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Posts from March, 2009
Surprise Industries!
March 26th, 2009 || No Comments »
I attended the Media Networking Event at Columbia University last night on behalf of Blue Fountain Media and met Maya Gilbert from a very interesting start-up, called SurpriseIndustries. I promised I would blog about it because it is quite an interesting idea:
What is Surprise Industries?
They sell surprises.
What kind of surprises are we talking about?
The surprises can be anything from a ride on a ferris wheel, to an acrobatic yoga class, to a sessions of hypnotherapy. The company does a good job of matching up surprise-seekers with the appropriate surprise.
How they can benefit you & your friends:
You tell them what time slots you are available for a surprise, and at any point you will be surprised with an interesting experience. You only pay for the cost of the activity. These surprises can also be gifted.
How they can benefit your business:
This is a great way to connect with potential clients. Come up with a good “surprise” that would interest someone: if you’re an SEO, that could be for example, creation of social media profiles and a blog. If you’re a web designer, why not create a mockup for a personal or family website? In the end, the point is that anyone who is surprised by your services will most likely talk about you to their friends as well. And we all know how effective word-of-mouth referrals are.
Avoid dupe content FAIL
March 10th, 2009 || 1 Comment »
Launch a redesigned website without destroying your SEO
Imagine you are doing a redesign on a gigantic website and you may or may not be doing some SEO for later down the road. As a responsible web developer you probably want to ensure that the client does not start to question why, all of a sudden, their search engine traffic dropped off the side of a cliff.
If you can preserve URLs as they are, then fine, there’s probably is not too much to worry about. But when you create a whole new URL structure and you’ve got a lot of pages, Here are a few basic steps to ensure that the website launch goes well. It is probably not the BEST way, but it is the SAFE way.
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Take a note of all indexed pages.
To do so, simply check with Google, using the parameter, site:www.reallyridiculouslygoodlookingwebsite.com . Make sure to show all supplementary results as well so that you have a more complete list. If you are using the SEO plugin for Firefox (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html) then you’ll be able to download this list as a .csv file. Nice.
You can also go through the website’s html or xml sitemap for a list of its URLs. Have fun doing that. Read the rest »
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