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PPAI announced today that eBlox designed and developed sites Advalite and 3M Promotional Markets won Silver and Gold Web Awards. Advalite took Silver in the Technical Innovations/E-commerce category, and 3M Promotional Markets was awarded the gold in the Marketing/Branding category.

We’re very proud of both sites (and many others!) and are happy to see storeBlox-driven sites take these big honors from the premier association for the promotional products industry. Both sites are products of much sweat, hard work and intensive collaboration with the clients.

Both sites showcase the extensive customization capabilities of storeBlox, as well as a wide variety of custom-developed distributor tools that enable both suppliers’ customers to market, sell and purchase their products easily.

Please check them out at advalite.com and promote.3m.com. You can view the Web Awards winners here.

Categories: General

Continued from the previous post. This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

PageRank is critical to understand (or at least know how to find) because it affects the quality judgment of inbound links. If a site with a very high PageRank links to yours, it can have a positive effect on your ranking; PageRank is “passed on”, to a degree, to the site that receives the inbound link. Conversely, a site with very low PageRank offers little value to your ranking. This is why trading links with your buddy’s nifty new website won’t accomplish much (most such “link-swapping” tactics are completely ineffective); you’re both passing on nothing of much value to each other. So, the goal in building inbound links is to get those links from sites with higher PageRank than your own.
Even this can be problematic, because Google is on the lookout for anything that might pass PageRank inappropriately – that is, without actually reflecting quality. That means that a lot of sites that you might consider as possible venues for building inbound links will actually not help you. For instance, advertisements, blog comments and many other commonly used tactics for building inbound links no longer pass PageRank to the target site. Google has even removed many common directories from its page ranking algorithm.
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Categories: Articles

This post is excerpted from an upcoming issue of Identity Marketing magazine

If there is anything approaching a “secret sauce” to search engine success, most experts would probably agree that it is the inbound link. An inbound link is simply a link from some other site to your site. On the surface, it would seem simple to acquire these – trade links with friends, get a link on your brother’s blog, get listed in a local directory, etc. And it is superficially simple to build inbound links to your site (and even simpler, though often expensive, to pay someone to build them for you).

Building and acquiring good inbound links – that is, ones that actually benefit your search engine rankings – is an entirely more difficult proposition. There are a number of reasons for this, but first, let’s review what we’re trying to accomplish in the first place.

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Categories: Articles