Archive | Blog RSS feed for this section

Google Places Help

Well it’s not a Google Places help phone number, but I guess it’s the next best thing. Today on the Google Small Business Blog they announced support for Google Places.  It’s a small success for SMB’ers who desperately need assistance, due to all the problems with Google Places. All I can say is, “thank-goodness!” I [...]

6 Comments Continue Reading →

The 30 Day Challenge – Not Just for IM’ers

Every year I do the 30 Day Challenge.  It’s 100% free.  And it’s totally awesome.   It’s where you follow along with 10-15 minute video tutorials for 30 days and then work for 30 minutes acting on those video instructions.   The goal is to build a website from scratch to make your first $1 doing it.  [...]

Leave a comment Continue Reading →

7-pack vs Blended Local Results – What Triggers It?

My good friend Darren Shaw over at Whitespark (who has the best citation finder ever!), wrote a very interesting post yesterday. The whole post is about what triggers the the different search results for local. I highly recommend you go and read the post. I added my thoughts in Darren’s comment section, but I wanted [...]

Leave a comment Continue Reading →

Does Optimizing Your Google Places Page Listing Work?

I found this really interesting post today that is a case study on on-page optimization of a Google Places Listing by Milestone Insights who offers Tips for Hotels that want to promote on the internet.   They followed the Google Places Optimization tips we usually promote: Filling out a competed listing (with photos, videos, and interesting [...]

4 Comments Continue Reading →

Google Displaying New Sitelinks

Is Google displaying or testing new sitelinks layout? Looks like Google is displaying new sitelinks for websites in the search engine result pages.  I just noticed it today, but looks like people have been seeing the new sitelinks since yesterday.  Each sitelink now has it’s own title and mini description. I suspect that if this [...]

3 Comments Continue Reading →

What is ‘Bounce Rate’ in Google Analytics?

I recently pointed out to a client of ours (who’s website we did not build), that they had a very high bounce rate and that was probably a bad indicator that there is a website design challenge, especially when you are driving targeted traffic back to that website. According to Google ‘bounce rate’ means: “Bounce [...]

1 Comment Continue Reading →

Review Management Begins Before You Get Poor Reviews

I was just speaking to Mike Blumenthal on Google Plus about his recent blog post titled “Review Management: 7 Tips on Avoiding Bad Reviews“ and it addresses some very important concepts a lot of small businesses are not implementing into their business procedures and I’d like to re-share Mike’s recommendations and add a few of [...]

5 Comments Continue Reading →

Inside Google’s Search Algorithm

Google’s Search Algorithm Video Very interesting video about how Google decides on their search algorithm.   Google makes over 500 changes a year to their algorithm. Matt Cutts says, “There is no perfect algorithm that will make everything perfect in search”. Go to 41 minutes to hear why they do not hand choose results and why [...]

3 Comments Continue Reading →