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VIDEO MARKETING TIPS
You Tube is owned and operated by Google and is the second largest search engine in the world. It gets over four billion video views every day. In fact many people that want the visual video experience use You Tube almost exclusively as their search engine of choice. Luckily Google Search also now integrates the best You Tube matches into it's general search presentations (both Chrome and Search). It will also begin integrating Google Plus public post content into Search as well, and Google Plus will also have it's own search engine.

Wow ... Google just keeps pumping out the products – so effectively they will have four search engines that also offer integration to a degree between them. This is one of the many reasons that You Tube is important for your web marketing efforts pertaining to your web site. You Tube is also a great viral social marketing tool as well. In a previous blog post we described to how best utilize video on and off your site (see Thinking About Video For Your Web Site?). Good tags on your You Tube videos and gooey links from content on your site to the videos with tags will ensure you get some help with your organic site placement as well as traffic to and from your site. I always tell clients that next to News Feeds ... You Tube is arguably the most powerful social marketing tool in your basket of options. While Google Plus will eventually be so integrated into all Google products (including Android devices) it will likely emerge as the King of social marketing ... for now You Tube is right up there with the best and I would argue more important for your businesses web site marketing presence than Facebook or Twitter.

Now You Tube isn't the only video show in town so when you post your videos to your channel make sure that you syndicate or post with You Tube's smaller competitors as well.They all have traffic and branded users or they wouldn't be alive for very long. Speaking of other channels, isn't neat the Smart TV's all include You Tube in their Smart hubs so the whole family can sit down together and watch funny videos on the big screen together without the use of a video switch. Yes you could have had your Superbowl open in the view window on a Smart hub while the game was playing and go over to You Tube to review the Madonna half time performance and all the neat ads over and over while the game continues.   

Here's your first big video tip for marketing virally – bigger is not better – keep them below two minutes in length whether they are promoted virally through video services like You Tube or simply just dropped into a player on your site. Here's another one – if your not a great actor the easiest way to make decent video clips is have an interviewer ask you the questions and respond naturally. You may have a few retakes but nothing close to memorizing lines. Anyone can make decent videos themselves with a high definition digital SLR or Flip style camera. The software in modern cameras makes it a breeze with some have direct interfaces to upload to You Tube.

Tip number three – have fun with it ... your viewers want to visualize what your referring to in your text so give them a little video clip every so often to show them what your talking about. It doesn't have to be professional but it helps if you keep a sense of humor when your doing it. Funny works and viewers will forgive you for anything if you make them laugh!

Using video for social marketing is cheap to do and to be honest consumes less time then blogging. Yes, do all those other social marketing channels as well in balance, but don't forget the videos.

WHO ARE GOOGLE QUALITY RATERS?
Google can use more than mathematical formula's called algorithms to decide on your collective web sites placement. Real human beings called Quality Raters can also have an effect on site ranking. A Quality Rater may review your site as a spot check or it may arise out of a consumer or competitor complaint.This has been going on to some degree since 2005 and you could think of Quality Raters as one big Focus Group. Apparently there are internal Google staffers that can directly affect your website and there are external contractors that are rating to adjust the overall viewer experience to ensure the best sites by algorithm adjustments

The external “Raters” are hired as contractors via outside companies, under job description's like Search Quality Judge and Search Engine Evaluator. Rumor has it that Google likes to have them on nine month contract durations to avoid any possibility on outside influence with a break of a number of months off between contracts. Webmasters may note if a Quality Rater has been one their site by the quality rater referral strings in a log.

So there are 4000 – 5000 of these external Raters out there – many university students that must pass a test and then they work under contract for a separate company that provides the service to Google in a particular format. The tests apparently are hard and get into spam identity and applying specific rules to various theoretical and real sites. The training period can exceed a month but the Raters only have contact with their contract company – not directly with Google. They work 10 – 20 hours per week and get paid in the $15 an hour range.

The results may help Google refine their algorithm and they can help sort out inconsistencies that may arise from algorithm changes. In other words it is a principle role to ensure the Google matches for queries that would also be the best matches that the average viewer could expect to see – quality control if you like. If the Rater has different results than another Rater for the same site situation they must reconcile the difference and work fast to do so since productivity measures are part of the deal. A Moderator supervises the process.

The moral of the story is provide the best looking , easy to navigate spam free site that someone searching for your keywords could land on and you're going to have happy Raters ... BUT REMEMBER from a practical point of view, you have to get found in the real world by searchers and that means reasonable keyword density in tags and site content. Obviously more content equals more capacity for keyword density without making the site spammy.

IS GOOGLE TOO POWERFUL?
Well Google just keeps rolling out the products and services. Google wants Near Field Communication chips supported in it's Android phones to use wireless payment systems at retail cashiers in conjunction with Google Wallet. This can all tie in with search to find the best bargains based on customer interest. Google has a partnership agreement with Master Card and one would assume negotiating with Visa. Google Wallet is direct threat to eBay's PayPal but that won't stop them from trying to dominate both online and smart device point of sale settlement systems.

Yes, Google wants to be your credit card and like everything Google does it will happen fast with great efficiency. Will this be good for consumers or bad? Depends how your look at it. Google would likely bring more security to the use of Near Fields Communications. It could create competition at the retail level by presenting best deal comparisons across retailers or inside store product/price comparisons including integration to skus and making it easy to flash your smart phone to pay as you walk out the door. It could eliminate product theft as basically everything a shopper has in possession at the cashier could be electronically accounted for and charged through the smart device. On the down side, think of the power of that information at all levels of retail. With that kind of information they could move to real time inventory ordering and replacement through their own warehousing and ultimately they might as well own the retailer if they are controlling all of the supporting systems.

Is Google really that ambitious? Where could this go? How big does one company need to be and how much information is safe with one source? Or do bright stars like Google have their time and eventually burn out under their own weight giving other companies with ideas the opportunity to seed and take hold?  Well I'm not sure ... some days I marvel at the innovation and convenience that Google consistently introduces to the marketplace on an ongoing basis ... and some days I wonder whether I will wake up one day with a Google chip planted in my body. People want convenience and thirst for increasing amounts of immediate information - but we have to ask ourselves ... at what expense do we achieve this? Is this technology progression enabling or ultimately disabling our freedom of choice that we take for granted in our daily lives? I don't have the answer but it is certainly something to think about, because it's an evolving process that increasingly affects all of us in some way or form.   

SAMSUNG GALAXY NEXUS 4G LTE
The Galaxy Nexus is available now. It is the first smart phone to run the Android Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0  OS platform which is the same software used on new Android Galaxy tablets. The device is impressive with 1.2 gigahertz dual core processor, 1 gigabyte ram, 32 gigabytes built in expandable storage , near field communications chip, a 4.65 inch touch screen and 1280 X 720 pixel resolution. It has a 1.3 megapixel camera out front and a 5 megapixel camera in back and can shoot 1080p video with an LED flash. It has a face pic unlock option which is cool and even uses it's own Ice Cream Sandwich custom font called Roboto. It has a very simple down to business understated look.

Ice Cream Sandwich OS is a ahead of the curve – so much so that the carriers in Canada have to catch up. While Bell offers the 4G LTE network in Toronto proper, it is only in process of rolling it out to other major centres. Although Rogers is committed to implementing the 4G LTE network at time of writing it has no 4G LTE network. For most Bell and Rogers customers your going to get the HSPA+ network only even though marketing seems to suggest the 4G network. Even more interesting Rogers cannot fully support Ice Cream Sandwich operating system on the network, so for now you won't be able to get the plan directly, guaranteed and supported by Rogers.

You can purchase the phone and buy the plan from a reseller but no guarantees on full operations from Rogers, as it hasn't been configured /certified to work 100% on the network.Yes we need some serious telecom competition in Canada. So for all of you 4G LTE buyers in Canada (Bell - Toronto exempted) your basically stuck on a side street driving your Ferrari hoping to get on the highway soon!

SMART PHONES - $300 MOBILE SITES
The open source Google Android operating system is leading the market. While IPhone has always been known as the applet king of smart phones the open source Android has caught up partially due to the fact that app developers can build apps quickly and get them approved and into the Android market very fast ... without the long lead times for approval that exist with IPhone apps. One could argue that IPhone apps are more thoroughly vetted for quality control. The counter argument is that Google just does things faster. Whatever the case, it is somewhat risker for developers of IPhone apps, because the lead time on approval is up to a year and lots of app developers after investing lots of time and dollars get refused. The open source Android developers know where they stand in a few weeks ... so it is enticing to focus on the market where the returns on investment come quicker and you can launch a new app and quickly move on to the next.

Keep in mind IPhone does not support Adobe Flash and lets face it many web sites and videos are using Flash. The answer for site owners is that you want to appeal to both operating platforms and there fore you should have a MOBILE site and the mobile site should not employ Flash. Objective with a mobile site is that it should be quick loading with condensed essential content only and built 240 pixels wide to fit most devices. Every web site owner in this day and age should have a MOBILE site and they are inexpensive – we custom build them for $300 per site. Call us if you don't have a mobile site attached to your main site and we will build one for you that is compatible with all mobile operating systems. 

BOATING GEORGIAN BAY DIRECTORY ACCOLADES
First Page SEO owns and operates a number of niche web directories. We build them as a sideline to our main web site development and search engine marketing services. One of our most popular directories also serves as as test platform site for seo innovation testing. BOATING GEORGIAN BAY was launched about one year ago and dominates the Georgian Bay cruising scene and Ontario yacht brokerage directory business.

In fact it has become the busiest Ontario boating site on the web peaking at more than 3,000 unique visitors per day. Even in winter off season the site can achieve more than 2,000 unique visitors per day attracting a boating audience from around the world. It usually places #1 for “Ontario yacht brokers” (index size 78,000 pages) on Google and it always places at the top for Georgian Bay boating and cruising keyword phrases.

Although the site was originally aimed at the cruising and boating fraternity, it gathers a wide audience interested in everything marine ... from cool boat accessories to the most extensive data base of marinas & diving wrecks on the Bay. The site draws traffic from around the world and employs all the most up to date marketing techniques of organic search engine optimization, social marketing and offsite backlink vote development. Within a few weeks of adding the Google Plus vote code to the site, it is showing more than 450 Google Plus votes ... making it the highest marine themed Google user endorsed site in Canada. Boating Georgian Bay is the perfect example of how quickly significant traffic can be built in short order to a niche themed website ... given the right web marketing and copious amounts of relevant shared content.  

GOOGLE PLUS GETS TRACTION
Google's Q3 financial statements showed 40 million Google Plus users. At 2011 year end it has over 150 million users in 27 countries. Google Plus has already surpassed Twitter in subscribers and is quickly closing in on Facebook. It's picking up new subscribers at a blazing pace of 2 million per day right now. Google + is now the hub of Google's social activity interface including Reader, Picassa, Gmail, You Tube and full integration into Android operating platforms for smart phones and tablets. We estimate Google + will overtake Facebook subscribers by August 2012. Not bad for a product that came out of beta this past spring. Don't get rid of your Facebook account though – it will survive in some form for many years, and you can sync Plus to Facebook so you only post once.

GOOGLE DOMINATES ONLINE ADVERTISING
Global internet ad expenditures continue to rise with Google Ad Words leading the pack. This year online advertising expenditures are predicted to be over 460 billion dollars. Downturns in the market (think Europe) are a particularly good time to expand market share and many online marketers are pursuing this strategy. North American expenditures are healthy and expected to be up 3.6% in 2012, however developing markets in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe could grow in the 7% –10% range leading the world.

Overall top ten online ad spenders are as follows:

1 - USA
2 - Japan
3 - China
4 - Germany
5 - UK
6 - Brazil
7 - France
8 - Australia
9 - Canada
10 - Italy

Paid search online ads (PPC) is the largest contributor to online advertising. Google has 85% of all online advertising. Microsoft, Yahoo & AOL combined is about 13% which has fallen dramatically from 33% in 2006 (Google has gained from 72% in 2006). Facebook is 3.1% of this market.

The biggest ad revenues behind web marketing are television and then newspapers, magazines, radio, cinema and outdoor advertising. Newspapers and magazines have been falling since 2007.

GOOGLE AD WORDS BILLING GLITCH
On the morning of December 8/2011 tons of advertisers received an email telling them their Google Ad Words had been shut down for non payment. In the Billing system consul the last payment charges were shown to come off December 6th however Google continued to remove payments from credit card accounts without accounting for them in their billing system ... and at the same time shutting down customer Ad Word accounts for non payment while they continued to collect against the customer credit card accounts.

Ad Word clients frantically called their bank credit card companies to see why they refused payment only to find that the payments were not refused and Google took the processed payment money from the customer bank account without reconciling in their own system that they were paid!  Scary stuff to say the least. There is a work around to get the Ad Words running again ... but as of this Blog entry on the afternoon of December 8th the accounting system is still broken. In addition to these problems, Google has sent some email notices of accounts overdue/failure to pay for campaigns that did not belong to the client. Looks like Google has some serious problems with their accounting software. Kind of unnerving for us considering they get paid $1000 – $1500 a day off of our credit card and they are not accounting for the payments. Luckily we saw the problem immediately and were able to reset our clients Ad Words campaigns and get them running again by 9 am a half hour after the meltdown. It will be interesting to see when and how Google accounts for the credit card payments they took without crediting the client campaigns.

FACEBOOK SHOPPING SURVEY
Billing Views a website run by Boreland House billing industry consultants did research by survey and determined that 87% of Facebook users would not be comfortable buying something through Facebook. 94% said they would not pay a bill through the social network. The general feelings of the participants were that privacy and security concerns were enough to scare them from doing any business transactions or purchases on Facebook.

FIRST PAGE SEO DROPS TOPSEOS.COM
We received our annual program renewal for the TopSeos.com directory service November 1 2011 for $3000.(same as we paid last year). The fee is to pay for having our seo service evaluated every month for search engine optimization capability, on both US standings and Canadian standings categories. We have been on this service for many years and they send us a trophy for Top Performer every year. We submitted information on our client site standings with client references and other information when requested and on our own accord. We thought it was worthy to challenge why we had not moved (up or down) from the 18th US position and 3rd Canadian position for the search engine optimization category in many months. We didn't get any clear answers on that, other than it was up to an evaluation team. So we checked with the client testimonials we had provided and we couldn't find anyone who had been contacted. Things just were not adding up for us. We were told that they would not honor the EXISTING invoice they had just sent for $3000.and to stay on the directory it would now cost $24,000. per year for the two categories – that was their new rate! There are some ethics at stake here so we told them we wouldn't be continuing with the service.

GOOGLE PLUS
Facebook is a major competitor for Google and the social networking tool has more than 750 million members making it second in visits behind Google. While it may be apples and oranges to some extent in terms of use and demographics visits online are branded customer visits and Google has taken note with massive advertising revenue at stake. Facebook's advertising model focuses on behavioral targeting of audiences through demographics like age, education, employment, location and gender.

 Google's new social network called Plus will compete on the same demographic attributes of Facebook. Google Plus will allow user profiles, personal inputs and connection with friends. The Google +1 button is the "like" broadcast button for users to endorse comments, websites, services or products. Google will go one step further presenting sites at a higher priority that best match the social network profile of the users based on past searches, user location, time spent on sites and other factors that Google refers to as "signals" that will affect the algorithm for Plus users. Site owners can now install the Google +1 button on their sites and users can essentially vote for the site.

Google Plus, although only in beta now with limited features, is a slick interface that promises to give Facebook a run for it's money with this new social networking tool fully integrated to Google's massive search index. Google Plus does everything Facebook does and more but Facebook has significant brand momentum on the social side of the business to overcome.

ADOBE DROPS FLASH SUPPORT FOR TV & MOBILE DEVICES
Adobe is dropping Flash TV and mobile device support while honoring current licenses. This will not affect web based flash on computers. Instead TV and mobile devices will be supported by Adobe AIR which takes SWF Flash content files and renders them to RIS files. For web programming the new HTML 5 essentially imbeds the Flash attributes imbedded in the programming. So not to worry  - life will go on ...this is just an update to modernize software and the attributes will still be there and your devices will still work.  

THINKING ABOUT VIDEO FOR YOUR WEBSITE?
There are a few things to think about when planning video for your website. There are essentially three ways to utilize video on your site. We recommend you use a combination of all three.

  1/ Onsite Player
For edited movies that have a professional flair to them that include full sound, pick a relevant page and install the video in a player window among your content as you would with adding a picture to the site. If you are building a new site reserve a standard spot for the player so you can change the video from time to time. Raw video's in a .movie file will likely be too large if they are over five minutes long so they may need to be converted to Flash. In any event try and keep your player movies under five minutes for both bandwidth/load considerations and so you don't bore or loose your audience.

  2/ Home Page Video Window On Site Header
Rather than just Flash pics consider using a video with very short clips without sound as an attractant for people to view when they land on your Home page. These short little clips stitched together and shown in Flash would typically be action orientated and the entire video should be made up of four or five clips totaling no more than a minute or so. They would simply roll over and replay. The objective is just to grab the user long enough to take a look so that they don't flee the site and establish an interest to look around further. A bit of a teaser I guess you could say.

  3/ Offsite Video Linked From Keywords To illustrate the context of your onsite text and to make the site more gooey and interesting for your viewers link keywords in your text to posted videos such as those that may be on your You Tube channel. Google owns You Tube and it indexes the tags associated with the videos and it makes the connection from your site keywords to the video resource. This is also a good seo practice. These videos can be very short – a minute or two  ... just enough to illustrate your point or they can be up to ten minutes if the topic is really interesting and you want to use it to educate the viewer. So you're not spending a fortune doing videos, pick up a Flip HD Camera for under $200 and you can plug the camera into your computer and edit and upload directly to You Tube. It's very easy to learn and you'll be making videos in less than half an hour once you get the hang of it.

  Resolution vs File Size: There is always a tradeoff between resolution and file size. The better the resolution quality the larger the file size. In the end you don't want Gigabyte plus movies playing on the web so generally regardless of what media the video was shot in, your likely to convert it to Adobe Flash for reasons of load speed.

  Video Formats For Web:
- Windows Media (.wmv) basic PC video file that comes for set up with Windows Media Player yielding reasonable quality and file size if shot in lower resolutions.
- Audio Video Interlaced (.avi) Microsofts original video format yields very large files that for the most part would be edited to another format.
- Apple Quick Time (.mov) files are big with high quality that work on Mac and PC's but likely would be converted to other formats for web applications.
- MPEG-4 (.mpg4) great compression and is becoming standard on video cameras ... the biggest market share in video formats for pro film makers and easy to share these videos.
- Flash Video (.flv) commonly used by video file sharing sites like YouTube that convert existing files to stream Flash ... Adobe Flash Player is standard on almost all computers and it is fast and can continue loading the movie is already underway without buffering ... most web videos are converted to flash for the benefits of the smaller file sizes.

First Page SEO can take your raw video footage and edit it and convert it to Flash for onsite playing or for any of the three video utilizations shown above. 

GOOGLE'S LATEST ALGORITHM UPDATE
Google's latest update rewards sites with constantly updated fresh content. Some are calling this update Fresh 1.0 and some Vince 3.0. It affects about 35% of searches with the objective of presenting more up to date relevant content. Date stamping new content may give the site an advantage but in all likelihood Google bot will have some kind of trigger going on when it recognizes a particular file has increased in size or has been updated with contextual fresh content.

Keep in mind that fresh content does not mean content feeds or scraped content from other sites ... which Google already penalizes as a result of the Panda update. Use original content and when something changes along the way, update that content. This will be especially useful for sites that are doing reviews, product intros and news repackaging. An on site blog built in standard PHP or HTML (not CMS) will benefit from this.

Some site owners are complaining that this update benefits large brands that have the resources to constantly update pages with new information. First Page SEO does offer a program called Content Builder for $40 per month to have ongoing keyword rich content added to your site every month.

GOOGLE CAN SPIDER & INDEX AJAX
Google bot now has the ability to spider AJAX/JS and index dynamic user comments that are made on third party social engines like Disqus, Intense Debate etc..

CANADIANS LOVE TO SHOP ONLINE
According to a recent IBM survey Canadian consumers are accepting new online shopping technologies ahead of most other countries. More than 2,000 Canadians were part of a survey of 30,000 consumers in 13 countries. Use of online technology increased by 160% last year - only second to the USA in uptake.. Those users that utilize two or more of: mobile devices, internet, store kiosks and digital TV shopping in Canada were double the global average of the 13 countries. Consumers are checking prices in stores with over 70% of final product selection in store being verified with smart phones and UPC tags. Canadian web traffic is set to quadruple from 2009 levels by 2014. Mobile internet access is estimated to go from 5 million to 14 million by 2015.

I.T.  LANDSCAPE LOOKING AHEAD
I often get asked questions about what will immerge technology wise on the horizon. The conversation often spins of from discussions regarding social media like Twitter , You Tube, Facebook or in years past Blogs, Social bookmarking etc. One thing is for sure, changes happen faster all the time and the objective should be to understand the big picture for transition rather than be reactive to every new technology or buzzword.

First of all here's what is not going away. GOOGLE. Google continues to maintain it's market share even post Bing/Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo and Google successfully fights competitors on all fronts including the Smartphone software market and social competitive sources like Facebook. Most folks don't realize the Google Android smart phone operating platform has greater market share than Apple's. Even Rim is rumored to be negotiating to move to that platform. Now Google owns Motorola Mobile so they have more control of the hardware side. The other Android hardware manufacturers are pleased with the Motorola acquisition as it adds momentum to all the Android driven brands  Google has worked it's way into every nook and cranny of modern communications so much so, that it's scary. What Facebook did to My Space ... Google Plus 1 will do to Facebook. Google has the by far the world's largest data base of organized information to draw from. Google continues to amaze with daily innovations like the recent Fetch Googlebot url submission, Android, Google Plus 1 and the 500+ search algorithm changes that have happened in the first half of 2011. When Google doesn't have the internal expertise, it buys the company that do. Whatever unfolds you can bet Google will have a role.  

So here's what is coming down the pipe. NETBOOKS and CLOUD computing will be pervasive. Hewlett Packard is already dropping production of smartphones and tablets and is moving to business hardware applications (netbooks). The interface to the clouds will be seamless and companies will flock in a massive way to low cost bare bones netbook hardware to dramatically lower their ongoing hardware cost and stop the technology hardware replacement cost cycle. Netbooks are portable, like smart phones and tablets ... but way more practical and cost will come down from the $350 range to the $150 range in a few short years. Money will shift from hardware cost to software as cloud computing takes hold. All your software, storage and applications will be up on vendor clouds, private clouds, government clouds and you will be able to connect seamlessly from anywhere. Hardware horsepower and hard drive storage will be a thing of the past as connectivity and access become the name of the game. The gadgets will be on the cloud not on the device.

Who will benefit from this? Everyone ... business will lower capital costs, consumers will lower hardware costs and gains in connectivity, software will get more competitive and many more choices, integration in operating systems and the overall playing field will be leveled where most of the developed world can participate in the information economy. Who will be big key players – Google of course, Microsoft is a software leader in cloud computing and Cisco has the connectivity or wires side of the business well in well in hand.

BACKLINKS
Most of you will know that one way (not reciprocated) anchor text based backlinks are votes for your site and make up a large part of the Google algorithm (approx. 25%). Of course to benefit your site the backlink vote must come from a site that matches your theme. Not all backlinks are alike – some have higher Page Rank than others which essentially means they are stronger votes because they have more valid backlink votes pointing at their site.

Hopefully you all know by now to stay away from the offshore junk link building and link triad or link farming services that create junk links that hurt your site rather than help it. Traditionally in the old days site owners built their backlinks from directories – preferably DMOZ style directories or niche directories that placed well that matched your site theme. For serious marketers a powerful backlink directory vote to help your sites organic position is often more important than the listing on the directory thrown in there with all the other competing businesses. Years ago we used to do backlink directory studies so we could recommend to our clients which directories are most cost effective and place the best. Now we just recommend they choose the top few niche directories for their own short tail broad themed keyword searches. Directories have gotten expensive – many used to be free but they are hard to come by now. We still offer high PR directory based backlink programs but rarely use them as the shift is over to viral link building via news and social. When we do use a directory link program we use unique anchor text for each directory and we submit no more than five directories per week. Google is is very slow to absorb directory backlinks and the trust level is lower because anybody can buy a directory link and the backlink votes are not necessarily the natural votes that Google is looking for. Sometimes Google knows bought links– sometimes it doesn't.  

Google absorbs backlinks from news readily and by syndicating specially formatted releases through many news services the process becomes viral. The same with social bookmarking ... but I find news to be more effective in general than social. By example Twitter backlinks have so low PR that they are not even taken into account at this stage. When we syndicate news we use 45 different news services and each release must pass through a human editor. In our organization it is one persons full time job just to write and syndicate news and social. We also submit to article engines. In the end the themed release ends up in the search engine index and search news sites pointing back at the customer site offering a low cost solution to creating one way themed anchor text based backlinks – usually less than $5 per backlink. Media reads are the sweet bonus to the news backlink strategy and every release gets at least 25,000 media reads. Call us for more information on backlink programs as we have the practical experience to know what works and what does not.     

MEASURING THE VALUE OF FACEBOOK
It is human nature to be interested in exciting new leading edge mediums rather than the fundamentals. Sometimes you must consciously resist those impulses with the sober reasoning that you can spend a lot of time social marketing without getting back any tangible results. Social media can be very worthwhile, but you need to have it in perspective. You need a realistic approach to the targeting of content and determining the value of the investment. Facebook is one of those edgy mediums where people tend to accept the worth of the exercise at face value - rather than evaluating the effort for what it really brings to your business. It's the "everyone else is doing it and talking about it" ... so I should be doing it syndrome.

The most common mistakes in using Facebook as a marketing tool is the avoidance of maintaining a websites content for organic search by being sidetracked ... and the failure to measure traffic from Facebook to the website. Users of Facebook commonly get sidetracked by building fan bases for the heck of it and not paying attention to the corresponding action or lack of action coming back to the main site. Even on Facebook you need to take into consideration the quality of the fan base you are building and their relationship to your web site and the products and services you are offering. Shaking up the bee hive doesn't usually translate to more honey.

Your fan engagement rate is critical to your Facebook strategy. Divide your fan base by comments and look at the percent that are actually engaging with your company. It is probably a fraction of a percent. It needs to be more than a percent to have your time and resources spent in relation to other web marketing things you could be doing. Better to have fewer fans making more positive comments than a lot of fans not doing much. If you want to convert fans you have to feed them the content that will interest them and lead them to your website. Basically it's the quality of fans not the quantity - and quality means a match for your products and services that at least stands a chance of conversion from promotions and special offers to customer. Don't waste your time just building fans for the sake of numbers ... focus on driving them to your website with information that is relevant to your business that may trigger further investigation of your offering.

THINK LIKE GOOGLE
After the Panda or Farm algorithm update there are a lot of folks sitting around scratching their heads as to what exactly happened. To be correct it is still happening because Google continues to tweak the algorithm every week in their quest for the best quality sites to be dominate the top of the search placements.

Think about your site in context to these questions:

• Would viewers appreciate the quality of the content on this site?
• Does the content offer specific helpful information ?
• Is this a site someone would bookmark to revisit?
• Is this a site with too many ads junking up the content?
• Would you recognize the site as an authority source for information related to the site theme?
• Is the content edited well and does it make sense?
• Are there pros and cons discussed in the content ...is it a balanced viewpoint?
• Is the content original and not scrapped from other sites?
• Is there duplicate or redundant copy on the site?
• Are there spelling mistakes in the content?
• Are the topics of genuine interest to the site viewers?

GOOGLE CHIEF ENGINEER QUIZZED ON TWITTER
In a recent FAQ video conference session Google's very knowledgeable algorithm guru Matt Cutts set the record straight on how Tweeting can benefit seo organic placement. Basically he related that the benefit would come to the site if someone reading the Tweet was interested in the site/topic and placed a backlink from their own site to the site referenced in the Tweet. Of course the site vote backlink would also have to have some kind of theme match - so the link would need some relevant anchor text to go with it. In other words there is no direct algorithmic connection from Twitter to your site.

So this is all well and good but ladies and gentlemen I would make the case that this is pretty far removed as a link strategy and although there is nothing wrong with Tweeting, the methodology would be painful as a way to help your organic search position. Reality is, you have to have other reasons to Tweet because it is not a terribly effective way to market your site organically at this juncture in time. We have been saying this all along, so it is nice that Google has stated the affects of Tweets on seo. Twitter is for social networking and it is not a seo tool for direct organic placement improvement. It is clear that there are more effective, less time consuming ways to build your backlinks than Tweeting because there is no direct connection from the Tweet from an organic marketing perspective to your site. It is strictly a case of human connection i.e. I read your Tweet and liked your info and I'll give you a link from my site to show others.

Without question Twitter is addictive and I love to Tweet on some of our feeds myself - so have fun and use your Twitter site feed to build general interest to the page ... but don't expect too much in placement improvements from Twitter or you will be disappointed. Please read our previous blog posts for more information on Twitter.

GOOGLE & BING WILL TIGHTEN UP ON ADVERTISING SITES
Many web site owners are still reeling over the affects of the Google so called "farm" or "panda" update. The farm update is about content. Sites that used scraped content from other sites, duplicate content feeds, poorly written content, shallow content or any content not relevant to the site theme got whacked. It is estimated that this update caused a billion dollar shift in revenues for companies marketing on the web. For every site that lost position someone else gained it. So get ready for the next phase.

Bing has recently filed patents that describe their methodology for weeding out sites that are really just about advertising. The patent details a sophisticated way for Bing to distinguish ads from other graphics. Google will be heading in the same direction. It seems hypocritical given the success of Google AdWords, but the search engines will be trying to screen out and punish sites whose sole purpose is to create advertising revenue rather than quality information for the user visiting the site. By identifying and separating those sites with over use of too many ads on their site relative to content, Google and Bing apparently will reward themselves with better quality sites that place and a more useful experience for the site visitor. It’s all about quality.

Granted there are many sites that wouldn't exist without advertising sponsorship. This isn't about wiping them all out, but rather identifying those whose main purpose is to generate revenue rather than provide relevant content for a given keyword search. So what is the answer? Keep your advertising and ad graphics to a reasonable level. Don't line the site with nothing but ads. Offset the ad volume with plenty of good relevant content - and we mean original well written quality topical content ... or you will subject yourself to the affects of the last "panda" update. Site owners increasingly need to be thinking about their site from a user perspective rather than just about what they can sell. I'm guessing at some point Google will be able to identify brand logos and also ensure that sites that show separate content but perhaps are really the same brand using the same brand logo graphics will not be able to continue to have the opportunity to list both sites, as if they were independent of each other.

IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION DIFFERENT THAN SOCIAL MARKETING?
Most seo firms have incorporated many aspects of social marketing into their standard optimization programs. First Page SEO™ by example has social article syndication and link building imbedded in our Yearly Search Engine Management Service.

The issue really isn't whether seo and social are separate (because they are not typically) ... the definition really comes down to onsite seo marketing vs offsite seo marketing. Social marketing fits into the offsite seo marketing category and would include examples like offsite blogs (for backlinks), viral backlink development, news syndication, social article syndication, forums, content feeds like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, offsite video feeds like You Tube, opt in email programs etc. Social marketing is far more than Twitter & Facebook. Onsite marketing elements are things like tags, site content, onsite blogs (for content), the level of site gooeyness with external links, onsite video, XML feeds, keyword density, theme, trust etc.

So the answer is ... social marketing is not mutually exclusive from seo work - it depends how the seo provider is bundling onsite and offsite services. Social, onsite seo, offsite seo, it doesn't really matter - it's all web marketing and the main thing is your seo provider may provide fully bundled options or unbundled program elements ... but almost every search engine optimization firm should be capable of providing all web marketing services. The situation the client should be concerned with really isn't so much of service definition, but rather the cost, prioritization of services and results driven capability of the seo firm.

GOOGLE FLOATS MAJOR ALGORITHM CHANGE
Just as Matt Cutts "Google Guy" had warned Google rolled out a major algo change that has affected the ranking on more than 11% of all web sites in the Google index, The change was aimed at punishing sites that were over using content from other sites. It also rewards sites that have played it straight and have not stolen content from other sites or taped into content feeds. This is referred to as "content farming" or "scraping". Many well known major brand players were affected with this recent change. A typical first page site with low quality scrapped content might find itself back five to seven pages from it's previous position. There are a lot of online product and service commerce sites where the web masters or their web marketing companies are ready to jump off the roof. Google has declared war on spamming sites that just pipe in content feed and duplicate content rather than writing relevant original text.

First Page SEO's site was unaffected and we do not employ content farming on any or our site builds, although we do see sites all the time that come in for search engine optimization that have employed this tactic. One of our jobs to correct scraped content sites is to remove the offending content and duplicate content from the site - if the customer will allow us to. Sometimes it's hard to identify scraped content and so when we optimize a site in the customer interview we inquire as to whether the site owner has been using any data feeds to supplement content. So Google just put a whole pile of companies out of business that make their living content farming and selling the same information over and over to sites that carry the same theme ... and rightfully so.

Once again First Page SEO™ is ahead of the game and has come through this major change in great shape. There is a simple morality to web site building and marketing. If you take the easy route and copy content, tags, links and buy offshore low quality junk link and content services your going to pay at some point. Most people know when they are lazy and cheating and this applies to web marketing as well. If you work hard to present a nice site with original content that viewers are going to find helpful, up to date and interesting - then you can't go wrong with Google.

TWITTER REALITY CHECK
Twitter is a great communication tool for group collaboration. Witness the political shifts in north Africa and how it helped link like minded people to organize and rise up against ruthless dictators. We are still getting tons of calls from customers caught up in the Twitter and broader social network frenzy that believe it will provide miraculous results for their site marketing.

For $60 we will install a custom Twitter feed on your site that will match your site. We have installed Twitter feeds on dozens of sites over the last year and we have Twitter feeds on several of our own non seo sites that we tweet to daily and monitor carefully for results. We would happily take your money to manage all aspects of your social marketing but we couldn't do it with a straight face without positioning the worth of the exercise beforehand. We don't have a Twitter on our main site www.first-page-seo.com. Competing for search engine marketing biz online is the toughest gig in town and we come across clearly as #1 in Ontario ... and if it was really useful believe me we'd be tweeting our heads off. Why not? Because it's not worth the effort at this stage to market your business this way. It just isn't effective enough at this point and we will shout it from the mountaintops when it is.

Here's the straight goods on Twitter from a marketing perspective. Twitter may ad some interest to your site but it will not have any measurable affect on your organic site placement. Tweets have been indexed by Google for quite some time, however none of them see the light of day on search. Check it out for yourself. Do a search on "Ontario resorts" and you are searching an index of approx. 4.8 million pages. You will not find a single Twitter post in the first 50 pages.

Ok so what about backlinks? Not very effective there either. If you are running an existing Twitter feed now and you tweet with the occasional backlink to you site (or even daily) and you check your backlinks with link popularity software you will see very few backlinks are from Twitter. As a matter of fact in most cases even if you are tweeting daily and you have thousands of backlinks you will not see any from Twitter.

So why is this? Just because Google indexes Twitter posts does not mean they will have the desired affect or any effect on your organic position. Fact is Twitter posts are to shallow to have any search prowess in any competitive keyword search and there is not enough context in a tweet to create a backlink that would establish anything over a PR 0 or PR 1.

Now this could change in the future if Google did major algorithm changes to treat Twitter differently than other content and give it a boost even given a tweets lack of content and context. However this would be a major shift in direction because it would in fact entail special treatment for Twitter and that means running parallel algorithms integrated downstream - which is possible but easier said than done. More likely that the Google search function would include a separate search request for Twitter similar to what it does with images and video ( I know your going to say Google is starting to integrate video into search ... and it is, if the video is optimized and only on a small scale for long tail searches).

What you will see creeping up into the search placement listings is syndicated news. On this same search for "Ontario resorts" two of the top 10 positions were occupied by news sources. And guess what? ... news is trusted by Google and creates viral backlinks when syndicated properly.

So to set the record straight we are not against social media or Twitter per say, but there are more effective and easier ways to influence content, back links and ultimately your site position than with Twitter, Twitter has an obvious use in specific group communications but most Tweets are like background noise. Don't get mislead and focus too much of your resources on social with Twitter, You Tube or Facebook. You'd be better off bookmarking social article releases in terms of backlink results to your site. How do we know? - we live and breath this stuff and we've tested it over and over on many sites.

If you want more details on social marketing including the benefits of onsite vs offsite video, Facebook strategies, link strategies or anything web marketing related give us a call and we will give you the straight goods and help you set priorities for what will give you the best results for dollars spent.

SURVEY SAYS
A recent report from respected ForeSee Results shows that when it comes to communicating with a company businesses favor promotional emails over social marketing. The conclusion is, traditional marketing provides a better return on investment for retailers than social media and that social media interactions are the main influence for only 5% of visitors to a web site. More traditional marketing methods like promotional emails resulted in 19% advertising influence.

Here is a summary of consumer advertising influence findings:

Brand familiarity 38%
Promotional emails 19%
Search engine placement results 8%
TV, Newspaper, Radio & Magazine 8%
Word of mouth 8%
Internet advertising 7%
Social networks 5%
Blogs & discussion forums 3%
Shopping comparison web sites 2%
Product review web sites 2%


Note: web marketing collectively rolled up without social media is 41%. In some markets though like hospitality marketing web marketing can be as high as 80%.

When it comes to communicating with a company consumer preference is:

Promotional emails 64%
Postal mail 25%
Companies web site 21%
TV 11%
Don’t want communications 10%
Social media web sites (Facebook, Twitter, You Tube) 8%
Mobile phone alerts 5%
Radio 3%
Other 2%

Traditional web marketing techniques like promotional emails influence not only more traffic but higher quality traffic. The main lesson that comes out of this survey is that while social media is important the “buzz” doesn’t deliver the results of traditional methods and therefore online retailers should not put ALL their eggs into the basket of social media investments because it simply won’t deliver the results on it’s own. We run into customers all the time that have been mislead by the buzz about Twitter, Facebook, & You Tube ... and are ready to abandon all but social marketing not realizing this would be the kiss of death for their business. By all means jump on board with social marketing but keep it in perspective as it relates to budget and resources.

SERVER INTERRUPTIONS
Your server host service should never be down. A search engine bot will forgive you once, but most search engines will punish the site from a trust perspective (paid inclusion excepted) if it is not available to be spidered more than once over a period of several weeks. Google will spider at least part of your site almost every single 24 hour period. Don’t assume that you know that your server is up and running 24/7 as overloaded servers typically have small outages amounting to mille seconds that go unnoticed - unless you are monitoring with software. In fact it is a good idea for any site owner to monitor server uptime. Free services like InternetSeer and ServiceUpTime will send you an email when your site is down and another when it is back up. If your site is going up and down every few days even for a second ... odds are not in your favor and your site will be punished when Google happens to find it down a few times.

Overloaded servers typically have problems around 2 pm when peak business bandwidth is running. Server maintenance outages are usually at night or on Sundays. However, there is really no excuse to have the server down and your site unavailable to search engines or site viewers. When we optimize sites as a part of the analysis, we look for leading indicators of unstable servers by pinging the server multiple times with equal sized info packets. If there is packet loss or wide swings in processing speed, it is an indicator of server loading and something to be wary of. There is no sense in properly search engine optimizing a web site if the server host is up and down like a yo-yo. The site will not place well regardless of how well the optimization was done.

There are times when a site must be down. Such as while a site is being legally contested. In unavoidable instances like this you should be using a 503 HTTP service unavailable result code instead of having a 404 Not Found or 200 OK status code show up. It allows site owners to provide a time when it is expected the site will be back up and running again and it can specify to the bot when to crawl the site again with the optional Retry After header. It is also a better solution than showing a site under construction. If the server is to be down for a planned outage then the domain should be available with a 503 service code on another server or better yet repoint the domain to a more reliable server host.

HOW GOOGLE IS GOING TO FIGHT SPAM SITES IN 2011
This is from the Google blog:
January brought a spate of stories about Google's search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. The short answer is that according to the evaluation metrics that we've refined over more than a decade, Google's search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness. Today, English-language spam in Google's results is less than half what it was five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English. However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we've already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality.

Just as a reminder, webspam is junk you see in search results when websites try to cheat their way into higher positions in search results or otherwise violate search engine quality guidelines. A decade ago, the spam situation was so bad that search engines would regularly return off-topic webspam for many different searches. For the most part, Google has successfully beaten back that type of "pure webspam" - even while some spammers resort to sneakier or even illegal tactics such as hacking websites.

As we've increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we've naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words-the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments. We've also radically improved our ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content. We'll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.

As "pure webspam" has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to "content farms," which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. We take pride in Google search and strive to make each and every search perfect. The fact is that we’re not perfect, and combined with users' skyrocketing expectations of Google, these imperfections get magnified in perception. However, we can and should do better.

One misconception that we've seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn't take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. To be crystal clear:

Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google;

Displaying Google ads does not help a site's rankings in Google; and

Buying Google ads does not increase a site's rankings in Google’s search results.

These principles have always applied, but it’s important to affirm they still hold true.

People care enough about Google to tell us—sometimes passionately-what they want to see improved. We deeply appreciate this feedback. Combined with our own scientific evaluations, user feedback allows us to explore every opportunity for possible improvements. Please tell us how we can do a better job, and we’ll continue to work towards a better Google.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer
"As pure webspam has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content...

We hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content."

"One misconception that we've seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn't take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. To be crystal clear: Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google;

Displaying Google ads does not help a site's rankings in Google; and

Buying Google ads does not increase a site's rankings in Google's search results."

Many spammers clone the content of websites to get high rankings.
Matt Cuts of Google says:

"I've been tracking how often this happens over the last month. It's gotten much, much better, and one additional algorithmic change coming soon should help even more. I'm not saying that a clone will never be listed above SO, but it definitely happens less often compared to a several weeks ago."

As long as your website has good content and good backlinks, Google will give it high rankings in the search results. You should not try to fool Google with scraped content from other sources.

TWITTER EVOLVES WITH PROMOTION OPTIONS
Twitter has three main means of paid promotion that go beyond the standard practice of setting up a Twitter feed and Tweeting on topics of interest. Although Twitter may not be the right demographic for some businesses no one can deny that it is gaining in popularity as one of the more successful social marketing tools. Just like blogs, they are only useful when there is an audience. Audiences are build on interesting subject matter and thoughtful relevant sharing of information. It also helps if your subject matter is topical and hot from a news perspective. Google has indexed Tweets for some time now. However you will never see a Tweet show up anywhere near the top of any search query. The Tweets are simply to content shallow. Matt Cutts (Google Guy) recently announced that Google may start looking at the quality of Tweets and the history of the generator of Tweets on a topic and determine whether the source is spammy or may be deserving of some kind of trigger factor that may benefit the source reference web site. No one knows yet what the strength that factor might be, but it is likely to be small - at least in comparison to backlink votes. It will also likely be dependent on four factors.

1. The quality of the site resource site referenced in the Tweet
2. The history of the Tweeter
3. The topical interest of the Tweet content
4. The volume of followers of the Tweet

Anyways if you think it's time for paid Twitter promotion here are your options.

Promoted Tweets - Promoted Tweets are regular Tweets that are amplified to a broader audience. This enables you to speak to users that don’t currently follow your account. Payment is charged onCost-per-Engagement (CPE) basis, so you only pay when a user Retweets, replies to, clicks on or favorites your Promoted Tweet.

Promoted Trends - Promoted Trends is the exclusive opportunity to feature a Trend related to your business at the top of this Trends list. When a user clicks on the Trend, they are taken to the conversation for that trend – with your Promoted Tweets pegged to the top of the timeline.

Promoted Accounts - Promoted Accounts are built to turbocharge your ability to gain new followers on Twitter. Part of Who to Follow, Twitter's account recommendation engine, Promoted Accounts highlight your account to users most likely to find it interesting.

First Page SEO™ are experts in social marketing and can help you execute a social marketing strategy that will be effective in bringing you traffic. You can avoid wasting time and money pursuing hit and miss low return methods typical of those that are just social market trend followers without the overall marketing perspective and testing experience.

2010 HOLIDAY SHOPPING REPORT SHOWS INCREASED ONLINE AD BUDGETS & REVENUE
The Kenshoo Online Holiday Shopping Report is a barometer for online shopping trends. Kenshoo key findings are an increase of 31% year over year in search advertising budgets for the holiday season as well a 83% increase in online shopping transactions and a 60% increase in online sales revenue.

The key trends are as follows:

• Holiday shopping is starting earlier
• Online shoppers are more responsive to paid search advertising
• Consumers are buying more often and in smaller purchase bundles
• Paid search advertisers like Google Ad Words have increased effectiveness
• Competition for retailers peaks right after the US Thanksgiving

GOOGLE PLACES DROPS TRIP ADVISOR REVIEWS
If you are a hospitality operator Trip Advisor may have been a sore point in that anyone can post comments good or bad to the online reviews. Competitors could post negative comments against each other - and properties could post positive reviews on themselves. Dropping Trip Advisor has shifted placement for Google Places results. For many hospitality properties the majority of their reviews comes from Trip Advisor. Is this a temporary dispute between Trip Advisor & Google or is Google cleaning house of property reviews that are all to easy to manipulate. This comes at a time when Google is putting more emphasis on local search. You will see Google Places more integrated with Google search and also being utilized for much larger geographic catchment areas E.G. Provincial or State wide qualified.

GOOGLE INSTANT
Google is now displaying search query keyword phrase results while the user is in the process of completing the search wording input. For example when you enter the keyword "boats f" - Google would display "boats for sale" first - preemptively because it believes that is the most likely user query. Google Instant will not display the actual search result listings for "boat f" - you must click the search button to bring up the actual listings from the preemptive choices Google presents. Or you can choose exactly what you keyed in... in this case "boat f".

Most users will begin choosing the most relevant phrase for their search that Google presents to save the time in typing. That means popular search terms will get more traffic than those of a more specific refined search. It therefore stands to reason that sites should include optimization for the most popular keyword phrases Google is suggesting using Google Instant. Google Instant is not an algorithm change it is just a display change. Google Chrome introduced some time ago, the notion that the popularity of the site for specific phrases in search positioning is an algorithm factor based on traffic to the site for those specific searches. This has since been integrated into the algorithm for Google Search.

OPTIMIZING ON SITE VIDEO
Google optimization of on site video is a service that First Page SEO™ provides that is separate from our standard optimization services. With the increased use of video on web sites it is important that Google can understand the content of your video. We do this utilizing a video sitemap which can be up to 50,000 video urls in the map but no larger than 10MB total. The cost for optimizing a video is $299 cdn. See our Optimization Programs for more details.

YAHOO & BING/MSN MARRIAGE
Beginning September 2010 Yahoo search results will be powered by Microsoft's Bing search. Combined the Yahoo & Bing market share will about 25%. Google of course is not standing still and is further entrenching it's Caffeine update and is focusing on maintaining it's 67% market share. As you may have noticed in the last number of months Google updates it's index very quickly capturing new site changes daily and even new domains can place in a matter of weeks as opposed to the year it used to take for new sites to gain Google trust.

But you need to pay attention to Bing because technically it is a very good search engine with many interesting features and collectively Bing & Yahoo will account for 5 billion searches per month. Basically Bing and Google are following similar algorithm attributes with the weighting slightly different so optimizing your site is still essentially the same process. Very soon Yahoo's PPC model will also switch over to the MSN keyword bidding model. Not sure if that is a good model. MSN's PPC interface is not nearly as friendly or effective as Google's AdWord interface but you can bet that MSN wants to squeeze more revenue than the current Yahoo model can provide.

DEMOGRAPHICS MATTER

• 16% of North American households live in households with at least three generations under one roof
• One in five adults aged 25 to 34 and over 65 lives in a multigenerational household so the elderly and young adults are especially influenced by unique needs
• Greatest Generation (65+) is value orientated and finds free-bees and discounts attractive and motivating
• Boomers (45 - 63) are spenders and find cash back savings programs motivating within reason of their spending ability
• Generation X (33 - 44) are time challenged so packages motivate them
• Millenials (15 - 32) are connected and are visual so internet and portable device marketing are critical ... this demographic spends more time on the web than watching tv and many don't even own a tv

TWITTER MISDIRECTED
We have already discussed in a previous post that at this stage Twitter doesn't do a whole lot for you from a seo perspective - yet... and the posts are indexed but not showing up on Google search for the most part. While Twitter can be fun to use as a general live time communication tool (if you have time) don't shift too much of your time from site content building to Twitter content building as you'll be getting poor value for your efforts.

Recently clients have been asking us to ad Twitter feeds (widgets) to their sites to match the look of their sites. This can be done for $60 and it ads an interesting dimension to the site. (see www.boatinggeorgianbay.com)

Last but not least... remember just because it's on Twitter does not make the Tweet true. Recently thousands of Tweets weighed in on use of antibiotics and as a result many readers thought the advice to be true and got themselves into a problem medically. Think of Twitter as a fun groupware communications product and not a tool to do valid research.

GOOGLE PAGE LOAD SPEED
Many of you may now know that page load speed was introduced to the Google algorithm with the rollout of Google's Caffeine release. So it looks like the factor is minor in terms of ranking affect as I still see plenty of sites that haven't moved but have god awful page load speeds. Recently Google has been talking about crawling slow loading sites less deeply and less often and it is likely to increase the algorithm affect to push down slow loading sites in the rankings. Google wants to put forward not only the best search match, but the best quality viewing experience for the user as well. Likewise load speed could also be an issue with Google AdWords PPC in terms of impressions. If faster loading sites perform better for the viewer than load speed will soon be part of the equation of bid price, ad design and budget.

A word to the wise - eliminate or crunch down those massive graphics that wreak havoc on your load speed and look for a host service that has stable fast servers that are not overloaded with sites. In our case we own our servers just for our First Page SEO™ client sites and we make sure the servers are lightly loaded and built robust - to be fast. We use an outboard service with a proven track record to maintain and manage our hosts 24/7. We tried buying space over the years with a number of different companies and they all let us down sooner or later so we took control of the situation ourselves years ago. We have many sites that come in for work that are on unstable host services and the bottom line is if your server is up and down like a yo-yo... even the best seo work will not be able to help the site after Google spiders it and finds it down a few times.

BUYER BEWARE
This is the kind of thing I get five times a day (shown below). Even more come directly from offshore sources. Many these days want to make a buck without doing the work or even understanding the subject matter. As a consumer purchasing web or seo services you should be aware that there are thousands of web and seo consultants running around who have no stake or knowledge in the business and simply resell the service. So where does the buck stop? 99% of the time the services are executed in third world environments like India, Pakistan, China etc. From there the client is another intermediate company who knows little about web design or search engine optimization and most certainly does not know your business. Then a North American based company then resells the service to other smaller companies who even know less about what they are doing... and they in turn, resell to the end consumer.

Of course at every stage there is mark ups but they usually are still able to offer these services at low prices because there is no value added up through the feeding chain. As long as the end seller can generate an invoice and call themselves a consultant that's all they need to know to make money. The offshore companies that generate the work get paid next to nothing ... but something is better than nothing. Of course the quality of the end product or service is very low by the time it slides through many hands and most border on outright fraud.

My argument is not that we should necessarily be protecting North American jobs but rather that the consumer should be aware that when you are not dealing with someone who really knows the trade things get watered down and quality tanks. I guess my other concern would be, as a society you cannot go on forever repackaging services with no value added and expect to survive over the long run. Eventually what goes round comes around. Search engine marketing practitioners and web site service providers should learn their trade. Buyer beware.

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TWITTER & SEO
So you're bombarded with Twitter news and your getting the feeling that your web site marketing efforts may be left behind if you don't jump on board with Twitter. Not so fast! While Twitter has some value as a social communications tool - for those that have time on their hands and for those that may use it for legitimate business purposes as a substitute for group ware ... for most businesses using Twitter as a web marketing tool it doesn't do much for you, given the time invested. For many businesses Twitter doesn't fit their demographic either.

So what is Twitters value from a search engine optimization objective? Well there are a few possibilities. One is if your business is somehow "hot news" for some reason you can spread the word in a hurry and pipe that traffic to your web site for more details. This in theory would benefit the site with the traffic gains and associated bump consistent with the recent Google Caffeine algorithm changes. But a bit of a long shot for most companies. Like all social media if a high quality topical tweet leads them via a link to your site then it's a backlink vote. But tweeting is a lot of time for a few backlinks and there's easier ways through media to achieve viral one way anchor text based backlinks with spending half your life thumbing your way along Twitter. And to top it off there is no evidence of the PR weight of the backlink. In my opinion Twitter is not an efficient tool to market most business sites at this point in time.

So how does Google evaluate Tweets from a Page Rank perspective? Well first of all Google only recently began indexing Tweets and presenting them in search. And ask yourself at this juncture how often have you seen Tweets as top placing search listings for anything business related? You see lots of PR and lots of Forum postings but very few, if any, Tweets. So Google assigns Tweets a reputation rank which is based on the importance of the topic and the number of followers on the Tweet. In this way Google is looking to post real time results of important topics that the Twitter masses are following. In addition the #hashtags attached to the Twitter comments show up when other users click the #hashtag keyword elsewhere on the page. Over use of the hashtag is considered spam. So Google uses Tweet volume, topic and hashtags as a way of sorting out Tweets with high interest value vs low quality Tweets.

So if these Tweets are hot news how long do they stay up? Not long... that's the nature of news.
Do they place? Not often.
Is there an important role for promoting your web site? Not really.
Is it efficient and an effective way to build backlink votes? No.
Is it an effective way to build site traffic. Yes if you are a celebrity or just invented a cure for baldness ... but the answer is no for the average business site with nothing earth shattering going on.

My advice - don't get caught up with the hype and unless your sitting around watching grass grow ... focus on your site content. Maybe there will be a day where Twitter has a direct measurable seo benefit that will warrant inordinate amounts of your time and attention but that's not now.

FLATTERY WILL GET YOU KNOW WHERE
For many years we have had other companies trying to pretend they are First Page SEO™ - so that when customers search on First Page SEO they see their sites too. This is because we have high brand awareness throughout North America and we have a lot of people searching on our name to find us. Of course we show up at the top of the listings for our own name just as we show up at the top of search for search engine optimization phrases across the board. It goes without saying that our business brand is registered and we go back to the days when web sites were first emerging in the public domain

Here's a couple new ones that we recently came across that are hoping to convince First Page SEO™ prospects that they are one and the same. Now you don't have to look very hard at these sites to see that they don't know what they're doing - and of course they don't show up organically on their own for any seo related searches. So they are kind of an annoyance more than anything from a competition perspective ... but still we must protect our intellectual property and our brand, so off to the lawyers it goes. We had one guy last year that copied our web site word for word thinking he could duplicate our placement success. He completely duplicated the site and slapped his own logo on it. Needless to say he still wasn't able to place the site. These kind of copycats are thinking in very simplistic terms and there are many factors at play besides content.

HERE ARE THE TWO LATEST IMPOSTORS. They are not able to place their own sites so they are satisfied trying to trick the unsuspecting using our good name. It's sad when you think about it. Buyer beware.

Dreiden SEO www.torontoseoconsultant.com
First Page Search Engine Optimization http://f1rstpageseo.com

GOOGLE CAFFEINE LIVE
Google's caffeine algorithm changes are now imbedded in the browser. Some of these changes may sound familiar to Google Chrome followers:

• traffic matters ... Google has built a traffic popularity measurement into the algorithm - more popular sites get rewarded
• where and how long browsers spend their time is a factor ... if a high volume of surfers keyword search and choose specific pages and spend time on those pages Google tracks these patterns and elevates the page position based on keyword phrase matches for the page
• page load speed is now a factor ... Google wants to reward sites that load quickly and provide the best viewing experience for end users
• elevated importance for existing factors like broken links on the site, navigation capability... site maps, volume of social bookmarks to the site
• Google may be paying attention to Descriptions & Keyword Meta Tags as an algorithm factor after many years of ignoring them

MICROSOFT POWERS YAHOO
Well they finally got together after years of speculation. A marriage to combat Google or just an easier target for Google to focus on and increase the already substantially higher Google market share?

It is anticipated that the Microsoft /Yahoo deal would create a 30% search market share position. Google is in the high 60's. MSN's new Bing search will be the search engine that will power the Yahoo/MSN partnership. Yahoo & MSN will display ads on both browsers and will split revenues. Problem is that while Bing search is an improvement, it has been generally accepted as not reaching the Google bar for search results quality. What this deal leaves is Yahoo's display business.

It looks like this is the beginning of the end for Yahoo as a distinct search brand. It will be interesting to see if the Yahoo & MSN PPC business will double up as the two combine or whether some advertising dollars will flow over to Google. Overall this merger will not solve Microsoft's scale problem in comparison to Google search - but it's a start.

SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLAINED
Some find social media difficult to understand. There are three distinct categories of social media.

1. User content sites where public content can be uploaded to formats like reviews, ratings and feedback. YouTube and Trip Advisor are examples of this.
2. Social News sites allow users to add content and cast a vote towards the content they deem to be the most important. A very democratic process indeed. Examples of this are Twitter and Digg.
3. Social Network sites stitch together a collection of friends with pictures and updates. MySpace and Facebook are examples of this.

Some Social Media overlap in characteristics like RSS subscriber content feeds and blogs. The one thing that is common is Google likes social links that match a site theme and they usually meet the criteria of one way anchor text based votes for the site.

GOOGLE TRUST FILTER IS ALIVE AND WELL
We get asked by many new web site owners about how long it will take to achieve top rankings with a brand new domain. Google has a filter that establishes domain trust. Some call this filter the Google Sandbox affect. In any event, the process is this - Google spiders your site and brings it into the index. The site may actually place for a while for some obscure searches. After a month your site is still not placing on it's intended keywords and may not even place on the company name if it is not in your Title tag.

Generally new domains will take three months to a year to achieve trust and maximum placement. Those that place earlier are sites with content and backlink updates. Those that place later are sites that sites without any updates.

Why does Google delay placement? Two reasons. First of all Google indexes thousands of new sites every day and many are not serious web sites and they are not maintained when the owner looses interest ... although the sites are alive and well because the server hosts have been paid for. Second reason is this Google filter practice does not reward gateway sites that can link from many domains to a main site for the purpose of creating backlink votes. These gateways from Google's perspective just use up resources and they are not serious sites. This is why we stopped building gateways many years ago yet we still run into many new clients buying domains and putting gateways thinking they are supporting their main site. Gateways are an awfully expensive way to build backlinks unless the domains have been in previous use and already have domain trust and a significant amount of themed unique content.

So what should you do about your brand new domain and web site that does not have Google trust.

1. Be patient.
2. Get the site optimized so your ready when the trust kicks in.
3. Take the opportunity to add lots of content & backlinks.
4. Keyword bid to get some traffic to your site to support your products or services while you wait for the trust to take hold.

GOOGLE "VINCE" UPDATE
Google confirmed a "change" to their algorithm which is giving big brands a helping hand in their SEO efforts. Google isn't really promoting the algorithm tweak as a major change but rather just a change to enhance the value of "trust" factors. This suggests an increase in the value of tradition trust factors in the algorithm such as domain age, linkage etc on specific search queries.
There's nothing in the algo change to greatly impact your current SEO strategies - just more of the trust stuff .

CANONICAL TAG ANNOUNCED
A tag has now been revealed jointly from three search engine giants that can give your pages the URL format to avoid spidering of duplicate content. This is called the Canonical Tag. You can simply add this tag to specify your preferred version of a URL inside the section of the duplicate content URLs and the search engines will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL. Additional URL properties, like Page Rank and related signals, are transferred as well.Google, Yahoo and MSN will all recognize this tag.

GOOGLES ALGORITHM
It looks something like this:

Keyword density, internal linking, body copy, url construction, outbound links >+10%

Domain strength (or as some suggest the sandbox issue), age of domain, stable history >+25%

Inbound links including link age, trust factor, web page source, theme match, PR of backlink, anchor text of backlink >+25%

User data, click thru volume, keyword search requests, revisits >+10%

Quality score, this is the Semantic stuff Google bought - determining the context and relevance of page and content quality >+10%

Manual boosts for sites that do not rank well on their own but are perceived with important news or topical information >+20%

Automated and manual penalties as per Google guidelines on mirrored domains, cloaking, gateways, redirects, duplicate content, hijacked content etc. >-??%

Obviously being penalized is the wild card...so behave.

FIRST PAGE SEO™ NAMED TOP SEO COMPANY
This is a excerpt from a media release.

topseos.com a trusted and well respected resource for evaluating internet market vendors has announced the inclusion of First Page SEO™ in the list of top 30 search engine marketing companies. "First Page™ SEO has demonstrated that it is a leader in it's field, showing superior service levels and performance for their clients" commented Bill Peden of topseos.com. First Page SEO™ is a standout amongst the many internet marketing vendors in the $5 billion plus search marketing industry". It is estimated there are 10,000 interent marketing firms worldwide.

topseos.com evaluates candidates based on a rigorous selection process. Each internet marketing firm, consultant or service is evaluated in terms of it's:

• Competitive advantage
• Superior services and pricing
• Customer and technical support
• Client response
• Innovations that set it apart from the competition
• Overall effeciency
• Overall performance including multiple client proof of top search engine placement

Only one other BC based Canadian search engine marketing company broke into the the top 30 list. First Page SEO™ has been offering internet marketing services for over eight years. It serves over 400 clients' worldwide and provides optimization services, web site development, opt-in email programs and media link services.

topseos.com was founded in 2002 by e-ventures and serves to provide the search engine marketing industry and companies with a single source for researching internet marketing vendors.

TRUSTED COPY
You have no doubt heard of the Google trusted link theory. Have you heard about Googles trusted copy? Yes Google looks for certain things in your copy besides proper keyword density. Some time ago Google bought up a company that allows the algo to understand the context of the words around it. Anchor text as it can be referred to. In addition Google sees phrases or words used together in various order as an indicator of importance. By example Google knows that one word reversal might be more popular as search than the other. "Brown cow" can mean the colour of a cow. Certainly "the cow was brown" refers to the colour of the cow but when you read "ordered a brown cow at the bar" we're not talking the colour of the cow so much as the drink called brown cow. So by measuring search terms and the words around the term that provide context along with historic incidence of that search and time spent on the found site, Google can determine the relevance of the text pertaining to the search. Further matches to title and alt tags help to confirm this conclusion. Outbound links with the keywords or font size of the keywords can also be contributing factors of trust.

What isn't trustworthy copy? Overly dense keyword phrases, text generated by auto copyrighting, text that doesn't read well or make sense and hidden text.

GOOGLE SYNDICATED SEARCH
Otherwise referred to as Open search where search engines compile data from other sources outside the algo listings like information from news engines, social network sites and other search engine results. Where does this Google rumour come from? Google has been buying up domains related to "syndicated search" keywords. Where there's smoke there's fire.

HITWISE TRAVEL INDUSTRY REPORT
Hitwise has released a travel industry report on online trends that says:

• local sites contribute 95.74% of all traffic to the travel industry so I guess that kind of leaves international directories out on a limb, also it says something about geographic refinement of the search
• 40.15% of visits to travel industry sites went to the top 10 web sites
• the average visit was 8.5 minutes

So buy local directory listings, keep your own site on the first or second page and put something interesting on your site.

WHAT ARE SUPPLEMENTAL LISTINGS?
Supplemental listings are pages that are shown when the search engine has no better examples to present from the main index to match the search query. Supplemental listings are therefore brought out of oblivion to serve the case. Some would say bringing the content out of the sandbox. So when you see sites presented as supplemental, remember they are the choice of last resort for the search engine.

HAVE YOU BEEN BOWLED?
One of the techniques black hat seo's have used to hurt competitor sites' has been to play with the competitor sites inbound links. Because the site owner has little control of inbound links and because it plays an important part of search engine algorithmns it is not uncommon for ruthless competitors to point junk links, bulk links, bad neighbourhood links and unrelavent links at a hapless web site to destroy it's Page Rank. More recently Google has been judging outbound links against inbound links. The web site owner can control outbound links. If Google sees a bunch of inbound junk links come on suddenly and no junk type outbound links leaving the site it will be more lenient with the site than when it sees poor links in and out - which can imply exchange services and link triads rather than a malicious unavoidable third party attack on a site.

At First Page SEO™ one of the steps we take when optimizing a site is to check for signs of link bowling. Sometimes we find that site owners have done the wrong thing when putting a link strategy into play but often we also find the site owner had no idea some competitor had "link bowled" them, hurting their site placement.

TOP 4 REASONS WHY SOME SEO CAMPAIGNS FAIL

1. Most common is that the search engine optimization on the web site is done thoroughly and correctly - but follow through in terms of continuing to add copy or back links does not happen. This can be the site owners fault or the contractors fault - if the contractors job was to maintain and add content to the web site on an ongoing basis.


2. Treating all businesses as if they were the same. The first step of any good seo contractor is to ask a lot of questions and learn your products and services and where your customers come from - both geographic and demographic analysis. This way the theme of your site and geographic qualifiers etc can be brought out and prioritized in your content, links and tags etc.


3. Trying to focus on too wide of a market either geographically or product wise. Every business has its niche market. Don't try and be all things to all people. Stick to your core or competitive advantage products or services and focus your seo efforts on that theme.


4. Failure to monitor site progress and make adjustments along the way. No ones perfect and hardly anyone gets everything 100% the first time around. Search engine optimization should not be a once in the life of a web site type of thing. Treat your seo provider like a doctor or ongoing consultant - over the long term - it will pay off for your web site placement in spades. Consider ongoing search engine marketing as part of your overall marketing budget. When compared to the cost of other types of collateral advertising like print ads, your seo costs will be cheap and well worthwhile.

FIRST PAGE SEO OFFERS SOCIAL BOOKMARKING PROGRAM
Social bookmarking or social networking has become a popular medium for search engines to spider for trusted links. Like the News Program that utilises viral media content with embedded back links our new Social Bookmarking Program will lever off the viral nature of the many sites that share group bookmarks. Our testing to date shows astounding results in the generation of themed high quality trusted back links. This program will be a major step forward for site owners who already have other link strategies in play and need another link channel. It is equally valuable to new sites that are starting out with few relevant or trusted back links. One that will drive huge numbers of links to your web site. Once again we've found a channel that means very little aging of the links before they are absorbed into the search engine indexes as a vote for your site. Details are on our site under Link Programs.

GOOGLE - DYNAMICALLY CREATED PAGE INDEXING
Many realize that search engines are not very good at indexing dynamic scripted pages built with PHP, PERL, ASP etc.It's beyond me why so many web masters insist on building 100% dynamic sites to make it easy for themselves at the expense of their customers.In fact Google has an official statement on the matter in it's Guidelines. "If you decide to use dynmic pages (i.e. the url contains a "?" character [in the syntac], be aware that not every search engine crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few."

Until recently Google also had this in it's guidelines: "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your urls, as we don't include these pages in our index."

This is what Google says now:
"Google now indexes urls that contain that parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewritting it - we'll accept it just fine as is.
Keep in mind however, that dynamic urls with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic urls into user friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you. If you can, keeping the parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls."

And the lesson is: use dynamic script for form pages and when you MUST generate dynamic content - and DO NOT build sites that are 100% dynamic as they will not place well without significant effort in other areas like link strategies to make up for the shortfall of the dynamic script or more simply, lack of content.

WHY DO SOME NEW SITES HAVE TROUBLE GETTING LISTED?
Often new site owners jump the gun and FTP (publish) sites without tags, incomplete content and broken links. The site may get indexed by Google or Yahoo before registration as they are likely to crawl in through an inbound link. If your site hasn't been properly optimized then guess what - you get cached way back in the listings. If your site is dynamic, flash heavy without html content or a site map they may not list your site at all because there is simply not enough content for them to latch on to index.

Older established sites that have all the bugs worked almost always out-place new sites. Some search engines will not index all the html body text on the first pass regardless of how well your site is designed so some measure of patience is necessary.

Remember optimizing your site as it is being built will save you some aggravation and will give you far better start up results than having to go back and correct problems after the fact.

MSNbot WINDOWS LIVE SEARCH
Microsoft is putting mega bucks into search. They have purged themselves of partner search indexes/directories like Looksmart, Inktomi(Yahoo) and have dropped Overture keyword bidding (Yahoo)in the US in favor of their own home brew. Canada Yahoo bidding is not yet affected.

The final product is competitive with plenty of innovative features. Microsoft will take some risks with regulators and integrate its search to business applications and operating system - hey its only lawyers and $. In its next version of Windows the new search will be integrated into the operating system so that users won't need to load web browsers to search the internet but rather they can move to the internet directly from any operating system application like say a spread sheet or whatever you happen to be working on. Longhorn will also include a file system to integrate to data bases used in Microsoft SQL server software.

Windows Live Search wants the following:

• no broken links on pages
• content in syntac carries weight
• page text content should be under 150kb per page
• keep to one topic per page
• gooey links to related topics help
• follows inbound links
• don't stuff alt tags
• no hidden text or links
• don't spam keyword content
• don't use non themed links or buy link farm services

SURVEY SAYS
Outsell research has forecast that marketing budgets will continue to shift on line this year to internet marketing such as pay per click campaigns. Online marketing spending is predicted to grow 19 percent with specific search marketing expected to increase 26 percent. Print advertising will increase by 3.3 percent and television & radio only 2.4 percent.The total information industry is estimated at $285 billion yearly with Yahoo & Google owning 5 percent of that market. Google has climbed to the #5 rank from #18 position behind leaders Reed Elsevier, Time Warner, Thomson Corp. and Gannett. Yahoo has gone to the #8 spot from #18th in one year. Are you seeing the trend? Internet marketing is in and print marketing is falling away. If you're trying to reach boomers and younger, your marketing budget should be heavily skewed towards internet web based marketing. Surveys are now showing that young adults under 30 and school age children spend far more time on the internet than they do watching television.

WHAT IS LINK WEIGHT & ANCHOR TEXT?
Anchor text is when you imbed links called "gooey" links in text relevant to your link so that search engines can spider the surrounding text and see the relevance or theme that ties to the link. Basically the engine wants to understand the context of the link and sees value in a good match and rewards the site. This is true of both inbound back links pointing at your site and the non reciprocated outbound links on your site.

Link weight is the Google Page Rank concept where links or "votes" that point at your site are judged as more important or less important based on the power of their own inbound links. The power or authority of the link pointing at your site (assuming the site pointing at the site matches your site theme) will determine the bump you get in the algorithm for the "vote". Google does not seem to care about links that point at you that have a Page Rank of less than 2 (Google PR runs from 1 to 10 with one being the bottom or weakiest on the scale). So, by example, pages that link to you that have a Page Rank of say 5 or 6 are pretty powerfull votes and an 8 is a very powerful vote. Pages that have a PR above 8 are few and far between and to acheive high PR of course those pages must have many powerful links pointing at them in their own right. So not all links are created equal. For each 1 point increase in PR the link popularity is increased 8X. So a PR6 link is 8X as valuable as the PR5 link. But the number of links count too and most important the relevance of the link to the page content. Weight is important but having it come from anchor text that matches your page theme is even more important.

YAHOO FIGHTS BACK
Yahoo and Google have been tripping over each other building bigger indexes and offering new tools to the consumer to brand their respective businesses. For a while, Google left everyone behind. Froogle retail merchant search, Google Earth, Google toolbar improvements, internet telephone click to call, query from your own software programs, 24 billion page index, user profiling, personalized search, WiFi side bar, Google mail and the list goes on. Yahoo is heavily involved also in leading edge research and seems to be able to time its own attribute additions and at the same time add feature additions that actually one up Google.Yahoo's desktop application features are easier to use than Googles and with kind of a friendly elegance. Google launches Maps. Yahoo ups them by adding live traffic conditions. Yahoo launches Yahoo 360 blog integration raising the bar over Googles Blogger. Yahoo has indexed on line movies. Google is struggling. Brands don't disappear overnight they erode. Sometimes leaner and meaner can beat the stuffing out of bigger and more. Google should watch out because Yahoo is back in the ring and it has some new tricks it has learned.

GOOGLE PROFILE RANK
Googles Profile Rank has evolved from Page Rank. Profile Rank takes into account user profiles or habits by tracking a web users online behaviour in and outside of Google Search. Therefore it combines the attributes of Page Rank but adjusts the presentation of the search to match the habits of the user profile it has developed. This QueryScore, as Google calls it, is modulated by the site's Page Rank. The effect being that your search is altered to match the priority of your personal tastes based on previous behavior. Scary don't you think? Personalized search in beta form was something you opted into. The gradual integration of behavioral targeting into the algorithm seems to be connected also to an integration of ad marketing where presented Adwords are better targeted to users search patterns. Hmm maybe Google is starting to take this too far. Nice that they want to help me to search better and find the info I want but excuse me for saying so but isn't this getting a little personnal? I suppose I have to learn to love the idea of software learning my preferences but God help us if the info falls into the wrong hands. I guess Google would argue the credit card companies have been doing this for years, why not them. Kind of reminds me of Hal the computer that takes over the space ship.

EYE TRACKING
For some time studies have been done on how users scan and perceive a web page. It has been determined that content on the top left portion of the screen gets read by virtually everyone and falls off as you go down the page or to the right of the page. Weak points are to the right margin of the page and increasingly weaker to the right bottom of the page. So it makes sense to put your brand or the important things you want to convey in that sweet spot at the page top left to centre of the page. If your brand name or logo is the most important thing for you, that's where it should be. If you have a special offer or package likewise get it near the top centre or left of centre area.

This also has a relationship to viewing search engine standings as well. 100% of viewers see the top three listings, 85% the fourth and by the time you get down to eighth and ninth listings 30% and at the bottom of the page only 20%. That might be a good reason to keyword bid for placement as well as organic listings. You might also want to think about the Google AdWord's that land in the boxes down the right hand side which have very weak position as compared to the top sponsored links. Problem is you can control that positioning on Yahoo pay per click but you can't really with Google AdWords. Something to consider.

CLICK THRU ADVERTISING - GOOGLE VS YAHOO
I keyword bid on Yahoo/MSN, Google, Ask and Kanoodle. Here's my comparitive experience from a value point of view. Keyword bidding is a must do for any serious site marketer. Organic placement by itself is not enough. Some businesses need the volume so that they must be on both Google and Yahoo/MSN. Google has the most volume by far. I keyword bid on over 800 accounts for my clients. I get the Yahoo gold treatment with a personalized account rep (which I never use). I have been bidding since the inception of Overture prior to Yahoo acquiring it and back before Google AdWords existed.

• traffic is traffic it doesn't matter what search engine it comes from as long as your getting enough of it to run your'e business
• Google AdWords are comparitively 4X the bid price of Yahoo PPC
• with Yahoo & MSN PPC you no longer know the position you're buying and what it costs exactly by position and click thru cost... essentially they have switched to a Google type model to boost revenue.
• with Google AdWords your position is a product of ad design, volume of click thrus and bid price - you cannot guarantee where you will land
• Google bid prices often have to be huge to trigger the placement and to get the ad presenting
• most Google ads end up in the right border and the top ad gets a 50% eye view at best.
• if you take the Google option to present your ad on partner sites and directories you can experience up to 30% click fraud as many sites are set up just to sell Google AdWords and many people make a living by clicking on these ads at your expense to increase the fortunes of the presenting site owners. Google prosecutes but it's hard to contain and harder to prove.
• I did an exact comparison of a high traffic term with identical ad content during the same time frame and my conclussion is that overall Google AdWords is about four times the cost of the click thru generated on Yahoo PPC
• with my own clients I tend to exhaust opportunities with Yahoo/MSN before I campaign on Google AdWords
• having said all this many are strongly branded to Google and if you need more volume than you can get from Yahoo you have to go Google as well
• I don't want to short sell Google because it is a great product and it has by far the bigger market reach but I find better value in Yahoo PPC.

First Page SEO™ is an expert in keyword bidding and trades daily 365 days per year. Our transaction cost for campaign management is 15%. Keyword bidding is one of the most effective marketing strategies available for those selling products or services if properly managed.

GOOGLE CLICK TO CALL SERVICE
Google is testing its click-to-call service that lets people call advertisers presented on search pages without having to pick up the phone. The web surfer simply clicks on the icon by the ad, enters their own phone number, clicks the "connect for free" button and Googles service calls the advertiser and connects the advertiser to the phone. This works on regular phone lines and your number is protected from the advertiser. Google pays for the call local or long distance. Google hopes to increase the value of its online ads in future by using this technology. Mean while MSN has bought Teleo to offer future similar service and Yahoo is testing click to call instant messaging.

INDEXING DELAYS FOR NEW SITES
Search engine spiders may crawl a new site expeditiously but it takes some time to land in the index. MSNbot is the fastest with new sites usually showing up in the index 30 days after the spider has crawled the site. Yahoo (Slurp), Googlebot and Ask (Teoma) all take over 60 days to show in the index and the index may only reflect a small portion of your actual pages. Google can take up to a year to fully reflect some sites in its index. If there is a lot of news associated with your site and powerful links are increasingly pointing at you then this process is accelerated according to interest. You should always avoid switching domains. Old active domains with many aged links should be considered valueable assets.

DON'T DO THIS
I run in to web site owners all the time with big problems that need to be fixed. Some of these businesses are literally loosing their shirts while their web site drops off the face of the earth and their revenue tanks. Most site owners don't realize site marketing execution is far more complex than other forms of advertising AND the web will generate the lions share of sales for many businesses.

Here's my top 10 - DON'T DO THIS

1. NEVER NEVER NEVER hire your cousin Vinny to build your web site. Yes I know he's cheap and I hope you can afford to throw away most of the potential business that you will never see. There are places where you can save money - building your site is not one of those. A business web site is instrumental to your success and your bottom line. Treat it with more respect than a magazine ad. Over 50% of your advertising/marketing budget should be going into your web site in this day and age so get with the program and put things in perspective.


2. Don't let someone build you a site entirely out of Flash or dynamic scripts such as ASP, PHP, PERL etc. Use it sparingly for form pages and data driven portions. You don't want your site to be a "dog" never to be found by any human search, do you?


3. Don't build a site with shallow content. If your site is going to be important then it must be authoritive on the theme your trying to convey. Content is king and where you end up will be determined to a major extent by content.


4. Never hang on to old frames sites and tired or amatuerish looking sites. Yes web sites have a shelf life. Technology changes. A five year old web site today will not show your business to it's best potential and would probably look like something a child in public school (or maybe cousin Vinny) might build today. Your site is probably the most important marketing tool you have - invest in it.


5. Never build a web site and forget about it. Even if you get high rankings initially it won't last. You have to keep it up to date and add content to it steadily and surely on an ongoing basis or you might as well not even bother to build the site in the first place.


6. You wouldn't want your family doctor to do open heart surgery on you right? You want a cardiolgist, a specialist in his/her field if you're like most people. Your web master is probably not able to make your site a top ranking site. The fact is the majority of web site developers don't have a clue what they are doing when it comes down to structuring the site for placement. So you end up with a post card - the one that no one ever sees - unless they get your url off of other collateral print materials. Now that's not marketing. It's called fumbling around in the dark. Find someone who understands internet marketing and have them prove it by reviewing their own site placement for their top keyword phrases. That's where the buck stops - show me your results.


7. Don't use multiple domains to mirror or duplicate site content, don't cloak pages or hide or mask text on the web page. In short don't do anything the search engines tell you not to do in their "terms of use". Get references on your search engine marketing specialist to ensure he/she is up to date and is not going to get you banned from a search engine for using "black hat" techniques.


8. Never assume your site is performing on track. Check your site stats and look for constant improvement taking into account seasonal fluctuations. Also compare year over year results by month. Look at your entrance and exit pages. Look at the time spent on site and the page views. If your'e getting an average of only 2-3 page views somethings wrong when you should be getting 6-8.


9. Never turn a blind eye to good advice - and that's what I'm giving you - good advice. If your doctor tells you to stop eating potato chips or your going to give yourself a heart attack - you cut out the chips right? If a internet marketing expert tells you that you should pay as much attention to your web site as you do to your other forms of marketing, and you choose to ignore it - maybe because your'e not as comfortable with that type of marketing, whose fault is it when things don't turn out? Buckle down and learn enough about online marketing to function or hire someone qualified that you trust to do it for you.

DOES MICROSOFT FAVOUR THEIR OWN SERVER PLATFORMS?
There has been some accusations that Microsoft is giving preference to those sites hosted on IIS servers vs. those hosted on Linux or Apache Unix servers. The theory is that after testing 10,000 sites on Google and MSN search and cross referencing the keyword search results back to the server platform ... and some believe there's hanky panky going on. The test results show that MSN Search gives preferential placement to those sites that are on their own server platforms - by a margin of a few percent.

Well personally, I doubt these findings. I think it's more likely to be a coincidence as I can't believe Microsoft would do that - thinking that some bright computer science types would never notice. I mean MSN gets scrutinized by half the IT guys on the planet and various governments wade in for good measure.
I didn't test 10,000 sites but what I do know is this. I have many sites sitting on Microsoft platforms. I have even more sitting on Apache Unix servers. I find that those sites on Apache servers get excellent placement on MSN and the placement is consistant and predictable when compared to Google btw.

My own site is currently on a Unix server and by example is ranked #1 for "Ontario search engine optimization". If you scroll down a few sites and check the server platform of some of the sites that rank further down on the first page you will see that the Microsoft platform sites ranked below the Unix sites in many cases. Now I realize there are many factors at play here but my point is there are too many variables for anyone to jump to the the conclusion that Microsoft is playing a game for the benefit of their own product over search relevance. Practical research does not bear this out.
Give Bill Gates a break, contrary to the beliefs of many he is not trying to take over the world. And I say that as a Netscape perferred user.

INFOSPACE SIGNS AGREEMENT WITH MSN
Infospace Search has announced that it will add results from MSN Search to both its search index and directory. Infoplace's claim to fame is that it brings together search results into one engine. Infospace has distribution agreements with all the top tier search engines now - MSN, Yahoo, Google & Ask Jeeves. Infospace reaches about 14 million users a month and controls Dogpile, WebCrawler and MetaCrawler. MSN Search in comparison has 380 million users per month.

WHY DO SOME NEW SITES HAVE TROUBLE GETTING LISTED?
Often new site owners jump the gun and FTP (publish) sites without tags, incomplete content and broken links. The site may get indexed by Google or Yahoo before registration as they are likely to crawl in through an inbound link. If your site hasn't been properly optimized then guess what - you get cached way back in the listings. If your site is dynamic, flash heavy without html content or a site map they may not list your site at all because there is simply not enough content for them to latch on to index.
Older established sites that have all the bugs worked almost always out place new sites. Some search engines will not index all the html body text on the first pass regardless of how well your site is designed so some measure of patience is necessary.
Remember optimizing your site as it is being built will save you some aggravation and will give you far better start up results than having to go back and correct problems after the fact.

DO YOU USE MORE THAN ONE SEARCH ENGINE?
According to the Nielson Ratings internet searchers use multiple search engines. The study determined 58% of Google users by example also visited MSN & Yahoo.
No surprise there as with Google algorithm changes of late and the variance in results between Google servers has resulted in some folks not finding what they expect in search results.
Google is heavily branded and is still the one to beat though with 47% market share compared to Yahoo's 21% and MSN's 13%. The study determined that Google shared 58% of it's vistors with Yahoo/Google while Yahoo shared 71% to Google & MSN. MSN shared 70%. Together those three top search engines represent 81% of the search market.

MACROMEDIA FLASH SEARCH ENGINE SDK
Macromedia has developed a software product for search engine software developers that allows them to build in Flash indexing of web sites.
SDK uses an application named "swf2html" that extracts text and links from Macromedia Flash files and converts the files to html content. Cool! It works on NT4, Windows 2000 Pro and Linux 7.1 server software platforms. The software allows indexing on Flash 3,4,5 and 6. Keep in mind, the search engine has to incorporate the software - it's not a browser tool.
How well does it work? Does not look great so far. It's not time to build 100% Flash sites yet if your'e concerned about search engine placement - but if your'e in a non competitive market space you might start to notice your Flash site placing with some search engines as they adopt the code.

ASK - WHAT'S UP
Ask (Jeeves) rebranded is the #4 search engine on the planet. The Teoma algorithm is exceptional and has been under rated by web users for years. InterActiveCorp has bought Ask for $1.85 billion dollars. IAC already owns Hotels.com, Expedia, Ticketmaster, CitySearch, Match.com, Home Shopping Network & Cornerstone Brands. Can anyone say ... media empire?

Ask will be integrated into all IAC portals. Ask has already been growing at 5% market share per year. So if I were you, I'd start paying attention to optimization and placement on Ask as their brand on all these partner sites entrenches itself. IAC will also make sure that Ask gets the ad promotion it deserves. Ask has always placed its algorithmic weight in site content and relational thinking as opposed to Google's high dependancy on links. Google, as of late, is also putting effort towards relational thinking as well so do you think the brains at Teoma were on the right track all those years?

INTERNET ADVERTISING IS BIG BUSINESS ... AND GETTING BIGGER
Best Buy and EBay will do $8 billion in 2005 more than 20 times what they did just four years ago. PPC search advertising revenue that was under $400 million four years ago is now going to hit $7.9 billion this year. The cost of acquiring a customer through internet search is pegged at $8.50. In contrast Yellow Pages is $20, $50 for display ads, $70 for direct mail and television & radio... well you don't want to know.
Many of the large corporate clients are figuring this out with budgets now going into the $5-$10 million mark for single company's paid search budgets. But the market is big and the opportunities even larger so any business of any size can promote and prosper in this market.
A year or so ago it was only my larger customers that were into keyword bidding by example. Now even very small businesses, like bed and breakfasts are involved.

There has been a monumental shift in the way consumers research and buy products and services. If your marketing budget for print advertising, radio, tv & collateral materials combined is more than 50% of what your spending on internet marketing then I hate to break you the news but your'e missing the boat. Without question many businesses are belated in realizing they have been backing the wrong horse. I'm not saying you shouldn't partake in other forms of advertising. But realize the web is mainstay in North America & Europe and internet marketing should make up the bulk of your promotional dollars. The problem is there are so may web based marketing options that it can be overwhelming for the average business person and hense slower adoption rates and lost income for some people.

Over the next few years ecommerce will double again. It is a compounding market with no end in sight. Many people are mistaken in the belief that once they have their web site up they are home free. In fact putting up a web site is akin to putting up a storefront. Once the bricks and mortar are in place you have to start marketing and advertising if you expect to be successful. I can't tell you how often I run into small biz people who developed less than stellar web sites without any marketing and are confounded as to all the hype about the internet because they are not getting any business.

The web for almost all product and service businesses is by far the most cost effective way to attract customers and very few customers will make any significant purchase or walk in your door before they have at least researched their purchase on the internet. They'll either find your business or your competitors business, it's as simple as that. If your'e not being found it's game over. So next time you are about to fork over $500 for a single column three inch high newspaper ad, think again - in most cases it is not money well spent unless it is surplus marketing dollars being used to saturate your brand with little expectation of ROI.

GOOGLES PATENT DOCUMENT
Recently Google filed a patent to protect certain procedures it is using or plans to use to place web sites as a result of customer searchs.
Google never tells you what it is up to so it is always wise to play detective and try and look at cause and effect to determine what impact this may have on internet marketing. And that's probably why your'e reading this enews letter because your'e smart enough to know that this kind of thing impacts your bottom line and those that stay on top of this game have the opportunity to profit over their competitors.

Given that lately even very important sites representing household brands are going from #1 to nowhere one might wonder if there is any logic or reason to Google. Well there is logic but unfortunately many good sites just get caught in the cross fire as these algorthmic changes take place and are implemented. Google employs some of the best minds in the world including scientists that implement latent semantic relationships in content. Latent semantics is a science which is kind of like putting Einstien type theories into a blender with statisticians, technoligists and mathematical modelling and coming up with formulas for applying theoretical relationships of words and content. What does that mean to the site owner? It means search engines are applying artificial intelligence to understanding context and content on web sites. It means Google is determining the best site match from both a statistical approach of how many exact phrases resulted in people spending a specific amount of time on your site in combination with understanding the context of the searched words in relationship to other words on your page that weren't searched for.

By example when the anchor text of one of your inbound links changes -is that relevant or applied also in changes in the body content of your web site? Or determining when someone searches say "farm for sale" that it can also mean "rural property with barn available". The way it does this is very complex and that is why Google employs rocket scientists to develope their algorithms.
And that also leads us to believe that perhaps you can over engineer search to the point that quality of search can decline. Anyways back to the patent registration stuff.

Here's what to watch out for:

• anchor text and discovery date of links are recorded by Google.
• monitoring the appearance and disappearance of inbound links.
• monitoring the growth rate of links in quantity and quality against that of independant peer documents.
• monitor changes in link anchor text.
• record a distribution rating for the age of the links.
• links with long life span are important (hence the Google aging filter/sandbox premise).
• links from fresh up to date changing pages more important (hence the importance of Blogs and news/press release portals).
• if a stale document continues to receive incoming links it will be considered fresh.
• if a new site gets a great burst of new links it will only be tolerated if they come from authoritive like themed sites e.g. sites that match your theme with a high Page Rank.
• link growth should ideally be constant and slow.
• anchor text should vary by link location especially in directory listings (that is why you should employ someone like First Page SEO™ that understands how to implement link strategies for placement).
• Google recognizes that sudden link growth is a strong indicator of search engine spam.
• recording of domain in service date and how long your domain is renewed for ... with older domains renewed for multiple years showing more importance.
• that link changes and in fact any site changes once indexed may take some time to reflect in your search rankings (six momths to a year type of stuff so be patient and think ahead).
• that Google knows relationally some sites are more worthy than others and isn't in a rush to place unworthy content weak sites.

DYNAMIC WEB SITES PRO VS CON
Dynamic web pages are not stored on the web server as static content but rather pieces are picked from a data base for customer presentaion based on the query.
The downside is most search engines with few exceptions cannot index dynamic pages as they see them as an indefinite string of links so they have to be suplimented with straight html page content to ensure placement or static html pages with links to dynamic content.

By example FAST will crawl a dynamic page but Google will slowly start to crawl a dynamic page until it realizes the multiple url query strings are leading to duplicate content and then it moves on. Most search engines will not spider the page at all so the site is riding off it's tags only and not it's content. In these days when content is so important it becomes difficult to get good placement with a dynamic structured web site.
The pro side is you give a custom approach to a customer on your site which is great if you are so well branded that they can find you with your URL (eg www.nike.com) or if your advertising materials are so strong your customers get your web address off print material almost exclusively.

For the most part small business should avoid dynamic web sites just as they should 100% Flash sites. To often small business owners are taken in by bells and whistles and miss the boat entirely on the fact that you have to be found on the web first before the customer can view your site and products. You can have an exceptional looking site that gets results without having to resort to a full dynamic site. Buyer beware.

CONTENT IS KEY
The best way to increase traffic and placement on your web site is to build your site theme to reinforce your tags with generous amounts of well written keyword rich text on the home page and throughout the site.
Many sites are well written and convey important information on products and services but lack the keyword density needed to place well for the site theme. In highly competitive fields, sites without keyword density just can't compete.

If your site theme carries through all of your pages it further reinforces the theme - especially with text hot links that act as windows to sources of relevant themed information. Remember though, your viewers are reading your story so the keywords should not be so obvious that it appears "clumsy". Use variations of phrases,word reversals and plurals when possible in the text presentation. The best way to do this is to have your keyword phrase list in front of you when you tell your story and spread the main theme around a bit so your not just talking about one themed topic and then moving other topics to other specific sections of your web site. In other words blend variations of your theme throughout the site.

GOOGLE SANDBOX - FACT OR FICTION
SEO practioners often debate whether Google holds back new sites and groups of inbound links in what is referred to as the "sandbox". The theory is many new sites come on to the internet and owners loose interest quickly or businesses falter, yet they can stay cached and available for some time and receive relatively good placement.
Accordingly the solution is put new sites into the "sandbox" before they achieve their potential placement to be sure that these sites plan on staying around for a while. Likewise when site owners and web masters embark on sourcing links to point at their web sites in the quest for Google Page Rank these groups of new links are sandboxed on the premise that they were not natural links pointing at a good site, but contrived or exchanged links.
The "sandbox" gives the site a time out from the links and down the road if the links are still valid and pointing at the site they get released from the "sandbox".

Here are my observations.

A) The lag time on new sites is simply a result that many new sites have little content and inbound links to support the site. Once Google has spidered a site (usually via an inbound link)it may take it's time before reflecting those sites in the index (what they used to call the Google dance). My observation is Google does not treat all sites the same. Those sites that are determined to be theme & link weak are not a high priority for application to the site index. On the other hand if the site is considered to provide hot news or authoritive content and has quality links it gets the VIP treatment. This applies to any site content. Look at how quickly Google indexes and presents press releases from news feed sites like PRLeap and PRWeb. Many times I have seen new sites spidered and presented within days and many times I have seen sites that that are submitted and wait forever to see the light of day. So my conclusion is Google does not "sandbox" new sites but rather has preference for some over others.

B) The issue of whether Google sandboxes inbound links is very different but connected. My observation is Google does hold back taking new links into account in the application of the algorithmn - until it schedules to do it's Page Rank updates. If you use a link popularity tool or inurl: to determine the the inbound links Google has accounted for, you will see several things

1. Google always lags and has not accounted for the full set of applied links that many other engines are seeing as pointing at your site.


2. Your Page Rank will be stagnent for long periods


3. Page Rank Look Ahead will eventually show some activity as the links are applied and Google popularity tools will then suddenly accept the links (but not all of them) that you have waited so long to see reflected.


4. These links that are now taken into account reflect in a Page Rank change - if the average of all your individual page ranks goes up or down.


5. It seems it takes 3-6 months to go through this link recognition cycle and then it goes through the cycle again and ignores some links until the next phase.

This would account for why some new sites have a hard time of it. If they have weak content theme to begin with (and perhaps a less than stellar title tag) then any links that they do have are not going to be much help for a while. The curious thing is - it almost seems as though when Google does get around to accounting for your links it does not have the resources to accept all of them at once. I say this because I have seen Google begin to account for some links that have less than a perfect theme and a low page rank while it ignores others with high page rank and a great theme. There is no reason to it - it seems arbitrary. However over time it will grab more of your links and it does give the bigger bump for those that have the relavancy and page rank. Patience is the rule of the day - kind of like waiting for Xmas to see whether you get the lump of coal or the present you always wanted.
So my conclusion is Google does not embrace all links when they come in - nor does it necessarily account for all links when it does update - sandboxing if you will.
The big question - is this by design for ranking, or is it a way to spread the load so that it can account for the the sites but manage the spidering resources the same way a utility might load balance? Food for thought!

SEARCH TRENDS
One of the trends that seems to be taking hold is Personalized Search. Basically the way it works is every time you work online with the search engine it builds a profile on your habits. If you use Google Gmail or the Google toolbar you are being profiled. Google keeps track of what you search for and what web sites you land on. Google uses cookies placed on your machine with a two year expiry and then auto renews for active users. You can control the process by managing cookies or by staying away from the toolbar and Gmail.

DUPLICATE SITES & PAGES EQUALS DROPPED RANKINGS
One of the most common reasons why sites drop is duplicate content. This can be duplicate content on another domain commonly called mirroring or it can be the ratio of duplicate content on your site that other sites also have. In the first case if you own multiple domain names DON'T put copies of your site on these domains. The only thing you can do is put a legal 301 address redirect from the domain to your main site. That means no content on other domains that match your site. As far as content goes on your main site, never have more than 10% of your content match the content of any other site including sites that you do not own. In other words write original text, rather than copying it from somewhere else unless it is a quote or something relevant you are discussing that needs the content as a reference.

GOOGLE & YAHOO LOCAL SEARCH
Both Google and Yahoo have adopted local search. Yahoo's SmartView business site presentation is slick with with expandable locator map selected that presents full info on the property selected. Google's beta local search product presents a zoomable & recentreable map with letters to match the listings on the left hand side of the page. At this time data does not appear to be inter linked USA to Canada so you must go the the countries individual domain. Google ad words are presented at the page top.

The Google product does not seem very intuative though. By example it doesn't understand the most popular resort districts in Ontario and when you search a big city like Toronto it brings back everything with the word resort - mostly tanning salons and associations but no resort hotels. Oh well it's early yet and as listings build I'm sure it will get figured out. Google structured category data comes from the Yellow Pages while the listing content comes from Google web results.

Yahoo on the other hand presents the web listings first and you can refine it or accept a listing and view the map for that listing along with the site info. Yahoo does offer the option of all results on one map but you have to look to do it.

Initially I like the Yahoo presentation better as it seems cleaner but the Google map is more techy and could be of more use in narrowing your search area before selecting a listing. Ahh isn't branding preference a wonderful thing? There's obviously some work to do here folks but local search is a great idea and you will need to get your business into this format soon, as the use of local search will catch on over time.

LIFE BEFORE GOOGLE
Hyper text was born in 1945 when Vannaver Bush proposed Memex as a way of sharing scientific knowledge in a data base. In 1963 Ted Nelson launched Xanadu and created a computer network with a user interface laying the groundwork for the world wide web. George Salton from Harvard started the Smart info retrieval system laying down early theory on indexing and search. In 1990 Alan Emtage a student at Canada's McGill University created Archie - the first search engine allowing quick access to stored data files. In 1991 Paul Lindner created a menu driven text based information browsing system called Golden Gophers. Up until 1991 folks used FTP to access data. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web browser and put up the first server named HTTPD or hyper text transfer protocol daemon. Sound familiar now? The first web site was put up in August of 1991. What a long way we have come in a few years. The information age is still exploding.

LSI - WHAT IS IT?
LSI is Latent Semantic Indexing and Google uses it in a human like way to understand the the theme of a site related to a customer search for a given keyword search string. Semantic indexing allows Google to determine the relavace of the site to the search even without specific words that were in the search query. This is why you can have a naturally written site and Google can still understand what the site is all about without overloading it with keywords... because it understands the context of a word text conversation.

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