eBlox e-commerce blog

One of my favorite “hybrid” web services, Jott, has come out of beta. This is good and bad news – good because the service is very mature and stable, bad because you now have to start paying (just a little bit) for it. For those of you who haven’t tried Jott, it’s essentially a speech-to-text service that allows you to call in notes, messages, to-dos and reminders to a phone number. Jott then transcribes the voice message and sends it to you (or a variety of other services, like your online calendar). It’s a great service when you can’t type a message – for instance, when you’re driving – and the transcriptions are almost always accurate. I use it almost every day, and I recommend you try it out if you spend any substantial time thinking away from a keyboard.

This post is from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

How do you determine the best keywords for your content? There are two important principles to keep in mind here. First, you need to think through what makes your product or service unique – drilling down to specific characteristics is the key. Second, you must put yourself in the mind of your audience; cast aside the presumptions you have about how to describe your business and get into the brain of your customers. They’re the ones doing the searching, after all.

When I teach search engine optimization classes here in Austin, we do a number of exercises to assist in creating keywords. By far the most successful exercise is “finding your uniqueness,” a strategy I recommend for anyone looking to craft a website, mission statement or even a simple company bio. Finding your uniqueness is simply a matter of taking the basic words that describe your product or service and building upon them.

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This post is from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

Talk about a moving target. Every time I sit down to write a column about search engine optimization, the game changes right under my feet. Rules change, tactics get refined, best practices evolve and entire strategies become worthless or worse - even damaging. The dynamics of search engine optimization are exactly that: dynamic, sometimes beyond any rational comprehension.

We do quite a bit of search engine optimization for our customers these days, and it’s almost a full-time job staying on top of the latest strategies and tactics. For those customers who invest heavily in search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising, a dedicated expert is sometimes the best option, and we refer them to companies that focus exclusively on these areas. Their services are expensive, but their results are often impressive.

For the rest of our customers – and, I’m sure, for many of you – a little bit of basic optimization can go a long way. I’ve covered the basics of search engine optimization in a previous series in this magazine, and many of those methods continue to produce good results. For the next few posts, I’m going to revisit search engine optimization in light of current best practices and knowledge. No big secrets here or nefarious tactics – just the good stuff that works right now.

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Adobe announced today that they are providing a method for the major search engines to index Flash content. eBlox has always recommended against extensive use of Flash for your site if you wish to be properly indexed and garner good search rankings. It looks like at least part of that problem is solved. We still recommend against using Flash for information-rich sites like e-commerce (it’s just too expensive to duplicate all that content for non-Flash users like mobile users) but for those of you with other sites that have mainly brochure-style content, this new method of crawling Flash sites might benefit you. Read a full writeup at TechCrunch here.

Great resource here for the technically inclined, especially if you want to know how many characters to put in a title tag or how many bytes a web page should be. Good stuff even for those of you just worried about creating proper meta tags. Check it out here.

Sales tax continues to be a potentially thorny issue for e-commerce companies, and now New York state has thrown a wrench into the process by requiring out-of-state e-commerce retailers to collect sales tax for purchases that originated with affiliate programs from sites based in the state. Today, Amazon filed a lawsuit against the state of New York challenging the new requirement. Read the full New York Times article here.

If you use a computer for your business, you’ve probably got a few desktop applications – that is, programs you installed on your own computer using a CD or DVD – that you do most of your work in every day. Millions of us use Microsoft Office to create letters, give presentations and crunch sales numbers. Thousands of businesses use “off-the-shelf” accounting software like QuickBooks to handle their accounting. Email programs like Microsoft Outlook handle the communication of countless messages every day. You might be so dependent on these programs that you can’t imagine how you’d live without them.

Get ready to live without them.

Well, at least to live without the ones that come in a box and live on your hard drive. Software is rapidly moving to the web. It’s easier than ever to sign on to a high-speed connection just about anywhere, and the advantages of delivering business applications through a web browser are huge. Just think about it: All your business data, always backed up, always in sync with everyone else in your organization, always current. Your P&L for the month is right in front of you, no crunching and printing required. The proposal you’re working on? Share it instantly with a colleague to get their feedback and let them make the changes in real time.

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A comprehensive (and somewhat technical) overview of all the factors that influence search engine rankings. Very detailed, and also acknowledges the disagreement over the significance of many factors. Good reading if you want to understand the details of search engine optimization. Check it out.

Jason is the proud owner of a skull/marching band/anarchy trophy after taking the title at the highly competitive Karaoke Apocalypse competition Friday night at the Alamo Ritz. The winning song was (of course) “Welcome to the Jungle.”

eBlox is pleased to announce the launch of rdbufordcomp.com, a site for the executive compensation practice of Robert Buford, a consultant in Portland, Oregon. Check it out here.