As business owners, most of us realize the importance of being “top-of-mind” in our customers’ eyes, and we use e-mail newsletters to tell them about new products or information they may not be aware of. Many businesses that use e-mail newsletters to market to their customers however, miss a huge opportunity to help their own online marketing efforts.

E-mail Newsletters Can Help Your Web Site

Online marketing is often referred to as “search engine optimization” or “SEO” or “internet marketing”. The idea is to get your Web site so it shows up in Google’s index of results on the search engine results …

Excuse me.  I couldn’t help noticing that strange and interesting plant.

• Little Shop of Horrors

Unfortunately, we do not all work at Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists.

Putting a strange and interesting plant in your window (or on your website) will not drive web traffic all on its own.

If nobody passes your window, then no one can see what’s there, nor can they tell their friends and acquaintances.

What you need is an integrated strategy that both uses your website as an asset and uses your other assets to draw attention to your website.  Here are some things to consider before working on your strategy:

• Do …
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Flash, well known for its elegant moving images and animations, is the application of choice for creating beautiful websites. But many web developers have scrapped the idea of using Flash for business websites because text that is created in Flash is not always easy to recognize by search engines like Google. Search engine optimization has been, and continues to be, a priority for many businesses. So many web developers have gotten into the habit of settling for two alternatives: the less elegant look of a completely HTML site or a hybrid in which only some of the site elements, …

Repetition can be a very good thing for Google.  It can also be a very bad thing.  It depends on what you are repeating and where you are repeating it.

As I discussed previously, anything that is worth saying once is worth saying again.  Google looks to see which words and phrases re-appear on the same page, and uses this to determine what the page is about.

Google also looks to see which words and phrases re-appear on multiple pages.  It uses this form of repetition to identify duplicate content, which it will then omit from its indexing.

This is actually …

Search engines like honesty.

If only one out of every three sites that Google returns on a search for Free Internet Consultation actually offers free internet consultations, it reflects poorly on Google, especially if another search engine can do better.

While it is certainly possible to stump the public with the truth (and the TV Show To Tell The Truth gives us plenty of examples), do you really want to convince your target audience that you’re exactly like the people who are pretending to do what you do?

Something Only an Expert Would Know

One of the things that the judges in To Tell …

Two weeks ago Google announced “Rich Snippets,” a new campaign on their part to categorize frequently sought items. The four main categories they are focusing on at this time are people, businesses, products, and reviews.

What Google recognizes right now is patterns of letters. It cannot be said to truly understand them as words, let alone understand how they interact relative to each other. Perform a search for “Marissa Berger” and you will get a mix of company websites and individual social media profiles from different Marissa Bergers all across the country.

Rich Snippets will eventually give Google the …

While Google is arguably the largest data retrieval system in the world, it is not built like the physical retrieval systems that are familiar to most of us who work in office (and home office) environments.

Most of us employ some sort of grouping or filing system when we are given a document that we think we may need to find again in the future.  This might be a Rolodex, a well maintained cabinet of hanging files, or even (perish the thought) ill defined stacks of paper where the most recently used documents tend to gravitate towards the top.

Basically, you know …

Depending on who you ask, some people will tell you that metadata keywords are essential to a website, and no design is complete without proper use.  Other web developers make it sound like metadata is an outdated concept, and that using metadata is a waste of time.

But what is metadata, and why is the debate over its use so contentious?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.

That’s a very powerful and broad definition, but because it’s so encompassing, it’s not very helpful when trying to wrap …

How are blogs different from other websites? To understand how blogs work, we need to describe the features that make them unique. A typical blog will include:

Posts. Posts are content entries presented in chronological order, with the newest ones on top. Each post will also be archived at a permanent URL to encourage other bloggers to link to your posts. Each post will display its author’s name, date, and category it belongs to.

Comments. Each post will have a reader section to allow readers and other bloggers to carry on a conversation. Although there are risks to making comments public, the …

Your Domain Name is an Integral Part of How You Market Your Business

Different people will remember different things when they visit a website. Some will remember the search terms or link that brought them to your site, others will remember visual or interactive components, and still others will remember the site name or the domain name.

As I suggested in my blog on how to avoid linking to online cons and pushers, one of the things that people will look for when deciding if they want to link to your site is whether or not your content matches …