Propel Marketing, LLC

Archive for June, 2009

A nice “lightbox” AJAX / JQuery Wordpress Contact Plugin

Today, as I was doing my usual somewhat coherent hunt through Wordpress plugins, I happened across a great little contact form utilizing AJAX and JQuery to achieve some snazzy effects. While SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) (contributed to the WordPress Community by Eric Martin) doesn’t allow much out of the box customization in terms of fields you can add or messages displayed straight from the admin, it’s nonetheless an impressive and slick tweak you can make to your wordpress blog or website that will enhance your visitor’s contact experience from first setup.

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For SEO and improvement in your website’s rankings, make sure that anything you put on your website is unique. Compiling content to increase your page count will get you nowhere fast unless it is interesting, useful, and original.

Occasionally I hear someone talk about copying relevant content from other sites to bulk up their website. While it’s great to add syndicated feeds of new article excerpts, photos, or tweets from others online, when you do so you typically link back to their website. Simply copying someone else’s writing is not only unethical — it will not give you an SEO boost, and may in fact hamper your long term efforts.

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Being in the business of optimizing websites, it’s no surprise that I get asked, “what is SEO?” Many have the idea that SEO is a “rip-off,” as results can take time to collect, and not all businesses are meant to be #1 on Google. In truth, many of these so-called SEO companies are using old practices and charging you for outdated materials. Beware of extreme promises of rankings and techniques that seem to “trick” users somehow. These old, seemingly-simple practices can actually drag you down on major search engines.

Search engine optimization in its earliest form (let’s call this SEO 1.0) was all about matching titles and domain names to products & keyword search phrases, making the site as easy as possible to crawl for Google and other engines. While these basics are indeed important to start with when building your online market, much more can be done. The businesses who still use this antiquated approach to optimization are probably looking for a 2.0 version, but end up spending up to $1,000 per month for 1.0 tips. How do you make sure your SEO company is using 2.0?

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Google Guesses

Optimizing your website for Google and other search algorithms

Ever wonder where Google gets its search results? Here’s how it works:

They guess.

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