Archive: January, 2010

In recent times the Vatican has been open about their perception of how the internet fits into the scheme of things from a religious standpoint. This is not a surprise as the internet has become nearly inseparable from our daily lives, as religion is to a number of us as well.

The somewhat “quakeresque” public perception of religious leadership is that anything “tech” is bad and living in an 1800’s way of life with a candle, and wooden shack and a Holy Bible is something we should all aspire to.

Possibly contrary to the stereotype, Pope Benedict XVI is encouraging his priests to become more versed in internet and technical things. The Vatican has been very much near the cutting edge, believe it or not, for most of the internet’s existence.

For example; The Vatican / Holy See has had its own internet ccTld since inception of the naming standard. The registration web site is http://www.nic.va, which is currently offline. The only used .va extension is vatican.va and the website is live.

Some of the content on the Vatican site is the PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS.

It appears we are all not quite seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with the latest economic slump. It has hit everyone hard regardless of business size or industry and in many cases marketing dollars are the first to disappear.

Truth be known, many companies that do succeed during tougher economic times are the ones who actually increase their online marketing budgets.  In many cases this strategy is used to take advantage of the competition dropping their strategies all together and the benefits are far reaching well after the economy woes are over.

Everyone can understand the incredible value in this economy of having highly relevant traffic directed to your website showcasing your products or services. A skilled SEO company is your best and most cost effective option to handle the daunting task of continuously growing relevant and converting search engine traffic.

There are a large amount of key points to consider when deciding whether or not to outsource your SEM / SEO initiatives. The following points are two that are common throughout regardless of industry.

Keeping Current and Connected

As a free open source option for beginners, advanced webmasters and SEO’s alike, Wordpress has become one of the most popular platforms in which to build a web property. Although Wordpress is rounding the corner towards version 3.0 there is still a lot of useful SEO tools that are not and will not be built-in to the blogging software.

Once having installed the software to your web server one must hunt around the internet tirelessly for Plugins in order to satisfy their requirements for SEO. Metamend has decided to make this task easier for our valued web visitors by putting together a little wordpress seo bundle. This Wordpress SEO theme bundle could save the average person hours of time researching and obtaining the best tools for Wordpress.

Wordpress in itself is naturally good for SEO in the way that it allows so much control over the website including on-page optimization and file naming. With a few additional plugins you can turn a wordpress site into an SEO dream.

To learn more about Wordpress and to download our comprehensive Wordpress SEO Bundle click here.

As I was working on a client’s social media build the other day, it occurred to me that suddenly,  we as people, have voluntarily surrendered most all of our privacy and anonymity. This idea took hold as I was watching a 1980’s era film, and I was observing how the executives in the go-go 80’s had a brick cell phone, monochrome screen computers, got the morning paper and had a wall of analog tube televisions on different channels; this represented a person “in the know”.

Having said that, and even after having lived through 1980’s, I had mixed emotions as I thought about how in 2010 this movie would have changed? We now all have a cell phone, and usually its a phone that essentially doubles as your laptop for most duties. Most of us get our news online and have, long ago good or bad, cancelled our paper newsprint. One giant wide screen, Plasma, or LED TV has replaced the TV bank, and Satellite TV does not require a 10 foot dish. But I digress;