By Richard V. Burckhardt

I’ve been seriously considering cutting the cord on cable TV and going with over-the-air and streaming sources like Netflix and Hulu through Roku, Boxee etc. I tend to watch very few shows on cable, which seems to be in love with reality shows these days (which I HATE). Mostly I have been viewing a handful of network shows and LOTS of streaming movies and TV shows. I have cut down to the extended basic package already and dumped everything in the premium tier.

More than anything, I am sick of paying for a ton of channels I never watch, but that are shoved down my throat in a “package” by the cable company. I have complained about this for years, yet here we are. I’ve had enough.

My problem is that I live in a condo where an outdoor digital TV antenna just isn’t possible, so I have been hunting for something indoor, fully realizing that no indoor antenna will work as well. But, it’s all I have to work with.

I have tried several. Indoor antennas are a lesson in frustration. Combined with digital signals, which give you little wiggle room (they are strong enough to work or not), you generally have to position, reposition, stand on your head, etc. to get the channels you want. Adjust the antenna to get one channel, you lose another.

Nothing has worked very well for me. I decided to give the Winegard FlatWAVE at try. It’s a flat, roughly 12″ x 12″ flexible, nearly paper thin panel with a nice long coaxial cable and comes with some Velcro to attach it to a wall or wherever.

Looks nice and the manual provides suggestions for getting the best signal. First, it suggests mounting on a window. Out of luck there as there is only a sliding glass door in the room . . . on the OTHER side of the room from the TV. So, it was basically hit or miss. I tried numerous positions around the room. In every case, some channels came in brilliantly but I lost others. Naturally, the place with the best reception was the most visible place, exactly where I DIDN’T want an antenna stuck to the wall.

Keep in mind that I don’t live in a huge city. The Palm Springs area has a population of about 500,000 so I don’t have a zillion TV channels available. The best location locked onto 29 channels, some just barely. By the time I filtered out the foreign language, shopping, religious and simply non-stable channels, I was down to about ten. I can get my local network TV stations along with some world news channels. One channel that I was hoping to get, KRET, which has some great classic shows, was hopeless.

So, your reception will vary, depending on where you live and how you can locate the antenna.

As indoor antennas go, I’d rate the Winegard FlatWAVE about 3 1/2 out of 5, but understand that indoor antennas are a last resort and generally don’t work that well.  Don’t expect them to.

Do I feel like I can cut the cord with this antenna? No, primarily due to placement. The best reception was on a wall right in the middle of the room where it stuck out like a sore thumb. I had hoped to be able to mount it behind or beside the TV. Didn’t work in my case.  Might for you.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Review: Winegard FlatWAVE Indoor TV Antenna is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Richard V. Burckhardt

The LG Optimus (photo from actual shipping box) is the phone available for the Republic Wireless beta program.

I’m an original iPhone user, grabbing one of the 2G iPhones when they first came out. And, I love my iPhone (currently on a 3GS) but what I don’t love is being forced into a data plan that costs more than my home broadband, especially when my data use is primarily over Wi-Fi. I have frequently wished I could get a good smartphone that didn’t require a data plan, but relied on Wi-Fi alone.

That’s where the idea of Republic Wireless comes in. Their plan, currently in beta, is basically opposite of what most mobile phone plans offer. Wi-Fi is the primary carrier with cellular the add-on. They expect their users (their “community”) to offload the majority of their phone use to Wi-Fi. When Wi-Fi isn’t available, cellular talk and data kick in. They call it “Hybrid Calling.”

For someone like me, who works from home and is covered by Wi-Fi something like 70% of the time, this is brilliant! I’m currently paying for two iPhones with rarely used data plans that cost more than my cable Internet (plus being slow and limited). With Republic Wireless, I pay $19 per month (plus tax) for each phone, covering talk and data. It’s so low because the majority of use is over Wi-Fi. If you go over your target offloading to Wi-Fi (expected to be 60% or more) you get notified of your overage and, if you continue, I’m guessing you are asked to leave the “community” nicely (this IS a beta, but I think that’s the idea).

You do have to purchase their modified LG Optimus phone for $199. It’s currently the only phone available, but more are apparently on the way. The Optimus includes auto-switching between Wi-Fi and cellular, though the ability to walk out of your office Wi-Fi and continue your call seamlessly on cellular is still in the works.

The Optimus is a nice Android phone, though as an iPhone user, I find the OS less polished than iOS, but still nice. And, the apps selection is huge these days, so if giving up my iPhone for it to save something like $100 per month (in my case), I’ll go for it.

The phone and data service are Sprint, which is fine with me as I’ve been considering ditching AT&T for a while (and, my contract just expired!). I’m already finding better signal quality on the service in a number of buildings here in the Palm Springs area where I get no signal at all on my iPhone. I even jail broke and unlocked my original iPhone so that I could put a T-Mobile SIM card in it as an emergency backup at one point. I could get a T-Mobile signal in a lot places where my AT&T iPhone was useless. As with all cellular services, signal strength will vary by location.

Naturally, before considering  joining the Republic Wireless “community” you would want to check the Sprint coverage maps for your area.

What about the quality? It sounds like a great idea to offload voice and data to Wi-Fi but does it really work? For me, it does. My voice calls over Wi-Fi have been just as clear as cellular calls have been. I know some folks in the “community” haven’t been so lucky. Maybe their Wi-Fi doesn’t get along with the phone for some reason. In my case, this is amazing. I loaded up the Optimus with Skype, a SIP app (for my work VOIP number) and synced it up with my Google Voice account. I get personal and business calls using a single device, though it can get a little confusing when a call comes in and the options are to answer using Google Voice or without. That’s new and taking some getting used to.

Since this is a beta, I wouldn’t recommend trying to port your number over or making this your sole telephone. Not yet, anyway. But, if you wanted to port your number to Google Voice and have calls to it ring on your new Republic Wireless number, well that’s definitely an option.

For now, I’m using Republic Wireless as a second line (at least until it’s out of beta), but I’m forwarding calls from my iPhone over to it. If my first couple of weeks are any indication of things to come, I will probably say goodbye to my iPhone as my primary phone and AT&T as my carrier. The savings potential is enormous for me.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Review: Republic Wireless Beta Hybrid Calling is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Brendan Egan

Well, blogging has become the new pink in the internet world. Almost everyone has their own blogs and websites however some are more well known than others. Maybe the popular blogs have more flare, maybe they are more creative or maybe they are just easier to find. And that is exactly what you need to earn more viewers for your page, to create an SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimization) friendly blog. And here are five great tips to get you started.

1. SEO Plug-ins

The first step you need to do is to create a Uniform Resource Locater so others can find your blog easily. This is a very important thing because having plug-ins allows you to manage title, address, and other vital parts of a message. It is important that you make all information as clear as you can so they can fit with the keywords on your blog.

2. Write a quality content

Don’t be lazy! Write a witty and relevant post that can attract more viewers. When you write a post that is as short as: “we’re having a sale come to our store.” then you might as well be sending a text message to your friend. But no, you’re not just randomly sending a message to someone you’re writing about something important so you have to make it seem important for your readers as well. Take the previous sentence and use it as a header after your title. Then with that in mind expand the topic into a post 200 to 500 words long. Remember be creative and funny without leaving out the important details.

3. Never copy/paste

Plagiarism is an unforgivable crime for us writers. It is never a good idea to just go and copy the works of other people and paste it on your blog claiming it as your own. Not only is it rude to the person you stole the work from but it is also bad for your blog’s reputation. So keep in mind that you are hurting yourself just as much as you are hurting the real writer. If by chance you saw something that inspired you and you want to share it on your blog then you have to credit the person who really wrote it by putting a link to their website in your post. That way you’re telling your readers that you are not taking claim of the contents you posted.

4. Categorize or tag your messages

For other people to find your blog faster, you need to arrange all categories properly and you can do this if you add tags on your posts. You would need a blog tagging software to make tags in your message and then link them to a page that have a similar content . This makes it more convenient for your visitors.

5. Find other blogs and write quality feedback

First of all comment spamming and writing a good feedback are two very different things. You won’t be helping the blogger to improve their posts by telling them their post was “good or awesome”. A comment should be serious and formal at the same time with a hint of warmth that can earn you a connection with the blogger. But most importantly: your comment has to be relevant to the blogger’s post.

While following these steps won’t get you to the first page of search results for a competitive keyword like “Stock Market”, it will get you to the first page for long tail keywords, for example “Learn How To Trade Options In The Stock Market”. I’ve seen dozens of posts on our blog and our client’s blogs get ranked on the top page of search results just by following these simple tips, and chances are following these suggestions will only take you an extra 10-15 minutes per blog post, but will help drive much more traffic to your blog.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Five Ways to Create an SEO Friendly Blog is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Charles Mburugu

No serious website can dare to ignore the significance of search engine rankings. Search engines provide more than 70% of the traffic for most websites. Therefore, if you rank high in search engines, you will receive more traffic.

However, getting and sustaining high rankings is not easy. It usually takes much hard word and effort to attain good search engine rankings. The following are three things you need to always keep in mind for better search engine rankings.

Content is king
Search engines love content. Without good and valuable content, you have little chance of success, no matter how great your website is or how much effort you have put into search engine optimization. It is important to have a lot of keyword rich content all through your site. Another great tip is to visit websites which are similar to yours. Read their articles and get ideas which you can make use of in your own site.

There are several reasons why content is vital for high search engine rankings. High search engine ranking will bring you a lot of traffic. However, to sustain the high traffic and retain a good number of return visitors, you need to have useful and well written content in your site. This volume of targeted traffic will be helpful in keeping your reciprocal links growing.

Effective web content also involves having catchy headlines which will encourage readers to visit pages on your site. Many site owners and webmasters usually forget the significance of good, captivating headlines.

Another helpful tip is to have some of your content published in other high traffic websites. This strategy has been effective in creating many links back to my blog which features webhostingpad coupons and register.com discounts.

Your website URL
If your website URL contains relevant keywords, it can have a great impact on your search engine rankings. However, this is not an easy task. It depends on several factors, such as the competitiveness of your main keyword. Less competitive keywords will have a greater impact on your rankings.

Another important factor to remember is that your website URL should be easy to remember. If you are about to register a new domain name or change an existing one, you need to think critically about your name.

Page title
Many webmasters and site owners choose their page titles very carelessly and casually. Your page title is very important for search engine ranking. Each of your pages should have a specific title which includes the keywords. Being specific reduces competition and enhances the chances of your page being found in search engines.

The more high ranking pages your website has, the better since it will generate much more traffic. It is a fact that websites with more pages usually receive more traffic than websites with fewer pages.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

How to Enhance Search Engine Rankings is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Richard V. Burckhardt

Made the 2½ hour drive over to San Diego after work yesterday for my partner’s chemo procedure at Sharp Hospital scheduled for Friday. Drove up to a dark hotel where we were told all of the San Diego area was without power, something like four million people. That meant no gas, no restaurants, no hotels, in some areas no water. It was like a really bad Syfy TV movie (of course, ALL Syfy TV flicks are bad). Kept waiting for the flying mutant Squidshark to appear…

Screen capture from a previous post about how a jailbroken original iPhone 2g works with a T-Mobile prepaid SIM card.

Went to the hospital to find out what to do. As we pulled up, we discovered a voice mail that all medical procedures for Friday were canceled (the phone never rang, the voice mail just appeared). Went into the hospital, which had emergency power, to see if anyone knew how far this thing went inland. Were told it went as far as some parts of Palm Springs. As usual, my AT&T iPhone was useless. Not even a signal. Pulled out a jailbroken original iPhone I stuck a T-Mobile prepaid sim into and, voila, it worked. (I am so canceling my AT&T when the contract expires).

Called the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, where Jim (my partner) works, and they had power. Since they are only a few minutes from where we live, we took a chance on our remaining half a tank of gas and headed towards Palm Springs and home, passing a lot of cars on the side of the road, obviously out of gas. Mercifully, we found gas an hour or so into the drive home. It took a 45 minute wait for a pump, but it was worth it as the remaining drive was through the mountains.

Got home at about 11 pm last night.

So, who wants to talk TV movie rights?

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

+Richard Burckhardt

San Diego Power Outage: Like a Bad Syfy Flick is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Philip Russell

Link building gets harder in every year. SEOs have to find a way to make their links work for their clients, and the type of links that will help your website are becoming harder and harder to achieve as Google finds different alternatives to their algorithms that they hope can help offset the totality of the weight of links (think Panda).

Many bold predictions were made in the beginning of the year in terms of where people thought link building would go in the year 2011. Not all of them came true. In fact, being an active link builder for the last year and a half, I found that the best results and money rely in one type of link building.

Forget the Link Directories

Unless you are willing to throw down some cash on some quality link directories, forget about them. Free link directories and “iffy” link directories will just prevent you from spending time on what you really should be doing with your day – which includes making your site more valuable by producing quality (the absolute best indirect way to build links) and taking care of all of your on-site SEO, which is often overlooked.

There is no better way to waste time than to spend countless hours filling out forms and submitting to free link directories. Their links hold very little weight, so little that even as many as 15 of them may not even guarantee that your website gets into the Google’s SERPs if your website is new and with zero links.

Forget SPAM tactics

You shouldn’t practice these methods and you shouldn’t keep “SEOs” that practice these methods employed. This includes spamming blogs with tremendous amounts of comments. Not only do many of these links provide little value in terms of “link juice” but they are considered extremely “black hat” and are very annoying (to say the least) to bloggers who want nothing to do with these types of comments.

Post Panda Issues

Ever since the major algorithm update of Panda, article marketing has taken a huge hit. This is because content farming was hit hard with the algorithm update as it was a major target for search engines as they provide little value to the search market.

This means that even if you submit 1,000-5,000 articles to sites like Ezine or Article Base (the amount that made article marketing worth it in the past) you still may receive little traffic from them, and the links are worth close to nothing. If article marketing wasn’t an effective way to build links or get traffic to your website pre-Panda, that fact was solidified after Panda rolled out.

Contextual Link Building is The Gold Mine

When it comes down to it, building links using white had methods (that some companies that provide link building services offer) is where you will see the most results in terms of the SERPs. In fact it is not uncommon to see a jump from say, the 11th page, to the 6th page, with around 25 contextual links with keyword targeted anchor text.

Guest posting is one of the best ways to build contextual links. They are much more effective for raising your position in the SERPs because the links they come with are the closest thing to natural looking links – at least in the eyes of Google.

They are also a more effective way of gaining traffic as opposed to article marketing as long as you are posting on blogs that relate to your website and are able to devise a good enough guest post that will allow you get people to be able to click through to your website.

One great trick for guest posting is to make sure that you are optimizing your post for long tail keywords and then post on quality topics. This will ensure that not only will your link provide a lot of juice for your website, but also that your article will arrive at the top position of the SERPs for whatever keyword you are optimizing for. It is a great way to get a link to your site to appear at the top of the SERPs for many different search results. You just want to make sure that those links are point to top tier quality and value!

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Link Building in 2011 is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Charles Mburugu

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Email Marketing – Getting Started is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Richard V. Burckhardt

Trying to see your way past all of the local search results? Here are some SEO tips.

This is a boon to local businesses as they now have the opportunity to appear on page one of the Google serps through their Google Places profiles. Of course, this is a big, fat middle finger pointed at non-local web-only sites without the local offices and locations that many of the big chains can leverage. (Image below)

Emphasis on local means fewer organic results appearing above the fold.

So, what is a web-based site to do? Here are five SEO tips that I have come up with to cope with this love affair with local that Google is having. I’m hoping that readers will contribute some of their own.

1. Stay in the Top 3: Yeah, this is a no-brainer, but Google has put the pressure on more than ever before to keep top rankings. They’ve always been the goal, but now they are a must. You can’t be content with being in the top five anymore.

2. Leverage Universal Search: Remember that all kinds of media can appear in the serps – video, images, news, etc. Optimize for all. You might not appear in the top three, but your images or videos might appear somewhere on the page. The more exposure for you, the better. (See image below)

3. Go for the Longtail: The local search results appear to come up more frequently for less specific queries like “tires” and not for more specific information like “snow tires” so optimize around keyword phrases for related queries. (See image below)

4. Cozy up to your PPC person: Do some research using Google Correlate and Google Trends and find out where you might want to target local PPC campaigns. This is a perfect example of SEO and PPC working together. For example, according to Google Trends, Burlington, VT would be the top city searching for “snow tires” so that might be a good target for local PPC if you sell that type of tire. And, of course, Google will be more than happy to take your ad money!

5. Submit a feed: If you offer items that qualify for Google Merchant Center, create and submit feeds so that you have the opportunity to appear in the Google Shopping results. Frequently these are at the bottom of the page, but sometimes they are higher up. Again, it’s one more opportunity for exposure on page one of results. (See image below)

Local search results don't appear to kick in on more specific queries.

OK, that’s what I have come up with so far. I’d love to hear ideas from readers, so please, post them here.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

+Richard Burckhardt

Five Non-Local SEO Tips is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Charles Mburugu

Tracking traffic will usually make the difference in an online marketing campaign. With the many free tracking tools available nowadays, there is no excuse for anyone not to track their hits to discover the source of their traffic.

For those tracking traffic, what should they look out for in the tracking data?

How did your visitors find you?

Many site owners are excited when they receive traffic from new sources. However, many will not bother to follow up and establish how their link got to the referring site. You need to take time to write an email and find out as much information as you can. How your visitors located you is a vital question that needs to be answered. The answer will be vital in helping you improve your marketing efforts.

What are the trends in your hits?

What are the common trends regarding hits on your website? Is traffic heavy on specific months, weeks or days? If so, why? Such questions need to be answered. Quite often, particular trends have enabled businesses to develop new products and find new market segments for their existing services and products. It is important to verify answers that appear to be obvious.

Are your findings used to test something?

Constant testing is the secret behind the very successful online entrepreneurs. Successful businesses are always improving by introducing small changes continuously that enables the business to grow significantly. Leading marketers test everything from headlines to designs and colors. Most of the tests conducted are drawn from the data of the traffic coming to their website.

The tracking information generated from tracking traffic will only help you if you use it for constant testing and enhancing your business.

What content is the most popular in your website?

This factor is missed many times. Why do you need to know the most popular content regularly? Content is the main thing in your site. Visitors come to your website because of content. Knowing the popular content will tell you what interests your visitors most. This will help you adjust your website content to ensure your visitors get more of what they want, and less of what they don’t want.

In brief, a successful website is one that is always changing in response to visitor’s needs and requirements. Evaluating and responding to web traffic data is vital for a successful website. This is a task that cannot be avoided and one that will yield great rewards for your website, if done properly.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Tips for Tracking Your Hits is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Kirsty Lee

A high bounce rate is a good indication that your content isn't engaging.

Google Adwords data is included in your Google Analytics data and includes metrics like click through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). Google recently released AdWords API v201101, which allows you to more efficiently run reports, as well as implement campaign experiments and other recently released advertising features at scale.

But how do you track success after PPC visitors are on your site? What metrics should you investigate to ensure that you are getting high quality traffic and capitalizing on opportunities to convert?

For these types of performance metrics, you need web analytics! Here are four important metrics you should review on a daily basis to evaluate PPC campaign performance. 

1. Conversions

It pretty much goes without saying that conversions are the best metric to determine how a PPC campaign is performing. You should have your web analytics set up to record both online conversions (newsletter subscriptions, content downloads) and offline conversions (phone calls, offline campaigns).

To track online conversions, configure your web analytics to record a conversion every time someone arrives on a specific URL. In the case of web forms, this URL would be something like a thank you or confirmation page. For downloads, you might need to add a piece of tracking code that will register the download as a pageview.

To track offline conversions, see one way of doing this in our previous post on Measuring Success of Offline Campaigns in Google Analytics. There are plenty of other solutions out there for tracking other offline conversions (e.g. by telephone) which will integrate directly into your web analytics program so you only have to access one dashboard.

2. Bounce Rate

A bounce is when someone lands on a site and leaves without viewing any other pages. Your bounce rate will vary for each campaign. A high bounce rate may be an indication that your content is not relevant or engaging to visitors.

3. Pages Per Visit

The interesting data comes from a very low or a very high number of page views. Very low could mean that visitors are not finding content useful or interesting, and have resigned to go back to search results to find a more relevant page. A high number of page views could mean either you are producing interesting and engaging content (look at time spent on page for engagement), or that the visitor cannot find the content they are looking for.

In both cases, review the relevance of the page content to traffic-producing keywords, and make sure the information people appear to be seeking is on the landing page, or a click away.

4. Average Time on Site

It goes without saying that a higher time on site is better than a low one. Extremely low (0-1 second) — There is no way to read a page’s content in this amount of time. If there are a lot of visitors spending less than a second on the site, it may be the result of one of two things:

• Invalid clicks – Check with your PPC platform to ensure you are not being charged for these.
• Slow site load time – May cause people to get frustrated and hit the back button before ever arriving on the landing page. Low (less than 15 seconds) — Generally, those visitors who spent 10 seconds or less on a site quickly decided that they were in the wrong place. This may be because at a first glance they didn’t find any relevant information, see their keywords anywhere on the page, or were confused by the landing page’s layout.

Look at these 4 web analytics metrics and you will have a better idea of your PPC performance. Once you have gathered enough data to draw conclusions about which parts of your campaign work well and which don’t work so well, you can start implementing small changes and tracking the different outcomes. By taking this methodical approach you should be able to optimize your campaigns to get the best ROI.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Four Key PPC Web Analytics Metrics You Should Consider is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO