Where to buy light bulbs and fixtures can be confusing, like anything else.

Every once in a while you run across a web site that has many of the desirable aspects you might look for in design and simplicity. These days there seems to be so much clutter and confusion on most sites without thought to what's really trying to be done. BuyLightFixtures.com is a lighting company and has one of those sites which has the simple attitude when people are looking to buy light bulbs or light fixtures. We like this site for how it makes navigation easy with good images and fast load times. Would this be the best way for a search engine to find and spider a site? Does the navigation make a difference when it comes to getting the information found by spiders and in-turn being found by searchers? Most of the time the answer is yes, but it should be interesting to see how this plays out with this particular web site. The simplicity makes it desirable, but the complete nature of the offering also makes a difference in relevancy. We're going to watch this one over time and report back on progress on how well it does and what other things they could do to improve their web marketing situation.

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Lately it's Dunn Brothers coffee for wireless. Nice!

I've really enjoyed the freedom that wireless communications can bring. It's never been something most people think of except for road warriors. For those of us who are on the road, Dunn Brothers Coffee is one of the best places to stop for several reasons. First, the wireless connection is a good one and always has a strong signal. It doesn't block anything that I know of, even e-mail which can be a problem at some wireless locations, epecially hotels. Dunn Brothers also has a wonderful coffee philosophy of fresh roating the beans in the store making them fresher than anything anyone else has. They also don't sweat you hanging out for a bit while you get your work done. How convenient. I don't know if there are Dunn Brothers in other states, but they sure seem to have the winning formula. It's real relaxed too, just the best for the wireless user. This freedom has allowed me to have my office wherever I am. It's the best of all possible worlds.

One of the ways they market themselves is that the wireless connection is free, while other coffee shops charge a fee. I'm sure it brings in more business and they use it as a marketing tool over the competition. Hey, it's cheap and it gives people access freely, they are smart marketers getting an edge over others who don't offer this service.

Web marketing in a new way, RealWebMarketing.com

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The death of a message in a nasty way.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting a fine men's restroom in the area I live in. It was clean and that always makes me feel good, at least having the illusion that disease is far from me. Of course, we know that isn't true, lurking everywhere in public bathrooms are a uncountable number of germs which are cross breeding into super microbes. Apart from the health issues, I saw an interesting thing in the urinal. There was a plastic cover which prevents stuff from being thrown into the urinal clogging it up. But what it said amazed me. The printing on it showed the manufacturer with the tag line, "Don't use drugs". I believe that when your message has a good chance to get urinated on, it has a diminishing factor on your idea or promotion.

I know that if I was a addict, it wouldn't stop me from using drugs. I imagine an addict seeing this and instead of being detered, is reminded that it's time for a little white powder. This gets to my idea of the of a message. When a message is trivialized, it is more than worthless, it actually goes backwards. The idea is that you need to get what you have in front of everyone regardless of the medium. The medium still is the message, that is, it affects the message by what channel it goes through. That why a lot of web marketing makes no sense. Sprayed everywhere like fertilizer, people think that something will grow, but the truth is a seed must have been planted first. In the case of urinal advertising, I can't think of a poorer way to communicate an important message except for maybe spam marketing or banner ads, completely out of context and useless.

Real marketing for higher web site rankings, RealWebMarketing.com

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Does it matter which search engine is top?

Recent information shows that Google continues to te the search engine market by 2 to 1 over nearest rival, Yahoo. But does it matter who is on top of the search engine game. Well, it matters to Google when they can command a premium for paid ads, and I imagine Yahoo looks at it the same. Apart from that, does it matter to the average searcher? I would put to you that it doesn't. It's all about relevant results and I'm sure that most searchers don't care so much about the entity as whether they find what they're looking for. The future could be stolen from Google if the results were just more relevant or easier to use. I don't think people are so loyal to a search engine as much as they are loyal to what they want to find. Whoever can provide those results will be the winner in the future. Although it's harder to capture mindshare after the inital phase of search engine exuberance, it might still be possible to take a siginificant share of the market if the idea is better. It's always been that way no matter what the product or service.

It's real marketing results from RealWebMarketing.com

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Make your point, what are you?

The biggest problem with most web sites is the way they lack direction. Most of the time, they don't stick with thier main objective as a business or thier cause, whatever that may be. It's not unlike seeing business names on the side of a building and wondering what "Tedco" makes. Tedco most likely is the owner's name and he started the company, so hence, Tedco. But it doesn't say anything about the company itself. A company should be able to identify itself in one sentence and if the company name isn't obvious, then the tagline needs to be added. All this is plain to see, but why do so many companies miss it? They miss this concept online too when they have an obscure name and they think people wil just know thier brand. Not so unless they invested big money into a brand building project. So when doing online business or promoting a cause, the mission or tagline must be very evident to people that are finding the web site. People don't like confusion in what they're looking for, they don't mind it in themselves, but they expect organized thinking on the part of others. It's funny how that works. So don't be like other web sites where it can be hard to tell what exactly they do, make your point, what are you?

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Paid ads online, more is less...

It seems as though everybody these days is going to have their own paid advertising. There's nothing to stop the juggernaut of revenue which each search engine believes is the only way to make a dollar. I remember early on, something like 12 years ago, some of the search engines had a very all truistic attitude about search. Of course, that was at the time when people in education still ruled many aspects of Internet life. The question isn't whether paid ads are good or not, that's up for the consumer to decide. The question is when everyone has something like this how much has it devalued everything? I would guess that this is going to cause some searchers to be a little jaded always having to deal with ads not unlike having to do with banners or pop-ups. I imagine there will come a day when people will decide to work with the search engine based on whether they have ads are not. That will also create some opportunities for other kinds of exposure without advertising. It's a little like billboards along the roadway, you see them but you don't really see them. In some ways it's subliminal, but how effective are billboards to a mass audience. I know that search engines have a targeted advertising situation which is better but that's not what I'm questioning. Is the sheer numbers of advertising opportunities going to dilute the results of those already listing. To this I would say, yes.
Now MSN and Ask Jeeves are going to be diving into this whole realm of pay per click advertising, which may be a good thing. I hope it drives down the cost of the whole system of paid advertising. I would guess with increased competition that this is what will happen eventually although not right away.

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Clusty asks, why cluster?

Some of the search engine results that you'll find in the future will reflect something called clustering. Clusty is a search engine that does just that and it's a really good search engine. It clusters results in groups and makes the search a more organized thing. It's also more natural for how we look at things in the world, we tend to put things into groups or categories even in our minds. We don't list things in our heads like some search engines do, we tend to categorize things in our life. If we didn't do that, we would have a harder time making sense of our world as if that wasn't difficult already! So this page that Clusty offers this explanation of why search engine clustering is a good thing. You might want to try to search engine for a while, it's good and it does make it easier to find what you're looking for.

Web marketing for real results, RealWebMarketing.com

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