Good Call Commander!

You should absolutely be suspicious of SEO firms these days. The industry is unfortunately saturated with unscrupulous, downright devious companies that prey on unsuspecting business owners attempting to better their rankings. They pump your site full of fluff and post thousands of links around their web of interconnected spam sites. We’re not saying what they do doesn’t work; in most cases you’ll see some results. But there will be reckoning in a very short time and you will undoubtedly be blacklisted by the major search engines.

How to spot the phonies.

If you hear the work “link farm”. Then run.

Do a Google search of the company. You can probably find out what they’re all about.

If they guarantee you this or that or promise you the world, they are probably blowing smoke.

Ask what they’ll spend their time doing? Is everything Paid-Per-Click or are you doing organic optimization?

Are you locked into a contract where you are forced to stay with the company for a certain period of time?

Local = Trusted in most cases. It is difficult for small local firms to run SEO scams.

There have been some big players that have fallen prey to these black-hat SEO companies. JCPenny comes to mind. A few years back they used a company that did things the wrong way, the real wrong way. And JCPenny paid the price. Google set their search engine results to the back of the line and their web traffic went into a freefall. It took them months to recover.

The point is. Caveat Emptor… buyer beware.

Why is WordPress our Go-To CMS?

Easy. It’s easy. Easy to use, operate and teach. We have dealt with virtually every blogging and Content Management Software out there, in existence, forever. Seen them all. Virtually all of them have their individual issues, yes, even WordPress. But few are as intuitive and easy to learn.

Woocommerce Products Per Page

Interestingly Woocommerce does not seem to have a default setting for ‘products per page’. Unsurprisingly, there’s a simple workaround. Add to your functions.php Replace “28” with whatever number you want. add_filter( ‘loop_shop_per_page’, create_function( ‘$cols’, ‘return 28;’ ), 20 );

Lawn Enforcement Agency Has A New Website

Lawn Enforcement came to us in need of some SEO advice. They were paying another company several hundred dollars per month and getting nowhere. We noted that there were many, many site structural problems with their current design and all the probably needed was a new site and

Is PPC Advertising Worth It?

The answer is: it depends. In our experience it really comes down to your industry, your ad’s effectiveness and … dum de dum dum … money. First, your industry should be visible online in the first place. Holly’s Bakery is probably going to do fine on Google ads

What’s New: Livewire Seminars

Want to become your own SEO specialist? Need to know how to put your site on page 1 but don’t have the capital to invest hundreds to thousands of dollars in optimization? We can help! Our Search Engine Optimization Seminars will teach you how to become your own

CSS3

Lots of new fun with CSS3. CSS makes styling web pages a snap. Now CSS3, the third “version”, allows for incredibly robust styling possible. For instance, background gradients are a breeze when before developers had to create them as images or use CSS ‘hacks’ to accomplish those goals.

Should you be wary of SEO firms?