by CoryPosted on Posted in Internet, Search Engine Optimization — No Comments ↓

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Firefox is a great browser, and one of the things that makes it so great is it’s wide selection of add-ons. Some of these add-ons are great for SEO work. We’ve compiled a list of 5 SEO add ons that you can get for Firefox:

  1. RankQuest SEO Toolbar
    RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensures the popularity of the site.
  2. SEOpen
    SEO services: Track sites placement at Google and Yahoo for any keyword. Watch Google PageRank (PR), Backlinks, Saturation over time. Graph and table presentation of the data.
  3. SEOQuake
    Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox SEO extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization(SEO) and internet promotion of web sites.
  4. Foxy SEO Tool
    Foxy SEO Tool offers tools for search engine optimization (SEO), web traffic and page analysis for webmasters and web professionals.
  5. Keyword Spy
    KeywordSpy SEO/PPC Plugin – Do your competitive research in SEO & PPC right from your browser! Download the revolutionary plugin which will change the way you do keyword research & competitor tracking, while you browse on Google, Yahoo in Real-time.
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by KevinPosted on Posted in Marketing, Social Media, User Generated Content — No Comments ↓

Video is important way to increase brand awareness and reach a large audience. Video is just as significant as network TV. A Comscore April 2009 report states that 72 percent of US Internet users watch video clips monthly.

A program advertisers should use is YouTube. YouTube is a video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. It allows Internet users to able to create their own accounts and channels with profiles and plenty of favorite videos. Anyone who goes to the site can view the videos that are posted on this site. Youtube Channel offers fans a brand platform to comment and share their opinions of the products.

Here is a video smallbiztrends.com/2009/08/youtube-small-businesses.html that demonstrates how to use YouTube.

Youtube also allows businesses to show off their products. It offers high visibility for their brands to connect to consumers. The Nielsen Company reports that YouTube reached 87.7 million unique visitors a 22% year over year jump in June. In addition, it is a great way to increase brand awareness by natural search, which allows for videos to be picked on search results with site links, images, videos, and news links.

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by CoryPosted on Posted in Social Media, Surveys/Polls, User Generated Content — No Comments ↓

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Polls (surveys) are a well known, effective way of measuring information/opinions. More formally known as opinion polls, polls ask various groups of people questions related to a certain topic. In the past, polls were only done through mail or telephone, however the power of the internet has brought new methods of polling as well as new types of polling altogether.

A poll using the internet is known as an online poll. Here are some of the many advantages to using a poll to capture opinion, especially an online one:

  1. Information is Provided Directly by the User
    Because the user interacts directly with the poll, there is no need for a middleman. This reduces costs, and ensures that the data is as close to accurate as possible.
  2. Cost
    The cost of an online polling system is extremely low in comparison to a phone based or mail based polling system. This is because there is not a high requirement for employees to complete tasks such as recording information, compiling information, etc, because it can all be complete by a computer.
  3. Size
    The size of an online poll can be as large, or as small, as you want it. The survey will only run however long you want it to collect data.
  4. Sampling
    Online surveys allow you to target the survey to whichever demographic you see fit. Here is an example, someone may fill out some preliminary information, such as their age or location, and then the software will determine if their answers match the demographic you are looking for.
  5. Results
    Survey software is automatically able to compile & analyze the results, both while the survey is running and when it is finished. Because the analysis is done by a computer, there is no need for a statistician to analyze the results for you, so you save both time & money.
  6. Incentive
    Many times you can offer an incentive to a user for completing a survey, such as being entered into a drawing to win a coupon, gift card, etc, which gives a better chance of people giving information.
  7. Speed/Timing
    Because computer transactions are instant, you are able to see instantly the results of a survey, as well as the exact time the survey was filled out. Also, the creation and use of surveys is extremely short when they are online.

Now that you know some of the benefits to online surveys/polls, here are some of the companies that provide online surveys:

Go to one of these sites, sign up, and then create your first survey and spread the link. Some sites will spread the link for you. If you aren’t sure of the best way to create and manage a survey, let a company like RP Design do it for you.

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by KevinPosted on Posted in E-Commerce, Marketing — No Comments ↓

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Online merchants need more sales online and a higher conversion rate? If your site sells products available in shopping search engines do not miss out on the opportunity. Try shopping search engines.

A growing section of search marketing is shopping search. Comparison Shopping Engines benefit consumers by researching products; user reviews, locating stores with best customer ratings, find the best price. Shopping search engines allow comparison features and prices for many different products. Customers are searching them. According to Matt Tatham of Hitwise, US shopping search sites are increasing at 51 percent between 2006 and 2007.

Consumers enjoy comparison shopping search engines because they allow for comparison of similar products across purchasing factors, such as price, reviews, and availability. Shopping search engines carry an assortment of consumer products, such as electronics, office supplies, DVDs, toys, and others. Internet users on these shopping search engines know what they want with price and availability, which are crucial factors in their purchasing decisions.

A comparison shopping engine survey of the comparison shopping engines that merchants use reports that comparison shopping engines produce better qualified leads than pay per click. The person clicking on the listing is further along in the buyer process. The listing includes product picture, short description. Also, merchants do no have to compete for as much attention as in the pay per click in search engines. Less competition leads to your products have a better chance for qualified leads.
Watch video on comparison shopping

Below are the results of comparison shopping engines survey that merchants use:

Price Grabber 41.2%
Nextag 27.5%
Shopping.com 47.1%
Yahoo!Shopping 64.7%
Shopzilla 33.3%

Take advantage of shopping search engine marketing and make sure no data is missing of the products. Provide product availability data such as in stock and ships within two weeks. By leaving out this critical information about your products, your products will fall to the bottom of the list when shoppers sort the product list.

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by CoryPosted on Posted in Web Design — No Comments ↓

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CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a format for laying out html content, commissioned by the W3C. When HTML was first created, it was a format for documents. There were ways to format text, (making it bold, changing the size, color, etc.), there were ways to insert images, but there wasn’t really a way to layout a page. People who really knew HTML began using tables to lay out pages, since it was the only real way to control page layout. Tables were actually designed for putting tabular data into pages, but that didn’t stop anybody. It wasn’t until 1996 that a standardized way for laying out web pages was developed (CSS 1.0), and even then it wasn’t adopted, mainly because the standard wasn’t fully supported by any browser until three years later in 1999 (CSS 2.0 was released in 1998.

CSS has slowly replaced tables for web design, but not completely. There is still a long way to go. Many modern websites (and their designers) fail to adopt CSS for their designs, and continue to use tables. In this post, we hope to explain the advantages to learning CSS, and using it to lay out HTML content instead of using tables.

There are many advantages to using CSS to lay out pages. Here are the most prevalent:

  • Speed: CSS takes much less code than tables, therefore pages tend to load faster.
  • Interoperability: CSS code can be altered and re-used rapidly on new sites and pages, because it is separate from the content of a page.
  • Compatibility: Because CSS is a standardized language, code written for one browser will (if written properly), look the same on all browsers supporting the standard.
  • Features: CSS has many ways of laying out a page and its elements, and therefore pages utilizing CSS can look more appealing than pages laid out in HTML.
  • Modularity: CSS defines the style of certain HTML tags. Therefore parts of a CSS file can be re-used on new CSS with no changes necessary.

These are just some of the advantages to designing a page/site using CSS. To get started learning CSS, we recommend you try the W3C’s CSS tutorial (http://www.w3schools.com/css/)

The next standard of CSS that the W3C is working on, CSS 3, is going to have some great new features. Many of them are leaning toward cool visual effects. So if you adopt CSS now, you will be ready to utilize the new features of CSS 3 when it is released. Here are some of the things that the W3C is cooking up:

If this article confuses you, or you don’t want to do any design, try hiring a web design company like RP Design to design your next web site.

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by KevinPosted on Posted in Affiliate Tax, Online Tax — No Comments ↓

182270_6971An issue impacting the ecomerce world is collecting tax online. According to a U.S. Supreme Court decision, a web-only retailer can be required to collect sales tax from residents of states where the retailer maintains a physical location. Recently an affiliate tax laws (Amazon Tax) is taking place, which require retailers to collect sales tax. For instance, New York, Rhode Island and North Carolina require Internet retailers to collect sales tax from instate customers as well as in state affiliates, which promote their products in those states.

Companies such Overstock state that unless laws change in North Carolina, New York and Rhode Island that they will no longer have affiliates in those states. In addition, Overstock finds it poor business to continue accepting sales hundreds or thousands of affiliates in those states. Furthermore, Overstock argues that tax has impact on online customers scaring them away.

New York was intended on raising tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue that they contend would go uncollected roughly more than $70 million. Overstock and Amazon have appealed a court decision that upheld the New York Law.

In our opinion, affiliate tax destroys business and impacts communities. The affiliates will get cut out and have to layoff workers impacting the local economy. Affiliates will have to move to survive. Let the private sector run ecommerce trade and leave the state out of the affiliate tax law. For example,California supported affiliate businesses in vetoing the affiliate laws. Another instance, Hawaii sided with the affiliate businesses. Furthermore, the National Retail Federation opposes the state affiliate laws.

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by CoryPosted on Posted in Internet, Web Design — No Comments ↓

182201_9624Who decides the correct syntax of HTML or CSS code? The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), founded in October of 1994, sets the current standards for valid HTML and CSS code. If your code does not meet these standards, this is a large problem, and should be fixed as soon as possible. Here are some issues that can arise if your code does not the HTML and CSS standards:

  • Pages do not display correctly in browsers, which can cause a whole number of problems.
  • Search engines cannot index your pages due to them not being able to read badly crafted code.
  • Modern design software cannot edit your pages correctly due to invalid code.
  • Adapting your pages to updated code standards becomes more difficult if you do not keep up with them.
  • Creating mobile versions of pages is very difficult with invalid pages to begin with.

So how do you check if you pages are valid? First off, you need to check your HTML code. Use the W3C’s Markup Validator Tool. Just enter the URL of your sites, and look at the results. Next you should probably check for broken links. Using the W3C’s Link Checker, you can find broken links in pages, invalid links, etc. Last, but certainly not least, you need to check your CSS code to ensure it is valid, and will display correctly on all browsers and platforms. Use the CSS Validator to ensure that your site meets the W3C CSS standards.

These tools will:

  • If your pages are valid, inform you of the standards that your pages meet, as well as give you embed code to put a badge on your site demonstrating the validity.
  • If they are not valid, it will give you a list of things that are invalid, so you can get to work fixing them.

Fixing invalid pages will allow your site to benefit greatly, but perhaps you are not skilled enough to fix them yourself. A web design company such as RP Design can fix the issues for you to ensure your pages are validated.

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by KevinPosted on Posted in E-Commerce, Shipping — No Comments ↓

298459_6058The web gives merchants a great advantage in the ability to sell products anywhere despite ones location. For internet retailers, shipping products to customers is expensive. When developing an e-commerce web site, merchants need to factor the cost of shipping in the business expense. The following video gives a great overview of some frequently asked shipping questions:

To understand shipping, merchants can get accurate estimates by using the online calculators provided by FedEx (www.fedex.com/ratefinder/home?cc=US&language=en, UPS (www.theupsstore.com/qcc/qcc.asp), and U.S. Postal Service (postcalc.usps.gov/). Looking at zones where the products ship is also significant. Prices increase as shipping distance increases. Merchants also need to be familiar with the weights of the products, shipping needs and zones that they will ship to. This allows for merchants to have an understanding of the shipping cost projections.

Utilize ecommerce solutions that integrate USP, FedEx or UPS in their shopping carts. Many ecommerce programs have built in calculation systems, which display accurate shipping rates based on total weight of order. In the customer’s shipping address, it relates to Internet shoppers using the platform. A realtime-shipping interface, which allows customers their preferred shipping provider as well as seeing shipping rates in the shipping cart would make it easier for the customer in choosing their shipping destination.

Merchants should also look into fulfillment solutions that reduce management expense while keeping order processing forward. They should consider the cost of third-party fulfillment services to what it costs to house merchandise, package items. Furthermore, merchants now have to be familiar with shipping expenditures.

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by CoryPosted on Posted in Content, Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media — No Comments ↓

In general marketing practices, there are two main methods of marketing. “Push” marketing, and “Pull” Marketing. In a Push-Marketing scenario, you push your content or product at your target market. Examples of this are newsletters trying to get people to sell, mail marketing campaigns, etc. In a Pull-Marketing scenario, your clients are pulled toward your content or product/service. Examples are Pay Per Click Ads, Search Engine Optimization, Viral Marketing, etc.

In a traditional market it is good to balance out your push/pull marketing. However in a market like the web, you want to have a much greater emphasis on pull marketing than push marketing. Here’s why. When someone gets on the computer, they choose where they are going to go. If they don’t want to go to your website, they aren’t going to go. Therefore, if you attempt push marketing on the majority of internet users, you’ll find that you will not much a response. An example is your website. If you put a website up online, and then market it using push tactics, not many people are going to go. They don’t want to be sold. They’d rather be on sites like Facebook, YouTube, or CNN. However if you make your site attractive, and give users a reason to go, you are using pull marketing, and you will see an increase in visitors to your site.

Although this defies some marketing convention, it actually makes a lot of sense. Think about it this way. A traditional medium is something like TV. Someone wants to watch their favorite show, but during that show, they are going to be served advertisements. They may not enjoy watching these ads, but they will do so to continue watching their show. This is push marketing. On a new medium like the web however, users choose what they see. Software exists to block advertisements, and people decide on whether they are going to click on them. In other words, most users don’t even need to look at ads to see the content they want. This is why a push marketing strategy will be largely unsuccessful on the web. The Internet is a democratic environment, so the users are going to decide what they see.

So how do you market to this new medium? Pull marketing. It is extremely effective on places like the web, mainly because of the ways the web works. Pull marketing on the Internet is highly related to Social Media and Viral Marketing. When using Social Media to market, you need to utilize the network so that users are attracted to what you are presenting. This is pull marketing in a nutshell. When using viral marketing, you need to create something that will attract users solely because it is something that will benefit them, instead of just advertising your brand.

Here are some ways that you can take advantage of pull marketing on the web:

  • Perform extensive Search Engine Optimization on your website, so that when someone is using Google, your listing “pulls” them in.
  • Use Google AdWords to serve ads to users that will pull them in.
  • Create a new blog with useful content. Give users tips, news, opinions, ideas, etc. Use the blog to link back to your main site sparingly, but always focus on having the blog be beneficial to users.
  • Commence a comprehensive Viral Marketing strategy. Come up with things that you can offer users that they will be attracted to due to the benefit they will receive. Then lightly brand the useful content, objects, etc before they are delivered to users.
  • Utilize social media networks extensively. Post update about your business, or things you think may be useful on microblogging sites like Twitter. Create a page for your business on Social Media sites like Facebook.
  • If you are a web related company, do something useful for the web community. Examples: release a free website template. Work on the development of an Open-Source project such as WordPress or Drupal. Provide industry insight.
  • Offer something for free. Nothing sells, or pulls better, then the word free.

Now that you have some ways you can take advantage of Pull Marketing, get to it. There is a whole range of ways to get started. Not exactly sure how? Need some help? Want someone else to do it? Perhaps you should contact RP Design. (Or you can click on the banner to the right.)

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by CoryPosted on Posted in Domains, Internet — No Comments ↓

SEO-CartoonMost of us know how to use the internet, and we use it every day. But few people know how the internet started or even how the internet works. Having this knowledge can be a key component to your web marketing success.

The following video is a small introduction to the internet.

Now that you have a bit of an idea of the history surrounding the internet, I will explain the way the internet works today.

First off, let me explain a couple of key terms. A server is a computer that holds some type of information on the internet. It could be the page you are trying to access, or simply information for your computer.

A client is a computer that connects to a server and makes a request. Your PC is a client.

The internet is what’s known as a centralized network. This means that it runs on a client-server setup, where computers such as your PC makes requests to servers on the internet.

Let’s talk about the basics of the internet. The internet is essentially a massive grid of clients and servers, interacting with each other. Each computer, whether it be a client or a server has what’s called an IP Address. This address is similar to the street address of your house. It allows other computers to connect directly to your computer, and vice-versa. Remembering the IP address of every computer you wanted to connect to would be difficult, so we have what are called domain names.

When you type a website into your browser, say google.com. Your computer has no idea where google.com is. There are servers that work kind of like directories for your computer. These are called DNS servers. So your computer asks a DNS server what the IP Address of google.com is. Once the DNS server responds, you computer connects directly to google.com using the IP Address.

If you think about a website like a house, think about if it has a bunch of doors for different purposes. This is the equivalent of ports. When you access a website, it is usually on port 80, which is designed for HTTP, which is the transfer of HTML pages. Other ports exist however, and are used for different purposes. I will not go into detail regarding other ports however, since there are nearly 50,000 of them in use!

Once your computer has the IP Address of google.com. It establishes a connection on port 80. Your computer then makes a request to download the home page of google in HTML format. Google’s server responds by sending you the homepage in HTML format.

The other main way to traverse the internet is through the use of hyperlinks. These are essentially parts of a webpage that guide your browser to other destinations on the internet. The following image gives you a good representation of first, the networks of the internet, and second, a minute portion of hyperlinks on the internet.

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WorldWideWebAroundWikipedia

This should give you a slight glimpse into the relative size of the internet. Now that you know the basics on how the internet started, and how it works, it will help you in your future SEO endeavors. If you head is spinning from all this information however, perhaps you should consider clicking the banner on the right, and hiring RP Design.

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