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…
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
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…
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 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 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.
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.
Increasingly, Google is prioritizing local businesses in search results, and this will impact Toronto small business. Given that:
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:
The North American search engine marketing industry will grow 14% from $14.6 billion in 2009 to $16.6 billion by the end of 2010, according to a global online survey of nearly 1,500 client-side marketers and agency respondents, commissioned by The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) and conducted by Econsultancy.
The report finds that measuring the return on investment (ROI) is the biggest challenge facing marketers this year in all three key search tactics covered in the survey — search engine optimization, paid search, and social media marketing.
And we’ll start off with a Dilbert cartoon on the missing ingredient for successful search engine optimization:
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