Category Archives: Technology

The Top Tech-Friendly Cities in the U.S.

Business Tech, Small Business Marketing, Technology, ,

top tech companies in the USA

If your tech company is setting its sites on an office or partnership in another U.S. city, we know where the sharpest, Web-savviest digitalogists are located.

The Mecca of Tech: Silicon Valley

The U.S. tech scene is still heavily slanted toward Silicon Valley. For British entrepreneurs and Web agencies looking to gain a foothold in the states, Silicon Valley is where the cream of the digerati crop is located. Fast-charging entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, IT and engineering veterans and new graduates from Southern California’s tech schools still head here to launch their empires and gain recognition from their peers.

Among the major companies headquartered in Silicon Valley are longtime tech stalwarts Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Apple, Google, eBay, Facebook, Oracle, SanDisk, Symantec and Yahoo. There are many more small-to-medium sized companies and agencies scattered throughout the area as well.

San Francisco, East Coast Still Hot

Smaller tech businesses looking to settle into a great entrepreneurial tech community should look to this Chron.com article on the best tech cities for your company. San Francisco offers great opportunities for a new Brit upstart to explore and call home. Not only are top Web companies like Twitter, Reddit, Yelp and Craigslist all centered in San Francisco, but industry publications like PCWorld, Wired and MacWorld call San Fran home, too.

The East Coast cities like Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., are still at the top of the list of tech opportunities for workers and partnerships, as are the West Coast cities Seattle, Portland (Oregon), Los Angeles and San Diego.

Bringing Up the Rear

There are a few newcomer cities that might be less well-known for tech to some Web agencies. St. Louis (Missouri), Charlotte (North Carolina), Austin (Texas) and Phoenix (Arizona) are the four top cities for job growth in the tech sector, according to a spring study from tech jobs site Dice.com. St. Louis’ tech job listing numbers grew 25 percent, Charlotte numbers were up 22 percent, Austin rose by 16 percent, and the greater Phoenix region, with hotshot digital content agencies like iAcquire Arizona leading the charge, jumped 13 percent.

Still, these smaller cities lag behind the more well-known, older destinations. The fastest-growing U.S. cities when it comes to tech jobs posted on Dice.com are:

1. New York

2. Washington, D.C./Baltimore

3. Silicon Valley

4. Chicago

5. Los Angeles

6. Boston

7. Atlanta

8. Dallas

9. Seattle

10. Philadelphia

About the Author: Peter Marino
Peter Marino is the owner and CDO of reelWebDesign.com, a boutique digital marketing and mobile website design company in NYC.

SEOPressor Plugin Review

Blogging, content marketing, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Technology, Web Design, , , ,

SEO plugin for WordPressOptimisation of onsite content for better SEO is something that’s always been and most likely always will be important. In essence, all SEO tools are there to help you rank better and SEOPressor is no different to the rest in that regard. So, let’s take a more in-depth look into the WordPress plug-in.

On-Page Management

Like most other tools of this nature SEOPressor looks at the usual variables, including length, keyword placement, keyword density, font decorations, images, links, and overall SEO score. However, in addition to this it also adds fonts and inserts alt text to images automatically. It also suggests modifications and warns of over optimisation also – a very useful feature, albeit a quite common one

Another useful addition is the fact that it supplies you with a full list of LSI keywords, taken directly by the plug-in from the search engine. This allows you to make your text that little bit broader in SEO terms and is something of benefit.

Linking with SEOPressor

Another thing that was impressive about SEOPressor was the fact that it allowed you to specify the specific keyword you want to link to and then do so to an individual URL. The plug-in then automatically does so for similar operations in the future. It also allows you to use snippets from SERPs and fully customise these snippets and what they show. This is ideal for those advertising on their blogs.

Social Media

SEOPressor also utilises social media and provides support for Facebook OpenGraph and Twitter Card too. This allows you to increase a sites visibility and integrate search to bring more views and more traffic to your site – always a nice benefit.

Slow

One of the things that we didn’t notice, but was mentioned regularly was that SEOPressor causes sites to slow down slightly after installation. This perhaps is down to the font decoration of keywords. In addition, we’d also say that due to the fact that the plugin tends to decorate keyword fonts, it could potentially lead to the chance of over optimisation.

Costs

Of course, because of the market and the number of competitors offering similar products price is central here. The licence for one site is $47, while a unlimited licence is $97. So, we’d say that when looking at the competition, it’s expensive for one and good value for an unlimited site licence that’s both unlimited as regards time and also the number of sites you can place it on.

The main competitors are ClickBumpSEO, Easy WP SEO and PushButton SEO all of which vary in their quality and pricing, though provide most of the options of SEOPressor.

SEOPressor comes out well against all three of these, though due to the price of Easy WP SEO it’s possibly not the best option for everyone out there (Easy WP SEO is lower in price and offers analysis of the whole HTML document, not just the content). However, it’s a very useful addition to any WordPress site and makes onsite optimisation a lot easier.

Our guest blogger, Cormac Reynolds, writes for UK digital marketing site www.mysocialagency.com and has worked in the area of social media and SEO for a number of years now.

The Ten Most Expensive Domains Ever Sold

Small Business Marketing, Technology,

Top selling domain names of all timeThese days, you can get a .com domain name for as little as $9.99. But if you’ve already registered a domain and a brand wants it, it can be worth millions.

One thing is for sure – big brands are willing to pay big bucks to snap up internet real estate if it suits their needs.

If you sell shoes, wouldn’t you want to get your hands on shoes.com, even if you’d just be using it to direct your visitors to your main website?

Of course you would and you’d probably also be willing to go to great lengths to make it yours.

So here are the top 10 most expensive domains ever sold:

1. Insure.com

Insure.com is the most expensive domain name ever sold, having been bought for $16M by Quin Street in 2009. “We have sold our Insure.com name and specified website content in a significant cash transaction that we think is in the best long-term interest of our shareholders,” said Robert Bland, CEO of Insure.com.

2. Sex.com

Sex.com is second on the list, having been sold in 2006 for $13M which saw it break into the Guinness Book of World Records in the High Price Paid for a Domain category. In October 2010 it sold again, this time for $14M.

3. Fund.com 2008

Fund.com was sold privately and at $9.9m it was the highest cash price sale ever reporter, having been paid for in an all-cash transaction.

And it wasn’t a one-off – writing at the time Ron Jackson of DN Journal said: “With the highest sale on record, another three sales in the six-figure range and 44 sales reaching at least five figures this was a pretty darn good week for domains.”

The fact the economy was supposedly on the skids at the time made the high volume of transactions even more impressive.

4. Porn.com 2007

The adult industry’s top domain name – porn.com – sold for $9.5M in 2007 to MXN Limited. Given the success of sex.com, it’s slightly surprising it didn’t go for even more.

5. Fb.com

Facebook bought Fb.com for $8.5M in November 2010 from the American Farm Bureau Federation, which is 42 times the amount the company originally paid for Facebook.com. “The Farm Bureau agreed to sell us fb.com and we in return have agreed not to sell farm subsidies,” Zuckerberg said in a post on techcrunch.com.

6. Business.com 1999

Another big sale was for business.com that was sold in 1999 for $7.5M. The domain was initially registered by two friends who wanted to use it to create their own B2B site. Then they sold it for 46 times what they originally paid. How’s that for a profit?

7. Diamond.com

If you’re selling jewellery online, diamond.com is one of the most desirable domain names, which is why it changed hands for $7.5M for back in 2006.

8. Beer.com

It’s understandable that Interbrew would want to own beer.com, which was originally used as a review site where people could go and rate their favourite beers. In 2004, Interbrew stepped in and bought it for $7 million. However, rumours are that Interbrew actually paid the beer.com owners in stock, rather than cash.

9. Israel.com

There’s no information on who actually bought Israel.com for $5.88 million in 2008. However, the seller, Joel Noel Friedman, became a celebrity when he revealed he decided to sell the domain to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary.

10. Casino.com

Casino.com is the 10th most expensive domain name ever sold and it’s now owned by a company in Gibraltar that paid $5.5 million for it in 2003.

So there you have it – ten domain names which netted their respective owners a fortune. Maybe yours could be next.
Guest post by Alex Gavril of 123-reg.co.uk, the UK’s largest domain name provider.

How Google Glass Could Change SEO

Blogging, Google glass, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Technology, , , ,

How Google glass will change EOMost of us who have been in the SEO game for a few years, will be somewhat reliant on Google to continue our trade. Google is the largest search engine by far, so it’s there that we want to reach the top of the SERPs, and it’s generally ‘what Google say goes’ as far as our promotional strategies are concerned.

But Google is reliant on hardware to be any use. In order to access Google at all, we need to be using a computer, smartphone or tablet of some kind – and so changes in the hardware industry could very easily have a big effect on the way we optimise for search. With Google Glass poised to make a huge splash in the hardware scene sometime soon, how might we expect this to alter the way we use search?

Factors to consider

Of course for Google Glass to have any impact on SEO, it is somewhat necessary for the device to actually be a hit. If nobody uses Google Glass, then it’s not going to affect search – end of story. That said though, even if Google Glass doesn’t take off in a big way, it could certainly prepare the market for the introduction of other augmented reality hardware. It might be that Google Glass flops, but ‘The Viewmaster 5,0089’ becomes a huge hit. And if that happens, then Google needs to make sure that it is the number one search provider still – lest Bing get in there first and steal a big portion of the market.

The New Search

How Google Glass will change search

Assuming though that Google Glass is a hit, and that the competition doesn’t turn up and throw a spoke in the works, we will likely all be using Google to search still – just on our faces.

Currently Google Glass isn’t really a device that you might surf the web with, but as developers start creating apps for it, we’ll probably find browsers popping up and people searching the web ‘hands free’.

And to do this, people will want to be able to use voice commands. With no other way to input text, they will be completely reliant on the in-built voice-recognition software in order to get the search results they want. In turn, this means we might start seeing a change in the kinds of keywords that people use – they’ll be searching for things that come more naturally to say rather than things that come more naturally to type.

This will likely mean a wider variety of keywords, and it will probably mean more ‘long tail’ keywords – though because voice-recognition isn’t perfect, most people will still probably want to keep their searches rather brief.

Searching on the Move

Augmented reality with Google glass

The fact that people will be walking around as they wear their hardware though, might also affect the kinds of things that they search for – we might start to see people searching for local conveniences more often for example, or for the weather reports.

Likewise, Google is likely to include location services even more closely as more and more people start searching on the go (something that has already happened to an extent thanks to the popularity of smartphones). Watch this space to find out what else might change, but just make sure that your site and your SEO is ready.

Today’s guest writer, Mike, is an internet marketing consultant who works at Wisdek. He is a passionate blogger and likes to share his strategies and views on marketing. He loves technology and is fond of knowing more about the latest gadgets that enter the market.