Web Biz Strategy

In the second half of 2008, Google started including Google Local listings in their results when they believed that you were doing a commercial search (”pizza”) instead of a regular content search.

This week they stepped it up, including Google Local results for just about any search you do. This is a game changer.

Last year I started adding all of my clients to Google Local as a matter of course. It takes five minutes to sign up, you verify by phone in real-time, and you start showing up within days. Even more importantly, the Google Local block often shows up at the top of the results page, short-cutting the regular text results below.

Now that Google is showing local results for all searches, the opportunity is too rich to pass up. So don’t pass it up! Go to http://local.google.com and click on “Put Your Business on Google Maps”.  When you do:

• Choose the right categories (Food & Dining, Web Designer, etc.)

• Put the keywords that you want to show up for in the Description. You can also put keywords in the “Details” section.

• Upload a photo - definitely do this, it will make your listing stand out in the results

• Upload a video if you have one

• Create a coupon like “10% off your initial consultation if you mention the web” - you can even add a code and an expiration date

Look at the search results I did for a local restaurant. Which restaurant would you choose?

Recently I’ve been trying to encourage Facebook to reverse their trend of constantly degrading the FB user experience, and my method has been to try to get people to chime in and offer up user experience improvement suggestions.
Here’s an easy but crucial user experience improvement for Facebook to implement: separate out Friends from Fans in [...]

Today when I logged into my Gmail account, I was greeted with an invitation to try Video Chat, another service being rolled out by Google in their attempt to have users integrate Google into every aspect of their online experience. 
Google is certainly not the first company to try this.  AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have all [...]

Over the past few months, Facebook has done a major update to their site interface, followed by a few smaller changes. Many of these updates have been broadly panned, Facebook groups have sprung up against the changes, and articles have been written criticizing the choices made by Facebook.
Why such a negative reaction?  Poor User Experience. [...]

When you work in the web business, the concept of “user experience” comes up a lot. That makes sense since real people (web “users”) have to interact with web sites, and someone has to design the interface for those interactions. Good user experience means happy visitors and thereby happy shoppers, customers, volunteers, and leads.
But user [...]

Warning: if you don’t know what Twitter is, this post will make no sense whatsoever, so please start here. All others please proceed!
This morning I went to Twitter.com and saw a lot of people asking about the www.Skittles.com homepage. I checked it out and found that Skittles had redirected all of their site traffic to [...]

One of the hats that I wear is webmaster, I build and maintain web sites for clients. This involves site hosting, and I’ve hosted sites with a number of different hosting providers. Recently I’ve been consolidating, moving my various sites to MediaTemple and closing out my hosting accounts with other providers.

Two days ago, I had [...]

Today’s question comes from a LinkedIn user who wants to know about site FAQ page issues and solutions. Many people on the thread (read it here) complained about FAQ pages and some even recommended against them, but I disagree. FAQ’s exist for a reason: they’re a quick and easy way to get answers and access [...]

Here’s a question that came in to LinkedIn regarding what Google calls “site links,” the links that can appear under a site listing which link directly to sub-pages and sub-sections of their sites.  There were many good answers on the LinkedIn thread, and anyone with a free LinkedIn account can read them all here.
Based on [...]

Here’s a question that came in to LinkedIn about the climate for E-Marketers. The bottom line is that it’s tough for everybody and every industry right now, there’s just that much more competition from the newly-unemployed (ahem, “self-employed”), and that much less money to go around. Even so, there are opportunities, which I speak to [...]