New video from Toronto Small Business
Learn the first steps to turn your Toronto small business website into a sales rep that creates new prospects for you.
Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
First TorontoSmallBusiness Video
As small business owners bravely move into social media, creating content on blogs and social networks like Facebook and Linked In, it’s clear that search engines are promoting optimized videos, especially Google (who owns YouTube) – Videos can help you leapfrog up the Google Search Rankings. So in the spirit of walking the talk, here’s the first in a series of educational videos to help Turn Your Website into a Sales Rep.
Can Twitter Go Bankrupt?
Twitter celebrated its 5th birthday last friday, showing off a lot of high-powered traffic statistics but still unable to provide a monetization plan i.e. how will they make money?
What happens if Twitter runs out of investor money, in other words, they go bankrupt. A lot of social media consulting advice is directed at being engaged on Twitter, and so millions of users including small businesses are investing time and energy (and rarely efficiently) in the hopes that Twitter energy somehow will translate into a customer or two.
Seems to me that Google+ could easily extend their “Circles” idea to include a Twitterish experience.
What Small Business should know about Search Engines
More than 80% of people research on-line prior to purchase. With over fourteen billion web pages on the Internet, how will customers find you?
Google, Bing and other search engines are highly motivated to prove that they should be your favorite resource to search for information on the Internet…
Canadians prefer Internet over other media
A Canadian-based survey of media users suggests that most value Internet access over their newspaper, cellphone and TV subscriptions. And if forced to choose one, they would stay online.
The Canadian Media Research Consortium commissioned the online survey and found:
- 42 % of respondents said the Internet would be the last service they would cut
- 24 % would keep their cable TV
- 17 % would keep their cellphone service or newspaper subscription.
Overall, the survey really speaks to how Canadians get their information – important news for business seeking to find customers.
Convert Visitors into Prospects
To be truly effective in helping you grow your business, your website must convince visitors to stay on your site and be willing to share data
Use Key Words to Drive Traffic to Your Website
First, you were told you needed a website. Then, you were told you had to have a blog. And that you need
to be on Facebook, YouTube and now Twitter.
Market surveys show that 80% of buyers now research on-line before making a purchase decision, so getting found on the Internet is important. It may be that your business can leverage all these types of on-line media – that will depend on your product and target customer.
What is most important is that all your Internet properties share a common set of words called Key Words that describe your solution and aligns with what people are typing into search boxes…
Google Tightens up Search Algorithm, targets Content Farms and Scraper Sites
With concerns that web publishers are flooding its search engine with low-quality pages and impacting the relevancy and usefulness of its search results, Google has taken action against content farms and scraper sites, changing its ranking algorithm to take out such material. Google says the changes impact 14% of its US-based search results.
Content Farms
Content farms are article-based websites. Generally, a farm site collects and posts content that is related to popular searches in a particular category (news, help topics). Content is generated specifically tailored to those searches and usually little time or money is spent generating that content, either by the site owner or the article writers.
eHow.com (despite their protests) is considered to be a content farm – Some content is well written and informative; the rest is derivative, poorly written and information-poor, with these articles typically posted with the goal of obtaining a link back to the author’s personal website. This means that websites dependent solely on self-generated article links from content farms will see their personal search engine rank drop as well.
Scraper Sites
“Scraper” sites pull content in from other sources. Some websites do this legitimately, such as using RSS feeds or aggregating content under fair use guidelines. Other sites simply “scrape” or copy content without modification from other sites using automated tools. It is these latter sites that Google is targeting.
The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content, with scraper sites falling in rank.
Google has implemented these two changes on their US site, with plans to implement worldwide.
Google downgrades JC Penny in Search Engine Results
The New York Times reports that JC Penney, the department store, was achieving exceptionally high search engine results for all manner of products, even products they didn’t carry. The high rankings were achieved using “black hat” techniques for paid link-building that are considered to be contrary to good link-building practices.
Google emphasizes local in search engine results
Increasingly, Google is prioritizing local businesses in search results, and this will impact Toronto small business. Given that:
- your Internet Protocol address (IP address) is tied to your postal code or zip code
- 80% of buyers research on-line prior to making their purchase decision and
- most people buy with 17 miles of their home/location
Google is guessing that when you search for something, you want something nearby, and will present search results based on that premise.
The net result is that small business websites highly optimized for a search term may find themselves pushed off Google page one by a long list of local business listings.
Here are some strategies to offset you potential loss of ranking in Google:
- Get a Google Places listing for every office and shop you have.
- Re-test your keywords. Find out which of your prioritized target keywords Google deems deserve local.
- Expand your link-building efforts with quality links to ensure you rank for those keyword phrases that are important to you.
- Review the naming conventions for your site graphics – make sure your pictures are named using keywords so that your images show up in Google image search.
- If you blog, make sure your posts are optimized the same way your website is – keywords in titles, content, tags and categories
- Research longer keyword phrases that have lower traffic levels and fewer competing sites so that you rank higher for a more specific product/service (example: if you’re a clothier, focus on “custom white dress shirts” rather than “white shirts” or “dress shirts”)
- Consider Pay-Per-Click (Google Adwords)
