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  1. Don’t Let People Rip Off Your Website Content

    It is not uncommon for people and automated bots to snap snippets of text from your website and then use it for their own diabolical purposes. Here’s a script that will let you know when that happens and it also automatically adds a link to your site in the snippet anyone copies, so you can get an incoming link which helps improve your ranking with search engines. Cool, eh? The best part is it’s free and very easy to set up. Check it out!

    Tracer:
    http://tcr52.tynt.com/

  2. How Do I Get My Website to Rank Well in Google? (Part 3)

    Okay, so we’ve been discussing keyword generation, search engine optimization, link building and today we tackle the basics of paid online advertising…

    Online Advertising

    There are a lot of places you can spend your money advertising on the web. Some places yield better results than others. Find sites that rank well in searches, and don’t forget you can advertise directly on search engines using Google Adwords or Yahoo Online Marketing. Often it’s easier to pay for an ad for a key phrase than to rank for it organically. This is especially true for highly competitive phrases. The best part is you get almost instant results with paid advertising, unlike link building, which takes months to see the full benefits of your labor. Also think about sites where your target demographic are. Facebook Advertising, for example, has a great advertising program that let’s you target specific demographics.

    So that sums up our three-part discussion on online marketing. I plan to flesh out more specific details in future posts as well, so stay tuned!

  3. How Do I Get My Website to Rank Well in Google? (Part 2)

    Last post I discussed the importance of developing good key phrases and optimizing your website for search engines. This post is going to cover the basics of link building.

    Link Building

    Now we need to get a lot of high quality links pointing to your site. Start of by searching the web for your key words and see what comes up. Take note of which sites seem to come up again and again. Those are sites you want to get linking to you. Also look for local business directories or directories that specialize in your industry as well as forums where you can post as an authority on a topic. Put a link to your website in your profile and signature. Write up several articles about your industry, include your key phrases, and post them on the web at online article syndication websites. Make sure to include links back to yourself. Post online press releases. Sign up for social media sites and find a few you really dig and set up camp. Build a network of friends and colleagues and link back to your site. Find other companies that are synergistic to what you do and contact them to see if they will link to you.

    Rinse and repeat.

    The next post I’ll be talking about paid online advertising, such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising with Google. Don’t miss it! 😉

  4. How Do I Get My Website to Rank Well in Google? (Part 1)

    One of the things we get asked a lot by business owners is "How do I get my website to rank well in Google searches."

    I typically respond with "It’s kinda complicated, but here’s the basics…"

    So, here’s that "basics" schpeel for those out there still wondering.

    This is a large conversation that all falls under the umbrella of
    "Online marketing." Online marketing is composed of three main subsets
    in my mind: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) , Link Building, and Paid
    Advertising. Over the next couple of days, I’m going to focus on each of these three areas.

    Search Engine Optimization

    SEO can be broken down into two things:

    1. Making sure your website
      contains the key phrases that people will be searching for on a search
      engine
    2. Making sure those key phrases are in the right places

    Come up with a list of key phrases that should land a potential client
    or customer to your site. Go ahead…I’ll wait. You may come up with
    10-20, if you’re good. Now we need to multiply that by ten 🙂 Think
    like a layperson. You may need to include terms that aren’t really
    accurate but they are what the general population might think to search
    on. Now think like an expert…a person in a desperate situation that
    may need your product or service right this second (Think emergency
    24-hour plumber)    . Now look at your competitor’s websites. Notice any
    key phrases being mentioned that you didn’t think of? Try viewing the
    source of their site and look for key words in META tags, the title, or
    as ALT names for images. Now pull out a thesaurus and come up with
    alternate synonyms for your words or concepts. Now plug in some
    adjectives that describe your terms like "free" or "best" or "cheap" or
    "friendly." Now think of geographical names for areas you marks to. Now
    mix and match all of the above. Your list ought to be rolling now.
    Note, there are tons of tools on the web that help with combining
    phrases or identifying new ones.

    Getting keywords in the right places may mean checking with your web designer, but basically, it means putting them in body copy,
    headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.), in the page title, as ALT tags on images, in TITLE tags for
    links, lists, in bold and italic. Also, put absolute links on your pages to other
    pages on your site and make sure each page of your site uses different keywords in the title and META tags. Many people use the same info for all pages and that is not ideal. Also, you may need to create "Landing pages" which are pages dedicated to talk about a particular group of related key phrases. You can’t optimize one page for all key words, so creating these landing pages is a must. And it’s not a bad ideal to link directly to these landing pages when linking elsewhere to your site, if you are referring to these key phrases. That would be called "Deep linking’ and it’s a good idea to link to specific pages when possible rather than your home page. It means more relevancy, and that is what search engines are after.

    So now you should have a bunch of key phrases and your website should be optimized for those phrases. Stay tuned for the next post, where I’ll discuss link building!

  5. What is Twitter and Why Should I Care?

    When I first heard of Twitter a couple years ago I thought "Nobody will ever use that!" Apparently I was wrong, as Twitter has become the "Next big thing" in the social media arena and is poised to outpace Facebook in the next year. I get asked a lot from our clients what Twitter is, so here’s a brief explanation to the non-tweeters out there.

    Twitter is basically a micro blog. So instead of writing a long, thought out post, you can keep it short and sweet. In fact, you have to, as each "tweet" is only allowed 140 characters. You can tweet text, links and even photos and you can do it from your computer and even from your cell phone.

    So why tweet? Good question. It’s a great way to let friends and family know what you’re up to and share the little things that happen in your day. Often people use it for sharing a random funny thought or a great website link or a photo of their kids. Professionally it’s a great way to find other people with similar interests and learn from them and share things you’ve found to be helpful too. Often people use Twitter for posting questions to friends and colleagues as well.

    Recently Twitter added the ability to search tweets. This is huge. Now you can see trends of what people are talking about right this second, unlike searching on Google and finding pages that were indexed days or even weeks ago. It’s like a giant, world-wide chat room. For example, your wife may be a huge American Idol Fan (This is all hypothetical, of course).  You could search on the term "Idol" and find what a bazillion other people are talking about right that second regarding American Idol. And it’s usually pretty amusing.Will Twitter replace Google….I doubt it, but it does have it’s place for searching for things that are very time sensitive, like news.

    So anyway, it’s a very interesting piece of technology and definitely worth checking out. If you’d like to follow Page Progressive on Twitter, click here, or to follow Daniel Trimpey, Click here.

     

  6. PDF Files Now Allowed in Google Docs

    For those of you out there using Google Apps, you may have noticed that Google has added a lot of new features lately, like working in Google Docs and email offline, and templates for presentations, spreadsheets and forms. One thing I’m pretty excited about is Google Docs now allows PDF file uploads, in addition to word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files. So if you have a nice, jazzy PDF of a price list, newsletter or sales sheet, you can post it in Google Docs and share it with your staff or clients. A feature I’ve been waiting for for a long time. You still can’t edit PDF files….but I wouldn’t be suprized to see that feature coming soon.

  7. News Module Now Posts to External Blogs!

    One of the painful parts of getting your company information out there on the web for better Google page rank is manually posting news and other information to the main blogs out there, such as Blogger and WordPress. Since Blogger has the feature to post items via email, we’ve added a new feature to the preferences section of our news module that sends out an email every time you post something new. So that means that if you are using our CMS and our updated "News" module, your Blogger account will update automatically with the new post. That means more exposure for you, with no extra work. As for WordPress and Facebook, they can subscribe to your news RSS feed (look in the widgets sidebar for WordPress), so those can get updated automatically too. Cool, eh?

  8. Google Apps Email Now Offers Offline Support!

    We highly recommend Google Apps to all of our hosting clients and one of the few things that made Gmail (or any webmail for that matter) not as attractive is it required an internet connection in order to work (IE: view old emails), since it’s a webmail system. That is not the case anymore! Utilizing the new "Google Gears" technology, now you can access your Google Apps Email even when not connected to the internet!

    To enable this feature, simply log into your Google Apps email account and click "Settings" in the top right corner of the screen and then go to "Labs."

    There you will see a link to enable "Offline" access (As well as several other nice goodies). Turn that on and then click the "Offline" link in your top right menu and your most recent email will be synced with your computer and accessible even if you are not connected to the internet.

    This is a great feature if you have a laptop and are always bouncing around from one wifi hotspot to the next. Obviously in offline mode, you will not receive new emails until you are back on the internet and any emails you compose and send will actually go to an "Out" box to wait until the next time you are online to get sent. But you do have access to the most recent emails that you have dealt with. And that’s pretty cool.

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