What Are QR Codes?
QR Codes are two-dimensional barcodes. QR stands for Quick Response and were developed to contain more data and character types then current barcodes. QR Codes can contain up to 7,089 characters versus the 20 characters for traditional barcodes. The mobile adoption rate has fueled the use of QR Codes in recent years through the use if QR Code Readers. QR Codes are currently being used to connect to a web address, compose a text message, dial a telephone number, or prompt your email client with...
How To Edit Your Company Profile on LinkedIn
At the beginning of November, LinkedIn released some new features for their Company Profile section. LinkedIn now allows businesses to add services and products to their company profiles, solicit customer endorsements for company products and services, as well as the ability to "follow" companies. Follow Company There is now a "Follow Company" button displayed on the company profile page. Selecting to "follow" a company allows you to keep up to date on when employees of this company leave...
Get Social With Ecommerce Receipts
The integration between social networks and search engines is going to start to impact traditional search engine optimization techniques. There has been more and more social influence being built into the search algorithms in order to present better search results to the end user. Just take a look at Bing's Instant Personalization program. Businesses of all sizes need to become aware of these impacts and understand how being a part of social networks can help their business succeed online...
Google Maps Adds Hotel Comparison Shopping
Noticing that Google Maps has added some additional functionality for hotel searches. I noticed at the top of the Google Maps search results a "Check In" and "Check Out" search feature. Also, beside each hotel listing there is a lowest price drop down. Clicking on the lowest price displays a list of Sponsored results with pricing information on the specific hotel. The drop down list looks to have four paid listings and the last one is the official hotel link. Here is a screen shot. This was...
Social Search Results - Facebook Friends Bing
Facebook recently announced a new partnership with Bing. Bing will now pull in Facebook "Like" information into their search result pages creating "social search". Social search will take the personal link recommendations from your group of Facebook friends and include those links within a special section of the search engine results page. In the future Bing will look to add your friend's "Likes" next to the individual search engine result listings. Bing will also be providing a "Friend...
IP Address Influencing Search Engine Rankings
Google has been using the user's IP address to serve up local results for the Google Local 7-pack for awhile now. Then back in February they added a search "Nearby" feature that would allow you to refine your organic search results as well as the Google Local 7-pack for a city. On top of this Google is now using your IP address to influence search engine rankings for broad terms. What does this mean? It means that a user in one location will be served up one set of results while a user in...
Click Through Rate Can Affect Your Bing Rankings
From the recent SMX East conference Barry Schwartz, contributor at Search Engine Land, confirmed with Steve Tullis, Sr Program Manager Lead at Bing/Microsoft, that Bing does indeed use click through rate CTR as one of the many factors in their Bing ranking algorithm. Steve Tullis made the comment that if a search result does not get clicked on Bing will likely lower the site's ranking. What can influence a user to click on your listing within the search engine result pages SERPs ? One of the...
How To Handle Secure Files Being Indexed
At SMT we typically do a website audit for new clients. During these website audits we see a lot of the same mistakes from web developers and web designers that do not fully understand search engine optimization best practices. One of the issues we come across is the client's site starts to get indexed under the HTTPS version of their site. HTTPS is typically used to protect sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, or personal information that is submitted...
Survey Finds Social Media Impacts Search Engine Rankings
A recent study, The Impact of Social Media on Search, by BtoB and Business.com took a look at how business-to-business B2B marketers are integrating social media with search engine marketing SEM. The study polled 464 B2B marketers to see how they are using social media to improve their search engine rankings.
Did social media have an impact on their search engine performance?
44% stated it had a positive impact 28% stated neutral 27% stated they did not know 1% stated it had a negative...
Using Infographics to Build Links
Infographics, or Information graphics, are visual representations of complex data or knowledge that is presented in an easy to understand graphic. While infographics have been around for a long time, Internet marketers have turned to using infographics as a link building tactic. As you can see from the Google Trends graph, infographics started to really pick up at the beginning of 2010. So, the start of 2010 has been the year of the infographic. Producing an attention grabbing and timely...
The Forgotten Power of Internal Linking
Did you know that Google says there are hundreds of factors that go into getting your site to rank for targeted keywords? It can be overwhelming to think about. That’s why many of our clients come to us in the first place. It can be intimidating to figure out everything you site needs in order to be successful online. There have been many instances where a client would search "SEO" or "Rank #1 on Google" and come back to us saying, Build me links so I can rank for keyword ! We hear that...
Few People Using Location-Based Social Networks
Forrester Research recently released a report, Location-Based Social Networks: A Hint Of Mobile Engagement Emerges, that noted there were only a few million consumers using geolocation apps on a monthly basis. Location-based Social Networks include such sites like Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, and Dopplr. The report states that only 4% of adults have used a location-based social network and only 1% have used it more then once. The profile of a location-based social network users: Male...
Digital Marketing: A Road Map of the Basics
Survival of the fittest To this day, the Internet is the fastest changing industry which adapts many changes throughout every month, even on a daily basis! With the Google algorithms always increasing in complexity, it becomes harder to be able to generate organic results for any given website. If you just now want to start with Digital marketing campaigns for your business, you must start with a very well defined niche which is in demand, yet is still not saturated with competitors. On top of...
Tips If Your Domain Name Is Too Long For Google PPC
Recently, we had a client that was very interested in launching an aggressive PPC campaign. Everything started out perfect. During our collaboration to form a strategy, we found out the domain name for this project has 36 characters. This is not including the www. ExampleOfA36CharacterDomain123.com For those of you who don't know, Google's Adwords policy states that the display URL has a character max of 35 characters. Since this site is a newly acquired site, it normally wouldn't have been an...
Digital Marketing: Investing Wisely in your Business
If you have a website, you need traffic. Unfortunately many people know this and also come to realize their lack of knowledge on how Internet traffic really works. There are lots of opportunities out there offering you thousands of targeted visitors to your website for just a few bucks, or a directory promoting your website on Google on your behalf. If you do not advertise your business, your incoming flow of customers will be low. Nowadays simple word-of-mouth and referrals are not sufficient...
Reduce SPAM without CAPTCHA using a CustomValidator
There are plenty of resources and methods out there you can use to reduce the amount of submissions to a form on your website by non-humans. Some website administrators get hundreds or thousands of submissions from bogus people. They are often automated bots searching for open holes your website to infuse content for whatever their purpose is. Many times it is to promote their own website, content, or services. Sometimes they are attempts to cause the website or webserver to crash, inject...
Optimizing Search Engine PageRanking by Using Dynamic 301 Redirects
How to Optimize your Page Rank Those SEO-savvy web programmers and search engine optimization specialists are familiar with the problem caused by changing a previously ranked URL to a new URL. For example, an old page that a search engine has ranked on page 1 may be www.domainname.com/about/default.aspx. For a variety of reasons, it may be necessary to change the URL to www.domainname.com/about-us/. The new URL will be identified by search engines as a new page, even though it is the same...
Tips on Choosing a Good Domain Name
Choosing a domain name is probably the most important step in getting your business online. When choosing a domain name for your business there are several factors to consider before you make that final purchase..COM – The.com domain extension is probably the most recognized and trusted domain extension. Now if you are a non-profit or healthcare organization you may want to consider the.org domain extension. And whatever you do stay away from the.info. The.info domain extension has...
Bing - Ask your friends to recommend
Bing is now giving you the option to send local search results to your Facebook and Twitter friends along with the option to email them the results in order to ask them if they agree with the results or have a better option. This is a direct way to see what your friends, coworkers, or mentors have to say about a particular location. As a consumer this gives you a quick way to find out if a restaurant is any good, etc. But as a business, you need to be aware that your listings are being...