Be creative with what you’ve got

July 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment

bromleyLast week my family and I took a much needed family vacation. We loaded into the car and set off for several random destinations located to our northeast which culminated in our arrival in Vermont at my wife’s cousin’s house. We visited an old, nostalgic amusement park in Pennsylvania, camped in some cabins in New York for a few days, met a skunk (Ugh…)  and then enjoyed the beauty and comforts that we found in Vermont for a few lazy days. The whole trip was our effort to be creative and experience some different things since our standard vacation is simply to travel south and sit on the beach for a week. We had an amazing time and we considered the trip a great success.

So as I reminisce about our trip, a constant theme runs through our adventures: “Be creative with what you’ve got”. What I mean by this (and how it applies to your business) is that you need to find new and creative ways to be successful. Think outside the box to grow and improve your business and try to utilize the tools that you have available to you already. Read more


Posted by chris.auman | Filed Under Blog 

What a basic Search Engine Optimization can get you

July 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment

We’ve been doing a lot of work lately around Ohio with new website clients that want us to help them rank better in the search engines. These are not huge, aggressive campaigns but simply clients that want to test the waters of what a little quality SEO can get them. They simply want to be on the radar instead of lost in the Antarctica of the web.

When we take on these projects we usually work with an existing website design, we don’t create new content, we don’t go above and beyond, but we do perform some fundamentally important improvements to the website that create a very solid foundation. It involves research, using that research properly, improving the code on the website and generally “optimizing” the existing site so it’s, well, optimized for the search engines who have to digest what the site is about and then turn around and determine how relevant the site’s content is to thousands of search queries. The results we can get by having our clients make a small investment in their website can be extraordinary.

whitmers-akron-seoThe search engine optimization client that I’d like to feature here is Whitmer’s Lighting in Akron, Ohio. As you can probably ascertain, they deal with lighting (residential, commercial, outdoor, etc.), basically any type of lighting that you might need – and much more than you’ve probably never thought of. They are a huge Ohio lighting store that has few peers.

So what they hired us to do was take their existing website and get some results. The budget was limited and the expectations we’re low but we came through with results that went through the roof. Remember, with a basic website optimization our goal is to get the client on the radar for their key terms and locations. In this case our goal was to have the client show up for searches that showed someone searching for a lighting store in Akron, Ohio. Read more


Posted by chris.auman | Filed Under Blog 

The decline of the meta tag

July 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment

meta-tag-graphicMany people who have a website or have spent any time trying to understand online marketing have come across the vague term “meta tag”. For those of you who have spoke to someone regarding online marketing, it’s possible that they threw around some fancy technical-sounding terms during the meeting to make themselves sound like they know what they’re talking about – possibly just to make your head spin so they can be left alone to do their  job while you write the checks. I’ve seen it many times before and I actually had a client ask me the other day why we didn’t have meta tags on their pages. So, in the spirit of educating all of our current and potential clients, let me tell you what a meta tag is and when it should be used.

Wikipedia describes a meta tag (or meta element) as an HTML or XHTML element used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Well, that’s clear as mud, right? Let me describe it in layman’s terms. Basically a meta tag is a short line of code that’s placed at the top of a web page that provides some information about the page. There are different types of meta tags depending on the type of information you want to provide or what you want to accomplish – the most popular being the content type, description, keywords, author or even an automatic redirect to another page! There are many uses and endless tags depending on your exact needs. You can do a search for meta tags on Google and it’s a simple process of copying and pasting the information into the header of your page, changing out the relevant information and updating the page.

In the recent past, search engines relied heavily on meta tags to determine what the page content was about. This is obviously very important because search engines want to return the most relevant search results possible. To do this, the keyword meta tag was filled with terms relating to the content of the page and it helped the search engines understand and rank that page better. As you can probably guess, this tag was quickly abused through a process called “keyword stuffing” and the tag basically became useless due to people’s inability to follow the rules. You had people putting the word Walmart in the keyword tag even though they were a mom and pop shop on Main Street. So obviously the the search engines had to find a better way and they did so quickly. Google was one of the first to develop an algorithm that considered not only what was on the page and in the code, but what are called “off site” factors that are much harder to influence. That discussion is for another post though. Read more


Posted by chris.auman | Filed Under Blog 

How to track visitors to your website

July 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment

I’ve had many requests to offer some advice about tracking visitors and traffic that come to a website. “How?”, they say “do we know how many people came to our site from the email blast that I sent out?” or “How do I know how many people came to my site from an online ad that I purchased on another site?”

The obvious basics

First, you need to do something that is free and simple. Get yourself setup with Google Analytics. GA is a hugely powerful (and did I mention free?) online suite of tools that can easily be installed on your website to track visitors, and pages, and keywords and all manner of sortable information that is highly useful.

To install GA you simply sign-up for an account, acquire the small line of code that they provide and then paste it into the footer of every page that you have on your site. If you’ve built your site in such a way that the footer is contained in one file (as I love to do), that will make your life even easier. At a minimum you need the code to be on your homepage. Then, after a couple hours GA will start playing big brother with your website and know more than you could ever want to know or care about. True spies would be totally jealous. Read more


Posted by chris.auman | Filed Under Blog