What do you do when your website doesn’t get enough traffic? While there are many legitimate and fully “kosher” answers to that question, my proposal for you today is a bit off the wall. Rather insanely crazy, in fact. Let me illustrate. One of our clients, a college search website, was having difficulty attracting organic […]
News & Articles
Help! The Web Designer Stole My Domain!
It starts out something like this … At BlueSpottedFishTails Web Design, our policy is to have the client transfer his domain over to us. It minimizes the frustrations we once experienced when the client retained his domain. Setting up a domain to work with the new website we’re designing is an extremely complicated matter. In […]
Sink or Swim: Beating the Recession Before It Beats You
A common theme in conversations with prospective clients lately is the “desperation motif.” A client operates a tool making factory and orders have slowed down to such a slow trickle that, as he forecasts future orders, a huge question mark lingers over the horizon: he knows he might not make it. Or, the Realtor dealing […]
Transparency: How Honest Is Your SEO Company?
The Google dictionary describes transparency as: The transparency of a process, situation, or statement is its quality of being easily understood or recognized, for example because there are no secrets connected with it, or because it is expressed in a clear way. In the world of SEO, it’s crucial that an SEO provider be transparent […]
Snake Oil Salesmen and SEO
Living in the world of search engine optimization can be particularly frustrating at times, I’ll readily admit. My wife and I have been watching the Dr Quinn Medicine Women series through Netflix over the past several months. In a couple of the episodes the classic “snake oil salesman” enters Colorado Springs, where the movie is […]
Online Pregnancy Test – Pregnancy Calculators & More
Our most recent website acquisition is a bit of an unusual one, but, considering how many pregnancy related clients we’ve served, not an altogether novel theme for us. This online pregnancy test site will need much graphical design work, but is attractive to us in many ways, particularly because the present traffic is around 10k […]
I Like Challenges
Challenges are fun, right? Well, I enjoy most challenges that clients place in my inbox. We recently took on a project different from our typical sort. A former co-owner of one of our current clients recently purchased a college search website. Like most college lead generation websites, it’s affiliate based with colleges regularly opting in and […]
How long for a nofollow to weaken a site’s rankings?
It’s always enlightening to carry out a variety of experiments that relate to our world of search engine optimization. Many of our experiments have been related to duplicate content & differentiation strategies. We’ve also been forerunners, we like to believe, with experiments regarding site wide anchor links and footer link positioning. Our latest experiment relates […]
School Fundraiser Ideas: Custom USB Flash Drives
May 20, 2010 update: Jessie, our graphic designer, just launched a one pager redesign on CFgear’s flash drive fundraising website. Check it out at FundraiserFlashDrives.com. April 26, 2010 update: CFgear now has a flash drive fundraiser form directly on their main website where you can request more information on their flash drive fundraiser programs. We […]
SEO Content Writers Sometimes Humor Me
Even before the economy crashed, we’ve always received a steady stream of emails from “seo content writers” asking for work. Sometimes their contact information ends up in a dedicated folder within my Outlook and, more often than not, their email is just deleted. A couple times, I’ve even thought of setting up a page with […]
Marketing USB Flash Drives
We spend many hours every month creatively marketing USB flash drives and we love every moment of it. Our client, CFgear.com, sells custom flash drives to universities, middle schools, Fortune 500 companies, you name it – all across the United States. To help maximize CFgear’s presence on the web, we’ve developed a number of small micro […]
There’s just something about family run businesses
Had a great meeting with a potential client yesterday (offers a wide variety of insurance in York, PA). There’s just something that attracts me to family run businesses, whether it’s CFgear in South Dakota, Stephen Case’s network of non profits or, in this case, the Nicholas Insurance Agency. Of course, it’s partially because I can relate […]
Differentiation Theory: An Experiment in Duplicate Content Filtration
The million dollar question: When is duplicate content not considered duplicate content by major search engines? Grounds for importance: Virtually identical pages are basically ignored by Google and are of little, if any, value in terms of promoting your brand, products & website through SEO. Answer: Without dropping names, I’ve read studies conducted by name brand […]
Are You a Victim of SEO Blackmail?
Here’s the latest in the not-so-pleasant “art” of web design companies offering “SEO” services. Picture yourself, a mid sized company with 130 or so employees, large enough to operate a profitable business but not big enough to have your own web developer on staff. So, as web standards change and browser resolutions expand, you’re forced […]
Help! My Adwords Budget is on Fire!
Are you burning through your online ad budget – or, more specifically, your Google Adwords budget – every day with minimal results to show? Here’s a humorous example: I was doing a search on “Sizzix.” For those who don’t have a Stampin’ Up! demonstrator as a wife, Sizzix is a company which makes die cutting, […]