Mike Maher

Whether you live in Pennsylvania or the neighboring areas, are planning to visit, or are simply a beer or brewery enthusiast, the Pennsylvania area has a lot to offer in terms of beer tours. Home to many successful breweries and microbreweries, including Yuengling, America’s oldest brewery, and Straub, the smallest one, Pennsylvania boasts some of America’s must-see brewery touring stops. Below are five breweries and microbreweries in Pennsylvania for passersby and enthusiasts alike to check out:

Yuengling and Son Brewing: Located in Pottsville, PA, Yuengling is America’s oldest brewery and has been around since 1829. It boasts what it considers the best brewery tours in America, and offers a unique history of how the brewery survived during the Prohibition era. Go all the way back to when beer was distributed in horse-drawn wagons and be brought right back up through the current process.

Barley Creek Brewing Company: Located in Tannersville, PA, Barley Creek Brewing Company opened in 1995 and offer seven of their own microbrews. From Antler Brown Ale to their Rescue IPA (India Pale Ale), they have a wide variety to sample for different beer tasters. Their brewery operates within their Restaurant and Pub, so food, draught beer and packs/cases are available on site at the best price around.

The Lion Brewery: Built in 1905 and located in Wilkes-Barre, PA, the Lion Brewery merges what they refer to as state-of-the-art brewing technology with rustic architecture. Their beers have been featured at The Great American Beer Festival and the World Beer Championships in past years, and they too have their own history about surviving Prohibition, producing what are referred to as “cereal beers.” Despite being a Pennsylvania microbrewery, their products can be found as far away as Oklahoma and Virginia.

Yards Brewing Company: Located in Philadelphia, PA, since 1994, the Yards Brewing Company produces six beers year-round and two beers seasonally. Their beer can be found as far north as Connecticut and as far south as Virginia, and their Philadelphia Pale Ale was rated by the New York Times as one of the best Pale Ales in the country. Since 2003, they have featured what are called “Ales of the Revolution,” which are based on the original recipes of Ben Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.

Straub Brewery: Located in Saint Marys, PA, and founded in the late 1800s, the Straub Brewery may not wow you in the way a Yuengling or Coors Light Tour would, but is still a must see because it is America’s smallest brewery. Their Straub Beer and Straub Light Beer have been made the same way for over 125 years now, and feature fresh mountain water from the Laurel Run Resevoir.

The increasingly competitive and innovative world of <a href=http://www.mysticliquid.com>small business search engine optimization</a> (SEO) is the most important factor for a website to get off the ground and then stay off it. Search engines are the first places people go when looking for something they want (or want to know) on the Internet, making SEO by far the most crucial thing to consider when starting your website.
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Common sense tells you that the higher your <a href=http://www.mysticliquid.com>small business website</a> appears on a search engine’s results list, the better it is for your site. A high ranking means more traffic to your website, and more traffic means only good things. You can’t make any money if no one is visiting your site, so therein lays your first step.
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 Consider your website’s SEO ranking to be similar to a resume. A person’s resume isn’t there to get them the job; it’s there to get them the interview. Likewise, a good SEO ranking won’t sell your website (or product) for you, but it will get people to take a look. That being said, how do you improve your SEO ranking? Having a good SEO ranking is, as the old saying goes, easier said than done, but there are a few basic ways to help improve it:
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 <b>Web Design</b> - Your <a href=http://www.mysticliquid.com>small business web design</a> is probably the most important aspect when considering SEO. Search engines use spiders to scan through and search your website, so having an organized, simplistic and informative web design is essential to your SEO. When designing your website, you want to keep your content relevant and your distractions (large images, media players etc.) to a minimum. Both search engines and readers should be able to effectively scan your website and find what they are looking for.
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 <b>Tags</b> - Whether it be Title tags or Meta tags, they are almost as important as Web Design. Title tags are what appear at the top of the browser when the page is displayed and is what the search engines show for the first line of the site link when they show their results. Search engines place a lot of importance on Title tags, and so should someone developing their website. Meta tags, on the other hand, serve to describe the various aspects of your website. Keywords are important here, since that is what the search engine is looking for first. Meta tags have three components: the title, the Meta Description and the Meta keywords. When matching a phrase or keywords, search engines first try to find it within the Meta tags of the sites within their databases. Simply put: Meta tags are a way to flag your web pages for the search engines.
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 A website with good SEO is better than online advertising - it generates more traffic and, better yet, it’s free. Hundreds of dollars of online advertising may only generate a handful of hits a day to your website, but appearing near the top of a search engine’s results can produce hundreds of hits a day. So, hundreds of dollars to get a few hits in comparison to no money for hundreds of hits leads to a fairly simple conclusion: improve your website’s SEO before anything else.

When creating (or fixing, changing etc.) a website, the first thing to be aware of is your website’s design and content and its direct relation to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Knowing how to effectively and efficiently design your website is crucial to its success. Before you start to worry about how a reader or potential client is going to react to your website, you have to make sure they find it. If you’re just starting out, make sure that your design enables search engine spiders everything they are looking for in the quickest but most organized manner. Keep it simple, brief, relevant, orderly, and attractive. An effective small business search engine optimization is key to early success.

Flashing images, music, auto-play videos, and other effects may sound and look exciting, but they often just get in the way and are detrimental to the quality of your website and its design. Just as your site should be designed for search engines to scan it, it should also do the same thing for readers. Short, indented (or listed) paragraphs with frequent break points to make it easier to scan and read, not to mention increasing its visual appeal.

Don’t understand? Copy and paste this entire article into a word document, delete all indentations and paragraph breaks, and then ask yourself: “Would I waste my time reading that?” Exactly, you wouldn’t, and neither will someone visiting your website.
Once you have your website designed in an effective manner, your next step is making sure you have the right content on there. Your quality design and organization will go for naught if you don’t keep your target audience in mind. Five paragraphs and five hundred words about mountain bikes won’t do much to bring people to your restaurant (or other small business, assuming that’s why you’re making the website). Stay relevant and identify your audience, but also keep your message universal. Avoiding slang and jargon is a good initial way to keep your content universal and optimized.

Most small business websites will use static pages (pages that need to be manually changed or updated), and it is important to keep the pages up to date. If a potential customer visits your site and sees information dated two weeks ago, he/she probably won’t stick around very long to see what else your site has to offer. Make sure that you are committed to keeping your site updated or have someone reliable in place to update it for you.

For example, a quick visit to www.burkestavernpa.com is a perfect guide to what the small business owner does not want to do. Not only is the homepage of the site unattractive and largely useless, but also the last update was over six months ago. This leaves the prices, product listings, menu, newsletter and promotions incredibly outdated. A “Happy Valentine’s Day” message doesn’t do much for small business in August.

Remember, the most important thing is making your small business web design attractive to search engines. SEO is the best way to increase traffic to your site, which is the first step in the right direction. If your site has a high SEO ranking, it’s already doing a lot of things right.