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As I was searching for a gift late one evening using Google, I came to a shocking realization. For all the work eBlox has done over the years in organic search – optimizing websites and links so that pages come up high in Google’s rankings – I’ve been won over by the “other” side of Google’s search results page. That’s right: I click on ads. Specifically, the “pay-per-click” ads that run down the right side and top of Google’s search results page. For me, those “Sponsored Links” have become a more reliable way to find many of the things I’m looking for. And if my behavior has changed, you can bet that other users’ habits are changing too.

Why on earth would I click an advertisement for “imprinted ceramic mugs” when Google has invested billions of dollars in technology to show me the absolute best, top-notch, high-quality, popular web site for ceramic mugs right there in the middle of the page? Quite a few reasons, actually, but the most salient one may be that Google has quite a few more billions riding on the accuracy and effectiveness of those ads that surround the natural results than the results themselves. Google’s stated mission is to organize the world’s information, but their balance sheet tells the real story: Google is an advertising company. That’s not to suggest Google neglects their organic search results; quite the opposite. Google’s search results are probably the best they can possibly be given the volume of information they have to process.
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Categories: Articles

For those of you that really like to tweak your search engine indexing performance, storeBlox 2 now offers custom URL management for products. storeBlox has long had the capability of automatically generating keyword-based URLs derived from each product name. However, many of you would like to add keywords to the URL that you wouldn’t normally include in a product name.

Now, this is as simple as entering the segment of the URL path in webBlox:

Custom SEO URL Management in webBlox

Contact us with questions on implementing this feature.

Categories: How-to

A few years ago, I introduced the readers of this column to cloud-based computer services like Salesforce.com, Google Apps and others. These services take something that you typically do with an application on your computer – e.g. word processing with Microsoft Word – and transform it into a service that you can use with any web browser connected to the internet.

In some cases, these services are more or less equivalent to their desktop counterpart and, in many cases, they go beyond them. Salesforce.com, for instance, has grown far beyond what is available in desktop customer relationship management applications like ACT! In other cases, the cloud software is a much simpler version of its shrink-wrapped competitors. While Google Docs will handle your short documents and basic spreadsheets with ease, you probably don’t want to build your 500-page textbook with it. (more…)

Categories: General