Bill Slawski is the Director of Search Marketing for Go Fish Digital and the editor of SEO by the Sea. He has been doing SEO and web promotion since the mid-90s, and was a legal and technical administrator in the highest level trial court in Delaware.
In the profit-centered business, customer happiness is merely a means to an end: maximizing profits. In the customer-centered business, customer happiness is an end in itself, and will be pursued with greater interest, passion, and empathy than the profit-centered business is capable of. – Putting Customers Ahead of Investors, John Mackey, founder and CEO of […]
The Web is getting more social, and the internet allows conversations between consumers and those who sell goods and services online on a scale that can be global in reach. The nature of that conversation has changed from the days of mass media to now, and success in business on the Web may rely more […]
A few weeks back, I started wondering about whether or not search engines might care whether or not a web site had a privacy policy. Is the content of a page less relevant or more relevant if there’s a link on it to information about how any data collected about visitors might be used? Probably […]
Starting out with my first website in 1996, I hadn’t realized that one of the most important pages that I had put on the site was a contact page. With a copy of “Learn HTML in 2 Weeks” at my side and a design that reflected my limited skills, I wasn’t aware of my limitations, […]
Sipping on a cup of coffee on a Wednesday morning in the lounge of the local bowling alley last summer, surrounded by shop keepers and insurance salesmen and other small business owners, I hand out my business card. Most of these merchants have actual places I can visit, while all I have are pages they […]
Robots reading cereal boxes in the supermarket? Googlebot at the art museum? Street signs and building addresses snatched from Street View images for local search, image search, and product search? Three new patent applications published at the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office this week explore the intricacies of reading text in images taken from Google’s […]
As a small business owner, the web holds a lot of challenges that, if navigated successfully, may yield some treasures. But there are some waves on the horizon, and uncharted waters ahead for many who would pursue those riches. A secret for those of you who are starting out with a fresh website, and something […]
One of the key elements of how the Google search engine works involves the use of the words, or anchor text, that appear in a link on a source page, to describe a page targeted by the link. We know this from statements about anchor text made in documents like the Lawrence Page and Sergey […]
There are opportunities that small businesses have that large businesses might not even considering touching, or that they may not have the ability to respond to quickly enough. The aerospace industry uses the term “launch window” to describe the right combination of time and location for a rocket to be launched so that it will […]
More and more small businesses are starting blogs on the Web, and it’s a positive development, if done correctly. One of the benefits is the chance for business owners to hold a conversation with potential clients, and with people who may be interested the services, or goods that the company offers as well as with […]
Until very recently, you might have seen a label next to a search result in Google that indicated it was a “supplemental” result. A couple of patents from Google, one of which was granted this week and one from earlier this year, discuss how a search query might return results from an extended database that […]
There’s a kind of page that shows up on websites that I think of as everyday pages. These are commonly appearing pages that you might see on almost every website, such as the “contact” page, the “about us,” the “terms of service” and the “privacy policy.” These are pages that I see small business sites […]
There’s a fallacy that sellers create for themselves, that most people go online to spend money. — Ammon Johns, from How Many Search Queries Are Really Unique?, I checked the AOL database :-) You research a niche for a business online, and find a genuine need in an area that larger businesses aren’t filling. You […]
The Web reaches out to embrace businesses online, even if the owners of those businesses hesitate at the attempt. There are many that haven’t taken the step of placing themselves on the internet, and yet they are there, even without a Web site. They may appear in business directories, with name and address and phone […]
Back in March, Christine Churchill wrote a Small is Beautiful column about the ability of small businesses to be flexible and creative, to think locally and explore niche markets that larger companies wouldn’t enter because they were too large or too slow to change in Survival of the Nimble. When your company is run by […]
One of the biggest stirs of 2005 in the search marketing field was caused by the release of a patent application from Google titled Information retrieval based on historical data. It introduced time as a dimension of ranking pages, with changes in content and linking and advertising and topics as factors to be considered, as […]
The Third International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web will be held next month, and there’s an impressive scope and depth to the topics that will be discussed based upon the papers to be presented during the conference, and the members of the committees who have worked to put this workshop together. This […]
In the online world, we’ve seen the emergence of social networking sites that allow for the discovery and sharing of websites, of bookmarks, of common interests, and the meeting of friends and friends of friends. In the business world offline, small businesses have the opportunity to be socially active in a number of ways, from […]
A new paper from Microsoft Research, Web Object Retrieval (pdf), discusses an approach towards Web indexing that changes focus from page level, to that of indexing objects found upon pages. OK, so that does that mean? It’s easiest to show you first, rather than tell you…
Is there a Google Phone waiting to be released, or just mobile software that makes it easier for people to use Google to search with? How serious is Google about mobile search? How would such a system work? I ran into a patent application on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) pages from Google that […]