9 Years of Digital Marketing and Everything Continues to Change
When I started Search Engine Marketing in 1998, there were 10 to 20 key players, instant search engine updates, Google was in beta, GoTo a new pay per click search engine had penny bids, banner ads were overpriced, and black hat techniques of hidden text and tag manipulation were all the rage. Today there are 3 main players in the search engine world, content is king and offsite factors are a greater influence in your online success. How It Has Changed Web site promotion has grown from...
Getting Local on Yahoo! Local
According to a recent comScore study : 63% of U.S. Internet users perform a local search online last July This is a 43% increase over July 2005 As Local Search starts to take off in the next couple of years, businesses need to monitor and update their business listings in the local search engines. Today we are going to take a look at Yahoo! Local. First, determine if you are indeed listed in Yahoo! Local by doing a search on your business name and the city / state that your local business...
The Pros and Cons of Google Analytics
Google Analytics has been on the website traffic statistics scene for just a little over a year now and looks to be in no danger of fading into obscurity. For many website owners and professional Digital marketing firms, it has become the standard for helping to manage online marketing campaigns. Much of this is due to the depth of data and the ability to cross reference categories of information. It really drills down to specifics on the who, what and when of your site’s visitors. When...
The Difference Between a Sitemap and a Site Map
Most people are familiar with the term "site map", but how does it differ from "sitemap"? Besides the obvious spelling, these two terms have completely different meanings. Knowing the difference when talking with your customer versus your Digital marketing team can make the word of a difference. Site Map A site map is a collection of plain text links to all of the pages on your website. Site maps are standard on most websites and are most commonly linked to in the footer section of the site...
Google Supplemental Results
Article Updated: Feb. 2015 Google Sandbox You may have heard about the Google Sandbox, or sandbox effect, while surfing the web for Digital marketing, SEO, SEM, or other related terms. This term is a name given to the supposed Google penalty which effects newly created websites. Although it has never been confirmed, the Sandbox has been up for discussion since 2004. The sandbox effect basically implies that Google filters webpages by the active age of a domain and by the competitiveness of the...
Using NOODP Meta Tag
What exactly is the NOODP meta tag? NOODP, or No Open Directory Project, is a meta tag that is used to prevent DMOZ, an open content directory or website’s link hub, from pushing titles to search engines that we don’t want. Instead, we want Google and other search engines to pull the meta titles and descriptions that we worked so hard on into the search results. Controlling the information that appears in search engines can have a huge effect of your rankings, your...
ModRewrite for Apache and IIS
There’s a lot of ModRewrite tutorials out there, but I always had a hard time finding a pretty clear cut explanation for the most common uses: redirecting and making search engine friendly URLs out of query string dynamic ones. Finding a simple laid out example was always a bear as well. A friend recently asked me for a rundown on using ModRewrite for both Apache and IIS servers and I wrote out a pretty good email explanation and thought, hey, perfect blog post. So here goes: Rewrite is...