This is often the scenario for many business owners. They are so relieved that their site is online that they don’t consider what would happen if it mysteriously went offline or needed updating.

Things happen on the Internet. Servers go down, protocols get mangled and hackers break code. This is only a few examples of what happens on the Web and often times your site will be affected. It will inevitably happen at some point.

So what can you do to be ready? At Goldstein Media we take the guesswork out of maintaining your Website. If anything should happen to your site our experience team of Web experts can fix the issue for you for as little as $75 a month.* Our team of developers will deal directly with the hosting company to figure out what the problems are and get them resolved as fast as possible.

Need to make revisions to the site to add a new product or service? You do not need to be worried about messing up the code and breaking the site. Our team can help you update your site as part of your maintenance contract and get the changes up quickly.

Want more information call us today at (215) 352-5216.

Back in the late 19th and early 20th century, salesmen used to travel across the country selling all kinds of potions and contraptions. These salesmen would make wild claims that their wares would cure everything from a constantly icky toe to the measles. Often times, like today, when a customer bought these items they did far less than what was promised.

Fast forward more than a century and you’ll find that not much has changed. Their are still people hocking their wares, claiming to be able to solve all of life’s mysteries. Now, you’re probably asking yourself what does this have to do with Web design or Internet marketing. Sadly, the Internet trades are not immune to these slithery, slimy characters. If anything, the Internet is the new frontier, where these vermin thrive.

Recently, I was courting  a client for a Website design. Like most of my customers they were interested in being found on Google and the other search engines. They already had a site made for them by one of the ma-bell outfits. They didn’t know much about the Web, but did they know that things as they weren’t working. So like many brave business owners they ventured out into the frontier of the Web and began talking to Web designers and Internet marketers to see what options they had to offer.

This is when we first met.

We met at a local cafe and I explained to them my philosophy of design and development: Clean, schematic, and readable sites that promote natural rankings in the search engines. They looked at me dumb founded. “Naturally?” they asked. Apparently they were led to believe that somehow a Website and Search Engine Marketing (pay-per-click) were one in the same — you couldn’t do one without the other.

I explained to them that even though they were in a competitive keyword and market they could still rank high in the natural listings. They were shocked and felt betrayed by the other designers and salesmen who steered them wrong.

When I first heard what they were being told, my blood boiled. Yes, there is a place for PPC in every Web design and Internet marketing strategy. PPC isn’t always a waste of money, if it’s done correctly. But it certainly isn’t the be-all-end-all.

I explained to them that I could do a number of things for them. Besides building them a custom site, coded correctly, I could get them ranked for keywords that were being searched for regularly and without PPC and in the end these prospective customers became clients.

A few tips for going at search engines naturally

• Going after a competitive keyword like, let’s say, Pizza Shop, you are competing with more than 36.6 million other listings. Remember that a broad search term like this is pulling up listings from all over.
• What you can do is go for Pizza Shop Philadelphia or Pizza Shop Yardley. The first one might still be hard to break into, due to the fact that others have been there much longer and the fact that Philadelphia is a large area, but the second one is definitely attainable.
• If you have a small company that is regional or even local, don’t go after the broad key terms. You’ll never be able to compete with the giants in that space. Go after your surrounding zip codes and local towns.
• If you have a regional or even national company, you can go after the broader key terms, but be prepared to spend lots of money and time getting there without any guarantee of success. What you can do though is go into the more regional or local spaces and compete on those levels for those key terms. It might be more work, but you’ll have a better chance of ranking.

The moral of the story beware of the low hanging fruit and those snakes that tell you to eat the apple. Do your homework and be an educated consumer. If something sounds way too good to be true it probably is and sometimes doing a little extra work pays off in dividends later on.

There was a very interesting article in Search Engine Land blog yesterday. The author points out some very interesting points:

But what about those that have a more basic Flash site that does indeed provide information? For them, I would ask, why Flash? If you don’t need to allow your visitors to interact with your website, then why not just use HTML with Flash accents? Because even if the search engines are indexing the information contained in Flash (more on this in a bit), there are other reasons not to use it. First and foremost, not every browser has Flash installed. In fact, currently on an iPhone, Flash shows up as a little blue cube. Second, many Flash-based sites use only one URL for the entire site. Besides the search engine implications of that, it is also a nightmare for bookmarking, as well as for most web analytics programs.

via Are The Search Engines Really Indexing Flash?.

So I leave you with this, if your site does not need the wow power and interactive feel of Flash, but you want to capitalize on the search results, leave Flash for another day or another project.

As more and more cell phones start to come out with Internet communication and viewing capabilities it is becoming more important than ever for companies to make their corporate sites viewable to this new segment of Internet viewer.

There are many ways to make sure the right version of your site is being viewed:

• Have a new site developed that takes into account the small viewing capabilities of the site
• Have the current site URL automatically redirect to a mobile friendly page/section on your site that is mobile browser friendly
• Have your main site scalable to view correctly in most if not all of the browsers, both mobile and otherwise.

These are all excellent solutions. But, especially the last one, the overall development and maintenance of such a site makes it much more cost prohibitive than it needs to be.

For all three points, developing such sites in such a way that allows it to view correctly in the plethora of different mobile browsers out there is a daunting and costly task.

There is a solution.

Recently, Goldstein Media acquired a Mobile Web construction and management system that not only makes it simple to view a site on both a computer and in a mobile browser,  but enables  the site to view correctly on all of the major handsets. In addition this new technology allows for easy editing with an intuitive interface.

The technology does not stop there. In addition to having the site viewable on all the major handsets, Goldstein Media is able to provide an advanced platform to market and communicate with Mobile Web clientele through a variety of different opt-in SMS/Text messaging campaigns.

For more information, please call Goldstein Media at (215) 352-5216 to setup a FREE, no obligation demonstration of this exciting new technology.

The idea of Twitter was to share what you are doing with your friends and fans, but it’s evolved into so much more. Twitter is like Blellow just without the amount of functionality that Blellow provides. I’d be interested to see if there will eventually be integration between the two.

What are your thoughts on Blellow? Post them below.