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5 Great Custom Google Analytics Reports for your website – FREE

Marc — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 18:04:09 +0000

My Dad often said “what gets measured gets done”. And these five custom reports seem to “channel” that wisdom helping you understand your website traffic and set and meet goals. All particularly important if you are an online marketer or derive other revenue from your website. And the standard Google Analytics reports often don’t provide some of the data detail you need.

I will be brief, just do the following now. Get the details, why these are most useful, how to use the reports and install the reports in your Google Analytics account by going to this Search Engine Watch article by Greg Habermann “My Top 5 Most Used Custom Reports in Google Analytics“.

These are excellent well crafted reports for analyzing your site traffic and making well-reasoned changes to your site to increase your results and meet your goal.

This is one of my favorite articles of this month and if you have any questions please send me an email or leave a comment.

The wholeness of Google+ has the spirit of the moment.

Marc — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:18:25 +0000

Or said another way, Google+’s gestalt is the zeitgeist! I think that small business marketers using the web will find competitive advantage through early adoption of Google+. Seems, over the last few months, for there to be a malaise regarding Facebook and since the June 28th’s “release” of Google+ a lot of excitement and evangelism. The “wholeness” approach to Google’s making the web a social network versus using a site as a social network, like Facebook, is new. Although small it is growing exponentially, Google+ is estimated to have now, as of this week, reached 9 million users (according to Search Engine Watch). And perhaps even more telling as to the general spirit swelling around Google+ are the pwns animated gifs like these -

So what can you do now to begin learning and gaining in Google+? Two quick suggestions:

If you haven’t already, sign up for a personal profile Google+ at the Google+ home page. There is also a good Google+ FAQ on that page. I am finding, right now in the limited Beta, that after 10pm PDT is most likely to be successful in signing up.
Add a Google+1 button to your business website. If you have a WordPress based website it is as easy as installing a plugin. I like this one - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-plus-one/. If you haven’t adopted WordPress for your website platform, or want to do it “old school” here is the Google+ code link – http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

Optimizing Google Places for Local Search Marketing Results

Marc — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 17:34:16 +0000

Local search is critical to most of my clients’ businesses. That is how people find many, if not most, of the goods and services they buy. Face it we have used it for years with directories and yellow pages, that is a form of local search. It is easy and appropriate to think of search engine driven local search as the new yellow pages and replacing all kinds of directories. Today’s market uses online search with computers and smart phones. Not so much anymore … phone books.

One of the most quickly effective and productive tactics to boost your local search engine marketing is to improve your Google Places page. This is the listing of a few business with a map locating them that appears at the beginning of many search results initial page. All it takes is time and effort properly applied, to frequently be one of those few businesses when people are searching for what you offer.

If you have not already verified (and captured) your Google Places page do it as soon as you can.

First step, if you not have already done it is to “verify” the Goole Places page for your business. Or if you’re a brand new business you may even need to start the Google Places page for your business.

Here is how you do it. (from this excellent 31 page pdf guide, “Ranking in Google Places” by SEOFactor)

We need to first see if your business is already listed in Google Places. If it is, we need to make sure there aren’t any problems like duplicate listings or incorrect information.

Finding Your Business.

Searching for a Google Places page is simple enough. Simply go to http://maps.google.com and search for the name of your business.

It’s a good idea to search for more than just the business name though. Try your street address and phone number. Also, go ahead and try a few “common” searches one of your customers might make. If you still don’t see any listings for your business, it’s probably not in there.

Google will also do a search for you when you first begin the claiming process, and if they find similar listings they will let you know.

What if You Find Your Business?

If you find a listing for your business, then there are a few things we need to look at. Take a look at all of the information on the listing’s Place page and note any corrections that need to be made. Also, see if there are more listings, and make a note of those as well.

When you’re looking at the Place page, you should see a link in the upper-right corner (almost the exact middle of the screen). The link will either say “Business owner?” or “Owner-verified listing.”

If your listing has the “Business owner?” link, then nobody has claimed ownership of this Place page yet. However, if the page you are looking at has the “Owner-verified listing” link, then somebody claimed that listing. Don’t worry too much. This could just mean that someone in your company has already claimed the listing. Ask around the office to make sure.

If your business was claimed, but not by anyone in your organization, then it means that someone claimed the listing, and not likely for honorable reasons. Take a closer look at the listing, and you may notice that the phone number or website address is incorrect.

No matter. Whether your business has a listing or not, you will soon be taking ownership.

If you didn’t find your listing, then you’ll need to add it to Google directly. Simply go to
http://google.com/places and you will be met with a login screen. If you don’t already have a Google account login, then you’ll have to create a new account.

If you found a listing during your initial search, you just have to click the “Business owner?” link, and the process will continue as normal.

Above are just the first steps in making Google Place provide a competitive advantage for you. For detailed instructions on completing the process and making as good a listing as is possible you should download the guide linked above, or contact me to make your Google Places page as strong as possible and significantly increase your search impressions. I recently increased a clients Google Places search impressions for their product in the Denver area from an average of 300 impressions per month to over 9,000 impressions per month in just two weeks time. If you don’t have the time it is worth the small amount of money to pay an experienced expert for this optimization service. I do this service for each of my website clients.

A final tip. This is not mentioned in the guide but one thing I have found recently that will significantly help boost your placement in Google Places is to offer a special or coupon. There is a link in the Google Places edit screen for the information and duration of the coupon special. Make it timely, relevant to your marketing keywords,of modest duration say 30-60 days and describe if with your marketing keywords. Then change and add new specials every 30-60 days. If you have question about this send me an email.

Bonus – here is another good link that will help you understand Google Places best practices and even a little information about optimizing Yelp for better placement and local marketing of your business.

Whois privacy may hurt your SEO and search marketing

Marc — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 04:39:25 +0000

Whois privacy, something that many domain name registrars like GoDaddy will try to sell you, but that you probably don’t need, and don’t want As much as domain name registrars will encourage you to make your registration information private and buy their upsell add-on annual fee, I have another view. Unless you have a compelling reason other than spam, I recommend not to do it. Compelling reasons could include a “no outside employment” agreement or perceived social acceptability of your site’s products/offering

As for spam, face it, if you are doing business on the internet with a website you will get spam. There are ways to reduce and fight spam, but be cautious about using domain name privacy to do so.

How might having your domain registration details private hurt? Well it turns out spam and scam websites often do have the registration privacy in-place. (you can reason why) While most legitimate sites don’t. Whois privacy can present a certain type of site profile.

And it is interesting when Matt Cutts (Google anti-spam team leader) was reviewing sites for SEO effectiveness and he had this to say about a HiFi store website:

The HiFi store was fine, but this was another example where someone had 40+ other sites. Having lots of sites isn’t bad, but I’ve mentioned the risk that not all the sites get as much attention as they should. In this case, 1-2 of the sites were stuff like cheap-cheap-(something-related-to-telephone-calling).com. Rather than any real content, most of the pages were pay-per-click (PPC) parked pages, and when I checked the whois on them, they all had “whois privacy protection service” on them. That’s relatively unusual. Having lots of sites isn’t automatically bad, and having PPC sites isn’t automatically bad, and having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad, but once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site or so.

More directly Jon Glick, former key member of the Yahoo! search team said this about using Whois domain registration privacy:

This is one more potential “flag” that can earn you points to a spam audit. It works well for spammers who are attempting to keep the engines from finding all their sites in one swoop. Those guys are in the business of disposable domains; if you’re not it’s better to avoid this tactic.

So this is one area where you can save money and perhaps help enhance your SEO. Particularly if you put that savings towards a longer domain name registration period.

Free Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimization

Marc — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 01:36:44 +0000

It has become pretty clear to almost everyone that online search has eclipsed yellow pages advertising as having the best value and greatest results. Even for local business. Thirty years ago it was not unusual to see business paying $3,000 per month for a full-page front section local yellow pages advertisement, even in a town of only 200,000 residents.

Today Google can have similar value but at a very much lower cost, free. Even if you pay someone to build your site, the payback can be as quick as 3-4 months from increased business. I have a client, Dennis Grimes, that wrote that his businesses’ new website cost payback happened in just the first week. And the best part of good structural and content SEO is that it continues to provide dividends, for almost no expense, long after the website goes live.

But, the main purpose of this post is to point out that not only is Google the new yellow pages, and organic search is meaningful yet free advertising if done correctly. And that you can do it yourself in many cases. Google has a great do-it-yourself guide, and it’s free, titled “Google’s Search Engine Optimization
Starter Guide” which you can download from this link (pdf). It is an excellent resource, understandable to the website novice and useful for the experienced as well.

Mihaela Lica at SitePoint.com provids a good discussion of the three most important on-page SEO opportunities identified in the Google guide in her post “On-page SEO – The Google Way. They are simple and inherently present in every website. And often under utilized in many websites, even I have found WordPress based websites. They are:

Most importantly, create a unique, accurate page title that communicates the content of each page. How many times do you see a website where the main page is simply titled “Home” or “somedomain.com”. I see even sites provided by professionals with this error. And the page title is arguably the single most important SEO related element. Lately now, I normally like to have the page title also set in
header tags, making it even more useful in SEO.
Make use of the “description” meta tag to accurately and uniquely accurately each page’s content using 160 characters. In the sites I create there is now a separate field for entering the page description for any page and post.
Improve the structure of your URLs to reflect your page content and be “friendly” to the site visitor. avoid having links with just numbers and symbols. Use words separated by hyphens. This is the purpose of WordPress’ pretty permalinks function. It also one of the nice benefits of Facebook’s custom usernames for profiles and pages.

Just using these three elements on multiple pages in your website can make a big difference in many cases. It may not be possible to do in some Flash based websites, but you should be able to accomplish it in most others. If you have any questions about your website or your businesses’ search marketing opportunities send me an email.

“WordPress Takes Care of 80-90% of Search Engine Optimization” says Matt Cutts of Google

Marc — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:49:46 +0000

He also said that “WordPress is a fantastic piece of software“. So why should we care what Matt Cutts has to say? Well here is what the Wikipedia has to say about who is Matt Cutts:

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google.

In other words … if you want to learn how Google indexes and ranks your website, Matt is the go-to guy. Fortunately for all of us he is a good teacher. His blog is a good resource, but the video below is outstanding for a short lesson on how you may improve your website’s or blog’s search rank, easily, particularly if it is WordPress based. The total video is about 45 minutes long, but take your time and just watch a few minutes at a time. Matt gives great tips on everything from site basics to writing content for maximum SEO results throughout the presentation below. You will learn why I now build websites using only WordPress and how I work to maximize the internet marketing results for my website clients.

“Straight From Google What You Need To Know”, WordCamp San Francisco 2009

Measuring and Improving your Social Media Impact

Marc — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:01:13 +0000

As Web 2.0 evolves to returns the internet to its social media roots, albeit with great advancements, interconnectedness and opportunity, it is useful to try to get an idea how well you are doing. After all, the first step towards improving is measurement.

Fortunately Google has a tool, wouldn’t you know it . Let’s begin reviewing what is called the Social Graph and how it tracks social media links. A Social Graph is a representation of internet based “relationships”. These relationships can be of any nature being presented through blogs and social networking websites presenting our information and presence. A social graph can then define your combined social networking “community” from the different social networking sites and blog you participate in. (This last part is why I am strong proponent of using a WordPress web/blogsite to act as a hub to help manage and improve the effectiveness of your Social Graph.)

Now to how Google can help. The Google Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people more easily available Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick gives an introduction to has an excellent short video over view explaining the workings of the Social Graph API.

Now lets use two simple forms provided by Google get some personal Social Graph measurements!

The first for site connectivity we will measure how your URLs for your websites and social network pages are connected. How many of your sites can be reached from each of your URLs?

And second, who are you connected to? The contacts you link to and the contacts that link to you.

Keep score, work to increase your social medial connections. It has been a constant for as long as we have had civilization … the more connections you have, the better opportunity you have for success.

Building a new website and domain? Replace your temporary landing page with a simple WordPress LAUNCH page for SEO and SEM jumpstart.

Marc — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:42:47 +0000

When starting a new domain name and related website I like to use a simple WordPress blog as the landing page. This makes the old style landing page more of a launch page. Often typical practice has been just to put up a single static HTML page announcing the coming website. In some situations is is even worse, just an image, a pretty image, but virtually un-indexable.

By putting up a simple WordPress blog launch page of 2-3 posts you can create a 1 page “launch page” to:

announce the coming website and its purpose
provide potential customers progress updates
test your “60 second elevator presentation”
evaluate your site design elements
initiate strong search engine recognition
attract RSS subscribers
provide contact information
share your Facebook and Twitter links

and perhaps even convert a few early prospects to customers.

When your website is ready to go live, just import any content from the launch page into your site. Replace the index page and setup any needed redirects.

It is even easier if you are creating a Bludomain type Flash website. Just update the WordPress based launch page to be your new website’s new Splash page. Keeping all your search recognition, and RSS subscribers.

Brad Frost also has a good blog post on the “launch page” approach and its benefits.

Put it into action and you will be pleased by the results. If you want to put it into place on your new site, I would be pleased to assist. Just send me an email.

Front Page Guarantee for Google Yahoo and MSN Placement – SCAM

Marc — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:45:51 +0000

The email quoted below was forwarded to me by a client wondering if it was legitimate. He asked how a company could guarantee front page search page results placement.

There are some ways it can be done, and you can do any of them yourself if you want to.

1) Bid high enough on the Adwords keywords that you will be in the top five. For some businesses and keywords this is an affordable (based on probable return on investment). But for many, if not most, businesses the cost is prohibitive. Some keywords cost $5 or more per click through and the typical good or service converts less than 5%.

2) Put yourself on the Google business map listing. This is free and only takes a few minutes. To do this, just go to Google Local Business (www.google.com/local/add) and go through the steps. Some of the offerings like the one below charge up to $50 a month for this … at least until the website owner get smart.

3) Another way they can promise front page search results placement is to convince you that a particular three or more word search term is valuable and/or use your business name or proper name. Using business or personal names is what I call the white pages technique. If someone is going to search on your name … is that really a search or just a look-up, and how many of you are there in the white pages. If it is a look-up you already reached them.

Relatedly, three or more word search phrases become so specific that they are not really very search marketing productive. Plus with three or more words, the exact word order can make a big difference in search results.

Rather than pay, do the steps above for yourself and even better … base your website on a very semantically correct structure (for search engines) and then regularly add new content about your business and services.

Regardless just beware of scams like this -

***********************************
* Our Company GUARANTEES to put your website on the front page of GOOGL*
*YAHOO, AND MSN as well as drive targeted traffic your site evey month.*
***********************************

{{{{{{ ATTENTION WEDDIING PHOTOGRAPHERS,LIMOUSINES COMPANIES AND WEDDING PLANNERS }}}}}}

***********************************
{{{We GUARANTEE you FRONT PAGE placement on GOOGLE, Yahoo and MSN and 100 new qualified prospects each month}}}
***********************************

Aggressive search engine marketing is critical for the success of your website and ultimately your business. We have a fixed price performance based model that guarantees new business sent directly to your company.

* If someone Google’s “Wedding Photographer, lIMOUSINE COMPANY OR WEDDING PLANNER” in your area and you do not come up on the first page then you need our help fast.

* Marketing Sherpa— An independent online survey organization shows that 76% of couples throughout the United States found their wedding photographer on one of the three major search engines GOOGLE, YAHOO, AND and MSN.

* Aggressive search engine marketing is critical for the success of your website and ultimately your business. Without it, you are losing money to your competitors that have already realized the importance of being on the FRONT PAGE OF page of GOOGLE, YAHOO, AND MSN.

* Strategically placing your marketing message in front of your target market at the exact moment they are looking for your service is something businesses have been trying to accomplish since the beginning of commerce.

* Keyword Marketing places your business in front of your customers at the exact moment they are looking to do business with you.

Our company:

1. Has formed a strategic alliance and partnership with Google.

2. Is publicly traded on the Nasdaq Exchange.

3. Has been in business since 1995.

4. Has been significantly more profitable each month for the last two years in a down economy.

Our packages include:

1. THE MOST AGGRESSIVE SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING SYSTEM IN THE WORLD WITH GUARANTEED FRONT PAGE PLACEMENT ON GOOGLE, YAHOO AND MSN.

2. We GUARANTEE you DOUBLE the amount of new qualified customers that are looking for your
product or service at the moment they need it most.

3. Website development.

4. Monthly visitor tracking and anylitics systems.

5. Free online Yellow Pages listing.

Q. What is the only reason a business owner repeatedly buys the same advertising package?

A. Because it works.

“Google.com’s only source of revenue is business owners just like yourself reading this email. And once again the only reason they CONTINUE TO PAY GOOGLE IS BECAUSE IT WORKS!”

*****Google has contracted with us and made us a complete partner and authorized reseller of Adwords.

"I can start thinking reducing my adwords month payment"

Marc — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:56:01 +0000

All the websites I do are based in the same technology and implemented with the same skill and crafting. It takes extra time and planning, but it is what works! Personally configured and installed by me, my website services are always designed to return the highest possible internet search marketing results for your particular business And for the lowest ongoing cost.

Below is an email message I received today from Tiago Valente, a Lisbon, Portugal based wedding photographer, who became a website client of mine just last month. His website is based on the same technology and implementation care I use for Real Estate brokers and agents.

He is getting fantastic Google results! Especially compared to his old website from just a month ago. So consider having me improve your web marketing and reduce your costs, like I have for Tiago.

——– Original Message ——–

Hi Marc,

My site placement evolution has been fantastic! From far, far away in google page with my old site (only in first page with adwords), I’m now in the first page in some keywords search. This is top ten!!

Here are the search words and results. For me this means that I can start thinking reducing my adwords month payment

Results:

Fotografos profissionais casamentos (wedding professional photographers) in 3rd place – 1st page!!!

Fotografos profissionais (professional photographers) 6th place -1st page

Fotografo casamentos (wedding photogrpahers) 13th place – 2nd page

Like I told you before I do not know what to say, I was not expecting such results in the first months or first year.

With my best regards,
Tiago Valente
www.tiagovalente.com

It has taken me ten years to develop the skills to get results for my clients like this in just one month. Makes me recall this quote from the A-Team -