Orange County Internet Marketing Advice by Darby Works, Inc.

Google Plans Service to Store Users' Data

This just in. Not sure if I would want to do this myself...

Google Inc. wants to offer consumers a new way to store their files on its hard drives, in a strategy that could accelerate a shift to Web-based computing and intensify the Internet company's competition with Microsoft Corp.

Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives -- such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password, and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now, one of the people said.

Read the full article at The Wall Street Journal.

14 Search Engine Optimization Tips - The Basics

Before we begin, it’s important for you to understand how search engines work. Otherwise these search engine optimization tips won’t make much sense to you.

So what is a search engine anyway?
A search engine is a computer program that indexes and searches a set of documents for specified keywords and then returns a list of the documents where those keywords were found. Now that’s a mouthful! Google is one example of a highly complex search engine built by hundreds of really smart people that has indexed billions of documents. While human beings built the Google search engine, no human being is involved when you conduct a search using Google.

What are keywords?
Keywords are individual search terms or phrases associated with a given document. The document could be a web page, PDF file, Microsoft Word or Excel document, image, or any other file type. People use keywords to find your website. You want to know which keywords your prospective customers are using so you can attract them to your site.

Now, on to the tips!

1) Install a Web Analytics Package for Tracking
Looking at web analytics is like looking at an X-ray of your website. You are able to see the number of visitors to your site, which sites are sending you traffic, which pages are most popular, what keywords people are using to find your site, how long people are staying on your site, which search engines are sending you the most traffic, and more. You can either purchase a web analytics package or install one that is free. Google offers a free one called Google Analytics.

2) Research Your Competition
This is a great way to help you brainstorm and get keyword ideas. Pretend you are your own customer. Go to Google.com and type in the keyword phrases you would use to find the products or services you sell. Click on some of the websites that show up. Try another phrase, and another and another. When you are on a competitor’s website, right click with your mouse. Then choose View Source. This will show you the actual website code. Look near the top and look for keywords in the <TITLE> tag, <META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” and <META NAME=”KEYWORDS” tags. Take note of which sites appear for your different queries. The idea is to discover which keywords will not just bring you traffic, but also targeted, motivated buyers who want what you have to sell.

3) Use Keyword Tools
Try these keyword tools to get an idea of keyword popularity. Keep in mind that the keyword counts are not exact. Use them only as a guide to get a rough idea of how much traffic one keyword gets relative to another. Three keyword tools to try are Word Tracker (paid), Keyword Discovery (paid) and the Google Keyword Tool (free).

4) Find Keywords that Get Leads and Make Sales
Find out which keywords are most profitable for you by running a small Google Adwords campaign. Be sure to use the built-in Keyword Tool Google offers to help build your campaign. Install the Adwords conversion tracking code on your site, and be sure to ask your prospective call-in customers what keywords they typed in to find you. Once you know your most profitable keywords, use them in all the ways below.

5) Keyword-Rich Title Tags
Write a different keyword-rich title tag for each page of your website. Make sure your title tag reflects the content of the page and uses keywords. Do not use the same title for every page! Your title tag should look something like this:

<TITLE>Keyword Title Here</TITLE> or <TITLE>Custom Cabinets by Joe Woodworking</TITLE>

6) Keyword-Rich Meta Tags
Write keyword-rich meta description tags. Make sure to write an original description for each and every page of your site. Don’t copy the same one over and over. The code should look something like this:

<META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT="This is where you write a couple keyword-rich sentences describing the benefits of your business." />

7) Keyword-Rich Header Tags
Use your keywords in header tags. Make sure you have a headline with an H1 tag at the top every page, and use your keywords in the headline. The code looks like this: <H1>Keyword Headline Here</H1>

8) Keyword-Rich Web Content
Use your keywords in the text you write on each page of your website. This may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many website owners fail to do this. Example: “We specialize in affordable custom cabinets for homes across the United States.” Do not use duplicate content on your web pages either.

9) Using Images Sparingly
Avoid using images where you can use text instead. The search engines can’t identify images very well. Yes, there are image tags called ALT tags which can help to get images recognized, but to my knowledge, text always works best. If possible, make sure your site navigation is text, not images.

10) Quality, Inbound Links
Get relevant inbound links to the pages of your site from other reputable websites. Use your keywords in the “anchor text” for the inbound link. Each link has two parts. The hyperlink is the URL to the page you want the site to link to. The anchor text is the visible text on the page that people see. Your anchor text should include your keywords. The code will look something like this:

<a href="http://www.affordablecustomcabinets.com">Affordable Custom Cabinets</a>

Contact other relevant websites and ask either to exchange links or offer to pay for a link from their site to yours. The basic philosophy here is that links are like little votes for your website. The more links you have from high-traffic, trustworthy websites, the better. These links carry more weight than those from an  obscure website with very little traffic. 

11) Make Internal Links
Link to your most important pages from within your own website. It’s similar to getting links (votes) from outside websites except you are doing it yourself. You probably have one or two web pages in addition to your home page that could use more traffic. Place additional links to those pages so that they stand out to the search engines. Put hyperlinks to those web pages in the content of other web pages.

12) Create Link Bait
Create “link bait” web pages. If your business lends itself to this approach, this can be a great way to get a ton of traffic to your site.

The basic idea is that you craft a well-written article about a topic within your industry. It might be an educational article on “how to avoid the pitfalls” or “the top 10 tips” or a “how to choose” article. Once the article is done, submit it to one of the larger social networks like Digg or StumbleUpon. Make sure the community to which you submit your article is interested in your topic! If your article gets enough positive reviews, it will get pushed to the top of the list, and lots of people will see the article teaser and click over to your web page.

You might even consider creating an entire educational resources area on your site with dozens of articles. Press releases are a form of “link bait” since you are enticing reporters and editors to visit your site. Use a service like PR Newswire or PR Web to get the word out.

13) Blogging Basics
Set aside time for blogs. If you have the resources to maintain a blog and it’s appropriate to your business, creating a blog as part of your website can bring quality traffic. Just make sure you have the time and energy to post frequently. Consider posting on other relevant blogs too, but make sure your posts are well written and informative! Don’t post a silly comment just to get a link.

14) Build Sitemaps
Create a sitemap. Build a simple web page that has links to all pages of your website. This purpose for this page is to give the search engines a quick access point to “spider” or find and index all your web pages. You can also create an XML version of your sitemap to submit to Google and Yahoo! There isn’t enough room here to discuss XML, but you can find XML sitemap tools on the web.

Well, there you have it. These 14 tips are by no means an exhaustive treatise on search engine optimization, but they should help you get started in the right direction!

Do You Know What "Social Search" Is?

A new search company called iRazoo, hopes to make search even more relevant by integrating "social search" elements.

“The real question here is, can a small band of guys uproot a big gorilla? The answer is yes. It’s already been done. Yahoo used to be king and now Google is. Relevancy won in the end of that race and we can be even more relevant using human intelligence and collaboration. Our goal is to have 99.9 relevancy within the first three search results.” That’s from Neal Verma, one of the Houston-based founders of a new search engine called iRazoo, talking to startuphouston.com about their latest venture, billed as world’s first people powered, points driven, search engine.

The great thing about the Internet is that it is constantly evolving. Even as social networking (Facebook, Orkut) has become a major fad, there is a relatively new trend on the block. It is called social search. If you want a single line definition, it’s a trend that is introducing a human element into Internet searches. If search engines are technology’s gift to knowledge seeking and sifting, using spiders and bots which retrieve information in a split second, they are now turning populist, literally, using people to rate sites and thereby influence their ranking. Verma calls it the second revolution of search. “We’re taking computer-driven algorithmic results and mixing that in with human intelligence.”

Read the full story on Social Search And iRazoo here.

Will Facebook's New Paid Ads Be Welcomed Or Cause A Rebellion?

Facebook, the hugely popular social networking site, has launched their equivalent of Google Adwords. Only time will tell whether the Facebook community accepts or rejects them. Read a nice Facebook Ads Review here.

Google AdWords Testing "Products from this Advertiser" in Ads?

Just saw this on Search Engine Roundtable...

"A WebmasterWorld member said he saw Google trying out a special type of Google AdWords listing.

He said he was using the AdWords Preview Tool and did a search on something. He then saw that under an ad, which showcased a Google Checkout icon, was a link with a plus sign that read "Products from this Advertiser."

He said, that if you clicked on the link or the plus sign, the box would expand to showed 3 products, descriptions, and links to the merchant's site."

A Simple Truth About The Quality of Life

I came across this brilliant quote in Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way.

"The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention."

SEO: Focus, Focus; Not Hocus, Pocus

By Courtney Heard, Abalone Designs

Anyone who knows me, knows that my biggest pet peeves are loud eaters, auto-loading music on web sites and my next door neighbor. Today we can safely add to this list web sites that are so ambiguous, it could be argued they are part of some cryptic conspiratorial code.

My company offers a free service analyzing web sites from a search engine marketing perspective. At least once daily, we are sent the link to a web site with no clear and apparent focus. It's so bad that we don't know what keyword exactly to talk to the web site owner about in their analysis. I always tell these people, their biggest problem is not search engine optimization (or lack thereof), it's focus!

The most important aspect of any web site in any industry, anywhere in the world is user friendliness. There is no straying from this. Your web site can be optimized for the most competitive keyword in the world, it can rank number one across the board and you can even have your URL flashed across the posing torso of America's Next Top Model on CNN and it will do absolutely nothing whatsoever for your business if your web site is not user-friendly.

Visitors need to come to your site and know immediately what it is about. You have literally just a few seconds to capture their attention. If they don't see what they are looking for, quickly, they will leave.

Some tips to help you make sure your web site visitors stick around and understand what your web site is all about are as follows:

1. Find out the language your target audience is using to find your site, refer to your product or refer to your service. More often than not, professionals in an industry refer to things differently than the layman. If you are using too much jargon on your web site, you will lose your visitor's interest.

2. Avoid start pages, flash intros, or extra steps before getting to your sites info. In this day and age, we've all been spoiled by instant gratification and we all know how to get what we want within seconds. If your site doesn't offer answers as fast as it possibly can, you've already lost customers. Flash intros and welcome pages are pretty and sparkly and fun, but pretty, sparkly and fun doesn't make money. Visitors do.

3. Do not, under any circumstances, ever have auto-loading music or sound on your web site. A vast majority of computer users listen to mp3s while using their computers, and now their mobile phones with built-in mp3 players. If they're listening to the new Jimmy Eat World record or singing along to The Cult, the very last thing they want is to have some cheesy sales pitch interrupt the chorus. The first thing I do when I hit a site with any sort of sound or music, including the web sites of my favorite bands, I leave. I immediately leave, no questions asked. They could probably pay me to stick around for a bit, but cold hard cash is about the only thing that would keep me around and being as the purpose of your site is to make you money, paying people to visit it isn't necessarily the most cost-effective route to take.

4. Use nice, clean, professional looking graphics AND text. Most web users tend not to read. They skim and usually will only go that far if prompted by something graphic that strikes their interest. As is the case with storefronts in the real world, what draws people into a store they've only just seen or heard of for the first time, is looks and what it's selling. Think about it. If you're looking for antiques and you walked up to a store called "Joe's Emporium" and the entire thing had tinted windows so you couldn't see in, would you bother going in when the store right next door says "Betty's Antiques" and has a beautiful display of some the prettiest old stuff you ever saw? No. Joe would be out of business in no time.

Your site needs to be clean, professional and enticing. Cut the bells and whistles, stop beating around the bush and give it to them straight. No one wants their time wasted or their intelligence insulted and no one wants to be chasing white rabbits around trying to make sense of your web site. Give them the goods, give it to them fast and give it to them with class. When you've done that, then focus on search engine optimization and you will find that your numbers in traffic will reflect nice and proportionately, your numbers of enquiries.

Google Adwords: Site Targeting Renamed to Placement Targeting

Google announced two changes to their site targeting option within Google Adwords.

First, advertisers can target not only websites but also precise subsections of sites, such as the soccer pages of a sports site, the diet section of a health site, and a specific ad unit (a block of Google ads) on a particular webpage. Better targeting equals better quality traffic and increased profits.

Second, Google introduced a new cost-per-click bidding option so you can now pay per click or per impression. I like this option. I prefer to pay per click so I can control costs more effectively. I know exactly what my ad conversion rates are.

Read it from the horse's mouth here.

Google Launches OpenSocial

Google Inc. on Friday announced the public release of OpenSocial, an application programming interface to build social applications across the Web.

Google is attempting to dominate the social media marketing world. This would be a real coup for Google, and I think they will pull it off.

Read the full article here.