Archive for April 2011
Monday, April 25th, 2011
When you talk to a Search Engine Optimization Company the conversation will very quickly gravitate towards keywords. These are the words that potential customers will type into search engines when looking for the products or services you provide.
Back in the early days of SEO, unscrupulous marketers quickly learned that repeating their primary keywords over and over within the keywords tag, or within the page content, would improve rankings. Search engines didn’t want their results to be gamed so easily and viewed keyword stuffing as a means to lower the quality of their results. In response algorithms were updated so that keyword stuffing became ineffectual and “false positives” were removed from their results. Search engines have continued to evolve in order to beat spammers and deliver accurate and relevant results. Read more...
Tags: Duplicate Content, Google Algorithm, seo, Update Panda
Posted in Online Marketing | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 21st, 2011
Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting to the attendees of the Advertising Association of Winnipeg Breakfast on the topic of Mobile Advertising a sub-topic of the fascinating field of Mobile Marketing. In this presentation (see below) I spoke about the increasing importance of Mobile Advertising with the explosive growth of mobile devices. According to Wikipedia, “In the twenty years from 1990 to 2010, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew from 12.4 million to over 4.6 billion.” Amazing growth and this doesn’t even consider the growth of other mobile devices like tablets such as the iPad and Blackberry playbook. Read more...
Tags: Augmeneted Reality, Bluetooth Proximity Marketing, Geolocation, Google Adwords Mobile, MMS, mobile advertising, Mobile Apps, mobile marketing, Near Field Communication, QR codes, SMS
Posted in Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Online Marketing | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 20th, 2011
I’m commonly assigned the task of converting a visual design created by a web designer to a website. The first step in this is to convert the .psd file the designer created with photoshop into markup a browser can display as a webpage. I’ve been trying to optimize the speed with which I do this, and I found that although each web developer has their process for completing this, there are certain tasks that are done each time by everyone who does it: Read more...
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
Your website is being viewed on a huge variety of resolutions, whether your design is ready for it or not. Every day mobile devices are becoming more connected and commonly used to browse the internet. In the past, website owners would strive to have their website displayed the same on as many screens as possible. As smaller and larger screens become more common, it’s becoming important to have your website display in a way optimized for the screen. The question remains: How do we give each size screen its own optimal user experience without creating multiple designs for each project? The answer is through Responsive Web Design. Read more...
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks, Web Design, Web Development | 1 Comment »
Friday, April 15th, 2011
Driving around Winnipeg and other cities I visit, I find I am seeing more and more digital billboard ads. It amazes me how some of these ads have so many words in them there is not a chance I am going to get their message when I am driving by. I have a competitor that is doing some of this advertising and I drive by his ad a lot and I look at it as he uses several different ads that are rotated. Most of his ads have a lot of verbiage on the ad. In my opinion few people are going to have time to read the entire ad and if 
they do they may get in a car accident as they have to look at the ad for so long and not look at the vehicle in front of them. Read more...
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 13th, 2011
It’s that time of year again when the top 16 teams in the NHL begin their playoff quest to become Stanley Cup Champions. With my beloved Vancouver Canucks in the running to take home this important trophy, I’ve noticed that there are a few tips that social media users can take away from hockey.
Make it a team effort.
No hockey team has ever been successful based on the strength of one player, and your social media presence will most-likely be the same. Clients and other users you interact with online appreciate seeing the human side of your business, so give as many people on your team as you can the chance to have a role in your social media presence. Read more...
Posted in Online Marketing, Social Media, Tools, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »
Monday, April 11th, 2011
I recently ran into a problem that most of us are very familiar with: the fileserver has nearly run out of storage space!
There were a few things compounding the upgrade. Read more...
- The server has only two SATA ports
- Both SATA ports were in use by the existing RAID1 so I could not connect another RAID array and rsync the files across.
- I needed to minimize downtime as the fileserver ran an important accounting and project management application. 10 hours of downtime to run a grow operation using a live-cd was unacceptable.
Posted in Linux System Administration, Tools, Tips and Tricks | 1 Comment »
Friday, April 8th, 2011
Anyone who has worked with Pay Per Click advertising will tell you that it is quite easy to spend a large amount of your budget without seeing any real results. Because of this, it’s important to make sure that when you design the messaging behind your Pay Per Click campaign, you design it properly for the Pay Per Click service you are hoping to employ: Read more...
- Google
Google Adwords has been established as somewhat of a standard in Pay Per Click advertising for a good reason: Google Search and Search Partners ads are targeted specifically towards people who are already looking for your product. As such, make sure that your Adwords messaging helps people to complete a search through less promotional language and more problem solving language.
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
Monday, April 4th, 2011
Landing pages can be like a “swear word” when you try to explain to upper management why we will be using landing pages as opposed to sending the prospect to their website. I hear over and over again “what, I paid all this money for this website and now I am not sending my prospects that I target through pay per click advertising to my website, explain this to me again”. Read more...
Posted in Online Marketing | 1 Comment »
