Archive for May, 2012

There are many national advertisers and marketers that ought to but not fully utilizing of local search marketing techniques.

Marketers underwent a survey from national US brands, but did not capitalize of the most  basic of the local search marketing techniques.

There had been a survey of marketers in the US national brands that have in excess of 500 physical locations; and2/3s of the respondents had come from the usual retail.

While about 70% of those who took the survey had mentioned that they made made a spending of more than 60 percent for the budgets of local marketing, the survey had also stated that a lot of the national companies are not performing the basic blocking and going in on local search advertising.

Here are some stats that are of note: (a) People in excess of a third would not be actively doing marketing for local directories including YP.com or Superpages.com; (b) Forty percent would not be actively managing the local business listings on Google Places, plus the Bing Business Portal (c)45% are not willfully engaged in paid search and (d) 55% would not actively be making use of local review sites.

It appears that the primary reasons for these would be lack of money, which comprised 58% and lack of awareness of opportunities which are local 32%.

It could just imply that local search is an enigma to many marketers, while there still being a chance in local for all marketers.

Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. His expert knowledge on Internet Marketing practices and techniques has earned him the title “Internet Marketing Guru”. He is also an innovator, investor and entrepreneur widely recognized by the top players in the industry.

We would want to address this question using  data from surveys made as of late stating how consumers would utilize search as well as social networks in the terms of local and small businesses. And we have to add that as consumer, they utilize search and social in a different manner.

In a recent local search study, it has been found out that, that when individuals locate local business information, they require the basics, including the phone number, the address and the hours. Such things would be above the other kinds of information needed like the URL, directions, etc.

They would also be above the social aspect, which would be ratings and reviews. Search would be largely fact-based and not social/opinion based.

But not many people search on social network sites. While it is a number that grows, just 15% list of the social networks which would be either the initial or second choice for looking for local business info.

Most of those who use social networks to look for local businesses utilize Facebook.They have most likely “liked” the favored local businesses, and looked for Pages on Facebook to check if there would be any deals or specials, or locate the address or phone number at once. As a matter of fact, just a few number of consumers utilize social networks for the location of local business information.

Few searches are done:

a) As social networks would be not search engines

b) As habits would be difficult to get rid of. Should you be looking for something, you would need to proceed to a search.

c) Social network would not typically give the type of information individuals would be looking for.

So why is social media still a significant aspect of small/local businesses?  This is since search would not be everything.

The local search study has shown how social networks have had an influence for consumer business thinking. 63% of those who had been surveyed would be more likely to utilize a local business should it be seen on a social networking site. This number would be down somewhat from a survey last year, but would still comprise a great chunk of decision making.

In this same study, 72% had stated that they would be more likely  to utilize a local business should one of the connections would show it. The power of personal recommendation would be strong, and this would be more successful on social networks at the moment.

You could proceed to Google and go to the jewelry store, for instance, but at times you would rather have recommendations of colleagues that do not have a root in SEO, but what happens in real life

While local businesses have to put out all of the time into social media, local businesses would need to exert visibility and availability on social networking sites. So for bothe search and social media, time should be dedicated to both.

Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. His expert knowledge on Internet Marketing practices and techniques has earned him the title “Internet Marketing Guru”. He is also an innovator, investor and entrepreneur widely recognized by the top players in the industry.

Google receives more than 250,000 requests to take down URLs accused of copyright infringement each week. In the past month, Google has received 1.2 million requests from 1,000 copyright owners to remove pages from 24,000 websites from its search results.

Microsoft was called out as the biggest requester as of this month, with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) listed as number two in most requests for May.

This month alone, Microsoft has requested a total of 543,378 URLs to be taken down over fears of copyright violation. BPI came in a distance second with 162,601 URL take down requests.

Google Senior Copyright Counsel Fred von Lohmann, “We believe that openness is crucial for the future of the Internet. When something gets in the way of the free flow of information, we believe there should be transparency around what that block might be.”

Google’s Transparency Report has been around since 2010. In 2011, Google added new features to its transparency reports, later adding user data requests. Before this month Google only reported on government requests to take down copyrighted information, but starting in May they started reporting on copyright holder’s requests.

Removal requests have seen a vast upswing in the past two years.

Source: Searchenginewatch

Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. His expert knowledge on Internet Marketing practices and techniques has earned him the title “Internet Marketing Guru”. He is also an innovator, investor and entrepreneur widely recognized by the top players in the industry.

Staying True to Dogma Will Get You Into Trouble:

Now that you have your head on SEO best practices, and made a tackling of the first e-commerce site, only to see nothing had turned out the way blogs pictured it to be. Search is algorithmic so we have the assumption it would follow similar rules for everyone. In theory, it often works, however such rules are very complex as well as situational. Google makes a claim of over 200 ranking factors, and a lot of those factors may be multi-part. The algorithm is changing more than once in a day, and there would occasionally be a manual intervention to get in the way.

It is nice to know basics, as well as best practices, but one has to learn rolling with punches. Even things that are as simple as de-indexing a few dozen pages would rarely take place as planned and may even take weeks. You need to measure, adapt and evaluate. If a tag or tactic is not working, you should make a consideration of the options.

One-Trick Ponies Would Make Good Glue:

Individuals would naturally get comfy with an aspect of search marketing, which includes link-building, on-page, social, etc. and are on track to perfect it, but they come up with diminishing results quickly. At their worst they are placing band-aids on URLs while suffering from a large link wound.

Links, Known By Other Names:

These could still end up dysfunctional. In a rush for making links, a lot of people, notably people who have brand new and very vulnerable sites create the mistake that all links would appear equally good.

Make A Check On Headers:

When something is not performing right and you do not have an idea, you need to check page headers. You should ensure that crawlers view what you see or perceive to see. It would be unbelievable how often problems would trickle down to bad redirects, status codes or other crawler accessibility issues.

Utilize The Basic Tools Well:

There are a couple of SEO and keyword tools like KeywordSpy, however we see a similar issue in SEO that we perform in writing, time management, as well as every single 21st century human endeavors. We would be so busy in chasing new tools as well as the perfect app that we do not bother learning using tools in a effective manner. You may know a long way through a solid header, checker, site of Google, an operator, link analyzers as well as desktop crawler. You need to master the site: operator and learn how to utilize inurl: as well as intitle:, and it would be amazing how many on-page problems you may diagnose. You should stop chasing every new tool and learn how to utilize a handful really well. You would save effort doing so.

Learn On Becoming Patient:

Patience may be the hardest thing any good SEO would eventually need to learn. There would be times wherein you would have to react fast to a problem, notably a technical problem, including a bad redirect or a site outage. There would be a fine line between reacting plus overreacting. One of the more common mistakes regarding technical SEO is when someone creates a change, it would not immediately make an improvement on rankings 24 hours later, and so you would revert it or makes a change, it would create another change on top. Even if it would not worsen the problem, you would not be able to measure the change that worked. Ensure that the changes became live, that Google has made an acknowledgement and you could measure impact or lack of impact. You should not change strategy overnight based on bad or not bad information.

Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. His expert knowledge on Internet Marketing practices and techniques has earned him the title “Internet Marketing Guru”. He is also an innovator, investor and entrepreneur widely recognized by the top players in the industry.

I once read a challenging question by Eric Ward (that I will paraphrase): “If the search engines went away tomorrow, how would anyone find your website?” Now, you might say, Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Then again, if you were hit by one of the recent algorithm changes, Google might as well have disappeared.

This is the true purpose of link building: helping people find your website.

This is also one of the points of the following infographic. If the only goal of your link building campaign is to build links that attempt to increase your rankings in the search engines you are placing your website into a very risky position- you are exposing your website (and your business) to the decisions of another company. Although this company’s motto might be not to do any evil, let’s get real: their real goal is to make money for their investors, even at the expense of your company going broke. Is that a risk you are willing to take?

Even if you weren’t hurt by Penguins recently, I think there’s a lesson for all of us: a healthy link building campaign builds links that generate visitors in addition to building a website’s authority in the eyes of the search engines.

Would you think it valuable to add a sentence to my infographic content relating it to the knowledge graph- as another reason why we can’t solely rely on the search engines for visitors?

Source: Searchenginejournal

Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. His expert knowledge on Internet Marketing practices and techniques has earned him the title “Internet Marketing Guru”. He is also an innovator, investor and entrepreneur widely recognized by the top players in the industry.