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Posts Tagged ‘search engines’
Monday, January 30th, 2012
Search engine optimization is fine, however, small business owners should remember one important lesson – the Google Bot has never ever made a purchase; your customers do. There’s an interesting interview with Hamlet Batista that discusses how too much SEO can harm a website, and it can. Your web pages need to be written so that potential customers can access your content quickly and easily. The article discusses, for example, changing navigation links to match keywords. If customers find your navigation links a little confusing, they may just leave, and that’s going to cost you business.
Drawing traffic from search engines just to boost traffic numbers is not the best way to run a business. You are often better off drawing less traffic from a search engine whilst increasing the quality of that traffic. As a business, conversions are the most important metric, so your SEO efforts should be targeting quality traffic, not just ‘any’ traffic.
Traffic, even from a search engine, is not free. SEO takes time, and that’s either time away from your business or a cost to a business when you engage others to perform it for you. An experienced SEO professional will help you target your efforts towards quality traffic. This doesn’t mean you should totally ignore traffic of a lower quality, by all means, attract that traffic if you wish, but not by making on page changes that could hurt the conversion rate of your quality traffic. Batista makes the following point:
The key principle is to first make sure the site, the content, the layout, and the instruction and navigation makes sense for the users because …. you are not optimizing the site for the search engine bots to make a purchase. You have to optimize it for the user.
It’s an interesting situation for small businesses, especially those in competitive markets. SEO is designed to get the best search results, however, your website should be designed to achieve conversion goals from visitors. The real key is to get the balance right, and it can be done.
Tags: conversions, search engines
Posted in SEO for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Saturday, January 7th, 2012
If you look back just 15 years, you would never have thought that you could do all the things you can do with smart phones. You certainly never thought you could access the Internet from your cell phone, right?
Now, technology allows you to do all kinds of things from smart phones or iPhones. Is your website ready to be accessed? It needs to be because more people today are using their phones to access the Internet and you will be left in the dust as far as users to your site go if you are not mobile web ready.
So, how do you do it? It is really quite simple. Your first step is to see if your site is mobile ready. You can do this with a free service called MobiReady. This will give you a report about how easy it is for your site to be viewed.
Then make sure your site is a clean, easy-to-read site. This in turn will make your site faster, which is what you need for it to be accessible to cell phones. It’s also a good idea to not use Flash on your website. It is not necessary for a site, especially when viewed from a smart phone.
Make sure you use HTML phone numbers instead of making users type in a phone number and use voice search. More users are using their voice option on the phone. This is another step to your marketing strategy.
As you can see, it’s quite simple to make your site mobile ready. You don’t want to be left in the dirt when it comes to users wanting to go to your site but don’t because they can’t get to you on their phone. They are not going to wait till they get home, so you need to get up to speed and become mobile web ready.
Tags: internet marketing, mobile web marketing, online marketing, search engines, website
Posted in Mobile Marketing for Small Business | 1 Comment »
Thursday, December 29th, 2011
Some small businesses think there is too much competition on line for any effective marketing. That is completely wrong, however. Small businesses just need to use different tactics than, say, the bigger corporations. So, how do small businesses compete against the big guys?
For starters, small businesses need to use different SEO tactics. Search engine optimization uses keywords for internet users who are searching for something. An example would be herbal products. Most of the big guys will have herbal products listed as a keyword so their websites will pull into the search.
Because of this, it does make it harder for a small business to use the very same keyword as it will be difficult to get to the first page that way. A way around that is to make your keywords mean the same, but different. Instead of using herbal products, list the actual brand name or a key word, like supplement.
With a little practice you will be able to see which keywords are more effective for your products so that you can move through the pages and compete against the big guys.
In actuality, small business have an advantage over the big guys as they can use as many keywords and variations as they like in order to sneak in under their radar. It is an easy way to get where you want to go, which is the first two pages. It is a good estimate that most searchers will not go past the third page very often. If they can find what they are looking for in the first three, that’s where they will go.
Spice up your keywords and try your hand at different variations. See what helps and use those more often than the same ones everyone else is using.
Tags: business, internet marketing, keywords, search engines, SEO
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
Are you concerned about search privacy? If so, then you might be interested in two smaller search engines. Google and Bing, the leading competitors in search, store your search data for up to 18 months. But Blekko and DuckDuckGo are banking on you wanting more privacy than that.
Blekko – Blekko stores your search data for 48 hours, and that’s it. But the problem with Blekko is that your searches are confined only to sites that you or your friends tell it to search. The search engine makes use of “slashtags,” which are akin to Twitter’s hashtags. The intent is to cut out spam and undesired results from your searches. This type of search engine can be useful to your business if you can train your customers to use it and add important search terms related to your website as slashtags for their searches. Good luck in that.
DuckDuckGo – DuckDuckGo is more traditional in that they do crawl the Web and return search results based on keyword-related queries. And they do not collect your private information at all. Nada. You can also turn the privacy features off, if you prefer.
DuckDuckGo even refers you to two other search engines (on its privacy page) that do not collect your private information: Ixquick and Scroogle. The latter seems to base its results on Google search results, but it appears to be the only one of the four sites mentioned in this post to do so.
Are these smaller search engines good? Can they be good for your business? You’ll have to test them. I ran a test at both Blekko and DuckDuckGo. I was impressed that SBM was No. 1 at DuckDuckGo for the search phrase “small business marketing minnesota.” Of course, I’m No. 1 in both Google and Bing for the same phrase.
If you train your customers to conduct private searches at these search engines when searching for your business or services that you offer, then you might get some traffic from these sources.
Tags: privacy, search, search engines
Posted in search engines | 3 Comments »
Monday, April 25th, 2011
Are you making the most use of your time as a marketer? I’d be willing to bet that most online marketers are spending too much time on social media or unproductive channels. I have no data to back it up, but I know people and I think I know that most people are going to do what is fun before they do what is profitable and unfun.
Social media is fun. You can chat for hours with your best friend from high school, get stuck playing Cityville, or laugh out loud at the funny jokes your fans are sending your way. But are you getting any work done?
It’s a well known fact that 80%-85% of traffic for almost every website online comes from the search engines. It should seem to reason then that website owners and managers should spend that much time on search engine marketing efforts rather than social media or other forms advertising. Don’t you think?
Let’s say you work 10 hours a day every day. Six hours of that is spent on customer service (fulfilling orders, taking complaints, billing, etc.). That leaves you four hours for other activity. How are you filling that four hours?
In my opinion, you should be spending three hours on search engine marketing activities (blogging, PPC, or content creation) and the remaining one hour on social media and non-SEM activities. If you are spending your time in just the reverse, then I’d say you’ve got it backwards.
Don’t get me wrong. Social media is good. It’s fun. And you can generate traffic and sales from it. But 85% of your traffic is going to come from Google and Bing. So you should probably put your efforts into activities that are going to bring you the most money. That’s SEM. That means writing that daily blog post and spending some time tweaking your landing pages and PPC ads. Are you doing that?
Tags: blogging, content, PPC, search engine marketing, search engines, Social Media
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »
Monday, March 28th, 2011
A lot has been said of Google’s most recent algorithm change, which was designed to kill the content farms. They call it the farmer update. But what started this?
Google has always tried to control the spam. That’s its mission. The sole purpose of the search engine is to help searchers find the best information for their search queries. Spam gets in the way of that.
Consider this: You decide you want to buy a new plasma screen TV. So you go online to search for one. In the No. 1 position is a bullet point list of how to go about buying a plasma screen TV. It’s obviously very low level content. And it doesn’t help you. That’s the kind of content the farmer update was supposed to address.
Whose fault is it that the search engines are full of those types of useless web pages? Some people say it’s Google’s policies that have created the spam market. But I’d argue that the spam market would be a huge market no matter what the search engine policies were.
The reason we all have to fight spam in our daily lives is because there are people who don’t care about business ethics. They are greedy and seeking to make a quick buck and if they can get you to click on a link on their low-level web page so they can earn a .50 commission on that click, well, that’s just business. If they can convince 1,000 people to do it, that’s $500 in their pocket. And if they can make $500 per page on 10,000 pages in six months, that’s not a bad salary.
Once you get a view of the economics of spam, it’s easy to see who is causing the problem. It’s not the search engines. It’s people who can’t, or won’t, create valuable content, but who want to earn a living as if they do. How do you fight it? Don’t click their links.
Tags: search engines, spam
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 19th, 2011
If you are looking for ways to hide your links on your web pages so that you can trick the search engines into giving you credit for anchor text, valuable linking, and increase your search engine rankings, then I’ve got some news for you. Good news, and bad news.
The good news is, I’m about to teach you how to hide your links. There are probably more than 4 ways to do this, but I’m going to show you 4 ways to hide links on your web pages so that your website viewers don’t see them but search engines do.
Now for the bad news. These methods could get your website banned from the search engines.
- Hide your links over an image – A few years ago, webmasters discovered they could hide text over images. Then they discovered they could link that text. This is bad. If the search engines discover you’ve done this, you’ll be banned or penalized.
- Using small font – If you can think you can make your font so small that humans can’t see it while the search engines eat it up, think again. The search engines don’t like it and they’ll de-index you.
- Using small characters – Some webmasters have gotten a little savvy and linked using small characters like periods, commas, semi-colons, hyphens, etc. Again, if the search engines find out, that’s bad news for your website.
- Hide links in CSS – In the last few years, webmasters have been hiding their links within CSS. Yes, this too will get you banned.
Search engine algorithms may or may not find your hidden links, but if they are noticed by savvy web denizens who report you, then Google’s spam team will review your website with human eyes. If they find any of these hidden links on your site, you’ll be penalized.
Do yourself a favor. Don’t risk it.
Tags: hidden links, linking, search engines, SEO
Posted in link building | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
If you had the chance to steal 200 million users from your competition, would you consider that success? Well, Bing recently announced that it has snagged that many users from its strongest competitor, Google.
This is actually pretty significant. I don’t know how much that will affect the total market share of these two search engines, but a few more deals like this one and Bing could gain considerable distance on Google. Trying to win searchers through TV and radio advertising, or word of mouth, could take a very long time. But convert publishers who have an exclusive agreement with your largest competitor and you make good headway.
Look at it this way: Bing just gained on Google by 400 million users. Google lost 200 million and Bing gained 200 million.
What if that happened with 5 other exclusive deals that Google currently has in place? That would be a total shift of 1 billion users from Google to Bing. Do you think that would be noticeable?
I don’t really know how poised Bing is to make that kind of move, but if they did it once, then they could do it again. And Microsoft is just savvy enough to make deals like that. Google has partnerships in place with certain computer manufacturers to have a built-in search feature on computer desktops. A few of those for Bing with large computer manufacturers and we could see some evening of the score. What do you think?
Tags: bing, google, search engines
Posted in search engines | 1 Comment »
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