Nine By Blue » Collected Writings

What Can Google+ Do for Your Business?

Blair Brown — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:24:39 +0000

In 2011, Google launched Google+, its long-awaited answer to Facebook. Several months later, in November 2011, Google+ opened up brand pages for businesses to get on board too.

Read Vanessa’s article to find out how your business can use Google+ here at businessonmain.msn.com

Ask Business On Main

Blair Brown — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 02:32:36 +0000

Vanessa answers the question: What are the most important things to have on a website to help attract more customers?

Read her response here: businessonmain.msn.com

Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux”

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:35:43 +0000

On around September 27th, Google launched what’s being called 2.5 of its Panda algorithm. On October 5th, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted:

“Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).”

Panda-related flux? Indeed, this seems to be the case, with site owners reporting Panda-related changes on at least October 3rd and October 13th. In several cases, I saw sites with Google organic traffic declines on 9/27, recovery on 10/3, and decline again on 10/13.

Read the entire article at Search Engine Land

Measuring Your Business’ Success on the Web

Vanessa Fox — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:28:22 +0000

It’s not enough to just have a website for your business — you need to measure how well you’re reaching your customers or audience.

Once you invest in a website, you want to make sure it’s creating real business value. You don’t need expensive software or a degree in statistics to measure your site’s success, but with all the data available, it’s hard to know what to keep track of and what it all means.

Fortunately, all you need are simple (and free) tools that’ll help you focus on a few key data points.

The Clickthrough Rate Equation In Organic Search

Todd Nemet — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:59:29 +0000

When I was in middle school, my favorite book and my favorite TV show were both Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I must have read the book at least 10 times, and I watched the series every time it was on the local PBS station.

One of the most interesting parts of Cosmos that has stuck with me is the Drake equation:

The Drake equation is an attempt to estimate the current number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way by breaking it down into component parts (such as “f(p), the fraction of stars that have planets” and “f(l), the fraction of planets capable of sustaining life”) and then multiplying them all together.

Read the entire article at Search Engine Land.

Go Local on the Web

Vanessa Fox — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 01:18:42 +0000

More than 80 percent of us have searched online for businesses in our area and researched product information on the Web before buying locally. Twice as many of us use search engines as printed yellow pages when looking for local business information — and yet only 44 percent of local businesses have a website, according to a 2009 research brief from the Center for Media Research.

If you’re a locally driven business of any kind, creating a Web presence can help you connect with more of your customers and get a leg up on the competition. And it’s easier than you think.

Pew Internet: Diving Into How We Access Local News

Vanessa Fox — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:37:49 +0000

In studies of the evolution in how Americans seek out news, the trends tend to be that we use search and other online methods for staying informed. The consistent exception is how we access local news. Despite the proliferation of hyperlocal blogging (my own neighborhood’s West Seattle Blog being an excellent example of how hyperlocal blogs can provide both high-quality journalism and to-the-minute breaking news about every local happening), we turn to TV and print far more often than online news sources and search for local news.

Google Provides New Options for Paginated Content

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:47:41 +0000

At SMX Advanced earlier this year, a hot topic was the use of the rel=”canonical” attribute in conjunction with pagination. Maile Ohye of Google noted that the rel=”canonical” attribute was not intended to cluster multiple pages (articles, product lists, etc.) to page one of that series (although it can be used to cluster multiple pages to a “view all” page).

The discussion was fast and furious and we dove into the various pagination issues that content owners encounter. Maile took the feedback to Google and they got to work on some options. The goal? To present some new solutions at SMX East at a panel set up just to talk through pagination issues. Today, be impressed with my multitasking skills as I write this article that describes these new solutions while I moderate the session!

Tricks For Taming Keywords With Regular Expressions

Todd Nemet — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:31:26 +0000

So far my articles about technical SEO have focused on how to adjust a site’s configuration or architecture to make it more crawlable and indexable. In this post, I’m writing about the other end of the technical SEO process: using analytics data to analyze traffic and user behavior by keywords.

When looking at keyword data, it’s important to group them by type. Looking at individual keywords is not only inefficient, but it will generally lead to information that is either misleading or worse, can’t be acted on.

The most precise way to group keywords is by using regular expressions. Regular Expressions are strings containing letters, numbers, and special characters that match a specific word or group of words.

Read the article at Search Engine Land.

Google’s Panda Update Launches Internationally in Most Languages

Vanessa Fox — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:45:23 +0000

Google has just announced that their “Panda” rankings changes, first launched in the United States in late February and rolled out toEnglish language indices internationally in April, have now launched internationally in all languages other than Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Read the article at Search Engine Land