Tips to Provide the Best Website Experience

SEO strategies must regularly be updated since Google is constantly revising its algorithm for determining site rank for specific search terms. Below are links to recent articles that provide things to think about as you are updating your website.

Have you recently noticed that your site is not as high up in the search results for specific targeted terms or phrases? If so, take a look at the reason why you no longer rank for your keyword.

Do you have a lot of ads on your website? If so, you may want to revise your ad strategy after reading about how Google Updates Its Page Layout Algorithm To Go After Sites “Top Heavy” With Ads.

Finally, don't forget about mobile design, the shift of focus to quality content and other changes to SEO, which are highlighted in 20 SEO Tips, Trends and Predictions for 2014.

Last week, we had the pleasure of a visit from one of our more “famous” clients, Oscar Zeballos, from the radio team Big O and Dukes. Contensive developed the application that runs the back office and billing side of their online podcast site bigoanddukes.com. Oscar was here to review the progress of the new billing application we are building for his site, but the conversation quickly evolved into a discussion of the state of radio and podcasting. According to Oscar traditional radio has evolved to a point where the business model is driving the content thus stifling creativity and uniqueness of the radio artist.

Personality driven shows can be found on the radio, but there are fewer and fewer of them and those that remain are typically syndicated shows that spread the production costs across multiple markets.

As Oscar said, “We all got into this business to express our creativity. Unfortunately, the business side of radio has forced the content to become vanilla. It is much easier sell top 40 music than alternative rock, and easier to sell local sports talk than two guys who have a segment where they rate snack foods.”

This is one of the reasons that podcasting has become so popular for personality driven shows and non-main stream topic shows. The amount of money required by a traditional radio station to support a tower, electricity, staff, sales, and talent is astronomical compared the infrastructure expenses of a podcast. The smaller expense footprint allows podcasters time to build their loyal audience. A good podcaster can tell you with precision the number of plays that each podcast receives, and who is actually listening. And advertisers are staring to listen as well. Without the huge expense of “run of air” campaigns an advertiser can gain exclusivity to a podcast and know exactly who is listening and when. And when teamed with a good podcaster the call to action can be such that there is a measurable response rate.

Oscar, who also works in marketing promotions, states that he knows that a targeted podcast will outperform radio any day of the week, and advertisers are starting to understand that as well. This is just another example of how inbound marketing can replace and improve on traditional marketing. The trick is to find a podcast with a large enough audience that matches your demographic, meet with the hosts and work with them to integrate your marketing message into their content presentation and you now have another cost efficient arrow in your inbound quiver, replacing the expensive scatter shot gun of traditional marketing.

Note—“Big O and Dukes” podcasts can be found on iTunes and on their site www.bigoanddukes.com. They produce a weekly show to over 30,000 fanatical subscribers.

There are many components to an effective inbound marketing strategy. With SEO, blogging, social media, and even pay per click advertising, it can be a lot to get organized. Also, if not handled properly, it becomes very easy for any of these equally important components to fall through the cracks.

Instead of Inbound Marketing giving you that extra headache and making your life more complicated, why not make it easy on yourself? Its all about planning. There are several project management tools available that have proven to be highly effective. Contensive uses Intervals, which is an online project management program allowing you access from any location. As a project manager myself, I use Intervals multiple times per day, and do not know what I would do without it.

If your business does not have the budget for a project management program, Google Calendar is highly useful, easy to organize, you can share it with multiple co-workers and best of all, it is free! A tool like this is so helpful when everyone can look at and access the inbound marketing goals and deadlines. With a strategy laid out and organized on the table, inbound marketing can become an easily manageable system.

Hubspot is also a great online tool for inbound marketing organization. They offer many free and paid articles, videos and webinars. They even offer a blog posting calendar template to help organize your blog posting schedule.

Don’t let inbound marketing overwhelm you, organization is the key to success in many things. Instead, go easy on yourself, get organized, plan ahead and soon you will see your inbound marketing campaign as a well oiled marketing machine, and not a chaotic mess.

First appearing in 1999, “Hackathons”, also known as “Hack Days”, “Codefests” or “Hackfests”, are not only growing more popular, but becoming more useful. A hackathon is an event in which computer programmers, developers, graphic designers, interface designers, and project managers from different companies and businesses (or freelancers) collaborate together to develop software. These can be held for a number of reasons, most of them being educational, cultural and social purposes. Generally the goal is to create usable software.

In the past year, several 48 hour meetups were held to create apps, websites and programs designed to help migrants in several Latin American countries. It is very important to keep the specific group of people in mind while developing these apps. Programs should not be designed for the average American smartphone user but that of the average user of the specific country or group being addressed.

Just days ago, a hackathon was held in Miami, Florida for the communist country of Cuba. The government of Cuba, like China, Russia and North Korea, routinely blocks content and internet pages deemed unsuitable for its citizens. In addition to this, the average Cuban makes a monthly salary of about $20, making the limited access of information offered even more limited.This specific hackathon was designed to break down the communication barriers between Cuba and the rest of the world. Programs and applications were designed to help immigrants and citizens of Cuba that there is access to the rest of the world.

I just thought I would take a minute and share what is going on in the world around us. Bringing technology to countries with limited access to communication is an excellent way of assisting people in bettering their lifestyles. I also wanted to point out that we do have this access to global communication readily available to us. Why not take advantage of this? What can you do to take your business’ communication or technology to the next level? Is it through mobile optimization? Better organization or your social media? Just food for thought.