Just a few years ago, when asked “How do you drive traffic to your website”, many companies would name banner ads as their main marketing medium for increasing online revenues. In an effort to increase brand awareness, companies spent thousands of dollars on obnoxious banner advertisements on high profile websites in an effort to cement their reputation as the number one company or product in their industry. It didn’t seem to matter that very few people actually clicked on these flashing, animated billboards. What did matter was Internet users saw these ads wherever they went on the web; there was a sense of pride and vanity from having your company’s banner appear more often than your competitors.

Fast-forward to the present day and banner ads have fallen from grace with few companies buying banner ads purely for the sake of one-upmanship on the competition. In their stead, search engine marketing has become the medium of choice for companies looking to increase website exposure. With the steady growth of search engine use, thanks in part to the technology and reliability offered by Google, companies already know that obtaining top positioning on the search engines will result in qualified traffic to their website and increased online revenues. However, there is a new phenomenon rising up to replace the battle once seen with banner advertising; Search Engine Vanity. Read the rest of this entry »

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For the past several months now, there has been a new development used more and more by businesses and companies of all sizes: Business Blogs. First, for those of you who may be wondering what “blogs” actually are, they are an abbreviation for “web logs”. First popularized by journalists, tech geeks and by teenagers, “blogs” are now increasingly in use by the business community and Fortune 500 companies.

If you have new ideas or a new product your company would like to promote, business blogs are a good, inexpensive vehicle. And there are many other advantages to using blogs too: major search directories and search engines such as Yahoo, Google Alta-Vista and most of the others crave on fresh and new information that is frequently updated, sometimes many times a day. Business Blogs consist of many links, written with fresh content that is propagated everywhere on the web. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the process of my day-to-day job optimizing and positioning corporate web sites for my clients, I often get emails and correspondence similar to the one you are about to read. The field of search engine optimization is littered with so-called “SEO experts” and people that promise you high search engine rankings with techniques that are forbidden by most search engines. The following is a true story.

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Hello Serge!
Just wanted you to know that I diligently read all your articles that you write on search engine optimization and I have learned so much from you since. I’m writing you regarding an article you wrote on your website about doorway and gateway pages. After listening to a number of people around me, I had planned on getting increased visibility from search engines to my site and some have told me that making a mirror of my existing site or a few “duplicates” might help me in the engines. They also told me each site should have a new, unique URL and unique domain name, a unique title and description tag, and body text “slightly” modified to focus on different keywords and key phrases might be a splendid idea. While I am at it, I also taught of a newer, fresher “look” with different background colour and font. Read the rest of this entry »

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As highlighted a couple of weeks ago, I have decided that with the growth of the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, it is important to ensure that we don’t forget the many newcomers. With many new business owners and webmasters exploring SEO for the first time, this series of articles looks to assist with the basic information needed to start a search engine marketing campaign.

In the first part of the series, I wish to ensure we discuss the importance of a solid foundation. When starting any SEO campaign it is tempting to leap straight in and start tweaking meta tags and changing text. However, like any successful marketing strategy, it is vital to ensure that you know whom your audience is and how to reach them. In the same way traditional advertising agencies survey their demographic audience, search engine marketers must ensure that their SEO campaign targets the correct keywords or search phrases. Target the wrong search phrase and you could end up with great search engine rankings for keywords that have no search requests. A few hours now spent ensuring that the correct search phrases are targeted, can save months of useless optimization. Read the rest of this entry »

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Monday, July 14 may very well go down in history as the day that the search engine industry grew up and finally gained the respect it so deserved. It was this day that Yahoo! announced that in a deal, comprising of $1.63 billion in cash and stock, it had acquired the popular pay-per-click company, Overture.

With rumors circulating for some months that Yahoo! had built a “war-chest” and was preparing to make a significant acquisition, investors have been watching and waiting for the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company to make its move. With Google increasing its audience reach and MSN announcing that it had recently started spidering the web with the intent of launching a revamped search engine, Yahoo! knew that in order to compete in the search engine industry it would have to make a move to increase its arsenal and improve investor confidence. Read the rest of this entry »

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When I first started this site, it was “APLAWRENCE.COM”. That’s the name of my company, it’s not overly long or hard to spell, so it seemed to be a good choice. However, later on I registered “PCUNIX.COM” thinking that that name is more related to what I do, is shorter and easier to type, and perhaps is more memorable.

Both domains point to the exact same content. The Apache configuration file at my web server just treated them both as virtual domains having the same filesystem location. There was no difference: no matter what domain name you used, you’d get the same pages. These are just duplicate domains.

For several years I flopped around, using the names inconsistently. When I’d refer people to my site, sometimes I’d send them to pcunix.com and sometimes to aplawrence.com, depending on my mood. Of course other sites that made link references to pages on my site were just as inconsistent: some of them point to pcunix.com, some to aplawrence.com, depending upon their whim or how they happened to find me. Read the rest of this entry »

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I spent some time recently talking to various Search Engine Optimization firms. These are people who offer to increase the visibility of your web site for a fee. Other than pretending to be interested in their services (I’m not), I was completely honest about my site, my present statistics, and my goals. We’ll cover all that, but first a statement you probably won’t find surprising:

There’s a lot of snake oil out there.

Well, you probably knew that. On the other hand, I did have some pleasant conversations with a few people, and even got a few snippets of free advice. Some of that advice might have even been worthwhile, though most of it was rather generic and nothing you couldn’t find easily on the web. Read the rest of this entry »

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Today more than ever, in the field of search engine optimization (SEO), there is a very important step that needs to be taken in order to help a website’s visibility in the major search engines. That important step is to submit it to DMOZ, or sometimes called the Open Directory Project or ODP. DMOZ provides a lot of search results for a good percentage of the most important search engines and directories, including Google. First, DMOZ is NOT a robot-driven crawler but rather a large, human-edited directory of the Web. For any submission to be successful, a few important points need to be taken ahead of time:

Step A)
Your full contact information needs to be there. Make certain that your full contact information is easily accessible, preferably with the help of a clearly identified contact button. An e-mail address is certainly not enough. Many ODP editors will tell you if they don’t see a real physical or postal address or telephone number, then that website in its particular category is usually tossed away and probably will never make it inside the directory. Most importantly, if you are wishing to sell anything, you need to build credibility and honesty with your clients. In such a case, giving proper and full contact information on the site is imperative. Read the rest of this entry »

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The name “Google Dance” is often used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. Google’s index update occurs on average once per month. It can be identified by significant movement in search results and especially by Google’s cache of all indexed pages reflecting the status of Google’s last spidering. But the update does not proceed as a switch from one index to another at one point in time. In fact, it takes several days to complete the index update. During this period, the old and the new index alternate on www.google.com. At an early stage, the results from the new index occur sporadically. But later on, they appear more frequently. Google dances.

The start dates of previous Google Dances have been compiled by WebmasterWorld’s administrator Brett Tabke. The last Google Dance has just been finished. It took place from 06/15/2003 to 06/22/2003. There are rumors that Google is about to modify its update procedures. However, if there will be another Google Dance we will report about it. But mainly, the reasons for the Google Dance shall be presented here. Read the rest of this entry »

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Advertising your business in the correct manner is a sure shot key to success. Advertising helps you to reach out to a larger number of people from other websites. You definitely cannot expect these many people to come to you on their own.

But Advertising is very, very COSTLY! And if you don’t watch out, you may actually be going broke after paying your advertising bills, if your ads do not generate revenue. So, you should make sure you get value for your money.

With my own experiences in this field, I have drawn up some questions for Webmasters who are new to the field of Website Marketing. Take a good look at them EVERY TIME you make your advertising plan. Read the rest of this entry »

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