Some of us are old enough to remember the days when the biggest map publishers were the oil companies, from Esso to Chevron to Atlantic to Shell. Times have changed. Gasoline now contains ethanol instead of lead, and those maps are only found in the “Collectibles” category on eBay. Some of the biggest map publishers are now MapQuest, Yahoo, and Google. Until very recently, when you needed a map to appear on your website, the challenges could be significant. Maps were time-consuming and costly to produce, and static maps had to be accompanied by a laundry list of travel directions from various points of origin.

The biggest problem with the first generation of online mapping (most notably MapQuest) was that the locations were often incorrect, particularly if your business was in a remote location or did not have a precise street address. It is no surprise that many websites still warn visitors not to use online mapping services for travel directions. With the advent of both nationwide 911 standards and GPS coordinates, many of those early issues have either been addressed or are easy to correct. In some instances, online mapping software might still be inappropriate for your particular business. For example, if you run a campground and the service insists upon sending travelers over routes that include covered bridges or steep grades that are either impossible to cross or dangerous to navigate with a large RV, online mapping may not be right for you. In fact, the same problems might occur when drivers use their vehicles’ GPS navigation systems. These are exceptions that will probably still mandate the use of carefully written travel directions and custom-built static maps.

For the rest of us, Google has provided a solution in the form of Google Maps. Google Maps are fully customizable to fit any page layout, and users can pan, zoom in or out, and generate travel directions directly from any point of origin to your door. Better yet, Google will allow you to make changes to your Google Maps listing, including the addition of your Web address, keywords, a 200 word description … even up to 10 photos from your website. Best of all, they make the process simple. Here are step-by-step instructions:

First, go to the Google Maps website: http://maps.google.com/. (You can also simply go to Google, do a search, then choose the “Maps” option at the top of the page.) Either way, enter the name of your business in the search box. Hopefully, it will appear as the sole entry in the search results. In rare instances, Google Maps may not be aware of your business, in which case you might try entering your exact street address. (If more than one listing appears for your business, you can request removal of any duplicates.) Click on the resulting link to go to your map, then click on the “edit” and “claim your business” links in the information balloon which overlays your map. Choose the “edit my business information” option, then click “continue”. (Alternately, you can click on the “more info” link next to your business in the Search Results frame on the left, then choose the “Add or edit your business” link.) On this next page, you can correct your marker location or any of your listing information. You will be able to add your Web address, e-mail address, alternate phone numbers, and more … including a 200 character description of your business. On subsequent pages, you can add your business hours, types of payment that you accept, up to 10 photos, even a link to a YouTube video or an online coupon … all for free! (Later, you can also ask satisfied customers to go to this page, click on the “write a review” link, and write favorable reviews that will help to persuade new customers to come your way.) Once you are done making your additions and corrections, ask for a telephone validation, choose the “call me now” option, and the process will be complete as soon as you type the assigned 4-digit PIN number into your telephone keypad when the automated phone call arrives seconds later. Most changes will appear within only minutes or hours, although significant corrections to the location of your business (the marker on the map) will be confirmed by a human editor and take longer to implement.

Now that you have enhanced your listing (and made any necessary corrections), you are ready to add this map functionality to your website. This process is slightly more complex. If you are uncomfortable with HTML or do not directly maintain your website yourself, replacing the existing map on your website with this code should be easy enough for your webmaster to implement in less than ten minutes. Go back to your Google Maps listing, then choose the “Link to this page” option in the upper right of the page, then choose the “Customize and preview embedded map” option. Choose the “Custom Map Size” option, and enter the width and height (in pixels) that will best fit your page layout. (If this seems too complex to you, you can always choose one of the “Small”, “Medium”, or “Large” preset options.) Copy and paste the resulting HTML into the location on your website’s travel directions page where you would like the map to appear. (If you would like to make the map look a bit cleaner on your page, I would suggest deleting the HTML after the </iframe> closing tag.) That’s all there is to it!

Compare this professional, highly interactive map that now appears on your website with the hand-drawn, confusing map that you might have been using before (and that your competitors may still be using on their websites). Now go back to your Google Maps listing, click on the “more info” link, and see the enhancements that you’ve made, fully aware the similar enhancements probably do not appear alongside of your competitors’ listings because they will not have taken the time to follow these simple steps. The entire process will take very little time, probably less than 20 minutes. As a bonus, keep in mind that your Google Maps results page will also represent one more inbound link to your website, enhancing your site’s search engine ranking!

This article was originally written in August 2008 for Northeast In-Sites, the newsletter of the Northeast Campground Association. It was later reprinted in Woodall’s Campground Management.

An online version of a seminar which I presented back in 2008 at the 44th Annual Northeast Conference On Camping, in Springfield, Massachusetts has been frequently referenced on other blogs. In particular, there are many links to a sample model release / waiver form that I have made available. The following is an excerpt from that seminar that covers the topics of Releases, Rights Management, and Legal Issues involving photography of guests at a campground, resort, tourist attraction, theme park, ski area or other similar place of business. Bear in mind that I am not a lawyer and that none of the information presented herein should be considered to be legal advice.

We are living in a society that is obsessed with litigation. We are also living in a society where our rights to personal privacy are under constant attack. When it comes to advertising photography, my recommendation is that you do your best to protect both your interests and the rights of your guests. Never, under any circumstances, take a photograph of anybody without their advance knowledge or, in the instance of a once in a lifetime candid photo opportunity, by getting their express permission immediately afterward. Always remember that you are taking photographs, not snapshots.

Nobody plans a vacation at a campground (or anywhere else) with either the intention or expectation of becoming a model. On the other hand, over 99% of your guests will be thrilled to be a part of a photo shoot and will go out of their way to be cooperative. Nonetheless, it is important that you at least get people’s implied, if not their signed, consent. I am pleased to provide you with a model waiver template which you are free to use; however, it is important to presume that no waiver or release will ever hold up in court. The rights of the individual will always prevail. The primary purpose of a release is to weed out potential problems from that one person in a thousand who would like to get rich quick and own your business, with the help of his attorney brother-in-law.

If a release is so powerless, when and why should it be used? In a public setting, where nobody is being held up to ridicule, I have always followed two rules:

1. If there are fewer than 7 people in a photo, get them each to sign a release.

2. If there are more than 7 people in a photo, but anybody is prominently featured in the center or foreground, get signed releases.

A third rule might be to always get signed releases for any children whom you photograph, remembering that only a parent of a minor has the legal authority to act in this manner.

If you take a photograph and a person balks about signing the release, refuses to sign the release, jokes about compensation or a lawsuit, or the subject is a minor who is not accompanied by a parent, make a note to not only not use the photo but to destroy the photo in order to prevent it from ever being used unintentionally or without your knowledge (but, as the photographer, with your ultimate responsibility). Should you hire a photographer to take photos on your behalf, you will share any liability which results from that photographer’s failure to exercise due diligence in obtaining a release.

Some resorts incorporate a blanket release into their registration agreement; however, these are much less likely to hold water in court than a signed release (which is already as water-tight as a colander) and are perhaps little better than no release at all.

Again, if you are hiring a photographer, you should be aware of precisely what it is that you are purchasing. As with stock photography, you need to know what rights are being conveyed. Just as certainly as stock photography will always require payment of a fee, no reputable photographer will ever perform what is legally defined as “work for hire”. You will not be purchasing the actual photographs (which is essentially virtual property anyway now that almost all photography is digital) but the rights to use those photographs. If there are any restrictions on their use, aside from actual ownership itself, be sure to get those limitations defined in advance.

Read the entire online seminar by clicking here.

In short, the answer is no.

I was one of four Web developers in a round-table session on broad-ranging Internet topics, presented at a trade association conference in New York this past weekend. In response to an audience question, one of my associates suggested that a longer-term domain name registration played a role in determining a site’s search engine ranking. The rationalization was based upon a presumption that a domain name registered or renewed for single-year terms was an indication of a “fly by night” business. Since it is always our policy to renew our clients’ domains (and our own domains) on a one-year basis, I had to take exception and question the validity of this statement.

Upon my return, I did a bit of online research, and this served to confirm that any suggestion that a longer-term domain name registration has an impact upon a site’s search engine ranking is total nonsense. Apparently this is a piece of misinformation that has been concocted and disseminated by GoDaddy(and often innocently passed along as “fact” by otherwise well-intentioned companies who use GoDaddy as their registrar of choice), in an effort to get people to sign up with them for longer terms. Long-term registrations are in any registrar’s interest because they reduce “churn”, the likelihood of a registrant to transfer to another registrar … either intentionally or as the result of being slammed by an unscrupulous registrar such as Domain Registry of America.

With some registrars, one must be very careful and wary about long-term registrations because they may be, in fact, banking your money (for 10 years, for example), while actually registering your domain on a year-by-year basis, essentially preventing you from transferring your domain to another registrar without suffering a financial loss and the loss of what you presumed was the remaining length of your registration. Do a whois lookup to check. The 10-year registration that you thought covered you through 2018 may, in fact, only be covering you on a year-by-year basis until 2018. In other words, if you transferred now, you may be in for the rude awakening that your domain has only been registered or renewed through 2010. Fortunately, this unscrupulous practice is quite rare.

In summary, there is NO reason to register a domain, or to renew a domain, for more than one year at a time, unless the discount for doing so presents a sufficient incentive in itself. According to Google itself, there is no validity to this recommendation.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=00acf87986f79dfa&hl=en
http://www.seoxp.net/?p=384

Domain authority, on the other hand, does play a role in determining search engine ranking. Domain authority is a measurement of the accumulated length of time that a domain name has been registered, but it has nothing to do with the term of registration (or renewal) itself. Domain authority is directly related to the length of time that a website has been in existence and is part of the explanation for why older, established websites often appear higher in search results than newer websites that are otherwise superior in every respect.

Here are a few additional sources of reference:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/domain_names/3334950.htm
http://www.searchengineguide.com/jennifer-laycock/does-registering-your-domain-for-longer.php

My advice is to always question statements of this nature claim to present tips that appear to be a bit far-fetched, in this case the SEO equivalent of urban legends. Take the time to do a search, and discover the truth.

One of our clients contacted me recently because she had received an e-mail (which she didn’t recognize as spam) that promoted services that would enhance her search engine ranking for keywords where she was said to be lacking. The client owns a campground in the Thousand Islands region of New York State. The salutation of the spammer’s e-mail was “Hi Business Owner” (very professional), and the name of the spammer’s own business was spelled incorrectly in the signature. (I think that the keyword here is “red flag”!) The company is located across the border in Canada. (Good luck in getting a refund from another country after you get ripped off.)

Anyway, the client pointed out that she gets similar solicitations (via both spam and telemarketing) on a weekly basis. To her credit, she questioned how they repeatedly find her site if is allegedly so hard to find. Good point! She also questioned how it could be possible for everybody to always be in the top ten search results. The answers are that software robots are used to harvest search results and then to harvest either an e-mail address that is linked directly from the site or is associated with the site’s registration. The spam usually starts with the statement that the sender has “just visited your site”, and that is somewhat true, except that they don’t ever point out that it was actually software on autopilot that found your site.

In the pitch to our client, it was pointed out that her campground “ranked in position 53 in Google for the phrase ‘Campgrounds New York’”. (Gee, I wonder if every New York campground received this same spam solicitation.) As I pointed out to our client, the very broad term “Campgrounds New York” that was used for the example is absurd. Nobody can expect to be at the top of that page of results other than CONY (the Campground Owners of New York) and similar directories of New York Campgrounds. For her business to come in at # 53 for such a broad term is actually quite good when one considers that there are over 200 CONY members.

What the spammers didn’t point out was that our client’s website is the #4 result (and the very first actual campground result) for the logical terms “Thousand Islands Camping” and “Thousand Islands Campground”? Of course not! That wouldn’t suit the effectiveness of their sales pitch. They would be happy to take the client’s money to improve her search position for terms that could only possibly come at the expense of her site’s position for the most important terms.

My advice to my client, and to the readers of this post, is to be very skeptical in reacting to spam like this. Anybody can come up with a set of keyword phrases that can make any business look very bad while ignoring any relevant keyword phrases that might not serve their purposes. Please do not even think of responding to people who conduct their business in this fashion because that is why we all continually get spammed. If even 1% of the people who receive spam like this respond to the “offer”, the spammers are making money and will continue in their practices.

What has happened to small businesses in America over the last 50 years? They’ve changed, that’s for certain. Let’s explore the one-mile linear microcosm that was my daily walking commute to grammar school back in the early to mid-1960’s to try to find some answers … and perhaps even some solutions that may be applied to small businesses today.

This post may now be found in its entirety at http://willimansett.com/.

Just when most of us thought that search couldn’t get better than Google, Microsoft has introduced its own new search engine, calling Bing. Didn’t Microsoft already have Live Search? Well, yes, but we all know that it never gained any traction in the market that was dominated by Google and Yahoo!. Type in http://www.live.com, and the URL redirects to http://www.bing.com. No surprise there. Is this actually Microsoft’s response to Google’s development of the Chrome browser. Two of the biggest forces in the industry fighting fire with fire? Maybe.

For you, the bottom line is to be certain that your website is indexed on Bing. It’s simple enough. Go to http://www.bing.com, and enter the name of your business into the search box. Hopefully, your site is already indexed and will come up at the top of the list. If not, submitting your site is as easy as entering a captcha and your URL at:
http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx.

Remember, every link to your site counts, particularly one from a site that, in theory at least, could become the next big search engine. On the other hand, it has been pointed out that Bing is also an acronym for “But It’s Not Google”.

When I started in business back in 1980, my primary client base consisted on smaller to medium-sized ski areas in the Northeastern United States. We produced collateral advertising for these clients, most of whom were struggling to hold their own, as their clientele increasingly felt that they had “outgrown” the smaller, more local mountains. The problem was that everybody had skied at one time or another at the “big” resorts in Vermont and out West. As disposable incomes increased, leisure time became more highly valued, and it increasingly seemed to make sense to book a flight to the Rockies or Europe. The small ski areas that have survived are mostly the ones that repositioned themselves within this market. They no longer saw themselves competing against the other nearby mountains but against the marketing of the bigger resorts elsewhere in the region or partway across the globe. As time has gone on, they have further redefined themselves, extending their seasons with golf courses and other non-winter attractions. The fact is that they are no longer just competing against the bigger ski resorts but against foreign travel, the cruise industry, and the full range of options that vie for the consumer’s leisure dollars.

When we offered marketing solutions to our clients in the ski industry, we closely examined what was being done at Killington, Vail, Stowe, Sun Valley, Park City, Aspen, Vail, Jackson Hole and others, including the big resorts in Canada and Europe. The same thing has happened with our clients in the amusement park and attractions industry, where everyone has visited Disney World and has come back with higher expectations. The same thing happened as well with our campground clients, where every camper has at one time or another stayed at a five-star resort. In every instance, the idea is not to present your business as something that it isn’t, but to present the unique advantages that your business offers that allow it to remain relevant in the overall scheme of evolving consumer expectations. You need to closely examine - and visit - the leaders within your industry, as well as industries that compete for the same consumer dollars. Then come back and see how you can apply the lessons learned to make your business hold greater appeal to both your existing clientele and an expanding base of prospects. In almost every instance, the issue is not size but the quality and level of services that you are able to provide. You know your clientele better than anyone else, so you should know exactly which services are the ones that they will most highly value and appreciate. Offer them those, with a smile and a personal touch!

I have explained in the past how to correct your business location on Google Maps; however, what do you do about getting your location corrected (or even listed!) on the GPS software that comes with many new motor vehicles or as after-market add-ons? Contact Map Reporter from NAVTEQ. This service allows you to easily take control of how your business is represented to the countless number of travelers who may be relying upon accurate guidance in finding their way to your door. NAVTEQ’s Map Reporter allows you to tell the company, the leading supplier of data to the GPS consumer products industry, where an update to a map may be necessary. Simply login, enter your address, zoom-in to the map interface, then report any of the following:
• Missing addresses or wrong locations
• Missing roads or incorrect road names
• Missing, incorrect, or defunct points of interest
• Traffic restrictions that should be added, corrected, or removed
Remember, it is ultimately up to YOU to take control of your business and to maximize every new tool that will help your business to prosper. This is one of those tools.

I am frequently asked to share my thoughts about banner advertising. Either the owners of a business would like to sell banner ad space as a source of revenue-generation on their websites, or business owners want to get their share of the “enormous” volume of traffic that will be generated by placing their own banner ads on high profile sites. These business owners have been sold a bill of goods about the fortunes waiting to be made through banner advertising, the Internet’s modern-day equivalent of the old story of the streets being paved with gold. Don’t fall for it.

If you are contemplating the placement of banner ads on another site, keep in mind that the people who are most likely to profit from your expenditures will be the people who will take your money to produce the ads or the hucksters selling the banner space with unsubstantiated promises of page views and impressions. If you are contemplating the addition of banner advertising to your own site, as a means of revenue generation, consider the costs of cluttering your site, with the result that both your website’s primary content and your business itself begin to hemorrhage credibility. It is a fact that websites with banner advertising have a lower trust factor in the eyes of consumers, with a corresponding decrease in perception as a source of either information or product reliability. The problem is that very few people are willing to admit to this “dirty little secret”.

As Marko Saric recently posted in his blog, “traditional banner ads take away from the user experience. They distract users and because of that users tend to ignore ads.” He goes on to reference the proven phenomenon called “Banner Blindness”. This term was coined by Dr. Jakob Nielsen back in August of 2007. For those who may be unfamiliar with Jakob Nielsen (and why his research is so highly creditable), he has been called “the guru of Web page usability” by The New York Times, “the world’s leading expert on Web usability” by U.S. News & World Report, “one of the top 10 minds in small business” by Fortune Small Business, and “one of the world’s foremost experts in Web usability” by Business Week.

In his study of banner advertising that first coined the term “Banner Blindness”, Dr. Nielsen summarizes that users rarely look at website display ads, and that the most common methods of increasing the effectiveness of banner advertising is to engage in deceptive practices to trick users into clicking, for example by incorporating fake “OK” or “Cancel” buttons into the ads. His earlier studies have shown that such online ads are either “very negatively” or “negatively” perceived by 94% of Web users, just 1 percentage point behind universally hated pop-up ads. His studies further concluded that, when users dislike online advertising, they “transfer their dislike to the advertisers behind the ad and to the website that exposed them to it.”

Getting back to Banner Blindness, Dr. Nielsen conducted extensive eyetracking studies that have conclusively proven that users “almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement.” In a 2003 survey conducted by PlanetFeedback, only 8% of U.S. consumers responded that they trusted banner ads (right behind infomercials, but ahead of door-to-door salesmen, spam, and pop-up ads) and 53% responded that they were annoyed by banner ads.

Substantiating this research, a study published in BusinessWeek in November of 2007, titled “So Many Ads, So Few Clicks”, reports that “the truth about online ads is that precious few people actually click on them. And the percentage of people who respond to common banner ads … is shrinking steadily”, with the average click-through rate having fallen to 0.2% in March of 2007 after several years of decline. The results of this study have been substantiated elsewhere in other independent research. Consider this if you are an advertiser, or contemplate joining the pack, since most advertisers pay based upon the number of impressions rather than clicks. It doesn’t take a mathematician to conclude that these ads do not represent a very sound investment.

Finally, if you are thinking about adding banner advertising to your own website as a source of revenue generation, consider the professional advice of Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, who suggests that you “crunch the numbers” before jumping onto the bandwagon. Based upon a combination of monthly page views and the cost per thousand impressions that you might be able to charge for your banner advertising space, your site will have to be generating an enormous amount of traffic (in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of page views per month) before your site would begin to generate any sizeable amount of income from the sale of banner advertising space.

Consider the cost of compromising your online integrity through the use of advertising that users both ignore and find annoying. Whether you are thinking about selling banner ads or buying banner ads, there are simply far more effective ways of growing your business online.

Additional references:
http://gigaom.com/2008/10/14/what-if-you-ran-an-ad-and-nobody-saw-it/
http://www.techdirt.com/blog.php?tag=banner+ads

There is a great deal of confusion about Google PageRank, one of the key – but optional – components of the Google Toolbar that you should have installed on each of your Web browsers. Pared down to the basics, PageRank is a numerical value, on a scale from 0 to 10, that indicates the importance of any page of content on the Web, based upon the concept that one page linking to another is essentially casting a “vote” for the importance of the second page. Not a truly democratic process, more “important” pages, based upon their own PageRank, carry more weight than pages that have been deemed to be less important, but the bottom line is that Google calculates each page’s relative importance from the “votes” that it has received. Certainly, anybody with even a rudimentary understanding of SEO (search engine optimization) can understand the importance of inbound links to a site.

You might ask, “Who cares?” You should! Those websites that you need to provide links to yours will often make their decisions based upon your the PageRank of your site’s Home page (or other linking page). Every webmaster would like to exchange links with a site with a PageRank of 7 or 8, but nobody wants to waste their time linking to a site with a PageRank of 1 or 2 (or even zero). More importantly, PageRank is an important factor in helping to determine a site’s ranking in the overall organic search results.

On the same token, you (or your webmaster) will want to take PageRank into consideration when you consider linking to other sites. Again, this is not a truly democratic process, and not all links are treated equally. For example, Google will filter out links from known link farms. Because incoming links from link farms are beyond any webmaster’s control (and link farms are more likely to try to capitalize upon a link to you if your site has a higher PageRank), Google will not penalize you for inbound links; however, you will be penalized for any outbound links to link farms or other penalized sites (often represented by a PageRank of zero).

What other factors come into play in determining the relative importance of one link versus another? For one, the number of links on a page. All else being equal, a link to your site from a page with only that one link is far more valuable than a link to your site from a page with 50 links. Basically, the more links on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from a link.

A few other points:

• PageRank values are not arithmetic. Nobody outside of Google’s upper echelons knows the formulae, but it is generally agreed that the scale is logarithmic. In other words, it takes a lot more to advance from PR4 to PR5 than it takes to advance from PR1 to PR2.
• A site’s total PageRank (the combined PageRanks of each of its component pages) is also an important measurement. More than anything else, this is determined by the number of unique pages within a site, clearly benefiting larger sites. New pages (”orphans”) should be directly linked to existing pages in order to yield any benefit for the PageRank of the overall site.
• Links to pages with no outbound links of their own (or pages that Google has not indexed) are known as “dangling” links and have little or no value.
• There are many experts who agree that outbound links that are not reciprocated can be a drain on a site’s total PageRank.

Because the Internet is constantly growing, the logarithmic scales that determine PageRank, by definition, must be continually evolving. This results in frequent changes in a page’s PageRank, where the measure will either increase or (more likely) decrease by a numerical value of 1 for no apparent reason, typically on a three-month basis. This phenomenon is referred to as the “Google dance” and is one more reason why it is important to continually build a site (by adding to its content) and to continually work on building the site’s number of inbound links from other highly-ranked sites.

Interesting tidbits:

• According to Wikipedia, the name “PageRank” is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented; however, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares in Google in exchange for use of the patent – shares that were sold in 2005 for $336 million.
• The name “PageRank” is derived from the name of its developer, Larry Page, one of the two founders, along with Sergey Brin, of what would become Google in 1998. The original search engine that Page and Brin developed as part of their research project at Stanford University in 1995 was called “Backrub”.

Learn more. The following references are listed in order of increasing complexity, ending with Page and Brin’s original research paper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
http://www.ianrogers.net/google-page-rank/
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html