We all have our pet peeves here at Alter Imaging. For my boss, it’s placing the home button in the wrong place. For our developers, it’s uncommented code. For our front end designers, it is old versions of IE.
For me, it’s when an internet marketer writes a blog that concludes with:
I get enraged when people claim internet marketing is not rocket science. Yes, I know: it is a euphemism meant to reduce apprehension and encourage people to learn something new. I get that. Read More
If you see "https" in your Google url, you are affected by this.
Last month Google made a significant announcement that literally shook the SEO community. To sum up, if a user is logged into Google, their default connection will now be secure. Not a big deal in itself, but search marketers now lose the ability to see which organic keywords brought traffic and led to transactions.
For example:
If someone searched for “web designers, in Charlotte NC” through a secure connection on Google, that traffic would now be lumped in to the (not provided) category.
We know they came from Google. We just don’t know what they typed into Google to get to us. Read More
From Tripl.com's infographic.
An interesting infographic was published the other week from Tripl.com entitled “The Social Travel Solution“. Good stuff, especially if you are a stats nerd. About halfway down the infographic, they state that SouthWest Airlines is the king of social media and them proceed to rank the airlines in terms of number of Facebook likes.
While Tripl was obviously analyzing this from a social media perspective, we thought it would be interesting to look at the social metrics and see how they correlate to search engine optimization metrics. Read More
We regularly receive inquiries about Alter Imaging’s Charlotte SEO services and they typically start with “Can you get my site to rank for [insert keyword phrase here]. You probably wouldn’t be reading this blog if you weren’t at least somewhat interested in having your site rank on Google’s first page for one or more high-traffic keywords. So here’s a quick question: why is that important to you?
What we’re getting at here is that a lot of small business owners we meet with seem to lose track of the point somewhere during the SEO process. In fact, your web design team can even be part of the problem – we are as obsessed with hits, on page times, and other metrics as anyone else. Read More
See that little button to the left? That’s new from Google; it’s called Plus One (+1) and the world of internet marketing is buzzing. This is Google’s latest foray into social media after failing miserably with Google Wave and the privacy nightmare that was/is Google Buzz. At Alter Imaging, we took an early test drive of the new Plus One service by signing up and installing the +1 buttons across our site. We’ve only begun but here’s what we’ve discovered so far:
Alter Imaging is a leading Charlotte SEO agency servicing large and mid-sized companies throughout the world. We’ve created a series of articles aimed at the small-business owner who is interested in the basics of online marketing and getting their website in front of more potential customers. If you feel like you’re ready to have a professional agency go beyond the basics, please contact Alter Imaging.
For the most part, search engine optimization is about keeping your online marketing strategy a secret. Sure, there are tips and tactics those of us in the industry rely upon, and (extremely) educated guesses as to what metrics Google, Yahoo, and Bing really utilize to determine your site’s rank, but much of what a search engine specialist does falls squarely into the category of “nuts and bolts.” This article’s purpose is to review three of the most basic SEO techniques that most companies don’t use.
A new website can cause clients and potential customers to see your business in a whole new light, but only if they are aware that you launched a new one in the first place. Sure, existing customers will probably notice eventually, and assuming you have a good search engine optimization plan in place, new visitors will eventually come. But given the time and expense it takes to put a new small business website together, it make sense to promote it as much as possible.
Website advertising services from Alter Imaging can do just that but here are four great ways to promote the launch of your new business website yourself: Read More
Early this morning Google began updating the PageRank score for web sites all across the internet. PageRank is an alogrithm used by Google to determine the importance of a website. A high score (10 is the highest) represents a highly respected, relevant and important site.
At Alter Imaging, we noticed a PageRank increase in almost all of our internet marketing clients’ sites. Is this cause for celebration? Not really. Here’s two reasons why we’re not popping the champagne yet.
1.) The PageRank that google uses internally is not the same as the PageRank that displays on the toolbar.
At Alter Imaging, we keep an eye on new developments with Google’s search results page. The last few months have seen huge changes with the introduction of instant results and, more recently, the incorporation of local results into the non-sponsored section.
Google is trying to make us search smarter and faster. If we search smarter, we find what we want and thus keep coming back to Google for more answers. If we search faster, Google gets to display more ads. In essence, Google wants to increase average ticket size (number of searches) and frequency (how quickly we revisit)…just like any other business.
Google’s latest development is the ability to view previews of of a website by mousing over its search result. This feature is currently available on the Chrome browser. Edit: It now is appearing on Firefox, too (but with a slightly different implementation).
Traditionally, a Yellow Pages print ad was a no-brainer; if you had a local company, part of your advertising budget was set aside to purchase an ad in the phone book. If you were aggressive, you would purchase a half-page ad or larger. On average, a half-page ad costs over $15,000.
These phones went out of style the same time as advertising in the yellow pages.
But in 2008, a major shift happened. According to ComScore, this was the year that Internet search surpassed the yellow pages in terms of consumer usage. In 2008, 31% of all local search enquiries for a commercial business originated online.
If you run a business, this is not news. You’ve probably reduced your print budget to focus on more modern forms of advertising, like Internet marketing. You are not alone. Wells Fargo/Wachovia forecasts almost a 40% drop in print and online spending on yellow pages over the next 4 years.
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