Online business profile services (directories) such as Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local, among many more, are a great, free services that can bring you new customers, more traffic, and more interactivity with your clients. A properly optimized and complete profile gives your enterprise a better chance of being found in map and directory searches, lets those searchers know what you’re about, and gives them an extra level of confidence when they actually want to visit your establishment.

Lets take a closer look at some additional services like this and what they allow you to add to your profiles.

Online Profiles Your Company Should Consider

• Google Places
• Bing Local
• Yahoo Local
• Yelp
• UrbanSpoon (foodie)
• VoicePlaces
• CitySearch
• MojoPages
• SpottedHere
• Kudzu
• SuperPages
• YellowPages
• InsiderPages
• TrueLocal
• Any Local-Specific Directories

This list is not exhaustive, but should be a good starting point. There are hundreds of these business profiles on the web, and you really only need to focus on updating those with the biggest reach. If you have had success with one not on this list, please do leave us a comment so we can check it out.

Common Online Profile Features

• Address, contact & website information
• Ability to add images
• Inclusion in multiple business categories
• Hours of operation
• Short Description of your business
• Customer reviews, including the ability to respond (in some cases)
• Social Media Feed syndication of Twitter feeds (in some cases)
• Additional information about services or products offered, including general pricing and payment terms (in some cases)

These features sometimes require you to verify the profile represents your business before updating. This is usually done via a post card of phone call that contains a verification number.

Benefits of Updating these Profiles

• Visibility in local map and directory searches
• Potential for your profile to show up in organic search results if the user is within proximity
• Customers are more educated about your business upfront, and more confident
• Patrons can leave positive (or negative) comments, allowing you to see how they are interacting with your business
• You can respond to this feedback, creating an additional level of trust and confidence (if handled properly)

Get Your Profiles Professionally Updated

Have questions? Not sure how you should go about getting all of your profiles updated and optimized to their maximum possible potential?

Email Us, and we’ll get you taken care of. We offer a few different packages that will have your business on its way to receiving the benefits listed above.

Sitemaps are often overlooked when creating a website, largely because most are unaware of the benefits and process. Having a properly formatted sitemap index and sitemap files that are also submitted to Google WebmasterTools will result in increased indexed pages, which means Google (and other search engines) have greater visibility of your website that they may not have otherwise. For new websites, it also helps your pages get indexed quicker, and with greater coverage. Lets look at an example:

Depending on the size of your website, you may want to split your URLs into several sitemaps, which will all be referenced in a sitemap index file. This is useful for websites with more than 30 or so webpage, and can help more of your pages get indexed, and faster. It also organizes things a bit better. I’ll get to that later.

Also worth noting is that there are several tools that can be used to generate sitemaps, but it is also highly desirable to have your developers, if you have developers, customize a stiemap to exclude any pages with session IDs, shopping carts, etc. You can do this manually, but it takes more time. A few tools that can crawl websites fairly well include GSiteCrawler and Xenu Link Sleuth. The only downfall here is that they basically see what search engines see. If your sites have pages that aren’t directly linked to on your site anywhere, these tools will not see them and you need to add those into the sitemaps manually.

Standard Sitemap Format:

This format should be used for each sitemap, whether that sitemap is the only one on your site or if it is included as one of many.

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/webpage1</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The urlset tag and line is required, including the url for the namespace (xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″). The url and loc tags are also required. Lastmod, changefreq, and priority are all optional. You can read more about them here on the Sitemaps.org Protocol page.

If you have a small website, with no large categories of products, services, or pages, you can include all of your URLs into one sitemap file using the above code as an example (I would generate it using one of the above tools, though), save it in your root web directory as sitemap.xml (or something else), and submit it to the search engines. Bam, you’re done.

Splitting sitemaps and using sitemap indexes:

Is your website a bit larger? Do you want quicker indexing of your pages and a larger percentage of them to get indexed? Read on.

If your website is large and has product or service categories, or any hierarchical navigation, you can use that as a logical way to split your sitemaps up. This will keep things organized, and we have also seen an improved percentage of our webpage urls get indexed, faster, using this method.

Setup

Lets say the DecisiveDesign site sold website browsers (it’s a fictional story, people!).

You have Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome (only 3, to keep it simple). These are your categories, silos, types of product, whatever you want to call them.

Then you have individual pages within each silo, lets say 3 articles each (at individual urls).

So what we want here is a sitemap for each set of articles, then a sitemap index that references those 3 sitemaps.

Sitemaps

Explorer-sitemap.xml

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/Internet-Explorer/IE-text-shadow-not-recognized.html</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/Internet-Explorer/IE-not-following-web-standards.html</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/Internet-Explorer/why-doesnt-IE-work-right.html</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Firefox-sitemap.xml

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/Firefox/firefox-is-a-good-browser.html</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/Firefox/firefox-renders-text-shadow-kind-of-funny.html</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/Firefox/use-firefox-instead-of-IE.html</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Chrome-sitemap.xml

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/Chrome/chrome-is-probably-the-fastest-browser.html</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/Chrome/chrome-will-continue-improving.html</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/Chrome/google-owns-our-interwebs.html</loc>
<lastmod>2011-08-26T05:11:19Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Sitemap Index (sitemap-index.xml)

Now it’s time to create the sitemap index, which will reference the URLs of the sitemaps you created above. In this instance, this is the only file you need to submit to search engines like Google. Their spiders will follow the index and pick up the individual sitemaps and URLs within automatically. Host this file as sitemap-index.xml (or similar) on the root of the director, and make sure to upload all the other sitemap files to whatever path you choose. Then submit it to your search engines.

<sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<sitemap><loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/sitemaps/Explorer-sitemap.xml</loc></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/sitemaps/Firefox-sitemap.xml</loc></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://www.decisivedesign.com/sitemaps/Chrome-sitemap.xml</loc></sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

That’s about it. It looks simple (or it may not), but honestly I manually pulled out 85,000 urls today into 3 sets of 51 sitemaps… and it took me several hours. I highly suggest having a coder run through it and automate the process if you have the means. However, like in my case, doing it now and spending the time on it will likely still be worth every minute.

Let me know if you have any questions – hope I haven’t missed anything or poorly explained something, it’s kinda late!

The article titles on your Joomla website are probably not optimized to their full potential. More specifically, they aren’t H1 tags on the article pages and H2 tags on the category, section, and home pages. They also don’t have title attributes in the href links on the category, section and home pages. These header tags and href title attributes help search engines like Google and Bing identify the topic of your page or link and are considered helpful on-site SEO must-haves.

Note: This article is in regards to Joomla 1.5. I’m sure 1.6 and 1.7 are at least slightly different.

To remedy this, you’ll need to make changes in a few files in your Joomla website directory. These will cover changing the article pages to H1 tags and the article titles on the Frontpage, Section and Category pages to H2 tags. You’ll also need to replicate the php that generates the article title into a title=”" tag in the href link on the Frontpage, Section and Category pages.

Don’t worry, it’s not too difficult! See below for the locations (in Joomla 1.5 at least) of these files and the code changes you’ll need to make. Post a comment if you have any questions. You’ll want to start in your website’s root joomla directory for all of these file paths.

For article pages:

Navigate to:

[root]\components\com_content\views\article\tmpl\default.php

Change:

<a href=”<?php echo $this->article->readmore_link; ?>” class=”contentpagetitle<?php echo $this->escape($this->params->get(‘pageclass_sfx’)); ?>”>
<?php echo $this->escape($this->article->title); ?></a>

To something like: (if you don’t want it to be a link.)

<h1><?php echo $this->escape($this->article->title); ?></h1>

For the frontpage:

Navigate to:

[root]\components\com_content\views\frontpage\tmpl\default_item.php

Change:

<a href=”<?php echo $this->item->readmore_link; ?>” class=”contentpagetitle<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->params->get( ‘pageclass_sfx’ )); ?>”>
<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->title); ?></a>

To something like this:

<a href=”<?php echo $this->item->readmore_link; ?>” title=”<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->title); ?>”><h2>
<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->title); ?></h2></a>

For Sections:

Navigate to:

[root]\components\com_content\views\section\tmpl\blog_item.php

Change:

<a href=”<?php echo $this->item->readmore_link; ?>” class=”contentpagetitle<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->params->get( ‘pageclass_sfx’ )); ?>”>
<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->title); ?></a>

To something like this:

<a href=”<?php echo $this->item->readmore_link; ?>” title=”<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->title); ?>”><h2>
<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->title); ?></h2></a>

For Categories:

Navigate to:

[root]\components\com_content\views\category\tmpl\blog_item.php

Change:

<a href=”<?php echo $this->item->readmore_link; ?>” class=”contentpagetitle<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->params->get( ‘pageclass_sfx’ )); ?>”>
<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->title); ?></a>

To something like this:

<a href=”<?php echo $this->item->readmore_link; ?>” title=”<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->title); ?>”><h2>
<?php echo $this->escape($this->item->title); ?></h2></a>

All done with the code changes (unless you need to work on your CSS file). If you copied these files onto your local machine, MAKE SURE you copy them back into their CORRECT directories on your web server.

Now you can style the H1 and H2 tags within the contentheading css class (.contentheading h1 / .contentheading h2) however you like. In my case, I copied over the contentheading link attribute and made it the same.

These changes will help with SEO, as long as your article titles are keyword driven and well constructed. Always remember to include what you think users will be searching for in your title, worded in a readable fashion, for the best chances of it ranking for those terms.

Let me know if you have any questions.

OK, that was a little extreme. But seriously, text shadow can be sexy, and it’s really easy. So stop using images for text in your banners and call-to-actions!

The CSS3 text-shadow property shouldn’t be overused, but it allows web designers and developers an excellent alternative to using text, with shadows, as images in banners, calls-to-action, buttons, etc. Combine text-shadow with box-shadow and gradient, and your buttons can be standardized and you won’t have to touch Photoshop to build them!

I’ll get straight to it… here’s the code:

text-shadow:[x-offset]px [y-offset]px [spread]px [color];

So you might be looking at something like this in your CSS for whatever id, class or element you are styling:

text-shadow:2px 2px 2px #444;

Which would look something like this on standard text.

But if you bold the text, or maybe change the color… you might end up with something like:

Which would look something like this on standard text.

The most useful cases you are going to find is when you need to bring additional definition with a slight 1px black text-shadow on a white background (like the above orange text), or a large black text-shadow on top of an image in a header or banner. Otherwise, things look a little gimmicky, I think.

That being said, play around with it! Combine it with non-image button creation and fall in love.

TEST

Lets take a few minutes and discuss what the Site Performance section of Google Webmaster Tools is all about and whether or not we should be putting any stock into its data.

If you’ve landed on this article, hopefully you have already installed Google WebmasterTools on your site. If not, I highly recommend it. There are a lot of measurable and admittedly cool features that allow you to see it how Google sees your site.

Now, on to the beef of the article: Is the Site Performance graph worth caring about, and what is it, anyway?

First of all, to check out what I’m talking about, log into your Webmaster Tools account for your site, expand “Labs” on the left hand navigation, then click on the “Site Performance” link (see below).

When you open that bad boy up, you should be looking at a graph similar to the one at the top of the article. Now, on this page Google will let you know what they are measuring your performance speeds at, what percentile it is compared to other sites on the web, and a semi close guess as to how many data points were used to calculate the data. From my experience, the chart varies wildly from day to day, and the number of data points used is always considered of “low accuracy.”

That doesn’t make me too confident of the data… and then there is this (see below).

That’s right! This data “… is collected directly from users who have installed the Google Toolbar and have enabled the optional PageRank feature.” This information can be found in the “Learn More” link for Site Performance.

When I first saw this my reaction was, “Woa… well that makes more sense!” That explains the sporadic nature of the graph, and the lack of data points, and the general inability to heavily influence this data.

So, in summary, Google Webmaster Tools’ Site Performance chart is calculated off of the small number of users that visit your site that are using the Google Toolbar with PageRank enabled, meaning that it just doesn’t have the amount of consistent data we need to make educated decisions on how fast our sites are running.

Now, they may have something enabled via Google Chrome these days, as well, as they are enhancing those extensions, but I still don’t see any reason to worry heavily about this metric. I would be more concerned with the “Time Spent Downloading a Page” chart in the “Crawl Stats” section if you’re worried that Google isn’t indexing all of your pages because of site speed. I have seen marked improvement in the number of indexed pages when optimizing to get that number down.

If you have had a similar, or different experience with Site Performance, please share in the comments below. I’d love to hear.

I really enjoyed this shoot. Jess, my model, was spectacular and down for whatever. There’s more to this set, but I haven’t decided whether or not i’ll be posting them up.

More coming from Jess in the future, for sure.

After at least two failed attempts at making a photoshoot happen near the Downtown Dallas intersection of Cockrell & Alma, also known as “Little Baghdad,” I was finally able to pull it off, with the help of a fantastic model.

Alaina, a fellow motorcycle rider and local model, is the first talent that I’ve had the pleasure of working with off ModelMayhem.  I frequently browse through the newest member profiles to see if anyone meshes well with the work I’m planning at the time, and she fit the description.  I shot her a message, and a few weeks later we put the shoot.  My choice to contact her was definitely not a poor one, and I think the shoot was my most successful yet.

It was pretty cloudy, which didn’t help the bland building colors, but those aren’t the focus of the image anyways!  The indirect lighting allowed Alaina’s skin tones to remain natural without me having to worry about correcting blown-out areas in post production, so it worked out well.  The wind also assisted in the creation of these [great?] images, along with making it difficult to get the perfect capture.  Even so, we were able to pull about 100 usable pictures out of nearly 500 taken.

This three-day car meet, sponsored by the DFWSupras club, promised to leave me smelling like race gas and with some shots of cute car-girls and fast machines… of course I’m in!

I got what I considered some good shots, and a lot of decent action photos as well, along with some really great shots of one of the models, Mel.

Enjoy.

I got the chance to cruise out to the BMRA offroading rec area with the local LSJC Jeep Club and ended up having a great time.

Running up and down large hills and rocky trails all day is certainly a workout, but to get shots of jeep owners almost rolling their vehicles down mountains is always worth it!

A little trip I took out and about a while back – got some pretty great shots, I think! Check them out!