So, you have a website, but you find that you are not getting the traffic you need to generate sales. You read an article online about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and find yourself completely lost. What are metas, how do I write an effective title, etc? You are completely overwhelmed. A few days later, you get a phone call or receive an email from a so called SEO group that can guarantee top 10 placement for keywords.

Any company that contacts you out of the blue and guarantees top 10 placement is most likely using Black Hat SEO tecniques.

Beware of statements like;

We optimize your site, creating pages that get you top positions in the search engines.
We Guarantee top 10 placement.

These so called SEO experts may be using a technique called doorway pages. A doorway page is a page created just for a search engine spider. They typically consist of jibberish sprinkled with keywords related to your service or product. These jibberish pages then re-direct to your home page when a human visitor clicks on a link to go to your site. From Matt Cutts Blog, you can see an example of such a practice here.

Another common practice of black hat seo is to promote a URL that the seo company owns to try to drive traffic to you. There is an article that covers this here.

I know this article is short and sweet, but here are a few pointers in determining if an SEO company is on the up and up.

• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
• Cold calling telemarketers are just that.
• Determine if the keywords they say they can get top rankings for are not obscure keyword strings that you probably rank well for in the first place.
• Make sure they are not employing doorway pages.
• Ask them about organic SEO by building traffic naturally through well written pages and a clean link management system.

Pantone has recently released it’s 2006 color forecast. To
me the forecast is 70’s art deco meets early American Victorian. Their forecast
calls for muted oranges (Glazed Ginger, Burnt Orange), muted blues(Moroccan
Blue) and yellows(Rattan and Moss). All of these colors scream “Brady Bunch”.
They complement these colors with deep earth tones such as the reds “American
Beauty” and “Ruby Wine”, a green “Burnt Olive”, and a royalty driven purple
called ”Gloxina”, all of which are Victorian in history and eclectic in
practice.

So how do these predictions play out in the work you are
doing? It really comes down to the client
and the media in which you are working. Some clients bend to the trends,
especially those doing traditional marketing. You will see these colors more
than likely showing up in advertising in magazines and direct mailings. They
may even make their way to billboards and annual reports. With the right
client, they may show up on promotional websites built for a particular
campaign with a very short lifespan. You see a great deal of this with the Nike’s
and Coca-cola’s of the world.

That being said, you won’t want to implement trendy colors in creative you
design that is meant to be seen for any extended period of time; let’s say
anything over nine months. Why? Because color carries with it different connotations,
implications and feelings. Pantone makes their predictions based on what they
think the mood of the consumer will respond to and cause them to act. Shortly
after 9-11, Pantone released a prediction palette of mostly pastels. The
thought behind it was that the consumer was more likely to respond to the
contrast of the light and less contrasting palette than the harsh darkness of
the deep reds, grays and blacks seen on their televisions everyday.A year from now you don’t know what will be
the mood of your target audience. Colors today that say “care free” or “whimsical”,
might say “lazy” and “weak” tomorrow. So you want to avoid trendy colors for
corporate websites and collateral such as business cards and letter that people
may look at years from now.

I have been watching the Google BD Update and according to Matt Cutt’s Blog, there are 3 datacenters involved at 66.249.93.104, 64.233.179.104 and now, Bigdaddy is up at 216.239.51.104. I check our ranking every so often (as any business owner vested in success of his business would be) for a few of our key search terms. Those terms are;

website design
website designers
website development

I keep seeing multiple SERPS for the above search terms that range from 391,000,000 to 1,200,000,000. When the larger of the 2 numbers is present, I can’t be found for website design, on the second page for website designers, and on the first page for website development. It is only during the lower numbers that I show up for website design (typically on page 2 at around #13

I am hoping that the final numbers on BigDaddy will be the lower set of numbers. I have also seen a lot of criticism of the new bigdaddy update on Matt’s blog that indicates websites with hidden keyword stuffed front pages are ranking in the top 10 for particular keywords.

Sounds like there are a few bugs left to work out.Â

Join me in welcoming Randy Stone and John Davis to our team here at CAD Enterprises LLC and CADWebsiteDesign.com

Randy has joined our team as a website designer bringing fresh new designs with a great eye for graphic design.

John has joined our team as a programmer bringing with him mastery of php and mysql along with visual basic, cobalt, c, c++, the list goes on …

The addition of these 2 guys rounds out our staff to 8 people total with 2 programmers and 3 designers and 3 administration or account management.