Lakeshore Branding Blog
Yesterday Yahoo! Site Explorer decided to retire from business. It has left many amateur SEOs, and some professional SEOs too, at a bit of a loss. Many SEOs and agencies have been using the back link service in Yahoo! Site Explorer to monitor, analyse, and generally try to copy the link building actions of their competitors. As someone who has been involved in SEO for over 5 years (not so much by choice but by necessity) I have used Yahoo! extensively, and seen my competitors use it against me, too! I manage several sites across various niches, and some of my sites do interlink with each other, wherever a connection really does benefit a reader. I have seen people leave comments on all my blogs, and doing so in the order of Yahoo! backlinks for my main website. SEO Stalkers are gonna have a harder time I have also seen the same people leave comments on other blogs where I – Read the full article
In the last fifteen years the Internet has gone from a platform for businesses and students to use in the workplace, to a tool found in every household and referred to daily for leisure, information and shopping. Because of the astronomical rise in the popularity of the net brands, large companies have had to adapt their products and services accordingly. Some, such as supermarket chain Tesco have been very successful and secured their rightful place in the World Wide Web. Some however have not and here we look at the companies which have failed miserably in their Internet rebranding. The Times The Times newspaper was and still is one of the most popular broadsheet newspapers around. It has been established for over two hundred years when it was first known as The Daily Universal Register. Since then it has been at the forefront of newsprint and considered a source of authority in the UK. However, in the last few – Read the full article
Every business shares a common goal – to survive, grow and prosper. In today’s fast-track competitive world, businesses large and small must turn to new measures in order to evolve, grow or simply stay afloat. Ecommerce website development can offer growth opportunities of enormous proportion for businesses from all sectors. This is mostly due to the advent of highly improved and user friendly web services (Ed’s note: services like our favorite, Magento) available across the web that have literally carved a place in the hearts of online users. As an online business owner, the employment of technological advances in e-Commerce website design can mean the difference between the success and failure of your business objectives. Accordingly, it is important to understand exactly what an ecommerce website is and how to get started with one. Basically, an ecommerce website is a virtual representation of your physical business. Interestingly, most business owners grow to learn that the biggest difference between an ecommerce – Read the full article
For those of you who are Google addicts like myself, you should find this piece choc-a-bloc full of Chrome apps for you to gorge yourself on. Whether it’s gaming you are looking for or an app to help your business run more smoothly, you should find something here to satisfy your taste buds. The Google Chrome Store makes me feel like a kid in a sweet shop at the best of times, and if you haven’t checked it out already you will find it hard not to after reading below. Bear in mind that you need to be using the Google Chrome browser (to enjoy these apps), so download it now and start browsing in the shop and on the Internet. Google Chrome apps for small business One of the best apps I have found on the Google Chrome Web store is the ZOHO Invoice app, which I now use religiously to process all my invoices and keep track of – Read the full article
Content marketing can be used to attract more traffic and build a better online reputation for your business. Here are a number of tips to help you do just that: 1. Be consistent in providing new and valuable information One thing that you need to do with content marketing is to make sure that you actually have new and valuable content to market. So, write up some articles, publish them, make sure you consistently provide useful information to your audience, and establish your expertise on the topic you’re writing about. 2. Always create keyword-targeted content Don’t just create any content. Your content must be optimized for the search engines, using certain relevant keywords, in order to be found and read. Remember that we are working with search engines to attract more (and better-targeted) potential customers to your website. In this case, if you are not doing SEO for your content, if you are not optimizing the textual content you’re writing, – Read the full article
As a local business owner, you know exactly how important SEO is for your web presence. What is the use of having a website when you cannot be found anyway? And when it comes to SEO, your online content plays a huge role. However, optimizing your website isn’t as simple as posting your random thoughts on your page. The entire act of creating content for SEO can be so perplexing that even the most internet-savvy business owner may still end up confused. Here are a few tips for creating content which will please not just the search engines but also your human readers. Think about your readers It’s very easy to get caught up in the entire SEO process especially when you get too focused on keywords. Some people think of optimization as an end all, be all that they write content which isn’t pleasing to human readers anymore. They forget that the main reason for why they – Read the full article
This is important — Congress is considering two bills (“Protect IP” and “SOPA”) that would let the government or any corporation censor the internet, using the same DNS-blocking techniques as Iran or China. PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo. The bills are ostensibly to stop copyright and trademark infringement, but they won’t. Instead– they’ll let the government shut down almost any social media website, since any site can be shut down just for audio, video, text, or even *links* posted by its users. Any corporations will have the power to bankrupt any website or organization by cutting it off from payments, advertising and donations– without so much as a court order. The law is being pushed by some of the strongest lobbies in Washington, it has broad bipartisan support, and it’s likely to pass in some form. As a company we have been active against it: this week we will be participating in – Read the full article
If you are hoping to increase the traffic directed to your website as well as your positioning in Google’s rankings, putting an effective and well-structured link building campaign together could work wonders for you. Increased traffic to your website can come from a number of benefits that link building can give you. If your ranking increase in the eyes of search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, your website will undoubtedly receive more traffic from organic searches (simply clicking through to your page via the hyperlink displayed on a search engine results page or SERPS), alternatively you can hope to see extra visitors landing on your website from the links you have established on other sites. Search engines are now users’ main tool for internet navigation and ranking high for some well-targeted search terms should be your ultimate goal when assembling a link building strategy. After being presented with a list of search engine results, a user is far – Read the full article
