2015

Welcome to 2015:

This song by Willie Nelson, my personal favorite, sort sums up how I feel.

And it's hard to explain how I feel
It won't go in words but I know that it's real
I can be moving or I can be still
But still is still moving in me,
still is still moving to me.

It's spring!

Today is a beautiful day here in the Hocking Hills. It's finally warming up! Over at Ash Cave Cabins, the trees are filled with chirping birds and chattering squirrels, and soon they'll be pouring that great summer shandy. And I wonder if there are baby swans on Lake Logan? This is about the time that Mom and Dad  like to take their new ones out for a morning swim in front of the Georgian Manner Bed and Breakfast. What a place to watch the sun rise!

Merry Christmas

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas as I'm winding down 2013. Trying to get my work done before the year ends.

Just launched a new Website yesterday, Remy's Manufactured Homes, they have been in business selling Modular, Sectional and Single-wide prefabricated houses in Southern Ohio for over 35 years. They must be doing something right.

I also launched earlier this month, A Slipping Glimpse and Full Leon two focused marketing sites to build awareness of my works in Lancaster, Ohio. I worked in the area for many years and have clients scattered throughout Fairfield County, but I needed a boost. Hence these sites.

I launched a new server named, 2UNA which I'm hosting my new design clients for free. If they want. Hosting accounts generally price out at $88 to $240 a year so this will save them a chunk of change in annual fees.

If you haven't optimized your site in awhile here is a reminder, it should be done at least twice a year, at minimum. If you're in a competitive market, more often. A lot of my competitors pretend they're know SEO, they talk the talk, but they really have no clue. Optimization is not a cheap trick, it's a many tiered all encompassing strategy that's fairly easy to implement. If you know how. I know how. To find out more give me a call, 740-596-4398.

A few photos to get you in the mood, first one is from Cherry Ridge Retreat, in the Hocking Hills their new chalet, "The Observatory" and Burlington Willis Graves Bed and Breakfast in Northern Kentucky, near Cincinnati.

 

 

Hocking Hills Canopy Tours, Wow!

Hey, guess what I did today? I zipped my butt off, it was great! You should try it the colors were fantastic. Try it for yourself Zip Line Ohio

Fried Spaghetti and Shrimp

This time of year, when tomatoes start coming on, you are always looking for interesting dishes for those fresh tomatoes. This is a good one. You can tell when your tomatoes are ready in the garden, it's when the blackbirds start pecking at them. So the idea is to get them out of the garden a few days before they're ready. Hey why not use that screened porch. Porch ripened tomatoes.

So you wash them, cut them up, cut out the bad spots etc.

Run them through your tomato sieve squisher, or food mill

This spits out skins and seeds at one end pulp and juice out the other, this is the seeds and skin end.

Then you start boiling the tomato pulp and juice, remove some of the water, and thicken.
I added about  3cups of previously frozen shrimp stock and today's shrimp stock to the pot too.

Meanwhile, peel, de vein, and butterfly your shrimp. Also save the shrimp skins and tails add some water in a sauce pan, not much water and boil it for about 5 minutes till they turn pink. And add to tomato pot as described above.

Might as well chop up some garlic and add to the shrimp with olive oil and place in the refrigerator for a few hours. I have a suspicion that this adds flavor to the shrimp.

Break the pasta, use whatever you want, into three inch pieces. I found wrapping them in a towel and cracking them over the counter edge makes it easy.

Then I like to get out all my spices, I usually forget a few items and add as I taste test. Like I added ground cayenne to this mix.

Fry the uncooked pasta in olive oil slightly less than medium heat till it turns a golden brown, maybe 6 or 7 minutes, you can tell when it's done. I cut up some more garlic, 2 large onions, 2 celery stalks and a green pepper, in Cajun cooking that would be garlic and trinity.

Sauteed for about 10 minutes gently and added the tomato sauce, and cooked it together until it was thick and bubbly, as above then add in the pasta, cook about 10 minutes in the boiling mixture till tender. While you're doing this, let the shrimp come to room temperature.

Then add the shrimp to your oven proof sauce pan, submerge shrimp into the sauce, and broil for about 7 or 8 minutes till it sort of skins over the top and the noodles on the surface turn brown. It looks like this!

Add fresh herbs to the top, I generally use parsley.

The Keyword Meta Tag and Being Flamboozled

OK I finally found a good use for my Blog. A rantarena or ventorama a way of ridding what's bugging you and return to a productive state without insulting one of your clients. What I'm talking about is the long dead Meta Tag "Keyword". It looks like this in the head of html page.

META NAME="keywords" content="www.romanceohio.com, romanceohio.com"

I had a client early this week who after talking to a SEO specialist determined his meditages, (his spelling), was low density, it had his domain name in the "keyword" meta tag twice, and it would be better if there were more keywords and they matched the content of his page.

So lets dive into this a bit. I thought we should go back in time, to the previous century actually. In 1996, I was the director of Customer Response Department for Diamond Electronics, in Carroll, Ohio. I had many responsibilities, QA, Training, Field Service including installations, and an in-house Repair Depot.

I thought it would be a great idea to have a Website to reflect the status of all of our internal repairs, field installations, and training schedules to help our staff cope with telephone inquiries and to improve our customer service. And so we dove into the Web.

Back in those days I had a Macintosh loaded with Microsoft Front Page, version 1.0. It barely functioned. One thing we learned right away was a Website needs to be found to be useful. It was fairly easy in those days, there wasn't any competition, rather there wasn't any online competition.

But even then, this was 2 or 3 years before Google existed, by the way, Alta Vista was the big horse Search Engine, and they were frustrated by the misuse of the Meta Tag "Keyword", They actually started to penalize sites whose keywords didn't match the content, or so they said. We were a company and played it square.

By the end of the century, none of the main search engines used the keyword meta tag and it become obsolete and was not useful in any way. Google came online shortly afterwards and Google always ignored the keyword meta tag and still does.

Well in 2000, I got into the Web design business, and in those days, even though the keyword meta tag wasn't meaningful, Web designers still loaded their customers pages with keywords. Why? Well after awhile you grew tired of your clients calling about their keyword density, structure, what words were used and on and on and on. But the real reason was competitors would call your clients and CON them into believing the reason why they were 5th in the organic ranking and not third, like their competition, was because of the keywords.

Sooooooo to all my SEO challenged clients if you received information about bad keyword tags from someone claiming to be a SEO specialist, purporting to help you update your site for a fee be very very wary. If only it was that easy to run a tool, change a few words and then zoom to the top of the search engines.

The fact that anyone these days is still talking about using keywords meta tags should tell you something about that person ethics and skillset. They are incompetent, outdated, and are trying to flamboozle and take advantage of your limited knowledge of the process.

I use the keyword meta tag, usually I'll put the domain name of the page in the meta tag, both ways, as the example of above. Why, well so I can remember the domain name of course.

Most clients get overly carried away about page ranking. There are complex algorithms in place to formulate page rankings. Briefly as I don't believe in training my competition, the client should focus on what's important selling rooms, widgets, bowling balls whatever, not necessarily getting to the top of every search engine query. There is a difference between traffic and quality traffic. And you need to pick your queries to champion.

Here is my clients traffic, the guy who was concerned about his keyword meta tags, presented as unique visitors per day, since his site came online in February. The traffic is actually very good. Some folks would love those stats. You should have your optimization tweaked every three months or so, and it hasn't been done since launch, so it's overdue.

Back to my example I started out with, go to Google.com, type in this phrase "southeastern ohio web design" you'll see Romance Ohio below ranked on the first page. This site breaks all the rules, domain name doesn't match the title tag and description, has hardly any content, no images, few links, no keywords, duplicate header tags etc. yet it ranks pretty well.

OK now enter the phrase "southeastern ohio web design" in bing.com or yahoo.com search engines, it does well in all of them. Obviously there's more to ranking than keywords!

Hocking Hills Web Design, Southeast OH SEO, Logan Ohio 

romanceohio.com/‎

Choose a modern web developer with clean compliant code, style, and search engine friendly technique, choose 22.

Responsive Webs

One of my New Year's resolutions for 2013 was to be a more active blogger. So how is that going, you ask? Well it's June and this is my first blog. So yeah if I do another post after this one I will indeed be more active. So yeah it's going well.

Another resolution was to redesign all my main Web sites. Make them all responsive. I have 4 servers to serve my clients better and I would like to have a brand new shiny responsive Web site fronting all of them. Well I have 2 done and 2 to go. www.fredfioto.com and www.f-webs.com are mostly complete. I have the essential content finished with some less traveled back-water pages to add into the Web at a later date. .... and tune the SEO.

I also built up www.1f3.com, which was my first responsive design, somebody has to be first might as well be me. The next one was a 1 page site, www.7sos.com, then 2 of my clients wanted mobile sites, so I built a new mobile site for me here www.frona.com, as a model. The cool thing about these mobile sites is they're responsive and have a swipe enabled slideshow. So instead of using the arrow next and previous you can swipe using the touchscreen. It has many more features but that is one I liked the most.

Back to responsive site design. What is Responsive Web Design?

Having a Website respond, or to resize the elements of the pages, both text and images and adapt to the viewport is called Responsive. It does this by changing the styles associated with the page elements.  Responsive Design is concerned with making a Web appear the same on all devices desktop, laptops, tables, and smartphone all on different platforms and screen sizes without compromising content. Do you need one, well that depends on your competitor, do you want to lead or follow?

Because of all this responsiveness business has been good. I have 6 client designs on the table, with a SEO project that may turn into a new site. Then after that I'm updating all my Webs which is kind of like mowing grass in that I mow continuously. By the time I finish mowing I need to start again.

In conclusion, I have too many Webs, too much grass, and not enough posts.