Archive for 'April, 2010'

Ask yourself this question – does your SEO suck? According to Shoemoney – it does. Todays article is based in part on his post Where my Hatred of SEO comes from. The man in that picture (Shoemoney) hates SEO. If you read his post it stems from the fact that he has never really had to do SEO in order to achieve success. SEO was usually an afterthought. He has some really, really good things to say – and in my opinion there are a few small elements he forgot to talk about.

His points are:

1. SEO should be an afterthought – build content people want to naturally link to
2. Getting traffic is useless if you can convert it to customers or sales
3. Become so big Google cannot ignore you
4. Do not fear making changes to your site because of potential negative effects to your rankings

I find it funny that his first point is the (now) age old saying ´content is king´. His second point is valid – if you concentrate only on rankings and forget about conversions you are missing out on sales. The third and fourth points I can only agree with for certain businesses.

I love Shoemoney – and I have been reading his posts for as long as I can remember. I do find though, that a lot of the time a lot of what he writes about relates to the world of Internet Marketing, and not as much for main street businesses. I mean, for example – if I am a dentist in Pittsburgh the thought of becoming so big google cannot ignore me is probably not an option. A dentist promotes products and services and his online web presence is merely an extension of his marketing and advertisement strategy to get new customers – not to build a brand. I mean, a dentist most certainly could turn his web site into a help site, forum, community – and let that brand complement his business to get even better rankings. But more times then not all they want to do is come up on the first page of google for mycity dentist.

The last point, about not making changes to pages for fear your rankings will change, I think you have to ponder what that means and how it will affect you. For instance, if you are as big as Shoemoney you do not care about SEO because you are already pagerank 6, and everything you do already oozes authority online. I think something more important to remember is that you shouldn’t be relying solely on google for traffic. Make sure you are getting traffic from Yahoo, bing, social media, and wherever else you can get it. Make sure that changes to your page layout and design complement your listings and SEO – and that they don’t obfuscate it.

Is Google too Powerful?

I think that one of Shoemoney´s underlying themes is to not let google completely dominate your business model. Letś look at one of the links he gave as a reference Graywolfś Why everyone should turn off blog comments. Michael Gray (Graywolf) says heś turned off his comments because the added content that keywords add change the SEO and rankings of the page – in addition to the fact that he doesn´t have the time to moderate or deal with them anymore.

Read that entire post from Graywolf – you might also be surprised that heś removed all the dates from his posts because google often ranks content based on the fact that the newer it is, the fresher or more important it is. Guess what – the comments were adding dates to his post. You probably noticed on this site I don´t have any dates on my posts either. I removed them 3 years ago for that very reason. My comments still have dates, however.

So we have here the two extremes, Shoemoney who thinks you should never do specific things like this to get or stay in googleś good graces, and Michael Gray who has done specific things for better rankings. Who is right, and who is wrong?

How much do you know?

In my opinion, whether your SEO sucks or not depends on what you know, combined with what you need. I have been watching the comments roll in from that Shoemoney post, and I could not resist mentioning this one that just came through:

Author: James Is (Not Working)
Comment:
I COMPLETELY AGREE with this post, and I’ve got the experience to prove it. You know, I was making some fat cash off a site last year. I was slapped by Google, and have not been able to recover. My site was SEO’d to the T. I watched my traffic plummet from 3,000 visitors a day / $18,000 / month to about 50 visitors a day. I am submitting resumes, bar tending, and trying to launch new sites while I figure it out. I have reworked the old site and am offering more value driven content, but I have a feeling it is going to take at least a year. It took me a year to get to where I was. I certainly hope I can recover. Building a business on SEO is like building a castle on the sand. Never again will I fall for that trap.

So this guy agrees with Shoemoney because he had a site making 18 grand a month and google suddenly gave him a penalty that reduced his income to zero and now heś out work work claiming building sites on SEO is like building castles in the sand.

First of all – he doesn´t say what his site was about, how much original content and authority he had, and how long he was making that kind of money. More than likely he did something against google Webmaster quality guidelines and got a penalty for being a thin affiliate site. Secondly, if he was making that much money and didn reinvest part of it in other forms of marketing to strengthen his business model – shame on him.

SEO is not just keywords and where to put them. SEO is doing all the things you need to do for optimum search engine place. Itś not necessarily how to game google, it´s how to get natural search rankings because you deserve them.

SEO IS:

• keyword research
• site setup
• competition
• metadata
• copywriting
• internal and external links
• linkbating
• integrating marketing with content

Shoemoney thinks that people shouldn’t have to learn to use SEO, and by creating content people want to link to they will naturally get good rankings. That is an admirable statement and one that could apply to lots of people. In my daily routine with clients that have regular businesses, and even people that want to create sites to make money online so they can quit the daily grind – creating good content alone just is not going to cut it.

For instance, a lot of my new clients already have 100 blog posts of pretty high quality content, but they still don’t get any traffic. Once I teach them how to use a little SEO, they start getting more traffic – and the targeted traffic they wanted in the first place. Most business owners aren’t very good at writing marketing copy. If that is you – you will also be bad at writing blog post titles. You may also have a hard time figuring out where and how to use the right keywords too. With a little tiny bit of SEO training – these same people start to get traffic FOR THE FIRST TIME!

I do agree with Shoemoney – don´t put all your apples in Google. But then again, you at least need to know how you can leverage it´s benefits for your advantage – because not all of us have a year or more to wait to build up a big brand like Shoemoney did. Most business would like to start getting more traffic now.

If your SEO sucks – find out what you don know and have someone (like me) help you. It does´t have to cost thousands of dollars to learn how to do better online.

The popular Yelp.com review site is accused of extortion, and apparently this is not the first time.

What Yelp.com is accused of?

The crux of it an Animal Hospital in Long Beach had a bad review and noticed it was 18 months old (and possibly not even based in fact). Yelp.com has a policy of allowing reviews to be posted for visits that occured during the last 12 months – and the facts of that review revealed the visit was 18 months before posting. The “Cats & Dogs Animal Hospital” contacted Yelp.com to have it removed (which they did).

Guess what happened next? A new negative review appeared 5 days later and then Yelp.com salesman started calling the animal hospital using high pressure tactics to sell an “advertising package” ($300/mo) to remove the negative review. You might say coincidence – right?

Well if you are – then think about this…the animal hospital refused to buy the $300 per month advertising package, and 5 days later ANOTHER negative review popped up. The lawsuit paperwork reveals that Yelp called the animal hospital frequently using “high pressure tactics” promising to move or delete negative reviews in exchange for a 1 year advertising contract – and even allegedly said they wouldn’t appear in google or search results.

This could still be coincidence right? Well, when the hospital refused to buy the ad contract – the original bad review from the 18 month old visit was republished. Followed by another bad review from the second reviewer. Still coincidence? I still say – highly doubtful in my personal opinion.

What allegedly happened here might no doubt be the work of an unscrupulous rogue employee within a large company of well meaning workers. On the other hand – it might be a regular business practice. When I read that article on Wired, what immediately came to mind for me was conversations I’ve had with clients of mine who own main street businesses, and their dealings with salesman in the new directories.

Something Phonebooks Could Never Do

If you don’t own a business you may not know this, but the phonebook, yellow pages, and local newspaper charge a LOT of money for advertisement. I can remember back in the 90′s working for an Internet Service Providor and the Yellow Pages ad salesman coming round once per year. To purchase a 3 or 4 inch square ad in the yellow pages could cost $5,000 per year (or more). The same ad in the local paper could run $500 per week (or may, depending on how many days it runs). The local phone book and newspaper have held for decades a stranglehold on main street businesses because that’s where the majority of people turned to find local merchants and services. If you were a dentist, doctor, accountant, lawyer, pizza palace, or muffler shop – it was vital that you have exposure in the yellow pages and local paper.

Phonebooks are dead now. Where I live we used to get 4-6 phonebooks per year. Now, I’m lucky to get one, and the last time it arrived it was 1/2 the size it used to be, about double the size of a paperback in width and height, but not as thick. Why? Because people don’t use them anymore. They use their cell phones, itouches, iphones, blackberrys, ipad, laptop, netbook, and some even lcd screens from their car. “Local search” is blowing up worldwide, and “getting found” online to a business is more important now than it ever was. I’m not just talking about the bartender at your favorite watering hole getting the business a MySpace or Facebook page either.

If you own a business you have to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of the “public Internet”. It’s very easy to setup your own web site in this day and age – even on a minimal budget. In my experience half of more of American small business owners don’t have a web site – because they don’t feel they need it. The local brake shop, the donut hole, the greasy spoon, and in some cases the lawyer or auto insurance guy may not yet have a local web site. Even if you do – if you don’t hire an expert to “get it ranked”, it won’t matter anyway (because no one will ever see it).

In my experience the small business owners that do “get” what the online world can do for them are people that thrive on “leads”. The local window and siding guy, the mortgage consultant, and even people like plumbers, painters, and general construction contractors. These are the people that live and work in a semi-populated area, and they’re very concerned about what comes up when you type something in like “painting contractor tampa” in google.

Try typing in “painting contrator yourcity” and see what you get. You might be surprised that all the results aren’t actual painters. Some are sites with nothing more than a list of painters, or a “directory”. Rather than look at individual painter sites all – a list of painters makes it easy to find one close to your neighborhood. But wait! Some of these directory listing sites have “reviews”. Now there you go – there’s something phonebooks could never do, offer interactivity and “real reviews, from real people”!

The “Squeeze”

It’s only natural that some of the first online directories would be from actual phone companies, like Yellow pages (AT&T), and Superpages (was Verizon). These sites offer “enhanced listings” just like real phonebooks, but they also offer reviews that nearly anyone can submit. When you do a search for something like “painter atlanta” usually half or less of the results are painters, and the rest of dirctory sites like superpages, and yellow pages – but many are now more like “review sites”, such as Angie’s List, Service Magic, or even Kudzu. Yelp is starting to get ranked more and more for searches like this as well.

In the beginning many local directory sites like this were just listing sites that made money form advertisements alone, but the tide has surely changed with the ripe smell of money in the air. I’ve talked to painters, plumbers, and general contractors who were clients of mine and they described the phone conversations with salesman at a directory like ServiceMagic.com. The directory says right at the top of the page “pros screened and approved by Service Magic” leading you to believe there’s some kind of rigorous entry process. I was told for the most part if you pay the fee (upwards of $5,000/yr? for most categories) – you’re in!

Let’s say you’re a local plumber and need first page google ranking for “yourcity plumber” to survive and get business. Can you imagine having to pay the listing fees for Yelp, Service Magic, Kudzu, Angie’s List, Yellowpages, Google Local search, Yahoo local search, and Superpages? I know businesses that can and do pay all those fees. “The Squeeze” occurs when you run in to a situation like what allegedly happened at Yelp where you feel forced to pay the fees to combat negative listings. There are two things going on here I don’t like. One is the blatant manipulations of the reviews in the first place (tainting the supposed “real reviews” usefullness of the site), and the second is the fact that asking for money to remove the negative reviews really boils down to extortion.

What You Can Do as A Business Owner

The nice thing about the Internet is that (despite what I just pointed out) – it’s a level playing field (provided you have someone that can help you). What you can do is take the elements of the Internet that could work against you (interactivity) and use them to your advantage.

Specifically…

• Start a Reputation Management Campaign: If you have negative reviews online, hire an online marketing specialist to run interference for you. A “reputation management” campaign can lessen the impact of negative reviews by enhancing your brand and online image with positive information
• Start an Online Authority Campaign: Instead of paying outrageous monthly fees to multiple online directory sites – invest that money building up a network of your own online properties to get ranked for the keywords that can bring you business through an online marketing consultant

John Pratt has 15 years experience working online, let me him put his skills to work for you. To find out more, just fill out the quick form on his “hire me” page.

Have you ever had to work with a client’s site on WordPress on Windows IIS web hosting (like Godaddy) – and you have no idea how to get the permalinks to work? The problem is mod_rewrite generally doesn’t work on Apache with Windows webhosts. Sometimes with a client – moving the entire WordPress site from Windows to Linux isn’t an option (or in their budget). So what can you do?

Believe it or not, there is another way. In the root of the Windows web site find a file called “web.config” (an XML file), and download it to your local PC. Open it in a text editor (like Notepad), and you’ll see something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules/>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration> 

Just change that to this, and save on your local PC, and re-upload in FTP:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Main Rule" stopProcessing="true">
<match url=".*" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
</conditions>
<action type="Rewrite" url="index.php/{R:0}" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>

This IIS fix is not a complete fix for mod_rewrite, but you will be able to get “pretty permalinks” working in WordPress hosted on Windows web hosting. I fixed this on Godaddy – and the URL’s worked just fine.

For more information visit the Using Permalinks page in the WordPress Codex.

If you use Adsense on your web site, are you targeting the appropriate content to get the ads displayed that you want?

I am astounded sometimes by people that say that they can’t make any money with google Adsense.  If you get as little as 50-100 pageviews per day you can make money with Adsense!  The problem is, you have to learn how to display ads that are relevant – so people will click on them!

I have a client right now that I built an resource site for, to be used for a particular market.  Let’s say it’s “electronic gadgets”.  If he installs some adsense ads and his main site keywords revolved around electronics terms – the ads displayed could vary wildly from pages, to posts, to categories, and tags.

Here’s an example, the home page targets “gadget reviews”, but there’s one whole page devoted to “DVR’s” (digital video recorders).  If the adsense ads displayed for that page are for gadget reviews, they might not get many clicks.  But if they’re ads specifically “DVR’s” – the odds of getting clicked go up about 1,000%!

Believe it or not, you can target sections of a page and tell google adsense to use just that section for keywords to generate adsense ads, and to ignore everything else.

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

content you want to suggest ads from

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you’d prefer, you can also tell it to “ignore” sections that might be throwing off the ads:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

content you want adsense to ignore

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

For my clients site, we wanted the adsense ads to reflect the post/page title and it’s content – ignoring the sidebar, header, and footer.  So we placed that code around “the loop”.  Of course, you’re going to need enough content to actually spawn some ads from adsense (and not get public service announcements), but you should have good original content on all your pages already anyway!