St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘internet marketing’ Category

Ocean Conservancy, a non profit with offices in St. Petersburg FL,  is getting some global internet attention.  It seems that Coca-Cola is hooking them up for Earth Day.

First a few words about the Ocean Conservancy and then we’ll talk about the exciting Coca-Cola and Facebook project.

If the name “Ocean Conservancy” sounds familiar, it may be because they’ve had an office, in between downtown and mid-town on Central ave, sometimes they have those real nice brochures setting out, and have been there for many years.

Continue reading “St Petersburg Non Profit Spotlight” »

Today we announce a new theme. This one isn’t just a WordPress Theme, it’s also been ported form many other content management systems and even a plain HTML/CSS version.

Simple and clean, the Desert Sage Theme has two columns, has a fixed width of 1000 pixels and has clean color scheme of light browns. It has a Search Engine friendly text Headline and Tag line space in the header.

• Drupal
• Joomla
• HTML
• DotNetNuke

Support, download and preview links after the fold below:
Continue reading “Free Theme – Desert Sage” »

We’ve just released our first free WordPress Template! We hope you enjoy this theme celebrating the glory of femininity.  And yes, I’m a man, do I have issues?  No, it’s just a theme I made for client through a third party.  Besides what wrong with loving women, and why are you looking at me like that?  Ahem! I’m plenty manly thank you!

Sadly when you work through a third party extra care needs to be taken as things get lost in translation, like the fact that she didn’t want anything like this.  My wife says this theme is  pretty good so we’ll use it as part of our new WordPress theme marketing efforts.  I hope I haven’t made it too feminine.

Download the Feminine Glory WordPress Template here. Preview the theme here.

Free support for this free WordPress theme!  If you have a problem, please just leave a comment below (and we’re a “Do Follow” Blog).

This free template is released under the Creative Commons – Attribution license.  No cost to you for this theme.

Sometimes instinct and timing make a link building campaign just taking off. There are thousands of established directories with good page rank out there. Most of them pass far more page rank to the first links that are added. The ones that fill up the first page of each category. Most link building directories give these coveted spots to websites by the order they join. The first sites that are added to the database of inks are the ones that get listed first in the directory. Since this page is closer to the index page of the directory, it usually has a high page rank. To make a long complicated scientific story a short one, if your performing a link building campaign that involves directories (most do), you want to be one of the first to add your website to the directory.

Most ink builders are put off by the low page rank of these new directories. They are new after all that means there aren’t a lot of links to the site. Our research tells us that a great deal of these sites will fail or close or switch content focus within a year however. Our research tells us that this failure rate isn’t as high as one would think and that the ones that do not fail provide links that pass on lots of link juice within a year or less.

If your going for the big bang, i.e., a proper text link from a related directory, that has a high page rank, well it’s hardly ever going to happen, even if your willing to pay top dollar for these links. The best bet, is to get in on the ground floor of a web directory that you think is going to gain some good page rank (and be there for more than a few months).

With this in mind, I present: Deck Boards Directory, a collection of links to sites that related to the decking industry. Deck builders, decking supply companies, information about the decking, etc. I know it’s going to take off because of the market research and I happen to know the guy who made it, so I know it’s going to stick around for a while. So if you’re marketing a site related to decking or deck boards in some way, go there and get a link form them. They require a link back to them on a page of theirs somewhere, but that’s what you have to give a directory, is a link because they need link juice, just like you!

I always knew that click fraud was way more prevalent than what Google says it is (and they admit it’s above 30%!). But now we have evidence that Google themselves is defrauding their own advertisers by teaming with adware companies to redirect directly typed addresses into searches.
That’s a mouthful, what’s that mean?

That means Google, in certain cases, is taking a directly typed domain name and turning it into a search and then a click on and advertisement so they can charge the advertiser for something they wouldn’t normally have to pay for. This is called click fraud, even by Google’s own definition which states:

Invalid clicks are clicks generated by prohibited methods. Examples of invalid clicks may include repeated manual clicking or the use of robots, automated clicking tools, or other deceptive software. Invalid clicks are sometimes intended to artificially and/or maliciously drive up an advertiser’s clicks and or a publisher’s earnings. Sources of invalid clicks may include:

* Manual clicks intended to increase your advertising costs or to increase profits for website owners hosting your ads.
* Clicks by automated tools, robots, or other deceptive software.

The evidence is long and tangled, but here’s another article that explains this better (LINK). Techy version
Here’s a link to the evidence and original report (LINK). Very techy version

The new Digg Bar seems innocent enough.  But there are things that could be bad for SEO, bad for search engines, bad for searchers and especially bad for website owners.

1. The Digg bar routes all Digg articles and links to the Diggbar URL, thus robbing you of Page rank in an effort to have their Digg article about your page replace your page in the search engine results. It works too!
2. The Digg bar frames your content and presents it as their own to the Search engines and some users are even confused into thinking the content s on digg.com
3. The short url (tiny url), raises duplicate content concerns. Perhaps a mini-flood of it real quick.
4. Digg claims a page view for itself every time a user views any web page with the toolbar active.
5. The Digg bar rewrites all the links on the page it’s displaying into Digg urls thus robbing the user of being able to bookmark your site properly and generally screwing up some web applications.

Expect another article on this subject after this software is tested by our staff. There’s a lot of positives to be found here too.

– TxS