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In this week’s Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, there’s a link to an article on the Canonical Blog about their new offering of proprietary media codecs available for purchase.  Canonical has partnered with Fluendo and Cyberlink to give Ubuntu users a legal option for viewing and listening to their media.  This is similar to those who purchased a computer with Ubuntu preinstalled– generally there is a small premium factored in to have the media codecs pre-bundled.

This is a wise move by Canonical.  Giving their users a legal option for playing their media will encourage more software and companies to also invest in Ubuntu and all Linux media alike.  The announcement doesn’t quite make it clear, but it sounds like the Medibuntu repository will still be available with instructions for Ubuntu users to download similar codecs for free– illegally in many countries.  The adoption of the legal, non-free software will depend largely on how it is marketed inside Ubuntu.  That is, when you try to play an MP3 for the first time, will a dialog prompt you to purchase MP3 support, or offer an easier link to Medibuntu and the ubuntu-restricted-extras package?

One of the reasons that I moved to Ubuntu in the first place was so I could have software I wanted, free and legally.  It’s nice to finally have the option of legal media codecs as well.  What do you think of the announcement?  Will you pay the $40 for most non-free media codecs, or the additional $50 for DVD support?

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One of the hardest questions I get asked is “What do you do?” Of course I could just say “SEO” and leave it at that, but for the vast majority of people, that will leave them more confused than before they asked the question. There are a number of different levels of explanation I go through, each one a test to see how much the questioner really wants to know and how much they will understand.

Continue reading “Defining SEO For the Uninitiated”

In this new age of social networking and being able to find just about ANYTHING on the internet (Thanks Al Gore!) it seems like your typical websites like Myspace and Facebook are where you can basically find anyone and their mom, literally.  I have experience with both websites and have watched both grow and deteriorate over time.  I’ve still noticed that I spend the majority of my time on websites like these, and it got me to thinking, “What is it about these websites that make me so attracted to them?”

Continue reading “Social Networking: Is it for you?”

A couple weeks ago I bought a bluetooth adapter for my computer in hopes that I could easily backup my cellphone contacts on my computer.  I haven’t yet found a program to sync my cellphone data, but I did find a program to use your phone to lock and unlock your screen when you leave and come back to your desk.  With BlueProximity, your cellphone acts as a wireless “key” to your desktop.

Continue reading “Lock Down Your Ubuntu Computer with A Bluetooth Cellphone and BlueProximity”

Since my upgrade to lead Organic Search Specialist at BKV I’ve been involved in a number of new business pitches. The most recent I’m a part of is for a new client who has partnered with one of our existing paid search clients.  They are going through a site overhaul and need some heavy duty SEO work. I’m talking a serious overhaul too; the client has over 400 individual domains. While they are working off a newly created template, it is still a beast to manage.

Because the client was a partner of one of our existing paid search clients, our strategy was to project our traffic and sales growth numbers off of our current client. What we quickly found out, however, was that this was not going to be possible.

After working out the numbers–direct traffic, search traffic, sales, leads, conversions, etc.–the figures we were coming out with were not making any sense. Somehow we had projected that with a decrease in traffic we could almost double their sales leads. Obviously something was wrong.

When the conversion rate matters

When we went back to the raw data, comparing our existing client to their partner they referred our SEO services to, we saw what the real problem was. Our prospective client was driving plenty of traffic, both through paid search and SEO. What they weren’t doing, however, was converting. Their conversion rate was nearly 1/4th that of what we were benchmarking from.

Finding this out early gave us a huge advantage, as now we can plan and project off 2 separate strategies, regular SEO and increasing website conversions. Justifying our costs is going to be even easier than we expected.

How to increase organic conversions

Increasing organic conversions is different than improving paid search conversion rates. Instead of calling out deals, adding starbursts, or using any other regular direct response techniques, converting organic traffic takes finesse. Instead of blasting potential customers with advertising techniques, the conversions need to come naturally. This can mean a number of things, but sometimes it’s the simplest techniques that make the biggest difference.

Keep it above the fold

Whatever your conversion method may be, you need to have access to it above the fold. This means the first section a user sees when they load a page needs to include your phone number, address, email signup, web form, or any combination of the above. The client we are pitching had their phone number above the fold, but it was tiny, gray on black text that screamed “IGNORE ME!”  Also, their main conversion metric, web leads through a contact form, wasn’t even available on the home page. After clicking through 2 whole layers the user would find the form…below the fold!

Lesson learned

Increasing the conversion rate for a client like this is going to be a no-brainer. With a few simple techniques, their sales leads should increase 2-3 times what they expected. But what have I learned from this? Most importantly, I’ve learned that SEO is about much more than title tags, descriptions and alt tags. At the end of the day the job of an SEO is to make your client richer through organic traffic. Whether that means #1 rankings, leveraging social media, or increasing conversion rates, the client will be happy if there is more money in their pocket.

As I sat there on a Friday night, the only logical thing that came to mind to do was to play stupid 2D games with a couple of my closest friends: my brothers.  The time was 9:26 and I was happily downloading a new game just so I could have fun and be sociable.  Granted this is nothing new to me, because I am an avid gamer.  I tend to like the more interactive games such as first person shooters and MMORPG’s .  My favorite first person shooter game(s) are anything in the Half-Life series, mainly Counter Strike, Counter Strike: Source, and Day of Defeat.  For the MMORPG side of gamer life, I have a new addiction to a game called Minions of Mirth (MoM) that my brother downloaded and bought.  For all you people out there that don’t know what MMORPG stands for, it is an acronym for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.  Games like this include Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Minions of Mirth, Final Fantasy (series), and World of Warcraft (Warcrap in my opinion).

My gaming career goes back quite far; I’m talking back into the first stages of apple computers, back with the computer with green screens, using “floppy disks” that were actually floppy and the size of your average sandwich you’re going to have for lunch.  Granted these games I started out with were all educational and not really for personal amusement, but trust me, it wouldn’t take many more years before I started to find games that I really enjoyed.

As you could probably tell, I was never really one to play games on a game system all day because that just didn’t appeal to me.  I really liked the way a PC felt and played games.  I want to say my gaming really started to emerge once Windows ‘95 came out.  I started out with the cheesy solitaire, minesweeper, and a few games of free cell (even though I still to this day can’t figure out how to play that game).  From there I was introduced to games such as Need For Speed and Doom, and that’s when my career really took off.  I progressed into more strategy based games like Age of Empires, Myst, and Tribes.  From there I moved onto the MMORPG’s and the first person shooters.

After that stage my love for gaming focused more on the first person shooters and the MMORPG’s because I loved the fact that you can interact with people from all around the world who had the same passion as you; to grab a dessert eagle, semi-automatic P-90, 2 flash grenades, an HE grenade, and just storm up the middle to surprise the terrorists and keep them from planting the bomb at bomb site A.  (For those of you who didn’t figure it out, the game described above is Half-Life: Counter Strike).

I don’t really know where my gaming career will lead me next, all I know is right now I feel as if I have a second set of friends that I meet up with every day, all around the world.

Just about every software project uses some sort of versioning control system, and subversion is arguably the most popular tool.  Having your files versioned and backed up in a central repository is essential.  I’ve written about how to set up your own subversion repository, but you can go a step further and install a graphical interface to use subversion right within Nautilus.

Installing and setting up the subversion GUI is as simple as three commands.

1. Install the nautilus-script-collection-svn package:
   

   sudo aptitude install nautilus-script-collection-svn

2. Enable the plugin (this is required to access the plugin from nautilus):
   

   nautilus-script-manager enable Subversion

3. Restart Nautilus:
   

   killall nautilus

Afterwards, Nautilus will have a new entry in the context menu when you right click.  You can now access most basic subversion commands without touching a terminal.

The interface isn’t quite as pretty as some Windows clients, such as TortoiseSVN.  However, it is still a nice alternative for users who prefer a GUI and only need basic functionality.  There doesn’t seem to be any support for merges, and other commands will use the default parameters.

I am a big fan of the previously mentioned Remember The Milk productivity webapp.  It does one thing– manages your Todo list– and it does it very well.  Remember The Milk offers a clean web interface, as well as integration inside Gmail, Google Calendar, and even has an iPhone app.  The only thing that was missing for me, though, was a simple interface for the Linux desktop.  Enter Tasque.

Continue reading “Organize Your ToDo List in Ubuntu with Remember The Milk and Tasque”

I’m thinking about writing about 5 new posts this weekend.  Any requests?