iData Technologies, the developer of the Synapse Publisher Web Content Management System™, announced today that Texas Chiropractic College of Pasadena, Texas has licensed iData’s Synapse Publisher CMS for the College’s Website at http://www.txchiro.edu. The College licensed Synapse as part of an extensive redesign and expansion of the Website, which will be bring a highly functional and graphically appealing look and feel to the site in addition to making a broad array of new information available to students, prospective students and the public.

Founded in 1908, Texas Chiropractic College is the fourth oldest chiropractic college in the nation and recognized as one of the very best. TCC is accredited as a Level V doctoral degree granting institution by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. It shares this distinction with other reputable medical schools such as Baylor College of Medicine and the UT Medical Branch at Galveston. Texas Chiropractic College is located at 5912 Spencer Highway, Pasadena, TX 77505-1699 and can be reached at 281-487-1170.

iData Technologies is a software development and Internet business enablement firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. iData develops solutions designed to put the Web to work for our clients through Web marketing and promotion, business process automation and knowledge management. iData can be contacted at 1.800.647.1905 or through www.idatatechnologies.com.

Cuyahoga County has launched a fully updated and redesigned Website for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections just in time to display information about and results of the March 4^th Ohio primary election. The new site, which is powered by iData’s Synapse Publisher Web Content Management System™ offers a broad array of information and resources for voters, candidates and poll workers. Some of the new features include the ability for voters to view their registration status, participation history and precinct details (including a map and directions to the precinct from their home address). The site also offers both complete results of elections as well as a “My Results” wizard that allows voters to select only the contests that they are interested in and view results of those, updated every 15 minutes.

iData Technologies assisted developers from the Cuyahoga County Information Services Center with implementation of the Synapse Publisher CMS for the new site as well as custom development of some functionality for the new site. The site was designed to allow election results to be updated as ballots were tabulated, and it was architected to handle heavy traffic as voters and members of the media accessed the site beginning with the closing of polls to view results of the primary election --- an election with unprecedented voter turnout and interest.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections is located at 2925 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44115 and can be reached at 216.443.3200 or http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us.

iData Technologies is a software development and Internet business enablement firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. iData develops solutions designed to put the Web to work for our clients through Web marketing and promotion, business process automation and knowledge management. iData can be contacted at 1.800.647.1905 or through www.idatatechnologies.com.

iData Technologies, developer of the Synapse Publisher Web Content Management System™ announced today that the Summit County Board of MRDD has licensed the Synapse System for their Website, www.csbmrdd.com. The first application to go live using Synapse Publisher™ will be a provider search portal. The provider search portal, currently in beta testing, will allow CSBMRDD clients to search for certified service providers by name, organization type, services and funding sources. Complete explanations of available services and sources of funding will be provided, as well as complete demographic and profile information on service providers. Providers will be able access the system using a secure username and password to update their profile information as well as services that they are currently accepting referrals for.

The County of Summit Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities provides services to more than 2,900 individuals with disabilities and their families in Summit County. It is the organization’s mission to be a primary community force that enables eligible individuals to work, live, learn, play and participate as equal citizens in their communities. The driving forces behind these efforts are the agency’s volunteer board members, as well as staff, families, affiliated agencies, advocates and the individuals served by the organization. The agency’s administrative offices are housed in the Weaver Learning Center, 89 East Howe Road in Tallmadge, Ohio. The CSBMR/DD also operates six education and work centers including Tallmadge Center, Akron Center, Canal Place, Bath Center, Southern Center and Potomac Center. Services are also delivered through many Summit County employers and contract agencies. More information regarding the agency is available online at www.csbmrdd.com.

iData Technologies is a software development and Internet business enablement firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. iData develops solutions designed to put the Web to work for our clients through Web marketing and promotion, business process automation and knowledge management. iData can be contacted at 1.800.647.1905 or through www.idatatechnologies.com.

iData Technologies, the developer of the Synapse Publisher Web Content Management System™, announced today that Cuyahoga County of Ohio has concluded an agreement to purchase an enterprise license of iData’s Synapse Publisher CMS. “We’re enormously proud to have been chosen by Cuyahoga County as their partner for Web Content Management, and we look forward to working with the County’s Information Services Center to develop function and content-rich solutions for the people of Northeast Ohio” said Mark Reichard, president of iData.

The County’s decision to license Synapse Publisher™ was based in part on the County’s requirement to provide Web-based information to its citizens in multiple languages. Initial sites in Spanish and English have already gone live, including the site of the Department of Development (http://development.cuyahogacounty.us) and the Department of Workforce Development (http://workforce.cuyahogacounty.us/).

iData Technologies is a software development and Internet business enablement firm based in Cleveland, Ohio. iData develops solutions designed to put the Web to work for our clients through Web marketing and promotion, business process automation and knowledge management. iData can be contacted at 1.800.647.1905 or through www.idatatechnologies.com.

The importance of focus

One of the hardest aspects of search engine optimization --- particularly for a newer site --- is the task of deciding which keywords to optimize the site for. This is a critically important task, because being found toward the top of search engine results for words related to your company's products and services will mean more traffic to your website, more phone calls and more sales.

One of the most important rules for trying to pick the right keywords is to keep the focus as narrow as possible. There are several good reasons for this.

The first and most discussed is simply competition. You probably know by now that you have a much better chance of achieving high search engine rankings if you can tightly focus keywords to match what potential customers are likely to search for. Consider the case of a hypothetical camera store in North Royalton, Ohio that wants to promote digital cameras. A quick check of Google shows 96 million results for the phrase "digital camera", but only 33 thousand for "digital camera North Royalton".

The second, less discussed but equally important reason for focusing more narrowly is that this will help to weed out irrelevant traffic. If our camera shop focuses on sales and service to local customers, they are really only interested in customers in or near their city, so for them being ranked highly for the "North Royalton" search is in many ways better than being ranked highly for the generic phrase "digital camera" because by focusing more narrowly they do not have to deal with hundreds or thousands of irrelevant inquiries.

How do you choose?

So, given that narrowly focused, targeted keywords are better, how do you choose them? There are a couple of obvious formulas:

• Your product or service combined with your location --- as we saw in the digital camera example above, this can lead to a much narrower competitive field and also limit results to those you are more likely to be interested in anyway.
• Synonyms for your product or service. One obvious example is a site that optimizes for "auto parts" --- it should not neglect "car parts" and parhaps even "autoparts."

Once you get beyond these two fairly obvious strategies, the next one to consider is the less clear-cut task of trying to figure out alternative ways that search engine users --- people who are often less familiar with your products and services than those in industry who define the standard jargon --- might talk about your offering. Examples of this tend to seem almost trivial, but they can make a big difference in results. Consider a fluid system component manufacturer that always refers to a particular product line as "quick connect fittings." Many call these same products "quick disconnect fittings", so the manufacturer must find ways to incorporate that phrase too. The standard advice for this task is to brainstorm as many alternatives as you can and then check them in a keyword tool such as the Overture keyword selector tool to see which are actually searched on.

Let your customers pick your keywords

A recent article at Web Pro World World suggests another approach --- one that you can use to augment the brainstorming described above one the site is up and running and being indexed by search engines. The article describes creating a "positive feedback loop" with the search engine Google. To try it, all you need is a website statistics package (such as iData's Visitrak Web analytics product or even a free tool like StatsCounter) that will tell you, among other things, what search terms are being used to find your site.

Once you know the terms being used to find your site, the goal is to look for terms that surprise you but are still relevant to your core market. Ideally, these would be terms for which your site shows up in the results pages, but for which it is not highly ranked. For example, some of the terms that the iData site got click-throughs for today from Google were "seo suggestion", "how to implement seo with cms" and "cms systems google position". We are currently ranked first in Google's results for the first two, so there is no room for improvement there. However, we are fairly far down the list for "cms systems google position", so we could try to get better there.  In order to improve, we just need to create some content that prominently includes the keywords we are trying to improve on and then link to that new content from the page we were already found for in Google --- the page that the user already clicked through to on our site. In our case, this is an article about how using a content management system (CMS) relates to search engine optimization (SEO). To improve our rankings for the phrase "cms systems google position", we would not make significant changes to the page that is already getting clicks -- after all, this page is doing OK, so why mess with it? Instead, we would create a new page about using a CMS system to improve position in Google and then link to it from our existing page. What this means is that the search engine, the next time that it crawls the site, will still find the page it already found and ranked, but now it will also find another page specifically targeted to the keywords we are trying to optimize for. When this approach works, it tends to work quite well because we are basically reinforcing the engine's tendency to do something that it is already doing.

You can think of your own variations of this approach, but the key elements will be the same --- creating relevant content targeted to the words and phrases that you want to be found for and using a Web analytics tool to which terms uses are currently finding your site for. From there, you can tweak and test, and -- if you are persistent and thorough --- watch your rankings improve accordingly.

• which Google searches most frequently bring up your site,
• which pages from your site Google was able to crawl,
• what errors the indexer encountered
• who links to your site

Search Engine Games

Folks who follow the news about Internet search engine optimization (SEO) will remember how, for most of last year, SEO was big news.  The Wall Street Journal did several prominent articles, and NPR did an entire series all about SEO.  It was probably inevitable after being such a hot topic, that SEO would quickly begin to be regarded as old news.  Some have even begun to suggest that, as a viable tool for promoting your business, search engine optimization is effectively dead.

Why has SEO gone from being the next big thing to being considered irrelevant so quickly? The answer primarily has to do with the growing awareness of off-page factors in determining how highly a site ranks in search engine results for a given search term.  By “off page factors” we primarily mean anything that the person creating the Website does not directly control, such as the number of links to a site (inbound links) and the site’s click density (i.e. the number of times that users actually click through to a given site from the search engines).  The idea here is that Website owners can easily manipulate the content of their site to try to lure in the search engines, so other factors that cannot be easily manipulated should be given more weight in determining how sites rank for competitive terms.

Given that search engine optimization has always been a cat-and-mouse game (in which some people continually try to come up with new tricks to game the engines, and the engines continually come up with ways to catch and punish those who try to fool them) you can probably guess what happened as off-page factors gained importance.  Link farms sprang up, in which large numbers of bogus Websites were created, all of which would link --- for a fee --- to sites hoping to build incoming links.  In response, Google and other engines adjusted their algorithms to try to determine not only the number of incoming links but also their quality, and the engines began to punish sites that used link farms by removing them from the search results altogether.

 And Now: Google Bowling

You might think that the only ones at risk as engines like Google battle it out with those who try to manipulate search results would be the participants --- people actively trying to achieve high search engine rankings for competitive keywords.  It has recently been reported, though, that bystanders have also been hurt by the evolution of link spam.   

Just as unscrupulous people try to decieve search engines to get high rankings for their dubious content, these same folks will also try to hurt competitors by trying to make sure that competitors’ sites are not found --- even for their company names.  As Google and other engines have begun to punish low-quality links, this has become easy --- unscrupulous people  can simply buy links to their competitors on the spammiest link site they can find.  This tactic is called Google Bowling, and it is getting a lot of attention lately.

What does it mean to you

What does this mean to you?  Google bowling will probably not directly affect you ---- unless you are in a highly competitive industry, you are a recognized leader, and you have unscrupulous competitors.  In that case, you should proactively monitor where you show up in search engine positions for your company name and other key search terms.  If you see a sudden, unexplained drop in rankings, you should investigate --- query the engine to find out who they see linking to your site and check out who shows up ahead of you on key terms.

In bigger picture terms, expect this latest development to lead to some reconsideration of the weighting of off-page factors.  The engines will probably shift to working harder to evaluate on-page content to determine how useful and relevant it is.  This means that having relevant, up to date and interesting content will continue to be one of your best strategies for ranking well in search engines.  An added benefit is that rich, relevant content will attract inbound links, and this will help your off-page optimization as well.

The International Association of IT Asset Managers (IAITAM) and iData Technologies announced today the launch of IAITAM’s redesigned Website (http://www.iaitam.org).

The International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers (IAITAM) is the professional association for IT Asset Management (ITAM), serving Software and Hardware Asset Management professionals and providers of software, hardware and IT services in more than eighteen countries around the world. In order to support IAIATAM's requirements for fully automated online event registration, membership management and members-only web content management, IAITAM's new site is based on iData's Synapse Publisher^TM content management system, Membership Manager^TM membership administration system, and Event Manager^TM online event management registration system.

Synapse Publisher^TM allows non-technical users to update Web content, including HTML text and files (including Microsoft Office® documents, Adobe PDF®, and other document files). Membership Manager^TM allows membership organizations to maintain member data online, upload and download member data to synchronize with other applications, and allows members to register for and renew memberships online. Integrated security features allow security levels to be set on content, so site visitors can be granted differential levels of access based on their membership level (individual, corporate, provider).