Greenwala is a Philanthropic company focused on harnessing the power of a community to create opportunity for people to “Go Green” and improve their lives. They believe that every individual has the power to foster change. Through that belief that they feel that the Greenwala community will be the destination for those wishing not to just Green their lives but to improve the lives of those around them.

Greenwala has created a contest called “What’s your story?” They have teamed up with helpareporterout.com. They want your help identifying stories about the most amazing eco-friendly, environmentally-conscious companies, products and services on the planet.

All of our friends + GREEN advocates, please vote for our Green Printing company! http://www.greenwala.com/greenwala_contests/all/7-What-s-Your-Story/entries/mine/565

If you wish to enter, submit a photo of the company (product, logo, or representative image) and a description – up to 500 words about how it is helping to reduce our impact on the planet and revolutionize the green economy. The story that gets the most votes will win a $500 Amex Gift card — and a featured article about the company, product or service on the Greenwala blog.

Greenwala is planting an additional tree for each entry with Trees For the Future. For information or to enter click here.

Winner will be selected from the top 10 vote getters by Greenwala.com editiorial staff.

Now you can find Skybox Creative on your favorite Social Networking sites! Follow or Add us us to stay current on updates, events, news and more!

Follow us on Twitter!

Add us as a friend on Facebook!

SEO is a term that is tossed around on a daily basis yet there are many people who still do not understand what it is. Firstly, there are 2 components to SEO and generating traffic online: Organic SEO and PPC. The term ‘Organic Search Engine Optimization’ refers to ranking well on Search Engines for specific keywords without paying on a per-click basis. Then there is PPC, which stands for, you guessed it Pay-Per-Click! There are a slew of local and national organizations offering SEO, but it is important to do your homework before hiring any of these companies. There are some basics that everyone should understand, so we are going to educate you here on just a few of the main points.

Defining your keywords and keyword combinations is a vital first step in the process. For instance, Web Design San Diego is a different keyword combination than San Diego Web Design, so selecting the appropriate keyword combinations is tricky. Getting thousands of ‘hits’ is not nearly as important as attracting relevant traffic. A great way to start your research is to sign up with a Google ‘Ad Words’ Account. You do not have pay anything to start the set up, but once your account is activated, you will have access to a tool called: Search-based Keyword Tool and the Keyword Tool. It is good to understand which keywords generate the most traffic, but also to make sure the ones you choose will help drive sales. For instance, a term such as ‘Brand’ will generate over 1,000,000 searches on Google monthly, but the term is too generic to sell ‘Branding’ or a specific brand for that matter, besides, you will be drown out by the 617,000,000 results, try getting to page 1-3, it will take A LOT of work!!

If you have a product or service that people will search for locally vs nationally, you are in luck! Whenever you add a city name to a search it narrows down the results tremendously. Take the Web Design example, a search for ‘Web Design’ generates 375,000,000 results, where as a search for ‘Web Design San Diego’ generates 11,600,000 results, you just eliminated 363,400,000 competitors from the running…not a bad place to start! If you have local seekers, you also have the benefit of Map listings which show up above the organic listings when a city name is added to a search. Google offers a free map listing, you can even add coupons and many other business details through their Local Business Center. Yahoo has a similar product as well, I would recommend setting up a listing with both Search Engines. A couple of factors will help you get to the top of that list, number one is location, but you can also submit your listing to specific categories + sub-categories and fill in keywords that way. It also helps to have customers go on and rate your business, if they like you! When visitors find a business with multiple testimonials and a five star rating up front, they will automatically feel a stronger sense of trust vs. your traditional Organic Search Results.

Ok, now to the on-site details.

Now that you understand the importance of keywords, you should know that your top (2-5) keywords should be all over your website. Developing a site entirely in Flash is fine if you don’t care about search engines, but if you want your site to be found, you should limit flash to a certain location on the page, keeping the navigation, title tags and body text in HTML/CSS. There is also a rule to be aware of called: Keyword Stuffing. If Google catches you trying to ‘trick’ the system, they can potentially blacklist your domain, which is definitely no good! Ok, so how do you repeat keywords without keyword stuffing, let me count the ways: title tags, url strings, meta keywords + description, h1 tags (proper definition of header text), body text and links (internal, inbound and outbound). If you have more questions about how these elements can be implemented on your site, please email us info@skyboxcreative.com I have attached a graphic below visually illustrating the elements I have mentioned above. The live site used as a reference model can be seen here: www.drgram.com

Read the rest of this entry »

Skybox Creative – providing Web Design + Branding in San Diego since 2006 is now on Yelp!

As an SEO effort, we encourage our clients to get in as many online directory listings as possible. There are many highly trafficked directories that offer free listings. This can help your business in two ways, firstly it increases the likelihood of people finding you on the web, secondly it  improvs your page rank by increasing back-links to your site. For those of you who are unfamiliar with page rank, Google provides a page rank based on a scale of 1-10 that helps determine the relevancy of the information on your web site.

Here are a few online directories for San Diego businesses:

www.kudzu.com

www.bizsandiego.com

www.yelp.com

www.dmoz.com

Click here to add a comment/star rating to our business listing on YELP!

For more industry specific online directories, type your primary target keywords in any major search engine and several directories should pop up for each keyword or keyword combination. For a longer list of general business directories, contact us and we will happliy provide you with more.

Now share your PPT and PDF presentations with the world! Simply add the SlideShare Application to your LinkedIn profile, then upload your files, up to 100MB!

You can embed the presentation with a code provided or share the URL, like you see below, with friends and business associates! Great tool. The internet is crazy!

We uploaded our corporate brochure >> Click here to view!

Link building is one of the most important search engine optimization steps. Without good inbound links, your website cannot get high rankings. Although it is very important that your website has optimized content, without the links to your website, search engines won’t consider that content much.

It’s important to get the right links to your website. Link spamming doesn’t work. You must make sure that you get high quality links that Google and other search engines like.

Step 1: Make your website linkworthy

You must make your website linkworthy. You cannot expect that other websites link to your website if your site is basically a collection of affiliate links or an online shop that looks like a thousand other online shops.
Your website must be different. Try the following:

• Add articles about your products or services to your website.
• Add tutorials and how-to articles about the topic of your website.
• If you have a lot to say, add a blog to your website.
• Add a directory with links to valuable resources on your website.

Step 2: Check your competitors

The best way to start link building is to duplicate the links that your competitors have. Find all websites that link to your competitors and then try to convince them to link to your website.

You can then check the websites one after the other and convince them to link to your website.

Step 3: Get links from blogs

There are millions of blogs on the Internet and they all need something to write about. Getting links from blogs is a good way to get links from related websites.

Bloggers give out millions of free links each month. Make sure that you get your share of these links.

Step 4: Get links from Internet directories

Submitting your website to Internet directories can be a good way to show Google that you have a reputable website. Low quality websites usually don’t invest the time and money that is needed to be listed in Internet directories.

An easy way to submit your website to many Internet directories as possible is IBP’s directory submitter.

Inbound links are very important if you want to get high rankings on search engines. You should optimize your web page content first to make sure that search engines find your website relevant to your targeted keywords.

If more than one website has been optimized for the same keywords (and that’s usually the case) then the website with the best links will get the best rankings.

Suppose that you have a great website with great content. Your web pages are perfectly optimized for visitors and search engines and you have found many related websites that could link to your site.
How do you convince these websites that they should link to your website? Here are five tips that will help you to convince other webmasters.

1. Offer something in return
The easiest thing that you could offer is a link in return. However, not all webmasters want to exchange links.
There are many things that you could offer in exchange for a link. This could be a discount for your products, an ad on your website or even a simple hint.
If you find a broken link on a website, inform the webmaster about the link. Tell him that your own website might be a good replacement for the broken link (if it is).

2. Ask your current link partners
If another website already links to you then they might add another link to a different page on your website.
Getting a second link from existing link partners is much easier than getting new links because you don’t have to explain yourself anymore. The other webmaster already knows you and your site.

3. Make friends with people from your industry
Networking can help you to get links to your website. This works best with blogs that are related to your website.
Contact the blog owners and compliment on their sites. Do not ask for a link in your first contact. When you’ve a good relationship with the blog owner, you might inform him about a new product or a new article that you’ve written.
Chances are that you’ll get a link from the blog then. These links from related blogs have a great impact on the position of your website in Google’s search results. IBP can help you to find blogs that are related to your website.

4. Show that other webmasters already linked to your website
It’s easier for people to do something if they see that other people have done the same thing before. If many other websites link to your website, you could mention this in your link request.
If a well known website mentioned your site, that’s even better: “As you might have seen on NYTimes.com, we’ve published a new product. This might be interesting to the visitors of your website.”

5. Offer something that other people don’t have
This is the easiest way to get links. If you have a report with ground-breaking new information or something other that’s very interesting and only available on your website then it will be very easy to get links to the page that contains that information.

Getting links from other websites isn’t difficult if you know how to do it. Further information about link building can be found in our free SEO book. The book explains everything you need to know to get links from related websites, Internet directories and other sources.

Tip 1. If your robots.txt file is damaged or it contains a typo.

If search engine robots misinterpret your robots file the may just completely ignore your pages.¬† Be sure to check it multiple times and be sure that you only use the disallow on the pages that you really don’t want to be indexed.

Tip 2. Add too many variables to your URL

URLs with too many variables can cause problems with search engine robots.  If your URL has too many variables then there is a chance that the spiders will ignore your pages.  Google has made an official statement about variables:

“Google indexes dynamically generated webpages, including .asp pages, .php pages, and pages with question marks in their URLs. However, these pages can cause problems for our crawler and may be ignored.”

Tip 3.  Use Session IDs in your URL

Many URLs with session IDs don’t get indexed by search engines because they can lead to duplicate content problems.¬† If possible, don’t use the session ID in the URL, use a cookie instead, in order to track the session.

Tip 4. Use far too much code in your site.

Of course your site can use JS and CSS that isn’t directly related to your content.¬† If possible, externalize these scripts and refference them in your site instead.¬† The goal is to have as little code on the page as possible to get as much done as you can.

View the source code of your site – if it is hard for you to see the content then it is hard for the spiders to as well.

Tip 5. Use fancy hard to follow navigation.

Fancy JavaScript or DHTML menues cannot be parsed by most search engine robots.¬† Flash and¬† Ajax menues are even worse, because they don’t have any readable content to follow.¬† OK, so, maybe you are thinking – Google is smart, they ca nread flash now – Well, yes and no.¬† If your font has been rasterized or the letters have been taken apart for the sake of “flashyness” then you will get no Google love.

Be smart, use – go with the good old fashion HTML and standard navigation.¬† Stick with the basics.¬† If search engines love your site then they will show it to the people.¬† If they don’t show it to the people, then why spend the time and money on cool effects!

Long long ago, in a galaxy not so different from ours there was a set of rules put on language, and they called these rules grammar. Once these rules were in place, like any organization needs, there had to be the enforcer of said rules. These people were called “English Teachers.”

That evolution from a non-grammar to fully patrolled lexicons only took about 100,000 years. Google is a little faster than that – which is no surprise.

There are web master guidelines that are as strict as Mrs. Von Likerstien was in 10th grade. Fortunately, there are rule books available, so if you are willing to learn the language of SEO (Which is far less complicated than the language of love) you are golden.

Today I bring you the newest in SEO grammar! The correct way to write a link.

No longer is a good old fashion “a href” good enough anymore. As many of you know – standards tell us to include “type” and “title” – but these are in the code. What is Google up to when it comes to the “non-code” side of things?

Write your text as if it wasn’t a link at all:

Getting links from other web sites is a fantastic way to improve your rankings on search engines.

Do not describe what you are doing, instead, describe the purpose of the link:

Very well, you have convinced me through all your emails to impart upon you a pearl of SEO wisdom.  This one is especially important, as I have learned it not through a decade of reading or a decade of conversing with other brilliant SEOs across the US, this I learned through the trials and tribulations of time.

This secret is is called time and involvement.  Sure, you can buy your way to the top, and that is often times important, look, competition is competition.  You can work towards 100% compliance with W3C standards, but at the end of the day Рif you have been involved in your industry with a web site that gives good, relevant information and have developed a good reputation, that may be just enough to get you to the top.

Here is an example:

Search Google for “discount clothes” and you will find 15dollarstore.com which has been an active site for 4+ years and sure enough, it doesn’t validate with XHTML very well.¬† (162 Errors, 27 warning(s)) – In-fact, the domain actually redirects to http://15dollarstore.com/s/home/0826907247 and from some tools I use this site has an SEO score of 75%. They do have a nice number of back links though – but I can’t imagine that is the definitive reason they rank so well.

This just goes to show you that time and commitment to your industry can really pay off.  Anyways Рthat is my little pearl for you today.

I would suggest putting in the time to create a good SEO and SEM campaign, because your competition is – but don’t just look for short cuts, dedicate time and effort on being involved with you industry.¬† Your reputation is on the line!

~k