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Google content and functionality directives

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Google content and functionality directives

If it sometimes feels like Google has a gun to your head when it comes to following SEO best practices, then you’d be correct. However, Google publishes their secret formula here, the cornerstones for any company’s successful Internet presence. This Google-sanctioned website content and functionality, the soul and body for website search engine optimization (SEO), must be followed – or else.

Website managers often fail to line up their strategies around these two Google pillars. Instead, some website managers deploy bad backend infrastructure and useless Applesque graphics, carefully written marketing copy and exhaustive navigation.

Google Monopoly

Worst of all, many of these folks ignore Google content and functionality directives, guidelines that are readily available for anyone to read and apply to a website. Here’s what Google says to website managers:

1. Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web

Google Logo

2. Google Webmaster Guidelines

3. When your site is ready

Don’t forget the functionality!

It should be noted there are ways to give website managers an edge – beyond what Google tells us. Traditional and new marketing strategies within the functionality of your WordPress website can take a website from good to great:

Use WordPress content management system (CMS) to level the playing field for your website. WordPress optimizes website content and functionality for website managers because the functionality can be easily added via plugins. These free or inexpensive modules plugin to your website to provide useful utilities for visitors. Here are common plugins used on WordPress that website managers should not be without:

  • Email Signup and Newsletters (i.e., MailPoet)
    Offering the ability to capture a visitor’s email address for the purpose of marketing to them later remains a good way to solicit content on a wide scale. The content from your website’s CRM can be easily re-purposed for email newsletters sent directly to subscribers with just a few clicks.
  • Appointment Calendar (i.e., Ink Appointment)
    Scheduling managers allow users to book hair appointments, medical office visits or any type of booking requirements for a business keen on capturing new users and having them sign up directly for services. Scheduling management is clutch for retail businesses, especially, but also serve the interests of consultants who want to schedule appointments and update appointments online with their customers.
  • Lead Capture (i.e, Gravity Forms)
    Most websites have a sidebar where users are asked to enter more than just an email address “To get more information on the service or product.” Software companies such as Brooklyn-based Thoughtful Systems or Chicago-based Neon CRM keenly capture visitors to their websites, parlaying that information to a sales manager who returns the phone call, offers the sales pitch and closes the deal.

    Landing Page Example

    Landing Page Example at http://thoughtfulsystems.com

Hipster designs are pretty and useless. Ask yourself if there is utility behind the slick designs of that slider, and if the rotating images provide unique functional options rather than rote stock photos. Does your website’s easy-to-maneuver and simplistic influence of the (nearly) trillion dollar company that is Apple actually do anything? The iPhone was not beautiful because of its lack of tactile buttons or original pinch and swipe touchscreen, the iPhone was fundamentally a good machine that delivered efficient functionality in a pretty package.

Don’t try to predict what Google wants when you can read it
Few website managers can claim to know exactly how Google evaluates websites for indexing on search results, but the steps above are clear, concise and the only sure-fire way to get results on your website. Where classic SEO strategies included key word listings and back linking to popular websites, today’s standards – as dictated by Google – are very different.

Google puts a gun to your head for how website content and functionality needs to look on a website to be properly indexed on their search results. There’s no changing it. Like it or not, the Google formula for content and functionality is what generates successful search results for your Internet presence.

Why emailing your customers is important

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Why emailing your customers is important
When Jim Koch started Samuel Adams Brewing Company in the 1980s, everyone said he was crazy. Today, he is a billionaire who speaks about the importance of communicating with customers in ways that other businesses are failing.

"It was a long, slow process for the education of a consumer," Koch says. "Beer was sold on the advertising and the marketing of a brand, not the ingredients, brewing process, and the passion of a brewer."

Why emailing your customers is importantMarketing has changed significantly with widespread adoption of email and social media, not to mention the way customers expect to be educated on a business. The story, ideals and values of your business should be told by emailing your customers, mailing your customers, posting...

How Plumbing Business Software Works

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How Plumbing Business Software Works
Richard Kirby succinctly names the three biggest challenges for a small business: people, finances, and time. A good business software solution tracks the performance of each plumber while helping to address their shortcomings. Second, financial reporting, billing and payroll features are central to any business operation. Last (but certainly not least) is finding the time to administer the business, delegate responsibility and hold yourself and others accountable. Richard-Kirby-philsophy Plumbers don't miss their appointments and customer service is first class when an all-in-one plumbing business software runs on your desktop or cloud service. With the Thoughtful Systems Plumbing Business Software desktop or cloud service, managers can set automatic reminders for employees to purchase parts for certain customers or remind them of appointments. Task are...

Janitorial Business Software For You

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Janitorial Business Software For You
Many of today’s most successfully businessmen got their start in the janitorial business, including Stewart Resnick, famous for building a successful cleaning business from scratch after his father won a floor scrubber in a raffle. Running a cleaning business was tough, labor-intensive work, he often said, and it taught him how to organize, schedule, estimate and grow a business with patience and acumen. He eventually acquired other businesses, applying the same discipline that he learned as a custodian. His labor, organization and employee management made him rich. Billionaire rich. Janitorial Software DemoCleaning and maintenance services are the most outsourced service in our economies. Janitorial services often require the cleaning and maintenance of buildings such as offices, restaurants, retail shops, hospitals, schools, residential accommodations and other types...

The Failed U.S. Conspiracy to Control Domains

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The Failed U.S. Conspiracy to Control Domains
Oprah Sucks

Read Yahoo! Finance’s take …

The recent outcry over the new dot-sucks (.SUCKS) generic top-level domain (gTLD) portrays a U.S. government that has failed everyone, even as the bureaucracy divests control over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

Generic top-level domains were specifically purposed for websites in the beginning, or that’s the common misconception world-wide-web dinosaurs cherished about the same time Al Gore was inventing the Internet:

  • Popular DomainsDot-com (.COM) for business
  • Dot-net (.NET) for networking
  • Dot-org (.ORG) for non profits
  • Dot-edu (.EDU) for schools
  • Dot-gov (.GOV) for governments
  • Dot-mil (.MIL) for military
  • Dot-xxx (.XXX) for porn

The failed U.S. conspiracy to control domains has gone on for more than two decades, led by the U.S. Commerce Department’s efforts to bring order to Icann, the domain name management organization who has ignored calls from Congress to ban the proliferation of useless names again and again. There are currently approximately 850 gTLDs, or domains, for the market to consider.

An embarrassed Senate Congress chairwoman Edith Ramirez recently elucidated their failure to organize the destiny of domain names on the Internet:

“The Commission provided Icann with policy recommendations in which we highlighted a range of issues implicated by the impending rollout of the new gTLDs, including the increased risk of consumer confusion …. I therefore urge Icann to consider ways in which it can address the concerns raised with respect to .SUCKS, as well as to consumer protection issues more generally, on a broader basis.”
– Senate Congress chairwoman Edith Ramirez

Both free-market and libertarian minded pundits are disparaging over the .SUCKS debacle just the same, realizing the mean-spirited and offensive circumstances Icann unleashed in their efforts to enrich themselves with more revenue.

“Developers, engineers and other Internet stakeholders were free to build the open Internet because ultimate U.S. control ensured its smooth operation. If Icann can’t fulfill its basic function of overseeing Internet names without U.S. oversight, there’s no way it can protect the Internet from authoritarian governments such as Russia and China trying to close down websites they don’t like.”
– L. Gordon Crovitz in The Wall Street Journal on June 1, 2015

The counterargument
Others conclude that by limiting domain names there simply is not enough inventory to supply the free market. Recent domain sales in the month of May demonstrate just how lucrative the market is when inventory is limited:

gTLD Domain Name
 Sold For Where Sold
1. Mera.com $132,500 Private
2. Adopting.com $125,000 DomainHoldings
3. FBET.com €50,000 = $54,500 Sedo
4. MyFood.com $33,500 Sedo
5. WJM.com $33,000 Private
6. BD.net $29,500 Sedo
7. LILV.com $28,000 eNaming
8. Astrology.tv €25,000 = $27,250 Sedo
9. 8255.com $26,500 Sedo
10. EasyFundraising.co.uk $24,000 NoktaDomains
11. AttorneyGroup.com $20,000 Sedo
12. Bando.com $19,999 Sedo
13. 5227.com $18,000 DomainsNext
14. IMX.com $17,500 Sedo
15. Buji.com $16,000 NoktaDomains/4.cn
16. Macfarlane.com £10,000 = $15,300 Sedo
17. Hi.net $15,000 Sedo
18. Paris24.com $11,000 Sedo
19.
tie		 CZ.cc €10,000 = $10,900 Sedo
19.
tie		 Joy.eu €10,000 = $10,900 Sedo

DN Journal follows the domain market and gathers trends. Any 3-letter .coms have been selling very high in 2015, but what is also interesting is the number of .net and .tv sales documented during the month. It’s only a matter of time until four-letter .coms become as lucrative to buy and sell as the lesser number letters.

Even if there were enough domain names, freedom of expression should allow for any gTLD, right? Well, not exactly. Freedom of speech (at least in the United States) does not include the right to be a jerk. The .SUCK domain would directly incite those who are targeted. A visit to www.uscourts.gov suggests obscenity and hate is illegal:

  • [It is llegal] to incite actions that would harm others (e.g., “[S]hout[ing] ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.”). Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919).
  • [It is llegal] to make or distribute obscene materials. Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957).

Slander seems peanuts where national security is concerned. Disrupting business over the Internet would be an act of war. DNS hijacking may seem an act of terrorism when done by a rogue perpetrator, but subversion by a country or large organization is something else. As recently reported in the New York Times Magazine, Russia employs hundreds of trolls and troublemakers who could easily be repurposed to disrupting gTLDs:

Several Russian media outlets have claimed that the agency is funded by Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch restaurateur called “the Kremlin’s chef” in the independent press for his lucrative government contracts and his close relationship with Putin …. One Russian newspaper put the number of employees at 400, with a budget of at least 20 million rubles (roughly $400,000) a month.
– Adrian Chen, The New York Times

There will be continued debate whether the U.S. government – or any independent oversight paradigm – has the ability to manage ICANN and the dynamics of the evolving domain markets given the failed U.S. conspiracy to control domains.

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