Jon’s In Waikiki (AKA The Waikiki Marketer)

Google is serving its search results more and more on a ‘personal’ basis. In other words, they use your previous searches and ‘search behavior’ to decide how to rank the results you get now. That means rankings are no longer a real guideline that we can hang our SEO hat on. Find out how you [...]

A few days ago the Official Word came from Google. Their big Caffeine update has NOT gone live, yet. This was news to many as it was assumed that it was already out there or at least partly so. According to Google Mouthpiece Matt Cutts, though, it isn’t. It’s being fed on a server in [...]

One of the important things people forget when creating web pages is that reading patterns are very different online than off. People reading websites tend to skim or skip around the page, looking for either what they came for or for something that catches their eye. That means you need to add signposts, in a [...]

All the SEO in the world won’t help if….you don’t complete the transaction. This is a real problem for most business on the web including, very possibly, yours. SEO gets the searcher to the site. SEO can confirm consciously and unconsciously that they’re at the right place to get what they want. BUT SEO alone [...]

It’s been a while since last posting due to: A. Some blog software problems B. I’m the current President of the Honolulu Chinese Jaycees and that’s taken a lot  my extra time. Things have eased up on both fronts so I should blogging more regularly. Follow me on Twitter for daily tips and search engine [...]

It looks like Google might be using your bounce rate as part of their ranking algorithm. What does that mean for our SEO efforts? Strictly speaking it’s not actually an SEO problem. Let’s define what a ‘bounce’ is and get some other facts of the way first. A bounce is a single page visit – [...]

Many businesses realize that their site(s) need to be changed – sometimes for a more current look or to improve the user experience or some other reason. What holds them back is the real fear that they could lose the search engine rankings they’ve fought so hard to get. After years of consistent SEO, the [...]

“What?!?! It takes THAT long?!?!”. I was sitting across the table from a prospective client who had just gone into shock. His outburst took place after I had told him that SEO might not produce results for a few months. His site was in bad shape and has not seen any search engine optimization ever. [...]

The Honolulu Advertiser carried an article today on the fact that Hawaii had seen a big gain in bankruptcy filings last month. It should be noted that this is going on all over, not just in Hawaii. Another important aspect is that many of these were personal bankruptcies. Still, that leaves a lot of room [...]

If you’ve ever run an AdWords campaign you probably already know that Google will show your ad for related keyphrases that are close to your selected keywords. That can be problematic if you don’t pay attention. It’s part of ongoing work to eliminate keywords or keyphrases that aren’t good for your bottom line. It looks [...]