If you have a physical location that you do the majority of your business from, you obviously want people in the area to be able to find you in search engines. They should be able to enter in the type of business or organization they are looking for, along with the city name, and your site should be in the first few pages.

There’s never any way to completely guarantee a specific position in the search engines. The search engine companies can, at any time, change their algorithm used to rank sites. And that type of thing does happen from time to time. But by putting the keywords that you want to search for in your site on multiple pages, and if you make sure that it does not look like it is only their for search engines, you can help your ranking.

Specifically, with addresses, what you can do is put your address at the bottom of each page on your site. Not only that, but if what you do is not a part of your name, add that to the address.

Let’s say your company is called Technomatic and your business is repairing vacuum cleaners. What you do is not at all obvious from the title of your business. So search engines won’t have any idea either. Instead, when you put your address on your site, do so similar to this:

Technomatic: Vacuum Cleaner Repair
1234 Local Street: My City, Texas 71111

That way, your business name, location and type of business are all located close together on your page, so the search engines are more likely to link them all together. And linking them all together means a higher ranking of your site on the search results.

Tim is the owner and senior web designer at T&S Web Design. His company has developed and maintained website for dozens of small businesses and organizations. Tim also maintains a blog with free website advice for small business owners, GetASiteOnline.com

The Google Sandbox Effect has been discussed at length in our case study of a new website first crawled in May by Googlebot. We can now further the case study with indexing comparisons and discuss interesting Googlebot crawler behavior after release, at the 75 day mark, of the study website from that very confining Sandbox.

This case study is not for the faint of heart - those just launching a new web business on a new domain name with hopes of instant indexing and immediate traffic may find their website very lonely for two and a half months - if it is in a competitive market segment. You may as well plan to stay in the Google Sandbox for at least 45 days on average. If some early release stories are to be believed, search phrases nobody wants to play with are taken pity on by Google and sent home for early release.

Those non-competitive or obscure search phrases seem to be seen as good, quiet little children, playing by themselves in Sandbox playground and are sent home early on good behavior. Googlebot probably sees good behavior as playing well with others, like a good little baby domain and NOT being competitive as some young domains can be. Throwing sand in other childrens’ faces and insisting on having your site indexed, throwing sand out of the Sandbox with your bright plastic toy shovel and bucket will not be allowed.

Now that the site discussed in this study is out of the Sandbox, it still lingers on the playground, unable to escape the community park and leave for the business world to play with the big boys in the outside world. It does indeed take time to grow up and be the model citizen in this new search playground. Though on the first full day after this first week of being released from the sandbox, the site has gotten 68 visitors referred by searches done at Google, the first referred search traffic coming into the site. MSN has sent 8 visitors, Yahoo has sent 6, 4 came from AOL searches, 2 from Netscape and 1 from Dogpile.

The indexing behavior of Yahoo and MSN has been nothing short of bizarre with numbers of indexed pages increasing rapidly over the first two months to reflect 6,941 pages indexed until 8 weeks into this study and we outlined previously how numbers changed as you click through results pages first upward, then downward to about half the total of highest numbers listed along the top of the results pages.

It appears that Yahoo and MSN are playing on the ’slippery slide’ in this playground, climbing to the top of the ladder of results at about 10 week mark showing 8,210 and 6,941 pages respectively indexed, then sliding down again to 3,510 for Yahoo and 373 for MSN, as of this writing two weeks later on August 6. Still, Yahoo will show you only 1,000 (100 pages) of those results and MSN will show you only 250 results, or 25 pages, no matter how many they claim to index. MSNbot is crawling the site faster and more consistently than any of the engines, yet shows by far fewer pages indexed than the others.

One of the interesting comparisons between Google and MSN in our Sandbox study is that Google will show you most of what they claim to have indexed after you click that link at the bottom of the first page showing only 3 or 4 results when you use the "site:Publish101.com" query operator then go to the bottom of the page and click the link under the line reading, "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 3 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

Go ahead and click that link, then you’ll be presented with the claimed total of indexed pages. That number has very steadily increased since Sandbox release after 75 days from first crawling of this Sandbox study site. The timing and numbers of indexed pages at Google goes upward, and ONLY upward with VERY distinct patterns noted from raw log files. Crawling schedules seem to have been established for this site by Google and indexing changes occur on a very regular schedule.

The first observation of Sandbox release was at noon on Thursday July 28, seventy-five days from first crawling by Googlebot when a search turned up 379 pages indexed with a "site:Publish101.com" query. That number increased later the same evening to 3,660 pages at a search done around the dinner hour Pacific time. Oddly, the next day, Friday July 29, the number took a slight hop upward to 3,700 pages and on the following Monday, showed 3,770 pages indexed.

That schedule and pattern have repeated on the second week of Sandbox release when a "site:Publish101.com" query produced 5,660 results from from Google for the site on Thursday August 4 at just after noon and then nearly doubled at around the dinner hour to 10,700 pages on that same query. A final check just now on Saturday shows it at 12,100 pages indexed by Google. It should be pointed out to those who wonder about the total number of pages that this is a dynamic site with a very large archive of articles that increases daily as new submissions are contributed by member authors at the site.

Those articles are added through a content management system on a daily basis by an editor who reviews submissions and processes them for approvals or rejections. Those approved are made live from the home page nightly. We’ve started doing this on the crawler’s schedules as we’ve noted very regular visits by Yahoo’s Slurp crawler to the site home page just once daily at around 5pm each evening and Googlebot visiting the home page only once, at near 11pm nightly, so we’ve instituted a midnight activation of each day’s new article submissions on the home page of the site so that none of the new pages are missed by those crawlers. MSNbot seems to hit the home page multiple times through the day, so timing is less important for MSN.

Crawler activity has been heated, with Yahoo crawling the least and the slowest, barely seeming to attempt any updates and the total of indexed pages has not changed for over three weeks since it peaked at 8,210 pages indexed and then dropped to it’s current level of 3,510. As previously stated, Slurp seems to be unhindered by any form of consistency in indexing or crawling behavior. MSNbot has crawled extensively and fairly regularly for weeks, but that odd indexing behavior is a serious flaw in their utility as a search tool.

It should be mentioned here that AskJeeves had been noted to crawl the site extensively early in this case study and displayed a very regular and consistent crawl, but stopped abruptly three weeks ago on july 13, after hitting most of the pages then available on the site. Teoma, their spider, has been absent ever since and they have not indexed this domain at all since first crawling on May 23, over 10 weeks ago. Clearly, Teoma appears to have the longest Sandbox of all the search engines.

Much has been learned in this Sandbox case study about crawler behavior, indexing delays, robots.txt requirements and index updates at each of the top three search engines. Where that knowledge leads will, of course, change as algorithms and crawling schedules are adjusted by MSN, Yahoo and Google. But valuable information has been shared that may help other webmasters to better understand each of the factors that determine the success of any website.

"Further findings in follow-up articles at the 3, 6 and 9 month marks, explore search referrals gained as Google adds more pages and rankings fluctuations begin to level. Meanwhile, we’d like to encourage others to publicly review their crawler traffic through logs to compare behavior on new domains to verify findings and disclose indexing behavior and timing for new domains and further document SE indexing as well as crawling behavior.

Copyright © August 6, 2005

Previous Sandbox Case Study Articles:

http://Publish101.com/Sandbox2 http://Publish101.com/Sandbox3 http://Publish101.com/Sandbox4

Mike Banks Valentine is a search engine optimization specialist

Website Announcements:

1) Business Cards

2) Brochures

3) Point-of-Sale handouts

4) Advertisements

5) Newsletters

6) Invoices

7) Press Releases

8) Magnetic door signs

There are 7 additional ways to promote traffic to your site.

1) E-Mail - you can purchase lists of people or businesses who are open to receiving information about certain subjects. These are valuable, effective ways to approach prospects. Do not send promotional e-mail blindly to people or businesses or you will be flamed, i.e. overloaded with vicious e-mail and lots of it. It’s kind of an excuse to be rude without consequences, like the guy behind you at the light who likes to blast his horn if it takes you more than 2 seconds to go.

2) Faxes - the same approach to the same kind of people with less flaming potential.

3) Telemarketing - It’s a soft kind of telemarketing, your not asking for an order, just selling them on going to your site to get some valuable free information or see some "specials."

4) Internet discussion groups - it’s a fun way to get some exposure, especially if you have useful, free information regarding your subject- dial in and learn "netiquite" before joining in, Abuse is another form of flaming.

5) Radio-TV interviews - same approach as above.

6) Networking - this is a nice way to generate lead or sales. You offer an added value of some kind and a bonus for somebody’s business that is compatible with yours, including your web address and come-on. Example: if you’re a plumber, offer a free value for an electrician to offer to his customer base, or to new customers in order to get their business in the first place, It’s free advertising, and, do the same for him.

7) Search Engines/Directories/e-zines- you can list your product to the whole world through search engines (clearing house locations for information, like a library) and Directories. You can find them for yourself or you can get the top 30 for free. This approach is for products that can be mailed anywhere or have a wide distribution network.

Samples for bottom of business cards, invoices, handouts, ads, yellow pages, etc;

Daniel Wadleigh is a nationally published marketing consultant and has programs for start-up and existing businesses including effective web sites, e-mail/database, other non-internet ways to drive them to your website, and low cost ways to get more new customers.

Go to: http://www.more-new-customers.com to get free copy of "Marketing to Men vs. Women- the 8 different responses" and a Free copy of "Market Research- 7 Questions to Ask to Start-up and 7 to Ask to Improve Any Business."

Search Engine Optimization is broken down into two segments. Aspects of onsite changes to make your site more spider friendly and Offsite keyword text backlinking.

From an on site SEO perspective, consistency and placement of your keywords are important. Spider read a page top to bottom left to right. Therefore your major keywords should be consistent from your Meta tags all the way down to your footer page. Consistency in Syntax as well a prominence. Interlinking your site with keyword text links not only helps navigation of your site but it improves your keyword density.

There is much discussion in regard to the keyword density as to what is considered a non spam factor. Each page should have about 350-500 words per page with a keyword density of no more than 7-10%. Keyword density is also considered in your graphic alt text as well as hyperlinks.

Generally speaking, if your keyword looks stuffed, it is.

Basic On site SEO Factors:

Title Tag ( with Keyword)
Meta Description ( Consistent with Title Tag)
Meta Keywords ( Consistent with Title tag and Description)
H1 Tags ( with Keyword)
Graphic Alt Text ( with Keyword)
Keyword Hyperlinks
Keyword Density in body text
Keyword in Menu Links
Footer Page with Keyword Text Links

Off site linking is generally though of as the most effective way to raise in the search engine rankings. However if your on site SEO is not complete you are battling an up hill battle.

When planning your off site linking strategy you need to keep in mind that reciprocal links are considered devalued through the latest round of algorithm updates. Textual Keyword Rich links from various C-block IP address are the best links possible.

There are many ways to receive quality links.

Some of the top linking strategies to receive quality links come from the following venues:

Article Submissions
SEO Friendly directories
Blogs
Press Releases

Growing your links in a consistent manor is also relevant. Creating 1000’s of links in a short period of time could set up red flags. You will receive many links via RSS Feeds from the sources described above and be successful in your linking campaign.

Getting Search Engine rankings can take time depending on your keywords, but consistency and effort both on site and off site will bring you the desired results.

About the Author:

Eric is a Business Analyst and Consultant. Co-owner of http://www.StmaDeveloper.com and SEO Richmond Virginia.

More and more webmasters are building websites with publicly available content (data feeds, news feeds, articles). This results in websites with duplicate content on the Internet. In cases of websites build on news feeds or data feeds you can even find websites that match each other 100% (except for the design). Several copies of the same content in a search engine does not really do any good and so Google apparently decided to weed out some of this duplicate content to be able to deliver cleaner and better search results.

Plain copies of websites were hit hardest. If a webmaster was publishing the exact same content on more than one domain, all domains in question were eventually removed from Google’s index. Many websites based on affiliate programs suddenly took a big hit in loss of traffic from Google.com. Shortly after this started some webmaster forums saw the same complaints and stories again and if 1 + 1 was put together a clear picture of the situation was available: a duplicate content filter was applied.

Duplicate content is not always bad and will always exist in one way or the other. News websites are the best example of duplicate content. Nobody expects those to be dropped from Google’s index.

So, how can webmasters avoid the duplicate content filter? There are quite a few things webmasters can do when using duplicate content of any sort and still create unique pages and content from it. Let’s see some of these options explained here.

1) Unique content on pages with duplicate content.

On pages where duplicate content is being used, unique content should be added. I do not mean like just a few different words or a link/navigation menu. If you (the webmaster) can add 15% - 30% unique content to pages where you display duplicate content the overall ratio of duplicate content compared to the overall content of that page goes down. This will reduce the risk of having a page flagged as duplicate content.

2) Randomization of content

Ever seen those "Quote of the Day" thingies on some websites? It adds a random quote of the day to a page at any given time. Every time you come back the page will look different. Those scripts can be used for many more things than just displaying a quote of the day with just a few code changes. With some creativity a webmaster can use such a script to create the impression pages are always updated and always different. This can be a great tool to prevent Google to apply the duplicate content filter.

3) Unique content

Yes, unique content is still king. But sometimes you just cannot work around using duplicate content at all. That is alright. But how about adding unique content to your website, too. If the overall ratio of unique content and duplicate content is well-balanced chances that the duplicate content filter applies to your website are much lower. I personally recommend that a website has at least 30% of unique content to offer (I admit - I am sometimes having difficulties myself to reach that level but I try).

Will this guarantee that your website stays in Google’s index? I don’t know. To be most successful a website should be completely unique. Unique content is what draws visitors to a website. Everything else can be found somewhere else, too and visitors have no reason to just visit one particular website if they can get the same thing somewhere else.

About The Author

Christoph Puetz is a successful Entrepreneur and international book author. Websites currently operated by Christoph are Credit Problems Help and Highlands Ranch Colorado. PPC and SEO Services provided by the author can be found at Net Services USA LLC.

Note: This article can be published by anyone as long as the resource box (About the Author) is posted on the website including the links and that these links must be clickable. This last paragraph in italic font informing about the author resource box does not need to be ublished.

It’s a big task for every webmaster to promote his site. It needs a lot of attention and hard work. Here are some tips which will make your life easy. Follow these steps and start getting genuine traffic, which is your dream. So here they are:

1. Share your knowledge- The best way of getting traffic to your site and promoting it world wide is by writing articles.If your article helps somebody in some way he will surely visit your site to find out what more you have got. Knowledge is the power, if used correctly, brings popularity.Otherwise it’s garbage lying in a lazy mind. Don’t write articles on irrelevant topics. If your site is about fashion designing and you write about hacking, that will not serve the purpose.

2. Share your views- This one is also an important. Write your views in various forums. Try to win some friends. May be they own websites too? In this way you can share links. And do try to share your views on various popular blogs. You will get some amazing results. Which you can’t even get by paid promotion.

3. Analytics- Analyze your traffic, very important. You can use many tools present. If you ask me, Google analytics is a good one. By analyzing your traffic, you will be in a better position in choosing the paid promotion method.

4. Never use auto traffic generation techniques. With these you just end up wasting the bandwidth of your website. One interested person visiting your site is equal to hundred visiting just to earn a credit.

5. Ad words- If you are interested in paid promotion of your website my suggestions are Google ad words, fastclick,Yahoo. And you can also try some web directories (paid and open both). These also help in generating good traffic. Your listing in renowned directories will also fetch you interested customers for your work.

6. Search engine submission- This is a basic thing when you prepare a website. Try to put your website into all the major search engines. Because your site exists for others for others if it is present on various search engines. There is no doubt that it increase between your website and you visitor.

You can easily achieve better promotion by following all these steps properly. If you are a webmaster, or want to be one, these should be your daily routine. Thanks for reading.

by Bikramjit Singh author for sycamore.in and sarvpriya.com

Yeah why not! They look good and can be very creative with a lot of visual effects. But the truth is they are not very search engine friendly. For those who have just spent a lot of bucks on creating a flash masterpiece, no need to panic, there are a few ways to help improve your website’s search engine visibility.

To give you a quick rundown as to why flash websites are not favoured by search engines, they are seen as a one page image file with no text based content. You will notice that when you navigate through a flash website, the URL address will always remain the same. So here you have a website with no text based content, is a one page image file and has no internal link structure, translating into a search engine’s enemy.

Unless you have an extremely popular name within your industry or have an enormous amount of relevant incoming links, then you will get away with having a flash website for the obvious keyword phrases i.e. company name. Who would fall into this category? An example would be Coca Cola, ever heard of them? So for those who fall into the other category, and that would be about 90% of us, fortunately there are alternatives to help boost your rankings.

There are three suitable methods that I would recommend. The first method is by far the easiest and cost efficient. It involves optimising your Title and Meta tags for the single page to the best of your ability and then including optimised text information beneath the flash image. Some may see this as a form of spam, but given the scenario, I would recommend this method provided that the text is written accordingly and avoids keyword stuffing.

The second method can be quite costly and might not be favoured given the fact that you have spent a lot of cash on your flash website. It involves developing a second site designed in HTML. When a visitor visits your site, they would be presented with two links, one to your flash site and one to your HTML site. That way search engine crawlers will access all the content and pages via the HTML website.

The third method is by far the most preferred. It works by developing an HTML website with your flash images embedded on the page, and all content is written in text based form. This allows you to have multiple HTML pages which will give you more Title and Meta tags to work with, as well as keyword rich content to write for each page.

To sum up, depending on your time and budget constraints, there are ways to help you avoid the search engine pitfalls of having a flash website. Any of the methods I have discussed, along with a strong incoming link structure, will help you get that extra exposure in the search engines. If are thinking of designing a flash website, make sure you look at implementing a search engine friendly strategy to avoid complications in the future.

About the Author: David Touri works for SEO Sydney, the SEO Consultants. He has worked on various projects and offers search engine optimisation in Australia.

Often, sites view seo and PPC marketing as exclusive marketing techniques. Each marketing method has its advocates. In reality, both have a place in the Internet marketing process. If you intend to pursue a major seo effort, a PPC campaign is a critical early step.

PPC For Testing

Let’s say you have a site offering a service or product in the travel market. You’ve put together a healthy budget and decided to go for broke. Yep, you’re optimizing and trading links in an effort to go after keyword phrases with major traffic and competition. For instance, you’ve decided to have a go at “Europe travel”, which has roughly 400,000 searches each month and major competition for high rankings. You spend two years trading links, adding content and so on. Miracle of miracles, you pop on to the first page of search results. You start shopping for your private jet only to realize a very disturbing thing. You are getting thousands of visits, but few sales. After running calculations, you find the site is converting at 1 in 10,000.

Houston, we have a problem.

A PPC campaign should be used to test your site against keyword phrases before you spend the time and money on an seo campaign. The best platforms to use for your campaign are Google Adwords and Overture. Yes, click fraud is a problem, but less so on these platforms.

After opening accounts and laying a credit card down at the PPC alter, you need to give some thought at to how you will test your keywords. Here’s a hint. The campaign should be designed to test the keyword phrases, not maximize sales. This may sound like a strange statement, but keep in mind the purpose of the campaign. You are determining whether you have picked appropriate keyword phrases for the seo campaign. So, how does it all go wrong?

With both Overture and Adwords, you have the ability to designate the reach of your keyword phrases. Most pick the “broad match” option, which is terrible for testing. With broad match, your advertisements are going to appear for your keyword phrase AND variations of the phrase. Since the ad is appearing on a variety of keyword phrases, the results can give you a false impression of the value of the primary keyword phrase.

Going back to our example, we start a Google Adwords campaign for “Europe travel” and use the default broad match option. After a month, we are happy to find the ads converting at 1 in 70. Having validated the keyword phrase, we set off on the long seo campaign. But are we really sure about the validity of the keyword phrase. Since Google has been known to seriously expand keyword phrases under the broad match option, how do we know that the true keyword phrase isn’t “European travel”? We don’t unless we take a few additional steps.

The first step is to limit the PPC advertisements by bypassing the broad match option. Instead, you want to limit the appearance of the ad only to searches for the exact keyword phrase. In Adwords, this is known as the “exact phrase” match. To designate it, you simply place brackets “[]” around the keyword phrase. Second, you need to track traffic originating from the ads. This can be done using tracking tools on your server or through the tracking options offered by each PPC platform. Regardless of your choice, the resulting data will give a much truer picture of the value of the particular keyword phrases.

Nothing is more aggravating then getting top rankings, but miserable conversions. The only way to beat this problem is to test, test, test. Using PPC campaigns at the outset of an Internet marketing efforts can save you a lot of headaches later on.

Halstatt Pires is with http://www.marketingtitan.com - a San Diego Internet marketing and advertising company.

This article examines the basics behind quality site promotion.

Let us take a good look at acronyms in the industry! Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is a term thrown around a million times a day online. So many sites use old techniques that will get there rankings hurt or reversed with there hap-hazard web designs it frustrates me. I don’t want you to be one of them. In fact this article is aimed for creating SEEN web design projects. If you don’t use this anti-SEO (i.e. cloaking and doorway pages) and follow the following rules you can expect decent results with your web design. The basics for SEO are simple and should be used by all web designers and web design services (although that doesn’t mean they are always used):

1. Optimize your site with a high percentage of text relevant to the search terms you intend to go after.

2. Make sure all alt (alternate image tags) and title tags have relative descriptions including keywords.

3. Make sure your site meets current online standards and can be equally viewed among all browsers and operating machines. Even though some pages may still display correctly with incorrect HTML, it can hinder the way search engines will look at them, bringing the overall optimization of the page down.

4. Make sure all pages are under 800K (recommended for fast loading pages).

5. Submit (manually, by hand) to all major search engines, an automatically to lesser engines through (at least) a free search engine submission service or program.

Keeping these five rules in mind will help, however a serious look at other aspects will help even more in SEO. I will go into these aspects in more detail with articles to come at websiterankingtop.com but this is a good start.

PPC, otherwise known as Pay Per Click advertising is found on numerous search engines and smaller ones alike. The two major players are Google and Overture (now own by Yahoo), however there are some other PPC engines that use a multiple of lesser engines and quality websites to offer there services. Some will give you a top ten ranking within your keyword searches while others have you bid for placement among there engines. A few simple rules to follow:

1. The content of your site must match the keywords bid on.

2. SELL! SELL! SELL! While traditional SEO focuses on how the search engines will view your page, this is your chance to engage the human customer! Traditional sales techniques work best here.

3. Will visits to your web pages convert into quality leads or actual sales? Make sure the cost of bidding will be recovered, plus some.

4. The more popular the search terms = the more expensive it will be. Keep this in mind and target populated terms with financial efficiency.

5. All of your keywords stand no chance whatsoever of being listed in the top ten positions on the major search engines. Organic top ten placements can be very expensive so this is your chance of competing with terms you don’t rank well with.

Make sure to have a relevant page for your search term. This is critical as we all know from browsing; if a site doesn’t fit the bill in the first three seconds we are more than happy to click that back button.

SEM = Structural Equation Modeling? NOPE! SEM = Search Engine Marketing? NOPE! SEM = Standard Error of Mean? Nope! While all of these are acronyms for SEM, there not the ones we care to discuss here in our brief overview of Search Engine Mechanics. Anything I say in this column may be outdated with the next big search engine “patch” so what I mean by SEM is simple: Keep Up! That’s right, by simply going by what you know, or an article written 8 months ago you will get lost or penalized in your attempts for effective online marketing. Search Engine mechanics is the mathematical art behind the algorithms of the popular, well producing engine online. To find out that a “Jagger Update” relinquishes all reciprocal links to your website in the eyes of the 75%+ that currently engage Google is huge. The mechanics of the currently used search engines is something to keep your eye on. While HTML doesn’t change much each year (comparatively), search engines do. Simply put: make sure you know what to do to get ranked in this ever evolving market!

-One last note: make sure you know what pages are visited and where users are spending there time. If you have a well visited page (found through your web stats) that isn’t receiving much time spent: GUESS WHERE YOU NEED A REWRITE!

This is meant to be, and should be a good start to all wanting high search engine ranking within there web design realm. Websiterankingtop.com Bill Naugle

Copyright 2006 Bill Naugle

Bill Naugle has been writing articles, press releases and ebooks to help Webmasters achieve success in search engine rankings. He has written on many subjects. He started writing on the internet in 2001. http://www.websiterankingtop.com/

I have been optimizing websites for the past six years, and all of a sudden last fall I began hearing about Google’s Jagger update. Now being a “Chick” I like to keep things pretty simple and wondered why Google named it Jagger. (At first that seemed more important to me than what effect the update would have!)

As I have mentioned before I am a Google Certified Professional , which doesn’t make me any more in the know because Google never called to notify me about Jagger, so I had to learn about it on my own. Curious about the name, I went to Google and typed, “Why did you name it the Jagger Update.” (Sometimes I like to approach Google like it is a magic eight ball just to see if it will talk to me)

Surprisingly, Google didn’t respond but thanks to a gentleman named Glenn Murray who wrote the article Jagger, Google Analytics and the Future of Search & SEO where he explains “… Just like hurricanes, Google updates have names. (A Google update is a change to the way Google determines its rankings. Google makes these changes periodically, and they’re universally feared because they can impact dramatically on a website’s ranking.) The latest update is called Jagger, and it has search engine optimizers (SEO’s) all around the world in a state of panic.”

That brought me a little closer to understanding why they named it “Jagger”. Maybe instead of woman’s names like they use for hurricanes, perhaps Google names their updates after famous Rock Stars? (To date I have not yet found any evidence to back up this statement so currently this is purely speculation).

Either way they have named it Jagger, and apparently from all I have read the update is complete. Simultaneously I have noticed over the last few months the rankings of some of my clients have experienced some drastic changes in Google and I have wondered if they have fallen victim to “The Jagger Effect.”

I am not writing to tell you the specific things that could possibly help you, or even hurt you in Jagger’s aftermath…( if you are an SEO Firm you can read a great article by Jason O’Conner Google and Jagger’s Aftermath.) If you have a website, I am sure all you really care about is, “Did Jagger effect my rankings in Google and can you fix it for me?”

As the world has exploded with numerous Optimization Companies in the last few years, the relevant question really becomes, “How well do you know your website optimizer and what experience and knowledge do they have to keep you ahead of the game?”

Here are a few simple yet powerful questions you should be asking your current or prospective Optimization Company:

1. How many websites have they optimized and can they show you how they improved their search engine ranking positions?

2. Is the Optimizer a member of any professional Search Associations?

3. Has the Optimizer spoken at any Search Conferences or written any industry Articles?

4. What does the optimizer do to stay current on the newest best practices when it comes to search engines and optimization?

5. Is the optimizer a specialist or is optimizing just a part of many things they do in a day?

Updates such as Jagger are not going away, and the power of the Internet as a direct-to-consumer distribution channel continues to grow, it is time to take a strategic approach to your search engine optimization strategy…in this Chicks’ humble opinion.

Finally, in case you were worried, The Jagger update had no effect on Mick Jagger at all. You can still go to Google and type in Jagger and www.mickjagger.com still ranks number one! It’s a great site…check it out!

Patricia Brusha is the co-founder of "A Couple of Chicks," an Internet Marketing, e-Distribution & Revenue Measurement Company. The “Chicks” specialize in using Creative, Distribution and Technology to bring clarity to marketing on-line.

To find out more about A Couple of Chicks Marketing and the tools and services available, visit http://www.acoupleofchicks.com. Visit http://www.onlinerevealed.com A New Conference Series Coming Soon - brought to you by A Couple of Chicks!