Global Search Pros

Handling Disasters & Emergencies: A Private Sector Solution

Since Katrina, I’ve been really interested in how governments, businesses and other organizations handle emergency situations. Thinking back to the tragedy in New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast, I know that our government was neither prepared for such a large-scale emergency nor able to gather the information necessary for making critical decisions.

At the time, I believed that emergency management was primarily a government function (and consequently its failure), but since then I’ve learned that there are several companies that will help both governments and businesses prepare for these situations.

Global Search Pros has recently signed such a firm as a client.

Early Alert is a Florida-based emergency management consulting company staffed by experienced professionals in meteorology, emergency response & emergency planning. Several members of their team have military backgrounds, as well as, extensive experience working with governments and businesses in this important area. They offer several really critical (and kind of cool) services.

In addition to Emergency Management Consulting, they offer:

• All Hazard Training - teaching governments and companies how to respond to disasters (man-made or natural)
• Situational Awareness - Tracking & reporting of critical information so clients know exactly what is going on during an emergency
• Continuity of Operations Planning - Creating plans and procedures so organizations can get key functions back up and running as soon as possible
• Alerts & E-letters - custom information about weather and other threats to operations

As you might have guessed, I’m pretty psyched about bringing Early Alert on board. While I don’t expect that I will need them (I live in the Northeast), I’m pretty sure that New Orleans would not be rebuilding (still) and my friend’s church wouldn’t have been torn apart if someone like them had been contacted.

This year, the hurricane season was not as violent or tragic but every year people lose their lives and billions in damages occur. I’d prefer that government kept the right expertise in house, but if they can’t or won’t do that, then we need to look to the private sector.

I don’t usually pay much attention to screensavers. Mine has been custom for years: after 15 minutes, my desktop starts saying “Get Back to Work”. Still, when a jewel drops into your lap, you have to be grateful.

System47 is THE Star Trek screensaver. If you ever dreamed of being Geordi, Worf, or Capt. Picard then you’ll want to download this. It has the different displays from ship (targeting, engineering, long-range scan, etc) and the sounds too.

I finally have a good reason to let my desktop go idle (as if I needed a reason).

Anytime I talk about what I do someone asks me for advice on improving their rankings. At Global Search Pros, we’ve moved away from using rankings as a key metric (though we still track them) and instead emphasize conversions and sales data. That said, traffic is still important and if you have invested time in keyword research, on-site optimization, and link building then you will want to see it payoff.

Below are 3 easy, but often overlooked task that can help your SEO efforts. They are also good practice for any webmaster. Experienced SEOs and webmasters will not see anything amazing here. This post is really about helping small companies and newbies get the most bang for their buck.

1.) Schedule Monthly URL Submissions to the Top Search Engines to Improve your Indexing and Visibility

While Google & Company will eventually get to you if you have any inbound links, waiting for them to make the discovery can be time consuming. Depending on your directory structure and what technology you run, it may take months for them to index your entire site and some key pages may only get spidered at the tail end. Of course, your internal linking structure can help with this but with ten minutes of cut’n'paste work, once a month, you can improve the speed and thoroughness of each crawl.

Start by going to the submission pages for the 3 majors:

• Google Url Submission
• Yahoo Url Submission
• Live Search URL Submission

Submit your top-level domain (e.g. http://www.example.com), and your top 2-3 content pages. After you’ve submitted, make a note of the date and schedule another round of submissions for next month. Thats it.

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