Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

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!

Google has been very busy this month with the release of their new design.

The left column on the search results page is more pre-dominate now with more options. A lot of people do not take advantage of the additional search options on Google. Did you know you can search through news articles, images, videos, blogs and much more?

You can also specify the time and date of your results. This means that you can do a web search with pages from this year only. This is great for researching current statistics for example.

Google has also implemented a brand result area in the search results. If you search for footballs, you now get many different areas as part of the universal search results -

• News clips
• football images
• football brands
• videos of football
• football products

All these changes are taking place to provide the user with a more user friendly appearance and better search results. Google says that by providing all these results, it adds to the users’ overall experience with the search engine.

Many people ask me why they aren’t ranked number one for their targetted keyword. I explain to them that their page needs great content and good backlinks to their site. If the content is great, people will link to it. Google will rank it higher because it is what people are looking for.

Have you ever had those phone calls from companies claiming to get your site to the first page of Google within 28 days?

Even as a search engine optimisation and marketing consultant, I still get them. I listen to their pitch and then ask a couple of questions. They usually have no clue how to answer them so what kind of service will they be providing?

I have done a search on their business name and they didn’t even come up first. That is a very easy task and a pathetic attempt on their behalf.

We advise all our customers to be aware of anyone calling up trying to sell them Internet services. There are a lot of people out there to take your money and there’s not much you can do about it if they do not deliver.

These telemarketers are driven by commission and can become aggressive pressuring you to sign up with them. I recommend avoiding any business that you have never with dealt with before or if they sound like they are over promising on what they can do.

They claim that having a good ranking will increase visitors and increase sales. This is true. It’s how they get you there – if they get your there at all. I don’t believe they will ever get you there. If you get banned from Google, that’s the end of it!

Wrap Up
Beware of any company that contacts you regarding search engine optimisation or marketing that you have not contacted first.

If you are ever unsure, contact your web developer or myself and I will tell you if it’s a good or bad.

The top 500 major Internet retailers spend approximately $1.2 million every day in search engine marketing. The problem is only 33% of their highest-priced keywords appear in the top 50 of natural search engine results.

Large corporations continue to fail with SEO efforts and keeping spending big to gain market share online.

This is where the smaller players have an equal playing field – natural search engine results.

It is estimated that 43% of people click on the number 1 natural search engine result for any query. This kind of traffic for popular keywords can really help a business grow.

Why aren’t large corporations getting in on this?
They often build their sites and think about optimising it afterwards – too late!

A solid SEO friendly web site starts withe foundations – when the web site is initially being built. Making major changes down the track can be time consuming, expensive and take up time.

What can you do about it?
You can learn how to optimise your own web site or pay an SEO expert to do it for you. Then plan a link building strategy to compliment your efforts.

When your web site is ranking well for you specific keyworkds, the amount of potential customers will increase and your online sales will increase. This means more profit for you.

Wrap Up
Optimise your web site if you haven’t already and start gaining that advantage over the big guys!!

Google leads when it comes to quality of search engine results for end-users. If you are looking for something, usually Google will find it. That’s why Google wants to continue to satisfy it’s customers.

Google has now added a new factor to the rankings of their search engine results. Research has shown that faster loading web sites adds to a user experience. They stay on fast longer web sites for a longer period of time.

Web sites that are slow to load are often aborted because they take too long to load.

What about your web site?
How long does your web site take to load? If your web site is slow to load, are you losing visitors? Now, you will not only lose visitors but your search engine rankings will drop.

Slow loading web site factors
The factors are all measured from the users’ point of view. How long it takes for a web site to be downloaded and rendered on a users computer screen is the measurement used.

There are two great books based on this topic by Steve Souders – High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites.

Here are his rules for producing fast web sites -

• Rule 1 – Make Fewer HTTP Requests
• Rule 2 – Use a Content Delivery Network
• Rule 3 – Add an Expires Header
• Rule 4 – Gzip Components
• Rule 5 – Put Stylesheets at the Top
• Rule 6 – Put Scripts at the Bottom
• Rule 7 – Avoid CSS Expressions
• Rule 8 – Make JavaScript and CSS External
• Rule 9 – Reduce DNS Lookups
• Rule 10 – Minify JavaScript
• Rule 11 – Avoid Redirects
• Rule 12 – Remove Duplicate Scripts
• Rule 13 – Configure ETags
• Rule 14 – Make AJAX Cacheable

Wrap Up
If you optimise your website, your users will have a better experience and you will get higher rankings in Google search results.

A lot of business owners that I talk to refuse to think or do anything about their marketing. They simply put it into the too hard basket or complain how they hate trying to sell stuff to people.

We are constantly marketing ourselves, our ideas, our products and services and our business. You can have the greatest product in the world but if no one knows about it, it’s useless!

So why do small business owners fail in marketing?
The difference between small business marketing and large business marketing is huge. They are the complete opposite and I will tell you why.

What is large business marketing?
Large businesses measure the results of marketing campaign by how many people now know and recognise their brand. Their goal is to get their name out there into the world. They also have larger budgets and want to spend that money to put their name into everyones’ head!

What is small business marketing?
Small business measure the results at a micro level. They measure how many extra customers they get, how many extra phone calls they got and if there was any increase in sales. They have a small budget and operate their campaigns in a much more refined way. Their goal is to get the customers in the door to spend their money – not to get inside everyones’ head.

What is the difference?
Large businesses are trying to get their name out there and small business are trying to get customers inside.

Wrap Up
How are you marketing your business? Are you putting your message in front of the right audience? Are the customers walking in the door or going to your website? Are they buying your products and services?

The power of social media is gaining momentum everyday. Large companies are taking social media serious.

Jetstar is leading the airline industry with innovative social media tactics with the recent announcement that it will direct 40% of its marketing budget to social media -

“We’ve conducted some very successful marketing and PR campaigns via social media in the past 18 months, including YouTube and Twitter, and the response has been phenomenal,” said David May, Jetstar’s head of marketing.”

In comparison to social media, traditional marketing is increasing in cost but I believe the effectiveness is decreasing -

“Social media offers more value for money and is a smarter way to reach our customers – which is what Jetstar is all about.”

Jetstar has previously has sales exclusively on Twitter with proved extremely successfuly -

“In line with the increasing need to talk to smaller, interconnected communities; communities that when aggregated deliver large numbers of engaged and involved brand advocates, we are likely to shift a large percentage of Jetstar’s above the line media spend into digital areas, with an increased focus on social media,” said Richard Smith, managing director of Jetstar’s media buying agency Maxus.

More information can be found at MarketingMag – Social media 40% of Jetstar’s marketing budget

Wrap Up
What are you doing with social media to help your business?

There’s an interesting statistic e-commerce statistic that I have written about earlier. The average time for a customer to make a purchase is 30 hours. This means that most people do not buy a product or service on their first visit. It is usually after they have thought about it and they come back the next day to make their purchase.

What is Remarketing?
The remarketing tool allows advertisers to hit the user days later to try and get their booking or purchase.

Example of Remarketing in action
Imagine someone wants to go to a concert in Sydney. The user visits a particular hotel’s website in Sydney but does not make a booking. The next day, they go to the booking website for the concert which is part of the Google Content Network – they have Google display ads running. The ads that they see are for the hotel they visited the day before. This is remarketing through Google Adwords.

Using this new tool
This new tool is available in your Adwords account if you advertise with Google. More information about this tool can be found here – Now Available: Reach the right audience through remarketing.

What is the GoogleBot?
The googlebot is the automatic spider program that Google uses to visit websites and report back with results to put into it’s search engine results. By understanding how the GoogleBot works and how it interprets your web pages, can increase your search engine rankings.

There are many factors that Google considers when indexing web pages. Here are a couple of questions and answers about how the GoogleBot works and how to get better search engine rankings.

What is host load limit?
Host load limit is the number of connections that your webserver allows at any given time.

A webserver with a lot of busy websites, would be limited to the number of connections each website can have.

That is why it’s important to have a reliable host that does not have overloaded servers. This means that the GoogleBot can index your website quickly and entirely without being restricted.

What is crawl budget?
Google will index a number of web pages on your website which is directly proportional to your PageRank. The lower the PageRank, the less pages of your website will be crawled. If you have a higher PageRank, most, if not all of your pages will be crawled.

The better your PageRank, the deeper the GoogleBot will go with indexing your website.

How does duplicate content affect crawl budget?
If the GoogleBot crawls three of your web pages and they all have the same content, Google will only index one of those pages and scrap the other two pages. It will then assign a lower PageRank value because of the duplicate content resulting in less pages being indexed by Google.

Are Session IDs bad for my website?
Google does not recommend the use of session ids for a number of reasons. They look ugly which is hard for the user to remember the address and less users are likely to click on a complicated link.

Google and Yahoo both have tools to remove unwanted variables in the address bar. Any variables that do not add value to the user’s experience can be removed for indexing.

Does 301 redirects take the link juice?
If you move a page or even change domain names, it is highly recommended to use 301 redirects. The link juice is carried to the new page. If the original page has a PageRank of 3, the new redirected page would take it.

There is some decay in the PageRank value but much of it is carried on.

What is a canonical tag?
Google has a fantastic post that describes everything about canonical tags including the new cross referencing of domain names. Specify your canonical.

Lady Gaga is the first music artist with over one billion online video views. She has three music videos on YouTube and Vevo -

• Poker Face – 374 million views
• Just Dance – 272 million views
• Bad Romance – 360 million views

A total of over 1 billion online video views.

She is closely followed by Twilight saga with 980 million and Soulja Boy with 860 million, as of today.

What is she doing that makes her such a star? Maybe add your comments below.

Here are her three top videos -