SEOMatrix LLC Blog: Your Daily Ethical Search Engine Marketing Treats

The web is getting more and more advanced and complicated everyday. Back in 1999 it was considered high-tech to have dynamic pages, Flash content and animated gifs but in 2008 it’s an everyday occurrence. The web is transitioning to an incredibly accessible social market. With the introduction of Web 2.0 technologies, anyone can find anyone, anywhere. Social Media sites like Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn are becoming prominent figures on the internet.

As the web evolves, so must the web-marketer. By utilizing these incredibly effective tools that encompass Web 2.0 technologies for your internet marketing needs you are staying up to date with the latest innovations. When your potential prospects see that your business is adapting to “the way of the future” they are not only more likely to contact you (because you’ve made it infinitely easier for them to do so by listing yourself in Social Media venues) you are also setting the prospect’s mind at ease by ensuring them you’re keeping yourself up to date; especially if you’re in a web-related industry.

I often recommend that anyone seeking new business through the internet enlist in social media websites. Websites like Facebook and Myspace are predominately geared towards the younger generation (Myspace in particular). But there is a plethora of venues at your disposal, places like LinkedIn and Jigsaw are excellent ways for you identify yourself to your prosepcts. These venues are also excellent methods of increasing your web visiblity on both a business and personal level. Adding your company’s videos to YouTube will certainly get you more exposure. With millions of visitors a day, your video is likely to be seen on YouTube. The best part of all of these Web 2.0 mediums is that they’re complely free and easy to use.

…Patrick Bateman had difficulty solidifying his request for a table at Dorsia in the 2000 film American Psycho. The exclusivity of the restaurant was never fully explained. Website conversion analysis can often be articulated in similar terms of psychological impact — webmasters are often smitten with large 1800 numbers that scream call me now, I am ready to take your valuable dollars! Both my practical and empirical experience on the internet has taught me that occasionally having an inconspicuous phone number actually gives you a higher conversion rate on phone calls (often times significantly higher). In fact, having a toll-free number occassionally decreases call volume in and of itself. A few websites with tough to find digits include:

1)    adwords.google.com
2)    www.seomoz.org
3)    www.amazon.com
4)    www.microsoft.com

Granted, these sites push a huge number of visitors through their pages on a daily basis, but the fact that the contact numbers are tough to find make some individuals all the hungrier to find them.

…sometimes inside Barnes and Noble I actually feel car sick — it’s not the Starbucks dragging me down — I think it may be more of an information overload type queeziness. Nowadays, I get a similar sense of awe when sifting through Google Books - it’s a neat invention. I tend to be more of a book skimmer or scanner type reader anyway, so Google Books is ideal for me. A few interesting notes on why:

1) You can store your favorite books to read at a later time
2) Books can be search on the basis of “full preview” or “limited preview” - my favorite prophetic Internet hypothesizing novel - A Logic Named Joe is available for limited preview.
3) You can share you book reviews and selections with others.
4) You can jot down notes under each title.

Overall, it assists me in organizing and storing information in one convenient location (and no, Google didn’t pay me to say that

What are the types of bots that Google sends out to the web?

Googlebot: crawl pages from our web index and our news index
Googlebot-Mobile: crawls pages for our mobile index
Googlebot-Image: crawls pages for our image index
Mediapartners-Google: crawls pages to determine AdSense content. We only use this bot to crawl your site if AdSense ads are displayed on your site.
Adsbot-Google: crawls pages to measure AdWords landing page quality. We only use this bot if you use Google AdWords to advertise your site.

He’ll often leave a little stamp in the weblogs like crawl-66-249-71-23.googlebot.com
Or, the image crawler will leave a little Googlebot-Image/1.0

To check to see how relatively frequent Google’s bots are coming around to your site, you can do the query in the Google search box cache:yoursite.com

%20 —- when you see one of those gremlins in the url string — it’s just the hex code for a space, which is not allowed in urls. Change those hexes to underscores or underlines and the problem is typically solved.

I would rate my ability to cook and prepare foods at, well, lets say extreme novice. In a perfect world I would be able to “replicate” pizza in a little microwave sized cubby-hole like in Star Trek. Despite how many times I click my heels – it hasn’t happened yet; so I’m forced to order takeout day after day from the same four to five mundane mediocre restaurants. Luckily, I can do a quick Google search for pizza in my area and bam – the ever knowing Google gives me ten additional pizza places I haven’t sampled yet. Not only does it tell me there are other options to where I can eat, it shows me where they are, and how to order some delicious pizza by listing their phone number right at the top of Google. This great feature known as Google Local has revolutionized my dining habits. With Google Local anyone can list their business, their contact information, and the location of the business on the ever-so-convenient Google Maps; you can even display photos of the store-front to boot!

Google Local isn’t just for hungry lack-luster cooks looking for a quick meal. It can be utilized for anything. Any type of business can be listed in Google Local, even businesses that don’t have websites (like small pizza places!). Have a flat tire? Google will tell you where you can get a new one. Desperately trying to find a new place to get your hair cut because your old stylist just can’t quite make you look like Brad Pitt no matter how many times you show him Mr. Pitt’s picture in GQ? Google will provide you with a plethora of different places right in your area.

Better yet, you don’t have to spend dozens of hours reading, researching, and learning the latest web development languages to optimize your site for the search engines. You can get your business listed at the top of the first page in Google for free by utilizing this new and rather easy feature.

If you are considering optimizing your business’ website; start by listing yourself on Google Local. It’s fast, free and surprisingly easy. All that you need is a [free] Google account and a computer. Click Here to sign up and get listed at the top of Google and find that pizza place that will actually put hotdogs on your pizza.

FAQ — what do you guys and Brian Ortiz at SEOMatrix do over there in 2008? — hit me with a few acronyms please —

1) organic search engine optimization (SEO / SEM)
2) website conversion rate improvement (CTR, CPM)
3) pay per click management and improvement (adwords PPC among others / quality score improvement)
4) social media optimization (SMO / SMM)
5) local search
6) reputation management and online identity management (OIM)

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…the ostensible reason for me not to expound on the term “canonicalization” is because Matt Cutts did a pretty decent job of it on his own, and wikipedia lends a hand as well. One area I wish to stress is the duplicate content issue as it relates to canonicalized urls. Using FTP clients I occassionally forget what an actual or intended home page url is – sometimes I upload index.htm files or index.html files without really giving it a second thought. I’ve also seen more than a few occassions where a given website has had up to six home pages saved on a server’s root directory- good for backup purposes in case of a hungry hi-tech gremlin — bad for search marketing and especially Googlebot — my recommendation is to perform a periodic scan of the root directory to see if there aren’t any duplicate home pages (or sub level pages for that matter) that may have been unitentionally saved with a different extension or page name. Google’s algorithm seems to be limiting the ranking possibilities of sites where they even suspect duplicate content to exist — a precaution well worth the time investment.

…not sure if it is worth the fight — but www.zodevdesign.com is toggling between #1 and #2 in Google for their keyword “architectural rendering.” Battling against the Wikis usually amounts to certain SEO death, but a steady stream of inbound linking, coupled with onsite optimization landed this target - www.seomatrix.com/robert/ was the particular optimizer on the project.