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New Miami Wedding Videographers’ Website for Scott Wolfson

Marc — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:13:51 +0000

Scott Wolfson Films in Miami is a great videographer doing event video from weddings to bar/bat mitzvahs. Scott’s professional news and broadcast video experience allows him to create standout wedding video for Miami and South Florida couples.

Old site screen capture

Because of low traffic and search engine rankings Scott emailed me. He had determined that his BluDomain website was not working for his businesses’ internet marketing. At the time we began working to improve Scott’s web presence was a standard BluDomain Flash site and a WordPress.com based blog. Each were using different domain name URLs causing linkback dilution, and there was even a masked third domain URL causing even more linkback dilution and confusion.

The first step of the project was to bring his old WordPress.com blog into his primary domain and begin create a new WordPress based splash/landing page. And coalesce the multiple domain names to only scottwolfsonfilms.com while creating 301 redirects for each of the other two domains and all the indexed/linked content of those two domains to their corresponding content at scottwolfsonfilms.com.

Miami Wedding Video Scott Wolfson

Next we sought to find a better way to display video, than what was provided in his BluDomain template. At this point we decided that the entire site would become WordPress. Scott’s Miami wedding videos are beautiful and it is important to share them in an attractive way. The BluDomain template maximum video display was only about 400 pixel wide and was only available to devices using Flash, so no iPads or iPhones. We decided to utilize the new self-hosted WordPress elements of his website to present his wedding and event video examples using HTML5 techniques. We wanted more than just the common video embedded video in a webpage. What we decided to use was a lightbox effect that expands the video and floats in over a darker background giving the Scott’s wedding and event video an almost theatrical appearance. And the video display size is automatically responsive to the visitor’s screen size. Here is a sample - http://scottwolfsonfilms.com/jamie-davids-wedding/

For the final design and implementation step Scott wanted to come up with a new look that would use his familiar logo and at the same time SEO very well. Scott reached out to graphic designer Danielle Figel who presented a new header design and many other details. These elements were then incorporated into a new WordPress splash/landing home page that includes strong SEO, call to action and contact information.

Since Scott can now use his new site for search marketing and reaching potential new clients for Miami area wedding and event videography his is steady adding new posts and pages content written with his key marketing phrases and sharing examples of his work.

If you would like to know more about any elements of Scott’s site or have other questions please comment, email or call.

BluDomain’s new Aiden template HTML add-on option SEO review

Marc — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:21:19 +0000

Since my year-end review a few days ago of 10 of BluDomain’s add-on HTML template options, BluDomain has added another, Aiden. So here is a quick review of the SEO attributes of Aiden. Before we started let’s review BluDomain’s selling advantage for adding their HTML option to your purchase.

A duplicate HTML version of your template. It automatically takes on all edits made within the administrative editing area of your flash site. The HTML site is also compatible with Apple’s iPad. The HTML site is highly beneficial for search engines, each word and image is searchable and as such your site will gain much more search engine exposure.

In summary while visible on non-flash devices, it is lacking in good structure and features for effective SEO improvement much the same as the other BluDomain HTML add-ons. A properly installed and themed WordPress install in conjunction with this BluDomain template will provide much better SEO opportunities and performance than the BluDomain HTML add-on.

Bludomain template name Aiden
HTML option cost $100
Audited HTML page: http://www.bludomaintemplates.com/aiden/html/#!/ABOUT_ME

Significant SEO related observations -

The URL would be better if it did not include the “html/#!/”, moving the unique page file “ABOUT_ME” name closer to the domain name.
None of the page’s content is present in the About page source code. Confirmed by Search Engine Spider simulator. The content is not indexable because it is not present in the page’s source code. Search engines need to “see” and read each individual page’s content in order to list pages in their indices. If your page content is not in the search engine’s index it is not able to be ranked and presented in search results.
No provision for SEO invaluable H1 and H2 headlines, SEO Doctor confirmed.
No internal crawlable navigation links. Confirmed by SEO Doctor and Spider Simulator.

Best WordPress SEO permalink structure for blogs and sites is now made simple

Marc — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:32:54 +0000

For SEO and site visitor engagement the URLs of your pages and posts can make a big difference. Fortunately new code in WordPress 3.3 allows more freedom in setting the URL link for your content with no negative performance or response time impact for the choice you make. Now your WordPress based site can have both user and search engine friendly permalink URLs with no penalty.

Prior to WordPress 3.3 setting the optimal URL for SEO and site visitors could cause your site to respond more slowly. This was as a result of a performance penalty related to “verbose rewrite rules” within WordPress which dictated increased database calls for URLs which included only the title or “postname”. Yet for visitor engagement and SEO slower site performance was often the result of an choosing SEO preferred option.

WordPress has a Settings option for what are called “permalinks“, meaning that the URL composition for the page or post can be modified or selected site wide. This is how WordPress describes the feature; “By default WordPress uses web URLs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links.”

Using a URL page/post descriptive keyword structure improves engagementfrom site visitors, who will be more inclined to visit descriptive URLs, and search engines which will be able to index and retrieve keywords from the URL when they match search terms. This can help a lot with SEO and your site visitor conversion. Google and other search engines have made it so your permalinks are a basic part of a search engine user’s decision making process. The URL permalink appears as part of your search snippet on search result pages. Using redundant terms from categories in your permalink URL option could make your site appear spammy. While using a date in the permalink could make your content seem dated. Both cause unneeded length and useless terms in your URL. Fortunately those compromises are no longer needed.

WordPress permalink performance considerations are now resolved.

Up until WordPress 3.3, there was a quite serious performance issue when you have a lot of pages when you use just the postname, that is solved in WordPress 3.3. We can now use a simple permalink URL having only the domain and postname. This means shorter undated URLs with less redundant terms and more relative keyword content are possible with no performance issues. There are no more excuses to not use just the postname.

The danger of changing WordPress permalink URLs on an established site

Now before you change the permalink URLs of an existing site consider the potential search and SEO impact. Despite how easy it is to change permalinks in Admin, it is complex and can have a dramatic negative impact on your site if you’re not careful. After all you do not want to present a site with many multiple “404 page not found” results to your visitors. There are two steps in changing your WordPress permalink structure.

The first is simple, go to Settings -> Permalinks and select “Post name”.
The second step is to redirect your old permalinks to your new ones. To do that, you have to add redirects to your .htaccess file. Fortunately Joost de Valk has created an excellent webpage-based tool to address the potential negative impact from changing the permalink URL for sites which already have external links to content on other sites and in search engines. It automatically generates the redirect for you based on your domain and your old permalink structure which you can then include in your site’s .htaccess file.

If you make the change to your .htaccess file please test it by looking up your content on your site in a search engine and clicking through to that post/page on your site.

For more information about URLs and SEO read this article from Search Engine Journal, “URLs and SEO: Various Strategies for URL File Names“.

And if you have any problem feel free to email or call.

IBM estimates 15% of site visits to retail sites in November are from smartphones and tablets

Marc — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 21:49:29 +0000

I mentioned this earlier as part of a long post, but it is very worthy of standing alone. IBM Coremetrics estimates that 15% of consumer retail site visits are using mobile devices in November 2011. This is a very recent, November 4th 2011, article and includes a trending graph showing the amazing growth of retail visits from mobile devices.

Please use the link above to read the entire, very worthwhile, article. But if you are rushed here are a couple of its nuggets:

Online Shopping Growth: Total online sales in November will experience impressive growth of 12-15 percent over the same period in 2010.
Mobile Traffic and Sales: Record numbers of consumers will shift their shopping from the PC to their mobile device this holiday season. In October nearly 11 percent of people used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 4.2 percent in October 2010. Additionally, mobile sales continue to increase, reaching a high of 9.6 percent in October 2011, up from 3.4 percent in October 2010.

ps – Keep in mind that a major share of these visitors do not have Flash enabled smartphones and tablets..

New website for custom woodworker and cabinet maker Don Ragland of Austin Texas

Marc — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 14:59:47 +0000

I enjoy creating websites for small business. These websites provide the business owner a competitive advantage and fairly quickly result in increased business. One of my most recent is a website for Austin, Texas based custom cabinet and furniture maker Don Ragland. Don is a successful craftsman and woodworker creating custom cabinets and furniture in Austin for over 20 years. His marketing was basically the yellow pages. But with dramatic reduction in use of yellow pages (search engines and smart phones have almost replaced yellow pages) and increase in cost of advertising Don had come to realize that he needed a good optimized website in order to be found and reach today’s prospective clients.

Because of the great business results a relative of Don’s has with one of my custom websites, Don asked me to create an effective website for marketing his upscale woodworking. Over a just two week period working with Don, and for much less cost than even a small yellow pages ad, you can now visit the website we created.

Online now for less than a week, we have already gotten the brand new site and domain name in the search indexes. All that is just the beginning of the SEO and search engine marketing that comes with the website.

If you would like to know about the cost and return on investment of my small business websites like Don’s, please call, send an email or leave a comment.

Almost everything you need to know about SEO for search marketing

Marc — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 21:30:08 +0000

Once I get the structure and functions of your complete website correct (valid HTML, semantically correct, permissions, sitemaps, indexable domains, blog and galleries together, social media integration, optimal URLs, site speed and much more) then it is all about your content. That is the key to strong online search engine marketing. That is what is important! But how to do it day-to-day after the site is built?

In the below video one of the most respected WordPress SEO gurus, Joost de Valk, explains “Making sure your content is found”. It is 40 minutes long and very well worth every moment of your time.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me.

Kudos from Dapper Images – San Diego wedding photography studio

Marc — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 02:03:48 +0000

We are a wedding photography studio and are so pleased with the work that Marc has done for us!

We hired him to create a new WordPress based splash page layout for our Bludomain flash website so that it would be search engine friendly. And very easy to update/modify.

We also had him create a new blog layout for us that is under the same domain name as our website, so that when we post keyword rich blog posts with relevant tags, it would point back to our main website, and not just to our blog domain.

Now our website and blog are under the same domain and we are thrilled because we know this will make our website so much more visible to search engines. Marc was amazing to work with, great communication, we highly recommend him!

Yasmine + Deshun
dapperimages.com

Beware strangers offering Free WordPress themes

Marc — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:44:01 +0000

Recently I had a client who had downloaded a free WordPress theme for their website. It was not a good situation, but more on that later. The site they downloaded it from was not the WordPress.org theme catalog. It was just a site they found in Googling that offered free themes. The theme contained malware and spam links that caused the site to become blocked by protected browsers. It seems that free WordPress themes from sources other thanWordPress.org often contain malware. A recent post by Siobhan Ambrose carefully reviews the first ten Google “free wordpress themes” search results and their themes for malware and other problems. The take away lesson is that 90 percent out of the first ten sites were providing dodgy themes, with 8 sites (that’s 80%) having themes with actual malware. The only search result without malware or other problems in free themes? WordPress.org!

As Lorelle writes, free themes that come with malware have the ability to “integrate into your site, even down to the server level, through a twisting path of imaginative code. … This code has the ability to activate, create trouble, then erase its path, making it tough to detect, test, and eliminate.”

Why are WordPress.org free themes safe? Because WordPress uses malware detection programs for the initial review. Then if it passes that, but before a theme is presented for download, it is carefully reviewed with the code inspected by hand by a team including leading website and WordPress security specialists. If you want to learn more about WordPress malware, read this post titled Anatomy of a Theme Malware by Otto.

In the case of my client it even infected his other themes. No part of his site was really left untouched. It took over 10 hours (it is a very large site) of time to find, scrub and restore his site. Just from simply downloading and installing a free theme from a source other than WordPress.org. So if you want a new blog/site look, I suggest you contact a good WordPress site creator (like me). We often can point you to a free theme that is “clean”, or even provide it for you. Or is you want something that is unique we can often redesign your blog/site theme in less time than it would take to “disinfect”. It is also why I offer my clients free built-in automatic usability and security upgrades that assure their blog/site will always work with the latest, most powerful and secure versions of WordPress.

Replacing a Bludomain splash page with WordPress splash page for better SEO and Search Marketing

Marc — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 05:01:58 +0000

Recently Dapper Images a wedding and portrait photographer located in San Diego asked if and how I would enhance the search engine marketing and SEO with their current Bludomain website located at dapperimages.com and their separate WordPress blog located at dapperimagesblog.com?

Dapper Images New WordPress based Bludomain splash page

They wanted to retain a Bludomain type splash page appearance and the basic layout of their blog’s styling. They also wanted a WordPress site that would be easy to customize the styling design with just click and save options.

The Bludomain site was, and is, hosted by Bludomain. The blog was hosted by a separate company on a Windows IIS server (please remember … friends don’t let friends host WordPress on Microsoft servers).

We discussed the tasks, options and prices and got the go ahead to begin the process. The first step was to install WordPress on their Bludomain hosting and then begin to create a WordPress based splash page and move the blog postings/content to dapperimages.com Then begin styling the major changes and minor design adjustments accordingly.

Below is a video review covering some of how the Bludomain splash page was replaced with a WordPress landing page for better site and blog integration and way better SEO and search marketing. Even looks better!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

WordPress Fatal Error Allowed Memory Size Exhausted on Bludomain Hosting

Marc — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 12:32:55 +0000

If you have installed WordPress on your Bludomain hosting account and have a good sized, well featured blog you may sometimes be getting an error message like this “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 122880 bytes) in /….”

This error is caused when WordPress “bumps up against” the hosting account’s PHP memory limit. This can happen when doing tasks like uploading a number of images or using the automatic update feature.

In almost every Bludomain hosting account I have worked with the limit is set at 32M. But as WordPress has grown and become more powerful over the last few years 32M is very often not enough. Particularly if you have a blog with a lot of posts and/or using plugins like NextGen Gallery. These days it is best to allow WordPress 48M or even better 64M of PHP memory.

In most hosting accounts the memory limit is set in a file in the root directory named php.ini. All you need to do is find a line that looks like “memory_limit = 32M” and change the number to what is needed. Unfortunately in Bludomain’s typical hosting it is not that easy, the php.ini file is not accessible. And I have not found an always successful alternative with Bludomain. Workarounds, like setting the memory limit in the .htaccess file does not often work. Neither does modifying the WordPress wp-config.php file. Bludomain seems to have set the memory limit firmly in place.

My recommendation is that if you are experiencing the memory exhausted fatal error send a support request to Bludomain requesting that the PHP memory limit for your hosting account be increased to 64M.

To see what your hosting memory limit is and how much of it your WordPress installation is using you can install and activate Alex Rabe’s handy plugin WP Memory Usage. WP Memory Usage will provide a graph with percentage usage as well as inform you of the PHP version in your WordPress dashboard. If you are showing over 85% memory usage you might as well send the support request into Bludomain soon. Once you get to 90% it is almost assured you will begin to experience the memory exhausted fatal error message from time to time. Let me know if you have any questions.