Jon Webb's blog

Selecting the best solution for website design and online marketing is one of the most complex tasks a business must undertake. Putting together a website design RFP can be a nightmare. There are literally thousands of options from free-lance designers, to large national ad agencies and IT consultancies. Development processes range from a few hours putting together sites of amateur quality to projects by an organization with a proven and refined process for crafting a world-class web presence. Costs range from virtually free to millions of dollars - and every web developer is marketing their offering as a complete “results driven” solution.

Being in an Interactive agency and living in a world where we spend half our life behind a monitor we sometimes forget that everyone might not have the same bleeding edge knowledge of online technology as we do. Simple concepts to the native web surfer are often times a foreign language to others.

Google real-time was introduced this week to counter Bings integration of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Google will now be streaming tweets, news releases, web pages, and Yahoo articles all within the confinements of a single Search Engine Result Page (SERP). It has Fantastic functionality and displays many different sources of rich content which creates a heightened user experience. All good, but it does raise some questions in my mind.

Almost daily I hear individuals tell me that they just don't understand how social media can help their businesses or further business objectives. It does take time to move individuals like that towards the light. Much longer than I have for this blog post. The best and easiest way I have found is to provide real examples of online success with business models surrounding the online social media sphere.

Have you ever wondered if there’s a “best time” for getting in contact with those leads you receive from your website? If you’re not receiving leads through your website, that’s a whole different problem for discussion with Levelten's Internet Marketing department at another time. I’m talking about making contact with the individuals that are making inquires or are submitting for additional information from your company website.

You’ve done it a million times. Gone to Google Search in a hurry for a quick query to find info on a given topic. In you're haste you type in the wrong spelling for the term you're searching, knowing that you have the safety of just choosing Google’s suggestion for what you really meant to type.

Hopefully, if you’re making a decision on re-designing or building a new website for your company at least one of the criteria for selecting an agency is; 1. “Doe's the agency’s own web site reflect the same kind of results that are being proposed for your new website?" In other words, doe's the website design company or agency practice what they preach?

Google just released this great little tool called "Wonder Wheel". It allows you to refine your search and find derivatives of keywords. Wonder Wheel is one of a series of refining options that Google has released. The way you use it is by putting in a keyword (broad) in the query box. For the sake of this example I'll use "Bows". When Google sends you back results for your query go up to the top left hand side of the page click on "Show options". This will take you to another page that will allow you to refine that search.

From the true inventor of the WWW, Tim Berners Lee talks at the 2009 TED conference about the importance of sharing linked data for the new horizons of the semantic Web. He challenges all individuals, enterprises and government entities to open their raw data sources to the Web. Tim believes that the next generation of the Web will be the linking of information from open data sources to correlate connections and relationships with objects and even concepts.

There are a tremendous amount of variables to consider when looking at developing a search engine marketing budget for your company. Even marketing managers may have a difficult time assessing how well their company’s website is doing and more over the direction and resources they need, in order to make it highly visible in the search engine result pages (SERPS).