Internet Marketing Blog!

Added by:11 February 2009 16:56

Welcome to our Internet Marketing Blog!

      The focus on internet marketing is relatively new - 1996 showed the first signs of companies allocating money - albeit small amounts - to internet advertising. By 1997 this number had jumped 3 fold, and internet marketing was born. Since then, companies have been updating, reupdating, succeeding and failing - and it seems still no one understands (with a few exceptions) how to really profit from web marketing. Despite the instability, approximately 16 billion dollars are spent annually on internet marketing. So how do you find your way through this - all the competition, all the unknowns, all the changes and updates? Thats where I come in. 

      My name is Rebecca. I grew up in Wisconsin and went to school at the University of Arizona. I now live in Buenos Aires, Argentina (which I love by the way). I am the manager of the Internet Marketing team at Connaxis - and I will be writing this blog to express my frustrations, my goals, my successes and insights to Web Marketing. New innovative ideas are king for advertising - so I welcome any comments suggestions and criticisms as well. Please e-mail me at Rebecca.Deering@connaxis.com

Google Page Rank

     In March, I began to see the Page Rank of some of my clients fluctuating. By the beggining of this month, all but one client went up or down. After investigation, I saw Google had updated its Page Rank alogorithms - which explained the change. While this isn't all that interesting, it is interesting to note that I was reading a Google forum and a person who works for Google said something along the lines of "We only update Page Rank 4 times a year- that should give you some indication of how important it is". Meaning - Google Page Rank is dying a slow death. A little increase or decrease in your Page Rank should not affect where you rank in organic searches anymore. Actually, I had one client drop in Page Rank and get a better position on the first page all in one day.You should be worried about your position, you should be worried about your leads and sales, and you should be worried that you are the best web page out there for your particular business - (which we can help you with!) but you SHOULD NOT worry about Page Rank. 

Domain Changes

     Today I read an article about domain changes. This can be one of the scariest things to perform in SEO because when you change your web address, all the links and advertising that you have pointed to your page are now gone. To avoid this, you create 301 (permanent) or 302 (temporary) redirects so that all of your "link juice" is passed to the new web address. To make this a faster and smoother process, Google has enacted the "Change of Address" tool.  Basically, you don't have to wait 2 weeks for Google to notice the redirect and start passing the "juice". There is a catch to use Google's Domain Change - you have to be verified with Google Webmaster Tools. This is as simple as adding a tag to your website. This new service can make you (and the person who is helping you with your site) feel just a little more at ease when performing redirects. 

I would like to start a new weekly series that highlights what I have learned over the past week regarding SEO.

 Week of July 27th

1. Learn something new every day

            There is an incredible amount of information about Search Engine Optimization. The great thing is that there are many experts that are willing to share their knowledge with the public - well, SEO public. I visit forums, subscribe to newsletters and emails, watch videos, etc. I have never, ever walked away not learning something new. As SEO is changing constantly, I need to know the latest and greatest tips and tricks so I can do my job effectively. If you are interested in SEO, and you must be if you are looking at this site, you need to immerse yourself in these free communities.

2. Keyword Stuffing vs Keyword Rich Content

            Keyword stuffing is the act of throwing keywords every where and anywhere in a website in hopes of increasing your ranking in Google. Keyword rich content is creating content that includes many important keywords related to your business in hopes of increasing your visitors interest in your site as well as your ranking in Google. You need to make your title and body text related, Google uses this (in part) to determine your relevance to a search term. But this does not require putting the same term over and over again in your website. In fact, you might see some well ranked websites without the Title keyword phrase repeated in the body text - but they will have relevant keywords, synonyms, etc. What does this mean? Content is more important than keywords. Period.

3. Title

            I read an article today from a trusted source that said they use 10 - 12 words in their title. I don't know that I agree with 10 - 12 words. I think a clean title in organic searches looks neater and gets your point across more clearly.  I wouldn't go so far as to say "if you have more than 3 words in your title you will rank lower" because the title is one part of the equation - if you have great content and great links, the amount words you have in your title makes little difference. What I have done for clients in the past is create longer titles with the vision of reducing them later for harder search terms. However, I have had a client that added a specific service to his business after we had optimized the website. Instead of totally changing the title for the home page, we simply included the new service. Now he is found on both terms separately as well as jointly.