News

"Digi Craft Agency Partners With Google"12.06.2010 In early December, the Digi Craft team became 1 of 2 companies in the entire state of Florida, achieving a certified partner company status with Google. The awarded partnership was extensive in it's requirements for the proper amount of credentials, experience and testing to help solidify the certified partnership. Read More... This company partnership does not come easy, Scott Stenzel president of Digi Craft said, "It took us 8 years to get us to this place, we have worked extremely hard for our clients, and in the end all the hard work paid off. The most positive aspect of the Google partnership is that our clients will be the ones that receive the benefit."

Out of the 100's of advertising agencies in Florida, Digi Craft is the only in house full service agency. Digi Craft has remained an online advertising powerhouse and continues to develop marketing and advertising strategies for companies of all sizes.

One of the main functioning components of Digi Craft is that it excels in everything web, video and print advertising and marketing. Having an award winning in-house production team helps maintain full control, harnessing both production and advertising, Digi Craft is able to better monetize client efforts and increase ROI. Digi Craft has a network of media buys that extend across every platform from web, TV, radio, and print.

"MSN, FOX, Direct TV, Dish Network are a few of our more prominent TV networks and of course Google's large content and display networks. We have become very skilled at monetizing our customers ROI and it shows with nearly every client of ours as we've seen them distribute more of their budgets toward online efforts," said Scott Stenzel. Show Less

"Digi Craft & Domino Effect Productions to dominate online and broadcast segment."11.30.2010 On November 30th, 2010 the Digi Craft Agency and Domino Effect Productions confirmed their media alliance. The duo will greatly impact their clients success moving forward. Ultimately the alliance will help both Digi Craft and Domino to offer a greater share of media services and technology Read More... to fulfill the request of some of the largest fortune 500 companies.

President Scott Stenzel said, "The entire video production elements, creative expertise and professional staff Domino Effect Productions brings to the table is simply amazing. When you add this depth to our Agency, the notable difference is branding strength and leverage. Our nationwide advertising and marketing strategies will be comparable to the top 5 advertising agencies in the country."

Marcus Small, founder of Domino Effect Productions, has developed an extensive list of commercials, music videos, and has even won an MTV music video award for his work on There For Tomorrow's "No Room To Breathe" music video. He has developed videos for such artists as 50 Cent, Akon, P Diddy, Nicki Minaj for MTV and BET. His commercials include recognizable brands such as Rockstar Energy, Dorritos, Oreo, Orlando Magic, and Absolute Vodka.

"The alliance will definitely help maintain current client relationships and acquire future client relationships. With the new music video alliance we will also be able to offer record labels a way to better monetize their efforts with realistic return on investments with Digi Craft. This also gives brand name outfits a way to combine video campaigns with real analytical data to report how well each video performed on specific networks." Scott Stenzel, Digi Craft's President also added, "Taking this one step further, we merge real online analytical data for these campaigns to deliver optimum performance. Two important aspects that every client demands and expects." Show Less

"Does cutting ad budgets make sense?"08.25.2010 As commodity prices climb, some companies in the CPG sector may be tempted to reduce advertising and marketing costs as a way to maintain profits without raising prices. However, this analysis notes that... Read More...As commodity prices climb, some companies in the CPG sector may be tempted to reduce advertising and marketing costs as a way to maintain profits without raising prices. However, this analysis notes that it is hard to maintain and expand consumer interest and sales momentum without advertising. "In a weak consumer environment, where the fight for market share will be intense," the author writes, "companies should resist the temptation of going for the easy option of sharp cuts to advertising budgets." The Wall Street Journal (8/25) Show Less

"Tip of the Day: Unique Content on Social Sites Helps SEO"08.17.2010 "If the content on your Facebook and Twitter sites is unique, there's a good chance that links from Facebook and Twitter will actually help Read More..."If the content on your Facebook and Twitter sites is unique, there's a good chance that links from Facebook and Twitter will actually help your website's search engine rankings, especially as your Facebook and Twitter presence increases."
Bill Hartzer, BillHartzer.com Show Less

"Focus on SEO Before You Launch Your New Website"08.15.2010 Focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) before you launch your new website. Are you launching a new website? There's no better time to think about search engine optimization than prior to launching a new site. Read More...Are you launching a new website? There's no better time to think about search engine optimization than prior to launching a new site. By giving consideration to your on-page optimization factors, you can increase your chances of achieving top organic search results.

To prepare your site for easy indexing, be sure to follow these basis guidelines:

1. Design your site in html or similar format that minimizes the use of java script and flash. The more complex you make your code, the more difficult it becomes for the search engine spiders to read your content and prescribe the appropriate Google PR to your web page.

2. Make sure that your meta tags are coded properly and include the Robots.txt tag. Many individuals downplay the importance of meta tags. Although meta tags themselves won't drastically change the organic ranking of your site, they do create the display text users will see when your site appears in search results. If your meta tags are search engine optimized and compelling, you increase the changes of improving click-throughs.

3. Apply the proper tags to your page. H1, H2, and H3 tags are a great wall to call attention to your content and promote your keywords and keyword phrases. Try to use each tag at least once, but don't force the issues. You want your text to flow and appear normal.

In addition to ensuring that you've made your page easy to access and presented text that is optimized, you also want to consider other factors that can help long-term with your SEO efforts. So often, web designers get caught up with on page factors, that they overlook the requirements for establishing a foundation that supports long-term initiatives.

In particular, consider adding pages that you can add to over time that support link building and accessibility for search engine spiders. Be sure to include:

1. An html sitemap and an xml sitemap. Including a sitemap on you site makes it easy for search engines to access all of your website pages and index your site accordingly. Your sitemap should be in both html as well as xml. Although users would not access the xml sitemap, search engine spiders use this version to crawl websites. Additionally, key search engine submission resources like Google's Webmasters Tools require xml site map versions.

2. Include a partners page. Previously referred to as a links page, the partners page is essential for reciprocal linking. This strategy isn't as powerful as developing one-way links, but until your site has been assigned a Google PR, one-way links can be difficult to acquire. So begin your link exchange program with a partners page that allows you add or remove link quickly and easily.

3. Submission pages that encourage new content. One of the most powerful seo techniques is the addition of new content. Make it easy for your users to add or submit content to your website. When search engines see new content, they rejoice. Don't underestimate how important it is to make it simple for your browsers to add or submit content.

When focusing on search engine optimization, especially with a new website, follow the basic ideas outlined above. There are a number of other factors to consider as well. However, you should always start with a strong foundation - a site design that meets basic SEO standards but one that also supports your long range search engine optimization goals.

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"Websites could get film-style ratings"08.09.2010 Courtesy of Reuters - LONDON (Reuters) - The kind of ratings used for films could be applied to websites in a bid to better police the Internet and protect children from harmful and offensive material, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has said. Read More...Burnham told The Daily Telegraph newspaper, published on Saturday, that the government was planning to negotiate with the administration of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

"The more we seek international solutions to this stuff -- the UK and the U.S. working together -- the more that an international norm will set an industry norm," the newspaper reports the Culture Secretary as saying in an interview.
Giving websites film-style ratings would be one possibility.

"This is an area that is really now coming into full focus," Burnham told the paper.

Internet service providers could also be forced to offer services where the only sites accessible are those deemed suitable for children, the paper said. Any moves to censor the Internet would go to the heart of a debate about freedom of speech on the World Wide Web.

"If you look back at the people who created the Internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn't reach," Burnham told The Telegraph. "I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now." He said some content should not be available to be viewed.

"This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it."

Burnham, who has three young children, pointed to the example of a 9 p.m. television "watershed" in Britain before which certain material, like violence, cannot be broadcast, and said better controls were needed for the Internet. The minister wants new industry-wide "take down times" so that websites like YouTube or Facebook would have to remove offensive or harmful content within a specified time once it is brought to their attention. He also said Britain was considering changing libel laws to give people access to legal help if they are defamed online. Show Less

"PageRank: What Is It? And How Do You Calculate It?"07.22.2010 Google's PageRank technology plays an important role in how online stores show up in search results. Understanding how this ranking system works will help ecommerce merchants improve their search engine optimization (SEO) and potentially increase website traffic. Read More...PageRank is a proprietary mathematical formula (algorithm) that Google uses to calculate the importance of a particular web page/URL based on incoming links. The PageRank algorithm assigns each web page a numeric value. That value is a particular URL's PageRank.

The underlying assumption is that links are analogous to "votes" for a page's importance. The more votes a page has, the more important it is. What's more, votes from important pages/URLs have more weight than votes from unimportant ones.

In this Ecommerce Know-How, I will (1) discuss why PageRank is important and (2) provide an explanation of how to use a simplified PageRank calculation to make sound SEO decisions about internal linking. In all, this article should give you a foundational understanding of this ranking system. And in future installments of Ecommerce Know-How, we will build on this fundamental PageRank information and apply it to SEO techniques like bot herding or siloing.



The Importance of PageRank
"Using PageRank, we are able to order search results so that more important and central Web pages are given preference. In experiments, this turns out to provide higher quality search results to users," wrote Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (along with Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd) in their January 29, 1998 paper, The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.

In spite of this paper and the complex calculations it included, Google's exact recipe for ranking web pages is not public information. But there is enough data available to make some educated guesses and assumptions about the PageRank algorithm and a search engine's basic procedures.

Our search assumption goes like this: Jack starts a search for the phrase "golf clubs." Google first seeks relevant pages that include content matching Jack's query. Once Google has located the relevant pages, it ranks those pages based on importance - that is PageRank. The first page/URL listed on the Google results page had the most PageRank out of all the pages that were relevant to Jack's search query. The last page/URL listed had the least.

Good content that matches a search query determines whether a given web page/URL will be included in Google's results. But PageRank determines the order relevant pages are shown in.

PageRank is important then because it will determine if your site shows up first or last when a potential customers looks for your keywords.

Google's Search Procedures
1. A Google user submits a search query.
2. Google searches all of the pages/URLs it has indexed for relevant content.
3. Google sorts the relevant pages/URLs based on PageRank scores.
4. Google displays a results page, placing those pages/URLs with the most PageRank (assumed importance) first.


Simplified PageRank and Ranking Power Estimates
Google does not disclose its exact PageRank formula. But it is a pretty safe bet that calculating PageRank is not easy math.

The folks at SEOmoz have come up with an excellent guess about the PageRank algorithm in their paper, The Professional's Guide To PageRank Optimization. And I recommend that paper for site owners that want to know how to estimate a page's actual Google PageRank and don't mind spending $39.99.

But when it comes to making certain good choices about SEO (particularly internal linking choices), you don't really need to know a URL's actual Google PageRank. Rather, a simple model that estimates the effect of one SEO strategy or another is just as good. For example, you'll be able to compare two different internal linking strategies, estimating how each one will affect a page's rank, without having to employ higher mathematics.

PageRank for a given page = Initial PageRank + (total ranking power / number of outbound links) + ...

Google assigns every new web page an initial PageRank score. For the sake of our example, that initial PageRank will be 1. If I create two new product pages, page A and page B, those pages would each have an initial PageRank of 1.


A link from page B to page A would effectively be a vote for page A's importance, and that vote would increase page A's PageRank to 2 - page A's initial PageRank plus the value of page B's vote. Page B's vote is worth its PageRank and is called ranking power.

If we add a new page C, and page B also linked to it, page A's PageRank would fall from 2 to 1.5 while page C's PageRank would rise from 1 to 1.5.

Adding more links from page B to either page A or page C will not change things, since only one link from page B to page A distributes ranking power. A second link would not add additional ranking power.


With just this simple model, we can now start to test some SEO tactics for internal linking. Simply plot out two or more scenarios, adding up each page's PageRank to determine which tactic will work best for a given goal. For example, let's imagine that your ecommerce site has five pages, including a home page, a category page, and three product pages, what is the best navigation strategy if your goal is to boost your category page's rank? Interconnecting every page would give the category page a total PageRank of 2 as in Figure A.

Linking product pages to the category page only as shown in Figure B, would result in a PageRank of 5 for the category page, making it the better choice.

Summing Up
In this Ecommerce Know-How, I explained why PageRank is important and provided a simple model for estimating PageRank for internal linking tactics. This model is not faultless, but it should help you make informed choices about the SEO tactics you use. Show Less

"Break Through the Frustration of Optimization"06.21.2010 "I am an artist," the man proudly proclaimed. "I don't care," the critic proudly responded. "The frame is too large, the colors are dark and it will not match my furniture," the critic further explained. Read More...

Many times web developers experience a similar scorn but not always from humans. A site has been designed with an interface that pops with beautiful GIFs and JPEGs, dazzles with Flash and functions like a charm with JavaScript. The search engines do not care. The content, the keywords and the tags do not correspond with the criteria of the search engines. Therefore, you are ignored.

It is a struggle between art and science that frustrates many. The responsibilities of web developing -- the art -- clash with the role of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) -- the science. That is why some companies and development firms are designating web developer and optimizer as two distinctive jobs.

Yet many smaller companies and shops still have the web developer fulfilling both roles. The problem is that optimization is becoming challenging and competitive. So here is some information to help start the optimization before, after or during the developing.

Content
It's all about the text.

Remember that optimization is all about the text. Search engines are text driven but there are still some basic HTML tags to keep in mind (i.e., h1, h2, meta tags, title tag). SEO helps improve search engine results but does not guarantee top ratings.

Patience and realistic goals will keep the frustrations low. Search engines have to crawl a site to determine what a site is about. This takes time, usually about a month, before crawls and indexing are completed by the various search engine spiders.

Take time to think (a lot) about the purpose of the website. Write down a lot of stuff in a word processing program even if it sounds silly at first. Then edit what you wrote. Edit some more, get some feedback and then start working on the keywords and keyphrases that identify the unique quality of your website.

Keywords and Keyphrases
Keywords used to be easy. Those days are gone. Keywords are highly competitive. Using two-word or three-word, maybe even four-word, phrases makes optimization less frustrating. A keyword phrase (keyphrase) helps identify the uniqueness of a website.

The keyword "game" will generate about 1 billion(!) results. The keyphrase "card game" will generate about 50 million results. That is a difference of approximately 950 million. The keyphrase "magic card game" will generate about four-million results. Time will need to be spent finding unique keyphrases but the benefits of narrowing the results, with multi-word phrases, provides a better chance of being noticed.

Keyword Density
The density formula is D = WC/KC (D = density; WC = word count; KC = keyword count)

For major keywords target 3-7% density
For minor keywords target 1-2% density

Keyword density measures how relevant keywords are in a page. The formula density = word count divided by keyword count will provide a general idea of the density percentage. For major keywords try to keep the density between three and seven percent. For minor keywords keep density between one and two percent. Try to optimize between five to ten keywords per web page.

Avoid the unethical practice of keyword stuffing. You will be penalized and possibly banned from the search engines which is worse than doing no optimization at all. Keyword stuffing uses various techniques but it is basically stuffing a page and/or meta tag with several occurrences of a keyword or keyphrase.

Keyword stuffing will result in being banned from the search engines.

Meta Tags
The meta tags are important although some will disagree. Meta tags have fallen out of favor because these tags used to be the magic solution to optimization. Not anymore. Keywords and content are more beneficial in getting a web site in top rankings. However, meta tags are still important. Meta tags are a part of the HTML and are used by most search engines to find a description of your website.

Therefore, no question about it, use the meta tags for description and keywords. Place these meta tags below the title tag on your page.The keyword meta tag helps you keep track of the keywords and having these meta tags give a small boost to search engine ranking. While it is true that meta tags do not perform the magic they once did it is better to have the tags than to have none. Think of meta tags like vitamins. Vitamins are not necessary for being healthy but vitamins do provide a healthy boost.

Title Tag
The title tag should be unique for every page because every page will or should have different information regarding your website. Therefore, some pages will have some but not all of your total keyword list. For example, let's say that your web site provides information about card games; one page has data about magic card games and another discusses bridge card games.

The title tag of the page with information about magic card games could have a title like Magic Card Games available at ourwebsite.com. The bridge card games page would likely have a title of Bridge Card Games at ourwebsite.com.

The name of pages should also have keywords like magic_card_games.htm orbridge_card_games.htm.

Developing websites is fun. Optimization can be a chore. Yet by focusing on content, keywords and tags you have a good start to decreasing the frustration of optimization. Granted there is more to optimization than the items addressed in this article but these are the items that can be and should be tackled first.

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About the Author: Lawrence Roth in an independent web developer who owns and maintainsrothline.com. Lawrence has worked on various e-commerce and website projects. Lawrence writes articles and stories to submit to online publications Show Less

"How To Determine Your Website Page Rank"05.21.2010 How good is your Web site? Is your Blog up to par? There are actually websites that will measure the ranking of your website. For those of you that don't know what page rank is, it's a tool put together by Google that determines the effectiveness or efficiency of your Web site. Read More...The higher your page rank, the higher your Web site is listed in the various search engines, and that means more traffic to your site. This, in essence, means more people are looking at your site, your products, your services, thus putting more money in your pocket in the form of paying customers

If more people are going to your Web site then less traffic is going to your competitors' Web site. Unfortunately most people don't even know what page rank is but those visitors that do will place your website in a higher esteem than your competitors and feel that your content is much more valuable and insightful.

Now you are probably wondering how page rank determined? And more importantly how do you increase your page rank?. Well, let's look at the first part of that question.

One way to help determine your page is when another site links to your page with a back link. The more back links you receive from other pages the higher your page rank. It's a good idea to make sure the back links are coming from sites that have content on the same theme as yours. This process can get quite involved and a little messy because all back links don't carry the same weight or force. The higher the page rank that a link is coming from the more beneficial it is in terms of boosting your page rank. So if you get links from a lot of pages with low page ranks it will not have as strong an impact as a few pages with higher page ranks.

Now this is the complicated part: If you have a page that has a page rank of 7 and it is already linked to 10 or 15 other pages then it will not be any more beneficial to you than a page that has a page rank of maybe 3 or so. There is only so much linking that a page can do. It's almost like the law of diminishing returns, in other words after awhile it begins to have the opposite effect.

Another way to improve your page rank is through the use of web directories. Not only will this increase your page rank but it will also increase the traffic to your site. So if you submit your site to a large number of Web directories you will be able to increase your rank. There are a number of web directories you can submit your website or blog to.

There's a host of other items that will definitely help you to increase your ranking and the general traffic flow to your Web site. Also if you are curious about the page ranking of your own site you can see exactly where you stand by doing a Google search for page rank. This should help you to find some of the sites out there that measure page rank. Once you find a site all you have to do is put your own URL in the designated box and you will have your answer. A page rank of 6 or higher is very high. Show Less