I returned to the office today after being away on vacation to find a letter and decal from Google recognizing our company as a “Favorite Place on Google.”  The letter reads in part Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I had a new client who has the word Roses in their name.  Though they have nothing to do with flowers or florists Google had them showing up highly for both in Google Maps for their area.

If you have a business name that could cause the search engine for Google local similar confusion, you should check to see if you’re showing up for terms you don’t want to appear for.  One easy way to do this is to go into your Google Local Business Center and see what terms your getting impressions for.  You can also, of course, look at your analytics.

I am sitting in Lakewood Colorado as I write this.  I’ve got a client here who is a real estate agent and so I googled Lakewood Realtor.  You’ll see in the image below that the results I got were for Lakewood Wa, Austraila!  Australia, what happened there?  Google should be using the searcher’s IP to help guide local results.

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Whent it comes to spam with WordPress and other blogging platforms there are generally two types, trackbacks and comments.

To deal with the trackback spam go to Settings > Discussion and make sure that “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” is unchecked. If someone wants to link to a page or post on the site they can grab the URL and paste it in. Doing this prevents spambots from blitzing your site with trackbacks.

To deal with the comment spam make sure that you have activated Akismet, it’s one of the two plugins that comes with WP by default and it is really good at catching over 90% of the spam. For example, on my blog out of the last 4861 comments I’ve had 4,713 spams caught by Akismet, it let through 148 legitimate comments, and missed only one with an overall accuracy rate of 99.589%. That’s good stuff.

The other plugin I recommend for stopping spam comments is SI Captcha Ani-Spam by Mike Challis. This puts a captcha on the login and/or comments.

Web site as a two word phrase is slipping into oblivion. Check out the chart below and then ask yourself what’s happening with the words that are key to your industry.

The best example of email marketing I’ve seen this month comes from my favorite local ski area Mount Hood Meadows.  What made it so special? Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t heard yet, one and one aka 1&1 is not a company that you want to be dealing with.  If  you’re unfortunate enough to have registered your domain name there or have hosting there, look out when you’re ready to make a change. Read the rest of this entry »