ATILUS - Web Design | Internet Marketing

Happy to Help, Big Brothers Big Sisters, The Howl 2007

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.

Touchscreen Displays, The Future

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.

How Long Does it Take a New Site to Rank in the Search Engines

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.

How Your Website’s Connected

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.

Website Visibility Optimization

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.

I propose we reanalyze what you, our web design and internet marketing clients really want. What do you want? Search engine rankings are just a step, a means to an end. The final goal of SEO is to send droves of quality, targeted visitors to your site, by ranking well. PPC accounts can also send lots of quality visitors instantly, for (at least initially) less then the cost of an “SEO” campaign. So you want quality visitors. People to visit your site, read your information, purchase or click on your advertising. That’s what you really want.

I purpose we rename SEO to WVO... Website Visibility Optimization.

In their article “SEO as Website Positioning Strategy? - Updated” Emergence Media observes the same. But, they have a different name in mind… Website Positioning Strategy. The great article goes in depth on the types of strategies involved in orchestrating and manipulating your website’s positioning online.

In addition to Emergence’s suggestions, I believe there needs to be a greater concentration, from the ground up, to build standards based sites and designs that are easily index-able and accessible. There needs to be more concentration on the foundation of a site as a facilitator of great rankings. Like a home, everything rests on that initial foundation.

So what does WVO involve? It involves:

• Site Construction (Proper, Appropriate Coding)
• Continued Content Generation (probably through a site blog)
• Community Involvement (participation in online communities related to your industry/web)
• Offline PR Efforts with an emphasis on online link building (charitable events, Press Releases, etc.)

No matter what we call it, the changing landscape of SEO and the tactics used to drive traffic and gain search rankings is a positive and rewarding experience for both the authors of sites as well as their visitors. And, by keeping your website visibility optimization or website positioning strategy in mind from the beginning you will be better prepared for success online.