Joe Steffen Attorney
Challenges:
Joe was in need of a new site to advertise his legal skills online. His old site was dated and filled with information from past elections, so it was a real priority to add some relevant and recent content to the site to send out the accurate message.

Solutions:

We […]

Everyone knows Google is and has been the internet darling of the last few years but very few people understand what it’s stratospheric rise in both the stock market and it’s dominance of online search has been powered by. Sure, it’s easy to use and by most peoples accounts (including ours) provides the best search results in a day-in-day-out basis but how is it making money?

The answer to that is in this great article by the New York Times. It breaks down the Google AdWords system and how it works. For those of you unfamiliar with it, when you do any search on Google you get a series of boxes on the right hand side of the page that are paid for by advertisers. What many people don’t know is how it works. It’s all based on a highly advanced auction system. Search keywords prices are determined purely through whatever your competitors want to pay for it. Brilliant system, and oh Lord do Google finances show it, in Fiscal 2007 Google raked in $16.5 Billion in revenues, 99% of it from those little ads on its site + its network of other sites who use its search results.

Sure, the amount of money Google is generating is interesting considering how simple its system is. What’s more interesting is how they are tracking what makes a “Good Ad” and all the factors that determine how Google places your ad, it’s not just based on how much you’re willing to pay. Here’s the meat of the article:

Traffic was growing rapidly, as was the average price that advertisers were paying for clicks. But Mr. Fox and others realized that measuring the average cost-per-click was not good enough. Users might be clicking on more high-priced ads and fewer lower-priced ads. That would cause the average cost-per-click to rise, but it would say little about the health of the overall system.

So Mr. Varian and Diane Tang, principal engineer in the ads quality group, helped devise what they call a basket of keywords. Much like the consumer price index, a basket of goods and services that economists use to track inflation, the measure is made up of a broad sample of keywords and is weighted to make it statistically accurate. This internal benchmark helps Google get a clearer picture of its performance.

As measurements improved, Mr. Fox’s team unleashed a stream of experiments meant to optimize the ad system. They evaluated changes to things like the clickable area and background color of ads, and the criteria for placing ads above search results rather than beside them.

Over time, the company also looked beyond click-through rates to rank ads. Google now takes into account the “landing page” that the ad links to, and, for example, gives low grades to pages whose sole purpose is to show more ads. Soon, the loading speed of a landing page will also be considered, Mr. Fox said.

These factors contribute to an ad’s “quality score.” The higher that score, the less the advertiser has to bid to secure top billing. For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.

Quality scores work as an incentive to advertisers to improve their ads, which benefits users and, in turn, benefits Google, Mr. Fox said.

Most interesting things are the amount of ads on the landing page being taken into consideration, and of extreme interest to us (since we started in the web hosting business) is the speed you web site loads being taken into consideration. We have been screaming from the rooftops for years that the speed + reliability of your web hosting is mission-critical to your site ranking well and, we’re sorry kids, $5 a month web hosting is not gonna cut it. That is why we spend so much money on top of the line servers, keep the server load as low as possible. We never put more than 400 customers on one machine, the industry average is 5000-10,000. Sure, it costs a lot more to do it this way, but the end result is sites up 100% of the time and load as fast as possible.

In conclusion, it’s extremely interesting to see that Google is taking the results of even paid advertisers landing pages so seriously. What does this mean to you? If your web site is chocked with ads, loads slowly/irregularly and is offline from time to time due to poor choice of hosting platform then you’re not only going to be ranking poorly on Google’s paid results and unpaid results engines, but you’ll also be losing money from potential customers. Update your pages design/hosting platform before its to late!

Most everyone has seen some pretty flashy websites in their day. They fly around the page, usually have all sorts of nifty animations when switching between pages, and generally look pretty impressive. Some of our favorites include 2Advanced and Web Agent 007. While sites like that are incredibly impressive, their main drawback (in our eyes) was that they were effectively invisible to search engines, an enormous drawback that really limited their appeal to companies who understood that while eye candy is great, the main thing that a website needs to do is rank highly.

Search Engines like Google and Yahoo are effectively blind. The only thing they can see is text like in this blog post. Now web technology has advanced to provide us a solution that has long been overdue. “Searchable” Flash Web Sites, powered by a full content management system like this blog. It’s called fCMS and really will open a new chapter in web site design. With the confluence of incredible animation and the ability to search everything in the site means that we’re going to see some pretty impressive sites in the coming years using tools such as these.

This is simply the beginning. The bright lads at Google have long known that while a lot of the information people are looking for online is text-heavy, the majority (in terms of file size) is in images, video, PDF’s, Flash, and downloadable files. Google and the other search engines are rapidly making progress in these areas. The one people are most familiar with is with PDF’s. If you do a search on Google for IRS Form 1099 the first result isn’t the proper IRS website, but the PDF form. As the years go on, we can expect more and more of the content that was previously available only by manually search on multiple sites. This will allow future websites to be increasingly content-rich and be rewarded appropriately with good rankings by Google.

The future is indeed bright for flashy, fun web sites.

The traditional view of most companies is that a website is a “loss-leader”, necessary for being considered a serious business, but not anything that could significantly boost sales or generate a significant ROI. This great article at SEOmoz shows that getting in the mindset of seeing your website as a investment and profit center as opposed to a money-pit is a good idea for your companies continued financial health.

Some interesting stats from the article:

* 43% of retail sales are to either be influenced by or made on the Internet by 2012

* 83% of business use the Internet to research and find potential vendors

* 75% of users admit to making judgments about the a company’s credibility based on their website’s design

The 75% of users admitting to making judgments on a companies credibility based on the website design is an incredible number. Think about your own website: if you don’t like the design of it currently, chances are your customers don’t either and it’s costing you a significant amount of business.

SEOChat.com posted a great article today for all you businesses out there who either do post their press releases online or are interested in doing so in the near future. It focuses on how to optimize those press releases you post online for maximum SEO advantage. Why should you care? Because it’s great content that’s on your website and therefore you want to have it integrated into your site-wide SEO strategy.

Check out the article here

The concept of the press release may be decades old, and in it’s modern online version, it still is and should be a major component of any business!

Click here to read the article

Here is an article posted by another company that does what we do. Its a great way to see if your website needs some attention. The focus of the article is on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) The goal of SEO, and subsequently our goal for your website, is to get your page to rank well on Google. This means that when someone types in “I drove my chevy to the levee and the levee was dry so I crashed, how do I fix my car?”, you show up offering automobile repair services. Provided that is actually what you do. There are many things which help your “page rank” and this article does a nice job of laying out some of them and some easy ways to get you out of the levee and into the limelight. Enjoy.

We are pleased to launch our new website! We have been working hard on it, and hopefully it will be a great way for people to learn about us and our services. Read the rest of this entry »

Gauge Interactive is one of Savannah, GA’s most cutting edge Web Design & Development firms. We offer enterprise level web design, web hosting, corporate branding, search engine optimization, and Interactive kiosk design.