Helly Hansen Warehouse Sale

Theatrium Design got a few weeks off this month, to do our annual sailing trip. This year we sailed from our homeport in Salem, MA down through the Cape Cod Canal and over to Newport, RI in time to check out the famous Annual Helly Hansen Warehouse Sale. The warehouse sale is a great opportunity to stock up on high quality Helly Hansen gear and save bundles in the process. But the fun part is, this is much more than just a sale, it’s an event full of entertainment and surprises!

Helly had so much gear on sale, they needed a huge space, so they take over a huge tent at the Newport Yachting Center. I knew this was a big event, but until we got there I had no idea HOW BIG it really was! Jay Lasky, owner of Helly Hansen Newport was happy to let us sneak over the first night to take photos for the Helly Hansen Newport blog.

Being out on the water, we took advantage of the sale to grab some foul weather gear, fleece jackets, deck shoes, base layer and socks. But the sale also offered a ton of skiing and snowboarding jackets and bibs, footwear, sportswear and everything else for outdoor adventuring, no matter what season.

As a bonus to the sale, we got to meet the Northwestern crew from Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch. Now, I know these guys look pretty rough on tv when they are crab fishing in the middle of the winter on the Bering Sea, but in person, they are the nicest guys and it’s easy to see why they have so many loyal fans. They signed autographs and met with people, did survival suit contests, and seemed to really enjoy meeting all their fans. We took lots of photos, and you can see them on the Helly Hansen Newport blog. All the merchandise from the Northwestern store was also available at the warehouse sale.

The warehouse sale also had great deals from the Life is Good store in Newport, as well as the Music Box. And true to Jay’s love of animals, the Newport Potter League was on hand to promote their pet rescue mission, and to raise funds for their new animal shelter. Several puppies that were available for adoption were there for meet and greet. As tempted as I was to grab one of those puppies, I had to remember that we were on a sailboat, and already have one puppy in training.

The Helly Hansen Warehouse sale was a major highlight of our trip, but we still had to move on. Our trip also included stops at Block Island, Point Judith, Westport, Onset, Scituate, Sandwich, Mattapoisett and Provincetown.

As much as we loved our sailing adventure, it’s also great to be back at work, out of the sun for a while and as soon as the house stops rocking and the laundry piles are diminished, we’ll start looking forward to next year’s adventure!

How’s Your SEO? - Website Grader Tool

This week, I’d like to share a tip to help you improve your website’s page rank and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) success so your site can do better on Google and the other important search engines and directories.

HubSpot’s Website Grader (http://www.websitegrader.com) is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of your website. It provides a score that incorporates a variety of parameters, such as website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

Some of the factors that influence your website’s score are the basic but important SEO items on your homepage, such as page titles, meta tags, alt tags, headings and such.  Website Grader will tell you what information is missing or incorrect so you can fix it, or tell your developer what needs to be done.  For example, if your meta description is too long, you are advised to shorten it to the character length that Google likes best. 

Next, it looks at a few interior pages of your site, to see if your meta tags and titles are unique for interior pages.  The search engines appreciate individual meta tags for each page that reflect the content of that particular page.

Website Grader then looks at your domain name registration (did you know that the search engines prefer domains that are registered for more than a year at a time?), and checks to see what your Google Page Rank is, how many pages of your site are indexed, when the last craw was done, how many incoming links your site enjoys and your traffic ranking.  It also lists whether your site is listed in important directories, such as Yahoo, ZoomInfo and Dmoz.

Next, Website Grader looks for a blog on your site, and searches for incoming links from the important social bookmarking sites, such as Digg and del.icio.us. It also checks to see if your site has a contact form, RSS feeds, and finally grades your keywords based on monthly search volumes.
Wow, that’s a lot of information to digest!  I ran my own website through the grader and found several areas to fix.  For example, the scorecard told me that my  site needed a 301 permanent redirect so that Google will know that a link to www.theatriumdesign.com is the same as a link to the simplified theatriumdesign.com. 

I’ll be going in to check my score again in a week or so, to see if my score has improved.  Also, since the algorithms are constantly being updated, it makes sense to check back periodically to see how the SEO world is changing.

As always, the web moves quickly and keeping up with all the new ways to cross promote your business is important if you want to keep up with the times and stay ahead of your competition.  So get out there and give your website a SEO tuneup!

Tapping in on the Facebook opportunity

I used to think that Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) was just for the under 25 crowd. I first heard of it when my niece was preparing for college and used Facebook to meet and get to know her dorm mates. And back then it was just that, a social networking site for the high school and college crowd.

Not so anymore! As social networking sites have entered the mainstream, more and more adults are using social networking sites as career networking sites. LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/) was the first major site that allowed professionals to post their career histories and network with colleagues from former companies and classmates from school. LinkedIn recently added groups to their free service, allowing anybody to form or join a group for career networking or that relates to a special interest.

Facebook has recently started offering some great opportunities for individuals, organizations and business to post information, and communicate to others with similar interests. I’ve been playing around with Facebook lately and it’s obvious that there is a terrific opportunity here if you want to spend some time.

The whole mantra of Facebook is “make it personal” and “keep it fresh”. The more you post to Facebook, the better. But be warned, Facebook can be pretty addictive!

I started by creating an account with Facebook and created my personal profile, including photos, career and education history, my interests and activities, that kind of thing. In order for people to see my profile, they need to also have a Facebook account and then become my friend. So I started looking for people I know to become “friends” with. Once a person is your friend, they can see your profile and you can see theirs. You can write on their page, send them email through Facebook, share photos and other tidbits, and vice versa. When you log in to Facebook, you’ll see a “newsfeed” of what your friends are up to. See how this can become addictive? But wait, there’s more… MUCH more!

And, here’s where it relates to your business or organization. Once you have your profile, you can then start adding to it with Facebook applications. For example, I found an application that lets me post my blog to my Facebook page… pretty cool, huh? As I write this post about Facebook, it will then show up on my Facebook page. How Escher! This helps to increase exposure for your blog, keeps your Facebook page fresh and notifies all your Facebook friends that you’ve posted to your blog, so they can come and read all your pearls of wisdom.

You can also create Facebook “pages” specifically about your business or organization or whatever interest you want. Unlike your profile, your page is public, and anybody can visit it. Your page shows up in the Facebook directory, and when people visit your page, they can in turn, become fans of your page. Once you’ve got some fans, you can then communicate with them and send them your exciting news and special offers! Okay, I don’t have any fans yet (well, except for me, I had to click the button!), but you can visit my page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Theatrium-Web-Design/18617011121 and become a fan. Once I have 10 fans, I will start to see more statistics about my page.

Let’s see, what else can you do? Well, for organizations, you might want to create a Facebook group to promote events and allow people to participate in discussions and post information of their own…

And perhaps coolest of all, you can now create targeted ads that will show up on Facebook pages. Similar to Google ads, you create a text based ad that links back to your Facebook page and you pay by the click. However, Facebook ads are targeted by interests and activities that people list on their profiles, or relating to interest groups. So for example, most of the ads I see are directly targeted at ME and my interests.

So, as you can see, Facebook has a lot of potential for you to promote whatever it is you want to market. Give it a try and let me know what you think!