admin, Author at Web Geek SEO

Bad Yelp Review Leads to $750,000 Lawsuit

Have you ever carelessly posted a Yelp review? Watch out, it could come back to bite you. For one unlucky reviewer, the bill for her scathing commentary might be $750,000 — you read that right. On Yelp, and other sites, Jane Perez typed out her dissatisfaction after Christopher Dietz did some construction work for her. Dietz in turn took her to court saying her comments amounted to defamation; the courts agreed with him and Perez had to take down specific segments of her written reviews.

Along with criticizing his work, Perez wrote that she suspected Dietz of stealing jewelry from her home. Unfortunately for her, Dietz was not one to take the importance of online reputation management lightly. Neither should you. Every day, more folks are gaining a deeper understanding of the impact their online reputation has on their lives. The First Amendment protects your right to express your opinions, but making false and malicious claims about another individual or entity may put you on the wrong side of the law.

Being measured with one’s words when speaking before the public is advised. It may hard, being used to oversharing, and all, but the consequences of not doing so may be even harder to face.
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Read More: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/12/09/166815629/bad-meal-to-yelp-or-not-to-yelp?sc=emaf

What to Look for in a Data Center

Written By Rack Alley

Just about every company these days needs a data center. Unless you’re a truly one or two person business, you definitely want a data center to help you reach the highest possible heights in your industry. This is especially true in LA, where competition can be fierce and there are so many resources around that if you aren’t taking advantage of them, you can bet your competitors are, meaning you may soon be in trouble.

While there are many ways to get a leg up in LA, you should definitely put your money into a data center. The right LA data center will help you do much more with less. That’s because you’ll have experts in the field basically housing and looking over the majority of your digital cache.

The problem is that you need to make the most of your digital presence, but doing so takes a lot of hardware. Most companies just don’t have the resources to house it. Those that do would then need to spend even more money on IT experts to keep watch over it.

If you have an LA colocation company helping out though—not even a data center, necessarily—you can get a physical space for your hardware, get all of its benefits and spend only a fraction of the amount.

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If you need a Los Angeles data center, don’t waste your time considering all your options in Southern California. Instead, let the experts at Rack Alley show you what is possible now and in the future for your company.

DMA Guidelines on Email Appending

Written by eTargetMedia.

Email appending is an incredibly effective tactic for businesses looking to increase their database of email contacts. It involves matching a company’s existing database with email databases controlled by third-party email marketing companies to fill in the gaps where a company has contact information for a person but does not have their email address. A leading company such as eTargetMedia can have a success rate of 15 to 35 percent in their email appending services.

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has released guidelines on the proper methods of email appending for businesses and third-party providers. The DMA recommends that a marketer only append an email address to an existing contact when one of the follow occurs:

They have received explicit permission from a consumer to be added to a database.

There is an existing online or offline business relationship with the consumer.
The consumer received notice that they would receive third-party email offers and did not opt out.
Reasonable effort has been made to match the consumer’s contact record with their email address.

The DMA further recommends that marketers refrain from selling, renting or trading a customer’s appended email address unless the customer has given their permission first. The organization also recommends that marketers give customers whose email contacts have been appended the option to opt out of email communications. It’s a good best practice to reach out to email contacts received through appending and ask for their permission before sending them any email marketing campaigns. Companies also need to have a method of tracking permissions and opt outs.

eTargetMedia specializes in helping companies of various sizes develop highly effective email marketing campaigns. They have a database of more than 150 million email contacts that can be targeted to various demographics.

How To Work To Erase Bad Reviews Online

Article provided by Reputation Stars

Every business runs into unhappy customers, and in many instances it can only take one unhappy customer to create a very negative perception about what you offer in terms of products or services. A negative review that appears on an internet site can do a lot of trouble for you, spreading on social networks, linking in news stories, comments sections, and more. There are ways that you can help fight these negative reviews though and work to bury them so that they are not the first thing people read about when learning about your business online.

Online reputation management is extremely important for every business, and can go a long way to making those bad reviews virtually disappear. Unfortunately on a site such as Yelp, there is no delete button to get rid of a review you do not agree with. What you can do though is utilize the power of things such as link building and social networking to help grow a reputation with your online business online. There are several strategies out there, but the key to all of them is that the more proactive you are, the better off you are going to be in the short and the long run.

When you have put the work in, the results that you see for your business when you search for it on a search engine such as Google will be more than positive. The reality of it is that when you have a business, you want your reputation in the online communities out there to be as positive as possible. This will drive new customers to your business to try your products or services. This in turn is going to allow you to grow your sales and grow your business overall.
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This article was provided by Reputation Stars. Reputation Stars provides online reputation management and reputation monitoring services. If you have negative reviews and feedback online, visit Reputation Stars website for more details on how they can help you.

4 Content Writing Tips

Article Submitted by iClimber, who provides content writing services.

Most professional writers will tell you that keeping it simple is probably the best way to go. Using big words doesn’t make you look smart but makes your reader feel stupid. That’s the only mistake that any budding writer should avoid.

So here are four tips that will work for all types of content writing:

#1: Write in short sentences

The thumb of rule is to keep it to one idea per sentence. This will make it easier for the reader to digest what you have written. Conversely, it will only cause confusion for the reader if you write longer sentences.

#2: Write in the ‘active voice’

To put it crudely: writing in the passive voice can come across as boring to the reader. The active voice involves writing in this sequence: subject-verb-object. The reverse, as you might have figured by now, is writing in the passive voice, and what you use sparingly.

#3: Maintain short paragraphs

Similar to writing short sentences, when you break information in small ‘chunks’, the reader is able to understand what you are writing clearly, and with no confusion. This is usually not demonstrated in academic writing where there are several sentences in a paragraph.

Feel free to limit a paragraph to one word too.

#4: Delete ‘fluff words’

Words like rather, little and very tend to drain the life out of your sentences. The reason for this is because these words can dilute the message that you are trying to convey but most of all, can serve as a distraction.

Web Design Tips for Better SEO

Guest Post Submitted by Tony Petros of Web Design Express

Be sure that your titles are written well just as your heading should be. You will need to utilize keywords that you believe that people are looking for within your header tags. You want the H1 tag on every page to correctly describe the content of the page. The better your headline is in attracting visitors, the better it will be for search engines.

When designing your website, it is important to use natural language. You do not want to try to stuff keywords on any of your pages in order to make them more keyword dense. Search engines do not respond well to keyword stuffing. You want to have the right amount of keywords, not too little and not overboard either. Try and use semantically related words when designing your website. In other words, you don’t want to use the same keyword phrase over and over again.

You will need to be sure that your site does not pop up with 404 errors. You can prevent this by using certain webmaster tools that will detect the 404 errors when Googlebot is spidering your website. Be certain that every single link that is coming in to your website as well as the internal links from your site do not make 404 errors or you will lose visitors.

Make an internal linking system by using keywords and user friendly workings within your links to assists your visitors in going from one page to another on your site. The navigating must be easy for your visitors so they know where they are on your site and where they are able to go.

How to Develop User-Friendly Content

We all know how to create search-engine friendly content, but what about the user experience? While you want to develop search-engine friendly content rich with keywords, you also want to make sure the content is written for human beings. But how do you know if you have quality content on your site? It’s time for a review.

Conduct a manual, in-depth review of your content. Quality content should be easy to find, readable, and credible. Start by reading every word on your site and check for spelling, grammar, and typos. You can also take this time to shorten complicated sentences. Next, consider style. Is the content written in a style that is interesting or captivating? Finally, imagine you’re a new visitor; is the font large enough to see and easy to read?

Once you’ve polished the content, check the facts. There is nothing more damaging to your reputation than offering wrong information. Drop misinformation and errors, and back up your facts with proper sources. Now is also a great time to delete outdated information or information that is longer relevant to your site, products, or services.

In short, keep your content fresh, fun, and simple, and chances are your visitors will want to hang around long enough to buy something.
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Article submitted by Richard Yong of www.SEOBuild.net

Questions to Ask Your Web Host Before Buying

Article Submitted by Host Visa – Hosting Info & Blog

While there’s no doubt that you should have a website for your business and which can cause you to miss out on profitability if not considered, you should also be able to find the best web hosting service for yourself.
And in order to do this, here is a list of questions that might help you to do so:
#1: Tech Support
a. What kind of tech support do they provide?
b. Do they charge extra for tech support?
#2: Security
a. What kind of protection do they offer for the site?
b. What measures have they taken in order to ensure that unauthorized users will not compromise the safety of your website?
#3: Storage
a. How much storage is offered with their package?
b. Do they offer extra megabytes as well that will facilitate the growth of your business?
#4: Domains
a. Is the web hosting company going to register your domain name?
b. Will they charge extra for doing so?
#5: Design
a. Do they have a website builder that is easy to use?
b. Will you have ‘control’ over updates and content changes?
#6: Email
a. Will you domain name be included for the email address that you obtain?
b. Are there any extra email addresses (and aliases) that they provide, and if so, at what cost?
#7: Value
a. How is what they are offering better than the competition?
b. If so, provide examples of why their product superior than their competitors?

Bing’s New Policy on Removing Defamatory Content

In a new article published in SearchEngineWatch.com, Pierre Zarokian writes about the changes in Bing’s policy on removing sites from its search engine based on court orders. It appears that several attorneys have found out that Bing refuses to remove certain content from its search engine, even after a court of order declares the content defamatory. This could be bad news for companies that have defamatory content posted against them. This technique was one of the only ways you can get defamatory posts removed from such sites as Ripoff Report. Some of these court orders are actually honored by Ripoff Report itself, but usually if it is a default judgement it may not be accepted, which is when you want to submit your order to the search engines direct and hope that they would honor the removal.

The article includes contains details from the attorneys, Bing’s response to the recent claims, and interesting commentary by Eric Goldman, a prominent professor of law.

More details can be found at:
Details on Bing’s Policy to Remove Defamatory Content by Our CEO