I just reviewed a one hour video featuring Matt Cutts (of Google) that gives a really good short course in search engine optimization. It is posted on Matt Cutts blog. Matt and his team go over all the basics of optimization in this session. It is a great overview, and points out a few tools that can be of great value to webmasters. Most everything he mentions in this session has been covered in our clinic, but I was not aware until he pointed it out, that Webmaster Tools will check your site for the existence of malware! Something like that can be really important to know if you think you are having a problem. This is a video that is worth an hour of your time if you want to make your web site perform better in the search engines!
This information was brought to my attention by Don Parsons, who has been associated with our clinic for many years and has taught several sessions for us. Thanks, Don!
In a new blog posting, Google has just announced that they are now using site speed in their ranking algorithm.
In our clinic, we have always taught that the speed with which your page loads is an important factor in achieving a high performing web site. This announcement from Google makes it official!
In their article, they also provide links to tools to evaluate the speed of your web site. These certainly belong in your “webmaster toolkit”.
One tool, in particular, I found very interesting. The webpagetest gave me a detailed readout of the time it takes to load various components on my main clinic page. It not only breaks down the file size, but reports the time for the initial connection to the component, the time to first result, and the time to complete the download. As a result of this one examination of a single page on my site, I will institute new practices for building my pages, and will make several modifications to the page I tested.
In this specific case, I will remove the map providing directions to the classes, and will make that into a link to another page where the map and the link to Google Maps will appear. I can easily foresee how important this kind of testing can be to showing my clients how important it can be to revise how they build some of their more complicated pages on their sites!
Google also emphasizes another of the points that we harp on in the clinic, which is that the most important factor in high ranking is good, relevant content! Join us in our free Internet Marketing class to stay up to date with the latest developments in effective marketing over the web.
“According to Forrester Research, 25% of US online retailers are planning at least some mobile features for 2010, compared with just 4% in 2009.”
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Mobile applications have not achieved much penetration in the marketing area yet, but there are signs that this may be changing. An article from eMarketer provides some of the reasons why businesses have not yet turned to mobile applications.
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In our Internet Marketing Clinic, we plan to have a presentation from a local developer of mobile applications in the near future. This will be a good opportunity to learn something about the mobile application environment and a chance to identify ways that mobile applications might offer some benefit to your web site and business.
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Watch our schedule to see when our guest will be presenting!
February 22nd, 2010
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What a surprise! I picked up the phone (actually, I listened to my voice mail) and a perky voice says to me, “Hi, this is Sharon from Google!” I never heard of Google calling people before. I am just not on that kind of list.
What the call was about, as it turned out, is they are promoting their local business center. This is the place where you can enter information about your business so it will come up on Google Maps when people search for your products or services. I have had a listing for years and recommend it to anyone with a web site and any kind of local business. It is a free service from Google.
I guess the reason for the call is that they are offering enhancements to the listing that you can pay for and they are actually informing people of that by phone (seems a little retrograde to me, but, hey, whatever works!)
I went to the site (click here for Local Business Center information) and found some new features that I had not seen before. Most interesting to me was the statistics that they provide on your listing, so you can see how many impressions you have gotten and how many clicks from those impressions. This is all available on a dashboard where you see other sites that you may have entered, say, if you have multiple businesses, or have entered site information for companies you are supporting.
Anyway, this is good information and worth your time to review just to update yourself on how the whole thing works. If you don’t have a listing for your business yet, this is a great time to set one up. Remember your keywords when you set up your business description, because that is what it is all about. This is one more way to give your business an edge that others (like your competitors) are not so astute about.
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