by KevinPosted on Posted in Search Engine Optimization — No Comments ↓

Questions that we often receive from our customers are should we do reciprocal links?  Reciprocal links take a reader from your website to another website. From our experience, most of these companies soliciting our clients have lower page ranks and would not benefit our clients.  You also have to be careful regarding reciprocal links from unethical webmasters that use schemes such as link farms.  Link farms can get your website penalized or banned from the search engines.

We recommend that our clients develop link worthy content and post their content on social media.  This way they can get inbound links to their website. The more inbound links you have, robots will visit your website more often.  In addition, the more high traffic links that your website receives, the higher the page rank. Therefore, focus on writing strong original content is the key to get more links.

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by KevinPosted on Posted in Social Media — No Comments ↓

Are you looking to get more Facebook likes? In this blog, we list how to get more Facebook likes.

1. Offer discounts and promos on your Facebook Fan page.
2. Show support for your brand to your Facebook friends
3. Offer a freebie (e.g., free samples, coupons)
4. keep your fans informed about your company activities
5. Have updates on futures projects
6. Have updates on upcoming sales
7. Show videos
8. Add relevant news articles links
9. Allow access for exclusive content
10. To learn more about the company
11. For education about company topics.
12. Add online polling
13. Have a like us on Facebook link on your employee’s signature

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by KevinPosted on Posted in Live Chat, Marketing — No Comments ↓

Are you looking for a way to improve customer service on your ecommerce website? Are you also looking for another way to decrease shopping cart abandonment and increase sales on your website? How about a way to differentiate your website from the competition? If so, consider using Live Chat. Live Chat allows you to communicate with prospects on your website and can improve both acquisition and retention. Live Chat personalizes the online process by making it closer for the prospect to make a purchase. It is an advantage to the prospect because the prospect gets answers immediately rather than waiting on the phone line. Furthermore, Live Chat offers personalization and high quality customer service is significant for customer retention.

Did you know? 61 percent of respondents say they are more likely to purchase because of Live Chat. A Bold Software study reports that the top factor for a successful live chat is the product/ service knowledge of the agent. Moreover, the time is now to implement Live Chat into your ecommerce website and get ahead of your competition.

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by KevinPosted on Posted in Web Design — No Comments ↓

Will your business web site be viewable on mobile phones? It should be if you want to fully participate in the hundreds of billion dollars of business-to-business and retail sales accruing from the Internet.

Although smart cell phones can view most web site content, they remain a minority of outstanding phones. In order to insure your company web site is mobile ready, you need a version that employs a liquid (no fixed dimensions) layout, detects the visitor browser type and directs to the correct display – PC or cell phone. A mobile ready upgrade can be done in three ways, depending upon the importance of this audience to your business.

Single Page Mobile Site

Basic information with logo, phone number, email, etc with a link to the full business web site.

Mini-Mobile Web Site

Multiple page website as pictured. Individual pages such as:

Home

a. Matches web site colors to keep branding
b. Company logo plus slogan at top
c. Phone number front and center with link to full site
d. Buttons linking other pages– For example,
“About Us” “Services” “Products” etc. that give detail

About Us – Several paragraphs about company

Services – Paragraphs describing services

Products – Product listing

Contact Us – Phone/address/email/fax etc

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by KevinPosted on Posted in Google Local — No Comments ↓

If you are the owner of the Google Local Listing, claim it. Claiming your listings is an opportunity to be found by more people in more places. People are searching for local businesses.
Google has integrated their local search into the main organic search results becoming the first thing searchers view.

Otherwise, anyone including your competitor can claim your Google Local Listing and hijack the account. The hijacker finds the listing they want and change it. The hijacker can change your business name,address, url, categories, description and telephone number. Your website or phone number is hijacked so customers trying to reach you get someone else. This causes lost sales to the real Google Local Listing owner and frustration.

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by KevinPosted on Posted in Mobile Web Design, Web Design — No Comments ↓

Juniper Research estimates that by 2014, there will be 2.4 billion mobile web users. People surf the web using mobile devices such as smart phones with tiny screens, limited bandwidth and navigation. When developing mobile design, keep your mobile design simple. Mobile design is integral for the future and should be implemented now. Do not wait until 2014 to start your mobile web design. Otherwise, you will lose out to your competition.

Here are some mobile design suggestions:

1. Define your mobile design purpose
2. Define your business objective
3. Streamline the menu system
4. Reduce graphics in navigation
5. Eliminate Flash design
6. Design in plain HTML, XHTML by using cascading style sheets.
7. Avoid pop-ups.
8. Avoid tables
9. Avoid Frames
10. Avoid Cookies
11. Mobile phone screen sizes vary from 320×480 down to roughly 128×160 pixels.
12. Design the mobile web design to be able to scroll vertically.
13. Design your mobile website with the appearance and navigation of your main web site.
14. Test your mobile website on many different devices

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by KevinPosted on Posted in Adwords, Google Adwords, Pay Per Click — No Comments ↓

For those of you who advertise on Google Adwords and cannot see your ads, see below for suggestions:

1. Use the Ads Diagnostic Tool: This tool can help explain why your ads may not be
appearing. You can find detailed explanations of these reasons and
solutions at Ads Diagnostic Tool Information. Access this tool by via the ‘Tools’ tab or view the results directly in the ‘Keywords tab’ under the main ‘Campaigns’ tab.
2. Use the Disapproved Ads Tool: You may still not be able to view your ad if it has been disapproved. This tool can help you find out why your ads were
disapproved. Click the ‘Tools’ tab in your account.
3. Double check your daily budget for your campaign. It could be possible that you reached your daily budget for the day. Also understand that a small percentage of advertisers in the market show up all the time for a particular keyword. Those are the advertisers who get the most clicks and have the best quality score.
4. Check to see if are using ad scheduling. You can find out whether you using ad scheduling by going to campaign settings advanced settings ad scheduling.
5. Use the Ad Preview Tool adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool. If you search for your ad multiple times on Google, it can impact your ad position by showing many ad impressions and lowers your clickthrough rate. The Ad Preview tool is recommended to view for your ads to preview because impressions are not counted and it does not lower your clickthrough rate. Simply enter a keyword and search the state or country.

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by KevinPosted on Posted in Web Design — No Comments ↓

The suggestions below are targeted to web designers.

1. Avoid splash pages
2. We do not recommend designing an entire site in flash.
3. Make the navigation easy to locate and use.
4. Blinking, flashing, scrolling and animated objects need to be kept at a minimum.
5. Dynamic sites such as sites developed in Drupal and Joomla give flexibility in showcase your new content. For example, have a list of the latest news, product updates on the home page.
6. Do not automatically play video or audio. There can be bandwidth or speed limitations. In addition, you do not know how loud the user’s speakers currently are.
7. Have a search feature on the home page and every page that is designed.
8. Content is the king.

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by KevinPosted on Posted in Browser — No Comments ↓

A question that we sometimes receive is what is a browser? If you do not know what a browser is do not feel bad because you are not alone. See browser video
If you have used Internet Explorer, then you have used a browser.

Browsers happen to be one of the most-used programs on computers. The most popular web browsers according to Netmarketshare are

1. Internet Explorer with 59.18% of world users
2. Mozilla Firefox, 22.83%
3. Google 8.50%
4. Chrome,Safari 5.36%
5. Opera 2.29 %

What does a browser do?

Web browsers allow for surfing the web. A browser is short for a Web browser, a software application used to locate and display Web pages. Browsers are software programs, which allow the user to search for and view information on the Web, such as web sites, video, audio, et cetera. A web browser or Internet browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.

I hope after reading this blog entry you now know what a browser is and what they do. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

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by KevinPosted on Posted in Web Design — No Comments ↓

An often overlooked area in web design is website performance on different browsers. Web users are expecting a pleasant web experience. There is a cost to not optimizing to different browsers. According to the Website Magazine, 67 percent of users encounter a slow website a few times a week or more. Also, 46 percent say slow load times cause them to abandon websites. In addition, over a third of respondents say that slowness makes them less likely to return to the site. These statistics show that it is imperative to optimize browser performance to keep users on websites, which has potential for more sales.

When designing a web site, the web designer should realize that different browser platforms perform in different ways. The audience needs to be considered when designing a web site. If you have a website with users that use different browsers, it is recommended to view your website in different browsers. You do this to make sure that the navigation, style and website structure are intact. This not only applies to various browsers but also various versions of browsers. Not all of the users will have the newest browser that a web designer is using. Therefore, it is important to test your website in different browsers.

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