Even if you’re as mobile as Paul seems to be, why the iPad over any other mobile work device?  I am pretty sure that Paul will be able to run his business from an iPad for 30 days.  Will he want to do it long-term?  I am guessing the answer will be “no.”  The reason I’ll follow and you may also want to follow his iPad experiment is that in doing this he will be putting the iPad through the paces in a unique way.  At the end of the experiment, we  should have a much better idea of what the pros and cons of using an iPad are.  In fact, you may even want to put purchasing one off until you see Paul’s conclusions.

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. All things being equal it is better to have a local number for showing up in these results, but what you really don’t want to do is have a shared number.  Many of our clients are small businesses that share space with other small businesses.  For example, several massage therapists might share the same office building, front desk staff and phone number.  While this can be a great way to save costs, it can be a killer for local rankings.

We’ve certainly seen situations where until business B got a different phone number than business A they couldn’t rank well.  Once they got their own number the situation completely changed.  So, if you’ve set up your local listing and can’t figure out why you’re not showing up and you have a shared number it’s time to make a change.

“In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.”

As  fans of Mozilla’s FireFox browser, we know it is a pipe dream that some day the World Wide Web community will say to Microsoft that they can do whatever they want with their latest browser because “We no longer support it.”  We don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, but what is likely is that Website developers, including Dew Point Productions, will stop trying to build Websites that work in outdated versions of IE.

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.

His conclusion may be less than accurate, or in other words there may be more going on here than meets the eye. Take the search term “Utah Dentist”  as seen in this image.

There’s a definite cluster of dentists down in the Orem area.  Given Mike’s conclusions about all non centroid factors mostly being equal we would expect to find these are the strongest listings in the state, but they aren’t.   Take for example, listing D “University Mall.  Mall Dentist Group.”  It does have the term “Dental” but this is a very weak listing.  The website is not a dentist website, there are 3 reviews but they are all for the mall, none for the dentist and the listing is not very complete.  Compare that against the listing up in Salt Lake City for “Warr Dental”  They have 21 reviews, their listing is verified and well filed out and  they also use Dental in their title.

Mike suggests optimizing for your state.  In most situations we believe this would be the wrong thing to do.  Most people will not search statewide for a dentist, restaurant, car dealer or just about any other service provider.  They will look to their city.  In rural areas, where people are willing and accustomed to driving a good distance, they’ll check the cities, by name, that are closest to them.

Not ready to give up optimizing for state search yet?  Have a look at this result for Orem where there was a cluster of dentists in the statewide search for Utah.

With only one exception, the good old University Mall Dental Group, a weak statewide result, none of the listings show up in both.  Given this you really may have to make a decision which you want to show up for in Google local your city or the state and we think you should put your bid on your individual city.

What you’ll commonly see once there are two listings for a business is that they gather slightly different information.  For example, Google will assign the pages that link to the business differently to the different listings.  This means that one listing may have some of the pages that link to it while the other link shows different pages.  Anyone researching the business gets a partial picture of the business.  And it’s not just linking pages.  Because different users find different listings, one user might leave a review on the first listing while another user leaves a referral on the second listing.

To make matters worse Google doesn’t provide a clean way for a business owner to consolidate the listing.  The best thing for searches would be if the business owner could go into Google’s Local Business Center claim both listings and then click a button to consolidate listings.  Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t exist.  Instead after claiming both listings a business owner is forced to choose which one to suspend, potentially leaving out reviews and third party pages that link to the business.

Ultimately, the best case scenario would be for Google to handle all of this automatically by simply looking to see if the phone number  and address are the same and if the business name is similar.  However, until this happens they should implement a clean consolidation feature in the Local Business Center.

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

The day before the books release, September 14, 2009 there’s no search volume for the term. The day of the books release more than a few folks had already reached page 87 and followed Langdon’s instructions.

The sculpture of Washington posing as Zeus isn’t the only search term Brown gave a major boost to. Here’s a graph of the term noetic science which is the field of science practiced by Brown’s female protagonist.

Tice softens the blow a couple of paragraphs later pointing out that many of the companies that don’t have web sites may be intending to start them and that 32% of companies in a VistaPrint Survey said they would work on Web development given more time and money.

Tice may have been a little harsh, but is she wrong?  No.  The Web is becoming the number one go to place people find businesses.  Ask your friends what they do with the phone books that show up on their doorstep each year and you’ll find many if not all pitch them.  Ask those who don’t how often they refer to them and you’ll find that most of them sit in a drawer gathering dust all year.

As Tice points out, “a company website is just a basic, must-have marketing tool for the 21st Century.”

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.