What is your view of your current website traffic and Internet marketing campaigns? Are you receiving as much traffic as you’d like or are you scoring as high on your top keywords as you had originally hoped? No, this isn’t my sales pitch; there is a point to these questions. If you’re the average small business owner, you know enough about organic search engine optimization to make you dangerous. You know a little about SEO (search engine optimization) and you periodically check your keyword ... Read More
Blog
When You Know Good SEO, Bad SEO is Like a Neon Sign
This week I was working on a project for a long-term client of mine. In doing some online research I visited a large number of B2B software developer websites. Some were large companies and some were smaller niche players. I was disappointed at the large percentage of these websites that were using less than stellar SEO practices. Technology companies own these websites and I would have imagined they’d know better. Back in my early days of SEO (search engine optimization) I was overwhelmed by ... Read More
The Value of Search and the User Experience
I’m currently reading a book titled Search Patterns by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender. Picking up a book is a rare treat for me, so even though this book is technically work-related I’m don’t mind. It is a good book and speaks to the Internet geek within me. As I read through the pages I’m awestruck by the explanation given for the qualities associated with the searcher’s experience. The authors boil this down to a simple illustration called the User Experience Honeycomb. The User ... Read More
CNN Polls Website Visitors On Their Search Engine
I have been visiting CNN's website for years. Rarely do I pay much attention to their polls, but today their poll catch my eye. The poll questions was "Which search engine do you use?" and the answer was Google. No surprise there for many of us, although I was surprised by how low Bing really was on the usage chart. As of this posting, 198,584 people voted and their results are fairly close to what we see on other websites and analyst reports. Website Usage Results Search Engine ... Read More
Conflicts Within Marketing, Social Media, and ERP
Since college I have loved ERP software. I embraced the concept of an order entry system back in 1993 when I created a tiny Lotus 123 script to enter a basic sales order. From that day on I was hooked. I mean really hooked. I fell absolutely in love with technology and could not turn back no matter how hard I tried. After college I found a temporary position at a barcode and data collection distribution and before I knew it, I was a full-time employee running their operations. Why? ... Read More
When a Website Designer’s Good Intentions Go Bad
Today I am meeting with a client to review the design and build of his new website. Quite frankly I’m not looking forward to this meeting. I am the barrier of bad news. When I originally accepted this project, I could see Google had indexed about 1,000 pages within his domain. While it would take some time to migrate and optimize this many pages, I was up for the challenge. The goal is to give him a more SEO friendly site that he can maintain himself in WordPress. If that meant throwing ... Read More
Popularity Contests Take the Next Level With Social Media
We are all familiar with the popularity contests of high school. The idea of becoming homecoming queen or the student council president scared me as a teen, as neither were my thing. I was more quiet and into other pursuits. What is funny is now, some twenty years later, I find myself in Internet marketing and social media. What is even funnier is the fact that I didn’t gasp at the idea of Mashable’s Open Web Awards Social Media Edition popularity contest. Instead, I’d love to be nominated ... Read More
Web Analytics 2.0 Hits the Stores
Today I ordered Web Analytics 2.0, which is the second book by Avinash Kaushik, the best selling author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day. As an avid website designer, SEO nut, social media fan, and overall Internet marketing addict, I can’t wait for delivery of my new purchase. I already subscribe to Avinash’s very popular blog Occam’s Razor, which provides insightful discussion on Google Analytics and the software’s newest functionality. I enjoy his blog entries and cannot wait to immerse ... Read More
WordPress is the Liberator of Growing Businesses
I have always been a fan of WordPress. Okay, let me rephrase that. Since I discovered WordPress, I have always been a great fan. Similar to other people, I was hesitant at first. I thought it was simply a blogging application with limited capabilities. I equated it to Google’s Blogger and thought it was solely used for bloggers and it was much to limited for a real corporate website. Thankfully, I was wrong. WordPress liberated me and it has liberated many website designers and business ... Read More
Twitter and Linkedin Unite in Social Matrimony
This week Twitter and Linkedin united to share status updates across their mass social media networks. I was thrilled, as I love both communities. As soon as the functionality was released, I was on my Linkedin profile attempting to unite the two applications. And for a moment, I quickly fell out of love with them and all the social ramblings they represent. At first, the process was bug ridden and would not connect my profiles. I am fairly savvy on the computer, so I knew this was not ... Read More
Internet Guru Matt Cutts Talks Sock Puppet Marketing
https://youtu.be/J-_BnVYuMb0 Last week Google’s Internet marketing Guru Matt Cutts posted a new video in their Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube. I love these videos because they are short and to the post and without any pitch or longwinded verbiage cluttering the real message. The video that caught my eye was Matt Cutts’ discussion on Sock Puppet Marketing. Yes you read that correctly. Mr. Cutts is talking openly about puppets. Puppets aside, the discussion was in relation to an ... Read More
Google and Twitter Make Social Search a Reality
Last week Google officially announced their newly formed partnership with Twitter. The officially statement indicates this partnership will allow social media updates on Twitter to appear in Google’s search results. Google also demonstrated their new Social Search feature at the Web 2.0 conference to really get Internet marketing consultants excited. Although this new feature isn’t live yet, Social Search will be launching soon on Google Experimental and Google Labs. What does Social Search ... Read More
Google Degrades PageRank
Much to the surprise of many Internet marketing consultants, Google recently removed PageRank information from their Webmaster Tools. In a response to a posting on Google’s Webmaster Central forum, Susan Moskwa stated “We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but ... Read More
Thirty Top WordPress Plugins
If you've ever used WordPress, you know the mass of WordPress' functionality resides in the plugins. Any high quality theme, blog, or website is loaded up with plugins. The problem is not the ability to locate plugins, but the plugin's actual ability to work without the need for special coding. Below is a list of my favorite plugins. These plugins are both functional and easy to use. The augment WordPress' core functionality and require little or no coding. Add to Any: ... Read More
When the Secret Service Goes After Social Media Misfits
Social media is not for everyone and the events of the last few days are a classic example of why this statement is true. Over the weekend a poll was released on Facebook that questioned the public’s desire to have someone kill President Obama. Yes, as amazing as it is, this story is true. Facebook responded quickly and shutdown both the poll and the third party application used to generate it. While some may dismiss this as just pure silliness, it is not. It is not only a very sad display of ... Read More
Google Officially Announces Meta Keywords Are Dead
Google, and in particular Internet guru Matt Cutts, formally end SEO consultant chatter and announce Google’s policy of keyword utilization by posting a video on Google’s Webmaster Blog. In the very direct posting, Matt said Google no longer uses meta based keywords for primary organic search, but quantified this statement by also stating Google does still use meta keywords for the search appliance. What does this mean? For some SEO consultants, it means meta keywords can be completely ... Read More
9/11 Remembered Through the Eyes of Social Media
I was sitting by my computer when the phone rang. My sister was calling my office in the middle of a workday, which was very odd. Did you hear was all I remember her saying and then silence – utter silence. I had not heard about the 9/11 attacks and quite frankly I almost did not believe her. I tried to access CNN’s website, but our Internet lines were jammed with activity and my screen stood in an abyss of grayness. I was completely cut off from the world or at least this is how I felt. I ... Read More
Michigan Embraces Social Media with Pure Michigan
I am a born and raised “Michigander”. I am also, an Internet marketing consultant. This summer my two loves united as the State of Michigan embraced social media and pursued vacationers through hardcore social media and online advertising. I am not only a Michigan girl; I was raised in a very small northern Michigan town that financially existed off of tourism. The survival of my little town of roughly 2,000 people is based on the cottage rentals, canoe trips, and bar tabs of summer ... Read More
Blogger Turns Ten and Still Dominates Competitors
Blogger is a Google application that is used by millions of people each month to produce and host personal and business-related blogs. Last month the application turned ten years old, which is rather old for Web2.0 applications. My first blog was hosted on Blogger and remnants of it still exist there today. While I’ve used Blogger in the past, I personally, have officially defected to WordPress, as I quickly outgrew Blogger’s functional capabilities. This little birthday celebration led me to ... Read More
How Long Does it Really Take to Get Indexed by Google?
It seems like just a few years ago it took Google forever to index a new URL and website. Well maybe not, but for anyone working on Internet marketing it felt like it took Google forever to index a new URL. Things have changed and Google is different these days. Remember the Six Million Dollar Man intro? “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was before. Better. Stronger.” That’s what I think of Google. Google is better. Okay I may have just dated myself ... Read More
Web Savvy Marketing
TwitterYoutubeFacebookLinkedinGoogle +