1. Paying For What You Don’t Have To

Our encounter last week began with a web design client of ours asking us to add some of his PPC keywords into his site.  This is perfectly common and highly encouraged.  The better the keyword score in the content, the lower the keyword will cost… (so use it…).  What surprised us was that the client was being charged for any and all variations of their own business name.   Even worse, they were being charged for their competitions business name.  Keywords are generally for prospective customers that don’t know the business that they are looking for, not for your assured clients that already know who you are.  Title tags should be used to make sure that your business name keeps you up top, but paying for a listing directly above your organic listing is absolutely ridiculous and highly dishonest by your marketing management team.  If you find that you are paying for your business name, it would be highly advised to demand an audit of clicks to that keyword and a refund for them.  In the future, I would also suggest ensuring that they are never added to a campaign.

-the only exception to this rule is for large companies that have scam sites attempting to take traffic, sadly, these still need title payment-

2. Wanted But Unneeded PPC Keywords

At what point are you happy with your position in the search engines?  There are arguments that say first on everything, and then there are those that say bottom of first page.  The debate on placement will continue to rage with no winners but several losers.  The problem is that it’s so case specific that nothing can be considered doctrine.  The only thing certain is that there is a point when the owner should feel comfortable in his organic, and comfortable in his Search Engine Marketing(SEM).  If a keyword cost $50.00/click, but you rank on the middle of Page 2, is it worth it to pay for a listing?  The hard answer is “probably not, but possibly maybe”. No one can say with absolute assurance that this keyword will inspire a client.  No one can say with any certainty that a client will not be born from someone clicking the add.  The point is to maximize the performance of your add campaign.  This requires sitting down with a calculator, a rank checking script ( We use Traffic Travis because the cartoon is cute), and weighing which keywords will pay for themselves and provide the best profits for the money spent.  This process should not be painless, and should not be quick.  This should be a process where both parties delve into the need of each keyword to make sure for effectiveness.  If this is something that is blown off or rushed by your advertisement representative, then I would suggest caution.  Nothing is worse than moving to quickly through a situation and purchasing something that wasn’t needed.  Proper management of your funds will lead to better returns on your investments.

3.Dishonest Practices

Most advertising management companies that you can meet face to face are going to be reputable.  There are a few out the who are not honest, but they often don’t survive a market based on the value of public image.  Most dishonest practices tend to come from Cold Calling representatives who either refuse to meet in person, or can’t because they live somewhere completely out of range.  It is highly suggested to conduct a simple Google search of a reps number as soon as you hear from them.  In this day and age of shared information, people are quick to report harassing calls from marketers, and more importantly, the ones that are selling a Scam.  While it’s true that not every company can be met with face to face, it is highly suggested to only teleconference with companies that have proven themselves to be reputable.  If you conduct a search and find nothing but complaints, it’s a good possibility that you will want to avoid their practices.  There are companies that have been spammed, and as much as we fight against these practices, the ultimate goal for you as a business owners is to safeguard your business.

Keep in mind, not every marketing company is suitable for your business.  Likewise, your business might not be suitable for the marketing agency.  Each agency has its strong-suits and they may differ from your company goals.  Come prepared with questions relevant to your business goals. After all, no matter how reputable, honest and effective the marketing company may be, if they don’t know your exact goals for the future, they will be unable to perform to peak performance.

For a list of trusted marketing agents, we suggest asking businesses that have been around for some time.  Ask them what companies they have worked with.  Study the trends in conversation.  Like all situations, if you stick with the winners, you’ll follow their path.

Similar Articles

• Avoiding Spam When Building Strong Backlinks Part 2 (0)
• Ensuring Quality Backlinks For Your Website Part 1 (1)
• 7 Ways Your Homepage is Like A First Date (1)
• Starting Your Own Viral Marketing Campaign (0)
• Viral Marketing PDF April 2010 (0)

For the past several months, we have been decisively studying a new wave of marketing methods.  We want to share this knowledge with everyone who wants to learn how to upgrade and manage the organic SEO of your own site.  These methods are usually free and require little more than an hour a day to improve the quantity and  quality of visitors to your sites.

We’re discovering the importance of a load of critical but unexciting things like:

• Researching your market
• Testing different propositions to suit your chosen market
• Learning how to write compelling copy
• And trying out a range of content to see what works best

These skills are not part of the average modern web designer’s arsenal, but they very soon will be! Those web site owners and designers who don’t apply the knowledge that direct marketers have built up over the last 125 years will soon find it harder to compete against those who can show real business results, backed up with figures.

We’re discovering a range of simple techniques that can have a massive impact on the success rates of your site. Many of these have been known for generations among certain disciplines, and it’s time we bring them into daily use in web design and online marketing.

Free Optimization Webinar

Our business development guy, Christian, recently attended several seminar on web site optimization and wants to share and disseminate the information to all of our associates.

We’re following up with our own free webinar to give time to answer our clients and all attendees’ questions. We also commit to analyse a few sample sites submitted in advance of the webinar. This will probably be on Monday September 23rd at around 13.00-15.00 Central time, but I’ll confirm the date & time later.

If you would like to attend, watch out for an email from me in the next week or so, and I’ll give you the link. Places are limited to 100, but we may follow up with more over the following weeks, so if you don’t get on, please let me know.

Our goal is to share all of our knowledge with the public.  The day of paying insane amounts for someone else to monitor and maintain your SEO campaign are definitely not over, but we want to at least show you how to take control of your marketing should you choose to.

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

You will need to first download the SEOmoz toolbar for Firefox.  This toolbar has a function that shows “No Follow” tags on page links.  Using this tool will allow you to determine which blogs are worth commenting and interacting with for links and track-backs.

Most everyone with a blog has visited or even pursued Tecnorati… (if you haven’t you will after reading this.)  Within Techgnorati, you have access to blogs that are separated by category and relevance.  There are other blog index sites that maintain a strong list of blogs by content, but Tecnorati tends to be the most reliable for the search engines.

Once you are on the site, search for a blog that resembles the topic of whatever page you wish to link to.  If you are choosing to link to your main page, choose a blog that is closely associated with the Keywords of your entire site.  If you are using the link of a specific page, search for a page that has that specific topic.  Tecnorati has a ranking system that allows the user to comb through different levels of relevance. Obviously, you want to get links from the most relevant site to the topic being covered.

Using this method, you’ll want to start by performing a “Time Honored Blogging Tradition” RTFA!!! Read the article people.  Seriously, if you don’t know what the topic is, it will show in what you’ve written. Once you read the article, then it’s time to interact.

Make sure that the comment you leave is more than the following junk:

“nice post”

“I agree with the points you made”

“good thoughts but I take issue with your points”

These comments are common and quite annoying pieces of spam.  These statements will likely be caught in any filter and removed from any site that cares about their relevancy.   It would always be suggested to be Part of a conversation.  If you’ve read a post, use enough of the material within it to make a valid statement.

Here’s a list of other rules that will avoid negative treatment for blog comments:

• Only leave comments that are a full, comprehensible sentence.
• Sign up for updates on future comments.  This can ensure many links and a future relationship between your site and the site you are commenting on.
• Leave only on link on the site, the one in your name description.  Leaving tons of links in the content of your comments makes it strongly resemble an unwanted communication, leaving many to list your comments as spam.  If your site links or email addresses becomes associated as spam, it’s very likely that your future comments on other blogs will be filtered as well.
• Leave the auto commenting software to those who don’t mind being banned from the search engines.  It’s just not worth it.
• Read the articles!!! There will always be a better exchange of ideas when you do and you’ll likely receive more convertible visitors to your website if they believe your communication to be respectful.

Similar Articles

• Ensuring Quality Backlinks For Your Website Part 1 (1)
• Starting Your Own Viral Marketing Campaign (0)
• Excellent Free SEO Monitoring Websites (1)
• Template Monster Releases New PrestaShop Themes (0)
• “Map Spam” Revisited (0)

While linking structure has always been an important piece of the SEO equation, it seems that a more intuitive linking structure is becoming more and more necessary for modern SEO development.  The day of submitting to random directories or commenting on unrelated blogs is long gone.  Spam comments and unrelated directory listings cause damage to website relevance and search engines are constantly looking for ways to counter their effects. That being said, there are highly effective methods of getting related backlinks, they just require more work than the spammers and scammers are likely to give.

If you’re wondering, “is Christian about to rail on the Spammers again?” the answer is always, yes!  Spammers not only made the system harder for all of us, they’ve caused themselves to become endangered.  Yes, you can still find tons of affiliate websites offering their “Link Building Software”.  This software is usually some form of Blog Spamming software.  While these sites can be found all over the place, they’re owned by only a small group of spam-jockeys who and are becoming marginalized by people becoming more aware of affiliate scams and MLM’s.`

Ok, now that we got that out of the way, blog backlink software is going to do nothing for your site but possibly get it banned from Google.  Not only is the software disastrous for your reputation with the SERPS, they almost always have a very short and mitigated list of sites to choose from.  They claim that their program makes searches through Google, but this is only a half truth, they are most often pre-rigged with a select amount of search criteria.  The resulting searches leave the user with the same tired group of blogs that were used 1,000’s of times before by other Spammers. Most of these sites and pages that have been bombarded by spam are already flagged by Google.  Add your link to this page, and you risk being considered spam as well.

That out of the way, the question of how to get the quality links and avoid being all spammy is going to be asked.  Unfortunately, the answer will have to wait until tomorrow. We’re out of coffee.

Similar Articles

• Avoiding Spam When Building Strong Backlinks Part 2 (0)
• Starting Your Own Viral Marketing Campaign (0)
• What Are The Best Management Groups For My PPC Campaign? (1)
• Excellent Free SEO Monitoring Websites (1)
• PrestaShop Devlopment for e-Commerce in Chicago (0)

If you’ve played with even half of the major names, you’ve likely run into and identified one major problem… they all give different numbers.  Many find themselves wondering which ones to trust and what to make of the numbers they’ve received.  Here is our take on the top 6 site Analytics and why we use them.

1. Google Analyticor- OK,  To those who always wish to bash the resource, I start by agreeing with you that Google looses a lot of information when scripts are blocked.  That being said, the number of people using script blockers is still not that high, so it’s really a moot point.  Google Analyticor is the most widely used website traffic index and is at least one must for web traffic monitoring. -to avoid the debate, that’s all we’re saying about Google today-
2. Majestic SEO Tools-  While Majestic has been around and has had a major resource for a few years now, the past year has offered a lot of new and useful tools within the site.  While it requires an account to gain access to some of the better tools, they are well worth the free account and the ten minutes it takes to set it up.  After a month of indexed tracking, Majestic provides a complete  breakdown of all your website backlinks.  This is quite useful in determining and targeting where to make more backlinks and what anchor text to use with them. Granted, there are plenty of costly and buggy forms of software that will perform this function, but most of them accompany an affiliate scam or someone’s get rich quick “Pyramid Scam”.  While the data for the links may be lagging, it’s fairly respectable in determining the  needs of a backlink campaign.
3. Quantcast -  Same as below…
4. Compete-    Do they help? Honestly, not so much.  What they do offer is valued information for those considering advertising on your website.  While many would argue, and often I’d agree with them that the information in both sites is a random guess, they are free and offer a strong form of traffic evidence when looking to sell ad-space on your site.  Whether you like them or not, it would be suggested to get listed within their database.  While you may not like or trust their services, most advertising groups are going to want to see their numbers to put ads on your site.
5. SEOmoz Free Tools-  These are an incredible assortment of custom tools designed for and by SEOmoz.  The SEO tools and link structure tools provided here are much stronger than most of their competition offers.  While we have yet to try their Pro Tools for review, we will soon be putting it to the test.  All I can say it that if the pro tools excel well above the free tools, we will likely remain a customer and refer our clients.  The free tools include several strong tools, but the best one and most unique is the “Trifecta Tool”.  This tool gives a full breakdown of a site in Page, Domain, or Blog format.   The information given here is usually free in it’s individual formats, but the way that they collate and arrange the data makes for a clean and valuable view of a websites performance.  It’s well worth signing up for a free account to try it out.
6. HUBSpot Grader.com Program – What can’t be said for the brilliant strategy of Inbound Marketing that HUBSpot has highlighted with this and many of its other websites.  Websitegrader.com is one of the most widely used website evaluation websites in use today.  With over 2.6 Million sites graded to date and an Alexa ranking around 2,000, they are becoming the most widely use “quick check” for determining any websites effectiveness.  We, like anyone else who has received it, value the 99% grade we were given by websitegrader.com and view and updated score from them on a weekly basis to see what adjustments need to be made.  If you have yet to run your site through their system, give it a try.  The information given will only serve to increase the reach and effectiveness of your website.

Similar Articles

• Avoiding Spam When Building Strong Backlinks Part 2 (0)
• Statistics a Win for SEO (0)
• Ensuring Quality Backlinks For Your Website Part 1 (1)
• PrestaShop Devlopment for e-Commerce in Chicago (0)
• Template Monster Releases New PrestaShop Themes (0)

Before we get into that portion though, we should probably explain why we were down…

As we often point out, we are hosted by Byethost.  They and Bluehost are the two hosting companies we’ve come to trust the most for shared server space. Unfortunately, we discovered that a plugin we were using for the feeds was not well accepted by our neighbors on the server.  We were capturing all of our feeds with the WordPress plugin wp-o-matic. What we didn’t realize is that this plugin causes for some major drain on the server side, and when on shared space, damages your neighbors bandwidth… OOPS!!!

We honestly never considered that such a widely-used plugin would be the cause of such issues, but test afterward have shown that it couldn’t have been anything else. Because of the excessive bandwidth, resources, and memory that wp-o-matic was stripping from the shared space, we were booted to a Virtual Private Server… Ie…Banished to the Degaba System.

It took a week of negotiating, but byethost was willing to settle the discourse once we were well assured that it had to be the plugin that was causing all of he trouble.  One week later, we’re back up and on the way again…. Needless to say, our feeds will no longer run through WP-O-Matic.

Now for the sob-story

While we were only down about a day and back and forth from IP’s for one week, Google took a lot of notice.  Our impressions went from an average of 1,000/day to 22 tonight.  Our traffic went from an average of 200/day to 30 tonight.

The past week of being back up is representative of absolute downtime in the SERPs.

Notice in the screen-shot that the exact date of being down is visible, as well as the subsequent falling out with Google ranking.

While this is a pretty steep setback for the short-term, we will return to our previous standing rather quickly.  We’ve run into similar situations with client sites, but never thought we would need to do damage control of our own.

Here are the following steps that must be taken directly after an event like this.

1. Immediate push for Back-links- During the month following a down-time like this one, the need for sites around the web to verify your existence is crucial.  The pages that Google attempts and fails to Crawl can be put on the back burners for a period of time.  Making a strong push for links and acknowledgment can get a faster crawl to those skipped pages than would likely come otherwise.

2. Add more content.  We all know that the best way to get Google’s attention is to give it something new to look at. While we feed several different blogs on this site, we also enjoy adding our own content on a regular basis  At this moment its pertinent to add more than we normally would.  The additional content will signal that the site is not dead and is in fact very much alive and active.

3.  In addition to adding the content, we have to make sure that Google is aware of it being added.  To drive home this point, we submit sitemaps… Several sitemaps.
From XML to ROR, wee submit every possible format of sitemap available.  Some may think this a bit eccentric, but in dire moments like these, it can be the difference between being demoted  for weeks or for months.  For additional sitemaps in WordPress, we suggest using the following

• Sitemap Index – a PHP virtual sitemap built upon every update.
• Google News XML Sitemap -Automatically generate an XML sitemap for inclusion to Google News 2.0
• XML Sitemap Feed – Creates a feed that complies with the XML Sitemap

We also have some made at xml-sitemaps.com in url.txt and rss.ror format.

Our running experiment will now be to see how long it will take to return to the traffic and ranking that we had last month.  We will share this experience with you all and welcome any suggestion or thoughts you would like to add.

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

Naoerville Business Directory

Raleigh Business Directory (serving the entire Triangle Area)

Chicago Business Directory

Aurora Business Directory (Aurora, Illinois)

Charleston Business Directory (For the entire Tri-County and Low Country Area)

There will be many more directories added to this list and all will be managed for accuracy.   After implementation on July 1st, listings will be automatic for all registered users of each site.

Leave your thoughts, and we’ll see what we can add to the directory plot that will make it more user friendly.

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

1. Sit around drinking and talking about funny video ideas.
2. List a bunch of successful viral videos and come up with knock-off ideas to copy them.
3. Call every funny video idea “viral” before it’s even created and before someone has ever seen it and before anyone has ever passed it to anyone.
4. Let your clients disapprove all your good ideas and then run with the lame ones.
5. Create videos without thinking about distribution because OF COURSE it’s going to go viral after just the first person views it.

You get the point.

I recently interviewed a couple of people for my Social Media Expert Interview series – Scott Stratten of UnMarketing fame and Carrie Wilkerson, The Barefoot Executive – who gave me a new perspective on viral video creation.

Why You Shouldn’t Try To Be Funny

The upshot is: funny videos are the hardest to get to go viral. Sense of humor is very personal. And it doesn’t matter if 100,000 people see your skateboarding dog catch fire and faceplant if you don’t get anything out of all those video views. Unless you’re just trying to have fun. But if you care about results, keep reading.

There’s a simpler way. And you can tie it to a conversion event you want to get.

A More Effective Viral Video Style

Just create what I call the “Emotional Slideshow” (because there was no name for it and that’s all I could think of on the spot) type of viral video.

These are nothing new, but they work like gangbusters.

The Time Movie has received 1.4MM views despite being very simply and cheezier than Fabio movie backed by a Yanni soundtrack. Scott admits to being sick of it. But his goal was to get motivational speaking gigs and launch his speaking career without years of painful free gigs- and it worked.

The Boss Movie helped Carrie Wilkerson build a list of 24,000 work-at-home women to market to in just 9 months.

The Crappy Day Movie just debuted and is my first attempt at one of these Emotional Slideshow movies. But it has its own Facebook page and I hear those are really hard to start and very, very expensive.

The Five Steps to Creating An “Emotional Slideshow” Viral Video

1. Know your audience
2. List their three biggest problems and three biggest obstacles (you’ll have 6 points)
3. List their three biggest dreams (not goals), then three examples each of life with those dreams fulfilled (you’ll have 9 points)
4. Create a line of negative and positive affirmations for each of those 15 points above
5. Find an emotionally evocative image for each point, and music for the entire slideshow, and create the movie

You can have more points, but you want each image and sentence to last about 7 seconds, and the full movie to be 3-4 minutes.

Then, of course, watch it on several occasions and have other people proof it, especially if they’re your target audience.

Getting Results

If you watched The Boss Movie, you’ll notice Carrie brings up an opt-in page after the movie for a pdf about the 7 Things Your Boss Doesn’t Want You To Know. This is a bribe that goes straight to the audience’s core problem- the limitations of employment. When conceiving your bribe, make sure you start with titles and think like a copywriter before you create the content you’re going to give away.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

5 Simple Steps to Viral Video Results

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

Recently, they just launched the ability to track and report on domains or pages ranking within local packs. If a keyword your tracking throws a local pack, and your domain isn’t found in it, you’ll get one icon in the ‘Type’ column.

Here we can see when you search for ‘hotel in dc’ you’ll get a local pack, but the domain ‘monaco-dc.com‘ isn’t ranking in it.

If you’re tracking a domain that is found within the local pack you’ll get a similar icon, but one which indicates where that domain ranked inside the local pack. Here you’ll see that if you search for ‘tampa lawyer’ you’ll get a local pack also, but in this case the domain ‘tgalaw.com‘ was found within it it at position E.

From my testing, it seems accurate for keywords which are locally targeted (ie: real estate seattle vs real estate). What’s interesting though, is being able to understand which keywords are throwing a local pack that aren’t locally targeted.

As with anything, you’ll want to take this data and look at it in aggregate. So, if you have a lot of keywords which are throwing the local pack, you know local optimization should be a priority, and for the keywords which are locally targeted you can track your progress. If you don’t have a lot of terms throwing the local pack, local optimization may not need to be a priority for you.

Along with local data, they’re also reporting on which universal results are found on a page. Currently, it looks like they’re finding image, video, shopping, real-time, news and blog results. In this case, we can see that a search on Google for ‘tiger woods’ throws image, news, video and blog results.

Again, this information is really useful in aggregate. So, if you’re tracking 100 terms and 90 of them are throwing image results, there’s an opportunity there for easier page one exposure. Or at least, you now know your images should be properly optimized, and you’ll probably see results from that work.

They took it one step further, and are also capturing whether or not rich snippets were found on a search result. So, if you have a lot of keywords where rich snippets exist, getting some micro-format or RDF markup on your pages will probably help bump you up a few spots, or at least, get you a few more clicks with a fancier serp snippet.

I appreciate Chase (one of the founders of Authority Labs) taking the time to walk me through, and demo a lot of these new features.  I would encourage you to keep an eye on them, they are doing some pretty cool stuff, and I personally know of some cool new tools they have in the pipeline that, IMO are going to be a game changer in the industry.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Using Authority Labs for “Local Pack” Rank Checking; My Review

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

Want an even better deal? Sign up with the discount code sejreader for an additional 10% off the Early Bird price!

What’s BlueGlass LA?

The anticipated follow-up conference to the Search & Social Spring Summit, BlueGlass LA is a special collaboration between us & 10e20 to bring the best speakers on Search Marketing & Social Media together into one spot for two days of sharing, discussion, education and networking. But the collaboration does not stop there because we needed a man on the scene in LA to make things happen! And who better to make the magic happen in LA than Tony Adam, the Sr. Online Marketing Manager at MySpace!

Just like Search & Social and 10e20, Tony Adam knows how to crank and get things done. And this special collaboration has put together an incredible conference agenda over the course of the last two weeks. Another month, another conference and another conference, another name; BlueGlass LA!

Why BlueGlass? Well, it’s short, brandable and gives an instant visual representation of transparency and vastness. There’s much more to the branding and BlueGlass name, but that explanation will have to wait until the conference.

What’s the Format of BlueGlass LA?

Just like our previous conferences, we’re going to keep the registration numbers low, and the sharing of information and collaboration high. Our format is this; get the best speakers and content available, and provide an exclusive atmosphere where attendees can interact with industry experts, fully participate in Q&A sessions, LIVE search & social marketing for 48 to 72 hours, and leave with the event with an expanded knowledge base, skill set and business connections that will last a lifetime.

Because of the intimate setting and round the clock events, from breakfast until the nighttime parties & networking events stop, all attendees will leave knowing much more than they did walking in, and usually with solid leads and business on the table.

Don’t just take it from me… here are some testimonials from past attendees :

“It’s small, close-knit setting, gives you a chance to sit down and talk shop with everyone, not just folks from your social clique. The topics were interesting, and I found myself taking a lot of notes…something that I haven’t done in years. It’s definitely on my must-do conferences for next year.” Kathryn Katz, Consolidated Credit Counseling Services

“Search and Social Summit was one of the best conferences I’ve attended in years. The sessions were extremely informative, and I’m looking forward to attending the next one.” Avi Wilensky, ProMediaCorp

“The casual feel of the event mixed with the intimacy and small size truly made your event top notch. Not only was I able to reconnect with my ‘Twitter family,’ again, but was also lucky enough to speak with many industry experts who were such a wealth of knowledge and were no means bothered by any sort of questions asked, whether basic or advanced.” Victoria Edwards, LinkShare

“This is by far my favorite SEO event not only because of the content but also because it takes the attendees and speakers from strangers to friends in 2 days. The willingness of the speakers to engage attendees, answer questions and really dig deep into their project issues, not only in sessions but in the pool as well is something special.!” Kristina Durakis, Timeshares Only

Where & When is BlueGlass LA?

BlueGlass LA will be held at the Marina del Rey Marriott, an oceanside resort in Marina del Rey, CA on July 19-20, 2010. The Marina is 15 minutes from LAX and within walking distance to Venice Beach & Venice Pier. It is also the location of the club Glow, which is one of West LA’s most happening hot spots!

Who Will Be at BlueGlass LA?

LA is a business town, and we’re looking to go a little beyond the usual basic online marketing tactics, and more into the nitty gritty of success stories and case studies. The speaker lineup for BlueGlass LA reads like a list of top quality Keynotes, and includes leading technologists and entrepreneurs like :

• Ben Huh from ICanHasCheezburger
• Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz
• Neil Patel from KISSMetrics
• Tony Adam from MySpace
• Marshall Simmonds from The New York Times
• Greg Boser of 3Dog Media
• Dave McClure from FF Angel
• Vanessa Fox from NinebyBlue

… and many more!

Please visit our agenda for the lineup of speakers and discussion topics.

And like Search & Social Spring Summit; Dave Snyder, Chris Winfield, Jordan Kasteler, Brent Csutoras and myself will be moderating, chiming in when needed, and running the show. It’s just going to be AMAZING!

How Much will BlueGlass LA Run?

The cost of attending BlueGlass LA is surprisingly affordbale. The Early Bird price until June 10 is $495. I highly recommend taking advantage of this deal now by registering.

This includes admission to both days of the conference, all speaker sessions, hyper-networking opportunities with speakers and attendees, three meals/day (breakfast, lunch & dinner), cash bar and two nights of evening entertainment.

Here’s more information on the location, hotel, pricing and accommodations from BlueGlass LA.

BlueGlass LA is an Internet marketing conference and networking event that is a follow-up to Search & Social Summit. It is produced by a collaboration between 10e20, an established leader in social media and search marketing, and Search & Social, a full service Internet marketing company that specializes in SEO, ORM and social media.

For additional information and to purchase tickets, please visit http://www.blueglass.com/conferences/la

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

BlueGlass LA : Last Day for Early Bird Tickets

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

Times have changed.

From a marketing standpoint, the use of local business listings has exploded with the increase of social media and mobile devices. Consumers not only use these interactive yellow pages to locate a business, product or service in their area; they are also posting reviews of those products and services.  Today, there are over 60 local business listing websites on the Internet in five different categories.  They include the search engines, social communities, 411 websites (aka yellow page type websites), GPS websites and that age-old business directory.

You can no longer be passive.

To make your interactive yellow pages listing a stronger marketing tool, you must first “claim” the listing with all the search engines, social communities, websites and organizations that lead people to it. Once you prove the listing is really yours you can update it with your business marketing material. Businesses are realizing the importance of this claiming process.  Once you have claimed your local listing you can update information with text, keywords, business descriptions, products, services, photos, videos, coupons, and more.  Some websites, such as Google, allow you to use all these options while others charge a fee for enhanced listings making this information present for local consumers through web or mobile searches

So what’s the “security challenge”?

The claiming process is crucial to security because if the wrong person gets access to your business local listing they can direct customers to a different location by phone or website address.  Additional damage can include incorrect information on photos, videos, coupons, and more.  Because consumers are using local business listings to locate a business, product or service in their immediate area, the security around local business listings must have a high priority for any local listing website.

Remember phishing?

Phishing was described in 1987 before the Internet was a commercial boom.  The first recorded use of phishing was in1996.  The question is whether the business industry is going to wait for something similar to occur using Local Business Listings. The security holes are quite evident with Local Business Listings and I don’t think it takes a genius see what could happen if businesses do not “claim” their listings – the first step in closing those “holes.”

When hackers capture a Local Listing it’s called “high-jacking.”

It is absolutely important that businesses not passively wait for local listing websites to put the appropriate security in place before you claim your listing. Installing security starts with the obvious claiming process, but many sites allow data to be inserted from other databases on the Internet and I am not sure there’s good security around this later process.  If someone wanted to hijack a local business listing, they could easily insert the wrong information through a low level business directory that sells its data upstream or inserts its data directly into a higher level local listing website.

While the top search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo have “some” front-end security; their API’s (Application Programming Interface) makes them vulnerable through the back door.  Data is provided to their local listings from 3rd party sources including “get listed” services.  Additionally, if someone cannot claim a listing easily, the process within these local listing websites allows for additional listings with the same address to be submitted by anyone.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Local Business Listing: A Marketing Opportunity and a Security Challenge

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

This is why the new non-official tool by Twitter employee Robin Sloan got my attention.

Blackbird Pie is a Twitter-based tool that allows to embed a Tweet to your web page to save time immensely:

• No time spent on making the screenshot;
• No time spent on editing the image;
• No time spent on uploading the image.

Besides saving your time, the tool has one more advantage: clickable links to:

• The Tweet;
• The Twitter user who said that.

- which will potentially encourage more people to go to your profile and follow you:

So let’s see this time-saver in action:

How It Works

1. Step one: get the direct link of the Tweet you want to embed.

Find it here:

2. Provide the link in the form and press “Bake it”:

3. Get the code to embed the Tweet to your page:

Enjoy the Time-Saving Tools

While Blackbird Pie is a time-saver in itself, it has a couple of tools that make it even faster:

1. WordPress Plugin for Blackbird Pie

That makes it easier to embed the Tweets to your WordPress blog.

2. Blackbird Pie Browser Bookmarklet

Just drop the bookmarklet to your browser, navigate to a separate Tweet page, click it and grab the code instantly.

Note: there’s also a Chrome extension that works the same way in Google Chrome.

Do you feel like using this tool?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Quickly Embed Tweets to a Web Page with Blackbird Pie

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

Google Caffeine is all about delivering fresh content, be it a blog or forum post or even news story. The idea is to highlight this real-time search results. Caffeine is different from Google’s current search index for the simple reason that these results are not really the live web content but rather Google’s index of the web.

According to Google , Caffeine was created to keep up with the evolution of the web as well as to meet rising user expectations. Google has analyzed the web in small portions and updated it’s search index continuously. Caffeine allows Google to index web pages on a huge scale and processes hundreds of pages in parallel.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Caffeine Goes Live

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

Today’s addon is another option to add to your searching arsenal. Cleeki is a nice little addon that makes searching the web much faster. I’ve been using it for about three weeks before actually reviewing it here. I decided to share it for the two main reasons:

• It’s a great time-saver;
• It aggregates multiple search engines in one handy pop-up.

Let’s take a quick look at the tool features…

Search Features

Just have the tool installed and forget about it. Now, while reading any web text, you may come across a phrase you’d like to look up in Google, Twitter, etc. So just select the phrase and notice a tiny icon nearby:

Click the icon and choose a search engine to perform the search:

If you need more engines, click a blue arrow sign:

After you choose a search engine you need and click it, the search results appear right on the same page in a handy pop-up:

From there you can:

• Switch to another Google service (blog search, image search, etc);
• Switch to any other search engine (to open them in the same pop-up);
• Go to any search result (will open in a new tab);
• Perform another search;
• Go to actual SERPs;
• Access the tool options.

Preview Features

The addon has another, quite useful feature. It allows to preview the link target page: just hover over the link and hold CTRL. You will see a tiny icon:

Click it and the page preview will load in the little pop-up:

The Addon Options

Speaking of options, here’s what you can customize:

• Set the number of “active” search engines (those you see before clicking “More” icon);
• Disable the Cleeki icon once you select any text;
• Set the time limit before the icon fades away (unless you click it to search);
• Set the window dimensions;
• Set the actions on various mouse clicks:

All in all, I found the addon useful enough and absolutely clutter-free. So if you search a lot, you may want to give it a try!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Search the Web Faster with Cleeki for FireFox

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

While working for a client in the past two weeks she contacted us demanding for changes in our marketing strategy. The changes she demanded were due in part to her being removed from the marketing strategy of this company.

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

The reference to Web 3.0 was made by members of the W3 to describe the desire for a Semantic Web. This new “Semantic Web” was to be user friendly and interactive… (I know; sounds familiar, right?). In almost all of the laymen terms, it sounds virtually the same as Web 2.0; the difference is when we look at the core problems with Web 2.0 and the theories behind it.

LOL Cats were the greatest gift of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 was to give an interactive world of exchanging ideas in an intelligent way.  Many would argue about how intelligent the exchange has actually been, but intelligent communication was the intent.  People have built on these principles to pass information accross the internet in a manner that resembled intelligence, but have found one major piece of the equasion was left out….

The Computers didn’t know what we were saying..!!!

The main purpose of Web 3.0 is to cooperatively enable the computers to understand the connections being made within the internet.  By enableing them to have an understanding of the importance that real people are placing on content, the systems will be able to weed out all of the Black Hat and Scam jobs.(at least for a little while)

Here’s the post of wikipedia:

“Purpose

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Irish word for “directory”, reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However, one computer cannot accomplish all of these tasks without human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.

Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the semantic web as follows:^[6]

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Semantic publishing will benefit greatly from the semantic web. In particular, the semantic web is expected to revolutionize scientific publishing, such as real-time publishing and sharing of experimental data on the Internet. This simple but radical idea is now being explored by W3C HCLS group’s Scientific Publishing Task Force.

Semantic Web application areas are experiencing intensified interest due to the rapid growth in the use of the Web, together with the innovation and renovation of information content technologies. The Semantic Web is regarded as an integrator across different content and information applications and systems, and provide mechanisms for the realisation of Enterprise Information Systems. The rapidity of the growth experienced provides the impetus for researchers to focus on the creation and dissemination of innovative Semantic Web technologies, where the envisaged ’Semantic Web’ is long overdue. Often the terms ’Semantics’, ’metadata’, ’ontologies’ and ’Semantic Web’ are used inconsistently. In particular, these terms are used as everyday terminology by researchers and practitioners, spanning a vast landscape of different fields, technologies, concepts and application areas. Furthermore, there is confusion with regards to the current status of the enabling technologies envisioned to realise the Semantic Web. In a paper presented by Gerber, Barnard and Van der Merwe^[7] the Semantic Web landscape are charted and a brief summary of related terms and enabling technologies are presented. The architectural model proposed by Tim Berners-Lee is used as basis to present a status model that reflects current and emerging technologies”

What this means for developers?

More work… more education.. longer nights

For those true to the desire of solving the next development or SEO equation, this is more tantalizing than tantrum causing.  Those who enjoy doing quality SEO work will only see this as a challenge.  This is also seen as a much needed improvement to kill off the scammera that kill the face of our business.

What this means for the “No Talent A$$ Clowns” using Black and Grey Hat Techniques:

You better learn some real SEO, or your days are numbered.  Many times before these threats have been issued by the W3, but never before have they issued exact concepts that will be so easily incorporated by both Google and MSN.  There will always be those who skirt the system, but most will find their cheep tricks no longer working after these new rules are implemented.

Here is the basic visual guide and reference to the new Semantic Solution.  i’ll leave links acrross to the entire Wiki article.

We will be evaluating the software available for the changes and should have a review within the next few weeks…

Cheers.

Web 3.0

Tim Berners-Lee has described the semantic web as a component of ‘Web 3.0′.^[9]

People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics – everything rippling and folding and looking misty — on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource…”

– Tim Berners-Lee, 2006

Relationship to the hypertext web

Limitations of HTML

Many files on a typical computer can be loosely divided into documents and data. Documents like mail messages, reports, and brochures are read by humans. Data, like calendars, addressbooks, playlists, and spreadsheets are presented using an application program which lets them be viewed, searched and combined in many ways.

Currently, the World Wide Web is based mainly on documents written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a markup convention that is used for coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms. Metadata tags, for example

<meta name="keywords" content="computing, computer studies, computer">
<meta name="description" content="Cheap widgets for sale">
<meta name="author" content="John Doe">

provide a method by which computers can categorise the content of web pages.

With HTML and a tool to render it (perhaps web browser software, perhaps another user agent), one can create and present a page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as “this document’s title is ‘Widget Superstore’”, but there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number X586172 is an Acme Gizmo with a retail price of €199, or that it is a consumer product. Rather, HTML can only say that the span of text “X586172″ is something that should be positioned near “Acme Gizmo” and “€199″, etc. There is no way to say “this is a catalog” or even to establish that “Acme Gizmo” is a kind of title or that “€199″ is a price. There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, distinct from other items perhaps listed on the page.

Semantic HTML refers to the traditional HTML practice of markup following intention, rather than specifying layout details directly. For example, the use of <em> denoting “emphasis” rather than <i>, which specifies italics. Layout details are left up to the browser, in combination with Cascading Style Sheets. But this practice falls short of specifying the semantics of objects such as items for sale or prices.

Microformats represent unofficial attempts to extend HTML syntax to create machine-readable semantic markup about objects such as retail stores and items for sale.

Semantic Web solutions

The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts. Tim Berners-Lee calls the resulting network of Linked Data the Giant Global Graph, in contrast to the HTML-based World Wide Web.

These technologies are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content may manifest itself as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases ^[10], or as markup within documents (particularly, in Extensible HTML (XHTML) interspersed with XML, or, more often, purely in XML, with layout or rendering cues stored separately). The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e., to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers to perform automated information gathering and research.

An example of a tag that would be used in a non-semantic web page:

<item>cat</item>

Encoding similar information in a semantic web page might look like this:

<item rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Cat">Cat</item>

Relationship to object oriented programming

A number of authors highlight the similarities which the Semantic Web shares with object-oriented programming (OOP).^[11][12] Both the semantic web and object-oriented programming have classes with attributes and the concept of instances or objects. Linked Data uses Dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers in a manner similar to the common programming concept of pointers or “object identifiers” in OOP. Dereferenceable URIs can thus be used to access “data by reference“. The Unified Modeling Language is designed to communicate about object-oriented systems, and can thus be used for both object-oriented programming and semantic web development.

When the web was first being created in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was done using object-oriented programming languages^{[citation needed]} such as Objective-C, Smalltalk and CORBA. In the mid-1990s this development practice was furthered with the announcement of the Enterprise Objects Framework, Portable Distributed Objects and WebObjects all by NeXT, in addition to the Component Object Model released by Microsoft. XML was then released in 1998, and RDF a year after in 1999.

Similarity to object oriented programming also came from two other routes: the first was the development of the very knowledge-centric “Hyperdocument” systems by Douglas Engelbart^[13], and the second comes from the usage and development of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.^{[14][clarification needed]}

Web 3.0

Tim Berners-Lee has described the semantic web as a component of ‘Web 3.0′.^[9]

People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics – everything rippling and folding and looking misty — on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource…”

– Tim Berners-Lee, 2006

[edit] Relationship to the hypertext web

[edit] Limitations of HTML

Many files on a typical computer can be loosely divided into documents and data. Documents like mail messages, reports, and brochures are read by humans. Data, like calendars, addressbooks, playlists, and spreadsheets are presented using an application program which lets them be viewed, searched and combined in many ways.

Currently, the World Wide Web is based mainly on documents written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a markup convention that is used for coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms. Metadata tags, for example

<meta name="keywords" content="computing, computer studies, computer">
<meta name="description" content="Cheap widgets for sale">
<meta name="author" content="John Doe">

provide a method by which computers can categorise the content of web pages.

With HTML and a tool to render it (perhaps web browser software, perhaps another user agent), one can create and present a page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as “this document’s title is ‘Widget Superstore’”, but there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number X586172 is an Acme Gizmo with a retail price of €199, or that it is a consumer product. Rather, HTML can only say that the span of text “X586172″ is something that should be positioned near “Acme Gizmo” and “€199″, etc. There is no way to say “this is a catalog” or even to establish that “Acme Gizmo” is a kind of title or that “€199″ is a price. There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, distinct from other items perhaps listed on the page.

Semantic HTML refers to the traditional HTML practice of markup following intention, rather than specifying layout details directly. For example, the use of <em> denoting “emphasis” rather than <i>, which specifies italics. Layout details are left up to the browser, in combination with Cascading Style Sheets. But this practice falls short of specifying the semantics of objects such as items for sale or prices.

Microformats represent unofficial attempts to extend HTML syntax to create machine-readable semantic markup about objects such as retail stores and items for sale.

[edit] Semantic Web solutions

The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts. Tim Berners-Lee calls the resulting network of Linked Data the Giant Global Graph, in contrast to the HTML-based World Wide Web.

These technologies are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content may manifest itself as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases ^[10], or as markup within documents (particularly, in Extensible HTML (XHTML) interspersed with XML, or, more often, purely in XML, with layout or rendering cues stored separately). The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e., to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers to perform automated information gathering and research.

An example of a tag that would be used in a non-semantic web page:

<item>cat</item>

Encoding similar information in a semantic web page might look like this:

<item rdf:about="http://dbpedia.org/resource/Cat">Cat</item>

[edit] Relationship to object oriented programming

A number of authors highlight the similarities which the Semantic Web shares with object-oriented programming (OOP).^[11][12] Both the semantic web and object-oriented programming have classes with attributes and the concept of instances or objects. Linked Data uses Dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers in a manner similar to the common programming concept of pointers or “object identifiers” in OOP. Dereferenceable URIs can thus be used to access “data by reference“. The Unified Modeling Language is designed to communicate about object-oriented systems, and can thus be used for both object-oriented programming and semantic web development.

When the web was first being created in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was done using object-oriented programming languages^{[citation needed]} such as Objective-C, Smalltalk and CORBA. In the mid-1990s this development practice was furthered with the announcement of the Enterprise Objects Framework, Portable Distributed Objects and WebObjects all by NeXT, in addition to the Component Object Model released by Microsoft. XML was then released in 1998, and RDF a year after in 1999.

Similarity to object oriented programming also came from two other routes: the first was the development of the very knowledge-centric “Hyperdocument” systems by Douglas Engelbart^[13], and the second comes from the usage and development of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.^{[14][clarification needed]}

[edit] Skeptical reactions

[edit] Practical feasibility

Critics (e.g. Which Semantic Web?) question the basic feasibility of a complete or even partial fulfillment of the semantic web. Cory Doctorow’s critique (“metacrap“) is from the perspective of human behavior and personal preferences. For example, people lie: they may include spurious metadata into Web pages in an attempt to mislead Semantic Web engines that naively assume the metadata’s veracity. This phenomenon was well-known with metatags that fooled the AltaVista ranking algorithm into elevating the ranking of certain Web pages: the Google indexing engine specifically looks for such attempts at manipulation. Peter Gärdenfors and Timo Honkela point out that logic-based semantic web technologies cover only a fraction of the relevant phenomena related to semantics ^{[15] [16]}.

Where semantic web technologies have found a greater degree of practical adoption, it has tended to be among core specialized communities and organizations for intra-company projects.^[17] The practical constraints toward adoption have appeared less challenging where domain and scope is more limited than that of the general public and the World-Wide Web.^[17]

[edit] The potential of an idea in fast progress

The original 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee described an expected evolution of the existing Web to a Semantic Web.^[18] A complete evolution as described by Berners-Lee has yet to occur. In 2006, Berners-Lee and colleagues stated that: “This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized.”^[19] While the idea is still in the making, it seems to evolve quickly and inspire many. Between 2007-2010 several scholars have already explored first applications and the social potential of the semantic web in the business and health sectors, and for social networking ^[20] and even for the broader evolution of democracy, specifically, how a society forms its common will in a democratic manner through a semantic web ^[21]

[edit] Censorship and privacy

Enthusiasm about the semantic web could be tempered by concerns regarding censorship and privacy. For instance, text-analyzing techniques can now be easily bypassed by using other words, metaphors for instance, or by using images in place of words. An advanced implementation of the semantic web would make it much easier for governments to control the viewing and creation of online information, as this information would be much easier for an automated content-blocking machine to understand. In addition, the issue has also been raised that, with the use of FOAF files and geo location meta-data, there would be very little anonymity associated with the authorship of articles on things such as a personal blog.

[edit] Doubling output formats

Another criticism of the semantic web is that it would be much more time-consuming to create and publish content because there would need to be two formats for one piece of data: one for human viewing and one for machines. However, many web applications in development are addressing this issue by creating a machine-readable format upon the publishing of data or the request of a machine for such data. The development of microformats has been one reaction to this kind of criticism.

Specifications such as eRDF and RDFa allow arbitrary RDF data to be embedded in HTML pages. The GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Language) mechanism allows existing material (including microformats) to be automatically interpreted as RDF, so publishers only need to use a single format, such as HTML.

[edit] Need

The idea of a semantic web, able to describe, and associate meaning with data, necessarily involves more than simple XHTML mark-up code. It is based on an assumption that, in order for it to be possible to endow machines with an ability to accurately interpret web homed content, far more than the mere ordered relationships involving letters and words is necessary as underlying infrastructure, (attendant to semantic issues). Otherwise, most of the supportive functionality would have been available in Web 2.0 (and before), and it would have been possible to derive a semantically capable Web with minor, incremental additions.

Additions to the infrastructure to support semantic functionality include latent dynamic network models that can, under certain conditions, be ‘trained’ to appropriately ‘learn’ meaning based on order data, in the process ‘learning’ relationships with order (a kind of rudimentary working grammar). See for example latent semantic analysis

[edit] Components

The Semantic Web Stack.

The semantic web comprises the standards and tools of XML, XML Schema, RDF, RDF Schema and OWL that are organized in the Semantic Web Stack. The OWL Web Ontology Language Overview describes the function and relationship of each of these components of the semantic web:

• XML provides an elemental syntax for content structure within documents, yet associates no semantics with the meaning of the content contained within.
• XML Schema is a language for providing and restricting the structure and content of elements contained within XML documents.
• RDF is a simple language for expressing data models, which refer to objects (“resources“) and their relationships. An RDF-based model can be represented in XML syntax.
• RDF Schema extends RDF and is a vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF-based resources, with semantics for generalized-hierarchies of such properties and classes.
• OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. “exactly one”), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes.
• SPARQL is a protocol and query language for semantic web data sources.

Current ongoing standardizations include:

• Rule Interchange Format (RIF) as the Rule Layer of the Semantic Web Stack

Not yet fully realized layers include:

• Unifying Logic and Proof layers are undergoing active research.

The intent is to enhance the usability and usefulness of the Web and its interconnected resources through:

• Servers which expose existing data systems using the RDF and SPARQL standards. Many converters to RDF exist from different applications. Relational databases are an important source. The semantic web server attaches to the existing system without affecting its operation.
• Documents “marked up” with semantic information (an extension of the HTML <meta> tags used in today’s Web pages to supply information for Web search engines using web crawlers). This could be machine-understandable information about the human-understandable content of the document (such as the creator, title, description, etc., of the document) or it could be purely metadata representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere in the site). (Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason about animals, people, places, ideas, etc.) Semantic markup is often generated automatically, rather than manually.
• Common metadata vocabularies (ontologies) and maps between vocabularies that allow document creators to know how to mark up their documents so that agents can use the information in the supplied metadata (so that Author in the sense of ‘the Author of the page’ won’t be confused with Author in the sense of a book that is the subject of a book review).
• Automated agents to perform tasks for users of the semantic web using this data
• Web-based services (often with agents of their own) to supply information specifically to agents (for example, a Trust service that an agent could ask if some online store has a history of poor service or spamming)

[edit] Challenges

Some of the challenges for the Semantic Web include vastness, vagueness, uncertainty, inconsistency and deceit. Automated reasoning systems will have to deal with all of these issues in order to deliver on the promise of the Semantic Web.

• Vastness: The World Wide Web contains at least 48 billion pages as of this writing (August 2, 2009). The SNOMED CT medical terminology ontology contains 370,000 class names, and existing technology has not yet been able to eliminate all semantically duplicated terms. Any automated reasoning system will have to deal with truly huge inputs.

• Vagueness: These are imprecise concepts like “young” or “tall”. This arises from the vagueness of user queries, of concepts represented by content providers, of matching query terms to provider terms and of trying to combine different knowledge bases with overlapping but subtly different concepts. Fuzzy logic is the most common technique for dealing with vagueness.

• Uncertainty: These are precise concepts with uncertain values. For example, a patient might present a set of symptoms which correspond to a number of different distinct diagnoses each with a different probability. Probabilistic reasoning techniques are generally employed to address uncertainty.

• Inconsistency: These are logical contradictions which will inevitably arise during the development of large ontologies, and when ontologies from separate sources are combined. Deductive reasoning fails catastrophically when faced with inconsistency, because “anything follows from a contradiction”. Defeasible reasoning and paraconsistent reasoning are two techniques which can be employed to deal with inconsistency.

• Deceit: This is when the producer of the information is intentionally misleading the consumer of the information. Cryptography techniques are currently utilized to alleviate this threat.

This list of challenges is illustrative rather than exhaustive, and it focuses on the challenges to the “unifying logic” and “proof” layers of the Semantic Web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Incubator Group for Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web (URW3-XG) final report lumps these problems together under the single heading of “uncertainty”. Many of the techniques mentioned here will require extensions to the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for example to annotate conditional probabilities. This is an area of active research.

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

Last week Jen and I attended the Search & Social Summit here in my backyard of Tampa Bay. This isn’t your typical conference recap post, though. I wanted to focus on the action items that still stand out for me a week later, the things will make a difference in what I do or how I do it. Perhaps you’ll rethink the way you do a thing or two as well.

Outsource, Seriously.

Kevin Henrikson is a low key guy, and one that I hadn’t met until the Search & Social Summit. You won’t see him spouting off on Twitter or elaborating on his accomplishments on LinkedIn. He beats even me in the blog neglect category. Personally, I wish he’d publish more. He has a strong business acumen and seems to find his comfort zone well outside the boundaries that most of us create in our own DIY vs. outsource struggles.

Kevin’s presentation was about outsourcing. I expected the standard cliché we’ve all heard 100 times, “Do what you do best. Outsource the rest.” Good advice, absolutely, but now what? Kevin’s presentation was different. It outlined real, actionable strategies for outsourcing the things you’d expect – like copywriting and development – but he also spoke about his experience delegating some pretty unusual stuff like the hiring of a housekeeper for his parents out-of-state.

Kevin covered more than a dozen solid online sources for building your outsourced empire including craigslist (for local need), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the old standby Elance. None of those excited me like oDesk and 99designs.

oDesk describes themselves as a marketplace for online workstreams. Don’t have time to sift through your email to identify the important ones that require a response? Hire a personal assistant to do the drudge work for you. Need a new site design converted to work with your WordPress blog? You’ll be surprised by the rates. I created my account while listening to Kevin’s presentation and can’t wait to get started.

99designs provides a platform and 192K strong community to facilitate your own ‘design contest’. Open an account, outline your project in seven simple fields, pay a few hundred dollars and within a week you’ll have dozens of designs to choose from that were created by the 99designs community. I did a hack job of my own blog logo design a few years ago. I figured there was no time like the present, so jumped onto 99designs and kicked off my own contest. For a few hundred dollars I’ve received around 200 logo designs. You can check out the contest entries and maybe even help me choose a winner from the frontrunners.

If you want more information on how to leverage the outsourcing vehicles like the ones mentioned above, check out Rand’s recent post on the topic here.

Targeted Promotion on Niche Social News Sites

If you’re like me, when you think ‘social news’, examples like Digg and Reddit stand out. Though the traffic from these sites is astounding – IF you can get your story to the front page – obtaining traction is hit or miss and the competition is intense. Brent Csutoras is a wiz in the world of social marketing, and another speaker that presented some refreshing content at the Search & Social Summit last week.

Brent highlighted Kirtsy.com as a great place to post content that would appeal to a female audience, for example. This isn’t the kind of place to post the latest puss video from PopThatZit (view at your own risk. eww) but if you take a look at the current list of most popular content on the Kirtsy homepage, you’ll get the idea of what is possible there. I was surprised to see a few listings from small personal blogs on topics like crafts and parenting.

Despite being more than a year old, Brent says that this list of niche social media sites from Chris Winfield over at 10e20 is still the best out there. Think about the opportunities for sites you represent. No doubt a few more niche social news sites have cropped up since then. If you have another one that works for you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Get New Content Indexed Faster

Michael Gray recommends creating small sitemaps of <100 pages, in addition to your regular sitemap(s), to help get  new content indexed faster.

Michael has found that for sites that add a lot of new pages, or want to get the pages they do add indexed quickly, using a dedicated sitemap for fresh content is the key. In his testing, deep pages on large sites that would sometimes take weeks or months to make it into the index took just 1-3 days with the dedicated fresh content XML sitemap. He suggests playing with the ’100′ number. That is what the need has been for his clients, but if you are working with a site that has a larger fresh content output you may achieve the same affect by including more.

I’ll be testing this one out for sure! Let us know how it goes for you, too.

Action Items

1. Are you making the most of your time? Think about the things that someone else could do for you and outsource it. Check out 99designs for graphics work and oDesk for nearly everything else.
2. Look through Chris Winfield’s list of niche social news sites. Maybe your content can ‘make popular’ on social news afte rall.
3. Try creating a supplemental fresh content XML sitemap to see if it helps you get your content indexed faster.

Happy Optimizing!

Lindsay Wassell (aka @lindzie)

Do you like this post? Yes No

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

Pinger is a great FireFox addon that checks all (or selected) links on a page and does it very fast!

To use it, you just need to:

• Right-click anywhere on the page and select “Ping all links”;
• Select any links on page and click either “Ping all links” or “”:

After running through the page links, the tool returns a summarized report:

The above statuses stand for the following:

1. Link returned HTTP code between 200 and 300, meaning it’s ok
2. Returned code was either 404, or some of other ‘can’t get here’
3. Every link has 45 seconds to open and return header. “This one didn’t make it, so you better check it yourself”
4. Link didn’t return any HTTP header. Either is server down, or it’s redirecting to protocol other than http / https.

The tool also visualizes the link status nicely by highlighting working links in green, broken links in red, skipped links in grey:

Other broken link checkers we have tried previously:

• 7 Things You Can Do With Xenu Link Sleuth: this post is full of screenshots that visualize how you can use Xenu in many more ways than just checking for broken links;
• 3 Broken Link Checkers Reviewed and Compared: the post compares Xenu, LinkAider and W3C Link Checker head-to-head.
• Tools to Explore and Validate Page Outbound Links: how to both check and analyze page outbound links;
• LinkExaminer: SEO Friendly Link Scanning Utility: a neat tool that also has quite a few SEO-friendly features.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Pinger: Fast and Fun Page Link Checker (FireFox)

Similar Articles

• Gorgeous Geometric Designs (0)
• skull (0)
• Fashion silhouette 2 (0)
• Feathers (0)
• Fun Dingbats (0)

Top Search Queries

The greatest improvement seems to be the most generic of them all.  Google Webmaster tools has become the META version of Google Analyticor.  This is great for those of us worried about “No Script”  giving false information. The only change to the console is that impressions have been added to the list and an inclusion of hit counts(clickthroughs) has been placed on the side.  The clickthroughs may frustrate those with a low traffic site, since they only show numbers for counts above ten… Otherwise you get a readout of <10 for the clickthroughs for that particular keywords.

The graphic interface allows for better interaction and quicker information access for each keyword Que.  This information can be used as a rough guide for how relevant your site is as a hole for each of the keywords that the site competes for.  While some fight endlessly for certain keywords in PPC and other venues, they rarely think of an easy concept…“USE WHAT YA GOT”.

If your site is already competitive for certain keywords(and assuming they area actually searched….Checking them against the Google Adwords Keyword Tool would be suggested) strengthen the relevancy of these unforeseen gifts.  It may not have been your intention to rank well for these items, but why waste a good thing? If you already are ranking for these items, and developing content on them won’t destroy the overall effectiveness of the site, then hit with more content relating to them.  The overall goal is to extend the reach of your website and to engage others with quality content.  By considering how man Impressions your site has received during specific Ques, the site can be introduced to a larger and broader audience.

Engage Google

Why wouldn’t you want Google actively involved in a site that you wish to perform.  With every tool by Google that is used throughout your website, the bond between it and Goglebot’s preferences will grow.  I was laughed at recently when I suggested this, but it only makes sense.   Having a base for the XML Sitemaps allows for direct interaction with the Bot.  While this may not be a relationship to write home to mother about, it is one that can spur growth between the bot learning your site and you learning the bot.

With continued interaction, this new tool is certain to add to the effectiveness and usage of Google Webmaster Tools.  I still say the interface is looking like a bridge between Webmaster Tools and Analyticor, but maybe that’s something they are considering.  Or, they want to keep things as I said, one in  META, one in SCRIPTS.  Either way, it’s a tool that continues to grow and become more and more useful to the overall goal of Search Engine Optimization.

On a side note, if anyone from Bing or Yahoo ever reads this, please make your Webmaster Tools more useful.  We want to use them, they just have limited uses right now.

TY

More on Naperville Web Design

• Top-5 Wordpress SEO Plugins (16)
• Chicago Web Design SEO Page-1 (16)
• Limos-Alive (12)
• Free Directories (10)
• Marketing (8)

Never before has it been easier to reach potential customers. Using digital technology, you can reach your audience for pennies. But as it turns out, inexpensive marketing is a double-edged sword because it attracts more competition. This is because the technology that makes production of media inexpensive, also creates a low barrier of entry.

As a result, the market is flooded with products, and the consumer is overwhelmed. The range of products and brands to purchase has become numbing to the customer. Proven strategies of the past are being abandoned, because they clearly no longer work.

That being said, brand-building is one strategy that will never go out of date regardless of technological advances. And the good news is that building a brand has never been more feasible than it is now—if you are willing to use social media and use it well.

Simply blogging or having a presence on Facebook is not enough.

Viral marketing needs four things to work properly:

1. An offer (preferably free) that has value
2. An easy way to distribute the offer
3. An incentive to get consumers to pass the offer along to their friends
4. A way to make the campaign profitable

1. An offer (preferably free) that has value. When thinking about viral campaigns, many people think of funny videos. Funny videos do have value, but I would encourage you to consider something different. There are just too many companies trying to do funny videos and it is hard to stand out. Rather, come up with an offer that has more legitimate value. For example, I offer free online piano lessons for church pianists. I have also offered free downloads of CDs and printed piano arrangements.The key is that whatever you offer has to have real value, and it probably needs to be free. People will not jeopardize their relationships by promoting an offer that has no value, and they will usually not promote offers that are not free (unless the brand is already very strong). Think hard about an offer you can make available that is inexpensive but has great perceived value to others. Be creative; there are numerous possibilities, particularly if you create digital media.
2. An easy way to distribute the offer. You must provide an easy way for people to get your offer, and ideally, it should be delivered automatically without requiring your involvement. For many of us, our offers can be distributed digitally on our websites. If you can host your offer on your own website, that is the best scenario. If you cannot, there are other websites that allow you to do these kinds of campaigns. For example, musicians can use BandCamp to deliver their music offers to consumers.
3. An incentive to get consumers to pass the offer along to others. It is critical that your consumers are “reimbursed” to pass along your offer. Sometimes, their payment can be as simple as the thanks they get from their friends when they pass along funny videos. But, I would not count on that being enough. Try to find a way to offer something extra to people who will post your offer in places like their Facebook status or on their blogs. These are the people who are critical to your viral marketing success.
4. A way to make the campaign profitable. Viral marketing is primarily about brand-building. But it is also a great way to sell other products, build a fan base, obtain concerts and speaking engagements, and much more. Don’t make your offer something that you can’t afford to give away. Also, set goals for what you hope to obtain from your campaign

Don’t go into this just to be the next Great Orator. Paid speaking engagements are far fewer than those seeking to host them.  They’re also limited to those who are truly qualified to deliver a strong message and have something so innovative that no one else will bringing it to market.  I myself will not being doing that, as there are four different post of other offers combined into this one to make a stronger thought.  The main goal is to bring your brand, products and clients to the top of their markets.

Execution is the key to all types of marketing. Plan and experiment before you launch. When you start something virally, there is no way to stop it and no way to fix mistakes; so make sure the message is the one you wanted. When you are ready to launch a campaign, you simply have to send out a short email to your fan email list. After that, if it is going to work, you simply manage which direction it needs to be steered(you won’t have much influence to provide, but can turn it to the next hit you have in waiting).

Similar Articles

• Avoiding Spam When Building Strong Backlinks Part 2 (0)
• Ensuring Quality Backlinks For Your Website Part 1 (1)
• Viral Marketing PDF April 2010 (0)
• What Are The Best Management Groups For My PPC Campaign? (1)
• Excellent Free SEO Monitoring Websites (1)

The average location can search the term “Flood Damage” on their map right now and you’ll encounter a group of fake “24 Hr Response groups” that have the same pictures and the same coupons on all of their listing pages.  Worse yet, they only exist(and I use the term “exist” lightly) on the map at locations that have never heard of them.  This specific group has fake “flood damage cleanup” companies across the entire country. In Naperville alone, we can find at least 15 such locations that are completely fake.  In the Chicago area, there are over 1,000 different map locations that are complete Spam.  Again, while it is important to report them to Google, don’t be surprised if it takes a while for anything to be done about them.  Google sells ad space to some of them and doesn’t seem to want them to go away to quickly.

You may ask, why is this such a big deal to Naper Design?  It is a good question, and one that deserves a proper answer.  This group was formally asked to remove their fake listings from one City area in Norther Illinois.  A client of our was having issues with being seen on the map.  Rather than immediately go to Google with the complaint,we called the company and made a simple request to have them pull just these 4 fake locations.  Instead of being ok with our request, they began harassing us with unlisted numbers, and would call in the middle of the night with claims that the were from the mob(as if a mob member would ever make that claim).  It was pathetic, but should show you just how much they value this business.  They make quite a fortune off of the small businesses who have to purchase the leads back from the people who stole from them.

In the case of these Carpet Cleaning and 24 Hour Flood Damage Cleanup Companies, they like to take their scam to an even higher level.  Having been caught by Google before, they leave fake identifying logos on their site.  They claim to be members of The Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC), but the fuzzed picture is an obvious fake.  This is a common tactic of those who are wishing to Scam the consumer, “claim you’re certified in something”.

While Google has been made aware of their fake sites, this can take some time.  There are still several sites within this thread of Google’s support blog that pay mention to companies that have yet to be removed.

The frustration is there because Google is still slow in responding to people who are playing by the rules.  The fakes and spammers out there have caused for contractors here in Naperville, Chicago, Michigan, California and New York to completely go out of business.  Worse still is the upcharge that these lead generation services add to the price of the work to be performed.  The mark-up can be hundreds of Dollars just to reach the guys you wanted to contact to begin with.

While it may not be to kosher, I do support Re-Spamming.  Several of us have begun looking up these fake companies and leaving negative comments to let people know they are Scammers and Spammers.   We don’t see this as negative or even spam since we are leaving legitimate feedback on these profiles… Unlike the fake ones they leave for themselves.

With hope, this will clear the map in the Naperville and Chicago area and allow for local contractors to conduct business more effectively.  The last thing we need during a recession are all of the lead groups steeling business from local contractors

hidden links

Similar Articles

• Avoiding Spam When Building Strong Backlinks Part 2 (0)
• Template Monster Releases New PrestaShop Themes (0)
• Our Stock Images of Chicago (0)
• Ensuring Quality Backlinks For Your Website Part 1 (1)
• PrestaShop Devlopment for e-Commerce in Chicago (0)

Similar Articles

• Avoiding Spam When Building Strong Backlinks Part 2 (0)
• Ensuring Quality Backlinks For Your Website Part 1 (1)
• Excellent Free SEO Monitoring Websites (1)
• PrestaShop Devlopment for e-Commerce in Chicago (0)
• Template Monster Releases New PrestaShop Themes (0)

The reason this subject is so irritating to us is the short suspension that we received for having just two locations that were uniquely verifiable.  The one problem with our listing was that we had only one phone line at the time and relayed everything through it.  Obviously those were harder days and we’ve moved up to a more sane business model.  The point is that such a minuscule notion immediately got Google’s attention, but the spammer/scammers of the map have been able continue their actions seemingly unaffected.

There are a few theories why the spammer are able to stay under the radar.  They study the new rules every time Google releases them and try to mask themselves as best as they can.  Here are the most common ways that a spammer is going to attempt to spam the Google Map.

1.) Using the addresses of local contractors they are selling the aggregated leads to.

2.) Using the addresses of pre-existing businesses and hoping no one will notice. (for instance.  search for the KFC 1015 Maple Avenue, Lisle, IL you’ll find more than one “business” there and only one building. It likely won’t surprise you that this additional “business” has locations at other surrounding area restaurants.)

3.) Having local telephone numbers that redirect to one switchboard that is usually just a phone bank for lead generation.  They collect the calls and them sell them for profit to local contractors in you area.  You know, the ones that can’t be seen on the map to begin with because these guys are listed on every single corner.

4.) The last, and probably most recognizable method of spamming the map comes from those companies that spam their own listings with positive comments.  A great example of these is a fake company called Naperville SEO run by a guy that ran Mann Insurance.  This guy used several fake locations, names and domains to set up multiple fake businesses that would loop SEO rewards back to his own site.  he spamming was even that more obvious by how many of the comments were added on the same date.  He obviously wasn’t fooling anyone.

The latest rules are supposedly made to aid in the removal of the spammers, but the results are mixed.  Many of them have been reported repeatedly and it would appear that Google is, at best, slow to respond.  The latest rules can be found here, but can be summarized in five basic points.

Here are the new listing rules and requirements from Google.  Their original location is on the help forum here.

Business Listings in Local Business Center must have correct information about physical, local businesses, as they appear in the real world. Google reserves the right to suspend access to Local Business Center or to other Google Services to individuals or businesses violating these guidelines.

Ownership

• Only business owners or authorized representatives may claim their business listings on Google Maps.

Business Name

• Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
• Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business into the business name.
• Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.

Physical Location

• Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist.
• PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.
• Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
• Businesses that operate in a service area as opposed to a single location should not create a listing for every city they service. Service area businesses should create one listing for the central office of the business only.
• Businesses with special services, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
• The precise address for the business must be provided in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
• A property for rent is not considered a place of business. Please create one listing for the central office that processes the rentals.

URL & Phone

• Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible. For example, you should provide an individual location phone number in place of a call center.
• Provide one URL that best identifies your individual business location.
• Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or ‘refer’ users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.

Custom Attributes & Description

• Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title, address or category fields.
• Please see this page of the LBC User Guide for examples of acceptable custom attributes.

A great comparison chart on these new rules vs the old rules can be found here.

I understand that some are having a field day pointing out fellow small businesses that have made a mistake with registering their multiple locations.  As I said, this was s short term stumbling block for us as well.  The hard focus should likely be made on the lead generation groups that are constantly assaulting the map with more and more spam.

What if I’m being punished by Google?

Local businesses who have found exclusion from the map.  There is hope!  Write Google a letter in your local listing area.  Let them know how sorry you are for violating the rules, ensure that all of your maps have been updated/erased to allow for only correct information, and make a solid commitment to not let it happen again.  As long as your business is on the map at all there is hope, but make sure not to let it happen again.  If multiple occurrences happen, it becomes more likely that Google will ban your business from the map completely and no one wishes for that outcome.

As for the large lead aggregators, I have no pity for them and hope that Google can find a way to track them all. Unfortunately, most of them immediately overhaul their domain and website and are up again within a week.  One aspect that would likely help Google is to track the phone numbers being used by spammer businesses and require a letter, not phone verification whenever they are used again… just a thought Google.  If you find one of these large groups who are obviously robbing the local business, feel free to turn them in here.

These guys claim they are helping local businesses get leads, but all they are doing is stealing the leads from them and then selling them back.  The end result of this mess is that you and your local contractor pay for a service that was never needed.

Similar Articles

• “Map Spam” Revisited (0)

Similar Articles

• Avoiding Spam When Building Strong Backlinks Part 2 (0)
• Ensuring Quality Backlinks For Your Website Part 1 (1)
• Excellent Free SEO Monitoring Websites (1)
• PrestaShop Devlopment for e-Commerce in Chicago (0)
• Template Monster Releases New PrestaShop Themes (0)

The following is a list of free or inexpensive Press Release Services:

PrWeb PR7 (small contribution)
PRUrgent PR3
PR Newswire PR7
PR Web Direct PR6
The Open Press PR5

• Plain text ONLY throughout.
• Appears below Public Relations Firm releases and paid releases or “below the fold”
  Free Press Releases will remain on the site for six months.
• No PR passed

Free Press Release PR5
Press Box PR5
PR Free
Soft Press Release
Market Wire
URL Wire
Webwire
eMediawire
Business Wire
PR9
Newswire
Press Release Network
i-newswire PR6
Newswire Today PR5

• Highly recommended
• PR given to releases
• basic service is free
• advanced $300/year

Openpr PR5
PR9 PR4
Press Radar PR7

• Highly recommended

PR-Inside PR4
PR Log PR5

Web Designers and Developers are strongly encouraged to get in the habit of using these tools with all of their customers as a basic portion of the site build.  Developing a website that already has a strong SEO footprint helps the client progress quickly and ensures that your portfolio will have higher relevance.

Similar Articles

• Avoiding Spam When Building Strong Backlinks Part 2 (0)
• Ensuring Quality Backlinks For Your Website Part 1 (1)
• Excellent Free SEO Monitoring Websites (1)
• PrestaShop Devlopment for e-Commerce in Chicago (0)
• Template Monster Releases New PrestaShop Themes (0)