Have you heard of Google's upcoming "Caffeine" update?  It is big news - a complete rebuild of Google's search platform!  Searchengineland.com summed it up nicely, "we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority (possibly beyond the link graph and what’s typically thought of as PageRank), and returning more relevant results more quickly, although Google’s Matt Cutts told me that the changes are 'primarily in how we index'".  This should be important to any website owner. Google controls such a large control of the search engine market that even small changes in a site's placement in SERPs can drastically affect the web site traffic.

Google's Matt Cutts confirmed a few days ago that this update will not be pushed out completely until after the Holidays.  I guess they don't want to rock the boat too much during the big holiday shopping season.  Matt specifically mentions that he wants web masters to breathe easy and not worry about the update until after the holidays have passed. Personally, I'm a little disappointed. I was really looking forward to this upcoming release. While I didn't roll up my sleeves and do any major testing in their sandbox (which is now closed), I did check out some of my sites - and client sites. I liked what I saw. I think this update will really help clean out sites that relied on spammy techniques to rank well and make room for more worthwhile sites - like mine! :)  I wish the update was hitting more quickly, but I guess we will all have to wait.

Are you looking for a home in Idaho Falls? Come check out the newest feature on HomeSoon.com. Use this Idaho Falls map to easily find home listings in neighborhoods or schools you are interested in.  Let us know what you think!

 

If your web developer is also your web host - you need to understand the answer to this very basic question.  Do you own the content on your website or does your web developer?  If you decide to move your website somewhere else for hosting - can you take everything with you?

This issue isn't treated uniformly by all web developers, so make sure it is clear before you enter in to a business relationship.  We recommend you obtain a contract from your developer that states your rights. Our standard web development agreement explicitly states that the client has exclusive rights to all the content they provide or for which they pay us to develop on their behalf.  If they ever wanted to move their website - they could take all their content with them.

Conversely, we have some services that allow our clients to use shared content that we have developed and own. For example, we offered a turn key IDX solution for real estate agents.  The solution came with content we developed, which is shared by all subscribers to our service. Our development agreement for this turn key solution states that we retain ownership of this content and it can only be used as a part of our subscription service.

We believe it all comes down to common sense. If you provided or paid for the content it should - and does - belong to you. If you didn't provide or pay for the content - then it doesn't belong to you.  While this seems like common sense to us - it isn't always the case and web developers can - and do - right their contracts differently.  

We have just launched a new website, www.homesoon.com, a search site for finding real estate and homes in Idaho Falls and the surrounding area. The basics are already up but we have grand plans for improving the site to make it even easier to find homes than ever before. The site really only has one purpose: make home searching easy.  Do you want your kids to attend the best schools possible? We have included short cuts that enable you to quickly find homes based on school boundaries and neighborhoods.  We have also included short cuts for widely used search phrases such as "price reduced".

While we believe this site is already the most user friendly home search site in the region we have plans to add even more great features in the near future such as map based searches and results.

We've posted earlier regarding the usefulness of a company blog on your web site.  Done correctly, it can be incredibly helpful.  There are some pitfalls though. Chris Lister put together an excellent post pointing out some of the worst offenses. As his commenters have already pointed out - these suggestions are just as relevant to other social media mediums.

The post is packed with great information and well worth the read. My favorite.... Greed. Don't constantly try to monetize your readers. Provide value your readers will appreciate. "Don’t be the Shamwow guy"... Love it.

Read Chris' post.

 

While setting up new web sites and helping folks register domain names we get this question a lot.  It is pretty common for people to register multiple domain names. Sometimes people just want both the .net and .com extension for the same name. Sometimes people register a handful of similar names to make sure no else can use them; decent strategies all. However, how you configure these domain names can have big implications. Having all of your domain name resolve to the same web site can cause you to be penalized by the search engines.

Consider if you purchase three domain names and point them all to your website. The search engines will view these as three different web sites all with the exact same content. This doesn't mean you can't use all of your domains - you just have to set it up correctly. You should choose the main domain you plan to use - the one you will print on your business cards and use for email.  This is the domain you will really promote and setup for your web site. The other domains should be configured with your domain registrar to respond with a HTTP status code of 301. This tells the visitor (and more important the search engines) that the content at that domain has been permanently moved – and you can point them to your main domain.

On the same thread - search engines can also consider www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com (no www.) to be separate web sites - earning you the same penalty. Even further www.yourdomain.com/default.htm and www.yourdomain.com can be considered separate pages with the same content.
This whole concept is called domain canonicalization. Matt Cutts explains this best I've seen, "Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices." Reading his entire post on the subject is very helpful.

When getting serious about SEO, domain canonicalization is a good place to start.

We were really excited when the Boys Scouts of America Grand Teton Council chose us to help them build their online store. They wished to setup an E-Commerce site that could be used by members of their council to signup and pay for scout camp, Cedar Badge, High Adventures and other camping and training events.  We built their store using our own E-Commerce engine and made several customizations they needed, such as providing an option for visitors to use their in house accounts - vs. a credit card - to pay for their registrations, and custom fields to collect the details they needed to process camp registrations.  We designed the store to look consistent with the rest of their existing web site.

Our Project Contributions:

• Web site graphic design
• Web site front-end coding (HTML/CSS)
  
• E-Commerce engine, installation & customization

We have recently completed a project working BuyMT.com, seller of Made in Montana Gifts & Souvenirs, to upgrade their web site. We did a complete redesign and rebuilt their store using our own e-commerce application.  Because BuyMT.com has been online for years and has done SEO work in the past it was very important to maintain their current search engine ranking. As part of the transition we setup 301 redirects from all of their old URLs to point to the relevant page on the new site. Not only did their rankings not fall, but coupled with the SEO improvements built in to our e-commerce application, their search engine rankings almost immediately improved.

Our Project Contributions:

• Web site graphic design
• Web site front-end coding (HTML/CSS)
  
• E-Commerce engine, installation & customization
• SEO friendly 301 redirects
• Migration of products, categories and customer information from previous shop

What does the client think?

"I've used Manwaring Web Solutions exclusively for every facet of my web presence - from the design to search engine optimization. I've been impressed with the high quality work that is always done quickly, professionally, and economically.  Jarom and his staff always go above and beyond my expectations.  Interest in my site, and sales of my Montana-made products are up!" 

- Mandi Heinle, Owner - BuyMT.com

 

 

 

Our beloved home town has garnered yet another award. Relocate America has named Idaho Falls on their 2009 Top 100 cities in America list. Of course, we've known this for a long time! We are proud to be part of this great community.

Since moving our base of operations to Idaho Falls nearly four years ago we have developed a great working relationship with QWK.net - the best (in our estimation) ISP in the area. In fact, most of our servers are located in the QWK.net data center. When QWK.net decided last year to re-design their website we were thrilled they selected us to work with.  We worked closely with the QWK.net staff to understand their objectives for the redesign and were able to deliver a complete graphic design concept for the new website and updated logo which were approved with no revisions! After getting design approval we were also responsible for converting the design to clean, SEO friendly and standard compliant HTML/CSS code and integrate the content provided by the client's team.

 Our Project Contributions:

• web site graphic design
• web site front-end code
• logo revision
• integrate content