May 2011 Archives - InsideOut Solutions

Oprah, QR and Me

May 19th, 2011 by Pat McCauley

Scan the InsideOut Solutions QR code with your Smartphone now!

One very rainy Sunday afternoon I decided to browse through the newest O magazine. I like O, The Oprah Magazine because Oprah and I have several things in common: we are the same age, we both love Maui, we both battle with weight issues and we are both CEOs of our own company. The similarities, however, end there. She is the ultimate marketing genius, and I am just in marketing. When she speaks, I need to listen.

O, The Oprah Magazine keeps me familiar with big city trends and the opinions of affluent women from all demographics. Reading it is a pleasurable form of work. My pre-reading ritual is to cull the magazine of its double-sided advertisements, which makes the 216-page magazine more manageable. On the rainy Sunday in question, I pulled out 58 pages and reviewed them before tossing them into the recycle bin. While doing so, I noticed that something was missing. Of the 113 advertisements, only 3 had been QR coded.

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Claim Your Online Business Listings: Part 1 – Google, Yahoo! & Bing

May 18th, 2011 by Shawn Kerr

This is the first of a series of blog posts that will focus on helping you take control of your online business listings to help protect your reputation and increase the search engine visibility of your website.

Chances are you have a website for your business. If you’re an innkeeper, you probably have free and/or paid directory listings that link to your website. You may have taken steps to broaden your online presence with “on-site” activities such as blogging on your website or “off-site” in social media such as Facebook or Twitter.

Even if you’ve done most or all of the above, there is still a major piece missing from your online marketing strategy: claiming your business online.

By claiming your business on a variety of targeted search engines, directories and review websites, you:

Protect your business listings from being the victim of “online business hijacking.”
Potentially increase the visibility of your website in the search engines.

Wait, what was that about hijacking my business?

“Hijacking” an online business listing is anyone other than a business owner or proxy claiming that business listing.

This type of hijacking is often done by spammers, but may also be perpetrated by dissatisfied customers, disgruntled employees or unscrupulous competitors.

While most online business listing claims require a verification process, which cuts down on the possibility of just anyone coming along and claiming your business, determined individuals will not find it that difficult to work around these systems to take control of your listings.

How will submitting these business claims help me in the search engines?

When you claim your business, you are submitting an official citation about your business, which creates “off-site” sources of information about your website that the search engines find valuable. Most submissions allow you to include a website address. The website address entries become links to your website. These can help increase the search engine rank of your website.

OK, sounds like I need to take control of this sooner rather than later. Where do I start?

Before you begin claiming your business to create these citations, you will want to keep the following in mind:

Always use the full business name
- Do not add anything, such as a tag-line, keywords, etc. to it.
- Do not use shortenings or symbols, such as B&B or Bed & Breakfast, if the full name includes “Bed and Breakfast”.
Be consistent in the contact information you provide to all listings.
- Use your street address and be sure to enter it correctly (e.g. “Main Street East” is not the same as “East Main Street”).
- List your local phone number as the primary phone number in the format: (123) 456-7890
Choose multiple valid business categories.
Be prepared to verify your listing (usually by phone call or mail).

Local Search

Local search, the use of specialized search engines to find businesses based on location, has emerged as one of fastest growing sectors in internet search. Mobile devices have driven much of this growth as more providers experiment with providing local search capabilities.

First up are the major players in the local search market: Google, Bing and Yahoo!.

Claiming your business on these three search engines ensures you are laying a good foundation for protecting the online reputation of your business and increasing its visibility in the online marketplace.

Future posts on this subject will include the steps to claiming your business with other important search engines, directories, and review websites. Following that will be posts that focus on how to make the most of your listings once you’ve claimed them.

Is Your Site Up-to-Date with the Latest Web Technologies and Standards?

May 6th, 2011 by Kailey Lampert

The web is growing fast, and new tools and techniques are being used all the time. When it comes to what’s online, it only takes a few years for what was once new, to become outdated. So how can you tell if your website needs a checkup?

Sites that take advantage of today's smallest average screen size have space to show off larger photos

How wide is your site?

The average screen size today is larger than it was five years ago. This means that if your site was built in 2006, there’s probably some unused screen real estate you could take advantage of now.
If your site can be widened, this means that there could be room for larger photos. Plus, you might be able to sport a nice multi-column layout that’s not too cramped; these sidebars can be a great place to post positive reviews or quotes, as well as call-to-action buttons.

Does your site have a “table-based” layout?

Once upon a time, it was common practice to build a site using a “table-based” structure. This was a great way to control the layout of your site – you could control columns as you would in a spreadsheet. However, this is not the way modern sites should work. Why? Those sorts of layouts are much more difficult to maintain over time since a lot more code goes into building the layout. More code means longer page load times – something that search engines now take into consideration when ranking a website. Lastly, it’s not correct syntactically, meaning that tables should be used for “tabular data” like comparison charts, or the sort of information you might put into a spreadsheet.

Are your main links image-based or text-based?

Did you know that there are only a handful of internet or “web-friendly” fonts? With current technology, we can expand that number, but in the past, the only way to use a non-standard font was to save your text as an image. This might seem pretty harmless because humans can still read it even though it’s an image of text. But here’s the problem: search engines aren’t human. Granted, search engines seem to be getting smarter all the time, but there’s still a limit to what they can “read”. If your text, and especially important links, were created as images the search engines can’t “read” what your pages or links are about, which may reduce the link’s relevance and ranking.

Sites that depend on Flash may not render correctly in some places

Does your site depend on Flash?

There’s no denying that Flash animation, when done well, is very eye-catching. But there are some things to consider, for example, Google’s relatively new site preview ability (that magnifying glass next to some of your search results). Google will attempt to get a snapshot of your site so visitors can quickly tell if this is what they’re looking for. But it can’t (at least not yet) capture Flash. Instead, it’ll replace what should be Flash with a gray block and a puzzle piece. Secondly, the ever-present iDevices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) do not support Flash. Fortunately, many effects that were once only possible with Flash can now be mimicked using other methods like JavaScript. For example, simple features, such as a header slideshow or photo galleries, are implemented easily in JavaScript. These two websites use JavaScript to make their slideshow run: Inn and Spa at Cedar Falls and the Oregon Bed and Breakfast Guild

How can you tell where your site stands?

If you’re not sure how your site measures up to the modern standard, and if you’re interested in finding out, contact InsideOut Solutions at info@insideout.com to request a free report. In a week or less, we’ll review your site and let you know how it stands, and what steps you can take to bring it up to date. Please write “Website Standards Review” in the subject line of your email request.

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Monthly Archives: May 2011

Oprah, QR and Me

Claim Your Online Business Listings: Part 1 – Google, Yahoo! & Bing

Wait, what was that about hijacking my business?

How will submitting these business claims help me in the search engines?

OK, sounds like I need to take control of this sooner rather than later. Where do I start?

Local Search

Google Places

Bing Business Portal

Yahoo! Local

Is Your Site Up-to-Date with the Latest Web Technologies and Standards?

How wide is your site?

Does your site have a “table-based” layout?

Are your main links image-based or text-based?

Does your site depend on Flash?

How can you tell where your site stands?

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