South Florida Web Marketing Blog

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A friend of mine sent an e-mail about Sam Walton and his 10 Rules of Success. I felt these 10 rules were essential for any business in this time of economic instability.

The basics …

Rule #1
Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anything else. If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do the best you can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you – like a fever.

Rule #2
Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.

Rule #3
Motivate your partners. Money and ownership aren’t enough. Set high goals, encourage competition and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous payoffs.

Rule #4
Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors.

Rule #5
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.

Rule #6
Celebrate your success and find humour in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up and everyone around you will loosen up. Have fun and always show enthusiasm. When all else fails put on a costume and sing a silly song.

Rule #7
Listen to everyone in your company, and figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front line – the ones who actually talk to customers – are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know.

Rule #8
Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want – and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes, and don’t make excuses – apologize. Stand behind everything you do. ‘Satisfaction guaranteed’ will make all the difference.

Rule #9
Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.

Rule #10
Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction

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Michael W. Kublin
President PeopleTek, Inc.
Creating Successful Leaders
(888) 565-9555 Ext 711
WWW.PeopleTekcoaching.com

How would you like it if you found your website duplicated on someone else’s website?

What if they copy your Titles, Descriptions and Keywords!

It will make you made as hell! There are ways to post content from other websites along with links to the other website that aids in the link building process, but not in this case. These people are thieves!

Well, I found such a company today and I am appalled at what they did.

Not only did they copy every single word from my website, they stole my Title, Description, and Meta Keyword list. Essentially, they stole my website ID as far as the search engines are concerned. When I did a search on my domain, I saw my title on their domain link!

Now if that was not bad enough, they claim they are offering a rating system for your website, while advertising all over the web page with Google Adsense ads of competitors!!!!

I have already notified their web hosting company, I documented everything and contacted my attorney.

If you work as hard as I have, to get your website ranked, you will realize how much time, effort and money it takes to get decent rankings. Now I find my all my content and website is being duplicated. They are using a narrow frame to allow people to view my website while is not a link, but another effort to steal my images and content to display in an unauthorized way on their website.

There is an important note: please realize that if you are conducting link building program, many times you may be giving people the right to use your content from your website.  I never submitted my website to this site! They use a web page harvester to steal content, including the meta data.

Fortunately, there is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

General Highlights:

• In general, limits Internet service providers from copyright infringement liability for simply transmitting information over the Internet.
• Service providers, however, are expected to remove material from users’ web sites that appears to constitute copyright infringement.
• Limits liability of nonprofit institutions of higher education — when they serve as online service providers and under certain circumstances — for copyright infringement by faculty members or graduate students.
• Requires that “webcasters” pay licensing fees to record companies.
• Requires that the Register of Copyrights, after consultation with relevant parties, submit to Congress recommendations regarding how to promote distance education through digital technologies while “maintaining an appropriate balance between the rights of copyright owners and the needs of users.”
• States explicitly that “[n]othing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use…”

It is this point – that I want to emphasis:

• Service providers, however, are expected to remove material from users’ web sites that appears to constitute copyright infringement.

Copyscape can save you a load of aggravation and help you locate duplicate content from your website. There are also a good set of guidelines to use in the event you do find a copyright issue:
http://www.copyscape.com/respond.php

You can also contact Google that will remove offending websites and they do follow the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as long as you contact them in writing or by fax.
http://www.google.com/dmca.html

Steps you should take in the process of resolving this type of issue:

1. Contact the Website owner and ask to have it removed – if you can
2. Immediately notify the Hosting company and explain in detail what you found (you can use a whois)
3. Contact your attorney and document the copyright issue
4. Send Google a written notification of the event

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The offending website, which I will not list, can be blocked using their IP Address. You can prevent this illegal listing – using your htaccess file.

simply add:

deny from 66.40.10.24

They have on their main web page that they have over 5 million websites in this illegal content stealing ranking process along with Google Adsense ads.

I will not promote or post their website, but you can e-mail me and I will reply with it if you want to check if your website is there.

Now let’s talk about the parts you don’t see.

The following components are part of the validation process and are required for search engine optimization:

DOCTYPE
Refers to “document type declaration”. The top of every web page must have one to be W3C compliant. The DOCTYPE informs the validator which version of (X)HTML you’re using. DOCTYPEs are essential for compliant web pages, your markup and CSS won’t validate without them.

meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=
Indicates the type of data sent to the browser. It is used by browsers to know what to do with the data that they receive.

TITLE
To identify the contents of a document. Keep it short and sweet no more than 9 words

meta NAME=”description” content=
Each web page needs a unique Title and Description. Do not duplicate web pages. Use no more than 40 words or 3 sentences.

meta name=”keywords” content=
Unfortunately this meta tag does not have much emphasis anymore. Although I recommend to use it with no more that 10-20 keywords. I use it as a point of reference of what possible keywords are on that page.

Menu system
A menu system can make or break a web site. I prefer CSS based menus because they are text based and can be spidered easily. If you do you do use a graphic based hyperlink menu with rollovers, I suggest to use a text menu system at the bottom of the page so you can still get the same links spidered with text names. It is so important to think about your menu structure before you do anything. Avoid going more than 3 levels and dynamic links are spidered as well.

Tags – H1, H2, H3, Bold, Italic
Use your tags liberally. Enhanced text seems to get a little more emphasis, Especially the H1 tags.

Hyperlinks
Hyperlink your keywords on every page to other pages on your web site. The search engines give you bonus points for doing this.

Alt Tags
If you do use images be sure to fill in the alt tags, although these do not have very much emphasis as they use to due to keyword stuffing by many web developers.

Good luck with your SEO

-=Smitty=-

Want to market your web site?

Most people think that if you build a web site people will come. I have spoken to people that believed this. Owning a web site is like owning a business. You need to do something to market and promote it.

Here are my thoughts that can help you realize your marketing avenues. First, you need to review your website for the following:

1) Content – Content is the most important step in getting your business noticed. You need to have information that people are searching for in relation to a product or service. I would use at least 250 words per page. As far as search engines go, the more content the better. You want to keep the web page readable by your audience, so too long is not a good thing. It may turn off your readers if it’s about 10 pages long! Try to add 1 page per month and update the information on your main page as often as you can.

2) Menu Layout – Be sure that the web site has an easy to use menu system. I have found that text based links have an advantage over graphics based hyperlinks. You can perform mouseovers with both graphics and text based hyperlinks, but text based hyperlinks carry more weight because the search engine spiders can read them more easily. Hyperlinking also tells the spiders to read those links as well. Graphic based hyperlinks may not have the alt tags (the text description) to gain any relevance. Even if the alt tags have text, the alt tags seem to have less importance because too many web sites like to keyword stuff the images in the alt tags.

3) Web page layout – Balance your graphics and text on a web page. Try to have your layout look professional. You should look at other web sites to get ideas before a single minute is spent building the web site.

4) Web page loading – Keep in mind, that if your web page takes too long to load, then you need to review what size your images are and if you really need them. All the images need to be optimized (reduced in sized yet still look good), all the code needs to be checked to see if there are any problems as well.

5) Do you have your contact information on every page? You don’t want to visitors hunting for your contact information. You should have at least your phone number, company name, address, city, state and zip code on every page. E-mail addresses are important, but due to all the e-mail harvesters out there, which will send you tons of spam, I would recommend an encrypted e-mail link or a well developed form page (one that will accept information from your web site only).

6) Hyperlink keyword phrases in your page to other web pages in your web site. This is called interlinking. The search engine spiders look for links connecting your web site and if you use the keywords to hyper link you can increase the likelyhood that these links will be found in the search engines. Highly recommended.

7) If you are using CSS or JavaScript, create separate files and add those files to the web page. Sometimes the different search engine spiders have issues with CSS and JavaScript. They can actually block the spider from seeing your whole web site.

Be sure that your web site is W3C compliant http://validator.w3.org/ . Search Engines are getting more sophisticated. The websites that have less errors in the html code seem to do better in ranking than those that have errors.

9) Check your grammar and spelling. Again, the search engines are getting smarter as they evolve in their algorithms. It has been rumored that search engines are using spell checkers and can also check the basic sentence structure.

10) If you are collecting information or have a contact form consider having a privacy page. A privacy page tells the user what you will do with their contact information. Obviously, you want to protect all customer contact information.

Check back for part 2
Until then – good luck in your SEM

-=Smitty=-

It’s time we all do our civic duty to help contribute in the political process. So please find out who is running for the local and federal government offices. Do your part and Vote!

To Find you Supervisor of Elections in Florida
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/SOE/supervisor_elections.shtml

Broward County Supervisor of Elections
Brenda C. Snipes, Supervisor
115 S. Andrews Avenue, Room 102
P O Box 029001
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301
Phone: 954-357-7050
Fax: 954-357-7070
Email: Elections@browardsoe.org
Web Address: http://www.browardsoe.org

District Maps
http://election.dos.state.fl.us/district-maps.shtml

Florida House of Representatives – District Maps

Florida Senate

US Congressional Districts

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To Find Your Legislators

Sample Result:

The ZIP Code 33328 was found in Broward County.

It corresponds with the following districts. To verify district assignments or get further information about voting districts and precincts in your area, contact your county’s supervisor of elections.

Click on a Senate district number to go to the Senator’s home page.
* State Senate – Districts 31 and 34 ….. Florida Senators …… District Maps
* State House – Districts 97 and 100 ….. Florida Representatives ….. District Maps
* Congressional – Districts 20 and 22 ….. Members of Congress ….. District Maps

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Use the above links to find out whom is running or who is the incumbent. The more you know when it’s time to vote – the better chance we will have the right person doing the job.

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To read about the new Florida Amendments

The Amendments on the Ballot

World’s biggest spam operator shut down
By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — The world’s largest spam e-mail operator has been silenced.

Federal authorities say they’ve shut down HerbalKing, a global spam gang responsible for billions of spam messages promoting prescription drugs, “male-enhancement” pills and diet pills. On Tuesday, a federal court in Chicago, acting on a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission, ordered a halt to its operations, pending trial. A federal judge said HerbalKing engaged in spamming and deceptive marketing.

The complete story….

Chalk one up for the good guys!

I talk to clients everyday to explain what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) entails and why you should hire someone like us to do it.  Optimization is the way to prepare your web pages to be interpreted by the search engines for keyword terms to help their visitors to locate what they are looking for.

When a website is submitted to a Search Engine, the search engine will schedule a scanning process to visit that website.  That scanning process is characterized by a search engine sending a piece of code called a bot or spider. The spider will read through every line of code and trace each hyperlink to each web page.

Once a site is scanned, the search engine will index all the information that it collected and place it in the enormous databases of accumulated information. It is this indexing that the optimization is most effective.  The indexing process will crunch your website information to provide your ranking results and of course, you want the highest ranking results for your website.

The 10 Reasons to Optimize with us:

1. Conducting a keyword analysis to locate the best fitting keyword phrases. Using the best keyword phrases will attract the right type of traffic.
2. We check your web page code for errors – This can cause browsers to view your content differently and affect some search engine spiders in a negative way – sometimes stoppng the spider in it’s tracks and not scanning your whole web site.
3. An optimized web site will provide better information for the search engines. Optimized pages makes your web pages far more effective and informative for the search engines.
4. You will avoid having duplicate titles & descriptions on each web page – each web page will have unique information. This is the web page information displayed by the search engines when someone gets a search engine result page (SERP).
5. Use the correct tags in the proper places that will help the ranking process.
6. An optimized web site will have a menu system that will be easy for the search engine spiders to read the whole website.
7. To have a sitemap for all the web pages on your website. This makes it easy for your visitors to locate a web page easily and the search engines to locate all your web pages
8. To insure that there are interconnecting hyperlinks of the keyword phrases between web pages.
9. We have over 10 years of Web Design experience & over 5 year of Web Optimization & Web Marketing.
10. Over 15 years in the Corporate world with superior skills in Marketing & Technology

When you optimize your website, you will have a site that can be found by customers searching the Search Engines to locate your products or services. Web site Optimization is an essential asset that any serious company must conduct and have as a cornerstone of their marketing effort.

Building a website is only half the battle – you need a marketing plan for that web site to make it a functioning asset.

• Proper Web Site Optimization = Ranking Results
• Ranking Results = Web Site Traffic
• Web Site Traffic = Sales, Inquires, and Revenue