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The biggest benefit of SEO is having your site rank highly in the search engine results for important and highly searched keywords. This was especially important for one of our clients as they’re continually publishing new and current information that can be very valuable to potential readers and are always looking for innovative ways to attract them to the site.

As a method to increase traffic and brand awareness, we identified the World Cup as a trending topic and devised a way for Maciverse to take advantage of the millions of people who would be searching World Cup related phrases in the search engines. We worked with Maciverse.com to produce and publish an article to their site to help iPad, iPhone, and Mac owners find the various ways that they could enjoy the World Cup from their devices. As the event got underway, many individuals started looking online to see the different options they had to tune in and watch the matches. As the excitement of the World Cup grew, so did the benefits of SEO for Maciverse – more traffic!

After just a few hours of being published, the information about how to watch the World Cup provided by Maciverse was appearing on the front page of Google and was the top result in the Google Blog search. The site saw hundreds of new visitors hitting the site within hours and more first time visitors were exposed to the interesting content that the site has to offer.

If you prepare for the events and trends that can have significant impacts on the amount of traffic your site can receive, you too can welcome many new visitors via this method. The team here at Mangoco would love to put our innovative techniques to work with your search engine optimization initiatives. Contact us so today and we’ll discuss how we can help.

We’ve launched a new website for Fairfax, VA based interior painting and décor company Blank Slate Concepts.  We really like how this one came out.  We used a darker background for this to really make the logo and imagery pop — and a dark logo makes a lot of sense for a company with ‘Slate’ in their name.

The site is built on WordPress (no surprise there) and includes a cool navigation hover feature that we created.  There is a blog on the “Who We Are” page and a contact us form on the “Contact Us” page.  Let us know what you think!

We were happy to catch this very nice (unprompted) plug from the Sports Junkies the other morning. Listen to it below:

Listen to the short mp3 here

We just finished working with Bret and EB of the Sports Junkies on a new project for their poker show called Mediocre Poker Radio.  For those not in the DC area, the Sports Junkies are a highly rated sports and entertainment morning talk radio show.  Last year they launched their new poker show and it has very quickly become a dominant voice in the poker industry.

We worked on their website and implemented some very cool features, including the ability for fans and listeners to sign up and blog directly on the site alongside the hosts.  Now we’re in the midst of a mini-makeover to keep things fresh, and as part of that we’ve worked with the guys on a new logo.  In this logo we wanted to call out the fact that it was a radio show (you’ll see we’ve tranformed the letter ‘i’ into a radio antenna) and also include some quality, customized poker chips.  We’ve stuck with the black and deep red theme and also dropped a reflection for a modern touch.

Our next step in this makeover is to re-do the header on their website.  We’ll clean it up and include the new logo.  Let us know what you think!

In one of our previous posts about SEO, we discussed how we have been working with the guys at Maciverse.com to help them improve their SEO efforts and increase their monetization of the site.  While we were able to make significant improvements on both fronts, we were somewhat limited by the older design they were using.  Nonetheless we pushed ahead and improved their position for many terms in the search rankings and beefed up their monetization efforts as much as we could while working around the design limitation, but the time finally came when we really couldn’t move them to the next level without rethinking how their site is laid out.

The first thing we wanted to improve is how they branded themselves.  While they’ve clearly carved out their space in the tech world as Apple/Mac experts, they hadn’t used this mind share to build out a recognizable brand for themselves.  They have a great brand name that really needed to be played upon and called out in their logo… this wasn’t taking place with their old logo seen below:

When one thinks of the word ‘Maciverse’, it conjurs up ideas of ‘Mac’, ‘Apple Computers’, ‘the Universe’, ‘Planets’, and the like. While these are great thought images to work with, they were not being utilized and taken advantage of in the logo.  The Mangoco team brainstormed ideas around the words that come to mind when you think ‘Maciverse’ and then got to work on creating some logo proposals for client review.

Below is the final, approved iteration of the Maciverse logo.  We all think it does a great job of conveying a very hip and technical feel and makes a whole lot of sense for a company called Maciverse.  The next phase of this project is to do a full-site redesign now that we have a logo to build their brand from.  Come back soon to see what we’ve come up with for them!

It is no secret that we are huge supporters, advocates, and users of WordPress. It is definitely the best free Content Management System (CMS) around (we think its better than anything others charge for, too)! WordPress is wildly popular and used by millions of people across the internet because of its ease-of-use, extensibility, and price (free!).

WordPress benefits in the following ways due to its large and loyal user base:

• A vibrant user community that actively develops plug-ins and themes to improve its functionality and aesthetics
• A large number of skilled designers and developers able to work on it
• Sustained improvements and upgrades over time
• A large number of specially trained users who will use, review, and fix issues (such as security or user-interface experts)
• Vast amounts of free support and assistance for almost any problem imaginable

Just like anything else, however, someone is always someone trying to ruin the fun. In WordPress’ case, hackers are now looking to exploit the system because figuring out just one loophole would mean that they could gain access to millions of websites.

This type of thing goes for any software that is widely used – Just look at Microsoft versus every other operating system. Microsoft is targeted because, among other reasons, it has the most users.  If you figure out just one little virus or exploit, you could infect a very large amount of people.

Back to the issue at hand… WordPress security.  Yesterday, WordPress was attacked by a worm that infected older versions of WordPress and allowed hackers to gain access to the WordPress system, all the way to the database. The important piece of that sentence is that it infected ‘older versions’.  If you were up-to-date with your WordPress install you didn’t have a thing to worry about.

Trust me, the good significantly outweighs the bad for WordPress.  Don’t let a few hackers scare you away from using WordPress. At the same time, you must be proactive and always be upgrading your WordPress install to the latest release.  If you skip this part you are very susceptible to hackers exploiting older versions of the CMS.

I wanted to do a quick post briefly to talk about the positive ROI benefits of SEO. When a business is dependent on internet traffic to make money and survive, SEO is critical to the success of the business.

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Do you need a logo, business cards, or other graphics created?  We have extensive experience with this type of work, and with our exclusive printing partnership, can handle the design and print work for you.  Easy!

One of the aspects of our business that we really encourage our clients and potential clients to talk to us about is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  SEO is a set of methodologies for researching the keywords that it would be good for your site to rank well in the search engines for, and then to implement a plan to improve your search engine rankings for those keywords.  We fancy ourselves as the best Virginia SEO company around.

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For many years I built most websites that contained dynamic (new, changing) content almost exclusively on Joomla (and before that Mambo, its previous name).  Before that I built most sites with straight html, so learning and implementing sites on Joomla was a huge step forward in efficiency.  Not only did it make doing updates much easier, but changing the design was simple and training clients to do their own updates wasn’t too bad, either.

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