As important as all part of a website are, link can be one of the major players in determining your website rank. After all, you’ll never rank without links. Google was originally built on an algorithm that weighted the amount of anchor text links in a site to determine its relevance in search results. Essentially, Google treats these links as votes, where more votes means higher rank. However, you can’t just spam your website with a variety of links which lead your visitors to something unrelated. Google has installed many mechanisms to ensure the quality of these links. These make sure that the links are relevant, segmented correctly, and from different IP addresses. Link building is important, and it’s just another piece of the puzzle in effective SEO.

Whenever you do a specific search for a product or service in a location on Google, you will notice a list of local businesses in that area next to a map. Ever wonder that is, and how to get your business on that list? That is Google Places, the next best thing to help your business succeed.

Google Places pretty much acts as an online yellow pages account for your business, combined with a personalized web page. Customers can visit this page to find out all kinds of information about your business, from basic contact information, to YouTube videos, reviews, photos, and more. This little known area of Google is essential for local businesses looking to create that extra edge.

Let’s say you are looking for something specific, say “pizza in Chicago”, or “Chicago pizza”. The first page you see an alphabetized list of local restaurants in Chicago offering pizza on their menus. These businesses have Google Places accounts, allowing them to easily make first page search engine results on Google. See the potential in this? Web-Op specializes in managing your Google Places account for your business, allowing your customers to keep up to date on your information and allowing for no missed opportunities in rankings to go unnoticed.

To learn more about Google Places and Web-Op services in this area, please refer to http://web-op.com/google-places.php.

In a recent post on the Google Analytics blog, Google announced support for getting an “adjusted bounce rate”. Google Analytics has consistently over reported bounce rate due to the nature of their tracking. Recently they added support for “events” – a way to store additional user behavior data – such as clicks on a facebook like or playing of a video. This new “adjusted bounce rate” feature looks like they’ve packaged up a significant use-case for event tracking into a standard feature. It’s about time. If you would like to take advantage of the new – better bounce rate stats you simply need to add one line to your analytics embed code:

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXXXX-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
  setTimeout("_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', '15_seconds', 'read'])",15000);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

This looks extremely similar to my bounce rate workaround I posted a while back.

Found this serp today searching for “meizitang”. Turns out Google may be as susceptible to being gamed with subdomains as Bing.

Looking up availability of m.esothelioma.com in 4…3…2…1

Had a great lunch today at the Las Vegas country club with business partner and friend Greg Herlean. We discussed the kick off next week of our new site Horizon Trust. We are also partnering on the new business and website called Business Plan Bluprint. Thanks to both Greg and Chris for showing me such a great time today.

We are all up in Snowflake visiting our partners with The Guru. Millions of dollars worth of windshields being sold with our amazing partners on this site. A special thanks to all our partners and wonderful employees who have turned this business into a huge success over the last several. Thank You

Visits from mobile devices are up three times over the last six months on WindshieldGuru.com. The ever changing world of the Internet keeps us scrambling to keep up. Check us out on your mobile device tomorrow. We’re going live with a new mobile site today.

A conversion funnel is a structure provided by most major analytics packages, such as Google Analytics. It aggregates the click paths of many visitors as they follow a pre-determined course through your site. In short, it lets you watch as visitors more from “arrival on site” to the destiation your site exists to encourage– the conversion. Typically, a conversion is a purchase, a request for information, or activating a contact form.

Much like a funnel in the kitchen, a properly configured conversion funnel will start with a large opening– the 50,000 visitors who hit your site in a month– and narrow down to a smaller number– like the 200 who buy– at the end. At each step, it should get narrower. There’s value in all of these factors– how fast it narrows, as well as how many people enter and leave the whole process.
(more…)

Google has been moving heavily into increasingly localized search recently. It used to be, triggering a local search required a regional qualifier, like a city name.

Now, many of the same searches will go directly to intensely local results without qualification. They rely on geo-location of your IP address, or perhaps your information in your Google profile.

Now, the reasoning for this is sound, from a business perspective. (more…)

Check out the attached screenshot of Google’s serp result for “cop-usa”

In the footer down below you will find the following bit of html:

<font size="1" face="Tahoma" color="#FFFFFF">www.cop-usa.com
	www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com
	www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com www.cop-usa.com
	www.cop-usa.com</font>