ELWsoftware.com

Why doesn’t your website use ads that can’t be blocked?  There was a huge whining session on Slashdot today about blocking ads.  Some major nerd site didn’t let users see content for a while if they used ad blocking software.  I don’t understand the big deal about it.  ELW has a solution for all of the websites out there that are upset about visitors blocking ads:

ELW designed an ad system where users can’t block your ads!

That is correct, unless you have some artificially intelligent browser that can actually see what you see like some modern day equivalent of a food taster.  ELW can install this system on your website with very little trouble.  We can also have your ads shown on the websites of our customers!

Do you understand what this means?  Unless you have a computer smart enough to tell the difference between ads and real content, an ELW ad will get through!  I suppose if you turn off all images, you won’t see a picture ad.  If you turn off all text, you won’t see a text ad.  If that is how you want to browse the internet, be our guest.

If you want to present unblockable ads on your website, contact ELW today! You will have full editorial control over the ads shown on your site.  You can even choose whether you want the ad links to be followed or nofollow.

The SEO Trick for today is to generate useful content every day.  I know, an SEO telling you to generate useful content is like a doctor telling you to exercise.  There must be a pill you can take instead, right?  Yes, of course there is an SEO pill you can take, and it is called automatically generated article spam.  It probably doesn’t work quite as well as magic weight-loss remedies.  There are certain stages your website can be in, and I call it the ELW visibility scale:

1. Non-existent.  You own the domain, and when you go there the page says “coming soon” or “under construction” or some other phrase that people think will get visitors to check again later.  They won’t.
2. Bad. Your site has the minimum information necessary, but that doesn’t really help you.  At this point people only find your site if they know your web address.  Hopefully, you didn’t choose a terribly long or hard to remember domain name.
3. Accidental.  You have your website the way you want it, but the only way to find it on a search engine is to type some phrase unique to you.  Maybe you are a law firm and your page title is the last names of all the partners.  (Yeah, lots of them do that.)  I call this state accidental because you are completely relying on people searching specifically for you.  Every other visitor is an accident.
4. Static.  Your website is designed well, and people find it through search engines if they are persistent enough.  There are generally only a few improvements to your on-page content that will make your page better for search engines visibility.  Maybe you even have some meta keywords and description tags filled.  At this stage, you might be thinking that the black-hat software to generate links might actually be worth a try.  It isn’t.  Most websites that need SEO are in this category, and it is sometimes a hopeless place to be.  The real world equivalent to this state is a person who has tried every diet, and is now considering surgery, or is going to give up and quit.
5. Measuring.  If you start measuring the traffic to your site adequately, you know what is really going on.  Surveillance isn’t reserved for big companies like Google and Yahoo.  You absolutely need to know what kind of visitors are coming to your site if you want it to improve.  Luckily, ELW makes excellent tracking software, so this problem is solved for you if you desire.  When you measure, you might actually find out that people are finding your site using search phrases you didn’t expect.  Now you can target your SEO efforts!
6. Spam target!  If your tracking software shows that most of your visitors are search engine bots and spammers, you are making progress.  Spam can actually be an indicator that your site is gaining visibility.  Spammers need to find your site too!  If spammers can’t find your site, nobody can.  These guys show up first because they are persistent.  Watch your inbox for real visitors among the spam.
7. Content generator!  Once you are a spam target, you can be sure that there is no real technical visibility problem.  What remains is to differentiate yourself so that more of the desired visitors arrive.  This really does mean producing new content on a semi-regular basis.  If visitors learn that your site will be the same every time they visit, they are less likely to return.  You should be writing articles while seriously considering SEO at this point.  Every new search phrase on your site is a new bunch of potential visitors.
8. Specialized spam target!  When your site starts getting spam related to what you sell, you are getting good.  Spammers are now using you to make themselves look better! This is the case with many blogs and blog comments.  A link from you, even in blog comments, looks like a good deal.  This probably means that your SEO-focused articles are working as they should.
9. Human.  You get a few humans leaving real comments on your blog.  It can take a while to get real human beings to read what you write.  There is just so much information out there.  Luckily, 99% of web users aren’t generating ANY useful content.  At this stage you need to be careful that your articles are useful.  Humans don’t just scan content and throw it on a pile like search engines do!
10. Useful content generator!  People regularly read your content because they found it useful the last time.  If your readers get into the habit of checking your site daily, it can only be because you published useful content daily.  Excellent work.

Yes, I decided to make the ELW visibility scale an even 10, but there is far more you can do with your website beyond #10.  If you can get the rest of the world to generate useful content for you, you need another visibility scale altogether.  Maybe tomorrow!

The best website ideas fill a need.  These days the world of websites really needs to know what is really going on in the world of search engine optimization or SEO.  Catching a cheater is easy, but getting them to stop cheating is difficult.  The only way to get someone to stop cheating is to make sure the other players know that they cheat.  Why don’t schools teach students how to detect cheaters and scams.  The world of SEO is filled with cheaters and scams.

How can a piece of SEO software guarantee you the top spot on Google?

After a while, isn’t it inevitable that two customers buying the software product will want to rank #1 for the same keyword?  Wouldn’t it be nice if an independent reviewer actually explained what a SEO program actually accomplished?  The best way to inform everyone who the SEO cheats are would be a website!  ELW will make this website idea a reality for the very first customer willing to try.

Since ELW started this blog we have learned a lot about SEO.  Every morning I look at the comments received by the Akismet plugin for WordPress.  In the beginning I had to do the spam detection manually, and I consider it a success that this would now be too much work.  What I notice about the spam comments is that most of them are vain attempts to get links to some site that sells crappy software that doesn’t work.  SEO is serious business, and should be as competitive as any other type of advertising.  I had this thought:

Why aren’t there spam sites advertising that they can get you an interview on Oprah or Leno?

These are just as unrealistic claims as most of the software for SEO or link building.  I would love to be #1 on Google for the keyword software too, even though ELW doesn’t really sell software anymore.  In case you were wondering, we write custom software for clients all the time.  It is up to the clients to tell us why they need it.  To be frank, we can’t get the top search engine ranking for the keyword software.  We can’t get you there either!  The reason is because we know what is necessary to get that done, and it would cost too much.  If we could afford to do it, we would probably use the money to retire instead, and so should you.

Why don’t people have realistic goals for SEO?

1. There are too many scammers telling them that $75 software can get them #1 on Google.
2. Do some people have unrealistic goals for everything?  Maybe.
3. Most people hire web designers to do SEO!

A “Web Designer doing SEO” is usually just a mediocre graphic designer pretending to be a computer scientist!

If there is one thing that every potential client looking for SEO needs to know is that SEO is not the domain of web design!

1. Google’s search engine was not developed by web designers, it was developed by computer science phds.
2. Art critics don’t decide where your site will rank, a computer program does.

It is easy to optimize web sites for the search engines of five years ago, but they don’t exist!

In five years, computers have become at least eight times faster.  This means that the SEO tricks that used to work are now obsolete!  There is plenty of extra computing resources left over to check whether you are leaving spam comments on blogs to promote your site, for example.  The computers now have ample time to analyze whether you hired someone to write a bunch of articles to make your site look established.  The computers have no trouble at all detecting if you scraped articles from someone else’s site and ran them through an article generating software program.  If I had to guess, with today’s technology, adequate black-hat SEO software costs more than hiring a real human being.  Spam and computer generated articles are just too easy to detect.

Since ELW is headquartered in Riverside, California we generally focus our attention on the local environment we see around us.  This is often the source for the best website ideas.  Let me throw a few observations out there:

1. Lawyers generally don’t have websites, and when they do they usually aren’t very good.  Some are terrible.
2. Lawyers charge serious money to get you out of serious problems.
3. Lawyers in your local area benefit from finding local clients.
4. Lawyers are experts on a subject where it is illegal for regular people to give advice.

So, the obvious approach to a lawyer website is for the lawyer to give advice on the site that will bring in new clients.  An even better idea is to create a site where lawyers provide the advice, and you make a profit! Making a decent website for dealing with legal advice would require a person who is motivated and honest, but the benefits could be extraordinary.  Contact ELW if you are interested in our help developing a website for lawyers.

What do you do when you have a cool website idea?  If you live near the Inland Empire in California, you need to contact ELW to make it a reality!  Although we are happy to help get your website idea off the ground no matter where you are, nothing beats the convenience of a free in-person consultation.  We are located in beautiful Riverside, California.  Even though it is raining this week, we will still be helping to get new web site ideas their start.

How much does a website cost?

• Most people don’t realize that a new website can be designed and ready for use for as little as a few hundred dollars.  You shouldn’t be worried about making your website idea into a slick nationwide brand just yet, but most web designers will charge you as though you are.  Keep it simple.  Your first idea might not be the one that makes you rich.  Save some money so you have some left for the next big idea.

How long does it take to make a website?

• Most websites can be ready in a less than a week, but that depends on how busy we are.  If we get so busy that it takes more than a week to put your website idea together, we will probably be hiring more designers immediately.  If you want us to program something that has never been done before, it might take longer.  We can’t make you a new search engine to compete with Google in a week for example.

What makes a good website idea?

• Anything you want to do on the internet that doesn’t exist, is a good website idea.  Even if the idea does already exist, it probably isn’t as good as it could be.  Many cool website ideas fall apart and are just taking up space on the internet.  Don’t be afraid to compete with an existing website if your idea is better!

How do I turn a website idea into reality?

• Contact ELW and we will answer any questions you have about getting a website made.  Don’t worry about protecting your website idea from copying.  We value your privacy greatly!  We have more ideas than we can possibly build.  That is why we give away free web site ideas every day on this blog.  Don’t be afraid to steal one of those ideas for yourself either!  We will gladly build the site for you.

6833 Indiana Avenue, Suite #208 is where you will find the most fantastic web design and development company in Riverside, California. If you need a website for your small business, you should come by and visit our office.

If you have a good idea for a money making website, we can help you get it off the ground.  We are always willing to discuss your idea with no obligations.

I use icerocket.com to find the latest information in blogs they scan from all over the world.  I highly recommend icerocket to anybody interested in keeping track of information in blogs that might not have gained too much popularity.

Today I noticed that there is another Ben Smith out there making posts about web hosting.  For a number of reasons, I’m going to give this guy a link:  The other Ben Smith.

Apparently this guy has been posting his ass off about web hosting.  This topic seems related to what we do at ELW, which is web design.  I love generating publicity for ELWsoftware.com, our fast-growing web design and development company.  My absolute favorite technique for publicity for ELW and our clients is link baiting.  This means that we post some articles that are specifically aimed at making people notice.  The best way to do this is to get people pissed off enough to write about you.  Here goes:

I am not the Ben Smith in Dallas that writes about web hosting.  I am not illiterate, and I don’t post bad articles and videos about web hosting on a politics.com blog.  If you want a real blog, contact us!

I am the real Ben Smith, and I have the scars to prove it.  I suspect this other guy is some spammer making posts all over the internet in some naive attempt at SEO.  He probably got paid $50 or something on Elance.com to write 500 articles about web hosting.  Let’s see how that works out for him.

If you are considering hiring a web designer for your small business, you should have all of the facts available.  If your small business doesn’t have a website at all, you need to read further.  If you have a website and you want to get more visitors, or if you don’t know how many visitors you get, please consider hiring a professional.  Here are a few things every small business owner should consider when making decisions about a website:

1. Do you want new customers? You would be surprised how many small business owners don’t think about this question.  What would you do with 10 or 100 new customers a month?  What will your existing customers do when the quiet place they like suddenly becomes busy with new people?  If you use your website as an online store, is it possible that fewer people will come in?
2. Do you have anything to say? There probably isn’t too much daily news about the auto repair business, so maybe a blog isn’t right for you.  On the other hand, if car repairs will be taking a while to fix, it would be pretty cool to get updates with pictures.  It might even be fun to have a step-by-step slide show of what goes into fixing or customizing a car.  People love their cars.  Showing people how things get done can produce a great deal of trust.
3. Do animations really look professional? The honest and truthful answer is no.  Animation distracts from your message, especially if you can’t read further until the animation finishes.  You want your web page to say one thing: We can solve your problem. Animations and other eye-candy distract from your message, if they even work.  If you rely on animations to get your message across, this could even hurt you.  Search engines don’t use graphics, they use text.  If the text on your site isn’t good enough, nobody will find it on Google.
4. Who visits your website? If you don’t know who is visiting and how often, you are at a great disadvantage.  A website is not a television commercial where the advertisers don’t even know who is paying attention.  A website offers the ability to know exactly how often people visit, what pages they look at, and where they found you.  You would want to know if all your website visitors came from a Google search for “worst website in town” right?
5. How expensive is a website? Most web designers don’t care that the budget for your small business doesn’t allow huge expenses.  Your plan shouldn’t be to spend as much as you can afford.  If you give a web designer a budget of $5000, they will find a way to spend it.  Your plan should be to find a web designer who wants to improve your business for as little money as possible.

Yesterday I went to Burger King because I wanted a burger with bacon.  I didn’t think about how difficult the drive would be because it isn’t very far.  The nearest Burger King is next to the mall, and the entire area was crowded with Christmas shoppers.  Every year it is like this.  I hate it.  The entire road-facing side of the Burger King restaurant was painted saying that Whoppers were 2 for $3.  So, that is what I ordered.  I added bacon to the whoppers for a dollar each.  I also asked for onion rings since I saw them on the BK value menu for $1. Who is doing the math with me?  The total should be $6 plus tax, but my bill was for 9.97!

I could go on and on about things like this but they happen every day, and apparently nobody seems to notice anymore.  I read a blog post by Seth Godin about what buying a new PC is like.  I had forgotten all of the PC troubles, since I have been using the same Apple computer for almost five years now.  I forgot all about anti-virus software, ridiculous desktop icons, and permission popups for everything.  I understand that they are cheaper, ok?  The problem is that the same people trying to save $100 on a PC are the same people who buy a new car because their old one has slow leaks in their tires or something.  I don’t want to sound like a salesperson for Apple.  I have written about some problems before like the Apple Mouse scroll ball, and how OSX won’t delete files in the trash.

I want to know whether there is a class in business schools that teaches any of the following:

1. Charge people for things at random, and refund them if you someone is patient enough to wait on hold and complain.  (I would single out Bank of America, but everybody else does it too.)
2. Make canceling any recurring payment as difficult as possible.
3. Don’t even think of fixing a problem with a product.  This is what upgrades are for!