| Don't Let Them Kidnap Your Good Name! |
Your domain name (the part of your Internet address after the "www.") is valuable to your business. Your customers know it, and it's part of your stationery and signage.
Do you know that there's an industry of kidnappers out there, waiting to snatch your name for their own purposes?
An Ozdachs client lost their domain name and had to re-start their site using at a different location.
So, keep vigilant, and keep your good name.
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Track Where Your Web Visitors Came From/Are Going: An Update on HitsLink
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 We've tracked visitors to client websites for several years using HitsLink online service. For $10 a month for low-volume sites you can track in real-time:
- Who visits your site
- How they found you
- Where in the world are they from (see map display at right)
- How they navigate your site
- Where they go from your site and what files they download
- If they buy or transact on your site
- How effective your advertising is
In July the service was upgraded to include a new report dashboard, more details, and more control over your account.
You can check them out with a 30-day free trial by signing up on their site. Ozdachs can also help you put the tracking code on your pages and set up the monitoring.
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| 3 Sticky Ways to Hold Reader Attention |
So you've taken the plunge, started a blog or
other online marketing, and you're posting
your entries.
How do you keep your readers
from wondering away after a sentence or two?
Tempting distractions are just a click away.
You need ways to get readers to stick on
your page.
This article will help!
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Active Clients Make Changes!
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Ozdachs clients have been very active, updating their websites and creating marketing campaigns.
 Here are some of the actions taken in recent months:
- Criminal Defense Attorney Tim Pori is focusing on building the client base for his San Francisco office. We've helped him by creating the online ad (at right), a print advertisement, and Craigslist notices. We also re-tuned his site to emphasize his San Francisco office, created Google ads, and installed hit tracking to evaluate the effectiveness of the different campaigns.
He's a smart, passionate lawyer.
We hope you don't need his services, but...!
- The Democratic Women's Forum of San Francisco restarted their site just in time for the Fall election.
- Congratulations to Baby Wonder Years on the release of 3 Little Wonders, a compilation of their most popular videos.
- Congratulations to Theatre Rhinoceros for winning a 2008 GLADD Award for its 30-year commitment to grassroots LGBT theater.
- Congratulations to Ashland custom home builder Jeff Hamlett who won the 2008 Ashland Historical Commission award for Historically Compatible Residential Addition.
We have enjoyed helping these and other clients celebrate tours, fun fund-raisers, new staff, new products, new assignments, and new publications. Thank you for letting Ozdachs Consulting share in your successes.
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Fire the Photographer
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Graphics and photographs are important for web pages. Good ones keep visitors' interest and help them understand the pages.
 We continue to be impressed with the 2008 look of the pictures at Dreamstime.com which are available in packages for as little as $1 each. We've recommended Dreamstime before, and they are continually improving their selection of pictures.
When we were looking for a political rally shot for the Democratic Women's Forum, we found the one at the left. Very 2008!
Dreamstime also excels in hip-looking, tongue-in-cheek images which the traditional corporate photo services ignore. Pictures of the non-glossy side of modern life (war, riots, crowds) just don't appear in the slick photo-selling sites, either.
Need a cool (or ugly) picture for your site, your newsletter, or your printed materials?
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Google Changes Some Rules -- Tech Talk
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This spring we read two "facts" in Search Engine Optimization publications that reflect changes in the way Google and other search engines rank sites in their results. (I put quotation marks around "facts" because no one knows what Google and other search engines do for sure. We just watch the results and reverse engineer the rules.)
These are technical changes -- so if you're not techy, go ahead and skip this article!
Change #1 - Google is starting to prefer domain names without hyphens in the names. Google used to need hyphens or underscores in the domain names to know where words started and stopped. Now, supposedly, their software figures this out and they look at hyphens as potential spam.
This means that for new sites I'm recommending www.customashlandhomes.com instead of www.custom-ashland-homes.com. I haven't seen any problems with Ozdachs sites using hyphens, but the Auguries say to drop them for the future.
Change #2 - Some search engines (probably not Google yet), are giving minor boosts to sites who have targeted words in the pages' "Keyword" metatag. For years no search engine looked at the listed keyword entries because they were so unreliable. Now, some search engines will read them and use them in figuring out what the page it about.
There never has been a downside in using keyword metatags. They just were a complete waste of time. Now, supposedly, they are marginally helpful for some search engines. We'll start typing them in.
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