Central Mass Web Design has been actively using, reporting, and promoting the use of Social Media to promote your business.  We looked into the effect Social Media sites have on our clients and the internet long before the reports that Social Media sites were on the fast track.  We encouraged all of our SEO clients to be blogging, and using Social Media sites to drive traffic to their website.

Now on the wake of all this… a new report made available a few days ago from Nielsen reports that Social Media and blogging are the fastest growing searches on the internet today.  Growing at over 2x the rate of others.  With an average age of not 16, 17 or 18 year old users…  but users in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s.

I can take this all in stride.  I mean, well, we predicted it over a year ago.

Imagine my shock when I received a news notice, that stated The Boston Massachusetts Police planned on using TWITTER.  Now for those of you that dont know what TWITTER is, it is a web based Social Networking tool where people post updates and tips on what they are doing.   To follow Central Mass Web Design on TWITTER visit, CentralMassWeb.

So how will Boston Police use TWITTER next week.   Imagine a city gridlocked with traffic.  Thousands of people converging on Boston to witness the annual St. Patricks Day Parade.  The Boston Police pulled in every direction directing traffic, moving people along, and keeping the peace.  Now imagine updates directly to your computer or smart phone, on TWITTER.  Police will be reporting up to the minute reports on traffic and crowd control issues, to give everyone a heads up coming into the area, so they may be able to replan their routes.  This also allows TWITTER followers to post their own updates that the police may not be aware of yet.

Simply brilliant!  Kudos to you Boston Police for being on the cutting edge, and making things easier for all of us!

See the story at The Boston Channel.

Kimberly Veautour

NIELSEN REPORTS , SOCIAL NETWORKS & BLOGS NOW 4TH MOST POPULAR ONLINE ACTIVITY, AHEAD OF PERSONAL EMAIL .

For months I have been on the social networking to grow your business band wagon.  We have personally seen the effects of its use here at Central Mass Web Design.  Now Nielson, www.nielsen-online.com has produced findings that show Social Networking and blogs via the internet is the fastest growing online category and is growing twice as fast as any of the other sectors.   Today, March 9, 2009, Nielsen released a report proving Social Media and Blogging are growing at a staggering rate.

Member Communities ( which includes Blogging) grew over 5 points in the past year, placing it above e-mail, and showing a growth of more than double any other.

Reports also show that time spent on social networks has increased globally by 18% in the past year.    Do you know what your employees are posting on their Facebook and Myspace accounts?  Do your employees know what you are posting on yours?

I recently gave a presentation to a local networking group on the benefits of using LinkedIn to grow their business and networking.  Part of this presentation talks about researching prospective employees via internet and social networking tools like LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Presentation

Time spent on Networking and Blogging sites is growing at over 3x the rate of all internet growth.  So much time is being spent on social networking sites it is eating into the time spent on other websites and activities.

The average age of online Community Networking Site Member has changed. Facebook started out as a service for university students but now almost one third of its global audience is aged 35-49 years of age, and growing.  Almost one quarter of all Facebook users are over age 50.

This is the way of the future, and I encourage you to get involved and grow with the times…before they leave you in the dust.  You can see the Nielsen report, in its entirety at http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/nielsen_globalfaces_mar09.pdf

Central Mass Web Design has actively been pursuing this avenue, and helping our clients to understand their Online Media presence.  All companies should be considering their Online Media presence when thinking about their website SEO.  Stay tuned for more information, on how to make MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook work for you!

Kimberly Veautour

The number one thing you can do to improve your website is add content. Content is the key to driving traffic to your site. Your content needs to be page specific. What I mean by this is that each page should have very detailed information regarding that page title. If your page title is Boston Based Widgets, then you content needs to contain those terms. Keep in mind that as you write your content you don’t just want to copy this term over and over again, that will get you banned from the search engines. Instead, construct reasonable sentences that will make sense to your reader. But also pay attention and utilize things like bullets. Most users won’t read this content you are writing, but they will read the bullets or other call to action items on your page. Write a good amount of content that will attract your prospect. Your prospective customer will find your site because Google, Yahoo, and MSN will crawl your site and index all the content, making it available as a search result. The more content you have on this particular topic, the more likely you are to be found. When addressing content, you have to think about the law of averages here. The more tickets you have for the lottery, the more likely you are to win it. However if you don’t even have one ticket, you have no chance in winning the lottery; therefore you must create your “tickets”, to get entered into the lottery.

You can edit your existing content to improve your rankings on search engines. Once you know where you rank and where your competition ranks then you can formulate a plan. Review your competitor’s website to determine what they might be doing to be ranked well on a particular search engine. Read their content, look over their site. Never copy their content that is against the law. However you can create your own content by learning what they have done. Simply begin editing the content on your site to reflect more of what you have learned from your competitors. Don’t be afraid to learn new things from other sites, and don’t be afraid to try things on your site. Consider including some call to action graphics that will get noticed by your visitors. Make these graphics clickable and deliver the user to a form page to complete when they click the graphic. Keep that form small so that the prospect will complete it.

Every site should have a robots.txt file. It can often be overlooked but it doesn’t take much to add one. Wikipedia says “The robot exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard complements Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.

A robots.txt file on a website will function as a request that specified robots ignore specified files or directories in their search. This might be, for example, out of a preference for privacy from search engine results, or the belief that the content of the selected directories might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorization of the site as a whole, or out of a desire that an application only operate on certain data.
For websites with multiple sub-domains, each sub-domain must have its own robots.txt file. If example.com had a robots.txt file but a.example.com did not, the rules that would apply for example.com will not apply to a.example.com.”

Titles are an important factor in ranking well. Think of the newspaper, if they didn’t have titles for the articles, then no one would read the articles. These titles help the search engines identify relevant pages to deliver to the search engine user. If you don’t have a title page that includes relevant information for the search then your page may not be shown to the user. Your title should help the search engines identify your content and it should clearly be related to the content. You can put your business name in the title, but my recommendation is that you put it after your key phrases and descriptive information.

To improve your page names, you first need to determine what the page has for a focus. The content and title should clearly indicate this to you. Now, review the page name in address bar of your web browser. Is the page name similar to the content? Does it give you a sense as to how close the content will be to the subject of the page? A page name of abc.html is not nearly as good as dog-treats-for-your-pet.html if your content is related to the type of dog treats you can feed your pet, or other treats you might give to your dog. Abc.html should be modified. To do this, on most sites, you simply copy the page, paste it again, and rename the file. Then you upload the new page to your site. Now you need to link the new page from all the other pages that point to abc.html. One point I want to make and be clear on, do not remove the abc.html file. You may be getting rankings and traffic from search engines delivering users to this page. You should eventually remove it but you first need to redirect the traffic going to the abc.html page to the newly named page. To do this you need to utilize something called a 301 redirect. This will direct the search engines to update their page from abc.html to the newly named page. Once you do the 301 redirect, you can remove abc.html

You need to understand where your website ranks and for what key phrases it does well for. Once you have identified what you want to show up for, start running ranking reports. Any reputable SEO company can run a ranking report for you for under $100. Sometimes it can be as low at $20. But you can do this yourself for free if you have time. Simply type in the key phrase into the search engine and start going through the pages. On Google you want to look for your domain in the “green” text under the description and link. Keep moving through the page results until you find something. This could take a while. Once you get through 10 pages, and then try another key phrase. If you are ranking above 100, then just mark 100 for the ranking result on a spreadsheet. Use this spreadsheet to track your results for all the key phrases. This will create a baseline to show you if things are improving over time. Don’t expect big jumps in your rankings