ATTRACT, CONNECT AND BOOST YOUR SALES

Web Design, SEO Services & Internet Marketing
by Deon Designs

I’ve been at companies large and small, fat and lean. Whether the company is two people trying to build a business out of their home, or 10K+ employees at companies like PayPal and Yahoo, no matter what the size of the company, there are always going to be resource constraints.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first person you’ll see constantly asking about project statuses and bubbling it up. But in the meantime, you’ll need to find out how you can deal with those resource constraints, while still remaining productive and not failing at your job.

Internal partnerships

Crawling and indexing issues can really put a damper on your efforts to rank well for a variety of competitive and non-competitive terms.  Solving indexing issues is definitely an important step towards increasing your keyword ranking footprint. And, the more real estate you own by solving those issues, means you’re taking the next steps in realizing your long-tail efforts.

Before I start with a problem site, I take a few measurements.  Whenever you’re trying to solve a problem, you need to figure out where you’re starting from to make sure you’re helping and not hurting your efforts. I start by pulling a variety of data:

More than a year since the three major search engines united to announce the canonical tag, neither Bing nor Yahoo formally support it. But that could be changing soon.

Speaking during the “Ask the Search Engines” session at SMX West on Thursday, reps from both search engines said they’re in the process of supporting rel=canonical right now.

Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy told attendees that canonical tag support should be in place by the end of March or early April. Arnab Bhattacharjee of Yahoo said they’re currently rolling out support of the tag, but cautioned that Yahoo will only use it “as a hint” regarding a web page’s original/primary URL.

Read the full article >>>

Subscribe Deon Designs SEO Blog:

Full Post Feed | Summary Feed | Comments Feed

Online marketing firm OneUpWeb recently conducted an eye-tracking study about the impact of integrating real-time data into search results. The study involved 44 people divided into two groups: “consumers” and “information foragers.” The difference between the groups involved the tasks they were given:

The first group was told to search for a product they might buy, and were called the “consumer” group. The second group was told to simply look for information on a product, and were called the “forager” group.

The study, conducted last month, sought to answer the following questions:

1. Does the average internet user recognize and understand real-time results?

Today at SMX West, Maile Ohye from Google confirmed that Google is indeed now crawling AJAX pages that use the standard proposed last Fall. The documentation is live on Google Code and you can also take a look at my recent article about how to implement the standard and its pros and cons. Maile mentioned that the Google Web Toolkit team is eager to help with any implementation questions over at their community forums.

Read the full article >>>

Subscribe Deon Designs SEO Blog:

Full Post Feed | Summary Feed | Comments Feed

Google is asking for user feedback and ideas for its Google Buzz product, and has setup an ideas forum using Google Moderator. After signing in with a Google account, users can submit ideas or vote on existing ideas from other users.

According to Google’s blog post, this ideas forum will remain open until March 31st.

Credits to: Matt McGee

Subscribe Deon Designs SEO Blog:

Full Post Feed | Summary Feed | Comments Feed

Culminating an internal project that seems to have lasted for several months, Google has published a “Google SEO Report Card” showing the results of an internal SEO audit on the home pages of 100 different Google Products. The main verdict? Like many companies, Google’s web site is a mixed bag of good SEO tactics and missed opportunities.

Read the full article >>>

Subscribe Deon Designs SEO Blog:

Full Post Feed | Summary Feed | Comments Feed

I’ve found it annoying that over the years, more and more people use SEM to mean paid search, as if SEM excludes SEO. That’s not how I defined SEM — search engine marketing — back 2001. I’d still like to see the original definition retained. But I might be swimming against the tide. Below, how I think we arrived at this conflict and some thoughts on where we go from here.

Types Of Listings

To understand where we’re at now, let me start with some core concepts. There are two basic ways to show up in search results:

Many management advice books recommend that businesses should make better use of what’s often their biggest investment: employees. Yet, a lot of companies fail to inspire, motivate and exploit the good ideas of their employees. Local search marketing often has an employee component that’s overlooked as well. Read on for some tips on leveraging your employee capital for better local search rankings!

In the Business 1.0 world, employees were often treated as depersonalized, faceless drones, replaceable cogwheels in corporate machinery. This perspective often seems to be reflected in traditional corporate websites where individual employees are relegated to the background, and rarely are any individuals highlighted or recognized on those company webpages.

This is the first of a two part series on selling SEO in a large enterprise. Part 2 will be published as my next Industrial Strength column. In Part 1, the focus will be on why getting search traffic is important to an organization. Part 2 will explore some of the consequences of that realization.

In many large enterprises, when SEO is first introduced, it happens because some internal person is championing its cause. If you are that person, chances are really good that you are facing some very interesting challenges related to the ignorance of others in the company. They probably think you are speaking Swahili to them.

In a letter earlier this month, members of the European Union’s data protection group urged Google to make changes to its Street View mapping/photo service and warned that Google might be breaking EU laws.

According to Bloomberg News, the letter from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party asks Google to store unblurred Street View images for six months, instead of the one year that images are currently stored. The Associated Press adds that the letter also asks Google to notify residents in advance of taking Street View photos by posting information on its web site, as well as in local and/or national media.

The Pew Internet project has just released a lengthy report on online news consumption entitled Understanding the Participatory News Consumer. There are no search-specific findings; however it appears from the survey data that “portal websites like Google News, AOL and Topix are the most commonly used online news sources, visited by over half of online news users on a typical day.”

Here are some of the high-level findings from the report:

• 92% get news from multiple platforms on a typical day, with half of those using four to six platforms daily. Fully 59% get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.  Just over a third (38%) rely solely on offline sources, and 2% rely exclusively on the internet for their daily news.

We’re getting more and more reports from readers who are seeing a “new” Google look-and-feel for its search results. This is a three column design that Google’s actually been testing for some time. That testing appears to be accelerating.

Google Tackles Its “UI Jazz” Problem, Tests Streamlining Search Options Feature is our story from last November that takes an in-depth look at the new user interface and the features it offers.

At the time, we wrote:

For the past couple of months, Google has been telling the world that page speed is an increasingly important aspect of Web sites. The Google Speed site – which has the laudable goal of making Web browsing as fast as turning the pages of a magazine – has been featured in several posts on their Webmaster blog, and features links to various free tools that they, and others, have made available for the masses.

So, as someone responsible for a site, if you suspect that you may have page load issues, what’s your first stop? Where should you go to get an overall idea of your site performance, short of opening every page of your site while holding a stopwatch?

Looking to integrate your analytical data and tracking across your site, blog and now even your Facebook Fanpages? It appears that the UK’s WebDigi Dev team has figured out a pretty easy way to use Google Analytics on your Facebook Fan Page. With SEJ’s Facebook Page having over 4,000 users and lots of cool comments and voting going on, adding Google Analytics to track referrals or time on site will be quite awesome.

If you travel much and still need to keep your blog active, you will definitely find these tips useful: they will show you how to post to your blogs from email (and thus from your mobile phone).

Of course, you won’t be able to apply those to all types of blogs but generally this is very useful to know.

Post from Email to Your Wordpress Blog

Detailed instructions can be found here; the steps:

1. Create a dedicated e-mail account to be used only for posting to your blog. You may want to use of the suggested random strings (You can find those in Options > Writing menus).

As social media continues to grow at an exhilarating pace, it can become challenging for marketers to balance the time-consuming demands of today’s social media marketing landscape with their career’s core focus. Whether you’re a full-time social media marketer whose main responsibility is to manage social media campaigns, a brand-side marketer who dabbles in social media throughout the day, or a consultant who networks with others in the industry, it’s important to streamline your social media initiatives as much as possible, in order to save time & stay focused. Here are 5 musts for boosting the efficiency of social media marketing in the workplace.

At a search engine marketing conference, several of us gave a session on website usability topics ranging from usability and SEO to site architecture and requirements gathering. Afterward, there was time for questions by the audience. Someone asked, “Why don’t we all just copy Amazon.com?” I replied, “Never, ever copy what Amazon does.” The audience responded with surprise, thinking I was not a fan of Amazon.

In my last Analyze This post, I alluded to the importance of click to conversion time, that is, the estimated conversion time of the revenue attribution window. I shall devote this article to explaining the importance of the revenue attribution window and some empirical methods to help determine the right window length.

The revenue attribution window refers to the maximum length of time between click and conversion that an advertiser must include when calculating the revenue from a click. Consider two consumers who clicked on an ad for a t-shirt on a given day. One consumer clicked on the ad and bought the shirt on the same day. The other consumer did not convert the same day but bought a shirt from the same website two months later.

Opera, the leading independent mobile browser, has been putting out great data on mobile Internet usage for quite some time. Google always ranks as one of the top sites globally. However this month’s “State of the Mobile Web” report is the first time that the company has released search market share data.

It shows Google with a lead comparable, almost exactly, to its market share on the PC in the US. Yahoo enjoys a larger share of mobile search than it now does on the PC, according to Opera. And Bing is virtually non-existent.