Design850 Website Design Studio

Tallahassee – Social Media Revolution

Mike — Tue, 11 May 2010 00:01:28 +0000

This video is a follow up video that was circulating on the web about a year ago. It includes many new statistics and thoughts for those who still consider social media a ‘fad’.

As a recognized leader in social media marketing in Tallahassee, Design850 is poised to help take your business to the next level online. Using social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others, Design850 can show you how being social is not just a fad, but a necessity in today’s business world.

Give us a call to let us show you the ins and outs of the major social media platforms and how each not only helps your brand, but helps you position your site more effectively in the search engines using proper SEO techniques.

If you are on Facebook or Twitter, please join Design850 on those platforms:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/design850

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dadofgage

Facebook Fan Page vs. Group Page: Which do you Choose?

Mike — Fri, 07 May 2010 06:37:48 +0000

As more and more business owners make the leap into the social media world, Tallahassee business owners should understand the difference between Facebook ‘Fan Page’s and Facebook ‘Group Pages’ to ensure they make the right decision for their business.

Let’s look at some of the top reasons why Tallahassee businesses would want to use a ‘FAN’ page on Facebook:

unlimited membership – profiles or groups are capped at 5000
administrators appear as the business when posting – so you can have multiple admins and they can all be posting as the business
indexed by external search engines (Google, etc.) – one of my favorites!
can host applications – once you get the basics of Facebook, having a more interactive fan page is a must and the ability to host applications is important
enables analytics and tracking – you get detailed statistics on who ‘LIKE’s your business, the age and sex demographics, etc.
resembles a regular profile page – and function like profile pages too!

Now let’s look at some of the reasons why businesses might choose a ‘GROUP’ page on Facebook:

Have more control over who joins by setting for member approval.
Can be ‘private’ thus creating a more ’secure’ environment for sharing.

Now obviously, the choice for Tallahassee businesses is Facebook fan pages.

The BIGGEST reason to choose a fan page is that the updates you make to your business fan page appear in the news stream of your fans so they can instantly react and INTERACT with you and your business!

While both Fan and Group pages can be beneficial in certain instances, overall the Fan Page is far superior to the Group Page when it comes to maximizing a brand’s Facebook presence.

SEO Tip: to ‘WWW’ or not to ‘WWW’

Mike — Fri, 07 May 2010 04:07:37 +0000

Here is a good search engine optimization tip for you to check out on your own Tallahassee business web site.

Type in the URL of your website as www.design850.com replacing the ‘design850′ with your web site URL. Your web site should load in the browser.

Now do the same thing only this time leave off the ‘www’ at the front and just type design850.com and replace the ‘design850′ with your web site URL. Again, your web site should load in the browser.

In the second example, you now want to check to see if your web server added the ‘www’ to your domain name. If not, you need to contact your web master or web host.

What you want to prevent from a search engine optimization point of view is having your domain search by Google (and other search engines) from viewing www.design850.com and design850.com as two separate domains/web sites. As you add more and more content to your site, you want to ensure that only ONE gets indexed and ranked by search engines.

This can be corrected on your server (or your web host) by performing what is known as a ‘301 redirect’. This redirect is done by a single setting to tell any browser or search engine bot that is visiting your site that it should add the ‘www’ to the domain if it was not there when someone visited a link or typed in your domain.

Design850 can help correct this and other SEO basics on your web site to ensure that you are being ranked as high as possible in the search engines – give us a call at 850-445-2076.

Review Your Web Site

Mike — Sun, 02 May 2010 03:44:38 +0000

For all of you that have business web sites here in Tallahassee, here are a few techniques that you can do on your web site to ensure that it is functioning normally. I would recommend that you (or your webmaster) complete this kind of review at minimum once every 90 days – maybe less depending on the site.

Links – check your links to ensure that they are still live. This would refer to both links that point to other pages within your web site and then also links that point to pages that are not on your web site. Hopefully your internal links will not be an issue, but linking to external sites could be problematic because other web sites might change their site structure periodically and your links might need to be updated.

Mobile Phones – since just about everyone has a mobile phone, you should be checking your site on a regular basis on multiple mobile phones to ensure that your site is visible and functions properly in the mobile environment.

Analytics – this should be done at least every 30 days. You should always be looking at analytics so you know where your site visitors are coming from and how they are finding you. I know that approximately 40% of traffic to design850.com and I can see how that is changing every month (or week in my case). I also can know what other sites are driving the most traffic to my site.

Newsletters/Forms – you should be testing your forms on a regular basis to ensure that the emails are getting through to you and to also know what the end user receives if they sign up for your newsletter or send a request through your contact form.

Images – the last item that you should check on a regular basis is that the images that you have on your site all load correctly. This is especially true if you have any sort of online store where the images are a necessary part of your ability to conduct business.

Social Networking for Tallahassee Business

Mike — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:03:09 +0000

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Basic SEO for Tallahassee Businesses Part 1

Mike — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 04:03:19 +0000

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Using GetListed.org for SEO

Mike — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 02:54:05 +0000

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Trusteria.com – Local Business Networking

Mike — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:29:21 +0000

Businesses: Trusteria.com is a package of digital networking tools to help your business survive good and bad times. With your subscription, your business will be able to take advantage of many features to market your business. Trusteria.com is low in cost but high in benefits. Benefits to the business include:

•	Consumers and Shoppers can search for your business and read what other consumers have said about your products and services. You will have the ability to request testimonials from your past clients to market to prospective customers. This feature also allows your business to “reconnect” with past clients which may lead to further sales.
•	The ability to create a full profile including your logo, company information and a direct link to your website.
•	The ability to search resumes or post jobs to find the right employee.
•	A forum to post announcement about your business and the ability to offer online coupons to current and past clients. Businesses can also post articles about their business and/or industry to show prospective customers that they are experts in their field.
•	Another feature available to businesses that subscribe to Trusteria.com is free online coupons at TrusteriaCoupons.com. Businesses will be able to post online coupons for consumers to print and bring into their business to redeem.
•	You will be assigned a Web link like http://www.trusteria.com/salestouches. Just give this link to your customers and they will be directed to your profile to leave a comment.
•	You will also be assigned html code to place on your website so anyone who visits your website can leave a testimonial for you business. An example of this feature can be seen at Seminole Electrical’s website http://www.seminoleelectrical.com.

SeaBayTrader.com Gets New Website

Mike — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:14:42 +0000

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Xippr URL Shortening

Mike — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:41:50 +0000

Xippr free URL shortening service

In today’s world, websites create extremely long URL’s that you might want to send to a colleague or friend.

Of course, as may have happened to you, Outlook (and many other email programs) will cut off part of the

URL that will cause the URL to break when it is clicked on inside the email.

To solve this problem, I recommend using a site like Xippr.com that will provide a great service for you:

Xippr.com will take this:

http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A9htfToQDdpDumkAjWxXNy

oA;_ylu=X3oDMTE2NGhncHQwBGNvbG8DZQRsA1dTMQR

wb3MDMQRzZWMDc3IEdnRpZANGNjkyXzg2/SIG=117jf2

and change it to this:

http://xippr.com/f561d5

You can then easily add this short URL to your blog posts, Facebook status, Twitter update – anywhere to make the URL much easier to click, copy and paste.

For Xippr.com, I was able to complete some PHP programming work inside the administration area of the site to show the site admins how many URL’s have been shortened in the last week (broken down by day), a listing of the last URL’s that were shortened and much, much more.