That’s the question Paul Colligan will answer for small business owners over 30 days in his iPad experiment. Of course there’s a big difference between “can” and “should.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always a good thing to be a the top of the search engine result pages and for local brick and mortar businesses that means showing up in the search engines’ map sections.  Just like their regular search result placements search engines have algorithms for their local / map results.  One of these is your phone number. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft is notorious, for among other things, its missteps with its browser Internet Explorer.  “Upgrades” they make to it end up causing headaches for Web developers whose websites don’t show in the new browser the way they did in the old.  This has always felt like Microsoft telling the World Wide Web that they better just get in line.  Now things are starting to change.  Many developers have told their clients that new sites may not work in older versions of IE.  And now comes an announcement from Google that they will not longer be supporting IE 6.0 Read the rest of this entry »

CoffeeReview. com is a specialty coffee site targeted at coffee drinkers, food service professionals and the coffee industry.  If you’re a coffee connoisseur, this is the site for you and we’ve been lucky enough to have been chosen to build their blogs and forums.  These are new additions to their site which launches today with a new look.

We’ve loved this job, not just because it’s about coffee but because it has provided some great technical challenges.  Take a look at the blog home page , for example, and you’ll see that the layout is quite different from common blogs.  The Blogger’s box pulls from the author profiles.   It also includes a forum that is integrated with WordPress.

Thanks to Ron, Ken, Day and Ted for the opportunity to work on this project.

Google is now show results in about half of US states for local listings if a searcher pairs the state name with a local service or product. Based on this information, should you optimize your local listing for your state? Read the rest of this entry »

Local businesses have gotten a huge boost out of the local search engines and the biggest boost comes from Google Maps.  Unfortunately Google has made a mess of their effort in numerous ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Google just sent us 20 $100 Adwords vouchers for new accounts.  The only catch is that they must be used on new Adwords accounts and used by March 30th.  If you’ve been thinking about trying out pay per click marketing through Adwords contact us today.  We’ll help you set up an account and provide you with a $100.00 voucher so you can try Adwords at no risk.

This offer is available to the first 20 people who contact us and use our services to set up a new account.

Here’s a just for fun post that also shines a light on what we can learn from Google Insights. In Dan Brown’s latest book The Lost Symbol Robert Langdon tells Director Inoue Sato to Google George Washington Zeus.  It turns out that Sato is not the only one who googled the term check out this graph from Google Insights. Read the rest of this entry »

Carol Tice, writing in Entrepreneur’s Daily Dose this week takes to task the nearly 50% of small businesses who don’t have web sites.  She says, Read the rest of this entry »

Our blog has been quite successful, however, we’ve strayed a bit from our mission. Our intention has always been to serve small business, but with our blog we’ve ended up serving web developers. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this, but we think it would be more fun and more productive to write a blog for small businesses that need information for marketing on the Internet. The other thing we haven’t done a good job of is sharing company news. We’d like to do a better job of promoting our successes which ultimately translates into the successes of our clients.

With both of these aims in mind we’re considering moving our efforts. We’ll leave the old blog up for reference, but our postings will move primarily to the new location here on our root directory. So, don’t be surprised to see some more changes around here soon.