The Forum Is Open

As part of the training site that is being worked on, we’ve built a forum to discuss this stuff.

Comments are nice, but a forum allows you to ask me anything and get an answer, as well as asking each other and building off everyone’s knowledge and experience.

The Forum is OPEN!

When the training site is complete and launched, the forum will be part of it, and as such, it will cost to be a member.

Right now, before everything is complete, we’re trying to build up the membership, so it is FREE.

If you join right now, it will be free forever. You will have a free lifetime subscription. Even after the training site goes up and it costs other people money to join, you will still have your free subscription to the forum.

You will also get a discount in the price of the training, when that’s offered as well.

There are not a lot of members yet, so there’s not a lot of conversation yet. Please jump on in and get things started. You can tell all your friends that you were there when it started.

If you have a question, I’ll be eager to answer it. Ask me anything about Internet Marketing, WordPress, Web Development, or Small Business. Ask whatever pops into your head.

Check out the Untangling the Web Forum.

Posted in free |

Local Business Center User Guide

Google has provided a way for you to manage how your business appears on Google Maps. You should use this tool so that your business is information is complete and accurate. It’s free and easy to use.

Why would you want to turn down free advertising?

Why would you want to turn down free advertising?

How it works

Each business listing in Google Maps is in fact a giant ‘cluster’ of information that we get from a few different places: Yellow Pages, for example, as well as other third-party providers. However, the basic information that you submit through the Local Business Center is the information that we trust the most. This means that it will appear instead of any basic information that we get from anywhere else. To make sure the basic information you submit is accurate, we’ll ask you to verify it first by contacting you at your business address or phone number.

You can add other information to your listing too — such as a description of your business, for example, as well as photos, reviews, or information about hours and parking costs — that will also appear above similar information from other providers.

Read the entire article at:
http://maps.google.com/support/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=21029&utm_source=fyiagencynews&utm_medium=blog

Posted in free |

SERPs

Search Engine Results Pages = SERPs

Who knows what magic algorithm Google uses to calculate what to return on those search pages? I’ve read about them. I’ve studied them. I’ve tested them. I don’t understand them. The more I know, the more I realize how much I don’t know.

I have a site that I’ve been trying to get ranked high. Per my research and everything I know about the on-page and off-page SEO and the competition, it should be doing pretty well. When I published it, it was #8 on the first page. Since then, it’s been slowly moving backward.

Down, down, down, into a burning ring of fire. – Johnny Cash

It’s been beyond page 3 for the last week or so, i.e., it doesn’t exist. I was bummed. What was I doing wrong? I knew a couple things I could do to make it better. I needed to work on the off-page back-links. I’ll get to those after some client work that needed to get done.

I check again this morning and it’s back on the first page! #10 with a bullet! I do some research on it and it seems that Google rolled through another one of my sites and recorded a bunch of links from those pages.

I guess my point is that random chance still has something to do with how you are rated on Google. The more I know, the more I realize how much they don’t know. They apparently are not quite networked with God yet, so they don’t quite know everything, all the time, everywhere. Yet.

If you are doing the best SEO you can and not getting the results you expect, give it some time. Time seems to be the great equalizer. Random chance will settle down over the long haul and the trends will stabilize.

You’ll get there. It will just take a while, or maybe a bolt of lightning.

SERP Position by Date

Posted in DNS, SEO, Wordpress, free |

Google Search Tricks for Your Web Site

You should be aware of how your web site is doing out there in the real world. Google published a page with search tricks on it. It can do magic tricks. Very useful stuff out there. The whole page is located at:

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

The two that I want to point out are:

link: Find linked pages, i.e., show pages that point to the URL.

site: Search only one website or domain.

link:websitestarterkit.com

If you want to know who’s pointing at your site, where your incoming links are coming in from, search for “link:www.yourdomain.com”, without the quotes, of course. This will return all of the pages on all of the sites that have a link to your site.

If you want to know who's pointing at your site, where your incoming links are coming in from

You can ask the owners of those sites to change the text and maybe they will, if that will help you out for specific keywords. As much as you get good points for them using keywords, you also get bad points if all of the link text is identical. That make you look like you’ve automated it. There needs to be a certain organic-ness to the text so Google knows that there are real people putting them in.

site:websitestarterkit.com

The next good search is “site:” followed by your domain name. (No space after the colon, by the way.) This search will list all of the pages that Google has indexed from your site. Any URL for a page that starts with your domain name.

This is how you can be sure that Google has indexed all of the pages in your site. Check the “cache date” if they list that. You might be able to tell how often they spider your site. If you are a good blogger and post something new every day and you publish an XML site map for them, which is easy to do in Wordpress, then they will probably be looking at your site often.

Posted in free |