Desi Matlock

Google Places Rural Bias

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If you’re very rural in the United States, the post office will not deliver your mail to your physical address. In fact, you may barely know your physical address. You’re a PO Box user, and you don’t have to pay for the box, because it’s mandated that when the Postal Service thinks you’re too remote, …

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Is Registering my Website Still Important?

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In a word, YES. Despite what you’ve heard, websites still need to be registered. I don’t know how many times I’ve said this to a client. Trusted links from human-reviewed directories or domain verified listings are very useful to bots. They show you’re trustworthy, real, and provide uniquely useful meta-information to the search engines about …

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Mission statement of sorts…

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People ask me why I do what I do. So here goes.
1. My purpose in living is to help people thrive. Everything I do is driven by it.
I get the world’s biggest kick out of finding a solution to a problem that makes it so that someone else can flourish and prosper. You can see it in all my career choices–nanny,  teacher, tech support, internal team support.  Once I started working with PHP and MySQL, I got hooked. I was a web programmer. Then I was an SEO, and finally I got roped into doing PPC marketing. But every turn this job takes, it takes only because of this:

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Mixing Search and Social

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Bing and Google are both trying to turn search into a social experience.
Google is doing it by integrating the Google Side-wiki into search, by incorporating Google buzz results into your search results, with Google me, and other recent stabs at the combination of search and social. They’re trying new ones all the time.
Bing is doing it by connecting up to Facebook, seeing who your friends are, what they like, and including those likes into your search results.
The point is they’re both competing to bring you a more social search, seemingly operating with “the web is social now, let’s make search social” as their mantra.
This, to me, translates to, “Let’s change what makes search valuable into something entirely different”.
I can see why they feel the money lies in combining the two. But they should not mix the two beyond the absolute minimum and they should maintain the possibility of keeping them completely separate.

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What is Social Media Good For?

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What is Social Media? ‘Social Media’ is a popular buzzword for a large number of connectivity tools that allow you to form a direct connection with nearly anyone who has a computer, tablet, or a web-enabled cell phone. Almost everyone with these tools has an account at one or more of the following, where you …

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Defining Local Service Areas in Local Business Listings

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Question:
My Hubbie [sic]’s company is located in Los Angeles. On Google we are #1 in organic and #1 in Local Business Listings. Sounds good, right?? Trouble is that we service Pasadena, Glendale, Northridge, Studio City, Santa Monica, etc, etc! And now with the Local Listings we are not seen AT ALL (in Google) for the some 35 other cities that we service.  I have gotten a listing in Altadena – by using a home address of one owner. And now I am doing Glendale from our home addresss, but I wonder if anyone has (very new, current) data on how we might succeed in getting into local listings for all these areas?
Answer:
Absolutely, there is a less “extreme” workaround than pretending nonexistent locations.

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