Social Media is changing the way marketing is done. Customers, potential customers and competitors share information every day through different Social Media channels to create new business and cultivate relationships. Many businesses—from start-ups and entrepreneurs to well-established companies—are creating increased returns and finding new customer leads from social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

What do these businesses share in common? They use social media tools to generate the kind of exposure that converts relationships to prospects and prospects to sales.

This can be your success story, too.

Give us a call to find out how we can help!

You may be doing many of these already, others you’ve heard of but haven’t done, and there may be a few that are new to you.  There are thousands of articles on this very topic on the Internet.  I can’t claim to have read all of them, and the items in this article aren’t really earth-shattering, but perhaps will represent a kind of a summary for you to help you focus and get more traffic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategies

The most important, and inexpensive strategy is to develop high rankings for your preferred keywords in the ‘organic’ searches, for instance on Google.  So let’s start with ways to deliver to search engines concise information about what your website is all about.

1) Write a keyword-rich title for each page

Use keywords in your titles.  The title of a page is very important to Google.  So take great care here.  Don’t use common words such as ‘and’ or ‘the’ if you can avoid them.

2) Write a description META tag

While META tags aren’t as important as they once were for search engine rankings, they still matter.  A description is  a sentence or two describing the content of the web page, using the keywords that page is focusing on.  The first 60 characters or so will appear in Google when that page is being returned in a search result.  Every page in your site should have distinct title and META description.

3) Include your keywords in the headings and sub-headings of your content

Search engines look at the headings and sub-headings (H1, H2, H3 etc) tags, to learn more about the content of your page.  So craft keyword-dense headings as part of your content development efforts.

4) Position your keywords in the first paragraph of the body text

Search engines read content the way humans do, top down, so put the most important keywords and phrases early on in the content.  More is not better, be judicious, but make sure you use them.

5) Include descriptive keywords in the ALT attribute of image tags

Taking this step will help your site be more useful to visitors with sight-impairments, and also helps your images find their way into the Google image library, which can bring you more traffic.

6) Use keywords in hyperlinks

Help the search engines understand what is important by using your keywords in all links.  Go a bit further by using your keywords in the actual page names.

7) Make your navigation system search engine friendly

You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don’t read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site.

8 ) Create a site map

A site map page with links to all your pages can help search engines (and visitors) find all your pages, particularly if you have a larger site. You can use a free tools to create XML sitemaps that are used by the major search engines to index your webpages accurately. Upload your sitemap to your website.

9) Develop web pages focused on each of your keywords

Google ’sees’ each page in your site as separate from the rest, so tune up each page to focus on a few specific keywords.

There is much more to SEO than this, but this should give you a good start.

Good luck in your quest for ever-higher rankings!

Paragraph upon paragraph of dense text, large picture files, heavy-handed Flash animations, generic stock-photo images and static content. These are some of the common mistakes businesses make when establishing an online presence or website.

The web is known for rapid change, so it is crucial that your business website meets a customer’s expectations.

Most small businesses want to be found on Google. However, a home page full of text doesn’t help it rank higher in a Google search and may turn potential customers away.

If users have to read a lot to do anything on the site, they may simply choose to click away to your competitors site.

We suggest you keep your home page simple and have short, sharp text that will engage the visitor. Avoid too much color because it can be difficult to read.  Make sure your text is a good font size and keep your paragraphs short.

Another area where websites commonly get it wrong is in the use of images. Large picture files or flashy content takes time to load. People will move on to some other site if your website doesn’t load quickly.

Pictures should also be unique and reflect your brand. Avoid using stock photos. Being online is about being found and when you’re found, you should have something different and inviting about your site.

You can use interactive elements on the site to really focus on your brand and how you want it to be perceived.  These can include Google Maps, video, commenting and other user interactions.

Once the website is built, it should also be updated regularly.

The biggest mistake a lot of business owners make is that once they’ve got their website up, they don’t pay any attention to it. If people can see something happening on the site every day, they know it’s a functioning website and business.

Businesses also need to analyze how visitors spend their time on the website. Business owners should use Google Analytics to help gather this data to see what is needed to improve their site, where customers go on the site and how long they spend there.

And if your business uses social media such as Twitter and Facebook to promote customer interest, be sure to link to these accounts from your website to make it easy for customers to join.

Before you put any design or copy on a page, you need to understand your users.  So, research your customer base and find out what information they are interested in, and what they need to do or learn to make their purchasing decision.

As the nature of the web keeps changing, so has the nature of website design. Websites are moving from a magazine-style format of pictures and text to being more interactive and dynamic.

Your website is the cornerstone of your marketing and communication activities. Today’s generation doesn’t look at the Yellow Pages, they look online and you need to be found online.

The do’s and don’ts of designing a business website.

Do

Keep text to a minimum on your home page and write it to engage your audience to explore your site.

Ensure images are unique and load quickly.

Analyze your website regularly to see where visitors are spending time and what you can improve.

Research your customers thoroughly before building a new website or redesign.

Promote social media accounts on your home page.

Don’t

Fill the home page full of text in the hope of improving your search optimisation.

Use large pictures or flashy content that is slow loading.

Neglect to update your content frequently.

Use colors on colors for text, making it difficult to read.

Use generic stock images.

The first step is to determine your business requirements.  The criteria should be reliability (or uptime), performance, support, and cost.  Try to estimate the cost of downtime, because that value should factor in your hosting decision.  If a day of downtime costs you thousands of dollars, then reliability is very important.

The cheapest hosting is to purchase an account on a shared server.  Your domain is one of perhaps hundreds or even thousands that vie for the server CPU, memory, and bandwidth.  If your site is slow, it may be difficult or even impossible to diagnose why since the fault may be with another domain on the same server.

The next level up is a virtual private server (VPS).  In reality you are still sharing the server with other customers, but there are separations between these relatively-independent operating systems so they affect each other less if problems on one arise.  The term “cloud computing” is really just another name for using virtual private servers, although often the cloud computing control panels make it easy and fast to add and remove VPS units as your domain needs change.

If you want the whole server to yourself, then you can hosting on a dedicated server.  This is all about control – there are no other customers to contend with if you are the only one using the server.  Note that you may need an experienced system administrator to help if you are setting up your own dedicated server.

If your domain outgrows a dedicated server, then you have graduated to a cluster solution.  You will have new challenges regarding sharing session management and your database between multiple servers.  It should also be mentioned that cloud computing supports clustering with their VPS machines, which is cheaper than a custom-built clustered solution.

At Gorges, we offer shared-server and dedicated-server hosting solutions to our software development clients.  We have two co-location facilities that we use in Ithaca, New York, and our servers are monitored constantly.  Since we do our own hosting, we can add software packages or customize the server configuration as-needed for our clients.

Part of creating “smart” web applications is understanding the semantics of what people type in, which implies using natural language processing.  Natural language processing software examines unstructured documents, and generates structured metadata that computers can handle.

Our application needed to understand phrases that people enter into a web browser.  We found three different approaches to handling this unstructured text:

SaaS APIs

These are hosted applications. All offer limited services at no charge, commercial services are generally pretty expensive. The major players appear to be:

Zemanta: offers an API with automatic tagging, among many other features.

OpenCalais: while it is by no means “open”, this API is powered by Reuters – which means that their “corpus” (body of words understood by the system) was composed using one of the world’s largest and most accurate volumes of text.

Alchemy API: offers automated categorization, tagging, keywords, etc.

NLP Toolkits

These are open-source toolkits (APIs that you can install on your own server) for analysis of unstructured text. Learning how to apply one of these might take a considerable effort – someone would have to learn at least the basics of NLP, to apply this software, or you might choose to hire a consultant with the the skills to develop this part of the application.

NLTK.org: a library written in Python, started in 2005, has been slowly creeping towards release 1.0 for the past year or so. While relatively young, it may be based on newer research than some of the more mature NLP libraries. Many corpora, grammar collections and trained models ready to use.

GATE: General Architecture for Text Engineering. Stable and proven toolkit for Java – this project started in 1995. Countless subprojects leverage this toolkit for various purposes.

FreeLing: Widely used toolkit in C++, with APIs for Java, PERL and Python. Online demos of this library demonstrate graphically how a short sentence can be broken down to a kind of tree-structure (nested subject/object, verb/adverb, etc.)

These are just a few examples – there are so many toolkits, and applications using these toolkits, that it would be impossible to make a choice based on a superficial analysis. To make a qualified choice, we would need to study at least the basics, or we would need the help of someone who knows enough about it to make a recommendation based on our needs.

Roll-your-own

Using e.g. MySQL, the Porter stemmer, a stop-word list and various other techniques to roll a basic search engine. Perhaps throw in a Bayesian text similarity measurement, to help rank the results and create stronger/weaker links between tables of keywords and posts.

It’s not NLP, and it’s not “web 3.0″, or “the semantic web” that everyone is buzzing about these days – because it does not understand semantics, and this will not yield the same kind of results – NLP systems “understand” unstructured text, where words like “not” and “really” can reverse or amplify the meaning of a subject – whereas anything you can roll on your own would most likely just recognize and consider these words “stop words” (ignoring them).

A firewall is used to only allow traffic to the outside world on a few of the TCP/UDP ports.  We obviously have to allow web and e-mail users access to the server, but almost all other ports can be closed to prevent intrusion attempts.  On our newest servers we even prevent FTP and Telnet access, since those protocols rely on unencrypted packets which are easier to intercept and hijack.

Every day we have perhaps dozens of “dicitionary” attacks that try to gain e-mail or user account access.  A dictionary attack picks a user (for example “root” or “john”) and then goes through a long, long list of possible passwords.  We use two packages Fail2Ban and DenyHosts that monitor our log files looking for dictionary attacks; if found, the originating computer is banned from accessing our servers.

When we develop online shopping solutions, we choose to not store credit card numbers online.  We securely pass this information to the credit card processing vendor, and then we only record the order information and the payment confirmation number.  For some web sites with user accounts, we encrypt the user account passwords, therefore gaining access to our user password list would still not result in someone gaining access to their online account.

Some of our hosting customers are concerned about unencrypted web traffic.  We occasionally add a feature that automatically forwards a web page inquiry from non-SSL to SSL mode, which means it forward to a page starting with “https://” thus all traffic is encrypted between our server and each web browser client.

We also have logging records and constant monitoring to help us detect intrusion attempts and help us implement even better security measures.  “Tripwire” software can also alert us when certain files are modified.

Do these basic measures above make us impervious to hackers?  Alas, no.  On two occasions in the last five years we have had hackers penetrate one of our servers.  However no damage was done and we patched those specific holes quickly.  Security is a cat-and-mouse game, and we strive to stay one step ahead.

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Wikipedia’s definition is a good one. Here’s 10 things that you should be looking at when optimizing a landing page:

• Relevant Content
  A landing page’s content should be related to organic search results, ad campaign, anchor text in inbound links and any other advertising, online or offline. If people don’t get what they expect, they will not stick around long.
• Multiple Landing Pages
  A landing page shouldn’t necessarily be your homepage. In many instances a homepage is a good landing page. However, for more targeted traffic and better results, you want a landing page to be focused on specific offer and specific call for action. To accomplish this, a given website could have multiple landing pages. Create some deep link landing pages (links that go to pages deep in your website) that will focus on specific offer and your conversion rate will be higher.
• Focus on Functionality
  More and more visitors seem to judge the professionalism and credibility of a site by its design. To satisfy this, many website owners concentrate on the design aspect instead of focusing on its functionality. A well-designed landing page is essentially worthless if the prospect can’t accomplish anything. While I wouldn’t suggest skimping on the design, it shouldn’t be your priority. Focus on the exact steps you want your visitor to take and design a page with that in mind.
• Call To Action
  You got visitors to your landing page, now direct them to take action. Make it clear a highly noticeable without overwhelming your audience. Whether it’s a sign-up form or a “buy now” button, make it the focus of your page.
• Send a Clear Message
  Keep your landing page clean and clutter free so your visitors stay focused on your message. Emphasize the biggest reasons that they should carry out the applicable call to action with larger text, contrasting colors, images. Make it easier for them to scan the content by using lists and getting right to the point.
• Offer Incentive
  Bribing your visitors with freebies and samples is a proven method of enticing them to sign up. Offer more then your competition but don’t sell yourself short either. Provide a list of reasons why your offer is better and what exactly the visitor can expect. Provide references and testimonials.
• Make Visitors Stay
  Avoid sending your visitors to another page unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any internal navigation as well as external banners. If you remove all distractions and limit navigation options, you stand a better chance of keeping your visitors around.
• Simple is Better
  Make it easy for your visitors to complete the action you want them to. Less confusion and decision making for your visitor means better conversions rate for your landing page. Don’t offer multiple choices and throw in optional extras. Focus on the offer the page was created for.
• Power of Freebies
  Everyone likes free offers. They are hard to resist and can be a powerful conversion tool. Whether a call to action is free or something free is received as a result of carrying out a call to action, it certainly doesn’t hurt. If your competition charges for something and you offer it for free, you’ll win the customer. Remember, just because you make a free offer doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be quality.
• Testing
  Testing various text, call to action forms, layouts will give you true idea what produces the best results as far as conversion. Using a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer you can easily monitor the conversion rate, bounce rate, and tons of other useful metrics found in most modern day web analytics tools. Using these metrics you can easily figure out which version will be your optimal page, one that maximizes the results.

Creating a successful and effective landing page takes a lot of work but should be the focus for anyone involved with a website. Whether you are a website owner, web designer, web developer or a web marketing specialist you must be aware of the components that comprise a solid landing page. After all this can mean website’s success or failure.

Most of our customers approach us with great ideas for the graphic design and features they would like to see on their websites.  When meeting with customers for our kickoff meeting and planning process, we avoid these topics.

Why? Isn’t the graphic design and features of a site important?  Yes, however, our process starts with the main objective your site visitors have when landing on your site.  If your website is selling or marketing products or services, your visitors are there for INFORMATION.  They don’t really care about colors, web 2.0 whiz-bang features which cost a ton, or how cool your blog software is. They have a question in their heads, and our job as website designers is to answer that question.

So the first most important step in website design is called ‘Information Architecture’.  We spend a fair amount of time talking about menus, pages, sidebars, page layouts, headings, and CONTENT.

Our goal in working with you to design your website is to deliver the key information that your customers need in a way that is easy for them to find.  We don’t want to keep them guessing which obscure menu name they have to click to find the information they are looking for.

If we can answer your prospective customers’ questions in one or two clicks and get them moving towards making a decision, then we consider our job well done.

After this process, we get into colors, styles, features, and other tactics to get your site looking top-notch.

If you’d like to hear more, we always offer no-obligation consultations to hear from you and make suggestions as to how we can help make your website work for you.

At Gorges Web Sites, we work on a wide variety of Web-based projects, but data is at the core of everything we do. Over the years, we have worked with all manners of data – from multilingual Web content to online videos; from logistics tracking data to energy efficiency reporting. We understand that your data is at the heart of your business and that is why we offer a wide range of data-specific services.

Reporting
Many businesses already have sophisticated software systems that have been running their business for years. Perhaps you purchased an off-the-shelf package or maybe you built your own custom system from scratch. Over the years, these systems have done the hard work of maintaining your information and are now the custodians to a reservoir of critical business data. What information lies latent in this structured data? What critical business intelligence can you extract from your software’s silo of data? Database reporting is one of the many services we offer that can help transform your business data into meaningful intelligence.

Data Scrubbing
As software architects, we review your business requirements and design the most fitting storage structures to manage and maintain your data. We choose sensible database constraints and implement form validation to ensure that your data stays as clean and flexible as possible. However, as users add data to your system, it can grow in unexpected and surprising ways. This is why we offer data scrubbing and sanitization services. We can help identify inconsistencies in your data and design scripts to correct those issues.

Data Migrations
As your business matures, you may find that you’ve outgrown your existing software systems, but you never outgrow your business data. When your business makes the decision to buy a new software solution, you will need to analyze, export, and migrate your legacy data from the existing system into the new one. This can be a complex and challenging process, especially for larger databases, but with the appropriate amount of research and planning, this process can be executed to maintain a high level of data fidelity. We have proven experience working with legacy business data in software upgrade and migration scenarios.

The name Gorges Web Sites may convey the notion that we simply build Web sites, but in actuality we are a team of skilled and experienced database engineers. We love working with your data and develop solutions that help your business grow and prosper. If your business already has a software system, but you want to get more from your data, please contact us today.

For about four years I have been using MythTV, which is a software package that records and plays back television shows.  Installing and configuring this package is not for the technology-challenged, and I have it working on a small Shuttle computer with a tv-tuner card and large hard disk.

I rarely see live television since MythTV has the ability to find and remove commercials and I always prefer to watch television without commercials.  I have three young children, and I have recorded hundreds of educational shows for kids (e.g. Magic School Bus, Zula Patrol) all without commercials.

Although we do not yet own a high-definition television (I know – we’re in the dark ages), I purchased a HDHomeRun device that converts unencrypted digital television signals into an ethernet-based UDP stream.  Since all television cable providers must provide unencrypted access to local digital channels, I can now record and playback high-definition shows recorded in MythTV to my laptop.

And converting any show or movie to an iPhone or iPod Touch compatible movie is as simple as running a script and then loading it into iTunes for syncing.  Long car trips are more than tolerable for our family when we can just hand an iPod Touch to a child which has a Backyardigans or Thomas the Tank Engine show on it.  And no need for another remote control – I can control MythTV from my iPhone or wireless iPod Touch.

And here’s one of the best features:  there is no monthly fee that Time Warner, Comcast, and DISH charge for PVR rental.  I do pay $20/year for access to an online television schedule, so I guess my licensing cost is a whopping 5¢/day.