There are plenty of considerations to make when thinking about starting a social media campaign.  Here I have listed just a few things that you might not have though about yet.

The New Authorize.Net® Mobile App                                

 We are pleased to announce the release of the Authorize.Net Mobile Application, which allows you to securely accept payments from any location using an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. The mobile application is designed to help you increase your sales by providing another way to easily and securely accept payments using your existing Authorize.Net Payment Gateway account. The mobile application is available now as a free download from the Apple App Store or iTunes.

It is a Quick Response code or QR code for short.  If you haven’t heard of QR codes yet, here is a brief introduction.  The codes were originally used for tracking parts in vehicle manufacturing and quickly became popular with the Japanese youth culture to tag outdoor events.

It’s similar to a bar code that is on most packaged goods, but this code links you to all kinds of great information.  This unique code can be used to link to rich media content on the web like a YouTube video, a web page, a text message or PDF document.

The process is pretty simple, you need a mobile phone that has a camera and can run a special application to process the QR code information.  On your phone, open the reader application which turns on the camera.  Point the phone’s camera at the QR code.  Scan the QR code and the application will redirect you to the media.  I have an iPhone so I was able to find several free QR Reader...

• Social Media Optimization
• Website Speed and On-Page SEO Activities
• The Web Is Going Mobile
• Online Videos
• Personalized Search
• Local Search

The following are a few recommended practices to optimize your webpages for the search engines. Of course we recommend using a professional firm like Narrow Gate Media for this but for educational purposes we wanted to share these points with our existing and hopefully new clients utilizing our sweet Edit On Site CMS.

A) Write your content for your page first without thinking about SEO. Think about your target market and what you want to communicate to them without worrying about keywords, yet. Since you are an expert in your industry and you know your customers, you will probably end up including keywords (in this stage) without thinking about it.

B) Now identify your target keywords that describe what the page is about. This is where you start thinking about optimization. Identify from your list of target keywords, any that best fit the pages content. If you find more that one keyword describes the page, try and use the one that has the greater search volume. If none of the keywords on your list are appropriate, you may need to do some further keyword research.  If so, we recommend the Google AdWords Tool because it makes it quick and easy.

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We often get requests for help in building a website solution for someone or some entity, not surprising since we are an Indianapolis web design and SEO company.

However, more often than you might think, the requests come with a need for a translator because many people simply don’t know what they want or how to ask for it. Obviously if you have never been involved in a web project before or you are not coming to us through professional business means, this is understandable.

The fact still remains, many times people are simply unrealistic in their expectations of what a website can and can not do, what it takes to be successful and how much it costs.

We continue to be surprised by the number of people that want to have the next Facebook or eBay site, or “you know, something simple and easy like Amazon.com”.

What many people don’t realize:

A)  It’s more difficult to make money on the web than you might think. Turning a profit can be difficult, especially when your goals are high....

How do you handle negative comments or outright lies being posted about you or your company on social media platforms across the web? This is becoming a bigger and bigger concern. The root problem is that social media can’t really be "controlled". The best defense is of course a good offense. Providing consistent company information and keeping engaged with your community can go a long way towards building and retaining loyalty even when you’re under attack. But what happens when you are targeted by competitors, or a political group and the negative impacts begin to take on a life of their own? The first rule is to remain cool. Don’t immediately respond and don’t try to stop the discussions all together. Instead, read through the comments and take the necessary time to understand the issues being raised. Then research within and beyond your company to gather factual, accurate data about the situation. Honesty and accuracy are going to be your best weapons. Once you have all of the facts it will be important to...

With many web designers in Indianapolis to choose from, it can be tough to figure out who you should hire. Here are some quick web design facts that you can consider when searching for the right firm.

Flash intros or entire flash websitesFlash animations are cool and eye-catching, unfortunately major search engines like Google and Yahoo can’t see it, read it or index it. They index text. This means flash is not search engine friendly, which can hinder your efforts to rank highly in the search engines. So make sure to use flash sparingly and only in certain instances, for example in the header of a page or within a page’s content area to draw attention to a particular item, but almost never just because “it will look cool”.

Optimized PagesStats show that most users will only wait a few seconds for the page to load. Furthermore, users will only wait up to 20 seconds for the whole page to load. If they load any slower than that, you can count on them leaving, hitting the back button, etc. Your site and its pages must have a good balance of graphics and text and must load quickly. 

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What do you do with a social media website with almost 200 million users and almost 70 million daily posts? I suggest you use it to promote your business.

Using Twitter for Website Traffic

After posting to your Blog or updating your website content, you should tweet about it. You’ll be glad you did because many users look for useful info on Twitter. However, don’t think you’re going to get thousands of visitors just by posting your website link. You need to do something more interesting like, “Top 5 ways to …”. Even though this won’t help your rankings in the search engines, it should provide some good traffic to your site.

Using Twitter for Link Building

First, you must build a large group of followers. Do this by following people who share your same interests and those in your industry. Many users will follow you back. Some will actually repurpose your content in their blogs, too. This is where the link building begins. You should also know that Google doesn’t index Twitter’s shortened...

If you have done research on search engine optimization and how SEO can help improve your website's performance, than you have undoubtedly come across the word SERP or SERP’s. If you are like most, you are probably curious as to what role this has in SEO.

 

Well, contrary to what some people think, SERP is not what you put on pancakes. It's actually an acronym for Search Engine Results Page. So a SERP is a page of results (list of links) that is generated after someone has gone to a search engine like Google and typed in a keyword phrase and then hit "enter".  In the simplest terms, it’s the results page.

 

Since the goal of every SEO campaign is to have high rankings on the SERP’s, you now know why this term is so widely used. 

 

Good luck on the SERP’s.