As Blender I have worked with clients from as far away as Aus­tralia, but by far the major­ity are local small busi­nesses here in Van­cou­ver. I like it like this. Over the years I have built solid rela­tion­ships with clients that have sup­ported and grown my business.

While meet­ing in per­son might seem inef­fi­cient, the truth is sit­ting across from some­one you can exchange ideas much more eas­ily. Meet­ing face to face is some­thing you take for granted in a nor­mal work­place, but as a self employed inde­pen­dent web designer, per­sonal con­tact is gold!

It’s not unusual to be meet­ing with a client or just talk­ing with some­one and learn­ing that I have worked with some­one close to them. The vast major­ity of my clients have come from refer­rals so reach­ing this local crit­i­cal mass feels really good.

So — Thanks Van­cou­ver Clients!

New client Squeeze Van­cou­ver had a web­site already, but it’s search engine traf­fic was very dis­ap­point­ing.  Blender was hired to opti­mize the web­site to bet­ter com­pete with other local chair mas­sage busi­nesses.  We quickly iden­ti­fied some struc­tural prob­lems with the web­site, worked with the client to cre­ate some new con­tent, and devel­oped an SEO plan.

Mobile Chair Mas­sage Squeeze Vancouver

UPDATE: Blender is happy to report that Squeeze has received it’s first clients from organic search!  After a lit­tle over a month clicks through Google are up 87%. Most impor­tantly we are see­ing our tar­geted search phrases start­ing to appear on the first page in some searches.

Blender is happy to wel­come new client Genssante. Blender will be doing their ongo­ing main­te­nance and updates.  First task — update the web­site using php script­ing to make main­tain­ing it eas­ier and cheaper.

Thanks to client Mark Rosen­garten (markrosengartenmd.ca) for the referral.

Another assign­ment for Cre­at­ing Excel­lence, small busi­ness mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ist.  Cor­ner Equip­ment needed a web­site that vis­i­tors could nav­i­gate quickly, that was easy to main­tain, and that search engines would pick up and list.  Because of the clien­t’s expe­ri­ence with Word­Press there was no ques­tion it would be our plat­form of choice.  Word­press is the most straight­for­ward CMS (Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem) avail­able, and because it is enjoy­ing recent pop­u­lar­ity there is no short­age of exten­sions  and support.

Blender cre­ated a cus­tom theme based on Cre­at­ing Excel­lence’s design.  Care­ful atten­tion was taken to ensure the web­site gen­er­ated would be friendly to search engines.  An SEO strat­egy was part of the early design process.

One inter­est­ing fea­ture of the Cor­ner Equip­ment web­site is the pro­cess­ing of images attached to items in the inven­tory.  Pic­tures are uploaded by the site owner and auto­mat­i­cally resized for dif­fer­ent pur­poses, lit­tle or no out­side pre­pro­cess­ing required.

Visit Cor­ner Equipment

A 6+ mil­lion pass­word list has been released to the wild which is strongly sus­pected to have orig­i­nated at LinkedIn.  The pass­words are not matched to any account names in this list, but it would be dan­ger­ous to assume some­one does not have them as well.  It is very impor­tant you change your pass­word at LinkedIn.  Since that account is asso­ci­ated with your email you will want to change that pass­word every­where you have used it.  LinkedIn is sus­pected as many of the pass­words in the list con­tained the a vari­a­tion of ‘linkedin’.

One part of this inci­dent that makes it inter­est­ing is that the pass­words were stored using a pro­tec­tion called hash­ing which con­verts the pass­word in a way which is sup­posed to be dif­fi­cult to reverse — but as of this writ­ing likely over 75% had been extracted.

To pro­tect you accounts you should:

• choose long com­pli­cated pass­words includ­ing cap­i­tal let­ters, num­ber, and punctuation
• avoid words
• not use the same pass­words for dif­fer­ent accounts

You can read the entire story at arstech­nica

SEO­Moz has a help­ful arti­cle dis­cussing on web page opti­miza­tion for e‑commerce web­sites. The arti­cle is pretty in depth with­out being too tech­ni­cal — per­fect for my clients.  Hope you find it helpful!

Per­fect­ing On-Page Opti­miza­tion for Ecom­merce Websites

Prop­erly deal­ing with expired con­tent is impor­tant. I have a few clients who reg­u­larly update their web­site and remove con­tent that is dated or obso­lete.  Usu­ally I notice the con­tent is miss­ing and send them an email along the lines of “never remove con­tent!” along with some expla­na­tion. But is just keeps hap­pen­ing, and it is hurt­ing their vis­i­tors expe­ri­ence and their web­site’s search engine ranking.

The con­cern with remov­ing expired con­tent, or not remov­ing it, is that  vis­i­tors will con­tinue to come to your web­site, directed by search engines and out­side links, and will not find what they are look­ing for.  Either what they wanted is miss­ing, or it is old and out of date.  You have just made a bad impres­sion.  Fur­ther, search engines are in the busi­ness of direct­ing vis­i­tors to use­ful con­tent.  If they detect that send­ing vis­i­tors your way isn’t help­ful they will rank you lower in their search results.  Search engines want the pages and con­tent they think you have to be sta­ble and reli­able. So what to do? (more…)

Web­site Ars Tech­nica has com­piled vis­i­tor browser use sta­tis­tics updated for March.  Inter­net Explorer con­tin­ues to be the most pop­u­lar browser with roughly 50% of users.  The next two most pop­u­lar are Fire­fox and Chrome.  The two graph­ics here show over usage includ­ing mobile, and desk­top only.  Note that Safari use dou­bles as you move from desk­top to over­all vis­i­tors — this reflects iPhone and iPad.

Track­ing vis­i­tor browser usage is impor­tant as each browser and plat­form has its own par­tic­u­lar con­sid­er­a­tions.  Mobile browsers have tiny screens, iPads and touch based, desk­tops have large screens.  All of these must be con­sid­ered in web­site design.

SEO pro­mo­tion of your web­site must con­sider both fac­tors inside your web­site, the design of your web­site, and out­side on web­sites that refer to you.  Search engines will look at where your web­site exists in the inter­net — who is link­ing to you and how rep­utable are they.  These are called back-links.

Good qual­ity back-links require a lit­tle work, but are worth­while.  One source for back-links are web­site direc­to­ries.  They will list your web­site and a descrip­tion.  There are bet­ter types of back-links, but direc­to­ries are cheap (free) and easy.  You do, how­ever, need a lot of them. There are ser­vices that can sub­mit your site auto­mat­i­cally for a fee, and you can also pay these direc­to­ries to pri­or­i­tize your list­ing.  Just be ready with your web­site’s address, title, and description.

This VERY long list has more direc­to­ries than you could ever need.  PR refers to PageR­ank and is a mea­sure of the direc­to­ries reputation.

(more…)