Before you make drastic changes to your website after a rocky search engine update, take time to study your web server logs, changes in traffic to your site, and your ranking in the search engines.
You probably do this already - complete regular searches in Google for your key phrases and see how high you rank. It's well known that the first three results are far and away the sites that get the most clicks. If you can get one of the top three results in your key terms then you will have more targeted visitors coming to your site. If you can get the first result, well that is even better. Of course all your competitors want to do the same.
One of the great things about Google is that it updates quite frequently. That little GoogleBot is busy 24/7 indexing the web to make sure everyone gets the best answers to their search questions. I've recently been playing with a technique that I thought might be worth testing and because Google has updated so quickly I've been able to get a result within a few weeks, and I got the perfect result - a number one ranking for one of the key phrases I was after. In fact this technique worked so well that I got the number one result for a related search phrase too!
Let me tell you a story. In my company, we recently decided that we would invest in bringing a new service in-house. The cost to do so, with required hardware and software, will be about $34,000 US. Having more than a passing interest in this particular expenditure, I did some preliminary consumer research. In the textbook case of how we all say search works, I turned to a search engine. I did my search and ended up clicking on a sponsored link because it seemed to be the most relevant one.
So far, a text book example of search marketing at work, right? Here's where it starts to go off the rails.
Ask Jeeves, Inc., a leading provider of information retrieval technologies, brands and Internet advertising services, today announced two new syndication partners: Clear Channel Online Music & Radio, the online division of Clear Channel Radio and the operator of approximately 1200 radio stations across the United States, and The Motley Fool, a leading financial services and media company. These new partners, combined with Ask Jeeves(R) existing syndication partners, make Ask Jeeves one of the largest search and advertising networks on the Internet, reaching nearly one-quarter (25%) of the total online population, according to Nielson/Net Ratings (May 2005).
What are consumer expectations when something is free? Realistically, consumers subconsiously assume free means free, and while that might be the initial intent rarely is it the case.
It is common that search engine rankings go up and down all the time. Many webmasters are unsure what they have to do to keep their web sites at the top of the search engine result pages. There are two main factors that influence the rankings of your web pages.
NEW YORK, NY - June 27, 2005 --JupiterWeb, a division of Jupitermedia Corporation (Nasdaq: JUPM), today announced the winners of its 2005 ClickZ.com Marketing Excellence Awards. The Marketing Technology Innovation of the Year Award winner is Crispin, Porter + Bogusky's Subservient Chicken, campaign for Burger King.
"ClickZ's readers are interactive marketers who rely on technology. They're the ones who voted for the winners. Who better to determine what works in interactive marketing? The best products and services help our readers not only to create and deploy campaigns, they also determine what those campaigns can be," said Rebecca Lieb, executive editor of the ClickZ.com Network.
We live in interesting times. The World Wide Web is growing so fast, and has embedded itself so much into our lives that we may wonder how we got along without it.
After all, the multi-billion dollar industry that employs me and everyone in my company didn't exist a mere 10 years ago. Search Engine Marketing was merely a glimmer in someone's eye. The thought that you could manipulate a website in such a way that it could move up in the search engine rankings and get you traffic was a novel idea, but one that was still in its infancy.
Today outlets like Google and Yahoo! are more than just search engines, they are entertainment portals. We go there for our email, to chat with friends, to get the latest news and more. There are even videos and online games available on some of these services.
Which leads me to my Google speculation of the day.
Keywords are the heart to effective Internet searches. Whether optimizing a web site or searching for a hard-to-find item, consider tapping resources to locate a variety of keywords. Identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to the products, services, or information you are promoting or searching for.
Internet nerds are actually secret prophets who change the way our world works. Check out Skype, a type of future communication technology.
I am an Internet creative writer and journalist and yet knowledge of the technical side of computers still eludes me. As I work with tech-heads I've always had a feeling that they were a different breed of people, with their strange language of numbers and abbreviated terminology. I've also had the egotistical belief that because they are always sitting at their computers, that somehow they were missing out on life, as opposed to people like me who try to spend as much time in fresh air as possible. Well, I had a wake up call today when I asked a few of my colleagues about the changing world of communication, television, film, and advertising that has begun to evolve at an alarming rate since the advent of the Internet.