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 -

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.

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.

Internet advertising is proving to be one of the most effective and best returns on investment for advertisers – if you know what you are doing!

Internet advertising is easy to setup, maintain and measure it’s effectiveness. Every dollar is accounted for and every lead is followed.

You are able to setup test campaigns and measure every interaction very closely. You can setup micro campaigns that target very specific areas.

The advertising inventory is huge as well. If you have a large budget, you can easily spend that budget and reach everyone.

Mobile commerce allows consumers to browse, buy, transact and deal with a company using their mobile phone or device.

Magento is at the forefront for shopping cart software innovation with their new mobile storefront solution.

The Online Retail Expo is fast approaching. The expo and conference is on 6 to 9 July, 2010 at Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre.

2010 ONLINE RETAIL INDUSTRY AWARDS FINALISTS:

1. Best Pure-Play Online Retailer
Deals Direct | www.dealsdirect.com.au
Appliances Online | www.appliancesonline.com.au
Little Dance Invitations | www.littledanceinvitations.com.au
Trixan Body | www.trixanbody.com.au

Businesses advertise their domain name to promote their website. Without a domain name, people cannot get to your website or send you emails. It’s a requirement for any business on the Internet.

Emails and text messages are often misunderstood and a break down in communication can happen very easily. But what would happen if your domain name could be easily misunderstood?

Imagine if there was a way where you could find out if someone mentioned your name, business name, product or service on the Internet.

Now you can with Google Alerts!

Why do you need to know?
Before I tell you how to setup a Google Alert, I need to let you know why it is so important to monitor this kind of activity.

Google Place Listings is the results box when you even a search query that may be location specific.

There is no hard rule for when the business listings will be displayed but it usually appears when a keyword is about a location or the type of keyword would be loacation specific.

If you entered pizza into Google, it would then show the business listings. The same would happen for accomomdation, hotel or motel.

These listings can be a very powerful tool that you can use to list your business above everyone else. Managed right and you will be up the top. Do the wrong thing, and you will be removed very quickly – within hours!

Magento have released a new version of their shopping cart system. It is called Magento Professional aimed at small businesses.

What is Magento?
Magento is an open source shopping cart system. It is a very complex shopping cart for advanced shopping carts. I have only setup a couple Magento shopping carts where are I have setup dozens of osCommerce, CRE Loaded and Zen Cart shopping carts.