Why Use Timekapsule?

The idea for Timekapsule came to one evening as I was watching the closing scene from the Gangs of NY. It showed a time lapse scene of 18th century grave stones being over taken by weeds and wearing away with as the NY skyline rose in the background to present day.

I asked myself, when I finally 'buy the farm' and 50, 60 , 70 years have passed it would be nice for my kin-folks and friends to know something more personal about me.

What music did I like?
What were my hobbies?
My favorite food, favorite books and movies?
Did I own any pets, or did I even like animals?

Let’s face it, not many of us are going to get around to writing an auto-biography. It’s all these little things that make us truly unique. It’s not our jobs, or accomplishments or the money we make that defines us.

Maybe my grand-kids will be able to find my Timekapsule and finally figure out why they possess a special talent for music or art. ( And hopefully after reading my Timekapsule they will figure out it that the talent might have came from me!)

Timekapsule is your final shout out. It’s Facebook for the dead.

Here’s how it works.
You sign-up and create a profile.
Timekapsule is completely secure.

Once you signup you can create as many Timekapsules as you want.

You can create a locked Timekapsule that sends email to any one you want letting them know you have created a Timekapsule, but it’s not mandatory.

It you create an alert, a notification will be sent to these people (and only these people) letting them know your Timekapsule has opened.

You can also create a FREE open Timekapsule that is open for anyone to see who is also a Timekapsule member.

So there you have. With Timekapsule, you create it, lock it and leave it.

in reference to: TIMEKAPSULE | extending one moment in time (view on Google Sidewiki)

Matt Cutts How to Video

Matt Cutts the Google Guy, who I call the 'man behind the curtain' at the gates Google posts informative videos for everything web! You can find Matt's videos on You Tube, Google Video and many other places.

in reference to: Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO (view on Google Sidewiki)

The Good, the Bad and the Rude

Social interaction is a wonderful thing, but there are too many people who forget how to be polite.

Maybe Google can create an API to detect rude, nasty and inflammatory speech that will serve-up a quick warning before the user clicks 'submit'.

in reference to: Google (view on Google Sidewiki)

When Big Brands Discover Social Media Marketing

Has anyone in your company asked you this lately, or at all? Chances are if you haven’t heard this question from a VP yet, you will soon। It’s what everyone is trying to figure out - not if we should be using social media, but how we should be using it. In this column, I’m going to look at a few ways that Yahoo!, and others, are using social media and how it’s evolving from a big-brand perspective.

But first, a bit of perspective
Why is it that SEOs typically end up being the ones in their respective companies who are responsible for social media? On the surface, the two activities have little in common। SEO can be very technical in nature, both in strategy and in practice, while social media looks a lot more a like a public relations campaign.

But just to reset, when sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, even Digg started to become popular, SEOs could readily see the potential for promoting their own sites। Social media in the beginning was a double-whammy: not only could SEOs get bloggers and other authorities to link to their sites, providing link relevance, but they also got the incremental traffic coming from users following those links. The link-building aspect has since been downplayed with the advent of nofollow tags, but the traffic source is very real and very powerful if you can get links put in the right places.

So now that social media is becoming much more mainstream (as has SEO), how does a big brand use social media to its full potential? As well, who in the organization should own social media marketing? When I look around at how we and other big brands are using social media, it’s clear that social media’s role has yet to be fully defined। Let’s look at a few examples and we’ll see.

Survey the landscape
Try this if you haven’t already: go to Facebook and search for your favorite big brand, be it online or offline। Where is the company’s official facebook page? The fan page? Specific product pages? Hard to tell, isn’t it? This is one of the challenges with the social media landscape. As a brand loyalist, do I really want to sift through all those entries so I can find the group that speaks to me? Try the same thing on Twitter - these spaces are already so crowded it’s hard to find the signal through all the noise.

If these networks are going to be viable for commercial use, and one could argue that they will have to be in order to survive, social networks will need to find some way to stratify the landscape, to draw lines between the commercial and the non-commercial, without alienating the user base। But enough of that, let’s look at some of the ways that big brands are trying to use social media to their advantage.

Customer support
Some companies are starting to leverage social media as a form of enhanced customer support। The reason is that it enables brands to have a dialogue with their customers in a new way. I saw a presentation recently about how a company was using Twitter to communicate with its customers in conjunction with their Superbowl ad. Other companies are using similar platforms to field support questions, akin to an 800-number or web chat. This works to a degree, but when you look at the volume of inquiries coming through say, twitter, with incoming emails and phone calls it hardly looks like a relevant channel at this point.

Community marketing
Many companies now have their own Facebook group that customers can join. This method of community marketing shows a great deal of potential (assuming customers can find the right page - see above). The additional challenge here is that companies largely have not figured out how to use this to their advantage.
For example, I joined the Facebook group of one of my favorite wineries in Sonoma, but in fact, there’s very little that happens there। The winery isn’t posting much in the way of notices, promotional or otherwise, and the customers, although you would think they would be posting about their favorite wines and discussing such topics, rarely do anything of the sort। I think the lesson here is that it’s not enough to simply put up a page; as a marketer you need to first generate a critical mass.
Naturally, if you’re a winery in Sonoma, you will need to work much harder at this than if you’re a top Internet site। Once critical mass is there, brands can offer their social communities first access to promotions, product previews, exclusive content, anything to allow this community to deepen engagement with your brand.

Protecting your brand
One of the things that social media does for big brands is to magnify consumer opinions, both positive and negative। This can be scary for brand owners who have grown accustomed to controlling their brand image and messaging. The notion that one dissatisfied customer can post a bad review on Yelp and dominate the image of the brand online has some marketers and business owners in a cold sweat late at night. Relax. Fight fire with fire. The best thing a brand owner can do is to leverage his own community and ask them to write their own reviews using the same channels. The above mentioned winery did a great job of this, posting a link on their Facebook page, inviting members to go to Yelp and write reviews.

Let’s be careful out there
One thing businesses should be aware of is that social media can be a double-edged sword। I was talking to a friend on the train today who revealed how he used Twitter as a competitive intelligence and sales tool. He was monitoring tweets from and about his competitors and could tell who his competitor was selling to.

From that point, a well-placed sales call is all it takes to get a meeting with the right party to close a deal। Big brands don’t need to fear this particular tactic so much, but the lesson remains: assume that whatever you post in social media will be read by everyone, and use this as a filter when crafting your social media मेस्सगिंग.

What’s ahead?
Despite the staggering numbers associated with the rise of social media, I don’t think we quite know what to do with it yet। Sure, we like it when celebrities tweet, but I think we will all agree that we don’t care if my cousin Vinny just ate a really good steak. We may be interested in Facebook updates from some of our friends, but the sheer volume of posts makes it almost impossible to find anything useful or interesting.

I think the people who are really going to capitalize on the medium will be the ones who find the niches where this medium really excels and build products that live in these niches। I have some friends, for example, who are looking at this space closely, and have figured out a really slick way to create deep and meaningful dialogue among groups of people। The beauty is that this happens in an anonymous mobile environment where people interact freely and in real-time, reducing the inevitable clutter and noise that come with existing social networks. I could go on and on about this - you’ll just have to follow my tweets if you want to know more.

David Roth is Director of Search Engine Marketing for Yahoo!, Inc.. The Industrial Strength column appears Mondays at Search Engine Land.

Local Business Marketing Tip: Turn Economic Lemons Into Sales Lemonade For The Holidays

The chain-reaction of foreclosures, mortgage company failures, banking sector woes, and see-sawing stock market are making for a very scary-looking retail season here in the fourth quarter. The U.S. Department of Commerce recently said that business sales have dropped the largest amount in two years, further fueling speculation that the holiday shopping season might not be so rosy this year.

However, all is not dark, and the nervousness that consumers are feeling right now may be tapped to effectively help improve one’s business right now and for the long-term. I’ve got a marketing tactic that can help with search engine optimization while simultaneously bumping up sales and even store visits for local brick-and-mortars. Read on!

My secret local search engine optimization tip du jour is exquisitely simple: coupons!
It’s unsurprising that consumers are searching for coupons more than ever, since they feel the need to cut back on expenses. Google Trends is showing a really sharp increase in searches for [coupons] as we approach the end of this year.

The potential for tapping into this consumer hyper-interest is remarkably clear!

Local businesses should provide a special coupon page on their websites for each of their local outlets. The page should be accessible to search engine spiders, and it should clearly state what the coupon is for, using all the classic SEO signals. You should particularly frame the title of that page with keyword-rich, targeted text. For example, something like:

“Blue Widgets in Anytown, State Coupon - Blue Widgets Discount”

People are going to more effort right now to research deals, discounts, rebates and coupons before they make purchases, so if your business site has content of that sort, you may be able to achieve additional sales.

Even better, the coupon content can be a good magnet for obtaining external links, so having coupon and other discount pages can help with your search engine optimization. Getting good quality links from other sites helps to increase your PageRank and will therefor help improve your pages’ rankings in all search engines.

There are a number of coupon directories sites out there which love to list deals and may link to you. While some of these may only list coupons if you pay them as an advertiser, there are sites out there which may list your coupons for free. Consumer blogs seem to be springing up all over, focusing on reporting best prices and discounts — some of these are even local city or regional blogs, specializing in particular geographic areas. If you put up a coupon page, do some searches in regular web search and blog search to find sites which might list your coupon and link to you, and report your coupon to them.

Don’t be afraid to ask various organizations and blogs which report on deals to link to you. You could even research local clubs and associations which post their newsletters on-line, and you could offer their members a special coupon with a link to a specific info page on your site, outlining the deal.

Even advertising on some of the coupon directories could be useful to you, depending on what your product or service is, although some coupon directories are not accepting further partners at the moment.

Additional coupon optimization tips:

Link to the coupon page from your homepage. Promote it on your homepage, even — display a small thumbnail of the coupon, and have linked text below that reiterates the coupon’s title.

Make the coupon “meaty”! There’s nothing more irritating than coupons for the stuff that no one buys, or coupons that are so insipid that they only bring your price down to what everyone can get at the corner discount store.

It’s hard to tell whether a blog is essentially a “sham blog” made up of all paid article content. So, some blogs which appear to be on the level may come back asking you for money in return for posting your coupon information. Pay-for-blog posts of this sort can be frowned upon by search engines, particularly if they’re not clearly labeled as sponsorships. I’d recommend avoiding these, since the search engines may have discounted the worth of their links anyway, and I think they typically have fewer subscribers/readers.

Always include expiration dates in your online coupons. Just to keep them live through this holiday season, you could have them expire on January 1. Or, have them expire more frequently if you’re planning to put up new promotions — churning your promotions could result in more links.

Ask people to print and bring in the coupon — this will let you get an idea of just how effective this promotion is.

Provide links to the top most popular items you might sell on your site, below the coupon information. The coupon might draw people into your site, but don’t waste the opportunity to show them a few other things they might also buy. Limit to only two or three items, though!

Ask people to rate your business or your product at one of the big ratings sites out there, such as internet yellow pages, in order for them to qualify for the coupon. Positive ratings can help your site to rank in local and regular web search! State outright that the review doesn’t have to be positive, but that you’d appreciate honest feedback in order to represent your business well and to obtain input in how to make improvements. You could ask them to write on the coupon the name of the site where they reviewed your business in order to validate the coupon. It’s not a good idea to reward people for only good ratings, or the host sites might take a dim view of the promotion — but, incenting people to give objective ratings should be acceptable. Also do not require that they write their usernames on the coupons.

Always include your URL on print advertising, including printed coupons.

To further engage holiday sentiment, offer to make a donation to a well-known charity for each coupon purchase, and outline that deal on the coupon webpage as well — and invite people to email the page link to others they know. Consumers will be more supportive of businesses which are supportive of their communities, and this can also help to attract more links as people report on the deal. When doing charitable tie-ins of this sort, it’s also worthwhile to coordinate an optimized press release announcing the program and linking back to the coupon page.

Offer a “serial coupon”, such as if the consumer makes purchases on three successive visits, they qualify for increased savings each time. This could really pump things into overdrive!

Don’t make the fine print of the coupon so extensive that no one can comprehend the exclusions.

People know what “bait and switch” is, and they really hate it. Avoid anything close to that such as luring people in by ambiguous language and stuff. Do this wrong and you can turn people off and lose potential longterm customers.

Be darn sure you have enough product for everyone who might bring the coupon by your store!

There’s nothing worse than getting excited by a coupon only to find the store ran out. The economic crunch has caused many businesses to keep much smaller inventories, but try to be prepared to rapidly reorder product if your coupon promotion appears to be working.

Using a good coupon strategy this season can allow you to take advantage of the hot consumer interest in discounts. Use this opportunity to get some great inbound links for your longterm SEO benefit, while also pumping up your short-term sales.

Chris “Silver” Smith is a Search Marketing Consultant and writes for the Locals Only column at Search Engine Land.

Google Answers Your Local Questions

Oct 6, 2008 at 1:48pm Eastern by Greg Sterling

In an earlier post, I solicited questions for Google about local search. My intention had been to present them at the What’s New in Local Search panel at SMX East this morning. But I didn’t get my act together to distribute them at the session. Google’s Eric Stein, who was on the panel, coordinated the response to the questions.

Here are the unedited, verbatim questions and answers:

Q: Are there any techniques for tracking clickthroughs from the 10-pack, 3-pack, or authoritative OneBox in Google Analytics (or other tracking programs)? The current URL strings only seem to show them as organic clickthroughs.

Google:: Local Universal results are organic results and there is no plan to separate them.

Q: It is considered a best practice in all of Google’s other properties (Adwords, Organic Results, News, Blogs, Images) to include keywords in titles. Why does Google consider local results to be an outlier in this ecosystem? Does Google have plans to stop bolding keyword matches in Local Business Titles? If not, why not, as there have been plenty of studies that show that a keyword match dramatically increases clickthrough rate?

Google:: On Google Maps, our mission is to show users the proper names and addresses of physical businesses. The Business Title is not the title of a website - it is the title of the actual business. Adding keywords to this field moves away from giving users the proper representation of the businesses they see on the map.
We have no plan to stop bolding keyword matches in titles. Bolding matches in titles and categories for example helps the user understand why we’re showing the result.

Q:: Can you tell us about authoritative sources in Google local? If a user makes a comment or requests a change, vs. a business owner, vs. a competitor, vs. a validated business owner, vs. a third party submission site (yellow pages, Yelp), whose content takes precedence? For us that is the biggest problem because it appears that Google takes that information and somehow creates a listing…not using the business owners listing.

Google:: A business owner’s verified listing trumps all other sources in terms of fields displayed. LBC-verified listing is the most authoritative source. The least authoritative is a single reference on an unverified web page. Everything else is in between those two ends of the spectrum. In terms of creating the listing, we distinguish between the “listing” and the “cluster.” We display the “cluster” which is composed of the union of one or more listings. When the fields in a listing overlap, the listing with the highest authoritativeness trumps the others; but it doesn’t block additional fields (like cuisine, parking, etc.) from being associated with the cluster.

Q:: Are you penalized for submitting your data on a weekly basis? Or should you let your data mature?

Google:: No; however if you’re making changes to your listing that prevent us from recognizing that it’s the same business as the one referenced by other sources in the cluster, then there is a risk that your listing becomes “orphaned” from the cluster and thereby loses the associated content and any positive ranking from that content.

Q:: How do you handle mergers? We purchase/manage many facilities and need to change their name and contact info. But the third party sources make changing the name almost impossible. We were told by one third party submission company that we had to pay them to change the company name and if we stopped paying the monthly fee they would switch back all our data to the old inaccurate data. In the end if we don’t pay the information is not correct and the users get less relevant results.

Google:: You should claim the old listing in Local Business Center, by finding the listing on Maps, clicking More Info, Edit, then Claim Your Business. Then, once you’ve claimed the business, update the name and contact info.
If you can verify neither the old/acquired business’s address nor phone number, then you should create a new listing with the new info, again using LBC. If the old listing continues to show alongside your new one and you can’t claim/verify it, you can click More Info, then Edit, then Remove Place to flag the old listing for deletion.

Q:: Why does the 1-800 number take precedence over the local number even if the local number is listed as the primary number?

Google:: This shouldn’t happen. There is no precedent for an 800 vs. non-800 number. The choice is determined by the sources of the data.

Q:: Do the old category listings have a higher value than the newer user generated categories?

Google:: All categories, including one you create in the LBC or if you edit a listing, get indexed and are searchable. A brand new user generated category may not have as many known synonyms as an existing category. Also, to clarify, the categories in the LBC are not user-generated categories - they are simply an improved set of suggested categories.

Q:: Does Google have any plans for a single corporate validation instead of a site validation? For us we have almost 700 locations and to get all of them validated on Google is a lot of work. On a side note we have done this twice in the last year.

Google:: We don’t have a definitive answer to this question. Rather, we’d like this to be a discussion topic. We would like to hear from business owners what inspired this question and what challenges they’re facing with their local listings.

Q:: How does Google plan on enforcing local spam?

Google: We started by documenting some quality guidelines, which you can find in the LBC help center. Our plan is to identify listings that don’t meet these guidelines and to remove them.
Google has a long history of dealing with spammers - on web search, as well as in Gmail and some other Google products. The Maps team is working closely with these teams to identify what methods work best for Google Maps, and we are even inventing some new spam fighting methods that attack the unique types of spam that plague Maps. There will always be some spam out there, but very recently we’ve made some big strides in catching and blocking spammers. That’s just the beginning.

Q:: How do some listings have more than four phone numbers?

Google:: We use the best data we get from multiple sources. Data provided by the business owner will show at the top of the list.

Q:: If I create an LBC entry for my business, why does other information that I did not provide also show up?

Google:: When we get data from multiple sources, we want to show the best data we get. The business owner’s data will show first, and for fields where we show only one piece of data, the business owner’s data will trump other data.

Q:: Is Google still using the Base feed?

Google:: Yes. LBC bulk upload uses Base. There was an older Base feed that does still submit data to Local, but it is not the preferred method.

Q:: When will Europe receive the upgrades/updates to the Local Business Center as they were launched earlier this year in the US/Canada/etc. (or is this considered a future product?)

Google:: The most up-to-date version of LBC has been launched in all European countries where LBC is available: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

Q:: When will we be able to distinguish local traffic from the 1box/3pack/10pack in our Google Analytics. Now it still accounts as “organic” and unless you are using parameters there is no way to tell if the path was taken from a universal search result Onebox. (Asking, because the LBC still provides very poor and basic information: views/impressions).

Google:: Local Universal results are organic results and there is no plan to separate them.

Q:: What would you say to the many florists whose listings were hijacked in mid September by affiliate mapspamers?

Google:: We won’t always be ahead of the spammers - that’s a tough race to run. But we wil be increasingly effective at putting an end to situations like the one you mentioned as soon as they pop up. And we don’t just blacklist the bad guys - we put systems in place to block the next guy who tries to do what the last guy did, so we’re making it increasingly hard for spammers to hurt the legitimate business owners.

Q:: What % of US businesses have claimed their record in the Local Business Center?

Google:: We don’t have a number we can release, in large part because we don’t have a definitive answer to how many local businesses exist in the US.

Q:: Why are the results of the 10 Pack sometimes different than the results from Maps?

Google:: Sometimes the data and scoring differ slightly on Google.com and on Google Maps.

Q:: When the stars were removed from the Local 10 Pack in August did you see much change in user behavior? Did it generate more visits to Maps from the main results page?

Google:: The stars were removed as part of the overall redesign that resulted in the current 10 listings view (from the prior 3 listings), so we don’t have any data about whether the stars specifically influence click through rates. The star ratings are still visible once you click through to Maps.

Q:: Should businesses take a proactive role of encouraging their customers to write reviews or should they take a more passive, wait until they are reviewed policy?

Google:: That’s a personal style decision for the business owner. As long as the reviews are legitimate and useful, it doesn’t matter how you gather them.

Q:: What is your opinion to the ethical questions surrounding a business incenting customers in some way to write a review? What would you see as best practice in this area?

Google:: We don’t have a stance on this.

___
Google’s Eric Stein also pointed people during the session to a relatively new site within Google: submit your content, which has guidelines and links for a range of content types including local.

Raise Your Local Business Listing Rank in Google LOCAL

It appears Google has recently changed its algorithm for Local Business Listings by only giving the top spots to those feeding the search engine’s ever increasing need for content. Keep reading to learn what are Google Local Business Listings, what’s changed recently, as well as how to optimize so your local business is on top of the map.

Google Local Business Listings are different than organic or pay-per-click listings. They typically only show up when the user types a service oriented business followed by the city for their search. A large map from Google Maps appears alongside up to ten URLs with a phone number by each. If you need more than ten listings you can click in “More Results from ‘Insert City’ “ and you’ll be taken to a map with alphabetically lettered red pegs for each register business on Google Maps.

It seems over the last year being listed on Google Maps and/or Google’s Local Business Listings is becoming even more important since they are being displayed more often in search with up to ten listings before organic listings even start.

Changes in Google Local Business Listings’ AlgorithmOne client of ours was listed and is still listed under a Local Business Listing for their service, but it seems the listing fell in a short period of time; they went from #2 to #44 out of 3,656. Since many local business owners are seeing the value in these listings and Google makes the submission process much easier to understand than the general ins and outs of SEO, competition is on the rise.

With this recent surprise in dropping, I have decided Google Local Business Listings has its own algorithm. After noticing what the patterns were and what the top listings did, I made some adjustments using the modeling method. Soon after I noticed a huge rise in ranking.

Based on researching and observation, the pattern that presents itself for those that are high on the listings is they have:

1. Photos - They only recently they allowed this. Add as many photos as you can and a company logo.

2. Multiple Reviews - It’s important that these be from real customers. You can not have too many. Don’t fake them either, it’s easy to see. Just as with Amazon, people trust products with lots reviews that have kept above three stars.

3. Use Keywords in Company Description - They offer an area where the business representative can describe what the company offers.

4. Use Keyword s in Company Name - Don’t be deceptive by changing your company name, but if your keywords are in the extended business name or LLC, make sure this is the name in which you register.

5. Add a Coupon – Google allows printable coupons to be added by your listing.
Add these elements to your Google Local Business Listing and you are sure to be in the top ten.

6. Create links to the listing – Add a link from your homepage to the listing and encourage current customers or website visitors to review your company.

7. Add Videos- If your company already has vides on YouTube you can place them right there on the page.

Authored by Neil on Thu, 08/07/2008 - 22:07.
in Google Local Search Business Listings

Small Business Marketing Success Story

Being small is hard enough. But being small and in retail? That's like having two strikes against you before the game even begins. From setting up relationships with banks, to finding trustworthy suppliers, to building a loyal customer base, being a small retailer is a challenge many businesses can't meet. And if you're an online-only small retailer? Well, that adds a whole new set of pros and cons into the mix.

K9cuisine.com is one such business that's so far been able to meet all the challenges of being a small, internet-only retailer. The nine-employee company sells premium pet foods and accessories from a warehouse in the remote town of Paris, Illinois -- about 100 miles west of Indianapolis and 200 miles south of Chicago. Owner Anthony Holloway launched the company in May, 2007, because he was frustrated with trying to find quality dog food locally and online.

After opening K9cuisine.com, he learned there were a lot of other pet owners sharing his frustrations. "Our business took off quickly and has grown at the rate of 50% each month for the last year," Anthony says. The web site, he says, currently gets close to 5,000 unique visitors per day, and has generated about $2.5 million in sales in the last 12 months.

K9cuisine.com is using customer ratings and reviews to add credibility to its online store; it's not unusual to see dozens of ratings on the store's products, and one brand of dog food has an astonishing 300-plus ratings. They also talk about all-things-canine on the K9 Chronicles blog, which includes a helpful section called Ask the Experts where readers can get free tips and advice from pet care experts.

They've also started experimenting with a Facebook page. Put it all together, and you have an interesting small business that offers plenty of lessons for other small, online retailers.
As with the previous small business success stories I've featured, I have no relationship with Anthony Holloway (or anyone at K9cuisine.com) and have never met him. Here's our interview.

Matt McGee: How does a small retailer compete today against the Big Box stores and the Amazon.coms?

Anthony Holloway: Customer service, customer service, customer service! Know your customers, provide for their needs, maintain a dialogue with those customers, and continue to find ways to exceed their expectations. Box stores and many Amazon.coms have done very little to "nurture" their customers. They rely on price alone. That formula has worked to a certain extent, but there is a niche market out there [of people] who demand more from their buying experience. Those customers are our market.

In my experience working with small retail clients, it really takes a lot of upfront spending -- on inventory, storage, staffing, etc. Does that fit your experience? How did you get "over the hump," as they say?

I was lucky. I did not depend on the business for an income. Funding was not an issue. We were well funded but we started small. The initial goal was to solve my own problem of getting quality food for my dog. We started with a handful of super high quality core products. We did not have to stock a store full of product. We stocked one or two bags of each item and added items one at a time to the site as we went. In the beginning, we were buying by the bag, with a warehouse of less than 1000 square feet. We currently buy by the truckload and maintain a warehouse of 26,000 square feet.

In the beginning, our largest expense was web development. That was a challenge. But we had a specific model and had a good idea of what we wanted. We have a great development team. They can do virtually anything I ask with the site. We continue to add features and tweak the site to make it more user-friendly. With creative and skilled technicians, so much is possible. We are fortunate to have such a great team in place.

But by far our toughest hurdle was in establishing consistent supply of the highest quality products by gaining credibility with suppliers. There are literally millions of web sites that sell dog food. Not many are successful. Suppliers are very leary of online merchants. It takes time to establish positive vendor relationships which are key to securing consistent supplies of the highest quality, most sought after products. It took us awhile, but I am pleased with the strong relationships we have developed. In addition the suppliers are pursuing us. They now see us as legitimate.

You mentioned your web development team. Are they in-house, or did you hire a design/development company?

We outsourced the development. I have worked with this group for the last 10 years on various projects. We bid out the graphics.

What advice would you share with small business owners who are trying to hire a design team right now?

The most important thing is to have a clear idea of what you want the end product to be. The vision needs to be clear and you need to be able to articulate that to designers. The biggest mistakes I have ever made in development was when I started and tried to figure it out along the way. Communication is also critical. A good design team has to be able to communicate the pros, cons and alternatives.

My group never says something can not be done. They may scratch their heads and give me a cost but they never say it can not be done. They are also extremely good at articulating alternatives. I am very careful not to micro manage them or tell them how to do their jobs. I communicate a concept they bring it to life. You also have to work with people that you feel comfortable going back to them multiple times when things do not fit your idea of the concept.

Whether you're big or small, retail has its own set of challenges. One of them is content. I see a lot of customer reviews on your product pages. Are you getting those direct from your customers, or from a review provider?

We want to keep it real. We never pay for reviews. I would never risk the loss of credibility with customers by paying for reviews. All of the reviews are customer generated. This is one of the coolest parts of the site. Our customers are passionate about their dogs and cats. We survey new and existing customers about their purchases. These reviews are not moderated. Our customers are actually very eager to share their experience. I really believe in transparency and providing information that has long term meaning to our customers. If you fake it, you may get a sale but not a repeat customer.

What methods do you use to encourage customers to leave reviews?

Whenever a customer purchases something for the first time we survey them on the item. We try to keep it simple and quick.

How exactly do you do that? Do you wait a couple weeks so they've had time to feed their pet, and then send an email? Or some other method?

We survey them 20-30 days after the purchase. It is an email with a link to a survey. The survey asks the customer to rate the new item on a one-to-five star scale. There is also an opportunity to include comments. The system knows what items are newly purchased. If they have completed a survey for an item they will not be asked to complete another one for the same item. We are careful not to annoy or bother customers. The way we do it is very respectful of their time.

What's your policy on handling negative reviews?

In general we do not moderate the reviews. They are added automatically to the site when a customer reviews a product. Unless the comments are completely off-topic, we do not touch them. For example, we had someone complain about a damaged shipment or they have not tried the product yet -- because these comments are not relevant to the product itself, we would then remove this type of comment. However, if they say my dog peed on the food bowl after trying the food -- that comment would stay. I see this as a survival of the fittest. The best products win.

Are product reviews good for business? What's the impact on your sales from having customers review what you sell?

This is very difficult to measure on the site level. To be honest, I am not sure. I know there is a lot of data out there that suggests user created content is more credible. I do know it provides transparency and honesty, key values of K9Cuisine. We do have customers tell us they read the reviews and they appreciate them being there. While we have not heard from those who it may have turned away, I believe for the most part the reviews are beneficial.

You're also creating content via a blog that you launched a little over a year ago. What made you give that a try?

Our goal was to personalize the experience and convey the values of the company. I also did not want to clutter the store. Not that the blog is clutter but we try and keep the store focused on products, sales, and conversion. We have reached out to a number of experts that contribute training, nutrition, and general pet info. The blog is the space where we have fun. It really has a nice following. It is something I am really proud of.

Was it difficult when you were starting, in terms of figuring out what to write about, how often to post, and things like that?

The most difficult thing as we grow is finding the time. We try and make it a priority. We do not have a ridgid schedule on how often. Having multiple contributors helps.
We just experimented. We felt pretty comfortable taking risks in this space. You can see a growth or maturity to the blog. We started out way too serious. We wanted to provide great content and we did. The problem was it was boring.

Do you have a company blogging policy in place? If so, can you share some of the guidelines you have for your employee bloggers?

We do not have a set policy. There are broad guidelines. Again, I do not micro-manage creativity. We want to keep it fun, on-topic, and PG. I want my kids to be able to read the blog. We engage like-minded bloggers and experts on their blogs and sites.

Tell me about that "Ask the Experts" feature on your blog.

This was obtained as a result of our reaching out to like-minded professionals. They have recognized our offerings as an opportunity to make a positive difference. We share similar values and a common goal to provide healthy alternatives for pets and their owners. These are not local vets. They are professionals that are passionate about pets and helping people. Further, they do not always suggest items we sell and I do not always agree with them. They are independent to suggest whatever they want. I think that is one of the attractions to them.

How did you go about marketing the blog and getting the word out to customers, other bloggers, etc.?

I really do not see what we are doing as marketing. I am an accountant by training. Marketing has always been a mystery to me. We are just passionate about what we are doing and that passion is contagious. The vast majority of our growth has been word of mouth or more precisely electronic word of mouth. It has been customer driven.

We generally do not do much paid advertising. We have a small adwords budget. We have tried to get some conventional press but there has been very little interest in online dog food. We truly live our mission statement. Every day we try to meet or exceed our customers' expectations of value, service, and delivery. These are not just words on a business plan. It is a culture, a way of doing business, that is honest, transparent, and truly customer focused. Many of our customers recognize this and respond by telling others of their experience. That is worth more than any paid advertising we could buy.

What benefits are you seeing from the blog? Do you consider it a success?

Again, this is hard to measure. I enjoy it. The blog is fun. It feels right and it conveys the values of the company. I know this is probably not the most useful answer, but I do not have an objective, numbers-type answer on this.

Why did you create a page for your business on Facebook?

Similar to the blog. We use Facebook to convey the values of the company. Again, we are trying to personalize the experience for our customers. We are trying in all of our efforts to narrow the divide between the impersonal process of completing an online transaction and truly connecting with customers. I believe that internet businesses who are able to secure this connection will be the ultimate winners in the online market.

Have you seen any benefits from it?

Not really. At least not to my satisfaction. We are still working at it. Our page on Facebook is growing and developing. Again it feels right, it conveys our values, and I believe it will pay off in the long run.

Do you do any PPC, or are you focused on organic and social traffic?

We do very little PPC. I believe most PPC lends itself to transactional price shoppers. We use PPC to supplement our organic traffic. We do quite well in organic traffic. I have been very successful at generating organic traffic. The social media space is still developing for us. We are exploring social marketing because I believe this is where the net is headed. We want to be positioned to be out front as it happens. This is truly a work-in-progress.

How important is SEO to you? Have you done any linkbuilding efforts, for example?

SEO is huge for us. Everything on the page is there for a reason. The challenge here is satisfying the search engines while maintaining a page that is attractive and usable for customers. We do not do any conventional link-begging. We get a substantial number of links pointing to our site but this is really a result of the way we run the business. People talk about our site. We do not have a links page. We have a few links on the blog but that is it.

Do you have time to stay on top of SEO best practices, or is that the responsibility of the web development team?

I do not trust anyone with this. It is just too important. I do it myself. I obsess about SEO. The design team has a pretty good idea of SEO after working with me over the years but they are not SEO experts. Much of SEO is in the nuances. I drive them crazy at times with tiny changes.

What marketing ideas do you want to try in the future?

I would like to try video, viral, contest, and go deeper into social media.

Last question: When it comes to online marketing, are you more of a "try everything and see what works" guy, or do you prefer a more careful and studied approach?

This is an interesting question for me. I think I am personally careful and studied in general. However, this business allows me the opportunity to take risks and explore. I have learned to do much more by feel and intuition. You have heard me say more than once, "it just feels right". So with this business, I would say I am more of a try it, measure it, and refine it. The nature of this business requires that the model remain fluid. This will forever be a work-in-progress.

Thanks so much, Anthony. Best of luck in all you do in the future.

Whether you're a small retailer or not, Anthony's final words probably rings true: "This will forever be a work-in-progress." That's the nature of running a modern small business, and I think it applies to all of the small businesses who've shared their success stories in this space.

If you are (or know of) a small business owner with a great story to tell about how you're using the Internet to grow your business, please contact me at Small Business SEM.

Process of website indexing by Google & other Search Engines

There is a lot of speculation about how search engines index websites. The topic is shrouded in mystery about exact working of search engine indexing process since most search engines offer limited information about how they architect the indexing process. Webmasters get some clues by checking their log reports about the crawler visits but are unaware of how the indexing happens or which pages of their website were really crawled.

While the speculation about search engine indexing process may continue, here is a theory, based on experience, research and clues, about how they may be going about indexing 8 to 10 billion web pages even so often or the reason why there is a delay in showing up newly added pages in their index. This discussion is centered around Google, but we believe that most popular search engines like Yahoo and MSN follow a similar pattern.

Google runs from about 10 Internet Data Centers (IDCs), each having 1000 to 2000 Pentium-3 or Pentium-4 servers running Linux OS.

Google has over 200 (some think 'over 1000') crawlers / bots scanning the web each day. These do not necessarily follow an exclusive pattern, which means different crawlers may visit the same site on the same day, not knowing other crawlers have been there before. This is what probably gives a 'daily visit' record in your traffic log reports, keeping web masters very happy about their frequent visits.

Some crawlers' jobs are only to grab new URLs (lets call them 'URL Grabbers' for convenience) - The URL grabbers grab links & URLs they detects on various websites (including links pointing to your site) and old/new URL's it detects on your site. They also capture the 'date stamp' of files when they visit your website, so that they can identify 'new content' or 'updated content' pages.

The URL grabbers respect your robots.txt file & Robots Meta Tags so that they can include / exclude URLs you want / do not want indexed. (Note: same URL with different session IDs are recorded as different 'unique' URLs. For this reason, session ID’s are best avoided, otherwise they can be misled as duplicate content. The URL grabbers spend very little time & bandwidth on your website, since their job is rather simple. However, just so you know, they need to scan 8 to 10 Billion URLs on the web each month. Not a petty job in itself, even for 1000 crawlers.

The URL grabbers write the captured URL's with their date stamps and other status in a 'Master URL List' so that these can be deep-indexed by other special crawlers.
The master list is then processed and classified somewhat like -
a) New URLs detected
b) Old URLs with new date stamp
c) 301 & 302 redirected URLs
d) Old URLs with old date stamp
e) 404 error URLs
f) Other URLs

The real indexing is done by (what we're calling) 'Deep Crawlers'. A deep crawler’s job is to pick up URLs from the master list and deep crawl each URL and capture all the content - text, HTML, images, flash etc.

Priority is given to ‘Old URLs with new date stamp’ as they relate to already indexed but updated content. ‘301 & 302 redirected URLs’ come next in priority followed by ‘New URLs detected’.

High priority is given to URLs whose links appear on several other sites. These are classified as 'important' URLs. Sites and URL's whose date stamp and content changes on a daily or hourly basis are 'stamped' as 'News' sites which are indexed hourly or even on minute-by-minute basis.
Indexing of ‘Old URLs with old date stamp’ and ‘404 error URLs’ are altogether ignored. There is no point wasting resources indexing ‘Old URLs with old date stamp’, since the search engine already has the content indexed, which is not yet updated. ‘404 error URLs’ are URLs collected from various sites but are broken links or error pages. These URLs do not show any content on them.

The 'Other URLs' may contain URLs which are dynamic URLs, have session IDs, PDF documents, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Multimedia files etc. Google needs to further process these and assess which ones are worth indexing and to what depth. It perhaps allocates indexing task of these to 'Special Crawlers'.

When Google 'schedules' the 'Deep Crawlers' to index 'New URLs' and '301 & 302 redirected URLs', just the URLs (not the descriptions) start appearing in search engines result pages when you run the search "site:www.domain.com" in Google.

Since Deep Crawlers need to crawl 'Billions' of web pages each month, they take as many as 4 to 8 weeks to index even updated content. New URL’s may take longer to index.

Once the Deep Crawlers index the content, it goes into their originating IDCs. Content is then processed, sorted and replicated (synchronized) to the rest of the IDCs. A few years back, when the data size was manageable, this data synchronization used to happen once a month, lasting for 5 days, called 'Google Dance'. Nowadays, the data synchronization happens constantly, which some people call 'Everflux'

When you hit www.google.com from your browser, you can land at any of their 10 IDCs depending upon their speed and availability. Since the data at any given time is slightly different at each IDC, you may get different results at different times or on repeated searches of the same term (Google Dance).

Bottom line is that one needs to wait for as long as 8 to 12 weeks, to see full indexing in Google. One should consider this as 'cooking time' in 'Google's kitchen'. Unless you can increase the 'importance' of your web pages by getting several incoming links from good sites, there is no way to speed up the indexing process, unless you personally know Sergey Brin & Larry Page, and have a significant influence over them.

Dynamic URLs may take longer to index (sometimes they do not get indexed at all) since even a small data can create unlimited URLs, which can clutter Google index with duplicate content.
Summary & Advise:

Ensure that you have cleared all roadblocks for crawlers and they can freely visit your site and capture all URLs. Help crawlers by creating good interlinking and sitemaps on your website.

Get lots of good incoming links to your pages from other websites to improve the 'importance' of your web pages. There is no special need to submit your website to search engines. Links to your website on other websites are sufficient.

Patiently wait for 4 to 12 weeks for the indexing to happen.

Disclaimer: The actual functioning and exact architecture of the search engines may vary but in essence, this is what we believe they do.

About the Author:
Atul Gupta is the founder & CEO of RedAlkemi a leading Internet Marketing, eCommerce, Graphic Design, Web & Software Development services company. He has about 20 years of experience in the field of Graphic Design, Visual Communication, Web Development and Search Engine Marketing Services. He has spent last 9 years of his career devoted solely in pursuing Search Engine Marketing and Web Development activities.