Detroit Auto News - Auto Industry News from the GM FastLane Blog and Bob Lutz

http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/

For all of you Car Enthusiasts that want to keep up on the GM news, their blog is great concept. Better yet, is the Saturn Social Network.

Enjoy.

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Google Says it's about Page Rank and CONTEXTUAL LINKS

Why can't I explain this fact to SEO Services clients, maybe they are just smarter than me? But it really is simple, read on from our blogging platform at MyTypes.com and SEO Blogs about the main factors for rankings. We have always told you it's about writing focused blogs and writing them often to get the most links, but read on.

User Behavior statistics on News within Google results and SEO Tip #11

A few days ago, we reported that Google started to add the News results in the middle of it’s search results. You may seen images results in the past, and YouTube video results in the past, but news is a fairly new addition. Being your SEO watch dog and experts, we try to bring these things to you as fast as we see the changes. We did this with the Dewey update as well, we think there will be changes to the Google Algorithms and the faster you learn about the changes, the better you will be able to SEO your own site. By the way, Dewey is not done yet and there is still some major testing and retesting being done by Google. How do we know, there are significant variance in the Google results, due to different server clusters not being in synch yet.

We talked about being news worthy, and writing about news stories that people are talking about. You can find that blog, about specifically how to write the news blogs for SEO value. The fact that you write your blogs often is important. Add the keyword “News” in your title of your post is SEO Tip #11. But, do make sure you cover the news at some level, don’t cheat anyone. The article below covers a thread by the SEO experts on SEORoundtable.com go to their site to see what the USER behavior is like on different segments of search results. As in the past, we have learned that Organic search results get clicked about 5-6 times more than ads, but Pay Per Click ads have a higher conversion rate. So do advertise on Google, that can never hurt your SEO efforts either.

User Behavior Influenced By Blended Search Results

I also want to add a couple of comments about SEO and SEO Services that I hear from clients and large companies. Obviously, I have an Enterprise computing back ground and a technology degree from a world class, well Wisconsin class University:-). I have been around technology for a long time, and I think most technologists can’t seem to get past this point. They always worry about the crawl ability, site structure, and think something is wrong with their site. They choose not to work with an SEO Services company until they feel that their ON-Site issues are solved. My suggestion to all enterprise or small businesses, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE listen to me, your site structure issues need only One small thing, and your techies can fix it within 5 minutes. That is you need the SEO Target keywords in the Title Tag. There are obviously many site structure issues that you need to address such as indexability, title tags based on URL and database fields to produce Search Engine Friendly Urls. And, you can do this internally, use an SEO services company and/or read the guide above from our Wordpress and solve this issues relatively quickly too.

What the big issue is that you need a high number, a very high number of quality contextual links, ethical blogs and content based links, from high Google Page Rank Sites. So is it really about the links for SEO? I hate to say that it’s as simple as getting more links than your competitors, but that is the fact folks. Now they need to be quality links from quality content such as blogs and contextual with proper Anchor text, but you really need more quality links. And, the best way to get them is to hire content writers to start blogging and get out and provide quality comments on popular blogs. So if you think some thing is wrong with your site, and you don’t want to hire an SEO Services, I don’t care if you do or you don’t. But, you need to get natural high quality links and blogging gives them to you. So take it from a biased SEO Services provider, but we are ranked pretty high for “SEO” and many of our blogging related keywords and for our clients. You need to get lots of quality links, and still clean up your site structure etc.

Picking up around the Queen Anne Duplex

Posted on April 20th, 2008 in SEO by Admin | Edit

My first blog was a blog about Seattle Real Estate when I was just learning about SEO and blogging. My blogs address is at Seattle Houses and the address is http://SeattleHouses.blogspot.com, kind of weird that it’s not ranked well for the keyword Seattle Houses, oh well. This SEO Services guru hasn’t cared about the SEOing any Seattle houses or Seattle Real state keyword for about 2 years. Having said that, I was shocked to see my Original website still ranked in the top 46 for Seattle Real Estate, and #14 for “Seattle Real Estate agent”. This may not mean much to you, but any SEO services provider will tell you that real estate keywords are very very very competitive. Now imagine, adding the word Seattle to it and making it “Seattle Real Estate“, ouch that is tough. So, I am proud that we do things in a great way, and for long term.

Some of you know that MyTypes.com the blogging company went through a hard financial time last fall, and we started to do well early this year, right before Christmas. We have been doing SEO Services for a large company, and are now picking up some SEO clients, and therefore started to think about SEOing our Seattle real estate agent site to may be do SEO for Seattle Real Estate keywords. And guess what, we are meeting with two seattle real estate agents tomorrow who want us to SEO their sites.

Today I did something I rarely do, I picked up around our families for sale. We did this as we had an Open house, and our renters like most renters don’t usually do the lawn work. Queen Anne DuplexQueen Anne Real Estate in Seattle is still a market, where I see a lot of homes sold versus for sale. I heard from a casual renter that, he saw three foreclosures on Queen Anne Real estate market recently, that is from about 10,000 homes folks. That is a very small percentage. Now homes in Seattle real estate market may be selling a lot slower, and are certainly not appreciating 15-20% a year. The Queen Anne real estate market had an average home sale price of $970,000.00. Hopefully our Queen Anne duplex will sell, if you wish to see it, send an email to our Seattle real estate agent JANET McDermott.

send her an email to: mcdermottja@comcast.net The Queen Anne Duplex is priced at $800,000.00 which has been on sale for while. For some reason, Seattle Real Estate developers have had a hard time getting financing due to crazy mortgage crisis. Seattle real estate market has softened quite a bit as far as brand new town homes and condos are concerned. A lot of brand new condos and town homes have been turned in to rentals. What amazes me is the amazing amount of brand new high rise condo buildings in construction. This large amount of properties can not bode well for the over Seattle real Estate market, and I know a lot of Seattle real estate agents are starving, and some have even left the business.

What amazes me is the number of multi-million dollar properties selling around Queen Anne real estate, most are selling quite fast. I think the rich and the extreme wealthy are not effected, and the Microsoft and Amazon earnings are certainly going higher and higher. What that means for Seattle Real Estate, is that more jobs are being creating and the seattle real estaet agents won’t starve for too long. I do not know any unemployed person in the Queen Anne real estate market, and not even in Queen Anne Seattle. I do wish that our company MyTypes, Inc would do better so that I can finally make a better earning, right? To be honest with you, I would like to get back to my earnings of 2004, maybe some day. So if you or anyone you know are looking for any SEO services, or to hire one of the best SEO consultants in the world. We are ranked #12 today on Google for the keyword “SEO“. Ok, we were ranked #9 last week for the same wonderful keyword SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization. I do think it’s a temporary Google cluster thing, I hope any way.

Till than, I will continue to write blogs, but at the early part of this week, I am working on my book check out my SEO blog for the latest, and by the way if you know anyone looking for SEO Services don’t be afraid to send them our way.

Online CRM Market heats up

Watch out SFDC here comes Microsoft CRM

Posted on April 20th, 2008 in CRM by Admin | Edit

So now that I am playing the role of a CRM analyst, well a blogging analyst on CRM Software. I have already written about my credentials on CRM software, the fact that created an online CRM software called realclients.com and I invested in Clarify, my business partners founded Primus Knowledge Solutions. Well, the world of success demands not what I did almost 10 years ago, but what I know today and how can I provide insights in to the CRM and CRM software market. To do this well, I have to scour all the public relations spin and provide intelligent insights. Here is an article from the credible ZDnet, before Tech Crunch, they were one of the best IT news sources, but of course I am biased. I did work for Gartner for 3 years so I know a few things about news and analysis without spin, which CRM world does require. Check out the article as MS is going to launch an online CRM solution this week. I do think that was the impetus of the Google and Salesforce announcement last week, they wanted to slow down the Microsoft dominance on CRM, which it does with Dynamics and Outlook. Here is the article from ZDnet, I can’t believe they provided a summary along with the blogs snippet, folks these people are smart technologists not just journalists.

Microsoft CRM Online Hunts Salesforce.com | Enterprise Anti-matter | ZDNet.com
Now there’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. And the challenges for Salesforce.com can now begin. The goals of CRM Online are to match or beat Salesforce.com in feature/functionality, absolutely beat it in price, and with the combined power of the Microsoft brand and the ubiquitousness of the Outlook user base, seriously challenge Benioff’s hype machine on the marketing side. And they definitely have a chance at succeeding in all three.

I’m not going to parse the feature/functionality battle between the two at the individual function level here, but I can offer three main reasons why I think CRM Online needs to be taken seriously as an alternative to Salesforce.com. The first is Microsoft’s Outlook UI, known though not always loved by hundreds of millions of users. Love it or not, that user experience makes training for CRM Online a non-issue. Salesforce.com is pretty easy to use as well, but using Outlook is, for most desktop users, already intuitive.

Functional advantage #2 for Microsoft is the ability to shift between on-premise and on-demand, and mix and match the two. On-premise support is about customer choice, and lots of customers I know don’t want to be locked into on-demand any more than they want to be locked into any other deployment model. There are good business cases for on-demand deployment, and equally good ones for on-premise, and Microsoft CRM wants to support them both, something Salesforce.com simply cannot match.

Functional advantage #3 for Microsoft comes from Office integration. Right now this is an on-premise Office integration to CRM Online, which means that if you want to push sales data into an Excel spreadsheet, that spreadsheet can only reside locally. This is not equivalent to the on-demand integration that Salesforce.com is promising with Google’s Apps, but, as I don’t believe Google Apps are really ready for prime-time in the enterprise, I think the Office integration direct from the Outlook UI is a better functional advantage than either Salesforce.com’s Google Apps support or its own native Office support.

That’s the functional side. On the price side, CRM Online wants to seriously undercut Saleforce.com pricing, and is doing so by charging significantly less than Salesforce.com for both basic and premium functionality. At the top end, Microsoft wants $59 per user per month for functionality that would cost a Salesforce.com several hundred dollars per month. Especially when you include the 20 gigs of storage that Microsoft offers for free, for which users of Salesforce.com would pay dearly for. For a comparison of Salesforce.com premium pricing, look at Ephraim Schwartz’s column on the subject. I think it’s going to be largely impossible for Salesforce.com to institute any across-the-board pricing changes to match Microsoft, without watching its stock price collapse. So, on the pricing front, I think Microsoft has Salesforce.com beat cold.

Now for the hype side. That will be hard, as Benioff has proven time and time again. Deals like the Google Apps agreement play well, even if substantively they are a lacking in demonstrable market impact. Regardless, Benioff keeps pulling rabbits like Google out of his hat on a regular basis. But Microsoft has it’s much-vaunted market clout, and Brad Wilson, the GM in charge of CRM at Microsoft, is no wall flower either. And, once Microsoft can get its own platform-as-a-service, Office in the cloud story aligned with CRM Online, there’s going to be a lot to hype that, under the covers, will be more than just a fortuitous rabbit popping up in a cloud of smoke. A lot more.

The article below I published a couple of days ago on this blog, but I wanted to include it for reference, as I do mention the MS Outlook advantage.

Google and Salesforce CRM Deal no big deal

Posted on April 19th, 2008 in CRM by Admin | Edit

On Monday Salesforce.com and Google announced a CRM deal that really is no big deal. I read about it on Sunday night on TechCrunch, to me it’s a big to do about nothing. Do you want to know what the top CRM software installations are? Why would you care, and what is CRM Software, and what can it do for you? Let’s answer the simple questions first, and maybe, just maybe that will help to answer why you should care, and why the announcement was no big deal.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and CRM Software has been around since the accounting days and client databases. Every big company has a CRM system, and by in large their customer and sales people do use. A research study published showed that only 4.5% of the companies had CRM Software. I didn’t look in to the details too much, but the website caters to small business, and so their research could be just based on SMB market. Why is that not a big deal, that your company or your small business does not have a CRM system?

Well, that is the big point of this blog, that with email, calendar, and web based systems, who really needs CRM. The point of the Google Salesforce.com partnership is just that in my opinion, it’s no big deal. Email is the killer app as far as CRM is concerned, and with contact management systems built in to Gmail or Outlook, those are the systems people will use. Now Salesforce.com has some great functionality, and for more than one person shops it’s a great way to manage customer relationships. Google and Microsoft are the big players in CRM, no SalesForce.com you are not in trouble. The better features you keep building, the more you stay ahead of the free email contact management systems. For any CRM Software provider to compete, they just have to innovate and make their product more business savvy and less email like.