My Local Movers, an on-line directory of preferred local movers, came to ArcStone for a design refresh. What they left with was a striking, professional new design, quality content, and a complete SEO strategy that puts their new site to work garnering more customers.

A Professional Design To Match
My Local Movers specializes in partnering with pre-screened professional movers that operate in a handful of local markets. ArcStone created a design that mirrored the professionalism of their movers, and made distinct local market pages with high quality photos and market specific resources.

Designed For Humans Searches & Search Engines
A critical aspect of the redesign was making the site easier for people AND search engines to navigate. Having a market specific home page, and quote request pages for each local mover market, helps My Local Movers market to specific regions and allows users to quickly navigate to the information pertaining to their move.

For instance, Houston area users can visit /houston/moving-quote to get multiple moving quotes from Houston local movers.

Real Results
At ArcStone we don’t just strive to produce top quality work, we like to see it working for our clients. After the new My Local Movers site launched we carefully studied traffic statistics and leveraged Google analytics to help gauge the redesign’s success. In a few weeks it became clear that our strategy was paying off.

Visit www.mylocalmovers.com to see our work and get multiple moving quotes for your local market. MyLocalMovers.com initially launched in eight markets – Minneapolis/St. Paul; Chicago; Houston; Dallas; Fort Worth; Austin, TX; Milwaukee and Kenosha/Racine, WI. Visit ArcStone’s products & services page to see our capabilities or check out our SEO services page for more information about search engine marketing.

Big news in Facebook land. Starting on June 12th at 11:01pm (to be exact), people and companies using the social networking giant, will be able to create their own “vanity URL”.

What does that mean to you and me? For you, it might mean an easier Facebook address to direct people to, for me it means new search engine optimization (SEO) and branding opportunities to explore.

On The Facebook blog, Facebook Designer, Blaise DiPersia writes,

“We’re planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.”

Note, new Facebookers (those who joined after May 31, 2009) and those fan pages with fewer than 1,000 fans will not be eligible. Sorry newbies!

What does that mean for SEO? Simply put, individuals and companies will be able to market their brands much easier. Did I mention that MySpace and Twitter already offer vanity URLs? Facebook has always lagged behind in this area. Very soon, individuals and companies will be able to easily share their “branded” Facebook URL. For example, in the past, finding someone on Facebook was a bit of a pain. Now people can just use your name.

See Blaise’s example:

A couple of notes, if you want to remain anonymous, you may not want your vanity URL. If your name is John Smith, be prepared for a longer vanity like www.facebook.com/JohnGeorgeFranklinSmith, unless you’re very lucky.

I suspect that there will be a mad frenzy to snatch up popular names and brands. Remember back when those sneaky cyber squatters bought up lots of great domains just to turn around and sell them for mucho dinaro? Facebook says that it is setup to handle trademark infringement cases but still, expect lots of gray areas and legal battles.

One significant thing to note, Facebookers will not be able to register generic terms like ‘houses’. I’m sure there will be a lot of people pushing the envelope on this one. Will you be allowed to select MinneapolisGreenHomes? It’s still pretty generic but it’s a specific, generic term.

Another important note, once you select your vanity URL you cannot go back and change it. Now is not the time to make a typo because you were rushed. Carefully review your selection before hitting that save button.

On a related note, Facebook’s rollout seems to coincide with speculation that Twitter is going to implode because of its inability to scale. It’s a little reminiscent of the hysteria around Y2K. Remember that? Call me a cynic, but how is it possible that this weekend is significant for the two social media giants? I wish I could believe that it’s pure coincidence but…

Be sure to remember to get your Facebook URL rockin’! As for me, I’ll be busy celebrating my son, Jackson’s 9th birthday!

We are pleased to announce the launch of our latest makeover!

Southview Design came to us several years ago (through our friend Kristin Kowler at Genius to Go) in search of a clean, professional site that reflected the caliber of work which they were producing in landscapes. The new site not only improved their image, but made their team proud to share it. That was the site design “version 1″

Just yesterday we launched the all new Southview Design, while the previous site was plenty good they sought a more interactive and engaging user experience – and to continue to their already strong search engine presence. The new site features a striking new look, continually updated project slideshow on the home page, and intuitive navigation scheme. The project gallery allows visitors to explore by image – or quickly filter the list of landscaping projects by Service or by Price.

With this new site Kristin has again provided powerful and effective search engine friendly content, which will continue to build upon the already strong search engine presence Southview Design enjoys. Coupled with the ultra-clean site code and site optimization techniques employed in this go-around we wish them much happiness and success with the new site.

And just in time for Spring!

These days everyone’s first stop for information, any kind of information, seems to be Google. For instance, if you want to find out which rehab clinic a specific celebrity is currently occupying, you could easily find out.

Not surprisingly, Google serves millions of queries for famous names, but chances are they also receive a few queries for your name. To know when people use Google to dig up dirt on you, all that’s required is a Google account, credit card, and five minutes of time.

1) Setup a Google Adwords account here
2) Create a fake ad, something ridiculous so no one will click on it (remember clicks cost you money)
3) Choose the keywords you want to target, make sure to put in all permutations of your name

Once everything is setup you can use Google’s excellent reports to track searches for your name. When done right, this handy service will cost nothing. Although, in case you suddenly become really popular, remember to set a small monthly budget.

Here is my ad in action:

The Seattle Post Intelligencer posted an interesting experimental article in January that compared keynote texts given by Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and Dell’s Michael Dell using keyword clouds. I know I’m a bit behind the times, but the keyword results and lengthy discussion were interesting.

If you scan over each keyword cloud, each speech evokes a different “personality”. While each speech was written for a different audience, you can’t help but notice the branding through repetition.

The popular Tag Cloud site is “getting an overhaul”, but here’s another tag-cloud generator I found while surfing. Go ahead, see what your keyword frequencies are in your web page, term paper, or presidential address.
http://www.tocloud.com/

Google’s done it again. By incorporating historically disparate search results such as videos, news, and blogs into the main body of the first page of search results, Google has effectively closed itself to some of the more disgusting SEO habits.

Some in the burgeoning SEO industry are clearly already a little upset and suggest that Webmasters try to move past Google. I say, good luck. Seems stupid to me–Google’s not going anywhere.

All in all, this is great news for us at ArcStone. We mostly practice organic SEO, which emphasizes quality content rather than obsessive use of keywords by writing content and creating links that are useful to humans and search engines alike.