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Posts Tagged ‘google’

Four Fast Fixes for Local Search

By: Brian Horn on: March 24th, 2010 10 Comments

As Google beings to take “search” to next level (i.e. Google’s real time search), more and more people are beginning to niche to their cities or neighborhoods for certain searches.

Targeting local visitors is critical if you serve the local market (totally “obvi”). The cool thing is…it is WAY easier to rank when you add a local modifier to your search term (i.e. easier to rank for “houston financial planner” than “financial planner”).

Optimizing a website for a locally oriented business includes all the steps of on page and off page optimization along with a few tweaks and additions. The following steps will ensure that your website marks its presence in the local results.
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Tips for Using WordPress for SEO

By: Brian Horn on: March 3rd, 2010 18 Comments

Even though there are dozens of platforms that bloggers and site owners can use, WordPress had become the one than many eventually decide to use.

Why do SO MANY end up using WordPress? Particularly SEO and Internet Marketing pros…kinda “obvi” that these guys might have a reason for that, huh?

A few months ago I met and had a few drinks with Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress. We talked specifically about why small business owners and entrepreneurs are choosing it to build their websites.

We both agreed that the main reason are that WordPress has great SEO capabilities out of the box, it’s easy to understand and is very user friendly.

However, being on page 1 of Google is only possible if you fully employ the maximum potential of WordPress, as it is not enough to have these types of features, if you do not use them to their full power.

To release the true strength of WordPress, you must use to the fullest some of the features in the WordPress blog. In order to get top rankings with major search engines, such as Google, you need to make getting these details right a priority.
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Why Don’t People Heat Their Mailboxes?

By: Brian Horn on: December 2nd, 2009 7 Comments

You don’t because unless you have money to throw away, its not a good use of available resources. You’re better off pumping all warm comforting air into your bedroom at night, right?

The same goes for funneling the PageRank (PR) of your site. Why waste valuable PageRank on your Privacy Policy page, T&C page…or any number of other pages that don’t support your sales process or provide valuable content for the search engines?

Let me explain…

PR is the value Google assigns to each page on your website.

Google describes PageRank (from Wikipedia):

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

In other words, a PageRank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it incoming links. A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.
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Owning Page 1 of Google for Your Name

By: Brian Horn on: November 18th, 2009 11 Comments

Do you Google yourself?

How many of the listings on page 1 are about you?

How many are about some other tool that just happens to be blessed with the exact same name as you?

If a potential client or customers is researching you, the first place they will go to (in most cases) is Google. Of course, your website should be there, but what are some other easy ways to own the 1st page with more content about you?

It’s actually not terribly hard, and it doesn’t require a whole lot of work.
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Pity the Foolish Small Business Owner

By: Dan Kennedy on: September 22nd, 2009 10 Comments

Any moron can make money with new media where only little folks play.

But when the big, dumb, brand advertisers arrive – as they have in PPC advertising – the media cost skyrockets and that’s that. This should never be a sudden surprise – or a gradual one, either – to anybody with even small quantities of small business marketing knowledge, historical perspective and common sense.

The Big Lesson is what immature, under-priced media giveth, mature, over-priced media taketh away.

For a while, independent specialty retailers in jewelry, handbags, shoes, spicy foods, even electronics had this space to themselves, so search ads that popped up when someone typed “diamond necklace” or “DVD player” worked.

Now that BestBuy, Zales’ Jewelers, etc. have arrived in those categories, buying with little regard to direct ROI, the price per click on such ads has risen to unprofiable numbers. And that will continue to worsen as even bigger, dumber companies cheerfully pay more.
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