Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

What is Google Places?
Local business listings is very important in Google. If you do a local search which includes a place, town, city or local service, Google will display the local business box. That’s how important Google thinks local search results are.

What determines your Google Places Rank?
Everyone is wondering what the ranking factors for local search engine optimisation. Do you stuff your Google Places page with as many keywords as possible or what?

Here are the top 10 factors that determine your Google Places ranking – From Least important to most important –

Want to know what everyone else is searching for? Did you know that Google publishes the top search queries and it’s called Google Trends.

It is broken into two areas -

Hot Searches – This is a list of the fastest rising searches on Google – updated daily.

Hot Topics – This is a list of popular topics in the news, Twitter, FriendFeed and other messaging services. – updated hourly.

What is Local SEO?
You may be wondering what exactly local seo is and how it can help your business. ‘Local Search Engine Optimisation’ is getting your business listed at the top of the search engine when local searches are performed.

A local search is defined as a search including a location, city, suburb, town, place, country or a local service.

Google Adwords is the sponsorship links that you see on any Google search. They appear above the organic search results and in the right column. They can also appear in the Google  content nextwork.

I have created hundreds of campaigns using Adwords and optimised campaigns for a lot of customers.

Many of the campaigns created by small business owners often have the same mistakes appearing time and time again.

I have complied this list of the 10 most common mistakes that advertisers make when creating and running their Google Adwords campaigns.

The subtitle says it all – “The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide” and the author, John Jantsch is not kidding.

Many business owners I talk to tell me they don’t have time to do any business planning or marketing just isn’t my thing.

The bad news is that no one is going to do your business planning and marketing without involving you so you may as well understand how it works.

This is a wonderful introduction into the world of getting your business listed on the major search engines and business directories.

The book is from the US but the explanation of local search engine optimisation and Google Places information is great.

If you want a shortcut to the top of search engines, the local business listings in the major search engines may just help you.

If you do a local search, the major search engines may display a listing of local businesses.

WordPress is open source software and one of the major players for blog publishing software. This blog was created with WordPress as well as many of the largest blogs in the world.

Wordpress 3.0 became available in June and is ready to download and install.

There are currently rumours floating around the Internet that Google may introduce a payment system for paid content.

What is Newspass
Newspass will be a micropayments system for viewing premium content. This premium content listing in the search engine result pages will be indicated with a Newspass icon. When you click on the link, your Newspass account will have the cost deducted from it.

The answer is GIMP!

GIMP is a free graphics program which is comparable to Adobe Photoshop. GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

I am often asked what graphic programs are good to use for basic graphic design. GIMP is a pretty good candidate for this. It can even save files in Photoshop format.

Here is a list of videos that are on YouTube and Vimeo that are quickly gaining popularity.

#1 – Nike Football – Write the future – 16,000,000 views