JBM WebMasters Blog

I have been very busy lately securing the latest and greatest technology for our clients and the latest thing we are adding is mobile website technology! Many people ask me, whats the point of mobile websites, to them I say that a 87 page report by Morgan Stanley states that by 2015 Mobile web browsing will pass standard PC browsing. What this means for websites owners is it is time to make sure you have websites optimized for mobile web platforms. One of the most common problems with mobile websites is people simply do not want to keep up with two different websites, that is why we have come up with a solution that allows you to build a website that takes the data from your current website to create and keep your mobile website current. In a growing world of cell phones being the all in one tool it is beyond important to stay a head of the game and make sure to have the best in mobile technology.

Oh and just a teaser, we are also working on a fast and easy way to create Mobile Apps for your business!

This is the first step on our journey of fully explaining what SEO is, and how to best take advantage of  it. I want us to start with Blogging, partly because its what I am doing now,  so it is a good place to start. Blogging accomplishes a lot for a businesses online presence, first it gives you a chance to connect with your clients or customers in a more personal way. It gives you as a business the opportunity to tell people about what is going on in your company, like what new products are you offering, what events are you going to, or what exactly it is that you do all day long.

Blogging also gives businesses the opportunity to build much needed pages for the all mightily search engines to index and help increase your page rank, thus helping in your positioning in Googles organic rankings. By creating several pages of text that talk about what you do and using several “keywords” you can do a part of what is needed to rase to the top of Googles First page. (I would like to note that I am not bias to the other search engines like Bing and simply use Google as they are still the worlds largest but similar ideas apply to the other search engines as well)

The most important thing you have to keep in mind when writing a blog, or anything really is that content is key. Without quality content that people want to read then there is no point in writing it and you are only wasting your time. There are tons of ways to invent and reinvent content to keep it fresh and reverent to your readers. Make sure to make use of not only writing include videos that your readers will find reverent, or soundbites or other forms of media. Keep the reader engaged is the ultimate goal in any Social Media outreach!

SEO is a term that is often used to describe improving your rankings on Google or other Search Engines, but what exactly does it mean? SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimization, but what is it to optimize a website for search engines. Most people have not idea what search engines even like to see. How can you pay someone to do something you don’t even understand, how do you know you are getting yours moneys worth? This is the introduction of a series of several Blog posts that will dive into what exactly SEO is. We will explore subject areas such as Link Building, Keyword Targeting, MetaTags, Blogging, and much more. Every week we are going to be posting a new update that will give you the insight you need to understand SEO and get the most of it.

Google provides some of the most important tools we as a company use to promote our clients on the web. I wanted to share with all of you this video from Google that shows how you can leverage the Google Tools to grown your own small business, and we can help. 

     In today’s world of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other peer-to-peer communication sites, do you really have control of your company’s image? Today, as the world moves to a Web 2.0 with more user interaction than ever before, it has become a necessity for a company to watch and maintain an image on the internet that is consistent, but what can you do if someone else on their website says something about your company that you do not agree with, or does not show the best in your company? All of this and much more about your company image is what we will be going over in this week’s blog entry.

    Have you ever Googled your company name and seen what comes up? Most likely, it would be your website, your Facebook Page, your Twitter Page, maybe LinkedIn or a directly listing. However it could also be a blog about someone who has worked for your company or was a customer or client talking about your company in a negative way. Chances are if a negative review is coming up when you Google your name, it is also coming up with your customers or clients Google your company too. The worst part of this is that you may never know that someone has written a negative review about you on a blog or review site until hundreds or even millions of potential clients or customers have read it. Unlike with more traditional ways of reporting problems, like with the Better Business Bureau, where they send you a letter to let you know about a complaint, and give you a chance to respond, an online review site will most likely not alert you to give a response and some private blogs may not even let you respond to the negative “buzz”. What can you do to fix this negative “buzz”? The first step is always, if possible, to issue some sort of reply or to reach out to the person who posted the negative review and attempt to solve the problem and fix your company image with that person so they will remove or update their negative review to a positive one. However, this does not always work and it becomes almost impossible to take down a bad review, leaving you with the only option of trying to bury it with positive reviews. This adds a whole new level of complexity to maintaining a consistent image across the internet, and that doesn’t even get into the major social media sites you have to also monitor.

How many Tweets or Facebook updates have you seen about someone frustrated with a product or service? What did that make you think of that product or service? Now what if someone else posted a Tweet, or a Facebook update about being frustrated with your product or service? Would you want everyone who read it to feel the same feeling you had when you read about someone being frustrated with a product or service to feel about your product or service? What sorts of effects can that have if someone famous happens to Tweet or Facebook update their frustration with your product or service? Most likely there is someone in the world who is, at some point, not going to be happy with your product or service, so you have to ask yourself what can you do to help prevent bad “buzz” from getting out to the social media world? One of the easiest and least expensive ways is to make sure you have a large social media presence, and have ways for people to come to you on your page with their frustrations so you can be alerted to them and do everything you can to make that client or customer happy and have them generate positive “buzz,” because I bet for every person you have seen post something negative about a product or service, you have also seen someone else post something positive about another, essentially marketing that product or service to all of their friends, something that every business should strive for.

The concept of Web 2.0 has presented many challenges and opportunities for businesses.  On one hand, businesses do not fully have control of their image anymore; Web 2.0 has empowered users to share their views on products or services with a global audience. This sharing of views can be both positive and negative. While the power of a bad review can turn hundreds or millions of potential clients or customers, the power of a good, or even great review can turn those same people into clients or customers. It becomes the responsibility of the business to make sure that its online image is kept the way they want it to by proactively getting involved in the social networks, and monitoring private blogs, and review sites to make sure if and when negative “buzz” is posted about your product or service, you are around to nip it in the butt and make it right to protect your image because you no longer have totally control.

In a world of the internet being at nearly everyone’s finger tips, and search engines allowing people to have instant access to virtually anything they want, it must be hard for someone to improve upon that, right? Well, the major search Engine companies did not stop there. They have introduced many new and different aspects into a standard search. It all started out by Advertising, but that was only the start for search engines now you can search for products to find a good deal, or only search from scholarly information and even searching maps to find places, but it didn’t stop there. The two major players in the Search Engine world, Google and Bing have taken steps to introduce personalized and blended search aspects when you look something up.

Google has taken Search Engine personalization to a new level by gathering information from users in two ways. (For the purpose of this article we are going to exclude Google Chrome as a method of personalizing searches.) The first way is by having people sign into their Google Account. Google then uses your search history and browsing history for as long as you have had the Google account to better personalize your search experience. If you are not logged into a Google account Google uses its servers to connect to anonymous browser cookies that last up to 180 days to attempt to provide you with a more personalized search experience.  Google Also uses a user’s location to help better personalize their needs. For example, if you Google Pizza places and you are in Orlando, Google will give Local Pizza places a boost as they assume that would not be looking for a pizza place in New York, unless your search specifically featured that. Google has also recently integrated Google Plus into their Search Engine ranking system. Google Plus is Google’s latest attempt to enter the social networking market. Google offers people the ability to give a website a +1 to show that they approve or like the page. This +1 is counted along with everyone else who has +1ed the site and is displayed next to its result on a Google Search.

All of this changes a lot when it comes to how we optimize websites for Google Search. While it is almost impossible to improve the likelihood that our content is relevant to someone else’s search history other than distributing a large number of back links to a large number of very popular sites, we can push for more +1’s on websites. We now recommend that Website owners have the Google +1 button on all of their web site pages to help promote people to add there “+1” to it and help with that page’s Google Ranking. However, I must note that Google +1 is an extremely new technology, and if it will stick around or not is not known, but it is in place right now and we have to take advantage of it, because if it does stay, the first people to start using the technology will have an edge over everyone else, which is beyond valuable in the Search Engine Optimization world.

Bing has almost copied Google in the world of using a social network to help Personalize Search. However, instead of creating their own social network, they partnered with Facebook. Bing hopes that integrating the common Facebook “Like” to their search engine they can help bring more relevant results back to their users based not only on general popularity but also on how popular it is among the user’s Facebook Friends. Bing also uses Locational based tracking to aid in its search engine personalization in the same way Google does.  Bing has created a lot of problems when it comes to trying to promote a website on the internet via search engines, as it gives us twice as much work as before Google was the supreme king. However Bing does make it easier to help optimize with their personalized search because they use Facebook, which is an already established social networking site that gives us little fear it will crash and burn. We recommend just like having a Google +1 button on your like to have the Facebook “Like” button on your site, and find ways to encourage people to click on them to share your website among their friends. This integration of Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization makes the process of promoting websites slightly easier for those who are already embracing the power of Social Media to promote your product. The bottom line is Personalized Search is no longer just using Internet history and location to give their users the best experience. Search Engines are now using social networks, thus prompting all business to get a presence out there if they haven’t already.

The other major change Search Engines have introduced is Search Engine Blending. This is the process of including images, video, news feeds, Tweets, books, and even products into a search. This gives a search user access to nearly every medium on the web with one search, something that was unheard of before its introduction. This created a whole new world of opportunities for marketing websites on the internet as people are much more likely to click on a video, or an image of something then go to a website, then just going to a web site right off the bat. It did however make it a lot more work to effectively market a website. Now we are forced to not only be concerned about our websites placements on Searches, but also company Videos, and images placement, and if we do not have any video’s or images, to go out and create some new marketing material.

With all of the constant changing, updating, and expanding going on in the world of Search on the web, a new person or team of people is required to keep your online persona strong and good. We no longer just have to worry where a website ranks, we now have to be concerned with how a website rank on search, how we rank with social media, how our videos rank on search and how our images rank on search. And there is still so much more to be expanded on in the coming days, months, and years. The online world that we know today can be completely changed tomorrow with new innovations like the advances in Personalized and Blended search.