Category Archives: Search Engine Optimization

Google Product Search for the Holidays

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Holidays and Product Searching
One of my favorite reads is the Google blog and they just wrote about their Improvements to Product Search for this holiday season which explains their product search but also has some interesting facts. For example, regarding retail purchases here is a quote:

According to a study by Forrester while 93 percent of retail purchases today happen in a store, more than 46 percent of those in-store purchases are influenced by online research.

It is amazing to think that while e-commerce is growing substantially it is still a small piece of the overall market with plenty of growth.

Google Product Search
google product searchIf you have not already, try the Google Product Search which provides information about individual products in a whole new way. You can go directly to the URL or click the “Shopping” tab on the left of your regular google search. The product search is a great idea. The results are not a website with a description but a product picture, information, review information, price information, and more. You can quickly comparison shop for products at multiple locations.

The information can be show in typical list form or much like an e-commerce site. You can also sort by category, price and by store. What is very interesting is the ability to only show those items with certain characteristics such as Free Shipping or even those items that are In stock nearby. For the in stock items they have currently partnered with over 70 retail brands to obtain this information.

Want to Feel Better About Your Shopping?
Fire up your smart phone and use the product search when you are in a store to assure you are getting a good deal. If not, then order it online while in the store and have it shipped, get a coffee, then people watch and it will come to you.

For Advertisers
What this means for advertisers is that you can compete with the larger stores. You can have your products for sale appear along side those from retailers that you could never open a store next to in a mall. But now you can have potential purchasers see your prices next to the larger retailers. Learn more at the Google Retail Blog.

SEO Consulting Package

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Use Register.com Promotional Code LONGESTSEOM20 for 20% off Monthly SEO consulting with Register.com. They have two Search Engine Optimization Packages. One package gives you some time with one of their consultants as well as use of their tools. The second package they do the work themselves, even change your necessary code.


register.com seoSearch Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of analyzing and optimizing your website to help potential customers find it on search engines. The idea is to have your content appear when relevant search terms are typed into Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other search engines.

More about their basic package from their site:

Monthly consulting sessions with an SEO Specialist help you take advantage of the set of tools we provide to help improve your site’s rankings on Google and Yahoo! Includes 30 minutes of consulting each month, plus advanced tools to track links to your website, measure your SEO performance against your competitors and improve your site’s use of keywords and meta-tags.

More about their Full Service SEO package:

Put your SEO efforts in the hands of the professionals. Our SEO specialists do all the work for you – from to implementing html tags and editing your site content to monitoring your progress and tracking the results.

As an example of what they do for the full service take a look at the description here.

You Want a Faster Site

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I was going to entitle this “you need a faster site” but it makes more sense to say “you WANT a faster site”. Why you ask? Of course there are the typical reasons of making sure you do not lose your visitors due to slow page time, but now it may effect your search results.

google_labs
Google Site Performance
Google now has a tab in the webmaster tools to view your site performance. Look under the “Labs” section within the webmaster tools and you will find “Site performance”. This information not only details the page load time for your site but also shows additional information about specific URLs.

google_site_performance
Individual Pages
The site performance tool highlights some of your pages showing the URL, size of the page, total requests and DNS lookups. More importantly these details are broken down into the individual elements. Finally they provide recommendations you can implement to improve individual page performance and overall site performance.

Effect Search Engine Rank?
Honestly I do not know, however a faster site overall cannot be a bad thing.

Google Webmaster Blog a Must Read

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I have written before about the importance of using the Google Webmaster tools for your blog and below you will find two instructional articles. A great way to keep up to date with what Google is doing for webmasters, is their webmaster blog and their webmaster help section.

Google Webmaster Blog
The google webmaster blog can be found here. To follow the latest goings on as well as what is on their mind, this blog is a must read to either bookmark, subscribe to RSS in a reader or via email. If they add something, remove something, explain something, you will want to know as it could effect your search engine rankings and indexing. There is a wealth of information there, the writing is excellent, easy to follow and very informative. When looking to determine how to use a tool of theirs, or what it means check there first.

Google Webmaster Help
Another great place to check when you have a question or are looking for an explanation is their webmaster help section. You can search through their help guides. You can also search in the forums where you are likely to find a similar question to yours and an answer. If not, then you may submit your own question. These forums are extremely helpful.

Here are two articles I have written in the past with step by step instructions on how to set particular Google Webmaster tools:

I wrote a Profiting Online eBook and it is Free

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I decided to write an eBook about Profiting Online. It took a while and is 40 pages, meant to be an easy read and instructional. Why an eBook and not just posts on a site? While blogs are a great tool to easily publish information, they typically list the posts and articles in order of the most recent to the oldest, which does not convey information in a step by step instructional method.

Making Money Online eBook
I wrote this book for many reasons. Online technology, websites, services, tools, social media tools, social media sites, however you want to categorize the latest site or service you have seen changes almost daily. It can seem overwhelming. However if you peel the layers off of any web product or service and look at the business model, how they make money, they are all very similar.

Whether you are starting from scratch and do not have your own site, or have an existing site and looking or new marketing methods or ways to make money online, I hope you find this very useful.

Download your copy for free here

Background
You will see from my background that I have been involved with online businesses in many ways, from starting my own online businesses to assisting others. I spend a lot of time merely analyzing business models and I have learned, as will you, that every business needs to make money, period. I have heard many tell me about the great “idea” that they have, many of which are amazing, however the bottom line is the answer to the question “how are you going to make money?”.

If you have ever walked through and viewed the paper copies of patents in the Patent & Trademark Office you will be amazed at what you see and many times wonder “why is that not being marketed or sold today?” and in many cases the answer is that there is either no demand or it cannot be made and sold for a profit. However, all of them are very cool and amazing, but if they cannot make money they will typically not see the light of day. Let’s discuss money making.

How Online Businesses Make Money
There are two ways to make money with online businesses, either make money as part of your business model or your model is to build an amazing technology and hope to sell it to another business that will either monetize it or provide it for free as a value added service. I will not be discussing the “I will build this cool thing and then sell it later” approach, which is valid but not for discussion here.

In many ways this book, these instructions and explanations, may seem simplified however I have chosen to touch on every aspect from start to finish with step by step instructions so anyone can set up a site, promote it, drive traffic to it and generate income.

The other approach I could of taken would have been to go in depth into one area, however I would prefer to get you started and then you may use many of the online sites to explore and learn more about any one particular topic in detail.

The book includes the following topics:

  • Types of Revenue
  • Money Making Online Now – the Best Programs
  • Setting up Your Site – How to Get Setup Quickly
  • Maintaing Your Site – What to Write About
  • Online Marketing – How to Obtain Visitors
  • Advertising and Free Traffic
  • Statistics – How are You Doing
  • Revenue and more….






Get Your FREE Copy of “Profiting Online“

If you are not yet a member of our newsletter you can get the free eBook by joining the newsletter on the side of this site. Once you confirm subscription you will receive the eBook.

If you are already a member of the newsletter just Direct Message me on twitter for a link, find me on twitter here http://www.twitter.com/longest.



Set Your Preferred Domain for Best SEO with Google

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Domains and links to your site can occur with or without the www in the domain such as http://longest.com and http://www.longest.com. Search engines can view these as two different domains. It is speculated that this may effect your PageRank with Google and potentially rankings with other search engines.

The thought is that if you have 20 links to a page using the www and 20 without, they may be looked at as two different pages and therefore only 20 links are associated to the page as opposed to 40. If 40 links were associated you may obtain a higher search engine ranking.

Preferred Domain
Google calls this a domain preference and allows you to set your preference. Log into Google’s Webmaster tools. Then navigate to the Tools option on the left hand menu, then to the Set preferred domain option. You will see a screen like below and you can choose, it is defaulted to Don’t Set an Association but this is where you can choose with or without www.

It is that simple, cannot hurt, and hopefully over time will help.

If you need to get another domain, use the godaddy coupon we have available.

Buy Keywords in Content linked to you for Traffic and SEO

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InLinks is a new service from those that brought you Text Link Ads. You can buy keywords and have them link to your site. What is interesting is that you pay a flat monthly fee instead of a cost per click basis. You also own that keyword on that site for the month you pay, that means that every time the keyword you bought appears on that site it will link to your site.

The benefits are that you will receive traffic. Also, for search engine optimization you will now have links within content on another site link to yours. Best of all, for a limited time you can get $100 in free links for only $1.

inLinks Coupon Code “100free”

$100 in Free Links for $1. Sign up for inLinks here and use the inlinks coupon code 100free when you checkout.



Get Top Search Engine Results Guaranteed

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Search engine optimization is a skill and takes time, patience, testing and more. There are multiple programs out there to assist and done right you can greatly increase your sites ranking in search engines. Obtaining a top 30 result will help with traffic, however being on the first page of results (typically top 10) or being in the top 3 will skyrocket your site traffic.

What if you only had to pay for results? RankPay only charges you for results. Use rankpay promo code RANK at checkout for a $50 credit. Go to RankPay Here

Obtaining High Search Engine Rankings
You can obviously pay search engines for clicks and drive traffic to your site, however search engine optimization allows you to increase your rankings in the search engines. If you have a site selling watches and Google does not list you in the top 30 for the term “watches“, chances are you will not get any traffic for those searching on “watches“. However you can use other highly targeted keywords such as “rolex watch” or “rolex submariner watch“, and it may be easier to obtain high search engine rankings for those keywords as they are more specific and typically would have less competition but also possibly less traffic.

Optimizing pages for keywords is a learned skill and one worth learning. However it can take months even if you know what you are doing to rank highly for your keywords.

Pay SEO Firms – Be Aware
There are many sites, some good some bad, that you can pay to optimize your pages for keywords. You pay them and they begin, hopefully they obtain the results you want. If not, some offer money back but rarely. However most importantly understand what key words they are optimizing you for. They will more than likely choose a word with very little competition, which typically also means very little searching for that word and hence very little traffic. That is not always the case but can happen. You want them to either let you choose the keywords to optimize for or have them pick your keywords and show you how much traffic those keywords receive. To find which keywords are searched for the most try a free service such as the Google Keyword Tool or an in-depth pay service such as WordTracker, but RankPay will also do that for you once you get started, read on.

A New Pay for Rank Service: Rank Pay
A new service I am trying out charges you only after your site achieves a top 30 position for the keywords you chose. They will obtain a top 30 position in Google, MSN and Yahoo, and the higher the position the more they charge so they are motivated to get you in the top 30 and even more motivated to get you in the top 3. Most importantly here is what you want your SEO firm relationship to have:

  • 1. you chose the keywords, not them
  • 2. you only pay if you are ranked high, and
  • 3. they are motivated to get you ranked in the top 3

Get Started with RankPay
You simply enter your website (go to RankPay Here to get started) and they quickly analyze it.

Next you enter the keywords you would like them to rank you for and they return the cost for top 30, 10, and positions 1-3 if and only if they obtain them. They also suggest many more keywords and tell you the number of searches per month. You can choose up to 10 keywords per domain, might as well sit back and let them go after your top keywords for you, you can stop at anytime. Get them started, wait a month or two and see what they have done. No loss.

You can also get a free $50 bonus if you use the code RANK by typing it in at checkout.  Go to RankPay here (or here if the other link does not work). Here is where you use the code at checkout:

Now do realize that once they achieve a high search engine result for you, you have to pay them every month. Therefore if you do not have the time to learn SEO just keep them running, if you do have the time to learn SEO, one strategy is to use RankPay now and then also work on the SEO yourself, it will get you started fast. Go to RankPay Here

With RankPay you only pay for results. Go to RankPay Here and use coupon code RANK at checkout for a $50 credit. Go to RankPay Here

Google Shared Pages for Free SEO

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I use most of the Google tools, in particular the webmaster tools. I switched recently to use the Google Reader for RSS subscription. After doing so I realized that Google provides a number of unique opportunities to syndicate your feed, items, and links. All of these are published at a google.com domain. What a great way to syndicate your content even further and hopefully gain some search engine optimization benefits along the way.

Here is what I found available and interesting.

First, Google creates a profile page for you. You can provide information about yourself and also provide links with the anchor text you choose. Take a look at my page on google, the Brian Longest’s Profile page, where you can write about yourself and provide links to your sites or any others.

Second, you probably already know that you can make folders and organize your RSS subscriptions. This is extremely helpful as you continue to follow and read more people. However, more importantly, did you know that by following the Manage Subscriptions link and going into the Folders and Tags tab you can make any of your folders public.

By making the folder public a page is created with a Google address having the posts of the RSS feeds you added to the folder. Also the name of the page will be the name you gave the folder. Take a look at this page which took on my folder name and therefore is entitled Make Money Online.

Third, in the Google Reader you have a folder for what Google calls Shared items. You can choose any blog post, yours or anothers, and mark it as a shared item. These items all end up on a unique page. Simply click the shared items folder to see what you have added. You will also notice a link provided to you which forwards to the shared items page. See my Shared Items Here. I chose to put those articles that are the most viewed, dugg, and sphinned on my site into this shared items folder. Another nice feature is the page also has your profile and your links.

A little known fact, is that you can add notes into the shared items. Essentially a blog post if you will, allowing text and links. Also very powerful.

Hopefully you will find this useful.