Marketing on the Web Google has just updated their guidelines for websites. Website designers and webmasters should review these guidelines to insure your sites follow best practices. Among the changes are new recommendations for mobile sites and using https (secure http). Google Webmasters Guidelines Bing's guidelines have not been updated, but can be found here.
MoreHTTPS Everywhere
Google has announced that https: (secure) connections are preferred and that sites using https: will enjoy a ranking advantage over https: (non-secure) sites. This video discusses some of the common pitfalls that occur when people switch.
MoreLocal Businesses Need a Google+ Local Page
As a part of your marketing strategy you need to have a Google local page. Google Local (formerly Google Places) is the web equivalent of the phone book. When Google translates a search as local in nature, these listings appear near the top of the search results. Local Listings are now part of Google Plus, enabling people to comment and vote on your business through their Google+ profiles. If you haven’t done so already, you’ll need to sign up for a personal Google+ account to create your...
MoreSEO Starter Guide by SEOMOZ
I previously posted links to Google's SEO Starter Guide in the 2008 and the update in 2010, but there have been no recent changes to Google's guide despite dramatic changes to ranking signals that occurred with the Panda and Penguin updates in 2011. SEOMOZ published this update to their SEO Starter Guide in May of 2012. It touches on optimizing for Google and Bing. -- Worth reading! > The Beginner's Guide to SEO by SEOMOZ
MoreGoogle SEO Starter Guide 2010
Google has just released a new SEO starter guide. The new guide is more complete, has more examples, and covers wider range of issues, including mobile content and images. I highly recommend that anyone who is launching or reworking a website review this document before you start. > Google SEO Starter Guide
MoreLink Building can be Detrimental to your Wallet
In a recent article in Inc Magazine, a on-line merchant of gift baskets discusses how a link building campaign cost him 4 million dollars. The loss comes both from a direct drop in traffic to his site and indirectly from the money that he had to spend on AdWords to bring traffic while his site was banned. While link building is an important part of any marketing effort, I would disqualify anyone who is sending bulk emails promoting this as a service. I feel that anyone doing link building in ...
MoreSaving Search Rank When Launching a New Website
On July 14, 2010, I will discuss how to maintain Pagerank when you update or launch a new website with the North Alabama Web Developers group. In this meet-up we’ll discuss Google webmaster tools, Google analytics, sitemaps, and using redirects to map content with the .htaccess file (emphasis will be on Apache/Linux hosting). Please visit the meet-up site for details and sign-up. https://www.meetup.com/web-99/calendar/13878846/ Slides from this discussion are here: Maintain Pagerank wh...
MoreLinking Google Analytics and AdWords Accounts
Google Analytics is updating their their system. To ensure AdWords continues to pass information to your Google Analytics account, a setting change may be needed. I have already taken care of this for my customers and in doing so found several cases where a change was required. I wanted to alert other readers that you should check your AdWords account to be sure the information is correct. For instructions see this Google Post Important change to AdWords/Analytics cost data importing T...
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