For quite some time MWI and the keyword phrase "utah seo" were a hot item. We were always number one in her book, although she flirted with other firms here and there. I can't say we didn't mind, but what can you do? Keywords can be hard to tame and their loyalty is never what you wish it were. Then, a few weeks ago, we decided to shake things up a bit by dramatically modifying the structure of our website.

Despite a do-not-call registry every business has to deal with sales calls. I'd say MWI averages about three per day. Sadly, almost all of these sales people do things that immediately alert me to the fact they're a sales person, and none of them get the hook in that they're trying to. Here's a list of things not to do when making a sales call to MWI. If you do, it's the instant hang-up.

1. "How are you?" I can identify a sales call immediately when someone calls and asks "Mr. Steimle?"

"Yes."

"How are you?"

Well, it's search engine optimization, it's search engine marketing, it's SEO consulting and training, and it's web design, but that's it! After many years of trying to be too many things for too many people, we're cutting back, again, and focusing on what we're really good at and what we enjoy doing.

Every year Connect Magazine publishes a print directory of various service firms in Utah, including "interactive" firms, which apparently includes companies like Omniture that provide website analytics tools as well as web design firms.

After seven years or so of having a real office with walls, lights, phones, secretaries, lease payments, utility bills, and break-ins, MWI has finally made the transition to a virtual office model. Some are probably saying "Well, this is just because MWI is going out of business and this is just a step along the way." But alas, no, I've been much closer to going out of business than I am now many, many times, and MWI is still around.

As for the reasons for going virtual, some of them I've detailed on my personal blog under the titles The Virtues of Going Virtual and The Virtual Office is Complete, but what I haven't discussed is why I think ultimately this makes sense for a lot of companies.

It's the end of an era. After four and a half years the sign you see in the photo at the top of our contact us page has been removed from the building. Truth be told, that sign is probably one of the main reasons I kept the office as long as I did in face of so many compelling reasons to go to a virtual office model and be done with the $5K in monthly office-related expenses.

We're going to be launching a number of random, niche-oriented blogs here over the next few weeks. One of the first that has become ready for prime time is The Bad Billboard Project. It's a compendium of just what you would expect, a lot of bad billboards.