Ever notice the "Products" tab in your listing.  You might think you would enter your products under the Dashboard -> Business Information, but nope, it's not there.  It's actually hiding under the Publish tab (at the top of the page when you are in the Dashboard), then the "Products&Services" link in the left navigation.  You can enter a product title, description, product number, and photo.  Adding products will allow your visitors to learn more about your products and services and will also help your listing in the search results. Here is a link to a video the Merchant Circle people developed. If you'd like to visit us, we are the Austin Web Design company Lone Star Internet, Inc. ...read more

Five Things To Consider With All Home Theater Or Wiring Related Installations: 1. Exterior walls are known to be more difficult to run wires behind but almost never impossible. If you must have wires run inside an exterior wall, consider drywall repairs as an option in case the attic does not give access to that part of the wall. 2. Allowing your installer to cut holes in the drywall may seem like a last resort option but it can actually save you money on the installation in most cases (if needed, most installs typically would not need any drywall holes) The holes can be patched for a relatively small cost and if done right, you will never know there was a hole in the first place. These holes allow the installer to access parts of the home that are relatively closed off from the attic. Without attic access, running wires without cutting holes in the drywall could take hours instead of minutes. 3. Wireless home theater systems should be avoided, they are not truly wireless anyway, they still have wires for power and the sound is never as good as a hard-wired system. Also, avoid home theater in a box setups if possible. You can get a much better system for only a little more cost. Buy the receiver, components and speakers separately. 4. Think about how much usable space you could save when you mount your television and hide all of your components (blu-ray dvd, cable box, receiver etc) out of the way somewhere(a closet or pantry, etc) Also, it would look much cleaner to have no wires visible and only a television mounted against the wall. 5. Always have your installer add more wire than you need, at the least have them leave a pull string for every run they do so that at anytime in the future you decide to add something, it will be easy to tape on your new wire and pull it through, or better yet, it will already be there waiting for you. ...read more

Page content is still king!  Search engines index all the text on the pages of your site to attempt to determine how well your web page matches a search.  So you will want to make sure you use the search phrases you identified in our first article 'Search Engine Optimization - First Steps' in your web pages.  Repeating the phrase 3 -4 times in the page content is a good rule.  Don't forget the description meta tags. Now let's discuss links.  This is where Google came in and search engines got a lot smarter.  Search engines now look at pages that link to your pages as well as your page's content.  They figure that if people link to your page, it must have superior content.  The actual algorithm used by the search engines is a carefully guarded secret, but here is a description of the basic premise.  To determine ranking the search engine will not only look at the page content, it will also look for other pages with content matching the search phrase and see what pages they link to.  The text on which the link to your page is applied is also considered.  If you are in the real estate business in Austin, TX and someone links to your site on the phrase "Austin real estate", that would be preferable to "Joe Bob Brokers, Inc.".  All links to your site are good, but links to your site from pages that index well for your selected search phrases are better, fewer links to other sites on the page is better, and if the link is on the search phrase, that's even better. There's a whole industry now devoted to building up links to web sites.  You might have received email from these folks.  What most of them are doing is paying independent contractors that own their own domains to place links on their sites.  Typically these are low value links in that the pages containing your link don't index well for the search phrases you are interested in and there may be quite a number of links on the page.  Typically they will say the link is guaranteed to last forever, but they rarely check the links and it is up to you to monitor them and request a substitute if a link, page, or site disappears. To establish better quality links, I recommend the following: Make sure if you are a member of any industry organizations that they provide a link to your site. Search Google, Yahoo and Bing using your selected search phrases.  Make a list of the top 50 results.  Strip out your competitors (I can pretty much guarantee they aren't going to link to you). Take the resulting list and visit each site.  See if they have a paid link program allowing you to purchase placement on their site.  If not, find an email address you can use to communicate with them and send an email praising their web site and suggesting their visitors might find a link to your site helpful.  I recommend specifying where you would like the link placed and the way you would like the link worded. Use sites like Yelp, Brownbook, Merchant Circle, Indeed, ZoomInfo, LocalSearch.com, MojoPages, YellowBot, ZipWeb, and HotFrog to ensure your company has a listing and the listing has a link to your website. Next you will want to be patient.  It takes several weeks for the revisions you have made to your web site and the links you have established to be indexed by the search engines. ...read more