Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Service

Google released a new feature of its mobile maps service, called my location. My location allows you to find your approximate location on the map, by analyzing cell towers close to you. As per official video:



“Google calculates your location on the unique footprint of nearby towers, it is not GPS, but it comes pretty close”

Unlike traditional GPS which relies on GPS satellite and a receiver to give the exact location, Google’s approach gives you an estimated location on the map according to cell towers. This service is only available in the UK, so the Britons are the first lucky bunch to try it in action.

The service is still in beta, so not all the cell phones will work with it, however if you got an internet uplink and want to give it a shot, visit www.google.co.uk/gmm on your mobile and follow the instructions.

Internet is a unique medium. You can track each and every click, anywhere. What is essential for a successful online expansion strategy is a good marketing intelligence which can be easily achieved on the web, surpassing offline in all categories.

Who, where and how?

Track, each end every one of them. Ask your self the following questions:

• Where do they come from? Google, Yahoo, blogs etc.
• What is the biggest source?
• What is the demographics(some software allows you to get general statistics on gender, age)
• What pages do they mostly land? If one is optimized, where do they go after?
• Where do they leave? Find out the page with the biggest exit ratio and improve it.
• How many convert? What can you do improve conversion?

A number of free-for-all, very effective web tracking tools are available at anyone’s disposal, which analyze traffic and break down raw log files into readable, very visual chunks of information.

Google Analytics – by far the most popular tool, very easy to install and very powerful. Analytics tracks all activity done on your website, not limited by Google traffic, so any actions on your part can be easily analyzed.

Live Search Webmaster Center(Microsoft) – following in Google’s footsteps Microsoft released it’s own tracking package, which essentially does the same task. One advantage to note - it can break down your traffic into demographics by age and gender.

Increase the conversion rate with back up responses.

A back up response can be described as content designed to capture prospects who are interested, but not ready to buy yet. The primary purpose of a good back up response would be to induce interest in potential customers and get them to read/use/download what you have.

It can take many forms:

Newsletter.

Who knows more about your industry then you do? A weekly newsletter, with valuable information, will paint an image of expertise. Depending on the nature of your business and the audience, you can blend a degree of sales with its content. A trade off can be accepted as long as there is value it.

PDF Book, White Paper.

A very effective method, not only to secure the prospects who are interested, but getting new traffic can be achieved through a PDF formatted book. Write helpful material of 40 - 80 pages on your topic and release it to the public domain though social networks, your web frontier and P2P networks. Prospects who are interested in your offerings will be more likely to purchase once you establish a high degree of expertise. PDF can also serve as a direct traffic line to your website.

Software.

If you naturally deal with software, it is a good idea to develop a small, useful application that eases the life of potential customers, who will thank you for it in the long run and come back to you when they are ready to purchase.

Whatever you do, conversion can be always taken to another level. A successful SEO strategy, mixed with strategic thinking will expand your profits and give you an edge over competition.

Ask.com invests 100$ in China.

As reported by Clickz, Ask.com will expand into Chinese search market with a 100$ dollar investment. Ask.com, owned by IAC/InteractiveCorp, is the fourth largest search engine in America, which recently signed a deal with Google to merge Adwords with Ask pay per click program.

IAC plans to compete on the Chinese market against the heavyweights dominating search, such as Baidu, g.cn and Yahoo.cn.

“We certainly have enough capital to do damage,” Diller told reporters in Beijing when asked about the firm’s plans to expand in China.

Ask.com plans to bring itself to the Chinese masses in about two years, as well as expand into the rising gaming market.

Currently Baidu and Google own about 92 percent of Chinese searches, Yahoo at around 8, leaving almost no room for competitors. Unlike West, the difference in search revenues differs at approximately 1 to10, meaning you will make 10 times less with the same marker share as opposed to America, where 1% can be equal a billion dollars.

There is a lot of speculation on the future uprise of Chinese internet users, which is already leading the curve globally and will only continue to do so, so IAC is making a strategic move to secure its ground.

Today November 20th 2007 Mozilla announced it released a new beta version of the version Firefox 3. You can download beta if you want to give it a trial run, however…

Quote:

“…We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 1 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.”

New features and updates include improved security, faster speed, new download manager, new graphics and font rendering architecture and more.

As of today Firefox is targeting beta testing community to route more bugs and prepare for another wide open assault on Microsoft Internet Explorer. W3C or The World Wide Web Consortium report, that Firefox holds about 25% of global browser market, however numbers differ to 15-19% across the rest of the web.

Regardless of the estimates, dinosaur internet explorer shares continue to slide, though with the release of Vista IE went up a notch, ultimately downslide pattern carried on well into the last quarter of 2007.

One of the biggest advantages of Firefox not only over IE, but over other browsers are free-for-all useful extensions spicing up the internet experience and making work for professionals a lot easier. An immense number of people rely on some of the extensions provided by Firefox community, saving time and easing the job. For Example, designers take advantage of Web Developer add-on which provides onpage statistics, breakdown and validation of any given website. SEOs are reaping the benefits of SEO extensions, which compile lengthy tasks into a couple of buttons.

For the occaional user Firefox can offer faster speeds and immense security advantages over IE, in fact security options are next to none in preferences because they cannot be turned off. Mozilla checks the websites you browse against the suspicios Google list and in some cases will refuse the connection to those who been flagged dangerous. You can download and give Firefox 2(not beta) trial run here - your internet experience will shift towards a more productive and more joyous one.

PS.
I am not way affiliated with Mozilla, but it made my days a lot easier.

More and more businesses are waking up to the power of SEO. Having a website has become a necessity, but what good is a website if no one can find it? This is the primary reason why SEO web design company is a better choice over traditional approach. Not only SEO company can create the site, but it can create it from the ground up to be search engine friendly. A website might be very visually appealing, but graphics does not sell on the web - words do and search engines only pay attention to words, something a qualified SEO web design company can provide.

Search Engine Optimization is the gateway for small businesses.

SEO web design company starts off with the solid material, it starts with the code. Unlike web designers who only limit themselves to visual appeal, SEO web design company codes by hand, securing clean, search-friendly framework for the clients. Many small businesses and out of home operations, rely 100% on online revenues, ether from eBay or from their own independent websites. Those who take the route of separating themselves from expensive platforms such as the Amazon and eBay have to create and design their own websites to present merchandize, which can be very costly if the task is outsourced, or very time consuming with do-it-yourself approach. This is where SEO web design company services can be of true value.

SEO web design company has the ability to create a website from the ground up, with same degree of visual appeal, but most importantly with single goal in mind – to be visible on the search engines. Companies who can be found through the search engines for specific products or services are at the very least making double profits as opposed to those who do not utilize SEO web design company services.

Of course there are names such as overstock, and tiger direct who do not need optimization and do not use SEO web design companies, since those are well known online brands. Smaller, young firms however, rarely get direct traffic through their domain name and require strategic online campaigns, which include submission and advertising on shopping directories such as shopping.com, industry specific link exchange and niche specific search engine optimization.

SEO web design companies clearly have full advantage as opposed to classic web design, but a good SEO web design company will charge more. The pricing may fluctuate, depending on the degree of competitiveness and the amount of pages to be optimized, however it will return well overtime. You get what you paid for.

SEO Web design company

What can be better than getting customers who are ready to buy?

Best internet advertising strategy.

And yet, so many people overlook that fact. Search engine marketing is truly the best internet advertising strategy available on the block. Simple truth is – when people search toronto limousine, toronto lawyer or anything else they want to use those services. Ask yourself a question: How many of those people are you missing if you are not appearing on the first page?

Best internet advertising strategy will allow people to find you, when they need to find you. Of course they might compare a number of websites before making a final choice, but the fact stays true - those advertisers who manage to get on the first page, will be the ones getting new calls.

Best Internet Advertising?

Lets do a quick test for the terms toronto limousine and toronto lawyer, in order to figure what is the best internet advertising strategy. There are currently more then 5 million people living in GTA. Our keyword research tool shows, there is an average of “7096” requests for toronto limousine and “7008″ for toronto lawyer per month, all across biggest search engines.

Roughly speaking 7000 divided by 30 equals 233 daily searches. Out of 5 million people living in GTA an average of 233 people search every day for toronto lawyer and toronto limousine with intentions to use those services. You can see why search engine optimization is the best internet advertising tactics. Who gets their business?

Whoever shows on the first page will get their business and out of 10 search results on Google(10 per page), ten companies will be sharing 230 new customers per day and taking the advantage of the best internet advertising strategy available! Two hundred thirty is an estimate for all the search engines, so we need to do some more math. Google currently controls about 70% share of all Canadian searches, therefore 70% of 230 will be 161. Google will be getting an average of 160 searches per day for those terms, and internet advertisers who have their site up on the first page will be sharing 160 new customers between each other, with an average of new 16 clients per day, reaping the power of the best internet advertising available.

Of course there are websites that do not sell, and some of them are directories, but this rough estimate shows you true potential of search engine optimization and the impact it can have on your business.

Simply put - it is the best internet advertising strategy.

As reported by Reuters, Internet advertising has grown 25% in the first 9 month of 2007. Companies spent 3.1 billion dollars more than in 2006, reinforcing predictions that are constantly being made across countless news portals, feeds and blogs.

Internet advertising has already become a key player for fortune 1000 and it will only gain more ground in the month and years to come, while Google’s shares continue to skyrocket with its expansion into cellular market.

Though I was not able to find any data as to what portion of $15.2 billion SEO constituted or question has to be asked whether it was even included in statistics – one fact is clear. Internet and ecommerce more and more is becoming a driving factor in marketing and advertising and those who fail to establish themselves today will lose out in a major shift of financing that is to take place in the future, particularly in SEO field.

As you can see on the graph from Google Trends, a term SEO experienced a steady climb over the past two years, well into 2007. What surprises me is the fact that India is leading the curve with about four times more searches for SEO then the States, which is modestly sitting as number nine. From this graph we can predict certain growth of search optimization for month to come as more and more individuals discover the benefits of this practice.

Lets hope US becomes number one =).

As reported by Channel Web in an article titled “Microsoft to Google: My Data Center’s Bigger Than Yours” Microsoft has set out to build a $500 million data center in its efforts to compete with Google.

It plans to build its information harvesting giant in Chicago suburbs, taking up space of eight football fields, employing 75 people. The use of the colossus will be similar to Google’s – hosting for Microsoft Live search engine, and information, such as queries and user behavior.

It seems that MS Corporation is very aggressive in it’s strategy of getting more shares of search engine treasures. At the moment Microsoft gets approximately 12% of all North American searches, which is very good number, considering the fact that Windows Live launched not so long ago.

In my opinion Microsoft lacks creativity. Generally speaking, storage capacity is an essential element in search engine business, however if we are to take a step back from the infrastructure and look at the products - Microfrost is desperate =).

Examples are Google Analytics and Microsoft Project Gatineau, which both perform exact functions. Google was the first one to offer a free web analytics tool that helps webmaster analyze amount of traffic their website received. Not long ago MS announced it will be releasing a beta version of its own analytics tool.

Another example is Google Earth and Virtual Earth beta by Microsoft. Both programs perform the same function of giving a birdseye view of planet earth with ability to zoom anywhere you deem appropriate and as you probably guessed Google was the first one to come up with an idea, now offering a “skyview” where you can explore galaxies and planets.

One might argue it is an appropriate strategy, after all it is good to have alternatives and some degree of choice, however I was not as impressed by Virtual Earth as I was with Google Earth, not because Microsoft product is bad, but simply because I’ve seen it before.

Google seems to always be one step ahead, while Microsoft is desperately running behind.

What MS needs is some unique never seen before idea that will delight its users and drive them to Live search every day, otherwise MS is up for a long, expensive battle, which in my opinion Ask.com will have a better chance of winning, not because of the budget, but because it is fresh, spirit driven company while Microsoft simply does not have it, due to its size.

Located at http://www.google.com/trends Google trends is a very useful online marketing tool.

One of the methods to adopt it to your strategies can be in a way of a geographical keyword monitor. As an example, I entered the term SEO into Google trends, which generated a graph for the year 2007 search volume, organized by regions, from biggest to smallest.

You also have an option to narrow the results by refining state/province in order to have a more in-depth geographical insight into the search patterns, zoom into the cities and see information broken down by municipal regions.

Combine Region Specific Keyword Research and Google Trends.

So far the only way to narrow the results geographically with tools such as WordTracker and Overture is to look for a specific name of that location in a term. With Google trends you are able to pinpoint the volume of actual searches done in a certain period of time in a location of your choice. A great way to find out if it’s worth the effort to target a particular geographical market.

Another useful asset of Google Trends is its ability to track your brand. It can give you a clear idea of where and when people search directly for your name, allowing you to lead your campaigns more effectively. Determine where you need to push, where you can relax and where competition is surpassing you.

Google trends can be very useful in holiday seasons, since it produces data in graph form, you can pinpoint the exact date when traffic started to pick up for your keywords last year, or the year before that and synchronize your efforts and stock level to earn highest profits.

Give Google Trends a try =)

These days, people are able to share photos, rate movies, create circle of friends, and throw virtual sheep at one another. All of these are done through social networks, but there’s a problem: it wasn’t one or two social networks doing this. There is more than one social network and their developers have had to customize their application for each one. It’s kinda a pain, isn’t it?

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