Google.
Usually they claim to have a special relationship with Google.
No matter how big a company they are, this is always a scam and a lie.
How do we know? Google says so!
Search Engine Roundtable
Run screaming the other way when you hear such a promise. Genuine SEO takes hard work and a lot of knowledge and experience. It can produce results rapidly - but that means months, not days or minutes.
Sorry to have to break the news.
Mobile browsing is rising at a dramatic pace, with smart phones becoming the norm, the fabulous success of the iPad and now competing tablet devices as well.
One report shows more website visitors on mobile platforms than on Internet Explorer 6.
Time to take mobile seriously, even if you aren't in the restaurant, recreation or entertainment fields.
However, building mobile-friendly websites is still full of question marks. There are multiple operating systems you have to deal with - having contradictory requirements (hello Steve Jobs and Flash).
Another question is what exactly to do for mobile. Offer a slightly mobile-friendly version of a site? Have an entire different site tailored for mobile? Build an app?
The same answer won't be correct in all cases. And there are things that won't be completely settled for years. Call it The Mobile Browser Wars.
But that's no reason not to at least start to address the questions.
With news of Facebook passing Google for number of U.S., visitors, you might assume that Facebook ads would be a lot like Google ads - only better.
They are very different - at least if you are talking about Google Search as opposed to Display Network ads.
Google Search ads show up when someone is searching on Google (or its partner search engines) - on the search results page. So your ad is being displayed to someone who is actually LOOKING for what you are selling.
Facebook ads, as well as Google Display Network ads, are traditional advertising - fundamentally no different than magazine ads. People aren't reading a magazine for the ads (for the most part), and people aren't going on Facebook to buy something.
See the difference?
So an ad that gets a 2% click through rate on Google Search, might get a 0.1% click through rate on the display network - and a lot of those might be mistakes or from idle curiosity, not buying interest.
Facebook does have the advantage of better demographics. So you can run your ad only to people of certain ages, for example. It can help build awareness in your target market even if it doesn't generate clicks (and sales).
But it is still a traditional ad. It can work for you, but don't expect too much from it.
There are a few Big Problems in marketing. One of them is getting the word out about your company, products or services.
And that is THE big problem because if you can't do that, you can't market. And if you CAN do it, all other marketing problems becoming a lot easier.
It is a problem for most small businesses because they don't have the budget to just blast their way into the awareness of their prospective customers, clients or patients.
Most of us can't afford a Superbowl TV commercial.
So how do you get the word out in a way you can afford? There are lots of answers, but the Holy Grail of answers is to Go Viral.
Go Viral. Get others to spread the word to others who spread the word to others... until your web server crashes because so many people are trying to view your website, the phones won't stop ringing and the warehouse is in despair over keeping up with shipping.
THAT'S the problem we all want.
So..... how do you go viral? How can you do something that will catch the imagination and spread like wildfire?
I'm afraid I haven't a lot of clues to offer on that. Except it isn't going to be by doing the ordinary.
However, there IS something effective you can do to make it easier for the right idea to go viral.
THIS Is what social media shine at.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, all the rest are capable of getting the word out like nobody's business.
So, if you have ambitions in this direction, get familiar with these tools. Play with them. Set up your accounts. Have fun with them.
Who knows. You could be The Next Big Thing.
Why is Google so innovative?
Their engineers can spend a day a week on projects of their own invention.
A large number of Google's many innovations have started this way. Google Instant is just one of these.
A Peak Inside Google Labs
One repeated question is whether you can use PO Boxes for addresses in Google (or Yahoo or Bing or....) local listings pages (called Place Pages in Google).
The answer is a firm "maybe."
Address-Less Businesses
This is an issue I expect Google to resolve in the near future - it has been festering for quite a while, but with the huge emphasis on local search now, I have to assume it is on their radar screens to sort it out.
Google was VERY busy with changes and releases in 2010.
Here's a good 4-part summary, with links to articles and announcements:
First Quarter Changes
Second Quarter Changes
Third Quarter Changes
Fourth Quarter Changes
What will 2011 bring? Stay tuned, and fasten your seatbelts....
A great sign for the economy. Online holiday sales were up 15% over last year.
Gift Shoppers Flocked to the Web - Wall Street Journal
Good News indeed.
A major limitation of the web has been the small number of text fonts that could be safely used.
This is because display of text fonts depends on them being installed on the computer they are being viewed on. And there are only a few fonts that are universal enough that you can count on their being available. Like Times New Roman and Arial (or Helvetica, its near cousin on Apple machines).
Inevitably, someone would come up with a workable solution.
First several companies, including Typekit and Google developed online font depositories which could be easily referenced and used on people's website.
Now you can add your own, even custom fonts to Typekit:
Customize the Web With Your Own Fonts
Sky's the limit folks.
Anyone interested in freedom and/or the Internet (which should be everyone), needs to be aware of a rising tide of efforts on the part of governments to censor websites and the dissemination of information via the Internet.
Of course the big news on this has always been China but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Many countries restrict the Internet to a greater or lesser degree. Many would like to do more.
Even the Land of the Free.
The U.S. government has shut down a number of websites - some of which were owned by foreigners and hosted outside of the U.S. Because their domain registrars were U.S. based, this was possible.
These were NOT shut down because they violated international laws or the laws of the countries in which they were based. In some cases they may have been violating U.S. law (relating to Cuba), but no civil or criminal due process was involved in the shut-downs.
Having a Constitution that guarantees Freedom of Speech is only half the battle. Then the rule of law must still prevail. Read the Constitution of the old Soviet Union some time. It sounds great! Guaranteed freedom of speech, assembly and religion.
Efforts to shut down Wikileaks sites have been ongoing for months. Not with a lot of success. It's a game of Whack-a-Mole since setting up mirror sites is so easy.
What's the future hold? Governments are fighting a losing battle in this. The structure of the Internet makes censorship difficult. And whatever they try, clever people will develop ways around it. Here's one proposal (it gets a bit technical): Building a Censorship Resistant Web.
An employee of a company that sells remanufactured ink cartridges, stuck writing boring copy for their website, got tired and just said what he thought.
The result went viral, generated so much traffic it overwhelmed their server.
The point?
Don't be boring.
Ink Cartridge Rant
There are a lot of developments going on to bring us a richer, more capable Internet experience.
Amongst these is a new graphics format Google has developed, WebGL. This is being showcased in Google Labs in their "Body Browser" which is a fabulous education and exploration tool.
News Article on Body Browser
Ever injured yourself exercising and wondered what exactly was that muscle?
Typically, the new format is at this point in time only supported in Chrome and in Firefox version 4.0 browsers.
That's the problem in every case with developments such as this. The ordinary website can't use them until the vast majority of visitors have browsers in which they will work. Or your website will have to detect what browser is being used and serve up an alternate version.
Internet Explorer is the main issue. Because of its huge market share, Microsoft's slowness in implementation, and IE users' slowness to upgrade, this currently means about a 3 year lag on new technologies.
Hopefully that will speed up.
One reason that twitter isn't a good fit for many companies: only 8% of American Internet users, use Twitter.
The People Who Use Twitter
A new survey finds 46% of small businesses still don't have a website.
Who knew?
The State of Small Business Online Marketing Budgets
Every website designer will look at this and nod their head.
I'm not sure what clients will think....
How A Web Design Goes Straight To Hell
The most used browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Opera is under 2% and others (hello Netscape) less than 1/2%.
The actual percentages for visitors vary greatly depending on the type of business you are in.
Here are numbers for November, from Hitslink:
Internet Explorer, all versions: 58%. For FastF.com, the total is only 38%. 6% are still on IE6 (2% for our visitors).
Firefox, 21%. For our visitors, 31%
Safari, 8%, for FastF, 16%.
Chrome, 7%, for FastF, 10%
Clearly the big loser continues to be Internet Explorer, which once completely dominated. The big visitor this year is really Chrome, which has tripled market share and no sign of slowing down.
That also does not bode well for Bing, since a lot of their market share of Search comes from the fact that it is the default search engine (of course) for Internet Explorer.
I predict this trend will continue, that by end of 2011, IE will have less than 50% market share. But since I don't see any of the three Safari, Chrome, or Firefox dominating the others, there's no clear path to any new winner in the browser wars, not anytime soon.
If you are wondering whether Social Media is a useful tool for your marketing efforts, there are two angles to look at.
First of all, the primary thing Social Networking is about is to make sharing information easier. At the top of the scale this is what makes it easy for something to "go viral" - to spread rapidly to a point where a YouTube video can get millions of views within days of its being posted.
The main point is that if you don't have a product or service subject to a buzz - being talked up or talked about - then Social is just not going to happen. Unless the hygienists are going topless, a dental office blog, video, Facebook page or tweet are not going to get a lot of action.
If you do have something people are going to want to talk about or share, then all these media can be a huge assist.
The only other way these channels are going to make a big difference is exposure. You can run Facebook ads targeted at a carefully identified target market and increase awareness of your product, service or company at a very low cost.
Otherwise these channels have very narrow application - as in the fishing boat captain who tweets fishing conditions.
There really is a fifth major element to the Internet Marketing Universe that we might call Big Sites.
Websites such as Amazon.com, the big weather, news and sports sites, and others, don't depend on Search, YouTube, Social or Mobile. People know the sites and have them bookmarked or use mobile apps to reach them. So these sites DRIVE traffic to other sites in significant quantities.
They are especially relevant for websites selling consumer products or related to what is called "trending" topics - what is hot in the news. If that is the territory you are in, they can't be ignored as they have the potential of driving a huge amount of traffic to your site - or deep sixing it.
People have been so focused for so long on Search, that many have missed where the battle is.
The battle for search is over. Google has around 70% of all searches, Bing/Yahoo about 25%. Everyone else is down in the weeds. These percentages are not likely to change greatly in the next few years - no matter what anyone says, predicts or does (hello Blekko). I won't try and predict farther than that. I am not insane. But it remains a highly dynamic area because Google continues to roll out improvements at a mad rate.
As has happened many times in the past, the face of the Internet continues to change. Once directories dominated and Yahoo was king. Once something called Usenet was where the action was.
There's a lot of talk of Social Networking (Facebook, Twitter and the like). They are huge and getting more so. Facebook gets a significant percentage of the total page views on the entire Internet!
There are more searches on YouTube than on Bing/Yahoo.
And mobile - everything mobile - is growing by leaps and bounds as smart phones become the norm in the world of cellular and iPads and their imitators sell at the rate of millions per month.
Right now, these four areas are where the action is. They are likely to remain the focus for the next few years. Within each area, I doubt anyone can predict where it is all going to go. One thing's for sure: Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a wild ride.
No surprise that Google would role out their integration of Search and Place Pages (what Google calls "Place Search") into Mobile Search.
That is launched and officially announced.
It's nicely done. Besides the integration you see on regular (non-mobile) search, you have buttons to click on immediately to phone, bring up a map, or get directions to.
One question that comes up regularly is what is the best TIMING for Internet Marketing actions including email broadcasts, blog and Facebook postings and tweets (posts to Twitter).
Emails broadcasts are most likely to be read if they go out on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning. For other channels, here's a great article:
When's The Best Time To Publish
Here's a good example of how Google is continually making small adjustments to fight abuses and "black hat" optimizers. Being Bad to Your Customers is Bad for Business:
A recent article by the New York Times related a disturbing story. By treating your customers badly, one merchant told the paper, you can generate complaints and negative reviews that translate to more links to your site; which, in turn, make it more prominent in search engines.
The main danger in email broadcasting is getting labeled as a spammer.
Now there's no world-wide list of spammers that everyone agrees on.
There are dozens of "blacklists" used to a greater or lesser degree. You can check your domain using the "MX Toolbox", put in your domain name ("fastf.com"), click on "MX Lookup" then click on "Blacklist Check." ("MX" refers to how the Internet knows on what server and how, email is handled for a particular domain).
But if you aren't on a list, that doesn't mean you are in the clear.
Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Comcast, Verizon, will have their own internal blacklists.
It's a pretty sure sign you are in bad with someone if your emails just don't arrive. They don't bounce, they just never arrive, say, at any Yahoo email address.
Getting back on their good side is another story. It isn't necessarily quick or easy.
That's even worse than having your account suspended by your own ISP. At least in that case you have someone to talk to.
Best not to get in trouble in the first place, by following best practices on list compilation and maintenance (see my earlier posts on this).
Given a list, there are a few things to know to make your broadcast work.
This is Email Marketing 101 - very basic - but we still see these points violated every day. So I thought it worth repeating (I've said all this before).
1. The subject line is critical. It has to start to interest the person, just as the headline in an ad. Put yourself in their shoes.
Realize that they probably receive a zillion emails every day. If it isn't a personal email from someone they know, chances are it has quite a wall to overcome to get them to stop and look at it, not just delete.
2. Your email needs to be mostly text. Fancy emails largely or completely in images don't work. These days hardly anyone will see your message without clicking to download pictures.
So you can use pictures but you have to interest them enough with the text FIRST so that they DO click to download them.
3. Realize the purpose of your email is to get people to click through to your website. Don't try and do too much with it. Get them interested and give them links to click through to a page on your website (a landing page) that continues the message of your email.
4. Make the email something they want to read. It could be a short, straight sales pitch about something new, a special sale or the like. That's fine for a very targeted mailing list. I'm always happy to receive Tiger Direct's latest "what's on sale" emails.
Most of the time you want informative, interesting content that will keep them reading - not a sales pitch at all. Keep them interested enough to perhaps open the NEXT email you send. Don't make them decide to unsubscribe or just to ignore all future emails from you.
Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a great book on this. You can't make people receive or read your emails. You are going for their cooperation, willingness and interest.
Your email list may be your most valuable marketing resource. Take good care of it. It took a certain amount of trust and a certain amount of hope for someone to give you their email address. Don't violate that trust, and don't bore them to death.
Great article in Search Engine Watch, "How Do You Find High-Quality SEO Services?":
Because anyone can sell SEO without a license (or sadly, without any knowledge), the industry is rife with, frankly, crap.
Coupled with this reality is the fact that SEO is a combination of art and science....
High-quality SEO is in high demand indeed. There's a lot of money at stake, too. Traffic and ranking improvements can mean millions of dollars for a company's bottom-line revenues.
This has created a market with service providers who are adept at selling SEO services, but less skilled at carrying them out.
The man speaks Truth. Read the whole article.
This is about SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) - an article written by a European Internet Marketer. I agree 100% with what he says.
Rules You Have to Know
"Once you've found that great SEO, it's easy to screw up the project...."
You don't have to use the same old Twitter and Facebook icons on your website.
Free Social Media Icons
(thanks to Laura Betterly)
Believe it or not, spam e-mail is on the decline:
Data from Cisco, which makes networking gear, show the volume of e-mail spam began declining slowly in late 2009 (see chart) and by almost half in the past three months, after the authorities disabled spam networks in Russia and the Netherlands.
It is well known that Google gives credit in search engine rankings if you have a part or all of the search term in your domain name.
This is logical since perhaps you are looking for that exact company.
How Google has dealt with this has changed. A couple of years ago it had to be an exact match or you got no credit for it. Even singular versus plural washed out the advantage.
Now even one word from the search phrase will give you a leg up in rankings.
According to Matt Cutts, Google's spokesperson for Search Quality, this is under debate at Google. The article referenced has more interesting material on what Google is and has been up to.
Matt Cutts at PubCon
We no longer support IE6 with our web designs.
Market share is now way below 10%.
And in case there is any question as to Why:
Why Web Developers Hate IE6
I had to laugh the other day when someone promoted themselves as a Flash SEO expert.
Huh?
That is what is known technically as an oxymoron. Like "cold heat" or "poor rich man".
Flash is NOT good for SEO. It can be AWFUL if you have an all Flash site - Google can barely see your site at all.
Google has made enormous strides over the last couple of years in being able to index text inside a Flash animation.
Here's their latest announcement of progress on this.
Even Better Indexing of Flash Content
That being said, I just saw another example of the limitations. Instant Preview, the new search feature that lets you preview a web page before you click on the link, does not work on Flash pages.
Google's official announcement on Instant Previews.
Google continues to roll out upgrades to Search at a mad rate. Barely two weeks after launching the integration of Google Places with organic search, and six weeks after the launch of Google Instant, here's another feature.
This had been announced previously, but now it is fully implemented. You will see a little magnifying glass at the end of the first line of a listing.
Click on that and you'll get a preview of the page.
This will of course reward great looking sites and help people distinguish actual company websites from directories and other intermediary type sites.
Like other recent changes, these are designed to speed up people finding what they are looking for.
Incidentally - or perhaps not - all of these as well tend to bypass the many businesses designed in a greater or lesser degree to compete with Google. Not just the yellow pages sites, but shopping sites, directory sites of all sorts, and so on have less reason for existence and less ability to compete.
Oh yes, and leaving Bing/Yahoo and the lesser search engines in the dust.
But the one big takeaway from all these changes is this:
More than ever, you need a great website and effective Internet Marketing.
It only makes sense to have a system in place so you don't lose track of the domains you own, your logins or email addresses for notification.
We usually keep track of this for our clients and make sure we are info'd on emails. so that this kind of thing doesn't happen:
Someone, probably someone not named Phillips, neglected to renew the domain name "dallascowboys.com" and as the Cowboys were playing the Packers on Sunday night in Green Bay, the site was replaced by a page that indicated the name was available for purchase from Network Solutions.
If it can happen to the Cowboys, it can happen to anyone.
There are many companies selling Internet Marketing Cheap.
The reason why you should run screaming in the other direction when you see this is that Internet Marketing is inherently a challenging undertaking.
No less a person than Google's spokesperson for search, Matt Cutts, says it is as much art as science.
While there are many things we know, there are at least four important elements that are constantly changing:
1. Google is making major changes at a faster rate than any time in its history. Each important change affects what we have to do for our clients to a greater or lesser degree.
2. Competition is not standing still and that can affect such factors as how large a site needs to be to compete, or what it has to do to differentiate itself and stand out from the competitors.
3. Your prospective customers are changing. How they search, what their fads are and so on, all can affect how you market your products, services and business. This includes seasonal changes as well as changes in the economy which affect the Internet to a degree WAY beyond what you would expect - we can see the shifts quite literally month by month.
4. Technological changes can majorly affect what you can or should do with a website or in promoting it.
All these factors make Internet Marketing a continuous challenge - and one which someone not focused on the area has little hope of keeping up with.
Some may wonder why such a high percentage of my posts are about Google, what it is up to, and what it all means.
Some may think I'm obsessed.
Well, maybe I am.
But there are few elements of this civilization that are significantly consequential. I can assure you that 50 years from now, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner are going to be footnotes.
Amongst the factors that DO matter, few are corporate. Google is one of them.
Google matters.
Especially, if you are in the marketing business Google matters.
Here's the official announcement on the change in Google Places - which Google is calling "Place Search". Note that if Google doesn't automatically serve up integrated local results, you can now select it in the left column.
For example, a search on "Dentist Tampa" gives old-style local listings, but clicking on the "Places" button gives integrated listings, which however, exclude videos and other "universal search" items. If you then click onto page two, you get only places results whereas, if Google is computing you are looking for local results (search Tampa Dentist to see the difference - and note that word order matters!) you get very different results on page two.
On a search for "Clearwater website designers", Google is so un-convinced you're looking for local results you have to click "more" in the left column even to get Places as a choice.
You can also see the "snippets" the information lines, will change sometimes.
Lots more to learn about what this all means....
We believe that Google is running a large-scale test right now which is why there are at least three different versions of the Search Engine Results Pages. Most likely within a few weeks, that will be concluded and all SERPs with maps (Places) listings will be fully integrated.
What does this mean?
1. If you are in local search, it becomes MUCH more important that you have Place pages with correct information.
2. It becomes essential to have at least one image on your Place page, so that a thumbnail shows on the SERPs, giving your listing much more emphasis.
3. It makes Reviews a much more important subject. A systematic approach to getting positive reviews and ratings onto your Place page is now essential.
4. Because national companies won't have a local Place page, it will be harder for them to compete with local companies in each locale.
5. Some businesses will be DRAMATICALLY affected by this change. Not all by any means, but some may see a huge increase or huge drop in traffic to their sites.
More to come....
Google about a week ago started to roll out another huge change.
This only affects searches where Google serves up its Places listings (formerly known as Maps, or Local).
So this is only a portion, even of local searches. For example, if you search for "website designers Clearwater" you don't get it, because no one cares exactly where a website designer is located. Dentists, Plumbers and many other searches, are a different story.
Currently there are at least three different versions of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) that Google will serve up. One is close to the past version, where all the local listings are gathered together, typically after the first few organic listings. However, the map itself is now moved to the top of the right column.
The second version is similar but with each local listing after the first indented further.
The third version is the most radical. Places listings are FULLY integrated with organic search results so the two combined have only 10 listings on the 1st page. If a company has BOTH a Places page AND a website, the two listings are combined, and if their places page has pictures, a thumbnail is displayed.
This makes for a VERY much more robust display, occupying more vertical space, with more information and a picture.
Expect that such listings will immediately start gathering the lion's share of the clicks, even at the expense of higher ranked sites.
There is a lot more to be said about this change. It is HUGE for those businesses that it affects. I'll have more to say over the next couple of days.
In case there was any question that the Internet is here to stay.
You can now get broadband Internet on the top of Mt. Everest.
What does your website look like on different screens?
Find out.
A critical point on usability is that not everyone has the same needs or expectations.
Needs: Someone on an iPhone is not going to be able to navigate a Flash menu, because Flash doesn't work on Apple mobile devices. So you can do cool things with Flash driven menus, but then you have to provide text links as an alternate method of navigation.
Expectations: Most people expect after they enter their credit card information, that the next time they click a button, their card will be charged. Also that it may take a few seconds for processing during which nothing is going to be happening on their screen.
But not everyone knows these things, so you need to tell them.
Now there is no way to accomodate everyone. If you have a small business, chances are you aren't going to provide a version of your website in Urdu for the few visitors who only speak that language.
So you have to figure out how far you are willing to go, can afford to go, or need to go.
But a starting point is CONCEIVING of your different types of visitors, their needs and expectations. That means knowing who your potential buyers are, how they think and what they know.
If you look down the lower right column of this blog, you'll see reference to a Creative Commons license, and the phrase "Some Rights Reserved."
What is that?
Creative Commons is an answer to the belief of many people - myself included - that traditional Copyright law doesn't serve well all the needs of intellectual property ownership.
There are six different licenses, specifying different degrees of control and ownership.
The license version used on this blog specifies that anyone can copy and re-distribute the material in this blog, even sell it to others so long as they don't alter it and so long as they credit me as the source of it.
Other versions let you specify, for example, that others can use your material but not charge for it.
Great idea, no?
I think I finally found a way to communicate what is special about our Internet Marketing Program.
It's here.
SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages are the screens Google serves up when you do a search.
Even since the launch of Google Instant five weeks ago, they've introduced a number of significant changes to their search results display:
1. Source of materials for Snippets. "Snippets" are the two lines of descriptive material on a Google search page listing, in between the title and the link. For several years, if you used a meta description tag (a piece of behind the scenes code), you could tell Google exactly how you wanted this to read. Now, Google may or may not use that. If the description tag doesn't include the search term, but copy on the page does, Google is likely to use copy from the page.
The big improvement here is that the snippet will vary and be more appropriate to the particular search.
2. More than two listings. For about a year, Google has been VERY reluctant to show more than two pages from a website on page one of its search results. The idea was to serve up a variety of listings to try and ensure they got what people were looking for.
This is clearly less true, especially on less competitive searches, we are seeing Google serve up three pages listings.
3. Indent of multiple pages. It has been Google's practice when it lists two pages for a site to indent the second one. That is now true only part of the time.
4. Rich snippets. You will sometimes see an extra line with links to internal pages. Google set up a way to communicate to them information that they would then use for these links and some other SERPs material. What has changed is they are more often figuring out and displaying these so-called "rich snippets" without the website doing anything special.
A page linked directly from your website's home page, is going to be considered more important. So it can get high rankings more easily than if it is "deep linked" meaning it takes several clicks to get to it.
Does that mean you should load up your home page with hundreds of links to pages on every conceivable search term you want to rank for?
No.
The general idea - and this is only an approximation - is your home page has only so much "link juice" to transmit.
Too many links on the page and Google devalues ALL of them.
This is not something you can attach firm numbers to, like "no more than 23.5 links."
It's a guideline for what you can do to improve rankings, or what may be worsening them.
There's a new initiative from the various industry groups involved in email marketing.
These include the Better Business Bureau, American Advertising Federation and Direct Marketing Association amongst others.
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This includes an opt-out website and an "advertising option icon" that websites can display to indicate they subscribe to the recommended practices.
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I think this is an effort to deal with the increasing nervousness about spam and hackers and the fact that it can be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. That has contributed to decreasing effectiveness of "newsletter sign-up" type offers on websites - or anything that requires a consumer to give a website their email address.
Whether this new effort takes hold - or is effective - remains to be seen.
Google has dozens of single-topic blogs. They also roll out new applications and features at a mad rate, which are typically announced on the most appropriate blog or blogs.
Now they have a blog specifically for such, called Google New, "The one place to find everything new from Google."
It has, by the way, a terrific video introduction to Google Instant (hint: Bob Dylan stars in it).
In September, no premium website hosting service we provided was down for more than 5 minutes over the course of the entire month.
The average uptime was 99.997%.
(Sites are checked automatically every five minutes. If they don't respond within 15 seconds it counts as an outage. Outages are automatically reported to us by email and cell phone text message, 24/7. I didn't get woken up once in September.)
No surprise, thousands of Google Watchers are feverishly running tests to find out everything they can about Google Instant and how it changes things.
Here's one: Google Instant has a blacklist.
If you start to type in certain words, it will not show an instant result, or a possibly undesirable result, until or unless you hit enter.
If you type b,i,t,c,h when you hit "h" the instant display will disappear. Same thing with "murder" though on "murde"
it will give you a link to click on for "murder" listings.
Interesting, eh? And sensible, I think. It may have taken them quite a bit to work this out.
How fast can things move on the Internet?
After Google announced Instant, a college kid sat down and programmed and launched YouTube Instant.
It took him five hours work.
It went completely viral and within ten days he had a million visits and a job offer from YouTube.
Since about January, Google has been testing "Store Views" which is an extension of Street Views. You would be able to take a digital walk into the store from the street.
Of course, Street Views has been dealing with a lot of heat, mostly from European governments talking about criminal charges for privacy violations. Probably why Google has been playing this very low key. There has been no official announcement about it at all.
But they are sending out photographers to take photos, and they currently have at least one photographer working in Tampa.
Here are a few links to information about it:
Google Photographers FAQ
Apply To Be Photographed
Search Engine Land Blog from February
Google has been so busy with changes and improvements, Google Watching has become almost a full-time job.
A slight exaggeration.
One recent announcement is a security enhancement that is being rolled out to work across many of Google's products and services.
It is called Two-Factor Authentication (link is to the announcement in regard to Google Apps).
The basic idea is if you have to both HAVE something (a street address, a particular phone number, etc.) and KNOW something (a password) it makes it much harder to hack into your accounts.
Matt Cutts talks about future use with other services / products.
So the secret is out of the bag:
There are many areas of SEO and website design that are as much an art as a science
From the Official Google Webmaster Blog.
So if anyone GUARANTEES you top rankings in a certain amount of time, what does that say about them?
(Hint: They are con artists.)
More along the same line, from Google's CEO.
Microsoft has announced the release of the next generation of Internet Explorer, IE9, in Beta (for use by anyone and everyone prior to general release).
They've been losing market share and currently are barely over 50% worldwide, with Firefox and Chrome having almost all the rest of the browser market.
They are fighting a losing battle on this. Perhaps IE9 will help them. We'll see.
Google uses various clues to decide how important a topic or page is on a website.
Here's one: How many clicks does it take to get there from the home page?
The more clicks, the less important it must be.
Don't try to have too many links directly from your home page though.
Google might just decide NONE of them are important.
No question, Google Instant will change how people search.
But how?
One change will be when a location is typed "plumbers New Orleans" or "New Orleans plumbers." Until now there has been little reason to do it in one order or the other. The tendency has been to put the location first as that is more natural language.
Now the reverse behavior will often reward with faster searches, especially when you are sure what the main search phrase is going to be.
Because of personalization, as soon as you type "plumb" Google starts serving up local plumbers in its click ads and map listings. One more letter and it starts giving suggestions for specific locations in the area.
I can get "plumbers Tampa" organic listings with 7 key strokes - p,l,u,m,b,e and two down arrows.
The reverse will probably turn out to be true where you are unsure of the best search phrase.. Put "Tampa" first then start typing in the likeliest phrase. Use suggestions or back up as needed.
In local searches this will also probably mean an increase in the percentage of clicks on paid and map listings.
Here in Tampa Bay it probably will mean a higher percentage of clicks on "Tampa" searches as opposed to individual localities in the area such as "Clearwater" or "Largo".
Stay tuned.
Yesterday morning, the Internet Marketing community was all abuzz over a major change in Google search: Google was displaying results as fast as you typed, without waiting for you to click.
Later yesterday, Google officially announced "Google Instant".
Google once again leap frogs over the competition to deliver a major improvement in the search experience.
Of course, not everyone will like it, and you can turn it off. But it will mean faster search. And that continues to be of top importance to most people. How long does it take me to find what I'm looking for?
How will Bing/Yahoo respond? Stay tuned.
It's the 12th anniversary of Google - started in 1998.
Imagine if AT&T, or Ford, or Germany, or the Republican Party had started only 12 years ago.
Do things move fast on the Internet, or what?
Search is down 16% from a year ago.
Now isn't THAT interesting?
There's lots of speculation on why that is. My own guess, it's a combination of factors:
1. People have less time for aimless wandering around the Net.
2. People have found sites that work for a lot of things, and have them bookmarked.
3. Google has gotten smarter so people are taking fewer searches to find what they are looking for.
4. People have gotten smarter in their searches so take fewer searches to find what they are looking for.
5. Alternatives to search are rising (such as mobile apps).
I've put them in order of what I think are the biggest to smallest factor.
In any case, pat yourself on the back, if your website is getting found as much or more through searches as it was a year ago.
Google has been making changes.
More and more, they are tending to show a wider variety of results.
It's all about ensuring they hit what you are looking for - even when your search may mean several things.
If you are searching for "mister" are you looking for a male person, or for a device for spraying little droplets of water?
If you search for plumber, are you looking for a plumber in your local area (probably), or maybe you just want to know more about the profession?
Are you looking for a web page, video or images? Information? A site where you can buy something online?
One way Google has dealt with this: It has been a firm rule for about a year, they will not serve up more than two pages from the same website.
That way there are eight other chances (not counting Places and Sponsored listings) to hit a home run with the searcher.
You see this where the second listing is indented slightly indicating it is another page from the same domain. Usually one is the home page.
Now Google has announced another tweak. Under certain circumstances, they will again show more than two pages for a domain.
For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site:
Note that in the example given, they still show only 7 results from the amnh.org website. This puts three other listings on the first page of results. Google still hedges their bets.
Smart. Very smart.
For the last two days it's looked like Bing started powering Yahoo Search, and, what-do-you-know. We were right.
Officially announced yesterday.
(Link is to a good article about the change and what it means, on Search Engine Watch.)
"MicroHoo" = Microsoft + Yahoo, and yes it is a bit derogatory. The combined market share is now somewhere around 25% of all U.S. search, compared to pushing 70% for Google. Will this change make them a viable challenger? No.
But one big change will be not having to run Bing and Yahoo click ad campaigns separately (starting probably in about a month). Possibly, it will drive Ask and the other miscellaneous search engines even further down into the weeds.
The secret is out. It's a myth that the AdWords keyword tool suggests keywords to use. (I'm being sarcastic... it's been no secret at all in the Internet Marketing community.)
As Google puts it:
Fact: The keyword tool doesn’t make any kind of recommendations about which keywords you should be using. The keyword tool just analyzes related queries that might be of benefit to you and displays them. It's up to you to decide which keywords you want to include in your account.
Oh yes, the numbers it puts up also need to be taken with a VERY large grain of salt.
There's a new version of the tool coming out. It's nicer. That doesn't make it more accurate.
The only thing we use it for is to suggest POSSIBLE areas of search terms we might otherwise miss.
If someone can't get you high rankings, volume traffic to your website and increased business from the Internet - or any marketing for that matter - then they are either incompetent, con artists, or both.
If someone promises to achieve these overnight, then they are either ignorant, con artists, or both.
Sometimes it goes quickly, when all the pieces are already in place. Usually it takes time. But someone who knows what they are doing and has nothing to hide, should be able to show you regular (monthly) progress.
There is one other point: You need to do what the expert says, or let them do their work. Why decide someone is an expert, pay them for their expertise, then second-guess them or fail to help them do their job?
We told one client it would take six months to a year to achieve what they wanted. They hired and paid us monthly, but wouldn't let us do what we said needed to be done, failed to provide us material we needed, and gave us specific instructions on what to do. At the end of five months they pulled the plug for lack of results.
Why didn't they just take the money and run it through a shredder?
Battles over the use of trademarks in click ads have been fought in the courts for years now.
Is there any problem with you running click ads against search terms, or even using the name of a competitor in your ad?
There have been enough victories on this front that it is a pretty much settled question with Google. Yes, you can do that.
It is entirely another question whether this is a useful strategy. Our tests indicate that in most situations, it will generate very little traffic. People looking for a particular brand or company are looking for that brand or company. Even if they find themselves on your website, chances are they'll just think they made a mistake (or you did) and hit their back button.
It may help build awareness of your name amongst prospects who have heard of a competitor only. That is more of a long-term strategy, but it doesn't cost much to include it in your program. Just don't count on it as a major player.
YouTube has as of today, increased the size limit for videos from 10 minutes to 15 minutes.
Official announcement: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/07/upload-limit-increases-to-15-minutes.html
Video is more and more common on the Web. For over a year now, Google has been selectively including videos in search results - even if you aren't specifically searching for video, which is one of the options in the left column of Google's search screen now.
But how does Google know what videos you have and what they are about? It isn't as easy as with most content where the text can be read by Google's robots.
Google has a recommended way of dealing with this. Here's their short introduction to the subject of video sitemaps.
How can you improve your quality score for key search terms?
Start by understanding how Google determines quality scores.
The higher the click-through-rate (CTR), the higher the quality score is going to be.
There are two ways to improve CTR. Improve the ad, or improve the keywords.
It's difficult to get a high CTR for a search term that is very general. Most searchers are going to be looking for something else.
Regardless, you can use negative keywords to reduce useless searches (and useless clicks!). You can run your ads in a more targeted geographical area, to a more precise demographic, run only at certain times, or fine-tune the networks it is running to (sometimes we turn off Google's search partners, for example).
You can also narrow the match type from broad to modified broad, phrase or exact match.
All that is well and good but a badly worded ad can waste a high percentage of your impressions.
ALL the rules of advertising apply to your click ads. They need to be noticed, to interest the prospective customer and to create enough curiosity and trust so they click on YOUR ad.
One of the great things about Click Ads is you can test and measure and improve your ads over time. And not much time at that.
There is no venue where you can fine-tune an ad faster and better than with click ads. That's so true we use them as a research tool with the results then used in our organic search work and other marketing efforts.
More to come on that.
I recently mentioned but did not explain "Quality Score" as a factor in reducing the effectiveness of click ads.
When you buy a click ad you are bidding on position. If you are willing to pay $3 a click your ad is going to be higher on the page than someone who will only pay up to $2.50 per click.
Maybe.
Because if you think about it, what about if your ad is really bad and no one clicks on it? Then Google will make less money than if they put the other guy's ad above yours. Even though he is paying less per click, if he is going to get a lot more clicks, Google makes more money that way.
PLUS it means they are delivering a better visitor experience. People want to see what they are looking for appear first, not something disrelated that shouldn't be there.
Google handles this by factoring in a quality score number (from 1 to 10) in with the bid amount on the keyword, so a lower quality score means a lower position despite how much you are willing to pay per click.
You still pay as much per click, you just appear lower on the page where fewer people will see and click on your ad.
So one way to reduce your cost per click - or in reverse, increase the number of clicks you get for your daily budget dollars, is to improve your quality score for important (high search volume) keywords.
Make sense?
So how do you do that?
Tune in tomorrow to find out.
Google has now rolled out a new match choice for keywords.
Where previously the choices were exact, phrase and broad match, they have now added a modified broad match option.
To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer's search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren't considered close variants.
I think this will find wide use in fine tuning the fairly common situation where negative keywords aren't useful for rejecting unwanted searches, but exact or phrase matches are really narrower than you want to go.
If you are signed in to a Google account when you search, Google knows more about where you are and your search patterns and can take that into account in personalizing your search results. Sign out and your results will probably be different.
You may not even be aware you are signed in since this is done using "cookies". If you look at the upper right corner of a Google page, it'll show if you are signed in to a Google account.
Also realize that Google is constantly updating its index and is doing so faster than ever. Don't be surprised if results are different one day than they were the day before or even an hour ago.
Of course this is going to be true for so-called "real-time" search subjects such as current news. But it is still true of more static subjects. The number of pages Google indexes for our own website (FastF.com) changes daily.
Did you know you can do a Google search two times and get different results, one right after the other?
Google handles such a huge volume of searches that they have multiple data centers around the U.S. and across the world.
These data centers don't always get the same updates at the same time. And sometimes one or more of them might be testing a new version of their software.
If you're curious just how much difference this can make, here's a nice tool that will query 10 Google data centers and show you all of their results. We ran a few tests and it never happened that all of them agreed.
Search Multiple Google Data Centers
I've written frequently about the value of video on your website.
It isn't just for the visitors. It can be a decided plus for search too.
For some time now, Google has been including videos in its search engine results pages. Whether it shows none, one or a few videos is going to vary wildly. But if you have videos online, Google can index them and you have at least the chance that they will show up on page one - as a possibly additional listing to the page itself. And videos are POPULAR. People love to click on them.
No surprise, Google will prefer to show videos from youTube (which they own), so make sure you put your videos up there as well as on your own website.
Name them and tag them descriptively using your search terms.
It's not helpful in every case, and it's not a guaranteed winner, but it can generate traffic to your site, and on occasion, it can be a big winner.
It's worth doing. Oh yes, and fun too.
It is widely known that for Google, Content Is King. In short, the more website you have, the better you are likely to rank.
The crudest manifestation of this is the more pages to the site, the higher it is likely to rank.
But not all content is equal.
Especially in their latest changes, Google has put more emphasis on the QUALITY of the content. Google isn't hiding this fact either, Matt Cutts has said so in no uncertain words.
One aspect of this: Google has become more reluctant to index a page just because it is there. Instead, it is picking and choosing and may index only a fraction of your pages.
It has become clear that one of the major clues Google is using to determine this is the STRUCTURE of your website. So, for example, it is much less likely to index all of a blog.
This is something to pay attention to. I know of no hard-and-fast rules and it is certainly going to vary from site to site. So look at which pages Google is and isn't indexing on your site, and experiment.
It's easier than ever to put videos on YouTube.
There is now limited video editing capability online at YouTube's Test Tube.
Here's the announcement on Google's official blog.
Some businesses by their nature are national or international - most online stores for example. But the majority of businesses operate locally or at most state-wide or regionally.
How does that change things?
For one, you need to ensure you are listed correctly in Google Places (what they called Maps and before that Local). And also in Bing's and Yahoo's versions of the same thing.
Plus in Yellow Pages sites such as SuperPages, plus the variety of local directory websites out there such as Kudzu, MerchantCircle, etc.
If you have more than one location, make sure all your locations are listed.
If you service areas in which you don't have a location, consider getting a virtual location - with a mailbox address and forwarding phone number for the area.
Ensure areas you serve are named on your website, including having individual pages for each location.
If you are running click ads such as Google AdWords, make sure you are limiting the area where your ads appear to those in your actual service area.
There's more to it, but make sure you at least get these done.
GoDaddy seems to have become the default choice for domain registration and website hosting. In my opinion they are the latest incarnation of AOL - their target is people that don't know much about the Internet.
They spend their money on advertising and Danica Patrick instead of on tech support and customer service.
Their do-it-yourself website builder, Website Tonight, is the worst such program I've seen yet.
If you register a domain with them and don't put up a website on it, they will advertise on and make money off your domain. You are paying them to make money off of your domain.
Their account interface is hard to navigate and hard to figure out (it isn't as bad as Network Solutions, I'll give them that).
Should I go on?
Their services are cheap, so they do have something going for them.
Google as of June 8th, officially announced the rollout of Caffeine (their new, faster, more efficient software) is complete.
That was no new news to members of the SEO community. It is nice to get the official word.
Bigger news is Matt Cutts, Google's more-or-less official spokesman, talking about some of the recent changes they have made in their search algorithm (how they rank pages). Even he is referring to it as "Mayday" (the unofficial name SEO's gave it):
Link to the video.
One big take-away: Put even more emphasis on quality content (copy) - not just number of pages or any-old-copy.
As I've pointed out, Google has been making changes both visible and under the hood, at a mad rate.
The latest change people have been able to distinguish is being called "Mayday" because it occurred on or about May 1st - and because it badly affected some websites rankings and traffic.
Drops in traffic as much as 90% have been reported. Other sites have noticed modest improvements in ranking and traffic.
Smaller sites don't seem to be much affected by this. We have noticed some affects on larger sites and VERY large sites (tens of thousands of pages) can be majorly affected by it.
This article has a good summary and links on the subject.
MAYDAY Google update
In case you didn't know it, Google AdWords offers ads for smart phones, with click to call buttons (link is about expanding this option to Content ads - those that appear on other websites).
For certain types of businesses, such as restaurants, this type of ad can be a big plus.
You can now search securely (encrypted) on Google:
When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network.
Here's another new feature that Google has now rolled out for Search.
They call it "Direct Answers". Quite a lot of searches are looking for a specific answer or fact such as "how old is Barack Obama" or "what time is it in Denver."
If you do a search for these, you'll get the answer displayed on the search results page so you don't have to click further.. But one of them actually displays separately at the very top of the page. That is what Google means by "Direct Answers". And it is a nice addition to Search.
I think you will see this appearing more over time as Google improves their recognition - when is someone looking for a fact and what is the answer.
DMOZ - www.DMOZ.org, the Open Directory Project, was once upon a time the most influential site on the web for search engine rankings. A suitable listing on DMOZ was a ticket to high rankings because every submission was reviewed by volunteers for appropriateness and accuracy - meaning listings could be trusted, at least theoretically. In that way it is a lot like Wikipedia (though DMOZ came first).
Over the years, it has become less and less useful, for several reasons. First of all, Google doesn't have to depend on any single source for evaluating a website. Secondly, DMOZ itself has gone downhill, mostly because it became nearly impossible to get your site into it - no matter how important or legitimate you were.
This article gives Google's comments on the current value of DMOZ (and read some of the comments to get the idea about what happened to it!).
I've blogged about one of the rarely mentioned secrets of Internet Marketing - the size of your site is the single biggest factor in search engine rankings.
The larger the better.
But Google doesn't necessarily index every page in your website. If you count up the number of pages you have, then do a "site:" you will usually find Google isn't showing all of your site.
This makes sense. Even Google has limited resources. And why clutter up search results with pages that are of very limited interest?
But it means you need to know something about how Google decides whether to index a page or not.
First of all, any pages which are way off topic are not likely to be indexed. This is one reason why bulking up your software sales website, with weather reports and financial news, is not likely to be helpful.
Secondly, there are certain types of pages Google is going to be less interested in by their nature. A good example of this is a blog that is part of a site. Google is probably only going to include a portion of the pages in its index, no matter how relevant.
If you are in an industry that is highly competitive in the online world, this is worth paying attention to.
For years, Internet Marketing has been to a very large part, a battle between the search engines and people trying to trick them into ranking their sites high ("Black Hat" SEO's). "White Hat" SEO means working WITH Google and the other search engines, how they think and what they are trying to do. It means delivering great content on-subject because that is what the search engines are trying to help people find.
Sure, it also means understanding the cues that Google uses to identify what your site and page are about, and how important they are. But that is something you do in addition to - not instead of - providing the visitor experience people are seeking.
Of course it is easier if you can just do some simple gimmick that shoots you to the top of the rankings.
"Black Hat" techniques have evolved over the years. In the early days it meant repeating keywords lots of times. Then there were so-called "link farms" where people would build pages with zillions of links to each other. Invisible text. The tricks go on and on.
Every time someone thought of a way to beat Google, Google responded by improving their algorithms.
But it has been a battle, a back-and-forth.
Until now.
This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not greatly so. Thanks to Caffeine, the Black Hats have lost the war.
It is no longer possible to invent a trick that Google can't respond to even before it becomes well known.
Google doesn't even have to really work at this. They are continuing to work at improving the search experience. Rolling out significant changes two or three in a week.
Searches are getting so localized and personalized, some people are saying "search engine ranking" doesn't mean anything anymore.
Of course that IS an exaggeration. But it points out the only real test of SEO: Not what a rankings report says, but how much quality traffic is actually delivered to a site. And, more than that: The subject is Internet Marketing. It is really about the volume of leads or sales generated through a website, and how much that costs.
Who cares how much traffic comes to a site if it is all wasted by the site itself?
So what does it all mean?
It means the Good Guys win. The guys in White Hats.
Thanks to "Caffeine", their new software, Google is capable of introducing changes faster than ever - and they are doing exactly that.
What are they trying to accomplish?
Their basic business model is much like that of a TV station: Give away the content, sell the eyeballs to advertisers.
Anyone can search on Google for free.
Because they do a great job of providing the best visitor experience, they own around 2/3 of the U.S. search market. Then they sell their ad space for billions of dollars in the form of AdWords - their pay-per-click or "sponsored links".
Staying on top means continuing to improve the searcher's experience. Delivering faster results that are more exactly what people are looking for. Eye-tracking studies show they are doing exactly that. These days, people find what they are looking for much more in the first couple of listings, compared to five years ago.
That means staying ahead of the competition. So Microsoft ("Live" and now "Bing") can spend tens of millions of dollars to very little result. Google also unashamedly picks up what other search engines do right, and includes them into their own search page and methods.
Thanks to Caffeine, Bing can do something today - and within days or weeks, Google is doing it to - if it works.
There is one more huge consequence of this rapidity of change. "Black Hat" SEO is becoming a hopeless task. I'll explain tomorrow.
Google on Wednesday rolled out their new interface. The left column options they have been testing for the last year are now a permanent fixture. They've rolled them all out, but what they serve up in the results page depends on the search and Google's judgment of what you are looking for. But you can rapidly modify it to suit.
By mid-day yesterday we were seeing the new interface in all searches.
At the same time without announcing it they no longer are offering full access to their keywords suggestions tool unless you access it through an AdWords (click ads) account.
These are dramatic changes when viewed from the perspective of the Internet Marketing community. They are probably a lot less dramatic, more incremental to the typical searcher - which is off course what Google is going for. They don't want to startle people. They want to continue to improve their search experience. And they are doing exactly that.
You are seeing one of the major effects of "Caffeine" (their new software). One of the reasons for doing a complete redesign of their programming was to make it easier and faster to make, test, and roll out changes.
Continuing to better the search experience is one result. Tomorrow, I'm going to explain the two other major consequences. And they are major - industry shaking.
Lots doing in Google Search this last week.
Probably of greatest interest are the roll-out of a couple of features which enhance certain types of searches -
1. "Suggested brands":
Sometimes when searching for product information on Google, you may not know some of the brand names relevant to your particular search.
2. "Similar sites":
Now, for queries where we think sites similar to the first search result might be helpful, a small block of similar sites will appear at the bottom of the results page.
One type of "social media" is actually about the oldest public use for the Internet: Forums (or as they were and still sometimes known, Bulletin Boards).
Of course like everything else they've grown up and can now support almost any functionality you would want. Probably the two most widely used platforms (programs) are phpBB and vBulletin.
The basic idea of a forum is a way for a group to interact in a selective manner amongst themselves.
The content is in "threads" much like email, except instead of getting bombarded with an email every time someone in the group adds a posting, you can go to the forum whenever you want, or not, search or browse what you are interested in. You can also set it up to notify you by email on a selective basis.
A forum can be open (anyone can see content, join, and add to the forum), partially open (anyone can see content), or closed (you can only see content if you are a member and only join on approval).
Forums are extremely useful in specific situations. One is if you sell software, or anything for which you have a users group, a closed forum for the users to interact and build a treasure chest of questions and answers about the product or service. This can build up a knowledge base far more complete than staff could ever create, and with far less work on their part. And users can really get into this (much like some people live to post on Wikipedia).
Staff can also answer questions and use the forum to inform users. It can be a way for users to request features, and it can be a way for management to see what the clientele think of the company, its services, new offerings, and so on.
There are many other ways forums can be used. People into Greek cooking trading recipes. People who are into online vampire games. And so on.
If you can conceive of a situation involving online interaction within a group, probably a forum is the answer.
Somehow I've managed to never write a full post about one of the most useful Internet Marketing tricks.
If you run click ads (pay-per-click such as Google AdWords), and you get the campaign more-or-less running well, you can test different ad wordings to see what works best.
This is not just a test to get the maximum click-through-rate, but you also need to track conversions (phone calls, emails, purchases, newsletter sign-ups - whatever action you are trying to accomplish) - as that shows not just the quantity but also the quality of the traffic you generate to your website.
When you've worked this over and have a good response rate, with good quality, you now know the highest percentage appeal - what should be the basis of all other marketing efforts, such as appearing in ad headlines, your website home page, in sales materials, and so on.
You don't have to do a huge spend on the click ads to work this out - you just need enough clicks to be sure it isn't random variation that is causing the difference.
You're welcome.
"SSL" stands for "Secure Socket Layer" - this is the technology for securing connections when you transmit confidential information to a website. As when a purchase is made online. Any time the website address you are looking at starts with "https" rather than "http", you are looking at a secure, encrypted connection. The "s" stands for secure.
Typically your browser indicates this by a lock symbol in the lower right corner of the screen.
Part of the process is the website having an "SSL certificate" - which is an electronic certification that the company is who it says it is.
There are usually two ways you can get an SSL cert for your website. Most website hosting services will provide a "shared" certificate as part of your hosting fee (or may charge a small yearly fee for this).
The difference is on secured screens (https) during the checkout process, with a shared cert, the URL would not be your own domain, but is based on the hosting company's domain, for example, frogsales.hostingcompany.com. instead of www.frogsales.com.
This has nothing to do with the look of the site, it is just the page address.
Most hosting companies will sell you your own cert, but there are other certificate authorities you can buy a cert from. The most well known (and expensive) is Verisign.
SSL certs vary in features and vary widely in cost. If you do get your own cert, part of the process is varying degrees of proof of who you are. More expensive certs also usually involve more definite proof of your company's legal existence and physical location.
In most cases there is little value in purchasing a high end cert.
Did you know someone tried to trademark "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization"?
Their rationale was to try and get some ethics in on a field in which probably 97% of the operators are either incompetent or downright frauds.
Of course, who decides whether someone is ethical or not? Competent or not? Who can be trusted?
The truth is, there is only one good answer and that is, do they deliver?
Only an educated buyer will be able to tell.
There may be no other business decision in which the typical buyer knows so little about what he is buying.
THAT is why sharks and idiots run rampant in the Internet Marketing industry.
At the same time millions are jumping on the social media bandwagon (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) for marketing purposes, their value is dropping like a stone. From Search Engine Land blog:
"In Edelman's annual Trust Barometer survey, it was revealed that consumers are losing trust in each other when it comes to providing credible information about products or companies. Confidence has dropped by nearly half since 2008 leading to only about 25% of people trusting their peers and friends online for information.
"While the dip in trust was across the board, there was a large emphasis on social media."
So the net result of the huge rise of social media, especially over the last year, has been to invalidate these media.
Well, they are still great for connecting and having fun.
Who do people trust the most now? Experts, especially if they hear the same thing from multiple sources.
This shift ups the importance of endorsements as distinct from testimonials in building credibility.
After denying the rumors that Google was taking site speed into account in rankings, it has now (April 9th) been officially announced that they ARE in fact considering site speed.
They also clarify that less than 1% of search queries are affected by this. So you can safely assume unless your site is REALLY slow, you don't have to worry about it.
Here's the full announcement including some ways to test your site speed.
That's irony of course.
There is no such thing as good cheap SEO -- except in the sense that any marketing that produces a good Return on Investment, is cheap marketing.
If competent SEO were cheap or easy, everyone would have top-drawer SEO and everyone would be ranked at the top on Google and....
You see the obvious impossibility.
Like a majority of people being of above average height.
Sorry if I burst your balloon....
Google search is currently going through the largest change we've seen in probably two years.
Some people ascribe this to the rollout of "Caffeine" which is a software change promoted as being done to improve efficiency of Google's computers. Supposedly this wasn't going to much affect search results, and, as is common, Google isn't talking. But in the last few weeks we've seen unusually large swings in rankings (up and down) not connected to any apparent change.
Some of the other things we've seen include clear evidence that Google has gotten smarter. For example, we are seeing more variation in from where Google is picking the content for its listing of a page.
We've also now seen a one page site with no copy, ranked #1 on organic search for a city in which the company had no presence. It made sense; the page was a portal to three sites for individual stores in locations that ringed the city in question. But Google would never have figured that out before.
We've seen Google greatly devalue blog pages on a site over the last few months. Now it seems to be going back in the other direction, at least some.
This is just another example of how you have to stay alert to stay on top of Search Engine Optimization.
It's official. Google is shutting down Google.cn.
That URL is now being redirected to Google's uncensored Hong Kong site.
Google's announcement:
'On January 12, we announced on this blog that Google and more than twenty other U.S. companies had been the victims of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China, and that during our investigation into these attacks we had uncovered evidence to suggest that the Gmail accounts of dozens of human rights activists connected with China were being routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on their computers. We also made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered?combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the web in China including the persistent blocking of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger?had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn."
High marks to Google for this action which will undoubtedly cost them billions in profit from business in China.
Over the centuries, many private companies have influenced the course of a nation, as often negatively as positively. China has been the adverse effect of such in the past - for example the British East India Company's opium trade, leading to the Opium Wars whereby China's sovereignty was severely compromised.
Now perhaps we'll see - over time - a very positive influence on China from this courageous action.
A client forwarded an email with this subject line. This was from a well-known local online marketing company.
The email is full of statements that are either false, not new, or deceptive, like these:
Google "Caffeine" is their most significant application change since 2006.
True but very misleading, since "Caffeine" is a rewrite of their software for better efficiency and is not supposed to majorly affect rankings.
Faster sites will show up higher in search results and slower sites will find it harder to rank.
False. This was a rumor that Google has specifically stated is untrue.
Fresh Content - If a site does not have this, it is perceived as out-of-date or abandoned.
Misleading. This mainly affects how often Google returns to your site to adjust rankings, not what are your rankings.
Quality Links - in and out - are a must. And they Must be Relevant.
Per Google, inbound links are at most 20% of your ranking, so that is seriously an exaggeration. Outbound links are almost irrelevant.
Real-time results for Integrated Social Media content will have prime position on search pages - similar to a live RSS feed as seen on social sites such as Twitter.
Many social media sites are now being picked up in real-time by Google. In most categories they don't have any advantage over other websites. If you're looking for a plumber, why would a Tweet be more important than a plumber's website?
Relevant Content Rules, as always.
Well they got that much right.
So if a reputable company with a big name can put out such misinformation, no question about it, when it comes to Internet Marketing: Let the Buyer Beware.
I thought I'd say this again since it keeps coming up.
There are certain techniques which once upon a time could shoot up your rankings very rapidly but which involve tricking Google. They violate Google's rules and will crash your rankings and possibly get your site completely blacklisted by Google.
These are called "black hat SEO" as opposed to "white hat SEO" which works with what Google is trying to do and follows their rules.
One of these tricks is to put a lot of keywords at the bottom of the page, possibly repeated multiple times, in the same color as the background so that they are invisible to the person visiting the website.
That was a very popular technique 4 or 5 years ago. Now it's a quick route to ranking disaster.
Don't do it.
There's a lot more to Internet Marketing than just SEO (Search Engine Optimization for high Google rankings).
This short video explains why "Internet Marketing" more accurately describes what we do:
The Death or Redefinition of SEO
There were more U.S. visits to Facebook than to Google last week.
Two points:
1. This shows the power of Facebook.
2. That doesn't mean drop all your efforts with Google and go Facebook 24/7 with your marketing.
People searching on Google are looking for something.
Visitors to Facebook are hooking up with their friends.
Get it?
The big three maintain their near total domination of the search market with 65.5%, 16.8%, and 11.5% respectively of US searches per comScore.
Read the whole article.
Since its start, the great innovation of Google was "Page Rank" - a way of measuring a website's importance by what other sites linked to it.
Over the years other factors have increased in importance - and it was never the all-encompassing factor many thought it to be - to a point where best estimates are it is now about 20% of what goes into search engine rankings.
And here's the latest in confirmation of that, from Peter Norvig, Google's Director of Research.
As described in Web Pro News,
Norvig said at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that is "overhyped," and that Google never felt that it was such a big factor. They have always looked at all available data, combining every available signal and trying to figure out the best way to combine them.
Got it?
From Newsweek, 1995, an assessment of the Internet and its future.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
So how cloudy is YOUR crystal ball?
This is easily the best article I've ever seen on how Google works and how it evolves:
It possesses the seemingly magical ability to interpret searchers' requests no matter how awkward or misspelled. Google refers to that ability as search quality, and for years the company has closely guarded the process by which it delivers such accurate results.
Once a visitor has satisfied themselves you sell what they are looking for, the inevitable next question is:
Will they sell to me and in a way I'm comfortable purchasing?
The fact that you sell women's clothes does not answer:
1. Do you sell retail (or wholesale or are you a manufacturer, if that is what they are looking for)
2. Do you sell in their geographical area.
3. Can they purchase online, or where are stores located, or how do I purchase?
If you think about it, a visitor is not going to bother checking on your pricing, features or selection, let alone your testimonials, unique selling proposition, etc., if they aren't going to be able to purchase from you.
So get this information up front and communicated in the first few seconds a visitor is on your site - whether by words or images or both. THEN you can get down to business: Showing and telling your visitor what you got and why they should buy from you.
Let's go further into the subject of website headlines which I introduced yesterday.
The first thing people look for is "what are you selling?" because people know that search engine listings can be deceiving. So they are poised and ready to hit their back button - like a nervous cat. Ready to bolt on anything scary, or merely a lack of reassurance.
So sublety is not an option. Just flat out tell people in your home page headline:
Natural Facial Care Products at Wholesale Prices
Family and Cosmetic Dentistry in Sarasota Florida
Rug and Art Tent Sales Coming To Your Area Soon
A second benefit, it also tells the search engines what you are about.
This is important.
There is a lot of skill to writing an ad headline. And there is a great deal known about it - there are whole books on the subject.
Your website has headlines too.
What are the first, largest words on your home page, if not a headline? The same is true, to a lesser degree, on interior pages, where they function more like sub-heads in most cases.
BUT there is one huge difference between headlines in an ad, and headlines on a website.
The headline in an ad has to be a stopper, as it is the first clue to what you are selling.
Whereas a website headline is never the first stop on the marketing chain. The person already knows you exist, either because the
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