Google Caffeine Officially Annouced

admin    google     alpharetta seo, facebook, google caffeine, Social Media, twitter

Google has officially announced the launch of caffeine their new search index. There has been a buzz around for a while that caffeine was being launched and Google told us a while back that they were testing out caffeine in various markets. It looks like it now official as you can see on their blog with the official launch of Google caffeine.

So what does the launch of the new index mean to you and me. As you can tell Google is pushing hard to pull as much content as they can and they are going to index it faster. If you have a static web site than you may be in trouble but if you have a blog on your site or are continually adding new web pages to your website you will be just fine. This also means you will see  a lot of the social media sites such as facebook, twitter, and youtube showing up in your search results more now than ever.

Remember the saying that content is king? Well this has been true in the past and will continue to be very important. If you do not have a content strategy now is the time to create one. My first recommendation would be to add a blog to your website and decide to populate it with new content. Make a blog part of you site so that it sits in a sub-directory so it would like this www.mysite.com/blog. Do not put it in a sub-domain or put your blog on an external site such as wordpress or blogger. I recommend wordpress because it has tons of free plug-ins and it is really seo friendly.

Consistently add new articles to your blog or website and if you have a company with several employees make them part of the content team and let them contribute articles to your site. If you are adding new content to your site every month or so you are missing the point and you need to schedule time in your week to add as much content to the site as you can.

Go ahead and add a facebook business page and a twitter account if have not already done it and when you post new content to your website
link back to the content. Since Google and the other search engines are constantly crawling facebook and twitter this will insure that the new content has been picked up by Google. If Google knows that your new content exist than the better your chances are that it will rank.

The caffeine update can be a good thing and help you with traffic to your website if understand what Google wants and serve it to them. Websites that are consistently add new and relevant content to their site will get all the Google love that they can stand.

Need help with your search engine marketing strategy drop us a line and schedule a consultation.

Twitter 101

admin    Uncategorized     alpharetta seo, Social Media, twitter

It has been a while since I have posted and I apologize but it has been a busy few weeks and business has been booming. So as opposed to not updating my blog I thought I pass along a link to a great read that I came across recently. If you have ever thought about using twitter to drive traffic than now is a great time dip your foot in the pool.

Twitter has gotten a lot of buzz and it seems like every place that you turn somebody is pushing their twitter account. To learn the basics of twitter here is a link to an article by Ron Jones that you should check out…Twitter 101.

After reading the article feel free to comment let me know your thoughts.

Social Media Marketing For Your Business

admin    Social Media     facebook, maketing for business, Social Media, twitter, youtube

If you go back 3 to 4 years ago using social media for business purposes was almost unheard of as a marketing avenue. Fast forward to today and most progressive  businesses realize that social media is here to stay and can be a great way to drive traffic to their website and can be great for branding. As part of their marketing they are using sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the list goes on and on. In fact social media is so popular that Facebook has passed Google as the most visited site on the internet.

If you are still skeptical about about the value of social media here are some stats for you to consider.

• The percentage of Facebook users who login on a daily basis is 50% and they spend a minimum of 55 minutes per day on the site.

• Twitter has 18 million users with an average of 600 tweets per second.

• YouTube had over 91 million unique visitors in the month of March 2010.

To give you some more stats that back up the fact the social media is now a major player in marketing your company. In January 2010 Facebook passed Yahoo and was only second to Google in regards to visitors. Based on visitors to Facebook in a week compared to last year the number increased by a whooping 185%. As I mentioned earlier Facebook now has passed Google for total visitors.

When you take a look at the numbers and utilize the selling power of social media when it comes to business marketing it has become a must in todays market. Using social media effectively is more than setting up accounts and hoping that people find your company, you need to jump and engage in the conversations. As with any type of selling and business in general people tend to buy from people they like and trust. Using social media can set your company apart from other businesses by building your brand becoming an expert in your field.

If you decide to add social media to your marketing efforts try not to only promote your business in every post or tweet. Get your followers or friends to communicate with you by adding interactive polls, games, or quizzes to your pages to get people to spend more time on your site. Repost interesting information from other users that are interesting  and relevant.

Social media is here to stay and using it to market yourself or your business is a cost effective way to find new prospects and customers. If you have not dipped your toes in the social media world now is a perfect time to give it a shot.

How Will Google Social Search Experiment Effect Search Marketing

admin    Social Media     flickr, google, google social search, organic traffic, picasa, twitter

The Google Social Search Experiment has gone live to beta for anybody who wants to sign up. In case you are not familiar with the Google Social Search you can check out their blog to find out more. This is very interesting because with the advent of the many social sites that are on the internet such as twitter, facebook, and etc. Google can now pull content from many sources.

The real question is how will effect search and search engine marketing. My first thought is that it will not effect search engine marketing at all but if you take a closer look you will see that it can have some ramifications. Lets say for example you are optimizing your website for golf clubs. You have done everything correctly from onsite optimization such as title tags, keyword rich content, file structure, and all of the various aspects that come into play while optimizing. You have also built relevant backlinks to your site and you find yourself ranking for #2 for golf clubs.

Since social search  is in the early stages most people will not see much loss in traffic. But what can happen over time is that the more people join social search the more your listing could get pushed down in the rankings when people have the social search turned on. The reason this could happen is because Google never lets you know where they will display the listings for the various sites such as flickr, tweeter, or blog post. The listings could be at the bottom of the page, the middle , or the top.

Right now if you have a ranking for you term and it is #2 than you are probably getting a good amount of traffic from that keyword because you are above the fold and one of the first listings that people see when they search for that term. The problem will happen if the social listings are on top and now you listing could be potentially pushed down below the fold giving you less exposure for the term.

In the long run I do not think it will have profound effect for traffic by itself but when you add in other pieces of the puzzle such as local maps, real time alerts, adwords, and images you will see that just organic ranking for a term is not the only thing to consider when you are trying to gain market share of traffic.