QR codes have grown in popularity since their major debut back in 2011. They are showing up at Starbucks, on popular magazines and department stores. In a Ragan.com article by Matt Wilson: 

How can SEO help you get more out of your website? Simple: landing pages. SEO is search engine optimization - which you can achieve just from including keywords and phrases that people are going to search on a daily basis. This is one great way to use SEO in order to draw in more traffic to your website. By using keywords in your title and the content on the landing page, you can draw more traffic and rank higher on search engines as well. 

What is the best day to tweet, update your Facebook page, post a blog (if you are only posting once a week) or post within any of your social media mediums? The short answer is: Tuesday.

Here are a few Facebook post ideas for YMCAs! Increasing membership and keeping members interested in a Facebook page can be challenging. Post interesting, relative content to keep members coming back for all their YMCA updates. Create interaction with your members on your Facebook page with some of these great post ideas: 

Pinterest is the newest social networking site to hit the internet. Pinterest allows users to "pin" their "interests" to boards that are centered around a theme. For example, let's say you are planning on redoing a room in your house. There is a list of interests that Pinterest has, where the pins are already organized in a newsfeed form. If you have the patience to scroll through the pins, and you click on the "Home Decor" link, then you will find a variety of different "For the Home" decor. There are pins for every decorating taste.

What is a call-to-action? A call-to-action, or CTA, is a statement intended to catch a reader's attention by inspiring them to click the statement and fill out your form. By filling your form out the reader is able to have access to useful information. CTAs need to be relevant to the content you are providing. There are several different words or phrases you can use to create hype around your CTA. Those phrases could be, Download Now!, Enter Here!, Subscribe me now! etc. 

The world is turning to mobile and we all need to stop, take a few moments and try to access our own websites for mobile usage. On average our team sees statistics that reflect 10% + of a YMCA website’s traffic viewed on a mobile device. Sometimes as high as 20%. This means that 1-2 people for every 10 are on a smartphone or a tablet.

Take a moment and go to your YMCA website on your mobile device. How does it look? If it’s not so good maybe it’s time to start planning to be “mobile friendly”.

Here are some things to consider......
    •    By 2013, more people will use their mobile phones than their PCs to get online (Gartner, 2010; Google Mobile Optimization Webinar 2011; Cisco, 2011)
    •    71% of users expect a mobile site to load as fast as a desktop site (Compuware, “What Users Want From Mobile”, 2011)
    •    57% would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site (Compuware, “What Users Want From Mobile”, 2011)
    •    79% prefer mobile sites for product reviews (Adobe Systems, “Adobe Mobile Experience Survey” 2011; eMarketer, 2011)


As a YMCA you can take this slowly. First put together a plan of action - here is a quick list..

1. Review your website statistics. Identify the top 5 most visited content areas.
2.  Rank them from 1-5.
3. Create a budget to work with to convert your site to be mobile ready. $3500 is an average figure you can usually get a strong first generation mobile site built for.

Once you have these steps taken care of you are ready to dive into creating a mobile site and stay ahead of the curve.

Any special tips for improving Yelp reviews? I have a client who has great reviews on other sites but not on Yelp. Any suggestions? We are working to improve our inbound marketing.