Marketing Answers Blog

By now you've probably heard about Google's most recent algorithm update and if you are like many people, maybe you feel as though it's going to be another round of you making adjustments to your online marketing strategy. You most likely have heard some of the reasons why Google came up with Hummingbird, but have some questions about it.

Web-logging or as it has now become 'Blogging' was a trendy thing to do in the 1990's when people did it as a way to interact online. We wrote about hobbies and philosophies, recipes and the like - it was a way to socialize on line.

Key to driving traffic to your site is the need for optimizing your content with keywords that pertain to your business and that web visitors are conducting searches for. This part of the equation is called 'on-page SEO' and really only accounts for about 25% of the effort that you need to put out in the SEO story.

Contratulations! You've put a lot of time and effort into building your new website because the old one was tired, boring, and just plain, well, old. You may have sunk considerable wads of money into the redesign project by signing on the best graphic designer you could find, and she spent weeks listening to your requirements, understanding your business, and figuring out what you do and don't like about your existing site. She then built your site taking your input into consideration and after many versions and revisions, now she's finally done, and the site looks absolutely fantastic!

As marketers, we spend considerable amounts of money and time in the development of a super cool, irresistable website; we purchase state of the art tool suites to track our online successes; and we churn out wads and wads of content to help our visitors make sense of the industry in which we position our products and services. So, uh, where is everyone? Why are all the wrong people visiting my site?

The periodic desire to redesign a company website is natural and often inescapable. We just get fed up with the way our sites look or function over time: what used to be trendy and appealing, has become tired looking and out of date. The more artistic one is, the shorter the interval between rounds of website redesign. You should, by all means, feel free to re-design your site, but go into the project with your eyes open and a plan to succeed.

It doesn't take long to figure out that a successful SEO positioning strategy is rooted in the development of content that is optimized for keywords of interest. But, interestingly, the process can easily become muddled and results hampered when this strategy is not cleanly aligned with a well defined keyword plan.

To me it seems sort of a slam dunk when it comes to copying other people's work, I mean, everyone must have learned why it's wrong to do this in grade school, right? Well, the reality is that not everyone gets it and if you were a search engine like Google with responsibility to go out and index all the sites on the internet on a regular basis, you would probably get stumped when running into pages with duplicate content. As a search engine, you don't want to serve up multiple versions of the same thing to your users.

While most of us use Google Search every day, few of us ever become power searchers either. If you aren’t aware of all the little tricks of the trade when it comes to using this search engine, please read on because with a few high-test commands in your tool belt, you can considerably increase the potency of your search capability. Take a look at the following list of must-know commands to make sure you know how to Google Search effectively: