Karen Thackston has just written a great post highlighting the value of article marketing and guest blogging. The essence of the article is that even if you don’t gain any SEO advantage of these two mediums, you still gain massive publicity that would have been difficult to achieve before the internet.
It’s a reminder that as online marketeers we shouldn’t forget the end result. Which is to grow the business. Read the article here
Today we’ve launched a new online shopping directory for Australians. The directory comes from my personal hobby of online shopping and started as a way to keep a list of all the sites I like to use I thought it might be useful for everyone to have a place they can find shops that deliver to their area. I’ve also enabled voting so people can rave about really good service. The directory is still in early stages and for all intents and purposes lets call it the beta version.
The aim of the directory is to be able to drill down to your local area, so either Sydney, or Northern Beaches for example so you can find sites that deliver specifically to your area, such as butchers and green grocers. If you have an online retail shop and you service Australia, go ahead and list your business for free for the first year.
Below are a listing of all of the Google search engines worldwide.
[column 1]
Google Uncle Sam (US Gov)
Google Lesotho
[/column]
[column 2]
Google Lithuania
Google Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Google Zambia
[/column][end_columns]
If you have a Google account, you’ve probably noticed the new buttons on your search results:
What do these mean for the future of search engine optimisers? Well, it seems Google is finally yielding to the fact they can’t create the perfect algorithm, they still need human input. Whilst there is no official line the promote or remove buttons will have any effect on a website, it’s only a matter of time before Google use the data and the SERPs will start to produce results based on promote and remove.
And why not. It will encourage businesses and website owners to create useful content, and hopefully banish spammy sites to the black hole. Just think about all the crap websites you currently have to sift through that just happen to be good at SEO, but provide no real value, this is a way to reduce them.
Will the system be gamed? Of course we’ve already heard the urban myth of SEO agencies outsourcing to China and having lots of people search for and click on their websites across internet cafes, so you’d assume this would be the next step. Except they’ll each have to have their own Google account, no big drama, but the different accounts would need to register a different promote and remove vote from different IP addresses, meaning one person would need to login to one account, promote or remove, then go to another internet cafe, login to another Google account, perform another promote or remove and so forth – not time effective at all. I’m sure if a heap of different accounts were promoting and removing the same websites from the same IP address Google would notice (at least I hope they would!). Or I guess you could have a range of IP addresses and move around from computer to computer for different accounts – not an easy setup and I’m actually imagining it would seem a bit futuristic sci-fi. It would be cheaper to just create some decent content…I can’t imagine it would be worth the investment for the outcome.
So, fingers crossed for Google working the promote and remove feature in their search engine results.
It felt like only a few blogs ago we were blogging about the expensive shipping fees with the launch of JC Penney and there was some hefty discussion about this issue. So it’s sad that already they’ve closed their doors after only two months in Australia.
I’m sure it wasn’t the hefty shipping fees, but the miserable Australian dollar that played the biggest part in the demise of JC Penney.
I’m hoping now DJ’s and Myer don’t think they don’t have to play in this online space. There really is a niche there, but it needs to be onshore so postage is ridiculous and doesn’t take weeks. All online retailers should take a leaf out of Zodee’s book. I ordered some products over the weekend and they arrived on Monday – less than a day later. That’s the most impressive online experience I’ve had in a while…
Yesterday Google released their SEO starter guide to the public. This document was initially given to Google staff, but they’ve now released it to assist website owners.
It really is SEO 101, but it’s a great lesson to new website owners that there is no substitute for a quality website when it comes to chasing a high search engine position.
Download the Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide here.
Feeling a bit of information overload? This video will confirm some scary statistics.
Did you there is more information in the New York Times in one week than a person was likely to come across their entire life in the 18th century? Somehow I don’t think that makes us smarter…
There have been 31 billion searches on Google this year, yet another reason to be on top!
The BBC has reported from Silicon Valley the next stage in online communities is exclusivity. Following on from a report by HP researcher, Bernardo Huberman, they both talk about the amount of information and groups which is freely accessible to everyone on the internet.
“Everybody has access to the same kind of information and the same array of products,” he said. “Those who manage to convince you to part with a lot of money in exchange for being exclusive, feeling different, and feeling part of an elite group are the ones that are going to make it.”
I think this is a valid point. As consumers expect a level of free stuff from the internet, they are finding out most of it is garbage, which will condition them into thinking they will have to pay for quality.
Read the full article here
Worried about the Hadron Collider?
Those mischievous chaps over at SEO Black Hat have written about Google’s black hole. A very real phenomena that happens frequently. It’s not what you think either, not about being page 1 one day and no-where to be found the next, although that too happens a lot. No, this is about the power of authority sites and how they dominate 70% of the top rankings.
Read the article here http://seoblackhat.com/2008/09/08/black-hole-seo/
Myer, David Jones and Target have been beaten to the world of online shopping by an overseas department store. JCPenney, the US department store, has setup shop in Australia – not physically but online.
It’s an odd move, considering they don’t have a bricks and mortar shop here, and even more odd is all their sizing is in inches. What the? Having obviously spent a considerable sum of money on an Australian online store they couldn’t scrape together another $10 to convert the sizing to centimeters?
Anyway, I’m going shopping now … www.jcpenney.com.au
p.s. Actually not, the shoes I want are $18, the freight charge is $29 and the handling charge is $10. Mmm…how do all those people on eBay do it?
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