Just a quick note to our readers, clients, & friends. StepForth will be closed on Monday May 24 for the Victoria Day, May Long Weekend.
We hope for those of you who observe this holiday that you have a wonderful and safe long weekend.
We will be back to normal hours on Tuesday May 25th.
I found this rather interesting bug over at Google today.
When doing a search for “Victoria BC Lawyer”, in the Local Business results I found that only one of the seven results were actually for law offices! The remaining 6 were for doctors as well as a government publishing office.
One would think that Google has been doing this long enough to not make such a big error – 1 out of 7 results relevant to the search? That’s pretty poor if you ask me.
Blogging is like an online cocktail party where you meet people, ask and answer questions, chat and discuss what is important to you and your site.
Some of our clients query whether Blogging is a valuable source of advertising and the answer is, absolutely. What does it do? It provides valuable inbound links and gets your site branded. Read more…
Do you have a suggestion for Google on how to improve Google Places (once called Google Local Business Center)? If you do, then Google is asking for your suggestions and I suggest we all take advantage of this rare opportunity.
Over at Yahoo they seem to be running into some technical difficulties. Regardless of the search phrase used, organic results are not appearing and the error message “We had temporary problems searching for web pages. Search again for <phrase> or type a new query above.
Regardless of the search phrase I tried, I continued to receive this error.
Interestingly enough, sponsored links continued to appear. Anyone else having these same issues this morning? There is not word out yet as far as what is causing this issue or how widespread it is.
If you have a blog or a website with a RSS (real simple syndication) feed and you haven’t heard of the new PuSH protocol then I have a treat for you. A little while back, Google announced a new open source protocol quirkily called PubSubHubbub, or PuSH for short. In Google’s own words PuSH is “a simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom and RSS.”
And now, without further adieu, here it is in English:
Read More on PuSH and get the link to the PubSubHubbub WordPress plugin »
Well it’s official. Google is now incorporating site load speed into its ranking algorithm according to a Webmaster Central Blog post earlier this morning.
There has been chatter about this addition being in the works for some time, and if you ask me, its one that will significantly help to improve the overall quality of search results and end user experience. Continue Reading about Site Speed
Yesterday Google announced in the Webmaster Central blog the added expansion for images within XML Sitemaps.
By expanding your XML Sitemap to include images in the new format, this will allow Google to easily learn which images you consider important. With image related queries being performed at Google every day, this extra step may help you to benefit from a bit of increased image related traffic. Continue Reading Images in Google XML Sitemap
In order to spend time with our families, StepForth will be closed tomorrow (Friday, April 02) for the Easter Holiday.
We hope everyone has a great long weekend, and may the Easter Bunny be good to all of you 
We will be back to our normal hours again on Monday April 05.
On the 24th of March I was in Vancouver doing some pro-bono work teaching a group of charities and non-profit organizations some of the ins-and-outs of effective web site marketing. Well, a little ways into discussing how to boost Google local search engine results I was asked by a participant how her charity can be on Google Local without showing her address. I was stumped! The only way I knew how to do that was through a PO Box which I did not recommend and the out-of-the-question methods commonly used by spammers. Well, in a wonderful occurrence of synchronicity, thanks to Matt McGee’s post that day on Search Engine Land I discovered later that Google had just added that very capability to a raft of Google Local Business Center accounts; allowing business owners to hide their address (among other enhancements).
Learn more about the great new options at Google Maps
