About the Video:
After selling her online business for $1,100,000.00 at age 26, Erica Douglass “temporarily retired.” She now shows you how to grow your own business to $1,000,000 via her Erica.biz. You can also download her free Blog Success Manifesto — which contains 30 tactical tips to grow your blog faster than you ever have before.

Search Marketing Now announces a special webcast featuring industry experts Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman on January 25 that will be a question and answer session on search marketing.

Titled “Search Marketing 2011: What to Expect — and why every marketer should care,” this one-hour presentation is free and registration is open at Search Marketing Now. This webcast is sponsored by SMX West.

Topics will be driven by audience questions — which can be submitted in advance at registration — and will likely cover everything from the impact of Twitter and Facebook on marketing to Google Instant and trends in local and display advertising.

Attendees will learn not only what’s important in search marketing for 2011, but why search is important for every marketing campaign.

Danny Sullivan is Editor in Chief of Search Engine Land and Co-Chair of Search Marketing Expo. Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade.

Chris Sherman is Executive Editor of Search Engine Land and Co-Chair of Search Marketing Expo. With more than 25 years experience in interactive technologies, he has analyzed and influenced developments in search marketing for more than a decade. He is the author of the book “Google Power: Unleash the Full Power of Google.”

For more information, visit http://searchmarketingnow.com/.

For the average small business owner, mastering the art of online marketing

Tempe, Arizona-based Seyego’s innovative approach to search engine visibility presents small business owners with simplicity, affordability, and peace of mind. With an abundance of websites on Google, Seyego takes the complicated and expensive part of search engine marketing out of the equation.

By renting a pre-ranked website from Seyego, business owners can reap all of the rewards of owning a top-ranked website without any of the time or hassle of starting their own online marketing campaign from scratch. The site generates leads for the renting business, and are forwarded on to them.

Granted, renting a pre-ranked website is a bit of a head-scratcher. It sounds like cheating, really. Offering this type of service is a very new approach to the whole question of search engine ranking — and Seyego is the first firm to offer this service.

According to their website, “Seyego knows the service industry. For years, Seyego has been successfully generating leads for locksmiths, carpet cleaners, plumbers, water damage restoration services, and other service industries nationwide. Our websites have consistently ranked at the top of the search engines for popular keyword phrases and often out-perform the leading companies in those industries.”

Is this new solution better or more cost-effective than pay-per-click? Only time will tell. This is one story that you can bet SEO service providers and web designers alike will be watching closely.

As one might expect, availability for this solution is limited. Exclusive geographic rights for a given niche is limited to one company per industry. For more information, visit Seyego on-line at http://Seyego.com.

In this week’s video: Many sites make the same content available via different URLs. Say you have a clothing site and one of your top items is a green dress. The product page for the dress may be accessible through several different URLs, especially if you use session IDs or other parameters. To gain more control over how your URLs appear in search results, and to consolidate properties, such as link popularity, it is recommended that you select a canonical (preferred) URL as the preferred version of the page.

]]> http://esbjournal.com/2010/04/canonicalization-video/feed/ 0 http://esbjournal.com/2010/04/all-about-alt-tags-video/ http://esbjournal.com/2010/04/all-about-alt-tags-video/#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:45:38 +0000 admin http://esbjournal.com/?p=3647 In his new weekly video blog here at ESB Journal, Jim Mueller of ReignNet shares tips for selecting and employing ALT tags.

Jim Mueller is the Founder & CEO of http://www.ReignNet.com, “Your Internet Marketing Concierge”. Small & medium size businesses who do not have the knowledge or the time to market themselves online use ReignNet services to do it for them.

If you keep a eye out on Microsoft Bing’s Local Listing Center you will find that occasionally their system is backlogged and they do not accept new local business listing claiming until their backlog and issues have been resolved.

When visiting the URL https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx the following notice gets posted:

“Local Listing Center Backlog: We have received a lot of feedback recently regarding issues with claiming and updating business listings using Bing Local Listing Center. We are actively working on fixing these issues and will closely monitor the progress of clearing out the backlog. We understand that this has been very frustrating for many of you and sincerely apologize for the long delays. Thank you for your patience!  Bing Local Listing Center Team”

These types of local business listing frustrations with the claiming process are only part of the problems business owners face. Feel free to take a look at the Bing Local Listing Center forums to see the types of frustrations that exist at http://www.bing.com/community/forums/12279.aspx.

Local business listings have become a good local business marketing tool for the local business to reach the local consumer through web searches and mobile searches. After all, local business listings are showing up before organic results in a regular search at the major search engines.

Unfortunately, not all business owners have come to the realization that they do not have to passively let these interactive web pages exist. There are those business owners that have caught on quickly if they claim and update their local business listing, they can use this as a local marketing tool. To some extent some do not even have to bother with search engine optimization (seo) of their website, but rather put their energy into the local business listing.

In order to make these interactive yellow pages a beneficial local business marketing tool, the first step is to claim the local listing before you can update the listing with the business marketing material. This claiming process is partly to blame for the issues Microsoft Bing is encountering with their backlog. Depending upon the website there are four methods being employed to verify the authenticity of the claimant

1. E-Mail
2. Postcard in the mail with a Pin code
3. Phone call to your business phone number with a pin code
4. Manual verification

The Pin Code that is provided is to unlock the local business listing in order to update the information with text copy, keywords, business descriptions, products, services, photos, videos, coupons, and much more. Depending upon the local listing website, some allow you all of these options (e.g. Google) others begin charging a fee for enhanced listing in order to have all this information present to the local consumer through web searches or mobile searches.

The claiming process is very important because if the wrong person gets access to the local business listing for a business they can detract customers to a different location by phone or by website address. Additional damage that can be done includes incorrect information on photos, videos, coupons, and much more. Because consumers are using the local business listings to locate a business, product or service in their immediate area in person, by phone or website, the security around local business listings has to be high priority for any local listing website.

Local business listings started with a basic business directory on the Internet going back over a decade. The process has evolved and matured as social media and mobile devices allowed consumers to start using these interactive yellow pages to post their reviews as well as use them to locate a business, product or service in their local area. There are over 60 local business listing websites on the Internet in five different categories. They include the search engines, social communities, 411 websites (aka yellow page type websites), GPS websites and the age old business directory.

It is absolutely important to not passively wait for the local listing websites to put the appropriate security in place to claim your listing. The complexity of these local listing websites to put security in place ranges to include not only the obvious claiming process, but many of them allow data to be inserted from other databases on the Internet and I cannot say I am clear there is good security around this later process. If someone wanted to hijack a local business listing, they could just as easily insert the wrong information through a low level business directory that sells its data upstream or inserts its data directly into a higher level local listing website.

Depending whose data source you use, there is an estimated 30 million businesses in the U.S. While the top search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo have “some” front end security to their process; their API’s make them vulnerable through the back door. Data is provided to their local listings from 3rd party sources including “get listed” services. Additionally, if someone cannot claim a listing easily, the process within these local listing websites allows for additional listings with the same address to be submitted by anyone. While none of these local listing websites have the capacity to take on the claiming process of 100% of all business all at the same time, the recommendation is to start the claiming process regardless of how long it may take and if they get back logged. This is not just a top tier search engine issue either. The claiming process has to be performed through lower tiered local listing websites, as well, in order to insure accurate information that is being passed around the Internet.

About the Author:
SmartFinds Internet Marketing provides Local Business Listing Management Services and can not only help you claim your local business listing, but also, manage the ongoing maintenance at multiple local listing websites. Not only to help you update the listings with your information, but also with promotions, coupons, QR-Codes, offers, videos and photos. SmartFinds Internet Marketing – http://www.smartfindsmarketing.com.

After months in production, WebBoar.com has launched — using innumerable sources from across the internet, the service sniffs out complete statistics for more than 120 million websites – for free.

Whatever users want to know about their competition – be it all the domains hosted on an IP address, backlink and outbound link stats, visitor geography, search queries, screenshot history, physical server location, hosting information, related websites or anything else – WebBoar.com presents it in a highly-detailed, easy-to-understand format.

The primary service offered is website analytics, which is available on a one-click basis. WebBoar.com users can now see where their visitors are coming from, what they typed into search engines to get to the site, which site pages are most popular and much more crucial information. Having the most comprehensive IP network database available online also allows WebBoar.com to offer IP analytics, which makes searching for all domains on an IP address or IP subnet much simpler than it ever was before.

Additionally, the service employs a series of complex algorithms to estimate website values and SEO scores. When users insert the WebBoar.com code into their website text, they will be provided with the latest information on how their backlinks are operating, and can also have their HTML code checked – invalid site programming is one of the key reasons for bad rankings.

Finally, WebBoar.com offers advice on choosing a hosting plan: an up-to-date list of all major hosting providers and a series of easy-to-use comparison charts show users the best options for their individual situations.

For more information, to register or remove your site from the listings, visit http://webboar.com.

Since Google rolled out its personalized search feature for all users, SEOs have raised concerns about its affect on tracking rankings for their companies and clients.

Minneapolis-based web design agency Internet Exposure has developed and launched Google Camo, a Firefox add-on that allows SEOs to easily and automatically opt out of Google’s personalized search when signed out of their Google account.

“Anyone who chooses to opt out of personalized search for SEO research purposes will benefit from this add-on, especially those who regularly delete their cookies” says Internet Exposure.

Since Google rolled out its personalized search feature for all of its users last month, SEOs have raised concerns about its affect on tracking rankings for their companies and clients. Extensive competitive research or even personal browsing can trigger search personalization and push frequently visited sites to the top of a results page. This is problematic for SEOs who are evaluating a new market or trying to track their progress.

Although users are able to opt out of the feature, deleting cookies automatically returns users to Google’s default setting, which optimizes search results according to the user’s web history. Google Camo solves this predicament by allowing users to automatically opt-out of personalization every time they clear their cookies. Google Camo’s simple color-coded icon also lets users know when Google’s search personalization is enabled and altering search results.

Developing this Firefox add-on is just one of the many ways Internet Exposure is constantly evolving with trends in search engine optimization, which affect its existing and prospective clients. Internet Exposure is a full-service Internet marketing agency that designs, builds, markets and supports its clients across multiple web platforms.

For more information visit: http://www.iexposure.com/googlecamo.