Professional SEO Specialist - janet bartoli roussos

I always enjoy the NYC SES conferences. I was only able to get to the conference just one day this year. I jumped into the conversion track yesterday for the converting visitors into buyers. I especially liked what Mike Moran of IBM had to say - you can read all the highlights of his talk in the searchengineland notes.

One of the many good points, which is pretty basic, but often overlooked is looking at your site every day, test and re-test. If something just does not work, change it and don’t wait until the next re-design, which happens way too often with many clients I see. Know how many of your visitors are converting into actual buyers. What are your visitors doing? Here’s a typical retail type site: Learn > Shop > Buy > Get > Use > and back to learn again, because they will need to upgrade their memory or battery or whatever.

I have some book recommendations too: Avinash’s Web Analytics 1 hour per day (I am going to read and review this later on for you) and Mike Moran’s “Do it Wrong Quickly” mikemoran.com.

Of course it’s all about the test, test and test some more!

Ok, I know there are people out there who believe in MSN, not sure why, but they are in the top 3 of those search engines we report results on. So why don’t they read a 301 or accept an XML sitemap yet? I just wish they would really try harder to be a little more - or hell just buy Yahoo already, let’s change up the playing field somehow.

A 301 redirect typically tells a search engine that page A (old URL) moved permanently to page B (a new URL). A search engine will see that 301 status code and log that the new URL is in a new location. Over time, a search engine would replace the original URL with the new URL in the search results, as well as transfer all or most of the links and signals associated with the original URL to the new URL. Google is fast with this, Yahoo picks up on this and although Ask.com is slow, they eventually get it as well. So, what up with MSN you ask? Great question.

MSN’s answer is they simply can not handle a 301 redirect at this time. Sorry folks!

This is one of the reasons why I personally like Google so much more than the others. It is not because of its many gadgets or its huge popularity, or that they are becoming the monolith that Microsoft has become. Very simply I appreciate a big huge company like Google with scruples - yes, a ton of money garnered from the society with which we live, doing smart things i.e. Google.org.

This past week Google announced that its charity organization (Google.org) will be working on five different initiatives to “combat climate change, global poverty and emerging threats such as pandemic disease.” While the news is being received well by many individuals who are glad that Google is stepping it up a notch, others are obviously skeptical of the approach. Take it for what it is, a genuine human gesture.

In this ever changing political season, when you hear things about big corporations and their fat cat CEOs making millions and billions, its really refreshing to see a large corporation like Google actually get it and with any luck if we learn something good from this, all the better.

This is really a blessing of humanity that arch rivals Microsoft and Google do have a same goal - to help mankind.

Thanks Google!