St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category

I just published another Florida focused web site. This isn’t tightly focused on St. Petersburg but instead on the general FL market. And yes, to a search engine, FL is different than Florida, but their getting lots better. In fact if you search for most terms using FL, instead of Florida, just about everything you get will have the word Florida bolded in the descriptions and the url’s as well as the rare instances of the “word” FL. It’s good that that the SE’s are catching on more and more to the way people write and search. I’m guessing the competition from Bing has had a lot of influence on a lot of the fixes to long time flaws Google has made recently. Including the one where incoming links aren’t so important anymore and the words on the page are more important.

Anyway the new web site is targeting the Fl Fishing market, Continue reading “New FL Web Site Design – FL Fishing TV Hobby Site” »

This guy makes some great points about competing in the local search market. Remember, it is a competition, not an automatic thing. You’re not going to be automatically listed #1 on Google for Florida Web Design just because you submitted your web site to Google and you are actually in Florida. On a smaller scale it’s the same for St. Petersburg Web Design. just because you are in St. Petersburg and you tell Google doesn’t mean that the national companies aren’t fighting hard for your spot.

He doesn’t really give away a lot of tips but he does highlight the challenges that most small businesses don’t understand.

Sometimes instinct and timing make a link building campaign just taking off. There are thousands of established directories with good page rank out there. Most of them pass far more page rank to the first links that are added. The ones that fill up the first page of each category. Most link building directories give these coveted spots to websites by the order they join. The first sites that are added to the database of inks are the ones that get listed first in the directory. Since this page is closer to the index page of the directory, it usually has a high page rank. To make a long complicated scientific story a short one, if your performing a link building campaign that involves directories (most do), you want to be one of the first to add your website to the directory.

Most ink builders are put off by the low page rank of these new directories. They are new after all that means there aren’t a lot of links to the site. Our research tells us that a great deal of these sites will fail or close or switch content focus within a year however. Our research tells us that this failure rate isn’t as high as one would think and that the ones that do not fail provide links that pass on lots of link juice within a year or less.

If your going for the big bang, i.e., a proper text link from a related directory, that has a high page rank, well it’s hardly ever going to happen, even if your willing to pay top dollar for these links. The best bet, is to get in on the ground floor of a web directory that you think is going to gain some good page rank (and be there for more than a few months).

With this in mind, I present: Deck Boards Directory, a collection of links to sites that related to the decking industry. Deck builders, decking supply companies, information about the decking, etc. I know it’s going to take off because of the market research and I happen to know the guy who made it, so I know it’s going to stick around for a while. So if you’re marketing a site related to decking or deck boards in some way, go there and get a link form them. They require a link back to them on a page of theirs somewhere, but that’s what you have to give a directory, is a link because they need link juice, just like you!

Microsoft’s latest search engine, “Bing” (at bing.com) was launched yesterday. That’s far ahead of when anyone thought.

The good news is that the preview that I wrote a review about, was evidently inaccurate in some way, or at least didn’t communicate properly how Bing would work.

I’ve only done a little testing on it so far, but at the moment it looks super relevant.

Maybe this is is why Google finally stepped up it’s relevancy a bit (it still has a long way to go).

Evidently Microsoft is totally revamping their search engine again. From looking at their preview, it’s pretty clear that they don’t get search. Maybe this is why their desktop SE sucks, Windows has never had a good search feature and their Windows Live Search Engine is doing so poorly.
Continue reading “Revamped Search from Microsoft Shows MS just doesn’t “Get It”” »

I always knew that click fraud was way more prevalent than what Google says it is (and they admit it’s above 30%!). But now we have evidence that Google themselves is defrauding their own advertisers by teaming with adware companies to redirect directly typed addresses into searches.
That’s a mouthful, what’s that mean?

That means Google, in certain cases, is taking a directly typed domain name and turning it into a search and then a click on and advertisement so they can charge the advertiser for something they wouldn’t normally have to pay for. This is called click fraud, even by Google’s own definition which states:

Invalid clicks are clicks generated by prohibited methods. Examples of invalid clicks may include repeated manual clicking or the use of robots, automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Invalid clicks are sometimes intended to artificially and/or maliciously drive up an advertiser’s clicks and or a publisher’s earnings. Sources of invalid clicks may include:

* Manual clicks intended to increase your advertising costs or to increase profits for website owners hosting your ads.
* Clicks by automated tools, robots, or other deceptive software.

The evidence is long and tangled, but here’s another article that explains this better (LINK). Techy version
Here’s a link to the evidence and original report (LINK). Very techy version