As an internet development and marketing company, Orlando Web Services hears the plight of many small to mid-sized businesses. The common question is, How can I make the internet work for my site? It’s a great question which comes with hundreds if not thousands of answers. We hope to answer a few of those questions right here.
Posted by: bjorlando | July 27, 2009
Introduction
Posted by: bjorlando | January 5, 2010
Google Ditches Local Listings for SEOs and Designers
By Chris Crum
Why is Google Eliminating Local Results for SEOs?
As 2009 came to a close, Google managed to get SEOs riled up for one last
controversial topic. For some time, SEOs and web designers have been noticing
that Google has not been showing local listings in search results for queries
related to their businesses – even location-specific ones.
Should SEOs and designers be worried about local listings?
As Matt McGee mentions in a Search Engine Land piece, even a query like “candy” without any geographical indicator will bring up a seven-pack of local results, but a query for “seo” or “web design” or even something as specific as “web design vancouver” will bring up no local listings whatsoever (although the organic results still heavily favor local businesses in location-specific queries).
Needless to say, some SEOs and designers are taking this as something of a slap in the face, justified or not. Search engine optimization and web design are both services after all, and just about every other type of service you can think of will yield local listings in a Google search.
While this phenomenon was originally thought to be a bug, Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick fame points to a Google Maps Help thread where a Googler going by Joel H. tells a different story:
Today, we’re intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings, however (as NSNA/php-er noted) [web design in bellingham]. I’m sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.
I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today.
So if you use the word “in” in your query, you are more likely to get the local results. Some still have a hard time finding the logic in this move.
“I’m all for their interest in balancing for user intent – it’s their business, their product – but I’m missing the logic here,” comments Bill Sebald.
“I find this disturbing,” says Scott Clark. “If I have a physical location in a given area, offer a service to customers in that area that is close to their query, then onebox listings should appear as they do for other creative-class industries.”
Not all SEOs have such a problem with what Google is doing though. “I want to be found by people everywhere, not just in the small city I happen to live in at the moment,” a content writer comments.
“But you would think that if people typed in a city name or other location, they are actually looking for local results and the maps could be useful,” they add. “Although if you have optimized your website for your location, you should get found anyway. And I do all my work online, people don’t need to visit me or even know where I am located so in that sense the maps aren’t always useful or necessary.”
People are saying that in some countries, they are still seeing local results for the type of query in question. It is possible that Google has just not rolled out the changes everywhere yet. The quoted content writer suggests that Google just doesn’t know the user-intent of all of its countries’ people as well as it does for the countries where the changes exist.
Posted in Best Practices, Business Plans, Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | Tags: LinkedIn
Posted by: bjorlando | December 18, 2009
Are You Outsourcing Your Relationships?
Posted by: bjorlando | November 7, 2009
Be True to Yourself (and you will be True to Others)
Many agressive business owners try to do everything and in the end fail. Why? Here are a few thoughts that we found interesting enough to pass on to you while we are waist deep in projects during a recession.
Sinnovation
The seven deadly sins of the innovator—and how you can stop yourself from committing them.
By G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón
The end-of-the-year sales push is in full swing. Planning for 2010 is under way. And between all the meetings, memos, and conference calls, your summer vacation is now just a distant memory. We all could use a break. So, just for fun, let’s take a look at seven of the most common and deadly sins of the innovator. We’ve seen all of these cause failures of Biblical proportions.
1. Lust: Innovating in a space you have no business being in. Trying to innovate outside your operational expertise or brand footprint creates incredible inertia internally. “Should I be working on the things I should be working on or the harebrained scheme that someone else higher up on the org chart has conjured up.” It also causes unhealthy confusion externally. “Wait,” the customer says. “My longtime supplier of plastic molding injection equipment is now making iPhone (AAPL) accessories? What gives?”
Most successful innovation involves complementary products, services, and business models because they are readily accepted by your team and make sense to your customers. Unless a solid business case proves otherwise, “Stick to your knitting” is excellent advice.
2. Gluttony: Trying to create too many initiatives with too few resources. Innovation takes emotional and financial capital and focus. Venture capitalists can afford to back 10 companies, hoping the payoff from one or two will cover the expense of having the other eight or nine investments fail. But those odds won’t work for you. Instead of making a number of small bets, focus your team and resources on one or two initiatives that have the greatest probability of hitting it big.
3. Greed: Taking short-term profits at the expense of long-term growth. The stock market demands a high rate of return, which naturally results in safe bets like line extensions. Line extensions are fine, but they leave you at risk of being blown out of the water by an industry-changing idea. The solution? Create two teams. Put one in charge of evolution and the other in charge of revolution. You’ll get both short- and long-term growth.
4. Sloth: Taking short cuts—not doing the hard work, not following the proven process. Too many otherwise brilliant leaders have made the mistake of thinking that speed and short cuts are the only way to successfully innovate. While we agree that being overly cautious—”Let’s test the idea for the 83rd time”—is also potentially fatal, there is a happy medium. Think big, quantify, qualify, refine, and launch. This should take no more than 12 months. If you can do it in eight, great! If you can do it in three, then you have left something out or you have a very, very tired staff on your hands. Remember: Just because it takes one woman nine months to have a baby doesn’t mean nine women can produce one in 30 days.
5. Wrath: Being so focused on your competition that you miss the same opportunities your rivals are missing. You can’t read the label when you are sitting inside the jar.
Remember, your competitors are in the same jar you’re in. If you concentrate on what they’re doing, you’re both going to get kicked to the curb by someone outside your industry who is rightly focused on the consumer (and not either one of you).
6. Envy: In the context of innovation, envy means launching a “me too” product instead of finding a space you can own. An example of envy is when your sales team comes to you and demands that you launch a product to compete with the “hot” new offering they just saw from the competitor. Don’t take the bait. Chances are, that product is going to fail. Instead, use your sales team to find out what other needs your customer or consumer has, and then attack them with your own novel product, service, or business model.
7. Pride: You won’t give up on your favorite idea—even when the numbers prove you’re wrong. “Hey boss, this one is for you.” Nobody wants to tell you that you are wrong, which means that when it comes to your ideas, you must take a long, hard look at the data. Unless the data are overwhelmingly in favor of your idea, drop it and work on the one the team secretly knows is better.
Religion tells us the seven deadly sins are fatal to spiritual progress. We will let you debate that thought with the theologian of your choice. But we can tell you they are definitely fatal if you want to innovate successfully.
G. Michael Maddock is founding partner, and Raphael Louis Vitón is president, of Maddock Douglas, a company that invents, brands, and markets products “for companies driven by innovation.” .
Posted by: bjorlando | August 27, 2009
Search Engine Optimization Process
SEO is not hard, so why is it always talked about? SEO is not rocket science, so why do so few sites do it right?
The thing about SEO that it has a number of layers to it. It requires the involvement of multiple team members such as the designer, coder, copywriter, and marketing department. Seldom do these players work together, so it’s no surprise when the SEO ball is dropped, if it was ever in anyones hands to begin with.
For those companies who don’t have a team of workers and for the most part are an army of ONE, the layers still exist, but due to lack of time and resources the SEO is incomplete.
If you fall into this last catagory, There is a list of things you can look at for each page of your site to get the SEO flowing. Here are a few ground rules:
- Each page needs to be optimized
- Each term needs to be validated
- Good statistics need to measure results
- Changes will need to be made regularly
SEO impacts the following areas of your site:
Copy (which is the easiest to change)
HTML (which is what the web developer does)
Design (which should not hamper SEO)
Copy is the stuff you write on the page, what you use for links, and is what makes the big sales pitch. If you don’t make a pitch, and tell your unique value, you are not doing your SEO justice. Eyeballs brought in by SEO need direction. Calls to action like…”click here for your free sample“, help complete the SEO mission.
HTML is the code or markup language that is used to format the pages in your site. Code is a word that covers a lot of territory, so we won’t go there. However, Google does look at the code of a site and if you can’t edit your code or don’t have an interest in editing code, you will need a web developer to help you. Page titles, meta tags and alt and title tags need to be modified for SEO.
Design should compliment SEO and not dismiss it. A home page or site built in flash throws any chance of SEO out the window and also makes it impossible for search engines to cache your content. Flash is nice when it compliments a site. For example, flash can be used to show an interactive video or chart. It can be used for a section of the page and be used to highlight an offer or special.
Search Terms
Everyone struggles a bit with search terms. One little trick to help things out is to select Google as your default search engine in your browser. With Google search activate you can start typing the term you are interested in and as you type it out you will see what Google shows in the drop down list what popular that’s related to your term.
Google as an SEO Tool
You can also use the following links to research your terms:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
What’s Next?
By now you’ve probably found a few new terms and dumped a few others. This process is called validating. This step is missed by many new site owners. The new terms which you have validated now need to be incorporated into the following:
Page titles
Page copy
Page file names
Image alt tags
Link Title Tags
This process should be done for each page. If you don’t know how to do this, you can look it up on Google.
The Great Debate – Less is More?
The number of times a term is used properly on a page MAY determine how high you appear in Google and other search engines. I have seen this work and I have seen it work with far fewer terms. There are other factors that influence placement so your mileage may very. There are ratios and percentages out there. To get some traction a term my
need to represent 2 to 10% of the content on a page. This can be a tall order if you have a lot of copy, at the same time the reverse is true since a search engine might dismiss you if you don’t have enough copy. Our success comes by matching or exceeding the search term percentages of the top sites for a particular term.
Is the Optimization Working?
Well you don’t need expensive software to see if your efforts are producing results. Get a Google Analytics account, insert the code into each of your pages and the create a report showing the keywords. You can also use this Keyword Position Checker to see if you are in the top 40 results for a term. Again…this is free!
Now you are in a position to take control of you SEO and to make changes to reach your goals. If this process is something you want to pay someone else to do, that’s where optimization companies like ours can help.
Posted in Best Practices, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | Tags: LinkedIn, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Posted by: bjorlando | August 20, 2009
Optimization Company – MainStreetHost.com
“If I send you a sample report…I could loose my job! Let me get my supervisor…”
Such were the last parting words that I had with MainStreetHost.com. MainStreetHost.com is a web company calling other web companies like mine, OrlandoWebServices.com to do optimization reports for our clients. There are a couple of problems though:
- They refuse to send me a sample report of what they are doing for the $9.99 it costs for my special report.
- They have a B Rating with the Better Business Bureau.
- They cold call using people who might get fired for showing a sample report…even if they are friendly.
PLEASE NOTE…they were not going to do optimization for me, they don’t do that, they were going to provide a report (an invisible one I guess) showing me what the opportunites are for me to go back and make money of my clients.
The problem is that this report tells me nothing more than what I already know when I look at the page titles, keywords, mete tags…etc…anyway. There are online tools already available that do this for free.
The real problem is clients NOT wanting to pay anyone to help make things happen to improve their ranking. Frankly it’s because of cold callers such as these who over promise and under deliver that have turned almost a generation of people to be unbelievers when it comes to optimization. Which is too bad…almost certainly a crime to do so, because they will fail to meet their business objectives by doing nothing.
So the next time the phone rings just remember…buyer beware! Ask questions, get second opinions and beware of people who post HOTBOT and Webcrawler logs on their site….that’s soooo mid-nineties.
Posted in Google, Online Marketing, Scams | Tags: LinkedIn, Scams, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
Posted by: bjorlando | August 13, 2009
Can Giving Away Something Build Followers?
Posted by: bjorlando | August 5, 2009
“White Hat” Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The email goes something like this:
We would like to get your website on first page of Google. All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized. Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal. In order for us to respond to your request for information, please include your company’s website address (mandatory) and or phone number.
Well this is basically spam that is sent to anyone with a domain. So please don’t feel that you were singled out. Nobody has looked at your site or done anything to see what the opportunity is or isn’t.
Of course they would like to get YOU on the first page of Google, but under what term? We have our business on the first page of Google, just type in “Orlando Web Services” and it’s not only on the first page, but the #1 listing. WOW! Mission Accomplished!
But wait, what about the secret “white hat” stuff? Isn’t this the “secret” stuff? Nope!
In recent years, the terms white hat and black hat have been applied to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry. Black hat SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service, whereas white hat methods are generally approved by the search engines. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.
I Want White Hat!
Ok, you really like the hook of the email that you received. Well if you really want to give your website the “white hat” treatment, you can do it yourself. Go to the article called: How to Improve Your Ranking in Google
This tells you how to give your site the white hat treatment without having to pay someone to do the work for you.
Of course, if you really want to outsource “white hat” SEO, contact us and we will be glad to do it for you.
Posted in Best Practices, Google, Online Marketing, Scams, Search Engine Optimization | Tags: LinkedIn, SEO
Posted by: bjorlando | August 2, 2009
A Privacy Policy is GOOD Policy for Your Site
We get asked a lot by clients as to what to use for a privacy policy. Although each business may use information differently, good privacy notice should be easy to find, easy to read, and comprehensively explains all your online information practices. It also provides online visitors an opportunity to make informed decisions about the collection and use of their information. As part of good business practices, posting a notice is an important first step in defining your online policies and towards answering one of the major concerns (and barriers) voiced by web-users when going online.
The following sample privacy notice describes basic information practices for a single website directed to U.S. residents. Additional disclosures would be required for website operators that:
- limit the application of the privacy notice to U.S. residents,
- share individually identifiable information collected online with unaffiliated third parties or corporate affiliates not governed by the same privacy policy,
- direct part of their website to children or collect information from online visitors actually known to be children,
- enhance or merge individually identifiable information or prospect information collected online with data from third parties for the purposes of marketing products or services to the subject of that information,
- apply the privacy notice provisions to everyone except those operating solely in a business capacity,
- limit the scope of the BBBOnLine privacy seal by excluding in the application corporate subsidiaries, operating divisions, or websites devoted to other discrete product lines,
- condition access to any part of the website on the disclosure of individually identifiable information,
- allow other organizations to collect individually identifiable information or prospect information by interacting directly with online visitors at the applicant’s website,
- collect passive information (including cookie information) that is linked to a name or similarly specific identifier,
- use prospect information for any purpose other than those for which the information was submitted, or
- limit access to maintained individually identifiable information or prospect information by limiting the frequency of requests or by requiring a processing fee; or limit access due to an inability to retrieve such information in the ordinary course of business.
SAMPLE PRIVACY POLICY- Courtesy of the BBB
Effective: xx/xx/xxxx
Our Commitment To Privacy
Your privacy is important to us. To better protect your privacy we provide this notice explaining our online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. To make this notice easy to find, we make it available on our homepage and at every point where personally identifiable information may be requested.
The Information We Collect:
This notice applies to all information collected or submitted on the [company name] website. On some pages, you can order products, make requests, and register to receive materials. The types of personal information collected at these pages are:
Name
Address
Email address
Phone number
Credit/Debit Card Information
(etc.)
On some pages, you can submit information about other people. For example, if you order a gift online and want it sent directly to the recipient, you will need to submit the recipient’s address. In this circumstance, the types of personal information collected are:
Name
Address
Phone Number
(etc.)
The Way We Use Information:
We use the information you provide about yourself when placing an order only to complete that order. We do not share this information with outside parties except to the extent necessary to complete that order.
We use the information you provide about someone else when placing an order only to ship the product and to confirm delivery. We do not share this information with outside parties except to the extent necessary to complete that order.
We offer gift-cards by which you can personalize a product you order for another person. Information you provide to us to create a gift-card is only used for that purpose, and it is only disclosed to the person receiving the gift.
We use return email addresses to answer the email we receive. Such addresses are not used for any other purpose and are not shared with outside parties.
You can register with our website if you would like to receive our catalog as well as updates on our new products and services. Information you submit on our website will not be used for this purpose unless you fill out the registration form.
We use non-identifying and aggregate information to better design our website and to share with advertisers. For example, we may tell an advertiser that X number of individuals visited a certain area on our website, or that Y number of men and Z number of women filled out our registration form, but we would not disclose anything that could be used to identify those individuals.
Finally, we never use or share the personally identifiable information provided to us online in ways unrelated to the ones described above without also providing you an opportunity to opt-out or otherwise prohibit such unrelated uses.
Our Commitment To Data Security
To prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we have put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.
Our Commitment To Children’s Privacy:
Protecting the privacy of the very young is especially important. For that reason, we never collect or maintain information at our website from those we actually know are under 13, and no part of our website is structured to attract anyone under 13.
How You Can Access Or Correct Your Information
You can access all your personally identifiable information that we collect online and maintain by accessing your account login. We use this procedure to better safeguard your information.
You can correct factual errors in your personally identifiable information by sending us a request that credibly shows error.
To protect your privacy and security, we will also take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting access or making corrections.
How To Contact Us
Should you have other questions or concerns about these privacy policies, please call us at [phone number] or send us an email at: [email address]
Posted in Best Practices, Online Marketing | Tags: LinkedIn
Posted by: bjorlando | July 30, 2009
Twitter Gets Good with Goodies
Posted by: bjorlando | July 27, 2009
