02.15.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:33 pm by Administrator
Have you read the NY Times today… well four companies that provide search engines or equipment to China that assist the Chinese government in taking away free speech or to imprison those that speak out against them, have been brought before the House of Representatives.
In an article entitled: “House Member Criticizes Internet Companies for Practices in China”
Those companies are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco.
It seems that the giants are beginning to feel the sting of consequence.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:32 pm by Administrator
Have you read the NY Times today… well four companies that provide search engines or equipment to China that assist the Chinese government in taking away free speech or to imprison those that speak out against them, have been brought before the House of Representatives.
In an article entitled: “House Member Criticizes Internet Companies for Practices in China”
It seems that the giants are beginning to feel the sting of consequence.
Permalink
01.26.06
Posted in Uncategorized, Recent Posts at 2:27 pm by Administrator
I must say, hats off to Google. Having been asked, ever so forcefully, by the Justice Dept. to hand over a week’s worth of searches, they said “no!”
There are multiple reasons for this, chief among them being the fact that the release would cause trade secrets to be made public and the other is that it would invade the privacy of their searchers.
It is extremely likely that the former reason is the sole reason and that the privacy issue is an added press benefit. As we have seen with Google’s recent China prostrating, that for the sake of money they would assist a nation in taking away peoples rights, Google doesn’t care much as much about privacy, except their own.
In the case of China Google plans to make a lot of money, in the case of the US, they won’t. Perhaps if the Justice Dept. paid them to give up the info and gave them a way of keeping private their proprietary trade secrets, they would. In fact it would then be no different than the China deal… they would be helping a nation to take away its people’s rights for money.
In the case of Micorsoft’s MSN and Yahoo, these two readily bowed down and gave in. It’s reminiscent to the days when AOL was supposedly giving their chat data to the secret service.
Big brother is watchin and the Search Engines appear to be another way for them to do so.
Permalink
01.18.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:36 pm by Administrator
Meteorsite client LiveOffice celebrates the launch of their 2 new properties, teleconference.liveoffice.com, their new Teleconferencing site and webconference.liveoffice.com, their new Web Conferencing, collaboration, application sharing and video conferencing site.
A word about LiveOffice Corp.
LiveOffice Corporation helps businesses nationwide kick office productivity into overdrive with its suite of Internet-based products. From email and instant message compliance applications to web, audio and video conferencing, LiveOffice makes it easy for organizations of any size to affordably equip their employees with the tools they need to communicate better and make quicker decisions. With LiveOffice’s products, business professionals are just a password away from the most powerful and cost effective web-based productivity solutions available today.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:30 pm by Administrator
From Search Engine to Search Giant, to Advertising Agency to World Advertising Domination. Google has stepped into Radio advertising with the purchase of dMarc Broadcasting for $102 million (and up to $1.1 billion more over the next three years). This adds to their arsenal of advertising outlets as they previously purchased some print outlets.
What does this mean for you? It means that if you have the budget to advertise on the radio, you can now blend radio and internet into one easy to use, track and profit from solution.
Let’s say you launch an ad on a radio station, whose listeners fall in the 25-35, upper middle class. Your ad can simultaneously run on websites that hit the same target market. This mixed with print and television would round up the one-stop shop for advertising.
Though they haven’t hit TV yet, I don’t believe they are far behind. Which cable or TV network will they buy first?
It does show the direction they are headed. To own advertising. Will they be like the big telcos or Microsoft, once they are on top, no competition in service or pricing? We shall see.
My money is on blimp advertising, buy blimps today, Google may want them next! 
Permalink
11.17.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:12 pm by Administrator
Google Base (beta) - What is it and how can I use it?
Wow! I have to say that those folks down at Google are not only smart they are the richest hungry people I’ve ever known of. What I mean is that they are loaded but have a hunger for both technological advancement and money. I’m not putting them down, as far as mega-corporations go, they’re pretty cool.
Here we see another major step in a direction that will gain them a huge amount of traffic, ad-views and, of course, revenue… the classifieds market.
What does this mean for you?
Well if you have a product to sell, an event to market, a course to promote, a recipte to share or a myriad other things, then Google Base will allow you to post it to its searchable data base.
As a web developer or SEO you can use this new forum to promote your clients’ products and services for free and with relatively easy access. They even allow multiple objects to be sent in RSS feeds. This is beautiful.
If you are a smaller classified (which 99% of classifieds will be smaller than Google’s for sure) then this is not so good for you.
Why? well for the same reason that it ain’t so good for affiliate sites… they don’t allow affiliates to add items. That means that, unless done right, if you are selling items through your site that belong to others, are bought through their site, then you are S.O.L.
When I say done right I mean that there is a way of promoting the item without having to sell it. I hope you don’t mind if I keep that little secret for my clients. Sorry guys.
Otherwise, I think that this is the beginning of something beautiful. The obviously see the power of the classifieds what with eBay purchasing a part of Craigslist, it’s an obvious good move.
Let’s keep an eye to see how long it stays free, how crowded it gets, how easy it becomes to optimize for, how it plays in as backlinks and how they serve up those top-10 results.
What’s next G?
Permalink
11.10.05
Posted in Recent Posts at 1:24 am by Administrator
Well, the name Jagger has been making quite a stir in Los Angeles this week. Though the reasons are far from similar. Fans of the group the Rolling Stones had a chance to fill the Hollywood Bowl to see Mick Jagger rock and roll.
While Los Angeles SEO firms got to see Google’s Jagger “updates” boost or devastate their precious rankings.
Fortunately Meteorsite is not affected by this, keeping many of our prized rankings such as “Los Angeles SEO Firm” and “Los Angeles SEM Firm”.
Jagger’s 1,2 and 3 are hitting and splitting some SEO rankings. Not all are being affected, many of the top sites are remaining because they had the sound practices that have now been shown to be sound. Others who had been doing techniques that were borderline, or not enough of the techniques that are now shown to be “the” techniques are left swinging.
What exactly are the techniques that are being rewarded by Google?
well a good close look at the SERPs will show you that sites that have been replaced have in many cases been replaced with sites pushing a lot of links on their pages. In fact the sites that did the replacing seem to be far more ladened with links than those they replaced that it seems strange that Google would swap sites based on such a single-minded characteristic. Well my friends, Google doesn’t do anything single-minedly.
However, there they are, starring us in the face, sites with a ton of links and all having relevant keywords in them. For one los angeles SEO firm that appeared after the dust had cleared from the “Update”, there were not only a few extra links, no no!, these guys laid it on thick, using those old tactics of link to 100 pages with the keyword in them and have only 10 words of page-specific text on the pages when you click through.
It is said by Matt Cutts (Google Engineer and Guru) that the effects have to do with a large backlinks update done somewheres around September.
Another thing these Los Angeles SEO firms are doing is using those, pardon me, extremely ugly pages that are so optimized that they forgo any user friendly design whatsoever. These pages have over 1,000 words and around 10% link density. These pages are only built for the Search Engines and it should be obvious not only to obeservers but to the Search Engines as well.
All in all this “update” as they call it, not an algo change, is appearing to be headed in the wrong direction.
If spammy sites with a ton of links, ton of words, low userability and ever reliant backlinks, which are still breeze easy to get, are what Google likes, then they took the wrong turn at Albequerque. They won’t win the war fighting like this.
We’ll see if , once the dust settles, the cream rises and the spam sinks back down to the murky depths…
Jeff Chance
Meteorsite
Permalink
09.30.05
Posted in Recent Posts at 4:46 pm by Administrator
Return to Meteorsite SEO
With Google stock shooting through the roof and MSN jumping into the SEM market this year, it just goes to show that the online marketing world is making a mega shift from SEO, optimizing for the natural results, to SEM, the paid placement side of the coin.
Though the CPC game has been going strong for some years now, the real shift has happened in the last two years. Many website operators have been having little or no luck on gaining rank on the organic results and have seen their site at the top when they pay for placement on the right side.
Even with limited budgets they can see some ROI and through consistent reinvestment in their P4P campaigns, they slowly grow their budgets, reach and traffic. It is this continuous recycling that has allowed many e-tailers and other types to lose interest in the natural results.
It just takes too much time and effort to try to optimize for the organic results when you have a company to run, or 20 websites to maintain. I spoke to a client recently who had done a great job on their SEM campaign, but he was seeking a professional to take it over and grow it. It made sense to me as he had missed a number of crucial elements that would considerably grow increase his conversions and is ROI. He felt he had reached his full potential without dedicating more time and effort to grow his campaign, learn more and in essence make it his full time job to run the campaign. He wasn’t prepared to do that as he has his company to run. When we spoke about the SEO side, he quickly stated that he didn’t know much more than you need to optimize your title tags, etc. I was very suprised at how well a non-professional had done with thir SEM campaign but like he himself stated, there is no substitute for a pro.
What does that mean for SEMs?
SEMs that have been doing this for some time will see two things, one good and one not so good.
The good thing is that they will see a lot more potential clients entering the market. These clients will be eager to begin and ready to spend money. SEM firms that are ethical will find excellent clients to build long term relationships with. Un-Ethical firms will find a ton of prey to over-charge, manipulate and abuse.
The not so good thing for SEMs is that there will be a lot of new competition as more and more new companies form to handle the increased market.
What does that mean for SEOs?
SEOs will also have an upside and a downside. The downside will be that a lot of their potential clients are wanting the guaranteed results from SEM and if the SEO isn’t familiar with how to run a SEM campaign then they may lose a client. They may also need a track record of success which will take them some time to build.
The upside is two-fold; one is that they will have less competition for performing SEO and the second is that they can now charge more for their services. An SEO with a proven track record stands to make a good living.
How do you leverage both?
Most firms that are doing SEM also offer SEO. I have spoken with a number of other firms whose main products are SEM and Paid Inclusion. SEO is more of an afterthought.
It is best for SEO focused companies to use both SEM and SEO. One strategy is to use the SEM side to build traffic until your SEO efforts prove successful, thus allowing you to wean the client off of the paid ads by increasing traffic from the organic results.
Another strategy is to use the paid ads to drive traffic from the people who click on that side by default. You then optimize to get the other side’s traffic. This way your are at the top for both sections and take advantage of all of the traffic, though you won’t get all of the clicks.
The best scenario is for any firm to know more than just one aspect, such as SEO or SEM. A good digital marketing firm should be able to provide services for SEO, SEM, Conversion Enhancement, Link Popularity Building, and more.
-Jeff Chance
Permalink
09.22.05
Posted in Recent Posts at 8:52 pm by Administrator
At MeteorSite we are passionate about Search.
To all of you out there who are likewise passionate about Search please feel free to post your thoughts, ideas, stories of success, tips, tricks and anything else on the subject.
We will be posting regular pieces of advice and our own tips and tricks, as well as things to consider in the industry.
We hope you’ll either add to or learn from the information found here.
Thanks,
-Meteorsite SEO Team
Permalink