Thank you for another wonderful year.

We are grateful to have you as a customer. The growth we’ve experienced over the years is because of customers like you, who faithfully support our business. We appreciate your trust, and we’ll do our best to continue to give you the kind of service you deserve. Thanks again for your business.

We wish you happy holidays and
Prosperity in the New Year.

1. Bing Webmaster Center

The first problem that webmasters usually have with new sites is getting them indexed in the first place. When you submit a site to Bing it can often be slow to index it at first. Often, only part of the site will be in Bing’s index at first. This can be terribly detrimental to a site’s success if a critical launch date is a priority. Luckily, Bing’s webmaster center has an area where users can submit their own XML sitemap (more info here). This allows Bing to crawl a website more quickly and thoroughly.

For example, MTCutters, who sells High Speed Steel Tool Bits, came up #1 for their targeted phrease  ”Line Bore Measuring Tools” in Google the day after launch but not in the first page for Bing. With Bing Webmaster Center we were able to upload a sitemap and see it indexed the next day.

2. Utilize Bing Maps

In case you haven’t checked up Bing maps lately, Bing has been “Stealing The Crown” from Google when it comes to proving an online map service. Their new map beta is most impressive and we can expect them to take market share here if Google doesn’t do something quick.  Make sure that if your website has a physical address that it is listed on Bing Maps. All that this entails is typing in you business name and state into the search bar and see if it comes up.

3. Target Long Tail Opportunities

Bing makes it a little easier to be found using long tail keywords because of it’s “Related Searches” feature. Bing tries to help it’s users narrow down what they are looking for by suggesting more specific phrases that they might be looking for.

For example, Tape Man Blue, an online distributor of Blue painters tape, who was doing 100% of sales from Google and direct traffic. After we looked at the phrases that Bing was suggesting, we saw a 6% increase in sales from Bing within 2 weeks and allows us to diversify traffic for this online retailer.

4. Check Your Outlinks

This is actually a lesser known trick in the SEO world. By using the search operator “linkfromdomain” on bing, we can see all of the pages that a given site links to. By typing “linkfromdomain:envoca.com” into the search bar on Bing (Bing is the only search engine that supports this) we can see the quality and relevancy of sites that we are linking to. This is important for quality control purposes because it is quite common for sites to become hacked or spammed in such a way that they link to “bad neighborhoods” on the internet which will almost always make your site rank lower.

Also, if your site is having difficulty ranking for a specific subject or keyword, use this tool to make sure that the sites you are linking to contain that same subject or keyword. Search engines often judge a sites context by whom it associates with.

5. Tweet it

Bing and Google are currently racing to be the first and best at the “Real-Time Search” game. Bing is trying to establish itself as the engine that indexes social networks like Twitter and Facebook the quickest. One trick we often use to get a new page quickly indexed on bing is to post a link to it on twitter (see the image at right). Because Bing is clamoring to quickly index our tweets, they are also indexing links just as fast.

If you have any questions about the information above or optimizing a site for Bing in general, feel free to email us your question or post in the comments section below. We will be glad to answer any questions you might have.

Drupal Camp PDX

Drupal Camp PDX 2009 is being held October 9-11 at NedSpace Old Town, right above Backspace at NW 5th & Davis in Old Town Portland. The Conference planners state that, “DrupalCamp PDX is a unconference…developed entirely by the camp participants – you and your fellow Drupalers.”

For those who are unfamiliar with Drupal, it is a Content Management System (CMS) that allows owners of a website to add pages and make changes to websites that have been created by professional web developers. We have found that our clients have been wanting this more and more in recent years and will soon be adding Drupal as an additional CMS option alongside Wordpress and osCommerce for our clients.

IT Professional and Developer Technical Briefing Portland

This event will be the official Portland developers launch event for Windows 7 and will be held on October 14th. The IT Professional and Developer Technical Briefing Portland will be a chance for us to learn some some the new and interesting things that are going on with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. On top of that, it will be a great chance to meet fellow Portland area web developers and hear how they are building their web applications on the Microsoft stack.

Bend WebCAM

The Bend WebCAM (Web + Creative And Marketing) Conference will be held October 15th-16th and will most likely be Oregon’s best web marketing event this year. There are several speakers attending that I have heard before and a handful of others that are very prominent in the web marketing industry. Among them will be online marketing heavyweights Chris Winfield, David Snyder, Jim Riswold and Rhea Drysdale. This is by far the highest quality of speakers that you will find in one place on the subject of online marketing speaking in the pacific northwest. They are among the most successful and prominent web marketers worldwide and they are presenting in Bend of all places.

Startup Weekend Corvallis

After attending Startup Weekend Redmond at the Microsoft Campus this last August, I am now officially hooked on the concept of having to start a company in under 72 hours. Startup Weekend Corvallis is one of a series of competitions where developers, designers, and marketers all compete to create a successful startup over the course of a weekend. This particular event will be held in Corvallis October 23-25.

Edit: This event has been postponed to December 4-6th

The idea is that many successful startups (at least in the web/software industry) are created very quickly by relentless individuals that despise sleep and thrive on caffeine. What better way to launch a company (or at least practice) than to do so with a group of complete strangers, over a short weekend, while competing for thousands of dollars in prize money and/or venture capital? I can honestly say that I learned more about business models, teamwork, coding, and development in one day the last startup weekend than in any other given week of my life.

If you are attending one of the events above or would like to know more about what we are up to, send us an email and we will be happy to talk about it with you further.

Staying Ahead of the Curve – The Hydroxycut Recall

On the morning of May 1, 2009 the FDA announced that the popular diet drug Hydroxycut was to be recalled due to severe cases of liver damage and the risk of death. Several of our clients are law firms who handle pharmaceutical injury lawsuits and wanted to be able to take the cases of people injured by this drug as soon as possible. We have found that these days, when people need a lawyer, they look on the internet to find one. Therefore, it was important to us to make sure that people searching online for a Hydroxycut lawyer found our clients on Google as soon as possible.

Because we are heavily interested in serving our clients, we receive notifications directly from the FDA and the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) regarding product recalls that could directly affect our clients. So on the morning of the recall we immediately began working on getting the information that consumers need regarding the drug recall and their rights online. Within 24 hours we had successfully created a series of resources across multiple websites that helped Hydroxycut victims find an available personal injury lawyer, depending on their case and the state that they lived in.

With the combination of quality copy writing, SEO practices, PPC ads and a quick turnaround time we were able to put our clients well ahead of the competition. Most competing law firms had to wait several weeks for production after having to “put a call in to the web guy who should have something by the end of the month”.

The trade show was open so I got a few minutes to chat with the folks working on Bing’s up-and-coming mobile search platform as well as WYS from Google who is known online as “that guy who does the Google webmaster videos with Matt Cutts.” In the afternoon I got to sit in on a panel that included 3 of the top 5 people involved in SEO in the world namely Bruce Clay, Michael Gray, and Aaron Wall. Then in the evening, WebmasterRadio.fm put on their Search Bash after party where the industry’s movers and shakers were able to well…move and shake together.

The Latest and Greatest

The most useful session for me so far has to be the panel on SEO tools I got to attend where the top industry experts shared what they are using for deploying, monitoring and maintaining their own personal search campaigns. Aaron Wall’s set of tools is continuing to be one of the most impressive set of SEO resources that are currently available as a side note at one point Bruce Clay admitted that he uses some of Aaron’s tools quite frequently. This was amusing since both parties are directly in competition with one another in some areas. Michael Gray’s presentation of tools was more diverse and gave a lot of good advice on avoiding some of the pitfalls that more intermediate to advanced SEO’s fall into.

The Future of SEO

One thing that everyone seems to be emphasizing is that the saying that “SEO is dead” could not be further from the truth. The obvious trend is that the search landscape is definitely changing and will continue to change drastically in the next couple years. The thing to remember is that search engines will always rank sites and that as long as that is happening there will be a need for SEO’s to get your site to the top of those rankings. The industry leaders will simply be the ones who optimize their clients for these new mediums first.

1. He seemed to be very passionate about his subject matter
2. He was well prepared and seemed to know the message without cues
3. I was drinking a caramel macchiato
4. I am interested in the subject

You can listen to it online.  The material is covered in his book, here comes everybody.   The two bits of his talk that I found most interesting were

1. The web facilitates Lynch Blogs and other forms of organization without organizations
2. The way we communicate has changed – but the motivation to do so has always been there

He pointed out two funny stories.  The first involved the HSBC deciding to cheat its student customers.  The bank assumed students would accept the new “value added” fees without resistance.  Instead a Lynch Blog organized the students in protest.  Finally the bank declared it a big misunderstanding – HSBC was concerned with customer service, not money.

Another funny example: Alisara Chirapongse blogged about the 06 Thai military coup as she experienced it.  She became a popular information provider overnight.   The next week writing about a pink Hello Kitty phone got people upset.  Where is the info that matters to them?  The coup!  The funny thing was that she didn’t think of her site as political news outlet.  Her blog is about her life and interests, not those of her audience.

Deborah has been our navigator for the trip, navigating us from the airport to the light rail to the hotel with little to no injury. Ryan has spent the evening running around downtown San Jose looking to buy clothes to work out in…of course packing them would have been too easy.

I spent the flight coming here listening the screaming two year old sitting next to me. She was trying to get her mom to let her listen to her iPod which had been turned off due to FAA regulations. Yes, you heard me correctly. The two year old is addicted to her iPod as well. No wonder Chris Pirillo calls them Apple’s “gateway drugs”. Now I am sitting in the lobby of our hotel blogging, tweeting, and listening to some guy play jazz piano and drinking ginger ale. It totally makes up for earlier.

So far the talk of the conference (and I guess the town since we’re in Silicon Valley) has been the new Caffeine Update that Google has released as a developer preview to those interested. The update includes changes that both make Google faster and larger in index. Honestly, I haven’t heard this much buzz about changes to Google’s search since the infamous Florida Update from several years ago.

Matt Cutts has made a blog post on this and will be appearing in a panel on Thursday.  At least one of us will be in attendance and will have more info on this new change later this week. For now you can check out the new developer preview of the new google engine by clicking on the link below.

Google’s Caffeine Update Preview

The confirmation email for my SES registration came in the email today. The plane tickets are purchased and I think we have come up with a plan to stay on top of managing our projects currently in development from the hotel in California. As of next Tuesday, Envoca will be fully immersed in one of the largest and most prominent search conferences in the world.

For those of you who are not familiar with search conferences, I will explain. Aside from designing and building beautiful and functional websites for our clients we are also heavily involved in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). What this means is that in addition to building websites for our clients, we also provide services that help them get better visibility and traffic from search engines such as Google.

The catch here is that Google is constantly being updated and evolving in the way it provides search results. This means that it is important for someone providing professional SEO services to stay up to date on all the latest trends and technologies involved in search. At SES San Jose this year there will be representatives from all of the major players in search including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, YouTube, and Facebook. The purpose of the conference is to provide “search engine strategies” to those attending so that they can make better use of search to promote the businesses that they represent.

If you would like to check out the different sessions I will be attending, click on the link below.

SES Schedule – Garrett

Among the speakers we will be interacting with and hearing from, I am particularly interested in the presentation on Tuesday by NYU Professor Clay Shirky. I fist say Clay speak on “How Cellphones, Twitter, Facebook Can Make History” several months ago and have been intrigued ever since. The presentation can be viewed below:

Are you interested in hearing about what’s going on at SES San Jose this year? Would you like to know a little more about how your site can get traffic from search engines like Google? If so, check out our website to see some of the work we’ve done, send us an email, or contact us on twitter. We’re always happy to discuss what optimizing your website for search can do for you.

The test is not particularly difficult if you have been using Adwords, but there were several questions which you just have to save time to look up, like, “If you are a pre-pay account can you pay your account with western-union or cashiers check.” Since this doesn’t apply to me I had to look it up. So anyone looking to take the test, keep your Google help open.

I noticed for my test, that there was a large section on new ways a site marketer can integrate with the Google Local Business center within their adwords account.  Since I had attended Google’s launch of these features in 08/09 in San Jose I had already been testing conversion when adding this association. But this was really one of the few times I had noticed a strong push for Google to start monitoring Google Local business and maps.  More on the Adwords / Local Business integration at a different time.