I think, starting today, the “Worlds Biggest Web Host” , 1&1, now offers built-in Google Site Map Tools in their Package-level domain lists, making it extremely easy to create a sitemap for any domain hosted with their services. Too Damn Easy. They’ve had such tools in their “marketing tools” before but now it’s much more “in your face” while you view your domain names in the hosting. The “standard” webmaster tool settings creates a very basic Google sitemap 0.84 schema, uploads it, and says “thank you” . Bam, it’s that easy.

You do not have to drink the Kool-Aid folks (more…)

I’m confused. I thought the point of the “.GOV” Top Level Domain (TLD) was to give citizens some assurance that they were dealing with a credible government entity. Trust, right? So why then is the EFTPS (Electronic Federal Tax Payment System) now changing from “eftps.gov” to “eftps.com”?   I can see that one might want to register the “.com” and 301 re-direct it back to .gov (lots of folks type “.com” out of habit) but to move the site there seems foolish to me…. whatever happend to the original TLD meanings?

Okay, it may have been this way for a little while, but I luckily don’t log in to this site that often.

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.

Danny Sullivan while on with Alex Bennert on the Daily Searchast Podcast recently wondered… “what is the equivalent to the cross or garlic ’round the neck to a vampire for SEO?” Well, Danny, here’s my list.

1. The Sandbox, or lack thereof, or derivative thereof.
2. Paid Search Editorial Reviews by clueless editors.
3. Presenting kickass SEO results for an hour, and then realizing you left personalized search on.
4. Sudden GOV or EDU links to client’s competitors before you’ve been paid.
5. Algorithm Updates while you’re on vacation.
6. Clients who muck with their domain name during SEO work.
7. Realizing you put the wrong title tag on a corporate website site, and they now rank #1 for “FREE Carrie Underwood Ringtones”
8. Clueless journalists’ soundbytes about SEO in mainstream media that your clients read/watch.
9. Click Fraud, Invalid Clicks, or whatever you want to call it.
10. Blog related health hazards, such as chair-shaped-butt, bug-eyes, or Digg-rage.
11. Presenting great SEO results, and realizing you analyzed another client’s logfiles.
12. Forgetting your MCC password, and your password clue.
13. Getting a hard-won link from a PR9 site, and having some dork nofollow it.
14. SEO case studies from irrelevant businesses- on a client’s desk.
15. Needing a nugget of information from the day you skipped Rocket Science 101.
16. Clueless hosts who kill DNS right before you present results
17. Getting on Shoemoney’s shit list.
18. Social search tagging.
19. Getting caught up in a Class-C blacklisting.
20. Typos in robots.txt on your top client site

Having a well-executed and simple website can be a great, low-cost extension of your non-profit - or a huge waste of time. As many charities increase their visibility during the holidays, I’m struck by how many have churned away obvious hours into sites that offer little that would help them move towards their stated organizational goals.

I’m not picking on one non-profit here - this is prevalent and widespread. I also realize that most sites are donated or done by volunteers. But, this is the point of my post. With limited resources, it makes sense to put every minute or dollar to good use. Here are a few tips for your non-profit website that will help accomplish more with limited resources.

First - keep this in mind: If you have 15 seconds to do something on your website with a visitor, what is it going to be? Impress them with your animated graphics? Show cute photos? List news events from 2 years ago? Show them the weather? Give long-winded history of your organization? I’m sorry to be so blunt, but my goal is to help. I’m here to tell you that you do have 15 seconds - use it wisely.

• Spend 90% of your time on your top 2 website goals. Really… write them down and every time you sit down to work on your website ask yourself if there’s a direct correlation.
• Spend 50% of your website efforts obtaining links to build awareness, traffic, and search rank. Make sure you have top of the line banners to provide other websites to link to you, as well as pre-written link text. Develop a variety of banners for various websites and make them easy to get on your site. Provide them with the needed HTML so that the webmaster on the other end has little work to do. As donors to link to you. All that matters is that you get them pointed at your domain name. Give them lots of kudos and encourage them to link. Big donors deserve their own web page or blog post if they want it. That same page can be linked from a “current donors” list. .
• Break down the content of your site into heading > summary > detail blocks. Your web pages should be skimmable, so break it down. Check out my article about writing skimmable web copy..
• Make sure your national organization provides a link to you..
• If your group is involved in events with lots of “Kodak Moments” then have a digital camera ready to capture them. Choose the best (only) and upload those to a dedicated Flickr account. Then set up one of the simple Flickr Flash slide shows on your website. It’s incredibly easy. TIP: Make a photo set called “Latest” that you refer to on your site - then you can shuffle pictures in-and-out of that “photo set” within Flickr. The website will show the latest ones automatically on the badge!.
• Be absolutely sure that the “Title” tag of your website matches the most common search people do to find you. If your non-profit is called “Kidspromise of Kentucky”, then you don’t want a title tag that says “Untitled Page” or “Home Page” — it should say “Kidspromise of Kentucky - Children’s Charity in KY” for example.
• Do not put dated material (e.g. news) unless you commit to updating it. If you cannot make such a commitment, keep your website date-independent. Stale news items causes people to worry the rest of the site is out-of-date..
• Never use a splash page (a page you must ‘get through’ before seeing your real home page.) Never waste your limited time on “flash animation” or other frivolous endeavors. For every minute spent on such a thing, you could have found several in-bound links or possibly improved your sites readability.
• If your entire site will be updated by one energetic person, consider using a blogging platform as the centerpiece of your entire website - and no, you don’t have to call it a blog. You can choose from dozens of free blogging templates. I recommend wordpress as your blogging environment, but have someone help you set it up on your own domain name. One inexpensive and quick way to set it up is to use bluehost.com as they host Wordpress 2.0 out of the box. Other blogging environments are fine, too. Call it a website. It’s okay.. Just make absolutely sure you use your own domain name!
• In your printed material, give people a reason to visit your site. “We’re on the web” is not a reason. “You can donate on our site today - any amount will help a child.” is a reason. See illustration..

See the tips above….

Resources

Raising Thousands (if Not Tens of Thousands) of Dollars With Email - A Review
Top 10 Tips for Online Fundraising
Study Finds Online Donors Are Younger, More Generous

It’s that time of year again - the Internet Registry & Optimization Bureau is coming to town! Trouble… right here in river city! They’ve bothered three of my already-busy clients with this crap, so I thought I’d shove a post up the Google tree and tell them to FK themselves on behalf of everyone.

If you see the following on your fax machine I suggest you find yourself a real SEO as fast as you can, and by all means don’t send them your money. Anyone who has to resort to fake invoices via unsolicited fax on a bizarro domain name doesn’t deserve your business.

It would be poetic justice to send them a big-assed email attachment like this GIF with %256 high-res bills on it to their email address.

warning big file! (right click to save as)

Every week I see it, an individual and a company facing off - or one business toe-to-toe with another - over domain names. And it always happens when one or another of them are faced with pressures of site deadlines, launch dates, or other critical in-house problems. The pressures makes everyone grumpy, and what otherwise could have been handled with a simple conversation end up in the content of legal documents and ugly correspondence - even sometimes the courtroom. Some classic cases involving VW and Nissan are some of the most-told stories about the history of domain name law.

If companies would only take the time to build domain name monitoring into their property asset monitoring schemes, this issue would probably be reduced dramatically. Small companies are the ones that seem to be hurt the most. Just this week, our own beloved independent theatre was embroiled in a domain name dispute with a volunteer who’d been working on the site for a long time. It was a hand-adjusted job, and probably took hours to update each week.

If someone had taken the time to review the domain name using a tool such as whois.sc, they’d have seem trouble coming - it was registered to the volunteer - not the Theater. Now, with a new website about to be launched (not by my firm) they are unable to use what is undoubtedly the only name that makes sense - and the one with hundreds of incoming links and search engine rank. I wish them luck in resolving it amicably.

This has also affected some of my clients, and countless other businesses. I would propose that companies build domain name review into their calendars twice annually. Don’t assign this task to your web designer - have your CFO/CIO/COO do the check. If you’re a small firm, pick someone else to keep an eye on it. It’s sort of geeky, but a really nice little domain monitoring tool is over here.

The most important domain data is the registrant information and the expiration date. With the registrant information set to your corporate entity, you have a well defined course of action even with an uncooperative web host or designer squatting on your name. If the registrant is not set up properly, things get complicated. Of course, the expiration date is important, as an expired name is like a lost child - it can wander into some very dark places.

I think it’s usually best to ask your web host to set up an email alias for your domain name administrative and billing contacts - that is, something like domain@yoursite.com. This email alias should cause any message sent to it to send notes to your web designer, your CFO/CIO/COO, and your accountant. Everyone should know that a name is expiring or when something changes on the registration.

One last note about web development voluntarism. There is a deeper issue at work here, and something I will probably write more about. When website design and development is volunteered for charity, I recommend that the developer produce invoices for the work and have them signed off as contributions. Otherwise, I’ve found that the organization in question does not value the contribution.

In fact, VERY FEW companies realize how much work it is to maintain a website that changes all the time. I recommend to just about all non-profits that come to me that they use a content management system such as Joomla to do their site so they can operate in a self-managing autonomous fashion, or easily transfer the effort between volunteers. Having a custom-built, glass-house website that only one person knows how to tweak is asking for trouble. But this is the only thing many amateur web designers know how to do!

First they block whois inquires from 3rd party vendors (so you must view all their freaking ads and get it via their own pages) and now they set an all time high for domain registration costs!

(Probably has to do with an error similar to the one that caused that probe to smash into Mars a couple of years ago. Decimals misplaced, or whatever)