Hiring The Internet

For our Site of the Day, Visible Shops would like to present: Lifehacker.

Lifehacker stands at the epicenter of a huge blogospheric earthquake: the new DIY (Do It Yourself) movement on the web. From blogs that demonstrate or teach you how to minimize rubbish in your life (Unclutterer) or work with computers (DIY PC), people are using the Internet to accomplish tasks on their own. Continue reading ‘Upgrading Life with Lifehacker’

Aside from working on SEO and having your website appear as early as possible in organic search engine results, there’s always AdWords. This product of Google allows for your ad to appear alongside organic search engine results (often at the right-hand side). AdWords ads can become invaluable, as many Internet readers often resist going to even the second page of organic search results.

Before you write out your ad, however, take a look at the following tips to maximize its effectiveness:

1. Ad space is precious, so try to drop as many “filler” words, like “an” and “the,” as possible.
2. Use important keywords in the ad. Google will automatically highlight those target keywords, and it will make your ad more conspicuous.
3. Put brackets (”[ ]“) around the keywords so that the ad only appears when those keywords are searched. This is ideal if you do not want your ad to show up for only partial matches in target keywords.
4. Create a landing page that is linked to the ad. Linking to the homepage may not be the most useful page for a reader with a specific interest. Cater to that interest by designing an ad hoc page.
5. Sell! Just like with a traditional marketing ad, use powerful, vibrant language to get attention, and sell a great benefit or unique quality. “Free shipping” or “40% below retail value” are great examples.
6. Track your both your ads’ return of investment. That’s right: both. By testing two ads at the same time, you can look and see what works and what doesn’t. Look at how many click-throughs you get. Always choose the stronger ad to live on, while creating another rival ad for experimentation. This process will allow you to continually refine the quality of your ads.

Remember, Google receives the king’s share of search engine action on the internet. Working on SEO, while rewarding, often takes a long time before you see results. Advertising with Google is an excellent way to quickly develop a strong presence on the web.

The w3c browser usage statistics from Jan. are in. No big changes from previous months, but look for IE6 usage to start shifting over to IE7 in the coming months as Microsoft is scheduled to start including upgrades to IE7 as part of their auto update on Feb.12.

Jan. 08 Browser Statistics:

While developing or optimizing a business website, you may have run across the advice to engage in link building. But what is the deal? Why should other destinations link to you?

The answer is that link popularity is one of the top factors for page ranking. Every major search engine analyzes link popularity to determine a website’s relevance and usefulness. There was a time in bygone, idyllic days when website developers did not bother so much with linkage because link popularity was an algorithm used by one or two search engines. Then Google came along with PageRank, which uses link popularity as a core factor in determining search worth. Now everyone furiously builds links like beavers build dams.

Link popularity is defined by how often other sites link to you (these are known as inbound links). The more people link to you, the better. However, Google does not just look at the number of inbound links. The pages that link to you must be deemed important themselves, and their importance will boost your own. So, having a mile-long list of throwaway websites will not help your site.

It is best to devote a scheduled amount of time each week just for link building. While the effects of gaining inbound links do not come overnight, they are definitely essential to the long-term success of a website.

We Optimize our clients’ sites to be found in search engines, but we never use the tactics described in this video. If you’re considering hiring a company for Search Engine Optimization, make sure their approach is clean and ethical; You will get better results in the long term. As one comment puts it, website are read by people. That should be the focus, even when working to show up in search engines.

While many people think that Digg has an irrational vendetta against these SEOs and SEO sites, it’s not entirely irrational. Here’s a video that shows why it happens.

read more | digg story