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I’ve decided to start answering occasional website management questions on the blog! I’ve always kind of wanted to be an advice columnist, so why not? Here, a business founder wonders how best to manage her website and a related off-site blog: So, I have my official web site, which provides all the info people need about my organization. But then, because I absolutely love blogging, I also have my blog that details the process of starting my organization. So, here’s the thing. They’re two different websites. Now, my initial thinking on this was to make the blog a separate site…

When you hire me to do SEO, online marketing, UX optimization, advertising, social media, or anything else: Consultations are always free. Marketing services will always come with education. I bring you new marketing ideas not because I want to make more money from you, but because I think that my ideas will help you do more business, and you will want to keep hiring me and referring your friends. While there is a lot of SEO and marketing information freely available on the internet, it seems to me that a lot of SEO companies are in the business of not…

Do you know what SOPA is? You should. It’s a piece of legislation moving through Congress right now that, if it passes, may change the internet drastically. Here’s CNN’s overview if you’re not familiar. In short, SOPA would force sites to go dark for US visitors if they were accused of infringing copyrights. Google has said that YouTube would “have to go dark immediately”. But possibly more alarmingly, the language of the bill is muddled enough that it really allows for sites to get shut down (not actually shut down, but dark for US visitors) on the whim of anyone…

Google’s latest revision to search has created a small uproar in the online marketing and SEO communities–not to mention annoyed Twitter to no end (Facebook’s probably irked as well, but Twitter needs the publicity–complaining loudly is a bid to stay relevant that Facebook doesn’t need). Here it is in a nutshell. Google has always personalized your search results, tailoring them to location, previous searches, and a whole host of other things. It’s the reason why your “ranking”–where your link appears in the search results–is not as cut and dried as many people believe. I don’t see the same results you…

Today I upgraded my late 2011 MacBook Pro from 4gb RAM to 8gb using a Crucial 2x4gb kit (model #CT2CP51264BC1339). Now, Apple provides a tutorial for this here. However, when I got started, I quickly discovered that they’ve left a decent amount out, probably in the interests of getting more people to pay them for overpriced RAM and service. I love Apple, really I do, but sometimes they’re kind of…irritating. So I’m dubbing this: How to replace RAM in a late 2011 MacBook Pro: The Better Instructions Purchase your RAM. I selected Crucial as a dependable and respected brand. There…

I recently had to research this question for a client–I knew the answer on a gut level, but needed the data to back it up. Turns out, it’s kind of hard to find. There’s a lot of information out there about what you should do with footer links. And there’s a lot of information out there about the practice of “keyword stuffing” (and if you’re still doing this in your site, please join us in this decade!). But there’s actually relatively little information about specifically stuffing your footer with keywords. Everyone wants to rank well for key terms that may be…

Complete site redesign and fleshing-out is still underway (I’m far too neurotic about the site structure to just start putting things up without making sure I’m 100% happy with what I’m doing!), but in the meantime I’ve rolled over to the Twenty-Eleven WP theme, which in my opinion is much nicer to look at than the old theme. Though I apparently briefly broke the blog in the changeover, sorry! One thing I don’t like about the Twenty Eleven theme, however, is that in my personal opinion it has way too much whitespace and dumps too much content below the fold….

Long overdue: I’m getting business cards. And a new website design. Thanks to a thoroughly awesome friend in the design field, they ought to be pretty snazzy. In other, less personal news: Google Plus profiles are now available for businesses. I won’t be getting one right now, but you can follow me on G+ here. This article on starting a business was great and totally worth a read. And I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but OMG user flow visualization in Google Analytics? Yes please! I’m currently working primarily in SEO, but my real love is…

Okay, maybe not. But I was pretty pleased when I checked the Analytics data for ZiiBest and discovered that in less than a month on the web, it’s received over 400 visitors and 1100 pageviews with a sub 40% bounce rate and a near 3 minute time on site. Not too shabby for brand new!

Behold: the sun rising over Big Sur about a week ago. I was on vacation (aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh) and snapped this with my iPhone camera right as the sun was coming up over the trees. Gorgeous. It was great to get out of LA and back into nature for a while, and definitely made me feel secure in my choice to move out of the city and back to the farm, which is happening alarmingly soon! My phone battery died shortly after we entered the campground, and there was little to no signal anyways, so I enjoyed two blissful days in Big…