Archive for June, 2009

Asheville Beer City

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Between March 18 and May 7 over 16,000 people from 46 countries took a moment to vote for their favorite beer city in the USA.  When the dust settled only two cities were left standing, although maybe a little bit wobbly.  The poll which was conducted by beer guru Charlie Papazian ended up calling the contest a tie on May 8 awarding the happy title to one east coast city, Asheville, NC and one west coast city Portland, OR.

As a resident of Asheville I am so happy to see our city get this acknowledgement.  I can remember an interview I once did with the owners of Pisgah Brewing Company, when I asked the question, “why Asheville?” I was told “because Asheville is the most beer drinkingest city in the country.”  It says quite a bit that Asheville was held up with a city eight times its size.  As I write this Buncombe County, where Asheville is situated, is home to 7 breweries and we have 2 more currently in the works.  That gives us more breweries per capita than even Portland, OR.

I myself am a great lover of our local beer scene.  Heading over to Pisgah Brewing Co. on a Thursday for a Pisgah Pale Ale is one of my favorite times during the week, going to chill out after work at the Asheville Pizza and Brewing Co. with a Shiva IPA and the great regular crowd is hard to beat, and my fiance Kati, who isn’t really a big beer drinker, could never turn down a Gaelic Ale from Highlands Brewing Co.  Our local beer and breweries are just a fundamental part of the Asheville culture, it is one of those things that makes Asheville Asheville.  Not to long ago an NPR journalist named Asheville the “happiest city in the nation”  and now we have “beer city”, I am willing to bet there is some sort of connection there. Asheville SEO

Tags: asheville, asheville beer city
Posted in Asheville SEO, General | No Comments »

The first step in Social Media for a Small Business

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Something that any small business with ears to hear is bombarded with these days is that you must take part in social media.  Over and over again these words are sounded, leading many business owners to start exploring sites like Twitter and Facebook, of course once they have set up their profiles and found all of their ex-girlfriends from high-school they usually start to stagnate, not really knowing what to do or where to go from there.  And although there is gigantic value to really working tools like Twitter and Facebook many business owners overlook what should be your first step in leveraging social media which is creating a company blog.

A blog for your business can serve you well in many ways, not least of which is that you and your employees will be able to easily add new content, thus updating your website often.  And because your blog is focused on your services it will be easy to generate content that organically targets your desired keywords and phrases.  Search engines love fresh content, especially content that is pertinent to the subject of your site.  My favorite analogy is that search engines are the bees of the Internet and your blog is a sweet sweet flower, the more you add content to your blog the more those bees will return and naturally the more they will spread your marketing seed all across the web.  There is nothing to loose by taking advantage of this enourmasely powerful marketing tool.

Tags: Blogging, seo, social marketing, social media, Social Networking
Posted in Asheville SEO, Blogging, General, SEO Tools, Social Networking | No Comments »

Google Wave: Making A Splash in the World of Communication

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Google has recently shown off an amazing new product out of it’s labs: Google Wave. The hour-plus long demo is actually captivating the whole time through, in part because of the exciting new methods of streamlining and optimizing of so many communications protocols and technologies. It may be a long watch, but I heartily recommend the viewing for anyone that is interested in where the web is going relative to where it has come from in terms of mass user adopted messaging and communications standards of today and the recent past.

Waves can serve to replace traditional emails in that they allow users participating in the Wave to reply to the message sent by a familiar thread-like response system. Waves can also replace instant messaging chat dialogs in that responses and changes made to the wave can be seen in real time. Waves support embedded video, images, widgets, and more– they can be collaboratively edited like documents and by proxy can be easily adapted for wiki-like use as well as blogging and live blogging. In the demo, users subscribed to the blog on which the Wave was published could respond as the blogger was blogging! This obviously holds great potential value for business efficiency not only in meetings and the dissemination of information across an organizational body, but also in planning, coordination, and implementation of data driven perogatives– especially once the spreadsheet collaboration capabilities go live shortly after public release.

Another fascinating aspect of Google Wave that particularly relates to Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Services is that it can be used interactively and extensibly with existing social networking technologies, such as Twitter. A Wave and a Tweet can work synchronously in a manner that produces a ‘Twave’, a thread-like conversation comprised of both contributions to the Wave, the Twitter page of the participants, and any and all Twitter clients involved.

What will be interesting to see is exactly to what degree users embrace this new avenue for communication and collaboration. From what can be seen in the demo even the fledgling iterations showcased seem to make exciting use of the strengths inherent to Google Wave, and given that the code is open-sourced, we’ll be getting our hands on even more implementations of the exciting new Wave technology. Will end users abandon their comfortable emailing/messaging/blogging/Twittering clients in light of the unified and concentrated communicative capabilities of a more robust and established Google Wave? Time will tell…

Posted in Blogging, General, Google, SEO Tools, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Bing, Microsoft’s New Search Engine

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Every now and then something comes along to shake up the world of search and search marketing. Microsoft has just launched a new service that they hope will be one of those big things to shake up searching, and they call it Bing.

Bing is not a normal search engine– instead, it bills itself as a ‘decision engine’. What this means is that instead of searching for a general keyword or key phrase and getting info from any number of angles as they might relate to that keyword or phrase, a user might type in a keyword that they have a query about in order to find out the answer (not just general information surrounding the term). This means everything from ‘Fitness’ returning results for calorie calculations and workout routines because it intuits the user wants fitness advice to ‘LAX to LaGuardia’ returning online booking options and itineraries for flights from LA to NYC.

How exactly SEO and Organic Search Placement factor into the results presented by this new ‘decision engine’ will be fascinating to develop understanding with, and it can be assured that the search community at large (not just us here at Search Placement!) will be diligently reverse-engineering the results of thousands of searches to gain such familiarity– and how it can be put to use for our clients.

What will also be interesting to observe will be the marketshare Bing stakes out for itself as a niche ‘decision engine’ in the world of Google’s hegemony and the type of searching users have gotten used to. As it stands, Bing is outpacing Yahoo! in terms of search volume; however, some of that flow can be attributed to the ‘new and shiny’ effect that loses its lustre in relatively short order. Will Bing hang on in the #2 spot? Microsoft surely hopes so, and we’ll see for ourselves over the next few months.

Posted in E-Commerce, General, MSN | No Comments »