Atilus Internet Marketing & Web Development

Social Media is doing to the SEO (search engine optimization) and Blog communities what Quicken’s Willmaker has done to Estate Planning Attorneys.

Say What? We’ll come back to this in a second.

According to Mr. Randfish, one of the world’s foremost SEOs (search engine optimizers), in order to be successful on the web three things are required:

• Keyword Selection
• Search Optimized and Friendly Web Site
• Links

So you have your keywords selected, you have a nice new site, and now you need links.

How do you get links?

Read the rest of this entry …

29 Mar | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under SEO, Search Engine Optimization, WVO, Web Design.

I have been a big fan of Dr. Jakob Nielsen since I started designing websites back in 1999. And I have always found his tips and comments on web design very useful.

Recently, he released the “10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities” which clearly outline every reason to think about your current and future web presence and how to market your business.

Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.

But I want to take it further and outline some of the reasons I think a web presence is so important.

In Today’s Market, You Customers Expect It
In today’s business world, the Internet is the fastest growing source for information. Without a web presence, your business risks never being found by prospective customers.

With a Web Presence, Your Business Stay Open 24/7
A brick and mortar business can be expensive to open, operate and maintain. Comparitively, a basic web site is very quick, easy, and inexpensive to start. Operating costs are miniscule and, unlike a physical business, a website is open and available to customers around the globe 24/7! With a website, customers are able to view your products and services long after your normal operating hours. If you decide to sell products online, the sky is the limit. With automated shopping carts and purchasing systems you can accept orders from any part of the world at any time.

Your Competitor Most Likely Has One
If your competitor has one and you do not then they have an advantage. If he/she does not have a site yet, then get ahead by having one first.

Email Address - Your Most Critical Contact and Networking Tool.
Emails are quickly replacing phone calls and letters as a businesses most common tool for communication, and rightly so. Are you currently using an email address from your ISP or a free email account for business contacts? Has anyone ever asked for your business email address? The status and branding for your business can be raised with an email address that includes your company name or services. For example: your-name@your-web-site.com or info@your-web-site.com, etc.

Find Out What Your Customers Really Want (Survey)
People visit your website for a purpose and/or an interest in your products, services or information. But you want to find out exactly why they came or what they’re looking for? Unlike brick and mortar business online transactions, visits, and activity are easily gathered and can be quickly referenced when making a customer oriented decision.

Increase Net Sale by Selling Your Products and Services Online
Have you seen or heard about some of the most successful online stores like eBay.com or Amazon.com or Half.com. Although these companies have huge infrastructures and massive marketing programs to drive their online business, it is possible to set up an online store in much the same way. If you have a retail product that can be shipped via UPS or FedEx then you’re a great candidate for an online store.

Unlimited Marketplace (International Markets Open)
A website is accessible 24 hours a day from anywhere on Earth with an Internet connection. Soon after the launching of your site, you can start doing business all over the globe, at any time of day.

Use Search Engines to Attract New Business
Search Engines have changed the way we gather information. Today most researches for business and/or services are done online. By having your website listed on the top search engines, customers from anywhere will be able to access your website. For example, if you’re selling running equipment and someone searches for “running watch” your site could be the first selection listed under the results. You guess it right. He/she will most likely to click on your link from the search result.

Instant Contact Information to Prospective Clients
With a website, you give customers instant access to some of the most important part of doing business. It helps deliver details about your business to anyone with an Internet connection. It gives customer directions to your business; tell people your hours or which product lines you carry. This frees up time to focus on what you do best, running your business.

Easy to Interact with Customers
One of the best ways to keep customers coming back is to keep in touch with them. Through a website you can interact with clients via online newsletters, message board (forum), polls, chat rooms, and special deals. When you keep in contact it shows customers that you care.

There can be many more reasons why you need a new a website and need it now, but these reasons above should give you an idea of where you stand with you business in a technological prospective.

28 Mar | Post by Harry Casimir. Filed under Design, Enewsletter, Internet Marketing, Web Design.

It’s finally happened… Bill Gates and Sergey Brin have gotten into a fist fight over search. Ok, I’m exaggerating, but if you’ve ever wanted to pit the owners of the major search engines against each other now is your chance!

From Neil Patel and the good folks over at Pronet Advertising comes the latest link bait…

Search Engine Smackdown

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about SEO (search engine optimization) but prefer learning via cartoon violence Search Engine Smackdown is for you. The small flash video game allows you to select from the top search engine founders, and battle in a boxing style trivia game. The seemingly simple game has already led to a few ah-ahs and incites and is definitely helpful in learning more about the search engines (albeit a little silly).

27 Mar | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under Internet Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Optimization.

I was poking around Pronet Advertising and Cameron Olthuis’s personal site when I stumbled upon a post Cameron made back in November about his personal site stats. The post is a highlight on the growing importance of Social Media sites and the type of results they can achieve.

What is Social Media? Social Media is a fairly new term, driven primarily by the widespread adoption of sites like Myspace, Facebook, Digg & Del.icio.us. If you have not been to one of these sites I suggest you visit one of them now. There are a dizzying array of startup sites that have extended the model, but at their core Social Media sites are sites driven by their users, sites like Digg where users submit web pages and stories from around the web and then vote them to popularity, a democratizing of the web so to speak.

In his post Cameron highlights the following:

I was poking around my stats tonight and decided to post a screen-shot of my top 10 referrers for this year. I started using Google Analytics in March, so these don’t quite reflect a full year, only about 8-9 months.

Del.icio.us sent his site 14,571 visitors in the 8 - 9 months
Google sent his site a little more than half of that: 7,911

Del.icio.us beat Google!

Now, it is true that the site is new, by Cameron’s own admission it is only a little more than a year old (4 months ago) so the Google sandbox might still have an effect on his rankings and consequently traffic, but in the ever evolving world of the Internet it is completely clear that Social Media as both a tool to increase rankings and as a tool for direct traffic is becoming more and more powerful every day. And, it is only with a web site and Internet marketing plan that incorporate this powerful tool (social media) that your company can truly out pace your competition online.

26 Mar | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under Internet Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, social media.

The single biggest tip for business bloggers occurred the other day during a conversation with a copy writer. I have been writing for years, in many capacities: for a newspaper, for teachers at school, myself both personally and in the form of various blogs. One of the most important things a writer must do, I must do, is keep my audience in mind. Every time I write, no matter what avenue or for whom, I must keep you, my audience in mind.

If you are writing an ad targeting elderly individuals with 3 - 6 children who have 8 million dollars or more you must write in a certain way. If you are developing a white paper that will primarily be seen by middle-aged, middle-eastern women who also have engineering degrees, you must write in a certain way. I am not saying that you must lose your “voice,” but a writer should typically vary their structure, their choice of words, the amount of humor or type of humor based on the audience of the piece.

And maybe that is why blogs are so popular. Never before has authoring been so easy. Indeed, typing a post in many ways is faster than a pen and paper journal. It can definitely be edited easier. But, amidst this ease of use and the ease of dissemination also comes a freedom, freedom from audience, or a disconnection to ones audience. It seems many authors neglect their audience, writing solely for themselves, emphasizing their “voice.” But you must always, especially in regards to business blogs…

Remember Your Audience

When I visit a blog about tech updates I am not typically searching for information on the authors’ most recent family outing. I don’t care if you went to the zoo and had a great time and allowed your two-year old to intensely watch an elephant urinate.

It is when authors neglect their audience, particularly business bloggers, that readership and subscriber numbers begin to suffer and decline. Of course, the negative effects of personal posts don’t happen overnight, and I am not telling everyone that you shouldn’t author personal posts. But, too often I have seen one personal post lead to another, and another, and another, until the topic of the blog (that thing your header has in bold text) is unrecognizable from the content in your posts.

21 Mar | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under Blogging, Blogs.

Unique ID was happy to help the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southwest Florida with their country themed charity auction “The Howl 2007” Saturday evening at the Naples Beach Hotel. The night was great, some of us chickened out of dressing up like cowboys, some didn’t! There were live wolves, caricatures, finger painting, and most of all a successful silent auction to help raise money for the charity to help support local children.

Although the night was fun, it was long, and a lot of hard work, but well worth it. We would especially like to thank Julie Gutierrez and Esther Toussaint. Thank you guys very very much for all of your help!

We have pledged a certain amount of time and resources to help the community and local charity organizations, with that said if you know of a local organization that needs help with anything (physical labor, web design, etc.) please feel free to contact us, and likewise, if you too would like to help out, just let us know.

19 Mar | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under Charity, Community.

Amazing new touchscreen technology. This new “multi-touch” touchscreen technology will let us use and manipulate computers and software in whole new ways. The video features some great examples of manipulating images and software with multiple fingers, hands, persons, etc. and could in fact be the way we use and interact with computers in the future.

I think the two things that have been barriers for touch screens are their accuracy and price. Perhaps, this new cheaper technology will address price, but (and it may actually be the fault of the size and clumsiness of our fingers and not the technology) until accuracy is addressed I don’t know if we can really use touchscreens to control computers.

18 Mar | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under Uncategorized.

Found a great article on SearchEngineWatch.com by Eric Enge entitled How Long Does it Take a New Site to Rank in the Search Engines?

Eric plans on continually analyzing a new site across all of the major search engines (Google, MSN, and Yahoo) in order to learn more about the time it takes for sites to rank as well as gain incite on the algorithms and methods used to rank sites.

The site he is testing, Follow the Drinking Gourd, was first published by Joel Bresler on January 17, 2007.

So far one thing is absolutely apparent, Google weights time (how long the site has been around) much more than the other two engines.

From this data, it looks like Yahoo and MSN are much faster to accept what their crawler finds (in terms of content and links) at face value. Google is much slower to do so. This is consistent with the general industry belief that Google puts more weight on temporal factors, and needs to build trust in a site before giving it higher rankings.

Because of its algorithims which are good at eliminating spam from its index, Google is inherently slow in the adoption of trends and new site content.

15 Mar | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under Internet Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Web Design.

I found this amazing tool called Touch Graph. It creates a really attractive, meaningful visual representation of your website, and the sites that link to and from it, online.

Go ahead, put your own web address and see how your site is connected.

15 Mar | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under Uncategorized.

I get a lot of questions about SEO or search engine optimization. A lot of people and companies want their web site at the top of the search engines, and so, by association, they think SEO will do it for them, and to some extent it will. But, SEO is a blanket term, with a number of newly evolving ideas and techniques that is a bit of a misnomer. Instead of focusing solely on a ranking in a search result, which is still very powerful and one of the best ways to gain consistent quality traffic, SEO is quickly involving creative marketing and PR techniques to gain viral traffic using various social media and social book marking outlets.

Read the rest of this entry …

15 Mar | Post by Zach Katkin. Filed under Blogging, Design, Pay Per Click, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, WVO.