Pleasanton Web Design

Here’s a list of the free concerts being held at the Alameda County Fair this year. All concerts happen from 6pm to 8pm at the Big O Tires Amphitheater and are free with Admission to the Fair!

June 22 – Papa Do Run Run
June 23 – Charlie Daniels Band
June 24 – FogHat
June 25 – Tower Of Power
June 26 – Blue Oyster Cult
June 27 – Tenth Avenue North
June 29 – Abbacadabra
June 30 – Roy Clark
July 1 – Ozomatli
July 2 – Evolution
July 3 – ConFunkShun
July 4 – Blues Festival
July 6 – We The Kings
July 7 – Sanctus Real
July 8 – Survivor
July 9 – The Whispers
July 10 – Tracy Lawrence

Pleasanton Free Concerts in The Park

Free Concerts on Friday evening are a summer tradition in Pleasanton. They are put on by the Pleasanton Downtown association and sponsored by various Pleasanton Businesses. The concerts are held at Lions Wayside Park, at First and Neal Street.

Here’s the line-up for Summer 2011:

June 3: Magic Moments

June 10: Batch 22

June 17: HouseRockers

June 24: Ruckatan Latin Tribe

July 1: Rooster’s Teeth

July 8: Georgi & The Rough Week

July 15: The Crisis

July 22: Dave Crimmen

July 29: Groovy Judy

August 5: The Cool Tones

August 12: Blind Nurse

August 19: Burton & Company

August 26: Finding Stella

September 2: Public Eye

Website redesign for GPS Fleet Services Company

I created this website for a restaurant in Danville. They have now expanded to a fourth restaurant, so you know the food is good. I’ve been there and can attest to the great food, great service and great atmosphere. And if you’ve never been to downtown Danville… Well, downtown Pleasanton definitely has some competition.

There has been some talk in the seo industry about Google PageRank becoming obsolete due to their exclusivity rights to the patent expiring this year. They can renew those rights,  however (not sure why they wouldn’t).  Even if they do, the patent expires completely in 2017, at which time any search engine can start using PageRank.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with PageRank, it was the concept that launched Google into the forefront of the search engine universe. It is the part of the ranking formula that counts links pointing to a website as part of that website’s relevance to the search phrase, as well as sign of that website’s authority on the subject. It made what is linking to a website more important than the content of the website itself, when it comes to ranking in competitive searches.

The thing is, that in the years since PageRank’s invention, the overall algorithm has become so complex, PageRank itself is now only a small piece of the puzzle. Looking at that little green bar is a favorite pastime of seo neophytes, but they soon learn that PageRank obsession is unproductive, and can often be an exercise in wheel spinning. PageRank SchmageRank, I say. I’m tired of hearing about it! As an SEO that needs to get results, PageRank is more a thorn in my side, especially when clients are familiar with it, and fixate on it, sometimes to the expense of the overall promotion campaign.

Ok, this concludes my first and possibly last post from my iPhone. Boy are my thumbs tired!

Google is at it again. Their “Google Caffeine” infrastructure update was vastly increased their computing power. That update has paved the way for features many of the new features that we’ve seen recently, such as Google Instant.

Today you may notice little magnifying glass icons next the your search results. Clicking on any of these icons will activate “Google Instant Previews.” On clicking you are presented with a thumbnail image of the website in the result, and from then on, rolling over the other results will also display the thumbnail of the associated website.

One positive result of Google Instant Previews, for those of us in the web design business, is that sites that are horribly ugly (a.k.a. not professionally designed) will most likely see a drop-off in traffic. Of course this will depend on the vertical involved, but I think most consumers will use this preview to filter out sites that look cheap, low-quality and unprofessional. Made For Adwords (mfa) sites will hopefully see a significant drop in traffic as will a lot of other spam, which is often easy to identify visually.

Across the board I think people will see less traffic overall, but their bounce rate should also decrease, as searchers no longer need to click in to get a preview of their website.

Another consequence I would expect, would be a lower CTR (click-through rate) for Adwords. Why? 1)Because Adwords ads do not have the Instant Preview feature, they are functionally separated from the natural results more than they have been in the past. In fact many searchers don’t know the difference between sponsored results and natural results, and to them, clicking on one was no different than clicking on the other. Now if the searcher likes the Instant Preview feature, they will be less likely to waste the extra click on the sponsored results that don’t have it. 2) At popular screen resolutions the Instant Previews actually block the Adwords ads.

I must admit I can’t imagine that Google would do anything to decrease the click-through for Adwords. It’s their bread and butter, and almost all of the recent changes they’ve made recently have had the effect of pushing searchers to Adwords, be it by rearranging the real estate, or pushing searchers to more popular key phrases.

What do you think?

A search engine called “Blekko“  launched to the general public yesterday. Who needs another search engine you ask? Well, Blekko is a little different than Yahoo, Google or Bing.

Blekko is designed for “vertical search.” Verticals, as far as search engines go, are topics of interest to the searcher. Blekko’s verticals are defined by things called “slashtags.” Unlike Twitter slashtags, which are used to attribute tweets to the proper source, Blekko slashtags refer to groupings of websites, associated by topic. So, for instance if you are interested in skiing, you could do a search like “vacation rentals /ski.” Your search for “vacation rentals” would be performed only in those web sites the Blekko people have associated with the “/ski” slashtag.

As a registered user, you can also create your own slashtags, associate them with the websites you choose, and make them public. You can do something similar, with Google, but Blekko is designed around this concept.

Sound like something useful? Not so fast. Try searching Blekko and you will quickly find out that the results are completely atrocious. Why? The most obvious drawback to me is that having the Blekko people select sites they think best define a topic I am interested in is an impossible task.

Can they improve the implementation of their concept? They’d better if they are going to succeed! I’ve had access to Blekko since it was in beta, and I haven’t found it useful yet. Maybe I’m not part of the target audience, but I sure do a lot of searches. Given Google and a well crafted key phrase, you can easily drill down into that vertical and come up with rich results, without having someone filtering the results with topic categorization. And the very idea that you would limit yourself by creating your own slashtags to group your favorite websites seems absurd. The serendipity of searching the Internet is finding something new on a website you’ve never seen before.

I noticed yet another change yesterday in the way Google is displaying results. It’s not the recent algorithm change that has many in the SEO industry complaining that their sites have been trashed. It’s not the also-recent indexing glitch that has yet to be resolved and has many new pages, including blog posts like this one, going unindexed for extended periods. It’s not Google Instant, taking a big bite out of the long-tail. This change has to do with the serving of local maps “places” results outside of the maps box, and over most of the natural results.

One variation of the new format gives a huge amount of real estate to the local results by pulling them out of the maps box and reformatting them to a size that is now twice the height of the natural results. With one or two Adwords results, then two natural results followed by six huge Google Places results, natural result number 3 might as well be on Page 2. If the Google Places ad includes an image, then the searcher is offered a chance to click on it and remain on Google property, and be exposed to another batch of Adwords results. Or in other words another Google income opportunity.

The second variation I am now seeing basically pulls the Places results out of the maps box, without reformatting them, but includes 3 Adwords results at the top and zero natural results before the Places results. With this variation, having the number 1 natural result is not so great anymore. It’s probably more like having a number 5 or 6 position.

For local businesses with results in Places, but not in the natural results, this may be a good thing. For searchers who are looking for a local company, this change may be good as well. Especially with the first variation I noted, the SEO landscape when it comes to natural local search is changing significantly, with Google Places playing an increasingly important role.