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and Tech Geek at Heart

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Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011

January 5, 2012

It’s my birthday and I have some great news!

In January of 2011, I said that I’d make our Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 subscriber only. And I did. Many loyal readers have checked in on the newsletter throughout 2011 to get both evergreen content, the content that typically embraces these monthly updates, in addition to something completely new, monthly digital trends – the stuff you use for presentations and proposals, for arguing that social media and online marketing does have a firm place in today’s landscape. The newsletter, which was sent within the first week of the month, would include new research findings from surveys conducted by research groups such as the Pew Research Center, new discoveries from a marketing firm’s eye tracking study, or data that was recently culled across a multitude of SEO agency case study reports.

This year, I am pleased to bring back our Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2011 thanks to an excellent sponsor, HubSpot. HubSpot has recently launched a most amazing Marketing Grader tool to help you measure the effectiveness of your website. Please be sure to check it out as it’s one of the best tools I’ve ever seen, and I would be saying that even if they weren’t a sponsor!

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Looking Back on the Year of the Panda: Google Algorithm Changes

December 27, 2011

This last year Google brought a large number of algorithm changes to the table.  Although these changes helped increase traffic and rankings to many large corporations such as YouTube and eBay, it hurt a large majority of small businesses. According to Search Engine Land, some domains saw a 94% loss in visibility, and others were left picking up the pieces after they lost 80% of their keyword positions. Consider this graph by Sistrix, created to describe where mahalo.com’s keywords landed on Google search engine results pages (SERPs) before and after one of the Google algorithm updates:

Although there were several Google algorithm changes (some with more impact than others), all of them left businesses scratching their heads. One minute their tactics were working; the next minute they must change their approach entirely. If you found your business scrambling to stay afloat during these changes, you may not realize just how much treading you had to do to stay alive. In case you missed it through all the chaos, below lists all of the crazy Google changes that occurred in 2011and just what they all meant:

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HOW TO: Guide to Performing Website Audits

December 13, 2011

This is a guest post by Harrison Jones.

Onsite optimization of websites is the most important factor in ranking better in search engine results. You can build all the links you want, but if your website isn’t optimized, Googlebot won’t be able to crawl the site properly. Over the past several years, Google and Bing have released guidelines for webmasters to make websites more crawlable. This is a consolidation of all the guidelines released by Google and Bing over the years to improve onsite optimization. Audits should be performed before the launch of any new website design, and at least twice per year to keep up with changes in industry standards.

Canonicalization and URL Structure

www or non-www, that is the question. Rather than wasting your time rehashing this topic, I have written a handy guide that explains URL structure best practices in full. To summarize the article, there should only be one URL used to get to the homepage of your website. Whether or not you choose to use www is your choice. Just make sure there is only one version, and it’s not followed by an index.php, index.html, etc… URLs should contain words only and no numbers or symbols. The words should be separated by dashes instead of spaces or underscores. All words should contain lower case letters. Each URL should contain a keyword phrase, and should be no longer than 5 words in length overall.

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How to Hire Your SEO Partner

November 29, 2011

This is a guest post by Brad Shorr.

Hiring an SEO specialist is one of the most important decisions you will make in your pursuit of online marketing success. It is also one of the most perplexing.

There are two enormous issues with search engine optimization that hinder your ability to zero in on the right partner:

  1. Rapidly changing, constantly evolving rules. Google’s algorithm – the formula it uses to determine page ranking – has undergone significant changes recently, and I believe we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
  2. Lack of industry standards. Lawyers pass the bar, doctors have diplomas, but SEOs have nothing of the sort to give you confidence in their level of training and talent.

With this in mind, the first two things you want to evaluate in a potential SEO partner are:

  1. Methodology. Are they are using today’s SEO best practices or yesterday’s?
  2. Results. Do they walk the talk? Are they surgeons … or butchers?

Let’s take these decision-making factors one at a time, and then move on to a few more very important factors that need to be addressed once these two are nailed down.

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Is Your Business Worth An Extra Hour Per Week? 5 Reasons Why Your Business Should Blog

November 2, 2011

This is a guest post by Preston Ehrler.

As a business owner, do I really have time to blog?  I’m a business owner too, and I realize that we are already pressed to our limits for time.  We are responsible for everything, including finding new business, working with our existing customers, interfacing with suppliers, running our books, and infinitely more.  Attempting to convince a business owner that we should add yet another task can understandably seem like a herculean endeavor.  For anything that is going to take more time, the rewards must be tangible and immediate.  As many of us cannot clearly identify what the rewards are that can be reaped by blogging, it is not placed high on the list of priorities.  It should be.

So, you ask, how important could blogging really be for my business?

My answer:  Instead of spinning out a list of theories we’ve heard again and again, what if we looked at blogging from a different perspective?  Employing a new paradigm by utilizing real data, what can we learn about how blogging, coupled with an effectively constructed website, can affect your company?  What, specifically, can we extrapolate?  How do we know blogging is worth the effort?

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