These are not the reasons we want you to stop using Internet Explorer!

Last week, vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer Versions 6, 7 and 8 were exploited by the Chinese government in an attempt to hack into Google’s Servers. This is now very well documented all over the web. Last week, Google made headlines because they traced massive hacking attempts on their GMail mailboxes that originated in China. Google responded by threatening to block China entirely and shut down their operations in China. Why would China try to hack Google? Because certain human rights activists use GMail. The security holes that allowed these attacks are only part of the problems with IE.

The only reason that we don’t push the IE issue too much with customers, is because there are still archaic companies that are stuck in 1999 by forcing their employees or customers to use outdated technology that is just plain not safe. Probably the worst offender I have ever seen is TrendMLS.com, the company that currently has the contract for Delaware area real estate multi list services. This practice of standardizing on one browser needs to stop. Now.

Most people don’t realize that Microsoft creates their own standards for how they render web pages. This is changing slowly over time, and Microsoft has stated that their next generation browser (version 9), will pass most of the standards tests to render web pages properly. This literally can’t happen soon enough. The problem is that many, many, many people use old versions of Internet Explorer. IE6 is an incredible pain in the ass for web designers. As recently as 6 months ago, we had to spend days making a standards-based website work in IE6 with stupid coding tricks because a customer’s wife works for the State of Delaware and she states that the State of Delaware won’t let her upgrade her web browser. This is incredibly shortsighted and dangerous.

You have many options for a much faster, safer, and more fun web experience. What is the best web browser out there? That depends who you ask. Google Chrome is very fast, and Safari is very fast on the Mac. My main web browser is still Firefox. Firefox has regular updates, is very fast, and it has an amazing number of plugins that make it a joy to use.

Take a moment, and get a better browser now. Please?

Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html
Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/
Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome/

1. Open up the space – we knocked down three walls in the office, combining the tech and design areas.
2. Bring in more natural light – knocking down the walls allowed more light in from the perimeter offices.
3. Get rid of barriers between people – all office desk hutches were disassembled and removed.
4. Improve lighting – replace flourecent lights with halogen spotlights and track lighting.
5. Improve the colors of the walls – we had the office painted with a warmer color.
6. Add more markerboards – we use markerboards a lot, so we got industrial markerboards from www.uwco.net.
7. New flooring – I wanted to remove all carpet from the floors, but we settled for having the carpets professionally cleaned.
8. Hang examples of our work – we created a wall of work examples that you pass as you walk into our office now.

After accomplishing all of these goals, I stepped back to admire our office space, and to see what else it needed to turn it into a true design studio. The thing that really jumped out at me is that we have collected quite an array of different computer desks over the years.  Some were 6 feet wide, some were 5 feet wide, and two were 4 feet wide.  All were made of that particle board that I hate.  So the next goal became:

1. Get new desks.

I looked at desks at local furniture stores, online, at office supply stores, and at sites like Herman Miller. Even the very expensive desks that were out there looked cheap to me.  One desk that looked interesting was the Milk desk, but that desk is $5000-$8000 for each desk.  You can see their cool site here:  http://www.milk.dk.    That Milk desk gave me some ideas for what we wanted.

One of my friends is a welder, and I thought about making a desk from sustainable materials.   I didn’t want the office to have recycled garbage in it, but I didn’t want particle board any longer either.  There had to be something in between.    I settled on making a frame for each desk out of metal, and then getting a flat surface for the top of each desk.

In speaking with my welder friend, we talked about steel or aluminum.   Steel would be inexpensive, but it would be heavy.  And it would rust. We agreed that a thick-wall aluminum square tubing frame would look the best, and would give the best strength. after sketching up 5 different designs on paper, we made the first prototype at his shop.

Here is the first prototype:

It looks really good in person.  And it only weighs about 10 pounds.

Here is what is coming next to finish the first prototype:

• Now we have a company manufacturing the surface for the desk out of architectural Corian that is translucent.
• A special cable box will mount underneath with a power strip inside.
• Power cabling will run through the desk tubing itself.
• There is a special surprise in the design that I will reveal when the desk is complete.

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-NEW-iPhone-4G-Coming-2010

Here are answers to the most common questions about accepting payments in real-time through your website:

Question:  “Can I easily accept payments through my website?”
YES!  Our Content Management System (CMS) has a built-in payment form system that makes it very easy to accept payments through your website.   You can even have multiple payment forms and run the cards in real time.

Do I need an ecommerce store to accept payments?
No.  You just need a form that can process the forms through a payment gateway service, such as Authorize.net

I have a merchant account from (Heartland, Wilmington Trust, PNC, etc.), isn’t that all I need?
No.  Your merchant account allows you to accept cards, but it doesn’t automate the transaction.  That is why you need a payment gateway.

But my merchant account provider (or bank) told me that this is all I need…..
They usually aren’t well versed with online transactions.  You still need the payment gateway.

What if I already have a different payment gateway from Authorize.net?
First make sure you aren’t talking about your merchant account.  If you are sure that you have a payment gateway account, then we can probably integrate whatever you have for free.   We integate with most popular payment gateways.  Simply let us know which one you are using.

How much is an Authorize.net account?
The price varies, because they are sometimes bundled with merchant accounts, but plan on spending a little over $100 for setup, then $10 per month, and 15 cents per transaction.  That is the normal cost for running cards in real-time.

How fast can you setup this payment form for me?
If you are already using our CMS-Logic system to run your website, then it will take less than a day.  Make sure you have your Authorize.net transaction ID ready to go when you come to us for setup.  If you aren’t using our CMS-Logic system to manage your website, it is still possible for us to place a payment form into your website, but it will take a few more days.

Who should I call for this?
Email our sales team at “sales-at-delaware.net” and we will contact you.

Comments: I recently started a website with (deleted name of host) which is a do-it-yourself web hosting site.  After a week or so, I think I’m about ready to throw in the towel!  The problem is that I’ve paid for my domain for the next 4 years!!  Can you all build my site through the existing host so I don’t lose my money?  I want a great website at an affordable cost (I’m sure you’ve never heard that before!)

I work in the area and could stop by your office at some point.  My website is (deleted)

Thanks,

(name deleted)

See my reply after the jump.

The Short Answer:
No, you will not lose the years that are pre-paid on your domain names.

The Long Answer:
When you purchase a domain name, you buy it from a registrar. Registrars don’t (can’t) force you to use their hosting company.  If you are the person that owns that domain name, you can point it at ANY hosting company for as long as you own it.   Each domain name has a pair of information entries for the name servers that are associated with your domain name.   Remember that and say it with me “NAME SERVERS”.    Those two name server addresses serve as the “zip code” for your domain, and it points the domain name that you own to some host on the web.  Since you are the owner of your domain name, you can login to your domain registrar (godaddy, network solutions, tucows, etc.) and change those name server entries.  Once you do that, all email and web hosting traffic will then be pointed at your new host.  Make sure that you choose a host first, setup an account with the host, setup email accounts, and then move the domain name last so that you don’t have downtime.

Now, since you are worried about losing $40 or so on your domain names, and you want something “great at an affordable cost”, we should probably meet or have a phone conversation to discuss what an “affordable cost” and what “great” is. 

The new interface for the website was designed within the first week of the contract signing, and will begin moving online very soon.

Cities interested in upgrading their websites and gaining better management tools are encouraged to contact Delaware.Net at 888-432-7965, or you can inquire for a quote on our website at http://www.delaware.net/free-web-design-quote/.   Examples of our applications for municipalities can be found online at http://www.civic-logic.com.

Here are some of the differences between us and our competitors;

MUNICIPAL WEB DESIGN PRICING
Some municipal website design companies package websites into flat fees based on the number of citizens that live in the city/town in question.   This flat-rate pricing doesn’t work because smaller cities end up overpaying for their website, and larger cities end up paying more for add-on website modules to get a complete solution.    Delaware.Net’s fees for municipal websites is usually less than these other companies, and our proposals are more accurate because they are customized for each site.  Our one-time development fees for municipalities have ranged typically from $8000 for a smaller municipality up to $30,000 for a very large site (included dedicated servers, backups, GIS integration, and much more than the average website), with the average Delaware.Net project being closer to $10,000.   You could always spend much, much more, as evidenced by this quote given by CivicPlus.

3-YEAR TERM CONTRACTS?!?!
Other firms bundle design pricing with hosting over multi-year terms, selling the website services as a lease.  This can trap the municipality with a vendor over a long period of time, limiting their options.     A small city website project that we just won was quoted at $27,000 for a 3-year project from CivicPlus.   Our contract was under $9,000 for custom design and development, training, an Intranet, a request tracking system, email newsletter system, consulting, and more. We bill for our projects in three or four payments, so this is much more affordable.  We saved that small city over $14,000, and their site will also be completed much faster on our more powerful CMS.

CITY WEBSITE DESIGN
One of the challenges of building a custom website on a CMS is how to make the site not appear to look like a template.   If you look at the city website for the City of Cheyenne, Wyoming, you can see how a city website can look like a very plain, template-based website.  Should every page of your city website have a kid on a skateboard at the top of the site?   This is the difference between our company and others.   Our designs are custom, and we are not cranking out cookie-cutter designs.   Many times we hire local photographers at each city to get the best possible result.

CIVIC LOGIC CMS
Marketing speak aside, you have to really demo a Content Management System (CMS) before you buy it.  Your CMS is where you will be spending a lot of your time managing your website.    When you try these systems, ask yourself – “how easy will this system be for my employees to use?”.   If a system requires 6-12 clicks to accomplish editing a page, and our system takes 2-3 clicks, ours will save your employees a LOT of time over the other system.  All CMSs are not created equally.   We spent quite a bit of time looking at competing CMS solutions before we built ours, and it took us two years to get it just right.   Some systems, like CivicPlus, are simply a page management system for your website.  Others, like our CivicLogic system, are designed to be a true Intranet (secure staff website) for your staff, as well as being a CMS.    With a true Intranet website, you can securely add personnel documents, resources, file, pages, calendars, news, messaging, and much more for your staff.   Each department in your city can have their own private calendar and portal to share information.   This will save your municipality time and money, and get better adoption of the whole system from your staff.

MONTHLY CITY WEBSITE HOSTING FEES
Hosting from CivicPlus last year was generally $600 per month before they went to their bundled pricing.  That is a steep fee that still didn’t include all of their available modules. For example, you would have to spend another $100 per month AND a $1500 setup fee if you wanted their request tracking system.  A request tracking system is a VERY desirable system because it can be used to track complaints from citizens.  Our system includes a better request tracking system at no additional cost, a mass email newsletter system, and a real Intranet system for $150 per month.  That is a savings of $6600 per year!  For a better system!   It obviously isn’t all about price, so you should test both systems to see what is better for your city.

MOVING AWAY FROM CIVICPLUS
If you paid for a CivicPlus website, and you are tired of overpaying for your monthly fees, we can help.   Generally speaking, we can move a CivicPlus website to our CMS, Intranet, Newsletter, Request Tracking, and even our Project Management Module in a matter of two weeks.   The cost to move your site would be very low, and you would recoup that fee in a matter of a couple of months because our hosting fees are so much less than CivicPlus.  Your design files would also remain intact, so you wouldn’t have to pay for a new design.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Contact Me at 888-432-7965 x100 if you have any questions.   If you are looking to have a new website for your municipality, or if you are interested in moving away from an expensive CivicPlus solution, you can get a quote from us online using our free online quote form.

When I say that ecommerce is hard, I’m talking about running an honest to goodness custom ecommerce store that hopes to gross over $50,000 per month in sales using a custom-built website.   Stores that sell a couple of thousand dollars worth of goods per month are usually not profitable, but companies that are just now becoming serious about their ecommerce stores have to start somewhere.

How to tell if running an ecommerce website is simply not for you:

1. If you hope to drop-ship all of your products so that you can avoid dealing with shipping and packaging.
   If you have a full-time day job, and you hope to grow an ecommerce store on the side, prepare for your online store to be your second job.  You will need to dedicate several hours a day to your store.  Its also difficult for a business to just add commerce and walk away without a plan to manage and grow the online store.
2. You can’t designate a person at your company who can manage the store once it is built.
   Who will answer the emails that come in?  Who will answer questions from customers?  Who will handle returns.   Typically customers will try a small order with your store to evaluate your customer service before they spend a lot of money on your website.
3. You don’t typically check email more than once or twice a day, and/or you don’t have a smartphone.
   You have to be somewhat of a techie to be successful with an ecommerce site.  All successful ecommerce store owners that I have met have a smartphone with push email and internet access to monitor their store.   A cheap flip phone and no qwerty keyboard is a bad sign.
4. You don’t experience editing photos on your computer.
   Your product catalog must be full of great photos.   One photo per product is NOT enough anymore.  If your store has hundreds or thousands of products, you will be spending a lot of time resizing photos on your computer. If the cost and learning curve of a photo editing program is too much for you, then so is ecommerce.   You don’t need to be a photoshop expert, but it helpful to know how to resize, rotate, crop, and sharpen photos.
5. You can’t designate an area to take photos of your products.
   You will need to create a small photo booth to take product photos.   If you intend to steal product photos from other websites, then don’t build an ecommerce site.
6. You use personal email addresses (comcast, verizon) to run your business on.
   A legitimate ecommerce store should have email addresses at your domain name.    If you can’t use Outlook or some other program to check multiple email addresses, that is a bad sign.
7. You aren’t the type to do research online, to learn about the latest search engine optimization techniques.
   The best place to learn about ecommerce, search engine optimization, and more is the web.   If you have to call your web designer to learn about all of these things, that is a bad sign.   Certainly your provider can help you take things to the next level, but you need to be able to do some basic research on your own to save time and money.   There are a LOT of buzzword topics that you will need to learn about quickly to be successful with ecommerce; SEO, cart abandonment, visitor conversion, Landing Pages, Optimization, tagging, payment gateways, APIs, inbound linking, etc.
8. You think that keywords and meta tags are the secret to coming up high in Google.
   It is a myth that adding a few keywords to your site is all you need to do to get found in Google and other search engines.  What will you do to get quality website to link to you, for example?  You will need a plan for this, and that takes time and money too.  If you have a list of terms that you think your business should show in the top ten results under in Google, then you must work closely with your web design team from the beginning to make sure that your site is optimized for these terms.
9. You have never used ebay, or done online shopping on your own.
   Again, you have to be a savvy web user and shopper to know what makes a good shopping experience.
10. You can’t/won’t write descriptions of your products (all of your products).
    Quality original content is what can make your site stand apart from others.   Your store will need to convince shoppers to buy, so you will need well-written product descriptions.  If you don’t have time to write these, then ecommerce may not be for you.
11. The products that you are trying to sell are a commodity that can be found anywhere.
    The sites that make the most money that I have seen sell products that people seek out.   Usually these are very specific or hard to find items.   Parts websites aren’t very sexy, but they make a ton of money. You have to have a niche with your business so that people will seek you out.
12. You think that $100 a month to cover all of your store fees is too much money.
    Ecommerce is expensive.  Our ecommerce hosting framework starts at $50 per month for an ecommerce website.  Add onto that the cost of accepting credit cards, and the payment gateway ($10/mo), and the fees can add up.  This is without spending any money on adwords with Google.   Be realistic with your recurring fees, not just your store development fees.
13. You wish to emulate stores online that belong to multi-million dollar businesses, on a tiny budget.
    Look for stores online that more closely resemble what you are trying to create.   Do a lot of Google searches for related products to what you are selling.   See what the competition looks like.   While it might be tempting to want to emulate a multi-national corporation website, be realistic.
14. You don’t have a database of people to market to right away
    This is why brick and motar stores do so well online.  They can market to their existing customers.
15. Your project’s goals aren’t realistic.
    If you are trying to build an expansive website in a matter of weeks, it just wont happen unless you have an extremely small or template-based online store. If the store is very small, then your sales will be small, and you may not make enough to cover expenses.

If you have comment or questions about ecommerce success, please post a follow-up below.  I will answer your questions here.

In a startling news release on CNET News, it was just reported that Network Solutions and Monster Commerce, who host about 10,000 ecommerce stores, had their credit card data stolen from almost 5,000 ecommerce websites.   This is obviously a nightmare for their customers, and the cardholders that have shopped on Monster Commerce stores.  We can help them!

Delaware.Net offers an alternative to Monster Commerce called Store-Logic

Monster Commerce has been a large ecommerce hosting company that we have looked at for some time for ideas as we built our next-generation ecommerce engine.   Particularly, we liked how Monster Commerce handled category viewing when managing their stores (we had a demo account with them), and we like how they employed a theme engine for their stores.    We took these good ideas into account when building our new ecommerce engine, which was released late in 2008.

Importing Monster Commerce Stores

Monster Commerce customers can call us, and we  will help them export their data from their existing stores into our engine.   We will import their product data, sales data, customer data, and more.

Credit Card Data Storage

While we can import your store data, we won’t import your credit card data.   Modern ecommerce stores should never hold onto credit card data permanently, as the risks are just too great.   It is possible to pass credit card data securely from your online store directly to a payment processor such as Authorize.Net, or PayPal’s PayFlowPro system, or YourPay.  All of these systems are already integrated into Store-Logic so that you can accept credit cards right away.

Ecommerce SEO, Shipping, and More.

Our system includes real-time shipping for UPS, FedEx, USPS, and UPS Freight.  Most other ecommerce engines out there do not include these features alone.   We are a certified UPS Ready Ecommerce Vendor, so our store engine talks directly with UPS’ servers.    Our store engine has the latest search engine optimization features, to help your store come up in search results. For example, as you add products and categories to your store, they are added to a special Google Sitemap file that you can register with Google.

Get a Quote Today to Upgrade Your Ecommerce Store

Let us help you with your ecommerce website. You can get a quote from us online using this form:
http://www.delaware.net/free-web-design-quote/

What is the “The Long Tail”?
The Long Tail has a detailed definition at Wikipedia, which goes into quite a lot of detail that gets a little bit too detailed, but the opening paragraph is useful for this discussion. It goes like this:

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities. Anderson elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8).

So we know that The Long Tail is a phrase that describes selling a large number of items, in realatively small quantities, that add up to be a large volume. In other words, the web makes it possible to sell a large number of items in small quantities, which when added up exceed the amount of more popular items that are sold. Amazon.com is an excellent representation of a company that sells way more unpopular books than it does popular books. The problem for Amazon, of course, is that it has to keep an incredible inventory of books in its inventory.

The point of the graph is that overall, Amazon.com makes more money (the yellow area) selling unpopular books overall, than it does selling popular books (the green area). This yellow area, is the long tail.

How does this help my website with search engines?
You probably thought I was going off track talking about books and Amazon.com, but I needed to explain that to lead you up to this next point. You and I can’t go out and build a warehouse and stock more books than Amazon.com, but there are things that are in virtually limitless supply that will help you sell online, and these are your keyword phrases and terms that your website contains. In other words, most website owners focus too much on a small number of phrases that they believe customers will enter into Google. The more popular phrases, or the first thing that comes into their mind, and they stop. If more time was spent focusing on a larger number of phrases and terms…. targeted words that coincided with each and every page in the website, they would have much, MUCH more success with less frustration. Lets take this further….

Focusing on Keyword Quality AND Quantity for SEO
Lets say that you are a Realtor. And you live in the state that I live in, Delaware. An you want to come up high in Google under “Delaware Real Estate”. So in your real estate website, you target the phrase “Delaware Real Estate” and you put it everywhere in your website. You might even hire an SEO guy to “optimize” your website to get that term in there everywhere. But nothing happens. You don’t really get a lot of traffic to your site, and when you search for this term in Google, you aren’t on one of the first couple of pages in search results. Something must be wrong with your website! Well, not really. It is more likely that something is wrong with your approach, because unless your website has an extremely high Google PageRank (discussed in a future blog post in detail), you aren’t likely to come up under that search term. So lets analyze why that might happen.

From the detail that Google gives us above, we can see above that 60,500 people searched Google for “Delaware Real Estate” in February 2009. The solid green bar also shows us that more than likely, quite a number of people are bidding on that term in Google’s AdWords system. This means that if you want to pay Google to have an advertisement under that term, you will probably need to budget into the thousands of dollars per month to both rank high in the paid listings, and have enough money to have staying power month to month. But lets face it – an individual Realtor won’t pay that. More people click on the free listings anyway, and since they are free, that is the place where Realtors want to be – at the top of of the organic (free) search results. It could also be argued that this term is too broad, so paying a premium for it or chasing it in your SEO might not be the best use of your time and money, since people that are searching for very broad terms are much less likely to be your ideal customer. This phrase (Delaware Real Estate), because it gets a significant amount of traffic, puts it into the green area of the graph, and it is not part of the long tail. Lets look at another phrase.

Now I did a search for “Dover Delaware Real Estate”. All I did is add the word “Dover” to the search phrase, making it 4 words long. You can see that Google shows “not enough data” for the month of February, but overall, they have statistics showing an average of 2,400 people per month that are searching for this phrase. Obviously this is a lot less people than the number that was searching for “Delaware Real Estate”. You can also see that not as many people are bidding up the value of the phrase, because the vague little green bar isn’t all the way full. If I were a real estate agent in Dover, Delaware, I would be targeting the crap out of this phrase. This phrase does not get a lot of traffic, but it is VERY targeted. There is also less competition for it, which is VERY important. It gets enough traffic to make it relevant to your website, so it should definitely be in there. More importantly than just including it, is WHERE you include it. Instead of being stuffed randomly throughout the website, it would make a lot of sense to make a page designed solely around this one term. The title of the page, the heading tag in the page, the content, the inbound text links, meta tags (not as useful, but not dead), and other attributes of that page should all have that term in it. This is where Delaware.Net shines, because we are very good at this, and we can automate much of it for you.

The Bottom Line
By targeting a larger volume of terms and phrases that are more specific, but less popular, will help you to cast a wider net with Google. Since there is less competition for larger word combinations, it is easier to dominate those phrases and come up number one. Understand that it is still sometimes worth the effort to target a two-word popular phrase, but as the popularity goes up, so does the work required to get noticed by Google for those popular phrases.

Action Plan For Using The Long Tail
Here is a “to do” list of things that you can do to use this technique in your website.

• Use Free Keyword Tools - There are a lot of tools online for generating keywords, and for researching keywords. You can get a good start on your own, but these tools sometimes expose ways that people search for your products that you are not aware of.
• Create a Larger List of Keywords – Don’t stop at 20 or even 50 terms. The more keyword research you do, the longer your list should be.
• Don’t Worry - You can always add more and more detailed keywords to your site as you go, but the sooner they get in there the better. Moving up in Google and changing your PageRank value can take months.
• Automate Where Possible - I mentioned in my example above that the Realtor should have a page in their site for ever city in their state. This could be done by manually creating each of those pages, or, it could be done by making a dynamic city page. In other words, one city page whose content changes on the fly, depending on how you link to it. Using this technique, I was able to make a page for every state in the country for a client in minutes. Be smart and plan this out with your web designer.
• Use Long-Tail Terms Everywhere – Google reads only what you give it, so these terms should exist in your links as well as your content. Also consider adding these tags to your image alt tags, and your link title tags.
• Add Pages – If you are able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then keep in mind that beside the cost of your time, those pages are free of charge to you. So the more content that you put into your website the better. This doesn’t mean that you should indiscriminately add pages and pages that have nothing but keywords in them. If you aren’t able to add pages and content to your website on your own, then consider adding a Content Management System (CMS) to your website. Almost every site we build now contains a CMS system so that clients can add and edit content on their own.
• Ecommerce Tricks
  
  • Informational Products- If you have an ecommerce store, then you should be able to add detailed descriptions of products, and also have the ability to add informational pages. In other words, it is possible to add pages into an ecommerce store that behave as articles, even if they are within a product page. In our store engine, we built the ability to hide the checkout and “add to cart” icons on certain pages. We call those pages “informational pages”. This was done so that customers can embed articles into the product catalog.
  • We also created “informational options”, which allows customers to add keyword-laden instructions into the options area of the product pages.
  • Always mix up your keywords in your custom page titles. The page title is the text that appears at the top of your browser window, and this can be edited on each product page. Instead of using the same keywords over and over in your store, add a custom title that reflects the make, model, part number, and keywords that reference each product.
• Blogs – If you are an expert at what you do, then you should add a blog to your site. Most importantly, you should keep it updated. Blogs are an easy and inexpensive way to add supplemental content to your website. I charge only $50 a year to host a blog, and there are free alternatives online as well. Blogs can exist as a site on their own as well, like this one. Adding articles to your blog that have long-tail phrases in them are very helpful.
• Add Product/Services Pages – get into detail about what you do, so that you can have more rich content in your site.
• Use Tagging Features – Blogs, Ecommerce Stores, and our new CMS system contain the ability to add keyword tagging links to each page. Use this feature to mix up how you are describing the content in your site. If you don’t know what this is, please ask me.

Problems with The Long Tail

• More Keyword Research is Required- Leveraging this technique requires more research time to find phrases that work. There are many resources online for generating keywords and phrases. You can’t be effective by only using one tool, so you see why this takes a lot of time. I can steer you in the right direction if you want more information on them.
• More Pages Need to Be Built – You might need a page for every city in your county if you were a Realtor that was following my example above. Also, you would need to know another dozen tricks or so for how to add those words in your site the right way. Many website owners forget that traffic can come from Google to one of your deeper pages (not your home page). So each page should be a little bit different and highly targeted to a small group of phrases, instead of stuffing lots of phrases into one page.
• There are Exceptions – Landing number one on a popular phrase can make you rich. I have seen it happen. But since Google shuffles up the index from time to time, that easy money can quickly vanish. Having a larger catalog of terms in your website that you target is like balancing your stock portfolio.
• It Requires Time – If you aren’t looking at your traffic reports and your inbound link performance from search engines, then you have no basis for measuring your performance. If you want to experiment with strategies like this one, you have to schedule monthly reviews of your traffic, to make sure that it is working for you.
• Fresh, Unique, Targeted Content is Still King – This isn’t what most website owners want to hear, but it is the truth. Search engines like fresh content. Stuffing your website with terms and walking away from it won’t necessarily help you in the long run. You should instead focus on how to adapt the long tail strategy into your overall strategy of adding and updating content in your website in an ongoing way.
• There is More – A solid website that has a solid SEO effort involves work in a lot of areas, so this is in no way a magic bullet.

I hope that this article will help you better optimize your website content better, and help you focus more on what will help you to get noticed. If you have questions about this article, or you have a related question, please reply using the comments under this post. I promise to answer every one.