A little monkey business can be a good thing sometimes. Such is the case with Gorilla Cycle, a new classifieds system for motorcycle parts and accessories.

The site is designed for the extremely vertical market of used motorcycles and motorcycle parts. Knowing that there are a number of classified sites already in the space, the site will leverage the fact that the ads will be monitored so the SPAM and junk posts will be minimized.

The site is full of features to help connect buyers and sellers. One major point is that sellers have a “profile” page that shows all the items they have in the system that they can broadcast out to their potential buyers.

The site is also fully SEO’d which will also help sellers get their product in front of buyers, and will help buyers find the products before they even get to the site.

A registration system, which is free, is in place for both buyers and sellers and helps cut down on the junk.

Check it out if you have a moment. It should be an interesting project to watch…

The folks over at Tradebank (the nation’s best barter exchange) took on a fairly daunting task earlier this year. Tradebank, which is based just outside of Atlanta, has independently owned regional offices across the US and Canada. Over the past several years some of these offices started their own websites, with varying degrees of success (and quality). So to help these individuals, each with their own ideas of what a site should do and how it should look, Tradebank created a system that not only allows each of these offices to create their own look but also shares the data that each site creates across the entire system. There are a number of benefits to this:

1. A centralized support system: As all of the offices use the same website administration system it is much easier for Tradebank to support the entire system. And since everyone utilizes the same interface, ideas and techniques can be shared between the offices.
2. Data sharing: The system was designed so that content created by one office can be used by other offices in the system. This reduces the duplication of effort that was happening across the system.
3. One step upgrades: When a new feature is introduced to the system it is available to all the sites in the system. Again, this reduces duplication and opens up new ideas to the entire group.
4. All the social networking links were built as well. Each office now has their own Twitter and Facebook pages so that clients in their region can keep track of each individual office instead of being blasted by updates from all the offices.

Often times when sites for a large company are created like this you will find that they all look the same with only some changes in text or logos. Not so with the system built for Tradebank. This system is highly customizable so that each office can be extremely creative in their designs and content. Take a look…

Tradebank of Greenville:

Tradebank of Charlotte:

Tradebank of Orlando:

There are many more examples, but you can check those out over at the Tradebank website. As you can see though, each office has been able to create their own look, even though the administration system is the same.

This system has helped Tradebank manage the different sites from one location saving them time and effort (and thus money) while giving all of their independent barter exchange owners an advantage over their competition. Stay tuned for even more updates to this system and the individual barter sites.

I’ve been so very busy over the last six months or so that I’ve been a bit remiss in adding anything to my own site. So over the next few weeks I’ll try to put up a few posts on what’s been going on with various clients.

I will say that it is an exciting time around here right now. Several projects should be wrapped up soon and there are new projects are in the hopper as well. It suffices to say that business is good, and for that I am very thankful.

A big change that has come about recently is the release of WordPress 3. I’ve done a few upgrades and the results have been excellent. What a fantastic upgrade to an already existing product. I will be updating this code, and the site template as well, in the not too distant future in order to take advantage of some of the new code so stay tuned for that. Of course that will have to take a back seat to client projects, but the thought is there regardless…

That’s it for now. Back to client work…

Here it is folks, the finest Google training tool out there… sort of.

This tongue-in-cheek site was put together in order to have a little fun with people who innocently ask questions on the Internet about topics that they could very easily find the answers to if they only took a moment to type the question into Google instead of sending it in an email or posting it on a message board. And if you’ve been around on the Internet for very long you know exactly what I mean…

On the technical side… the site uses a bit of custom programming to:

1. Handle the scripting on the home page.
2. Display the correct search results from Google.
3. Create a custom “award” for the user to download.
4. Handle the emailing of the site to “friend’s”… keeping the spammers at bay using re-captcha (which nobody likes but is a must-have in an open environment like this)… and generating an email tracking system that allows people to add themselves to a “block” list so that the site will not send them any additional email.

So the next time someone asks you “Does the light go off when I close the refrigerator door?” you can simply point them to http://youcangoogletoo.com and they can learn how to search for answers to life’s most profound questions (in just THREE easy steps). We hope you enjoy.

One of the things that we’ve implemented with Tradebank is an inbound linking program… they refer to it as “WebLinks”… Whatever you want to call it the results are the same.

If you have regular visitors to your site, having them post links TO your site on throughout the internet will help your ranking. There are certain exceptions… this is one area where there can be too much of a good thing… but that would likely only happen if you were indeed trying to cheat the system. The search engines are smart… they’ll figure that out. But we aren’t focusing on “cheating” here… we want to focus on how inbound linking can play a part in your SEO program.

Tradebank leverages the Barter System to increase their exposure on the Internet.

So how can inbound linking work for you? Well, we can help with that. First off, there is value to links. So if you really want people to link to your site you need to find something of value to give for those links. Often times it can simply be a link in return. Be careful though of getting involved with “link exchanges”… sites that contain thousands of links, but no real content. Those fall into the “too much of a good thing” category.

Once you have links, you’ll want to start tracking them. There are a number of analytics tools out there that can get you started (and of course, when we build an inbound linking program we provide that data to you). If you custom build your web app (like we did with Tradebank) then the link clicks should be counted for you. But you can also just watch your log files for “referrals” to determine where your traffic is coming from.

No matter how you track the results though, getting links out there will help your site in the organic rankings, as well as build your pagerank.

Have questions…? Just blip us an email (link to the right or below) and we’ll be glad to help however we can.

An exercise in online marketing…

Your Comprehensive Online Source for Information About Warts and Other Skin Conditions!

Wart.NET is a basic informational website concerning a slightly bizzare, yet fairly common, topic.

The challenge of the project is to utilize content and SEO techniques to increase the rankings. Once the site has the rankings they are looking for then an affiliate program will be put in place to provide a product to treat the conditions the site discusses.

The interesting thing about this project is that the site owner is simply using rankings to drive traffic to a product site that they don’t control. They are simply a sales point for that other site. When a visitor purchases a product a commision is paid to the site owner. They never touch the product or the money. They just get paid when their site generates a sale. It’s brilliant.

The site owners drive traffic to their site using standard SEO techiques as well as complex viral marketing efforts.

Custom design, familiar features

Often clients come to us with a website that they already have designed. Clients that have a marketing firm already working for them will sometimes already have a fantasticly “designed” site that only needs to be implemented.

And of course, often times a graphic designer will have little or no knowlegde regarding HTML design (the code that makes all this stuff work), much less have an understanding of Search Engine Optimization.

Again, this is where we can help. We can take your site design and add it to our content control and SEO system. There are usually a few minor changes that have to be made to the layout, just because of the way the web actually works.

With The Yellow House, we had a great design that they had spent a lot of time developing. The challenge here was that it was designed more like a print brochure than a website. And it was no small challenge.

In the end though we produced a website that was about as close to their original design as could be, yet was also integrated into the content control system. This gives the client a solid foundation to build additional content and features upon.

Enabling the client to control their content.

Sometimes clients just need a little nudge in the right direction. With The Swallow we took an existing design that the client had and placed it into our content management system. This enables the client to maintain control of almost all aspects of their site design, and the content it contains, while enabling us to continue to manage the optimization functions in the site.

As the client becomes more comfortable with the management software we can add even more functions and features. This process continues over and over again, with the client becoming more capable of managing their own site without being overwhelmed by the tools at hand.

Good design… but SEO?… not so much.

We began working with Classic Tents & Events in August of 2008. Ria Bruns, the owner of Classic Tents, had spent a good deal of time and effort getting her website designed and was happy with the results. What she wasn’t happy with was her organic ranking in the search engines. When we started she was at the bottom of page three, not a real good place to be when you’re depending on that ranking to drive customers to your site.


So we went to work. We made some minor changes to the site while maintaining the look and feel she had in place but overall the site changed very little on the outside.


What did change though were some key code functions on the site that took herfrom page three to number three in just a few days.

Analytics for a company that does analytics

It is great to work with companies that understand analytics. And that’s just what Analytics IQ does, so they have a pretty good grasp of the whole concept.

Here again we have a company that has a site already designed, they just need some help with the whole SEO process and they need to know what their site’s visitors are doing.

Enter FeO. Over the past few months we have put their site into our content control and SEO management software. We’ve increased their search ranking, and we’ve built a file management application for their customers to send files for them to analyze.