Internet search

What is Internet?

A global network connecting millions of computers. More than 100 countries are linked into exchanges of data, news and opinions. Unlike online services, which are centrally controlled, the Internet is decentralized by design. Each Internet computer, called a host, is independent. Its operators can choose which Internet services to use and which local services to make available to the global Internet community. Remarkably, this anarchy by design works exceedingly well. There are a variety of ways to access the Internet. Most online services, such as America Online, offer access to some Internet services. It is also possible to gain access through a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP). Internet search is the process of exploring the Internet for information with the use of a search engines like Google or Microsoft Bing.

Internet Search

Internet research or search is the practice of using the Internet, especially the World Wide Web, for research. The internet is widely used and readily accessible to hundreds of millions of people in many parts of the world. It can provide practically instant information on most topics, and has a profound impact on the way ideas are formed and knowledge is created.

What is the difference of World Wide Web and the Internet?

The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

Internet Search involves Search engines and Internet browsers such as the following:

Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites that have a search facility for online databases.

Google site search

Everything you love about Google search, now on your website.

• Customizable design

Match the look and feel of search results to your website by using your own logo and colour scheme.

• Multilingual

Search across many languages, set a default language or detect visitors’ browser language settings.

• Date biasing

Adjust search rankings based on documents’ ages, ensuring that updated versions display above older ones.

• XML feeds

Choose how search results are displayed and fully integrate applications with the XML API.

• Label refinements

Create labels to categorize content and let users filter their search results.

• Image search

Allow users to search for images and see results in a separate tab.

• Ad-free results

Give your users the accuracy and relevance of Google Search, minus the ads.

Synonyms

Expand user queries to automatically include synonyms and acronyms, like “automated teller machine” for “ATM.”

• Rich snippets

Add formatting, images and special elements to the content samples users see in search results.

• Thumbnails

Enhance search results with thumbnail images generated automatically or specified by you.

• Highly relevant results

Google.com relevance

Factors in more than 100 variables for each query, delivering highly relevant results from the same algorithms used on Google.com.

• Synonyms

Uses synonym dictionaries to make sure one user’s ‘401K’ produces the same results as another user’s ‘retirement savings’.

• Spellcheck

Automatically suggests corrections with startling accuracy, even on company specific words and phrases.

• Helps narrow customers’ searches

Offers category labels like About Us or Product Documentation that allow your customers to refine their search results.

• Provides customer data with Google Analytics

Integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics, providing insight into search patterns so you can optimize for your customer’s needs.

• Streamlines customer support

Allows customers to quickly solve issues by streamlining your site’s self-service portal.

SEO Website

What Does SEO Mean?

Our world is full of jargon. SEO is yet another three letter acronym that people throw around and they don’t even always know what SEO even means. 

So, what does SEO mean?

SEO is a three letter acronym short for Search Engine Optimization.

Search engine optimization about trying to rank higher in search engines. To rank higher you make changes to your website that make it easier for search engines to understand your content. Also, it can mean getting links from other websites.

3 Simple SEO Rules

You don’t need to get caught up in all that complexity. The basics are simple enough that if you follow a few simple rules you will be fine.

Write For Humans

First, write for humans. It’s not robots that you care about getting to your website and influencing, its people. So, you have to write for them. That means, you write like you talk to people and you write about what people want to know. If someone in real life were to ask you a question, you would answer it right? Well, on the internet, it’s the same deal. So, write down the questions people might have, and then answer them.

I’ve seen this work over and over for businesses. For example, Marcus Sheridon built his fiberglass pool company using SEO and inbound marketing. His company went from being just another local pool company to the #1 website on the internet for fiberglass pools. He did it by simply answering customer questions on the company website.

He has made millions of dollars in sales from the leads his website generates. It all starts with the simple idea “they ask, you answer”. If a customer asks a question, he writes it down and creates a page on his website to answer that question.

It’s not any more complicated than that.

Think like A Human

Second, think like a human. User intent is the biggest driver of action on the internet, just like in real life. What do I mean by user intent? Well, I’ll give you an example.

I once stepped foot on a used car lot because I wanted to see what cars were available and what the prices were. I wasn’t looking to buy, I didn’t have a lot of time to spend at the car lot. I just wanted to look.

The salesman decided he would focus on getting his commission. He thought that he could shove us into a vehicle we weren’t too sure that he would make more money. He did not consider our wants and needs

A couple unpleasant hours later, we finally got the heck out of there and no we didn’t buy a vehicle. In fact, I would tell people never to shop there because they are very shady and they treated us like junk.

If the salesman was smart, he would have understood where we were in the buying process. We were not in the buying mode that evening. We were looking for buying information and if he provided that, we probably would have bought a car there. Instead, we purchased a vehicle from a dealer who found us exactly what we wanted, even if it took him a month or two to find the right vehicle.

That is what I mean when I say user intent. Our intent was information, not purchase.

When someone comes to your website, they have an intent. Maybe its information, maybe it’s to buy, maybe it’s something news related or some promotion you are running. Create content that matches that intent and helps solve their problem.

Not every page will lead to a sale, lead, or conversion. However, each page that solves a problem helps support the overall online marketing process.

Have a Measurable SEO Goal

Third, and maybe most important, your SEO efforts need to support a measurable goal. This is not part of search engine optimization directly, but it allows you to continue to invest in it. Every page on your site should have some kind of call to action that fits the user intent and supports your business’ goals.

You can use different tools to track this, but what we like to do is to setup lead capture form. We do this all over the place on the Fast Forward Network. Every page has some kind of sign up button or other call to action. I look at those leads compared to our effort in building content for this site and search engine optimization.

It is easy to see what is working if you are tracking it. It is easy to invest in what is working.

So, start with a simple lead gen form. It doesn’t have to be fancy and it only needs fields as simple as name, email address, and phone number. Just enough to get in contact with your perspective customers.

If you are a blogger or are running a content site, maybe instead of a lead gen form, you might want to go with an email newsletter sign up.

SEO analyser

SEO analyser should include the following:

Statistical Data – The biggest part of an SEO analysis is the research.  Research results in statistical data. This is not just information you have in your web stats program, but other information you may not have access to, such as how many people do a search every day on your particular keyword, or what your competition is doing, and how they are doing it.  There can be endless reports and data that an SEO could provide, so be aware you can easily be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers provided. An SEO might consider creating the analysis as an overview, with the statistical data in addenda or reports to back up the information.

Explanations of Terminology – You may end up with a huge analysis with lots of data, findings, and reports, but if you can’t make heads or tails of it, then it may not do you much good. Some SEO firms put the analysis on paper for you, and then offer a free consultation with it to go over anything you may not understand.  This is a good idea if the SEO firm doesn’t explain the results in the analysis directly.

Specific Keyword Research – I hate broad keywords. I hate SEOs that recommend broad keywords even more. Unless you are a site with thousands of backlinks because of branding or other link popularity reasons, you are just not going to rank highly for broad keywords. A good SEO analysis will gear its keyword research to keywords and key phrases that are appropriate for your site and its pages, and make recommendations for keywords or key phrases to consider optimizing for.

Screenshots or Other Evidence – If you get an analysis with a bunch of recommendations or percentages, keyword densities or whatever statistics you are provided without any corroborating evidence, then the analysis provider could just be pulling numbers out of a hat as far as you’re concerned. A good analysis will have additional information that will back up the analysis findings.

Detailed Findings – It is not enough just to show you what your meta tags say. You can find that information out yourself, so why would you need someone else to do that for you? You need specific research customized to your site that digs pretty deep. You will want to look for a search engine simulation (what a search engine would see if it were to crawl your site), a list of broken links, site structure, navigation crawlability, which pages and how many of them are being indexed, when the last search engine crawl was, and so on.

Current Search Engine Rankings – I don’t just mean the top ten or even top 40 results, because chances are you can do all of this yourself. Look for a company or individual who can access 500 to 1000 or more results in more than just one search engine

Site Recommendations – If you pay for an analysis, you should be able to take that analysis and change some of your site elements yourself with that SEO’s recommendation. Now obviously an SEO wants your business, and wants to do the work for you, so they aren’t going to reveal all of the little secrets they have about your site, but there should still be a good portion of step by step instructions for you to work with. If there is a consultation included, it’s even better.

WordPress SEO

WordPress search engine optimization for less duplication, better onsite SEO and higher rankings in Google.

What Will I Learn?

• Set up a WordPress website for maximum search engine exposure.
• Avoid duplicate content on the site using a variety of techniques.
• Rank web pages higher in the search engines.
• Add a self-updating XML sitemap to their website and submit it to Google.
• Test the web host for uptime and reliability.
• Test the website for page load speeds, and identify image files that may be loading too slowly.
• Appreciate the speed gains obtained by using a Content Delivery Network (free with the recommended web host).
• Install and configure the W3 Total Cache plugin for even faster page load times.
• Understand the importance of site navigation, and know the various types that can help the visitor.
• Understand the importance of dynamic sidebars and implement them using free WordPress plugins.
• Correctly set the Permalinks for better URL structure and then edit the filename manually where necessary.

WordPress SEO is a course that will teach you how to optimize your WordPress website for Google and other search engines.  WordPress is a fantastic platform for building websites but can produce a lot of SEO challenges out of the box.  Most notable is the duplicate content issues that can get your site penalized by the search engines. 

WordPress SEO will teach you how to set up your WordPress website in an efficient and search engine friendly manner, to minimize duplicate content and to maximize your exposure in the search engines.

IS WORDPRESS GOOD FOR SEO?

Our clients often ask us if WordPress is good for SEO. The answer is yes! Once known primarily as a blogging platform, WordPress has built a reputation for providing a solid SEO foundation as a CMS—and with good reason. It’s not a coincidence that WordPress sites tend to rank well on Google. Its success can be attributed primarily to the built-in features that make it easy to customize a site, especially for businesses or authors with little technical experience.

What’s more, WordPress automatically alerts Google each time you update your site, causing recent blogs to move up the ranks in Google search results. But it’s SEO friendly for a variety of other reasons as well. And if you use it to your advantage, you’ll be seeing an increase in marketing ROI in no time. If you need help launching your SEO campaign on WordPress to improve your website’s search rankings, just contact Fast Forward Marketing.

 Who is the target audience?

• This course is for anyone with a WordPress website that wants to rank better in Google.
• This course is important for anyone needing to learn how to reduce the duplicate content that a WordPress site can produce.
• This course is not for you if you simply want to learn how to build spam my links to your site.

Website marketing

Website marketing is marketing used to promote a website and hopefully get more traffic to a website. Moretraffic translates to better on-line advertising placed on the website. When Internet users visit an ad on a website’s page, it is called Click Through Rate (CTR)and the higher the CTR, the more the website owner stands to earn from the ads.

Website marketing may utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which is the process of customizing a page, so it rates high on search engine queries. Garnering the top one or two positions can result in 50% of the clicks from the search result. Other methods of website advertising may include creating blog posts on fellow blogger’s sites, and even including your signature when you post in forums. The more traffic a website consistently can measure, the more the site is thought to be worth.

Who Needs Website Marketing?

All businesses need website marketing. Businesses with international ambitions, have much more to gain from website marketing. This is because website marketing provides them with a rare opportunity to operate the same marketing model all over the world from a central location. When consumers of a business’s products are scatted all over the world the internet is the best way to bring them together. Usually, the websites require very minimal amounts of money to be paid for hosting the adverts.

Types of Website Marketing

1. Display Advertising

This is where a client employs the use of banners and other similar types of advertisements. These banners usually appear on the company websites. Every once in a while, the company can pay a different company to host the banner.

2. Search Engine Optimization

This marketing occurs when a person tries to organically influence search engines. In case a certain thing is searched for using a search engine, the search engine returns results of certain products which have been promoted through the inclusion of targeted keywords. When SEO can also be categorized as a variant of Social Engine Marketing (SEM). SEM is a type of website marketing which entails placement of adverts in search engines.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media is now by far the fastest and most effective way for people to connect. Many companies have, themselves opened social media accounts. Through these accounts, companies are able to engage directly with their clients. Clients are able to give feedback through direct messaging with company management. Social media marketing also seeks to inform customers about any new products being introduced in the market. Through the social media, clients are able to give their input on the effectiveness of the products before their release. This ensures that the manufacturer releases a product which clients can use.

4. E-mail Marketing

This happens when a business sends information concerning new product to customers and potential customers in their mailing list. The messages may include text explaining the products in detail. They may also include adverts of existing or new products.

5. Referral Marketing

This happens when a person, pleased with the information they find in a website or a social media recommends it to other people. This might create a chain reaction of people keep recommending it.

6. Affiliate Marketing

This happens when a website that markets its own products links its visitors to a different website. The website that gives the link is known as an affiliate website and it gets paid depending on the number of clicks.

7. Video Marketing

This marketing normally happens in video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. Companies post their video adverts in these sites and potential customers can view the adverts.

 Conclusion

The development of web marketing has led to the emergence of certain professions which did not exist before the advent of the internet. These include social media marketing managers who are charged with the responsibility of maintaining company social media accounts. They also formulate ways to maintain the image of the company. Others include digital marketers who are experts in all types of electronic advertising.

Do you have a website? Do you need help with web marketing? Contact us and we’ll help you out

Backlinks

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are the relationship amongst pages on the Internet, which allow users to navigate from a given point on the internet to the page you are looking at within your browser. Many people might think of these just as “Links” rather than “Backlinks”  and this is true – but “Backlinks” describe the links coming INTO a web page or document, whilst “Links” generally refer to the  outbound links from the page itself. When you ask “What are backlinks”, this is key.

Why are Backlinks important?

Knowing a page’s Backlinks allow one to build a link map of how your web site and web page fits within cyberspace. For  instance, you may write a blog that is of interest to someone else who then writes his/her own blog and links it back to yours.  This results in increased exposure to your original page. If nobody links to your content, then the only practical way to get  people to your web page is to link yourself from other pages on your site or in your control. This is fine – but the really “good”  stuff on the internet tends to get linked to from other websites outside your control.

This is the essence of all Internet  Marketing. Unless you want a person to type in the whole URL into a web browser, users only travel around the internet by  clicking links. So the backlinks to a page are ultimately more important to that page than the outbound links on the page itself,  when it comes to understanding the strength of the page itself.

But isn’t it hard or even impossible then to see a page’s backlinks?

You might be able to find some pages that link to any given page using a search engine, but you are unlikely to find all of them.  To use other methods is difficult because you would need to look at EVERY PAGE on the internet (or a large proportion) to be able to see which ones link to the URL you are interested in. Clearly, this is a huge undertaking that costs millions. Luckily, there are just a few companies that have made these investments and Majestic has the largest link map at the time of writing of any commercial dataset. These days, most of the major tools that analyse links use Majestic to help understand their link map of the Internet.

Majestic shows this link relationship within web pages very well with the use of Backlink History and Bulk Backlink

Checker tools.