The search engine behemoth Google announced this week that they will be adding the hours and reviews of local businesses in a city or town to their local search results.  Now you will not have to click on a web site address, wait for the page to load, and try to find out the hours, directions, or reviews of the business.  Google provides all of that for you.

Google does not do this automatically though – a business needs to register all of this information with the search engines first.  Putting up a small website is not enough anymore for businesses – now there are Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts that need to be managed.

Feel free to contact us at sales@ladwebdesign.com if you want more information on how you attain success on the internet.  Follow us on http://www.twitter.com/ladwebdesign because you will find out we are real people with great information to share.

Influence By Scarcity

I have read the book “Influence” by Robert Cialdinia and found it to be a fascinating book that all marketers and business people should read.  It examines in depth how we are influenced in both interpersonal relationships as well as influenced by marketing messages.  The information is backed up with scientifically peer-reviewed studies.  Here is a snippet from google:  http://books.google.com/books?id=d91vPwAACAAJ&dq=Robert+B+Cialdini

Below is a quote from Cialdini’s website on using scarcity in influencing someone:

“If I can’t have it, I want it.” Cialdini gave the consumer market fervor over iPhone as an example. “The idea of losing something mobilizes people into action.”

And, when combined with exclusivity, scarcity became even more effective. “People are more convinced and receptive to exclusive information.” A product that is scarce and marketed with information that is exclusive is highly persuasive. Cialdini cautioned that information must be shared quickly or it can lose its potency. “It’s like bread not wine. It doesn’t get better with time. You need to serve it up while it’s fresh and warm.”

Cialdini made a slight modification to a Bose Wave ad that resulted in a 45 percent sales increase versus previously stagnant product sales. Whereas the high end stereo manufacturer was using words like “new” to launch its product, Cialdini instead employed the words “Hear what you’ve been missing.”

As you can see, the way you communicate with your customers, clients, (and even friends and family lol) can be greatly influenced by just using a slight change in strategy.  Give them the gift of missing you.

Google Alerts are an invaluable way to keep tabs of mentions of your own name, your company name, industry news, competitors, and many other useful bits of information.  Google Alerts may be found here:  http://www.google.com/alerts You need to first sign in with a Google account, then just insert the keywords that you want to research.

This is important (and easy!) to do because if someone is talking about you or your company in a blog posting or forum – you want to know about it in a timely manner!

A while back I googled someone’s name because I wanted to call them and didn’t feel like going through my stack of my business cards.  I just thought I would enter this person’s name into the search engines and I couldn’t believe what came up in the search engine page.  This person had a small website which had not been updated in a while which appeared lower on the page, and a scathing report had been filed on Ripoffreport.com – it was listed first on the search engine page for this person’s name.  Ripoffreport has a page rank of 8 – a high page rank and it is very difficult to get that kind of posting buried in the search engines.  Believe me, you definitely don’t want a posting on Rip Off Report to show up first as the first result in a search engine.

People in general are increasingly turning to the web for their information.  I have used the web to find reviews of products, services, and travel destinations.  Every person and their business name can be kept up to date as to what people are saying about them on the web so that they are not surprised when they one day google their name.

What to do if you find yourself with a scathing review on a high page ranked website?  You need to blanket the web with video postings, podcasts, press releases, articles, blog postings, forum postings, blog comments and ping everything so that your positive spin unequivocally shows that you are seen as the expert in your field – or at the very least – a decent human being.

Be sure to sign up for your Google Alerts and keep it updated with new terms as you see fit.  If it gets too annoying, you can always receive the information on a weekly basis.  Just make sure that you do it!

Blogging is a great way to get your website noticed in the search engines.  Search engines love blogs because they are usually updated frequently with the latest and greatest information on the web.  However, you can’t just stop at blogging when planning a search engine domination scheme.

Websites such as http://www.socialmarker.com help any website to be disseminated across many different websites.  People are always looking for information in different niches – it may be your niche website that gets picked up by a major blog, or Tweeted or Facebooked.

There are also directory websites such as http://www.brownbook.net and http://www.olx.com .

Success in the search engines means much more than just choosing the right keywords for your domain name.  It involves a concerted effort across many different websites in order to keep your website consistently ranking above your competition in the search engines.

I have been having a lot of fun writing on Twitter.  Twitter posts are called tweets.  At first, I found the 140 character limit kind of strange – what do I write?  Why would I write it?  What happens if you write something but then you can’t fully explain what you were talking about?

Twitter is so easy to use.  You can add links to your blog posts, links to websites, talk about anything. You can publicly respond to other people.  It is about relationship building.

I am only following a few people, and I currently have about 50 followers.  Follow me here:   http://www.twitter.com/ladwebdesign

Since I have been updating my site on a fairly regular basis, my Alexa ranking has been continually improving.  You may view your Alexa rank, or the Alexa rank of any website, by visiting alexa.com and downloading the toolbar.

As of today, October 5, 2008, my Alexa rank is 987,581.  Not great, but not too bad.

There are a number of ways of improving your Alexa ranking, or any search engine ranking for that matter.  Google really loves blog posts.  Blog posts that provide good content are highly rewarded in the search engines.

The search engines are always looking to thwart the people who try to scam (or beat) the system to get their website ranked higher.  I was doing some research for this article and there were suggestions from people to post in forums and blogs using the alexa.com link.  There were also other suggestions such as asking all of your friends and relatives to visit your site using their browser with Alexa toolbar.

I have a better suggestion.  Have good solid relevant content on your website.  Be active in forums and blogs and attach your website to your posts.  Get your traffic up through a combination of Google Adwords, relevant advertising in your niche, and blog posting.

At the end of the day, is an Alexa ranking of 20 all that important, or is it qualified traffic that you are looking for?

I have been designing websites for more than 10 years, and I have used the services of many different hosting companies.  I have hosted with some of the biggest names in the business – 1and1.com, AIT, Jumpline, and even Cobalt Raqs a few years ago.

One of the first clients I worked with had a small site on a shared server.  It just so happened that it was on the same server as Ticketmaster, and some big-name group’s tickets went on sale and the resulting spike in traffic crashed the server.  I complained to the hosting company about being unable to access my client’s website, and the technician told me what had happened, and that they were moving Ticketmaster to their own server.

Since that time, technology has rapidly improved.  Now there is technology that can spread the load over a number of servers, if one server gets too much traffic.  There is linking of different servers if your website needs grow beyond the constraints of one server.

I have thought about getting my own T1 line and just setting up my own hosting company – but then I realize that I would need to monitor the server 24/7, 365 days a year.  No thanks.  Not only that, but I live on the Space Coast of Florida, and we have certainly been hit with our fair share of tropical storms and hurricanes which could knock out power for days.

Currently, my hosting partner is Midphase.  They are based out of Chicago, and they have recently been acquired by an English hosting company.  However, their base of operations will still remain in Chicago.  While Chicago might have lots of wind and cold – there are no hurricanes.  As long as they have top-notch technical staff that keep the servers running 24/7, I am happy.

I chose Midphase for several reasons:

They have free individual (not shared) SSL certificates.  An SSL certificate is what makes any communication between your browser and the server much more secure and provides the https designation instead of the standard http address in the address bar.  Most SSL certificates cost at least $100 per year.

Most hosting companies have bandwidth limitations – meaning that if your website suddenly gets thousands of hits per second then they are going to charge you a great deal more per month because they have to allocate more available connections to your server, or your part of the server.  Midphase allows for unmetered bandwidth for one low price – although, I would like to see what their true limitations are.  I think they are just banking on the fact that most websites get only a few hundred visitors a day, not a few hundred visitors in a minute.

I was looking into setting up an account with Hostgator recently.  I transferred a few websites over there for a test run of their servers.  After the sites were set up, I logged in to the control panel and I found out that I am almost at the limit for the amount of disk space I am allowed.  If I am at my limit of disk space, well then I can’t expand.  Midphase allows for unlimited disk space.  Now I just need to cancel my Hostgator account.

I have been banging out the Joomla sites.  Not familiar with Joomla?  It’s a content management system – much like WordPress.  It is much more involved than a blog, though.  A Joomla installation can certainly have a blog.  Or a forum.  Or a community membership.  

I have certainly been dealing with the Joomla learning curve.  It’s a steep one.  I have stumbled many times.  The newest version of Joomla came out earlier this year, and there are about 4 templates for the new version ( WordPress templates abound on the internet – both free and paid).  Not only that, the templates themselves are a little bloated – meaning that page load times are affected.  A page loading slowly is not what a client wants to see.

I learned some new tricks with G-zip compression, caching, and smaller image sizes – although I still believe the Joomla core can be cleaned up.  It takes a long time to upload via FTP.  

So I guess you are wondering what sites I have been working on – to end the suspense, here they are:

http://www.brevardarchers.com

http://www.smilemore.com

The clients love the ability to make changes easily to any text on the site, without having to know any coding.  It is easy to upload pictures or text.

Here’s to more Joomla installs.