I downloaded Bobby Labonte’s ‘B Lab’ iPhone application today and took a look at the first iPhone application for a NASCAR driver.

Developer: Xco Software LLC
Category:Sports
Size:4.7 MB
Cost: $0.99
Download: View In iTunes

Here’s a quote from driver Bobby Labonte, “We’re creating an app that will give fans in-depth information of everything that I’m involved in each day,” continued Labonte. “The B Lab is more than just race information, but rather unique content including video and audio updates, race day previews, and contests for app only users, that will help draw race fans closer to what it’s like for everyone that touches my life. It’s going to be pretty cool and I’m looking forward to it.”

After downloading I ran the application. The first thing that happens is that it downloads a set of images and content. This seemed a little slow but I don’t know exactly how much it downloaded. The initial ‘Welcome’ screen is a little confusing. You see a picture of Bobby and two buttons at the top (Skip & Begin). There’s a button at the bottom with a headphone icon, but the audio there is a ‘test’ file. Not sure how that got left in the application. I’m guessing there was supposed to be a greeting from Bobby.

If you click Begin you receive a Opt In message for Coke. No matter how many times I filled out the form (and even saved my contact info in the preferences) this option is available. It seems unfinished, as I would expect this to go away after one load and an option to Opt Out in the preferences.

Clicking Skip brings you into the application where you can find a lot of information about Bobby. The menu items are:

• B Lab Bio
• B Lab Career Highlights
• B Lab Schedule
• B Lab Interviews
• Go Behind The Scenes
• Latest B Lab News
• B Lab Partners
• Bobby’s Facebook
• Bobby’s Twitter
• B Lab Contact
• Email Bobby

The first few menu items link to simple text and image sections. Basically short web pages in the application. They contain some good information about Bobby. I’m sure most fans know it all but you can always educate your friends. The B Lab Interviews contain a couple recent videos that were online – Bobby’s Sonoma interview (audio only – volume was a little low) and a video where Bobby is talking about the difference between the Wing and the Spoiler. Will be nice to see more videos here later on.

Latest B Lab News just points to a news page on BobbyLabonte.com which is kind of disappointing for an iPhone app. Facebook and Twitter links also link to those websites. The developers didn’t link to the mobile versions of the pages either. Luckily Twitter picks up on the fact that I am on an iPhone and redirects me to their mobile version. Personally I think the application should link to the Twitter and Facebook apps – if that is possible.

Contact B Lab tells you all the name and address information for Bobby’s fan club and email Bobby brings up a customized email form that allows you to mail the fan club.

When I first started using the application it crashed several times. After about 5 crashes it seemed to stop crashing. Not sure if there was something conflicting on my phone or if the application is just a little buggy.

There’s also a lot of additional application pages about Bobby’s other activites:

• BL Racing – Bobby’s dirt track team
• Bobby Labonte Foundation (I played at his annual golf tournament in April… OK ‘played’ is a stretch but I was there LOL)
• Breaking Limits – Bobby’s marketing company
• Other – email address storage and settings

So while this application has some cool features, its pretty simple. The best parts is that is consolidates a lot of Bobby Labonte information into one place for his fans, it costs $1 and it should in the future have some good insider content (one would hope – paying fans can at least get content first).

Cons – right now the app is a little buggy. Having 5 crashes right off the bat wasn’t fun. It does not have much real unique content and has a lot of weblinks. The coke sign up form does not have a “Next” button to get your through the fields so it was awkward to fill it out has half the fields were covered.

In the end I would give it 3 out out 5. If you are a Bobby Labonte fan you need to get this application, even if its just to show your support for Bobby. If not you can probably skip this application.

More information about Bobby Labonte can be found at http://www.bobbylabonte.com

Recently I was working for Morningstar Properties to optimize their Mini Storage and Marinas websites. While they had nice and clean websites neither were SEO friendly. After working off and on for a couple months we have both sites fully optimized with search engine friendly titles, metas and descriptions as well as copy on their pages that is geared towards they keywords that they are looking to capture for organic search traffic.

On the Mini-Storage site we dynamically update the location pages as well to make them more locally appealing by utilizing the location address and neighborhoods by integrating them into the titles. Also by recoding some of the styles to use H1 and H2 tags we’ll better tell the crawlers what is important.

Over on marinas, we also made major title updates and added a quick directory of locations on the home page in text so it is easily seen by users and crawlers alike. All and all a very fun project to work on and best of all seeing positive keyword ranks very quickly was cool to see!

Morningstar Marinas – http://www.morningstarmarinas.com/
Morningstar Mini Storage –  http://www.morningstarstorage.com/

I was approached by a new client with a small, but very interesting website called The Ouzo Papers. The website owner didn’t have a lot of projects for me but at Rhino Web Services no job is too big or too small. I reviewed his site and made some small optimizations and bug fixes for him.

The Church Of Ouzo has a bunch of original PDFs on there regarding certain passages of scripture and something known as the The Ouzo Prophecy.

This weekend while looking for a few things I needed around the house I noticed some SEO holes in some major websites:

1. Williams-Sonoma: While searching for a Bread Maker I noticed that they didn’t have a dynamic title for their search results and also they seemed to have a bug in their meta tags.Their title for my search of “bread maker” was “Williams-Sonoma | Search” which is not that great. I’d expect the inclusion of my search term. Maybe “Bread Maker | Williams-Sonoma | Search” as well the page contained no meta name tags or descriptions.
2. Lowe’s Home Improvement: Many Search Results have no information nor meta tags. This hurts SEO rankings as well as user experience. For example search for simple things like hammers (compare to Home Depot’s title of “Hammer, Mallets, & Sledges – Hand Tools – Tools & Hardware at The Home Depot”) or grills and there’s no title tag or meta tags

Sites like Lowes and Williams-Sonoma sell hundreds and thousands of products. Ignoring simple SEO practices most likely hurts them in the rankings. According to most SEO experts the title tag has is generally the most important on-page SEO feature for the past several years and placing the a search query term or phrase in the title tag is extremely important.

Update: 12/15/09 – I double checked both these sites and neither one has taken advantage of optimizing their titles to increase their SEO values. I had contacted them both back in June as well. I guess they don’t like free traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique to increase the ranking of any web page or website on search engines like Google or Yahoo, for a given keyword or keyword phrase search. A higher search rank will produce a higher result in the organic search results and generally more traffic to the web site from search keyword traffic. Organic search traffic is generally high quality and can be more easily converted into repeat visits or product purchases. As well higher rankings give your business and brand more exposure.

Importance of SEO in Internet Marketing

The basic tenant of Web marketing is to increase the traffic and awareness of any web site and their respective products and services on Internet. As well the more traffic you can receive for free from organic search results means you need to spend less on Search Engine Marketing (i.e. buying traffic)

On average Search drives an average of 50-75% of all visits to web sites. Therefore it is very important that search engines direct traffic to your site instead of others. This is where SEO comes into play: generating more traffic for your site.

Site Optimization

Keyword Research: determining what to use keywords is a very important. Make a list of words and phrases that are related to your business and then use tools like Google Trends to determine which are the best for your business.

URL Format: having an easy to read URL structure makes it easier for search engine crawlers to determine how to read your site. It will also make it easier for users to remember subdirectories on your site so that they can go back directly. Ensure that the main keywords of your page are in the page name or URL structure. Also choosing a domain that is related to your business and its main keywords can be helpful.

Titles & Meta Tags: For titles try moving your brand name to the end and start your titles with the main words of your site or page. Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions should also be dynamic and customized to each page.

Content Optimization: Content of the webpage should be carefully written using the selected keywords effectively and should not cross 5-10% density amongst the total content of the webpage. Other factors are: wise usage of Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3), selective usage of bolding, italics, colors and intra-page hyperlinking on keywords and phrases.

Content Generation: Use a blog on your site to generate keyword rich articles about your site’s product or services. Not only will you be providing users with interesting information you will be generating text rich pages that search engine crawlers like to index.

Page structure: Most sites now use CSS or cascade style sheets. Make sure to use alt text for images, using headers and footer links. Consider using image sprites to increase page performance.

Site Map: Submit a site map to the major search engines and keep it updated. A visitor friendly (HTML) version and a machine friendly (XML) version will help search engines know where your pages are. Also be sure to use a robots.txt file to tell search engines what not to crawl.