(co-written by Bill Stroll, Sales and Marketing Manager)

Christmas is coming. Six months from today, retailers and E-Tailers relying on a strong holiday season will be assessing the bounties of the season. The winter holiday season is the most important segment of the year for North American retail businesses, often accounting for more than half of annual revenues. For many businesses, the period between October and mid-January makes or breaks the bottom line. Read more…

Two months ago, Google released a 63-point patent document outlining how it examines historical data associated with websites and documents in its index. Since that time, we have witnessed changes in the algorithm which have become known as the Bourbon Update. StepForth has written a short whitepaper which studies that document and gives a short overview of the patent and how its contents may affect the Google organic search engine. It is important to note, this document does not cover subsequent announcements from Google such as Google Sitemaps. The following are a few paragraphs from the whitepaper, “Historic Data and Google Ranking: An analysis of the March 30th, 2005 Patent” Read more…

Google is trying a little experiment. They already have the largest public database of documents found on the web but there is always more to see than meets their spiders’ eyes. Google Sitemaps is a good way to start finding it.

Google appears to be inviting webmasters and SEOs to create detailed sitemaps in XML format to invite, direct and re-invite Google’s spiders as the sitemap evolves with the site. Webmasters can set priorities and protocols to tell the spider what should be examined and how it should be seen. Google provides a highly detailed explanation of XML instructions, but only to those who’ve signed up for a Google account. More on that stuff later.

Get a jump on your weekend and start learning about creating and submitting sitemaps to Google today. In the long run, a lost techno-weekend following a pleasant long-weekend might not be so bad after all, given fun of playing with spiders.

Working out a marketing plan for new and evolving websites is a bit more complicated than it used to be. There are a few new things to be considered before embarking on a search marketing campaign than in previous years. Search marketing has become more important and is thus becoming more professional. With growing acceptance of online communication tools, and a number of alterations to the faces of search engines themselves, the marketing arena has been upgraded from a three-ring circus venue to a Super Bowl sized stadium. Read more…

Click Fraud is the greatest threat to the rapid growth of the paid-search marketing sector. Speaking about click fraud to an investor conference in December, Google CFO George Reyes stated, “I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model.” Accounting for an estimated 5 – 15 percent of all PPC clicks (estimates differ by sector), click fraud is assumed to cost advertisers tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The problem has become so pervasive the April 7 edition of Wall Street Journal ran a front-page center column story titled, “In Click Fraud, Web Outfits Have A Costly Problem“. (subscription req.) Read more…

Imagine this scenario. Too tired to cook after arriving home from a long day at work you call your local pizza shop to order two large pizzas and a bunch of soft drinks. You dial the number as usual and, instead of the familiar voice of Tony, the owner/pizza champion, a younger voice comes on the line. Read more…

“What’s the use of a good algorithm if you can’t change it?” Dr. Who (The Fortune Program)

Search engine optimization firms tend to have unique relationships with their clients. Like our colligate cousins in the web design field, our clients often see our services as one-time events. Once the initial SEO campaign is completed and websites have achieved Top10 placements, some clients are content to go about their business assuming their placements are going to stay in place. In many cases, they do. A website that has been optimized by a good SEO can prove difficult to dislodge, even when these placements are targeted by other SEOs. Read more…

Over the past week, SEOs and SEMs have noted some significant changes in the search engine results delivered by Google. Google appears to be actively cleaning its listings by targeting sites using suspicious link-building techniques. A couple of well-known search engine marketing sites have vanished from Google results under keyword phrases they dominated just last week. Read more…

Thoughts on Google’s patent…
“Information retrieval based on historical data”

Google’s newest patent application is lengthy. It is interesting in some places and enigmatic in others. Less colourful than most end user license agreements, the patent covers an enormous range of ranking analysis techniques Google wants to ensure are kept under their control. Some of the ideas and concepts covered in the document are almost certainly worked into the current algorithm running Google. Some are being worked in as this article is being written. Some may never see the blue-light of electrons but are pretty good ideas so it might have been considered wise to patent them. Google’s not saying which is which. While not exactly War and Peace, it’s a pretty complex document that gives readers a glimpse inside the minds of Google engineers. Read more…

Understanding the value of global communications, nearly every organized organization in the world has a website. From grassroot community groups to major corporations, the World Wide Web has expanded by billions of websites over the past half decade. Because the medium is easy, cheap and absurdly flexible, it has become the backbone of a “people’s global communications network”. Read more…