Pleasanton Web Design

Just completed this Website for a custom cabinet maker in Pleasanton. Check out their work. It’s pretty cool!

Website for DUI Attorneys serving Pleasanton

Internet Search Engines are vitally important to modern businesses, particulary to small businesses with limted resources. They are also widely misunderstood, or just plain mysteries to many small business owners. The following is an excert from an eBook I am writing to help small business people understand search engines, so that they might better incorporate search engines into their overall business strategy.

1. What is a Search Engine?

Search engines are complex web applications that do the following:

1)      They crawl (visit) all available pages on the internet

2)      They “index” (store a snapshot) of every web page.

3)      They take the word or phrase (search term)  entered into their search box and process it through an algorithm (complex equation) to create a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This is a list of links to websites found in the search engines index.

To gain traffic through the Internet it is important that a business’ website show up within the first ten results when the keywords that best describe their business are typed into a search engine.

Myth #1: “Gaining significant targeted traffic through your website is easy.” It is definitely not a matter of “build it and they will come.” Search engine exposure is “free” advertising and is extremely competitive.

2. What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization usually refers to the activity of designing or tweaking a website so that it has the best chance at showing up high in SERPs for the selected keywords. It refers to manipulation of on-page factors – characteristics of the website itself.

Often SEO is used to refer to the entire process of gaining more search engine traffic for a website, however this usage is misleading. Even Wikipedia promotes this idea:

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

Myth #2: Search engine optimization alone will only result in good ranking for non-competitive searches. Doing well in competitive searches primarily depends on off-page factors – factors not directly modifiable by the Webmaster.

What are off-page factors? Check back next week for the next installment!!!

Website redesigned for a local environmental testing laboratory.

Pleasanton Web Design Services

Here’s a new logo we designed for a telecom consulting firm here in the Bay Area:

Check out our logo design services.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how Google broke the local business listings that show up on Google Maps. I surmised they did this to push searchers to more profitable links, like their Adwords Sponsored PPC links. They didn’t come up with this brilliant idea themselves. They copied Bing, which launched with atrocious local business lisitngs in their results and drove people to paid AT&T Internet Yellow page ads. It’s all about money.

Today I needed to find a local office supply store in Pleasanton. I know about Office Max and Office Depot, but thought there might be a place a little closer. So I searched Google for “office supplies pleasanton.” Here’s what I got:

Besides listing OfficeMax twice, missing Staples and listing a strange closed business named “Vanguard Legato,” Google lists the name of an individual as its third result. Clicking on the details, let me know that this indeed was an individual, categorized under “office supply store.”

My first thought was, “that is pretty lame.” And it is. My second thought was wondering if any people searching for office supplies have ever shown up at this guy’s house.

It’s pretty common to have the same global navigation items it both the main navigation and footer links of a website. Be careful though, if you are using an SEF URL extension for Joomla 1.5, such as sh404SEF. Having multiple menu items pointing to the same article or ItemId can disable the active menu styling. Instead, use the standard Joomla menu links for the main navigation, and set up the footer navigation with external type menu items, pointing to the sef urls created for the main navigation.

Link exchanges are one way to help with link authority, especially if you have nothing else going for you. Promoting blogs and fresh quality content are preferrable, but some people don’t have time, and reasonable, content targeted link exchanges can at least get you on the map. But you need to be very careful.

1) Beware 3 way link exchanges with junk sites. Generally the person requesting the link will want you to link to their client’s site, but all you get is an incoming link from their throw-away wordpress site that looks like it was put up in 15 minutes. Don’t bother.

2) Ignore link exchange requests that require you to put your link up first. If you do, they won’t. Credible link partners will always place your link first (not necessarily before they contact you though).

3) Ignore link exchanges showing y0u some great PR sites that will link to you, but you have to put up your link first. Hint: those aren’t even their sites! A certain percentage of webmasters will see that high PR and put the link up.

4) Don’t exchange links with any website that is unrelated to yours, i.e. don’t put a viagra link on your golf club ecommerce site.

5) Don’t swap links with any low quality website. The search engines will never count the link anyway, and you will be wasting your time and credibility.

We launched this website a couple of months ago. The company manufactures special plastic bags that keep artisan bread fresh for a long time. I could sure use these!

Manufacturing Company Web Design

I just put up a quick and simple website for a friend in Sacramento who runs an annual book fair. If you are a book collector, this is the place to be this spring: Sacramento Antiquarian Book Fair.