Magro International is pleased to announce the Beta launch of Boardroom Couple. For the past few months we have been working on building a website to support couples who are in business together. We feel that going into business with your spouse can be a successful yet often overlooked option for many couples.
The new website will provide resources to improve the conference table to dinner table relationship. These resources will help those considering going into business with their spouse and those who already work with their spouse. Leonard is getting close to completing a unique online course that will help anyone to Build a Website. The site will also combine Julie’s work on aMichiganMom.com into a new feature called The Dinner Table, that will focus on helping entrepreneurial couples eat healthy, organic meals despite the busy life of entrepreneurs.
Please have a look around the website. We welcome any feedback you would like to provide! Email us at info @ BoardroomCouple.com
Leonard Magro receiving Young Professional of the Year Award
Congrats to Leonard, Magro International’s President, for winning the Rochester Regional Chamber of Commerce Young Professional of the Year at the Sunrise Pinnacle Awards. If you’ve ever been around our office, you know that Leonard works hard and is very passionate about providing all Magro International’s clients with superior products and services. We think he couldn’t be more deserving. We also would like to thank The Athena Group for sponsoring the award.
Congratulations Leonard! Here are some more photos of the event:
Sunrise Pinnacle Awards Winners & Sponsors
Dave Lewallen, Master of Ceremonies
Leonard with the Young Professional of the Year Sponsor, Diane Young from The Athena Group
Reading over the latest Business Week article on Google, I pulled out the following quotes, that I thought are interesting. We’ve been telling clients these things for awhile, but it is always interesting to hear it from the source:
“Google’s computers are constantly running may indicate people aren’t clicking on some results as much or in the same way as they did historically.”
Performance on the Search Engine Result page matters just as much as your appearance there.
“Google is famous for its algorithms and data-driven approach, but the company depends nearly as much on a global network of human evaluators, or “raters.” These part-time contract workers are asked to provide opinions on proposed changes and whether results are more relevant, among other things. Often their opinions carry the day.”
Never create a website just for computers. Users matter just as much.
“About 10 changes are approved to go live at each Thursday morning launch meeting.”
Google is constantly changing the way the SERP operates — every week.
“So Google has been tweaking algorithms to emphasize the searcher’s apparent location. Now, a search on “bank” on the U.S. site, google.com, will bring up links to Bank of America and Wells Fargo (WFC), while the same search on google.co.in, Google’s Indian site, will bring up homegrown HDFC Bank (HDB) and ICICI Bank (IBN).”
Ranking reports can provide some estimate of where you rank, but increasingly, traffic and Analytics analysis is the best way to determine the effectiveness of your campaign.
According to Aaron Wall’s blog, “Google is planning to roll out a system of micropayments within the next year. Micropayments, as the name implies, are small payments – a cent or even a fraction of a cent – and the idea is that micropayments can be used to pay for accessing web content.
“He has an excellent post on Micropayments/Google/Traditional Media that summarizes a few thoughts on the subject.According to his post, Jakob Neilsen predicted a pay-per-webpage-view internet access system way back in 1998.
Aaron quotes Neilsen as saying (back in 1998);“A true micropayment system would operate invisibly and simply accumulate charges on the user’s monthly bill without an explicit confirmation for every click. That’s exactly how electricity bills and long-distance telephone bills work. True, people wouldn’t make many long-distance calls if they first had to discuss the fee with an operator (though we certainly made calls back when we had to talk to a long-distance operator and acknowledge charges for each call). In any case, telephone companies now simply add up the calls and put them all on a single bill. Intellectually, you know that it costs money to use the phone and turn on a light, but if you want to talk to somebody, you pick up the phone. And if the room is too dark, you switch on the light. You don’t go out to the meter every few minutes to check on your electricity bill.”
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. A new system like this could really change the way the web operates. If anyone else tried to roll this out, it wouldn’t fly, but imagine you are browsing Google, find some trusted content you want to read and have the option paying a few cents (or fraction of a cent) to get content that is “trusted” or taking your chances on free content. Which would you choose? I would probably choose the “trusted” content.There is much to be explored with this concept, but a change like this does have the ability to fundamentally change the way content is accessed. Some issues I see on the horizion are:
What do the other search engines do? If Google is charging and others are not, what happens?
What about people who include references to this paid content in their web writing?
What about people who link to this content from their website? If people started linking or stopped linking more/less to paid content wouldn’t it mess up the whole link popularity algorithm?
Doesn’t this make Google the ultimate publisher? If they are “publishing” the news and then charging for the news in their SERP, who really owns the content? Doesn’t this just make the newspapers content divisions of Google?
Under-the-hood changes by Google will change how they index your website. They cannot guarantee that this change will not affect your rankings, but are trying to disrupt things as little as possible.Watch this interview with Google to hear directly from them on how they are changing the way they index and serve up the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
If you have not heard by now, Bing and Yahoo are partnering to challenge Google.At this point in time Google dominates 65-to-82% (depending on how you measure this…) of all search queries.The landscape is obviously changing, Bing will gain more relevance, but at this point in time certainly not to Google’s expense. After the merger Bing is estimated to have approx 28% of the market share. Bing is definitely worth optimizing more for if this deal goes through, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions at this point in time and we’ll keep you up to date as soon as the dust starts to settle.
Have you grabbed social media profiles for your brand name and key employees?
Managing what people see when they search for you or your business is important step in today’s brand management strategies.
Creating profiles on popular social media websites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and many others can help you manage the search results for your brand and employees. Even if you don’t plan to actively participate in the site, it prevents other people from registering your brand name
When I learned that I had an opportunity for a summer internship at Magro International, I was very excited about all the the new skills and experiences I could acquire, and after one month into the internship, I haven’t been disappointed.
One of the tasks that I have spent a lot of time on in the last month is using the DotNetNuke content management system to edit existing websites, and to create new ones. I hadn’t had any experience with this CMS prior to the internship, but I must say I have found it surprisingly easy to get used to. Layout of the pages is based on the placement of separate modules; each having a specific function, such as displaying text, media, or a shopping cart system. Organizing these modules in a way that is both appealing to the eye and functional for visitors is something that I’m sure will always be a learning process.
I can’t believe it has already been over a month since I started my internship at Magro International. I was so excited to be given the opportunity to work here this summer completing an internship in the field I am going to school for. In the beginning, I was not 100% sure about all the things I would be working on and learning, but just from this past month my expectations have been exceeded.I work more on the marketing side of Magro International with Julie. I have been focusing on helping her put together Local SEO reports for companies they do work for. I really enjoy doing the SEO work because many business owners don’t know exactly how to get their business out there and how to get their search engine rankings higher, which is something Julie has been teaching me how to do.
Something I have been working a lot this past month at Magro is link building. I have learned how important it is to get links to your website from other sites. This can be a very time consuming process, but in the end I know it pays off for the companies we do it for.
Something else I have been working on a lot is keyword research. By knowing the keywords potential customers are searching for can really help your ranking on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. I have been using a tool called Google Ad Words which shows me the amount of times a certain keyword has been searched locally and globally. Keyword research can help companies more ways than just for search engines, it can also help to decide what to name a video listed on YouTube. By knowing these highly searched keywords, you can increase the viewings of your YouTube videos, and website.
I have been learning about all the local search engines to submit businesses to such as Google Local and Yahoo Local. These listings should be step number one when listing a business. Also, I just learned of a new website, universal business listing, which can help to list a business to many different search engines.
Overall, my experience at Magro International so far has been excellent. Leonard and Julie are very willing to help me with anything I need and encourage me to as questions when I am unsure of anything. I like how they are actually teaching me skills that I will use in my future and I know over the next couple months it will only get better.
