The Facts on Search Engine Optimization

The primary benefit of search engine optimization (SEO) is widely known as a prime placement on a search engine’s first result page. Companies across the globe are manipulating their website in order to achieve the elusive status of a first page appearance. There are many things that a company should be aware of in the SEO process. First, it will necessitate change and a significant amount of time. Along with this, keywords will be chosen and links will be earned. Above all, your company should set realistic goals for your search engine optimization.


Change

In order for SEO to be effective, you web page will change; it may be as simple as minor wording adjustments or it may be a complete overhaul. The HTML code on your site must be changed so that search engine spiders can easily scan your site. Along with this, the keywords for which you want to be known must appear throughout your web pages. If you are a small site competing against large sites with various blogs, communities, archives, and forums, your site will most likely require significant change in order to compete.

Time

SEO does not garner immediate results for your website. It should be seen as an ongoing marathon, instead of a ½ mile sprint. A search engine has to first find and index your website. Older, more established sites are rewarded a higher ranking because of their long-standing success. New sites require much more time, sometimes even years, to rank well in big search engines. On the other hand, some sites may only require relatively quick fixes to appear on the first page. Be persistent and continually work toward optimization success.

Keywords

In order to attract your target customer to your site, your keywords should be chosen specifically and deliberately. Although common words may appear on your list, it is also important to target the keywords to the best products/services/information on your site. For example, the website of a cosmetic dentist will contain keywords of elective dental treatments rather than general dental provisions. In this way, you are attracting your target audience to your site rather than those that are looking for something else entirely. It will often take time to find the best keywords.

Links

The right backlinks are crucial to your placement on Google’s results pages. Generally you are looking for links to your site from related websites. Your keywords should appear in the link text. If you only have links that were simple to get, it is likely that their influence will be minimal to Google or another major search engine. Create a high-quality, dynamic, attractive website in order to obtain good links. After all, if your content is bland and dull, no one will find it linkworthy.

Goals

Successful search engine optimization involves setting realistic goals. First of all, the objective is to draw your target audience to your website based on the keywords they have entered into the search engine. You need not lure just anyone to the site; the goal is the draw potential buyers to the site. Additionally, your goal should be to increase your sales based on the SEO efforts.

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Notice of Internet Intellectual Property Rights Dispute in China???

Update 4/22/16-

 I can't believe this scam is still going on. Today one of our clients received a version of this message but the spammer was claiming to be part of Network Solutions. 

We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in China. We received an application from Huabao Ltd on April 18, 2016. They want to register " rockcountyalliance " as their Internet Keyword and " rockcountyalliance .cn "、" rockcountyalliance .com.cn " 、" rockcountyalliance .net.cn "、" rockcountyalliance .org.cn " 、" rockcountyalliance .asia " domain names, they are in China and Asia domain names. But after checking it, we find " rockcountyalliance " conflicts with your company. In order to deal with this matter better, so we send you email and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China or not? 

We still get a call on this topic once a month or so. Be careful out there people.

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For about the last year or so I have been getting calls from many of our manufacturing customers that are in a panic because they have received an email with the subject line: "Notice of Internet Intellectual Property Rights Dispute in China". 

The email claims to be with the department of Asian Domain registration service in China and they claim to have received a application from a company that is attempting to register my clients brand name  in a domain. 

This is a scam.  They are attempting to sell you a bunch of over priced domain names.  Don't be fooled.   Often times the phone numbers in the email actually work but in none of the cases we have looked at have we found the companies initiating the emails NOT legitimate ICANN registrars.

Here is an example of one such email:

Subject: Notice of Internet Intellectual Property Rights Dispute in China
(If you are NOT CEO,please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent.Thanks.)

Dear CEO,

We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in China, have something need to confirm with you. we formally received an application on July 19,2010. one company which called "Brazil Kpore Investment S.A" are applying to register "YourCompanyName" as Brand Name and Domains.

YourCompanyName.asia (Asia)

YourCompanyName.hk (Hong Kong)

YourCompanyName.com.tw (Taiwan)

YourCompanyName.hk (Hong Kong)

YourCompanyName.net.cn (China)

YourCompanyName.org.cn (China)

YourCompanyName.tw (Taiwan)

YourCompanyName.com.sg (Singapore)

YourCompanyName.com.vn (Vietnam)

YourCompanyName.sg (Singa pore)

YourCompanyName.vn (Vietnam)

YourCompanyName.my (Malaysia)

YourCompanyName.ae (Arab Emirates)

YourCompanyName.co.kr (Korea)

YourCompanyName.kr (Korea)

YourCompanyName.cn (China)

YourCompanyName.com.cn (China)

But we found that "Brazil Kpore Investment S.A" is not the original owner of the brand and trademark in the checking period,which belong to your company .I need confirm with you whether your company authorized that company to register these domain name.If you have done that ,We will finish the registration for them and link to their website.

If not, please let me know ASAP.

In addition, we hereby affirm that our time limit for dissent application is 7 workdays. If your company files no dissent within the time limit, we will unconditionally approve the application.

Best Regards,
Peter Yan(Mr)
Auditing Consultant

Tel: +0086-566-2629-555 Fax: +0086-566-2629-666

Address:Room205, No.D4 Qingxi South Garden, South-ChangJiang Road,Guichi Shi District,Chizhou,China

UPDATE- 12/20/2011

Here is another email I received from what I believe is the same group:

Dear CEO,
(If you are not in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent. Thanks)
We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in Shanghai, China. On Dec 15, 2011, we received an application from Hantong company requested "foremosthunting" as their internet keyword and China (CN) domain names. But after checking it, we find this name conflict with your company name or trademark. In order to deal with this matter better, it's necessary to send email to you and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China?
Kind regards 

Paul PangOffice Manager Shanghai Office (Head Office)3002, Nanhai Building, No. 854 Nandan Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai 200070, China Tel:             +86-21-6191-8696       Mobile: +86-182-2195-1605Fax: +86-21-6191-8697Web: www.yiguannetwork.comP Please consider the environment before printing this email

I responded to the latest email from these guys posted above stating that the domain in question was our brand name. This is the response I got back:

"Dear Sirs,We are Hantong company based in China. We will register the "foremosthunting" as internet keyword and CN domain names .cn, .com.cn, .net.cn, .org.cn. We have handed in our application and are waiting for Mr. Paul Pang's approval. We think this name is important for our products in Chinese market. Even though Mr. Paul Pang advises us to change another name, we will persist in this name.Best regardsGareth Lee"

I responded again saying I wanted to protect my brand and this is the response I got back:

Dear Jon Ballard,

Based on your company having no relationship with them, we have suggested they should choose another name to avoid this conflict but they insist on this name as CN domain names (.cn/.com.cn/.net.cn/.org.cn) and internet keyword on the internet. In our opinion, maybe they do the similar business as your company and register it to promote his company.
According to the domain name registration principle: Domain name and internet keyword which applied based on the international principle are opened to companies as well as individuals. Any companies or individuals have rights to register any domain name and internet keyword which are unregistered. Because your company haven't registered this name as CN domains and internet keyword on the internet, anyone can obtain them by registration. However, in order to avoid this conflict, the trademark or original name owner has priority to make this registration in our audit period.
If your company is the original owner of this name and want to register these CN domain names (.cn/.com.cn/.net.cn/.org.cn) and internet keyword to prevent anybody from using them, please inform us. We can send you an application form with price list and help your company register them.

Kind regards

As you can see the end game here is to get me to buy some over priced Chinese domain name extensions.  The next correspondence I received from this company was a invoice.  The invoice contained:

$144/Year from a "Internet Key Word" (My Brand Name)
4 different Chinese domain name extension versions of my URL at $44/Year.

The invoice said it was the "Internet Keyword & CN Domain Name Application Form"

Attached please find this application form. You can find the price from this form. If your company want to make this application, please fill out this form and send it back with the copy of company business license (company registration certificate).

I also asked what a internet keyword was (Only $144/Year) and this is the response I received:

Thanks for your email. Internet Keyword is one of the new accessing ways to internet, which is the real-world brand’s extension and incorporeal property in the network. It is also a new generation of network accessing technology, which can help users get the companies and products’ information directly by inputting the name of company, product, trademark etc. into browser, search engines, regional infoports and so on.
Kind regards
Paul Pang

Here is the latest version of this scam from an Abby Wang 11/13/12 :

Dear Manager,
(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO,Thanks)
This email is from China domain name registration center, which mainly deal with the domain name registration and dispute internationally in China and Asia.
On Nov 12th 2012, We received Kenya Ltd's application that they are registering the name "foremosthunting" as their Internet Keyword and "foremosthunting.cn "、"foremosthunting.com.cn " 、"foremosthunting.asia "domain names etc.., they are China and ASIA domain names. But after auditing we found the brand name been used by your company. As the domain name registrar in China, it is our duty to notice you, so we are sending you this email to check. According to the principle in China, your company is the owner of the trademark, In our auditing time we can keep the domain names safe for you firstly, but our audit period is limited, if you object the third party application these domain names and need to protect the brand in china and Asia by yourself, please let the responsible officer contact us as soon as possible. Thank you!
Best Regards,Abby Wang

 

General Manager
Anhui Office (Head Office)Registration Department Manager
Room 1008 Shenhui Building
Haitian Road, Huli Anhui, ChinaOffice:  +86 0553 4994789
Fax:     +86 0553 4994789

web:  www.ygcompany.org

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What's in a font?

Typography. It's such a beautiful art. Simple adjustments can drastically improve not only how we read text, but how we feel when reading text. Conveying emotions through text via the web has some serious limits. Only a small subset of fonts are going to work cross-platform. Here's the basics.

Arial / Helvetica
Courier New
Times New Roman

Of course it is possible to use other fonts, but those are the basics that are "guaranteed" to work.

Luckily, Google has done it once again. Using Google's font directory we can finally use a wider variety of fonts on the web. This is an awesome service that provides the web with open and royalty free fonts. Not only are these fonts free to use, but Google hosts this service for you. Embedding fonts is as simple as adding a few lines to your web page. Just check out this tutorial on Google's website.

We here at Foremost Media are really excited about this. We are always on the look out for cool new technologies to make your websites look and work great.

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Google announces new features

"We introduced a new way to view search results for sites with lots of images. Each result will now include a strip of images from the website, so you can get a better preview of what each page has to offer. [...]


This week, we released a new version of Goggles with translation capabilities built in. To use it, point your phone's camera at a foreign word or phrase and use the 'region of interest button' to draw a box around specific words."

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It's official: Google uses page speed as a ranking factor

Last Friday, Google announced that they started to use site speed as one of the 200 signals that influence the position of a website in the search results.

"As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...]
We've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites."

Will your website rankings drop?

Google's Matt Cutts says that the change will affect only some websites:
"Fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.
So please don?t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that 'We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.'
The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change."
While 1% does not sound much, it can be a problem if your website belongs to the pages whose rankings will drop.

At this time, Google's new site speed signal only applies to visitors searching in English on Google.com. 


What does this mean for Foremost Media Customers?  Not a whole lot, but if your using a ultra low cost web host, or  your site has lots of Java script calls or gZip is not enabled along with a multitude of other best practices you may want to pay attention to this announcement.  If you need help making your website preform better give us a call today!

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The State Of The Internet- Video

Some pretty interesting facts about the internet:

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Increase Website Load Speed With Neat Little Trick

I was looking into this a while back and it just popped back up in my mind again. To reduce bandwidth and page load times some websites will place a majority of their images in a single image and use it as if it were a tile sheet.

Example: http://www.google.com/images/nav_logo8.png

Using some a certain combination of CSS properties you can crop out unneeded parts of the image.

Example:

.next-button {

     cursor: pointer;

     background-image: url(tilesheet.png);

     background-position: 32px 0px;

     width: 16px;

     height: 16px;

}

Pretty cool stuff no doubt. It obviously not worth it for smaller sites considering the amount of work it would take to get it setup. But it's always an option for bulky high traffic sites. Keep in mind this is just one out of a thousand techniques Google uses to give you those quick loading pages.

-Posted By Foremost Media Staff Member Kevin W.

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