In the news, The Redlands Daily Facts reported today,

“REDLANDS - Redlands-based RedFusion Media was named the Inland Empire’s best Web design and content management firm for the second consecutive year.” Read the complete story here, http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/ci_9540428

One of the practices that most SEO experts overlook when placing your website links into other sites, is that they focus on your industry, forgetting about your geography. One of the best ways to build links, is to build them locally though directories, organizations, and geographically focused sites. Years ago we started RedlandsWeb.com to gain traffic sources for our clients. We have since built a number of directory sites including InlandEmpire.US, and our clients benefit from the traffic and links to their sites. No other Inland Empire or Southern California SEO firms have built their own infrastructure to build authority for your site. So when reviewing SEO companies, make sure that they have a plan that includes their controlled sites, local search, and regional websites.

For more information on how you SEO plan should come together, find out how RedFusion Media’s Search Engine Optimization works.

Is “print” dead?  Clearly not, but there is a big adjustment in how we use print in our marketing and advertising campaigns.  Print is still a tactile tool that can drive people to your website, but due to the successful analytics you can find online, print is just not pulling its weight in many media outlets.

In a report, Eloqua’s “State of the Marketer”, online spending would continue to increase, with 90% of respondents stating they would increase their online budgets this year.  With the economy tight, the increase in spending will not come from revenue growth, but at the expense of print.  55% of the decision makers will decrease print ad spending over the next 3 years.

With all the new innovations still coming Email looks like the old granddaddy. But it still has plenty of spunk. In fact it dominates.

Email works, and marketers keep finding new uses. A new study supports previous ones; two-thirds of adult responders say they prefer email to other communications. They expect this to continue for another five years.  Well, most of us don’t know what we will be doing until we see what is new in the next five years, but that does not diminish email today.

If anything if points out that businesses should be using email much more than they do.

Here is how it stacks up.

Notible is the expected drop in postal mail and even the slight increase in the website. People like appropriate email that links into good websites with up-to-date information.

Cool new applications seen in the iphone like dragging files with your finger will come to a computer near you in the next 20 to 30 months. First seen in popular Sci-Fi movies, the reality will be spread up by the power of Microsoft. What does it mean to you the smaller business owner?

Even more use of the Internet and small computing devises. Newer slick interfaces will ultimately lead to new ways of using computers and the Internet. For those who thought we were done with the tech innovation, just look the last two postings for exciting things to come.

A major new initiative (reported by the Wall Street Journal will radically change the wireless landscape; it’s called WiMax. Really big companies such as Sprint, Google, Time Warner and Intel are jointing forces in a new broadband venture to expand coverage of wireless broadband connectivity.

Wifi can download about 1 megabit per second at from 100 to 300 feet. The new WiMax can reach you at 6 miles and download up to 5 megabits! This drastic improvement is sure to lower costs for infrastructure and thus consumers eventually.

What does it mean to smaller businesses? More access to your websites. As more laptops and cell phones have better access to the web, people will become even more dependent on Internet information. New kinds of devises will also be developed to fill the need to be connected all the time.

What do you do about it? Pay attention to your website with more zeal.

It seems like there are more SEO experts out there these days. Most do not know what they are doing, so you need to weed them out. Back in the dark ages of the Internet (pre-dot com bust), we had the same situation with Webmasters. The dime a dozen of Webmasters are now gone because the market matured. SEO has not matured yet, but you have a major advantage over the dark ages, we have Google. Google allows you to see exactly how successful an SEO expert is.

So the Golden Rule about SEO experts is that they must have a HIGH Google Rank on their website!!!

After all, Google Rank is what tells you the power of your page in relation to your competition. So, logically, your SEO professional should have a high page rank. How can you tell? Download a Google Toolbar, so that you can see the PageRank.

Once you have the bar loaded the Google Toolbar in your browser, go to the homepages of the guys you are looking at. Once there, you will see the rank, and if you want to know what the Google PagerRank means, here is a handy chart.

The annual survey of Television Bureau of Advertising (TVB) reports that the average adult spent 145.4 minutes online vs. 109.7 minutes last year. The gap with TV narrowed by over 30 minutes, TV viewership slipped (206 minutes compared with 246.7) last year.

This is a remarkable finding given that our TV habits are so engrained. Some polls have previously reported that some age groups (teenaged boys) were now online more than the time they watch TV. But the overall population shift is steadily following the boys.

Other significant changes include lower newspaper readership overall, but the differences in media use is striking as well. Newspaper readership for instance is less than 20 minutes per day for the 10-49 age group while it is 43.2 minutes for the over 65 crowd, less than 1/3 the time.

Other trends:
TV and newspaper viewership drops with higher income and education
Magazines are read more by the over 65 group but other groups are similar
Internet usage drops by age, but increases by income.
Cell phone usage among the 18-24 group is 4 time that of the over 55 age group

For years our biggest customer service problems have been generated by customers email issues. For the last few years, those problems have almost gone away with our use of Everyone.net email for our clients. We still get a number of questions about new accounts and setting up unusual email programs.

Here is a list of great resources for your email questions.

Everyone.net Email Setup (Outlook 2003) - Email Setup (Mac users)
Everyone.net Mail Status - If you are having issues connecting, check the server status.
Blackberry Setup for Everyone.net Users - NEW
Screen Shots of Outlook 2003 Setup
Screen Shot of Mac Mail
Email Setup - PDF - How to Configure Outlook Express (pre v.6)
Trouble Shooting - PDF - Troubleshooting Outlook Express (pre v.6)
Email Blocked? Are you leaving a email copy on the server?
Suggested Policy - Your Company’s Email Policy
Suggested HTML Coding - Java Script Email Scramble

As always you can check our Technical Support or contact us with more questions.

Not sure what the Bounce in your Analytics report mean? Bounces - think of this as jumping on your trampoline with your friend, and you bounce them right off, landing somewhere else.

If you website is getting too many “bounces” then maybe you are not, no, YOU ARE NOT communicating to your potential customers well. It is that simple. The surfer shows up to your site thinking you are one thing, you have a few seconds to show them your stuff, and they immediately turn around and leave. That could mean your site does not mean what the customer was looking for, or people were looking for something totally different, or it could mean you are very bad communicator in general.

Internet surfers in general are fairly driven to find the right information. During the dark ages of dial-up, we had a rule of thumb that viewers would not wait more than 8 seconds for a page to load. Page loading wait time has very little to do with communicating your product, it is simply a measure of efficiently. So in the modern high speed internet, people want a confirmation of what they are looking for in at least under 8 seconds. If they searched a keyword, they want confirmation NOW!

Common Sense about online Buyers: When was the last time someone walked up to Wal-Mart’s front door, walked in, looked around for 8 seconds and walked out? It doesn’t happen. People wanted “Wal-Mart”, they drove to Wal-Mart, and they shopped at Wal-Mart. Buyers generally know exactly what they are looking for online, they don’t window shop like they are mall.

Common Sense about online Surfers: Surfers are like you mother-in-law, shopping with your wife on a Sunday while you watch a football game. They drive to the mall, they walk all around, they may walk into some shops (or all of the shops), and they may buy one or two things. Generally surfers online will find your website, but they are not really your target buyer, so if your website does not show strong sales to visitors, then maybe you are inviting in the wrong buyers. Sometimes, visitors and views are a waist of your time.

Example: We have a great page on a local site about parks. We silo the page’s content to include every single park in the Inland Empire of Southern California. The problem is the page is on average the 4th highest ranked page on the site, and it has about a 75% bounce rate. In simple terms, we too highly keyworded on the word “park” for our market place. So we get a bunch of views, but no return visits, because the surfers are not in Southern California.