Google Local Business Center Categories

I just discovered another tool that could be very useful in optimizing a site for a local business. This is a list of the categories that Google uses to identify local business listings. The really handy part of this list is that it includes a list of keywords that are associated with each category. This makes it easy to scan the list for ideas of categories that might be relevant to your business. Using this in combination with the Google Toolbar, which allows you to highlight words on a page that match those entered in the Google search field, makes it very easy to scan the listing for occurrences of selected phrases to determine what categories Google thinks they are relevant to.

I came across this list while browsing the Search Engine Guide blog, which is another handy source of useful information. While not completely clear what the source of the list is, the information should be helpful as a reference for any of your keyword optimization efforts.

To see the complete listing, click on the title of this article.

Google Strikes WebPosition!

I have long used, and often described in class, a rank checking program called Web Position Gold. The software does many things beyond checking ranking positions, but I have never used other features, nor advocated their use. I have found this a very handy program for evaluating how well the search engine optimization and marketing techniques that we teach are working in practice. I have used it only periodically, perhaps only on a monthly basis, for any given site, in part to avoid overuse that would attract the attention of the search engines, and in part because one can obsess over rankings to no good end. Nevertheless, I find it very useful to occasionally see how my rankings on different sites are standing up on the web.

Google has never liked any of these programs becuause they can eat up so much bandwidth and processing capacity, but the only program they have ever specifically identified as something they disapprove of (at least as far as I have seen) is Web Position. Recently, they appear to have disabled the program completely. When I run the program against any of the sites I check, there are no Google results returned!

As a replacement, I have turned to RankChecker, an application that is an add-on to the Firefox browser and available from SEOBook at no charge (for now, they reserve the right to begin charging for it in the future). This is a web site with a number of good tools available and some good information about search engine marketing. It is definitely worth taking a look at if you are looking for tools to use to evaluate your web site performance.

The New Internet Start-Up Boom: Get Rich Slow

"At no other time in recent history has it been easier or cheaper to start a new kind of company."

If you are thinking about starting a business, here is an article that might give you some good ideas and some inspiration.

Don't get the idea that we are talking about easy money. This is not "easy" for most people. It is hard work and can be lots of work. What you can learn here is that there is lots of opportunity if you can find it, and you can do it for very little money if you are capable of putting everything together.

The article describes the startup of a web site that would summarize car reviews from other sources and rank every model of new car. The creator put it together himself by contracting for development help through various sites on the web. He is not a developer himself. The article provides links to many sites where you can find contract help.

One of the investors quoted in the article says, '"The biggest problem facing any website is distribution." In a world where it's so easy to start a company, how will anyone find yours?' For participants in our free Internet Marketing Clinics, this sounds like an invitation! That is exactly where the skills and techniques we teach can become a competitive advantage to help make your business one of the successful ones.

One other point made in the article is that the cost of failure is low, and that is important because it means you can try lots of ideas in order to find one that works for you. In other words, you might expect that your effort will not succeed, but that does not mean that it was not worth trying. With a low cost of failure, you can go on to try other ideas which might become successful.

My grandfather always told me, "There's more than one way to skin a cat!" (apologies in advance to cat lovers, I never actually skinned a cat, nor intended to!!) So keep that in mind as you start out on your business venture and be prepared to regroup and start over if it doesn't work out. Successful entrepreneurs often have multiple failures before they hit a success. Keep swinging until you connect with the long ball!

One Social Network I Couldn't Work Without

"... if I had to pick just one, LinkedIn would win, hands down."

We recently had a presentation in our Internet marketing clinic on social media and how small businesses can use it to their advantage. In this presentation, there seemed to be a bias toward Facebook. For a different point of view, check out this link.

Jennifer, who has been around a while and has lots of good advice, gives a good example of how to use LinkedIn as a business tool. She provides the kind of concrete detail that makes it easy to see how to relate her experience to your own situation. No two people have exactly the same situation or circumstances to deal with. We all have to adjust these stories to our own needs, and this is the kind of report that makes it easy to do so.

The bigger point, of course, is that the Internet is a huge resource, and the trick is to figure out how to exploit it most effectively for your own business requirements.

Blogging’s a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool

"But by far the most successful blog, in terms of traffic, turned out to be Free Money Finance, a blog that has nothing to do with Denali’s business. Mr. Nardini’s plan was to create a blog with so much traffic that it could serve as an independent media outlet owned by Denali Flavors, where the company could be the sole sponsor and advertiser.

He chose personal finance because it is a popular search category on the Web and because he knew he would not tire of posting about it. And post he does, about five times each weekday."

We are always on the lookout for new ways to utilize Internet "features" to improve the marketing of our businesses. this article had a new twist described in it that I thought was really interesting.

In all of our classes about blogging, we have emphasized the idea of informing readers about some aspect of your principle business. This article, by contrast, points out how someone can choose a popular topic to blog about in order to attract traffic that the business can benefit from simply by being the sponsor of the blog. This strikes me as being the same approach as used in traditional advertising, where the shows that businesses sponsor on television and radio are not about the business, but attract demographics that are of interest to the business. Education about the business itself takes place only in the ads that the sponsor has attracted traffic to!

This is one of those ideas that seem so simple and obvious that I cannot understand why we have not seen it and talked about it before this time!

One other element of this story also needs to be emphasized, and that is the frequency with which the author of this blog posts to the blog. Note that he posts to the blog "... about five times each weekday." That is a lot of posting, but that is a big part of what makes it work for the author!

So Does Blogging Really Work? Here's the Proof.

An interesting post provides some insights to using blogs to promote your business. The first part of the posting is all about Dell turning around its attitude to blogging for businesses, and is an interesting story about the impact hat blogging can have on a company. It is not really too relevant to most small businesses except in that it shows that the wrong kind of attention can really hurt you! In most cases, small businesses don't have the visibility for that to be much of an issue. Attention is what they are trying to get!

To me, the more interesting part of this post has to do with the South African winery that took up blogging. If you read the details, they increased their business volume by more than a factor of ten! Yes, I did say ten! They state that they were selling some 40,000 cases of wine per year when they began their blog, and are now approaching 40,000 cases per week. Who would not like this result!

Their efforts in marketing through their blog go well beyond posting information on the blog, but that was the starting point. In their case, they began giving wine away to people on the blog, which is sure to get attention, but, for a tenfold increase in sales, it makes a lot of sense! The lesson here is that by using your blog creatively in your business arena, you can have a huge impact. You can be sure that these people are believers in the power of the Internet to promote business.

For more information about blogging and how to use the Internet effectively, browse some of our presentations that we have made in our free Internet Marketing Clinic at the University of Houston Small business Development Center.

Matt Cutts Interviewed about Link Building, etc.

"We really think of these things as trying to provide as many opportunities as possible to sculpt where you want your PageRank to flow, or where you want Googlebot to spend more time and attention."

This is an extended interview with Matt Cutts where a number of interesting topics are covered, such as link building, PageRank management, hidden text on pages, adjustments made to the Google algorithm, and so on. I recommend reading the full interview, as I am only mentioning a small part of what was covered.

The discussion of link building was of particular interest to me and covered items like the NoIndex and NoFollow tags as well as a discussion of the Robots.txt file. In brief:

• NoIndex - can accumulate and pass on Page Rank, but will not show in Google index.
• NoFollow - stops the spider from following the link, so the target page will not be crawled and indexed (although it could still be based on a link from elsewhere!)
• Robots.txt - allows for management of the spider activity from a single location, but with some differences in application.

Note that the description of each of these features is limited to one point of view, and that it pertains only to how Google handles them. There is more to know about them, and other search engines may not treat them the same way!

Why I found this interesting is in reading about how these tools can be applied to redirect the pagerank within a site to emphasize the importance of the important pages and de-emphasize the importance of pages that are not relevant to search engine results. Specifically, when examining the link structure on a site, it is common to see many links point to such pages as "Contact Us" or "About Us". Neither of these pages will typically carry much information about the business focus of a site (sometimes you will see relevant material on the About us page, but that is an exception), so it is not important for these pages to rank in searches. These tools allow the site manager to take the pagerank value that is being sent to these pages and redirect it to pages that will do much more for the business if they can be made to rank well.

Attention to this kind of detail in creating your site is what will set you apart from your competition! Learn to use these techniques to your best benefit and apply them consistently as you create your site and you will be successful! Review our postings from past Internet Marketing Classes to find help on how to apply these principles to help yourbusiness.

Enhancements to Sitemaps!

"... webmasters could notify the search engines of the URLs on their site that they wanted crawled.

Sitemaps are an extremely useful tool provided by the search engines to make it easier to ensure that the pages of your web site get crawled effectively. Recently, the search engines established a standard protocol so that different engines would use the same technique for indexing a site. Now, the engines have simplified the process even further by providing a means of referring the crawlers to the location of the site map on the site.

In simple terms, they have just provided a line of code within the robots.txt file to point to the sitemap for the site. Since all search engine crawlers check this file when visiting a site, it is a simple way to inform them of where to find the sitemap.

The code line is:
Sitemap: http://www.mysitename.com/sitemap.xml

All you have to do is add this line to your robots.txt file in the root directory of your website.

What could be simpler?

SEO Site Analysis: Knowing the Score, Part 1

"... prepare a report card for your current Web site. Think of the process as a scorecard of sorts, though the analysis could become a blueprint for any online marketing project.prepare a report card for your current Web site. Think of the process as a scorecard of sorts, though the analysis could become a blueprint for any online marketing project."

The author of this article provides an outline for evaluating the effectiveness of your web site. In the process, she describes, or mentions, many of the points that we regularly stress in our Internet Marketing Clinic in teaching how to create a powerful web site from scratch.

Two of her points that I found particularly interesting were, "If you don't have access to any information about your site, give your site a zero for Web metrics ..." and "... if you site is entirely Flash- or AJAX-based and doesn't produce an alternative site for non-JavaScript users, give your site a zero." She was unequivocal about these points, making it clear how important it is to avoid the mistake of Flash style sites, and how important it is to have statistics that your regularly utilize to understand what is going on with your site.

Some of the evaluation she recommends will require some tools that go beyond site statistics, but she offers some suggestions and links to places where they can be obtained. Some of the analysis may also go beyond the capability of many site owners, but we offer help on those points through our free internet marketing classes.

Alexa Toolbar and the Problem of Experiment Design

"... next time you see a statistic on web usage (or any statistic) that the results are only as good as the selection process that brings in the data. "

All of us are interested in tools that provide an insight into user activity on the Internet, and we all have different tools that we use to provide and evaluate the the information we are seeking. It is important to remember that each of these tools provides a particular, and biased, view of the data. When using the information we collect from these tools, we need to keep in mind what is the bias of the particular tool that we are using.

This article provides some insight into the bias inherent in the data offered by Alexa, one of the best sources of information about importance of different web sites and about the activity they attract.

The author points out that data collected by Alexa tends to reflect the activity of a rather select group of web users, that will not be completely representative of the Internet user community as a whole. This shows up in some distinctly biased reporting on activity on a few sites that he examined in his admittedly unscientific analysis.

One question that his report raises in my mind is, "how would this bias effect differences between different sites that I might be attempting to understand?" His analysis focused on sites that it seems might be particularly vulnerable to the specific bias that is part of Alexa data. Would that bias be as significant for sites that I might want to compare? I don't have an answer, but the point is to raise the question and think about it as I consider my findings.

As part of his analysis, he illustrates the capacity of Alexa to do comparisons of sites, which I had not explored to this degree and was happy to learn about (he graphed the activity on the sites he was comparing, making it easy to see how their activity varied over time.)

The caution in this article reiterates something we have emphasized on our classes: use the data available, but be careful that you understand what it means and what it does not mean when applying its lessons to your site management.

Check Your Google Links Now!

"You can view the links to your site by selecting a verified site in your webmaster tools account and clicking on the new Links tab at the top."

Finally, we have a way to get a good count of what Google knows about pages linking to our sites! Many of the tools I have tried recently that count external links to sites simply do not report much information about Google links. Even the Google "backward links" tool on the toolbar does not provide satisfying results. This uses the "links:..." operator that works for other search engines, such as Yahoo.

Now, Google has offered the ability to check on your own links through the Webmaster Tools interface. Too bad, this will not help in checking Google back links to other sites (unless you own them, or at least, have access to the sites). but it is a big step forward in helping to collect information about sites that you do control.

To use it, you have to get into the Webmaster Tools site, which requires registering, but it is free, so, no worries. Once there, you must set up the site(s) you want to check. This will require posting a file or some code to the site to verify that you have that kind of access, so there are several steps involved the first time you go in. After that, you have access to a nice set of tools to explore and analyze various aspects of your site operation.

This is also where you register sitemaps for your site, another Google supported tool for helping you to improve your site performance.

If you have not done so yet, you must go to the Webmaster Tools site and get yourself established and begin using this toolkit to help you manage your site

Google Offers Web Analytics for Free

"Webmasters can get free, sophisticated tools to determine how many people are visiting their sites, and what they're clicking on, causing suffering among pricey competitors."

Major good news for small web site owners! Google has made Urchin statistics available for free in a script-driven application. All you have to do is paste a small piece of script into every page on your web site (that you want tracked, you can skip pages that you do not want statistics on!), and go into the reporting application to see the results. The only limitation I have seen so far on the application is that it is limited to 5M pageviews per month for non AdWords advertisers. This will not be a problem for most small sites. Larger sites can always initiate a small AdWords campaign to qualify.

Our classes have always emphasized the importance of comprehensive, thorough site statistics to enable site operators to manage their site performance. The Urchin reporting package is one of the better packages available and will easily meet the needs of most site owners.

For more information, go to the Google Web Analytics page. Thanks to Bob Tchoryk, one of our class participants, for the "heads-up" on this news!

Google Sends Warning to Sites & Webmasters?

"While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: [link]"

An article in the SearchEngineJournal describes a new program from Google (now in beta) that will warn webmasters that they are inviolation of practices that Google approves of.

This could be a great boon to webmasters who are attempting to be as aggressive as possible in promoting their sites, but want to avoid problems like getting thrown out of the listings entirely.

It could possibly be a good thing for people who hire outside search engine marketers who employ "bad practices", but I have to wonder whether those site owners would ever see any such warning issued by Google. If they did, it should be a real wake-up call to get another webmaster, but, in most cases, I suspect the webmaster would receive the notice. It seems unlikely that they will pass along this kind of information to their clients, since it points out that they are potentially contributing to harm to their clients.

In any event, it is another indication of change and growth in the search engine field. I have provided a short description of "good practices" in creating a web site for those interested.