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The Importance Of Online Reviews

What are Reviews and why are they important?

Online reviews are an assessment of your business, whether from a customer, another outside resource, or even yourself.

Reviews are such an important part of your business and can literally make or break you.

A recent survey from the online department at Gallup stated that 82% of all consumers purchase after they’ve gone online and researched what other people are saying about that particular product or business.

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May 2, 2013 Leave a commentReviews, Search Engine Optimization

Zappos Shoes Pays Employees $1000 To Quit

Zappos.com shoe seller has fanatical employees that live for customer service. They have a company manifesto to put the customer first, something rarely seen in the e-commerce world. I remember Nordstrom having fanatical service and went to extraordinary lengths to keep customers satisfied.

One legendary Nordstrom story is when a long time customer wanted to return a set of automobile tires. Nordstrom is a clothing company that doesn’t sell tires, but to keep this man happy the sales staff cheerfully accepted the car tires and issued an in store credit. When you have lifetime customers, this is a small price to pay for loyalty.

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May 1, 2013 1 CommentOnline Business

$250 Google Adwords Discount

Huge deal – today only get a $250 credit on all new Google Adwords accounts. This is the largest incentive ever offered by Adwords, and I highly recommend you take them up on it. AdWords lets you reach people at the moment they’re searching for what you offer. Your $250 coupon is a great way…

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April 30, 2013 26 CommentsCoupon, Search Engine Marketing, Specials

Pandora Founder Talks About Life in a Web Startup Business

Video interview with Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora. Tim has built an extremely successful online startup and he discusses the story of how he came to start this revolutionary music company.

He is inspirational and bases most of his success on his never say die attitude.

Tim tells the story of flying back from New York City after pitching 10 different venture capitalists and returning with no money. He took a 2 flight trip via Southwest Airlines, which was the cheapest available.

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April 26, 2013 3 CommentsOnline Business, Web Development

No Penalty Claim For Duplicate Content

Straight from Google webmaster central, the search engineers claim that they correctly identify duplicate content and scraped text 99% of the time.

The Google Search Quality Team post about the underlying concerns detailing how their spider handles scraped content.

If you have ever had your content brazenly scraped and repurposed by other websites, and then seen it outrank your own pages in the search results then you need to understand the following tips.

Creating high quality content without proper attribution, links and authorship with google+ is only a license to give someone else an advantage over you.

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April 25, 2013 Leave a commentSearch Engines

The Future of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Algorithms

SEO’s face a future of nearly insurmountable competition from huge established websites, and a decreased reliance on backlinks.

Search engine optimization professionals enjoy competitive advantages for ranking in the search engine results pages due to years of hands on experience, but experience, grit and force of will cannot always match giant budgets when corporations throw their hats into the SEO arena.

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April 16, 2013 19 CommentsSearch Engine Optimization, Search Engines

The True Long Term Viability of SEO

Many people like to predict the end of search engine optimization and online marketing as we know it. SEO will change and evolve as the web becomes more advanced and desktop oriented but it will not disappear.

As Mark Twain would say, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Here is a quote from a popular web forum:

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April 11, 2013 6 CommentsSearch Engine Optimization

Great Customer Service – Quality Is Free

In the book “Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig a father tries to teach his son the basics of life, which also happens to coincide with the basics of business.

People who do more than the basics and actively listen and help people will succeed. Companies that do more than only what is required are rewarded with happier customers, more referrals and better profits.

A few pleasant surprises

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April 10, 2013 3 CommentsOnline Business

Google Spreads Linking Naivety and False Link Information

Links are one of the largest untracked forms of online currency, and as soon as the IRS discovers this they will try to find a way to tax them. Every link is an indication of an exchange of real value, even if the parties are linking naively.

Here is one example where an innocent link exchange with no money changing hands is increasing the value of a site:

Site A finds a cool image they want to use on site B. Site A copies the image and gives credit to site B via a link. In this example, a link has replaced payment for usage of the image. This is a basic barter deal and no search engine can complain about the link exchange.

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April 8, 2013 1 CommentLink Building, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines