Tips For Keeping Customers Engaged Over the Summer

Keeping your customers engaged over the summer can be a challenge. Between vacations, outdoor events, and school being out, the consumer’s buying habits and attention span change. People are in front of their computers less and use mobile devices more to check email in the summer months.

So how do you keep your customers engaged during the lazy, hazy days of summer?

    Make sure your emails are mobile-ready. If at all possible, create a mobile version of your email. If you do not have the resources to do this, at the very least make the font bigger and keep the call to action closer to the top and more centered (so you don’t have to slide the email to the right).The same would be true with landing pages.

    Try a time-of-day split test. A change in season can mean a change in your contacts’ behaviors. Parents are distracted by children now that school is out, children stay up later, there are more activities outside. If you usually send at the same time, try a different time or split-test one time with another and look for a difference in engagement. There is no magical time – it depends on your audience.

    Be patient. In the lazy days of summer, it may take people longer to get to your email.  Studies show that it can take 2 weeks for all of your interested contacts to interact with your email.  Make sure your offer is still valid or, at the very least, make sure the landing page has an offer of some kind.  It may be best to avoid “today only” specials in the summer, unless this is your business model.

    Do a “summer tips” email. Retailers – do you have a product that can be used more/differently in the summer (hats, lotions, shoes, equipment)? Do you have information that is more relevant in the summer (healthy tips, travel destinations, children’s study tips while out of school, water safety)? Get creative and your audience will appreciate the tips.

    Do a summer auto-responder series. Alternatively, set up an email calendar now and create the emails ahead of time. Schedule these emails in advance – especially if your email manager will be on vacation. An example of a “summer series” could be around deals each week, summer safety tips, motivating health tips related to the summer (skin care, pool exercises, healthy eating). Nonprofits could consider hosting a “summer challenge” fundraising goal and offer winners a prize at the end of the summer.

    Express yourself. Summer is a more casual time, making it a good time to relate to your customers on a personal level. People like to feel they are buying from people, rather than companies. Take time this summer to stop selling and start building relationships. Take pictures of your staff at a company cook-out, share pictures from employee travels (this would be great on a blog or social media, too). Have a picture-caption contest – for example, use a picture of your CEO or owner doing something fun and ask your subscribers to write the caption with a small prize for the winning caption. Ask your customers what they did during the summer and ask them to post pictures to your website or Facebook page.

Get creative, find a reason to send to your list, and you’ll find your audience engaged with you through the summer and into fall. Read more about the importance of summer campaigns to small businesses here.

Written By: Penny Ashley-Lawrence, iContact Enterprise Account Manager

Choosing Search Engine Optimization Services

If you decide to use our search engine promotion services, be sure to find out what is included in these services. SEO Specialist Online can help you through every step of the process: researching keywords, writing the content, even updating the optimization periodically.

This is the type of service you want so that you can sit back and put your web site’s future on the search engines in the hands of trusted, experienced professionals who will generate the results you want.

Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Let SEO Specialist Online do a free website evaluation.
 

Delivering on Your Brand

Your brand positioning has been agreed on, your target customer has been identified, your message has been refined to reach that audience, you have a new logo and tagline, a new email marketing template and your website has a new design. All of this really captures who you are and where you want to go.

So, your work is done. Right?

Wrong.

Good start, but you’ve only scratched the surface. Your smart positioning, new site, new template and new logo will only get you so far. Now, the real challenge: delivering on your brand experience.

Experience can make or break a brand. Say you’ve premised your entire brand on exceptional service (á la Nordstrom), but your frontline employees don’t deliver. At all. What stays with your audience is not that winning tagline about service, but the abrasive rep who rubbed them the wrong way. And at that point, no amount of appealing logos or clever messages can salvage your brand.

Retailers provide an example of how to think about your brand experience. In fact, the emphasis on brand experience in retail has inspired a whole cottage industry. Perfumers develop special scents for specialty shops. Of-the-moment DJs craft brand-inspired soundtracks for store stereos. But before you write this off as a trend for retailers only, think again. While you might not need to rush out for that perfect fragrance for your office headquarters, the lesson is this: Take a hard look at your brand experience.

Getting your brand experience right requires a top-to-bottom sweep of your touch points. So, do yourself this favor. Get your team in a room and start mapping out all the possible ways your audience might interact with your organization. In other words, audit your brand experience.

As a warm-up, start with the obvious conveyers of brand: your emails, your website, your ads. But then get into the not-so-obvious: how your staff interacts with your audiences, the atmosphere in your lobby, how you answer the phone, the music playing when a caller goes on hold, the tone in your email marketing messages.

Also, think hard about whether your processes actually reinforce your brand promise—and identify the gaps. For example, are you promising “easy” but making customers take a dozen steps to complete an order? Do you want to target young families but aren’t actually offering family-friendly policies for your employees? Do you want to be known for hospitality but have a less-than-welcoming presence at the front door? All of these details add up to an impression of your brand—good or bad.

So, get beyond the big picture and think through all those details that make up the experience. Then, make some changes, start actively managing the experience and watch your brand take off. Written By: Anna Adlard, Director of Account Planning at capstrat

Choosing Search Engine Optimization Services

If you decide to use our search engine promotion services, be sure to find out what is included in these services. SEO Specialist Online can help you through every step of the process: researching keywords, writing the content, even updating the optimization periodically.

This is the type of service you want so that you can sit back and put your web site’s future on the search engines in the hands of trusted, experienced professionals who will generate the results you want.

Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Let SEO Specialist Online do a free website evaluation.

Tips to Clean Up Your Email Marketing This Spring

Just like cleaning up your house, prepping the garden, or washing all the pollen off your car, with spring comes another set of tasks you should follow to get the most out of your email marketing; Email Spring Cleaning. Each spring you should take the time to make sure your campaigns are following best practices, to update your templates, to take advantage of any new features iContact is recommending, to review the basics, and to make sure your email marketing has as much impact as possible. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your email marketing.

    * Clearly identify who your email is from – Be sure to set up your Campaign in iContact with an email address your recipients will recognize. Using your company name as the sender name is always our recommendation. Once you choose the “from name,” be consistent with it so your customers will always recognize emails from your business. As an example, we could use emailmarketing@seo-specialist-online.com

    * Set your sending schedule – Pick a day and time for your emails (whether they are weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc.) and stick to it. Add it to your calendar and set a reminder. If you can’t log in during that time, use our Schedule Delivery feature to have your email sent at the date and time you want. Be sure to let your subscribers know on your sign-up form and in the newsletter what the schedule is.

    * Make it easy for others to reach you or your company – In the body of your email, show your email recipients multiple ways to get in touch with your company. This can include an email address, a phone number, and a postal address. Having a physical address can assure your list members that your company has a real-world presence. Be sure your campaign settings are up-to-date.

    * Make navigation easier - If your emails tend to be longer, use a table of contents. List out each story/article and link it to the item within the email. Your recipients can then navigate directly to the items that interest them. If you find your current template makes this difficult, consider switching to a new template as part of your spring-cleaning. With more than 500 beautiful templates to choose from, MessageBuilderTM can solve your navigation issues, and give your emails a fresh look.

    * Check on your list-building activities – Review the different methods you are using to build your email list. If you have not added a sign-up form to your website, it is very easy to add one using our Sign-Up Form Creator. Be sure there is a form available on every page of your website. If you own a retail store, add a form at the register. While at conferences and events, bring a form or computer to allow potential customers to sign up on the spot.

    * Combine Email Marketing with Social Media – If you have not already taken advantage of iContact’s Social Tools, now is the time. With Social Tools you can easily take advantage of the social networks of your subscribers. Using Facebook and Twitter allows you to reach a wider audience than with email marketing alone. Our social media integrations take all the guess work out, and allow you to leverage the power of email marketing with social media today.

These are just a few of the best practices we recommend to make your email marketing as successful as possible. To see more, and to read about how to build strong relationships with your customers and prospects, check out our Email Marketing Guide. It is full of information on how you can become an email marketing expert. Written By: Daniel Smith, iContact Senior Product Marketing Manager

Choosing Search Engine Optimization Services

If you decide to use our search engine promotion services, be sure to find out what is included in these services. SEO Specialist Online can help you through every step of the process: researching keywords, writing the content, even updating the optimization periodically.

This is the type of service you want so that you can sit back and put your web site’s future on the search engines in the hands of trusted, experienced professionals who will generate the results you want. 

Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Let SEO Specialist Online do a free website evaluation.

SEO Title Tag  

Search engine optimize your blog’s title tags.  Title tags are important factors when it comes to search engine optimization.  Search engine marketing and search engine optimization advice, tips, strategy and tactics. 

All search engines use title tags to gather information about your Web site.  Such title tags cannot be called unique as many sites/blogs have got exactly the same wordings in their title tags.  Twokad suggested to change the title tags from one title.  Please careful when writing title tags never, never over stuff keywords title. 

Make sure your title tags are not stuffed with keywords.  I always thought that title tags and header tags were the same things.  For the same very reason, title tags should vary.  Vary the title tags on the inner pages of your website.  For some web pages, such as product pages, automatically generated title tags may be sufficient. 

Title tags for WordPress blog posts vs static pages.  SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website.  While WordPress is perfectly built for SEO, it usually requires tweaking if you want to optimize your title tags accordingly.  If it’s important that user’s see more than 55 characters in the WordPress title tags — then do it.  The title tags should be between 10-60 characters. 

Keep your title tags to 65 characters including spaces.You won’t get penalized for having longer title tags, but the search engine will simply ignore the longer part.  The title tag is used by pretty much every search engine that uses spiders to crawl your website.  The only information they are giving the search engine is their brand name.

This entry was posted in  SEO  and tagged  html tags ,  html title tags .  WordPress title tags are located in the   part of the HTML code.  I’m in fact talking about title tags in a post title – as in the title attribute in a link.  At this point we’re talking about  tagging your blog title tags for search engines.  Understanding how search engines use and treat title tags allows us to maximize the use of title tags. 

Choosing Search Engine Optimization Services

If you decide to use our search engine promotion services, be sure to find out what is included in these services. SEO Specialist Online can help you through every step of the process: researching keywords, writing the content, even updating the optimization periodically.

This is the type of service you want so that you can sit back and put your web site’s future on the search engines in the hands of trusted, experienced professionals who will generate the results you want. 

Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Let SEO Specialist Online do a free website evaluation.

It’s important to educate our children about Veterans Day and to understand the sacrifices these brave soldiers made and continue to make, to fight for our country.

History of Veterans Day

World War I – known at the time as “The Great War” – officially ended when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, in the Palace of Versailles outside the town of Versailles, France. However, fighting ceased seven months earlier when an armistice, or temporary cessation of hostilities, between the Allied nations and Germany went into effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. For that reason, November 11, 1918, is generally regarded as the end of “the war to end all wars.”

In November 1919, President Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day with the following words: "To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…"

The original concept for the celebration was for a day observed with parades and public meetings and a brief suspension of business beginning at 11:00 a.m.

The United States Congress officially recognized the end of World War I when it passed a concurrent resolution on June 4, 1926, with these words:

    Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

    Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

    Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

Benefits:

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ok, Ok, Ok,

It has become apparent that Yahoo has “adopted” the technology that Bing uses to deliver search results in a certain way. This was a move I have been expected for some time. Since Google was determined to dominate the search market, Yahoo has given me the impression that they have decided to disappear from the “popular vote”nomination so to speak and focus on restructuring their business, their brand, and their focus on marketing.

Yahoo apparently become attracted to Bing when MSN changed their “image” to Bing, Yahoo decided to “flirt” with Bing and pass notes to each other during SEO class. I remember my days in high school when I was shy to meet a girl and ask her out, so I would play chicken and pass her a love note! Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you, this technique never worked for me, so as you can probably tell I wasn’t the one with the most dates or any dates for that matter.

Today we are in the 21st century and anything is possible. I am several years older now along with being married, so I obviously cannot try that technique again, unless I want to have my wife stop feeding my face at night along with throw me out on the street. If other people want to try this technique, then by all means, hey knock yourself out!

This merger of harmony is just a sign of things to come! I have always believed that “what goes up, must come down.” Google has managed to become the “big dog” on the market, and I believe that Google will eventually “crumble” under the weight of fortune and fame thus Yahoo will be there to grab the baton and win the race.

Time will tell the tale! Ladies and gentleman, welcome to “Binghoo!”

Article was used with permission! Original can be found at http://www.seomarketingunderground.com

Over the last decade I have come to the realization that “Freedom in America is not Free.” Ever since 9/11, the rights and privileges of American citizens have come under scrutiny from the government. There is no sense of privacy anymore and government leaders believe that increased federal regulation provisions are the answer to issues plaguing the government and its people.

If you believe that government intervention into the problems facing America today is the correct and only solution, then, I completely respect your opinion on this matter. I personally believe that government intervention is leading to the “suspension and/or removal” of our rights and freedoms and civil liberties. America was built on the concept of “free enterprise.” America is a country that was created “by the people,” and “for the people.” Allowing the government to intervene on certain matters certainly violates this concept. Just ask the residents of Philadelphia who’s favorite past-time or business function involves going on the internet and creating and maintaining a blog.

Philadelphia bloggers got a surprise in their mail recently when their city government asked them to purchase a “business privilege license” at the price of $300. While it is required that all Pennsylvania business owners file for ownership right to their business with the Pennsylvania Department of State, what about those folks who blog for fun and without any intention of monetary gain? That is a question one fellow blogger Marylin Bess had to answer.

“The real kick in the pants is that I don’t even have a full-time job, so for the city to tell me to pony up $300 for a business privilege license, pay wage tax, business privilege tax, net profits tax on a handful of money is outrageous,” Bess says.

Bloggers would also have to find the money to hire their own accountants. This, my friends is the perfect way to end a dream and destroy what fun we have as American citizens as a result of government intervention. Perhaps this is a way for struggling cities to recoup funds from mismanaged governmental budget operations which put our country into the debt that it has in the first place. Don’t blame the American people for government mistakes, take responsibility and blame yourself Uncle Sam!

This article was used with permission and can be obtained at http://www.seomarketingunderground.com

Facebook’s population is now larger than that of the U.S., Mexico and France combined.  The world’s largest social networking site announced Wednesday that it has hit a widely anticipated milestone, signing up its 500 millionth user.

In a blog post, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he “could have never imagined all of the ways people would use Facebook when we were getting started 6 years ago.” In a video message, Zuckerberg thanked Facebook users and told them “you really have created a worldwide movement.”

To show off its international reach, Facebook launched a new application Wednesday called Facebook Stories. The app lets users recount their own stories and read others’ posts, filtered by theme and geographic location.

The speed with which Facebook hit the 500 million mark is a sign of its accelerating growth. Launched in early 2004, it took Facebook nearly four years to add its first 100 million users, but only five months to add its most recent batch. Around 70% of the current user base for the Palo Alto, Calif., company now comes from outside the U.S. 

‘Operation In Our Sites‘ targeted several sites including TVShack.net, Movies-Links.TV, FilesPump.com, Now-Movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org, ZML.com, NinjaVideo.net and NinjaThis.net. In almost unprecedented action, the domain names of 7 sites were seized and indications are that others – The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload – narrowly avoided the same fate.

Fears remain, however, that this action is only the beginning, and that more sites will be targeted as the months roll on. Indeed, TorrentFreak has already received information that other sites, so far unnamed in the media, are being monitored by the authorities on copyright grounds.

Now, according to the owner of a free WordPress platform which hosts more than 73,000 blogs, his network of sites has been completely shut down on the orders of the authorities.

Indeed, 73,000 blogs is a significant number to take down in one swoop, regardless of what some users of the site may or may not have been doing. Time will tell if it was indeed a copyright complaint that took down the service but the signs are certainly there. Not so long ago the conclusion that this type of action could be taken on copyright grounds would have been dismissed out of hand, but the current atmosphere seems to be changing.

Search Engine Optimization Today

Today Google Real-Time Search Changes Everything. Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Search engines are tightening up the loopholes to manipulate positioning.

So-called “doorway” pages, tricks with meta tag/keyword files, etc. no longer are effective. Keyword positioning, along with indexing, is the way to be seen on today’s Internet.

• The vast majority of clicks occur within the top 5 positions on a search page.

• As a rule, the more competitive the business category, the harder it is to attain decent placement. Conversely, the more competitive the business category, the more important placement is to success of the business.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses constantly find themselves looking around asking themselves why they can’t quite seem to find a good fit for what they need from service providers.

People do business with who they like, who they trust and who truly care about their business. In fact, a recent study by US News & World Report revealed that when clients leave their current provider it’s not because of a pricing or product problem, but a “people” problem. People that no longer value their business, or seem indifferent to it. A whopping 68% of them.

• A fractional 14% defected because of a pricing issue followed by 9% who were successfully wooed by a competitor.

• With Google Real-Time Search the playing field has been leveled.

• No longer can you or your competition sit back and think they own their TOP organic Google positions!

Google search engine ranking factors are among the most important items to check in any SEO work. This will ensure that the strategies formulated are effective, current and optimal for the best search engine ranking results. Every search engine optimization analysis examines the website’s performance against these important ranking factors. This article series will take a closer look at these factors and find evidence for their existence, so you will know that you are on the right track when performing SEO on your website.

If deficiencies are found in a site’s Google search engine ranking factors, the SEO in charge will attempt to make some changes to the website in such a way that it will now become search engine friendly and compliant with SEO ranking factors. Taken from a broader perspective, these improvements cover three important aspects:

• Content (using optimal titles, checking content quality, focusing relevance to targeted keywords, etc).

• Links (how other sites reference the website in terms of quality and quantity).

• Technical aspects (i.e. crawlability of the website) to name just a few!.

Are all big factor’s in SEO, to improve Web Site Search Engine Rankings, with the Top Ten Search Engines, like Google, Alta Vista, AOL Search, Ask Jeeves, Excite, Inktomi, Lycos, MSN, Teoma and Yahoo.

SEO is the skillful art of placing researched keywords, that have a known searching audience, into various places on a web page that are known to be given weight by the ranking systems and algorithms of Major Search Engines

It is estimated that less than two percent of the commercial and small business website content writing on the Internet have had any optimization for search engines today still.

Our SEO Campaign Management Services provides you with the ultimate search engine optimization (SEO) system – virtually ensuring you will obtain top ten search engines rankings for your chosen web sites and keywords to Improve Web Site Search Engine Rankings

Furthermore, we are aware of all of the major search engines Webmaster and marketing guidelines and all of our marketing strategies and techniques are compliant with these guidelines and we work one on one with you to insure your knowledge of How does search engine optimization work.

All of our clients enjoy greatly improved positions in the Top Ten Search Engines for competitive keywords. The free, organic positions available through natural search marketing are the most coveted spots on these algorithmic search engines.

A properly optimized Web Site can take you from search invisibility and zero rankings to top spots in these Top Ten Search Engines, especially if optimization is combined with known off page ranking factors.

Those who act now, with decisiveness and confidence will lead their competition for the rest of this decade, while their competitors catch on and try to catch up.

Spam free, guideline compliant marketing is at the top of our list, to make sure our client is protected.

To Improve Web Site Search Engine Rankings, it’s SEO Specialist Online for all your search engine optimization needs Why not let us do a Free Website Evaluation for Your Business TODAY!

As reported by Worldstart.com Remember when IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997? IBM is ready to challenge human knowledge again with their supercomputer named “Watson”. Watson will compete against human players in the game of Jeopardy, although it does have a tendency to crash or answer a series of questions incorrectly. The supercomputer has already completed against humans in IBM’s development environment, but there are reports that the computer may make an appearance on the actual television show, Jeopardy.

What would you think about the Internet having a kill switch? One Senator has introduced legislation which would allow Homeland Security to issue emergency orders to broadband providers, search engines and software companies, essentially allowing HLS to order the turn-off or enact government control of the Internet in the United States. At the moment, the proposed legislation is supported by several Senators, but it is expected to gain major opposition from the technology industry and Net Neutrality organizations.

LimeWire, the popular file sharing platform, received another lawsuit last week. Eight members of the National Music Publishers’ Association, including EMI, Sony and Universal, have filed a lawsuit stating that LimeWire allows for online copyright infringement through its peer-to-peer network. According to the lawsuit, the LimeWire client has been downloaded 200 million times from download.com alone, which the National Music Publishers’ Association members believe is harming the industry and preventing growth. LimeWire is operated by the Lime Group which is based in New York state.

Do you have all the traffic and sales you need?

Ever wondered what it would take to get your site on the top of the engines? Want to conquer social media and actually see results? Let a Business Growth Expert at SEO-Specialist-Online.com review your site and prepare a custom proposal. No obligation!

If you prefer to speak with someone right now, please call Jim Gras, Senior SEO Strategist at 800-897-6458

Cookie-cutter SEO won’t get you the results you are looking for. We provide custom SEO solutions.

Simply complete this form and we will send you a custom proposal within 3 business day. Thank you!

As we all know, our results are only as good as our plan. One of my mentors, taught me that it’s not what happens that determines the major part of our future, because what happens, happens to us all.

Instead, he taught me the key is what we do about it.

If we start the process of change by developing a plan, doing something different in this next year than we did the previous year, it won’t matter how small those efforts start.

Start doing “different” things with the same set of circumstances – the ones we’ve always had and cannot change – and see what miracles occur.

If we start the miracle process and change ourselves, then everything changes. And here’s what is interesting: the difference between success and failure is so subtle.

Let me explain by giving you my definitions of failure and success.

Here it is: Failure is a few errors in judgment repeated every day. The man says, “Well I didn’t walk around the block today and it didn’t kill me, so it must be okay.”

No, it’s this kind of error in judgment that after six years has him out of breath and panting as he walks from his car to his office. You can’t make those kinds of mistakes; it will end up costing you.

Now, here is my definition of success: A few simple disciplines practiced every day.

Do you see the distinction? A few disciplines. Here’s a little phrase we’ve all heard: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” And my question to you is, “What if that’s true?” How simple and easy is that plan?

The fact is, when you look at successful people, you will almost always DISCOVER a plan behind their success. They know what they want, they work out a plan that will get them where they want to go, and they work their plan.

It is the foundation for success. We as humans have the unique ability to produce change in our lives; it is through our own conscious choice when we engage in the miracle process of personal development that we are able to transform our nature and our lives.

A Little Inspiration When You Need It :

These quotes tell a different tale, one of survival, endurance and the ability of a willing human spirit to conquer most anything.

Do you have all the traffic and sales you need?

Ever wondered what it would take to get your site on the top of the engines? Want to conquer social media and actually see results? Let a Business Growth Expert at SEO-Specialist-Online.com review your site and prepare a custom proposal. No obligation!

If you prefer to speak with someone right now, please call Jim Gras, Senior SEO Strategist at 800-897-6458

Cookie-cutter SEO won’t get you the results you are looking for. We provide custom SEO solutions.

Simply complete the form and we will send you a custom proposal within 3 business day. Thank you!

Major new features in this release include the following:

A sexy new  WordPress default theme called Twenty Ten!

Move over Legendary WordPress Kubrick Theme! Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.)

MU and WordPress Finally Merge Together!

Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of  WordPress MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation.

A lighter Interface with many bug fixes!!

As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click.

SEO Specialist Online is a proud user of the  WordPress platform.  Blogging is essential when it comes to good search engine optimization techniques for your website, and WordPress is no doubt the way to go when getting your website online and acheiving top ranking on Google and many other search engines .  The video below gives you an inside look at some of the features in WordPress 3.0.  Blogging is alive and well, and the future is now!!!

Do you have all the traffic and sales you need?

Ever wondered what it would take to get your site on the top of the engines? Want to conquer social media and actually see results? Let a Business Growth Expert at SEO-Specialist-Online.com review your site and prepare a custom proposal. No obligation!

If you prefer to speak with someone right now, please call Jim Gras, Senior SEO Strategist at 800-897-6458

Cookie-cutter SEO won’t get you the results you are looking for. We provide custom SEO solutions.

Simply complete the form and we will send you a custom proposal within 3 business day. Thank you!

The Big secret is, “There is No Secret”

Every web site owner wants more traffic and higher rankings in the search engines. In the midst of an SEO campaign, however, it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. So before you change a single title, you might want to shift your focus to answer some important questions.

So what do I mean by losing sight of the forest for the trees anyway? You’ve probably heard that expression since you were a teenager at least. You may even know that it means focusing on the details to the point that you lose sight of the big picture – and with the amount of detail work that goes into a proper SEO project, that’s easy to do.

The mission of search engines is to supply their visitors with relevant results, so penalizing or banning sites that appear to interfere with that mission is a necessity. Understanding which blunders adversely impact your search engine rankings is a prerequisite to a well-optimized site.

1. Do you use pull-down boxes for navigation? Search engine spiders can’t fill out forms, even short ones with just one pull-down. Thus, they can’t get to the pages that follow. If you’re using pull-downs, make sure there is an alternate means of navigating to those pages that the spiders can use. Note this is not the same as a mouseover menu, where sub-choices show up upon hovering over the main navigation bar; that’s fine if done using CSS (rather than Javascript.)

2. Does your primary navigation require Flash, Java or Javascript? If you rely on search engine spiders executing Flash, Java or Javascript code in order to access links to deeper pages within your site, you’re taking a big risk. The search engines have a limited ability to deal with Flash, Java and Javascript. So the links may not be accessible to the spiders, or the link text may not get associated with the link. Semantically marked up HTML is always the most search engine friendly way to go.

3. Is your site done entirely in Flash or overly graphical with very little textual content? Text is always better than graphics or Flash animations for search engine rankings. Page titles and section headings should be text, not graphics. The main textual content of the page should ideally not be embedded within Flash. If it is, then have an alternative text version within div tags and use SWFObject to determine whether that text is displayed based on whether the visitor has the Flash plugin installed.

4. Is your home page a “splash page” or otherwise content-less? With most webites, as mentioned above, the home page is weighted by the search engines as the most important page on the site (i.e., given the highest PageRank score.) Thus, having no keyword-rich content on your home page is a missed opportunity.

5. Does your site employ frames? Search engines have problems crawling sites that use frames (i.e., where part of the page moves when you scroll but other parts stay stationary.) Google advises not using frames: “Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don’t fit the conceptual model of the Web (every page corresponds to a single URL.) “Furthermore, if a frame does get indexed, searchers clicking through to it from search results will often find an “orphaned page”: a frame without the content it framed, or content without the associated navigation links in the frame it was intended to display with. Often, they will simply find an error page.What about “iFrames”, you ask? iFrames are better than frames for a variety of reasons, but the content within an iframe on a page still won’t be indexed as part of that page’s content.

6. Do the URLs of your pages Include “cgi-bin” or numerous ampersands? As discussed, search engines are leery of dynamically generated pages. That’s because they can lead the search spider into an infinite loop called a “spider trap.” Certain characters (question marks, ampersands, equal signs) and “cgi-bin” in the URL are sure-fire tip-offs to the search engines that the page is dynamic and thus to proceed with caution. If the URLs have long, overly complex “query strings” (the part of the URL after the question mark), with a number of ampersands and equals signs (which signify that there are multiple variables in the query string), then your page is less likely to get included in the search engine’s index.

7. Do the URLs of your pages include session IDs or user IDs? If your answer to this question is yes, then consider this: search engine spiders like Googlebot don’t support cookies, and thus the spider will be assigned a new session ID or user ID on each page on your site that it visits. This is the proverbial “spider trap” waiting to happen. Search engine spiders may just skip over these pages. If such pages do get indexed, there will be multiple copies of the same pages each taking a share of the PageRank score, resulting in PageRank dilution and lowered rankings.If you’re not quite clear on why your PageRank scores will be diluted, think of it this way: Googlebot will find minimal links pointing to the exact version of a page with a particular session ID in its URL.

8. Do you unnecessarily spread your site across multiple domains? This is typically done for load balancing purposes. For example, the links on the JCPenney.com home page point off to www2.jcpenney.com, or www3.jcpenney.com, or www4.jcpenney.com and so on, depending on which server is the least busy. This dilutes PageRank in a way similar to how session IDs in the URL dilute PageRank.

9. Are your title tags the same on all pages? Far too many websites use a single title tag for the entire site. If your site falls into that group, you’re missing out on a lot of search engine traffic. Each page of your site should “sing” for one or several unique keyword themes. That “singing” is stifled when the page’s title tag doesn’t incorporate the particular keyword being targeted.

10. Do you have pop-ups on your site? Most search engines don’t index Javascript-based pop-ups, so the content within the pop-up will not get indexed. If that’s not good enough reason to stop using pop-ups, you should know that people hate them – with a passion. Also consider that untold millions of users have pop-up blockers installed. (The Google Toolbar and Yahoo Companion toolbar are pop-up blockers, too, in case you didn’t know.)

I expect many of you will look at these questions and think that they should be asked well before a site goes live, very early in the design process. That’s probably true. But it’s also true that web sites evolve over time, rather like people. They change, grow, and adapt to conditions in the marketplace. By the time a web site has been up for a couple of years (or even less), it might be a very different creature from what the site owner originally had in mind.

This kind of change is not a bad thing, per se. We all get a certain amount of satisfaction out of growing and tweaking our sites, and then watching what happens. If we’re not looking clearly at what the site is turning into, however, we can’t see what it needs.

Search engine optimization could be a tiring task but with time it sure helps you get better traffic.

Today Google Real-Time Search Changes Everything. Not being where your customer is looking could be costing you their business! Search engines are tightening up the loopholes to manipulate positioning.

So called “doorway” pages, tricks with meta tag/keyword files, etc. no longer are effective. Keyword positioning, along with indexing, is the way to be seen on today’s Internet.

•The vast majority of clicks occur within the top 5 positions on a search page.

• As a rule, the more competitive the business category, the harder it is to attain decent placement. Conversely, the more competitive the business category, the more important placement is to success of the business.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses constantly find themselves looking around asking themselves why they can’t quite seem to find a good fit for what they need from service providers.

People do business with who they like, who they trust and who truly care about their business. In fact, a recent study by US News & World Report revealed that when clients leave their current provider it’s not because of a pricing or product problem, but a “people” problem. People that no longer value their business, or seem indifferent to it. A whopping 68% of them.

• A fractional 14% defected because of a pricing issue followed by 9% who were successfully wooed by a competitor.

• With Google Real-Time Search the playing field has been leveled.

• No longer can you or your competition sit back and think they own their TOP organic Google positions!

To Improve Web Site Search Engine Rankings, it’s SEO Specialist Online for all your search engine optimization needs Why not let us do a Free Website Evaluation for Your Business TODAY!

All it currently says on WordPress-hosted blogs is the following:

UPDATE 2: From @Wordpressdotcom “We’ve isolated the issue on WordPress.com, and we are working on a fix.”

In all, the downtime was around an hour!

Stay Tuned to SEO-Specialist-Online.com for Further Updates!!!!

“

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs

Says it is!

Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs says he’s predicted the steady decline of rival Microsoft’s Windows operating system (OS). That swipe at Microsoft comes only a day after Google says it’s phasing out MS Windows as it ramps up internal testing of its Chrome OS.

Jobs made the comments Tuesday night in an onstage interview at the D: All Things Digital conference. Jobs said he believes computers running Windows would begin a decline in popularity as people move to new platforms for their web needs: devices like the iPad, other tablet computers, or smartphones. Apple CEO Compares PCs to Big Old Trucks

Jobs even went so far as to compare the standard Windows PC with motorized trucks, which he said were at their height when people lived on farms, but have faded in importance as people have moved to cities and suburbs.

Although the logic of his analogy seems questionable, other industry experts agree with Jobs on the decline of Windows PCs. “He is pretty clear about ‘it’s over’, and it is,” said DreamWorks chief executive Jeffrey Katzenberger. (Source: ft.com)

Katzenberger agreed that people in the future will rely less on Windows, noting that he’d personally started using an Apple iPad and RIM BlackBerry combination rather than a laptop.

Windows Security Issues: a Top Concern

Jobs’ attack on Windows comes only day’s after Google said it would stop using the ubiquitous OS. The company reportedly cited security concerns, though it’s likely the announcement was more of an attempt to build up hype over Google’s own Chrome OS. Chrome will begin debuting on netbooks soon, with plans for use on regular laptops to follow. (Source: pcworld.com)

Jobs also cited security concerns in suggesting the future decline of Windows. He added that less-than-stellar battery life and poor user experiences will force the Windows PC out of its market dominance.

Unfortunately, many search marketers do exactly that when they treat their keywords, ad copy, landing pages and customers all the same.

Webmasters take note of Google Algorithm Change

Websites across the world have noticed slumps in their Google rankings and traffic levels. SEOs have been frantically seeking explanations and deliberating the true cause of these sudden dips and increases. Is this search Armageddon?

Is Mayday the algorithm update that pushes many towards extinction?

Probably not. In fact almost certainly not. While Google has been predictably aloof over just what their Mayday algorithm update includes, evidence suggests it isn’t something that most will need to be overly concerned about.

If you have suffered a large drop in your site traffic, indexed pages and long-tail keyword performance since May 1st, you are not alone though. This is particularly true for larger sites, such as those ecommerce outlets with a
diverse product range, according to Search Engine Land [see: Google Confirms “Mayday” Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic].
In the first real post to address the issue with facts rather than speculation, Vanessa Fox got to the crux of the update. As we know, Google have been looking to achieve a few fundamental things with their search engine:

1)    Improve speed of results
2)    Improve relevance of results
3)    Increase the amount of time users spend on Google

The Mayday update (along with the left-hand navigation) appears simply to target these three principles. Leaving Google’s stickiness to one side for a moment, the biggest issue for site owners and webmasters is quality. Unfortunately ‘quality’ is something of a loose term and Google certainly don’t do much to provide a definitive answer as to what they expect.

In Vanessa Fox’s piece for Search Engine Land, we get an understanding for how and why some sites have been affected. We also see how deeper pages using long tail keywords are being impacted the greater.

To see how some sites may suffer, here is a quick (slightly exaggerated) example:

Say you have a website with 30 pages. You have just 12 core products and have optimized the entire site to target these pages. There is an excellent linking profile, including plenty of deep links to your individual product. You have also developed a good internal link structure, with all pages easily accessible and sharing their content.

Better still, you have unique content on each page and customer reviews to keep a fresh stream of information for the search engines to index.

Your competitor on the other hand has a sprawling site covering thousands of pages. They offer a variety of products in a wide number of categories. Each product has the manufacturer’s description attached, but no dynamic or unique content. The site has a high number of links, but the majority go to the Homepage and other main money pages.

Now you both have the same product. You are also both targeting the phrase ‘Sky Blue Brand X Sports Jacket’. This is a long tail keyword; it is also a term that you are likely to be far more optimized for being as though you
have created original content. This could mean that you could now possibly overtake your rival due to your page’s greater authority.

Google usually tries to use a variety of methods to determine a website’s authority. Going beyond just including the main search keyword, it looks for synonyms, uniqueness and of course the strength of its linking profile.

If you have no links to your child pages across the site, there is a fair chance that your pages will suffer a Mayday relevance drop. Equally if you don’t have unique content, even on what you might consider to be less important
pages (such as individual products), you could see a dip.

Brand Recognition Counts

Seemingly, the brands are benefiting most from this. Google have been working hard to ensure that brands (or their preferred distributor) are being seen first for their own goods and products first. This of course is common sense, but hasn’t always been the case (and still isn’t).

So if you were ranking first for a Sony Bravia television, you probably won’t now. As I say, this is something they have been slowly rolling out over a number of algorithm updates (especially the Florida update at the end of last
year); now though it seems to be for more apparent than ever before.

What is the Solution?

If you have 10,000 products on your site, writing 300 words of engaging, unique content for each just isn’t going to be viable. Neither are you likely to be able to gain the number of links required to boost its profile sufficiently.

The solution really is about prioritizing. If you have found your traffic and rankings slip significantly on a select few pages particularly, you’ve got yourself a starting point. See what you can do to make the page unique. Review the link structure and the content, see where improvements can be made and implement them.

Site-wide changes including customer comments, can help you to increase your page’s content organically and ensure that the Googlebot has something to crawl. Ensure that your internal linking structure allows for
straightforward crawling and the passing on of page strength.

Should you Panic?

Easy for us to say, but there’s no reason to get too carried away with this. Even if your rankings have suffered take stock of the situation, look at who overtook you, what they’re doing differently and make changes accordingly. Don’t resort to spam, don’t try to buy up some links to quickly reinstate your position. Focus on quality and develop your site.

Traffic isn’t everything. You need to be more focused on ROI, so only when this suffers should you really be concerned. Obviously the two often go hand in hand; but many site owners are seeing that whilst some rankings have faltered, others have thrived.

Invariably one person’s loss is another’s gain in the world of search engine rankings, so it is far from doom and gloom. If you haven’t seen any significant changes, you can rest a little easier. There’s no reason to cease your website optimization, if anything there’s more reason to continue.

At the moment the only solid confirmation of the Mayday update has come in the form of a Matt Cutts YouTube post (below). This simply confirms the above, as well as dismissing suggestions that it is part of Caffeine or indeed is likely to be a temporary thing.

If you have experienced significant changes, good or bad, keep us posted. For those that have suffered drops, do you hold Google accountable? What are you doing to get traffic back? What affect has it had on your overall business?

Generally speaking, do you believe that the Mayday update has been a positive thing for searchers or not? Is Google giving too much weight to the big brands and letting down the small guys? Are they playing God online, holding the fortunes of millions in their hands?