Chicago Web Maintenance

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 by Wikipedia

Ribs of beef and pork are a cut of meat. The term ribs usually refers to the less meaty part of the chops, often cooked as a slab (not cut into separate ribs).

They can be roasted, grilled, or smoked.

A set of ribs served together (3-4 or more), is known as a rack (such as a rack of ribs).

In American cuisine, ribs usually refers to barbecue pork ribs, which are served with various barbecue sauces. They are served as a slab of meat which diners customarily tear apart by hand, then gnaw the meat from the bone. Slow roasting or barbecuing for as much as 10-12 hours creates a tender finished product.

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By Jeffrey Smith

I know many businesses are a hesitant when they think about SEO Services, due to bad press or SEO companies who have given the industry a black eye. Just as in any industry, there are going to be a few bad eggs, but with the costs of SEO rising due to supply and demand and the competitive nature of online business.

SEO is more than just a passing fad, it’s a necessity for most companies today.

Internet marketing and web sales represent one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising in existence. Just keep in mind that It’s not the size of the organization, it’s the thoroughness of the specialist optimizing your site that is in question.

SEO is never a one and done scenario.

Once the process starts it may take months to achieve the desired effect (this is why the pricing is typically so high). The upside of course is that one your keywords are anchored in your industry, a steady influx of traffic is nearly guaranteed.

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by Chris Silver Smith

Over at Media Post, The Kelsey Group is quoted today saying that the erosion in usage of print yellow pages is likely to fall off at a higher rate this year — by 10% this year, compared with only 2% to 3% erosion in recent years.

They state that a combination of factors such as more users going to internet yellow pages and local search engines combined with a recession are propelling the rapid erosion. Concerningly, one can extrapolate that if print YP usage is dropping, advertiser dollars might also follow the herd.

As Greg Sterling points out, The Kelsey Group has historically been a very staunch defender of the print YP industry, so this article is a bit of a gut-punch to people in the legacy print business, even though anyone watching the trends over the last few years won’t find it all that surprising.

One thing the Media Post article doesn’t mention is how a number of smaller, regional print yellow pages companies have had surprising growth in ad sales over the past year, likely at the expense of the larger yellow pages directory sales. As Greg further points out, some of the smaller, nimble companies like ReachLocal (who are frenemies with the yellow pages industry) may be poised to take over the small business advertiser base as those companies’ agencies of choice if the yellow pages industry cannot retain them.

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by Chris Silver Smith

With all the focus on optimization of textual page content and near-obsessive concentration on text-oriented web search engine results pages (”SERPs”), most webmasters and SEOs neglect an area of their potential repertoire which could provide a lot of benefit to their site and business: image search optimization.

One aspect of effective optimization is to keep your eyes open for all the various avenues for referral traffic which can convert to a sale on your site. Depending upon the products or services you offer, it may be very valuable to consider the possibilities of optimizing for the Image Search utilities offered by the various search engines. Even if your site isn’t a product or services website, if you’re looking to increase organic referral traffic, optimizing for image search could work well for you. Read on and I’ll explain…

Image Search utilities are built to allow users to find images by keyword. It’s maybe not widely known, but Image Search features comprise a significant and growing portion of the traffic of the major search engines. In an article about Google in Newsweek Magazine by Adi Ignatius (”In Search of the Real Google”, February, 2006 issue), it’s mentioned that Sergey Brin and Larry Page were recently considering a proposal from some of their engineers to attach sponsorship ads to Google Image search result pages.

The developers proposing this concept provided metrics and projections indicating that the ads would be very profitable – to the tune of $80 million – but Brin and Page apparently declined the proposal out of concerns that the impact to users’ experience would be too negative. Obviously, there’s a lot of user search traffic happening in that section of their search engine. That story highlights the fact that traffic for the Google Image search is significant and could be monetarily beneficial to other websites who key into the possibilities.

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by newswiretoday.com

Four day SES Conference will start February 19 in London, UK. The conference, which is the intersection of search, marketing & commerce, is devoted to the questions of promotion on the web.

February 19-21, 2008 – the 9th annual SES Conference will be held at the Business Design Centre, London .This is a leading global conference & expo with the possibility of delegates education in search engine marketing (SEM), including SEO and advertising strategies. SES Search Marketing Events provide instruction from the industry’s top search experts, including representatives of the Search Engines themselves.

”In order to outline Company’s presence on the web it is not enough to simply create a website. The site must be recognizable by search engines, so a lot of attention should be paid to its SEO and internet promotion,” comments Mat Bondarenko, marketing manager of Eldev Company – provider of Web Development Services, on the necessity of being well-informed about web promotion issues.

White hat SEO techniques, the ones that search engines approve and recommend as part of good design, include such activities as writing optimized content (which ensures other sites will link to it), listing the website in catalogues, posting articles and press releases that spotlight company’s latest news. It all can be very beneficial for both company recognition and targeted search traffic.

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by Rebecca Allen

Part one of our Success Guide “Online Marketing for Small Businesses”

How to get started: First, make sure your site has lots of relevant content, and add fresh content on a regular basis. Next, avoid using Flash for navigation elements, and skip the Flash “intro” page; search engines can’t “see” the text or links within Flash so it creates a barrier to getting the rest of your site noticed. For those who know some HTML, review your code to be sure that the title tags (invisible pieces of code that help search engines categorize your content) of every page are unique and accurately reflect its main theme. Check to see that the most important headline on your page (which should be enclosed within what coders call h1 tags) and the page content contain the keywords you believe users will be searching for. Finally, if your site doesn’t have a site map, now’s the time to add one, and if you do have a site map, consider optimizing it for Google. ( See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ for more.)

Don’t try “tricks” such as keyword stuffing (filling your page full of keywords, to the point that the text no longer makes sense), using hidden content, multiple h1 tags, or link farms (pages that are merely long lists of links to other sites). Any of these can get your site sandboxed (excluded from search results altogether), leading to a costly loss of traffic. And don’t risk a temporary drop in rankings by doing a major redesign that changes the site structure, page names, and content of your whole site at once. Instead, change your site gradually over the course of several months, and inform important sites linking to you if any of the links they’re using have changed.

Because of the way search engines work (using programs called spiders to keep track of what content is where), it can take time to show up on Google and other search indexes. Don’t expect to see significant results from your NSO efforts for anywhere from three to six months. It isn’t unusual for companies to contract for one-year NSO engagements—avoid any companies that claim they can get you results immediately.

Your Investment: If you have an intermediate knowledge of HTML, you can probably do some of the most basic NSO work on a small site yourself, but larger sites or sites in a highly competitive category will need the help of an expert to win. Depending on the size of your site and your industry, costs can vary from $500 to $15,000 a month during the terms of your engagement. NSO isn’t a one-shot deal, either; plan on re-evaluating your position and strategy once a quarter after that if you want to stay ahead of the pack. And if you’re doing it right, NSO also makes your site as friendly to human visitors as it is to search engines.

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