April 3, 2012 in Blog, Google, SEO by Chris von Nieda

Think of SEO as Part Science and Part Art

SEO is the Rodney Dangerfield of online marketing —it just can’t get no respect.  (Did ya hear his voice in your head when you read that) Developers view SEOs with suspicious eyes at best, business owners think SEO is all about ranking and link building, and many SEOs don’t even know the basics.  Case in point:  all those offshore pitches detailing tactics that may have worked 2 years ago.  And that’s being generous.

When I talk to lay –and even more experienced- people about SEO I usually begin by saying its part science and part art.  Feel free to substitute left and right brain.  Now, this thought process is certainly not a stretch:  SEO is a merging of disciplines to ensure one’s Web site is optimally designed for users (there’s a reason I’m putting this first, as it has greater importance) and the search engines.

SEO as Part Science

Like any building or structure requires a strong foundation to ensure a long and steady life, any Web site needs to have the SEO fundamentals built in to ensure the highest level of optimization.  Accordingly, with any new project the first step should be an audit of the Web site itself, from content architecture to canonical tags & content, 301 redirects to 404 page not found’s.

Not to be overly cute, but there are literally a ton of other considerations, depending on the nature of the site and its goals, that need to be addressed to ensure the site it is waterproof.  The good news is that these considerations all follow a science based script of well-known best practices.  Good points of reference include Google’s Official Blog and many other credible SEO blogs that are up to date on all search engine related happenings.

SEO as Part Art

If your refrigerator had every square inch covered by your grade school artwork chances are this is where you’ll thrive.

With all the fundamentals down the process shifts to the art side where creativity is key.  Of course, inbound links to a Web site are an integral component to any SEOs work.  The challenge lies in thinking outside the box to develop link baiting campaigns, liaise with bloggers, and drive quality traffic to your Web site.  There are a number of angels to consider, but do remember people love free stuff, people love local, and people love sharing interesting things.

Social media.  Love it or hate it it’s a huge signal that will continue to have more importance and tie in with the major search engines.  Plus it’s a great way to develop more personal relationships with your audiences/customers.  As the SEO professional it’s your job to embrace it!  While it’s one thing to have a following of, say, 1,244 fans on Facebook and 598 Google +1’s it’s how your interact with and build a relationship with your followers that truly counts.  Again, creativity is key especially if your Web site sells unsexy products.  Plastic cups anybody?

Finally, content for content’s sake is great but it’ll provide little value.  Rather, all site content should have an inherent value to your target visitor.  Of course, research relevant keywords and use throughout including in the meta tags, title, etc.

We could go on and on with basic -and essential- SEO tactics, but that’s been done a million times before.  That said, the next time someone asks you what SEO is, or if they need a bit of a lesson as to why it’s so important, try the part science and part art angle on for size.

Guest Post Author Bio:

Eric B. is the director of marketing and sales direction of Jersey City, NJ based Magnets.com and Customized Stickers.  If you’re looking for strong ROI custom promotional magnets and stickers are the easiest, least expensive, and most fun way to grow your business and bottom line.

What do you think?

What do you think about Eric’s post? Agree? Disagree? Tell us below in the comments.  I for one agree and that is why I like this post.  As I grow the team here at ROI4my.com and I am investing in training people to do SEO I find it challenging at times to effectively communicate what I want to convey.  The reason is because of the “art” aspect of SEO. No two situations are the same. No two pages are the same. No two sites are the same.  So, if I say “for this site find keywords with search volume > 500 searches per month and < 8000″ that may work fine for this client. This is a smaller site. But, if I was giving the same advice for Norwegian cruise lines I might say > 10,000 and < 50,000. You have to understand that part of the business to be effective and although it can be taught, I consider that the art part. Another example is Title and Meta Description writing. This my friends is pure art!

- Chris

January 30, 2012 in Blog, Google by Chris von Nieda

61 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Google

This is a random list of 20 MORE things I found fascinating about Google plus links to 40 others and one bonus fact that you may not know.  It’s the 4th in a series I’m writing after I recently read the book; Steven Levy’s “In The Plex” – How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives.  If you would like to read the first 20 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Google back up 6 words and click or the 2nd list of 20 MORE things you probably didn’t know about Google click the link.  The first post was called Don’t be Evil – Google Isn’t and I encourage you to read that before this one to tie it all together.

As always, lets not waste any time and jump right in to the list:

1. The engineers are treated like Royalty at Google and work in the same building as the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The corporate hierarchy is “Engineers and everyone else”.
2. Google’s mission is to “Gather and organize all the worlds information”. Think about that a minute…
3. New employees at Google are called “Nooglers”. If you are not new you are called a “Googler”.  They wear beanies with propellers on top and get a round of applause when they sheepishly stand up to be identified.
4. For a few days in 2008 Google employees built and operated a zip line that let them over a ravine while hanging on to a tiny trapeze bar connected by pulleys to a cable bridging the gap as a shortcut for getting from one Google building to a group of others.  The city of Mountain View shut it down.
5. The first Chef hired by Google, (Charlie Ayers) to prepare food for employees formerly  prepared meals for the well known rock band “The Grateful Dead“.
6. By 2008 Google had 18 cafe’s in Mountain View spread over several miles of their campus as they continued to grow by snapping up nearby buildings abandoned by other Valley business’s.
7. Google spends over $80 million a year providing free food to employees
8.  Google provides employees a Concierge Service. Just send them an email and they will run any errand you want for $25 an hour.
9. When geek milestone movies debuted, such as new installments of the Star Wars series Google often bought out a theater and sprang employees early for the showing.
10. Google has tiny computer shops they call “tech stops” every few hundred feet throughout the campus’s that provide any type of computer equipment required should a mouse fail or there is a sudden need for a phone charger.
11. Google screens new employment candidates carefully. If one is rude to a receptionist that is a deal breaker.
12. Paul Buckheit was the first to propose what is still today Google’s famous slogan “Don’t be evil“. (which has recently been under attack due to some moves Google has made giving their own Social Networks Google+ priority in a search results over other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. )
13. During the early stages of Google’s IPO they were hypersensitive about leaks. They sent 20 banks slightly differently worded letters so hey could identify which banks could be trusted to keep their mouths shut.
14. Google’s founders “aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place”.  But, some investors had difficulty with the heresy that Google was willing to forgo some profits for it’s founders idealistic views of what made the world a better place.
15. The day of the IPO Google’s stock finished at $100 per share, a win for sure.  But, it would never be that low again. It climbed to $280 a year later, $383 a year after that and in just over 3 years after the IPO topped $700 per share.
16. The founders had a number of concerns relating to how the new found wealth of Google employees post IPO may affect the culture.  They noticed that increases in stock performance made people happier and more optimistic but that also led them to regard innovative ideas more warily, indicating that as Googlers became richer they became more conservative. That was exactly the downside of the IPO the owners had dreaded.
17. In 2001 Google already had over 400 employees and grew to over 20,000.
18. Around 2005 Google determined a simple formula to distribute it’s engineering talent: 70-20-10.  Seventy percent of it’s engineers would work in either search or ads, 20 percent would focus on key products such as applications and 10 percent on wild cards which would often emerge from the “20 percent” rule where Google employees are allowed to use 20% of their work time to work on anything they want.
19. In 1999 Google instituted a management system called OKR (Objectives and Key Results) which was originally devised by Andy Grove at Intel.  The idea is to identify not only what one wants to do (Objectives), but to break down the task in to measurable bytes (Key Results).
20. 4 times a year everything stops at Google for division-wide meetings to assess OKR progress

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Ok, here is one more bonus Google fact that I didn’t want to leave off while we are on the topic of OKR’s because I think this is critical for all you managers out there that are thinking, “hey this OKR thing sounds pretty interesting!”

21. The sweet spot was making about 70% to 80% of your OKR’s. Why is that not considered a failure? Because if you dramatically exceed your OKR’s it would appear you sand bagged it and played it safe in your projections. If you fell slightly short it meant that you thought big, with aggressive goals and Google has no place for audacity challenged people whose grasp exceeded their reach.

I sincerely hope you enjoyed this latest installment of 61 Things You Probably Didn’t know about Google as much as I have enjoyed learning more about this amazing company. There will easily be 3 or 4 more posts like this one.

Do you know something interesting about Google you would like to share?  Please leave it in the comments below and please share this post with anyone you think may find it interesting.  Also, be sure to subscribe to our blog over there on the right and get our future posts.  Thanks for reading!

January 12, 2012 in Blog, Google by Chris von Nieda

20 MORE Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Google

This is a random list of 20 MORE things I found fascinating about Google that you may not know.  It’s the 3rd in a series I’m writing after I recently read the book; Steven Levy’s “In The Plex” – How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives.  If you would like to read the first 20 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Google back up 6 words and click. The first post was called Don’t be Evil – Google Isn’t and I encourage you to read that before this one to tie it all together.

So, let’s not waste any more time and let’s jump right in!

1. Google was started in 1998 and was not profitable as a business until 4 years later in 2002
2. Paul Buckheit was the brains behind Gmail
3. Google’s main revenue stream, Adwords was not their own original idea. Bill Gross of GoTo back in 1999 had a version they called LinkAds
4. Adsense was started by another company called Applied Semantics.  Google saw it’s potential and paid $42 million to acquire the company in 2003! (as you can see from #1 above it’s pretty impressive that Google was able to make a $42 million dollar acquisition in just one year of being profitable! Obviously they were VERY profitable.
5. Originally Google targeted it’s Adsense product (their ad network) to large publishers such as web portals and online news papers like the New York Times and later realized it made more sense to open it up to everyone as a “self serve” ad platform. I think they were right!
6. The code name for Adsense before it’s launch was “puppy” and a common mantra Google used at the time was “Get this puppy launched!”
7. Google had some early challenges serving up the best ads on the right pages at the right time.  An account of massive food poisoning at an Olive Garden in Los Angeles was accompanied by a coupon offering a “Free Dinner for Two at Olive Garden! (ha ha)
8.  If Sergey Brin (one of the Google founders) says something is “pretty good” that’s the equivalent of a Nobel prize.
9. Sergey Brin orginally predicted Adsense would generate 2 billion a year in revenue. He was wrong – it produces over 10 billion dollars year after year…
10. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin HATE golf.
11. A company called “Urchin” developed what we now all know as “Google Analytics”. Google paid $20 million for Urchin in late 2004.
12. Google’s servers (all of them) crashed within 48 hours of the launch of Google Analytics unable to handle the tidal wave of traffic and data washing in to the company’s servers!
13. Google Analytics was not born out of a desire to provide the web free analytics for their websites. It was born to reveal the value of the ads Google’s publishers were serving up, to entice new customers and keep the current ones assured their investment in Ads was a genuine purchase with measurable value.
14. Diane Tang, a computer scientist and mathematician from Stanford University was hired to create Google’s search-word advertising equivalent of the stock market called the “Keyword Pricing Index”. This is the system that decides what each keyword costs us in their Adwords platform.  Later she was known as the “Queen of Clicks”. Here is some homework for you tonight, consider how you would decide what every keyword on the web is worth and then how would you document it? There will be a test in the morning…
15. Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin were “Montessori kids”. Montessori refers to an educational philosophy developed by Maria Montessori, an Italian Physician born in 1870 who believed that children should be allowed the freedom to pursue what interested them. As a result of their upbringing Larry and Sergey disrespect authority and do what they think makes sense versus what an authority figure says they should do.  They were trained and programmed to question authority!
16. Google plans an elaborate April fools joke(s) every year that require months of preparation!  I wonder what the title of the person who heads up that department is? Director of Fools?
17. Early in Google’s history they instituted the “20% rule” which says that all Google employees can devote one day a week or the equivalent to a project of their choice as opposed to something imposed by their boss or manager.
18. Google believes in having fun at work. Even while you are in the bathroom!  In some of their toilets they have high tech Japanese units with heated seats, cleansing high speed water jets and control panels that look like they can fly the space shuttle.
19. Google tries to create an environment where the type of people they want to work there would be willing to work there for free.
20. At Google, early on a desk was made up of a door on saw horses!  I can relate…when I started my first business we did the same thing only it was a door over file cabinets. Back then there wasn’t many computers but when you think about that set up today it’s ideal. A huge desk with a big round hole you can put all the cords through!

Do you know something interesting about Google you would like to share?  Please leave it in the comments below and please share this post with anyone you think may find it interesting.  Also, be sure to subscribe to our blog over there on the right and get our future posts.  Thanks for reading!

December 19, 2011 in Blog, Google by Chris von Nieda

Google+ Unexpected Picture Uploads

Last week I was browsing my Google+ account on my PC getting more familiar with it and I stumbled across some pictures that were online from my phone that I did not upload!  I learned how it was happening and how to stop it and wrote this post to help others do the same.

Now, granted these were just silly pics of our cat and other things around the house but I was shocked!  I DID NOT authorize the pictures to be online. After some quick and frantic poking around I did see in the settings on Google+ that the pictures were private to me unless I manually shared them.  Nevertheless, I was wondering how that could happen?  So, I proceeded to delete the pics as they were hardly worth sharing.

Next I needed to figure out how this happened so I did some quick Googling and found that there is a feature called “Google+ Instant Upload” in the Google+ Android app.  (I have a Droid X2).  By default it is turned on when you install the app. That is how the pictures were being uploaded unbeknownst to me.  The way it works is every time you snap a pic, it automatically uploads a copy to your Google+ account.

I can see the merits in why Google included this feature and how it can be beneficial to have a copy of every picture you take simultaneously stored online, but at the same time I wanted that control. I want to decide when a picture is uploaded and who see’s it so I wanted to turn this feature off.

Here are the steps to turn of “Google Plus Instant Upload” in the Android App:

1. Open the Google+ app on your phone
2. Click the menu button on your phone and select “Settings”
3. Scroll to the bottom of the settings screen and uncheck “Turn on Instant Upload”
4. That’s it!

As a precaution you may want to shoot a quick picture and then check to see if it’s online afterwards but it should not be.

We hope you find this post useful and will consider sharing it online to your friends and networks.

December 7, 2011 in Blog, Google by Chris von Nieda

How Google Makes Search Algorithm Changes

I read an article recently on Web Pro News about a blog post Jennifer Ledbetter an Internet Marketer wrote. In it she discusses the influence Google Quality Raters have on search algorithm changes. In particular, she was suggesting that the Quality Raters may be responsible for URL’s getting flagged and marked as spam, which Matt Cutts says is not true.

This is an image of what the interface may look like that the graders use:

But at the bottom of the article was this video. In it, Google explains the role of the quality raters and how the process works when changes are made to their search Algorithm.  If you are like me you are always looking for ways to learn more about Google and what makes it tick so I wanted to share this video. You can also read the article