Posts

Season's Greetings!

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 1959 Jeep FC-150 rendering done in Google Drawing. GooglePlus auto-awesome snow effect applied. One of the real joys of the Holiday Season is the opportunity to say Thank You for our acquaintance and to wish you the very best for the New Year! Patrick LaJuett manages a website design agency : + LaJuett.com , where he supports clients as a Web technology consultant and search marketing strategy advisor.

Google Snippets in Search Results

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Google Snippets in Search Results Snippet Discovery I recently discovered a unique occurrence of Google snippets that appeared in a Google search engine results page (SERP).  It happens to be one of my portfolio pages, so naturally, it peaked my interest. A Google snippet is a description of or an excerpt from the webpage.  A snippet refers to the description portion of a Google search listing. Take a look at the SERP snippet below: Note, the snippet is made up of an element count (40+ items), the meta description, and four excerpts from the page. Page Rendering in Browser Here's what the portfolio page looks like when rendered in the browser: Underlying Page Code In this case, it appears as though the Google bot has gone into the page code, and parsed out the top four image descriptions.  What's interesting is that the page contains an html table with alternating rows.  Images, followed by the company name and location. Consistency and Stabilit

Social Media for Small Business

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Social Media for Small Business - Don't Over Complicate Things! I get a lot of questions from customers regarding social networking. The majority of them feel it is something they should be doing.  But many have a fear of taking the plunge... due in part to concerns with not having enough time. Being active on social media doesn't have to be overly complex.  A few minutes a day can get the job done for 99% of the small businesses out there.  Here are some thoughts on how a small business can benefit from being "social". What Is Social Media? According to Wikipedia, "social media refers to interaction among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. It introduces substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organizations, communities, and individuals." Why Small Business Should Incorporate Social Into their Marketing Efforts Audience Reach + Relationship

Google Sites Not Indexing? Try This SEO Fix

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I recently received this question from a client needing SEO help: "I have a website for my company XYZ...the site is a Google Site. For some reason, my site is not indexed at all. Can you help?" Diagnosing the Problem Using Google Webmaster Tools, it became quickly apparent that Google was aware of the website (site was verified and an XML sitemap was uploaded).  But for some reason the search engine was not indexing it. The first thing I looked at was the robots.txt file to make sure no-follow wasn't blocking the Google bot.  Seemed OK.  Next I took a look at the page's source code...here's what I found: Page Source (Before):   HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow, nosnippet Last-Modified: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 19:27:23 GMT ... This is a problem!  Digging deeper...when I looked at the Google Sites Sharing and Permissions settings, it was set to " Anyone who has link can view ". This was