I saw this for the first time in Lexington this week. They want you to snap a photo of a billboard (on a very busy road) bring it into a restaurant, and save on your next meal. Okay folks, how’s your Dukes of Hazard driving skills… squeeeeeeaaaal!!!!

SIDE NOTE: I would have sent Ramsey’s Restaurant some link juice, but they have no website - not even a really simple one. As I’ve said before, when you have no web site you’re leaving it up to others to dominate the search results pages for your name when searched. If I wanted to, I could post a page on my site today that would rank in the top 1-3 on Google for their name - and say whatever I wanted. For the record, I would rave about their Buffalo Chicken Salad to die for - but what if someone else had something less flattering to say?

Well, some folks have told me they’d like to receive emails with ideas that are aimed at the small business looking to build an online store or extend their business marketing program and finally I’ve put it together in the ramp up to my new EBook series. While my blog tends to get somewhat technical (and wanders a bit!,) I’ve started this email list to be very simple and offer my experience in short, sweet and to-the-point tips that you can use every day. Sign up with confidence, no spam will be sent. JOIN HERE

SUBSCRIBERS will learn first about my new ebook - members of this list will get pieces of my new ebook “Finding the Sweet Spot” that’s schedule to be published this year and other bonus items. This will combine concepts from The Wisdom of Crowds The E-Myth Revisited and Small Is the New Big along with years of Internet experience into a unique and hyper-effective approach. You must be a member of the email list for these announcements as my (less commercial) blog is not really going to talk about them much.The new ebook will offer Internet Marketing Coaching that I normally charge thousands of dollars for, in plain English without any hype or ego…. those of you who know me realize that this is going to be a pretty big deal, so sign up! JOIN HERE to receive this regular, free tip sheet — NO SPAM!!!

If you’re a local business, and you’re not in Google Local now, I must admit, possibly living in denial. Google 411 (1-800-GOOG411) is amazing, and I am just blown away that so many businesses haven’t taken the time to insert their company into the Google Local Business Center. We couldn’t find our favorite pizza restaurant through it tonight. Paid 411 is dead.

Another thing that’s apparent is that names not easily pronounced phonetically are going to be at a disadvantage without human assistance. Puccinis Pizza (pronounced Pooch-ee-nees) for example, will lose to simpler names such as “Mad Mushroom Pizza.”

The other thing I’m looking forward to is the ability to send the google results to my phone via text - and for attached coupons to come with the text into the phone (codes, hopefully, that the restaurants, etc. will accept over the phone.)

Women now dominate the web according to a new poll by emarketer, and Jordan over at Marketing Pilgrim put together some good links on how web marketers should think about targeting them online if they want to survive.

There are now even specialty marketing certification programs starting to crop up just for targeting women shoppers. Advertising Age claims that now is the time to catch the wave if you want to be a part of this rapidly growing segment. “In the consumer sector, women bring in half or more of the income in 55% of U.S households. In 27% of U.S. households, single women are the sole earners, and 30% of working wives earn more than their husbands. ” says Marti Barletta in Advertising Age, “In the small-business arena, women have accounted for 70% of all privately held start-ups over the last 15 years. Tom Peters calls marketing to women “economic opportunity No. 1 … and there’s no close second.”

Perhaps some of the Superbowl ad cash should be reallocated next year to the rest of the population?

In related news, a virtual “International Museum of Women” is going to have digital exhibits in around 800 Best Buy Stores. This kind of ‘inverted’ sponsorship is something we’ll see more of as interactivity gets simpler and more advanced. Women spend nearly $70 billion on consumer electronics (60% of the total spent in North America.) I’d be putting up exhibits, too.

While I was out, it seems techdirt had this story about a restauranteur who was concerned his business was being affected by a murder story coming up in the organic search results when his restaurant’s name, Cer….no’s Restaurant, was entered into Google. I’ve left out part here so as to not add to the mess.

Well, the publicity in the blogosphere has at least partially solved that problem, replacing the murder story with stories about the story about the story.

Ain’t link-bait amazing?

It’s always a good idea to watch your business name on Google. Even having a small website on your domain name with some nice incoming links that cover your business name are a good idea. Set your title tag and your H1 tags to the name of your business and you’ll have at least a modest defence against this. You can make the site yourself.

Postscript: The Wall Street Journal has since put together a story on Googling Your Own Name which is very similar to what I wrote about, too.

Doh!  They don’t bother to think about the title tag or meta description on the temporary page (and no description tag on the REAL page) so I guess few expect them to be found in the search results pages. Brand Nirvana. Not having to care about petty things.

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If you need a model of web design, you don’t need to look further than our own Bluegrass state for one of the best I’ve seen. A measured balance between graphics, clean headings, and well written text greet consumers on every page in a friendly way when it could easily have been overwhelming. There’s an uncompromising style guide in place, good accessibility scores, and tasteful use of, but not dependence on, subtle hues.

The UK Healthcare site was recently honored for its new design by receiving a national Merit Award in the Patient Education Class by the WWW Health Awards. Other honerees were St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and Holy Spirit Health System.

The web, graphics, and marketing team are all to be congratulated on putting the consumer first by avoiding the traps that snag so many developing big sites these days.

Would you like to give instructions to your visitors about how to white list your domain name when they sign up for your email list? Get tired of keeping up with the latest instructions? Well fret no longer, just point your visitors to my free whitelist generator, which will produce a custom white list instruction set for your newsletter. And, since I’ll keep it up-to-date, you’ll never have to worry about it again. And no, it’s not covered with ads.

Here’s all you need to do….

• Site or Newsletter Name - Your Newsletter Name, spaces replaced with “%20″… so “Weekly Newsletter” becomes “Weekly%20Newsletter”.
• Your Domain Name - your “.com” name. For example, websiteadvice.com… don’t use the “WWW”
• SendAddress - the address that will appear in the “From” field of newsletters. CHECK IT, this is important.

Here’s how the link is assembled:

http://www.sitecreations.com/whitelist.php
?params&SiteName=SITE-or-NEWSLETTER-NAME
&DomainName=yourdomainname.com
&SendAddress=send@yourdomain.com

Examples of this in use (don’t forget to replace the information in the link)

Click here for instructions about how to make sure you get our newsletter.

White-listing instructions for our newsletter.

Where to Use it:

• On your “thank you for signing up page”
• On your email footer.
• On your website or blog.

Did I skip a spam filter? Bugs? Let me know and I’ll take a look.

Beware of the Ides of March!

Okay, we don’t need to get astrological on this, and after all, it was just a graph that cause the technical problem, but try telling that to the average identity-theft-security-paranoid-id customer who logs on to these major financial sites.Â

(Click thumbnail to zoom JP Morgan’s screen shot)

Rustybrick at SEOroundtable has drawn attention to a very interesting thread which should make those in charge of client webservers prick up their ears. I encounter resistance from some clients when I suggest a hosting change once I see they’re using a cut-rate provider. DNS changes, server switch-overs, and broken 404 pages are all major poison to your Google rank. It’s also sounding like you may not get back where you were in the Google index - as it’s my understanding that Google counts “length in index” as one of its 200 ranking factors.

People wonder sometimes why I run my own servers and have a backup SLA of 4-6 hours. I think his observation speaks directly to the need for this. SEO and server uptime are peas in a pod, folks.

So the next time your host says “your site will be off-line for a few hours while we do maintenence” think about the implications to your rank!