There is an interesting debate going on at highrankings.com about whether it’s better to host your own video’s or use Youtube and embed the video into your page.
I have always recommended to my customers that they use YouTube or Google Video to host their videos and embed them into their pages. There are a couple of reasons for this. My customers tend to be smaller businesses and their hosting plans don’t include a huge amount of bandwidth or the ability to stream their content.
Most every business who post a video hopes that it get very popular and is a great promotion for their site, but if you get a good Digg, Stumble or some other sharing service recommending your video, you can quickly use up all of your bandwidth. Before you even know that it’s all gone your site may be down for quite a while and then you’ll probably have to buy more.
I don’t believe Google will ever run out of bandwidth.
The next issue is streaming. If you just post a video on your site the entire thing must be downloaded by your visitor before it will start to play. Many of them will leave your site before that if it’s a large video. To start playing the video as soon as the visitor arrives at your page requires a streaming server. Many web hosts don’t even offer that and true video streaming in any form can be expensive.
This is not an issue with most video hosting services.
There are also some some advantages to self-hosting. You can view the debate on
When I first started this business I had some business cards made.
I didn’t give it much thought and threw them together pretty quickly.
I’ve been talking about new cards for quite a while now and one of the members of Business Leads Exchange Networking Group that I attend is a graphic designer and illustrator named Dan Szwedko. I know Dan pretty well from the meetings and I like his work. What I thought I’d do is to get a fresh perspective on my card design.
One of Dan’s promotion ideas is that if you’re only printing on one side of your business card you’re also wasting valuable advertising space that you already own. He has a special on two sided business cards.
I gave Dan my logo, my company colors and the text that I wanted on my card. Those of you who read this blog know that I like black text on a white background. It’s always the easiest to read.
I let Dan know this as well and being an artist Dan wanted to add some color to my card. I told him to use my colors any way that he wanted.
He sent me this back…
I must admit that I think the color definitely gives it some style and looking at it I realized that if we flipped the gradient background and put the tan on the top, all of my contact info will still be black on white.
Same with the back.
I really like the ghosted logo Dan added on the back so I kept that and added a bit more text.
I am very happy with the final product.
If you would like to take advantage of my freind Dan’s special of 1000 two sided cards for $47.95, plus a flat fee of Only $25.00 for layout. Just visit his site dsgraphics.net. It’s quality work at a great price and he will even include Free Shipping!
There has been quite a bit written and talked about lately about an “SEO Bubble” and how long that search engine optimization will remain viable. One of the best posts that I’ve read recently is on a blog called Conversation Marketing.
The issues that seem to be of the most concern is that SEO is pretty simple and that site owners will be doing it themselves, much more than will it go away. I don’t believe that SEO will go away, because if it’s done well it is one the best and most economical ways to bring customers to your site. Even with all of the phoney, fly by night “SEO Experts” out there, most people will learn the difference between good work and bad.
The main concern that has really benn there for quite a while now is that it will move “in house” and individual shops will not have any customers. My feeling here is that while SEO is simple, if done well it’s also quite a bit of hard work. Even is all of the site owners out there know everything about it (still a huge IF) there will be plenty that just would rather pay someone else to do the work well.
I got an email the other day from a company in India that wanted my SEO business. I don’t think that they read my site, but they talked to me about link building and I don’t write about that much so maybe they did. They contacted me through my email form so what they sent wasn’t officially Spam, but it sure read like a form letter and if I got it through the regular email I would have considered it junk.
Their claim to “AMAZE you with our work” and mentioning several times their “ETHICAL LINK building process” and “white hat technique” got me curious so I wrote to them and asked them exactly how they planned to do that.
They told me that they wanted 50% up front and before the other half was to be paid they would send me a “report of the confirmed links”. They sent me a lot of other information about how their “One Way Links will help to achieve Top 10 ranks in Google, Yahoo & MSN” and sent a price list, but still no mention of how they got the links that they claim would be so beneficial to my site. While I don’t argue that getting relevant inbound links to my site will help in my rankings, being labeled as a spammer may get me in trouble (like with so much of the crap that I fight against being posted here in this blog).
So I Googled this company. I tried several keyword terms that they claimed to help me with like “Search Engine Optimization”, “SEO services”, “link building packages” and more and couldn’t find them anywhere (surprise, surprise). The keyword terms were all pretty competitive ones so I tried to find them for their name (not mentioned here) and I went back 25 pages. Still nothing!
I am thinking that if you can’t be found for your own name and your site is more than a couple of days old you must have done something bad not to be on the search engine results.
To read more about shopping for SEO services there’s a good post on the Wordpreneur site
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I found myself at a get together the other night and was asked What is it that you do, exactly?
I found myself trying to explain search engine optimization, search engine marketing and things like viral marketing to people who had never heard of them. I went on for a bit and I think that they had a bit of a clue, but no more.
Today I happened upon an article by William Flaiz on Search Engine Watch that speaks to this. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or not.
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As another year comes to a close I like to look back at the current year and review the progress that I have made in my business.
Looking back seems to be the thing to do this time of year and I think that it’s important. Knowing where things have been is the very best way to help us understand where we are today and possibly where we are going tomorrow.
I found an article by Donovan Baldwin on the SEO News site that looks at the history of search engine optimization.
This article is well worth reading for anyone interested in SEO, it’s not just for newbies.
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SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the best thing going, right? Kind of like “Why don’t we slice the bread before we put it in the package?”
Have a look around the web these days and see how many sites ignore SEO completely. I used to wonder why that was and then one day I realized why. SEO is simple, but it’s also hard work!
You need to get good quality, related outside sites pointing their links at your site, but as I mentioned yesterday you also need to keep updating your site. There are many things that you can do right away to help, but it’s really an ongoing thing.
I subscribe to several Craigslist feeds for web design, email marketing and promotion work in cities in the Eastern US. Many times I have come across ads for SEO services and they are almost all looking for some “magic bullet” that will rocket them to the top of the search engines and keep them there for the most competitive keyword that they can think of. Many times they want this done for their site that contains about four pages.
I used to write and try to explain the problem until I realized that these folks were probably looking for snake oil salesmen and I was just banging my head against the wall. They were were probably going to get exactly what they were looking for.
In the cases of both web design and SEO there are no shortcuts. If you don’t do it right it will not work at all or if it does work it will be limited and will eventually come back to bite you.
I have been reading to the Site Pro News website for almost six years and subscribing to their newsletter/rss feed.. It is still one of my favorite sites for news and tools for my favorite topics, web design, web promotion, and search engine optimization.
Today’s article is Part 1 in a series called “Freeware SEO Tools for the Do It Yourself Webmaster”. Today’s list if SEO tools and there will be more to follow. It’s a list well worth reading and bookmarking. This site has always had some of the best tools anywhere and most of them are free.
Before you redesign your old site is the perfect time to start planning for SEO.You want to build your new site with the search engines in mind because getting them to like and trust your site can be the biggest boost to traffic and sales that you can have. You want to be able to improve your sites appearance, while making it more easily spiderable and also be sure that any hard earned rankings that your old site has built up will be retained and improved.
Paul O’Brien has some great tips on his blog series called “Search Engine Optimization”. This post is “Do Not Redesign Without a Plan for Search”
SEO (search engine optimization) still seems to be the most popular topic for readers of my blog. It seems many designers either don’t have the resources to hire an SEO company, don’t trust the SEO companies, or just want to learn to do it themselves. In any case here is another resource that will let you learn more.
Back in 2003 Ross Dunn wrote an article called “The Ten Minute Optimization REDUX” it contained many good points about how search engines worked and read your site. He updated it last month and not much has changed, but there are some significant changes.
