Tuna Traffic - Digital Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Web/Graphic Design, & Technology

Tuna Goes Off To WordCamp

Lori Weisberg — Sat, 18 May 2013 20:33:33 +0000

Their sleeping bags are nicely rolled, they’re loaded up with bug spray and they’ve stashed away a few postcards to write to us at Tuna School in case they get home sick.

It’s time for Tuna’s very own Mike Zielonka and Lisa Dodd to head off to camp.

WordCamp, Miwaukee, that is.

What is WordCamp Milwaukee?

Both Mike and Lisa have assured the rest of us at Tuna Traffic that they will not be spending their WordCamp time making lanyards and singing campfire songs. So, what is WordCamp, then? It’s a 3-day event in June for people who are gaga over WordPress, our favorite open-sourced content management system, to learn and share on the topics of web development and design, blogging, business management and much, much more. There will be WordPress inspired presentations, beginner workshops, free swag and an awesome after party. Our own WordPress aficionado, Mike Zielonka, is imparting his wisdom in a presentation. More on that in a minute.

Tuna’s WordCamp Counselors

First, let’s give a shout out to Mike and Lisa, our own WordCamp Counselors, for all their behind the scenes hard work in designing, developing and planning this huge event. Mike worked tirelessly from the ground floor, helping organize the event, select presenters and secure sponsors. Lisa flexed her graphic design muscles and created several amazing, eye-popping WordCamp Milwaukee logos and promotional pieces for the event. Drawing inspiration from the strong Milwaukee/Harley Davidson connection, Lisa’s designs are gritty, grungy and iconic, capturing the spirit of adventure and freedom. Take a look for yourself.

He Likes It, Hey Mikey!

We know that Mike is an adoring fan of WordPress. We also know he is our resident SEO sage. Put the two together and you’ve got one heck of a presentation. Mike will be giving a WordPress SEO 101 master class of sorts, providing the tools and tips for the casual to complex WordPress-er to use SEO for good, instead of evil. Or rather, for effectiveness instead of idiocy. Mike will be expounding with his SEO partner in crime, Scott Offord, owner and director of internet marketing for Orion Group. His can’t-miss presentation will be Sunday, June 9th at 11am. As always, Mike will engage, educate and entertain. Find out more about Mike, his past presentations and his love for all things SEO.

Come Camp With Us

So, we can’t guarantee there will be s’mores, but there will be lots to learn. Plus you won’t get swimmer’s itch or a nasty sun burn. Come camp with Mike and Lisa at WordCamp Milwaukee on June 7-9th. Get your tickets now!

The Recipe for Cooking up a Blogtastic Website

Lori Weisberg — Fri, 10 May 2013 17:55:07 +0000

We at Tuna Traffic just want to issue this mouthwatering warning. Your tummy might not be growling right now, but we pretty much guarantee it will be, once you’ve read this sweet and savory post about our friend Halle Cottis and her delicious creation, Whole Lifestyle Nutrition.

Take One Part Passion for Food

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you meet a person who has a calling in life; a calling to help people the best they know how and truly make a difference. That’s Halle Cottis in a nutshell (an organically grown nutshell, by the way). Halle is all about delicious, healthy food. Organically growing it, cooking it, blogging about it, and sharing easy and delectable ways for us to enjoy it too.

Add One Part Tuna Traffic

When we first started working with Halle, she already had a website, but it just wasn’t doing what she wanted it to do. There were a whole lot of bugs. Not real bugs, of course. We’re talking scrumptious food here. Rather, the type of technical bugs that get in the way of executing an outstanding website. Plus, her site wasn’t generating the buzz she wanted. Halle had recently published her first cookbook, chalk full of lip smacking recipes, tips and ideas on how to eat clean and healthy and she wanted to market it online. But, there was a key ingredient missing to really get Whole Lifestyle Nutrition off and running. And that ingredient was Tuna. Tuna Traffic, that is.

Halle asked us to:

Effectively drive traffic to her website.
Deliver consistent, premium content.
Grow her brand by creating a reoccurring revenue source.
Establish a member-driven portal website.
Successfully optimize her website for SEO.
Problem solve and eliminate all technical issues from her website.

Mix Well and Serve

They say the proof is in the pudding. (And it is. Plus, the pudding is yummy too.) After a short 30 days, (that’s 3-0), The Whole Lifestyle Nutrition website boasted 112,000 visitors, up from a mere 500. And, Halle’s site charted over 1/4 million page views, quickly ranking in the Top 10 of organic and holistic recipe sites. How’s that for some appetizing traffic!

Here’s what Halle had to say about her tasty transformation:

“Not only did Tuna Traffic help with increasing my traffic, they also gave me the confidence that is needed in this ever changing internet world. I have learned so much from them and continue to learn and grow everyday.”

Bon Appetit

Take a look for yourself. It’s like eating potato chips (organically farmed with a hint of kosher salt). You can’t view her website just once.

Check Out All The Real Food Recipes at Whole Lifestyle Nutrition

Curious about what our Tuna Team can do for your business? Give us a holler. We’d love to chat. Send Us a Message or Tweet Us!

Happy Birthday, Elise!

Lori Weisberg — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:12:46 +0000

Listen to the dulcet tones of our Tuna Tenors as they serenade Elise on her special day.

Control What You Can Control in WordPress. On Page SEO FTW!

Mike Zielonka — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 01:29:36 +0000

These slides are from Mike Zielonka’s talk at the McHenry County WordPress Meetup.

Control What You Can Control in WordPress. On Page SEO FTW! Talk Description

Listen, we all know that SEO is a bottomless pit. The factors of what impacts a page’s SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) on Google, Bing, Etc is a long long laundry list and frankly it’s very hard to control every single factor. BUT there are two things you can control: Developing Quality Content and On Page SEO. I can’t commit to teaching you how to create amazing content in an hour but I can teach you everything you need to know to control your One Page SEO using WordPress with a few plugins and few lines of code.

During this interactive talk we’ll cover:

Natural Keyword Rich Content
Open Graph Tags
Title Text
SEO Friendly URLs
Why the Meta Description still matters
Meta Keywords are useless but can be useful
Semantic Markup & heading tags
Microdata, Microformats, RDFa & Rich Snippets
Googlent + Authorship
Canonical URL
Anchor text & Title Text for Links
Alt Text, Title Text & file naming
How to use nofollow and noindex
XML Sitemaps
Why comments are gold
Social Authority

How to Bring a 93 Year Old Institution into the Web World, Tuna Style

Lori Weisberg — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 21:31:43 +0000

The rich history behind Nelson Brothers & Strom sounds almost like an urban legend. One day, as they were sitting on the 6th Street bridge in Racine, two brothers, Herb and Frank Nelson and their friend Cliff Strom decided to start a machining business. That was 1919. Today, Nelson Brothers & Strom is an established leader in the manufacturing, machining and engineering industry, doing work for some major players throughout the country.

It’s All About the Service

At the heart of Nelson Brothers & Strom is their commitment to service, a commitment born on their first day of business. It’s that commitment to any product, any service, any size, any time that sets them apart. So, when our friends at Nelson Brothers & Strom came to us, we knew this was going to be a marriage made in heaven. After all, (we’ll try to say this without blushing), we feel the same way about service too.

Ready to be Relevant

Being the smart cookies that they are, David and Mary Kay Hall, the owners of Nelson Brothers & Strom, realized a very important thing. Their current marketing plan relied solely on a very old school approach to reaching new customers. (Almost 100 years old to be exact.) Their customer demographic was changing and their way of doing business needed to change with it. It was time to prepare for the future of machining. Enter Tuna Traffic.

Nelson Brothers & Strom asked us to:

Develop, launch and manage a modern and dynamic web presence.
Capture their state-of -the-art machining capabilities.
Showcase their on-demand support – that good ‘ol service commitment.
Incorporate social sharing on blog posts, highlighting new projects.
Consult on content writing for clarity and creativity.
Drive traffic through local SEO and online awareness.

Gearing up for the next 100 years

Take a look at the new and improved Nelson Brothers & Strom, courtesy of the Tuna Team.

Here’s what David Hall says about his web site’s impact.

“These guys – and gals know what they are doing. Since the website went live, we moved to the 1^st page on a Google search in just 4 weeks! We had our 1^st internet sale in 6 weeks from our launch date. They help you with the blogs and launch pages to keep our website on the front page of any Google or Bing search.”

Think Your Web Presence is Relevant? Ready to Find Out?

Give us a holler. We’d love to chat. Send Us a Message or Tweet Us!

Mike Guest Blogs on ZippyKid About Dedicated IP Addresses And SEO

Sud Shanmugabaskaran — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:17:34 +0000

Like a proud parent, Tuna is beaming with pride over our own Mike Zielonka. Being an SEO expert, he was asked to guest blog for ZippyKid regarding dedicated IP addresses and SEO. Here’s a teaser from the blog:

Back in December my friend and ZippyKid owner, Vid Luther and I had an interesting discussion on Facebook regarding dedicated IPs and SEO.

The discussion stemmed from the original thought provoking post by Vid:

“Dear ‘SEO consultants’, Please stop telling people to put their sites on different IP’s. Every time I hear this, I tell our customers to find different SEO consultants.”

So Mike, do you really need a dedicated IP address for better SEO?

Tuna Goes to Hollywood in Their Office With Green Screen Magic in their Racine, WI Studio

Lori Weisberg — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:03:11 +0000

“And the Oscar goes to….”

In this season of Academy Awards, we thought it timely to toot our own horn about our professional video services. Granted, our Tuna Team hasn’t quite mastered the art of walking the red carpet, but we’ve produced some pretty innovative videos lately. And the videos have totally boosted sales for our clients. Inspired and effective – now that truly rates two enthusiastic thumbs up.

Behind the Scenes, Tuna-style

Our Tuna School is home to a state-of-the-art video production facility, outfitted with high-tech editing equipment and a mobile green screen studio. It’s the place where dreams are made. Really. We can expertly transform the look and feel of your video with amazing effects just as quickly as you can say, “The envelope, please.”

Here’s a little Behind-The-Scenes video of our Green Screen Video Shoot!

And, since our green screen is mobile,we can come to your place of business and film in your neck of the woods. Then we’ll return to Tuna School and wave our glittery editing wand. Voila, a professional video is born, ready to make it’s way onto the web and make a difference for your business.

On a Screen Near You

Want to see some of our video work? Grab some popcorn and check out the Tuna produced videos below:

Is it time for your business to make it’s video debut?

We’d love to talk to you about how professional video production can bolster your web presence. Give us a jingle or drop us a note. And remember, years from now in your acceptance speech, to thank all the little people (a.k.a. Tuna Traffic) who got you where you are today.

If You Build It, They Will Come (to Good Water Aquatics)

Lori Weisberg — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 18:19:36 +0000

Perhaps the title of this blog is just a take-off of quote from an ’80s movie about a farmer who builds a baseball field in the center of a bunch of corn. But, to those of us at Tuna Traffic, we know that this quote really means something in the world of custom built and Tuna created websites. And we’ve got the success stories to prove it.

Something from Nothing

Take our buddies at Good Water Aquatics. Andrew Wolf, the owner of Good Water Aquatics, asked us to create a website that would do a couple of things:

Create an amazing, interactive gallery to show off his livestock and corals.
Grow online traffic to his business.
Secure his position as the premier aquarium consultant and designer in his market.
Utilize social media to establish a strong tie in with Facebook.

They Say a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, But What About an Outstanding Website?

We put our Tuna team to work. And, voila. Take a look for yourself.

Beautiful, huh?

And guess what. Not only is it a breathtaking website, it’s driving new business to Good Water Aquatics.

Here’s what Good Water Aquatics Owner Andrew Wolf told us about the new site:

” I love that visitors can come to my new site and see our gallery of tanks we have installed or maintained. We are so proud of our customer’s tanks and it’s so cool that we can show them off to the world in our client gallery.”

Outstanding Web Design is not just for These Fish in the Sea

Curious about what our Tuna Team can do for your business? Give us a holler. We’d love to chat. Send Us a Message or Tweet Us!

Tuna Traffic’s Chili Cook-Off Extravaganza Winning Recipe!

Elise Muehlenberg — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 20:22:48 +0000

As the humble winner of Tuna Traffic’s Chili Cook-Off Extravaganza, here is the winning recipe. It’s so easy, it practically makes itself! I hope you enjoy this taco-inspired chili recipe! : )

Ingredients

lb lean/extra lean ground turkey
2 cups water
1 envelope (1 oz) taco seasoning mix
1 cup (approx 8 oz) black beans, rinsed, drained
1 cup (approx 8 oz) red kidney beans, rinsed, drained
1 can (10 oz) diced tomatoes, undrained
1 can (4 oz) green chilies, undrained
1 cup (approx 8 oz) frozen corn, thawed, drained
2 teaspoons sugar

Cook ground turkey in a large skillet until completely brown. Drain.

Combine all ingredients in a dutch oven. Heat until boiling. Simmer uncovered for about 18 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Since it is taco-inspired, feel free to garnish it like a taco with tortilla chips, shredded cheese and sour cream (if desired)!

Honda Holiday Classic – Raising Money for Go Sports America

Sud Shanmugabaskaran — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 22:30:42 +0000

Tuna Traffic would like to take this moment and tell you about this awesome event we are proud to be sponsoring at Carthage College. Go Sports America is hosting a boys high school basketball tournament at Carthage College in the 1st Annual Honda Holiday Classic Basketball Tournament! All money raised will go back to the Kenosha area schools’ athletic programs, supporting equipment needs.

Tournament Location: Carthage College – 2001 Alford Park Drive Kenosha, WI 53140

Dates of Games: Dec. 27th, 28th, 29th

Times: 5:30 p.m. and 7:15 p.m.

More Information: Official Website or Facebook

Here’s a two-photo teaser from last night’s first round of exciting tournament games!

Honda Holiday Classic 2012

Support your local boys basketball teams. They want to see YOU in the stands!

For more information:

Go Sports America Facebook Page , 1st Annual Honda Holiday Classic Basketball Tournament Event Page

A little history about Go Sports America Foundation created by our friend, Jon Palmen:

Founded in 2012, Go Sports America gives local athletes the opportunity to participate in organized sports. Drawing on his personal passion for athletics and coaching, Jon Palmen created the non-profit organization with the goal of helping athletes experience the lifelong values of team sports. Upon seeing first-hand how area sports teams struggle in today’s economy, Jon, as President of Athletic Republic of Kenosha and Libertyville, realized he was in a unique position to make a difference through fundraising for local athletic programs, team sponsorships and scholarships. Go Sport America donates all proceeds to local athletic teams to purchase equipment, uniforms and additional items. Funds are also distributed to local sports clubs and travel teams to help sponsor athletes in need.