Play Music Through A Mono Bluetooth Headset?
Written on December 30, 2011 at 2:08 am, by admin
Being in the technology industry (well, sort of) sometimes we stumble upon some cool tricks and pass them along. Well, I recently discovered that Blackberry devices with the Pandora app can actually play music through a mono-bluetooth headset. Under setting, go to audio and select “bluetooth headset” and the unit will activate the headset and stream music right to your bluetooth headset.
I love the feature, but it will tend to kill your battery after a few hours 
I couldn’t reproduce that on the Iphone with the Pandora app, but this is a fun little Easter Egg for Blackberry users.
Business Growth Against The Grain
Written on September 28, 2011 at 11:51 pm, by admin
Business Growth Against The Grain
We are seeing some really great things in SEO and social media this year. Google has been continuing to clean up their index and integrate social aspects into ranking factors, Google+ opened to the public, and Facebook is unveiling a new layout. Internet marketing and social media are becoming more and more the things that get business moving and growing again, even in spite of a slow economy.
One of our clients was just rated as a top 75 software company in INC 5000 after consecutive years of 40% growth. Several other clients have been able to expand and add new staff to accommodate growth. Others are just getting started and are getting new calls and customers from their websites. It is exciting to be able to help business attract new customers and increase their revenues.
As for our team, we are manufacturing better than one website per month right now, plus adding new marketing clients along the way. We have some awesome sites to add to the portfolio in the coming weeks, and some new businesses getting launched in the coming weeks.
With so many businesses searching for ways to stay afloat and attract new business (and some even struggling to retain customers), it is refreshing to know that the norm doesn’t have to be the rule. There are lots of business still growing, still hiring, and helping move the economy forward. We would love to hear your stories too!
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Does Your SEO Company Matter?
Written on February 15, 2011 at 5:11 pm, by admin
Your Website Developer Matters – Part 3
In our two previous posts, we have been looking at whether your webs designer and your hosting company actually matter. Today, we will be looking at search engine optimization firms and why it is important to know their process, their techniques, and their long-term results with other clients.
I was actually in the process of drafting this post when Jim Amick (our sales representative in Columbia, CS) sent our team an article from the New York Times. The article talks about JC Penny’s rise to search engine dominance and their quick demise.
For starters, JC Penny hired an outside SEO firm to help them increase their search engine rankings. Eventually they started appearing in top positions for thousands of keywords with online revenues continuing to grow. At first glance, you would think their SEO firm was doing spectacular work, right? This couldn’t be further from the truth.
When Google looked at their back-link profile (all the websites that were linking to JC Penny) they found that there were thousands of paid links placed on non-relevant websites with anchor text (the actual text of the link) matching a lot of their top performing keywords. These links violated Google’s webmaster guidelines and were deemed to be an “effort to manipulate search results” according to Matt Cutts of Google’s web spam team.
You can read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=google%20search&st=cse
So some pose the question: isn’t the job of an SEO firm to “manipulate search results” and increase the rankings of their clients? Well, the answer totally depends on the SEO firm’s process.
There are strategies in SEO that Google sees as being reputable – called white hat SEO. These strategies are tactics that follow Google’s webmaster guidelines. There are guidelines for on-site content and code, meta info, titles, structure, and off-site metrics such as inbound links, link exchange partners, buying links, and so much more. These guidelines are in place to give SEO companies and website developers a sense of what is acceptable activities to increase the relevance of your website.
So, it becomes very clear that the SEO process used by your SEO firm in vitally important to the long term sustainability of your website’s Google rankings. Look at their results and how long those results have been maintained. Also look at how quickly they achieve results. In most cases, very fast results point to using tactics that could result in penalties and even removal from Google’s index.
When looking into hiring an SEO firm, they need to understand the balance of on-site SEO (content/code/meta info/titles/internal link structure/etc) and the off-site SEO (incoming link profiles/social media/mentions/linking root domains/anchor text/linking domain authority/etc). The content must be written for users first, utilizing the appropriate keywords, page code and structure. This needs to be combined with a natural incoming link profile (not paid links or link farms) and social media strategy. Taking shortcuts or purchasing thousands of low quality links to get faster results may work in the short term (as in the case of JC Penny) but will not have long term sustainability.
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Does Your Hosting Account Matter?
Written on February 5, 2011 at 11:32 pm, by admin
Your Website Developer Matters – Part 2
In Part 1 of Does Your Website Developer Matter, we talked about the process of building a website, some costs, and what really goes into making a successful website. An often overlooked part of websites is the hosting account. A hosting account acts as a host for the website files and databases. A website requires a specific environment to render pages over the internet. The packages include some amount and mixture of disk space, RAM (memory), bandwidth, databases, PHP, MYSQL (or other database type), security features, and more depending on the server it is on.
A lot of websites don’t require a lot of disk space or resources, so a popular form of hosting is a “shared” hosting account. Hosting companies figured out that they can cram a lot of websites into a small space, limit the resources and the bandwidth they give each one, and increase overall profitability by giving out very small slices of servers and resources. This gave rise to a small price war of mainstream hosting companies – offering very cheap hosting plans and very limited resources.
These plans are OK for sites with minimal traffic, small databases, and a small amount of files, but when you start increasing traffic and bandwidth use, these websites will see dramatic losses in performance because they don’t have the resources to handle the increased load. Also, if you have a large database of products or pages, limited amounts of RAM can really hinder page load times because less information can be stored in RAM memory.
When having a website built, your website developers need to understand the technology being used for the website, and the server requirements for its software, database, and file system under load. If you plan on increasing traffic to the site, it has to be able to maintain performance with increasing amounts of people browsing the website. If the website drags under the load of additional users, you may end up loosing them all together. One of the most frustrating things about browsing the internet (according to end users) is slow websites. A slow loading site will cause a quick click of the back button and a swift exit from your business’s “online presence.”
2010 also brought some interesting news from Google – website performance is now considered as a ranking factor in the search results. All things being equal, the faster loading site will outrank a slower loading site. Small investments in the proper hosting account can provide additional SEO benefits in addition to keeping customers browsing.
In addition to just “hosting” a website (or just providing a space for your website files and databases), there are also hosting accounts set up for managing and maintaining the software, security, and updates for the technology used to run your website. This is considered “managed hosting” – where a systems administrator oversees the website and monitors up-time, performance, security, backups, testing prior to production upgrades, and updates. This is especially important with e-commerce sites or any websites that store sensitive information. If your company has a breach of data, you will be held responsible for it in most cases unless you have taken proactive steps to prevent it (as in the case of using a managed hosting solution). When you read the fine print of a cheap hosting account, you are responsible for your own software updates, security patches, database maintenance and security, and the overall security of the information you store and transmit online. Most business owners don’t know how to manage and maintain this – and don’t know they are responsible for it.
In the end, your website hosting account matters – more than most people realize. Once your website becomes a source of leads and business, loosing it or having unplanned downtime can affect your entire business. Just because there is a cheap option doesn’t mean it is the right option. Ask your developers about how they plan to host and what systems they have in place to protect you and your business’s intellectual property from hardware or software failures, malicious intent, or bandwidth and load spikes. It is always better to ask the “how” questions now instead of the “why” questions later after issues arise.
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Does It Matter Who Builds Your Website?
Written on February 5, 2011 at 11:32 pm, by admin
Your Website Developer Matters – Part 1
You need a website, but aren’t sure what direction to go. You see commercials about $199 websites, getting a website for $9.99 a month, and then see companies charging thousands of dollars for websites. Is there a difference in these services, and which one is right for you?
The truth is, there is a website solution for just about every price range from free to tens of thousands of dollars. There are some very specific and drastic differences in the solutions available with varying features for each. Understanding the difference in the details will hopefully shed some light on what each type of solution is able to do for your business.
Before we begin, lets look at the elephant in the room. If you want to, you can go online and find a free website template, find a hosting company, and get a website up for little more than a few dollars a year and some time invested. If you don’t have a budget but want to get something going, you can. You can find tons of designs online, put it on a website, and have it up in a few days to a few weeks. There is a learning curve to overcome on how to do it, but most individuals can understand the basics well enough to get a website published online. You can get a hosting account for $6-$10 a month, get your domain for $9-15 a year, and have a very low cost website up and running.
First, let’s look at the website, and we will come back to the hosting account in Part 2 of this series. A website can serve a lot of different functions for your business. It can be a digital business card, sell items, engage customers, capture leads, provide information, and interact with people in a lot of different ways. Before you get a website, it is important to understand why you need it.
- Do you need an “online presence”?
- Do you need a logo?
- Do you need to interact with people?
- Do you need to capture leads and new business?
- Do you need a blog?
- Do you need regularly updated content?
- Do you need it to appear in search results?
- Do you need website metrics and analytics?
- Do you need to sell anything?
- Do you need reports on sales?
- … and on and on.
Understanding your needs will help you fill out your requirements for the new website. This is an important step to making sure that you get the website you need for your business.
We could address each one of these items individually, but there are a few that deserve a little extra attention. The idea of having an “online presence” has become kind of a catch phrase for website developers. It is one of the most important parts of your website – to give you a way to be found and interacted with online. If you build your website and no one sees it, it really doesn’t accomplish the goal of being an online presence. You need to know a little something about search engine optimization (or SEO).
SEO is the process of building relevance for your website so it can be found by searching for keywords related to your business. It involves having the right website (content/code/meta info/titles/page structure/etc) and having enough authority (links from other reputable websites/social media engagement/off-site factors) for search engines like Google to recognize your website as a valuable resource.
There are over 200 individual ranking factors or signals (and they are increasing and changing in weight regularly). If you plan to build your website, do you know and understand how SEO works, what the ranking factors are and how to optimize them, and how to engage in the right strategies to build trust and authority with the search engines? If not, then you can invest the time to research and uncover how to do it, or have someone build your website that understands how these things work together. If your goal is to have a website to get leads or increase your business, it is vitally important to understand that just having a website won’t do it. It has to be engineered specifically for a purpose, have the right design, the right content, and the right SEO strategy to become successful.
The “process” of building a website can be done by just about anyone, but having someone that understands how everything works together for success is a different level of expertise. To create a winning website strategy, you need proper keyword and industry research, planning, content creation, professional design, strong calls to action, visitor funneling (lead visitors to appropriate actions), and website metrics and analytics to continue the optimization process based on actual visitor data and search engine data.
As you can start to see, who builds your website is becoming increasingly important. There is a lot more to a successful website than just getting online. There are tons of inexpensive resource to help you get online – the real difference shows up when your website starts producing leads and helping you retain and interact with customers. The “cost” of a properly developed website is more up front, but the real cost of having an ineffective website will be much higher in the end.
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SEOTERIC Host SEO Learning Workshop
Written on January 29, 2011 at 5:38 pm, by admin
The Athens-Clarke County Department of Human and Economic Development and Oconee County Economic Development Department are collaborating to offer a series of free monthly workshops to small businesses in the area. Beginning January 24, these free workshops will be offered every fourth Monday of the month. The location of these workshops will rotate between Oconee and Athens-Clarke County. Each month’s workshop will cover a different topic relative to area small business owners. The January 24 workshop covered search engine optimization. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website in search engines. Presented by Jeff Rorabaugh and Matt Brooks of SEOteric, the workshop answered introductory SEO questions and explain how a website/SEO marketing campaign can increase small business revenue. This workshop was for all skill levels.
There were about 50 people in attendance for this free SEO learning workshop, and Jeff and Matt covered everything from a Google Page layout down to algorithmic ranking factors. We had some rich discussion and Q&A, offering solutions to practical SEO issues.
Championing SEO education is a part of our mission statement, and we were excited about the opportunity to offer this SEO workshop in conjunction with Athens Clarke County and Oconee County. We hope to be included in further workshops about hosting, social media, and using the internet as a source of marketing. Join our facebook page for info and updates.
Andre Gallant of the Flagpole in Athens gives a good write up of the SEO workshop and some overview of the Athens-Clarke and Oconee County partnership in hosting this and future business seminars.
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2010 – A Year In Review
Written on January 3, 2011 at 11:15 pm, by admin
2010 – A Great Year In Review
SEOTERIC finished up its first real year of business this year. Until January 2010, it was a two man show working on websites, hosting, and SEO for small local clients. This year, we created a great team here at SEOTERIC, adding a few key positions and people along the way.
Our first goal was to set up a customer advocate/customer servant role within the company. We wanted someone to be able to liason between the development team and the customer, building relationships and fostering long term partnerships. Jeff Rorabaugh came on board this year and has help fulfill exactly that role – just about to perfection. Jeff brings a great attitude and a heart for people, he believes in the company and the services we provide. Adding Jeff was probably our smartest move of 2010.
We also grew in our core competencies of CMS website development, design, and marketing strategies. We had our first national publication on SEOmoz (a national SEO blog) and actually had one of the top 5 blog posts all year. We want to keep pushing the envelope of success and strategy, so we continue to research and contribute our findings with our clients and other industry professionals.
We took our product offering from Athens and expanded into Alpahretta, Atlanta, and Columbia, SC. Jeff Rorabaugh is covering sales and service in Georgia, while Jim Amick is covering the Carolinas. Both Jeff and Jim give us an edge of personal touch when dealing with very technical stuff such as hosting, design, development, and SEO. We hope to continue to expand our service areas into the next year.
We have also seen some amazing successes for some of of clients this year – some adding hundreds of new customers, other achieving multi-hundred thousand dollar sales, and some others breaking into new markets and expanding their service areas.
Our hope is to see an even brighter 2011. Through a slow economy, we saw a full year of growth and opportunity with more exciting things to come. We have some great SEO tools and resources we are rolling out for our clients this year, and a lot of other great things in the pipeline. If you haven’t become a fan on facebook yet, go there now and “LIKE” us. We will be blogging a lot more this year, so stay up to date with what is going on in the WWW.
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See Our Article On SEOmoz!
Written on October 21, 2010 at 11:57 pm, by admin
Check out our article on www.seomoz.org! http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/its-getting-harder-and-harder-to-keep-a-white-hat-clean. We did a write up about blog comments and spam SEO tactics. We will do a follow-up on our site from info gathered from the comments on SEOmoz. Stay Tuned!
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Is Your Business Experiencing Growth?
Written on September 28, 2010 at 11:55 pm, by admin
As a marketing company, we often talk to business owners about how business is going. We want to understand what is going on and how the current status compares to historical data to help identify and establish a baseline of company performance. The recent recession has caused a lot of pain for businesses. With the current economic conditions, is there a way to alleviate some of the pressure?
Economist say the recession technically ended in July of 2009. Since then, the economy has seen very small incremental growth. The problem is, the fallout was quick and deep, leaving a 10% unemployment rate, businesses filing bankruptcy, and an economic forecast of extended period of pain and slow growth.
Sounds great. I’ll have two of those.
Here is the catch. Yes, the overall economic growth is going to be slow. Yes there are less “consumers” in each industry, and yes sales are down. Unemployment will be high until companies feel safe to start hiring again. BUT – this is the median result, the norm, but NOT the rule. There are a lot of exceptions to this.
We talked with a few of our clients and wanted to share some GOOD news. One of our software provider clients has had over 200 new clients since July. A lot of this can be attributed to strong SEO and visibility in the search engines. Another client just signed a contract for the largest commercial solar project in South Carolina, and they found his company on the internet. Another client of our is hosting a grand opening this coming week (the week of 10/01/10) after we helped them with launching their new businesses.
With so much negative media, it is important to understand that there are still ways to grow your business and get your products and services in front of your customers. Stay positive. Capitalize on opportunities to seize market share. Improve your image. And when the economy starts getting stronger, you will be in a real position of competitive advantage. Are you ready to get your business growing again?
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A Sampling of Current Projects
Written on September 18, 2010 at 4:55 pm, by admin
We have been having a lot of fun here at SEOTERIC. We have some great website under construction and we thought we would give a sneak peak at some of the current developments! In addition to these few in development, we also have a few other website going live this week, including a girls clothing and consignment e-commerce project and a beautiful landscape company website with enhanced images and photography
The most exciting thing about launching new business websites is the impact it can have on your business. Your online image has the opportunity to win over potential clients, and when added to one of our marketing campaigns, you will see your search engine rankings, website traffic, and sales and leads begin to increase. We are going against the grain of a slow economy and helping businesses start growing again. Are you ready?
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