SEO-SEM Internet Marketing

Search Engine Wars – Will You Survive?

xanzamar — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:27:11 +0000

I have used FaceBook to keep up with friends and family and blogging, LinkedIn and Twitter for business. The area of social media comes up in most internet marketing conversations I have so I thought it might be best for me to explore the commercial aspects of FaceBook.

The whole issue of social media is gaining steam and Google is making major major changes to head off any defections to FaceBoook and other platforms that can be modified into search platforms.

Personally, I think Google is slipping with their new one privacy policy for all services which is basically no privacy at all and allows them to share information they gain about you from each service you use into one profile. Think about it; your email, docs, calendars, search, Google+….you get the picture. Over 50 services.

They are using this new ability to sell you to advertisers as a totally targeted lead and the worst thing I have heard to date is that they are going to start accepting payment from companies to appear near the top of search engine results pages (SERP). This pages have always been considered organic search and free of influence from money.

The changes coming are so major and coming so quickly that it is going to be a challenge to help people stay on top of search results. The game is changing and anyone that counts on business from the internet better adapt quickly or their business is likely to suffer.

We are going to explore many of the changes and offer tips and suggestions as to how you can adapt your internet presence to create the best result. You will a combination of posts that highlight tips and some in depth posts on specific key issues.

As always you will be able to post comments to me that I will attempt to answer either personally or in a future post. Our comment system encourages dialogue between users also.

Richard G Roberts/Founder XanZaMar Consulting

Volunteer Vice-Chair of Northwest Arkansas SCORE

Blogging from your site in less than an hour for free

xanzamar — Tue, 08 May 2012 09:39:31 +0000

Blogging has become very a very prominent part of the internet experience. I follow about a hundred blogs……no, I don’t read every post but I do clip based on headlines and later read and share the better ones. The greatest benefit for me is that I get many perspectives regarding many diverse subjects.

People who blog do it for a variety of reasons ranging from wanting to share their knowledge, as a creative outlook, to establish themselves as experts in their field, build traffic to their main website, entertain, generate income from ads and the list goes on.

What I am going to present today is how to add a blog to your existing website without spending a dime.

If you have a website that you have hosted by a professional hosting service, you can easily install a blog and be blogging the same day. Most hosting services have WordPress as an add on that you can have them install at no cost. This can be done through your hosting control panel.

You will need to create a subdomain to install it in….I recommend naming this folder blog. That way your blog address is blog.yourdomain.com. Very easy for all concerned. Once the blogging platform is installed…..takes about 15 minutes on GoDaddy…..you login and view the 100′s of WordPress Templates that are available and then install the one that fits your purpose and look best.

You are all set to go! If you want to do more that just blog, you will want to add plug-ins to add features and tools to your blog. The most common ones are search engine optimization, spam, sitemap generator and comment systems. These are available in your WordPress Dashboard and again there are hundreds of these.

For more information, contact your hosting company and WordPress.

If you want assistance or have questions, please contact us at XanZaMar Consulting

We encourage use of your comment forum for interaction between other users and us.

Richard G Roberts/XanZaMar Consulting
SCORE/Volunteer Counselor

You Need a Website – WHY?

xanzamar — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 01:14:01 +0000

I often hear the statement “I need a website” and it brings to mind a question to me. Do you
really and how will it serve your business. As the go to person in my SCORE
volunteer counselor group, I am often called in very early in a business
concept to assess the clients stated needs for a website. Often I find
approaches to their business and marketing that could often be more productive.

An example was a SCORE client I met with the other day that insisted she needed a website.
I made several inquiries as to her existing and future plans and who she hoped
to reach with here website. Turns out her market consisted of about 25
companies and she had already talked to all 25 of them on more than one occasion.
So my question was, why do you think a passive website is going to get them to
try your service when an active approach has not. No answer there. After much
more discussion it seemed like an update to her FaceBook page and some more
direct marketing were a better investment than a website.

Then there are the “I will get a domain name and they will come flocking”.
Something along the line of “build it and they will come”. There is so much
more than a domain name that is required to get online, such as a hosting site, a web design,
optimization, and publicization of the site. This is a much more complex issue
than many people think.

First of all, the domain name…….it must fit the business and should come after the business
name and business plan are firm. Your entire internet presence is going to be
built on top of your domain name.

If you have millions of dollars to invest, you can make any domain name mean what you

want it too. Most of us have limited budgets and need to make the largest
impact with the least amount of money. This requires a great deal of research
and thought about your domain name. Unless you company name is Apple or General
Electric or BP Oil, your company name in your domain name is only serves to stroke
your ego. You can always get a domain name with your company name in it and
point it to your real domain.

Part of choosing a domain name is knowing what you keyword phrase is going to be that
you want to optimize for and this takes research also. If you are selling
shoes, you will never get to the top of Google or Bing with the word shoes.
There is much too much competition for shoes. you will need to find a word or
phrase that describes your main product and has the most number of searches and
least amount of competition. These is done with keyword analysis.

Now you would be ready to find a hosting service and this should cost $50-100 per year
and will include email addresses and other features that are options for you to
consider. You can add a blog for free and many blogs can be used as websites.
Check out WordPress.org.

Web design is the next step and many hosting services have great web design templates that
are free. There are also many template designs that you can buy for less than
$100 and modify to your heart’s content. These templates are generally more
flexible and robust than ones that come with a hosting account.

Then you can move up to a web designer if it is in you budget and get a more custom
professional design but you are now approaching $750-1,500 for a decent one and
you have to make sure they are fully aware of what needs to be done to optimize
your site for the search engines or you have wasted your money.

Optimization can be purchased separately but expect to pay $150-250 per quarter. Search algorithms
are very fluid and changing daily as Google freely admits.

In summary, put pencil to paper and address each issue above and you will be ahead of most
of your competition and competition is what you will get on the internet.

For suggestions to some suitable service providers and detailed information, please post in our comment section and we will respond.

Richard G Roberts/Founder XanZaMar Internet Marketing

Search Engine Optimization – What Good Is It?

xanzamar — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 22:42:20 +0000

Search Engine Optimization includes a wide set of factors that impact the ranking of your website and its placement on the search engine results page (SERP) as well as the quality of your visitors. There are approximately a hundred factors that Google uses in its search algorithms to rank and place your website on the results page. The most important factor is choosing the proper keyword(s). You might have more people looking for shoes but if you are selling a unique shoe like pink sneakers you are much more likely to hit the first search engine results page (SERP) when optimizing for pink sneakers rather than shoe. Though there is a larger audience for shoes, there is also more competition making it much harder to stand out.

Content has also become much more important. It should be original and meaningful having a few of your chosen keywords sprinkled through it.

Domain names, page naming, page title, bold words, links to your website, directory listings, age of your domain, type of domain (com, net, org, usa, biz, info, etc). length of time until next renewal is due, etc. These are just a few of the factors that impact how you are ranked, where you are ranked and comes to your website.

This blog will focus on all aspects of search optimization and marketing.

Richard G Roberts/Found XanZaMar Internet Marketing

Meta-Tags – How Important Are They?

xanzamar — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:24:52 +0000

Meta-Tags are used to provide information to search engines. While search engine bots are getting smarter every day and are able to get much information from the content of your site there are a few meta-tags that are still important.

The most important one is the title meta-tag and should include the keyword(s) that you want people to find your site with. These words should also be in your page title, h1 and first sentence of two of your content. Characters should be limited to no more than 70.

NOTE: We all like to see our name in print but your name in the title is only important if people will use it to find you. Otherwise use this space to promote you keyword(s) and/or message.

The next most important meta-tag is your description and should expand on the title meta-tag and can include your company name. Characters should be limited to 120.

The least important meta-tag is for keywords as most search engine bots pick up keywords from you title, description and content. There are a few search engine bots that still read this meta-tag so do include the most important keywords for the page you are optimizing.

Richard Roberts/Founder

XanZaMar Consulting

Algorithms – How they Affect Search Results

xanzamar — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:58:48 +0000

Algorithms are at the heart of search engine results and basically determines what you see when you enter a phrase for search. Major search engines not only use these, they often change them daily. How you website or blog relates to these algorithms determines where you get placed on the results page.

It is VERY important to know what the search engines are looking for and because of this it is a highly guarded secret. There are many programs and people that make educated guesses but it is in the search engines best interest to keep this a secret so no one “games” the system and results remain relative to you search terms.

Per Wikipedia:

While there is no generally accepted formal definition of “algorithm,” an informal definition could be “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.”[11] For some people, a program is only an algorithm if it stops eventually; for others, a program is only an algorithm if it stops before a given number of calculation steps.[12]

A prototypical example of an algorithm is Euclid’s algorithm to determine the maximum common divisor of two integers; an example (there are others) is described by the flow chart above and as an example in a later section.

Boolos & Jeffrey (1974, 1999) offer an informal meaning of the word in the following quotation:

No human being can write fast enough, or long enough, or small enough† ( †”smaller and smaller without limit …you’d be trying to write on molecules, on atoms, on electrons”) to list all members of an enumerably infinite set by writing out their names, one after another, in some notation. But humans can do something equally useful, in the case of certain enumerably infinite sets: They can give explicit instructions for determining the nth member of the set, for arbitrary finite n. Such instructions are to be given quite explicitly, in a form in which they could be followed by a computing machine, or by a human who is capable of carrying out only very elementary operations on symbols.[13]

The term “enumerably infinite” means “countable using integers perhaps extending to infinity.” Thus Boolos and Jeffrey are saying that an algorithm implies instructions for a process that “creates” output integers from an arbitrary “input” integer or integers that, in theory, can be chosen from 0 to infinity. Thus an algorithm can be an algebraic equation such as y = m + n—two arbitrary “input variables” m and n that produce an output y. But various authors’ attempts to define the notion (see more at Algorithm characterizations) indicate that the word implies much more than this, something on the order of (for the addition example):
Precise instructions (in language understood by “the computer”)[14] for a fast, efficient, “good”[15] process that specifies the “moves” of “the computer” (machine or human, equipped with the necessary internally contained information and capabilities)[16] to find, decode, and then process arbitrary input integers/symbols m and n, symbols + and = … and “effectively”[17] produce, in a “reasonable” time,[18] output-integer y at a specified place and in a specified format.
The concept of algorithm is also used to define the notion of decidability. That notion is central for explaining how formal systems come into being starting from a small set of axioms and rules. In logic, the time that an algorithm requires to complete cannot be measured, as it is not apparently related with our customary physical dimension. From such uncertainties, that characterize ongoing work, stems the unavailability of a definition of algorithm that suits both concrete (in some sense) and abstract usage of the term. MORE……

Please make sure to post your comments where you can get into a dialogue with fellow posters.

Richard G Roberts/XanZaMar Consulting