Category Archives: Google, Yahoo, & others

Getting a Company Listed on Google Maps

Date:
Author:
Categories: Google, Yahoo, & others How To Do It

First, you will need to either already have a Google account or you will need to create one here

Next go to:  http://www.google.com/maps

Click “Put your business on Google Maps” link on left side of screen.

Click “Add new business” button on right.

Enter your Company contact information, website and description. Once you have entered your basic information you will be given the option to add more advanced details to your business profile such as a logo image, hours of operation, payment options, videos etc.

Next you will need to choose to be contacted by Google, by either by phone or by postcard in order to validate your listing.

Once you recieve the postcard or phone call, verify your business information.

The Golden Rule to choosing an SEO expert

Date:
Author:
Categories: Google, Yahoo, & others SEO - Natural Search

It seems like there are more SEO experts out there these days. Most do not know what they are doing, so you need to weed them out. Back in the dark ages of the Internet (pre-dot com bust), we had the same situation with Webmasters. The dime a dozen of Webmasters are now gone because the market matured. SEO has not matured yet, but you have a major advantage over the dark ages, we have Google. Google allows you to see exactly how successful an SEO expert is.

So the Golden Rule about SEO experts is that they must have a HIGH Google Rank on their website!!!

After all, Google Rank is what tells you the power of your page in relation to your competition. So, logically, your SEO professional should have a high page rank. How can you tell? Download a Google Toolbar, so that you can see the PageRank.

Once you have the bar loaded the Google Toolbar in your browser, go to the homepages of the guys you are looking at. Once there, you will see the rank, and if you want to know what the Google PagerRank means, here is a handy chart.

Increase Your Search Ranking: Google Rank

Date:
Author:
Categories: Google, Yahoo, & others SEO - Natural Search

Anyone who sells SEO or search copy for your website should have a high ranking and a lots of back links to their website. I attended a very good program on writing Emails from a professional and experienced web writer. While I found no fault with her knowledge (in fact she has many good insights), her website Google ranking are seriously lacking.

The Google Ranking system is a logarithmic scale from 1 to 10. Getting a ranking of 2 or 3 is not difficult although requires well organized pages. This site has a 4 and just 11 back links on the main page, and NO ranking on the page that discusses Search Engine Optimization.

This is unacceptable.

While a 4 is respectable, most of the secondary pages are not even registered with Google. Here is the problem, this person can write fine copy, but she is not a webmaster and doesn’t understand the rest of the technical issues that Google needs to find the pages.

Words do not matter if Google doesn’t know they are there!

Contrast this with the RedFusion Media website that is ranked a 6 with 300 back links. To put this is rough proportions, it is much more difficult to get from a 5 to a 6 than from a 4 to a 5. Meaning the ranking from a 4 to a 6 is several times higher than just 2 more.

If you are serious about increasing your ranking, only companies that are achieving these results should be hired, because this is expensive. Most SEO people quote about $100 per page, after your website is built.

Writing is very important to increase your search position, but only the right combination of writing and technical tricks can get the job done.

Google is now crawling your HTML Forms

Date:
Author:
Categories: Google, Yahoo, & others

Forms on websites have always been a problem whether it is coding, execution, or the fact that it was a wall to spiders. I would say that in my 10 years of coding, html forms have been the biggest problem in web site design. From the start forms were created using odd execution triggers; you could use CGI, Java, and the always dangerous Microsoft Front Page extensions. Today we use a number of other functions, php, asp, and flash to improve the delivery of the information. Internet data is now mission critical, so the old form techniques are out – mostly due to security and mail delivery problems.

For Google search, or any spiders for that matter, forms were the end of the road, spiders could not follow. Spiders could not follow the destinations of the forms. Many times forms just go to a “Thank You page”, but sometime they unlock whole sections of content that would not be indexed in the search engines. Other navigation solutions used “jump menus” which are usually coded as forms, so none of your jump menu content was found by the engines.

Google has announced that is now experimenting with the ability to search, from “Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Crawling through HTML forms”

“In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a <FORM> element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form” – Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy, Crawling and Indexing Team.

RedFusion Media has always placed high value on “Google-able” search pages, and if you would like to learn more about how Google works, and how search engine optimization works.

Yahoo and AOL work together against Microsoft

Date:
Author:
Categories: Business Google, Yahoo, & others

Reported today in the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo and Time Warner’s AOL are talking about a deal that would combine internet operations. This action is in response to Microsoft’s un-solicited bid to buy Yahoo, which declined the offer. In response Microsoft has gone to News Corp, which owns MySpace.com in an attempt to put a joint deal together where they could buy out Yahoo.

The “Bigger News” may be the disclosure of an apparent defeat, Yahoo is talking to Google about outsourcing search ad sales for Yahoo’s advertising engine. Google has a large lead in market share on all add placement and sale revenue.

Tips – Making a “Google Maps” Link

Date:
Author:
Categories: Google, Yahoo, & others

Google Map Links

Go to Google Maps: http://www.google.com/maps

Plot your location in the “Search Field”. Once you confirm that the location you want is in the map, look at the top right on the map and click on the Link to this page, button.

It then will show a new pop-up window with the link. Clicking in the box should select the full line, copy the selection and then paste it into your page.