Tag Archives: webitmd internet marketing

Is SEO Dying?

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It was bound to happen- some person writing about the death of SEO. There are a few reasons for this speculation, try searching for “is seo dead.”

Reasons why people think SEO is dying are as follows:

First, people do not really know what SEO is. Even among marketers, people continue to believe that SEO is the “process of tricking search engines to rank a site for search queries for which it isn’t one of the better matches. With this viewpoint, it’s easy to see why people would want to conclude that SEO is a dying medium. Google and Microsoft make billions of dollars in revenue from their search engines, and protecting that revenue stream is a critical activity for them.”

If people are not using SEO correctly, they will ruin the search engine system. This is why Google has invested so much in WebSpam. When consumers receive poor search results they become dissatisfied and turn to different search engines.

Second, other people believe that social media will soon replace SEO. “These people argue that inbound links are an elitist system of voting for Web sites (you have to own a Web site to vote), and that social media will provide a much broader array of signals, because anyone with an Internet connection can sign up for a social media service and start making their opinions known. Further, they argue, more people will rely on social media for opinions on things because people love to learn from the experience of others.”

Social media sites have not been adopted broadly across the population, making the data lumpy and inconsistent- and it is easily spammed. In creating an account, no real investment is needed; all you have to do is sign up and begin posting your opinions and thoughts.

Authority is another issue here. We can assume those with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter have some authority on a topic, but the most they can offer is their own opinions. “Someone with a Web site has made a significant investment in building that site, and here the stamp of authority is likewise relatively easy to measure. However, it’s much more meaningful to receive an authoritative link than an authoritative Tweet.”

So is SEO dying?

“Not a chance. Defined properly, but still somewhat narrowly, SEO is the practice of helping publishers bring new traffic and customers to their Web site, by building and promoting high quality Web sites using technology that the search engines can parse. That need isn’t going away anytime soon.”

Make the most out of available opportunities. For example, Microsoft’s Bing. SEO can and will evolve with the changing times. The advent of universal search resulted in some changes, and created new opportunities for SEOs. The rising prominence of local search did as well. Increasing personalization will create yet more opportunities.

“For the SEO professional, staying abreast of the changing market environment is part of the price of being in this business. While change is constant, publishers use SEO as a means for obtaining new customers from search engines. As long as search is around, there will be a need for people who know how to make that happen.”

Information provided by: searchenginewatch.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan

Amazon Kindle vs. Apple iPad

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Amazon’s Kindle has been on the market for consumers to purchase since late 2007; just before the holiday season had begun. The Kindle is a neat device. It comes in two versions: a 6” display and 9.7” display. The 6” display stores 1,500 books, has manual rotation of the display and is priced at $259.00. The 9.7” display holds 3,500 books; auto rotates its display and is priced at $489.00.

The Kindle store has more than 400,000 books for consumers to choose from and is accessible from the Kindle itself. Amazon pays for Kindle’s wireless connectivity so you won’t see a monthly wireless bill. GSM technology is the most popular mobile wireless standard; allowing coverage in over 100 countries.

Weighing only 10.2 ounces, the Kindle weighs almost as much as an average paper back book. It also comes with automatic library back up: “books you purchase from the Kindle store are backed up online in your Kindle book library at Amazon.com. You can wirelessly re-download books available in your library. This allows you to make room for new titles on your Kindle. We even back up your last page read and annotations.”

Sick of seeing a glare while working outdoors? The Kindle’s screen is designed to let you sit anywhere you want in the sun without a glare. The pages actually look like a real book too, without the evident grain pieces. Text on the pages can be adjusted to your comfort level, there are 16 shades of gray for pictures, and images can be zoomed to the full size of the screen.

There is also an option for you to listen to the text. With text to speech, the Kindle reads to you in a male or female voice at a fast or slow rate. It won’t ever lose your place on a page either.

The battery life is also impressive. You could go one week without recharging your device while having the wireless option turned on. On the previous Kindle, the battery lasted on average four days with the wireless turned on and one week with it off.

Need to browse the web? The Kindle comes with an internet web browser that is basic, and can be used to read simple text-centric sites like Google and Wikipedia. This is great for looking up movie times or a sports score.

Recently, the Kindle has been a popular topic. With Amazon stock on the rise, people think that maybe Amazon is feeling threatened by Apple’s latest creation: the iPad. Kindle owners need to know that they’re not alone in supporting a platform that won’t come undone against the colorful, touch screen iPad.

Information provided by: Amazon.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan

Link building and inbound link relevance

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Conventionally the purpose of link building is to give a website a better chance to be noticed by the search engines. Every SEO professional knows the key to high search engine ranking is link building.

However, most importantly we must not forget a website’s true worth according to the search engines, is the content it provides. Does the site present ideas, services, products and educating information to improve our daily lives? Much too often websites are packed with keywords in order to rank for a certain product or service while offering something completely irrelevant.

Sites that appear in the first pages of the search engines are the ones with the most relevant and useful information using honest and appropriate techniques. Some have developed sophisticated yet irrelevant SEO techniques that may be damaging the Internet’s value, however, search engines have responded to such techniques and will penalize websites by removing them from search results. Therefore, stay away from link farms, spamming, duplicate websites and keyword generated link pages.

Some SEO experts are seeing great success in achieving high search engine ranking through substantial effort put into receiving inbound links from high-classified websites. When your site receives links from pages with high page rank, your website is able to maintain or grow in page rank simultaneously.

Written By: Sam Kim

Mobile App Usage on the Rise in 2010

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The number of mobile applications is growing daily pretty soon we won’t even need computers! Marketers are quickly jumping on this trend in 2010- the world of applications will soon grow to an all-time high. Although the spending on social apps will stagnate this year, most marketers have already produced them. “Less than one-half of marketers created either a mobile or social app in 2009, but most plan to invest in a mobile app this year. The iPhone is the platform of choice, followed by Android.” And among those marketers with apps in 09, Facebook was the leading platform.

Social apps were perceived as the top goal for achieving engagement, audience targeting, reach, sharing and branding potential. “The top one-third of advertisers and agencies using mobile apps planned to up their investments by 75% or more. Marketers who used apps reported a growing market, client demand and increased standardization in the app world as reasons to spend more in the coming months.”

Mobile applications by marketers and publishers are the next goal for distribution and discover ability.

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15% of advertisers and agencies spent more than 60% of their budgets on promotion in 2009, but more than one-third spent less than 5%. Times are changing, and today consumers want easy access to their favorite sites quickly. Mobile apps are the newest trend for 2010 when it comes to reaching your target audience.

Information Provided by: eMarketer.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan

Tech Growth in Emerging Markets Embraced

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Due to a rising middle class in the emerging countries, there has been a rising demand of the latest gadgets and online media activities while Internet users in the US and other mature markets are loosing their edge.

According to reports by Accenture, the top consumer electronics owned by US Internet users were computers and mobile phones, with web-enabled mobile phone usage increasing more than 300% in the past 3 years. Mobile phone and web-enabled smartphones taken together become the most important consumer technology to Americans.

Web users surveyed in emerging countries such as China, India, Malaysia and Singapore were ahead of mature markets such as the US, Germany, France and Japan in areas such as:

  • “Emerging-market Web users were more than two and one-half times as likely to buy a smartphone during the next year (52%) compared with mature-market respondents (20%), and were also more likely to have bought a smartphone in the past year (67% versus 32%).
  • Internet users in emerging markets were twice as likely to have bought a computer in the past year (40% versus 20%).
  • Emerging-market respondents tended to spend more money on consumer electronics in 2009 than their mature-market counterparts.”

In addition emerging markets are showing more usage of Web activities than mature markets in areas such as – watching tv shows/movies on the Internet or mobile, working from home, managing photos and videos on the Internet, connecting with people on social networking sites, and blogging.

“One of the reasons for this emerging-country growth is the rapid expansion of the middle class with its substantial disposable income,” says Jean-Laurent Poitou, managing director of Accenture’s Electronics & High Tech industry group.

Written By: Sam Kim
Information Provided By: eMarketer

Android OS sees significant growth in handset market

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Android is quickly catching up to iPhone to become a mobile platform to be recognized, according to data from ChangeWave Research.

The majority of growth was seen between September and December 2009. Android-based phone purchases jumped from 6% to 21%, which the much-hyped launch of Motorola’s Droid undoubtedly was a big reason for the surge. Thus, Google’s operating system was able to overtake Blackberry in the handset market.

Although iPhone remains the top choice for handsets at 28% of the market, they did see a 4% drop between September and December 2009.

Meanwhile, overall smartphone usage continues to see a steady rise, with 42% of US consumers by December 2009. Data shows that over the past 3 years, usage of smartphones has increased 27%. Additionally, roughly 13% of respondents in the study were planning to buy smartphone over the next 90 days.

According to ChangeWave, iPhone owners were most satisfied with their handsets followed closely by Android-based phones. Satisfaction rates drop significantly with other smartphones. Another common trait the iPhone and Android users have is that they share similar mobile content habits.

Written By: Sam Kim
Information Provided By: eMarketer

Subdomain Blog Post

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Although Pagerank is not available on the Google Toolbar, Google still ranks websites higher in their index if they have a higher Pagerank. It would benefit your website greatly within the search engines if all of the pages within your site’s directory contained high Pageranks so that each page is ranked higher for the keywords they possess, but this is hard to come by.

Normally, the homepage of your website is usually the page with the highest Pagerank because when online users share and link to your site (link-building), they are linking to your homepage’s url the majority of the time, rather than the subpages’ directory urls of your site. This makes your homepage more visible in search engines leading to higher traffic over the rest of the pages your site contains. Many ask the question: In theory, would it benefit my website’s subpages, and their Pagerank, if they had their own subdomains rather than using their current directory urls?

A change for a subpage’s directory url to a subdomain would look like this:

WebitMD’s current blog directory url is http://www.webitmd.com/blog

If we changed the blog’s directory url to make it a subdomain, some examples would look like this:

http://www.blog.webitmd.com/ or http://www.webitmdblog.com

By changing your subpages’ directory urls to their own subdomains, this would allow those that share and link to your site’s content to drive straight traffic to your subpages thus increasing their Pagerank individually. This is because Google looks at subdomains as individual websites themselves. This in turn, will allow visitors to come across these subpages more often in the organic results of search engines.

Is this strategy worth pursuing on your site? In theory, yes and no.

If we look at the basic rules of SEO, fresh and interesting content is key! If you have a website that has subpages where you often update and provide interesting content for the online audience, this subdomain strategy can help tremendously provided that people are linking to your subpages and the content is rich in SEO text. For those pages that are not updated very often, this would be a waste of time.

It is important to note that if you do pursue this strategy, you may experience an initial drop in Pagerank when you first create the new subdomains from your original homepage at first, but provided you stick by the smart rules of SEO, you may end up with three or four websites with high rankings instead of just one. This is certainly worth the time!

Information Provided By: Entrepreneur’s Journey
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Does Your Website Make Sense?

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It is surprising that even today website owners haven’t discovered how to make their sites user friendly. People like aesthetically pleasing sites that cater to them: the customer.

Here is a short checklist of dos and don’ts for anyone working on the internet to sell their product or service.

  • In the space “above the fold,” state what the site is aiming to achieve. The area above the fold is the section that is seen without scrolling down. This space should be used to tell the consumer what you do exactly. Why does your site exist? This should be clear to the audience in one quick glance. “You can’t solve someone’s problem if they can’t even figure out what it is that you do.”
  • Use large fonts and plenty of white space. “This is a no brainer. You want your website to be read by as many people as possible so don’t use tiny fonts, don’t use clever fonts, just keep it simple, double spaced and big. You wouldn’t whisper your sales pitch to a potential customer in real life, so don’t do it online.”
  • Keep it simple- not too fancy. Text comes first to graphics; the words on the page are primary. “Graphics should only be used to enhance the presentation of text and never hinder or distract the visitor from what they are supposed to do at your website – read it!”
  • Use headings, bolds, and lists. Unfortunately, people today are getting lazier and lazier. People don’t want to read your five paragraph essay on your product or service. They want to see bullet points, lists of benefits and get information as quickly and painlessly as possible.
  • If you aren’t as technologically advances graphic wise as you’d like to be, just use one nice text-based page. “You can have tremendous success online by using a webpage that is just a simple letter format. Follow the rules above and tell your story using just words. If you can’t do website design yourself or can’t afford it, you can keep things simple and still have a very effective message. It won’t be pretty, but like I said, pretty doesn’t sell – the words do.”

Information provided by: entrepreneurs-journey.com

Written by: Samantha J Stephan

Top SEO Trends for 2010

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Out with the old and in with the new! A new year has begun and keeping up with SEO trends should be at the top of your to-do list. So for 2010 here is a list of trends to keep an eye out for:

  • Site Speed – Site speed may be used as a new ranking factor in 2010. Make sure your pages load quickly by decreasing load time. “The order of things on your page will affect its load time, so make sure you’re using proper HTML, and cleaning up your CSS and JavaScript so that users aren’t left waiting when they try to access your site.”
  • Mobile – Research done by Neilson shows that there are now 56.9 million people looking for information on mobile web sites, which is up 34% from last year. First you should find out how your site performs on small devices. There are paid services which provide feedback for this. Then, once it is functional, take advantage of Google’s new mobile services and free online coupons.
  • Online Video – YouTube was made the second largest search engine last year. With larger companies dropping out, more space is available for small to medium sized companies which could use the attention. So make a video and post it soon!
  • Reputation Management Meets Real-Time Search – “When Google put real-time search updates into the SERPs they unleashed a potential online reputation problem of epic proportions. They essentially opened the floodgates to give angry customers immediate power in the search results. You no longer have a window to reach out to an angry tweeter to ask them to amend their update or tone down that Blog post. Google is pulling from tweets, from Blogs, from news, from articles and other Web content and throwing it immediately into your search results, often right above your own site. All of this means that you need to be even more vigilant about monitoring the conversation in an attempt to protect your brand. For a small business owner, your best line of defense is to build a listening station that will help keep you abreast of conversations as they happen.”
  • Increased Awareness of Local – “If you haven’t tied up all your local listings and profiles, it is beyond time to do that. The search engines, especially Google, are looking at the consistency and completeness of your local listings in order to rank you for relevant queries. That’s a huge ranking factor that is 100 percent in your control. Take advantage of it!”

Information Provided by: Smallbiztrends.com

Written by: Samantha J Stephan

What is PageRank?

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Curiosity about getting your page to the top of the Google search is not rocket science; in fact, Google even offers a PageRank tool that can be downloaded for free. If you are running a website or Internet business then PageRank is a vital tool to measure how much traffic you are really getting.

Google is known for providing the best results on internet searches. This is because of PageRank’s ability to determine the value of a website for any given search term or keyword phrase. “This value is determined by how websites link together with the more popular (and theoretically better) sites receiving more links. It’s these incoming links that help the site have a high PageRank value and thus display higher up in search results.”

Here is a brief description of PageRank, written by the Google team:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.”

An important key note to understand is that it is a combination of variables that determine how well your site performs on Google. These are the most important variables to worry about:

  • Incoming links to your site.
  • The relevancy (to your site’s theme) of the pages linking to your site and the PageRank of these pages.
  • The keywords that other sites use to link to your site.
  • The keywords on your website in particular in places like page titles and headlines.

Not all of the above points are controllable, but some are, like keywords in headlines. The bottom line to PageRank is that all these variables listed determine how high your site shows up in the search engine results. Therefore it is important to utilize this information for your competitive advantage- no matter how tech-savvy you are.

Information Provided By: Entrepreneurs-journey.com

Written By: Samantha J. Stephan