Canada’s Web Shop

Hi again!  It’s been a while since I’ve posted so I figured it was about time.  Things have been exceptionally busy around here taking on several new clients and doing preliminary work on projects.  One of the clients had expressed a desire to start collecting emails at their cash counters and this article which I wrote a little while ago came in very handy explaining the things that everyone should know when collecting emails.  The full article is on our company website.  Go check it out! 

Michael

How many times have you been to a store and been asked for your personal information and/or your email address? Have you ever filled out a small ballot form for a draw and noticed a field at the very bottom for email? Do you notice that some registration and application forms for things like credit cards and loyalty programs now have a space where you can write your email address?

[ Full Article ] 

Relax. Don’t panic. By offline I mean that Google has a feature which allows you to place advertising offline audio ads and print ads in your choice of over 200 major newspapers and 1600 AM and FM Stations all across the United States. I’m not sure how long this feature has been around but it looks like it could be a really good way to advertise your business outside of the web and it looks pretty easy although I haven’t tried it myself because our focus is on customers within our local and surrounding area.

To make things simple for the average advertiser to understand, Google has created a simple video demo for audio ads as well as a video demo for print ads.

The main advantage for this new way to advertise through Google is that it allows people who don’t have experience in media buying to access radio and print advertising easily. They’ll also be able to centralize their radio and print advertising under one umbrella for tracking and organization purposes; something that traditionally even larger, more experienced corporations spent big bucks to do.

Bravo Google!

If anyone has any experience with Google Print or Audio ads I’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to share your experience here.

Recently, Google has introduced a new search feature for searchers which allows you to add a date parameter to your search queries. 

This means that you can now specify a freshness factor to your searches.  For example, if there was an event that happened several years ago that has recently had an update…say within the last 10 days, such as a re-opened criminal case then you can specify a paramater on the search to return only pages found by Google within the last 10 days.  This way, you return only the most relevent information that is known by Google right now without returning the pages that were relevant for that topic years ago. 

You can do this by typing into your address bar the following address:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=search_term&as_qdr=d10

Note: replace search_term with what you’re looking for such as Internet Marketing Information or Email Marketing Information for example and then replace the 10 with the number of days you want to go back.  This search for example would return all known documents for “pet care” within the last 10 days. 

http://www.google.ca/search?q=pet care&as_qdr=d10

The screen below shows the screen once the results have returned.  You can now change the date by changing the value in the “past 10 days” drop down box to whatever you choose.

So how does this help you if you’re a web site owner? 

Have you ever wondered what pages Google has found and indexed on your website in the last X number of days?  A HAH!  I can see the lights coming on now.  This new tool will let you find out which pages you added to your website in a particular period have been found and indexed by Google.  Previously accomplished by going to google and typing the full web page address to see if a result comes back.  If not, the page wasn’t indexed yet.

 So now if you replace search term with site:www.yourdomain.com then you’ll return all indexed pages on your website within the last 10 days or whatever period you specified. 

So now your query looks like this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.yourdomain.com&as_qdr=d10

replace www.yourdomain.com with your own domain to see the results for your specific domain. 

So there you have it.  A much easier way to find out which pages on your website Google has indexed within a certain time period.