Tips

A lot of people talk about the importance of SEO (a.k.a. search engine optimization.) And it is important. If your site is about an uncommon, commodity, or undifferentiated topic and has to compete with hundreds or thousands of too-similar sites it can be really important. There are a lot of people out there who specialize in SEO. Some charge thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars, and some will use every trick in the book to help get you on top. Including a lot of shortcuts... some of which Google and the other search engines will eventually block. Why?

This post is about how you can use your own website to enhance... or counter... Yelp's influence on your business.

Prospective clients have been asking me about Yelp lately, wondering if there was anything to be done about their review policies. More than one has asked why positive reviews keep disappearing behind Yelp's notorious "Filtered" link. Another has been tearing his hair about dealing with an unfavorable review on his Yelp page that's pretty clearly referring to someone else with the same name.

A lot of bloggers have a hard time deciding when their post is "done" enough to press the the Submit button.  Stephen Dodd blogs for the time-tracking app vendor OfficeTime.* In a recent post he offered three tips for time management that work very nicely as "am I ready to post this" tips.  Stephen writes

Greetings everyone!  Here are a 3 time management tips to help you get out of the office and get into the rest of your life!

In the bad old days (not very long ago, actually) all web sites were stuck with a very small handful of live fonts.  Helvetica/Arial, Times Roman/Courier, Comic Sans, Georgia, and... not much else.  If you did want anything else you did what almost everyone did and that was either do without or make images of text and plop them down.

Nutshell version: easy to remember phrases like "give me your answer true" are waaaaaay harder to "crack" than short, cryptic words like "D@1sy-DaI&y".

The execllent technology cartoonist Randall Munroe (who publishes credible technical research in cartoon form) offered the following observation about passwords and hacking.

From Cody Fink at MacStories: How To Wrangle Outlook 2011 To Work With Gmail

Neither Microsoft nor Gmail are exactly famous for working well with others.  Outlook uses non-standard folder names, Gmail requires desktop clients to use unusual ports, and so on.  Fink isn't shy about expressing his displeasure but he does a good job explaining what he went through so you won't have to.