One of the ways they do this is by allowing, or requesting, several steps of verification from the service provider. Telephone, address, electronic background check, even social security number and physical identity checks. Pretty thorough, if you ask me. While there may be some concern about providing a social security number, Thumbtack.com has a detailed and exhaustive privacy policy that you can check out here.

So what’s so special about another web directory listings service? One thing that stands out is that they provide a very SEO friendly URL for your listing. You can see ours here, Domain Name Registration and Web Hosting. This is great because their link back to our site provides some needed authority for Google that ultimately helps our site here rank better.

If you’re a small business providing services, you should check out Thumbtack.com. But if you’re a potential client, looking for a service provider in which you can put your trust, you definitely need to check them out.

We learned back in March of this year that a site we did for a client a while back, Mathmagical, was featured by WooThemes. We’ve now learned that we have a couple of other sites that are now featured there.

Ivy Springs Home Owners Association

Ivy Springs Home Owners Association featured at WooThemes.

1. Built on Canvas by WooThemes. It is very flexible and very much like a blank canvas to begin with.

2. Using the Gravity Forms plugin to enable residents to create their own Business Listing Posts and For Sale Listing Posts.

3. Using the Gravity Forms MailChimp add-on to enable residents to opt-in to the HOA Email List.

Grilling Bobby Hicks

Grilling Bobby Hicks featured WooThemes.

1. Built on Over Easy by WooThemes. A great theme for featuring products or media.

2. The graphics and design were adapted from the original motion picture graphics and then coded into place using custom CSS classes.

These two websites are great examples of why we use WordPress and WooThemes for practically every website that we build. Sure, we’ve used some other themes from other developers in the past, but ultimately, WooThemes almost always is the best starting point for most of our clients.

Are you ready to get your project started? If so, feel free to Contact Us. Also, take a look at Our Process, and if you wish, you can even complete and submit our Web Presence Client Questionnaire.

We are very excited about today’s news that WordPress 3.0, code name “Thelonious” has been released. There are lots of awesome new features that we look forward to using here on our own site as well as on our clients’ sites. Below is the official release with the introductory video. If you use WordPress and need help upgrading, please contact us and we can help. If you’ve been hearing a lot about it and want to know why you should care or how it can benefit you, contact us and we’d love to talk with you about how and why we believe it is the perfect foundation for your web presence strategy. If you want to get a feel for the type of sites we’ve put together for our clients, take a look at our portfolio.

Arm your vuvuzelas: WordPress 3.0, the thirteenth major release of WordPress and the culmination of half a year of work by 218 contributors, is now available for download (or upgrade within your dashboard). Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.) Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation. As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click, and blah blah blah just watch the video. (In HD, if you can, so you can catch the Easter eggs.)

via WordPress › Blog » WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”.

1. Scribe SEO LLC – Scribe is a service that we use to grade our work and make sure every little SEO detail is spot on. Learn more about How We Use Scribe.

2. SEO Book – We use SEO Book as a reference many times daily. Additionally we use their SEO Tools, many of which are available for FREE. Download SEO Book tools free. Learn more about How We Use SEO Book.

3. WooThemes – Premium WordPress Themes – WooThemes designs and develops some incredibly beautiful WordPress Business Themes. Their themes are also developed to integrate tightly with the Scribe service so our clients always get a great looking site that’s ready for search engine optimization.

In this post, I’ll talk about why we use WooThemes – Premium WordPress Themes and the very important role that WooThemes products play in making sure that our client’s websites are fully search engine optimized.

Squeaky Clean Code

We’ve done client work using WordPress for quite some time now. As well, we’ve worked with tons of different themes from a lot of different Theme Developers. One of the biggest reasons that we tend to gravitate toward using WooThemes for most projects is because of the way they code their products. Everything is valid and impeccably clean. This is positive in a lot of ways, but as it relates to SEO, it means that we don’t have to worry about search engine spiders being confused due to invalid code. Clean Code = Win for the Client.

Built-in SEO settings and controls

When it comes to developers of Premium WordPress Themes, the guys at WooThemes are the creme of the crop. They constantly enhance their product functionality and value. Recently, they began building SEO settings and controls, or as they call it SEO-love, in to all of their Themes. Because of this, their themes now integrate with the Scribe SEO LLC service we talked about in Our SEO Arsenal: Part 1. As well, we can now eliminate the use of the All in One SEO Pack on new projects since we can achieve the same thing with the built-in WooThemes settings for search engine optimization.

Professional Business-Worthy Designs

You won’t find a better Premium WordPress Theme developer than WooThemes when it comes to Business Themes. (Or any other theme style for that matter). Some of you technical folks are probably reading this and thinking, “Ok buddy, design has nothing to do with optimizing for search engines” and technically, you’re correct, design has nothing to do with search engine optmization. But in reality, search engines really just funnel prospects to your website. Useable design keeps them there and guides your prospect to the answers they are looking for and ultimately helps convert them into a bonafide lead.

Here’s the bottom line: If a search engine directs a prospect to your website but it is so disorganized that they can’t find the information they are looking for, they will leave quickly.

Are you ready to start reaching and connecting with prospects that are looking for your product or service? If so, get in touch with us, we can help you win the search engine optimization battle.

Read the first two entries in this series Our SEO Arsenal: Part 1, and Our SEO Arsenal: Part 2.

1. Scribe SEO LLC – Scribe is a service that we use to grade our work and make sure every little SEO detail is spot on. Learn more about How We Use Scribe.

2. SEO Book – We use SEO Book as a reference many times daily. Additionally we use their SEO Tools, many of which are available for FREE. Download SEO Book tools free

3. WooThemes – Premium WordPress Themes – WooThemes designs and develops some incredibly beautiful WordPress Business Themes. Their themes are also developed to integrate tightly with the Scribe service so our clients always get a great looking site that’s ready for search engine optimization. Learn more about How We Use WooThemes.

In this post, I’ll share why SEO Book and their SEO Tools are so vital to delivering the best for our clients.

SEO Tools

SEO is very goal related. Our clients typically approach us about SEO for one of the following reasons:

1. They aren’t satisfied with the amount of traffic to their website.

2. They aren’t generating the number of leads they want from their website.

We spend a lot of time doing research and discovery before we take on a new client. This may be stating the obvious, but we have to get a good picture of where the client currently is so that we can help them set goals and more importantly, implement an SEO strategy to reach those goals. The SEO Tools from SEO Book are very helpful in finding a lot of the factual answers we need quickly. The three biggest benefits that we get from these tools are:

1. A quick glance at existing directory listings and other incoming link information.

2. Basic analytics information. (Since we usually don’t have full analytics access till we’ve been hired).

3. The ability to quickly “X-ray” each page on a site to find out which areas are in need of immediate improvement.

SEO Book

Getting all of the answers that are mentioned above is important. However, knowing how to use that information to best serve our clients is where the rubber meets the road. The content and information at SEO Book is probably some of the most valuable and helpful information related to SEO. A lot of the content there is FREE and they also have a paid subscription program. For us, the access to always up-to-date content related to SEO makes this site our go-to reference manual.

Why are we sharing our SEO “secrets”?

First of all, none of this stuff is really secret, anyone can find it on the internet. Second, and more importantly, we want to make sure that our clients and prospects understand that we have the most valuable SEO tools at our disposal.

As well, we know that a lot of our clients want to hire us to help them with their SEO but for some of them, it’s just not in their budget. We feel that if we share some of the things that we are utilizing that this might also help the clients who can’t afford us to at least get going and gain access to the things that help us on a daily basis. Ultimately, we want to make sure that every client has the best opportunity to be successful in meeting their web goals.

Are you ready to start reaching and connecting with prospects that are looking for your product or service? If so, get in touch with us, we can help you win the SEO battle.

Read the next entry in this series Our SEO Arsenal: Part 3, which will be published on June 3, 2010.

1. Scribe SEO LLC – Scribe is a service that we use to grade our work and make sure every little SEO detail is spot on.

2. SEO Book – We use SEO Book as a reference many times daily. Additionally we use their SEO Tools, many of which are available for FREE. Download SEO Book tools free

3. WooThemes – Premium WordPress Themes – WooThemes designs and develops some incredibly beautiful WordPress Business Themes. Their themes are also developed to integrate tightly with the Scribe service so our clients always get a great looking site that’s ready for search engine optimization.

In this post, I’ll share why the Scribe SEO LLC service is so vital to delivering the best for our clients.

Making the Grade

Our clients deserve and expect “A+” work. Before we began using the Scribe service, we did our best to put out “A+” work but we didn’t know for sure until a week or two after the fact by measuring with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. The thing that makes the Scribe service so valuable is that we can now grade our work before we go live with it. This drastically increases the likelihood that we’ll make the grade.

Priceless Feedback

Getting a grade on our work is really important, but not nearly as important as the feedback that comes along the way. There are tons of services that will grade web content (typically with the intent to try and sell you SEO services), few however offer such detailed valuable feedback about how to improve your grade and ultimately, maximize all aspects of your SEO. Don’t get the wrong idea, a website grader is not an end all be all, it’s just one part of the equation. This article by Michael Gray talks about why a website grader is a bad idea without a good working knowledge of all aspects of SEO. We liken using the Scribe service to letting an SEO Instructor read our first draft. We get valuable feedback and keep making edits till we score 100%.

The types of feedback Scribe provides

Scribe evaluates both On-Page and Off-Page SEO elements. The most important On-Page evaluation the service provides is that of Keywords found in the body content of pages and/or blog posts. The evaluation is displayed, grid style, showing the top searchable keyword combinations found in the text, along with each one’s respective keyword rank, prominence, frequency, and density. Scribe digs in deeper though, and also provides recommendations about what Keywords should be added, changed, or deleted in case you want to focus on different Keyword combinations.

As far as Off-Page evaluation goes, Scribe provides a list of semantically relevant terms that are identified within the content and encourages adding these terms as post tags. As well, the services provides a preview of how the content may appear on a Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

Ultimately, we rely on Scribe to help us make sure that we are effectively communicating as many of the 200 relevant signals used for ranking as possible.

Education – The Biggest SEO Hurdle

What has really been most valuable to us as it relates to the Scribe service is how much it has helped reinforce what we’ve learned about SEO and SEO Best Practices. No matter how much you think you know about a subject, there’s always more to learn. In the case of search engine optimization, what is a best practice today may be a no-no next week. The Scribe service developers are always current with all best practices and that enables us to deliver what’s best for our clients.

What we are finding as well is that we are scoring a 100% on the first evaluation a lot now. We attribute this to the consistent guidance that Scribe continues to provide. Why do we keep using it if we are consistently scoring so high? Because we owe it to our clients to know for sure that we are hitting the mark every time.

We can help you win the battle

Having weapons in your arsenal is really pointless if you aren’t equipped and trained to use them. Clients that hire us to do SEO for them understand this and they understand that they must focus on sharpening the skills that make them valuable to their clients and customers. We’ve invested in these weapons, and in sharpening the skills it takes to use them, to serve small businesses like yours.

Are you ready to start reaching and connecting with prospects that are looking for your product or service? If so, get in touch with us, we can help you win the SEO battle.

Read the next entry in this series Our SEO Arsenal: Part 2

What is the value of a Facebook Fan? What should I expect my Social Media ROI to be?

Here is a little insight from Insurance Marketing expert Chris Jordan:

“One big reason that some agency owners are hesitating to become active online is the question of ROI. What is it? What is the potential? The truth is, nobody really knows at this point.”

To put a value on a Social Media connection such as a Facebook Fan or Twitter follower is a great idea in theory, but in practice, it’s very hard to measure.

Here’s a question that might put it in a little different perspective:

“How much would you pay to acquire a new Facebook Fan, Twitter Follower, or Email List Subscriber?”

Think about that for a moment. If you have an answer, it would be really awesome if you’d share it in the comments section below. The reality of ROI from Social Media is that it’s definitely worth something or else companies wouldn’t be doing it. In most cases, what you get out of Social Media is dependent upon what you put into it. With the right strategy and Internet Marketing Engine, you can engage your Social Media connections, and ultimately develop them into connections that will be more likely to result in real revenue as opposed to just impressions.

If you are willing, we’d appreciate you taking a moment to complete a survey that we are conducting related to Social Media Marketing. Just click the link below to get started.

Social Media ROI Survey

Want some help or need some advice on how to make this happen. Get in touch with us we’re here to help.

The Little Internet Marketing Engine that Could

If you are a small or medium business owner, or for that matter, even if your business is part of the Fortune 500, your website should function as much more than just a website. It should function as an Internet Marketing Engine. So, what is an Internet Marketing Engine?

Very simply, an Internet Marketing Engine is a website that has the power to deliver content across the web to Social Networks, Email, and other media outlets. More importantly, that engine needs to be connected to a dashboard that enables the owner or administrator to analyze it’s performance and make adjustments as necessary. The final and most important function of the Internet Marketing Engine is the ability to quickly and accurately deliver information about visitors that convert into leads. An engine like this not only CAN, but WILL make the marketing life of a small or medium business owner, much more like a business strategy and less like a battle.

Do you need an Internet Marketing Engine for your business?

To find out for sure, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Are you consistently generating enough leads to reach your business or revenue goals?

2. Do you have lots of extra time with which you can learn how to market your business on the internet?

3. Would you want to hire an Internet Marketing company that didn’t let you own the work that you paid them for?

Did you answer NO to any of these questions? If so, then you need an Internet Marketing Engine for your business. If you answered YES to any of them, there’s a pretty good chance that your competitors will be serving your clients and prospects very soon.

This is our HUGE Value Proposition

You might have found our website because you are in need of a new or updated website for your business. Lucky you, we don’t actually design and build websites. We design and build Internet Marketing Engines. Most small and medium business owners can utilize our solutions with our standard training package and documentation which we deliver for each and every project. Many of our clients also end up coming back and hiring us to help them do ongoing Internet Marketing or to help them get their Internet Marketing kickstarted. Either way, we’re here to make marketing your business on the Internet easier.

If you’re ready to get started, get in touch with us. If you’re still not ready, we understand. Perhaps you’d like to learn a little more about us and how we do things. Here are some links that might help with that:

Our Portfolio
Our Story
Our Process

Overview and Scope

This particular project was focused on creating and deploying a Blog style personal website rather than a business style website. The main objective was to create a clean and professional looking site that allowed to visitor to focus on content. There were several other objectives including the integration of a way to recommend books and music. Many people look to Pastors for guidance on books and music that will help them change and shape their lives, so this was an important aspect of the site as well. Finally, there was a goal to harness the power of Social Media and make sure that Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and LinkedIn connections could easily be within reach of the website content from each of those services.

This project was also a rare occasion for us, where customization was far less important than simply being able to deliver a nice looking and easy to use personal website quickly.

Social Media Integration

The integration of Social Media for this project was a no brainer. I don’t imagine that there is a Pastor on the face of the earth that isn’t at least using Facebook. As well, many Pastors are seeing the great potential that comes with using Twitter to instantly broadcast a message to thousands of people. In this particular case, Tad was also using LinkedIn to help connect with church members and ultimately, try and help them connect with other professionals. We set Tad’s personal website up so that every time he publishes a new blog post three things happen:

1. A Tweet is automatically generated announcing the new blog post and a shortened link is included in that Tweet which links people directly to the blog post.

2. A copy of the blog post, including media, gets posted to his Facebook wall.

3. A copy of the blog post, including media, gets posted to his LinkedIn profile page.

Unique Aspects of the Site

The primary unique aspect of this personal website compared to others we have done is the integration and implementation of the Amazon Associates code. Because it was so important for Tad to have a way to recommend books and music to site visitors, we recommended that he take advantage of the Amazon Associates program. Essentially, this enables him to recommend the books and music of his choice using some code snippets that Amazon created uniquely for Tad. By putting these code snippets in place, whenever a site visitor clicks on a book or a music item, they are directed to Amazon.com. If they end up purchasing that book or music at Amazon.com then Amazon pays Tad a small bit of change for referring the purchaser. It doesn’t cost the purchaser anything extra and it can help out a Pastor who is trying to help people change and improve their lives.

Pictures

Math-magical.com featured in the WooThemes Showcase

We have submitted a number of our other past projects to WooThemes and some other theme developers for showcase consideration. This is a win-win for us and our clients because we both gain website traffic and Search Engine Rankings because of recognition like this.