8 easy lessons:
Maintaining a great relationship with clients is tricky – and a lot of it revolves around our ability, as web designers, to educate our clients and set expectations so that both sides end up feeling satisfied at the end of a project.
Simon Property Group's Central Florida holdings include The Florida Mall, Seminole Towne Center, Waterford Lakes Town Center, Lake Square Mall, Melbourne Square, Terrace at The Florida Mall, West Town Corners, Highland Lakes Center and Orlando Premium Outlet.
Per Matt Cutts
CodeGuard backs up your site's code & helps find malware. To join closed beta use this code: cgfr0425
As shown in class. great for developing a color palette
Downtown Orlando’s entrepreneur center has a new name to go with its new home at Orlando Fashion Square mall.
The Orlando-based National Entrepreneur Center — formerly the Disney Entrepreneur Center — plans to begin moving into nearly 22,000-square-foot space at the mall on East Colonial Drive April 21 in time for an April 25 opening.
While the Disney name helped the center establish itself and gave it credibility, Jerry Ross, executive director of the center, said its scope and abilities have grown to a national and even global level. A Croatian film crew visited the center to film a documentary to help small businesses in that central European country, Ross said.
“We’ve been contacted by other states, cities and even countries who wanted to see how we do what we do, which pulled us back to our original vision as a national entrepreneur center,” Ross told Orlando Business Journal. “As we were printing everything related to the move, we decided to change our name.”
The Walt Disney World Resort continues to fund the center and raised its contribution to $150,000, $50,000 more than the company gave the center last year, Ross said. Disney, Orange County and the University of Central Florida also extended their sponsorship commitments through 2016.
The center provides one-on-one business coaching, seminars, networking events, access to software and business resources and other resources for small businesses. The center houses the Hispanic Business Initiative Fund, SCORE-Counselors to America’s Small Business, the Small Business Development Center at UCF, the UCF Business Incubation Program and the U.S. Department of Commerce.
The African American Chamber of Commerce, the British American Chamber of Commerce of Central Florida, the Central Florida Disability Chamber, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metro Orlando, the National Association of Women Business Owners-Orlando and the Central Florida Chapter of the National Black MBA Association are also based at the center.
Since its founding in 2003, the center and its six service providers have been involved in $125 million worth of loans, coached 70,000 businesses and assisted in more than 700 new business launches.
Be sure to use this resource to help your freelance business
Open Office has been forked. Welcome LibreOffice.
Lets hope the best free Microsoft Office alternative continues
Each of the top 10 provides a graceful degradation solution for problematic browsers. From Denise Jacobs - a trusted source
Matt Chapman CEO of Origintech came by our class and gave us an introduction to app development for the IPhone Ipad and Android mobile platforms.
Matt recently received national publicity for the Avalon Park IPhone app as the first community to have it's own app. There is no question that mobile apps are a big part of future growth and our students were thrilled to get some coaching from a recognized expert in this exciting field.
Matt has also agreed to join our Advisory Board for the Web Design Development class at Winter Park Tech
THANKS Matt
www.origintech.net
The web has come a long way since Tim Berners-Lee created the first website way back in 1991. Here’s an infographic that takes you on a tour of web design, starting with those humble beginnings, and bringing you all the way up to the present day.
It’s like getting into a time machine, where the tremendous progress design has made on the World Wide Web over the past two decades is all laid out in front of you.
Follow along this extensively researched infographic from KISSmetrics, showing us exactly how far we’ve come from those early days where wide pages of text with hyperlinks in between ruled the roost. Do you remember when an animated .gif graphic of a letter folding up and flying into an envelope was seen as the highest of technology? We’re starting to feel nostalgic.
Please note: This graphic is so huge, we had to shrink it to fit our format, but if you’re having a hard time reading it, click the graphic for an enlargement.
Graphic courtesy KISSmetrics
Our curriculum requires knowledge of the basics of copyright law. This is about as basic as you can get.
An excellent primer from the EFF can be found at http://www.teachingcopyright.org/
I have some bad habits I need to get rid of. I bite my nails, forget to turn off the TV when I leave a room, and pay way too much attention to Google. Google is the largest search engine, but with Bing Powered search engines accounting for 30.8% of the market share, it can’t be ignored anymore.
This post will provide a walk-through of Bing Webmaster’s features to help you better understand and take advantage of these tools to enhance SEO. (If you haven’t already, you need to set up a Bing Webmaster account for your website.)
Home Page
When you log into Bing Webmaster center you will land on the Home page. Here you can see a list of messages about any issues affecting your site. Below the messages box is a list of all the sites in your account and general performance statistics. To view more details on a site, simply click the URL. (Click on an image to enlarge)
Dashboard
The dashboard tab provides you with an overview of your site’s performance. It shows both statistical data as well as chart data to help analyze performance trends.
Statistical Data
Bing bases the statistical data on the last crawl data and compares it to the previous month. Below are the definitions of these metrics:
- Clicks (%) – number of users who clicked on your website’s link displayed on the Bing SERPs (search engine result pages)
- Impressions (%) – site link impressions displayed on Bing’s SERPs
- Pages Indexed (%) – pages on your site that were crawled and indexed
- Pages Crawled (%) – pages of your site that were crawled, regardless of if they were indexed
The example above is comparing the metric values on March 25th to the metric values on February 25th. The arrow indicates the trend in the data over the past month. A green arrow means performance on that metric has improved while a red arrow means it has decreased. You can get more data on any of these statistics by mousing over them.
Chart Data
The charts at the bottom of the page show last 6 months’ data for the crawling, indexing, and traffic of your site. Pause your mouse over a point on the chart to see values for that specific day. You can click on any of these charts to take you to the corresponding page or click on the tabs along the top.
Crawl Tab
Crawl Summary: When you click on the crawl tab you will be taken to the Crawl Summary page. Here you can find the pages crawled chart and pages with crawl errors charts from the Dashboard. Hopefully, your crawl errors chart looks like the one below, with no errors reported.
Crawl Settings: On this page, you can add or remove the query string parameters you want the crawler to ignore. This is important if you use dynamic parameters for tracking as it can create multiple URL variations that all point to the same content. Adding these parameters helps to prevent duplicate content, avoid splitting index value, and reduce unnecessary site bandwidth usage when crawling your site.
Crawl Details: The Crawl Details tab shows you information about errors, redirects, malware, and exclusions detected by Bing during the last crawl of your site. You can also see when your site was last crawled.
To view more information on any of these details, just click on the type and a new box will open at the bottom of the page with the specific URL information.
Sitemaps: This page is pretty self-explanatory. Here you can see when your sitemap was last uploaded, if it was successful, and upload new sitemaps.
Index Tab
Index Summary: The index summary page shows your sites directory and all the pages in the Bing index. Mousing over the chart shows how many pages were indexed each day.
Index Explorer: This page provides a list of all the URLs of the indexed pages. You can filter the indexed pages by HTTP Code, crawl date range, discovery range, and pages with malware infections or excluded by robots.txt.
Submit URLs: You can submit URLs that are currently not in the Bing index or that have been recently updated and need to be re-indexed. Pages submitted through this feature will be crawled more quickly than if you wait for Bing to discover the update on its own. We had a client who recently moved its products into different categories, so we submitted URLs for those pages to be re-indexed. You can submit up to 50 URLs a month and 10 URLs a day.
Block URLs: From here you can block or unblock indexed URLs from appearing in Bing search results. If you need to remove content from your site quickly the search engine’s cached version of the page will still contain the old content. Entering in the blocked cached version here will expedite the update.
Links: Here you can view the number of inbound links to your site. Below the chart you will see a list of target pages and the total count of links pointing to that page. Click on a URL to view link details and anchor text. Link details window will open showing the source URL and anchor text of the link. You can export the links to a .csv file.
Traffic Tab
Traffic Summary: This page allows you to review traffic data and analyze search query performance for the last 6 months. The chart at the top of the page shows the number of impressions and clicks for your site on the SERPs. Below the chart, is a table showing the search queries, number of impressions, clicks, Click-Through Rate, Avg. Impression Position and Avg. Click Position for each search query. If you click on a query, it will display each page of your site that showed for that query.
Page Traffic: This page provides detailed information on your top performing pages in Bing. You can view the same metrics for each indexed page that you can for the search queries. Click on any page to view its performance by each query is appeared for. Looking at the performance trends by page can help you determine which pages you need to optimize.
This post should provide you with enough information to feel comfortable getting started in Bing Webmaster Tools. Now go, set up your account, and explore all Bing has to offer. If you have any questions or comments along the way, please post below!
Bethany is an Account Executive at Hanapin Marketing, a search engine marketing firm focused on generating results through PPC and SEO.
Related posts:
- Need Another Reason to Use XML Sitemaps? Compare Index Stats in Google Webmaster Tools
- How and Why You Should be Using Google Webmaster Tools – Part 2
- How and Why You Should be Using Google Webmaster Tools – Part 1
- 3 Stats Reports I Use Often From Google Webmaster Tools
- How to Set Up and Use MSN’s Live Search: Webmaster Central
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Crawlability, SEO Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
This article claims a new paradigm shift in Web development. What do you think?
Google’s announcement that it’s adding a “+1” button to incorporate sentiment into its search results raised a lot of questions not addressed in the company’s official announcement.
Every Social Media marketing expert should have this. What do you think?
Following the instructions here could avoid a great deal of pain. FileZilla is an excellent FREE FTP client for windows mac and Linux.
