has 13+ years experience in web development, ecommerce, and internet marketing. He has been actively involved in the internet marketing efforts of more then 100 websites in some of the most competitive industries online. John comes up with truly off the wall ideas, and has pioneered some completely unique marketing methods and campaigns. John is active in every single aspect of the work we do: link sourcing, website analytics, conversion optimization, PPC management, CMS, CRM, database management, hosting solutions, site optimization, social media, local search, content marketing. He is our conductor and idea man, and has a reputation of being a brutally honest straight shooter. He has been in the trenches directly and understands what motivates a site owner. His driven personality works to the client's benefit as his passion fuels his desire for your success. His aggressive approach is motivating, his intuition for internet marketing is fine tuned, and his knack for link building is unparalleled. He has been published in books, numerous international trade magazines, featured in the Wall Street Journal, sat on boards of trade associations, and has been a spokesperson for Fortune 100 corporations including MSN, Microsoft, EBay and Amazon at several internet marketing industry events. John is addicted to Peets coffee, loves travel and golf, and is a workaholic except on Sunday during Steelers games.
Our top tips to optimize your ecommerce for holiday seasons
The holiday shopping season is approaching and you’ve worked hard this year to improve the SEO of your website. Now its getting to the busiest month of the year and you are checking your web stats everyday to see if sales and traffic are increasing.
You’re thinking to yourself, what can I do in the next few weeks to generate more sales? Clearly its too late to make any drastic changes to the SEO campaign? And you would be right, what follows are some simple tips you can implement today to capture more sales during the holiday season.
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Has this been a busy week or what? We’ve barely had time to dissect the new Google Social Search from last Monday and now the big G is hitting us with even more announcements. Why the sudden spurt of new products ? Is Mr Schmidt planning something? Is Google feeling threatened by ‘Bing’ ?
These questions will have to wait, for the time being lets see what has happened;
| Google Dashboard | See what data Google collects from your all your Google products, manage them in one simple place | Official Release | Test it here |
| Google Commerce Search | Hosted ecommerce platform by Google delivered via SaaS using cloud computing. (paid service) | Official Release | See it here (video) |
| Adwords Ad Sitelinks | New Adwords feature that allows advertisers to create sitelinks in the adblock | Official Release | Read our report |
| Google Music Search | New vertical search results for music that lets you listen and purchase directly from SERP | Official Release | Test it here |
| 2 free Google Webinars | – Think2010: Four Winning Moves for 2010 – Holiday Webmaster Webinar |
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| TBA? Adwords new “Automatic Matching” service | Still hot gossip at the moment, Google Adwords testing a set and forget service to run your campaign | First report | Further confirmation |
Adwords Ad Sitelinks
Today, Google has introduced a new Adword’s feature called ‘ Ad Sitelinks ‘ which gives Adwords advertisers the opportunity to deep link into selected landing pages on the one ad block.
Interesting concept, no doubt inspired by organic site links. But unlike organic sitelinks , advertisers are able to specify exactly how many Ad Sitelinks to show, their anchor text and the URL of the landing page.
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Advertising real estate on Google Maps
Are you in the Real Estate industry? Do you run a housing related portal? Than read on, because Google is now giving you more opportunities to advertise your properties on Google Maps and Google Web Search using Google Base.
Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we’ll make searchable on Google (if your content isn’t online yet, we’ll host it for you). You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches.
via http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=59260
Google’s own explanation is pretty good, essentially Base is a portal where you can provide information and data on your leasing or for sale properties, Google can take this information, which may or may not be available on your website and display it in Google Maps and Google universal search. Note: Google base is not a new search product in itself, it simply acts as a information collection point.
As announced on Google webmaster central blog, Google has confirmed its now crawling RSS feeds to discover fresh content and links.
While it has been known for sometime now within the search industry that Google actively crawls RSS feeds, Google has never officially confirmed this as part of their content discovering practice until now.
Just how much weight RSS feeds impact the indexing factors remains to be seen, but now having confirmation, webmasters and SEOs should be recommending clients to setup valid RSS feeds and making them available to Googlebot.
Here are some tips to make sure your RSS feed is setup for Googlebot crawling;
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PPC Audit Guest Post by Steve Loszewski
Popular pay per click programs include Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), and Microsoft adCenter. If you have accounts in these programs, you’re probably interested in improving them to increase (or achieve) profitability. There are a number of ways to improve a pay per click account – what follows is a summary of some of the most common methods in identifying and improving elements of a campaign. Google AdWords is given heavy focus in this article, although many of the concepts can be applied to YSM and MSN as well.
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It was bound to happen, both Google and Bing have been targeting social media and real-time search since the launch of Google caffeine back in August 2009, roughly the same time that Google started to index tweets from Twitter.com.
On October 21st during the Web 2.0 Summit, Yusuf Mehdi of Bing officially confirmed partnerships with Twitter and Facebook to integrate public tweets and Facebook updates into its search results.
A few hours later Marrisa Mayer of Google also announced a partnership with Twitter in her presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Wow, what a day! Two massive partnerships announced in 1 day and only a few hours apart. However, those of you that have been following the two search engines will understand that both Google and Bing have been working on real-time search facilities for quite sometime now and have been trading blow by blow with each other.
Lets take a quick look at the scores
top search queries - Google webmaster tools
Checking the Google webmaster tools today we noticed the keyword sorting feature appearing in the ‘ Top Search Queries’ dashboard.
The three drop down menus will allow webmaster tool users to segment the top search queries by;
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FTC announces guidelines for disclosures
What has got every internet marketer up in arms this week? If you have not heard, the FTC ( Federal Trade Commission, USA ) has released its final guidelines for advertisements using endorsements and testimonials.
In its press release on the FTC blog, the commission released two PDFS titled;
Guides Concerning the Use of : Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising – PDF
Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides – PDF
A combined behemoth of 94 pages, most of which is filled with legal jargon ( Hint – skip to the end of the first PDF and the second PDF, it has some easier to read scenarios and examples of what the FTC classifies as an endorsement etc ) .
While this author has not attempted to completely analysis the guidelines, which is a task too daunting at 3:31am, I have managed to find some great resources for our readers, that should help explain and clarify the report and its impacts.
Update: There is a great interview by Jim Edwards of igottatellyou.com with Mr. Rich Cleland, Assistant Deputy at The Federal Trade Commission that really clearifies a great deal of misconceptions of the new FTC guidelines. Thank you to @smbusinesscoach for the twitter update.
yahoo site explorer
Looking for an alternative to Google Webmaster tools? Yahoo’s site explorer might just be the answer. Yahoo recently announced 2 new features to site explorer which should add even more appeal.
Keyterms are available for individual pages and site-wide , this will help you nail down how your pages and entire site in search engines eyes related to your target terms. To read more about the technology behind how the keyterms are generated check out this post on the yahoo blog.
Delicious bookmarks is also a handy way to find out how your content is spreading. Clicking on each tag will give you some additional data from the delicious website.
These new features are certainly not ground-breaking, but add to the value of Yahoo site explorer which makes it an attractive alternative to Google webmaster tools.
