According to Google, today’s hottest search was for When A Man Loves A Woman Lyrics, which is strange what with everything happening out in SE land today that could impact Website SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Website Ranking, Portland. Not to mention Website Promotion for Oregon companies that operate sites or conduct ecommerce business with China.

Today Google ended talks with China over censorship of search results in that country, redirecting its China search engine (google.cn) visitors to the Hong Kong-based service (google.com.hk).

Should an American company compromise its principles to gain access to world’s fastest growing internet market? State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley is reported as saying, “Were I China, I would seriously consider the implications when one of the world’s most recognizable institutions has decided that it’s too difficult to do business in China.”

For local companies, this may well influence how we do business with clients from China, affecting our Portland Website SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Website Ranking and Website Promotion for Oregon on Baidu, China’s #1 Search Engine now that Google has exited the country.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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!