Google have been contacting the people to who use their email alert service to tell them that due to the fact that not many people actually using the service they provide, they will be altering the way in works in the future. Interesting to see that people are not using it as we know that it can be an important tool when doing search engine optimisation and general web marketing for companies.

Google Alerts

Basically the way they work is to email you once someone puts in a search for a term or phrase that you have requested to be notified by email. It is useful if you would like to know for instance if a phrase is one that really is used by people to search for a product or service. Often when talking to customers and potential clients they will have a predefined concept into the words that people use. Most times it is actually not the phrase that would necessarily the one that would bring them the most amount of hits.

Google Adwords

This would be the next step up in looking to see which word you might pay Google if someone searched for it and to display your name first. There is a google adwords keyword tool that allows you too see which words are most popular and then actually put in a real time bid to get your name listed top of the listings.

To start working with Google Alerts or Google Adwords just log in into your Google account and start researching how it all works.

To start getting results straight away let Cada Media set it up for you and let you get back to what Your Good at. Tel : 053 9430748

See Below

*****

We're contacting you because you have an alert of type Web. We've decided to retire Web alerts because
(1) they are used by very few people and
(2) an alert of type Everything will find the same results.

This week we'll be changing all alerts of type Web into alerts of type Everything.
Your alert will continue to include results from all kinds of web sites.

You may receive more results after this change. If you find that you are getting too many results,
you can change the "How often" setting to "once a day" or "once a week." You can also change your search query.
You can do this on the alerts management page (www.google.com/alerts/manage),
or by removing the alert using the link at the bottom of each alert email and creating it again with different settings.

We hope that you'll continue to find your alert useful.

******

A question arose today where a caller to the office was wondering if Truvo / Golden Pages had done a deal with Google. The answer is Yes, but so has everyone who has a Google Account !

Looking further it looks like they are just selling Google Adword.

What are Google Adwords?

This is a method by which you pay Google to display an advert for a search word or phrase someones looks up. These types of Adverts can me made by yourself or you can pay a company such as Golden Pages to make them for you.

But the thing that caught my attention was that this caller is the owner of a major business in Dublin and he really thought that they has “stricken a deal” with Google, he then emailed me a copy of their email to him and all it actually was, was a proposal for Truvo to make these adverts for him and “they” would display them on Google for him.

We too at Cada Media Ltd have this “special Deal” with Google and we too can make you number One in Google for the right price. We do this by setting you up with a Google Account and inserting the terms and phrases that you would like to appear under. The price of these adverts are governed by you!

You pay what you wish to pay and if its enough the advert will be displayed higher and higher in their search results. The cute whores took a leaf out of the auctioneers books years ago and you put in a blind bid to get your advert displayed. These bids gan be as little 11 cent but could also be $20 per advert if you really needed it to be.

Pay Per Click Adverts

Yes as it says, you pay Google every time someone clicks on your advert, each time someone searches for a phrase like “hotels in Wexford” Google will display adverts at the very top in a light yellow colour with the word “sponsored” on the top right hand side. These are Adverts from Hotels in the south each wish to grab you attention. The adverts costs them nothing until you click on it and then it will bring you to their website and also deduct a fee from the hotels google account.

This is how Google earn their money, many people under estimate how much they earn from this type of system, but imagine getting a euro from everyone in Ireland each day, I’d enjoy that so does Google!

So if you wish to do a “deal with Google” and get you company to the top of search engines call Cada Media Ltd today and let starts start getting more business on-line

Tel: 053 9430748

Yes,  the age old question that every web designer looses sleep over,

Does Size Matter?

Does Size Matter?

Deos Size Matter?

The answer is yes, for over 10 years now we have been creating websites that abide to Google Webmaster rule and keep website page small in order to help keep the Size of the page small. One of the methods of keeping the size of a page small is to make sure the images have been reduced in MB size to KB size.

Often these days we find that companies using Content Management Software (CMS) will have the ability to update a website themselves, Great until they update the website with out decreasing the images in megabyte size to a smaller size that will help download the website faster. We see people reducing the image size by grabbing a conor and dragging the image to “appear” smaller but in fact its still 5mb in size.

Remember is the epidose of Father Ted, when Father Ted was explaining to Dougle the difference in size of object in showing hime something “near” and something “far away”, well its the exact same in theis case. Just because the image appears to be smaller, doesnt actually mean that it has changed in volumn in terms of megabyte size.

Anyway, Google is telling us again to stick to these rules so if you have a website and are interested in keeping the Gods happy we would suggest abiding by their rules.

Google Website Speed tips

Yes, is the answer.

The latest changes to the number one search engine in Ireland has finally come online. These latest updates to it’s functionality are pushing the ability of local search right down to the county level.

Before we were able to choose by the world or pages from Ireland. Now we can step even further into a search and breakdown our definition of what we hope to get as results by specifing our current localtion.

Google will then look for local information for your search term. Didn’t they always do this you say . . . I thought so too but apparently not.

Look at the new left hand column of a search to see the changes to the layout and options available. Then look at the results and see if they are more local local !

Great news for getting more precise results now all we have to do is tell google that some counties names are also towns in that county. So when someone googles “something in Wexford” do the mean the county or the town!

For more information on how we can help google find your business call Dave Jordan of Cada Media Ltd today, tel 053 9430748.

News today that Facebook have overtaken Google as the number 1 website in terms of visits according to “Hitwise”.

This is something I was only giving a talk about today to a group of business people here in the south east. I was explaining that social media needs to be managed correctly by staff of businesses if they are going to use this tool to attract traffic to their business using Facebook.

I had mentioned that facebook had over taken Yahoo and Microsoft already and this news today that this has happened this week has huge implications for the search world in general.

Companies will now be wondering if they should get a website and Facebook should now be exploiting this fact with their advertising costs and web designers/ programmers guru’s should be writting Apps for facebook.

The Whole World’s In A State O Chassis !

If you remember the quote from,  Juno And The Paycock then you will know what I mean. If we look at this in other terms, lets say 10 years ago we needed to find a telephone number where did we look ? Yes in a big yellow book in the office, now that big yellow book has been demoted to “Computer stand for your Monitor”

The whole world is changing, now we look for information online usually Goolge. But if Google have been toppled off the number 1 position in just 3 short years, what is next?

Food for thougt, chewing gum for the brain.

Enjoy the St Patrick’s Day where ever you are

Hearing interesting things about the new social media offering from Google called Google Buzz, it looks like their privacy policy and the fact that you can edit a on going conversation to alter the meaning means that this would be used by someone from the Dark side!!!

Gonna play around with it over the weekend and see what my friends in the Sunday papers make of it as I see they have been busy little beavers all week playing around and trying to see what friends are out there and I watch and didn’t reply!

Oh the fun, if you have any news on google buzz then let me know.

Have a nice Valentines Weekend everyone.

So there I was today having lunch with a Internet Marketing guy I know in the Amber Springs hotel in Gorey and the two of us going on about how to manage adword campaings successfully and then we discussed the different methods of managing them, different keywords to use, different settings. . . localisation and so on and then we talked about pricing for such a service . . . We both agreed and found the most business didnt the the “best bang for their buck”.

Why pay an Internet “expert”?

Exactly, why would you pay someone to manage a google adwords advertising campaign that you can manage yourself? just log into google yourself and set up an account and put the price you are happy to pay for someone to pay to get yo your website and then input your vredit cards details.

Easy? Yes it is, and it’s even easier to get it wrong and not understand the different settings and variations that will display your adword on search results and in-line content. The words you choose could be expensive to bid on and there could be other words that you should be using.  Is your advert being clicked on by a night security guard on a laptop at 3am in Manchester, when you are advertising your painting and decorating service in Wexford!

Wasting money?

Yes, very often we come across people throwing away their money in Google adwords campaigns.

If you are trying to manage a pay per click yourself and running your business and want to spend your money correctly there are a number of things you need to have in place. At Cada Media Ltd we can help you spend your money better. Yes, we will charge you but yes you will gain the right traffic from the right people in the right location. We can either manage a campaign for you on a monthly basis or configure and fine tune it for you.

Then you manage it.

Cada Media, helping companies use the internet better since 1999 in Wexford.

As any of our regular readers know we are always saying how “The web is Everywhere”.

Well no more so than on mobile phones and with the looming Christmas gift giving season upon us there is no avoiding speak of Apps and Downloads etc.

Google have recently launched their Google Mobile App which allows a user to search for anything by simply speaking into the phone.

This Free service should certainly give the chaps at 11811 and 11850 a run for their money eh?

No longer having to worry about typing errors or how to spell ‘phoenix’ anymore, you can just say “hotels in gorey’ and the results will speak for themselves.

After all, those with the most up to date online presence are surely the most up to date businesses in that sector?…

The Web IS Everywhere…Be part of it…

With all the bitching and moaning about the changes to the Facebook privacy policy we have to ask ourselves why are they now changing as they have always been one of the most private social medial websites for people to network and meet up.

We believe that it ultimately has to do with search engines now wanting to incorporate content from social media websites into their results. recently we have heard news of Twitter doing a deal with the business networking website “Linked In” to allow that website to bring in its content.

All the Major websites are doing it, MSN live chat now allows you to bring in your MySpace information into your account there. The use of a login system called Open ID allows you to have one account from facebook for example and that can be used on loads of other sites, making it easier to integrate larger and larger sites together.

Facebook is estimated to have nearly 1,000,000 users in Ireland by Christmas 2009, so now they have 1/4 of the population, they also have what all hungry search engines need. . . Content. We talked about content for web last week and how it will be needed more and more in the coming years.

Google Live Search

This is a new feature of Google’s algorithm that basically reads social media websites such as Twitter and uses its content as the results for questions searched for. So this is a big step away from google showing your websites it read through last night and showing you the “latest news”. Well if its from last night then its not the “latest” but if its from Twitter or F it is the latest. Facebook and Twitter are no strapped to a computer desk any more, we carry them around with us, they are now part of most mobile phones with all of us feeding them each time we click on a letter.

Doing a search today, google replied with a live twitter feed as the first results and then the normal listing from websites it would have indexed the day before. This is Google specifically pushing the social media websites as they have the “latest” content and this is why they need to read our content on Facebook!

For more information on how the interweb is changing call 053 9430748 to make an appointment.

Make up your mind!

Sitting here working away on a busy Friday after singing happy birthday to Mary and eating our squashy buns from Joanne’s, we heard one of our pc’s in the office saying “google alert” over and over again. (yes it’s annoying, we usually have the sound turned down)

It was a Google alert telling us that we have received an email about a topic we have subscribed to. A Google Alerts is a way of asking Google to email you when someone searches for a phrase or posts information about topics that you are interested in. So you tell google to notify you by email when someone searches for a phrase like. . . “Hair dressers in Wexford” for example that it emails you.

Why would you do this?

Well, it tells you how often a search is carried out, what were the results of the were, basically it’s a simpler version of Google Trends which is another online tool about how people use the web and what they are looking for. More on that, another day.

It’s all about “information” these day, knowing and understanding how the internet and people work together makes for a better web designer and web developer. Wexford web designers such as ourselves are interested in more that if an image goes to the left or the right of a page. We are interested in the method of navigation a person has when they arrive on a site, What pages are they interested in, do they use menu systems or search facilities to find information, do they speed read and jump to anchor text on a page. How long do they stay on each page or is the “bounce rate” very high, meaning that they have literally bounced away from that page.

Its this “information” that is available using web design tools and using your head and a spoonfull of “cop on” as my Dad would say. Often people will tell me how may “hits” they get on a website and I will tell them how many pageviews we get, what time we get them, what button people click on the most, what part of Ireland they are searching from and what our most popular search terms are. They usually ask do I know who the people are and I have to say no, but I know roughly what district in Dublin they are in , if Sandyford or Dun Laughaire etc.

This is available to everyone.

Anyway, getting back to the point!

Today we noticed that a web design business in Wexford has registered a number of domain names and is using these domains to point to their website. Great, I think most of the full time web designers in Wexford, Enniscorthy and Gorey have done this too. All we are doing is speculating that the Google Algorithm will detect this domain and associate it this us.

It’s worth a try, We here have a number of domains we bought about 4 years ago such as

WexfordWebsiteDesign.com and WebsiteDesignWexford.com

Will it help, who knows, it it any harm, Well the Google Webmaster Handbook wouldn’t be putting it top of their list of “great ideas” but at the moment the Google Algorithm seem to like it.

So how does this help you, well if I you’re thinking of registering a domain name, I would suggest  looking for register a .com for instance for your trade and in your town. www.HairdressersWexford.com for example.

Remember Google changes it results everyday, so this is just one way to get ahead in search results, It will be different in 1 month, 6 months etc

To get ahead in business today, call Dave Jordan of Cada Media Ltd on 053 9430748

We had a meeting today in which the client told me that he had a Telephone call from Google this morning asking him if he needed help spending the Voucher they had send him. We have spoken about this before about Vouchers from Google but were interested to hear that the caller who identified himself as being a staff member from google in London.

Is this true?

If you have received a call from Google please can you let me know, as we hear of scams and dodgy companies in the UK calling Irish companies trying to sell them the Top position in Google for a small monthly fee also known as Google Adwords Campaigns

The client told him that we were looking after that for them, but I am still unsure if Google would actually call.

Please let me know if you have received a call from Google, Call Dave Jordan 053 9430748 or email dave at cadamedia.ie and tell me more . .

Google’s listing, How do they work?

We have had a number of inquiries from companies this week asking us to help them get on top of Google.  It’s interesting to see how the “recession in the building trade” has pushed into many other aspects of life in Ireland.

One inquiry today asked if we could create a script to refresh a website so that I will appear higher in Google? Is this true If I write a script to refresh the page it will increase it Page Ranking in Google?

I don’t think so, is the simple answer.

Google has a complex algorithm that now consists of over 200 criteria that it rates a website. Google changes and alter this algorithm each day. Google is not a script that is the same each and every week. Google evolves, think of it like the stock exchange, it adapts to trends in the world and sometimes there are more focus on certain area’s than other.

In years gone by it could have been many things such as :

• your domain name
• your image content
• your video content
• the amount of links that pointed to you
• the amount of internal links
• the amount of good copy you have written on the site
• the amount of times the website was updated
• spelling
• grammar

Often business owners have their own idea of how Google works, but it is not always as simple as they think. We also has one company marketing director ask about changing the company domain name to AAsometing.ie as they assumed that Google lists is websites alphabetically.

Interesting so see how different businesses assume so much about how a search engines work and yet all be so far from the truth. Search Engine are a science, not rocket science but never the less a science, It’s called “Computer Science”

Many people are afraid to ask for help in business these days, we have found that if people let us work on the area of expertise that we specialise in we can help grow their business and grow their company.

Let Cada Media Ltd take your hand through the complex world of Search Engine Optimisation and put your business ahead of the rest. Call Dave Jordan on 053 9430748 for more information.

If you are one of the many companies wondering why Google as chosen you to write to and offer you a free €50 Euro Voucher to spend on Google Adword Campaign well then you are not alone. Many business around Ireland have received a letter from Google in the past 3 weeks giving them this free Voucher.

This is not a scam, it is a real offer from Google!

Enjoy it, Use it, Spend It

And if like may business you just shred it as you think its another online scam well its a pity as you just shredded €50 euros!

The voucher enables you to spend €50 free from google on “Pay Per Click Advertising“, that is feature from Google called Google Ad words, allowing you to pay a small fee to Google if a person clicks on a link advertising on either a website or in their listing pages.

If you would like help setting up or managing this please feel free to give myself Dave Jordan a call on 053 9430748

Bing.com

Microsoft have finally launched their new search engine to compete against the search engine giant of Google Launched in May 2009 this new search engine has a similar looks to Google simple looking one line to input your search term. It also has features similar to Googles Image Search and returns the results in a way that we are all familar with. I personally think it’s too late for Microsoft to get into this market as the Internet is not really a place for their technology (in my personally opinion, I’m a linux and Unbunto and Open Source type of guy!)

If you have an opinion on their stab at this type of technology, please let me know

www.Bing.com

We have had a number of clients call complaining that they are being harassed by a UK company telling them that for a small amount each week they can get on top of google. This UK company have NO affiliation with Google and are not calling on their behalf.

YES, you can, but you must pay Google.

Google adwords is a system that you “Pay Per Click” to be listed at the top of their listing. You Pay Google. This can be set up yourself and you spend any amount you wish or you can get it managed by a company you know.

Do Not Give them Your VISA card details.

We have had more say they are doing the hard sell and in hard times people can fall victom to these methods of selling and the promise of more hits and more sales. I would stress that if anyone has any questions about using google adwords and paying for click adverting then call myself dave jordan on 053 9430748 for a free consultation.