PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

Netfirms, Inc. , Canada’s leading web hosting provider and one of the fastest growing .CA domain registrars, recently announced that the best time to acquire the .CA extension is now. With the US economy not operating up to par as of late and the Canadian dollar performing at historic highs against the US dollar, what better time to invest in the .CA? Continue Reading »

Internet marketing strategies involve driving targeted (people who are interested in what you have to offer) traffic to your website, blog, or sales page.

That traffic then has to be converted into sales. This simple formula illustrates this process:

Traffic + Conversions = Sales

Keeping this formula in your mind will help you in your internet marketing efforts because you will realize that you not only have to generate traffic, but also turn those visitors into buyers.

Furthermore, here are 7 basic rules to follow when applying this formula. These rules are relevant to all forms of marketing but are especially important for online marketing where inexperienced people can “burn” a lot of money quickly and become very discouraged.

Continue Reading »

Jennifer Slegg
Search engine spiders aren’t the only ones that can interact with a Web site’s robots.txt file. As Jennifer Slegg illustrates, sometimes the very file Webmasters use to keep the crawlers out are like beacons drawing competitors in.

Slegg notes that when you exclude a directory from being indexed with robots.txt,, crafty searchers can actually use the file to find it, and without password protection, they’ll be able to see all of the content you tried to hide. In addition, if you’re developing any new content, or pushing out a new product and plan to promote it on the site, then using robots.txt to keep it unseen is a no go.

“Play it smart with your robots.txt file so you don’t inadvertently hand your competitors the keys to your site or give them the edge up by alerting them to what you are working on,” Slegg says.

TechCrunch
EBay owns a 25% stake in local classifieds leader Craigslist, but still decided to launch competitor Kijiji to capitalize on the huge hyper-local search market. Kijiji went live overseas first and then came to the U.S. last summer. Since then, traffic to the U.S. version of the site has grown dramatically, from 362,000 visitors in July 2007 to 1.8 million in January 2008, according to comScore.

This places Kijiji ahead of Microsoft’s Windows Live Expo with just 176,000 visitors, Yahoo Classifieds with 97,000 and Google’s classified service and Google Base–whose traffic didn’t even register as blips on comScore’s radar. Kijiji also ranked ahead of smaller competitors like Oodle and Vast.

While Kijiji’s traffic represents less than 10% of the 26.7 million U.S. visitors Craigslist had in January, Erick Schonfeld says that it begs an inevitable question. “EBay is obviously doing something right with Kijiji. But can it ever catch up to Craigslist?”

GigaOm
For years, the Mobile World Congress has issued the promise that the mobile Web will one day be more like the traditional Internet that we access from our PCs. But GigaOm notes there’s too much variation in operating systems and end devices, which makes it hard for developers to build applications for a mobile phone. In other words, a shakeout needs to occur, a leader needs to emerge.

But there’s a greater problem, here: according to Wikipedia, U.S. smartphone (loosely described as a phone with PC-like functionality) penetration is only expected to hit 10 percent this year. Most of these handsets have different interfaces: touch-screen, scroll wheel, stylus or keyboard. This requires different operating systems. There are six vying for control of that market: (in order of market share) Symbian OS, Linux, Windows Mobile, RIM BlackBerry, Palm OS, and Apple’s OS X.

What we have here is a market maturity problem. For starters, smartphone penetration has a long way to grow. Once it reaches 30 or so percent, leaders will emerge in the handset and OS markets. Then software developers can create more and better programs that scale, and advertisers will have a sizable audience and quality programs to buy space on. But we’re talking years, not months.

EOmoz provides companies around the world with consulting, Internet marketing and search engine optimization services. Although our home offices in Seattle, WA serve as our base of operations, we’re frequently found globetrotting across the US, Canada & Europe. Our goal is to provide a high level of service and education to businesses, individuals, non-profits and government organizations so they can best leverage the unique reach of the Internet to increase visibility and achieve success.

by David Koretz

Henry Ford said “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” In this new world of Web-based applications, advertisers and application developers alike are mistakenly searching for a faster horse.

I stumbled onto the advertising world by accident. I am a software guy, and have been building Web-based applications since the mid ‘90s. In 2006, I began studying how Web-based applications were being monetized. Our customers, large ISPs and Web publishers, were asking us to build advertising support into our Web-based email and calendaring application to help them turn email into a profit center.

Continue Reading »

PromotionWorld
Search Engine Optimizer’s often have two different views when it comes to meta tags. One this is unanimous meta tags have definitely been devalued for use in most major search engines but you will find they are still being used as the description often times when your site is listed in the search results.

Meta tags were started back in the early 90’s when the internet was just getting it’s brand new legs and they were used to help the search engines organize the growing number of web pages. This was an easy way to make your site indexed and listed high. Soon after unethical webmasters started to abuse the meta tag by either spamming the page full of so many keywords or sometimes even made different websites appear in the results for a completely different keyword. Gambling sites would stuff their meta tags with more commonly used phrases in order to bring their sites to the first page and trick the search engine and moreover the user.

Continue Reading »

Ranked Hard
The Big Oak team takes a lighthearted look at SEO with their new comic blog, Ranked Hard. In this installment, Brad Smart (the search firm’s CEO) is chatting with a potential client over the phone who seems amazed that Smart is able to explain the tactics that make SEO effective. “The other company said it was too complicated to explain to mere mortals,” the caller says.

The panel cuts to a scene of the other company working their SEO “black magic”–complete with hoods, a pentagram and glowing black eyes. It’s a tongue-in-cheek jab not just at black hats, but at any consultant or search firm that continues to further the myth that there’s some mysterious, murky art to snagging good rankings.

As writer Shell Harris concludes, “When an SEO company isn’t willing to share their methods, it is usually because they have no methods to share or else they are doing things they wish to hide.”