You’ve spent a great deal of time and effort optimizing your website for the search engines. Why? Because a stellar search ranking is how you’re going to get visitors and ultimately, customers. SEO has been pegged as the most important – and only – way to cultivate traffic. Your SEO tactics have been successful, and you’re among the top results for your keywords. And then comes a curveball. Siri and Her Effect on SEO and Local Search For millions of Apple iPhone 4S users, and there are more of them every day, your SEO won’t matter. Meet Siri. She’s a clever little witch, and you’re going to have to reassess your current SEO tactics if you hope to please her. And please her you must, because iPhone users rely on her. Instead of opening a search engine and manually typing keywords, they’re just going to ask Siri to find them what they’re looking for. And Siri, being the intelligent voice – Read the full article
If you got a pretty good site, which shows up on the first page of Google, you ought to be cautious about some possible threats. Hacking might be a huge issue indeed, but there is another form of threat lurking on the Internet these days. This threat is not a virus or a bug or a worm, yet it is very potent and can cause chaos for you and your adored website. Beware of Page Jacking! What is Page Jacking? The attack called page jacking mainly involves copying the content on your website onto some other site, so that the user believes that the other site is your legitimate site. If proper measures are not taken to secure your content, you are bound to lose your privileged spot on the first page of the search engine. The Consequences of Page Jacking Because the page jacker uses the same keywords and the same content, with a few exceptions here and there, – Read the full article
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that we’re crazy about Magento. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not willing to give other platforms their due – because we most certainly are. Shopify, for example, is an equally viable e-Commerce solution for anyone who has ever thought of building an online store, boosting sales, and enhancing Internet presence. The platform is growing very quickly, too, with over 16,000 Shopify stores to date. Like Magento, Shopify features an easy-to-use store builder, as well as a set of fully customizable store designs. (If you’re good with codes like HTML and CSS, you can create your own design from scratch.) It’s also integrated with a number of today’s most popular payment gateways, including PayPal, Authorize.Net, Google Checkout, QuickBooks Merchant Services, ePay, and more. Shopify caps off its rich feature set with unlimited e-Commerce hosting, which includes automatic updates and backups, Level 1 PCI compliance, unlimited bandwidth, and its own – Read the full article
Social media advocates are often quoted as claiming that social media is the greatest form of advertising because it is free. At Silicon Beach Training we use social media in a big way; we use it to increase exposure for our training courses. We use it to build relationships with key influencers and our customers. We also use it extensively to promote and share our flow of content generated to inform and inspire our existing customers and potential clients. One of the most important paybacks for all of this activity is it seriously improves our ranking. I believe that Google is going to up the stakes on this one, too; social shares are going to become even stronger signals that affect page position. In order to sustain these benefits, however, we need to employ people. We employ full-time people and we need to tap many external sources for content generation, paid for in currency and in back-links. Time and people – Read the full article
Bing is the search engine by Microsoft, a company that, after having been outperformed by Google, is once again keen on boosting revenues and retaining users via search engine marketing. With Bing, Microsoft has so far succeeded, thanks largely to their mass Internet marketing and continued usage of their Internet Explorer web browser (whose default search engine is Bing). This is why your blog should be optimized for Bing, too – and not just Google. Otherwise, you might lose potential readers and leave potential profit on the table. If you’re a smart blogger, Internet marketing, SEO specialist, or social media professional, you’ll find ways to reach Bing users, too. Here are a few useful steps to help you do that. On-page / on-site optimization: Your first step is to work on optimizing your website and the pages within it. Here’s an on-page optimization checklist you can use: No Broken Links Correct Redirects H1 Tags For Headlines URL Friendly Pages Most – Read the full article
Bing may have a chance to gain market share against Google now that the partnership between the search leader and Mozilla has expired. For years, Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser has featured Google as its default search engine as the result of a profit-sharing arrangement. That deal and the popularity of Firefox resulted in a windfall for Mozilla that has fueled its success. More than three-quarters of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google’s payments. No Comment Neither Google nor Mozilla have commented about the lapse of their lucrative deal, and they would not indicate whether the agreement would continue. On one occasion, a Mozilla spokesman observed that the company has agreements with several search engines; on another he suggested that negotiations with Google were in progress. Global Adversaries Google and Mozilla began an amiable relationship long before Google launched a competing product. Now, the search giant has its own browser that has now surpassed Firefox in market share. By many accounts Chrome – Read the full article
The World Wide Web has billion of websites. Some of them are small (for example, most of the personal blogs), some of them are big (for example, eBay), and some of them are too big (for example, Facebook). But some of them are just very important, because they really changed the world over the last years and gave way to a number of Internet-enabled revolutions. What are these websites and how did they influence the world? 1. info.cern.ch: This is where it all began. In 1990, not many years ago if you think about it, a revolution took place in CERN and the first website on the World Wide Web was made by Sir Tim Burns Lee and browsed by Robert Cailliau. 2. Google: Some people confuse it with the Internet itself. Some people even type Google inside Google’s search box! It is considered to be the main entrance of the Internet and changed the way we search for information. It started – Read the full article
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
