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Suggest You - Search Engine Algorithm Quandaries
How's Your Yellow Page Ad's ROI? Let’s assume that you are one of the millions of family-run businesses that form the very core of the typical local Yellow Page directory. Say you’re the area plumber, auto repair shop, electrician, insurance agent, or restaurant owner. You have a YP ad because it seemed like the right thing to do when you opened up a few years back. Your YP rep helped draw up the ad and it looks pretty good. It has a picture of your shop, which he took with his digital camera. There’s a nice map and you even opted for some color too. The headline is the business name and you’ve also incr If you do not take anything else away with you from this article be sure you heed this advice: you need a log statistics program in place. With a good log statistics program you will be able to see various reports showing the number of unique visits taking place on your website, what keyword phrases visitors use to find your pages, what pages are being visited, which search engines are being used to find your website, and much more. Knowing what the "normal" website traffic of your website is will give you a good idea o Main Stream Media vs Blogosphere Rap Rehash Before you make drastic changes to your website after a rocky search engine update, take time to study your web server logs, changes in traffic to your site, and your ranking in the search engines.The mainstream media and blogosphere both have their fans. Fans on both side recite positive and negative vignettes - researchers proffer their numbers and writers play the action.A recent example of this action pictures the Wall Street Journal's editorial features editor Joseph Rago's salute to the work of journalists as opposed to blogger-generated info. Rago was quoted, "The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for Making Changes Before Analysis Making rash decisions when you are hearing one thing then another from forum postings and articles is not the best choice to make. Much of the talk about fluctuations in the search engine rankings is just that--talk. Cold hard facts come from established tests of what is going on and why. Don't jump ship before examining what is going on with your website first. Panic will lead you nowhere. Let's talk about basic search engine fundamentals you need to know. Search Engine Rankings Fluctuate First, you need to know that search engine rankings fluctuate; that is just the way it is. Google is a prime example of ranking changes happening throughout the day. The best way to find out how you are faring is to study the traffic coming to your site over time. Nope, not just a day or two, try a week or two at least to see if your rankings return. A search engine update may last a week before finishing and the rankings settle. Most importantly, are you receiving traffic at your website? Are you still making sales? Okay then, something is working. Don't jump on the "change everything" bandwagon. Pay attention to what is true in regard to your website. No One Knows Algorithms Like The Search Engines The truth is much of the talk about organic (natural) search engine marketing information is speculative. The people who know exactly what the search engine is doing are the engineers who created it, and they are not going to give away their secrets. This means that understanding what happens when updates occur may be difficult to pin down. Keeping tabs with leaders in the industry through articles, forum postings and blogs may give you a general idea of what is happening. Take that information and then apply it to what is actually happening with your website traffic and sales. You Need A Log Statistics Program If you do not take anything else away with you from this article be sure you heed this advice: you need a log statistics program in place. With a good log statistics program you will be able to see various reports showing the number of unique visits taking place on your website, what keyword phrases visitors use to find your pages, what pages are being visited, which search engines are being used to find your website, and much more. Knowing what the "normal" website traffic of your website is will give you a good idea of Marketing - How Do You Know What Is Working? why. Don't jump ship before examining what is going on with your website first. Panic will lead you nowhere.If you've been in business some time - you will have more than one marketing strategy going on - so how do you find out which one is working?Split testing is the answer. What is that? As the implies – you are splitting your campaigns and testing them separately. You do this by marking each of your marketing campaigns in some way so that you know where your traffic and sales are coming from and which campaign is the most successful. Here are a few ideas as to how to do this.1) Direct each campaign to a different company contact – be it web site, domain, e Let's talk about basic search engine fundamentals you need to know. Search Engine Rankings Fluctuate First, you need to know that search engine rankings fluctuate; that is just the way it is. Google is a prime example of ranking changes happening throughout the day. The best way to find out how you are faring is to study the traffic coming to your site over time. Nope, not just a day or two, try a week or two at least to see if your rankings return. A search engine update may last a week before finishing and the rankings settle. Most importantly, are you receiving traffic at your website? Are you still making sales? Okay then, something is working. Don't jump on the "change everything" bandwagon. Pay attention to what is true in regard to your website. No One Knows Algorithms Like The Search Engines The truth is much of the talk about organic (natural) search engine marketing information is speculative. The people who know exactly what the search engine is doing are the engineers who created it, and they are not going to give away their secrets. This means that understanding what happens when updates occur may be difficult to pin down. Keeping tabs with leaders in the industry through articles, forum postings and blogs may give you a general idea of what is happening. Take that information and then apply it to what is actually happening with your website traffic and sales. You Need A Log Statistics Program If you do not take anything else away with you from this article be sure you heed this advice: you need a log statistics program in place. With a good log statistics program you will be able to see various reports showing the number of unique visits taking place on your website, what keyword phrases visitors use to find your pages, what pages are being visited, which search engines are being used to find your website, and much more. Knowing what the "normal" website traffic of your website is will give you a good idea o Are Online Surveys Worth the Time and Effort? y a week or two at least to see if your rankings return. A search engine update may last a week before finishing and the rankings settle. Most importantly, are you receiving traffic at your website? Are you still making sales? Okay then, something is working. Don't jump on the "change everything" bandwagon. Pay attention to what is true in regard to your website.Internet surveys offer many rewards, ranging from free products, samples, or gift certificates, but the most alluring reward that paid surveys can offer is cash. Finding Internet surveys that pay well is difficult, but possible. It is a good idea to search for reputable companies offering cash paid surveys. Survey participants should be wary of promises that seem unrealistic. People should also be aware that the surveys that do pay cash usually require the most work.Most of the cash paid surveys advertised on the Internet are unfulfilling. Nearly any survey of No One Knows Algorithms Like The Search Engines The truth is much of the talk about organic (natural) search engine marketing information is speculative. The people who know exactly what the search engine is doing are the engineers who created it, and they are not going to give away their secrets. This means that understanding what happens when updates occur may be difficult to pin down. Keeping tabs with leaders in the industry through articles, forum postings and blogs may give you a general idea of what is happening. Take that information and then apply it to what is actually happening with your website traffic and sales. You Need A Log Statistics Program If you do not take anything else away with you from this article be sure you heed this advice: you need a log statistics program in place. With a good log statistics program you will be able to see various reports showing the number of unique visits taking place on your website, what keyword phrases visitors use to find your pages, what pages are being visited, which search engines are being used to find your website, and much more. Knowing what the "normal" website traffic of your website is will give you a good idea o Employee Benefits for the Small Business - What to Offer ative. The people who know exactly what the search engine is doing are the engineers who created it, and they are not going to give away their secrets. This means that understanding what happens when updates occur may be difficult to pin down. Keeping tabs with leaders in the industry through articles, forum postings and blogs may give you a general idea of what is happening. Take that information and then apply it to what is actually happening with your website traffic and sales.Employee benefits are a crucial piece of getting quality employees to work for your small business. In most cases, the small business owner cannot afford to offer many benefits due to the cost to the small business owner.As a small business owner, you can offer some incentives to employees to get quality employees to work for you.1. Hours of operation are critical to a small business. You need employee availability when your customers or potential customers are available. However, you could offer your employees flex time or reduced hours on Friday (the You Need A Log Statistics Program If you do not take anything else away with you from this article be sure you heed this advice: you need a log statistics program in place. With a good log statistics program you will be able to see various reports showing the number of unique visits taking place on your website, what keyword phrases visitors use to find your pages, what pages are being visited, which search engines are being used to find your website, and much more. Knowing what the "normal" website traffic of your website is will give you a good idea o The Top 10 Reasons Businesses Succeed Only one of every 5 businesses makes it to its 5th year, and fewer still make it to 10 years. What do the successful businesses have in common?1. The experience and skills of the top managers. Over half of business failures are directly related to managerial incompetence.2. The energy, persistence and resourcefulness (the will to make the business succeed) of the top managers. Many business owners have failed or come close several times before their “instant” success. Don’t give up.3. A product that is at least a cut above the competition and service If you do not take anything else away with you from this article be sure you heed this advice: you need a log statistics program in place. With a good log statistics program you will be able to see various reports showing the number of unique visits taking place on your website, what keyword phrases visitors use to find your pages, what pages are being visited, which search engines are being used to find your website, and much more. Knowing what the "normal" website traffic of your website is will give you a good idea of what may be actually changing over time when updates do occur. Resubmitting Doesn't Help Don't resubmit your web pages in the crush of an update. Search engines have crawlers, known as search engine robots or spiders, that are able to pick up a web page through links in order to add it to the search engine databases. For this reason you do not need to submit your pages to search engines anymore. Even if you mysteriously go from "top ten" to number 500 in the rankings, the fact that you are still listed means that you are still in the search engine's database, and you do not need to resubmit. Watch search engine robot activity in your server logs and you will be able to see when your web pages are being revisited by the robots. Google PageRank Should Not Rule Your Life So many people fixate on Google's PageRank. I suggest you should be more concerned about the traffic coming to your website, sales, the amount of content on your site and the number of on topic or directory backlinks you have acquired. PageRank is part of a much bigger equation of over 100 ways in which Google evaluates your website. Don't forget about the traffic that comes from the other search engines as well. Google may not always be the leader in search engines, keep current with the other major search engine players in the industry. Common Sense Makes Sense Use common sense. If you are a small business you can ill afford to make changes that may adversely affect your bottom line. Observation and patience will gain you more than quick fixes. In my experience, the true test of an update is watching the search engine results settle over at least a week or two worth of time. Let the dust settle, analyze the situation, and see what happens from there. Moderation may be helpful, whether in gaining backlinks, making website changes or your reactions to changes. Don't panic. If it isn't broken...don't fix it.
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