Search Engine Placement

Each holiday, Google’s homepage displays a new logo that combines their official logo with the theme for that holiday. With Halloween coming up, we thought it’d be nice to reflect on some of the Google Halloween logos of past years.

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Yes, folks….it’s that time again. Google has updated the visible PageRank (PR) over the weekend and just in time for Halloween!

What’s does PR have to do with Halloween? Absolutely nothing. What does PR have to do with your search engine placement? Well, a fair amount.

Google PageRank measures a website’s link popularity (the number and quality of backlinks it has) on a scale of 0 to 10. A strong link popularity generally equates to trust from Google (and other search engines) and therefore increased search engine placement as well. There are still some people that interpret PageRank as “the holy grail” of search engine optimization but it seems to have been devalued over the years. Don’t get me wrong…there is still a strong connection between link popularity and search engine placement, but there is a bit of a disconnect between the visible PageRank and search engine rankings.

Many website owners have tried to capitalize on PageRank by buying and selling links based strictly on the PR of the referring website. This is against Google’s Webmaster Guidlines and could potentially get both websites penalized if paid links are detected.

Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. Now social browsing sites like StumbleUpon or Digg allow users to browse through categorize of their choice and see web-sites that have been “voted up” or bookmakred by other users. So naturally web-sites that are unique, have good design, and or provide valuable content, will show up higher and more often as users give the site a thumbs up.
So how does this help you as a web-site owner? Getting your business or web-site into these web-sites can lead to truckloads of targeted traffic, good press coverage, and lots of back links.

Submitting your web-site or articles to these directories is easy as pie, but to give your site the best coverage and chances to survive you’ll need more then one vote. This is where our social bookmarking service comes in. Contact us today for pricing and info.

Marketing budgets allocated to paid search are forecasted to see double digit growth next year, according to the latest benchmark survey from MarketingSherpa.

Many marketers plan to increase spending by over 11% next year. Why? Mainly because of higher cost per click prices. As more and more businesses realize how effective search marketing is, the costs can only go up from here.

Of course, one has to ask how much effort those marketers are putting into their search engine optimization or organic search efforts. In my experience throwing more money at a problem is not the answer. Instead, businesses should be improving their usability of their web-sites and landing pages. Adding more pages and putting more effort into organic search engine placement would also be a wise choice IMO.