website maintenance time

Let’s face it: everything needs maintenance, and you haven’t touched your website since you changed the copyright notice last year. Sure, you give your car gas, oil changes, insurance, new tires…and maybe a new roof rack or fancy headlights. But enough about you. My goal is to make sure you maintain your website. Here’s why.
But first, it’s a new year. I love the idea of a new beginning, a chance to start anew doing the things we should be doing, but never do. But no more resolutions, please. Why not? Because they fail. And why do they fail? Let’s take a look at the top resolutions in the US:

• drink less
• eat healthier
• get a better (education/home/job/body)
• Reduce debt/weight/stress

Notice a trend? Here’s a hint: there is no measure of success, and no clear goals. It’s all a general idea: a little less of this, a little more of that. Do you know how ‘healthy” you eat now? and if not, how can you measure how much “healthier” you will eat? Two less Big Macs a month? Or a week?

But I’m not here to talk about your health. I want to talk about your website goals for 2012.

Here’s a goal you can reach: a maintenance plan for your website. Why? Because without website maintenance, you’re playing Russian roulette with your website. And because it’s cheaper than a personal trainer. Of course, we can help: think of us as the personal trainer for your website.

4 critical website layers

These are the elements of your website you must keep on top of.

1. Content Delivery: network and server maintenance

If your website is hosted on a hosting server, there’s not much you can do about the network, except ask. But you should ask about the upgrade plans for your server: how often is the operating system, database server, web server, etc upgraded? Are you notified when updates happen? A lot of hosting providers won’t update their servers since these updates may break sites running on those servers.

2. Content Management System maintenance

This includes upgrades and routine maintenance of your CMS, such as Drupal and WordPress, and its database. If you don’t have the latest version, chances are good there is a known security issue with your website—an issue hackers can exploit.

The sad thing is that, even with a maintenance plan, you’re often on your own on this one. We are among the few to provide CMS updates as part of our maintenance plan, and we can do this because we only provide hosting and maintenance to our development clients.

3. Content strategy and curation

Content is king. It’s why people visit your website. Do you provide them with good content? Is your content updated, relevant, and helpful? Are images clear and explanatory or do they just serve as filler?

The most common complaint we see with older websites is that they no longer look “good”. The theme and design are still the same. The only thing that changed is content.

4. Content findability and web analytics

What good is content when your users can’t find it? If it’s not worth finding, it’s not worth writing. Your content, social media campaigns, email campaigns, and PR all work together to make sure your content reaches its intended audience. A good website maintenance plan will include regular reviews of your website and campaign metrics, to see what works, and what needs improvement.

Cost

If you don’t have the time or know-how to implement these yourself, we can help! Our website maintenance plans may be cheaper than Weight Watchers!

New Look, Responsive Web Design

Infamia on mobile

Surely by now you’ve seen Infamia’s new website, complete with web fonts courtesy of the Google Fonts API. (Our apologies to some Windows XP users.)  But have you opened it in your iphone? or several different-sized android phones? or your iPad? Your 6-inch, 7-inch, 10.3-inch tablet? If so, you  will no doubt noticed very little: everything was still as it should be.  Closer inspection, however, would reveal that the layout is slightly different. Our new theme uses a new technique called “responsive web design.”  In responsive web design, all design elements are defined in relative terms.  This takes more work, but it means that a webpage can dynamically scale up or down to fit the appropriate medium.  The image on the right shows the webpage on my phone: note the menu is vertical.  The menu goes back to its horizontal orientation if I rotate the phone!

We consider ourselves craftsmen of web things, and  we are proud of our web development work. Staying on the cutting edge is an integral part of Infamia. The new site was long overdue. Tell us how you like it in the comments or drop us a line. We’ve written a bit more about how we build our website, if you’re interested.

SINS: SEO Is Not SPAM (and google says so)

Matt Cutts needs no introduction. He is the public face of Google search. And in a new video, Matt Cutts talks about why SEO is not spam.

Don’t feel like spending three minutes of your day?  It’s OK, we watched it for you.  The basic premise is that SEOs do good things for your site, the search world, and all your users too. Here are some key things SEOs can help with:

• Make sure pages are crawl-able and accessible (read: no Flash)
• Use the right keywords: no jargon
• Improve usability.
• Make your site runs fast
• Write copy that converts

Of course, Black Hat SEO tactics, keyword stuffing, doing “Sneaky things with redirects” is still bad. Luckily, we wrote about how to hire an SEO. Or you can contact us directly.

Social Media news: Google Plus graduates to Business users

What’s this? You’re a business user of Google’s business-level services, namely Google Apps?  You’ve been waiting for months for you and your business to jump on the Google Plus bandwagon?  Well the wait is over.  Although Google Plus does not (yet) allow for business pages the way facebook does, the service is now open to Google Apps accounts. Such as mine. Of course this means that B2B enterprises can now benefit from the +1 button.

Three things business users should do:

1. Add a +1 button to your website
2. Assign someone to be your company’s voice on Google Plus
3. Tell all your friends

Web Usability Bonus Round: Google Reader under the knife

Google Reader viewport surgery

Speaking of Google, it seems their trained pigeons have been busy rolling out a new design. And not everyone is happy.  So we thought we’d do some math on Google Reader (although gmail and google docs have similar layouts). There are many things I like about the new design, but I agree that top headers are distracting from the main “action area”. We now have three headers: the login/google plus header, the search header, and the utility header.  So how much real estate is used by different things? Here is the math:

• Headers: 24%
• Left navigation: 18%
• “Action” area: 56%

As I said, I like the clear new design. I even like the action area, which is adjustable on some services. But the headers seem to waste some useful real estate. From a usability perspective, these seem to do little more than add visual consistency between google products.

Your turn

The WordPress Theme

Consider this free. We paid $75 at woothemes; now, there are cheaper, free, and more expensive themes. The bottom line is: the cost of the theme is insignificant compared to the cost of choosing a theme. We estimate 4-10 hours for a client; but even for our internal, no-discussion, no-revisions, let’s get it done website, we spent close to 5 hours selecting a theme. (This was over several weeks.)

Customizations and content

Of course, the theme does not quite fit our needs. In our case, we wanted a portfolio area and a bold, modern look. We didn’t find a theme that had both out of the box. We also wanted more branding than uploading a jagged logo image: we wanted to adjust colors, fonts, font colors, etc.  We’re still not 100% there, but we’re close.

Content was seemingly easy: transferring content from our previous website was simple since the old site was also WordPress. But we soon found out that the old content did not meet our content strategy, our SEO strategy, or the feeling that we wanted to convey. I think we scrapped about 60–75% of the old content (excluding blog posts), and spent at least 6 hour on new content.

The WordPress Portfolio plug-in took a good amount of work to set up and configure. Even though not every site has a portfolio, it seems every site has that one piece of it that takes longer to develop than expected. Sometimes it’s a difficult plugin, sometimes it’s a difficult decision, sometimes it’s trying to make several things work well together.

All told, including basic “dev mode” WordPress setup, customizations and content changes have taken roughly 20 hours.

Buff, polish, launch

When we realize the theme would work for our company, it was time to install and configure the “standard” features. Between the webmaster and SEO plug-ins, caching and performance, Social plug-ins, maintenance (to clean up all the stuff we installed and deinstalled in development, for example), we have a list of roughly 12–20 plugins to install and configure. This site has (so far) 15 done. Configuration varies: sometimes configuring a theme is enough. With others (such as with SEO-related plugins), you need to go back and review all the content. Often, logging into third-party sites and verifying pieces is required, as is selection between multiple similar plugins.

Then it’s ready. But, of course, it’s not live. And after spending the past week putting your website together, you don’t want to mess it up.  Going live often requires probably-complicated-and-always-dangerous database changes, lots of backups, and bated breath.

All told, chalk up another 5 hours to getting there.

Spit-shine, and more testing: getting out of the ICU

Plan as much as you want, but some things can’t be tested unless they’re live.  Test and fix these.  Also, invariably, when you push the red button, you find things that weren’t good enough in the development. The site is now your pride and joy. Not your first-born perhaps, but certainly your newest. The first few hours (days?) are exciting:  Is the Analytics code working?  All the sitemaps in place? Why does the cursor turn green?  Did we update the feeds? Take care of redirects?  Are all the social sharing places using the correct address or do they still point to “dev”?

If you did your homework above, this should only take 1-2 hours.

Stayin’ alive

So you have a new site.  Take a few moments to enjoy the euphoria. Then the work begins. Content strategies need to be implemented (you don’t think we rewrote all our content already?). SEO strategies need to be implemented. Social Media strategies need to be implemented.  Add an estimated 5 hours to the total, to include monitoring and tweaking over the next week.

Remember the “three pillars“? (I ought to write more about this.)  After you launch, you have a website. It can grow, or it can flounder.  To sustain a website, we need the two other stools: SEO and Marketing. (Content strategy is included here as well.). Now the real fun begins.

We have budgeted about 25 hours per month for routine site updates (creating and posting quality blog posts, reviewing and tweaking and implementing SEO, content, and social media strategies). We also budget an extra 10+ hour per quarter for more in-depth analysis: review our analytics reports, the performance of our social media and SEO strategies, etc.

Costs

Ours was a “low-budget” website.  We used an existing theme, and mostly existing content.  The numbers, please:

• research and theme selection, 5 hours
• content and customizations, 20 hours
• buff, polish, and post-launch ICU: 6-7 hours

These numbers are for things we did for our own site: they exclude presentations, meetings, discussions, revisions, choices, training, research, etc.  We selected a theme, and we implemented it.  On average, working on a client website would increase these by 15-25%.

Total for launch: 31–32 hours (this works out to roughly  $3–5,000 depending on hourly cost and quality; often the cheaper end of the scale will need more work long-term care. )

Recurring costs work out to 10–15 hours per month, plus hosting costs. That seems pretty high, but most clients can do the content work in-house. For a small business, we often estimate 2-3 hours consulting per quarter, plus hosting. The low-end works out at $150–200/mo.

Coda

A reminder: this post is not based on our estimates for a new site. The numbers reflected here are based on how much time it actually took us to put together our own website. We see this as the low-end of the spectrum, since we already knew what we wanted and how to go about it. We believe that a business of any size should have an awesome website.

$5,000 can be a lot of money to a small business. If you fall in that category, don’t despair. We’d love to figure out the best way to get you online, no matter how small your budget. Sometimes the best things online, as in life, are free.  So…call or leave a message.

Thus, the first ever DC Wine Week was created.

The team wanted to post something online quickly so that press and the future-oriented DC wine connoisseurs with busy schedules could save-the-date for the Wine Week activities. We worked with Pivot Point to develop a website placeholder.

Our next challenge was to create a visually compelling and fun navigable website, within a very compressed schedule and budget. We advised Pivot Point on the designs and structure of the official web page. The unique fonts, logo, and overall layout of the site make up a user experience that is enticing to the wine drinker and set the tone for the week’s events.

Because of the various revisions that generally happen during any web project, we were given the final creative only one week before the site’s launch date. In true Infamia style, we came through and, thanks to our amazing developers, we made this tough project happen. The site launched in time for the social media and other marketing campaigns to begin.

Mayor Vincent Gray officially declared October 15-22, 2011 “DC Wine Week.” We like to think our website had something to do with that momentous decision.

There has never been a DC Wine Week to celebrate the region’s wine industry, and Infamia was proud to play a role in making it happen. We hope to see you at a DC Wine Week event.

Cheers!

Search engine algorithms and You.

Search engines used to have an easy job:  Scan a website, analyze its content for keywords, and create an index.  It was easy for the search engines but it was also easy to “game,” and sucked for the users. The worst sites won,  as they were artificially “stuffed” with keywords. Then in 2003 Google released  certain updates to its algorithm that changed the (Search Engine) world. These updates started putting emphasis on a complex list of factors, including external websites. This updated was codenamed “Florida”. Even before then, google algorithm updates have had code names.  Some of them are of interest to business owners (such as “Florida” in 2003 which put an end to shady SEO techniques and left businesses scrambling to figure out what happened to their search rankings.)  Others are small updates of interest mostly to SEOs.

Google’s algorithms are a closely held secret, not only because of competing search engines but also because any published algorithm can be “gamed”.  We can’t know the exact method used to calculate search engine rankings.  Still, Google is interested generating the best results for searchers, and in doing that they actually publish blogs on how webmasters should create sites that are better suited for the user.  In addition, SEOs test different sites and can analyze the results to decipher how we can make sites rank better.

Panda, the “high quality sites” update

The latest significant update is codenamed “Panda.”  How significant? Panda affects an estimated 12% of websites in the US. We break it down for you here.

The big change in Panda is its focus on site-wide quality.  We tell our clients that  a website is a process: a habit you form, rather than set of tasks you check off.  The process involves multiple disciplines, but web consultants can help you form good habits without the need to understand the full complexity.  Panda reinforces this in terms of search rankings: Search Engine Optimization is one of the disciplines involved in producing a good site, but SEO is no longer a list of tasks.  These disciplines are as diverse as visual design and systems engineering.  A high quality design, good writing, and a system architecture that can maintain low response times all are now important to SEO.

With the Panda update, SEO will need to involve all these disciplines, and all these disciplines become important to Search ranking. You can no longer, for example,  skimp on usability if you can get a lot of back-links.

There’s also some inference that Panda takes into account user behavior.  Let’s look at an example.  Consider Alice, a cryptography student, using google to search for “cryptography”. Alice visits a website on the search results, Bob’sCryptoWorld, and spends 5 minutes reading 5 pages. She then returns to the search engine results, and visits another site, CryptoByChuck where she spends 30 seconds on one page.  A smart Google algorithm (perhaps Panda) would keep track of this and declare that CryptoByChuck is a lower quality site, causing Alice to quickly jump back to the search engine. The algorithm would also rank Bob’s site much higher, since Alice spent a lot of time there.

What are the elements that keep Alice interested in one site over the other?

Writing good content

Content is still king, so let’s look at what Panda means for  content. For many, this means blog posts.  We’ve covered writing for the web before, and those hints still work.

A key element of Panda is that it’s a site-wide ranking algorithm:  individual pieces of bad content sprinkled on your site will negatively impact your entire site. This means you can no longer push a lot of low-quality content, simply share or copy other sites, or repost your twiter stream to your blog.  Panda values quality over quantity:  original content, original research, insightful analysis.

Still, according to Aaron Wheeler from SEOmoz, simply writing good content not enough:

“There are too many people making too much amazing stuff on the Internet for good and unique and grammatically correct and spelled properly and describes the topic adequately to be enough”  — Aaron Wheeler, SEOmoz.com

We used to get by writing content that people want to read.  The new strategy is: write content that people want to keep reading.  After someone reads your article, they should want to read another article.  We can no longer get by writing individual articles: we must now write chapters of the same book.  Writing something because it’s popular today is a good idea, but people will keep reading your site only if you stay on-topic with consistently high-quality articles. The bar has been raised.

While this emphasis on original content will not signal the end of landing pages, it will hopefully mean the end of low-quality landing pages designed specifically for SEO.  Landing pages should be helpful and informative.  Why would Alice leave Chuck’s site?  Could she have found a lot of off-topic or badly presented content?  Was the cryptography page on Chuck’s site simply a landing page without additional crypto content on the rest of the site?  Those are the kind of things Panda penalizes.

To sum up, here are a few notes on content:

• Always keep your audience in mind.  Write what your audience wants to read, not what you want to push.
• Write about what you know.  Panda places emphasis on articles written by experts. Shallow, short, or unsubstantial content is penalized.
• Be original.  Write about original research, or your original and insightful analysis.
• Link to authoritative sources, and to primary sources, when these help your user.  But don’t be a link-farm
• Review our “P.S.” model when writing for the web.
• A few bad pieces of content can bring down the entire site.  Delete them, improve them, or merge them with relevant good content.
• Content does not only mean text.  Include images and videos that are helpful and informative.
• Lastly, develop a good content strategy so you can consistently produce good, high-quality content that is on-topic.

Why? I don’t know, but I’m guessing P.S. has a couple of magnetic features. The trick is to use the the lessons from the postscript in the body of the message as well.

[Note: this post was guest-written by Holly Harper, an excellent writer .]

Dear Mr./Ms. Reader,

Are you going to write a rich and elaborate intro on your home page, seven sentences long? When you write an email, are the sentence structure interesting and varied? Are your blog posts thorough, thoughtful analyses of the latest industry news?

Well, good for you, but be careful. No one may be reading your stuff.

Love,
Mickey

P.S. Did you read this sentence first? Many people do.

Why is the Postscript Magnetic?

Adding a postscript (P.S.) is definitely a good thing when writing “ask” emails. People, for whatever reason, often read the postscript, often even before reading the main body…and even often to the exclusion of the main body.

Why?  I don’t know, but I’m guessing P.S. has a couple of magnetic features:

• It’s low-energy: You rarely see long, drawn-out floral text on a postscript. It’s a sentence or two and it gets the point across.
• It is concise.
• It’s at a clear break point for your eyes when scanning. There’s rarely a separation between paragraphs on email, so the postscript is often the only place your eyes get a rest and can focus on.
• It seems important (otherwise why would you take the time to include it?) but low-key (if it was top priority you surely would have included it in the body!)

The trick is to use the incorporate the lessons from the postscript in the body of the message as well.

The P.S. Model for content readability

1. Use the ENTER key. Yes, small paragraphs, my friends. Mr. P.S. is rarely longer than this entry. Not only that, consider a full line break between paragraphs so each tidbit is manageable.

2. Write clear headings and subheadings. The P.S. is a subheading it itself. Generally, headings and subheadings provide an outline for the reader, so they can skim and come back to get more detail in each section. They should be clear to guide readers appropriately.

3. Writing using the inverted pyramid model. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but it’s a good one. People don’t have loads of time on their hands, so tell them what they NEED to know first, and then let them decide if they want to read on for more non-essential, yet interesting, detail.

4. Declutter the page. P.S. is generally the same style as the main body. Don’t be afraid of white space (see #1) and don’t muddy up your content with underlined text, colorful text, and random changes in point size. It will end up looking like a cheap advertisement.

5. Use style sheets. Designers usually advise two fonts in a branding guide. A headline/subhead font and a body text font. Pick your fonts and then create a stylesheet that dictates what color, size, and effects to use in each area to maintain consistency and a clean look.

6. Use lists and bullets. Haven’t you found it easier to read this post because you can just read the bolded entries and not read the rest if you want? I thought so (although if this applies to you, you didn’t read this sentence).

7. Ask for one thing at a time. By organizing with headers and subheads, your content should be making more sense already. But if you’re, say, writing a home page, then you need to figure out what you want your reader to do with the information. Click? Sign up? Contact you? Buy a product? As a question? Don’t overwhelm with too many hoops and asks. Like the P.S., your content should be clear and concise.

Summary: Try the “P.S. Model” and write for the way people read.

It doesn’t matter how good your writing is or how fantastic your point of view is, if your written documents – online or off – are “black” with text, a reader will probably run away scared. Lengthy paragraphs with no visual relief will put off the most committed reader, and will really frighten the “skimming” types.

So, when you write, keep readability in mind. Try out The P.S. Model for readability and see whether your response rates increase.

In just two weeks, we took the site from Pivot Point’s design stage to full launch – pushing from zero to 8,000 daily views in a period of just 48 hours!  At peak times today, we’re seeing over 1000 views per 15 minutes—that’s over one page view per second. (By comparison, most websites load in 2-3 seconds. By the time you clicked “go” and this page loaded, we had already served 1-2 pages.) In web terms, this is not a huge load. It certainly an impressive number, however,  for a site which didn’t exist last Friday.

Here are a few things that helped us along.

High-speed development

The development process was fast-paced and collaborative. We worked closely with Pivot Point, prioritizing features for the short launch schedule. This process required us to be flexible on how we rolled out site features and conducted testing. Of course, we coded the most important public-facing pages first, and tested them on the live platform, and then rolled out additional features with the site up and running.

This live-launch roll out allowed the Citi Open fans access to basic info on an “ASAP” time frame – which they obviously wanted since 8,000 of them visited the page within the first couple of days of operation – yet still allowed us to plug in additional features on an ongoing basis.

Traffic management

Without knowing how many hits to prepare for, it was difficult to judge what kind of server resources we would need during the development phase. So, we opted to use a cloud server courtesy of our favorite hosting provider and a robust Content Delivery Network, courtesy of CloudFlare. The CDN allowed us to focus on content and features, acting as a web application firewall to help us mitigate any nefarious attacks while dampening the effects of spikes on the server.

Likewise, the flexibility of the cloud allowed us to instantly scale up as traffic grew, making possible for us to avoid having to move servers if site traffic grew too fast – the server simply grew with us. At the same time, we’ll be able to “scale down” equally fast in a week or two, when the tournament is over and the traffic goes down.

Terrific people

Of course it takes a team to succeed.   Throughout this process (which is ongoing as we write this), the teams at Citi Open and Pivot Point Communications have been wonderful to work with.  Both the design and technical teams have been outstanding.  Everyone understands the need to act quickly, the reasons for some of the limits we need to impose, and the importance of valuing each other’s expertise and opinion.

Certain inevitable changes at the beginning of the process meant that the development schedule was further compressed; with a one-week development schedule, there are plenty of functionality limitations—which sometimes translate to more people-time. Here is exactly where a good team makes all the difference, and we’re proud to be part of this team.

Summary

We love a challenge, and we especially loved this one. Pivot Point designed a beautiful website with well-planned strategy and marketing. The high-speed development and uncertain traffic provided an interesting puzzle for us. We had the site fully functional within 14 days and the cloud server is easily handling the load.

We say: Who’s next? Bring it on.  And read on for updates as the tournament continues.

P.S.  Special thanks goes to Holly Harper, who helped us write this article and keeps us on our toes about blogging our successes.

dot you?

URL length can get out of hand when you’re trying to Tweet and add a comment in just 140 characters. To solve the URL length problem, URL shortening services (such as bit.ly and goo.gl and t.co) have popped up.

The downside of the most popular URL shorteners is that the links aren’t memorable, and aren’t generally tied to a certain website, blogger, or brand.

Are you missing an additional branding opportunity by using bit.ly and not your personal shortened URL (think http://pep.si)?

What is a URL shortener?

It’s been said that a URL can be as long as 2,000 characters, any more and the universe implodes or your computer truncates it (saving the universe).

The point is that URL length can get out of hand when you’re trying to Tweet and add a comment in just 140 characters. To solve the URL length problem, URL shortening services (such as bit.ly and goo.gl and t.co) have popped up.

Likewise, companies that want to retain their branding identity, even in shortened URLs, have registered their own shorter (or sometimes longer) URLs to keep broadcasting their message.

There are three incontrovertible reasons to shorten:

• You get more room when you submit your dissertation through Twitter
• Your links are more “clickable” and more “shareable”
• Your text is more “readable”

But is there a fourth?

• (some people claim) you reinforce your brand

Hw to shrtn

Using a URL shortening tool is simple: go to the http://bit.ly site, enter a 263 character or shorter URL, click “shorten” and the bit.ly tool shrinks the URL into a manageable character length that looks like this: http://bit.ly/jFq5u6. It works the same with ow.ly, goo.gl, and a number of others.

The shortened URLs are used primarily in Twitter where concise, clickable URLs are needed. Others use them in email, Facebook posts, and other documents in lieu of hyperlinked text.

A missed opportunity?

The downside of the most popular URL shorteners is that the links aren’t memorable, and aren’t generally tied to a certain website, blogger, or brand. For example, a goo.gl shortened URL, such as goo.gl/ajpc3 says nothing about the site you’re going to be visiting. The site could be a phishing, spamming, XXX, pop-up-ad-filled nightmare, for all you know.

Or, more likely, you’ve posted an amazing blog on your website, MyGreatCompanyRocks.com. The URL is something like www.mygreatcompanyrocks.com/blog/this-is-an-amazing-blog. You shorten it up with bit.ly and send it out into the Twitterverse. Because the post is so great, you get re-tweeted like crazy and your blog metrics are off the chain. The problem here is you’ve missed an additional branding opportunity by using bit.ly and not your personal shortened URL (think great.co/amazingblog).

Do you see the point? If you owned the shortened URL http://great.co, then everyone knows that great content is coming from Your Great Company every time you Tweet or use that shortened URL for any reason.

The big boys seem to be going branded

Coca Cola has http://cokeurl.com (shorter than cocacola.com, but just one character. Odd.). Overstock.com ran a whole O.co ad campaign over the holidays, and Pepsi owns http://pep.si. These companies are both trying to make their URLs more memorable and trying to make them easier to pass on (by being shorter), while also retaining the core brand element of the company name within the URL.

As an aside, Microsoft supposedly started http://binged.it, but

• it is actually longer than Bing.com
• when you type in “binged.it,” you’re just redirected to Bing with no shortening option.

I don’t get it, but then again I don’t know if they’re still offering that service.

Do you need yo.u?

There are a couple of options for you if you’re considering a branded shortened URL for My Great Company Rocks.

Option 1: You don’t care. Stick with a generic shortening service. It’s free. It’s easy. And if you’re getting enough hits on your blogs, no matter where they’re coming from, you feel like you’re ahead of the game. Your tools: http://goo.gl, http://owl.y, http://bit.ly, and others.

Option 2: You want some sort of brand recognition because with your 50,000 Twitter followers, it would be nice for them to recognize when a link is coming from your site. Go hybrid. You can create an account with bit.ly or awe.sm to use your own domain for shortened URLs. Your tools: http://bit.ly or http://awe.sm (Awe.sm charges $15 a month for a customized shortened URL “for better metrics.” I’m a bit skeptical.)

There are some downsides to the hybrid option. First, the chances of you getting the perfect bit.ly URL every time are slim.  Someone whose site no longer exists already has used http://bit.ly/great—and by extension http://yo.u/great.  Also, using a hosted service means that your short URLs are all “in the cloud” – you don’t own them and if bit.ly gets shut down (more on that later), you’re sunk.

Option 3: You’re a control freak. Of course, you’ll have to decide on another URL to buy just as above. But now you’ve got to host it yourself.  You can use any domain and any short URL you want. Yo.u/re_great is available!  Full control means you host it yourself. The good news is you don’t have to worry about who else may have used your memorable and awesome short URL and you have control over its use in the future. The bad news is, you need to maintain, link, upgrade, and update just like you do with your website.

A great web consulting firm can seamlessly link your shortened URL into your blog or website content management system if you choose to go this route and you don’t have the technical savvy to set it up yourself. Your tools: try YOURLS.

The TLD dilemma (why you can’t have “yo.u”)

Is great.co possible? Well, maybe it is. Under the current ICANN rules for website names, we’re limited to the suffixes we can have for our URLs. Addresses like .com, .net., .org., and .biz are the most common in the U.S.

So how did bit.ly get .ly? Like many URL shortening services, they’re using a country domain. In this case, it’s the country domain for Lybia. Wonder if that country’s unrest is going to affect the stability of the bit.ly name in the future? It could. And choosing a non-standard or country-specific suffix could significantly affect your URL in the future.

Similarly, .gl is from Greenland (goo.gl), .it is from Italy (binged.it), and the .co that is becoming so popular these days is the country domain for Columbia (O.co). Note: You’ll never see Finnish .fi domains out there, as Finland has strict rules about the use of .fi.

Tools: A reputable registrar, and $12 – $80/year to register your new, shortened URL. Or, you can wait until the new ICANN rules go into effect (Check out this Associated Press video for more info) and buy your own, custom suffix for a whopping $185,000 fee. Imagine being “.great”!

Summary

Using URL shorteners is a MUST if you’re on Twitter.

Deciding which type to use is surely a decision based on your business and revenue stream. If you are getting a majority of your business on Twitter, or if you have an extremely long URL and need to shorten it up for print, social media, television, or other advertising to help make it memorable, then a custom shortened URL is probably the way to go for you. Also, if you want 100 percent control over your content and your identity, then you should also be shopping for your own shortened identity.

For the rest of you, maybe goo.gl will suffice, or maybe registering hybrid bit.ly or awe.sm customized URL will fill the gap.

Over the next few weeks we’ll post some use cases.  In the meantime, share some of your own in the comments.

SEO is no longer (primarily) about keyword placement and directory listings. Instead it’s  classic public relations – getting your site linked, promoted, and mentioned. If anyone tries to “guarantee” you a number-one listing, be skeptical. Very skeptical. Here are the three things you need to know about SEO.

I got an e-mail the other day from “Snowwhite SEO” guaranteeing a top-10 Google ranking for my website in just a few short weeks. Delete.

But the next day, a client got a similar e-mail touting the same guarantee. Of course she was a bit piqued – she’s hitting the top-3 on her targeted keyword searches, but still wanted to hear my thoughts on this “guaranteed” e-mail. Could she get to number one?

It’s the easiest tricky question out there. Here’s my three-part answer:

1. If anyone is sending you spam about SEO, they are idiots and you would be an idiot to hire them.

Think about it logically. If you need to hire someone to help you with SEO, you would probably Google “SEO expert” or “SEO services” or “SEO consulting.” If the spammer doesn’t come up in the top-10 on Google when you search, then they suck at SEO. Shouldn’t their site be on the top-10 if they’re such experts? If they are so good at SEO and are drawing in leads from organic searches, then why would they resort to marketing via spam? Find an experienced, trusted web consultant to help you with SEO and educate you on how it works.

2. If you don’t understand SEO, then you’re setting yourself up to get fleeced.

I used to say “no one can guarantee placement.” But that’s not entirely true. I could probably guarantee your website’s placement under the search: Regina Landers hair loss bicycle coffee. But, seriously, would that be helpful? No. SEO is about increasing your page rank on keyword searches that matter to your business, not just “being number-1″ on some never-searched keyword jumble.

What if they guaranteed placement on my top keyword list? Well, they’re probably going to bombard the internet with a series of “black hat” tactics – like hidden text, blog comment spam, or spamdexing – to move you up the rankings. These “black hat” SEO techniques might get you to number one on your preferred keyword list in the short term, but they can do some long-term damage to your reputation. “Black hat” tactics are considered unethical, are often against search-engine guidelines, and can even get your site blocked by search engines. The short-term, unethical rankings spike isn’t worth the risk to your valuable web property.

3. If you don’t understand search-engine rankings, then you could be wasting your time.

In order to increase your search engine ranking, you should engage in a strategic SEO program. Strategic SEO is concentrating on building “domain trust” — which is what search engines rely on to find your site. A site is “trusted” mostly by being linked to by other “trusted” sites. Like getting an article on the Huffington Post or a link to your site posted by an influential blogger. It’s classic public relations.

As your site grows and you begin building your reputation through good work, quality content, and your real and virtual social networks, then bloggers, magazines, and newspapers will start to write about you and link to your site. This is where domain trust is built and rankings increase. As linking increases, keyword-based SEO matters less and less. And, if you’ve engaged in “black hat” SEO in the past, you could seriously hurt your site’s reputation in the future.

Just starting out?

If you’ve just launched your new website, search engines have no history or domain trust for that site. There are no back-links from other sources, so search engines must rely on things like keywords, directory submissions, etc. These are important for a new site because they can be done quickly without relying on others. But, in a competitive marketplace, launching an integrated marketing strategy that includes SEO tactics will be much more important than keywords in the long run. So, get out there and get networking!

(Start by leaving us a comment.)

1. Your domain is your online name: Own it

Easy to say, but the number one problem we see with domains is that the entity (individual or business) that should own their domain does not.   Look up your domain now: go to http://whois.domaintools.com, and enter your domain name.  Here is the result for our domain name below.  Note the “Organisation Name” is our company name.  The Admin section is less important, but if it’s not your own company it should be a trusted contact.

WHOIS record for Infamia.com

Remember that you should own your domain name always. If you’re not the owner, log in to  (or call) your registrar and change this now.

2. Choose a trusted registrar

Not all registrars are created equal.  Between 2000 and 2007, Registerfly, a fraudulent registrar, was used by nearly a million people.  Among other things, this registrar would accept domain name renewals from its customers, but never renew the domain.  Many people lost their domains, some their business because of it.  I don’t think that any existing domain registrar is nearly as corrupt, but levels of service vary.

Cheap registrars today will provide much fewer features, and often will not give you access to these features unless you also have a hosting or other service with them.  Moreover, any downtime with your registrar usually brings down your entire domain.

The difference between the highest-priced and lowest-priced registrars is usually less than $5/year.   Our registrar of choice is Tierra.net (www.tierra.net).  They’ve served us well over the years, so we’re proud to recommend them. And we don’t make a penny for the plug.

3. Register for the maximum term

Always register your domain for the maximum term possible.  Usually that’s 10 years, and you get a small price break. If you can’t think that far ahead, you should register for a minimum of five years.  This has a small positive effect on your SEO as well.

4. Lock your domain

Make sure your domain is under “registrar lock”. This will prevent unauthorized transfers.

5. Seek help when transferring

And here’s a fifth: If your domain is “live,” seek help when transferring.  Transferring a live domain can be tricky.

For more detailed information about how to maintain, protect, and transfer your domain name, please contact us for a copy of our white paper, Domain Name Best Practices.  Or leave a message here in the comments and share your experience with your domain name: Is yours registered for the full 10 years?  Did you have to fight someone for it?