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Twitter is a Fad (But Include a Link Anyway)

February 8, 2011 By

I’ve been writing this since it was invented: Twitter is a fad. It’s something people try a few times and then abandon as fast as throwing out a candy wrapper. For most internet users… and I mean more than 99%, Twitter is a tool for idle chatting that will never get touched after the initial couple experimental uses.

There are people who Tweet all day every day and yes, it’s an important social media tool for them. Mostly people in that category are in technology and they have people from coast to coast listening to their every move. Guys like Brian Gardner – CEO of Studio Press. Brian tweets sometimes over a hundred times in a day but he is also communicating with a group of hundreds of other industry leaders and pundits and fans.

Other people use Twitter to gain a little more fame or pretend they integrated the latest technology into their daily lives. Right… like Oprah. She wanted to do a showbiz “impress the crowd thing” by bringing Ashton Kutcher onto her show to start her new Oprah Twitter page. Take a look a year and a half later at how Oprah integrated Twitter into Her daily life… hmmm let’s see, she used it on 5 days in the last 7 weeks. I wonder if that was even her tweeting.

Twitter has a very low retention rate. That means a lot of people try it and then leave it in the toybox forever. I’m not the only one saying it. Take a look at this BusinessWeek.com article called (can you guess?) Twitter is a Fad. Looks like the InternetNews.com has the same idea.

So now the real reason for this article. Ahhhhh !!!! I just did a search on Google and I was served a results page where ranking in at #2, #3, and #4 were tweets from unreliable “garbage” sources… “Twitter Trash“. Wow. Now why would I as a researcher want garbage results from an unidentified 18 year old with a twitter page taking up positions #2, #3, and #4 on a search engine results page? I would not is the answer. Then why is it happening? Google tests all kinds of stuff and I hope this is just a test. It would be a real mistake to compromise the quality and reliability Google brought to search with Twitter Trash. And I hope I don’t see it again. If I do see it again it’s a bad mistake on the part of the new kid running his own company – Larry Page. Please Google, Twitt away on you own personal time and leave the Twitter Trash out of our important research.

Since Twitter associations are apparently becoming part of the Google Algorithm, and because Oprah and a lot of SEO pundits are trying to create ways for them all to still have jobs, I have Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn icons on my website. I make them for all my clients now too. I tell them they will probably never use them, they will probably never get a job or a lead from them, but they look nice and Google wants them because they are playing with fads now.

Thanks !!

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: ,

1 Million Google Impressions

February 3, 2011 By

Affordable web design just hit another new milestone – a Web Design WorkPlace site is generating over 1 million Google impressions a month. CenturyCafe.com is a WordPress site designed by Web Design Consultant Mal Milligan on one of the original Studio Press Themes… when Brian Gardner called his company Revolution Themes. This site has some very impressive SEO stats:

  • over 50,000 unique visitors a year
  • 15% bounce rate – WOW !!
  • 15 GB of bandwidth a month with no video – Whoa !!
  • 95% new visitors
  • 1.2 million impressions in 30 days starting on January 1, 2011. That’s right… 1,200,000 impressions !! Go WordPress !
  • up to 30,000 impressions PER DAY in January
  • almost 1,000 high resolution photos on the site including a 400 image slideshow

This is from the Google WebMaster Tools Dashboard:

Check our Google Analytics Stats for January:

Now everyone must be wondering how much would that be worth in Google Adsense clicks? Actually we have not monetized the site with advertisements of any kind and we are seriously thinking about it now. So we are wondering that same question. The problem is that when I tried to use my all powerful main Google ID to login to Adsense, it would not let me.

Here is what happens trying to login to Google AdSense with my main ID:

So if I try to create a new Google AdSense account with my normal ID this is next:

And the drumroll please… will it work???

No. It sends me back into a never ending vicious circle of denial. It makes me think of Nancy Kerrigan… “Why, why, why”.

Well I used to be a bad boy I guess. Back in the day I made a lot of money with SEO before it was fashionable. Back in 2003 and ’04 and ’05. I eventually got my Google Adsense account suspended for experimenting with who knows what. Now that I have sites cranking out millions of impressions using pure White Hat SEO, I hope someone tells me how to get back in there to do some more experimentation. Good clean fun this time – yeah, like Gregg Allman with a brand new [donated] liver.

Otherwise I think I’ll build a new even bigger and better site and 301-redirect those links to the new site.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With: , ,

I have 10,000 Inbound Links

January 6, 2011 By

Thank You Google !!  (For reporting to me in my WebMaster Tools Account that I’ve finally exceeded 10,000 inbound links). I’ve been building websites since before FrontPage 1997 was released and I’ve dabbled with SEO ever since. But this is a very big milestone and I’m super STOKED right now. This is also the 101st blog post from this website. Wow !!

OK – Where’s the money?

Well – it never works out like that for the good guys in SEO.  For the bad guys… that 10,000 inbound links would mean a payday. That’s a huge amount of work, and for White Hat SEO’s the reward is higher PageRank usually. Maybe a bit more TrustRank as well. For the Black Hat SEO’s generating ten thousand inbound links would probably be worth something like $10,000 to $50,000 depending on the site, the genre, and the clicks they were generating. I’m just handing out SEO tips and Web Design ideas so it’s not really a payday for me. But I’m still TOTALLY STOKED !

Thank You Google!! This was nice.

Google used to have a reputation for not reporting all or sometimes even many inbound links it was aware of. The new WebMaster Tools control panel has a lot more information and some of it is supplied by Google Analytics if you have that installed. The bottom line is if you are a webmaster and you want to see stats you MUST have a nicely maintained WebMaster Tools account AND Google Analytics.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: , ,

Web Design WorkPlace SEO Example

January 5, 2011 By

On a handmade WordPress website done as a “work for food” project for a friend of the family, we are still achieving “over the top” results in 2011. For the phrase:

Manhattan Bakery

Our website http://centurycafe.com ranks #2 in the Google main index behind one of the most world famous bakeries in the world – the Magnolia Bakery. Now Magnolia has been on magazine covers for many years since it was featured in a popular T.V. series “Sex in the City”. It’s got almost 1000 user reviews displayed from the busloads of tourists that are dropped off there on a daily basis. The website we promoted is a small Chinese Bakery on Bowery Street between Grand and Hester.

  • there are a dozen world famous bakeries in Manhattan that all rank below the site we built for our friends
  • there are 6,000 web pages that Google reports with the phrase “Manhattan Bakery” in their title
  • we have never paid for a link or solicited any linking scheme ever

How did we outrank all those world famous bakeries in Manhattan?

  • The design is stunning and the high resolution food and architecture photography is the best you will ever see on the internet.
  • This website does 10 to 15 GIGABYTES of bandwith a month
  • We pioneered the website image feature “Click it 3 times to blow it up“. That means you can click any photo you see on the site and expand the high res image to the point where a single chocolate covered strawberry can take up your entire monitor in perfect focus with exquisite detail. You literally cannot stop your mouth from watering when you “Click it 3 times to blow it up” on some of our Web Design WorkPlace food photos.
  • We use WordPress so Google loves the site because of it’s internal linkiness and other technical features.
  • We used On Page SEO to carefully hand tune the search engine optimization
  • We built a website that has over 100 pages with over 1000 photos !
  • Google Images favored the site and promotes the images in their image directory. We get a lot of people to the site from Google Images
  • We have as many as 50,000 unique visitors a year

If you need a beautiful website for a restaurant or any small business and you need it to rank well on Google, Please use the Contact Form to drop us a note and we’ll be happy to discuss your unique situation and what we can do for you.

Cheers !!  Regards everyone – Mal Milligan

Filed Under: Learn About SEO, Learn About WordPress, Web Designer's Corner

Fighting Comment Spam

December 8, 2010 By

A week and a half after we described exactly how comment spammers work, one of the example sites has installed comment spam filters ! Bravo !! We wrote to the webmaster actually and whether it had anything to do with them installing the filters we will never know. Or if our article had any impact either. Only 3 to 30 unique visitors go to our site a day. But we are happy to show that it’s easy to stop spammers from tainting your otherwise respectable internet publication.

Cheers and so long spammers.

Web Design Workplace originally allowed comments but there were over 100 spamm comments dropped per day and it was an extra management chore to delete them that we did not have time for. So we went the route of providing interesting and valuable information but not trying to manage comments. Big publications with large staffs encourage commenting becasue they get lots of engaged readers that way. We engage readers with useful information and affordable web design.

Cheers !

Filed Under: Learn About SEO

Affordable Web Design’s First 20 Years

December 3, 2010 By

I was just talking about the last 20 years of affordable web design with my good friend and web design mentor Charlie Frederick, owner of LakeFront Media Inc., in Ramsey NJ. I’ve known Charlie for 6 or 7 years and he’s been building and selling websites for 20 years in Northern NJ. During that time I’ve mostly worked as a Senior Technical Officer at Fortune 100 firms on Wall Street – building and maintaining PC servers. But of course I’ve worked professionally with the leading edge technologies since 1985, and it was great looking back at the last 20 years in the history of affordable web design.

My first professional experience with the “internet” was using a dial-up called Compuserve to access Purdue University using a protocol called Gopher. That was around 1989 when I was a Technical Officer at the World Headquarters of Kidder Peabody in NYC. Compuserve allowed PC’s to dial a phone and access file sharing networks and eventually use email. Subscriptions cost 20 or 30 dollars a month but some of the higher speed file transfer options cost 5 bucks a minute back… then so it was corporate use only. But it was not until around 1993 when the Mosaic browser hit the street that the internet and the “World Wide Web” (WWW) took off. So prior to 1993 web sites were essentially file sharing systems and after Mosaic, they took the modern form and general appearance we know today.

In 1993, the internet, HTML hyper text markup language, and Mosaic combined to give birth to the first modern HTML based websites we are familiar with. Prior to that I witnessed a brilliant guy named Richard A. Lucas invent a language that was eerily close to the later development of HTML. He did it 6 years earlier too, in 1987. He called it “RAL” and it was an add-on library of Pascal language modules he created for Turbo Pascal. I believe Rich Lucas also invented the first system outside Microsoft facilities where he could make PC based programs that appeared to behave like “Windows”. So Rich invented his own “markup language” where he literally used “tags” to pull in programming subroutines, and they looked like “Windows” commercial applications. There were a hand full of brilliant programmers in the world working on similar projects, but the HTML markup created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and 1990 became the default language of the internet and modern web sites. Tim is known as the “Inventor of the World Wide Web”. Rich used to like quoting Tom Cruise lines, and I have to repeat a phrase from Cruise’s latest action movie Knight and Day to describe why Rich did not become one of the early giants in the industry, although unquestionably in my mind Rich Lucas did have the true genius level intellect to do it… it was “just one of those things”.

So after Mosaic was developed it quickly was commercialized by the initial software developers who were paid by the NCSA. They formed Netscape Navigator and Microsoft worked on their own proprietary version which became Internet Explorer. This has been one of the biggest problems facing web developers since the beginning. When we make a website using HTML, we have to make sure it is “cross-browser compliant”. That means the website will look and act the same whether it is being rendered by IE or other more popular modern browsers like FireFox. So right from 1993 it became almost a nightmare in some cases to build websites that were cross-browser compliant because Microsoft veered away from the standards that HTML was based on. But in the middle of all this… affordable web design was born.

In the mid 1990′s an average website would cost between $7,500 and $12,00 for a 15 page site according to Web Page FX. That was the beginning of affordable web design. And like the price of computer processing power and the price of RAM memory chips, the cost has gone down every year since then as development tools have become better. Now the average cost of a 15 page website is between $2,000 and $7,500 according to the same reference. But in reality there is a big difference in “play” websites and “professional” websites. The “Big Box” web design companies frequently charge up to $32,000 for a custom made 15 page website. And that’s exactly why Web Design Workplace was formed in the first place. Because web design should be affordable and prices should not be jacked up by hype and sales people who make a living on commission. Web Design WorkPlace IS affordable web design. We charge a fraction of average prices because we don’t pay for or condone the hype, and we don’t use sales people that work on commission.

So during our conversation, Charlie mentioned several times that “web design ain’t what it used to be”. That’s so true and Charlie’s the voice of experience talking. There are 10 times the number of businesses, and non-profits, and professionals that buy custom web design now. There are also so many providers of all different levels that the price range now is between $300 and $32,000 with every price in between being offered.

What’s affordable web design now?

Contact Web Design WorkPlace owner Mal Milligan to find out. Prices starting at $500. 201-696-5375.

Filed Under: Web Designer's Corner

Comment Spam

November 27, 2010 By

First of all, what is comment spam?

When you see a comment in a blog it could be a spam comment if it meets any of these criteria:

  • a hyperlink in that comment that has no relevance to the blog post,
  • the link is a “dofollow” link
  • the text in the comment appears “spammy” as if the writer did not even read the post and they threw up something totally generic and rather useless

Spam comments are like all forms of internet spam in that they take up valuable space and time and they contribute nothing. They are disingenuous tricks by spammers to increase their Google PageRank or to get more traffic.

There are surprising numbers of remarkably high quality internet publications that allow comment spam… to the detriment of their readers. Here is an excellent example of a top shelf site with a huge PR8 on their homepage that unfortunately allows comment spammers to drop spammy links until other readers flag them. Foreign Policy no less: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/

And note some of this comment spam garners a massive PR5 link back to the spam target site before other readers flag it. I’ll show you an example of that… a successful PR5 linkback from a spam comment. That is enough to trick Google into giving PR to the target site in many cases. Sometimes the spam is never flagged…

And these links are still passing PR as I write the article… http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/12/16/nauru_recognized_abkhazia

What does the Spammer get by dropping Spam Comments?

Here is why the “comment spammers” do it. One of the most important factors Google considers in “the Algorithm” for giving your web page “PageRank” is the inbound links to your page. Google looks at their PR (PageRank), their “anchor text”, and their “relevance”. Google only ranks your page based on “DoFollow” links (which pass PR to the target page) as opposed to “NoFollow” links which do not pass PR. So the more inbound links you have with high PR and high relevance, the higher the target page gets pushed in PageRank and in rankings for the key phrases that page are about. Sometimes even when a link is not really relevant, Google still credits the target page with “link juice” and that boosts their PR. So comment spammers just have to find the juicy unregulated spam spots to use Black Hat SEO successfully… although it is usually somewhat short lived it still works for a time.

Want some proof? Check this very successful spammer:

And here’s the goods on this Comment Spammer. They have dozens of PR5 spam comments and believe it or not, even up to PR7 spam comments.

This guy is a really good comment spammer – very prolific.

Now what does all this mean for Affordable Web Design and SEO?

When you hire a firm to work on your SEO, you must keep tabs on exactly what they are doing unfortunately. Some firms and even big box SEO vendors use comment spamming to temporarily boost your PR and they won’t tell you about it because it’s ethically wrong and it goes against the Google Webmaster Guidelines. When you ask them about the inbound links they are generating for your site they frequently respond that it is a “Proprietary Formula that they cannot divulge”. What it really means is that they are ripping you off and telling Google on the long run that you are a comment spammer. Yeah, Google is a little slow to recognize these tricky comment spammers in some cases. That’s why when I catch one competing with one of my clients, I report them using my Google WebMaster Tools account. So when Google verifies that these are non-relevant dofollow links and they follow a pattern of comment spamming, they downgrade the target page to PR0. Yeah !! The moral of the story is “don’t pollute the internet with comment spam”. Affordable web design and SEO are totally legitimate if you go to the right group… like us at WebDesignWorkPlace.com

Filed Under: Learn About SEO, Web Designer's Corner

When Can An Affordable Website Make Lots of Money?

November 24, 2010 By

When there are a lot of clicks for a group of related phrases on Google, and a firm has a website on Page One in the Top 10 Rankings for those phrases, they can get lot’s of clicks. If their landing page is compelling enough and there’s a good call to action, they can get lots of sales and therefore lots of money. When SEO companies like Web Design Workplace see a phrase that generates lots of clicks on Google, but the competition is weak, we call that an “SEO Jackpot“. So for a company with no website that happens to work in an area that has a jackpot phrase on Google, for a tiny investment into the web design and some SEO, that firm can get massive return on investment.

Here’s an example:

I was doing a little business in Manhattan today at a well known funeral home on the upper east side. This firm has been around for many decades and everyone in the neighborhood has probably been in there at least once. They don’t have a website after all these years. Their parent company uses a national referral website and in just organic search alone, they are missing out on a quarter million searches a year on just one phrase and it’s related derivatives. Look at these numbers and ask yourself if you would leave a quarter million clicks behind because you did not want to invest a few thousand dollars into a website and get it ranking on Google.

Wow. And it’s pure natural search. No PPC. It’s free qualified customers clicking away to the tune of more than 20,000 clicks a month on just this one phrase and some small variations including a reversal.

OK let’s look at the competition:

Wow – the second firm on the list below the directories is a PR1 !! Easy pickins. This is truly an SEO Jackpot. Affordable web design makes sense. It makes dollars and cents too. Especially when we find a well established firm with a large existing customer base and they don’t have a website and their main search phrases have lot’s of clicks and weak competition.

Filed Under: Learn About SEO Tagged With:

Making a Case for Affordable Web Design

November 22, 2010 By

I have a lot of friends in the web design business that think I’m crazy for charging only 500 dollars for a basic WordPress site. On some promotions I also throw in an additional $500 bonus… Google, Yahoo, and Bing / MSN local listings. They all charge a minimum of $2,000 for a website and an additional $500 for local listings with no discounts ever. So they do a lot less websites than I do but they charge a lot more. For essentially the same thing.

Web Design WorkPlace makes affordable web design for 3 main reasons:

  1. We sell to more customers and we get a lot of new business from people who were referred from existing clients or they saw the link.
  2. There is a great advantage to being very experienced building websites, we’re fast.
  3. Our customers are super happy with the incredible Value they got from working with us. And we’re happy to provide such a great product at a price that’s as little as 10% the cost of the big box rip-off artists.

The expensive web design companies have a lot in common. Many times they have a sales person who works on commission. That means they will try to get you for as much money as they can. The more they can get you to spend the more they make. They really could care less whether you need something or not, their focus and main drive is to sell more to make more. We are just the opposite. We only sell to customers who sign a contract and who pay up front. Our customers are almost always thrilled to get their site launched for a low price with tons of great features.

Expensive web design companies try to sell the same product at 5 to 10 times the normal price to make it appear to be more valuable! What a crock! A total lie and sales ploy. And with a lot of customers, it works like a champ. People pay big box vendors 30 grand every day for an attorney web site that we would give them for around $2,000. Take your pick but choose wisely. Same product… one costs X amount and the other is 10X. If you choose to spend 10X on a product that sells down the street for X, you won’t last too long in business.

Expensive web companies like to hook a client for a sale then they jack them up for all kinds of add on extras at additional costs. They try to charge for everything. Some charge $100 for hosting. So they just marked up their cost by 100 times or 1,000%. Wow !! Our company will be the first to tell you when you don’t need something. We give an expert opinion backed up with 25 years of Wall Street level performance.

Shop around with every web design company you can find then come back here and find out why Web Design WorkPlace is simply the best and why we have the best prices too.

Filed Under: Web Designer's Corner Tagged With:

Latest WordPress Site: StudioPress Executive

November 10, 2010 By

My friend Tim from the Sharp Shop in Midland Park NJ and I have been talking about websites for a long time. I’ve known Tim for about 25 years or so and he’s the best small engine repair man anywhere. His shop has had at least 10,000 customers since 1962. So I had a break in the action from doing attorney sites last week and I asked Tim if he wanted a new website and he agreed this would be a good time to do it.

We arranged a time to meet when his constant stream of customers would not be an interruption and we talked for over an hour. We mostly discussed his business and things I might design into the site. We looked at Google and he was not listed anywhere except for a reference in insiderpages which Google had picked up on and used to create a Google Places listing. So we agreed on the basic things Tim wanted in his website and set a price. Since this was a job for a friend or family member… Tim did not have to sign my new NOLO Creative Contract. I was going to do a lot of work for a small fee, but the exposure to other potential clients by doing a site for a place like the Sharp Shop was well worth the low price in money I was getting. Plus I owed Tim for all the good work he had done for my family for more than 2 decades. I might mention here that Tim was one of those rare customers that are very flexible and go into a first website without preconceived notions. He might be a perfect client in that regard.

So I picked the Studio Press Executive Theme because I’m constantly impressed by the clean lines and examples I have seen in the wild. I have mostly used the Lifestyle Theme followed by the Serenity in the Genesis Framework series but I thought the Executive would be a perfect match for the Sharp Shop’s identity. They are a Master dealer for 4 of the biggest landscaping power equipment vendors and they also sell many other brands… but the big 4 would all look nice right on the homepage of the Executive. In terms of the color selection I discussed with Tim that since he sold to landscapers and resedential homeowners in Northern NJ, we might pick a style that can be converted from fall colors to winter and spring. So I setup the site with that in mind. All the .psd files are carefully setup to allow new backgrounds and colors to be added.

After I got the basic site up on a test URL, I added placeholder images that I made in Photoshop with their sizes prominantly displayed to help me size out the design. Then I made a basic header file and started playing with colors. This is the part that takes me the longest. And I also need to ask others for their opinions a lot at this stage. My kids helped for an hour as I changed colors and found a combo that worked. This particular palette combo not only worked, but it really blended beautifully and immediately, the web design started to pop. I don’t know if there is an artistic term for that but it was a point in the project that I felt we were onto a beautiful design. Along the way I used Adobe Kuler a few times for suggestions but since I’m still on CS3 I can’t use it to it’s full advantage yet. Anyway it helped.And here is the final product:

So I can change the main image quickly because it’s a “featured image” on a WordPress page. Or I can replace it with WP-Cycle and replace the image with a slider window in the future. I can also change the header colors and the nav bar and the backgrounds on the content windows quickly in the future if we want a seasonal change. I circulated the link to 3 of my WordPress builder buddies and got a thumbs up from all my professional friends. More importantly, my client Tim was impressed and grateful. Now this front page is only a fraction of the work I did. I also did this:

Items Completed with new WordPress Website from Web Design WorkPlace:

  • 1. WordPress Installed on protected IP
  • 2. Studio Press Executive Theme Installed
  • 3. General Settings – no www
  • 4. Writing – Remote Publishing OFF for security reasons
  • 5. Discussion – users must be registered – commenting turned OFF for security reasons
  • 6. Permalinks setup for SEO – OK
  • 7. Minimum plugins installed, all from highly regarded industry leading authors
  • 8. Google Analytics OK
  • 9. Google Sitemap OK
  • 10. dB backups set @ 12 hours
  • 11. fresh posts export to XML
  • 12. fresh file system backup to PC
  • 13. .htaccess contents verified
  • 14. robots.txt verified
  • 15. favicon working OK and verified
  • 16. all files rights rights checked and verified
  • 17. Google WebMaster Tools verified
  • 18. Yahoo SiteExplorer verified
  • 19. Bing WebMaster Tools verified
  • 20. snippets for meta tags for all SE in Genesis header
  • 21. Google Places Local Listing Updated and Verified
  • 22. Yahoo Local Listing Claimed – Updated and Pending
  • 23. Bing Local Listing Entered – Used Mail Verification

So there is a huge difference in what you get when you go to different web designers. At Web Design WorkPlace we are at the very top of the pyramid in terms of getting it all done right. There is a tremendous amount of work in the background that a client never sees. Getting the site looking good for web surfers is only a small part of the work. Most of the work goes into the structure and operations aspects that drive rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN / Bing. A great looking site is absolutely worthless if the search engines don’t like it. So when you are looking for a great web designer make sure all the items in the background are covered too. And unless it’s a “friends and family” type job, get it all in writing and in a contract before the work is started.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: ,
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