Category Archives: Internet Marketing

Internet marketing ideas, tips, tricks, reviews, commentary, etc.

Internet Marketing

When Will Google See Me?

English: a chart to describe the search engine...
English: a chart to describe the search engine market (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writing a blog is a good way to attract potential customers to your business, but there is an art to the science. The web is crawling with all manner of experts who claim they know how to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and that will rank you high on results for terms your potential customers use. Great. But they all claim it and they all can’t be correct. After all, how many different websites will be using the terms you want?

Do a keyword search using Google’s tool and you will see how popular certain search criteria are. Really think these experts will get you ranked high on those? They will say choose different ones that are not so competitive. If your are selling jackets and sweaters on your site, why would you want to rank high for terms like wool thread or outer clothing? The terms need to be relevant or it will nor work properly.

Regular readers of this blog will start to wonder if I’m repeating myself as there are several posts here lamenting the plights of SEO and the rip-off artists that prey upon those who have new domain registrations. True and this is not a repeat as much as it is a flow of consciousness rant. Google keeps changing their search engine rules and staying up to date on the latest techniques is exhausting. My blog doesn’t even rank highest for my name, Bryon Lape. Why is that?

A few weeks ago, I moved all the content for my blog to a domain that is my name. I’ve had bryonlape.com for quite some time, but I was using a permanent forward to the old domain. The content was exported and then imported to a newer WordPress server. Several of the posts have been pushed to Twitter and the old site has been redirecting to a BlueHost capture day for weeks.

And so what?

Searches for phrases from the old site reveal that Google has not yet followed the content. The results that are shown are still the old domain and must be fetched from Google’s cache to be viewed. I even searched for my name this domain was nearly at the bottom of the list. How is that? My name is in the title of this blog and in the domain. Surely that should rank higher. My nickname of Brainmuffin ranks worse with Google still believing I’m really wanting bran muffins. Arg!

I’ve had several nicknames over the years, with Brainmuffin being the most recent and given to me nearly 20 years ago. Two others of mine, Ropeman and Schnurmann, go back to high school nearly 30 years ago. Perhaps I should blog on their meaning and origins too and see if Google ever ranks them high enough to recognize.

There are times I truly do not understand Google’s algorithms and why pages rank as they do. Microsoft uses this lack of understanding on the part of users in their Bing ad campaigns. It is not too infrequently that Google will return a mismatch of pages and one has to use the phrase remove feature to remove them. Search for a business opportunity review and it gets worse.

This latter inquiry is not all the fault of Google though. Remember those SEO experts? Some of them have a service behind them that puts your content all over the web, with changes made here and there to make the search engines believe the content is different. It is this manner of inorganic content that Google is trying to combat with all their algorithm changes. Sometimes it works, other times it really hurts the small business website.

So, now here I am. I make new content and post in different places. I wait a day or two and search for terms in my content. Often the pages returned are irrelevant and the old site continues to be returned. I have moved. When will Google see me?

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Internet Marketing

Search Engine Optimization – It Moves

The beginning

Search Engine Optimization. What is it? Does it work? How can it be used? Where is it? Why does it keep changing? Is SEO a verb or noun? What about? What about? What about???

In the early days of the web, search engine optimization was nearly unheard of. Websites were grouped by audience or subject. Business sites over here. Research sites over there. Government sites on the shelf below. Yahoo felt more like a library or a book store than a search engine. Ideas for indexing content was in its infancy and WAIS databases were king. The most used protocol was Z39.50, not e-mail, ftp, telnet, gopher or web. Times were about to change.

The Middle

Along came Alta Vista and the proverbial genie was out of the bottle. Now someone did not have to look through a endless sea of categories for a website, but could now enter words and phrases. Ask Jeeves allow the user to take the next step and ask in a question form: “What is the color blue?”, “Why is the sky blue?”, “How is beer made?”. The web and Internet were becoming synonyms, even though the Internet is more than the web. People were getting dial up accounts in large numbers. The web was growing exponentially. Thousands of sites were being added each day. How could a business be heard in all that noise?

By studying the algorithms of the search engines, content started to be created that took advantage of it. Pages did not necessarily have to be human readable. All it had to be was consumed by the spiders and seen as optimized by the search engine. When a page is optimized for say “the best home business” or “make money now stuffing envelopes”, it gets pushed to the top of the page. A business’ voice is heard the best and loudest. They get more traffic, others get less.

As pages become flooded with keywords to create better search engine optimization, the spammers took over. Site after site of pure gibberish was created. The charlatans started to win. The snake oil salesmen gave everyone a bad name. Something had to give. It did.

Panda Me

The largest search engine, Google, changed their algorithm. Panda went live and search engine optimization changed overnight. Content became king again. Real content. Not machine gibberish. Articles started to become relevant again. Blogs mattered. The sun came out.

Google continues to change their algorithm. Search engine optimization has become both an Art and a Science. Good content, good social awareness and backlinking all play their part in making sites rank higher. Sure, the spammers will now hire armies of writers to earn their top spots again, however, their efforts and expenses will greatly increase. In the meantime, actual individuals will be able to have their voices heard.

Learn to move with search engine optimization or get left behind. Know what the changes mean. Create your content to adhere to the new standards. Be heard. Be seen.

Bryon Lape can also be read on HubPages. A longer form article entitled SEO: the moving target can be found there. Read. Comment. Share. Together we grow.

Internet Marketing, Marketing

The Marketing Event of the Year

On May 21st in Phoenix, Arizona, the most amazing event will take place. It will not be witnessed by many people and some of the attendees will not doubt miss the significance, but for those who are prepared, it will change their lives forever. Though billed as a marketing event, it is really a journey of self-discovery for the leaders.

In the realm of marketing, branding is king. Creating a brand that has appeal to your target audience is a never ending process. When that brand is, it is of more import that you build correctly. The event in Phoenix is meant for such. Discover your brand, build your brand and market true to your brand.

Being true can be one of the hardest ideals of marketing to maintain. All too often it is too easy to over-hype and over-promise on your brand to not deliver. Once jaded about your brand, it is very hard to reacquire a good reputation. The wrong news spreads faster than the correct. Tread carefully and with integrity.

One may wonder how this event will be helpful. Getting to meet and be with the founders and leaders of CarbonCopyPRO is how. While it is true that many other business hold such events, very few limit the attendance to the serious and allow such up close access. Attend your typical MLM event and there will be thousands. The speakers, though leaders, are not close to the founders nor are they are accessible. If one has earned enough, one might get to sit closer, but that is it. How is that helpful? It isn’t. It is just a “Rah, rah, we rock!” party not an event geared to help you build your dream. This event is.

How can you get to the Master Marketing Event? Easy, plug into the system and get your ticket. Your next 90 days will never be the same.

Internet Marketing, Marketing

Keeping the conversation

This post comes in support of the effort to move the blog to a new site without doing a bulk copy of every post. It was originally posted on 18 April 2011.

A search of the web will reveal all manner of ideas on what makes a blog well attended. Is your topic interesting? Do you engage the reader? Is the information timely or are you commenting on old news? Is the grammar and sentence structure correct? Does it make sense? But what does it really?

In the world of business, timing and positioning is everything. Sometimes the pioneers of an industry survive, while others are eclipsed by the late comer. At the dawn of social media, MySpace became king. Here the narcissistic could trumpet themselves to everyone. It grew rapidly and pulled the concern of some parent groups. But what of now? Sure, it still has many members, but it is nowhere close to the likes of Facebook. What happened?

MySpace was first and acquired a bit of a party town atmosphere. It was young and hip. Facebook grew from colleges only to be something that your mom or dad might want to join. That was the biggest difference. With an older, more fiscally established crowd came better demographics for advertisers. That’s positioning right there. Being able to get the correct eyeballs to see content generated more corporate interest and thereby money.

Being at the right place at the right time is an ever changing mix of know-how, luck, experience and planning. Knowing what came before, knowing what your customers want, knowing where the markets are. Those are some serious keys to success. Some of it can be gained by study, focus groups, surveys, etc, but knowing how and when to strike, that is the portion that few seem to have. Many times, it is not just striking at the right time as it is persistantly striking. Trying new ideas and approaches. Constantly adapting the tactics and motives. Finding new streams and ideas. Tenacity.

Nice ramble, but what is the bottom line? All of these ideas are correct and incorrect, simultaneously. Not all blogs are popular with all people. Keep writing. Find new ideas. Post and tweet. Advertise on other blogs. Learn to use keywords. Get your friends to tell there friends etc. Position and timing, mixed with hard work and some luck.

And if there weren’t enough clichés, keep on keeping on.

Internet Marketing, Marketing

To Backlink or not to Backlink

Creating backlinks was an early want to get traffic to your site and have it known around the Internet world. In a way, one could argue that Yahoo started out as a large backlink site, though organized by topic. With the advent of crawling search engines, backlinks became one of the ways to measure of a site’s popularity. Knowing this, many site owners created pages of nothing but backlinks. As search engines became smarter though, out of context links were filtered.

Various methods arose to give the search engines more reason to view the links as relavant and meaningful. Placing links inside of text such as an article or a post help provide more information to not only the human reader, but the engines as well. Link pages started to content text and keywords to give more weight to sites. Services such as 3 Way Links aide in giving sites meaningful and context reach links. With the current algorithms in use, such links help to give a site more weight and move it up the SEO ladder.

In the area of article and post writing, an idea as risen on automatically generate different versions. The idea is quite simple, though it involves some rather ingenious methods. Write three different versions of an article, upload them to Unique Article Wizard and it will generate multiple versions of your article.

Sound like good services? What about a combined one? One that delivers both strategies and more. Does such a combined service exist? Indeed. Enter LinkNetworker. Write articles or have them written for you. LinkNetworker will also post your articles to various article websites, saving you time and money.

In answer to the title, “To Backlink or not to Backlink,” if you want your site to be found and measured in your favor by search engine, then yes. Want your website to be amongst the crickets? Then do nothing and that will be the result.

**In need of help marketing your business? We can help.**

Internet Marketing, Marketing

An SEO first stop or: How a Geek Experiment took over the World

As promised, here is a repost of an article from the old blog location. It was first posted on 13 April 2011.

I quite fondly remember a time in the late-mid-90’s when Yahoo had a Standford address and was more an exercise in manually linking websites than some version of an automated spider. It was the pioneer days of Internet search engines and no one really had a clue of what was to come. Over the next few years, various ideas of how to index and search the web were being tried. Soon to arrive were the likes of AltaVista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves. To index what eventually became known as Intranets, a resourceful programmer could download Glimpse onto a Unix box, run make, install and start indexing a list of sites. A rather simple CGI form was needed to provide a user interface and away it all went.

Times have changed since those days. Yahoo left the confines of the .edu domain and became its own business. Alta Vista became a favorite of self-filtering junkies with the use of + and -, as well as finding +links. Lycos dropped off the face of the Earth and along came Google. The technology wars were eventually eclipsed when it was figured out how to monetize searching. Pay results, sidebar ads and AdWords are now the norm. Without resources to back link like mad or not having a site that is already very popular many are linking on their own, attention has to be made to key words and content.

In real estate, the saying goes that there only three rules: Location. Location. Location. For websites, content is key and traffic is King. It is more than just making sure the content serves the keywords. It is about properly choosing keywords based on how users you want search and how they will find you. The business is marketing and marketing is the business. It is really no different than the old way, just made global. In brick and mortar, just putting out your sign and placing an ad in the Sunday paper will not drive business to your door. The same ideas apply on the Internet, now they are in an electronic environment. On-line advertising follows the same rules as off. Know your audience and how they will go about finding you. Then place yourself in their path, get their attention (and not their scorn) and give them a value proposition geared to why they should purchase. Some will, some will not, so what? Sell to those who buy and chase not those who wish not.