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.

We are always taking on new and exciting project here at Web-Op. One of the first things the SEO team usually looks for with a new client is whether or not they have existing data we can leverage for search engine traffic. A recent client of ours specializes in selling items that are custom made for specific car makes and models. This client had already done a lot of the work creating make pages. We saw that there was also a huge opportunity for more search engine traffic if we could generate model pages with the data they had gathered over the last few years. Over the next week our programmers worked to generate over 1,000 new pages. As a result, daily visits more than doubled.

This all happened during the first two months of optimization with Web-Op.

Ever wanted to show your visitors or staff where your traffic is coming from, without dragging them through Google Analytics? We’ve developed a simple package which processes your Analytics visit data and displays it as an easy-to-read map. There’s no coding required– just edit one file to add details of your Analytics profile, and away you go. It installs as a simple image you can embed in your blog, on a prominent page, or in a back-office dashboard.

Configuration Options

$username="email@domain.com";
$password="PASSWORD HERE";
$profile="12345678"; // See http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=73f5507df43705db&hl=en -
$usaonly=1; //Set to filter out non-US information.
$hsize=640; //Horizontal Size
$vsize=480; // Vertical Size
$days=14; // Days to show results from
$maxtoshow = 40; //Show so many dots.

/* thats it */

It should run on any typically configured PHP hosting environment

See it in action at Auto Glass Guru

Get the zip download at our site. A Github repository is now available

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.

After being in the website business as long as anybody has been in this business, there is one attribute we have decided that helps is more than any other, patience. It has become much easier to be a patient because we have money, and a strong belief in the future of what we do.

Look at these two charts comparing January 2011 to January 2012. If you make the mistake of measuring your growth from the beginning of each month till the end, it’s hard to see any increase. However, if you’re patient for a year the growth becomes quite apparent.

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.

Web-Op started this cremation site in November of this year www.cremation-USA.com. You can see the growth in the chart above. We have opened a service office in Ogden, Utah and have been enjoying a pretty good amount of success after just a few months. We are ranking first page for hundreds of US cities already. Check out this one. We’ll keep you updated.

Web-Op has dealt with countless companies – large and small – that have found themselves on the receiving end of negative press. It only takes a few comments on pissedconsumer.com or ripoffreport.com to have a negative effect on your business’s online reputation. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to push this negative press off the first page of Google.

(1)   Create profiles for your company on websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. Remember that it is important to show activity on these websites to get them to rank. Just creating them isn’t enough. Post something regularly, build a few links to them, and watch each profile page rise in the search engines. Below are a number of websites you can create profiles on. Each one of these rank extremely well.

1. Twitter.com
2. Linkedin.com
3. Facebook.com
4. Digg.com
5. WordPress.com
6. Google.com/profiles
7. Quora.com
8. About.me
9. Formspring.me

(2)  Buy other domains such as websitenamereviews.com, websitenametestimonials.com, and websitenamecomplaints.com. We recommend looking at Google suggestions to start. These days keyword rich domains rank extremely well. Your $8 purchase will be well worth it.

Remember that negative comments added to powerful domains like pissedconsumer.com can rank for your business name extremely fast. Being proactive about your online reputation can minimize the impact of one unhappy client’s comment.