Rapp on this: An introduction to copyright law

Our Guest blogger Paul Rapp continues to have a lot to say! This months article is an introduction to copyright law. See an excerpt below:

Every artist ought to have at least an elementary understanding of copyright law. Second only to an artwork's aesthetic qualities, it is copyright law that drives a work's value and integrity. This is so because copyright law establishes and defines what it is that the artist owns of his or her work, both while the artist possesses the work and after the work has been sold, or copied, displayed or performed. In future months, this column will hopefully shed some light on this deceptively complicated area of law, dispel common myths and misunderstandings, and discuss other legal areas that impact on the creative process as well as the business of art. Click here for full article.

Thanks Paul!

Namaro SEO standing

Search Engine Optimization is a slow and steady process. Painfully slow. However, if you continually work at it the results start coming in and hopefully some new business.

So after 4 months, Erica Darcy (our guest blogger and SEO expert/emhdarcy@gmail.com) looked over the webstats for our website www.namaro.com:

1. Search is currently driving about 50% of the referrals to the site this month, up from 15% in February. Good!

2. Gone up in positioning overall, so that is a good also.

3. Traffic overall has not been increasing. Not so good!

What can we do to drive traffic? Erica is suggesting some article syndication, both for the traffic boost, and the links. She believes that bringing the blog onto your domain will also help in that area, as will posting to the blog more frequently. She also wants us to play around with digg or other social media.

Yes, it gets confusing but this blog is about working through this SEO stuff to gain a better understanding for ourselves and for you the readers to take full advantage of the web.

The next post will cover some of the things we continue to do to increase the traffic.

“Rapp on this” Information on intellectual property law

Every artist ought to have at least an elementary understanding of copyright law. Second only to an artwork's aesthetic qualities, it is copyright law that drives a work's value and integrity. This is so because copyright law establishes and defines what it is that the artist owns of his or her work, both while the artist possesses the work and after the work has been sold, or copied, displayed or performed. In future months, this column will hopefully shed some light on this deceptively complicated area of law, dispel common myths and misunderstandings, and discuss other legal areas that impact on the creative process as well as the business of art. Click to read more.

The Law Office of Paul C. Rapp
348 Long Pond Road
Housatonic, Massachusetts 01236

Specializing in intellectual property law including copyright, trademark, Internet, and art and entertainment matters. Adjunct professor of copyright and art & entertainment law, Albany Law School

Licensed in New York and Massachusetts
MA: 413.553.3189
NY: 518.935.4568

What is search engine optimization (SEO)?

We have a guest blogger this month with detailed information about SEO. An essential tool for anyone marketing on the internet today. Erica Darcy is an SEO consultant with experience working with small, mid-size and large companies including fortune 500 corporations.

She has great things to say!

You've spent time and money developing a website for your business, now you're wondering where all those new customers you should be getting are.

Why can't you find your site on Google, Yahoo or MSN?

Why is your competitor's site showing up and not yours?

No, it's not magic or some sort of trick. It's a process called search engine optimization or SEO.

What is search engine optimization?
SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural (also called organic) search results for targeted keywords. What this means is if your website is a community for dog lovers, like dogster.com, when you search for “dog community site”on Google, Yahoo or another search engine you would want to see dogster.com at or near the top of the results.

The higher up in the search results, the more traffic a site will receive. The top three results receive the most traffic and it decreases as you go further down the page. Very few searchers will go beyond the second or third page of results.

SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

How does it work?
As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users.

Basically, SEO works by focusing on creating a good site both for your visitors and for the search engines.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the other school of thought on SEO. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and usually remove them.

Using black hat techniques can get your site banned from the search engines. It may work for the short term, but it's not a sustainable model. It's not easy to get a site re-indexed after it has been banned. I've had new clients who have come to me after being banned, and it took months to clean up the site and to get re indexed.

How do I get started?
SEO works best when it is included from the very beginning. Before you design the site, before a single line of HTML gets written you need to research your keywords. These will be the basis of everything for the site. SEO when it is built into a new site is more cost effective then when doing it as an afterthought.

If you have an existing site, not to worry, there are plenty of things you can do to improve your site too. You start in the same place as well – researching your keywords.

When is the SEO done?
Never. SEO is a continual process of optimizing, measuring and seeing what works best for your unique site. Just like your website should be updated from time to time, your SEO needs to be measured and re-evaluated. The search engines change the way they index results frequently, so your site needs to change as well.

Am I guaranteed results?
No. there is no way to guarantee a site will rank in a certain position in the natural or organic results. No reputable consultant or company will ever guarantee results. That disclaimer being said, you should see improvements within 3-6 months of starting a SEO campaign.

Many Thanks to Erica Darcy for this informative post. She can be reached at

emhdarcy@gmail.com

http://mhvtheater.blogspot.com
http://thefrequentbookworm.blogspot.com