In fact, over 200 factors figure into your ranking…many of them you have little or no real control over.  Bill Hartzer recently published an article highlighting 5 important factors that go into your SEO ranking that I would like to share with you.

Keep in mind that this is just a sampler of what you need to be aware of with regard to your ranking, but these are vital points to consider…

1. Original content on your website is probably the most important factor.  Fake or copied content will get you flagged or blacklisted by the search engines.

2. Too many ads.  Web pages with heavy advertisements on top of the page are being targeted not just by Google, but by the other search engines as well.  Websites that  focus more on promotion rather than providing actual useful information are being eliminated.

3.  ”Likes” and “+1′s.”   These are becoming as important as links in the search engine algorithms.

4. Mobile searching.  Having a mobile-friendly website is more vital than ever and this is only increasing in importance.

5. Site speed.  The speed optimization of your website is most definitely factored into your ranking.  Be careful with video usage.  It’s a valuable medium, but too much video on your website can slow it down considerably.

To read the full article on Bill Hartzer’s website, click here.   It paints a nice picture of factors you can control in your quest to be found by your target audience.

As always, drop me a line if SEO seems like a confusing quagmire to you and you want some easy-to-understand clarification.

Every day is a 5-Hour Energy day!

Having been cynical regarding advertising since I was a child – thank you, MAD Magazine for opening my eyes at a young age – I’m always looking for patterns in advertising campaigns because they’re usually there.  And 5-Hour Energy didn’t disappoint.

I shared my article with my brother, Dr. William R. Boyd, Jr., who is a clinical psychologist in Tennessee and he emailed me back some really intriguing clinical evaluation of what he noticed in the progression of commercials:

•  It is normal to not feel like working out at times. It is also normal to feel good (better) after making yourself work out without any supplements such as 5-hour energy drinks.
• Eliminating sugar spikes in your system will also remove the mid-afternoon drowsiness off of which the one commercial feeds. It seems like their product just adds to these spikes and would likely cause a person to feel dependent on the product after awhile. Same ploy used in cigarettes.
• There is a reason that it is called an “Alarm” clock! If you are not getting enough sleep and rest, the device is causing your body to awaken basically before it is ready and the manner in which it does this activates the body’s Sympathetic Division of the Autonomic Nervous System (The Flight or Flight Mechanism), thus alarming you into consciousness every morning. What a great way to start your day. In this scenario the word “Alarm” clock is actually appropriate. This is why people feel better when they can wake up on their own, such as on weekends.
• The product is heavily touted as being very convenient which is a popular twist to marketing because people want to be inconvenienced as little as possible. In other words our product is so easy to obtain and use it will not interrupt what you are already doing in your routine. In fact, since you won’t need to take the time to make coffee, your current routine will run even smoother. What they don’t point out is that in many cases, people will use this convenience to sleep in longer since they don’t need to make coffee and will still find themselves being late for work!

I hope you found my brother’s insight as fascinating as I did.

The old axiom is true:  Haste makes waste.

To read my original article from a couple of weeks ago, click here.

For help with your seo, social semantic web and other marketing questions, drop me a line by email or phone.

Cheers!

While her videos tend to be focused on the area where she lives, Sacramento, the information can be applied to most any market.   In this piece, she talks about why people should hire a Realtor and how it works with commission.  In a word, transparency.

If you’re a real estate pro – heck, whatever your profession is – I encourage you to watch this and see how comfortably and concisely Tamara communicates in a short span of time.  This is a great example of what you want to be doing in your business…

Educate.  Share information that will legitimately help people and answer questions.

As SEO evolves into social semantic web (or Web 3.0), sharing information is becoming more and more important in the grand scheme of building and maintaining your online presence.

Quite frankly, the only people who should be worried are the businesses and SEO’ers who are abusing the current system.  SEO is not dead.  SEO as we know it is evolving into a more content-focused entity.

Those who are worth their salt and have been doing SEO properly will make the transition just fine.  There will be changes…most notably RDFa tags replacing current tag configurations as a prominent piece of the indexing puzzle.  The bottom line is this:

Google is creating an algorithm to filter out crappy content that has been over-optimized and penalize those sites for it.  Well thought-out and well written content that is properly optimized is still relevant.

Heck, you still have to have the right key words on your site in order to be found in the right places.

I found a brilliant article online that explains the situation just perfectly.  It’s written by Scott Ensign of DAC Group and will put your mind at ease as to what it all really means.  Here is my favorite excerpt from the article:

“Cutts said that, as part of Google’s ongoing effort to rank the most relevant results (i.e., the ones most satisfying to the user), their engineers are actually developing a way to promote good content (regardless of how “optimized” it is) over content that might not be as good, but has clearly had some work done from an SEO perspective.

In a sense, this should be no great surprise. The kind of “over optimized” content that Cutts is referring to is often not a very good result if you’re the actual searcher. As such, this fits into the overarching Google theme that good content should win.”

I highly recommend you read the entire article.  It’s a pretty quick read…and a very important one for you and your business.

Click here to read the whole article on DAC Group’s website.

And remember…SEO is not dead.  Your website still has to be optimized with the right words in the right places.  It’s just that the ridiculous abuse of SEO methods by spammers and black hatters has come to a head and change is on the horizon to protect those of us who are doing our optimization and Internet marketing with integrity.

In closing, this quote from Springboard SEO over a year ago really says it all with regard to these changes:

“SEO is not the problem.   People that use SEO to index garbage content of no value are the problem.”

For more tips or to ask any questions, shoot me an email or call me at 717-538-8940.

Advertising tactics have always bothered me for the most part.  Of course, reading MAD Magazine in my youth gave me a real appreciation for the deceptive tactics and outright stupidity of many ad campaigns.  Car commercials manage to achieve both (de)merits with their “blah blah blah blah blah MSRP” speed reading at the end of commercials.

Recently, I’ve been intrigued by the ad campaign of 5 Hour Energy over the past couple of years.   My purpose in writing this is to make you aware of it and get you thinking about your own approach to your advertising and marketing.   Some of you will have no problem with it…others will be as disturbed as I am at the degree of laziness encouraged by what is really a case study of suggestive psychology in advertising.

When they started (I think it was 2010), they were kind of “best buddy”-like in their approach…

Our “buddy” here in the commercial has suggested that we all feel like crap at 2:30 in the afternoon and our antiquated methods of ingesting caffeine (i.e. coffee and soda) just aren’t good enough anymore.  A good night’s sleep, anyone?

So now, we’ve got a series of 3 commercials to drive home the point that we all don’t get enough sleep…ever.  I’ll address that seeming assumption a little later.   These three commercials address the person who doesn’t wanna get up to exercise in the morning…

…the person who doesn’t wanna get up in the morning to go to work and who “hates” mornings…

…and the “on the go” professional who is too lazy “make,” “wait for,” or “hassle with” coffee.    If you have as much trouble with sugar as the lady in this commercial, caffeine is the least of your worries…

To interpret the complicated language in the above commercial:

“Make” = the incredibly complex and complicated act of preparing your coffee grounds and water for the brewing process.  Oh, I forgot the hardest part of all…turning the coffee brewer “on.”

“Wait for” = the time between making your coffee and hassling with it.  This time is created after turning the coffee brewer “on” and is the time when most people would be showering, getting dressed or otherwise being productive.  But I digress.

“Hassle with” = the unreasonably difficult act of adding ingredients such as sugar or creamer to your coffee.  And as if that’s not difficult enough, we have all these different flavors of creamer to choose from now.   Oh, the pain of it all.

So now that we’ve been told by these commercials that we’re all basically tired all the time and too lazy to do things for ourselves, it’s time for the next step.   Notice that by the end of this series of commercials, virtually all general categories of working adults has been addressed.

So to recap, what has happened here is in two years we’ve gone from 5 Hour Energy being an occasional 2:30 pick-me-up at work to being an every day habit to replace coffee.   Hey, people have been spending $3 – $4 dollars a day for a cup of coffee from Starbucks for years, so why wouldn’t there be a market for a more “cost effective” solution as 5 Hour Energy runs around a buck ninety-nine a shot?

Now, virtually all active adult categories have been addressed:  night shift workers, stay at home moms, health conscious people who don’t feel like working out, college students, young professionals, mature professionals, working class in general.

The point of all this is simply to show how suggestive psychology is alive and well in advertising and is becoming more and more overt and obvious if you take a step back and look at the big picture.    Is this tactic offensive to consumers?  I would argue that it is…at least moreso than many would want to admit.   Heck, as of the time of this writing the only one of these commercials that doesn’t have more “dislikes” than “likes” on YouTube is the second one.

Yes, the one with the woman getting up to workout…where we get to see her briefly in tight workout clothes at the end.  Yes ladies, we men are just that shallow.

Be aware of your web presence and what it says about you and the way you do business.  It will ultimately figure greatly in determining your own level of personal satisfaction with the work you do through your website online.

For more tips on SEO and Internet marketing or for a truly FREE (yes, I mean it) SEO Analysis of your website and online presence, call me or email me at marqeteer@marqeteer.com.

And in closing, now that we’ve discussed the above foolishness, I leave you with their latest gem…

If you are a real estate pro and are having any difficulty in getting your buyers and/or sellers to understand what each is and the differences between them, Tamara explains them clearly here along with the rationale behind both.

Thank you, Tamara:)

The Good Advice:  The webinar, conducted by IMSD recommended that real estate agents need 4 different websites…Buyers Site, Sellers Site, Hyper-Local Site and Niche Site.  This is sound advice except that they were touting greatly the importance of setting up these sites through WordPress.com as free blogs customized with templates.   WordPress for your website is a wonderful platform that can be optimized with numerous plug-ins and most of the templates are easy to navigate.   Using the free WordPress blog platform to set up your 4 sites, though, is a different story.  Which brings us to…

The Bad Advice:  To reiterate, you can go to WordPress.com and set up your very own blog site absolutely free.  Wordpress became such a popular blog platform that it then became available as an actual website platform with SEO and advanced customization capabilities.  Setting up your website with its own URL and uploading WordPress as your content management system is A-OK.  However, using the free WordPress.com blog platform to set up your multiple sites as the aforementioned webinar suggested is not recommended!  A couple of years back, it worked.  Now, it doesn’t.

Simply put, the free WordPress.com blog platform is so easy to use that (like other easy to use tools) it has been abused by spammers and black-hat marketers to the point where Google does not index those blogs the way it once did.  What happened, in a nutshell, was that people would set up their own regular website and then set up multiple free WordPress.com blog pages for the sole purpose of creating links back to their main website.   Done in moderation, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

Unfortunately, these blog pages were set up in ludicrous numbers as “link wheels” which led to the Panda update last year wherein Google changed their indexing of the WordPress.com blog sites.  Simply put, Google doesn’t give much attention to these sites anymore and if you follow the strategy laid out in the above referenced webinar you will hurt your indexing and SEO by giving the appearance of black hat marketing.

If you want to create multiple sites, buy the URL’s and get proper hosting for the sites.  Yes, it’s not free but it’s also not going to cost you an arm and a leg.

And it’s well worth the small investment:)

For more tips and advice on your SEO and Internet marketing, drop me a line.

I came across this new one that I’m starting a trial on.  It’s called “amoCRM” and the starting cost is $10 per month to use for 1 user, up to 2,500 contacts and 50 open leads.  The 30-day trial is actually a free trial that requires no credit card up front.  So it’s not one of those “30 day trials” where they take your credit card number and hope that you forget to cancel.

I’m looking forward to trying this product out, as it looks to be a great value.  To try it yourself free, just click the ad below or in the side bar.  Please comment or shoot me an email with your rating/review if you try it, too:)

Doing an Android how-to search on Google, I found this great forum that has answered all of my questions so far.  It’s called Android Enthusiasts.  Check it out…I found it to be very helpful!

Visit Android Enthusiasts website here

P.S.  Click on the picture to visit the site where you can get your very own stuffed Android (ain’t it cute?).

I’m not tellin’…ya gotta watch:)