Did You Know-You Should Be Using Anaytics

If you have a website, you should be utilizing some form of analytics to track activity and traffic. If you have a storefront, you very likely could tell me approximately how many people come into your store on a daily basis and how much your average customer spends, right? Your website should be the same way, you should be looking at analytics at least weekly. See how long people are on your site, what pages they are viewing, etc. This tells you what’s working and what you need to change.

The beauty of analytics is that basically have a survey of what your customers think right in front of you. If your bounce rate is 85% your customers don’t like something about the home page. If they go into your inventory and spend a long time there they really like what they see. As a small business you need all the power you can get, and utilizing analytics helps harness that power.

Aren’t sure how to use analytics, need a website or a new website? We can help check us out at coppermoonwebdesign.com

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

SOPA and PIPA Aren’t Just About Piracy

I am so glad that 1/18/12 is over. I can’t tell you how many websites I regularly visit weren’t functioning normally due to the SOPA/PIPA protest. These bills heading towards congress next week, SOPA and PIPA are supposed to help stop internet piracy, but their are written in such a way that it could hurt the rest of the internet, and the web would perpetually look like it did yesterday. There is a potentially good alternative to SOPA and PIPA called OPEN, check out this chart below that compares the bills:

A Full Explaination of SOPA Can Be Found on SearchEngineWatch.com

TheOatmeal.com was blacked out yesterday, but had a video running instead of their usual website (if you are easily offended do not proceed to the video in question) in the video they said “This is like dealing with a lion escaped from the zoo by blasting some kittens with a flame thrower!” There are better ways to deal with piracy than by passing a bill that is so poorly written that it could potentially shut down any website accused of copyright infringement without due process.

The lawmakers writing these bills did not have a solid understanding of the ramifications. As it has become more clear to them with the outrage over the last several days that it’s a bad thing, the SOPA train has been losing steam. Many of the supporters, even co-sponsors of the bill have withdrawn their support. Many of the Hollywood companies, Time Warner and such are backing it because they are losing millions to pirated material, they deserve a good bill that protects them and their intellectual property, but not at the cost of millions of websites and blogs that would be censored under this new legislation.

If you are in favor of an open internet without censorship make sure that your voice is heard, sign the petition and call or write an email to your congressman asking them to oppose the bill, or if they already oppose it tell them thank you.

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

Why are SOPA and PIPA so Bad?

SearchEngineLand.com along with other resources have been helping webmasters and SEO firms prepare for today’s protest of the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation. Wikipedia and Reddit are some of the biggest names going black for the day.

WordPress and Google’s hompages have been altered to show their solidarity.

Google’s Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst announced that they would be slowing down GoogleBot’s crawl activity to reduce the effects of the blackout on a sites SEO standings.

Pierre Far posted the following on his Google+:

Hello webmasters! We realize many webmasters are concerned about the medium-term effects of today’s blackout. As a precaution, the crawl team at Google has configured Googlebot to crawl at a much lower rate for today only so that the Google results of websites participating in the blackout are less likely to be affected.

Floating around Twitter, Facebook and accessible from Google’s homepage is a petition to tell congress that we don’t want this kind of censorship on the web. I’ve seen online people saying “Well shouldn’t Wikipedia and Google want to stop piracy?” All of these sites and those supporting this want to stop piracy, but the legislation needs to be rewritten, as it stands it could cripple the internet with far too much censorship. This post from Stumble Upon’s blog gives a good overview of why so many websites are against SOPA and PIPA.

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

Search, plus Your World

If you are a part of Google+ you have probably seen Google’s push for you to use Search Plus Your World. As rolled out on Google’s official blog on January 10, 2012, Google has announced that when you utilize this type of search you are going to get the following features:

1. “Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community. “

But this new method of searching is under much scrutiny, as PCMag.com reports. Google’s new search results could warrant an FTC probe. Critics are claiming that Google is favoring its own networks over its competitors. This goes against Google’s initial mission, which was to bring the most relevant results regardless of the network. They have claimed since day one that they would provide the most relevant results, so does this cross that line? This new search could exclude blogs not under Google’s Blogger, and block out other sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Do you think this new search crosses a line? Are you using the new search method?

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

 

Classic Cooking and Sewing Goes Digital

The Finishing School, a private academy specializing in teaching homemaking arts to children and adults, has launched a new website developed by Coppermoon Web Design. The new site includes a full content management system giving full site control to the School’s staff to add content without programmer intervention. Custom produced video explains the School’s offering and franchise opportunities. An eCommerce component features online class enrollment and credit card processing, enabling easy student interaction. A mobile version of the site is optimized for iPhone, iPad, and Droid based devices. Coppermoon hosts the site on secure, high speed servers, with analytics to determine site visitor behavior.

As The Finishing School expands through franchising, the new site showcases class offerings and will be the basis for supporting new locations. Visit the site at LearntoCookandSew.com

Coppermoon Web Design offers website development, mobile enabled sites, eCommerce functionality, content creation, search engine optimization, internet marketing, social media management and YouTube campaign with video production. We deliver websites that bring our clients new customers, patients, members or donors using a holistic approach to internet marketing.

For more information visit us on the web coppermoonwebdesign.com or YouTube

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

Great Trailer, Bad Movie

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away my wife & I went to a movie.  I don’t remember what the film was, but I do remember the trailer for a future attraction called “Star Wars”, billed as the ‘story of a boy a girl and a universe’… really!  As we and the rest of the audience watched the trailer in disbelief, it looked corny to say the least.  It was like a bad kids’ cartoon plot mixed with ‘Star Trek”.   We all laughed and hooted, then I said to my wife, “That’s one we’ll miss!”  Needless to say, the movie was better than its trailer.

Sadly, the ‘Star Wars’ experience was the exception.  There are countless bad, bad movies with great trailers.  The Hollywood marketing machine has become expert at creating fantastic trailers to lure us in, only to endure such torture as “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” or “Howard the Duck” (yes, both real and bad movies!)

In today’s world, your website is where you tell your story. It’s your feature film and your web marketing, and SEO is like your trailer.  If you’re like most companies, your marketing department works hard on Search Engine Optimization to bring more people to your website.  They write blogs, post on Facebook and Twitter, sends press releases and pay for Google Adwords.  But what do visitors see when they go there?

Are you telling your story in a compelling way that engages each visitor?  Do they pick up the phone or order or hire you from your website?  Are you showing a great trailer but a bad movie?

If you blow it, your visitors will look for competitors.  And in a mouse click, they’ll be ‘Gone with the Wind’.

-Coppermoon President, Rod Garlick

How Does Your Customer Find Info About the Community?

Pew Research Center recently released a study on how people learn about their local community. As a business owner this information is very important when determining what your local marketing strategy should be. The study revealed media habits based on demographic, not surprisingly over 40 relied on more traditional forms of information, where as the younger crowd turned to the internet. This information comes directly from the study:

“If someone is under age 40, she tends to get the following kinds of local news and information from the following

• Internet: weather, politics, crime, arts/cultural events, local businesses, schools, community events, restaurants, traffic, taxes, housing, local government, jobs, social services, and zoning/development
• Newspapers: crime, arts/cultural events, community events, taxes, local government, jobs, social services, zoning/development
• TV stations: weather, breaking news, politics, crime, traffic, local government, and social services
• Radio: traffic
• Word of mouth: Community events

If she is 40 or older, she tends to get the following kinds of news in the following places:

• Newspapers: politics, crime, arts/cultural events, local businesses, schools, community events, restaurants, taxes, housing and real estate, government activities, jobs, zoning/development, social services
• TV stations: weather, breaking news, politics, traffic, crime
• Internet: local businesses, restaurants”

The information reveals a great deal, not only about having a web presence from your website, but other sources such as review sites like “Urban Spoon” or “Yelp.” Read the full study report here on PEWinternet.org.

If you aren’t reaching your local audience with your online presence let us know, we can help!

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

The Panda Change, A Year Later

We are coming up on a year since the Panda algorithm changes rolled out, focusing on cracking down on content farming. The Google algorithm change known as Panda has been updates several times in the last year to tweak the algorithm, but has it worked? University of Glasgow scientist Richard McCreadie addresses the results in an article in the NewScientist.

In a test to see how successful the search engines were doing in the war on content farms McCreadie ran 50 searches known to be a target, the results were run in March and then again in August of 2011. Then he had the results examined for links to sites whose primary function was to display advertising rather than providing high-quality information on the subject at hand. The results showed that the top 10 sites in March, which were rather poor quality and full of ads, had disappeared and high quality pages replaced them in August.

Amit Singhal, a software engineer at Google and Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, explained how Panda finds low quality sites, in a March interview with Wired:
Singhal: We wanted to keep it strictly scientific, so we used our standard evaluation system that we’ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”
Cutts: There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?” Questions along those lines.
Singhal: And based on that, we basically formed some definition of what could be considered low quality. In addition, we launched the Chrome Site Blocker [allowing users to specify sites they wanted blocked from their search results] earlier , and we didn’t use that data in this change. However, we compared and it was 84 percent overlap [between sites downloaded by the Chrome blocker and downgraded by the update]. So that said that we were in the right direction.

This is great news for those doing white-hat SEO. As time goes on a new black-hat culprit will emerge but for now, the Panda has saved us!

 

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

2011 Year in Searches

What did we search for in 2011?

New Years Resolution, Be Found Online

Make your 2012 New Years Resolution to be found online! I don’t know if you’ve heard on social media and even the news information on how to opt-out of the phone book for eco-friendly reasons. This makes an interesting social statement, the phone book is out the web is in! The phone book used to be the place to be found. If you wanted to make yourself known to your potential customers you bought advertising space in a phone book, some people are still shelling out hundreds of dollars a year on this. Besides your grandpa, who was the last person to find a mortgage broker, lawyer or credit union in the phone book? Why would they when all they get in the phone book is the most basic ad as opposed to pages of info on a website?

If you aren’t utilizing a website, you should consider investing the money you would have put into print advertising into building and optimizing a website. You need to consider also not only should you have a website, but a mobile site as well as we have seen an increase in mobile usage. Help your customers find you, don’t lose out to competitors.

Wishing you a very safe and Happy New Year!
From Your Friends at Coppermoon Web Design

Coppermoon is a full service Web Design & SEM firm which aims to help businesses compete in this digital age. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates.