This is the website for the 5 international schools that Aveda has where salon professionals can go for advanced training and education from some of the top artists in the industry.
Since they have schools in New York, London, Berlin, Toronto and Vancouver -the site has a mix of travel and education-related themes.
We are all really happy with this one. Hope you enjoy it.
SalonBiz LIGHT, the free version of SalonBiz salon software, has been added to one of the web’s biggest archives of free, trial and demo software, Download.com
View the SalonBiz LIGHT free software download page
On a side note: when they initially posted it, they had a small typo where they described it as a tool to help run your “saloon” business. They have since (and rather quickly) corrected so that it now accurately lets users know that is is in-fact, salon management software (not for bars, speakeasies or wild west watering holes)
Some of my earliest video work for Extended Technologies is now showing on YouTube. Back at TSA in Miami, January 2002, we interviewed salon and spa owners and managers that use SalonBiz and SpaBiz about why they chose the software, what benefits they got from the software and other topics. I took their responses and cut them together to let the customers tell the story.
Here’s an example:
There are 5 total, and you can view the rest of the videos here:
http://youtube.com/user/ExtendedTechnologies.
Some of the owners and managers interviewed:
Can’t believe I didn’t post about this, but the SalonBizsite made it to the top of Google for “salon software” a few weeks back. When I first saw it, it was #1, but later that day settled to #2, but it has stayed there ever since.
And yes, it was something I did and no, I am not going to say what it was. But, it was completely legal and the result has shifted my approach to SEO in a big way.
But here’s proof of the fleeting #1 ranking.
Keeps on climbing. It’s been a while since I posted an update on how the Aveda Institutes Beauty Basics site is doing in it’s quest to regain it’s position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
So here some of the latest updates on searches for “aveda institutes”:
Google
Aveda Institutes Beauty Basics: #4
Aveda Institutes Florida: #5
Yahoo!
Aveda Institutes Beauty Basics: #3
Aveda Institutes Florida: #5
Pretty pleased. Of course there is always room for improvement, but I am happy with how it has gone so far.
We just launched our most recent site for the Offspring Miami Jam Hair Show.
The site is a fully flash based site that lists the presenters and bios, provides travel information and information on the hands-on workshops available.
Pretty proud of this one – it uses a whole new world of Flash programming we haven’t done before and has worked out really well. So we are excited. Hope you will be too.
Hopefully it is a worthy successor to last year’s Addy-award winning EVE: South Beach Jam website.
Made it all the way to San Jose this week to attend the Search Engine Strategies conference.
After the first day, my brain is full and there are still 2 1/2 days to go.
Just checked today and the Aveda Institutes Beauty Basics site has fought its way back to the home page, ranking #9.
But no time for resting now… still work to do. Good thing I am picking up some great search engine tips in San Jose this week.
Well, the initial dust has settled and things are calming down. After the domain switch, the Aveda Institutes Beauty Basics site had dropped to an abyssmal #192 in a Google search for “aveda institutes” (but we did expect a fallout).
However, over the weeks it has made a steady climb all the way up to #17 (as of today). Next stop, front page.
Some folks have been asking me lately about “META” tags for web pages, what they are and how they work, so here is a brief overview that should hopefully shed some light on the subject.
META tags are kind of like hints for search engines to indicate what a page is about. There are two that relate to site content: KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION.
KEYWORDS is practically useless nowadays as most search engines ignore them completely focusing instead on the actual content of the page itself (which is why copy is so important). Those that do still give it any weight really only do so if the keywords are also reflected in the text of the page (which is why the actual text copy on a page is so important). As such, there would be little benefit in jamming all these phrases into the keywords tag. It could even be frowned upon by search engines (a minimal payoff, so it’s not really worth the risk).
The DESCRIPTION tag is a little different and is far more beneficial to search engines and the end-user. If a search engine considers a page relevant for a search term (for other magical reasons) but no content on the page contains the searched words or phrases themselves, the search engine will in most cases use the contents of the DESCRIPTION tag for the description it provides for the link in the search engine results pages.
You can view a Google search for “aveda institutes” as an example.
You will see that the result for “avedainstitutes.com” shows the link to the main site with a description. However, if you visit the site you will not see any standard text that a search engine could see. So since the page itself has no text content (Search Engines can’t read flash or images) and no relevant text to pull from, but this is obviously a relevant site for “aveda institutes”, it used the description it found in the DESCRIPTION meta tag.
Also, a small note: DESCRIPTION and KEYWORD tags should be unique for each page (as each page is about something different).
So there are the basics. Hope you found them useful.
Check back for some info on some of the lesser known META tags.
