Jason Marquand - Bayshore Solutions IT Manager

By: Jason Marquand – Bayshore Solutions IT Team

Every day as I make my way through all of my tech blogs, I see at least one article about one technology corporation suing another over patents.  This has been occurring so frequently in present day that you have to wonder “How much of what I bought is going towards legal fees?”  It’s either Apple suing Samsung or Google, or vice versa for patents that should not be applicable in the first place.  The patent laws in this country need to be reformed, and quickly.  Hundreds of millions of dollars a year are spent by these corporations over frivolous legal battles attempting to ban the import of competitor’s products, or force them into some sort of expensive licensing structure.  Microsoft makes money on every Android device that is sold, an estimated $444 million a year. Google is purchasing Motorola Mobility for their patents to help cover their device vendors, which will help negate the legal woes created by patent infringement.  Apple uses lawsuits to counteract their slipping hold on the mobile OS market, particularly with their largest competitor, Samsung.

In this day in age we see more and more anti-competitive behavior from businesses dressed in lawsuits over patents that should never have been allowed.  One of my favorite recent lawsuits is over the slide to unlock patent.  Apple is suing anyone and everyone who uses his feature. But if you think about it, should a thumb swipe to bring a phone out of a lockscreen be something you patent?  It is a simple human behavior that is intuitive and easily learned.  Should we patent the simple mechanics of the human hand next?  Who gets that patent?  Everyone’s deity of choice?  Charles Darwin? This sort of mechanic should not be patent worthy.  The only things that should be covered by patent laws are things that require manufacture. It should not be a sword that a company uses to keep their competition at bay.

Over the holiday we saw a few items that sold quite well, namely for this example the Kindle Fire.  It managed to outsell the iPad, which has had a stranglehold on the tablet market. The entry price point of $199 for a well equipped tablet made this tablet a big seller.  Now in comparison to other Android based offerings on the market, even the iPad it was within 50-60% cheaper than anything else on the market.  What Amazon did to differentiate their product was to use a custom skin that skated around the patents already at play by their competitors.  This kept price down and allowed them to get some saturation in a market dominated by Apple.  Now look at the iPad and the other higher end Android tablets in the tablet space.  They start at $400 and reach prices as high as $700, based on internal storage and size of the device.  Which makes you wonder how much of that cost is legal fees, and licensing?  Wouldn’t it be easier to stop the legal wrangling and reform patent laws to exclude some of the more common sense aspects of design and ergonomics to deter the manufacturers from filing non-stop lawsuits?  Which would then lower costs for the end user and increase market share by getting these products into the hands of people that cannot afford these items at their current price points?  Just my $.02.

Jason Marquand is an IT Manager at Bayshore Solutions—a Tampa Web Design, Web Development, and Internet Marketing Company.

Jessica Camara - Bayshore Solutions Account Manager

By: Jessica Camara – Bayshore Solutions Emarketing Team

There has been a tremendous amount of buzz today about two bills that are currently before Congress. The Protect IP Act known as PIPA and the Stop Online Piracy Act known as SOPA. If passed, these bills will censor the Internet and place damaging regulations on various businesses. Already there have been numerous Internet users and companies that have openly opposed to these bills passing. In fact, if you attempt to visit Wikipedia today, you will soon discover that the English website is locked. Wikipedia is protesting the two bills for 24 hours with a blackout. You are directed to a page that encourages you to contact your state representatives and voice to them that you oppose the passing of these bills. Over 7,000 websites are expected to be offline today and other major websites are also displaying their protest such as Google, WordPress, and Reddit.

While Members of Congress’ main purpose of these bills is to stop copyright infringement, the large holes within SOPA and PIPA would do more damage to the internet community than it would to stop the piracy. This will equal to a reduction in the economic growth of the United States.

What does that mean for me? If passed, all Internet companies would need to closely monitor anything and everything that their users link to or upload in fear that they would be breaking the new laws. These bills would force search engines to totally eliminate an entire domain at any given time if the site is caught with even the tiniest of infringements. Social media sites, such as, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia are in the greatest danger and could effectively be shut down if these bills are passed.

While I agree that laws need to be in place to stop piracy, as an online marketer and having the responsibility to the success of my clients, I am completely against SOPA and PIPA being passed. The Senate will begin voting on January 24th, therefore, if you agree with me, please contact your state representatives and let them know how you feel about these bills. Google has also set-up a petition against PIPA and SOPA. You can sign that petition at https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction.

I have taken action. Will you?

Jessica Camara is an Account Manager at Bayshore Solutions—a Tampa Web Design, Web Development, and Internet Marketing Company.

Greg Smith - Bayshore Solutions Project Manager

By: Greg Smith – Bayshore Solutions Project Management Team

My wife and I are currently in the process of buying a car, which can be a pretty overwhelming experience as anyone who has ever had to do so can attest. Notwithstanding the act of physically buying the car and having to deal with the fun of ‘haggling’ over price, just the process of researching the types of vehicles you’re interested in can feel like a full-time job. Unless you know the exact car you want, it can be a lot of work trying to figure out which ones in the market are the highest-rated and make the most sense for your particular situation. This day in age, there’s no shortage of information online, so it really just becomes a matter of sifting through everything to figure out which car is going to be THE car for you.

Once you’ve done so however, what’s next? You may have determined that the (insert make and model here) is the perfect car but the task now becomes finding out where in the world you can actually go to look at and/or buy one. Not so long ago, you would have had no choice but to head into your local dealership hoping that they had something close to what you were looking for. If they did, you were in luck. If not, you would either have to wait until the next shipment came in or settle for something that wasn’t exactly what you were wanting. Nowadays however, the task is made exponentially easier by the fact that you can do a quick Google search for the exact car you want and get a listing of all matching vehicles in the area, where they are and how much they cost. Having this information at your fingertips is helpful for consumers but is also an incredibly powerful tool for the dealership as well. While cars are the example that I’m using here, this concept applies to ANY kind of product. Making your product information available online via tools like Google’s product search (the ‘Shopping’ tab at the top of the search page) means that consumers can see exactly what you have. Not only does this help to educate the consumer, but it also means that when they eventually show up at your dealership (or website), they are likely doing so because they are primed and ready to buy.

Most of the time, we think of online ecommerce marketing as the act of bringing people to your site to buy a product; how best to optimize your site so that it shows up in search results and gets people to visit. This is of course an incredibly important aspect of online marketing but just as you’re optimizing your site to appear in search results, you should be optimizing your individual products as well. Why not work to make sure a search term pulls back the product itself in addition to the site on which it can be found? The easier you make it for a consumer to find your product, the more likely it is they will buy. Using tools like Google’s product feed are free and easy to setup and can have a dramatic effect on your sales. Instead of depending on someone coming to your site to find a product, a consumer who has never even heard of your company may stumble across, and ultimately purchase, your product after having done a simple Google search. This tool, and a litany of others just like it, should be key components of any solid ecommerce marketing strategy. Tools themselves are not enough to ensure sales success however; just as with marketing your website, it takes expertise to ensure that your product feed and the individual products themselves are correctly optimized to appear in related search results. Once they are, it’s a huge step in the direction of getting your business on the road to success.

Greg Smith is a Project Manager at Bayshore Solutions—a Tampa Web Design, Web Development, and Internet Marketing Company.

Krista Sinardi - Bayshore Solutions Account Manager

By: Krista Sinardi – Bayshore Solutions Emarketing Team

What Is A 404 (Not Found) Error?

A 404 (Not Found) Error is an HTTP standard response code indicating that the webpage was able to communicate with the server, but the server could NOT find the page that was requested.  A 404 error is completely separate from a “Server Not Found” error, which means the connection to the server could not be made at all.

What Causes 404 Errors?

A 404 (Not Found) error in Webmaster Tools can be caused by a few different circumstances. Here are some examples of situations that cause 404 errors to occur:

1. If you delete a page on your site (and you do not 301 re-direct the URL)
2. If you change the URL name of a page (and you do not 301 re-direct the URL)
3. If you accidentally misspell the URL in an internal link
4. Someone else accidentally misspells the URL in link to your site

Where to Find 404 Errors In Webmaster Tools?

Before understanding how to fix 404 errors, it’s important to know where you can view “Not Found” errors that Google is discovering on your website. First, login to your Webmaster Tools account. (www.google.com/webmaster/tools). Next, click on the “Diagnostics” drop down and then click the “Crawl Errors” link.  This link will show you all the 404 (Not Found) errors that Google is reporting.

How to Fix 404 Errors?

Now that you know how to find 404 (Not Found) errors, the next step is to fix them. Based on SEO best practices, it is recommended that 404 (Not Found) errors be 301 re-directed to a working/ live URL that is similar in context to the error page or that is linked in other places throughout the internet (since you would not want an error message to pop up). Also, it is important to note that not all 404 (Not Found) errors should be 301 re-directed. If you have an old page or even a large set of pages that you would like completely erased from search engines and that are not linked from other websites, it is best to let these sit as 404s rather than 301 re-directing them. Over time, Google will erase these 404 errors from the search engines naturally.  According to Google’s official Webmaster Central blog, “If you’re getting rid of that content entirely and don’t have anything on your site that would fill the same user need, then the old URL should return a 404 or 410.”

For more information on 404 (Not Found) errors and how Google views 404 errors, please visit the official Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html

Bayshore Solutions, a Tampa-based Web design, development, and internet marketing firm, has a team of online marketing experts that follows standard SEO best practices like 301 re-directing, keyword research, meta data optimization, and copy optimization. Our online marketing team makes sure that your website remains easy for users to navigate and index-friendly to search engines!

Krista Sinardi is an Account Manager at Bayshore Solutions—a Tampa Web Design, Web Development, and Internet Marketing Company.

Sarah Buckner - Bayshore Solutions Account Associate

By: Sarah Buckner – Bayshore Solutions Emarketing Team

If you’re anything like me, or any of the other 4 million users, you’ve become obsessed with Pinterest this year. Pinterest is a social network used to organize and share online images linked to the source of the image. Users create virtual pin boards of anything from recipes, crafts, and party themes, to DIY home renovation tutorials, dream vacation spots, and must-read blogs. Pinners can browse other users’ pin boards for inspiration or search all of Pinterest by specific keyword to find more ideas to add to their own boards.

In January of 2011, Pinterest had just fewer than 120,000 users. Today the site has over 4.4 million users, surpassing other social photo sharing sites like flickr and picasa. With its growing popularity and users actively adding and sharing countless links each day, the potential for Pinterest as an SEO tool is huge.

Everything that gets pinned on Pinterest is a followed link back to your site, so getting people to pin photos linking to your site creates many high-quality backlinks excellent for SEO.

Here are some tips on using Pinterest for SEO:

• Create a business profile on Pinterest and share your content
• Be sure to use hashtags and categories to tag your content appropriately, and organize your boards with related content
• Link the photo you’re pinning to a specific and relevant URL on your site, just like you would a landing page
• Comment on other pins and boards of similar interests
• Pin and repin related content NOT from your business, and allow users to share content with you.  An excellent example of this is Whole Foods Market, Whole Foods has a number of boards with content from outside sources, and they allow their 6,000+ followers to add items to their boards.  This makes Whole Foods’ Pinterest profile an excellent resource for users and keeps users coming back to see what’s new.
• Be careful, spamming and in-your-face self-promotion is frowned upon. But creative marketing is welcomed, remember that Pinners are looking for something new and different and you might have just what they need, so share it with them!

Need help getting started on Pinterest? Here’s Mashable’s Pinterest Beginner’s Guide.

Happy Pinning!

Sarah Buckner is an Account Associate at Bayshore Solutions—a Tampa Web Design, Web Development, and Internet Marketing Company.