NetBiz is basically a SEM company and not an SEO company. Unfortunately for most consumers these two very different types of services have been blurred into one. SEM is basically pay-per-click advertising and getting listings in online websites like yellow pages, Dexknows, ect.. SEO is much more complicated and requires an indepth understanding of web programming, search engine algorithms and what is required to get a good natural ranking. It appears that Netbiz does pay-per-click advertising through Google and presents it as SEO. Unfortunately I found a number of complaints like the one below where basically what they said over the phone was not actually what the customer got.

A review of NetBiz.com and their claim to being an SEO company by one of their customers:

I saw a post from a company called NetBiz.com that guarantees placement on the first page for certain search terms. I got a call from them probably about a year ago and gave me a major search term for my area. However, after I had paid the fees to get everything going, I did not appear under that search term. Instead it was under another search term that I believed would never get any business. Called and said they were sorry that I misunderstood the term that I would be listed with. However the gentleman said I will definitely get lots of action under the search term they gave me. I watched my statistics over a few months and never got one hit. Personally I  would be very careful of this and other SEO companies.

Jeff Launiere

When one looked up the BBB ratings for Netbiz their claims became even more suspect.

BBB Rating for Netbiz Inc

Based on BBB files, Netbiz Inc has a BBB Rating of C- on a scale from A+ to F.
Reasons for this rating include:

* 37 complaints filed against Netbiz Inc.

Bottomline is one always has to ask careful questions and make sure you understand what the prospective SEO company or consultant is promising. Having a first page ranking for an obscure term that will never generate any traffic is an obvious waste of money and completely disingenuous on the part of the SEO company. Our grandparents didn’t tell the age old adage, “if it sounds to good to be true …. ” for nothing.

For more information about our proven SEO strategies call us at 1-800-975-5695.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services – “Bringing you business one click at a time.”

Worldtravelawards.com/vote

As if that wasn’t news enough, the resort was then written up on USA Today.  It’s a pretty glowing analysis of the place (which is always nice).  Take a look for yourself, and feel free to add a comment if you’ve visited:

Travel.usatoday.com/destinations/guide/The+Cayes+and+Atolls/Hotels/70307

While our SEO work continues to help Las Terrazas make gains, it’s always nice when outside sources like these two take the initiative and recognize a great resort on their own.

Ok, so why does this weird square code matter?

While SEO implications and practices are not completely ironed out, theoretically the benefits are many.  As QR Codes are backlinks, the benefits at the very least will be similar to the benefits associated with URL backlinks.  It seems likely that Google will start recognizing and caching QR Codes and separate directories for these types of links will begin cropping up.

But beyond this, these codes will begin to provide a link between SEO and the older forms of marketing like newspaper ads, billboards, posters, etc.  Suddenly, these seemingly antiquated forms of marketing can be used to drive traffic to your website.  And better yet, that traffic will be trackable.

Whereas before a traditional print ad would have to read “check out our website at www.slickrockweb.net,” the QR Code now provides not only a brevity of language (or images), but it also provides efficient user interaction.  Instead of remembering the URL and typing it into a browser, the user simply points their phone at the image and is directed to the destination instantly.  So, if you we were to buy a newspaper ad, include a QR Code for some URL like:

www.slickrockweb.net/qrcodeforournewspaperad

and have that same URL simply redirect to our homepage.  Then, by using free programs like Google Analytics or the like, we could easily tell what kind of “click through rate” our newspaper add is accruing.

Thus, as the number of smart-phone users, and the number QR Codes continues to grow, so does their importance for SEO.  Who knows, in the near future, an SEO Company might have to include QR Optimized Business Cards, Newspaper Ads and Billboards in their proposals.

We used the currently free QR code generator at the website called Kaywa. The process is quite easy, although the potential applications for these codes can be very creative and sophisticated.

The potential benefit of these QR codes is clear but what is also clear it that any successful company needs an SEO expert like SlickRockWeb as a partner and resource to navigate the rapidly changing landscape of online and digital marketing and the rapid adoption of new technologies.

For more information about our proven SEO strategies call us at 1-800-975-5695.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services – “Bringing you business one click at a time.”

But what many people don’t realize is that there is traffic and then there is effective traffic. Traffic that comes to your site and then immediately leaves without staying is called a bounce and every type of traffic will produce a different bounce rate depending on how well the referring site matches the visitor with the content and interest of your website. A floral shop referring visitors from its site to your site which is an Auto Body shop may produce a very high bounce rate for you. There are many obvious reasons why this might be the case. A website that sells auto tools that then refers its visitors to your Auto Body shop will have a better chance at producing relevant or highly motivated traffic and that referred traffic should have a lower bounce rate … provided of course that the Auto Body shop site is functional and doesn’t look terrible.

Anyway I think you get the idea. The effective website traffic to your website is your Total traffic – (Total traffic * bounce rate). Thus one can greatly improve their effective web traffic merely by improving their site’s bounce rate. If your site is getting alot of traffic but has a very high bounce rate, say something over 60% a wiser marketing initiative for your company might be to work on reducing your website’s bounce rate. Or at least analyze why it is you have such a high bounce rate.

To illustrate this the graph below shows the total monthly traffic coming to a website located within the state of Washington along the blue line and the monthly average bounce rate for the entire site is indicated by the red line. In the most current month the bounce rate is dramatically cut in half, due to the exceptional effort and guidance by a company such as say …. SlickRockWeb.

Because of this dramatic improvement in the website’s bounce rate, even though the total monthly traffic actually goes down slightly from March to April, the effective traffic (shown below in green) goes up dramatically. This reduction in bounce rate produces the highest effective traffic levels in the past 9 months even though total traffic is only 60% of what it was 6 months earlier. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that this increase in effective traffic will correspond to an increase in sales.

The moral of the story is make sure you know what your site’s bounce rate is and make sure you have a company strategy in place to analyze the monthly bounce rate and compare it to industry averages to make sure you are not losing significant amounts of effective web traffic every month.

From this simple example it is clear why having an SEO expert like SlickRockWeb as a partner and resource is such a valuable asset to any successful business.

For more information about our proven SEO strategies call us at 1-800-975-5695.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services – “Bringing you business one click at a time.”

Why would someone want to look in these folders? We for example recently had problems with our DNS changing hostnames without our knowledge and wanted to track down how this was happening. Because we knew the hostname was changing from powerbookG4.local to gmail.local we simply wanted to search for all system config files that might contain the text string “gmail”.

After much searching and educating ourselves we found a simple solution using the command “grep” and Mac OS X’s command line tool, Terminal.app. Because the text string “gmail” could appear in lots of files that might contain a gmail email address such as  myemail@gmail.com we made use of Regular Expressions to exclude text strings that would be email addresses and would thus give us false positives.

Here is the solution:

1. Open Terminal.app

2. change to root access by typing at the prompt # su root

Last login: Mon Apr  1 14:22:31 on console

powerbookG4:~ user$ su root

3. Enter your password when prompted

Password:

4. Navigate to the directory of files that you want to search using the cd command.

5. Enter the grep command to search for the appropriate text string: grep -irl ‘[^(@|o|n)]gmail[^(\.com)]‘ *

sh-3.2# grep -irl ‘[^(@|o|n)]gmail[^(\.com)]‘ *

I won’t get into all the details of how grep works but the flags we used were -i (for case insensitive) -r (to search all files within the directory recursively) and -l (to list all the results). The next section is the regular expression of the text string you want to search for. Lastly the wildcard * just means to search in all files. If you wanted to only search in html files for example you could use *.html.

We used the regular expressions such as ^ to exclude any gmail email addresses and only find files where “gmail” occurred and exclude any strings such as xxxx@gmail.com.

After grep runs it will list all the files that contain your text string. Example list of files below.

var/log/asl/2010.04.04.U501.asl
var/log/asl/LongTTL.asl
var/log/daily.out
var/log/install.log
var/log/krb5kdc/kdc.log
var/log/samba/log.nmbd
var/log/secure.log
var/log/system.log

This method can be very useful if for example you know a certain virus string and are trying to find all the files on your system that have been affected by the virus string. An example of this would be for instance last summer’s iframe injection trojans.