robertludvig | Internet, trends | Thursday, June 12th, 2008
The following green business video focuses on Google and what they are doing to advance the movement towards sustainability. When multi-billion dollar companies make a conscious effort to protect the environment and minimize their carbon footprint, things are changing. I personally hope that other major corporations realize that taking action to protect the environment is possible. Small steps can lead to major change. Good job Google.
robertludvig | Internet | Thursday, March 1st, 2007
Welcome to the Information Age. Okay, we’ve already been here for a while but now ordinary people like you and me are actually reaping some of the financial benefits from it. Unlike the industrial age, the average Joe and Jane can actually make money from the Information Age. All it takes is original content. You have to teach someone something. We have entered the first period in history where literally any person can ask a question and what ever the question is, it will be answered in mere moments. This is why quality search engines such as; Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN are so valuable. These web sites scan billions of web pages to find the most relevant answers to the questions you pose. Knowledge is power, and information is profitable.
Newspapers have been selling information for decades, so what makes the Information Age different? One answer is control. People have the autonomy to get the the information that they want, not just the information that newspapers decide to feed us. This may seem like a simplistic answer, but if you look under the surface you can see that for the first time people have control over information from both ends. Control over creating it, and control over choosing what’s important. Obviously the internet has bridged the gap, and is narrowing that gap with each passing day as millions of more people obtain access to the internet. No one can pinpoint an exact date when the world went online, but there seems to be a general consensus that it was in the mid nineteen nineties. We’ve only been in the Information Age for roughly twelve years, and as it stands at this moment I can’t even imagine my life without web access. How did I, let alone the world, survive without being “connected”? A similar question might have been asked by people living in the Sixties with regards to television.
Okay, so most everyone has access to all kinds information, but how can the average person profit from it? As it stands today, the answer lies in online advertising. If content is key, then Google is the key-hole. Just like television, advertising is generating money for people who are creating original content and who know how to market it on the internet. Getting personal, many of my friends who are in their mid 20’s to mid 30’s refuse to pay for anything on the internet. One of them actually scoffed at the idea. I remember a few years ago trying to view online newspapers on the internet but couldn’t because they asked users to purchase a membership. I never did, nor will I ever. The most widely used way people make money from the internet is through online advertising. Unlike television, or other forms of media, anyone can make money from the internet thanks to online advertising from companies such as Google. Creating Google Adsense, Google’s online advertising program, in 2003 has revolutionized the internet by placing the potential for profit in everyone’s lap. Placing ads on a web site does not automatically make someone a millionaire, but it does offer a chance. The same cannot be said for television, magazines, movies, etc. Creativity is important. How can you distinguish your web site from others? That’s a question that everyone is trying to answer. In my opinion, there are no short cuts. By writing original, interesting articles that are in demand by people trying to educate and entertain themselves is the only true way to gain an audience. A sustained audience is what every site is after since people who surf the web have billions of options out there.
In the end, the Information Age is about choice. It’s about having access to all information and then choosing what is important to you.
A brand new area of business was born a few short years ago. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has quietly changed the business of marketing web sites on the internet. When someone uses a search engine such as Google to find information about their topic of choice they simply type in the subject they want to find out about. The web sites that the search engine determines to posses the most relevant content are listed in order. This is where SEO comes into play. The search engine could list ten pages of web sites, with ten sites per page. That’s a total of one hundred web sites, and there could very well be many more than ten pages of data. Experts in this field have determined, with some certainty, that most people who search almost never look past page two, while others believe that people don’t look past page one. The importance of being ranked on page one is crucial to gain “people traffic”.
To get into the coveted top ten list one must optimize their web site too meet the strict standards that search engines implement to weed through literally billions of web pages. What SEO companies do is structure a web site’s content in a specific way to give it a fighting chance to have the site rank highly among search engine results. One such company is run by entrepreneur Alex Ramon. His brand new company is named DataPencil and the goal is to get your company’s web site the most traffic as possible. Still in the early stages of development, Data Pencil is different than most Search Engine Optimization companies by the simple fact that Alex’s company has created a free tutorial to help people optimize their web site. Along with this tutorial is a forum dedicated to answering any question that students may have.
Alex begins to open up, “What a lot of people who have web sites forget is that content is key. It’s impossible to optimize a web site if it doesn’t have quality, focused content. You have to have both of those things if you want to make money. I can’t make something out of nothing. Search engines always seem to be tweaking the way they analyze web sites because people keep trying to cheat. They knowingly load their site with key words to try and manipulate search engines to obtain a high page rank. Well, people at Google aren’t dumb. They quickly caught on and shifted the way they analyze sites to the point where web sites that over load key words are now penalized. Content, quality links to and from your site, and having an optimized site are all keys to getting a high page rank today. Just to let you know, it could change next month. It all depends how search engines determine what’s important and what’s not important. Oh yeah, grammar is important too. You might not have thought about it, but things like proper grammar and spelling are both factors in SEO. Search engines are smart.
So much potential profit from the internet is out there, and maximizing this potential is what search engine optimization is all about. You can hire companies to help you or you can do it yourself, but one thing is for certain, it’s all changing right before our eyes. A few years ago who would have thought about structuring their company’s web site to aid in search engine rankings. Now it has become so important that smart, e-business entrepreneurs, like Alex Ramon of Data Pencil, are devoting much of their time and energy to help you add profit to your company’s bottom line.
