Business Blogging Tips

Will Google Glasses Ever Become Reality?

2012-04-12T15:04:43Z

Project Glass is an effort from Google to develop augmented reality glasses. The concept for these glasses was introduced on April 4, 2012 on a Google+ page. The launch also included a YouTube video demonstrating the possible uses of Project Glass.

The video is pretty futuristic! Or is it? It shows a man only using his voice and other inputs does things commonly handled by smartphones, such as scheduling meetings, taking pictures, checking the weather, getting directions, and placing a video call. The difference is instead of having to hold a device in your hand, the data you need hovers in your field of view.

People have been saying they are fake. But Google co-founder Sergey Brin was spotted wearing them in San Francisco by a prominent tech writer, and he even managed to snap a photo of the prototype specs.

Blogger Robert Scoble met up with Brin at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and, seeing that Brin was wearing a pair of the freshly unveiled Google Glasses, took a photo of the two of them with his camera, which he promptly posted on Instagram and Twitter.

Scoble says Brin wouldn’t let him try on the sci-fi specs, which communicate with the wearer’s smartphone to relay information and turn the glasses into a futuristic heads-up display. However, he did say the glasses appeared to be very lightweight and that they seemed to be flashing info to Brin as they talked. He also said they looked “self-contained,” not requiring other hardware (although a wireless connection to a phone wouldn’t be visible).

Yet in spite of the hype and the fact that in February, The New York Times reported that Google was planning to release such high-tech glasses later this year, not everybody is holding their breath for an actual product like the one in the video.

According to Wired, at least a couple of experts say the technology Google is showing off can’t possibly deliver what the concept video depicted.

“In one simple fake video, Google has created a level of over-hype and over-expectation that their hardware cannot possibly live up to,” said Blair MacIntyre, director of the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech.

WATCH NOW AND SEE PROJECT GLASS!

Facebook Buys Instagram for $1 BILLION

2012-04-10T13:31:46Z

We told you about Instagram in 2011. It was growing like crazy! In January 2011 they had 1 million users. By December that year they had 15 million! And today they have over 30 million!

Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above.

What's great about it is that it is very fast – especially compared to Facebook.

With the Facebook iPhone app, there are 6 screens a user has to go through before a user can actually take a picture. With Instagram, there is one.

Facebook saw this growth pattern and got a little worried. So they bought Instagram. For $1 Billion!

Zuckerberg says, "We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram's strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That's why we're committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people."

Windows 8 may Bridge the Gap Between PC and iPhone

2012-04-05T19:37:55Z

Who says the PC is dead? Just because Apple is ruling the world with iPhone, iPad, iPod, iEverything.

Microsoft® has announced Windows® 8 and change is coming! Some believe that the PC is dead because we are spending more and more of our time interacting with technology away from our PCs – but Microsoft is responding to this challenge with a dramatically different approach. It was the highlight in Barcelona a few weeks ago when Microsoft publicly released its Windows 8 Consumer Preview, the most recent Beta version of the Windows operating system that is set to release later this year. Many reviewers are already expressing their opinion of Windows 8, detailing the pros and cons, and making predictions – some positive, some negative. That said, there is a definite purpose behind Redmond's latest foray into their future OS.

We have witnessed a clear trend to the "consumerization of IT" over the past few years. And Microsoft is consequently following a path to "unify" its operating system for PCs, phones, tablets and other "smart" devices.

With Windows 8, Microsoft is firing back against a development that separates everyday usage of iPhones, iPads and other devices from the common IT environment. Finding a common platform on which mobile devices and PC's can interact seamlessly is the name of the game. Certainly we cannot count Microsoft out. They always take a long term approach and usually get it right.

It will be a while before we can be sure whether Windows 8 is the solution to this problem. But for consumers, I expect Windows 8 to be adopted widely and very quickly, particularly on PCs. Following the critical and commercial success of Windows 7, consumers should be hungry for Microsoft's next OS.

Hmmmm.....we'll see......

Google Analytics Keyword NOT PROVIDED

2012-02-16T14:47:07Z

I just noticed this showing up a couple weeks ago in my analytics. My top keywords, usually # 1 or # 2, were saying NOT PROVIDED.

Come to find out Google announced this change in their blog last fall, stating that “As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver.”

As internet marketers and website owners, this change has presented us with a new challenge in our quest to determine the health and success of our website in the eyes of the Google.

SO NOW if you use Google Analytics to regularly monitor the popular keywords that drive traffic to your website, you can check with their Google Webmaster Tools and you can find the top 1,000 search queries that have delivered traffic to your website in the last 30 days.

For most of my sites I can figure out what the NOT PROVIDED word is - it's a pain in the analytics!

Komen vs. Planned Parenthood

2012-02-03T14:08:19Z

You do realize the importance now, of Social Media, right?

We have told clients for years, what a powerful medium this is growing into. As of this month, 800 MILLION people use Facebook! They had 600 million last year. And Twitter has 200 Million users. That's a LOT OF CONVERSATION.

Social Media destroyed 3 decades of brand building in just 24 hours. Komen for the Cure has been rebranded.

Planned Parenthood made the announcement - and people around the world weighed in with anger, disgust, revolt and wrath! Within 24 hours, people dropped their support for Komen like a hot potato.

Within minutes, both Facebook and Twitter were swamped with pro-Planned Parenthood, anti-Komen comments. At one point last night, Kivi Miller did a quick count and found the ratio of anti-Komen’s decision to pro-Komen’s decision to be about 80 to 1 on Twitter.

Their mission blow up aside, they completely failed to understand how the Internet works, how news spreads, how a news cycle works, and the political climate.

(That's another whole story! The left side - Democrats - are using Social Media at high speed! Speaking out about the Republican's hourly! You have to admit, the Republicans have no one solid this year!)

But back to our story - Komen knew they planned to make this decision for almost 1 year. Their first mistake was they didn’t break the news, Planned Parenthood did with a press release. So right from the beginning they were not in control of the story. The story contained within the press release spread like wildfire on twitter, Facebook, and on listservs of activists.

And there’s absolutely nothing Komen can do to stop the story now. Even if they were to announce that the people responsible for the decision had been fired and the funds were being restored there’s plenty to keep going. And a door has been opened for all sorts of activism that wouldn’t have made an impact just 72 hours ago. New dimensions to this story will surface on their own, or activists will take action to keep the story going.

At the end of all this, whenever that comes, Komen will be a completely different organization. By changing their mission and stepping into a political debate unprepared, they will have had their future written for them by others.

We live in a transparent world people!

Is Your Site Attracting Organic Search Visits?

2011-12-20T14:31:06Z

I hope you are measuring your site's traffic. I was talking with a client the other day and asked, "so what keywords are people using to find you?"

And the client had a glazed look on his face. Then I asked, "Do you know how many unique visitors you are getting a day? or a month?"

And the client had no idea.

So installed Google analytics into his site and followed up 30 days later.

It appears he is getting 5-10 unique visitors a day - but, almost all the traffic is direct hits
(meaning they already know the client and his business or were referred to the site, from his main website, business card email signature.)
5% were coming in by way of pure organic search. That's not good. That means he is losing, at the Google game.
The "findability" game.

We have 12 sites. All of our sites attract 70-80% of all my readers, from pure organic search. That means they find me in top Google searches, for the keywords I want to be found for.

Last month my 12 sites came up for over 150,000 different keywords. THAT's how people find YOU. Not paid place placement. Not paid search. Pure ORGANIC search.

Organic describes a search that returns results by indexing pages based on content and keyword relevancy.
This is in contrast to listings ranked based on who paid the most money to appear at the top of search results.
Sometimes this is called "pure" or "natural search" as it is supposed to be "untainted" by commercial payments or bids.

If people thought their searches returned nothing but a bunch of advertisements, they would stop searching.
For that reason these organic listings are pure, or at least the search engines want us to believe they are pure.

Google has been praised heavily for returning what many have deemed the most relevant search results while
keeping their revenue stream clearly isolated from the organic listing results. As time passes though pressures
have degraded Google's search relevancy.

If your site is set up properly, you do your posts properly, position your posts for Google search, THEY WILL INDEX YOU! And you will ATTRACT readers.

SEO Tips to Improve Organic Rankings
There are many stages to achieving great organic listings.

- Scope out the competition to see how competitive your keyword landscape is.

- Decide what keywords you want to use prior to making your site (and before each page), and include them in your meta tags , page copy, page title, and file names when possible.

- Your site should be easy to navigate and search engine friendly.

- Submit your site to the directories - and share your site link in Social Networks.

- Build a linking campaign. (Link building is the single most important step to EFFECTIVE SEO.)

If you are not getting at least, at the very low end 50% of your traffic from pure organic search - you are doing something wrong.

Get Help!!

MALWARE REMOVAL and Google Blacklisting

2011-12-04T18:41:54Z

Yesterday afternoon, I found out one of our sites was hacked somehow and a malicious script was somehow "injected" into our site - causing Google to blacklist us and warn readers NOT TO ENTER our site.

Traffic plummeted.

After doing some research, I could not locate the problem. I am not a programmer. Someone told me about SUCURI. For $89 they claimed they could fix the problem, remove the bad code and monitor my site for the next year.

Skeptical - I paid the $89. On a Sunday morning, within 2 hours - they cleaned the site and I was able to re-secure it with new passwords. And they have submitted us with a clean bill of health to Google.

If you EVER have an issue - we HIGHLY RECOMMEND Sucuri!

Protect your sites

with Sucuri!
Web site

MALWARE removal!

IT WORKS!
We have used it!!

Facebook Accounts Hacked with Porn and Violence

2011-11-18T00:16:53Z

In the last 2 days, my Facebook pages have been filled with pornography and violent images!

Facebook denies there is a problem.

Indian users accounts seem to be getting hacked. While the company has denied any such issue, the users are confused whether to stick to Facebook or not. There were reports that indicated that some of Indian users reported their accounts being hacked with pornographic and violent images being sent on their name to others.

This is what I found out yesterday. One of my "friends" commented on hacked image. Porn or violence. The next person that comments, gets the virus, and so on, and so on. If you see one of these images - DO NOT COMMENT. Click REPORT IMAGE .

Facebook asserted that they are committed to protect the privacy of users and there is no compromise on it whatever be the case. - This is BS.

Even a media report confirmed that nearly 200,000 Facebook users were facing such problems, but the company seems to be in denial mode since the report struck the company.

FedEX Facebook Social Media Giveaway BACKFIRES

2011-11-01T18:07:17Z

WHOOPSIE. Talk about a social media nightmare! Last week I recieved a pr ess release outling the upcoming FedEx Facebook giveaway -

It said -

We're injecting $1 million into the U.S. small-business economy with our support of Small Business Saturday 2011. Through our involvement in the Shop Small Gift Card program, we will give away 30,000 Shop Small American Express gift cards, each worth $25, to consumers through our Facebook promotion leading up to Small Business Saturday (SBS) on Nov. 26.

Be one of the first to link to the FedEx Facebook page on Tuesday, Nov. 1, for your chance to receive a $25 American Express gift card. Then get shopping! It's a great way to help boost the economy while celebrating small businesses.

Yesterday they had 180,000 liking them. This morning it jumped to 203,000. And in the last 30 minutes, it went to 209,000.

ok- So 1pm rolls around. Nothing happened. Within 15 minutes, over 8000 angry comments were posted.

Come to find out, FedEx posted this -

You can receive a one-time $25 statement credit when you register any eligible American Express^® Card and use that Card to make a purchase of $25 or more at a small business on November 26, 2011.

What? the original instructions said nothing about owning an AmEx or a credit. It said a GIFT CARD.

After 9000 comments and counting FedEx posted - Hi all - we're loading the registration for the Amex gift cards now - you will see the form very shortly - sorry for the delay!

hmmmmmm. 48 minutes in and still nothing. Yet, their LIKES jumped to 235,000.

58 minutes and they finally got a link up - of course, their server could not handle the traffic - and then, mysteriously, within 10 minutes they claimed 30,000 cards were given away....

I smell a FISH!

PostPost is a Twitter Tool to Help You Sort out the Noise

2011-10-20T13:16:15Z

Dunbar's number is suggested to be a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.

So what do you do if you're following 500? or even 1000, people?!

PostPost strips out the noise.

Delivers relevant search results from the people on Twitter you value the most: the people you follow.

The way social networks are wired, the stuff doesn’t get treated the way it deserves to be treated. Everything gets pushed down, down, down…until it’s all-but-lost in the disconnected and unusable archives of the web.
PostPost is a way to bring it back. PLUS, all this other stuff comes back, too. Stuff you will be happier to discover!

Check it out!

A Guide to Public Liability for Small Businesses

2011-10-17T13:54:55Z

Public liability insurance is not necessarily the easiest thing in the world to get to grips with, but the fact that it is vital for your small business is undeniable. It is essential for any kind and any size of business, but small businesses are particularly at risk if they do not have it.

Put simply, it covers your business for any kind of incident in which a member of the public sustains an injury or falls ill on your premises or if any damage is caused to their property. Of course, as the old saying goes, accidents can happen and accidents can certainly happen anywhere. In that sense, then, it is really not worth trying to save money by not taking out a public liability insurance policy because the financial ramifications will be severe in the event of an accident.

Every different type of business needs a different kind of policy to cover it sufficiently. For instance, a high street store would need the insurance to cover it in case anybody who is not associated with the business tripped or fell and injured themselves while they were in the store, or on the business’ property. A plumber, on the other hand, would need a policy to cover them for any damage they might cause to somebody else’s house or other property while they are on the job, by leaving leaks unattended, for example.

It certainly pays to read the small print in the public liability policies to make sure that your business is covered for every eventuality. You should also make sure that your cover extends to any peculiarities that your business might have, such as working outdoors above a certain height. That way, any compensation, legal costs and repair costs will not be shouldered by your business.

With the advent of price comparison websites on the internet, it has never been easier to find a policy and a price that suits you. Sites like moneysupermarket.com can pull together a list of the deals that suit your requirements from across the World Wide Web. All you have to do then is pick the one that will not only give you the best cover, but also save you the most money in the long run.

Photo: FLICKR

Pageviews Impressions HITS and Unique Visitors

2011-09-10T14:55:52Z

I was chatting with someone the other day, a local plumber, who was bragging his site got 100,000 hits per month. And he was so proud! And I asked how many unique visitors he was getting, and he said 100,000!

WRONG. Hits do not = Visitors.

A hit is generated when a file is requested and served on your website . The file can be anything from the ordinary HTML document, an image file, a video and so on. An HTML document with 10 image files on it will register 11 hits (1 HTML file + 10 image file) when the page is viewed by a visitor.

Therefore, a page containing 1000 images will register 1001 hits when viewed by a single visitor. The same visitor may reload the same page 10 times to register 10,010 hits instantly. Obviously, that doesn’t mean there are 10,010 people visiting your site.

Sorry to burst your bubble.

Page impression, also known as page view is just that. It shows how many times the page is viewed. For example, when you click a link and the page is loaded, that request is counted as one page view. When you click the back button on your web browser to return to the previous page, another page view is registered.

As you can see, there may therefore be many hits per page view.

Page impression can be used to gauge the ability of your pages to retain the visitors’ interest, sometimes called the stickiness of your website. High number of page view per visitor means your visitors may be browsing several pages during their visits. This can be a good thing to mention if you are selling advertising on your site.

A unique visitor means a visit from a person to a site, at least once, typically within a 24 hour period.

Several visits from the same person to that site within a 24 hour period are only counted once. The person is identified by his or her IP address and sometimes through cookies, which acts like an online fingerprint.

So, if a blog gets 1000 unique visitors per day, it means that 1000 different individuals have visited the blog within the 24 hours period. While several individual may have visited the blog several times during the period to read new posts or comments, each visit would be counted once only.

Next time if you’d like to talk about how popular your blog is, tell people how many unique visitors you have instead of hits.

for more useful info like this, see the site Sabahan.

Business Intelligence Certification

"The business and tech world are constantly changing. Individuals seeking a upper tier job must receive some kind of higher education, such as receiving their a business intelligence certification from a university. This well help improve your chances of succeeding in both of these fields."

LinkedIn Button will Streamline Applying for Jobs

2011-07-26T02:16:43Z

LinkedIn just made it easier to apply for a job, thanks to the launch of its new “Apply With LinkedIn” button.

The business-oriented social network is billing the new feature as “the future of job applications.” The company’s goal is to make the job application process as simple as a click.

“Our goal with Apply With LinkedIn is to help every professional put their best foot forward, anywhere across the web when they take that leap to apply for a new position,” Technical Product Manager Jonathan Seitel said on the company’s blog.

The button is much like the Twitter tweet button or the Facebook Like button in that companies can embed it on their website. The button essentially lets you submit your LinkedIn profile as your resume — no cover letter necessary. Once you submit your job application, you are given the opportunity to message your contacts at the company and ask for a referral. You can see how the button works in the slideshow below.

Google + PLUS vs Facebook

2011-07-14T17:41:51Z

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD LinkedIn and FaceBook figured out...

GOOGLE PLUS is going to shake things up!

Real-life sharing rethought for the web could make Facebook, look like MySpace.

This IS THE HOTTEST TOPIC right now. And you probably can't even get an invite yet!

Right now they are in Beta testing with a small group of people, but you can leave your name to get on the "waiting list".

FORBES SAID....

Google+ (also known as G+, Google Plus or Plus) is the biggest trending topic online these days. So, what is it and why should you care about it? Simple – it’s a new social media site that is directly tied into the most widely-used search engine on the planet, with looming search engine optimization (SEO) implications. If you care about your company’s online reputation – what consumers are saying and where they are saying it – you need to read this post.

1. Yes, It’s a social media site.

Google+ is Google’s answer to Facebook. If you’ve ever used Facebook, you already know how this works. You can share content (such as text, photos, video, etc.) to a network of contacts. Your contacts can respond and rate your shared content in turn. You can add contacts, block them, connect to other services like Twitter, and much more.

2. It’s sort of like Facebook – but different.

Privacy issues have been a burr under the saddle of Facebook since its inception in 2004. Users have complained that the privacy settings were too obtuse and instructions on how to protect their accounts were confusing. G+ removes the confusion by introducing a better privacy management system. You’re able to create groups for contacts (they call these Circles) and then select them on the fly as you create content.

Any post you make can be edited to remove or add contacts individually, or entire Circles. This sort of direct control is lacking in Facebook and is a boon for those who want to manage their information online in an organized manner. The other change is perhaps more important for businesses. The +1 button is a way to signal your approval of a contact’s post (whether it be text, a photo, a video, etc) and effectively validate it as a good source of information. On the surface, this may appear as simply the equivalent of Facebook’s “Like” button, but this is where it gets interesting – and a little bit confusing.

3. The +1 button will probably directly impact SEO – but we’re not yet exactly sure how.

If you used Google’s search engine in the last year, you may have noticed a strange development – a little “+1” button that would show up in search results. Clicking on it would indicate to Google that you have endorsed that result as a solid source of information for the search term you used. Naturally, everyone speculated that the more +1 clicks that a site received, the higher that Google would esteem it for that particular search term. Google denied this at +1’s implementation but did not dismiss the possibility of +1 affecting search rankings in the future – which means it will be a reality soon enough.

With G+ using the +1 button as a way to endorse a post by a contact, the overall vision for +1 is revealed to be a bit grander. Google envisions +1 as the tool that ties together all user-endorsed content across the web. Whether you +1 something in search results or a photo that your friend took of his dog and uploaded to Google+, you’re contributing to your personal version of Google’s search algorithm, meaning that content may eventually be served to you differently based on your +1 behaviors.

This concept is very bold and presents an interesting problem for SEO management, if it does indeed create a personalized set of results which varies wildly for every user. When the SEO community reaches some sort of consensus (or if Google releases more information) then I’ll do a follow-up to this post on how +1 effects Google+ SEO performance.

4. Google says that businesses should not create profiles for themselves on Google+ yet – but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try it out.

While it may seem logical to create a G+ profile for your firm and get ahead of the competition, there won’t be special business profiles until later this year. These new business-only profiles will reportedly contain features that are highly useful to companies – my guess is that they will be analytics-focused, providing deeper details on user demographics and the like.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment with G+ as it currently exists, but be aware that you may end up having to recreate the profile again this fall. Of course, it would be to your benefit to try out the new platform that consumers may use to talk about your company.

5. Google is putting its full weight behind G+.

Pretty soon Picasa and Blogger will cease to exist and you’ll be using G+ for blogging and uploading photos. What’s next? Will we see more Google services die a slow death, only to be reborn as a part of G+? Absolutely. We’ll also likely see new services pop up, such as games, plugins, and more customization. What does this mean for you? SEO is going to be influenced by this in a big way. Instead of being an aggregator or a channel to find blog posts about your firm, G+ will instead be both the platform and means of distribution for content.

Google certainly has big plans for G+, that much is clear. It’s taken aim at Facebook (and, to a lesser degree, Twitter) in a big way. The bottom line is that any company that cares about what consumers are saying – and where they are saying it – should get familiar with Google+ now.

INSIDE JOB - How We Got F*CKED in America

2011-05-06T15:49:00Z

This has nothing to do with blogging -
but I just had to share this -

I just saw this film last night.

WOW.

Every person in America needs to watch this.

From Academy Award® nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson ("No End in Sight"), comes "Inside Job " the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008.

The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs.

Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, "Inside Job" traces the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have corrupted politics, regulation and academia.

This film will make you SO ANGRY. All the financial "experts" keep making the rich richer and the poor, poorer. And they answer to NO ONE.

This film attempts to provide a comprehensive portrayal of an extremely important and timely subject: the worst financial crisis since the Depression, which continues to haunt us via Europe’s debt problems and global financial instability. It was a completely avoidable crisis; indeed for 40 years after the reforms following the Great Depression, the United States did not have a single financial crisis.

However, the progressive deregulation of the financial sector since the 1980s gave rise to an increasingly criminal industry, whose “innovations” have produced a succession of financial crises.

Each crisis has been worse than the last; and yet, due to the industry’s increasing wealth and power, each crisis has seen few people go to prison. In the case of this crisis, nobody has gone to prison, despite fraud that caused trillions of dollars in losses.

I hope that the film, in less than two hours, will enable everyone to understand the fundamental nature and causes of this problem. It is also my hope that, whatever political opinions individual viewers may have, that after seeing this film we can all agree on the importance of restoring honesty and stability to our financial system, and of holding accountable those to destroyed it.

Our world will NEVER be the same - unless someone is held accountable.
How could this happen to America?

Narrated by Academy Award® winner Matt Damon, "Inside Job" was made on location in the United States, Iceland, England, France, Singapore, and China.

Buy it on DV for under $14 Inside Job

Visit Inside Job - The Site

The Importance of the Long Tail with Keywords and Phrases

2011-04-07T20:03:00Z

The Long Tail or long tail refers to the statistical property that a larger share of population rests within the tail of a probability distribution than observed under a 'normal' or Gaussian distribution. A long tail distortion will arise with the inclusion of some unusually high (or low) values which increase (decrease) the mean, skewing the distribution to the right (or left).

The term Long Tail has gained popularity in recent times as describing the retailing strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The Long Tail was popularized by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article, in which he mentioned Amazon.com and Netflix as examples of businesses applying this strategy.Anderson elaborated the concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.

So what does this all mean?

Many bloggers and online publishers are obsessed with being on page one for a certain keyword, and they forget about the Long Tail. I have a client, a plumber, who wanted to be on Page One of Google for BEST CHICAGO PLUMBER. And we got him there. And he gets about 50 hits a month for that word. But his Long Tail, he gets over 300 hits for about 250 keywords! That is the long tail in action!

One recent study shows that even if your site is optimized for the top 100 keyword phrases in your niche, you are still missing 94% of the people who are searching for what you have to offer.

The reason you're missing so much potential traffic is because most people don't search for short keyword phrases. They search for what is called long tail phrases.

Below is a quote from Wordtracker that shows how valuable long tail
keywords are:

"Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise,
revealed that for any given topic, the top 100 keywords account for
just 5.7% of all website traffic - while long tail keywords account
for the remaining 94.3%!"

One big advantage of long tail keyword phrases is that they include the short phrase within the long tail phrase, so you're getting two birds with one stone.

Another big advantage of optimizing for long tail keyword phrases is that when someone searches using a long phrase, they are describing exactly what they want and they are ready to buy.

Bottom line: Write and post more pages of text on your website (at least, one new page a week).
Have a unique keyword-rich Title tag for each page and have 300 to 500 words of high-quality, keyword-rich text on each page.

Do this and you could soon see 10 times more visitors to your site -- and these will be highly motivated viewers.

Google Slaps JC Penny for Black Hat Seo

2011-03-12T15:42:00Z

J.C. Penney has just been caught in the middle of a very ambitious search-engine manipulation scheme, and Google isn't thrilled about it.

Google has just caught and cracked down on what is arguably one of the biggest attempts at manipulating the company's search engine rankings. While stories like this aren't uncommon when it comes to spam tactics and black hat seo - it is usually from little guys - not retail giants, who should no better!

They achieved high rankings by buying thousands of links --most of them on totally unrelated sites. This is totally against Google's rules.

Online expert Doug Pierce discovered that, when he searched for "dresses", there were over 2,000 sites listed that referenced dresses. However, many of these sites had nothing to do dresses, but they included text links to J.C. Penney. In fact, many of these sites were nothing but link farms.

J.C. Penney got a good bitch slap! And immeadiatelt fell of page one and dropped to page 10! Of course, JCP isn't happy about this. The retail chain fired SearchDex, it's search engine consulting firm. A spokeswoman for the company denied any wrongdoing in the matter, and the company issued the following statement following Google's response: "We are disappointed that Google has reduced our rankings due to this matter, but we will continue to work actively to retain our high natural search position."

Previously Google had totally removed BMWs site from their search index for a while because BMW was using hidden text.

Google has said that now they are going to be even more aggressive when it comes to going after websites that are not playing by the rules.

Bottom line: Don't be tempted to violate Google's rules even if you
do see other companies doing it and getting away with it.

ICAAN Takes on the World....and Google

2011-03-07T21:33:00Z

WHAT THE HELL IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN?

I think, the world of search, is about to be shook up.

The “.com” at the end of TIME.com is known as a top-level domain—or TLD—and you may be aware of others, including .net, .org, .edu, etc.

While there are over a hundred other country code TLDs like .uk and .jp, there are only 21 generic TLDs like .com, including the lesser known .travel and .museum. That's about to change radically.

What TLDs exist is decided by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a small non-profit corporation that runs the Internet's namespace under contract with the U.S. Government. After much deliberation, ICANN decided in 2008 to expand the number of generic TLDs, and later this month will begin the process of accepting applications for new domains.

.gay, .car, .health are all trying get applications in. So what does this mean? I myself own 50 gay themed .com names.......and we come up in search on page one for most of the names. So now, with the advent of .gay, will I still come up in top search? Do I need to purchase my 50 domains under the new .gay? It's going to be a mess, I think. And costly, for all of us.

A few weeks ago President Obama met with Google, behind closed doors. What was discussed, no one knows. But this is going to be crazy in the next 8 weeks. Fasten your seat belts, it could be a very bumpy ride.

Read more at Techland/Time .

TELLO Customer Service Ratings at Your Fingertips

2011-02-17T21:28:00Z

Forget YELP!

TELLO is the new app in town!

With Tello and your mobile phone, you can rate the customer service you receive from any employee at any business in just seconds.

With Tello's mobile and social applications in hand, people everywhere can express their satisfaction (or dis-satisfaction)with recent experiences and purchases.

Tello then aggregates these sentiments and provides additional analysis. Using Tello, businesses of all sizes can continuously improve service by engaging customers in conversation, resolving issues, and monitoring employee ratings, comments, and analytics.

People expect great customer service and are eager to offer insights to help businesses improve. Now everyone can make a difference by thanking employees for great service, and by providing constructive feedback on less-than-great service.

"We think Tello can be a new kind of rating system that offers businesses structured, constructive criticism in real-time. During our beta period, we were pleased to find that more than 85 percent of Tello ratings were positive."

Google Wonder Wheel May Reveal Relevant KeyWords

2011-02-09T16:48:00Z

Content is KING, right? we all know that.

But titling your posts that are keyword rich and search engine friendly, is equally important.

Google has a tool that will find these keywords for you. They call the tool the "Wonder Wheel."

Here is a step-by-step guide showing you how to use this tool to get your website ranked higher and get more traffic to your site.

To see how Google's Wonder Wheel works, go to Google and search for any word or phrase.

After you do this search look in the left nav. panel and click on the phrase, "Wonder Wheel." (If you don't see this in the left nav. panel, click on "More Options" at the top of the page under the word, "Google."

When you click on the Wonder Wheel link, you will see Google's wheel showing the phrases Google considers to be related to your searched for phrase.

You can take it a step further by clicking on any of the related phrases in the Wonder Wheel and you will see a new wheel showing the phrases that are related to the phrase you clicked on.

When you title a post, you have to ask yourself, "how will someone find my post?"
You want to use keywords that make sense and will attract the reader to you!