For the past couple of years I’ve been discussing, well… preaching might be a better word, about the merits of social networking. From Myspace to Facebook and Twitter (anlong with countless others). Throughout it all I’ve been saying that you need to have a presence in the social space. I’ve spent my days (and nights) integrating my clients’ sites with a number of tools to make this job easier and faster. And for those that leverage the social space, life can be good. But there is a downside that I feel the need to caution against. Managed incorrectly, the social space can actually hurt your web presence.

So when you are building those social pages out there, remember that your goal is to leverage those sites to drive traffic to YOUR site, not to those sites. If your social space contains too much information, or more information that your “real” website then you are hurting yourself.

Some things to consider:

1. Your goal in the social space should be to push your information out to where your users are and by doing that draw them back to your site. If you post everything on Facebook (for example), then why would your Facebook fans bother to come to your site?
2. When you create content on social sites you are building the social site, not your own. Their site, their users, their ads, their control. Again… leverage that tool, don’t build your business on it. Put YOUR content on YOUR site, under YOUR control, with whatever other message you want those users to see.
3. When a user sees ALL of your information about a given topic on a social site, and therefore doesn’t bother to visit YOUR site, they may miss other items of interest that you’ve spent time developing (look to the right for an example). So don’t leave them out there, bring them home.
4. Lastly, remember that trendy, social type sites come and go. Their popularity may be huge this month, but six months down the road it may fall off when the next new site comes along. So if you have all this great content, and “followers”/”fans”/”peeps”, and posts on your “wall” telling the world how great you are… and it’s all out there on your Tripod account… what do you do when the next thing comes down the road, rebuild it all? Conversely, if you are pointing all those things towards your own site then you can just go with the flow… and when the next big thing happens you just draw customers from that site as well.

So keep building those social pages. Reach out to where your current, and new, customers spend their time. Just remember that your goal is to bring them back to your site and build those pages and posts accordingly.

Google announced yesterday that it is rolling out a new “engine” for its search engine. Code named “Caffeine” this new engine won’t look much different on the outside, but early tests do indicate that it will perform much better on the inside delivering more relevant search results, and delivering them faster. And by golly they should… earlier today it took 0.29 seconds for them to give me Results 1-10 of about 12,900,000… that’s far too long (please note the sarcasm).

With Microsoft’s new engine “Bing“, and the upcoming Yahoo/Microsoft team-up, Google does have to stay on top of things. So we’ll just have to see if these new changes, which again will be mostly transparent to end users, will make any real impact or if they will just help Google stay on top.

Regardless though, the landscape is changing. And if you operate a web site that relies on search results you need to be aware of these, and other, changes. While Google still maintains a healthy dominance, they are not the only game in town. So a little attention to some of the “lesser” players is certainly in order. So brush up on your Microsoft SEO tactics if you haven’t already. The differences are minor (mostly dealing with how inbound linking is handled from what we can tell), but with Microsoft making gains on this front you don’t want to get caught napping…

Of course questions and comments are welcomed, as always.

RSS Feeds are critical to your SEO strategy.

RSS? Really Simple Syndication. Bet that helped…

RSS is the juice that keeps the Web moving...

RSS is the “juice” behind Web 2.0. As we discussed in the first part of this article on leveraging the web, in today’s Internet there are two types of businesses, those that use new technology to push their messages to their customers, and those that are still trying to figure out how to do that. RSS is part of the “how you to that.”

Now, we aren’t going to go get all technical here. You don’t need to “know” a new coding language (don’t go run out and buy “RSS for Dummies“… yes, that is a real book). Here’s what I want you to do:

1. Become RSS “aware”: It’s all around you. Look for the RSS Icon. You might even click on it. You might be a bit confused by what you see, but we’ll get to that in a second. The point is that RSS is “everywhere” these days (except on your site, right?). Now… if we could just figure out how to leverage RSS to OUR advantage…
2. Get an RSS “reader”: This is the important part. You can read most RSS feeds directly in your browser, but then you’ll have to open each feed EVERY time
   you want to see what is going on with that site. That isn’t very efficient, is it? No. And that’s sort of the point of all of this… LEVERAGING the tools… So go grab yourself an RSS reader. You can Google “RSS readers” and find something that works for you. I personally recommend Google’s Reader (http://www.google.com/reader) as that allows me to keep track of my feeds from pretty much any browser.
3. Subscribe to at least TWO RSS feeds using your reader: Start with the RSS feed for this site then add at least one more feed. Remember, we’re talking about using the tools here. Subscribing to just one feed is certainly a start, but the real benefits of will become apparent when you are keeping up with multiple feeds at the same time from one location. This is the power of Web 2.0.

I should also note here that you can pull RSS feeds into other sites as well. If you’re on Facebook (FeO is!) you can import feeds directly to your profile using several methods (Google for more information). Again… that’s the “magic” to all of this… you can read this data from pretty much anywhere you already are… now… if there were only a way for YOU to get YOUR information out to YOUR customers in such a manner…

It’s time to put the web to work for you.

You’ve built your website. You’ve pasted it on everything that goes out of your office or business, from letterhead, to receipts, to email signatures, to business cards. Your “www” is all around you. But that’s just it. It’s all around YOU. But your customers only see it when they need something from you (you hope). How can you engage your clients in such a manner as to stay on their proverbial radar?

Back in “the day” you would gather your client’s email addresses and every so often send out a mass email about your latest product offering. Or perhaps an actual mailing using the good old “direct mail” method. Maybe you did some cold-calling. Whatever it took to get your message in front of your clients, you did.

And all the while, your website is sitting there. Waiting. Hoping that one of those customers, or perhaps even a new customer, would stumble by and go bananas over this great new product/service/idea/annoucement (you did put this great new product/service/idea/annoucement on your webiste, didn’t you?). If we could only figure out a way to put the information on your site and then instantly inform your customers, and potential customers, of this information. Well, perhaps we can, and it’s Really Simple.

Over the course of the next few posts I’ll be exploring just how to do that. We’ll be talking about things like “Web 2.0″, and RSS, and a bunch of other terms (some of which I’ll make up as I go along, just for entertainment value). So stay tuned…

One of the things that we’ve implemented with Tradebank is an inbound linking program… they refer to it as “WebLinks”… Whatever you want to call it the results are the same.

If you have regular visitors to your site, having them post links TO your site on throughout the internet will help your ranking. There are certain exceptions… this is one area where there can be too much of a good thing… but that would likely only happen if you were indeed trying to cheat the system. The search engines are smart… they’ll figure that out. But we aren’t focusing on “cheating” here… we want to focus on how inbound linking can play a part in your SEO program.

Tradebank leverages the Barter System to increase their exposure on the Internet.

So how can inbound linking work for you? Well, we can help with that. First off, there is value to links. So if you really want people to link to your site you need to find something of value to give for those links. Often times it can simply be a link in return. Be careful though of getting involved with “link exchanges”… sites that contain thousands of links, but no real content. Those fall into the “too much of a good thing” category.

Once you have links, you’ll want to start tracking them. There are a number of analytics tools out there that can get you started (and of course, when we build an inbound linking program we provide that data to you). If you custom build your web app (like we did with Tradebank) then the link clicks should be counted for you. But you can also just watch your log files for “referrals” to determine where your traffic is coming from.

No matter how you track the results though, getting links out there will help your site in the organic rankings, as well as build your pagerank.

Have questions…? Just blip us an email (link to the right or below) and we’ll be glad to help however we can.

An exercise in online marketing…

Your Comprehensive Online Source for Information About Warts and Other Skin Conditions!

Wart.NET is a basic informational website concerning a slightly bizzare, yet fairly common, topic.

The challenge of the project is to utilize content and SEO techniques to increase the rankings. Once the site has the rankings they are looking for then an affiliate program will be put in place to provide a product to treat the conditions the site discusses.

The interesting thing about this project is that the site owner is simply using rankings to drive traffic to a product site that they don’t control. They are simply a sales point for that other site. When a visitor purchases a product a commision is paid to the site owner. They never touch the product or the money. They just get paid when their site generates a sale. It’s brilliant.

The site owners drive traffic to their site using standard SEO techiques as well as complex viral marketing efforts.

Custom design, familiar features

Often clients come to us with a website that they already have designed. Clients that have a marketing firm already working for them will sometimes already have a fantasticly “designed” site that only needs to be implemented.

And of course, often times a graphic designer will have little or no knowlegde regarding HTML design (the code that makes all this stuff work), much less have an understanding of Search Engine Optimization.

Again, this is where we can help. We can take your site design and add it to our content control and SEO system. There are usually a few minor changes that have to be made to the layout, just because of the way the web actually works.

With The Yellow House, we had a great design that they had spent a lot of time developing. The challenge here was that it was designed more like a print brochure than a website. And it was no small challenge.

In the end though we produced a website that was about as close to their original design as could be, yet was also integrated into the content control system. This gives the client a solid foundation to build additional content and features upon.

Enabling the client to control their content.

Sometimes clients just need a little nudge in the right direction. With The Swallow we took an existing design that the client had and placed it into our content management system. This enables the client to maintain control of almost all aspects of their site design, and the content it contains, while enabling us to continue to manage the optimization functions in the site.

As the client becomes more comfortable with the management software we can add even more functions and features. This process continues over and over again, with the client becoming more capable of managing their own site without being overwhelmed by the tools at hand.

Good design… but SEO?… not so much.

We began working with Classic Tents & Events in August of 2008. Ria Bruns, the owner of Classic Tents, had spent a good deal of time and effort getting her website designed and was happy with the results. What she wasn’t happy with was her organic ranking in the search engines. When we started she was at the bottom of page three, not a real good place to be when you’re depending on that ranking to drive customers to your site.


So we went to work. We made some minor changes to the site while maintaining the look and feel she had in place but overall the site changed very little on the outside.


What did change though were some key code functions on the site that took herfrom page three to number three in just a few days.

Barter, using FeO, is Smarter…

Barter is Smarter with Tradebank

Tradebank has been a client for well over a decade. The relationship with Tradebank began in 1997 when FeO became a client of Tradebank. Since then we have helped Tradebank develop an entire business application that handles all of their customer interaction on the web.

With over a million lines of code Tradebank’s CRM system (known as myTradebank) is one of the largest applications that we manage. We integrate this application into Tradebank’s online presense, their online client management system, as well as their backoffice accounting and customer management system.

Using this system hundreds of Tradebank associates manage tens of thousands of customers all over the United States and Canada. Some of the highlights include:

• Online payment processing.
• A client locating process that integrates with Google Maps to provide location and direction information that helps clients find one another.
• A client directory listing all clients, their business categories, and contact information.
• An automated matching system that helps identify which clients are most likely to do business with each other.
• A classifieds system that allows clients to list items for sale in the myTradebank application.
• A “message board” that allows all the clients and associates to communicate within the application.