I normally don’t post things like this, but Denai is a really good friend of mine, and I’d like to do what I can to help her live her dream.  If you could, please just take a few seconds to click on the link below, vote for her, and then either forward this link to everyone in your address book, your Facebook, Twitter, etc?  You don’t have to actually read anything….  Just click on the link below, click to vote for Denai, and it takes all of 30 seconds…

I’d very much appreciate your help with this, and I’m sure Denai would also…

Mike

The below is copied and pasted from an e-mail from her:

!!!PLEASE FORWARD!!!
====================
You read correctly, I am pursing a dream of being on TV… as a Talk Show host!
With Oprah’s contest for Your OWN Show, this will become a reality in 2010!!!
WOO HOO!!!
 
I need YOUR VOTES to climb the charts.
 
I am COMMITTED to working my way from page 70 to page ONE by July 3rd!
The Top FIVE with the most online votes will be on a REALITY TV SHOW.
Those persons will compete and my intention is to WIN my OWN show!!!
 
I NEED YOUR HELP TO GET THERE!!!
There are already people with over 1 million votes, but I BELIEVE in my friend, my colleagues, their networks, my family, and in my dream!!!
That is why my audition will RESONATE with the producers, Oprah, and all involved and you will see me on TV!!!
 
You can VOTE as often as you want whenever you want from now until midnight on July 3rd!
 
You can SHARE on Facebook, Twitter, and in your email asking your contacts to VOTE.
 
Please FORWARD this message to EVERYONE you know.
 
Here is the link: http://TheDenaiShow.com
 
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!!!
Denai
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
VOTE TODAY & EVERYDAY FOR THE DENAI SHOW on OWN!!!
 

http://TheDenaiShow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yesterday, Google announced it’s new search index, Caffeine. What is Google  Caffeine?  How will Google Caffeine affect my SEO?   The premise behind Google Caffeine is that they can offer you MUCH fresher results, and that pages can be indexed at a MUCH faster rate that they’d previously been able to.  Google surmizes that people want to receive much more relevant content faster, and with the advent and exponentially increasing popularity of video, articles, blogs, and other various rich media content and information publication platforms, Google says that Caffeine can and will deliver.  How will it affect our SEO?  Remains to be seen.  From what it says, it will be possible for pages to get indexed and actually show up in the search results MUCH faster than before, but it could also create a demand for pages that refresh much more frequently, or content that is updated much more quickly, thus more labor intensive and increased effort and or costs associated with SEO.  Of course, as always, automation kicks in and enables these things to be taken into consideration and rolled out without manual intervention after being setup, but we’ll see.  According to Google “Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.”  That surely WOULD require a healthy dose of caffeine to manage that, and for many, to even begin to understand it.  As for search results and how it will affect SEO if at all, it’s only a day or so old, and the jury is out for sure still on Google Caffeine.  Read more about it here on Google’s official blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html

How would you like to get 30 to 100 new DEPENDABLE referral sources?  Yeah, that’s what I thought….  Main difference here being DEPENDABLE, and constant…

This video is pretty awesome, and has some information.  Check out You Want 30 to 100 New Referral Sources right now here http://www.livescribe.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/LDApp.woa/wa/MLSOverviewPage?sid=mx2cRHqSRj5M

 This meeting was the monthly meeting of the DFWSEM, of which I’m a Corporate Member – Coolbubba Multimedia.  Meetings are $30 each, and free for members.  Annual Membership is $150 for individuals and $300 for corporate. Individual memberships include one attendance per month, corproate memberships include 3 people per meeting with additional seats available for I believe $50 annually.

 The meeting last night was on Local Search, and the panel of nationally known experts on the subject included David Nihm (nationally recognized expert), Chris Silver Smith – Keyrelevance – Dallas, and Brian Combs, CEO ionadas local LLC out of Austin.

The meeting bascially covered the differences between Local Search and “normal” SEO and the different approaches to take when undertaiking campaigns of each.  It answered on a basic level the questions of  “How Do I Rank in Google Maps” and “How Do I Rank in Local Search?”

 The comparability somewhat of citations in local search as compared to “links” in “normal” seo.  About keeping your information consistant with all sources of citation and your own site, advertisements, etc.  If you have your business name and address formatted in a certain way on your site, i.e  123 Main Street, don’t list it somewhere else as 123 Main St.  – be consistant with the formatting of all of your local search information. 

The topic of tracking numbers was also covered – if you are going to use tracking numbers – either include them as images or have them called externally via javascript, no inline javascript, etc.  Reason being, the most consistant your company information, including address, phone number, name formatting, etc. the higher the “trust” element with Google, and thus, in theory, the higher the ranking.

For local search links are important, but so are “citations.”  Citations are mentions of your site, URL, phone number, etc. on other websites.  Your URL may or may not be a hyperlink, as well any geo information that can be incorporated in your site as well as sites on which citations exist.  Maps, hcards, etc.

Reviews are also extremely important for local search.  Reviews by a wide variet of people on a wide variety of sites, such as Yelp, City Search, IYP, etc.

Data providers are also important. Localeze, infoUSA and Acxiom.  Get your information into these resources, which supply information and feed data to many other sites, and, again, make sure it’s formatted identically, as identical information formatting helps out with the trust factor, which is again a large part of local search. 

They went over a ton of other things, but the above being some of the basic, recurring themes.  If you are into local search, I’ll have a book coming out soon, so check back on the site for a comprehensive book on decimating your competition in local search and Google Maps.

Smart phones now half of AdMob’s worldwide mobile traffic.  AdMob, which is one of the world’s largests mobile advertising networks, divides its traffic into three categories – smart phones, feature phones, and mobile internet devices.  In February 2010, smartphones contributed 48 percent of the networks traffic, up from 35 percent a year earlier - all data coming from AdMob’s latest Mobile Metrics Report.  For more information, check out:  Smart Phones Half of AdMob’s Traffic

Google Maps have, for quite some time, presented challenges for many small businesses, especially home based, or service based businesses.  Requiring a business address, this is often not ideal and can in fact be very problematic for home based business owners and/or service based business owners.  People such as real estate agents, and even in businesses such as my own, Search Engine Optimization, and Local Search Engine Optimization and consulting, it presents quite a few challenges.  Also, it’s been very frustrating for many of my clients in that they have a hard time getting visibility on maps, especially in situations such as home inspectors, plumbers, pest control, and real estate agents, where they would just get visibility on maps for their exact location…  Not ideal when you have a home inspector who has an office in North Richland Hills, but services Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, and 50 other odd small towns around the metroplex and surrounding areas.  When you log into the Google Business Center, you should now see a new tab entitled “Service Areas and Location Settings” which will give you the ability to identify whether customers come to your location, or whether you service customers as their location.  And when you identify that you service customers at their location, you can identify your service area in one of two ways – either list a distance from a central location, or you can input a list of service areas for your business. 

This provides some much needed improvements, but also presents some new, additional challenges as well.  I do think it is a positive step in addressing one of the fundamental problems with the Google Business Center for many home based and service based businesses though, and provides some welcomed relief.

Log into your Google Business Center listing today and see if this new functionality can lend some relief or new exposure for your business, and also contact me for help in dominating the search results, local or otherwise…

Yelp for Local Search.  There are many places where you can either claim your business listing or create a listing for your business which will help with your local search placement.  Make sure you have your business name and address information format down, and then go about getting your business listed on each of the sites with your information listed identically, and then get your customers to give you as many reviews as you can.  As far as your business name and info, if you have Acme SEO, Inc.  don’t list it one place as Acme SEO, another as Acme Seo, Inc (with lowercase Seo), and another place as Acme SEO Incorporated, and yet another as Acme SEO, Inc.  If you can control it, list your name and address on all sites the same.  As well, if your business is on a Blvd.  list it consistantly as Blvd. and not Blvd. in one place, Bolevaurd in another and then blvd in yet another.  Places to get listed are InfoUSA, Localeze, and Yelp.  There is a really good site called Yelp Secrets that you should check out.   It shows you how to put a “Find Us on Yelp” button on your page, and you can put comments near it about adding reviews there as well.  Check out Yelp Secrets for more information as well.

Free Local Search Engine Optimization – Are you interested in getting some free local search engine optimization for your company?  If so, you’ve come to the right place.  Just post a reply to this blog with just a few sentences about why you need it, or what it could do for your company, and we’ll provide our free $197 real value, Local Search Blast TM submissions.  We’ll submit you to all of the important sites for you to be found on in order to do well in the search engine listings, especially with local search, Google Maps, etc.  We’ll submit you to sites like InfoUSA, Yelp, 411 and yellow page sites, directory sites, and, this is REALLY exciting considering the massive importance of mobile search, etc. we’ll add you to mobile search databases, GPS databases, even OnStar….  Beat your competitors to the punch and in many cases, you can be the only one in your niche in GPS and OnStar databases.    Simply post here, or e-mail me, Mike, and let me know why you want me to do this, how it will benefit your business, and what you intend to do with all of the extra business you get as you start to dominate the local search and maps.   We’ll randomly pick some,  and set them up.  We may even use your site as a case study for the results of this, getting you even more exposure and high quality links. 

Another thing – for a limited time, those who e-mail or post here can get a free Top 10 Ranking Report – It will tell you EXACTLY what you need to do to get into the top 10 on Google for your chosen keyword – GUARANTEED.* 

Just let us know why you need it, and what your site is, and your wish is our command…  If we pick your site/e-mail/blog post.

Search Engine Optimization – First Things First – Local Search – I’ve been becoming more aware of and having to deal with a few specific things lately with SEO and campaings for clients.  Must of the time in the past, I’ve done the hosting and had clients sites created for them by my web developers, etc. and their hosting has been on my servers or hosting accounts, with known enviroments and dependability.  Over the past six months, I’ve had a few clients here and there whom I’ve done the same amount of link building and same work I’ve done for the rest of my clients, based upon competition for keywords, and have gotten way less than optimal or expected results, and thus less happy clients.

When I first start on a site, especially if it’s already built, there are a few things that I check for,  www. vs non www, i.e. checking that only one version of their site resolves, or make the appropriate entires into their .htaccess file and creating 301 permanent redirects, and insuring that they have either 100% uptime or 99.9% uptime.   A few of the clients I’ve picked up over the past year have had hosted applications for  their professions (i.e. online scheduling systems, or industry related services as a hosted application) and have found a few with DISMAL uptimes….  97% uptime, 98% uptime, etc.   A few percentage points as far as uptime can have huge consequenses as far as the ability to rank a site.  It a search engine spider goes to your site repeatedly and the pages either take a long time to load, or even worse, your site is down, you need to do something immediately about it, or assume you aren’t going to rank where you want to rank.

There are a few tools out there and uptime monitors you can use to over time, find out your actual availablity.  One free one is www.uptimedog.com .  When checking uptime, the more frequently they check, the better off you are.  The paid service I’m using now checks every 5 seconds.  I’ll find out what the name is and update the post with it, but I’ve found that a few of the sites I was working on wouldn’t rank regardless of what I was doing because of their downtime…  The paid service I use is called Service Uptime.  it’s very reasonable, will send e-mail notifications, and it’s been a HUGE help, both from my own standpoint, and being able to provide documentation to my clients from a neutral third party.

You need to make sure you have a hosting company who either has 100% (or 99.999% ) uptime or find one who does.  It’s not asking that much these days for those percentages of uptime.  Check to see if your hosting company has SLA’s (service level agreements) in regards to uptime, or see if they monitor or guarantee in any way.  If not, find someone who does.  The hosting company I use has awesome uptime, and I frequently have clients move over to them now.  The hosting I use and recommend can be found here.  I’ve used it for the past years and host literally hundreds of sites on it, and it’s rock solid, good uptime, and very reasonable.

I was checking my log files today, and noticed that someone found my site by searching on the term:

“we would like to get your website on first page of google. all of our processes use the most ethical white hat search engine optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized. please reply and i would be happy to send you a proposal.”

Someone had posted some comment spam containing the above string.  The post had since been deleted, but it was on my page for a while and got indexed.  When I searched Google for the above string, it returned 71,000 results (at least it did about 30 min ago), and most of them were places that I could easily put my link.  They were forums, blogs, etc.  Most of the heavy lifting of finding a place to post comments to gain incoming links had been done.  All of the sites were laid out right there for the picking.  I’m going to check into them a bit further later on, but I’m sure I’ll get some nice incoming links.

There are all sorts of good things you can find by checking your referral logs, search terms people land at your site with, etc.  Link Building is just one of the things you can work this angle on.  What other places can you find information you can use to build your backlinks?

I’m working with a developer right now on a tool that will help with this.  it’s pretty simple really, but you just put in a search string, and then it will return the results, check the PR of the homepage of the sites listed, and then link the links in order of PR of homepage.  You can then go through the list, click on a url, and either post a response to a blog, create a social media account and then publish links, etc.  It should be available very soon, check back..  It will literally provide tens of thousands of high pr sites where you can post your links.  I’m anxious for it.

When going down this line of thought on building backlinks, what would be the easiest ways to find the most amount of available links?  What platforms are routinely used to create the sites that you can post on, what terms are used in comment spam on your own blogs that you could maybe search for to find other places to post links?

You can pass this information along to someone and outsource the creation of backlinks, or if you have time, do it yourself.  Get ya some links…..