Although the term “cloud” is seeing increasing use, it’s necessary to clarify what portion of “the cloud” is of interest to a particular audience. For small and medium businesses (SMBs), there are generally two areas of relevance in the evolution of IT services to the cloud. The first is the application layer, commonly referred [...]
By Melissa Luther
Google’s already powerful Web site Analytics service recently became even better with the addition of a new feature called Intelligence. This newest enhancement to Analytics, still in beta, automatically alerts you to marked changes in your site metrics over a defined time period. Google has pre-loaded several alerts that it considers important, and allows you to create additional alerts based on your needs. continue »
By Melissa J Luther
Google’s Local Business Center officially became Google Places on April 20, 2010. This change is the natural extension of the Place Pages introduced to Google Maps in September 2009. The intent of Place Pages was to have a Web page containing all the relevant information you might need to know about any place in the world. Since your business is a place, it makes sense for it to have a Place Page. continue »
By Joanna Fletcher
What ever happened to the revolutionary floating data center that won Time Magazine’s most innovative invention for 2008 for Google? This fascinating patent was filed two years ago — so will Google be dominating the waves any time soon? continue »
By Gail Seymour
The Google Closure Compiler is one of the latest tools released by Google in its never-ending quest for enhanced user experience. Unlike iGoogle and Google apps, the Closure Compiler is not aimed at the end user though. Instead it is one of the suite of tools designed to help Web developers create faster, cleaner code. That’s because Google has started including page speed as one of it’s ranking criteria, in recognition of the fact Web users don’t want to sit around waiting for pages to download. continue »
By Peter Nisbet
The truth of the Google duplicate content penalty is quite simply that there is none! If that confuses you, then you have been reading too many misinformed forums or blogs where people get stuck on some popular term that they have no idea what it means, and then profess to be experts. continue »
By Joanna Fletcher
Geocoding is finding location coordinates, usually latitude and longitude, from street addresses or postal/zip codes. The most common use of the technology is to find that location on a digital map. Geocodes are also used in Geographic Information Systems like local search engines, and entered as links, or geotags, in an online image or text. continue »
By Monique Martin
If you’ve ever seen someone post a completely unrelated, spammy URL in the comments section of a blog or online article, you’ve seen the reason for no-follow links. Fighting spam is an uphill battle. The no-follow attribute is one of the tools in a Webmaster’s arsenal to help them keep their hard-earned PageRank from leaking out to spammers. continue »
By Melissa J Luther
If you have a Web site that you’ve worked hard to get ranked well with the search engines, you may be wondering why on earth you’d want to prevent any part of it from getting indexed. However, there are several types of pages you might want to share only with certain visitors. These might include: continue »
By Melissa Luther
The Microsoft/Yahoo! merger deal recently received regulatory approval from both the U.S. and E.U., and they are moving forward with their search alliance. As a result, Bing will replace Yahoo’s search algorithm, and the Yahoo! Search Marketing platform will migrate to Microsoft’s adCenter. Essentially Microsoft will power the search technology for both companies, while Yahoo! focuses on users’ search experience. continue »
By Suzanne Vara
Google recently introduced us to Real Time Search, and this has been met with a lot of questions. What tweets will show up in real time? How will this affect businesses who are, and those who are not, engaging in social media? How will it affect PPC? Where will the searches show up? The biggest question is what impact will this have on small business? Small business owners are met with limited resources and adding any additional hours into their day is nearly impossible. But can a small business ignore real time search? continue »
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