Over the past year we have been using the Advanced Web Ranking tool from Caphyon Ltd.  The tool allows you to easily track rankings for your website on the search engine results pages. It even lets you set up the rankings to come from local search results, which is a weak point of similar ranking tools. The interface of the tool is extremely user friendly and provides a wealth of information that is never far from your reach. 

The local aspect of this tool is probably the most helpful aspect with relation to the recent changes in the Google search engine algorithms. Google has moved to more local-based results page that has been focusing the first page of results to local listings. Before the changes, a website had to compete with the whole web for some SEO benefits, now with the help of Advanced Web Ranking; it is easy for a small business to stand tall with the big companies that used to dominate the results pages.  Understanding the influence of these new algorithms is a key success behind the Advanced Web Ranking Tool.

The competition data can be filtered by keyword and search engine, which is another strong suit of Advanced Web Ranking tool. This makes it really easy to see how much competition you have on a particular keyword or search engine.  The ability to see a graphical representation of these competitors will make it easy to see the weak points of your competition so you can plan your attack.  If you notice that a particular keyword is slipping for a competitor, you can easily move right in with the help of Advanced Web Ranking’s keyword research tool.

The keyword research tool makes easy hunting of profitable keywords. The keyword tool gives you a competition level that explains the intensity of competition, a local search volume, and a global search volume for each keyword.  The local search volume gives you a great idea of the niches that exist in your local market. 

The one aspect of the Advanced Web Ranking tool that has the most effect on our business is the reporting features.  There are so many options and adjustments that you can make to completely make each report your own.  From the ability to generate a report in a PDF, HTML, CSV, and many other formats makes them accessible to everyone.  This is important because there is no use to make a report for a client if they cannot read it.

The reports generate quickly and look professional.  The reports can be easily customized to mirror branding for your site. This helps you keep a consistent look. They also have an easy to understand layout that can be easily interpreted.  Colored arrows display the changes in position and can explain the changes to a kindergartener.  This is really the best reporting tool that we have come across, ever!

Our company has been focusing more and more on the art of SEO to help our clients reach the top of search engines.  The Advanced Web Ranking tool is a great tool, but in conjunction with the Advanced Link Manager, also from Caphyon Ltd., there is a two pronged attack.  The Advanced Link Manager is capable of indexing the links that point to a domain.  This is priceless in the practice of link building.

With the Advanced Link Manager, we can see all of the links that come into the site we are working with, and we are not limited by pointless restrictions like other tools.  The tool allows us to compare the link popularity of some of the toughest completion to our client’s sites.  This is a powerful advantage that was before impossible.  Instead of switching back and forth between pages and pages of links, Advanced Link Manager displays the results by referring domains.  This keeps the screen uncluttered and easily readable.

The Advanced LInk Manager tool lets you analyize the backlinks to your competitors. This is a essential part of understanding your position in the search engine pages. Once you know where your competitors are getting your links, you can begin to understnad what it is going to take to get your site up in the rankings too.

The Advanced LInk Manager can even run while you are away. This will allow you to always have updated link data in your portfolio. It is of no use if you have old data. Having fresh data is the most important part of a productive SEO strategy.

The Advanced Link Manager software also allows you to track the evolution of your backlinks to your website. This will allow you to keep a good reference of the progress of your backlinking. This is important when reporting progress to clients and keeping track of what is working in your SEO strategy.

The reporting feature of the Link Manager is just as powerful as that of the Advanced Web Ranking tool.  There are 10 different reports that you can run; all the way from an analysis of the pages that are indexed on your site to the links by referring domains and search engines. This makes it easy to show our clients how they match up with respect to their competition.  We have never used a linking program like this before.  Every day, we seem to find new features that take time and effort out of tasks that used to be tedious and annoying to complete.

We have seen reduced time and effort in our SEO research and from what we have seen this first year, there is no limit to what the Advanced Link Manager and Advanced Web Ranking tool can do for our company.

Even with non-Facebook smartphones these days the connections with social media run deep; contacts synched with your social media friends and followers, new apps dedicated to the social experience, and abilities to communicate with anyone on the fly. This deep relationship could be due to the fact that the phone was one of the first true social networks. It was one of the first ways to get ahold of another person in seconds rather than days, weeks, or even months.

The rise in social media has moved the direction of the web for ever. Before websites were essentially static and maybe changed once a week at the most. The websites were basically informative and that's it. The move now in the web is towards interactive content that is more like interacting with a human.

Websites that have fully embraced a social focus are updating the content on their sites many times every second. In the case of Twitter, nearly 600 twitter updates every second. This movement towards recency and updates lends to the perception of human interaction that we all crave.  This is called the web 2.0 movement.

The web 2.0 movement is focused on the user, making it easier and easier for people to find what they want and enjoy the search.  Social media, blogs, wikis, and video sharing are all examples of forces in the web 2.0 movement.

Every time a person visits a different web 2.0 site they will notice that it feels like they are entering into a conversation with a different person. Inevitably they will find one (or more) network that suits them best. This is why you see people having devotions to certain social networks. It is like having an exclusive group of real friends, but they exist online and the only way to find out what they are doing is to log on. This is the reason why social networks can be addictive to some.

The reason why social media works is that it instills a sense of real conversation in the seemingly simple interactions that we carry out online. Social media brings us everything we want to know right to where we want it...in front of us.

Some people are under the impression that their website has been working for years, so why change. Others are skeptical of the effect that a website can have on a business. You can find the perfect solution for online involvement when you choose Insite Advice.

We can offer you a multitude of services that reach across the breadth of the online landscape. The possibilities are seemingly endless to what we can do.

If you are in the hunt for the company to make your new website, or are skeptical of its benefits, come take a look at Insite Advice and see what we can do for you!

The Google program is called Engage, and is designed to help grow the relationship of consumers and businesses. While in the program, we here at Insite Advice will receive training on the ins and outs of Google's programs, like AdWords, to further extend our knowledge. In turn we will be able to take that knowledge and pass it on to you; our clients. We will find more efficient and cost effective ways to provide you with the top of the line service that you come to expect from us and Google.

Be sure to keep Insite Advice in mind when you are deciding on a company for your web solutions. We can provide assistance and expert advice in every aspect of the web.  Now that we have teamed up with Google we are stronger than ever and can provide you with a more complete online marketing presence than ever before.

The web archives of the Library of Congress are important because they contribute to the historical record of our Nation, capturing information that could otherwise be lost in time. With the growing role of the web as an influential medium of information and communication, records and information about historic events could be considered incomplete without the materials that were "born digital" and never printed on paper such as websites.

The Library of Congress is interested in gathering and conserving the information contained on the Web because an ever-increasing amount of the world’s cultural and intellectual output is created in purely digital formats and does not exist in any tangible form. Creating an archive of websites supports the goals of the Library’s Digital Strategic Plan, announced in March 2003, which focuses on the collection and management of digital content for preservation.

The Missouri’s Civil War website was one of Insite Advice’s first websites and it continues to be relevant even in today’s vastly digital environment. The website provides a great deal of information on the history of the Civil War and really brought the rich history of the War in Missouri to the masses. This website has won national awards from the US Travel Industry Association and seen continuous praise from Civil War aficionados. Before the site was launched, there was no one place to learn about the seemingly unknown role of Missouri in the Civil War. Now it seems that the history of the state is well known and common knowledge.

Us here at Insite Advice are extremely excited to be involved with something as big and important as the Library of Congress. The fact that one of our websites was selected as an important historical resource for such an influential part of the information in our Nation is just purely amazing.  We are excited for the people at the Missouri Civil War Heritage Foundation and look forward to seeing the records of our Nation’s and State’s history permanently recorded and preserved in the Library of Congress.

There are text ads in your search engine results, ads before you get to watch a video, ads in the middle of your video, ads that display before you can enter a webpage, and the list goes on and on.

The likely question is where to start. Like many decisions about your business, this will most likely involve some sort of budget. If you are limited by a budget, your choices are somewhat limited, but not to the extent of other types of advertising. In comparison to other advertising mediums such as billboards and commercials, internet marketing is pretty cheap. You can convert searchers at a cost as little as a few cents.

Another huge advantage of advertising on the internet is the ability to target your customers at a very high level. With traditional advertising you are basically throwing out your ad to a mass of people and hoping that a percentage of them will find your advertisement relevant to their needs. With internet advertising you can pinpoint your targeted consumer with some pretty high accuracy.

For example Google’s AdWords program allows you to advertise on the search engine’s results pages. The customizations that can be made are numerous and can identify a searcher on their age, location, search term, time of day, type of device, and so on. This is a huge improvement of targeting from the traditional forms of advertising. The AdWords program also allows you to set a specific address for your business to display on Google Maps. The results are displayed on the map with your ordinary search results.

Google also offers a newer TV advertisement platform for AdWords. This provides the ads for Google TV. These ads start out at about $20 per spot; hundreds to thousands of times less expensive to some of the network TV ads. Just like the text ads on AdWords, the TV ads are targetable to the specific networks and programs that are related to the content of the advertisement.  

You can choose to start anywhere with online advertisements. You can do pay per click advertisements with Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Amazon, Facebook, and more. These are great places to start because they are relatively cheap and provide extremely well targeted ads to the customers that you are trying to reach.  Each one of these companies offer very similar platforms so either one (or a combination of them) can be a great place to start.

I only talked about a few of the many opportunities that are out there for internet marketing and specifically internet advertising. You can’t go wrong with any type of legitimate advertising as long as you are careful and have a bit of knowledge about your target customer. With all of the opportunities there is no doubt that you will find the one out there that will fit your business and help your business grow on the internet and beyond.

Insite Advice can serve the entire United States and beyond with our technologies, but we specialize in web design, development, SEO, and web hosting right here in the St. Louis area. Whether you live in St. Charles or Belleville, Fenton or Chesterfield and anywhere in between we are available to serve you. Our offices are conveniently located in beautiful South St. Louis and we are within a short drive of nearly anywhere.  From Downtown St. Louis we are just a short drive down Highway 55 and easily accessible from Highways 40 and 44.

We have done web design, development and other services for companies and organizations across the United States.  We are completely capable of handling accounts all over, but fell that we can offer our best support and services to those in our own backyard. It is much simpler to be able to communicate with our customers that are here in St. Louis.  We can meet at your place of business, at a neutral location, or here at our office. If you ever need support we are just a call away.  We pride ourselves on our ability to serve all of our clients with the upmost quality and efficiency.

We strive not only to be your choice for web design, web development, SEO, web hosting, and more, but also to being the “friend in the business” that you can count on time after time. If you have a question about anything related to the internet, web design, social media – anything, we will guide you as best we can to the information that you need.  

We offer free consultations for customers interested in our services. We believe that it is beneficial for everyone if there is a no-obligation, open conversation about your website. You will leave with a further understanding of your website and how it should operate on the web. We will leave with a greater understanding of you business and how businesses like yours operate.  Even if we don’t end up providing web design or any other service for you, we hope that the discussions we have will improve your understanding of your own business’ possibilities for the future.

You can count on us to provide you with the most up-to-date information about the services that would be most beneficial to your organization. We do not oversell our services. If you run a small website, we understand that you do not need all the bells and whistles that you might expect from a huge corporation.

Insite Advice has been you hometown choice for St. Louis web design and development for over 9 years and we look forward to the opportunity to serve the St. Louis community for many more years to come.

Alex Wolk
President, Insite Advice

Google has seemed to be on the forefront of technology and continue to innovate today. Most recently, Google has made changes to the way and how search results show up in the results pages. You may have noticed that Google Places accounts have been popping up on the results pages. If you haven’t, they are mixed into the search results and ranked by a pin. That pin is linked to a Google Places listing and can be seen on the map that is displayed on the right of the screen. This effort was in the belief that the users of Google want to have more localized content within their search results.

This can be either good or bad for your company. If you are a small company and have a regularly maintained Google Places account, you can see your places page in the top of the Google search results. This is a big plus for a company that probably doesn’t have a big marketing budget if one at all.  You are now in with the big boys of the web and have a presence that can be noticed. This new exposure can bring in increased revenue, customers, leads, vendors, etc.

On the other hand you may be one of those big boys of the web and have noticed that the smaller companies are taking your place. This can seem unfair to the big companies, but in reality they will still receive a lot of the search traffic because they operate all over the country and not in a few locations like the Places listings.

Another way that Google has changed the results pages are the inclusion of social media. In the past, Google has included socially driven content in their Realtime section of their search.  This displays the most recent updates from the social media outlets about the searched term. This can be useful but takes a second to find out how to access it.

Just today, Google announced that it will be integrating social content into the search results. The premise behind this thinking is that people trust things that people they know provide. For example, if you are searching for a good Italian restaurant you will see places and websites that your friends have shared on Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites.  This will allow you to find more relevant search results and have a more personalized, reference-based way to find information on the web.  

The way Google sees it, if you can see what your friends have recommended and posted, you will be more likely to find what you need quicker and with more confidence. You can find out who has eaten recently at an Italian restaurant and go directly to them for more information.  You can even choose what social media sites that you want to be linked to the aggregation service.

Google still maintains its popular, sleek look, but packs a huge punch.  I doubt that these changes will make a huge impact on the overall market share and popularity of Google, but they are definitely an innovation that will likely be mocked by the other search engines. The simple integration of localized and social aspects into the search results pages are changing the way that people use the search engine to find information. Maybe someday search engines will take over the world, but until then they can still provide a great insight into the world around us.

The "Stand for Stan" campaign that was started to convince the White House that "The Man" deserved to recieve this honor, was the starting point of this dream for Cardinals fans.  The Cardinals promoted the idea of Stan recieving the Medal of Freedom through Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites. Politicians quickly joined in letter-writing campaigns that made the the dream a reality.

Stan never wanted to be recognized for what he has done for others. He is one of the most humble people you will ever meet. However, the look on his face when recieving his award was like a kid on christmas morning. Out of all the great memories that the world has of Stan "The Man", this has to be one of the greatest.

A link to an article on the story on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Musial: "Greatest day in my life"

The tool makes it really simple to check your website in just a matter of seconds.  Even if you have no idea what HTML is or you are well versed in the language, this tool can really make the process of optimizing your website simple. Instead of going in to each and every page and looking for what is wrong you can analyze every page on your website with one click and automatically test at 450 checkpoints. Even if you think you know the ins and outs of HTML, you will be surprised to what you missed.

The SortSite software is broken down in to 7 different categories of tests and standards. They are Accessibility, Browser Compatibility, Legal Compliance, Broken Links and Errors, Spell Checking, Search Optimization, Web Standards, and User Experience. Each one of these sections offers direct insight into the opportunities available to increase the effectiveness of your website. 

With the Accessibility section, you can make sure that all of your code is up to par with the standards of the internet.  The Browser Compatibility runs through the website making sure that it is compatible and displays correctly on popular internet browsers. The Legal Compliance feature makes sure that you are not breaking any laws in the process of conducting your business on the web.

The Search Optimization section is focused on the optimization of your website for SEO purposes.  This goes through your website and makes suggestions on the organization to be more search engine friendly. The Web Standards tells you if your site is valid; making sure it is running optimally and clean.  Finally, the User Experience module offers the some suggestions on the ability of your pages to be read easily by the end user.

A web site is crucial to the perception of a business or organization, so web site problems create a negative impression in the minds of site visitors. Eliminating problems improves the web site user experience, and helps sell the organization, its products and services. 

The SortSite tool is a great way to get a quick snapshot of the optimization of your website.  It also offers the ability to dig deep into your site to optimize your content and code. This is really important with concern to the ever changing standards of the web. With SortSite you never have to worry that your website is not running optimally. You can rest assured that your website is a well oiled machine and you can find the errors before the end user and search engines do.