You’ve probably heard of 2048-bit encryption, or seen the HTTPS markup in your address bar indicating that the site has an SSL certificate. Have you wondered “Do I need an SSL certificate on my site?” or “Will an SSL certificate help my Portland SEO in any way?” Using an SSL certificate helps your users know that their information is safe. Using an SSL certificate provides two important things:

• Encryption of sensitive data like credit card numbers and personal information
• Some assurance to your customers that you are trustworthy (the process of getting an SSL certificate can’t guarantee this, but it can make it more likely which is part of the reason why visitors have this perception)

These are very important benefits and, while not all websites require an SSL certificate, it is essential for certain types of sites. To find out if you need an SSL certificate for your site, answer these questions:

Is my site an e-commerce site that collects credit card information?
For most e-commerce sites, you absolutely need an SSL certificate! As an online merchant, it is your responsibility to make sure the information you collect from your customers is protected. This will shield you and your customers by making sure that no one can intercept and misuse their credit card information.

Your customers are providing you with very important and personal information that allows access to their hard earned money. If an identity thief gets access to your customer’s credit card information because you didn’t take the necessary precautions, it can be devastating to you and to your customer. Your customers need to know that you value their security and privacy and are serious about protecting their information. More and more customers are becoming savvy online shoppers and won’t buy from you if you don’t have an SSL certificate installed.

If you accept credit card information and store it in a database so you can process it using an offline POS machine or charge it manually on your merchant account’s website, then you definitely need an SSL certificate to secure the credit card data as it is transferred. You also need to be very careful with the data when it is stored on your servers. Learn more about PCI Compliance and SSL and the requirements of protecting stored credit card information.

Do I use a 3rd party payment processor?
If your e-commerce site forwards your visitors to a 3rd party payment processor (like PayPal) to enter the credit card information then you don’t need an SSL certificate because your website won’t touch the credit card information. Just make sure none of the credit card details get entered when the address bar still shows your domain name. Note that PayPal allows you to accept the credit card information on your site or forward visitors to their site. If you accept the credit card information on your site, you need an SSL certificate.

Do I have a login form?
If your users enter a username and password to login to your site without an SSL certificate, an attacker can easily see their username and password in clear text. This would allow someone else to impersonate your visitor, but it allows for a far more dangerous possibility: Because users often use the same password on many sites (including their bank accounts), an attacker can potentially compromise many other accounts. If you let people store a password with you, you must take responsibility for protecting it, even if the security of your own site isn’t critical.

It is true that most login forms don’t currently use SSL. This means that most login forms are vulnerable. With the number of cheap SSL certificates available, it is becoming more and more worthwhile to secure login forms. If you want to forego the SSL certificate without having to worry about securing the login information, you can also use OpenID, Facebook Connect, or another technology that lets users log in on a another site and return to your site. Learn more about creating a secure login form.

In short, if your website is a collection of pictures of your pet slug “Flash” with a small blog and doesn’t require visitors to log in, you probably don’t need SSL. If you have a login form or send or receive private customer information, then you need SSL. If you run an e-commerce website where people provide you with credit card information directly on your site, you absolutely need SSL.

Google has announced that going HTTPS — adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site — will give you a minor ranking boost.

Google says this gives websites a small ranking benefit, only counting as a “very lightweight signal” within the overall ranking algorithm. In fact, Google said this carries “less weight than other signals such as high-quality content.” Based on their tests, Google says it has an impact on “fewer than 1% of global queries” but said they “may decide to strengthen” the signal because they want to “encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.”

Google also said based on their tests for the past few months, the HTTPS signal showed “positive results” in terms of relevancy and ranking in Google’s search results.

As you may remember, at SMX West, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, said he’d love to make SSL a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. Well, less than five months after that announcement, and while he is on an extended leave, Google is making it a reality.

Portland SEO Concerns With Going HTTPS

Should you be concerned when switching from your HTTP to HTTPS site for SEO purposes? Not so much. Google has been telling webmasters it is safe to do so for years. But you need to take the proper steps to ensure your traffic doesn’t suffer. That means make sure to communicate to Google that you moved your site from HTTP to HTTPS. Google promises to release more documentation in the future, but for now has provided the following tips

• Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
• Use 2048-bit key certificates
• Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
• Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
• Check out our site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
• Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
• Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.
• Google has also updated Google Webmaster Tools to better handle HTTPS sites and the reporting on them.
• One last thing: You will want to make sure to track your HTTP to HTTPS migration carefully in your analytics software and within Google Webmaster Tools.

For the past several months you have likely heard digital marketing, internet marketing and SEO used more or less interchangeably. However, the three terms are not synonymous for each other.

Digital marketing is a broad term that describes a set of marketing processes that utilize all available digital channels to promote a product or service or build a digital brand. Digital marketing has come to succeed traditional marketing and the transition from paper and newspaper ads to Facebook and PPC campaigns.

The channels that make up digital marketing include: Web sites, Social media platforms, Banner placement, email marketing, mobile marketing, SEO, pay per click campaigns, Web TV, SMS, billboards and anything else with a digital foundation.

Internet marketing is a subset of digital marketing. It is in fact the most important component since the majority of digital marketing activities fall within the boundaries of Internet marketing. We will see below how digital marketing budgets are spent and their relationship with Internet marketing.

A very simple breakdown is as follows:

Digital marketing includes internet marketing and internet marketing includes SEO. Here’s how it looks in a hierarchical breakdown:

1. Digital Marketing

• a. Internet Marketing
• a1. SEO

A sampling of digital marketing activities are:

• Web presence (website)
• Social media marketing
• Digital advertising
• SEO
• Online AV advertising

Many people who hear the term Digital Marketing think that immediately they are talking about Internet Marketing After years of experience in the arena, we feel that Digital Marketing includes all marketing that is not print. Whereas Internet Marketing (a component of Digital Marketing) is just that marketing on the Internet only, including SEO.

During 2014 top digital marketing investments will be made on ecommerce, social media marketing, content creation and mobile marketing.

According to a recent study by Gartner Research, the majority of digital marketing budgets is spent on internet marketing components, such as SEO.

In particular the most important findings are:

Marketing budgets represent 10% of total company revenues and this is expected to grow by 6% in 2013
Digital marketing represents ¼ of overall marketing spend 50% of digital marketing activities are outsourced (if you are thinking to outsource, make sure that you do it correctly without spending a fortune).

Digital Marketing includes Internet Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Email Marketing. Using the Smart Phones to deliver your message is a great way for lots of kinds of businesses to have immediate gratification with their marketing. For example imagine your a restaurant and every Monday you are slow, but Thursday, Friday, and Sunday you really pack them in. How do you think you can get some of those people who normal wait an hour or so on Friday night to come in and enjoy your great food on Monday? The answer is mobile marketing. First you have some very tasteful signs you can put on table or at the hostess station. asking people to text a few number to a 5 digit code. Offer them a free appetizer or to win a I-PAD. Then on Monday around 3 0r 4 in the afternoon hit them with a text saying something like 2 for 1 special or some other creative giveaway to come in tonight and eat that great food with little to no wait. now lets say that you have a few hundred to a few thousand on your Mobile marketing list. You only need a very small percentage to come in and your terrible Monday has turned into a profitable night that the servers are happy to work. Because Smart Phones would receive this message from the restaurant while people are getting ready to leave for the day, a few might just call their partner and say , “Hey let go to that great restaurant we love , they are having a 2 for 1 special”. That is POWERFUL.

Now when we are talking about Internet Marketing by itself, that is what people usually mean when they say things like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Local SEO (LSEO), SEM, Social Media, and Display or Banner Advertising. They all take place on the Internet in some form. SEO, SEM, LSEO all take place on the search engines, more likely Google. The SEO is in the main area of Google, this area is commonly know as the organic section. LSEO is the area next to the map on the first page of Google. SEM or commonly know as ADWORDS or Pay Per Click. It is the area on the very top of the page in the shaded area and along the side of the first page of Google. Social Media is using sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Blogging, and many more. I like to think of Social Media as word of mouth on crack. It is the ultimate word of mouth advertising. When a friend has “liked” or +1 a site or product, you are more likely to also like or +1 it. Display advertising is more of a branding effort and it is harder to calculate ROI, but if your budget will allow it is quite effective. For example if you go to a site, then it tracks you where you go and places Display or Banner ads on sites that your then visit.

In conclusion, Internet Marketing and all of the kinds of ways to go about doing Internet Marketing falls under the Digital Marketing agenda.

Keeping up with what your fans and followers do as they move from one screen to another has sometimes been difficult. For Google Analytics users, this process will get a bit easier with the launch of Universal Analytics in public beta. Originally available only to paying customers, Universal Analytics is now available to all users.

Google announced the availability of Universal Analytics in public beta on Friday. Universal Analytics was originally offered to paying customers but everyone can now get access via their free Google Analytics account.

What Google’s Universal Analytics Offers

If you’re new to this terrain, Google Analytics offers a free way to find out what’s happening on your website by simply adding a simple code to each page. Often this process is automated by blog platforms and webhosts so that you can just add your account code via your control panel.

You’re then able to track a somewhat overwhelming array of information about how many visitors you have, how many visits are made, what countries they come from, how long they stay on the site and what devices they use to view the site. There has been a mobile element available but Universal Analytics should improve this process, according to Google Analytics help, via:

• New data collection methods
• Simplified feature configuration
• Custom dimensions & custom metrics
• Multi-platform tracking
• Newbies will have the choice of Universal Analytics or Classic Analytics when they set up their site. You can also choose to track Android and iOS app activity but that’s separate from desktop and mobile web activity.

Old timey users will have to set up a new web property to use the new features. They say there’s going to be some kind of migration guide which may mean they’re going to introduce an easy way to switch over your old web property records to the new system but you’ll still need to add the new code to your site to get new features.

Visualize Your Google Analytics

Google Analytics isn’t the most user friendly tool for quickly grasping the big picture. Visual.ly recently introduced a free Google Analytics Report. This will make it not only easier to get a quick overview of what’s happening but will also be useful in creating reports for presentation.

Here’s more from the official announcement:

A typical consumer today uses multiple devices to surf the web and interact in many ways with your business. For most large businesses, already swimming in many sources of data, it’s an enormous challenge, but also an incredible opportunity.

Back in October, we announced the limited beta release of Universal Analytics as a way for businesses to understand the changing, multi-device customer journey. Today, we’re excited to welcome and invite all Google Analytics customers to try Universal Analytics.

The benefits of using Universal Analytics to businesses are:

• Understanding how customers interact with your businesses across many devices and touch-points,
• Insights into the performance of your mobile apps,
• Improvements of lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions so you can understand which channels drive the best results,
• Improved latency on your site by reducing client-side demands.

Let’s discuss how to make those links you’re developing look totally organic and natural to search engines. This is a cornerstone to good Portland SEO.

Link Anchor Texts — What It’s All About

First things first. Link anchor text is the visible text in a hyperlink that you click to visit another Website or page. In HTML terms, link anchor text is the text placed between the anchor tags (<a> and </a>), hence the name. Here goes an HTML code snippet of an anchor text:

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”>Anchor Text</a>

And on your page this code will look like this:

Anchor Text

Since the Google “Florida” update (rolled out November 2003) link anchor texts have become hugely important from the SEO perspective. Here’s why.

The Hilltop Algorithm (patented Google’s algo effective since the “Florida” update) states that Google will associate your Website with the anchor text of incoming links. What this means is that if you use “blue widget accessories” in the anchor text of your incomings links, Google will assign a higher relevancy score to your site for “blue widgets” as well as “blue widget accessories”, and rank it accordingly in its search results.

Currently, this is one of the fundamental aspects behind the way Google works and ranks its search results.

Always Do It The Natural Way

Now, one of the commonest mistakes Webmasters make is take their keyword phrases, stuff them into link anchors and then email people with link exchange offers asking everyone to use the exact same anchor text by all means.

This is not the way to go. Allow me to repeat that: This is NOT the way to go! This is the way Google seriously frowns upon. Why? You guessed it — it doesn’t look natural, it doesn’t feel natural, so it’s not natural, and you are asking for trouble if you do that because Google will think you are trying to manipulate its search results.

Think about it. If people linked naturally to your site, would they use all the same anchor texts? ‘Course not! The anchor texts would be all different.

So the answer to the “How do I make my anchor texts natural?” question is “Vary them!” Yes, vary them, and you’ll be well on your way to making Google love the links pointing to your site and rank your site higher for the keywords you target.

For example, you could use a slightly different anchor text every once in a while to achieve that. So instead of putting “blue widgets” into each and every anchor text, try to get your incoming links to look like this:

Blue widgets company
Comprehensive info on blue widgets
Blue widgets discounts available!
How to choose blue widgets wisely
Cost-effective blue widget services

…and so on, you get the idea.

Link Descriptions — Always Provide Natural Context For Your Links

If you want to benefit from your incoming links, you want to make sure your links appear on a page that has other (relevant) text. If a page consists of links and nothing but links, chances are it will look like a link farm to the search engines, which, of course, is a bad thing.

So make sure your link appears in the right context — surrounded by relevant text that includes your keywords. When you email other Webmasters asking to place a link to your site, give them a link description to use.

And yes, you guessed what I’m about to say: The right way of doing things is to avoid recognizable patterns and vary your link descriptions every so often so it looks perfectly organic to Google. Again, instead of using a description stuffed with your keywords such as “Blue widget company selling blue widgets!”, make it look natural by varying the description and making it sound natural:

“XYZ company is a recognized leader in the widget technology. The company’s primary specialization is blue widgets. Follow the link above to find out more.”

“XYZ offers value-added blue widgets to hundreds of happy customers from around the world. Find out more about our widgets by using the link above.”

Put some effort into writing at least several proper link descriptions, and not only will you provide more value to the human visitors, you will also make search engines rank your site higher in their SERPs, because your linking strategy will look more natural.

At the risk of sounding boring, let me emphasize this one more time. Don’t think varied link anchor texts and descriptions are not that important and don’t underestimate the power of Google. Use the same anchor text for a thousand of links and the new Google will simply devalue or even disregards your incoming links at all. You have been warned.

So when developing your backlink campaign, come prepared. Create several link anchor texts and descriptions (the more the better, actually), and use different ones every once in a while for your Portland SEO.

We are proud to announce that we are rolling out our Atlanta SEO Training in Atlanta, GA. For SEO in Atlanta related to corporate training, small business training, marketing team training and more please visit us at www.smt-atlantaseo.com.

Whether you are searching for SMM, SEO, SEM or PPC training or services for your business, we can help. We can train your team from the ground up, or work with what you already have in place.

In this business, the Search Marketing Company you hire can and will get you the best rankings they can, but – for ongoing SEO – the Best Search Engine Optimization to Improve Search Engine Ranking and keep it is to train someone on your staff Learn Search Engine Optimization basics.

For our readers across the U.S., you’ll need to do some research online for local SEO Training. Thankfully, locals in Atlanta, Georgia have at their disposal what we consider to be the Best Corporate Search Engine Optimization Training and Search Engine Training company in the form of the Search Marketing Team of Atlanta (http://smt-atlantaseo.com/). The SMT’s trainers have trained thousands of people all over the world since 2001. Additionally, the company is kept up-to-date monthly on the latest tools and techniques and they share that knowledge with you.

As a final note: The Search Marketing Company you hire will do their job and get you noticed, but our advice for the Best Search Engine Optimization to Improve Search Engine Ranking is to put someone on your staff through The SMT’s Training to Learn Search Engine Optimization so that they can keep your site competitive after your SEO/SEM company get’s you the ranking you deserve.

Hello and welcome to Organic Link Building Revealed. Today we’re gonna talk about one of the most important things to consider when developing links — namely, theme relevancy. Got a lot to discuss so let’s get straight to business.

—Josh

In Today’s Issue:

***What Is Theme Relevancy And Why Should I Care?***
***Hey, A Link Is Still A Link, No Matter Where It Comes From, Right? Wrong!***
***OK, So How Do I Find All These Beautiful Sites Related To Mine?***

What Is Theme Relevancy And Why Should I Care?

What theme relevancy means is the site that places a link to yours (an vice versa) should be relevant or related to your sites “theme”. Ideally, your link partner’s Website should complement, but not compete with whatever you are offering.

For instance, if you are selling blue widgets, it makes sense to get a link from a site selling widget accessories. Or, if you are selling Search Engine Optimization services, it’s a good idea to get links pointing to SEO-related articles, search engines news and forums. And, in both examples, it’s definitely NOT a good idea to exchange links with casino, gambling, or real estate sites.

This is not to say that blue widget buyers never gamble or never purchase real estate. But if they came to your site looking for your products or services such as blue widgets or SEO services, there’s probably one chance out of a million they are interested in casinos or real estate right now.

This is how your site’s visitors would have thought, and this is how search engines think it should be. Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other major search engines have been designed with one purpose — to provide value to their users, which means relevant, accurate search results. Their algorithms may — and will — change, but this underlying principle will remain the same.
“Hey, A Link Is Still A Link, No Matter Where It Comes From, Right?”

Wrong! This is a misconception that can easily get you in trouble. This approach could bring you short-term benefits 2 or 3 years ago, but major search engines (especially Google) have gotten a lot smarter since then.

If you still think theme relevancy is nice-to-have rather than a must-have, well, think again. Get a hundred unrelated links pointing to your site, and several things will happen, none of which involves high rankings for you:

• Google will simply not count these links when computing your ranking. This is the best thing that could happen since it doesn’t involve penalizing your site;
• Google will think (justifiably) that your site belongs to a different theme (say, gambling) and treat it accordingly. This could mean your site will go up in gambling-related search results, and down in the results you seek (such as blue widget results). Now, you don’t want this, do you?
• With the last Google algo update (dubbed “Big Daddy”), Google will decide (again, justifiably) you are trying to trick search engines and will simply drop your site from its index. Ouch. That was definitely NOT intended.

So here’s a rule of thumb: Always keep your site’s visitors in mind when running your link building campaigns. Try to get into your visitors’ shoes and think what resources they would be numberswiki.com

interested in. Would they be interested in casino sites? No? Then don’t do it.
“OK, So How Do I Find All These Beautiful Sites Related To Mine?”

Easy. There are several ways you can do it:

1. Do a search in major search engines such as Google using your niche keywords. Scan the results, copy the URLs you are interested in into a spreadsheet, wash rinse and repeat.
2. Visit a good link directory. Link directories are human-compiled directories of sites broken down into categories. DMOZ is an excellent example. Simply find your niche category in a directory, and search for relevant link partners there.
3. A trick you could use is examine your competition. Your competitors, who are selling, say, red widgets, most likely have other sites that link to them. You can use the LINK:WWW.COMPETITOR.COM command in Google, for example, to find out who.

So really, you can do it all by hand. The only problem is that finding quality link partners for your site — as important for your site’s success as it is — is very time-consuming. So if the above does not seem easy for you, here’s the good part.

Search Marketing Team makes it a lot easier to find relevant link partners. Just point to Tools -> Find new link partners… and explore your options. In short, you can do it all:

1. Find new partners using keyword search. Point to Tools -> Find new link partners… -> Search for new partners on the Web -> Find sites by keyword search. Then simply enter your niche keyword phrase and let Search Marketing Team do the rest — find hundreds of potential link partners related to your site’s theme. Pretty fast, too.
2. With Search Marketing Team you can also scan a complete Website (such as a links directory) and harvest all links from it, or just a specific category or page.
3. Search Marketing Team doesn’t stop here. You can also use it to quickly figure out who links to your competition and acquire hundreds of relevant link partners this way.
4. And it’s getting even better. Some sites are using link submission forms to exchange links. They provide you with a form that you must fill in specifying your domain, the page with a backlink, your email, etc. With Search Marketing Team you can quickly find relevant “Auto-Complete” link partners, and fill in their submission forms automatically — again, saving you time.

Now, let’s assume you need to find and evaluate 50 link partners a day. If you do it by hand, and spend 5 minutes on every link partner, you’ll end up stealing more then 4 hours of your precious time. If you don’t use Search Marketing Team, that is.

And, after you’ve tried the manual versus the Search Marketing Team way of finding potential link partners, I won’t have to ask you which one you like best — I know the answer 😉

I hope you enjoyed this issue as much as I did when I wrote it. So go make yourself a cup of your favorite beverage, sit back, power up Search Marketing Team and let it do the job for you.

That’s it for now. Contact me at josh@thesmt.com if you have any questions, and stay tuned for the next issue!!!

Is your company getting the search engine exposure needed to reach the increasing demand for companies that export? If you are not ranking near the top of the first page or if you are paying too much for SEO in Portland or Pay-Per-Click in Portland we will put your website in front of more searchers for export goods and services. It is all about REAL ESTATE. If you own a good position, or good placement on the first page of search result real estate, you will receive the lion’s share of searchers.

Why does this matter to an import/export company in Portland? Well, let’s consider this quote today from the Business Journal:

Portland business leaders said Tuesday that a new plan to double the region’s exports over the next five years could create 113,000 area jobs.

Economic development officials, who want to raise the region’s value of exported goods to $42 million by 2017, unveiled strategies that could build on Portland’s exporting base. The Greater Portland Metro Portland Export Strategy was developed in concert with a Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution    program. The Brookings-Rockefeller Project seeks to better link American companies with global customers.

The strategies, which will be presented Wednesday morning at a Portland Business Alliance  event, include:

• Supporting and cultivating primary exporters, including such area tech giants as Intel Corp.  and TriQuint Semiconductor Inc., so that they provide “greater economic impact and longer-term local industry sustainability.” Tech companies provide some 56 percent of the area’s total exports.
• Encourage companies that don’t export a lot of materials to export more.
• Build a pipeline that makes it easier to export. Some 18 percent of Portland’s economy depends on exports, much higher than the national average of 11 percent. However, 89 percent of the area’s companies either aren’t exporting at all or aren’t even considering it.
• Market the city’s various business proclivities, such as clean technology and other clusters.

SEO and Internet Marketing in Portland is one of the most efficient and effective marketing tools that bring measurable results. Call or email and we can walk you through ways that we can position your company for great search exposure, more traffic and an increase in revenue.

Is your company poised to take part in the educational market in China through internet marketing in Portland Seattle and the world?

China needs leadership management growth for its technical resources and its explosive growth. It is looking to outside sources for experienced educational resources.

If there was ever a need for business schools in China, including SEO and internet marketing courses, it’s now.

From the WSJ:

Breakneck economic growth has far outstripped the supply of management talent. Meanwhile, Chinese companies in both the private and state sectors are responding to government incentives to “Go Out” and compete against the best companies in the world—while juggling fierce competition, rapidly changing technology and shifting macro-economic forces at home.

No wonder some of the world’s most prominent business schools are eyeing China as the next educational frontier.

China Europe International Business School got to China early. That gives it a head start in terms of faculty and facilities. Its new pitch: “China Depth Global Breadth,” marrying insight into how China works with an international perspective that attracts students from China and around the world.

Dean John A. Quelch, a veteran of the Harvard Business School and London Business School, insists that despite economic turmoil in Europe, the CEIBS brand in China remains untarnished. “Germany is held in very high regard,” he insists. Besides, he adds: “People in China take the long view.”

Mr. Quelch talked with Andrew Browne in Shanghai. The following interview has been edited.

WSJ: Like everybody else in China, CEIBS seems to be investing massively in infrastructure. Tell us something about your expansion plans.

Mr. Quelch: The Shanghai campus will double in size by the end of 2013. We also have a campus that we opened in Beijing in 2010 and we currently have operations in Shenzhen that may convert into a fully fledged campus within the next two to three years.

We also have an appetite for going west, and looking at that hundred million people in the Chengdu-Xian-Chongqing triangle, who will eventually want their own business school and will not necessarily want—or be able—to fly to Beijing or Shanghai.

The reason why Stanford exists is because Harvard always thought that Californians would be happy to come east to Boston, and never imagined they’d want their own Harvard, a.k.a. Stanford.

WSJ: The No. 1 complaint of foreign companies in China is lack of management talent. Isn’t that a huge opportunity for you?

Mr. Quelch: First of all, China’s pace of expansion has outrun the speed with which managers can experientially develop themselves, and so our role is to be an accelerant. We take experienced or high-potential young managers, and we accelerate the speed with which they can assume more management and leadership responsibilities.

Are you and your company ready to fill this educational void in China? Internet marketing in Portland, Seattle and the world is one effective way to participate in that market. Is your website ranking on page one? Call us.

There’s nothing like winning – ranking first as world champions no matter what the field is a great feeling! Do you have the SEO and SEM tools to make your website the super bowl champs of eCommerce?

Thousands of fans roared as New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning hoisted the team’s Super Bowl trophy from a glittering blue-and-white float Tuesday as the victory parade made its way down the Canyon of Heroes, where the city has honored stars for almost a century.

The parade set off from the southern tip of Manhattan and moved slowly north to City Hall as fans dressed head-to-toe in Giants gear cheered and confetti wafted slowly down from the high-rises that line the street.

Manning, joined by coach Tom Coughlin, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other teammates, waved and grinned from the float as a deep roar rose from the crowds. The team will be honored with symbolic keys to the city at a City Hall Plaza ceremony.

Some fans waited since 6 a.m. to catch a glimpse of their favorite players. About half of a Long Island high school class skipped school to see “a whole nation coming together in one place – this parade,” said Mike King, 16, of Wantagh, N.Y.

King and seven school friends got up at dawn, arriving by subway in lower Manhattan to join the crowds packed behind police barricades lining Broadway. He attributed the win to the stellar performance of Manning and the hold-your-breath catch by Mario Manningham that led to the game-winning drive.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/football/nfl/02/07/new.york.giants.parade.ap/index.html#ixzz1lijqRPyF

As cited above : ““I like the whole atmosphere here – of winning in New York – there’s nothing like it. Winning in the greatest city in the world,” Lobosco said.”

Winning and ranking first for online searches with help from The Search Marketing team is a great feeling. Take your web site for a ride down the Canyon of Heroes with SEO from the search marketing team where ranking first is fun and rewarding. Be a champ and call The SMT today.

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Does it feel like Google has been loco over local search results and relevancy lately? If so, here’s the reason: Google has been aggressively updating Google Places and rolling out new products such as Hotpot (a hyper-local, user reviewed, social recommendation engine) with an aim toward improving local results and displaying these results above organic listings.

What this means for Oregon businesses: Local businesses have a competitive edge over non-local businesses.

In a video uploaded to Google’s Webmaster YouTube channel (watch it on our video page), Matt Cutts, Google, addressed this comment: “… how can an out of town company compete with the local based (and locally housed) competition without lying to show up in these results?”

Cutts explains in the video that the the entire first page of organic rankings is there for out-of-towner to compete on. But this didn’t really answer the commentor’s question. So, what he didn’t say is that if your company is not local, you just aren’t going to be able to compete with businesses that appear in the local results.

Our advice is this: If you want to compete in a local market where you do not have a physical location, you may just need to get a local phone number and a local mailing address (street only, Google Places will not work with a PO Box) and set up a virtual shop in that geographic market. This trend, focus on local results and relevancy, is going to continue, especially now that Google has entered the mobile geolocator race with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.

The AP in Seattle today reported that Microsoft and Yahoo may have finalized a Internet search advertising partnership aimed at narrowing Google’s chunk of the lucrative piece of the online advertising market pie.

Microsoft just recently launched Bing, it’s new search engine, which leads us to nickname the new Yahoo, Bing ad alliance as “Ying”.

As of now, it looks as though Yahoo will handle ad sales and customer service and Microsoft will power search results and display the appropriate ads to display.

It is unsubstantiated, but expected that part of the deal includes Yahoo promoting Bing on its engine.