What to do About Copyright Infringement

Copyright infringement, what can you do? Have you found your website content on another website? Found others using your trademark name? Found a website that has snatched your own personal images?

How to resolve copyright infringement

It is smart to look for your copyrighted content on other websites and take action.
It is smart to look for your copyrighted content on other websites and take action.

There are several things you can do to get the offending site owner’s notice and protect your own copyrighted content.

The first step is to send a notice with a formal takedown request. Give the website owner 10 days to take action or respond. Make sure you keep copies of your email or written correspondence.

Be specific in your request, but reasonable. Ten days to remove content or images is about the norm.

At the end of your time period review if the copyright infringement has been resolved. If not, now it’s time to contact the webhost.

Go first to Who Is Hosting This, and do a search on the site’s domain name. Then contact the web host and ask that the site that is infringing on your copyright be taken down. Make sure to mention the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and ask for a DMCA site takedown.

The host will typically take immediate action and take down the entire website, contact the site owner, and demand the offending content be removed before the host will relaunch the website.

You’d better believe that this gets quick action from the website owner who may have initially disregarded your removal notice. Don’t just take copyright infringement, protect your own intellectual property.

Great Tips on Using AdSense

I use AdSense to monetize certain sections of my website to make additional money off my traffic. Here are a few of my tips that can help you with AdSense too.

  1. Don’t exclude your own business areas. Advertisers will pay  more to advertise on your website if they are selling the same or similar services that you are. That being said, be careful where you monetize so you don’t bleed off your own potential customers.
  2. Be judicious about the number of ad panels and where you put them. Don’t over do it.
  3. Build AdSense ad spaces into your new design. Don’t paste them in as an after thought.
  4. Be realistic about how much money you can earn with AdSense ads. Try to cover your hosting expenses for the year and you’ll be doing great.
  5. Don’t use AdSense everywhere in your website. Choose high traffic areas that typically are not conversion sections in your website. For me this means we show AdSense ads on our blog and in our how-to article sections. These are high traffic sites, but are not typically high conversion sections of our website. You won’t find ads on key pages of our website that are important to our own business, just what I consider adjunct pages.

Tips on Website Content

Here are my top tips on creating website content.

  1. Think like a reader. Make sure you write what people will want to know about your services.
  2. Keep paragraphs small. Content on the web is scanned, don’t have large blocks of content.
  3. Make sure to use h1 and h2 tags to sort your content for search engines.
  4. Give enough depth so prospects can really understand what you sell and can do.
  5. Provide interesting information about more than just your services – give the why and how.

The bottom-line is to think like a customer when you write website content. If you knew nothing about your firm, what would you want to know. What makes you different and sells your services to a prospect?

Make sure you use bullets, graphics, and white space to break up your content pages. The page should be interesting to the eye as well as have something great and interesting to say.

Make sure to visit our website for information about our own content creation services today.

Sometimes What You Really Need Is Not SEO

I had a client contact me this past week and ask me to perform SEO code optimization services on his website as he felt he was not getting enough business and thought it was due to low search engine placement. As part of our process of working with a client, we did a statistical analysis of his site to find out exactly where his placement was and if SEO was really what he needed versus maybe link building.

What we found out was that he owned the number one and two spots on both Google.com and Bing/Yahoo on nearly every single keyword. We also reviewed his website traffic and found it to be relatively high, and then we carefully reviewed his website content. After our review it was clear that the issue was not the website look or feel, not the optimization, or the organic placement, but rather the website content was not communicating his authority or longevity in the industry. was rife with typos, and did not include a strong call to action.

For an e-commerce website typos and website layout issues are the kiss of death. A lack of attention to these details sabotages all the good things you do and creates an impression about you online that is not necessarily as professional as you would want. All of these issues may even impact your sales as e-commerce is all about trust, transparency, authority, and confidence.

If you feel like you are not getting enough leads or sales it is important to work through a process to clearly identify where the issues that are impacting your performance are. Don’t throw money at one thing that ends up not being the real root of your problem. Take time to analyze and then act smartly!