Chuck E Cheese’s Saginaw
Chuck E Cheese’s Restaurant
5105 Bay Road
Saginaw, MI 48604
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Photo of buisness taken by David Defoe on Feb 25, 2010
Lon Woock Allstate Insurance Saginaw
Lon Woock Allstate Insurance Agency
3085 Bay Road, Suite 9
Saginaw, MI 48603
Business picture taken by David Defoe on Feb 25, 2010
Qdoba Mexican Grill Saginaw
Qdoba Mexican Grill
5165 Bay Road
Saginaw, MI 48604
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Business photo taken by David Defoe on Feb 25, 2010
Dr Marc C Komorowski MD F.A.C.S. Bay City
Dr Marc C Komorowski, MD F.A.C.S.
610 S Trumbull
Bay City, MI
989.893.9393
Dr office building picture taken by David Defoe on Feb 24, 2010
Photography Website Redesign
I’m on the 3rd redesign of my photography website. The current one was easy for me to update but I’m getting feedback from potential customers that they want to see more of my work. The work is on the website but it’s not organized very well. I was using a blog format with is easy for me but is not effectively meeting my customers needs.
I looked at some online resources and have not been very happy with what I was finding or the pricing. It seems that a lot of photographers website look a lot alike and that is probably why customers are expecting me to have a similar type of layout. I want to be able to update the portfolio easily and frequently. Using Lightroom for my workflow I tested a bunch of the website templates and found some issues with each one. After doing some searches for Lightroom website templates I found a few that I liked the look of. Unfortunately they didn’t plug into my website as easily as I would have liked. After some playing around the redesign has started. Check out one of the new pages on my site at http://defoe-photography.com/portrait-photography/
Can You Find My Business?
As the Internet continues to increase the amount of information available at a phenomenal speed some of the basics for business owners are still getting missed. Gone are the days of putting your business listing in the phone book and expecting to get phone calls. In fact I don’t know anyone that still uses the phone book. They are using the Internet to find everything either from their computer of cell phone. As with everything else on the Internet there are a plethora of business listing websites. Most will list your business for free and most require you to sign up in some way.
One very important element to remember is that we are dealing with computers. Remember the saying, “garbage in, garbage out?” This is very true and important to remember in the search engine world. Gone are the days of humans reviewing websites and listing them. The same is true of your business listing. It is very important to make sure that you check your listings and make the data consistant across all the sites the information is listed on. What does this mean? Lets say that your address is 123 North Main Street. This can also be listed as 123 N Main St or 123 North Main St or 123 N Main Street. These are all different addresses to a computer. Pick a way that you are going to list your address and be consistant with every listing for maximum results.
Also, be sure to search for you listing with each site. If you need to update the information claim your listing and follow the instructions for the website. If you are not listed at all be sure to submit your business and follow the conformation process.
So where does a business start when trying to get their information out and accessable to the masses?
The three places to start are:
Google – http://www.google.com/local/
Yahoo – http://local.yahoo.com/
Bing – https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx
Here are some high quality sites that will get you some major exposure because they feed to other major players:
InfoUSA – http://leads.infousa.com/Landing/UpdateListing.aspx
Citysearch – http://national.citysearch.com
Acxiom – http://www.acxiom.com (This company provides data to a ton of listing websites like Yelp, yellowpages.com, superpages.com, local.com and superpages.com. I have not been able to find out how to submit your data to Acxiom and all the links for doing so that I’ve seen on the Internet do not work.)
Following is a list of other listing providers that are simple to get listed with:
HotFrog – http://www.hotfrog.com/
MagicYellow – http://www.magicyellow.com/add_your_business.cfm
CityVoter – http://cityvoter.com
Angie’s List – www.angieslist.com (this site requires a small membership fee)
Discover Our Town – http://www.discoverourtown.com/
WCities – http://wcities.com (My city wasn’t listed and I couldn’t find a way to submit a listing automatically. I submitted an editorial content request. Don’t know what is going to happen yet.)
InsiderPages – http://www.insiderpages.com
YellowBot – https://www.yellowbot.com
Local.com – https://register.local.com
I’m sure there are other websites. These I found relatively easy to use and updated listing quickly.
Don’t have a website for your business? Looking for a website designer in Saginaw? Click Here to contact me for more information and a custom quote.
Google Analytics
I’ve tried out a few website traffic reporting systems, Hubspot, Quantcast, Sitemeter and of course Google. No matter which site I use the results are similar but different. And the stats never seem to match my WordPress Blog Stats. So which one do you use? Which one provides better information? All but Hubspot can be used for free (with advanced features being subscription based). Granted Hubspot is way more than a visitor statistics provider and is a very useful system at a reasonable price.
Quantcast – the free statistics break-up the visitors into US and Overseas. The Quantcast counter on my site is only showing 468 monthly visitors. This is only the US visitors. They are reporting and additional 560 global people. They also give some nice demographic information such as 58% of the visitors to my site are female, 62% are between the ages of 18-49, 31% earn between $60-100k per year, and 44% have finished college. I’m not sure how they get this information but I’ll take it! The other area that is interesting is the section labeled, “Audience Also Likes”. This shows that the people that are visiting my site are likely to visit the following categories of sites: bridal, commerce-food, discount, parenting, fashion/cosmetics. This gives me some information that is helpful in trying to get advertisers and making sure that any banner ads are targeted correctly for my visitors.
Google Analytics – now I look at my google stats and I see that in the past month I’ve had 710 visits with 1,538 page views. The information that I get from Google is a little different from Quantcast. From google I get that 70% of my visitors get to me by search engines, I can see my most popular pages, and my most popular search phrases. From this information I can see that restaurants are the most popular pages and search terms. This would either indicate that I’m heavy with restaurant pages or that there are a lot of searches for restaurants so I should concentrate on that area to build more traffic.
Sitemeter – this site gives me the same information that Google does, visitors, page views and referrers. The reports look ok and the nice this is they give me a little banner I can put on my site so that visitors can see how many visits I’ve had. This is always a nice little ego booster if your numbers are good.
Conclusion – I like Google and Quantcast and they are both free. Because they provide some different useful information I would use them both. This is going to junk up the code of your pages a little but it’s worth it especially if you are trying to get advertising for your site.
Want to advertise on my site? Contact me
Save A Lot Saginaw
Save-A-Lot Grocery
321 North Michigan Avenue
Saginaw, MI 48602
Photo of Save A Lot grocery store taken by David Defoe on Feb 4, 2010
Happy’s Pizza Saginaw
Happy’s Pizza
2007 N Michigan Ave
Saginaw, MI 48602
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Photo taken by David Defoe on Feb 17, 2010
Far East Market Saginaw
Far East Market – Asain Grocery Store
4066 Bay Road
Saginaw, MI 48603
Photo taken by David Defoe on February 15, 2010
