When you think of a large business that has millions of tasks, automation becomes a much bigger conversation. Think for example about something like processing mail. A corporation receives 1,000′s of mail pieces each week. Processing this manually starts to become a serious time restraint as well as a cost. Having to pay the employees just to manage that can become costly.

Automation can apply to more than just business as well. Even in the SEO world sometimes automation is a strong suit.

When referencing business automation solutions i think of a company by the name of Informa Software. They specialize in custom software development geared around automated mail sorting and automated fax management.

When i think of SEO automation I think of platforms like Raven Tools and Conductor. Business process software is definitely making it’s way into business strategies. I am very curious where this will go in the immediate future.

With that being said, I saw a nice meta description written about my employer Ephricon today. It doesn’t get much better than this: when an internet marketer in the same region as us (Charlotte, NC) writes an excellent meta description that endorses us. This speaks volumes about our charlotte search engine optimization services!

These results can be viewed by doing a search on Google for Charlotte SEO

Recently I had a client that decided to change their business address and business name. The business maintained the same type of service and only changed the name slightly due to a partnership change (LLC etc.). With that change I went into the verified Google Places account for said client and updated the business name and address to reflect the new updates. You would think this should be a good standard practice as I am promoting accurate content.

Within 2 weeks of this update I had noticed the clients local positioning had dropped off. This made me dig in and notice that Google Places had actually created a duplicate Google Places listing for said client with the old business information. This duplicate listing had impacted the results of the claimed listing. Under further examination it was determined that Google Places had automatically created a new listing with the old information due to many citations still existing on the web with that information.

This now creates a huge problem because a few side effects were felt and will continue to be felt.
1. We dropped in the local results
2. Google Places automatically made this change because more citations exist for the old incorrect address
3. Google Places will continue to support the old business information until I update ALL old citations with new ones (possibly 100′s)
4. Google’s report a problem tool barely ever works, but I will try to tell Google this is a duplicate anyway
5. Any many other issues …

The summary seems to be that the automated system will continue to inaccurate skew my manually updated data until I can force the automated system to see the new information. I feel like this is a flawed system. Being the verified owner, I should be able to say “hey, my address changed”.

… is the MorningStar Ministries Heritage Towers reservation a scam? It seems as if Morningstar Ministries is attempting to take reservations to reserve a homesite in the Old Heritage Towers that used to once be PTL. They seem to be promoting a restoration of the towers and have been discussing this for months, yet nothing is being done. Here is additional information on the MorningStar Ministries Towers: http://towerlife.org/.

What is really interesting is all the Regent Park residence (in Fort Mill, SC) want the tower demolished do to hazards and being a huge eye sore. Additional information from the residence views can be found here at this facebook group specifically for the towers “Tear Down the MorningStar Tower”: http://www.facebook.com/groups/103986112983510/.

I am curious what others think of this. It sure does look like a scam, just as it was over 30 years ago when 100′s of people put down deposits on tower timeshares, which ultimately became a scam. More information on this here Jim Bakker – Wikipedia.

Here is the actual link where they are trying to collect $1,000 for each tower reservation:
http://morningstarministries.org/Shop/Sections/Items/Item.aspx?item_id=1000015147

So, do you think MorningStar Ministries Heritage Towers of Fort Mill, South Carolina is a Scam?

The data is generated based on opinions from 132 different SEO’s. The chart represents the average of these opinions from most important to least important. It is important to note that even though domain level keyword usage has decreased from year to year, there is still a lot of weight on exact match keyword domain. It is also surprising to me that the second highest value comes from a domain name with the keyword phrase in the actual domain i.e. keywordsomething.com. Thoughts on this data? I am curious to hear what others think.

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A search on Google for “seo agency” and “seo company” produced a #4/#5 ranking out of 75 million results roughly. It doesn’t get a whole lot more competitive than that.

Ephricon’s Videos on Search Marketing

Within the last few weeks I have noticed that Google is swapping out my title tag text even though I have specified the title tag text within the title tags. I am not referring to the situation where Google would every once in awhile use the DMOZ title in place of your specified title. The text that is being used to replace my created text is coming specifically from the site navigation. I also witnessed that this happens only when my queried search is very closely and almost exactly related to the navigation text corresponding with that page. Let me lay this out in more detail:

For example, lets say I create a page called “purple widgets”. I link to the page within my main site navigation as “purple widgets”. I manually create a title tag for this page with something like: <title>purplie big widgets – the creation of purple widgitie things</title>. A Google search for: purplie big widgets produces my page ranked with the title tag used: “purplie big widgets – the creation of purple widgitie things”. I do another Google search for: “purple widgets” and Google displays my page ranked with “purple widgets” as the title tag as opposed to the title tag I created manually.

In summary it seems Google is swapping out the manually created title tag with different text based on the search in question and more so if it deems the search is very closely related to the navigation name of that page. This could potentially be the beginning stages of automatically decreasing page titles which are stuffed / off target.

Click Rate for the Top 10 Search Results

Donna at SEO Scoop catches a post where they used the recently released AOL Search Data to figure out click through rates for the the top 10 positions in search results.

For ages people have been guessing at these figures – now we really know!

Results in:
Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 4.9x less
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 6.9x less
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 8.5x less
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 10.4x less
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 12.3x less
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 14.0x less
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 14.8x less
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 14.1x less

The Data proves that it pays to be in the top 3 positions by a mile!

source url click here