Reach Local Scam Artists & Thwack ‘Em!
Have you ever been taken advantage of by a business, and wanted to get your due justice? In most cases we may encounter generally bad service or unacceptable products from small businesses. But, in the worst cases, we actually get victimized by our friendly, local scam artists. It’s not just a matter of unsatisfactory service, but they willfully intended to dupe or cheat your or treat you badly!
With merely a bad service or product, we might push for a discount or refund, and write some negative reviews about a company at various ratings sites like Yelp. But, when it’s an actual scam artist, it becomes a question of how to reach them in the first place, and then how to do anything that they’d even feel.
In the local search marketing world, many of us have noticed a spate of bad actors who are setting up fraudulent business listings (perhaps even operating under bogus names), and once they’ve lured people into doing business with them, they abscond with fees in return for shoddy service or no service/product whatsoever. So, there are some basic issues around how they are operating with impunity, promoting themselves online (sometimes out-ranking bona fide established local businesses), and then taking consumers’ money with zero accountability.
So, here are some tips we’ve made to help you REACH LOCAL SCAM ARTISTS and even thwack ‘em! You may not be able to get your lost time and money back, but you may get a little justice or you might be able to declaw these bad guys just a bit so they can’t prey on other consumers as easily.
Tips To Reach Local Scam Artists & Thwack ‘Em: (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/05/2011
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Filed under: Best Practices, General, Google, Reference Material, Security, Worst Practices complaints, con men, consumer complaints, reach local, reach local complaints, reach local scams, reachlocal, reachlocal scams, scam artists, scams
Pure Oxygen Mobile: New Marketing Venture Worth Watching
My former coworker and colleague, Brian Klais, who has also been a contributor to Natural Search Blog, has launched a new venture to assist companies with marketing to wireless device users and mobile optimization: Pure Oxygen Mobile.
Almost everyone is aware that mobile usage has been on the upswing for the past few years, and more and more search activities are being conducted via smartphones. Since consumers are going to handheld devices to find products and services, it behooves companies to target the mobile market and focus on the unique opportunities to be found there.
Enter Pure Oxygen, a real pioneer in the field of mobile ad optimization. The firm provides consumer brands and marketers independent analysis, tools, and strategy to improve results across mobile web, search, social, sms, apps, and more.
They have created a tool for checking out webpages on mobile devices, the Mobile Site Analyzer, currently in beta, which checks content for optimal delivery on multiple platforms including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.
Pure Oxygen also provides consultation services for more sophisticated analysis of mobile friendliness, and they help increase conversion rates and ROI derived from mobile channels.
There’s a surprising number of companies which are ignoring mobile optimization and ad targeting — apparently expecting their regular internet marketing via SEO and PPC advertising to automatically distribute their marketing message via mobile as well. This is a very poor assumption, since traditional internet media does not automatically translate onto mobile platforms, and there’s a plethora of mobile-specific channels which would fail to be exploited under this lack of strategy. For instance, mobile apps can be a terrific source of referrals and promotion, but they must be properly engineered and could be offered through iPhone app store, Android/Verizon app store, and Amazon’s appstore.
I recently pointed out how Google is treating mobile-friendly sites differently than sites without mobile optimization, and this has significant implications for websites’ performance as mobile usage continues to grow. For many local companies desiring to appear and rank in local search results, the need for mobile optimization borders upon necessity — it could well be, ahem, “oxygen” to them!
Anyway, congrats to Brian on the launch of Pure Oxygen Mobile! I think this new venture is targeting a great niche, and will provide just what many companies need.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/04/2011
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Filed under: Best Practices, Content Optimization, Marketing, Mobile Search, News, Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Tools cellular phones marketing, marketing agencies, marketing agency, mobile marketing, mobile marketing agencies, mobile marketing agency, mobile optimization, mobile search marketing, mobile search optimization, wireless devices marketing, wireless marketing
Good Practices SEO With A Tinge Of Creativity
Search engine marketing is increasingly becoming popular with people from all walks of life and businesses of all hues adopting the web in a big way. The global recesssion has clearly thrust SEM into the spotlight as a great way to drive targeted traffic that is measurable and also making a huge difference to the bottomline of any company, the $ generated in revenue.
Search engine optimisation(SEO) and Pay per click (PPC) marketing are being accorded increasing importance as affordable means of tapping the market potential by reaching a targeted audience on the web compared to the traditional TV and/or newsprint advertising which are more expensive and the results are hard to measure. It is all the more imperative that SEO practitioners adopt more white hat creative methods to improve the visibility of their clients’ sites.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 11/01/2009
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Filed under: Best Practices, Content Optimization, General, SEO Amazon, auckland search engine optimisation, backlink profile, Google-Trends, natural search, Netconcepts, on page optimisation, Paid Search, ppc marketing, search engine optimisation, Search-Engine-Marketing, Social-Media, twitter landscape, unique quality content
Unique Content And Its SEO Implications
The world wide web is still dominated by content on websites though audio and video content have come to stay. There is no sign of textual content and its importance dissipating in the eyes of search engines in the future.
There is a crying need for unique quality content nowadays. Copywriters are in demand and I have come across cases where journalists in leading dailies and magazines have kicked their full time jobs and taken to writing content for the web. But the uniqueness of the content has come under the scrutiny of the major search engines.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 09/20/2009
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Filed under: Best Practices, Content Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Affiliate Marketing, auckland seo consultancy, content categories, content duplication filter, domain diversity, editorial content, machine built content, main index, organic seo, page rank threshold, paid search marketing, search-engine-algorithms, seo implications, unique content, user generated content ugc
Link Building Tactics That Influence Search Engine Ranking Factors
Today’s post dwells on the discussion of link buillding tactics that influence search engine ranking factors in 2009. Link acquisition is a key component of the ranking algorithms. The number of external links pointing to your site and the anchor text contained therein can certainly propel your site to the top of the search results pages.
I will be discussing only the top 4 factors under each section with a mention of the value score allotted by the SEO professionals . This biennial survey by Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz picks the brains of the top 72 SEO professionals from all over the world and their collective wisdom is presented in this post.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 09/13/2009
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Filed under: Best Practices, Link Building, PageRank, Searching, SEO blogging, blogosphere, content creation, domain trust, editorial content, editorial link, effectiveness of link building tactics using seo, global authority of domain, keyword anchor text of link, link building tactics for seo, link-bait, PageRank, pagerank passed by a link, press release, public relations, TrustRank, value of external links, viral content creation
10 Practical Actionable SEO Tips To Boost Your Website Visibility
Today’s post covers ten practical actionable SEO techniques that can give your site a major boost and help it achieve better visibility in the major search engines. These observations are made by Whitespark, a SEOmoz member who attended the recent SEOMoz PRO Training series.
These tips are easy to implement and will suit a majority of the businesses on the web. With paid traffic getting more expensive with each passing day (and yet providing only 12% of traffic on the web), it is high time all website owners started ramping up their organic seo efforts. These tips will certainly help in improving a site’s natural search visibility which still accounts for 88% of the traffic on the web.
There are a few proprietary tools (created by SEOMoz) that are mentioned in the post. These tools do a great job of automating the mundane tasks thus saving valuable time and giving great results to help you plan your strategy. You have to be a paid PRO member to access these tools.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 09/06/2009
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Filed under: Best Practices, Conferences, Link Building, Local Search Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Tools 301 redirects, adwords keyword tool, competitor link finder tool, google local listing optimization, green business, high search and low competition keywords, identify competitor backlinks, link request from customer, paid advertisements on google content network, seth's marketing opportunity calculator, top pages tool
Search Engine Ranking Factors in 2009
Recently, SEOmoz released a fantastic biennial search engine rankings report. Every two years, SEOmoz interviews the top 100 minds in the SEO industry. This time, they have gathered data from the top 72 SEO professionals to give a clear idea of how the search engines rank documents.
This aggregate data gives any SEO professional the key factors that Google uses when it comes to ranking sites on the SERPs. It is a thoroughly interesting read and will assist all SEO professionals be it a beginner or an advanced level practitioner.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 08/31/2009
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Filed under: Best Practices, Search Engine Optimization auckland organic search, auckland ppc services, auckland seo, cloaking by cookie detection, cloaking by Javascript, content freshness, diversity of link sources, domain link diversity, domain name search queries, domain registration length, domain trust, external link popularity, external links to trusted sites, geo targeting factors, global link popularity of domain, hiding text with same colored text/background, historical click through rate, internal linking architecture, keyword in root domain name, keyword in title tag, link acquisition from link brokers, link acquisition from link sellers, link source diversity, links to webspam pages, negative factors affecting external link, negative ranking factors, netconcepts new zealand, on page keyword specific ranking factors, on page non keyword specific ranking factors, page specific link popularity ranking factors, paid links, search engine ranking factors, site architecture of domain, sitewide link based ranking factors, social media ranking factors, stumbleupon data, top 3 contentious factors, top 3 ranking factors, twitter data, usage data ranking factors
Quova Awarded Patent for Improved Geotargeting
Quova recently announced that they were awarded a patent for various methods which improve geotargeting accuracy and capability. My understanding is that Quova has been using these methods for quite some time already, prior to receiving the patent.
Here’s Quova’s description of the innovations:
“Quova’s newly added patent describes a method for determining the geographic location of an Internet user based upon combining trace routes, user registration information, host names with textual patterns that reveal geolocation information and Internet Service Provider (ISP) service area information. These trace routes describe the pathways by which data moves through the Internet. Each node or ‘hop’ in the trace route is identified by an IP address. These interconnected nodes can be used to recreate the topology of the Internet. Each geolocation can then be assigned to these IP addresses in order to determine the location of each node, up to and including the end user’s IP address and the geolocation of that end user.”
I previously have written about Quova in my extensive article, (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/28/2009
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Filed under: Advertising, Best Practices, Local Search, Maps, Research and Development, Security, technology click-fraud, geo targeted ads, geodata, geographic location data, Geolocation, geotargeting, Quova
Google Image Search – Second Only To Web Search In Size
This post is based on the interview between Eric Enge and Peter Linsley, Google’s Product Manager for Image Search. It reveals some interesting aspects of image search which is growing at an accelerated pace.
A recent survey by Hitwise in February 2009 shows Google Image Search as part of the troika of top web properties owned by Google in terms of traffic and revenue.
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 07/19/2009
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Filed under: Best Practices, Google, Image Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, Searching, SEO alt text, auckland search engine optimisation, auckland seo, combating spam in image search, facial recognition software, Google-Image-Search, googlelabs, growth of image search, image search results, image-search, matching image with content, Netconcepts, on page factors in optimising images, ranking of images, signals in html world, signals in image world, similar images, universal search results, web page strength
Domain Diversity – Key Metric For Higher Google Rankings
Domain diversity is an important SEO factor that is crucial for a site in order to rank well on the Google SERPs. This is achieved by the site gaining inbound links from a diverse set of domains. This is a daunting task as it is not easy to get inbound links. The best way to achieve this is for the site to contain top quality content that makes it a standout in the industry in which it operates.
Research done by the experts at SEOmoz indicated (above the 95% confidence level) that domain diversity is a key metric that helps a site achieve top rankings. The diversity here refers to the number of links coming from a variety of root domains to the site in question.
(more…)
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Posted by Ravi of Netconcepts Ltd. on 07/12/2009
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Filed under: Best Practices, Link Building, Search Engine Optimization, SEO anchor text, auckland search engine marketing, blog integration, consolidation of links, domain authority, domain diversity, domain trust, inbound links, metric for higher google rankings, microsites, Netconcepts, topical focus
