Before you spend time and money on search engine optimization, you need to decide if your small business really needs to be in the search engines. It all boils down to answering one basic question: how do your customers usually look for your products and services? In other words: will customers be looking for you on a search engine?
If your business has a local clientele, it is probably not a very effective idea to dedicate resources to getting top search engine rankings.
Question : After reading a lot of advice in your past newsletters and on your site, I realized that I need to have lots of good content on my site to get better rankings and traffic. In the last few weeks I have developed fresh content, which I feel confident about. I have added the new content in fresh files with optimized filenames and a more search engine friendly directory structure. My problem is the search engines are still directing traffic to the old pages it has indexed in the past and I do not want to lose that traffic. At the same time, I want viewers (and search engines) to locate and direct traffic to the new content. Any suggestions how can I achieve this. Thanks.
Many people don't realize that all of those toolbars that you install in your browser do more than offer you handy links to your favorite search engine. In fact, they also track your online usage.
While some people don't mind, there are others who prefer to remain anonymous online.
So it should come as no surprise that many of the companies that offer toolbars are now (and have been for some time) gathering your habits in order to better serve you advertising.
BEIJING, CHINA, June 15, 2004 -- Baidu.com, Inc., a leading Internet search engine in mainland China, today announced that it has closed a strategic round of financing co-led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet Ventures and Google Inc. Additional participants in the financing were current investors Integrity Partners and Peninsula Capital; and new investors Bridger Management, China Equity, China Value, and Venture TDF.
"Baidu is a leader for search in China and at the forefront of new technological innovations for search and related services," said Robin Li, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Baidu. "Today's announcement is a testimony to our strong growth and relentless execution in the Chinese market. With our new investor support, we plan to continue expanding our presence in China with additional services and extending our reach into new markets."
"Since its inception, Baidu has gained significant market share in mainland China with its products and services," said Asad Jamal, Founder and Co-Chairman of DFJ ePlanet Ventures. "The founders and the management team of Baidu continue to demonstrate extraordinary execution capabilities in delivering new products and attracting more users to their service."
Anyone who's ever had to change a multitude of static pages on a site knows what a pain it is to find and change the same snippets of code on one page after another- even using an HTML editor's find-and-replace function can be cumbersome since you have to upload all of the pages to the server again with the new code. Sometimes a page or two will get missed or the find-and-replace function replaces some things you didn't intend to change, so it requires some quality-checking time to run through all the pages and make sure the changes are there.
An easier way to manage pages in your site is by replacing chunks of repeating code, such as your navigation links, with server side include (SSI) files. Instead of repeating the same code over and over, you create a separate file with just that chunk of repeated code in it, then place a line of code on each page that tells the server to insert the contents of a separate file into that spot on the page.
At the risk of sounding sensational, if you understand the concepts introduced in this article it could literally mean the difference between miserable failure and insane online profits for your business. I'm not talking about a magical formula that will guarantee success, but it's something that all online marketers need to understand...
If you spend $50 on advertising and it generates more than $50 in net profits, that's a good investment.
Simple right? Well, through the use of proper testing and a "scientific" approach to advertising, there's no reason you can't turn your original $50 ad into millions of dollars in profits. It's just a matter of developing a system that creates a profit, and then reinvesting your initial profits back into your business in order to further expand your advertising.
By now I am sure you have heard that Ask Jeeves bought a small unknown company called Tukaroo. What you may not know is that Tukaroo was in the business to build a search application which could search both your desktop and the web in a seamless "end-to-end" search experience.
Desktop search is the new buzzword these days, with both Microsoft and Google developing these types of applications. It is kind of surprising to me to see Ask wading into this market. At least until you consider what the outcome could be.
Of course if you take MSN, Google and Yahoo! out of the mix for a while, it does make sense. With the recent acquisition of IWon, Excite and Myway and of course the purchase of Tukaroo, Ask is trying to set itself up as a legitimate alternate to the big 3.
NEW YORK, NY - June 10, 2004 (INB) -- Jupitermedia Corporation (Nasdaq: JUPM) today announced the launch of the SearchEngineWatch.com Forums (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com), an online discussion area allowing readers to share experiences, tips and thoughts about the growing area of search and search marketing.
"Forums are a great way for people to learn and share knowledge. Our Search Engine Strategies conferences have long been the leading way for people to do this in person. Now, the SearchEngineWatch.com Forums allow our audience to do this virtually," said Danny Sullivan, Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com.
About a month ago we brought you an article on the art of PPC bid management. In it we explained how, based on our research, bidding on broad terms might not be as effective as more specific targeted terms. However, if you need to build up your customer's awareness of you or your product then perhaps you may need to bid on both broad and narrow phrases in order to reinforce yourself to them.
So now that you may have defined the most appropriate bid management strategy, the next step you need to take to help the strategy be the most effective it can be is determine where people will enter your site.
Many PPC campaigns tend to send people to the home page of a site. To me this makes no sense. How often have you gone to the grocery store and found exactly what you wanted right by the door? So why would you force your potential customers to wade through a site (which could be hundreds of pages) just to find what they were looking for in the first place?