Plexus Web Creations : Blog

Search Engine Benefits of Tagging

Stephanie Sharp — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:43:01 GMT

Tagging is quick and easy way to annotate and categorize content. Tags are used in many different ways on many different web sites now. Examples include Flickr, Amazon.com, Blogger, etc.

Let me give you a good example of how powerful tags can be. Lets say you are trying to find photos of Athens, GA. Where do you even start? You could go to Google and type in "Photos of Athens Georgia" and you will get back 699,000 results. Each of those results may have a photo or two of Athens, Georgia but you would have to spend an enormous amount of time to find anything useful. Or you could go to Flickr.com - a photo sharing site - and use their search by tag feature. Thousands of Athenians and tourists have posted photos of Athens Georgia and each of those people took the time to tag their photos with "Athens Georgia". In one action, and on one web site you can see every photo that was "tagged" with Athens Georgia.

Because tags are so prevalent, and usually have very good relevance in relation to content, search engines see them very favorably. When applied to the concept of search engine optimization, tags become an invaluable tool.

Because of the way a tag works, when you create a tag, a new page is created. So each unique tag you make becomes a new page. If you made 1 blog post and tagged it with 10 individual unique keywords or keyword phrases you essentially created 1 page for the blog post itself, and 1 page for each of the unique keywords. In a very short amount of time you have amassed 11 pages for your site!

Because ONE of the factors in how well your site is ranked compared to other sites in relation to a particular keyword is the volume of content in your site, the faster you can create relevant content, the more competitive you can be.

If you have worked with us on building your site you have the capability to add any of our tools which have the tagging capability to your site. Here is a few of those tools.

If you do not have a site built by us, and would like to talk to us about building your site please contact us at (706) 353-2048 or through our contact form

The Ultimate Gift

Team Plexus * — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:25:04 GMT

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), an innovative initiative to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves takes "buy one, get one free" to a whole new level. This pioneering venture created the XO laptop, a unique machine with features created specifically for children of the emerging world and it's latest innovation is the holiday promotion that is currently underway in which each computer purchased ensures that one is also given to a disadvantaged child in a developing nation.

The XO laptop

Award winning

Honored by Popular Science magazine's "Best of What's New" Grand Award, the XO laptop marries fuseproject's high-concept design with cutting-edge technological solutions for a very low price. The goal of the project is both simple and worthy: to give every child a laptop computer, especially in developing countries, where the machines will be sold in bulk for about $130 each.

Innovative design

Each computer comes complete with a high resolution (for reading), high contrast (for operation in full daylight) LED backlit screen, Wi-Fi, "mesh networking" — a type of peer-to-peer ad hoc networking that requires zero configuration and will enable XO owners to collaborate and interact, a screen that can pivot 180 degrees to lie flat on top of the keyboard like a tablet, and it uses so little power that an external hand generator or a solar panel can recharge the system's battery.

OLPC classroom in Skopje

Give one, Get one

The XO isn't intended to be sold in modern markets like the United States. However, the XO laptop will be temporarily available through the Give One, Get One program. Basically, you can purchase two XO laptops for $400 and you'll get one, and one will be sent to a child in the emerging world.

Learn more about the OLPC

Plexus Design "Takes Off!"

Kim Landrum — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:35:00 GMT

Plexus recently designed a series of materials for Georgia's Aerospace Center of Innovation celebrating 100 years of flight in Georgia - pictured above (L to R) Governor Sonny Perdue, Aerospace Innovation Center Director Nick Fuhrman, and Pat Epps read the Plexus-designed Aviation Gazette in front of the 50-foot Plexus-designed display created for the National Business Aviation Association Convention held at the Georgia World Congress Center September 25-27 in Atlanta.

The Aerospace Innovation Center and the Georgia Department of Economic Development have partnered with NBAA to celebrate Georgia’s Centennial of Flight at the 60th Annual Convention of NBAA. NBAA attracts over 30,000 industry registrants and exhibitors and this year’s convention in Atlanta will be especially exciting. Static displays will be at Fulton County Airport with a number of special events scheduled at Peachtree Dekalb Airport. It’s also Savannah-based Gulfstream Aerospace’s 40th Anniversary since delivering its first G-I business jet in 1967.

For more information, visit Aerospace Innovation Center

Real Estate Web Sites Boom Despite Market

Natalie Rittle — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:37:36 GMT

Yahoo! News reported this week that although the real estate market is experiencing a slump, industry Web sites are on an upswing.

With house shopping happening more and more online instead of door to door, real estate Web sites have spruced up their curb appeal. With features such as online mapping capabilities, photo galleries and virtual tours as well as detailed pricing searches, consumers have access to homes right at their fingertips.

The article reports quotes Pete Flint, CEO of www.trulia.com who says the housing market's downturn has played to the strengths of real estate Web sites.

"Although it's unfortunate what's going on in the housing market, it's really the online sites that are benefiting because consumers are spending a little bit more time before they make decisions and traditional real estate brokers are rethinking the way they're marketing themselves," Flint said.

In addition to the large sites like trulia.com and other listing services, individual agents are beefing up their efforts to provide better service to customers and potential customers online.

Just among the local agents and real estate companies who have become clients of Plexus over the past few years, a similar trend is occurring.

Agents want all the necessary features on their personal sites including listing capabilities, mapping, photo galleries, document uploads and more. And perhaps the biggest trend is that of optimizing a real estate site so that it is appearing near the top of the search engines.

In our experience, real estate SEO - especially in the Athens market is perhaps the most competitive around. Agents are busy vying for the coveted top spots ranking for "Athens Georgia real estate," "Athens homes," "Athens Georgia neighborhoods," "Athens Georgia real estate agent," and more.

So, according to the trends, if you have a real estate Web site lacking in the abilities to:

immediately post and update listings with multiple photos and accompanying information
have potential clients contact you directly from your site instantaneously
regularly communicate with clients and interested parties with up to date listings and information
improve your search engine ranking

Then, watch out for your competition because they are certainly stepping it up!

Google Continues to WOW!

Stephanie Sharp — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:06:50 GMT

There’s nothing new about singing the praises of Google but...what the heck. Plexus has only been using the Google Analytics tool set for about a year and a half to evaluate traffic, customer trends, and sales figures for the sites we build. In that short time Google Analytics has undergone many vast improvements which has positioned it as the leading Web site traffic analysis tool if not for its wide array of reporting menus, then for its extremely cheap price – FREE!

Most companies extremely undervalue and underappreciate the knowledge they gain from properly analyzing their site traffic. Everytime I ask a potential client that already has a Web site but comes to us for help, what they know about their visitors and their site traffic, I get some variation of the following answer: "Yeah we have about xxx hits per month and xxx percent of our visitors are new each month." They smile, feeling proud they are armed with an answer to a seemingly simple question. Bravo to them for at leat knowing how to start to answer that question but...the question they can’t answer is “does your site produce results, and how do you know?” It’s as simple question to answer if you are using the right kind of statistics. Introducing Google Analytics.

Aside from the normal statistics you can get from any other Log Analysis software, Google Analytics takes special care in allowing you to answer the questions of “does your site produce results, and how do you know?” It does this with Goal Conversion Tracking. Every site should be equipped with some kind of lead generation tool whether it be a simple contact form, request a quote form, schedule an appointment form, or newsletter sign up form – som way to gather potential client contact information. Goal tracking allows you to create up to four goals. Just by having one block of Analytics code in your site and setting up your goals (takes about one minute), you can find out just how much of your traffic converts to a lead for your business.

For example, if you made a decision to purchase a Web link on the Yellow Pages Web site or, you were running banner ads on the local newspaper's Web site, and you wanted to know if that spending was brnging leads you could check the Goal Tracking report to find out. The Yellow Pages and Newspaper staff will be eager to tell you how many people clicked to your site through their ads, but don't trust this number to tell you anything besides the fact that someone actually made it to your homepage. You need to know how many of those people stayed on your site long enough to convert to a lead. Google Analytics Goal tracking does just that. It tells you how many leads your site generates, and where those viitors come from whether it be from the banner ad on your local newspaper site, your online yellow page ad, or some other source you may not have even known about!

If you have an e-commerce site where you actually make sales online, you can track every penny you make and find out what sources are sending the sales to you. E-commerce tracking is especially important for retail sites because most retail sites use different marketing methods to achieve sales goals. How can you make decisions about wich efforts are working if you can’t tie every marketing dollar to your sales? For instance, if you purchase a number of Google Adwords and you want to know which words perform and which words don’t, the e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics will show you which words bring in the most revenue.

Look at the following keyword report. This is a real report but we have replaced the real keywords to protect client information. Notice that for Keyword 1 (which is a paid keyword) the site received 1925 visits. It brought in over $1500 in revenue from that paid adword. The report also shows that the average sale for that keyword is $28.84. Now, you can compare that against what was paid for that keyword over the same period to find out if you are making money off that keyword. If you make a decision to discontinue that keyword, you are making that decision armed with knowedge instead of instinct. Many companies make the mistake of thinking if their sales aren’t strong during a particular quarter when they happen to be using Adwords, that their selected Adwords aren’t performing, so they suspend their campaigns. Then their sales really take a dive. If they had been using Google Analytics, they may have found their sales from other traffic sources were down and Google Adwords were the only thing that were producing. Armed with that knowledge they could have prevened losing more sales.

To sum up, if you are using any kind of traffic tracking software, kudos to you. But if you can’t answer the question “Does your site produce results and how do you know,” you might want to think about switching your preferred statistics tracking software to Google Analytics. Call Plexus if you would like help with getting it set up with your site and learning how to use it.

Viral? More Like... Organic

Buck Sharp — Tue, 08 May 2007 18:27:46 GMT

It seems like everyone is talking about viral these days. It's quite the buzzword. With the emergence of social sites like YouTube, Digg, mySpace & Flickr it seems like everyone is either chasing, or trying to start the next viral phenom. Lazy Sunday, Star Wars kid and multitudes of other media snippets have been elevated to icon status by the viral power of the new social Internet.

Can it be manipulated?

Agencies now boast of being able to create "viral marketing" campaigns to tap into the power of this strange new phenomenon. While there is no denying that some savvy use of the aforementioned sites can generate some traffic to your site, spending valuable resources hoping to generate viral buzz is for the most part folly. The name itself defines unpredictable nature with which it gains momentum and spreads. The best thing to do would be to just sit back and enjoy the ebb and flow of the viral tide.

Think Organic. Grow Locally.

A better course of action for a small to medium sized business would be to grow their own site into something that is updated frequently, reflecting industry trends and the dynamic growth of the business in an ever-changing 21st century marketplace. The more updated your site is, the more pages it has. The more pages it has, the more content you present to Google. The more content you present to Google, the higher your search engine ranking, the higher your search engine ranking, the more Web site visitors you get, and by the time you're getting all of that shade grown traffic you'll have a content rich site that will encourage reading and exploration, adding precious time to a visitor's stay.

A Real World Example

At Plexus we develop Web sites and applications built on an exciting new framework called Ruby On Rails. Thus, one of our target search phrases is "Ruby On Rails Georgia" so that we can get in front of anyone in our geographic area that is interested in Rails Web development. If you do the search you'll see that we generally show up between the fifth and tenth position. This is excellent first page presence. Look closer and you'll notice that it's not the Plexus home page that garners this result. It's the page that lists all of our blog posts about Ruby On Rails. Our site's organic growth strengthened our search engine position. Yours could too.

Organic is Easy

On our site we use the same tools that are available to our customers. These tools allow anyone, even the non web savvy, to add dynamic, content-rich pages to your site as often as you like. In essence, we provide you the seed, you grow the tree. Now, we are expert gardeners and we care dearly about every seed we sell, so we'll be with you every step of the way to make sure your site is experiencing healthy growth.

The Tools

Every content management tool we offer will easily enable you to add content to your site, contact us today for a face to face meeting to help you decide what is best for your site and your business.

Find Out Why Your Competition Outranks You in the Search Engines

Stephanie Sharp — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 19:17:15 GMT

There are plenty of ways to increase your search engine rankings once your site is built - pay per click advertising is the most popular and can be effective. But, are you doing the right things from the onset to ensure the engines are properly indexing your site?

While your meta tags and title tags are extremely important to search engine rankings, search engine saturation (how many pages of your site are indexed in a search engine) and search engine popularity (how many sites link to your site) are the two other major factors in where you rank on the search engines for your keywords.

I use a variety of resource sites for comparitive analysis when meeting with potential clients and analyzing our existing sites. My systems uses three tools to find out why your competition is outranking you. Here is my breakdown for researching the competition's rankings and better postion Web sites to rank higher in the search engines.

Step One: Gather the data.

We start by entering your Web address, then the keyword or phrase you are optimizing for. For example, we optimize our Web site for "Web Design Athens". So I would put www.plexusweb.com in as my URL and Web Design Athens for the keyword phrase. My results show that our Web site is ranked on the first page for five out of the six major search engines.

Step 2: Find out who your competition is for that keyword phrase.

From the results offered by the Keyword Verification Tool I employ, I click on each of the search engine names. It provides information on the 1st page of results for those keywords for each search engine. I make a list of the URLs of the top couple of sites in each engine.

Step 3: Compare the Web site address with a couple of the competing sites that came up in the top of the search engines.

This reports how many other sites link to the site in questions and to those other competition sites. 99% of the time, the sites that outrank your site on your specified keywords have more link popularity than you and this is why they outrank you.

Step 4: Analyze The data.

Now that you know who outranks you and why, so do something about it. Our reporting provides you with a hyperlink under each of the results of numbers in each search engine. If you click the links, you will get a list of all the Web sites linking to your competition on those engines. The goal is to get your site linked to as many of those same sites as you can. Some sites have reciprocal linking policies and you can actually fill out a form and add your link, some will require you email them a request, etc. It is hard work but that is the only way to get higher in the search engines without paying for it!

"Visual Communication Realized" or "Snakes Got Nothin' on The Big Chill"

Kim Landrum — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:03:27 GMT

Remember the 1983 movie The Big Chill? The story of eight old friends searching for something they lost, and finding that all they needed was each other? There's a scene in which Jeff Goldblum (Michael) pontificates about the importance of rationalization. It helps if you are familiar with his character – a self-obsessed celebrity type journalist who would register as obnoxious if he didn't play the part so well. If you don't remember the scene -- or worse, never saw the movie -- it plays out like this...

Michael: I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex.

Sam Weber: Ah, come on. Nothing's more important than sex.

Michael: Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?

This is one of many notable quotes from the movie...for more go to imdb.com (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085244/quotes)! Far cry from "Snakes", right Steph? This exchange might seem void of any relevance to visual communication but it parallels the dialog I often have with clients. Minus the reference to sex. The reference? When is the last time you went a week without a visual clue?

As Creative Director at Plexus, I spend my days (as well as the occasional sleepless night) finding ways to help clients visually communicate with their audience. This process might take the form of a logo, business card & letterhead, newspaper or magazine ad, billboard, brochure or Web site – and sometimes all of them. I know The Big Chill is over 20 years old, but I've been studying visual design almost that long. Now that I think about it, 2006 marks my 20th year as a "designer" of some sort. Twenty years is a long time to learn about shapes, color, scale, balance -- all the elements you learn in basic composition. You'd think I would know all there is to know. That is hardly the case. The visual landscape changes so quickly it seems impossible to keep up. Our tolerance for visuals stimulation is so high, and the amount of poorly designed messages we are forced to process so great, it's easy to understand how your efforts can get lost in the shuffle.

As a designer, I am not immune to the negative effects of an overly saturated visual landscape. The only difference is that I can easily distinguish the difference between good and bad. I believe everyone has the ability to make this distinction but often have difficulty articulating their response. I'm not sure I can fully deconstruct what makes something good (balanced, effective, memorable, inspiring) or bad (unbalanced, common, fleeting or vague) but I can feel it when I see it. I know certain shapes evoke feelings of stability, and certain colors elicit specific emotional responses. The same is true of a typeface or the placement of a headline within the context of an ad. For me, placement and juxtaposition of elements within a common space (be they photos, illustrations, type, etc.) is as second nature as putting one foot in front of the other. The solution isn't always apparent (that's where the sleepless nights come in) and often requires several missteps or wrong turns before moving in the right direction. And there have definitely been times when the right direction alluded me altogether.

I'll be the first to admit graphic design isn't rocket science or brain surgery. A well-designed logo, ad or Web site won't get anyone to the moon and probably won't save your life...but it could help your business. Don't discount the importance of your place in the visual landscape. Are you being seen? Or being seen but in a way your hadn't anticipated? Do people understand your message? Are you lost in a sea of sameness?

If you want to effectively communicate with clients or potential clients but are unsure where to start, here are some tips:

Know your audience. Understanding your audience will help narrow the field you are trying to reach with your marketing efforts.
Stay current in your industry. Who are your competitors and how do you stand out in the crowd?
Consult a professional. Many people think hiring a professional is too costly but in fact, a professional can save you money by relying on past experience. They can often tell you which methods work best for your industry.
Take your visual identity seriously, particularly if you are a new business. A well-designed logo, ad or Web site will go a long way in communicating your message. Even an existing business can benefit from reworking ads or refining a logo.
Be consistent. Marketing takes time and patience. Results are rarely immediate so be prepared to go small and go long if you have to. Spot marketing can be a huge waste of money.

Gentlemen, start your search engines!

Colin Jones — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 22:40:17 GMT

I've been learning a lot recently about optimizing sites for search engine rankings, which is clearly one of the most important business components of any website. If a customer can't find your store, how can they buy what you're selling? Think about your own experiences with Google or other search engines (there are others?!?)---would you look through more than 2-3 pages of search results if you found anything decent on the first page of results? I wouldn't, and you can bet the average customer wouldn't.

You can see for yourself what a difference search engine optimization can make by googling my name. You'll find it eventually, at #26, on my Plexus staff page. Before I worked here, I can remember going through the list pretty far past 10 pages (10 links each), and not seeing the real CoJo at all. At first, I thought that this increase in my internet fame was just due to the number of incoming links to the Plexus domain, but after a little digging in the source code, I had an epiphany: the word "colin" is littered throughout in URLs because we use Ruby on Rails, and "colin" is part of a route we�ve mapped to all the pages that have to do with me. So you end up with URLs like this:

http://www.plexusweb.com/staff/colin/blog

This colin-ized route appears in tons of link tags in the markup, and search engines are finding each instance (and ranking accordingly). Yet another reason to let us build your site with Ruby on Rails.

Welcome to Plexus 2.0

Buck Sharp — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 17:14:51 GMT

After six years, Plexus clients will see a new face when they come to our site. Why the delay? You know the story...something about cobblers and shoes. Believe me, we aren't complaining. Too much work is a good problem to have.

A few weeks ago we gathered as a company to kick around some new ideas. I quickly got started on a new look that was more in sync with our logo and collateral redesign (new colors, refined logo, new design elements) done by the brilliant Kim Landrum. Designs have been started before but inevitably the time needed to bring them to completion was devoured by work for our paying clients. Remember the cobblers and shoes I was telling you about?

It wasn�t long before we stopped in our tracks and realized the challenges our clients face when traveling down this road. Building a new identity is daunting. Creating an internet presence that embodied all we are�how do we accomplish such a thing? And how can we make this whole experience better for our clients?

We decided to try something different. Since time is our enemy, maybe we should take an incremental approach to designing our site. What if we created a site that was ever evolving? What if the decisions we made weren�t finite? What if our site was a proving ground for new technologies and creative ideas in flux?

This idea was working.

So here we are, the first draft of the new us. We�ve given ourself a solid foundation and will continue to build, refine and enhance our online presence.

While we have plans for many new features to the site, some that made this first draft are:

Comprehensive portfolio organized by services and clients
Staff spaces to that allow you to learn more about the people at Plexus, and that enable us to share technical problems and solutions with the worldwide web development community
More current information about our expanded set of services
A site more represenative of our capabilities
Entire site managed through a user-friendly web interface, encouraging updates and decreasing maintenance overhead.

Features soon to come:

A multitude of info architecture, design consistency and path enhancements
Ability to enlarge portfolio images (probably priority number one)
Easy to understand web site packages.
Live demos of our content management solutions
Case studies to give you practical examples of how our products and services solved problems for our customers
Screencasts of products and content management components in action

We value you and we value your opinions. Please provide them. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy our new incarnation and look foward to bowling you over with creative greatness in the days to come.