Power of Search

It is very interesting to see how the search engines wars will shape up in the years ahead.

I simply love Google as they are without doubt the best thing to happen since sliced bread. But that statement applies to where you are in the scheme of things. And how great they will stay is starting to unravel.

For those of you who were born recently, you'll find that there is a system of old money in place that does not want that scheme to change ever! The bigger the foundation, the more true that statement becomes.

Old money will always to find a way to monopolize as much of the trading buck as is possible. And this is why search engines scare the heck out of old money. Especially if you have a search engine that can determine where your cash can be spent. 

In the old days, you had to pay for expensive Yellow Pages, TV and Magazine advertizing to get your brand known but a computer network [internet] can give small business just as much brand awareness for free [if your SEO really knows what he is doing].

So, selecting a search engine to personally use comes down to knowing where you will end up if you use it. A string of related companies [by ownership, co-ownership etc.] can create and promote a search engine that will bias all potential sales to their own group of websites.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Bing is an example of this as I have noticed Bing is started to list more smaller businesses these days. Maybe that because they are seeking the advertizing revenue too? Someone else can research that. But at this time, Google is starting to waver. It seems they are trying to please the old money crowd instead of simply returning clean good page results for any genuine business.  They do have big and difficult job even without trying to give preferential leads to their income source but it seems weird no independent has bothered to come up with a unique search engine in all these years to rival the juggernaut. I really don't know why. It is obviously one of the most lucrative online activities. I am sure it would make a fantastic project for Uni Student across the globe to work on. 

DuckDuckGo.com has an interesting twist on search results. They endeavor to re-interpret search results of the big guys and return a selection that is not weighted by favor. In other words, a more true actual search result. So, if you are wondering "how is my SEO work really performing?", then you should run your tests through this nifty search engine.They might become a power house to watch in the coming years.

Success through Link Building

Success through Link Building
How can you expect to have successful website if you dont use link building methods [gasp.. choke..]?

One of the most useless things you can do for your website is to listen to spam emails out of India that ask for reciprocal links. I get at least one of these requests every day. This usually takes the form of: "...and I was wondering if you are interested in exchange links, I'll place your link on my sites exactly here..."

In the last year and a half, I have only received one genuine and relevant request which I accepted.

What is a Valid Link Exchange Request
You can tell a valid link exchange request by checking the senders email. Is it from a real website? Is this the same website in the link?

Sometimes [by which I mean mostly], the email will come from a .com but ask you to link a .net or a totally different website. This gives the sender a one-way link from your honest site which helps to improve their PR ranking in Google. But you get a link from a page that has hundreds or thousands of other links by those who were also not so wise to this trick and this does nothing to your PR rating and in some cases, can even lower your ranking.

How then do i Build up Links to my site?
If you have a good site, and as time rolls by, people will find and link your data or services. You can nudge this along by asking suppliers or similar businesses to include a link to you on their site. The links must make sense. If you do gutter repairs on this side of town, you might share a link with another tradie on that side of town.

You can also join a group that talks about home repairs and post a link to your website on that forum [join one that allows this].

Though my site has hundreds of incoming links now, it was not that way when I started and I rank in the top 300,000 in the alexa.com list. I did this with only 2 or 3 inbound links at the time.

So dont place too much importance on this activity. Having someone like me to seo your website is a far better course of action to increase your online presence.

cheap and free websites with seo

There is definitely a push to get business into cheap and/or free websites that claim to have seo optimized code.

What actually lies behind many of these offers?
To get you business onto the internet so that you pay and pay.

If your website is not found by those searching the internet, then it doesnt matter how much  you paid, it is wasted cash. Ideally, you'll be told you need to pay advertizing dollars to make it work. But you could do that anyway in papers and newsletters in your suburb and probably get much more sales anyway. So what's the use. Really?

Costing study for free websites
I did a costing study recently and found most free websites cost between 99 and 150 dollars a year. If you want this or that feature, it is usually an extra 60 per year. Some dont even come with a real email address or expect you to use an online service. To me, your email address should be post@mywebsite.com to look even half professional. I shudder when I get spam in my inbox from gmail or hotmail or similar claiming they are a legitimate business. How do you check it?

Websites I setup, design and host for small, micro and home business are mostly priced into this same bracket. But of course, you get real help [I even do it for you if you like] with getting your site up and going.

website builders
Another issue is that many expect you to design and build your business page. Though this may look good, most are so poorly formulated it is a miracle if anyone finds your website at all. I recommend using artisteer if you want to build your own site. I then take it apart and make the code effective for the search engines. You can buy the student demo for 50 bucks.

The only upside to website builders is that you can manage your pages a little easier. But in practice, I find that very few of these owners update their sites at all, so if you wanted a little up date here or there, I do it for free with my deals.

New websites and seo
But by far the biggest area of omission is having your site found by the search engines.

You can easily install statcounter.com's tracker to see how your website is really doing. This will tell you ifyou have a lemon website on your hands or not. Most likely, I can recreate your website for the same price as your are paying now [maybe even cheaper]. Then take another look at how the site is performing. If it is not better, work out some deal with me to make up for it. I doubt this would ever happen though.

I take pride in my work and I freely work with my clients to make sure they are being found. There is always other things you can do to help your website along. I discuss this on a personal level for your business. My recommendations are provided free to my customers as I like to see you do well.

yellow pages in oz

In aussie, and a little while ago, someone at yellow pages told me they paid a chunk of cash to google and that yellow pages would start getting better serp presence as a result. Yeah, right. As if google would sell-out on the aussies and make their search engine crappy again. We had this problem a few years back with many other types of useless directories hogging the returned serps but they finally fixed it.

Or did they?

Let's look at this mentality at work here.

Yellow pages is a search engine [they wish], and when you search for a biz name in google oz, google thinks you want to search further search sites to find the biz you are looking for. Then why do aussies even bother to use google in the first place? Is google saying that if I have a business named "blah blah" that already has an official website called "blah blah", i need to go to yellow pages first who may or may not have a link to "blah blah's" official website.

I understand that a few aussies are not too bright, but most of us out here know that yellow pages has a website that we could use if we were chasing a directly listing and not the actual website.

But guess what? It seems to be true. I now have to dig past many useless directory listings again to find actual websites.

Now Bing is trying to be more sociable at the moment. And if google dont get their act together soon, I might start looking around for a search engine that gives me sensible data results. Now, I guess that Bing is mainly interested in stuffing their affiliated coffers but are willing to put this aside to get at the ad revenue cash. And google seems to be hell bent on personal profit over having a quality product that honestly became the envy of madison ave.

So where does this leave the small business? Time for someone to actually make another powerful search engine by the masses for the masses? It looks like we are getting to that point.

See, if you internet shoppers started to only shop at small business websites that offer good value and service, the billions going into the coffers of the unworthy would then [almost over nite] be spread out in a town near you. And local business owners are more sane that the organizations that hide unspent profits behind foundations and jobs and cash would again begin to flow in the western world.

Sitemaps for new websites. SEO Basics.

SiteMaps, importance of for new websites.

When you first start a new website, you want the search engines to be able to find you and all the pages you have on your site that are for the pubic to see.

And this is very important from an SEO standpoint too.

The site map is an .xml file and is usually stored in the root of your website. For example, if your website was websiteadministrator.com.au , you should be able to find and view the sitemap.xml by entering  www.websiteadministrator.com.au/sitemap.xml in your web browser. This is what search engines look for they want to know what pages you have on your site. If you do not have this file there, they may or may not find all your pages. So how and where can we get a sitemap?

How and where to get a sitemap.xml for your website
Use this link if you would like help in creating a site map (there are other useful tools on this page too), when the sitemap has been created, you then download the .xml file and then upload it to your directory root (usually the same folder/directory as that of your home page or index.html) at your website. In due course, the file will be found by the search engines.

If you want to be a little more efficient, you can inform google, yahoo and bing that the file is now there. If you know what a robots.txt file is, then add the link in their too! To do this you add a line exactly like:

SITEMAP: http://www.websiteadministrator.com.au/sitemap.xml

This of course is a little different for blogspot websites.

-Fin