With the sun starting to fall for the night, I snapped a few quick photos.   Nothing to impressive, but enough that it was able to give me something to play around with.  For amateur photographers out there, this quick tutorial is especially helpful to use lightroom to bring out some colors in your landscape.

My original shot is a bit overexposed in order to get enough light for the foreground.  A typical problem in this instance is that our sky no longer looked blue.  In addition, our colors simply are not all that vibrant looking.

Using lightroom, you can bring new life to your basic landscape scenery photos.  In about 2 minutes time, I take a rather boring looking photo and give it some new life.  The photo is not going to win any awards, but it certainly looks a whole lot better to share with friends and family.

Taking your advertising to the next level takes a lot of hard work.  There are so many things to think about.  You need a new website, you need to advertise on the Internet, on TV, on various online mediums.  In additional to all of these marketing expenses, you have some shoddy images that you continue to use over and over again in your marketing materials that do not truly represent your company.  You may be in for a great surprise, stock photography may just be the answer you were looking for help free up some of your marketing expenses in the area of digital photography.

Stock photography has grown and grown over the years to be of great value to web designer and online marketers.  The above photo collage is a sample stock photography set for a random Asian businessman.  Imagine you were an start-up company that is looking to present a face to the public that targets specifically the Asian community.  Of course you would want to have an Asian individual in your photos then.

Imagine you needed a friendly but firm facial expressing, to show warmth yet strong decision making skills.  Just like shopping for the right car can be easier online, finding the right stock photo for your company can be very telling to how you want to portray your business.

If you are in need of a professional photographer for your business, New Blood Media is there to take your professional photos.  However, do not be afraid to give stock photography a try?  You may find exactly what you are after in an image that perfectly represents your company, and will not cost you an arm and a leg to obtain.

This video was a well done video demonstrating thoughts on how top notch SEOs should be attacking their strategies for 2012.  Well, now that it is 2013, what can we learn from our expectations for 2012.

We have learned that many of the explained theories are correct.

Lets review what was mentioned in the list:

1. We should be developing back-links that are not only using our keywords, but also creating a variety of back-links that have only part of our keywords in them.  In addition, some links should simply have call to actions to sound more natural (such as click here).  We are finding the google’s algorithm still loves to see your desired phrase in back-links, however, if that is all they see, then that phrase will likely get devalued and you could see your site getting penalized.
2. Social media links are beginning to play a roll in driving Google’s algorithm.  While facebook and twitter are important to be aware of, google+ should not be ignored as Google is certainly trying to push their own brand.
3. Using more than 50% of un-original copy should be completely avoided.    Google is looking for original content and looking for your site to have a lot of it.
4. Search engines are focusing less on page rank than in years past.
5. Your page’s bounce rate is becoming more and more an important signal to google that your site is either offering something great that people are interested in, or your site is not offering the right content as people are bouncing away from your website way too quickly compared to your competing sites.
6. Fresh content plays a an even more important role than it has in the past.  Older content sites are getting pushed further and further down the list.

Out of the list mentioned, I see all of these factors continuing to play a strong role in the upcoming year.  2013 will be a year where companies are spending more and more dollars trying to reach their audience through search engine optimization.

An All in One Shopping Cart Solution with Little Product Support

The downside to using Interspire Shopping Cart, the product support is almost non-existent.  For that reason, New Blood Media has become a ‘savior’ to companies looking to get real support in a short period of time.  It is simple to get your shopping cart up and running, it very difficult to keep it running smoothly and securely with the constant changing hosting environments.

Timely Shopping Cart Support

Your business is supported by your online sales, it is simply not acceptable to have to wait two weeks for a response to your support question on Interspire.  Interspire is known to have some software complaints.  New Blood Media instead hears your problem and gets to work on your solution as soon as you give the go ahead.

Contact us now to get your problem reviewed right away!

For some reason, Yahoo’s Directory listings were having an issue recently with accepting submissions.  The error reported:

• database error – contact customer service

Please correct and resubmit your information below.

The problem is everything was submitted correctly.  Database error is not really a warning that we can take care of.  Not sure if this is a temporary thing or not.  I assume Yahoo is a big enough directory that they can have this taken care of shortly.  But in the mean time, what is the workaround?

As some may be aware, Google has recently added the pagespeed check (as a result of Google Caffeine and Google Instant) within their ranking algorithms.  This means that if your website is loading slowly (say above 3 seconds per page), Google is now going to be dropping the page ranking for the entire website.  With so much necessity being placed on being the first result of any search keyword or phrase, it has become even more important to keep your page load speed at its peak performance.  So while trying to make a buck or two sounds nice by adding infolinks or kontera as in-text advertising, it may be at a greater cost of lowering your SEO page rank.

The slower page load appears to be occurring from 2 or 3 external javascript files that are loaded to search the page and generate the ads.  The javascript files themselves run on the individual’s computer so it is not a matter of waiting for the scripts to run, it is simply the amount of time it takes to download these files from Kontera or Infolinks to the user’s computer (or search spider’s server).

We have run some split tests within some test websites.  The results went specifically with noticing page rank from Google.  One website found its way to a page rank of 4.  We then added infolinks and after 5 months, the page rank dropped down to 3.  Noticing this change, we then tested without infolinks for the next month.  After a month, the page rank of the site then again rose to page rank of 4.

The website statistics from Google noted a page speed average time drop in the month.  The average speed load still appeared high (comparitively), but it seemed to be low enough to take away whatever was dropping the page rank from the previous months.

These results may not be the same for everyone, but our experience has noted that the few extra bucks infolinks or kontera generate per day (or per month for some people) is not worth the hit Google is implementing for a slower page load.

The solution

1. Cry to Kontera or Infolinks and tell them to speed up their delivery services so that these javascript files are loaded quicker.  If their servers delivered these files simultaneously with your normal content download, there should not be any added delay in page load speed.  But because their servers sometimes add a lag time, there is a noticeable slowing in page speed when added Kontera or Infolinks.
2. Remove your in-text ads from your website.  The page ranking is way too valuable.  If you are a small business or an a aspiring blog writer, you want every advantage you can get, and there are much better ways to get money than holding your potential growth back with these drops in page ranks.

Is Google taking out its competition?

Google is not in battle with Infolinks or Kontera with their adsense publisher solution.  They have stated that it is fine to include both types of ads within your website at the same time without violating the terms.  But there are some that look to in-text advertising as an alternative to adsense.  Google knows this.  It may not be a direct part of their plan, but the fact that this new algorithm change effects those using Infolinks and Kontera in a negative way may not be something Google is going to lose any sleep over.  In fact, it may be cause for a few celebratory claps in their party rooms.

Page speed has become a vital part of your on page SEO optimization.  Learning basics such as in-text advertising javascript loading effects is just part of the transition in your site.

Update: November 23, 2011

I didn’t want to believe that it was indeed true the Infolinks was playing such a huge role on our Google page rank, so I once again did another test on a PR4 website and re-inserted the infolinks included javascript.  Two days later, I have checked our pagerank and it is already dropped to PR3.  Nothing else has changed in the website.  Yes, the site might be right on the edge of PR4 and PR3, but I am amazed at the impact Infolinks has on dropping the page rank so quickly.

Needless to say, the in-text advertising is once again dropped from the site and I will report back as soon as the pagerank is re-instated to PR4.

Update: November 28, 2011

5 days later, the pagerank is back up to 4 of the test website using in text advertising.  It is good to see that Google is adjusting the rankings rather quickly, but it is sad to see the negative impact that in-text advertising directly has on the overall site pagerank.  I guess we will be excluding it from our sites from now on.

So I was doing my normal blog writing this week, and as I was proofreading through one of my blog posts I noticed that I had mistakenly used the word “no” in a place where “know” should have been used.  I have to say that I may not be the greatest of spellers, but I have never had a hard time with using the correct forms of various like-sounding words such as two, too, to – or know, no – or pair, pear, pare.  As I thought about why this may have happened, it dawned on me that my texting is beginning to influence my brains typing process.

When you text (or in some cases tweet), you are going to be shortening your typing strokes and hope that the recipient will understand the meaning based on the context.  Many times, someone will “no” what I mean when I type the shorter version of the like-sounding word and therefore I choose to use the shorter version.  Since you are limited on the amount of characters you can use in a given message, you use a vast array of abbreviations.  Many times, it is just plain quicker to type the shorter version as well.

Is texting causing our content to suffer?

The one simple reminder that comes into place is be sure to proofread all of your emails, blogposts, and marketing materials.  Sure you can likely get the same point across with using the incorrect shortened form of a word, but on a medium that is not limited by characters, you should always use the correct form of a word.    Do not replace “you” with “u”.

Sure texting has become an extremely valuable medium for contacting individuals, but be sure to separate the quality of writing used in your texting life, with the quality of writing used in your professional life.  Your business’ image is dependent on everything you do in life, every email you send, every blog post you write.  Make sure that you market your image correctly with proper writing techniques.

Recently, a client came to us with a hard drive which they couldn’t get to function properly.  The product was the seagate goflex desk external drive that they had purchased from Costco a few months prior.  The hard drive had functioned properly, but it was formatted originally under NTFS file system and they were really trying to reformat the drive under Mac’s OS Extended format. But many different attempts weren’t allowing this to occur.  They could only get a fat32 format running and this severely limited the value of the hard drive. Not only that, the file system was now completely erased and they had no way of at least getting back the NTFS file system they had previously had working correctly.

Research into this issue showed others had gone through this same type of hard drive difficulty with the seagate goflex hard drive.

• Serious issue with FreeAgent GoFlex 2TB… (on Mac OS)
• Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex – constant “com_seagate_IOPowSecUserClient”

After reading through these threads, we concluded that the seagate goflex desk external drive does not function well with the Mac’s Disk Utility that runs on OS Panther, Leopard, or Snow Leopard.  We are not sure about the Lion OS.  In order to properly format the drive entirely to function with a Mac OS Extended format, we had to start the Apple OS from our installation disc and use the disk utility function within that startup.  For some reason, that disc utility correctly formatted the hard drive where the dick utility version on our Loepard OS was not able to do so.  We are not certain if this is a Seagate issue or a Mac Disk Utility issue.  Nevertheless, the hard drive was formatted correctly for Mac OS Extended and client is happily using the entire drive under this format.

Never take for granted the value of backing up your content.  Get a nice size external hard drive that is trustworthy and make sure to have a good back-up routine setup.  Recovering lost information from a failed hard drive is painful!  While there are many advanced ways to recover “lost” information from a hard drive, proper hard drive recovery tactics are the best solution for ensuring all necessary documents, photos, and videos do not bite the dust forever.

A recent video from Google expert Matt Cutts suggests that Google is now using signals from social media such as twitter and facebook to help them figure out what sites should rank well in the search engines. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who cares about getting their site found on search engines. Basically, this is just a confirmation that the more involved you are on the Internet in general, the more you as an author and your company build reputation. The reputation you build as a whole ultimately will fill in how google and other search engines rank your content.

Does this mean that youtube videos are going to help my site get found in search engines?

The short answer is, yes. Ultimately, anything you do on the Internet can possibly effect you authority on the Internet. If you post a valuable video that many people want to share and talk about, the discussions ultimately will get pointed back to the author of the video. Whether you like it or not, google does its best to figure out what they should do with that data they get about you as the author and then ultimately add (or decrease) rankings accordingly.

This is just a reminder to think about what you post before you post it, on any content site. It is also a reminder that there is some significant value in creating quality social media avenues not only for short term traffic, but long term sustained traffic as well.