From the monthly archives:

August 2009

Seo and Web Developer Humor

by Charles Grimm on August 27, 2009

Top Secret Training for the SEO and Web Developer

You know, it’s funny, inspiration can come from all sorts of places. Today I was going through a regular routine of checking emails, analytic’s and news when out of my eye should appear a funny video on the SEO and SEM service industry. Although it had a bit of victim language attached to it, Boooo Whoooo, whoa is me, stuff you just have to laugh. It hit the nail on head fairly well regarding the client vendor relationship and the and the occasional client expectations. The acting was superb!

OK, now everyone group Hug, Aaaahhhh! I ‘ll give David Brown credit on this because I saw it on his site first. But Kudos to the Indie film makers on this baby!

The reality is the ridiculous and almost comical candor that, some, should display is pretty common across many industries especially with independent contractors. I think maybe the service industry takes a little more offense than most. I have been guilty myself. But hey thats business and we don’t have to work with people that assume unrealistic expectations. Having said that, I should have really titled this article,
“Top Secret Training for the SEO that you won’t Learn in Harvard Business School.”

Cheers, Have fun!

{ 0 comments }

Small Business CRM. Do you need one?

by Charles Grimm on August 21, 2009

I spent some time yesterday looking at CRM products (Customer Relationship Management). Since I am in the service business I have to organize many aspects from web development to sales.

What I was looking for was a CRM that would allow 3 main functions which MS Outlook cannot perform well. These include: 1.Organizing my client data. 2. Adding products and services. 3. Forecasting sales. The latter being the most important as it tends to be the thing I least like to do and also one of the most important activates. It also had to be easy and simple.

Price was important as was being able to export my data back to my desk top. I did not want to host the product or have to run it off my own computer. Thus I was interested in a web based platform.

So as not to cheapen the aspects of CRM, I will say that CRM choices are complex and sophisticated at the same time. There are many different aspects to delivering accurate data. With Social Media relevance and tracking on the rise, CRM’S are likely to become even more technical. If you want a detailed breakdown of CRM’S I find that Wikipedia does a pretty good job.

Back to the task at hand, I narrowed down my selection to 4 possibilities.

CRM	Free Version	Base Price	Sales Forecasting
SalesForce.com	yes	$65	paid version
Zoho.com	yes	$12	paid version
SimpleSalesTracking.com	yes	$15	paid version
vTiger.com(open source)	yes	Free	yes

___________________________________________________________

If you want any amount of functionality to perform anything beyond MS Outlook you have to go with a paid version, vTiger withstanding. However if you want to use vTiger you will have to install it on your server if you have one or use a web hosting company. I do happen to have my own server and went through this exercise already with SugarCRM, another open source product. It was a pain then and I don’t expect it will be any more fun now to set up vTiger.

Bottom Line: If you are a small business chances are you are not going to host your own CRM so you are better off going with a paid version of one of these more well known products.

In summary you have to decide whether it is worth your while to make time to use this tool. As the saying goes,” the output is as only as good as the input.” I am an Internet Marketing Consultant and Trainer. It’s me and my wife Maria. We get to do all the work! I find these products take time to use. When I owned part of a health club in Toronto and had hundreds of customers and several employees, it made sense, but for now, until someone comes out with a simpler product I think I will stick with Outlook.

{ 0 comments }

Do you like Caffeine? Google does!

by Charles Grimm on August 17, 2009

Google recently announced it’s new Google Caffeine infrastructure.

According to Google’s Webmaster Central Blog a large team of Googlers have been working on this top secret project for several months.

“The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

If you would like to test it out visit http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

This is a short interview with Matt Cutts’ Principal Engineer & ” Key Man” at Google Web Spam Team.

More Background information on Caffeine can be found by visiting Matt Cutts Blog, The Register, and CompareCaffeine.com (with old Google, Yahoo, Bing)

BOTTOM LINE. It appears to me that Google is getting much tighter on it’s search algorithm. This may mean that those companies that espouse ROI, based on SEO campaigns, may be looking for other ways to earn a living. Or put another way according to SeoBook, “Google is doing everything in their power to diminish ROI of algorithmically focused optimization efforts”.

While things are changing the message still seems; stick to good SEO practices as outlined by Google and build quality content into your sites.

Who knows you may become an authority site in your industry and thus rewarded with a good page rank.(SERP)

Let us know your feedback on SEO and Caffeine and whether you think this is a good thing for the search industry or not.

{ 0 comments }

Blogging & SEO: Joomla vs WordPress

by Charles Grimm on August 13, 2009

I came across Frugal theme for word press. I like the clean structure. It looks a lot like Matt Cutts (Google) theme. I am thinking about using this a main theme for all our clients that want to now add a blog to there Joomla website. The My Blog extension in Joomla1.5 is the best that is available for Joomla but it is still not as good as using a word press theme. WordPress is built for blogging and has the styling that is more suitable for copy writers. It’s SEO structure is much better out of the box than Joomla”s. It appears that Joomla is moving toward more blog type templates and better SEO and WordPress is getting more into business websites. For now think I will stick with Joomla for websites and WordPress for blogs.

I am thinking about doing an experiment: I have just set up my SearchMarketinglife.com blog site in using a Joomla platform. I think will set up the same structure with OnlineMarketinglife.com using a WordPress platform and see which one does the best from and SEO stand point. Hopefully I won’t get penalized by Google for duplicate content. If you have any thoughts on this please add your comments.

{ 0 comments }

A Guide to Local Search

by Charles Grimm on August 10, 2009

Are you doing business in your Local area?

Google is great if you want to do business nationally or regionally. Working at developing your SEO & SEM strategy is worth your while to build your page rank organically with Google. But what if the majority of your business is local. What do you do? Where do you go? How do you get found by the searcher looking for your product or service? Well, Google does have it’s local search version called Google Maps but this article is to inform you that there is a lot more going on in local search now and it isn’t slowing up any time soon!

There is no doubt statistically that the internet has replaced the BIG printed yellow book for search… and that’s local search too!For lots of stats on Local Search visit Borrell Associates.

Local Search can be defined into 3 categories, Local Search Engines, Internet Yellow Page Directories and Local Social Networks.

Some of these top Local Search Engines include: City Search, Local.com,AOL Local, Ask City and Yahoo Local.

Internet Yellow Page Directories abound. They include the names like: Info Space, Any Who, Superpages, Bigbook, Switchboard and Yellow Book.

Local Social Networks is a market that is developing quickly. These are few you might be interested in checking out to list your business: Insider Pages, YellowBot, Mojo Pages, City Squares, Yelp and of course our own Quest Social. The development in the Local Social Network arena is huge partly because of the development of open source software, just about anyone can now very easily establish their own local social network.

For a complete list visit SMLife Guide section. I will point out, while I am always interested in bringing you the most recent information, if I have not included your site in my list, please let me know by leaving a comment. I will be making every attempt to keep our guides current by revisiting and updating the lists on a regular basis.

While this guide is to provide you with some of the main sites to get started listing your business locally I will advise that there are many more sites, far too many to list here, where you can register and list your business. Some of these are vertical specific categories like real estate. A growing trend are the Local Mobile sites that are emerging.

So come back and let us know if you have found a great local network site, new local directory or new Local Search Engine.

Visit the SMLife Guides and Resources area of this site a list and links to Local Search Engines, Internet Yellow Page Directories, and Local Social networks.

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries