Talk about make a point!  This is juicy. While I love Google and use so many of their products, they are notorious for using fans to help them perfect their tools -or dumping them after you love them.

While Google has been in the latest news for accusations from Microsoft of  patent abuse, this video highlights a more down home concern for businesses trying to switch to the Google cloud based office tools.  There is a lot of convenience in the connect anywhere anytime to your data that Google offers, but at the same time, you must be connected to the internet for any tool to work.  The Office suite championed by Microsoft for years already provides a stability and level of business excellence that Google has yet to achieve.

Meanwhile the fiery competition between the two major players provides a “time-out” kick for the rest of us, who turn on our computers or mobile phones and watch the show.
You’ve got to admit – it’s kinda funny to host this video on YOUTUBE – a Google product.

PS I first saw this video last night around 7 pm – there were 300+ views, now at 8:55 am there is already 168,736 views. It’s amazing the power of a good viral video!

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While we all want to be beautiful, our website design needs more than a pretty face to get the job done.

To help you determine if you have design mistakes on your website or your upcoming plans for a new website  have problems use this handy checklist.  It’s only the beginning, but it’s a start.

Design Mistakes on Websites Include:

1. Forget about how wonderful you are or your product is: think about what your customer needs/wants/ or is suffering from.  Write the entire site to suit them.
2. If you must drone on about your brilliance, put it on the About page – but remember they don’t care!  Your visitors care about what is interesting to them. If you are a rocket scientist and your visitor is interested in fashion, he/she will notice what you are wearing in the photo before they hear what you want to say.  So do your best to think like a customer and give us what we want!
3. Don’t over do color schemes.  Sure some restaurants need to get people in and out quickly, so they decorate with super bright colors that make you want to hurry and play music so obstinate that you can’t wait to leave (even if you don’t know why!)  But you don’t want people hurrying to leave your site.  You want them lingering and coming back over and over again.
4. So, choose colors that invite.  You may want to pick up a color wheel book for home decor from the library or your local book store (even the paint store).  Take a look at the palettes used for rooms and think “relaxSAtion”.  While it’s true you want people to take action on your site, you don’t need (want) them to leave it in order for them to act.
5. Stop the flashing, beeping, bopping, soothing, dinging, distractions.  We don’t want to look at all your toys – unless you sell video games.  While they are “fun” they are flat out annoying to the buyer (unless your customers are under 14).  Look at all the master websites that sell millions of dollars every month…no distractions there baby.  Think amazon.
6. Don’t have music playing unexpectedly when I arrive at your site.  I may be on the job, or browsing at 2 am.  It will drive me, and most buyers off in a hurry  Listen to me – we don’t want to listen to your tunes.  Or at least give me the option to decide if I want to turn on the tunes before I hear them.
7. Load quickly.  Google tells us they are rewarding sites that load quickly.  If your drags around, slowly unfolding the photos – people will leave before your mug ever appears.  And search engines will stop sending them, cause they don’t like your lazy pixels either.  Optimize those photos.
8. Don’t put pics on your site you have not re-sized for the web.  What works in print doesn’t work on your site.
9. Java script – careful how much you use and where you put in on the site.  It can really SLOW down the search engines and they will abandon you ….and head over to my site.  They like me.  A lot!  (smile)
10. Keep your pages short – with clear, concise writing, that invites the reader to make one decision per page – even if that decision is to go to the next page.

SEO Small Business makes it our business to make your business do good business.  HOLY COW.  That sounds like a lot of websites I read.  (Smile.)  Seriously, it is our quest to stream line your website to be your agent 24/7 .

Call us today and let us see what we can do to optimize your business online.  (604)306. 7634  Read about Website Development or SEO Smart Business Package

Questions or Comments? Feel free to ask in the comment section below.  We will respond.

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Are you still trying to use “long tail” keywords like “buy green electric motor cars chicago” in your SEO strategy?

For many reasons the SEO strategies on your website are always evolving.  Mostly though, it revolves around the constant updating of the major search engines and how they deliver information.

Gone Is The Long Tail

If you or your webmaster are still trying to catch all the keywords that include long tail descriptions like “the green electric motor”, or spelling glitches like: “spelling”, “speling”, “spealling”, you are wasting your time.

The updated Google Instant search (responsible for the vast majority of searches) has effectively reduced all those SEO efforts to nil.  Now with predictive text-ing, Google has removed the effectiveness of these old SEO methods.  Predictive text-ing means that Google finishes your search term for you, based on their records of most searched items.

For instance: If you used to type “best Italian restaurant in Vancouver” the instant search will stop you mid way and say:

You Type                                                  Google Says

“Best”                                                        Best Buy?

“Best Itali”                                                  Best Italian restaurant in Vancouver

THAT’S IT - You didn’t get a chance to type in your long tail. Google cut you off and solved the problem for you . For SEO purposes, this could be devastating to your site if you don’t optimize properly.

The way you update your website is critical. Old strategies won’t work.

Suggestions for SEO

One simple suggestion: do several instant searches on Google for the keywords you want to use and see what Google offers. Those terms will be your best bet. But unless you work hard on content, linking and targeted niche SEO, the competition out there for your few keywords will overwhelm your individual website.

You may find an info-graphic provided by SEO BOOK helpful.

Infographic by SEO Book

At SEO Small Business we can help the small business owner find your place online. We offer options for monthly SEO services and social media presence. We can help you accomplish your online communication – check us out  www.seosmallbusiness.net

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Writing Blog content is a daunting task for many small business owners. You many worry that your grammar is incorrect, your spelling is rudimentary or that you just don’t know what to write about. But writing blog content can be simplified into some simple steps:

1. Don’t be a perfectionist. Don’t worry about the Pulitzer prize! You are writing to provide blog content on your website that helps readers, not to impress you 7th grade English teacher.
2. Make a list of keywords or phrases that have something to do with your industry, business, product etc.  This will provide you with months of writing ideas.  So for instance if I had a hair salon that also offered manicures I could write blog content about:

• Hair coloring – how to choose the right shade
• Hair coloring- the Chemical question: Is it harmful to my health?
• Hair coloring- different ways to do it
• Hair coloring- for men
• Hair coloring – How to preserve the color…

Are you starting to see the picture? I haven’t even begun to list all that I could write about Hair coloring and each one of the topics is a blog post. Imagine all the other keywords in a hair salon:

• Hair cut
• Child Cuts
• Short hair
• Long hair
• Thin hair
• Thick hair
• Loss of hair
• Tangled hair
• Straight hair
• Curly Hair
• Dandruff
• Excess Oily hair

Now you are getting the picture!

3. Choose one keyword or keyword phrase as your topic for your blog content that day.
4. Now set  aside your list of keywords, and just write anything that comes to mind on that one keyword topic. Make a list of facts or thoughts, or rumors or anything you can think of about your keyword/phrase.
5. Turn those thoughts into sentences – and don’t worry how they fit.
6. Walk away and do something else for a few minutes or hours

7. Re-read what you have and see if anything else pops into your mind.

8. Connect the sentences in a logical sequence – OR, at this point, if it’s a real problem, send off to a copywriter who will probably charge you about $5.00 or $10.00 per short blog post to finalize for you (maybe even less!). Be sure to give the post one final read out loud to insure it makes sense and for any final edits.
9. When the post is written, you will need to come back and SEO or search engine optimize the article.
10. POST. DONE. Walla. Fait Accompli’ CHEERS.

Be sure the reader has one or two very clear points that they walk away with after reading your post. Insure that the points add value to their experience. Do this 12-20 times, and you won’t need more than 10 min to start and finish your everyday posts. Sometimes, you will want to add Pillar content to your site, but you can outsource for that and save yourself the hassle.

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Building links to your local website is not as difficult as you might imagine.  You can increase your page rank with the search engines simply by connecting ONLINE with people who you work with in the Vancouver area  OFFLINE.

Make a Link List

Begin by making a list of your top ten to twenty business contacts. Think about suppliers, neighbors, associated industries, (for instance, you own a clothing store, they own an accessories store) people you know on community committees or chambers, etc.  The closer they are to your area the better but you can include: Vancouver, Greater Vancouver Regional District -GVRD, Fraser Valley etc.

For instance, my head office for SEO Small Business is in White Rock, BC. Although links from the North Shore are great for me, my best links for local SEO would be from White Rock, Surrey BC, Delta, Langley, Richmond and even Abbotsford.

If you have multiple locations you can create links accordingly.

Decide you will make one phone call or write one email to one contact a week – asking if they would consider linking to your website from their website.

What You Can Offer In Return for A Friendly Link

You might feel uneasy to simply ask for a link.  Here are some suggestions to increase your success rate:

1. Indicate you are doing some work on your website to increase your optimization for search engines, and tell them your specialist told you to ask for links.   Simple. Explain that you have just written a blog post on what you find most beneficial in your community and you have mentioned them in the post – would they like to link to it on their website?
2. Explain you are running a contest in the area and giving away some key promo gifts from different suppliers in the area.  Offer cash to pay them for a gift that they might want to offer in the contest to promote their business. Kindly suggest that each company supplying promos is requested to link to it from their website. (You didn’t offer to buy a link, you offered to buy a promo gift)
3. Tell people you have just developed a resource list on your site for businesses you recommend to others.  Suggest they might also want to link to it, and if they have suggestions about other businesses they know of, you could add those your website list as well. (Of course, contact those new businesses and pitch the link!)
4. Create a widget that tells something about the community you live in that any business can download from your site onto their website.  It could be about the weather, sales in the area, events in town etc. When they download the widget, you will have a built-in link back to your site.
5. Did you get a write up in the paper, or another website?  Be sure they have a link to your site included online.
6. If reciprocal links are the only way to get a link – go ahead. But don’t make your whole link effort built only on reciprocal links, as they are not as valuable for you in SEO.

Got a question – Shoot it to me below in the comments.

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It’s official.  General Motors Place is becoming Rogers Area.  Think of all the possible ramifications:

• Tourists are lost for hours looking for “the GM Place?”
• People flocking to the Arena to buy new Iphones 4 late July 2010 – whoops sold out!
• Rogers customers receive special bonus features at the Arena (too bad for Fido fans, tough luck for Telus talkers!)
• The Telus World of Science (previously the humble “Science World”) and the Rogers Arena appear to be an emerging theme – your phone company wants to be with you when you do anything, go anywhere, or learn something new.
• All the sports shuffling now in motion – who gets to cover what and when and for how long and play it on which channel and aoi vey!

SEO and Rogers Arena

As with any major business change, they will have a lot of branding issues.  From taxi cabs to Tourism Centers, Ticketmaster to literally thousands of travel publications around the world. The world will need to adjust to a new identity.  Rock stars and country music legends have sold hundreds of thousands of tickets using GM PLACE as a reference. Schedules all over the world need to be adjusted.  Not to mention all the new billings, contracts, policies, and so on.

Here are a few suggestions for your business (and Rogers!) to use when implementing a new (old) brand change:

1. Keywords – your site will be optimized, let’s hope for the old brand.  But if you start a new website, it will take a long time to create the same Domain Authority you would have already established.  Keywords must be adjusted to all new content.  Based on the size of your company, certain transition phrases can be very helpful.  Connect old brand with the new.  For instance: Rogers Arena (formally GM Place).  Of course, no one wants to do it too long as you are promoting the old brand as well.   Remember in this case (Rogers Arena (formally GM Place), it’s quite a different situation from your business introducing a new brand of granite table tops or a new type of service to your brake and muffler shop.  You may still want to sell the old, or at least clear out previous stock.  For you, use the transition terms as long as necessary.
2. Press Releases –  Write and distribute as many different angles to the story as you can find to foster different press releases.  You never know which one will catch the eye of a hungry journalist and meet the needs of their publication.  Ask vendors, joint venture partners, and organizations you work with to write a press release from their standpoint about your change.  Or write it for them (with permission of course!)
3. Links - A bonus to your situation is that your website will most likely retain the majority of links accrued through old linking strategy.  New links can now be obtained through a whole new world of connections.  What used to be themed around North American Cars (in our GM turns Rogers model), is now themed around telecommunications.  The linking opportunities are vast.
4. Local SEO – Don’t forget all those local links and connections, directories, listings etc that need updating.
5. Pay the Pros – Can you imagine how many working hours will be involved in the re-branding of the Rogers Arena?  I am guessing there will be a few yearly salaries involved in this process for the next 12 months.  Rogers may be able to afford them: you most likely cannot.  You don’t have the time to do it right if you are running your small business effectively.

Normally I encourage you to try SEO yourself – learn from my site and many others how to do some basics and work consistently each week to enhance your rank.  However, if you do institute a change which relative to your business size, is as major as the new Rogers Arena is to the Canucks, I would set a monthly budget aside for SEO and SEM (search engine marketing – paid advertising models) to insure the transition you have invested in and the risk you have taken, is justified with strategic and effective search engine optimization.

Interested in what services we have to offer – SEO SERVICES

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Keywords are vital for effective SEO content and search engine indexing. There are many tools available for keyword searches to help you learn what people are searching for when they find you. One new tool is the Wonder Wheel, found only on a Google Search.

You can use the Wonder Wheel to help you find many related keywords (and websites) to your original idea, and perhaps expand your keyword list without costly programs or complex strategies.

Let’s Play.

Go to www.Google.com

Enter one of your search terms. For example, if you are a tire repair shop in Oliver BC, you might type in tire repair Oliver BC.

This is what you would get:

Once you arrive at your first step, (after you check out your ranking position and your top 2 or 3 competitors), follow the arrow below and click on “more” on the left hand side of your screen. Once the drop down menu appears, you should be able to find the “wonder wheel” option.

As you can see , it opens to a whole new set of ideas, any of which you can follow. Simply click on the link, and follow the trail as long as it’s useful.

What to Look for
Watch for keywords you hadn’t thought of before, or phrases that could be useful. Notice some of the sites mentioned and see if you can learn from them.

Have fun! It’s a Wonder Wheel after all.

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Word is traveling fast among my colleagues about a new video you can make in 5 min. YouTube Google Search Stories is a free tool  for people like you and I to show off our SEO and how well we show up in the search with keywords we use to rank in the SERPS.  For Google, it helps people become familiar with just how many different ways you can search using Google.  For YouTube it’s more videos!

You can search so many different ways on Google:

1. Web search – The default search

2. Image search- images of products, services, people

3. Books

4. Maps

5. Groups

6. Blogs

7. News

8. Social, Movies, Weather, and more…

Learn more about Google search tools

I used the latest toy I could find to demonstrate how cool it is to be found in the various search results.

Harmony Thiessen-SEO Small Business-Greater Vancouver-GVRD

Check it out below!  It’s only 30 seconds. Maybe you will want to do the same for your site.  Instructions are listed at the end of the video or if you click the link to latest toy in above paragraph.

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Joes Burgers, Sally’s B&B, Gimmytown Laundry, and Best Grocery Store in Town can all stand some honest, free, online publicity.  It’s easy to get more local SEO – if you ask for Reviews.

Reviews are the  buzzword for testimonials.  In the old testimonial days (term taken from the legal proceedings of bearing witness) clients wrote a line or more about your product or service and you included it on your printed material, your website and perhaps in video on YouTube. They looked something like:

Wow JOE Thanks!  You make the best picked pepper this side of Philly! Rick Snubnose, CA

I have some of these on this very website.

But there are even better ways of getting the social approval you need for your business to be in demand today.

Google Places, Yelp, and Yahoo

These major players are great for getting you noticed in SEO.  The more reviews you have influence how quickly the search engines will display your business in the search results.

Ask Your Customers To Help

Ask customers to go to your Google Places listing – (you do have one right?) and write a review or at least click one to five of the 5 stars.  If you have a restaurant, clothing store, bowling alley, etc – ask customers to also visit YELP.ca and write a review. (Be sure to go list your business there too.)

Maybe you have a bed and breakfast, hotel, or tourist centered business – they could offer your review at Tripadvisor.com

Reward

You may want to offer some kind of reward to users who offer a credible and honest review of your business. Consider a draw, a discount, a thank you card – the possibilities are limited only to your imagination.

This is free, effective, and easy.  Don’t delay – get people talking about you online.

You may want to offer you customers this quick outline to help them on Google: http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?answer=65452

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Sixty-five eager learners joined Jose Uzcategui tonight to learn about stronger link building strategies at the Vancouver Search Engine Marketing Meetup. Tonight’s presenter was none less than the Organizer himself, Jose Uzcategui from Snaptech.com.

Feeling pressed for time, Jose quickly scanned the obvious and later offered the crowd a new twist on link building.

To recap the main points:

Links are like Votes

Where the links come from, who wrote them, how they are written, what size they are, where they are on the page, and how they relate to other material linking to it can be compared to votes being cast for the authority of this site.  Google tallies the votes to help determine the rank of the site.

There are various kinds of links which capture various strength of votes.

• Non-reciprocal links – usually considered the top vote
• Reciprocal –
• Exchange Link Programs
• Link Rings – cirucular “tag” for linking
• Link Farms- don’t buy that “bull”!
• Paid Links – where you pay someone to have your link posted on their site.
• No Follow –meaning they are not actually buying you link juice but may well still drive traffic.

Flat Sites

Jose quickly mentioned the need to keep your site flat rather than digging deep with internal linking.  If you get too complicated, you internally link with too many pages through other pages on your site, the whole process gets convoluted and in short terms: you lose.  I welcome Jose’s comments of clarification.

Anchor Text

You will do much better with BEST HOT DOG STAND and having those words link to your site than you will with see Bob’s Hot Dog Stand here- and have” here” be the word that is linked.

Jose recommended some tools that I too use in my work and can verify their usefulness.

SEO Backlink Tools (add the .com to any of them and you will be good to go)

• Webceo
• Link Diagnosis
• Authority Labs
• Majestic
• Google – use their syntax tools to help you find Meetup groups for instance with your key word in them.

For instance –  site:meetup.com intitle: hotdogs

Link Request Letter

Jose couldn’t help but show off just a bit, since most of the time he appears so humble.

If you search “sample link request letter,” on Google you will find a sample that was written one year ago today by none other than Mr. U himself.

Here is an anchor text lesson: Which anchor text will be most helpful to Jose?  Jose’s letter or Best Sample Link Letter On Google?

Yahoo Pipes

The moment we have all been waiting for.  Jose revealed a strategy he is using for clients that involves what is called Yahoo Pipes.  This writer is confused frankly, and is hoping that with some goading, Jose will come here and make a few comments and clear things up a bit. In fact, I would be happy to do an interview with him on this topic.  But for now,

Here is the best I got:

If you would like to use the question and answer feature let’s say on Linkin to answer questions for others (which just happen to be collecting links for you), you can use the pipes to follow “feeds” and search for terms.  You could do the same on Craig’s List.

Here is a link to the Yahoo Video that describes how to use the Pipes

Here is a link to Jose’s site where he will no doubt say much more about it : SEO EXPERT

Finally here is a video taken on the spur of  the moment of Harmony Thiessen (that would most likely be me) as she describes SEO Small Business to the BYZHUB community.

SEO Services Vancouver

Here is a photo slide show of the event posted by Vancouver Photographer Jeremy Lim

Thanks to all who were there and participated in the event. Feel free to comment, ask Jose questions, etc.

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