Internet Marketing and SEO Tips

by Dave Maloney
Just like New England weather, features in Google change pretty quickly and pretty often. Seems like they only just came out with Google Places, and already it's gone. If you had your business listed on Google Places, don't worry, it wasn't all for nothing; it's been rolled into what's now called Google+ Local pages, and there are actually a few improvements:

by Dave Maloney
Recently there's been a lot of press about the big changes in the new Google Privacy Policy, with opposers arguing that their privacy is being invaded. Although Google defends that the new changes are only to make your online experience better and more helpful, the whole "Big Brother is watching" thing was bound to come up.

Google's latest change could hurt your page rankings if a lot of your content is below the fold!

by Dave Maloney
On their neverending mission to make our online experience more productive by providing the most helpful search results, Google recently announced an update to their algorithm that targets your page layouts. While Google Preview helps users scan a search result to pinpoint exactly where the relevant text is on that page, what they're looking for may still be difficult to find on a long and cluttered page. This usually ends up with the user abandoning the page and returning to the search results to search some more. Google wants to help ease some of that frustration and improve our experience by lowering the rankings of guilty sites.

People (and robots) prefer fresh content over stale!

by Dave Maloney
You may not want to hear this: If you thought you were "all done" with your website because you've written and laid out your site content exactly the way you want it on each page...well, that was a good start.

by Dave Maloney
You may have never heard of them, but Google sitelinks have been around for a few years. You may have even used them in your web searches and not even noticed them. Google sitelinks are the list of links that is displayed beneath a search result to help users find what they're looking for within that website. Usually Google site links are only displayed for search terms of a company's name or brand, but they can appear for other keyword phrases that a site ranks well for. Just this week, Google unveiled their latest updated version of sitelinks, intended to further improve the quality and organization of search results.

by Dave Maloney
"Google +1" (pronounced Google Plus One), a new feature from Google, offers to make search results even more helpful by displaying personal recommendations adjacent to each listing. It works exactly like Facebook's already popular "Like" button, except instead of "Liking" a page's product or service, you can "plus one" it. For businesses who see a lot more traffic coming to their website from Google (the world's largest search engine!) than from Facebook, this is worth looking into!

by Dave Maloney
What are Stop Words? Search engines can't quite think as we do (yet), but they are constantly evolving to figure out what we're searching for and deliver the most relevant results. Stop Words are words that we use so frequently (the, a, in, from, etc) that Google and other search engines consider them unnecessary and ignore them in your search terms.

by Dave Maloney
In their continuing quest to provide the world with the most relevant search results, Google unveiled "Google Instant Preview" a few months ago. If you haven't noticed, there's a little magnifying glass to the right of every page listing; when you click on it you'll see a small screenshot of that page. Wherever the terms of your search appear on that page, they're shown highlighted in the Google Preview screenshot. You're able to tell right away if that page has what you're looking for or if you need to go on to the next listing without even having to visit the page. 

Whether it's a newsletter or press release, even a downloadable pdf file, if it's been crawled by search engines and you use it on your page, it will be considered duplicate content. You may think that just by changing a few words here and there, you may be covered, but not true. Aside from being against the law (it's called plagiarism, and you can be sued for it), Google and other search engines offer their own repercussions for duplicate content.

By Dave Maloney
 Walking through the main lobby of our office building the past few days I've been passing the latest dropped-off stack of unwanted phone books. Following the same destiny as last year's delivery, they will probably wind up in the dumpster after someone finally gets tired of seeing the pile there.