Pacific Leisure

What a great Day in San Simeon California at the Pier!
Feb. is a good time to visit San Simeon.

Pier in San Simeon CA

The Pacific Leisure staff went on a photo shoot trip to see the Elephant Seals in San Simeon.
It is Baby Elephant Seal time!

Elephant Seal Mom with Baby in San Simeon

Google vs Microsoft in 2010
Google and Microsoft to escalate war in 2010

One of the most heated battles among technology companies was waged this year between Google and Microsoft
For those who think this corporate fight hit a crescendo in 2009, industry analysts say they better think again. It looks like this is just getting started.

The battle escalated this year as the two high-tech titans went after each other’s market share and revenue stream in Internet search, operating systems, enterprise applications and browsers. With each company seeing the other as a major threat to its bread and butter products, 2009 may been just a warm-up for the battle that will ensue in the months to come.

“These two companies really squared off this year,” said Jim McGregor, an analyst with In-Stat. “Both are looking for dominant positions in the Internet. For Google to increase its business, it needs to move into other territory. For Microsoft to have significant growth opportunities, it needs to become an Internet powerhouse, and they know it. This is not a war that is going to be won by one or two battles. This is going to be a prolonged activity.”

He added that the battle isn’t simply over which can be called top dog, because the fight is critical to both companies. “For Google, it’s about expanding, and for Microsoft, it’s about a life-or-death challenge,” McGregor said.

The two companies basically grew into this face-off.

Google, one of the great Internet success stories, has grown into an online behemoth. With a name that has evolved into a verb meaning “to search,” Google grown so much that it has become a threat to Microsoft, which has had a long and storied history of high-tech industry dominance. There was a time not so long ago when few believed that any company could rattle Microsoft, let alone a Web company like Google.

But those days are over. Google has rattled Microsoft’s cage and, in turn, the software giant has set its sights on taking its new rival down a notch or two. Microsoft has spent millions of dollars and used countless manpower hours to grab a chunk of Google’s search market share and topple the Web company from its new lofty perch above the high-tech industry – eliminating the threat to Microsoft’s longheld industry dominance.

“The reason that Microsoft is so focused on Google is because Google is chipping away at Microsoft’s crown jewels of Office and Windows with their online applications,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “While Microsoft plays defense on the applications/operating system front, they’re attacking Google on search and online services. Search is the key to Google’s success since Web ads account for more than 90% of its revenue. If you can steal some eyes from Google’s search engine, you cut into their ad revenue and, perhaps over time, cripple them.”

This back and forth between the two companies intensified when Microsoft overhauled its far-from-beloved Microsoft Live Search and released the update, Bing search engine in June. But make no mistake about it – Google still owns the search market with a share of more than 64 percent. But Microsoft’s Bing has failed to fail. The new search service has largely been gaining steam, albeit in small increments, but gaining nontheless.

Microsoft has more reason to hope that Bing will take a significant chunk out of Google search since the company announced plans over the summer to team with Yahoo, which holds the second-place spot in the search market—nestled snugly between Google and third-place Bing. The deal, which still has to be approved in the U.S. and in Europe, would have Yahoo give up its own search technology to use Microsoft’s.

Pooling their resources and industry might, the two companies hope to do together what neither has been able to do alone—significantly make gains on Google’s ubiquitous search.

The search battle heated up this fall when both companies announced they had struck individual deals to serve up real-time search results. Microsoft will be offering users real-time tweets from Twitter and posts from Facebook, while Google has already begun working with Twitter to offer up tweets in its search results.

But this fight extends beyond search.

Google pushed hard this past year to move its cloud-based office applications into the enterprise. Taking on Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office applications was a bold move that could prove lucrative if it succeeds. Microsoft, however, isn’t sitting back and watching Google move into that territory. The company announced this year that it plans to move its Office applications to the cloud and take on Google head-to-head.

The Google/Microsoft fight also extends into the browser arena with Google Chrome going up against Internet Explorer. Google also announced that it’s working on the Linux-based Chrome OS operating system, which, if widely adopted, could help users see Google’s Apps offering as a viable alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite.

“This battle was always looking like a long-term conflict,” Olds said. “It’s the equivalent of high-tech trench warfare. In 2010, we can expect to see the bitter competition continue, with each company keeping up the heat with new features and innovations.”

McGregor noted that the next 18 to 24 months are looking to be fun to watch with the two giants pulling out all the stops, and all their weaponry, to try to take down the other.

He added that the search market should expect to see a greater focus on real-time search and more advanced algorithms designed to help the search engines figure out what people are thinking and how to give them more information. For instance, instead of searching for pet stores and getting a list of stores in a certain area, users might be given a list of stores along with directions on how to get to each one from their current location.

Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group, said we’re likely to see more industry players, such as Apple, Mozilla, and News Corp. aligning against Google.

“Both companies are largely betting their collective futures on this battle so the stakes are huge,” Enderle said. “Microsoft is going to partner and try to starve Google out of content and partners. Google is going to work against Microsoft’s pricing model and starve them out of money. Both are, for once, largely going after each other’s relative weaknesses and leveraging their respective strengths, so this will likely be a battle for the history books.”

by Sharon Gaudin, Computerworld
SOURCE: www.macworld.com

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE

SEO: “Speak” to the Search Engine Spiders

Always write for humans, and optimize for engines.

Search engines are like translators. With no more than a couple of words entered into the search box, they attempt to translate a word or phrase into the searcher’s meaning or intent and compare it to the millions of potential matches in their indices.

But the less understood and even more arduous translation happens in reverse. Search engines are also translating the trillions of pages they crawl and boiling them down to a series of signals. Understanding the signals – what speaks most loudly and what whispers – is the foundation of search engine optimization. Capitalizing on SEO requires implementing that foundation.

We’re going to zoom past the first critical step of SEO, the structure of a particular website. Assuming the site is structurally crawlable, every content element on every page is sending some sort of signal back to the search engine.
“Loud” SEO Signals

The loudest on-page signals come from the title tags, HTML headings, and anchor text. When all of these signals send the same message, the engines hear it loud and clear. If the search engine translates the searcher’s intent to match the message that your page is signaling, all other SEO factors being equal, your page will be served in the search results.

If the signal that your page is sending differs between the title tag, HTML headings and anchor text, then the potentially loud signal will be garbled noise. Engines will not be able to match that page, all other SEO factors being equal, with the searcher’s query and a competitor will presumably win the click.

For example, O’Reilly Media ranks highly in Google for the phrase open source, which relates to a number of books, conferences and training courses they sell. On its open source landing page, the title tags, HTML headings and anchor text (as well as the body content and other signals) are all sending the same primary message: open source.

If the title were reversed to lead with the brand and the product types they sell, such as “O’Reilly Media Books, Conferences & Courses about Open Source,” the signal would be weaker. If the HTML H1 heading were around the logo instead of the primary keyword phrase for the page, the signal would be nonexistent. If the anchor text linking into the page and linking off the page were about pink poodles, again the signal would be garbled. The consistency of these three loud signals elements is critical to improving rankings through content optimization.
Title Tags

For title tags, start with your most important keyword or phrase that’s uniquely relevant to that individual page. Include secondary, related keywords and end with the site’s brand or name. Only the first 65-70 characters are visible in the search results, so make sure you cover the critical elements up front.
HTML Headings

For HTML Headings, target the same keyword or phrase as the title tag. Only place headings around text. Design for a single H1 heading. Include H2-H6 headings as needed to highlight useful headings that contain relevant keywords.
Anchor Text

Meta descriptions, meta keywords, alternative attributes in image tags, title attributes in anchor tags all send small SEO signals. Make sure they agree with the theme of the page and don’t stuff them full of repetitions and unrelated garbage, and you’ll be fine.

SOURCE: practicalecommerce.com

Click here to read the rest of the Article from practicalecommerce.com

You need to make sure that each person following you on Twitter is someone you are okay with posting.
There are many XXX rated people that you might not want following you.
1. Every time a new person is following you, click on their link.
2. If their picture Icon is questionable… then block them ASAP.
3. If they have never posted anything… then that may also be a clue that you want to block them.
4. If they have a zillion people that they are following… and hardly any followers… they you might want to block them.
5. Check out their web site… if it is questionable… then block them.

November 8: Veteran’s Day Celebration on the Pier
Celebrate and remember our nation’s heroes on Sunday for a Memorial Service on the pier. Program begins at 11am.

For more information, please contact the Chamber of Commerce at 800-443-7778.

Survey Says: More Than 9 in 10 Businesses Will Invest in Social Media
According to a recent report published by eWeek.com: A survey of 400 companies found that 94 percent of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social media tools such as blogs, wikis, and microblogging tools.

Does your company have a blog? (Comment and post a link to it!) Is your company on Facebook? Twitter?

The latest issue of Assisted Living Executive reports on a study by Altimeter Group, which found that companies with the greatest social media involvement increased their revenues by an average of 18 percent over a 12-month period. Those companies with very little social media involvement experienced a 6 percent sales drop during hte same period. According to MediaPostNews, companies were scored based on their level of interaction accross 10 social media channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and wikis.

Is your company social?

SOURCE:alfa-resource.org

Check out the Pismo Beach Travel Log
Send us your vote on the best Carrot Cake in then SLO County.

Click here for more info on the best Carrot Cake

Redesigning Your Web Site? Don’t Neglect SEO
SEW EXPERTS: ORGANIC SEO
By Mark Jackson, Search Engine Watch, Sep 15, 2009
About 9,999 times out of 10,000, companies that begin a redesign of their Web site do so with the following reasons in mind:

“We want to freshen the look/feel.”
“We need to update our content, to be more relevant for where we are today.”
“We have too much information on our Web site…we need to clean house and provide a slimmed down version.”
It’s rare, even in 2009, that companies will speak to things that also matter a great deal: usability and SEO.

Usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. Search engines want to rank Web sites that provide a quality user experience for the searcher. How that’s defined can be somewhat subjective (every Web site is unique and its target audience will also be unique).

So, rather than speak to usability, let’s look at common mistakes that can happen when you’re redesigning your Web site.

Keyword Research

If you’re building a Web site to do well in SEO, you must begin with quality keyword research and competitive analysis. Many tools are available for keyword research, including Google’s AdWords Tool, Wordtracker, and Keyword Discovery.

Another great source for keyword research is your existing paid search campaigns. After all, you can see actual impressions and historical data on how these words have performed in terms of CTR, time on site, pages visited, and — most importantly — conversion rate.

OK, so the keyword research is done, but we’re not quite ready for the graphic designer yet.

Competitive Analysis

Once you know which keywords you want to target, you need to determine what it will take to compete (or if it’s even feasible to try). If you determine that “travel” would be a great keyword, make sure have loads of content and links already, or have the patience to ride out the long process of building up this kind of authority. You may want to re-think this keyword, unless your brand is already a household name.

A quick and easy way to check the competitive landscape is to do a Google search for your targeted keyword(s). Find the top 10 ranking Web sites, then do a “site:www.example.com” search on Yahoo and see how many pages (and backlinks) are indexed for these Web sites. From there, you can also see how these other Web sites have built their information architecture and structured their content.

Information Architecture

Your goal should absolutely be to have a Web site that looks good, is search engine friendly, and provides a quality user experience. This stage of the game is very important. You don’t want to just throw together a bunch of pages with little meaning or pages that don’t add to the user experience.

That said, there are ways to generate quality, useful content that is good for SEO and adds to the user experience.

Check out the Central Coast Outdoor Adventures Blog about things happening on the Central Coast.
Ryan and Danielle from KSBY post their adventures and thoughs about activity and exercise.

Central Coast Outdoor Adventures

Click here for more info