We have been busy, busy bees here at InsideOut lately – or should I say not here lately! There has been quite a bit of travel in the last two months. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Cutts, Google’s unofficial SEO spokesperson, recently has said that the time that it takes a website page to load in a browser is now an important factor in your Google ranking. So if your website has inline styling, is table-based, built around Flash or image-heavy, chances are that your page download times will hurt your sites ranking in Google. Now might be a good time to invest in a website upgrade to convert your site from old, tables-based HTML to a new, cleaner, and faster CSS-based site.

If Matt Cutts says it, time to do it.

What a difference a new website makes.  We recently launched a new website for the Bright Morning Inn of Davis West Virginia.  Susan has been a long time client of InsideOut Solutions and took the plunge this year to develop a new site. Read the rest of this entry »

InsideOut Solutions will be at the 2010 CABBI Conference, being held at the Meritage Resort & Spa in Napa California. We are offering personal one-on-one meetings with our staff to help you learn more about marketing your property with either web or print media.

Steven Dunston, our SEO Manager, will present “15 Minute Marketing Makeover: Refocus your Revenue Goals with the help of Web Statistics”. This is a great presentation on how to read your web site stats and use them to help your online marketing. We have given this presentation at past B&B conferences and have had standing room only, so show up early to grab a seat.

We hope to see you at the conference and go here to sign up for your one-on-one meeting.

We just published our list of January Webinars for Internet Marketing a few days ago and now we are looking to the future.  We have reviewed the requests for past attendees of our November and December Webinars and below we have outlined four new Webinars you might want to attend.

We will also be repeating some of our past Webinars in case you where not able to attend them.

Webinars Scheduled for the month of February:
Getting the most out of Google Analytics – Thursday February 4th at 11am PST
Learn more or sign up at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/696208362

Read the rest of this entry »

InsideOut Solutions, the B&B web site development and marketing leader, will be offering free educational Webinars in January 2010.  You are invited to attend so you can learn new strategies on how to improve your online marketing.

Webinars are easy and fun to attend. To see how the process works please follow this link http://screencast.com/t/MTVkNTJkN2

Read the rest of this entry »

InsideOut will become greener in 2010 as we continue to find ways to become more sustainable in efforts to reduce our carbon foot print.

Our current effort:

1. Since 1995 we have recycled every piece of paper and cardboard that comes through our door and continue to try to reduce our use of white paper whenever possible. We also recycle our cans and glass. We e-mail invoices whenever possible and accept automatic credit card payments reducing mail waste.
2. Since 2008 we have been buying Green Power which means we pay more for our electricity so our power supplier can buy more wind or solar power.
3. Beginning in 2008, we have allowed some employees (over one year of employment) to work at home one day per week. Many of our employees come some distance to work and the at home program not only is good for morale it also saves the employee’s commute cost and reduces their auto carbon footprint.
4. Encourage commute alternatives from car to bus and bike. We pay for bus passes for all our employees who opt to take the bus instead of drive. We also pay a $20/month bonus to those who ride their bikes to work.

2010 and Beyond

1. We will continue to try to conserve power, water and paper whenever possible.
2. We will measure our carbon footprint and buy carbon offset credits to pay for our usages.
3. InsideOut travels to many trade shows and conferences because we believe face-to-face time is essential in our business. We will calculate a separate carbon footprint for travel and buy offsets. We will gladly publish our results at the end of 2010.
4. We will increase the use of GotoWebinar to engage our clients and reduce our air travel whenever possible.
5. We will be reprinting all our branded collateral in 2010 and it will be printed using sustainable forest initiative stock with soy inks. We will encourage our clients to do the same whenever possible.

Our green effort is far from perfect but are committed to finding solutions for our contribution to climate change. Our commitment to become carbon neutral is unwavering and we will accomplish our goal in 2010.

Google is always updating the features they provide to their users. The newest feature we are seeing now under the Google Local Business Center is called “What people are saying about”. It seem that Google is reading reviews left about your property and parsing them into segments that a user can read.

Check out the video to learn more.

We were thrilled to launch a new site for the very large Antlers at Vail Condominiums and Conference Center. With over 90 condos and ample facilities for Vail Weddings or business retreats, this was an exciting site for us to work on. We made individual pages for each of their different lodging options, as well as 4 pages of custom Google maps. The different ski parks, driving directions, Lionshead village and Vail attractions maps are all outlined clearly.

The New Antlers at Vail Website

It is a very large site, and is also built completely in Wordpress. This allows the owners to change almost all aspects of the site with minimal assistance from us. If they want to add pages or change photos, the Wordpress interface makes it quite easy.  With some training, they are underway!

Another great things about having a site in Wordpress: backup copies of your pages are clearly saved, so you can always feel confident when changing pages that nothing has to be permanent if you don’t want it to be. It is easy to add items into the main navigation of the site, as well as create Menu labels for those items so that a long title can still fit into a narrow navigation structure.

We look forward to see great results from this new Vail lodging site. Maybe we can come for a vacation sometime as well!

We recently got a disturbing email from one of our clients about her disdain of blogs. She expressed her frustration with the “stupid story that never ends”, and that they are often mindless bits of news that are not important for anyone’s real life.

She makes some good points. The vast majority of blogs have a readership of one, the writer. That is because their blog is filled with dribble about mundane aspects of daily life. This is not the content you want in your blog. However, I would like to highlight some real-life examples where blogging with relevant content has been beneficial for our clients. Read the rest of this entry »