Bretts Marketing Bytes

Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

What is a CMS (Content Management Systems)?
A CMS is a graphical user interface that allows you to add, update and delete pages on your website. The beauty of one of these systems is that it makes it easy for even a non technical person to make quick changes to their website.

In today’s day and age it is critical to have a CMS. One of the most common mistakes that companies make when they hire a web development firm to implement a CMS is that they trust their web developer too much.

Not to put web developers down, but the problem is most of them don’t keep up with SEO on a regular basis. That is why I always say SEO is a marketing function, not a development function. I can’t tell you how many times I go to work with a company and they just had their website re-designed and I say…I can’t help you unless you get this fixed. And their response is… But I just had this done; shouldn’t my web developer have told me this?

It is unfortunate because the customer has usually spent a significant amount of money on the system at this point. But more often than not, I can’t help them. So I put together this list of important elements that every CMS should contain.  If your web developer is not providing these, walk away. If they say, oh yes, we will do that; make sure you have it in writing. Below is the list.

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Google is rolling out a new “under-the-hood” search technology, codenamed “Caffeine,” that could change how your company ranks in its search results.

Matt Cutts of Google says Caffeine is not intended to combat spammers like previous updates, but simply to update the foundation of the Google search infrastructure. He also notes that this update will not make Google look any different; however it may affect search engine rankings in a minor way. Unlike other algorithm updates, Google is actually giving us a preview of what our search results will look like if affected by the update.

To find out how your search rankings will be affected by cafeine click here to see the Google sandbox.

Here is what Google says

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search,” two engineers wrote in the company’s official blog.

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

You will begin to see these changes take place over the next few weeks or months.

What is the difference between being ranked number 1 and number 2 on Google?

I often get this question when I am out on meetings talking with customers. So I decided to write a post about it. All of the data below is based on a leaked document from AOL that was posted a few years back.  Even though it is from AOL, it should reflect all of the other search engines including Google.

To figure out the difference between a number 1 listing and a number 2 listing, you have to think in click-through rates. A click-through rate is the amount of times a searcher will click on your listing from a Google search.

The information below will help you understand how much traffic you may be losing out on. Remember…Traffic = Sales.

• Ranking Number 1 receives 42.1 percent of clicks
• Ranking Number 2 receives 11.9 percent of clicks
• Ranking Number 3 receives 8.5 percent of clicks
• Ranking Number 4 receives 6.1 percent of clicks
• Ranking Number 5 receives 4.9 percent of clicks
• Ranking Number 6 receives 4.1 percent of clicks
• Ranking Number 7 receives 3.4 percent of clicks
• Ranking Number 8 receives 3.0 percent of clicks
• Ranking Number 9 receives 2.8 percent of clicks
• Ranking Number 10 receives 3.0 percent of click s

This means if you rank number 1 on Google for the term ” Niagara Falls Hotels “  and that term gets searched 100,000 times per month, you should expect roughly 42,100 clicks.

If you rank number 2 on Google for the same term, you can expect to get 11,900 clicks.

I know what you are thinking. Who cares about clicks? Well… you can’t sell to someone who isn’t clicking on your site. That just means they are not finding you at all. Imagine if you were on page 2 or even worse… page 10? You would be out of business if you were an online retailer.

Search engines are one of the first places that consumers go to when they are looking for products or services. Your company should be there. If it is not, you are losing out on making money. To find out if you are listed on page 1 of Google just type in your products or services in Google and view the results.

I help companies everyday accomplish the task of ranking on page 1 of the major search engines. If your company is not listed and you need help, contact me to set up a free one on one consultation with you or your company.

Good Luck!

Times are tough for many people. We are going through some of the worst economic times in 70 years and people are getting laid off left and right.

If you are afraid of losing your job or just want to create a future income for yourself, you should take advantage of one of the many opportunities to make money on the web.  You don’t have to be a webmaster, you simply have to be willing to learn.

So what can you do to make sure that you have an income in the event you lose your job? Start now, don’t wait until you have no income. Even if you only make a few hundred dollars at first, you can build on it over time.

Below  are some of the many opportunities to make money online.

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In the old days, say 2 or 3 years ago, blog commenting  used to be a great method to get links to your site. However, Google and other search engines have been telling us recently that these are really a waste of time for SEO’s due to the “no-follow” attribute tag that most blog commenting software utilizes these days.

So should you stop commenting on blogs? Well quite honestly, I still believe commenting on blogs is a great place to get links and network with other bloggers. When you build relationships with other bloggers, you increase the chances that they might link to you using the “do-follow” attribute in a future post.

Blog comments also get read by people and these people are who you want to visit your site, right? And of course, there is always the possibility that those people will click on your link, especially if it is relevant to what they are reading.

One thing that drives me crazy is comment spammers. They leave comments on my blog that don’t make any sense. Geez, at least act like you read my post and I might give you a chance. Don’t these people know that as the blog administrator, I approve these?
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Is this possible? Let’s break it down.

Let’s say you go after a highly searched keyword and are able to rank on the first page of Google. Let’s say that this keyword is searched 1 million times per month. Of course you are not going to convert all of that traffic, but let’s say you converted only 1%. For this example we will assume your average product sale is $10.00.

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One of the most common mistakes business people make is thinking that if they type their business name into Google and their website comes up, that they are optimized.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Potential customers are not typing in your company name, they are typing in your products or services.

Do this simple test to see if your site needs to be optimized.

Zoodle Marketing Group offers Search Engine Optimization services.

Do you want to know what the secret to good SEO is?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often viewed as a secret spice type of technology with SEO firms hiding their techniques from companies wishing to engage with them. However, most of these secret techniques are nothing more than snake oil. Easy steps to making your website rank for unqualified traffic. Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to discredit legitimate SEO’s out there. But a true quality SEO knows that to bring in quality traffic it requires more than just a few tricks pulled out of a hat.

So what is the SECRET?
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Will the internet be the next artificial life form? Not quite, but it is looking like the new search engine, Wolfram Alpha to be released later this month is the closest that computer technology has ever come to being human.

What makes Wolfram Alpha so special? Well quite honestly the proof will be in the pudding, but so far the idea sounds like it could change the way we use the internet forever.

Wolfram Alpha recognizes human questions and spits back relevant data and also a neat page of related information. The beauty of this search tool is that it can calculate and compute things on the fly. For example, you could say, “life expectancy, male in Italy , 19th century compared to 20th century.” It will bring up distributions of life expectancy and also a comparison of the two centuries.

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Believe it or not search engines do not index all of the pages on your website.They really only index the pages that they feel are most important. So how do you figure out which pages are indexed and which ones are not?

Indexed = pages that are in the Search Engine database.

In order to see which pages are indexed in the Google search engine you can use the Google “site” command. This will pull up the pages from your site that have been indexed from the Google search engine.

Example: Go to Google and type in:  site:yoursite.com Make sure to replace “yoursite.com” with your company website.

The results will be all of the indexed pages of your website. Now you will know if you need to work on some pages that arent indexed to get them into Google.