Geo targeting (in internet marketing) is the method of determining the physical location of a website visitor and deliver different content to that visitor based his location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, ISP or other criteria.

Or in more generic terms, “tell Google your address so they can share with potential customers”.

Geo-targeting is the practice of catering to internet searches based upon their addresss. And it’s smart SEO. Many search engines and directories offer some type of geo-targeting capability. Usually, these normally require that your physical address be included on your web site, or that you list your site in the right section of a directory.

“Location! Location! Location!” Well, location is becoming more and more important on the Internet as it in the real world, so don’t skip the geo-targeting aspect of search engine optimization. Give search engines and directories the extra information they need to ensure that your site shows up in locally.

-N

He turns more work away than he takes, he has a select client list ranging from NASDAQ listed companies to Celebrities.

He is the person Google (Yes the Big G) paid out of court and served a NDA on in 2004 not to divulge any information on it’s search engine algorithms for years.

He once had 7 of the top 10 listings in Google, Yahoo & MSN for major keywords in the industry he worked in, scooping $100,000 – $200,000 commission cheques every month for years

Since those days his talents have been requested by some of the largest giants in industry.

For the first time ever he is visiting Costa Rica, the home of online poker and casino website companies.

Need an insight on how to be top of tree the right way?

Call Now to make your appointment 1 204 661 5295 Limited availablity. 15th -18th April

Who is this guy, our very own boss here at the Fresh Group Jerry Booth.

Office in the USA, Canada & UK

Post by Nathan

Internet leader Google has been named the number one business brand in Britain by the Superbrands Council.

The organisation uses an independent selection process, seeking the opinion of a council and a representative sample of consumers, and found the Internet Advertising giant to be the foremost brand in the UK.

Google is hugely popular and its way of working – which includes “twenty per cent time” whereby company engineers are encouraged to spend 20 per cent of their work time on projects that interest them – has obviously struck a chord with the public.

In December last year, Google was by far the leading provider of videos online, with Google sites (including YouTube), underlining the popularity of the site.

Arch-rival Microsoft, which provided a mere 1.8 per cent of online videos, was placed second in the Superbrands list.

Stephen Cheliotis, chairman of the Superbrands Council, pointed out that companies need to ensure their brands are credible in a more uncertain economic time.

“Reputation is a company’s greatest asset and brand building is likely to become even more crucial over the next few years than in the last decade of stability,” he said.

Search engine giant Google is focusing its energies on developing free music downloads in China, as well as struggling to maintain the online advertising industry in the west.

Google is battling with Microsoft over its potential takeover of Yahoo!, which the search engine market leader claims would unfairly affect competition.

But in China, Google is also trying to secure a deal which would allow it to offer free music downloads from some of the world’s leading music companies.

The move is part of a strategic battle with Baidu.com, the online search engine which is currently dominating the Chinese market and causing some concern for Google.

Baidu.com gets a lot of its traffic from users searching for illegal music downloads and Google is hoping a legal, free service, would be able to prise some of the huge amounts of traffic onto its own sites.

The Chinese-based engine currently holds a 60 per cent share of the search market in China, compared to Google’s 26 per cent.

Internet users in the US watched a massive ten billion videos online in December, according to new figures from comScore.

The figures bode well for Internet Advertising companies, which are keen to develop this potentially lucrative market.

As expected, Google sites (including YouTube) received the most hits, with a total of 3.3 billion videos watched, representing 32.6 per cent of the total. Google was followed by Fox Interactive Media (with a 3.5 per cent share), Yahoo sites (3.4 per cent), Viacom Digital (2.3 per cent) and Microsoft (1.8 per cent).

Google’s dominance also partly explains why Microsoft is so keen to buy Yahoo, as together they would arguably be better-placed to take on Google.

“December represented a considerably strong month for online video viewing,” said comScore’s Erin Hunter.

“With the writer’s strike keeping new TV episodes from reaching the airwaves, viewers have been seeking alternatives for fresh content. It appears that online video is stepping in to help fill that void.”

On YouTube, 77.6 million US viewers watched 3.2 billion videos in December. Google is investigating various ways of implementing online advertising on the popular video sharing website.

Does putting two losers together make a winner, or just one big loser?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has declared that combining his company with Yahoo would make the internet marketplace more competitive by establishing a strong number two in search and search advertising.

Then again it, maybe it will just make a weak number two. Microsoft and Yahoo have both been leaders in their own fields but in search, they suck. Put them together and they will still suck, in a bigger way.

These days it’s search that matters and the customers are discerning about it. The key to success is not brand or scale but the quality of the algorithm, and Google’s is the best.

Maybe Microsoft and Yahoo together can invent a better search algorithm than Google, but it’s doubtful. They haven’t done it separately and anyway Google is now making so much money it is attracting the best programmers who are constantly refining the algorithm that Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented in 1995.

It was then called ‘BackRub’, named for the way the algorithm analysed the “back links” that point to a website. Now it’s called PageRank, after Larry Page, and although the algorithm has been refined and added to over the past ten years, at its heart the system still computes a recursive score for web pages based on the weighted sum of the other websites that link to them.

That was the insight of Brin and Page: that the number of links to a website that are generated by other human beings is a good way to measure relevance based on human concepts of importance.

The other advantage of Google was that it focused on search. That meant it has a beautifully simple website, with nothing but a good brand, a search field and – for the first few years at least – the number of web pages being indexed. That number passed a billion pages in April 2000, which made the Google search offering astounding and compelling.

In February 1994, a year before Brin and Page started creating their search algorithm, Yahoo’s founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, working in a trailer at Stanford University California, started organising their own web surfing into links that they saved as bookmarks. As the list of links got longer, they put them into categories and then sub-categories.

It was a pretty useful bunch of links, so they created a web page to make them easier to use and available to others. It was called ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web’. That soon became too long so they used an acronym: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle – that is, Yahoo

Word spread fast around the internet and Yahoo had its first million hit day in the autumn of 1994, which translated to 100,000 unique users. In April 1995 Yang and Filo got $2 million from Sequoia Capital, which had seed-funded Apple Computers, Oracle and Cisco Systems, and they were away.

So Yahoo is a directory site that added search later, when the company bought the Inktomi search engine in 2002.

Inktomi was developed in 1995 by Eric Brewer, at the University of Berkeley, and put more emphasis on keyword density than external links. It was a sort of wholesale search, designed to power the search engines of other websites, including AOL. In 2003 Yahoo also bought Overture, another wholesale search business.

Microsoft, meanwhile, was sound asleep, lying on the soft bed of the cash it was making from its Windows operating system monopoly. It eventually used the Inktomi/Yahoo search engine in msn.com, but basically Microsoft was caught out by Google’s advance in the same way IBM was caught out by Paul Allen’s and Bill Gates’ PC revolution during the 1980s.

The only other major search engine that survived the shake-out that followed the tech wreck is Ask Jeeves, later renamed ask.com, developed by Garrett Greuner and David Warthen. They had the idea of users being able to search using plain English questions; it was pretty cool, but never really took off, although Ask is still one of the top four search engines.

So there are four major search engines, but it’s Google, daylight, and then the other three.

The reason Google dominates is that its algorithm is still the most efficient – it most quickly searches the most pages and sorts them better than the others. It’s true that its brand is powerful and the advertising model produces so much cash that the company is a juggernaut, but those things derive from the quality of the search engine.

Google now is the market. Search engine optimisation (SEO) means manipulating or subverting Google to get a better ranking, and Google spends a fortune trying to maintain the integrity of its results. For example, there’s a ‘sandbox’ that you sit in for a few months while Google’s web crawlers inspect your website to make sure it’s kosher.

Brin, Page, Yang and Filo have themselves proved that on the internet scale does not matter – they succeeded when their businesses were small.

One day someone will challenge Google, but it’s unlikely to be Steve Ballmer.

You may or may not be aware, but Google has released a list of SEO do’s and dont’s that you should follow if you want any hope of being indexed and ranked in the search engines. Most SEO information is disputed, but when it comes from the BIG G’s mouth, you know it’s probably very true!

Ok, so maybe this isn’t breaking news – and although it’s been out for a while, Google has a small guide on what to do and what not to do when it comes to getting ranked in their glorious index. Again, while these are some common sense items, you’d be surprised at the amount of people that do not read it, and end up either suffering a drop in rankings, penalized, or banned from Google’s index all together.

I want to sum up the Do’s and Don’ts of Google’s guidelines to SEO best practices (not all of them, because some are extremely basic, so just the ones that you may have forgotten)

Do’s:

Have other sites link to yours (quality, relevant sites).
Submit a sitemap using your Google Webmaster Tools account.
Submit your site to quality, high authority directories in the appropriate category.
Make a site with text links and a clear hierarchy, and make sure every page is reachable by at least one static text link.
Create useful, unique, and clearly written content. Relevancy is key.
Make sure your TITLE tags and ALT tags are”descriptive and accurate” (see, even Google recommends this – told you I wasn’t BS’ing!)
Maintain clean HTML code.
Keep the outgoing links on a particular page under 100.
Make it easy for search bots to crawl your site without error.
Make use of the robots.txt file to limit crawling on pages that aren’t useful to visitors.
Make pages for users, not search engines. (It’s fine to optimize your page, but don’t do nasty spammy things just to get the search engine’s to look for it)

Dont’s:

Don’t have any broken links on your site.
Don’t use hidden text or hidden links (people, doing that is soooo 2002, and will get you heavily penalized)
Don’t cloak or use “sneaky” redirects.
Don’t load pages with keywords or keyphrases. This is spam, and Google knows it.
Don’t send automated queries to Google.
Don’t create duplicate content. (This will kill your rankings most of the time)
Don’t create pages that install bad things (trojan’s, viruses, malware, etc..) – kind of a no brainer anyway.

If you participate in an affiliate program, don’t provide duplicate, run of the mill content. Provide useful, relevant content for the user.

DON’T participate in linking schemes!!! Bloggers pay attention to that one. So many of those viral linking posts go around, and they are just not good for business.

That’s why you rarely see the bigger A-list blogs take part, because they know it’s bad for rankings. Resist the temptation to gain 30 extra links overnight (do you really think Google doesn’t know what’s up with that, c’mon….).

So, what you just read comes from the horses mouth itself, and I personally agree that you can’t go wrong by following the above advice. I take it for granted sometimes that people know all of this stuff, but I see it every single day that people will still try to keyword stuff, white text on white background, cloak, and all sorts of nasty things. Rarely, there are a few that get away with this and achieve good rankings, however, those rankings don’t last long at all.

Google is all knowing, and will catch you eventually. You can bet on that.

To read the entire paper from Google, check it out here.

Looks like we have coursed a little stir within the SEO community in Canada,especially in the Winnipeg area where I new office is to open shortly, not before time may I add as Canadians spend more time online than any other country, have more connected households than anyone else and most are still in the dark ages when it comes to online marketing for there business.

Yes a new office in Winnipeg, another soon in BC and newly trained staff are ready to bring the world of search engine optimization and online marketing to the Canuck’s.

It’s going to be tough, these guys have heard it all before, they have either been ripped off by some website design company who profess to be SEO’s, been shafted by individuals who think >SEO Winnipeg is being listed on top of Google AdWords and the list goes on, we have heard some horrendous stories within the last 6 month’s in Winnipeg while setting up the new global office.

All is not lost, we have been inundated with requests from every Province, why, because we get the job done right, we get results and we get return on investment, not hard to work out really, that’s all that anyone could ask, after all is that not what they pay us for.

So if your in need of an SEO company in Canada or search engine optimization in Toronto, a SEO consultant in Vancouver, a trusted SEO company in Winnipeg, SEO services in Calgary, website optimization in Montreal or an seo expert in Quebec, please give us call, it’s free and you have nothing to lose.

We work with company’s large and small from $100k – $100 million turnover, be the best you can, make that call today. SEO Winnipeg 204 661 5295

Below is list of names of some of the perceived experts in seo and Internet marketing,

Aaron Wall, Bill Slawski, Jim Boykin, Jeremy Schoemaker, Jill Whalen, Bruce Clay Barry Schwartz, Danny Sullivan, Dave Naylor and others.

I am sure most people in the industry will have come across or heard of these people, what makes them who they are? I personally know a few of them myself and from what I have seen do great work, I would love to see some answers on this please,

but Im guessing here,

but could it be fees they charge for there work?
Newspaper articles?
results they achieve for clients?
or just be that they seem to be at every SEO marketing Internet show, they get out there and like to be seen?

Question, I know one so called SEO Expert, there retainer for consultancy is $300,000 per year to each client, they have other experienced seo’s in the company who work for a lot less.

They where making $2 million a year in the early 2000′s on affiliate websites.

They worked with both Yahoo & Google on PPC in the early days helping them improve the products we know today.

Google even paid an out of court settlement in 2004 to this person after a 2 year high court battle, along with a gagging order included not to divulge information about the company, it algorithms, its workings etc before the Big G’s floatation. I know that they are now free to speak if they wish, but will they?

Today they still work with some of the best known companies worldwide.

Who is this person?

Ideas are a plenty, do you know them?

Some people may be surprised to find out, they rarely ever post on forums, keep a reasonably low profile, don’t show up at shows and don’t write books.

All will be revealed in 2008

Let me have your thoughts

Off-Site SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are not performed on your own website or page, and are therefore termed “off-site.”

You see, these days, optimizing the content on your pages is not enough. For effective SEO you need help from other websites in the form of incoming links, commonly referred to as backlinks.

That’s basically what off-site SEO is all about – getting quality links relevant to your topic to assist the search engines in establishing what your web page focuses on. You can think of each backlink as a vote for your page. This is what Google’s PageRank measures, albeit in a complex way, taking many factors into consideration.

There are many ways to get backlinks; unfortunately, few of them are quick and easy. Here are some options:

Creating content that makes people link to it
Doing link exchanges
Getting directory listings
Writing and syndicating articles
Making forum postings
Posting comments to theme related blogs
Buying links
One link from a high quality site is worth tens from a poor site. And linking to bad sites can negatively effect your own website’s rankings.

One-way links into your website from another are of greater value than reciprocal links from carrying out link exchanges.

Links to your pages should use the relevant keywords in the anchor text. Use several variations on this text if you plan to create a high number of backlinks to a page. You’ll get better results and it looks more natural to the search engines, keeping you below the radar.

It’s generally best to avoid organized link exchanges or link farms. In the vast majority of cases they will harm, not help you. This is because the search engines see it as manipulation of the SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) and punish linked websites when they discover the network.

Although I’ve summarized link building in just a few sentences, don’t underestimate how important off-site SEO is. Good backlinks with targeted keyword anchor text carry so much weight these days that if it’s done well it’s entirely possible to rank a website highly for terms not even occurring on the page.

The advice on SEO in these 2 articles is all you need to start getting your pages ranking highly for traffic generating keywords. You just need to get on and do it, and be prepared to spend the time good off-site SEO requires. The more high rankings you get, the greater their influence on your overall rankings, and the easier it will become to tackle more difficult keyword phrases