Google just added +1 Metrix to google webmaster today. it allows you first to add +1 button to your site. you can do that by first click on “add +1 button” in the above image.

the link will take you to this page.

where you can copy the code to your site and have the +1 button added to your website.

This is in an effort to allow friend and family recommend businesses and sites to each others. Not sure yet if this is going to effect the search ranking results but it will for sure effect the local search ranking.

google is more and more moving towards human audit of sites by the internet users in an attempt to utilize the data for search ranking factors. I think google is taking the example of Yandex which is the biggest search engine in Russia where they use human auditing to rank their sites.

Google initiated local search with the 7-10 pack. This consisted of a list of 7-10 local businesses with their exact locations on a local map of the area next to the listing. This list occupied about 1/3 of the first page, as an effort from Google to help users find local businesses much faster and easier.

Below is an example of Google’s 7 pack local search results page when looking for a local dentist in Burbank.

This is another example of Google’s 10 pack results page when using a search for a divorce lawyer in Chicago.

Google Starts to Compete with IYPs

Over time, Google realized the competition in local search from big directories like yellowpages.com and MojoPages.com. With local directories, users not only find the location of local businesses but can also read and write reviews about them. In an effort to compete with these local directories, Google introduced the new Opack which replaced the 7-10 packs. This new method enabled Google to show local businesses with reviews and stars provided by users,making it much easier for users when performing a local search, and thus choosing the Google 0 pack over MojoPages and other local directories.

Below is an example of the different experimentations Google has utilized for their O pack, starting with the 3 pack.

Google also tried moving the map to the right to give more focus on their 3 pack, in an attempt to eliminate the competition of the local business directories. Below is an example of the newer 3 pack layout, as of August 2010.

Having worked for a local directory at this time, I found that we were not affected much by Google’s new attempt to gain more of the market share that originally belonged to the local business directories. Most of the directories were getting almost the same amount of traffic as they did prior to the new O pack. I am sure that Google realized this as well, so they began removing all their competition from the first page of results, as shown in the example below. When you search for car rental in NY, you will find that the whole first page is the new Google local only, followed by Google paid search and no one else on the first page. Google also tried to buy Yelp in order to eliminate their biggest competition in local search but when Yelp refused, Google started to show local business directory reviews on their own local search results. By doing that, they were informing Yelp that if they do not like it they would block their reviews completely from the search engine.

When Google was asked, “Why the change?”

Google said “We’ve made results like this possible by developing technology to better understand places. … One of the great things about our approach is that it makes it easier to find a comprehensive view of each place.”

Negative Sentiment Online Against Google Local

Google’s odd behavior to eliminate IYPs from the local search results has created a lot of negative sentiment online. Google was viewed as the new Microsoft that wants to take over the world and destroy all their competition.

Steve Peron “I think it is about money. Google is forcing small business owners to use a Google product instead of their website to gain exposure in their search engine. Now, claiming your Google local account is free, but for a small business owner to really stand out they will have to start using Google paid services like: Google Tag, Adwords, or even Google Boost.

Do you think it is coincidence that within one week Google Boost was announced, Google Tag no longer allowed you to promote your website, and now there is a new Places format? I think not. Google wants money!”

Silver “Google Maps Hates Small Businesses By Launching Local Folksonomy Descriptive Terms”

Yelp ” Google told us ” Our way or the highway”

Read this post on how small businesses are frustrated with Google’s new local update.

And here is another example of how small businesses think of the new Google Local. It shows how much of frustration small businesses have with the new Google service.

“Having tried to upload my lovely business on Google places, I was tearing my hair out in frustration as the seismic idiocy of Google in producing such a complex, complicated, completely impossible system which would drive anyone including Mr. ultimately-Zen-calm  round the I-twist. I received my postcard, logged on to the totally unintuitive “local/add” Google places website and received a message from the planet zog which said, bluntly “There is no data for your request”on my errr “dashboard” (apple speak). Having no idea what this meant, and watching in dismay as my  competitors have happily logged their businesses on places, I tried to contact Google for help. Woooow ho ho, back up tonto and don’t go there. Clearly Google are so customer-loving and hugging that they have no facility in England or in Holland to receive a telephone call, or an email.

Earth to Google… Come in Google. Who are these people? Really, I’d like to know, who are they?

Luckily, I have a snuffle around the web (wasting valuable earning time) and found your wonderful google translation which told me that “there is no data…zogg…dubble….woogla…request” means that they haven’t uploaded the details I put in yet. Ohhh. (though quite why this  takes 6 weeks  - six!! and relies on pigeon postcards to send me cyber pin numbers, baffles me , if possible, even further).

Anyway, on my e-wanderings I met many other perfectly sensible people who have considerably less hair (and nerves) than they once did as a result of crossing paths with Google Places -How this bunch of prepubescent techno-nerds ended up with a reputation for leading edge business practice is, well, its beyond me. But thanks to you. At least I know now to wait a few days, pity the poor so and sos who have bigger problems, Google represents hells on waiting room for common sense folk of the planet”

Google’s final layout shows local businesses on the first ¾ of the page and left the bottom ¼ of the page for organic search results, as demonstrated below.

Panda/Farmer Update

Google did not stop competing with IYPs on Google Local only, but also started to block them from organic search with the newly released Panda/Farmer update.

Google also penalized most of the business directories where they have dramatically dropped in ranking.

According to Sistrix report:

Business directories that lost most of their organic traffic

Superpages  -68%

mahalo.com  -77%

hotfrog.com.uk -87%

manta.com -64%

Sites such as merchantcircle have dropped 75%.

Below is a quick example of their traffic drop

Another example of the number of keywords drop

kudzu.com

Drop in search traffic

Drop in the number of keywords

Is Google Succeeding In Gaining Market Share From IYPs?

Below is the results of a survey taken to find out where internet users are going to look for businesses.



As it seems, Google is the number one destination for internet users to find their business online.

What can small business do to survive Google Place search?

• Claim a Google Local Place Account for your business.
• Provide as much information as possible about your business on your Google Local Place Account.
• Make sure to include your local address and phone number on each and every page of your website.
• Use a local telephone number instead of an 800 number.
• Acquire a bunch of reviews to your Google Place listing.
• Find out where your competitors are gaining local references by looking at their Local Place Account and examining all websites listed under, “More About This Place.”
• Generate user map content where your business is mentioned. Hard data isn’t available to support this, but it has been said that this could help your local rankings.
• Still optimize for normal Google Results. (I have seen instances where clients that were not being listed in the old 7 pack results, but were number 1 organically, got a major boost to number one with the new layout.)
• Use Google Boost
• Make sure your address and phone number is consistent across the Internet.  If you submit your business to local directories, make sure you have the same phone number and address on all local directories.

What can IYPs do to survive Google Place Search?

• Have a niche that no one else has, such as unique information about the business or a great review.
• Excellent user experience including photos and videos.
• Focus on small neighborhoods within each city.
• Reach out to local businesses and provide them with widgets that feed them reviews on their own site.
• Be the link between the businesses and the users, where businesses can communicate with their angry customers and accommodate them.

With all these changes, I am not sure if you can completely win the competition with Google but I think it will help IYPs gain more traffic.

All of the above has led the FTC to file an antitrust investigation on Google’s business practice.

As a first reaction to Google, I see that Google Local has changed  some of the searches in order to show more organic results today, as shown below.

I look forward to more and more changes from Google in order to help local businesses and IYPs to gain back their previous market share in the local search space.

If you look at our orange county SEO company page, you will find a graph from February 2010 that shows the market share of  the 3 major search engines back then. With Google owning 65% of the market share, while yahoo owned 14 % and bing around 13%.  In June,  according to Hitwise,  Google gained an extra 7% of the market share to become 72% of the search engine market share.   And finally this month, and for the first time Google lost 1% of the market share to Bing. Many may say that this is a sign of the rise of a new search engine, especially now that yahoo will start using the bing engine starting next month. What do you think? Do you think that bing will take over Google in the near future? I would really like to hear your opinions.

If you have an ecommerce site online then you must optimize it. There is no other way around it.If you have an ecommerce site online then you must optimize it. There is no other way around it.If your site is not optimized then you will not be able to sell your products and very soon you will be out of business. I will talk about a couple of things that will help you optimize your ecommerce.It all starts with development, so if you live in San Diego and hired a web development company, here are some of the things that you should ask them to do.Basically, do not have a flat architecture site. Allow for multiple categories and subcategories so you can target different key phrases on different pages.    For example if you have an online clothing store, you should have a category called men clothes and under that you should have sub categories such as pants, shirts, ETC. this will allow you to target these keyword separately instead of trying to target all of them on the same page.So for the black jeans page the URL should be www.yoursite.com/men-clothes/pants/black-jeans.htmlIn my next post I will try to give a couple of more hints such as how to get over the duplicate content problem, canonicalization , using Java script # function so look out for my next blog on how to optimize your ecommerce site.

If you are a web development company, you must consider trying scrum.
Scrum belongs to the family of Agile methodologies. I am not going to talk about how scrum starts and who started it, but I will talk more about what is Scrum and where to go to learn more about it. Scrum is a PM methodology that is being widely used by many major companies such as Google, yahoo, Nokia, and most of the major Japanese gaming companies.

Scrum is a completely different way from waterfall in terms of managing your project. In scrum every thing is a time box.

Here is how it works.

1) Backlog

The Back log is a complete list of all the functionalities needed for the project.

It starts with a meeting with the product owner and the rest of your team to identify the functionalities that needs to be executed (backlog) for the project.

As you’ve already noticed, there is no functional spec or any kind of paper work that does not add value to the project owner. The team members are all there because they are going to be self managed from the start. They will create the backlog with the product owner.

After the backlog is created , the Scrum master (aka the project manager) needs to ask the product owner about the most important functionalities that he/she would like to see implemented first. These functionalities will be taken to the top of the backlog. The team members will then identify the amount of functionalities that can be completed in three months. Yes, the team members are the ones who are going to decide that, because no one can measure the work load and the amount it takes better than the people that are going to do the actual work.

2) Sprints

The first three months the work load will be divided into sprints. Each sprint is like a two week to a one month time box. At the end of each sprint, there needs to be some completed functionalities. Completed means documented, tested , checked in CVS or SVN, and it is on the server and could even be shippable. After completing all the sprints for the first 3 month Phase, there will be a meeting with the product owner to show him/her the progress and present a demo of what the functionalities look like.

3 ) Daily Scrum meeting

After getting your first sprint in place, the team members will sit together to divide the work into very small tasks. Each task will be between 4 to 16 hours. The team will decide on the length of time needed, and the due date for each task.

There will be a daily meeting for all the team members involved in the project. This meeting will take about 10 to 15 min depending on the size of the team. There will be 3 questions in that meeting.

1) what did each team member accomplish the previous day

2) what each team member will accomplish today

3) what are the red flags.

If one of the team members is not completed with his/her tasks, the Scrum master should stop the meeting and ask to meet again in an hour when every one is done with their tasks. Done means documented, tested , checked in.

The product owner or the client can be in that meeting every day if he or she chooses to. They can be there in person or on the phone.

This is a complete transparency between the different individuals on the project.

4 ) Retrospective

At the end of each phase, there is the retrospective meeting. In that meeting, the team members will discuss what went right and what went wrong. How can they improve the next sprint and how can they learn from their mistakes in the first phase.

Whatever could not be completed or whatever needs to change from the first phase can be added to the first sprint in the second phase.

5) Management

There are three managers in Scrum

a) the product Owner

b) the scrum master aka the project manager

c) the team members

6) Burn down chart

the burn down chart is a chart between the workload or the tasks of each phase in the y-axes and the time that needs to complete on the x-axes. this will show the team members the velocity and the speed of the work flow, it will also give a clear presentation of weather or not the project can be completed on time.

7) Iteration

Scrum is an iterative methodology. Unlike water fall, you do not have to wait for the design to start the development. All aspects of the project will be worked on at the same time and the team members will be working on it for the whole life cycle of the project.

Here is a graphical representation of the iteration

A great book to read on Scrum is Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber.

Ken is one of the founders of Scrum.

In my next blog I will talk about other Agile methodologies that go hand in hand with Scrum Such as TDD and XP.

I use agile methodology. Scrum is a good methodology to use with a non productive team member.

In Scrum, the work load is divided into small tasks. Each task is between 4 to 16 hours. Each task will have a due date.
The task hours, division and due date are given by the resource itself . This will create a sense of ownership and accountability for each team member since they are the ones who committed o do the work in a given time and date. There is a 10 to 15 min. daily scrum meeting where the PM meets with the team members to discuss 3 questions.
1) what have we accomplished yesterday
2) what are we going to accomplish today
3) what are the red flags or concerns.

In the daily scrum, Non-productive team members not only fail themselves but they also fail the other team members’ hard work. it is very difficult for any one person to keep failing the rest of the team every day in the scrum meeting.

the red flag question is mentioned to make sure that there is no obstacle to carry out the assigned work.

When one of the team members is not done with the workload from the previous date, the PM stops the scrum and asks to meet again in a couple of hours when all the work is completely done by each and every member.

IF the non-productive team member fails the rest of the team more than once, the PM needs to sit with that team member to find out what the problem is and how he can resolve it. If the problem lies in the person’s skills, then the PM needs to find the best work for this resource. Maybe the work tasks are not best suited and other tasks could be more suited to this person.

In final stages and after trying all different methods to help the team member, if all of the above does not work then the PM should ask to change that resource from the team.

Keep in mind that each team member has a different motivation angle, personality and circumstances and you should treat each individual member accordingly.

Does my meta description heavily effect my ranking? This is a question that I get asked all the time, and the answer is absolutely not. Meta description does not help you a bet in Google ranking, but if this is the case, why would anyone write meta description? There are many reasons why you should write meta description. The most important reason to write it is that it really helps your click rate. when users find your site on Google, they first read your meta description to decided if your site is the one they are looking for. If the meta description is not clear they will click on another site. The second thing is that if you do not write meta description, Google will write it for you. Google will choose some random content on your site to display it. These random content will be based on the users search and it might change from one search term to another.

Some asked me that they do not see the meta description that they wrote, instead they see different text on the search engine when it comes to some search terms. this is true, what happen is that google first read your meta description. If your description does not include the keywords the user is looking for, Google will choose some text on your site that does include the search terms and displays that instead. what you need to do in order to avoid such a thing is to change your meta description in order to catch most keywords needed to show your description on major search engine.

About a couple of weeks ago, Google increased the size of the title tags to 70 characters instead of the original 65 characters. This will allow you to add an extra word to your title tags and will help your site to target an extra keyword.

Title tags is on of the important factors in ranking your site. Google uses over 200 factors to rank your site.

I have tried increasing my title tags to 70 characters and it works. I heard some people saying that it even goes beyond 70 characters and that it even rotates to the second line but I have not confirmed that yet.