Websitetology

If you aren’t maintaining a website for your business, you aren’t really in business anymore.

With the advent of google on cell phones, it’s become absolutely critical to have a site that Google can find. Not only that, but it’s not enough to just build a website- you also need to build a community- and we’ll teach you how.

If you have a site that uses web 2.0 technology like RSS, CSS and allows for comments: and come to our seminar, you will be able to get listed on the first page of Google (without paying for ads). We can teach you how to be a webmaster in one day- without having to learn any code.

Spend a day with us and learn everything you need to know about how the web works- but the secrets of how you get to the first page of Google without paying for ads.

We’ll teach you how to maintain a website using the newest coolest Web 2.0 tools- which means nothing to buy, no code to learn and the ability to connect with customers easier than ever before.

What we preach is organic search engine optimization as opposed to paying for “Search Engine Optimization” voodoo. It’s much more cost effective and it actually works.

Your website can become a powerful business tool and easy to use if you take this seminar. Your webstats will prove it in no time.

So sign up now- we know you’ll become one of our many successful Websitetologists.

Wed Jul 8, 2009 at The Next Wave, 100 Bonner Street Dayton OH 45410 from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm.

Google adds rating features for signed in users

I almost had a heart attack this morning. When looking at search results for a client- there were two little boxes next to every listing: Promote and Remove.

This puts the power of the ranking in the hands of the cloud- not in the hands of “Search Engine Optimization” experts.

However, it didn’t take long to do a search- and find the following:

Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.

The changes you make only affect your own searches. But SearchWiki also is a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link.

Official Google Blog: SearchWiki: make search your own.

So, this is only for my benefit? Who are they kidding? This is just one more way for Google to accumulate information about your site- and what it’s most dedicated users are thinking.

There is also a Comment bubble at the end of each listing- and this will be shared among all users.

If there is one industry that should be shaking in their shoes right now- it’s the Yellow Pages directories. With no user interaction, and static displays (yep- that’s the reality of print) there is no reason to ever use a Yellow Pages directory again- especially with Google available just one toll free call away at 1-800-Goog-411. All small businesses should be sure to register with Google Local, it’s more important than ever.

Take a look at your Google search rank now- and, realize, the days of gaming for the top of the search are ending now.

We tell people to check their own site by going to Google and searching for site:yourdomainname.tld to see how many pages Google sees and how it sees them. Now, Wired shows us how to go scan all the Craigslist sites for a certain item- using the same trick.

Go to Google, type in site:craigslist.com “search term” and you’ll find ever P150 Vespa across the country.

If you’re a Craigslist addict, you know the Holy Grail of the online classified site would be a way to search the entire site at the same time.

For whatever reason, Craigslist does not want you to do this. When the question of searching the whole site at once is posed to Craigslist discussion forums, the response is always “you can’t,” and the civility of responses goes downhill from there. It should be noted that searching the entire site goes against the culture that Craigslist attempts to engender. It was never meant to be an alternative to Ebay, a global online forum for trade, but rather a community-based forum for trade. Do not be surprised if your communications with people outside your area are ignored or you are treated as a scam artist.

So if you want to buy a car, find a job or trade antique fly fishing lures, and you’re not having luck in your specific locale, you would search the San Francisco Bay Area region landing page, then New York, Great Britain or any other city, state, or country where cars, jobs and fly fishing lures are found.

read the step-by-step by following this link: Search Every Craigslist Site at Once – Wired How-To Wiki

You can also find out how many places your competitor has your product name on their site using the same logic site:yourcompetitionsurl.tld “your product name” etc. etc.

Just another cool Google tool.

Flash designers all over are jumping for joy, thinking they’ll no longer have to build dual sites so that their clients don’t get ignored by Google, with this announcement from Adobe. But, read my comments after the blockquote to fully understand what this means for your business:

Adobe Advances Rich Media Search on the Web
“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine. With Adobe’s help, Google can now better read the content on sites that use Adobe Flash technology, helping users find more relevant information when conducting searches. As a result, millions of pre-existing RIAs and dynamic Web experiences that utilize Adobe Flash technology, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without the need for companies and developers to alter them.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help Web site owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”…

“Designers and Web developers have long been frustrated that search engines couldn’t better access the information within their content created with Flash technology. It’s great to see Adobe and the search engines working directly together to improve the situation,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief, SearchEngineLand.com. “The changes should help unlock information that’s previously been ‘invisible’ and will likely result in a better experience for searchers.”

But there are many reasons not to get that excited, especially for small businesses, and here is why:

Flash is generally dependent on screen size- ie- it’s built to run on a standard computer screen- of a certain size. If you want it to work on a cell phone (and right now- it still doesn’t work on the iPhone) you have to build your files for each screen size.

Updating and creating content in Flash requires the Flash software- and the smarts to use it. Unless your Flash designer builds a database driven site- with a browser access portal, you are going to continue to pay out the yang to update and change your site. I don’t know what the percentage is of DB driven flash sites, but from my travels on the web- it’s pretty small.

Even if the site is built using a database, and works on all screens, and manages to meet all ADA and W3C standards for accessibility, it’s ability to interact with Google and play with other sites through social tools is nascent. It’s like getting on the web 2.0 bandwagon 4 years too late.

If you have a huge budget for a website and you like to keep your web monkeys in bananas, Flash may be the tool for you in about a year or two. However if you want the fastest, easiest, most compliant solution that puts your company in charge of your website without a web monkey, look to the many Open Source Content Managers that can have you up and running and indexed by Google today.

Yes, I know you aren’t Apple, or have a product like the iPhone, but if someone wants your product, they’ll turn to Google. This short article summing up what kind of numbers a hot product can generate and how Google is the only one that matters:

MacNN | iPhone generates 7m US searches in April
the iPhone generated huge traffic for internet search engines in April. ComScore, which provides market research for advertisers, says 1.3 million Americans conducted 6.9 million iPhone-related searches in April. The word “iPhone” was the most popular term, with nearly 1.5 million searches, followed by “iPhone 2.0” and “iPhone 3G.” The vast majority of those seaches — 88.4 percent — went to Google, Yahoo got about 7 percent, with MSN getting less than 3 percent.

Those searches generated a lot of traffic for Apple, which attracted 17.5 percent of search click-thrus. Of that number, about 17 percent were the result of “paid” searches, the rest were “organic” searches. Google’s You Tube and various blogger sites garnered about 9 percent of the total click-thrus, followed by NetShelter Technology Media at about 8.5 percent. NetShelter owns several iPhone-specific sites. The data were collected using comScore Marketer software.

“Search is frequently a harbinger of purchase intent,” said Dan Lackner, Senior VP of comScore. “The increase in volume of iPhone searches demonstrates just how heavy that interest has been for the next generation of Apple’s popular phone — even when its existence was still just a rumor.”

As if it needs repeating: “88.4 percent — went to Google, Yahoo got about 7 percent, with MSN getting less than 3 percent.” Optimizing for Google isn’t optional.

Someone said on the hackers forum: “The analogy I use is that Categories are like a book’s table of contents, and Tags like its index.”

However, be aware that categories that are actual search terms are very strong Google magnets.

So, instead of using a category “lines we carry” think about “High Performance Motorcycles in Dayton OH”  and then use tags to highlight the brands and product names.

Tags are ways to identify the keywords or concepts in each post- categories group the posts in ways that make sense for others. Lately, Google has started dinging sites for putting a single post in more than three categories (which is too bad)- so think carefully about your choice of categories.

There is always Google ad sense, but, what if you want to sell even more ad space?

AdBrite is a way for publishers to add revenue to their site.

AdBrite – How AdBrite Works
AdBrite’s aim is to provide our publishers with the most control, best service, and highest payout possible.
Step 1 – Choose Products

Through a single snippet of HTML, AdBrite can serve any combination of the following ad formats:

* Text and banner ads with customizable layout
* Full page ads – A high-paying full-screen ad on the third pageview of your site, shown only once per user per day

Step 2 – Attract advertisers

Anyone visiting your site can buy an ad directly on your site by clicking “Your Ad Here.” You’ll also be listed in the AdBrite marketplace, and represented by our busy in-house sales staff.
Step 3 – Control

You can choose to review each ad before it appears on your site. You can set the price for ads bought directly on your site. You can even have AdBrite show another ad network (your Google AdSense ads, Burst, etc.) if we can’t meet your minimum revenue requirement.

For really high volume sites, you can look to other ad placement services like Doubleclick which is now also owned by Google.

One thing you have to be aware of: once you ad advertising from a remote server, your page load times can start slowing down, which can lose you readers and reach. Some really successful sites can sell their own advertising and serve the ads internally, but you have to have a really targeted audience that advertisers want to reach.

One of the reasons people love WordPress is it’s simplicity. Another is the love that Google gives it. But sometimes doing things in WordPress is a bit of a pain in the butt-until some genius writes a plugin that makes things easy- really easy. Like so easy, I think I’m in love.

One of the things we’ve had on our site for a long time is a booklist where we suggested books that people may find useful. We’re not stupid, so we thought we’d make it easy to buy them from Amazon- and take a cut on the sales as well through the Amazon associates program. There are sites that make a living just off their revenue from Amazon, but, we had to admit that our booklist didn’t get updated often since making links through Amazon was a slow tedious process.

Not anymore! This plugin makes adding Amazon links and product pictures to your site so easy it’s a reason in itself to upgrade your install.

WP-Amazon « manalang
Have you ever wanted an easy way to link to a book, movie, or product that’s relevant to what you’re writing about? Typically, this is a pretty cumbersome task — open up a browser, go to Amazon, look for the product you’re interested in, copy the URL, then paste the link to your entry.

Not anymore. With WP-Amazon, the Amazon product catalog is available right from WordPress. This plugin will allow you to search Amazon as you compose your post or page entry. Check out the demo

This plugin is not only an amazing way to add interest to your site, but to also generate income. There are books and products to go with almost everything you write about.

We also have an affiliate program with iTunes- but that interface is even more complicated, and with Amazon now selling music, I think we’ll start using them for those links as well.

Matt Cutts is the guy at Google who figures out how to deliver better search results- what gets to the first results page. Officially he’s the Head of Web Spam at Google- which makes sense once you realize a big part of his job is making sure that you aren’t trying to “game” Google. All those SEO tricks that may work for a minute- aren’t near as useful as new helpful content on a fairly regular basis. We’re in an “Expert Economy” and those with the newest, best answers to solve searchers problems- will be the people who get to the front page.The days of the static brochure type site are long over.Watch the video- and realize, everything that Matt is talking about is what we teach in the Websitetology seminar. He even praises WordPress, our content manager of choice right at the beginning of the video. And if you need further proof that Wordpress is the bomb, it’s the tool he uses for his blog (see link above)Some tips Matt makes are some of the things we emphasize- like make sure you add descriptions of your audio or video content as text, because Google can’t index audio. (That’s what we’re doing here!) He talks about Googles other tools, like Google base, Google Maps, Google local, as well as tips on video- Google video longer for videos longer than 10 minutes, YouTube for 10 minutes or less (although we’ve got “Directors Status” and have loaded up 30 minute videos to YouTube). He also reminds smart web content creators to use Google ad words to generate alternate key words for your posts.Matt’s best advice to a budding site builder- use a really old browser, or a text only browser to see how a bot sees your site. Flash and Javascript make your site much harder or impossible to crawl. If you do insist on using Flash, use it as decoration, but leave the navigation in HTML.If you are in Dayton OH, and want to learn all the ins and outs of building the best site for Google rank, or, if you want a seminar on how to build an easy to use, effective website that can get you to the front page of Google, you can read up on Matt Cutts or you can take the Websitetology seminar which will give you the insight to get to the top, without having to buy ad words.