Author Archives: Natoscia Reynolds

Google Adds Reputation Management To Local Biz Maps’ Listings

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Disgruntled employee, obnoxious competitor or fictitious “customers” affecting your SERP Ranking in Portland or your Google Local Business Center Listing in Portland? Google now lets businesses take action on reviews posted about their listing in Google Maps. This new “reputation management” option will help businesses in industries wherein fake or overly malicious reviews are posted.

As of Aug. 4, 2010, if you’re a verified Google Places business owner, you can publicly respond to reviews written by Google Maps users on the Place Page for your business, according to John Maguire, Google Place Page team. “Engaging with the people who have shared their thoughts about your business is a great way to get to know your customers and find out more. Both positive and negative feedback can be good for your business and help it grow (even though it’s sometimes hard to hear). By responding, you can build stronger relationships with existing and prospective customers. For example, a thoughtful response acknowledging a problem and offering a solution can often turn a customer who had an initially negative experience into a raving supporter. A simple thank you or a personal message can further reinforce a positive experience. Ultimately, business owner responses give you the opportunity to learn what you do well, what you can do better, and show your customers that you’re listening.

And Google has provided a user guide with some tips on how to handle responses.

For more on the topic and how reviews can affect your SERP Ranking in Portland or your Google Local Business Center Listing in Portland visit the links above.

Google Instant: Immediately Boring

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I realize that what we’re trying to do with the web is essentially create an informational feed  which sprays all data directly into our brains immediately.  I realize that we’re fast outstripping even our ability to process the amount of information coming to us in a a classic sense, or in any way compete with the massive overload we deal with every day. I realize that we’re a very immediate society, which thrives not just just on information, but also instant information processing.  All that said, this Google Instant™ rollout is kind of a non-event.  Let me rephrase that; it’s an event which demonstrates Google’s vested interests and is immediately irrelevant.

Backstory: Earlier today at work I noticed that the web had gone crazy.  As I was typing, my results were changing Instant™ly, so a stream of info was constantly moving below my search bar, like, as I was typing.  I turned to Josh and told him that something cool was happening, and he called it Google Instant™ like it was no big deal, as if he’d seen it a million times.  It seemed like the web was coming unglued, and for a moment I felt the world turn, ever so slightly.  Then I didn’t use it at all for the entire day.

Google claims that it’s a big deal because they’ve done studies and we read faster than we write and blah blah blah, but actually they just did it because it looks cool and it was just a few jumps away from the suggestion bar, which has been a smash.  If you aren’t familiar with what Instant™ does, it basically just performs the suggestion bar for all your results, so it gives you results you don’t want (and probably won’t read) while you’re on your way to the results you do want. You don’t even have to hit return! Pinkies all over the world salute you, Google.  Why would you use this service?  Well first off, let’s just say, hypothetically, that you are actually going to Google’s site as opposed to using your browser’s nifty search bar, or even the highlight- right click- Google function.  Okay, so you’re on Google’s site and you’re doing an old fashioned web search.  So you type in “web search”, but actually you wanted to know more about the extraneous information related to “web sea” without even asking for it.  BOOM- you got it.  Even better, you can scroll through the suggestions to find out what each of the affiliate sites is up to.  Oh, wait you just wanted to know about web searches.  Okay, you can do that too, but all the web sea info is there, just in case you want to know about it. Great, huh? I could understand using the technology a lot if you were really super indecisive, or if you had only one piece of information and no other piece of information to tie it to. Or maybe just zero direction, just aimlessly wandering the data fields looking for something about “samurai”.

Generally I find this isn’t the case. I rarely, if ever type in just one search term, frequently producing like, an entire string of words which highly resemble a fully reasoned thought, or a contextual idea, transition words and all.  This is shocking because it implies that the producer may be a reasoning human being, as opposed to a yearning, easily distracted machine which knows not why (or what) it wants.  In fact I usually find myself dumbing down my question for the machine, which doesn’t understand exactly what I mean in even the way a child could (yet).  The algorithm suggesting the things I might be interested in is usually wrong even though it’s gathered information on me roughly 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, for the past 2 years.  Now, were we co-workers, a bad tip occasionally would be understood, or even expected, but that’s okay because people are just people, and we’re all doing our own thing, you can’t expect everybody to be perfect all the time, etc.  Google, however, all day, everyday misreads me, constantly producing suggestions I don’t take, and even worse, it knows about them, and keeps doing it.  The worst part is, they don’t have anything else to do. Google doesn’t go camping on the weekends, it’s not it’s sister’s birthday, it doesn’t have a big party coming up, and it didn’t meet someone really special last night: it’s got time to figure me out. But it hasn’t, which is indicative of the fact that it’s really just an alphanumeric rubric behind there, and it’s a rubric which favors certain types of results, chiefest among them being Google.

It’s attractive for a marketing firm to market themselves, it’s like,  one of the original no-brainers.  But what if that marketing firm is actually selling a directory to all the information on earth?  What if Webster’s definition of a dictionary included definitions exclusive to that dictionary?  What if the Encyclopedia Britannica listed itself as the only encyclopedia admissible in court?  Google gathering information on us and pointing us in the direction it wants us to go in shapes the future of the web and how the web grows, which when dealt with realistically, is obviously the future of informational organization.  The grading rubric will, upon repeated trials, shape the writer of the paper.  So should we be satisfied with Google as our grader, when it seems perfectly content to bring us more bad results faster? Do we have other options, different search engines which we maybe like more?

I dunno, Google it.  Instant™ly.

Black Hat SEO: Things You Must Avoid

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Black-Hat SEO Tactics:

Keyword Stuffing
This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of search engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes that the search engine will read this as relevant. In order to offset the fact that this text generally reads horribly it will often be placed at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size. An additional tactic that is often associated with this practice is hidden text which is commented on below.

Hidden Text
Hidden text is text that is set at the same color as the background or very close to it. While the major search engines can easily detect text set to the same color as a background some webmasters will try to get around it by creating an image file the same color as the text and setting the image file as the background. While undetectable at this time to the search engines this is blatant spam and websites using this tactic are usually quickly reported by competitors and the site blacklisted.

Cloaking
In short, cloaking is a method of presenting different information to the search engines than a human visitor would see. There are too many methods of cloaking to possibly list here and some of them are still undetectable by the search engines. That said, which methods still work and how long they will is rarely set-in-stone and like hidden text, when one of your competitors figures out what is being done (and don’t think they aren’t watching you if you’re holding one of the top search engine positions) they can and will report your site and it will get banned.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases and provide little in the way of value to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, that they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Often to save time these pages are generated by software and added to a site automatically. This is a very dangerous practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages.

Redirects
Redirecting, when used as a black-hat tactic, is most commonly brought in as a compliment to doorway pages. Because doorway pages generally have little or no substantial content, redirects are sometime applied to automatically move a visitor to a page with actual content such as the homepage of the site. As quickly as the search engines find ways of detecting such redirects, the spammers are uncovering ways around detection. That said, the search engines figure them out eventually and your site will be penalized. That or you’ll be reported by a competitor or a disgruntled searcher.

Duplicate Sites
A throwback tactic that rarely works these days. When affiliate programs became popular many webmasters would simply create a copy of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it online in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture their sales. As the search engines would ideally like to see unique content across all of their results this tactic was quickly banned and the search engines have methods for detecting and removing duplicate sites from their index. If the site is changed just enough to avoid automatic detection with hidden text or the such, you can once again be reported to the search engines and be banned that way.

Interlinking
As incoming links became more important for search engine positioning the practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build the overall link popularity of them all became a common practice. This tactic is more difficult to detect than others when done “correctly” (we cannot give the method for “correct” interlinking here as it’s still undetectable at the time of this writing and we don’t want to provide a means to spam engines). This tactic is difficult to detect from a user standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported.

Reporting Your Competitors
While this may seem a bit off, the practice of reporting competitors that you find using the tactics noted above or other search engine spam tactics is entirely legitimate and shouldn’t be considered at all unethical. When we take on search engine positioning clients this is always incorporated into our practices when applicable (which happily is not that often).

Quality guidelines from Google

If you determine that your site doesn’t meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.

What Will CUIL Mean for Portland, Oregon Businesses and SEO/SEM Folks?

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CUIL Portland Oregon SEO SEM Business

Portland, Oregon Businesses and SEO/SEM folks may be singing “Don’t be Cruil” to CUIL, a new search engine from some ex-Google engineers. At the time of this writing, a simple search on a subject that is popular both for recreation and business in Portland, came up with a dozen or so results that had, as far as we could tell, nothing to do with the topic. What we typed in: portland oregon beer. Our results ranged from several generic Citysearch links, to a site that, apparently, was a storage place for Portlanders to upload photos. As far as we can tell, CUIL didn’t really display any relevant links related to our search query for Portland, Oregon Businesses based on the usual SEO/SEM tools.

But there may be some logic behind this. The engineers may purposefully be trying a different approach than Google, in order to display results that are more relevant to the user and not the algorithm.

Here’s what CUIL has to say:

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

Then we offer you helpful choices and suggestions until you find the page you want and that you know is out there. We believe that analyzing the Web rather than our users is a more useful approach, so we don’t collect data about you and your habits, lest we are tempted to peek. With Cuil, your search history is always private.

Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil.

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SEO Marketing in Portland Oregon

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Search Engine Marketing has become a significant marketing medium for a successful Portland Oregon business. If a small business can successfully market their products or services online they open up multiple new doors to people and sales leads. A well structured and organised Search engine marketing consultant will suggest two avenues for internet promotion, SEO and Paid Internet Marketing.

There will always be room for growth and if you market a product or service then there is always online marketing potential.

So, let’s look at why SEO is a substantially better option than paid web marketing.

SEO is a long term technique for online marketing. Should you carry out pay per click and other paid online marketing then when you quit paying your bills to the advertiser the traffic to your website will disappear. Although you will also pay for SEO consulting and implementation, results are often so impressive it is almost compelling to go with SEO instead.

With pay-per-click marketing you pay for each and every site visitor delivered to your internet site whether they like your service or product or not. With Search Engine Optimization your website will appear high in organic listings and this will mean you don’t pay for a click through to your website.

The psychology of clicking on sponsored links

Should you appear in both the paid and unpaid search results then you would spot around 80% of your web site traffic comes from organic results. There is a psychology relevant to consumers clicking on pay per click links particularly if they are labeled as such, such as in Google “Sponsored Links”. Searchers see straight through this and know it is a paid advertising link.

A well-executed Search Engine Optimization strategy will get your site massive amounts of website traffic. But once visitors get to your site, the site needs to be “sticky” so, make sure you couple your SEO in Portland Oregon with fantastic design, clear and prevalent calls to action and appropriate marketing principles like color schemes and layouts. In my opinion it is very important to get this SEO campaign mix correct so talk to someone at Search Marketing Team and see how they can optimize your site and drive traffic to your site.

Contributed by– Jeff Dunn

Site sponsored by OSPS Security

The Chrome, TyBit SEO Tag-Team

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I thought I would share something I use with SEO clients in Portland that like a DIY game to play to see how I am helping them rank well in organic search results. Practice using Google’s Chrome Browser, Downloadable Here, alongside TyBit’s Search Engine Toolbar Downloadable Here.

The main reason I use Google Chrome to conduct targeted keyword searches for clients that want me to focus on certain phrases, is that Chrome immediately returns updated results from Google’s search engine before either Firefox or IE. I’m serious. Conduct your favorite search (or use a search for one of my clients, like “harvester repair” [csiequip.com], “portland computer repair” [1201.com], “Oregon coast excavating” [salmonrivercontractors.com], “Chinese food Portland” [szechuankitchen.com], “Portland sports bar” [cidermillpdx.com OR fryertuckchicken.com], “fried chicken in Portland” [cidermillpdx.com OR fryertuckchicken.com], or “Portland SEO” [streethelper.com]) in both FF and IE and you will see vastly different organic search results. Now do the same search in Google’s Chrome browser and you will get more recent search result rankings because Chrome clears out and refreshes your cache at a more regular and frequent rate (the precise rate is top-secret, but rumors report that the browser does this every twelve hours by default, and more often based on how often you conduct searches.).

Ok, now move on to phase two of this game. After you know your up-to-the-minute Google ranking, you will want to see where you rank in the other leading engines. You COULD do this by searching each engine individually, OR you can use TyBit to search all of the 16 most popular (except Google, but including MSN, Yahoo and Bing) engines at once and see the overall average returns and rankings for organic search results.

Try it. If you wonder if your SEO Company in Portland (or anywhere for that matter) is working for you, this is one way to check on their progress.

SEM, SEO Courses Coming to Portland Oregon Campuses?

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Mediapost published an interesting article today that made me start to wonder if SEM/SEO accredited college courses were bound to come to Portland State University, or other Oregon universities.

The story, based on a course at the University of California San Diego read in part:

“The course is designed for small business owners and corporate marketing staff. “SEO & SEM: The Fast Track to Search Engine Optimization and Marketing,” will cover basic and intermediate tactics and practices, including Web site architecture and content creation, search engine operation, keyword research and linking strategies.”

I found this workshop today on the Portland State University (PSU) website:

“Search engine marketing is a rapidly growing and evolving discipline. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or someone looking for a career change, the Internet Strategies search engine marketing 12 hour workshop is the ideal opportunity to maximize your value and earning potential. Search marketing veteran Kent Lewis, President of Anvil Media, Inc., will teach you the fundamentals, including search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), link development, online reputation management and social media marketing. The workshop will incorporate real-world examples, guest speakers and an interactive assignment to enable instant application in your world.”

Upon further research, I found that Vertical Measures compiled a list of the top college level curriculum for both search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) a while ago.

It will be interesting to see how these colleges tackle the ever-fluctuating “Gray Hat” area of SEO and SEM.

Here is what Vertical Measures came up with:

California State University – Long Beach

CSU’s marketing curriculum includes SEO.

DePaul University of Continuing and Professional Education

A six-week course designed to provide individuals with tools for online marketing.

The European Graduate School

The European Graduate School offers courses in Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Information Architecture.

George Mason University

George Mason University’s Search Engine Marketing program provides a high level of coverage including in depth courses in Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click Marketing and Web Site Copywriting.

Harvard Extension

The Harvard Extension School offers Information Systems Management, which includes Interactive Online Marketing.

Indiana University (SLIS)

Indiana University has an introductory SEM course as a part of their curriculum. They cover SEO, PPC, social media, and analytics.

James Madison University, College Of Business

James Madison University College of Business offers online marketing practices, building traffic to websites, attracting visitors and using necessary technologies and practices.

New York University, School of Continuing And Professional Studies

NYU offers beginning, intermediate and advanced courses in digital media marketing, search engine marketing strategies, multi-channel marketing and internet copyrighting.

Rasmussen College

Rasmussen College is offering an internet marketing course with a BS in Business Management. The course teaches e-strategies, and web media marketing.

Rice University, Glasscock School of Continuing Studies

The Glasscock School of Continuing Studies provides a course in search engine optimization.

Rutgers University

Rutgers offers a nationally recognized search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEM), pay per click (PPC) marketing, and website copywriting course.

University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)

UAH offers a search engine optimization course to teach students learn to set up and maintain search engine optimization campaigns, search engine compatibility, and how to start SEM or SEO based businesses.

University of Georgia

U of G offers a Master of Internet Technology that features database management, internet programming, electronic commerce and website design and usability.

University of Nevada at Las Vegas (UNLV)

UNLV offers a Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing course in online marketing, website development that is search engine appealing, and Pay Per Click campaigns.

University of Texas at Austin, School of Information

The University of Texas at Austin offers a technical approach to learning web design and SEO/SEM.

University of Utah

The University of Utah’s Search Engine Optimization course includes accessibility, “black hat” optimization, and search friendly website design.

University of Virginia, Darden School of Business

The University of Virginia offers an Online Marketing Update course offers instruction on search engine marketing, email marketing, leading and cutting edge concepts as well as Web 2.0.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Continuing Education

UWM’s Information Technology program in Search Engine Optimization provides basic and advanced techniques in developing content and maximizing search engine results.

Valdosta State University

Valdosta State University offers online courses on achieving top search engine positions, and designing effective websites.

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Google Adds HotPot to Portland Google Places Local Search Results

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According to Google Inc., local searches account for 20 percent of all queries on Google.

Now Google is showing what Near Field Communication capabilities will do in the near future with a new marketing campaign in Portland for Google Places’ HotPot, a local recommendation engine powered by users and friends rumored to be replacing the existing review interface in Google Places within the next year.

To encourage more reviews in Hotpot, Google is holding contest with dinner prizes at local restaurants. Google chose Portland as its first city to promote Google Places and Hotpot because of its thriving local business community.

Beginning in the first week of December 2010, a Google marketing team will began working with around 250 Portland-area businesses to provide tools for using Hotpot, an extension of Google Places, a free service that allows businesses to enter data to have a presence on Google.

HotPot allows users to rate and review establishments based upon a six-star system. Once a rating is made, Google provides the user with recommendations of other places he or she may like. The more ratings users make, the more the engine gets to know their tastes and can provide better recommendations.

Users can also share their recommendations with friends and family and personalize their searches to focus on places their friends recommended.

The marketing push involves distributing window decals enabled with near-field communication technology that will allow people with NFC-enabled phones to instantly get information about the business.

Google’s Portland-only contest, the Hotpot Jackpot, ends Jan. 20 and the winner will receive dinner with up to 10 people at any Portland restaurant, paid for by Google.

Google Commerce Search

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Google just announced a new search engine product (hopefully one to replace Google Product Search… That thing is so clunky), to help big online retailers make their websites easier to search.

With Google Commerce Search Google sets up a search function on an online retailer’s website, which Google says will dramatically improve user experience and drive sales.

The main selling points are that everything that has made Google a dominant company will help people navigate clunky retail websites that cause a major stumbling block to sales.

Well, The Speed Of Sound Was Just Busted Again With The 51a Waverider

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The Boeing X51A Waverider, a U.S. Air Force scramjet reached a speed nearly five times the speed of sound today. Which is pretty cool. The aircraft is the size of a cruise missile. The scramjet ignited for about 200 seconds and reached a 70,000-foot altitude at Mach 5, making aviation history with the longest-ever scramjet-powered hypersonic flight. Officials say that the waverider surfs sonic shockwaves, as opposed to normal jets.

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Check out this new Baby Spoon Weaning thingie! Dubbed the Flowspoon, check out the video on the site, it explains why babies often swallow too much air when they transition from breastfeeding and bottle feeding to solid foods.

You can find them online under these keywords:

Baby Bottle Feeding,
Baby Breastfed,
Baby Breastfeeding,
Baby Feed,
Baby Feeding Bottles,
Baby Feeding Spoon,
Baby Food Spoon,
Baby Spoon,
Baby Spoons,
Baby Weaning,
Feeding Spoons,
Infant Spoon,
Milk Feeding,
Spoon Feeding

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Check out this new invention that is purporting to be the Best Alternative to Dust Masks.

The Tuxedo No Dust is an apparatus that connects your average shopvac to a bucket to suck the dust while you’re mixing so that the dust never even reaches your face. You will find it online by searching for these keywords:

Dust Mask,
Dust Masks,
3m Masks,
3m Respirator,
3m Respirator Mask,
Disposable Mask,
Face Masks,
Face Respirator,
Full Face Mask,
Mask Face,
N95 3m Respirator,
N95 Mask,
N95 Respirator,
Particulate Mask,
Particulate Respirator,
Respirator Mask,
Respirators,
Safety Mask,
Safety Masks,
Concrete Dust,
Dust Silica,
Occupational Exposure,
Sandblasting,
Silica Dust,
Silicosis Prevention,
Grout Dust,
Dust Grout,
Safety Mask

Texas Flooding NOT Due to Stream Of Searchers Using Google Instant!

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News Flash! Texas Flooding not due to release of Google Instant, the search engine giant’s auto-complete/time-saver tool.

As of today, if you sign into Google and begin typing a search on Google’s home page, the site will display possible Organic and Map matches for your query after you’ve typed the first letter.

For example, typing just “Portland Se” yields links to scads of Portland Sewing sites. Yay!

Google claims that Instant can save time, this option “saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search.”

Sweet, now I’ll have time to watch Fox’s coverage of the Flooding in Texas!

Is Google Plus a Big Minus? Two News Articles Today Say ‘Yes’

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Have you spent any time really kicking the tires with Google+? If you have, you’ve probably found, as we have, that there isn’t a lot to see over there.

SEO Portland Web Design

Already Invited? Tough Crap...

From very obvious oversights such as the name Google choose to go with for the project (with Facebook you can “Like” or “Recommend”, but with Google you can only “Plus” a page … Whatever THAT means) to the awkward soft launch of the project itself, with Google’s patented invitation-only enrollment and this cryptic message that began appearing a few days ago for folks that were supposedly already enrolled: “Already invited? We’ve temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon.”

For whatever reason, as of right now it seems that Google+ misses much more than it hits, so if Google really intends to be a player in the social networking game, they are going to have to brush up on their social skills. Right now Google is just socially retarded.

With the massive buzz today related to Google’s acquisition of Motorola, there are at least two great news items related to Google+ and its inadequacies that may have fallen off your radar. As a public service, we will feature snippets of them here, now:

The first bit comes to us from Forbes in an article titled “A Eulogy for Google Plus“, and here are some of the highlights we found interesting:

 

Google Plus is a failure no matter what the numbers may say.

It’s a vast and empty wasteland, full of people who signed up but never actually stuck around to figure out how things worked in this new part of town. One simple click takes me back to Facebook, and my wall is flooded with updates and pictures from 400+ friends. This just isn’t a contest, and it never will be.

To know why G+ has failed, we must first look at how Facebook succeeded.

Facebook had exclusivity on its side, a once-upon-a-time fact we’re only reminded of when we watch The Social Network, but even when it expanded past college to the general population, it was a hundred times more user friendly and visually streamlined than MySpace. That site was destroyed by the tackiness of its own users with a propensity for glitter text GIFs and autoplaying pop songs, and when it failed to evolve, the exodus to Facebook was massive and unstoppable.

Now Google has fallen into the same trap with Plus. If anyone is annoyed by Facebook, it’s simply that they’re tired of using it. Their gripes aren’t from the layout, or even the privacy settings, as much as internet outrage over the suspect Terms of Service would have you believe. Google can launch a product that fixes Facebook’s issues, and even looks a touch nicer to boot, but its biggest flaw is simply something it can’t overcome. It’s not Facebook.

The next article related to Google+ and its flaws comes from the Charleston Daily Mail and is titled “Google’s attempt to end Facebook misses target“:

With its new social network, Google has scored a huge blow against its archenemy.

Yes, Google delivers features and functionality that Microsoft’s Bing search engine can’t touch.

Wrong archenemy, you say? Google is supposed to be a Facebook-killer? Ehhh, not so much.

At least not now. While Google brings some welcome new features to the social-networking space, there’s no great innovation that would make you want to use it as your primary online identity, or that Facebook couldn’t emulate if it chose to.

Google , which launched about a month ago, is officially a beta, or test, service; to join, you need an invitation from someone who’s already a user. Judging from the evidence, invites aren’t very hard to come by: Less than three weeks after launch, Chief Executive Officer Larry Page announced that the service had already signed up 10 million members.

That sounds like a lot, and it is. But considering that Facebook is up around three-quarters of a billion, Google has a long way to go before your friends are as likely to be hanging out there as they are on the competition.

The core of Google will be familiar to Facebook loyalists. Users can post items that friends can comment on, just like Facebook’s Wall. There’s also what Google calls the Stream, a flow of items posted by others – essentially, Facebook’s News feature. On Facebook, if you see a post you like, you can “Like” it; on Google , you can ” 1″ it.

And it isn’t just Facebook that Google borrows from. In addition to people you know, you also have the ability to latch on to those you don’t, as on Twitter, and add their posts to your Stream.

The Google system for managing all this is its most interesting feature: Circles. They’re an easy and logical way for you to organize the people in your network and decide whose stuff you want to see, and who you want to see your stuff. In some ways, it isn’t all that different from Facebook’s “Friend Lists,” but Google makes Circles far simpler to establish and manage.

 

 

 

Filed Under: SEO Portland Web Design

Portland Oregon Businesses: Eight Essential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips

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Bytestart provided this quick list of eight tips for streamlining SEO efforts that I thought might be useful to some Portland, Oregon-area businesses:

1. Be realistic

Everybody knows the “ideal” keyword that they would like to rank for, but the chances of ranking well for this keyword may be slim / almost impossible in competitive industries.

Be realistic with yourself in terms of the amount of time, money and effort required to rank well for these search terms. Does the potential reward justify the time and effort? Are your competitors actively carrying out SEO work? Would the rewards of achieving 6th / 7th position justify the effort? Are you competing against big brands outsourcing their SEO to large search marketing companies?

Prioritise your tasks and look at outsourcing opportunities if you do not have the time necessary to complete tasks. You should be asking yourself all of these questions before deciding on a primary keyword to target.

2. Set short term and long term goals

Related to the point above, setting realistic short and long term goals are great ways of staying motivated. Keep the short term goals towards longer tail search terms. If you already have a relatively established site, which terms are currently driving significant amounts of traffic? How easy will it be to increase the ranking of this term?

Use click through rate data to predict the number of clicks you can achieve. For example, if you rank 9th for “purple mice”, and receive 22 visitors per month, if you increased this 4 places to 5th, you could expect to almost double this number.

Look through all of your search terms looking for good short term search strategies. Longer term goals should be your more competitive keywords, often with a 6-8+ month timescale (depending on industry) for achieving good rankings.

3. Research

Spend a lot of time researching every aspect of your strategy. Keywords, potential link building strategies, onsite work, content, industry authorities, competition. In order to have a credible search marketing strategy, all of these factors need to be analysed in as much detail as possible.

4. Competitors

One of the most important individual factors to focus on is the competition. How good is their onsite SEO? Have they missed obvious tricks? Can you take positive things from their site design /structure and implement it yourself? How impressive are your competitors’ backlink profiles? How are they going about obtaining back links? Is there scope to replicate strategies, or further improve on strategies your competitors have implemented?

5. Use available tools

There are a number of useful tools out there today to help with all aspects of SEO and search marketing. The use of Google webmaster tools, and rank checking software are a definite must. Google trends and Google Adword keyword suggestion tools are great resources for keyword research.

Other handy tools include SEO plug-ins for the Firefox browser, spider simulators and keyword density tools. There are multiple versions of many tools, it is worth spending a little bit of time trying each one.

6. Stay up to date

The SEO industry is changing all of the time, so it is important to stay up to date with the latest developments. Reading SEO blogs and browsing SEO discussion forums are a great way of staying informed of the latest developments. By doing so, you will also learn a lot, be it a new link building idea or a new handy plugin which may save you a lot of time.

7. Wider picture

Look at your search marketing campaign from broader picture, what else could you be doing in online marketing that will have a positive impact on your backlink profile / traffic / rankings?

For example, if your site has a blog, are you using blog pinging services (Google’s own service or services such as Weblogs and Feedburner). Are you utilising local search, universal search elements? How appropriate is your site to social media outlets?

8. Stay ‘white hat’

There are a lot of SEO practices that are frowned upon by the search engines, if you are unaware of them, the chances are that you are not doing them. If you have heard or read of “new” SEO techniques, spend a lot of time researching their potential negative impacts before implementing them.

Search engine algorithms are getting better and better at detecting techniques used to purposely manipulate their algorithm. Read their guidelines and stay within them, if you decide to implement grey hat or black hat techniques, it is only a matter of time before you are found out and penalised.


Interesting facts from The Search Marketing Team in Portland, Oregon.

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The Search Maketing Team in Portland, Oregon has found that searches that include a location stand at 20 percent of all Google searches. And the proportion of Google results pages that display a map was at 1 in 13 at the beginning of the year. The U.S. Small Business Administration says that in 2008 there were 29.6 million small businesses across the country, and just 4 million business listings on Google have been claimed by business owners. It’s clear that local SEO represents both an opportunity and an imperative at this point. Smart businesses are poised to overtake any lagging competition, however local SEO doesn’t simply give an edge to brick-and-mortar businesses today – it’s a requirement. Today, if you can’t be found online, there’s a good chance you won’t be found on the street.This is why Search Marketing Team is so influential in helping a business market themselves or their products.

The search engines’ algorithms for local search results are technically unknown, however, a number of ranking factors have been inferred based on testing and performance. Google applies three distinct algorithms used to serve results: the organic algorithm, the maps algorithm and the 7- or 10-pack algorithm. The maps and local-pack algorithm overlap, though are considered separate, according to a presentation during December 2009’s SES Chicago session on local search ranking factors.

With many small business owners busy running day-to-day operations, there’s a need for streamlined instruction on the straight-forward tasks that can improve the chances of being discovered by consumers online. This is where Search Marketing Team in Portland Oregon can be such an asset in your company’s bottom line.
Contributed by– John Smith

 

Jobs to Google: Geek Off!

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Earlier this week, Steve Jobs “ripped” Google Android as  “fragmented”.

Wait for it.

BURN.

Stay with me for a second here.

Jobs went on a five minute rant in which he “developed” the idea that because the Android market was neither homogeneous nor monopolized, it was not open source.  On the contrary, that is the very definition of an open source approach.  He also gave a shoutout to “Twitterdeck” (which is old guy slang for Tweetdeck) saying they had to use like, a kajillion different approaches when working with the ‘droid market, and that they talked to him about it, which turned out to be a total lie.  Furthermore, he characterized the Apple market as being totally open source, and the room as being drafty, both of which are untrue.  Creating a channel through which all development flows isn’t open source, it’s actually the opposite, and the reason a term like “open source” even exists. I get it, no-one cares, but you guys! Seriously! Sacrificing functionality for ease of use is bad y’all!  It narrows the realm of the possible into rigidly controlled structures which behoove profiteers and those who would use our power ( or apathy towards it) for evi… wait, I just got a tweet.

Hot Tip: Paypal is Moving on Up

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A little bird flew down on my shoulder and whispered in my ear that he had just been in a market research study for Paypal, and the main focus of the questions was whether or not Paypal should move into broader financial services, such as credit cards and banking.  As market research is usually a sign that a CEO thinks these are good ideas, it’s fair to say that someone up there is thinking that the  company should move deeper into the physical realm.  The fact that it’s taking place in Portland probably means they’re aiming it at the youngsters!(or the unemployed!) For like, Silly Bandz and stuff! OMG, I bet they’ll fall in love with the 25 page arbitration agreement!

Google’s “Mission Drift”

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Recently it seems we’ve seen Google’s focus shift away from web technology to what the CEO would describe as “making the world better” as a focus.  Though one might object to the claim that a self-driving car is, in fact, a societal advancement, it appears as though the company has made a decided shift away from it flagship product; search.  Indeed, the company seems to be saying that they are “done” with the algorithm they use to compile all of the known information in the universe, and are now seeking bigger, better projects.  Even Mevil Dewey had to call it a day after some time.  The real question, is this simply an effect of Google’s market dominance, or has search algorithm gotten as good as it can get, is yet to be answered.  However, the wellspring of new,specialized search engines for specific types of data and the growing use of these tools in the mainstream seem to suggest that Google will continue to dominate for specific types of search (generalized) with small-scale “micro-competitors” taking the niche markets on specific data, such as photos, or video.  Economically, Google must do something with the money, which it has scads of, but the decision to focus the cash on more “real world” investments as opposed to ethereal web opportunities represents a shift in ideology from the largest advertising firm in the world.  As Google continues to expand, I think we’ll see more of this “mission drift” into an increasing role of major web businesses “irl“.

Google Autonomous Search; World Quietly Panicking

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Google recently announced that it would begin work on an autonomous search program for mobile devices by which your phone would constantly be searching based on the information you appear to need.  For example, when you walk by a theater it tells you what’s playing there, when you walk by a cafe it tells you the Yelp! listing- generally attempting to bring us further into the locational web much like foursquare.  The real deal here is that these things will be done automatically, which freaks people out.  See, as opposed opting in to a third party app which stores all the data, Google autonomous will be trying to predict what you want based on your location and your history, which is kind of Google’s big deal.  The real question is will the web be not only able to deliver relevant results but quality results?  Who cares about the opinions of 50 suburbanites about the restaurant on this street, the real question is: do they serve omelette’s? Which is hard enough to find out on a home computer.  This is basically the same idea as google instant: google has a ton of information, but the web is fundamentally too big to deliver real quality, so they just give away the info in bulk. Like so much of it that it’d constantly be running in the background, in your pocket, even though no-one’s seeing it.

Microsoft to Users: “We’ll Pay You To Use Bing”

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In a familiar scheme, Microsoft rolled out a new incentive scheme for it’s poorly performing Bing search engine akin to frequent flier miles, or a Randall’s card (for those not familiar with Randall’s, it’s an awful chain of grocery stores).  The scheme is as old as time, just for using Bing, Microsoft will give you reward points which you can spend on this stuff. This is a type of loyalty program, which critics argue basically amounts to a bribe, and at best feels a lot like the prizes at the arcade.  Why would Microsoft repeatedly use these incentives in order to get people to use Livesearch, Live, And Bing?  Because everyone just Googles instead.  Why does everyone just Google instead? Probably because they don’t seem desperate.

Bing Gains Ground, Blogs About It

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Microsoft’s Bing gained slight ground over Yahoo in terms of search traffic, the aftermath of Bing finally powering all of Yahoo’s searches.  The web didn’t exactly turn on it’s head, as even cursory inspection of the numbers show that Google is still overwhelmingly the most popular search engine, and continues to gain ground against it’s competitors.  That didn’t stop Microsoft cronies Ziff Davis from blogging about it heavily across platforms, which wouldn’t be a big concern except that ZD is a huge web source of information, and was acquired by CNET back in the 0’s for 1.6 billion dollars, and CNET is owned by CBS, and CBS is a Microsoft partner from way back.  Which doesn’t really change the fact that the shift is expected and essentially inconsequential, but it does illuminate the need for “Don’t be evil” corporate charters.  Or maybe it doesn’t, and Microsoft is totally a good guy, (as reported by ZDnet).  Either way, this paranoia was powered and brought to you by Google Search, and will be for the foreseeable future of search.