Patrick Peterhans of Focused Financial Planning was recently recognized for his publication “Secrets of Financial Planning” on Channel 9 News of Denver, Colorado.
Patrick has been a client of SEO Prodigy since fall of 2007. He is a professional certified financial planner for nearly 20 years. Lately he has been sought out for financial advice on how to manage our current turbulent economy. He offers free tips and advice on his blog financial solutions box.
Since its inception Google Analytics has always been reputed as an excellent traffic reporting tool. They are continually providing new interfaces to analyze data. Best of all they are completely free. In fact SEO Prodigy believes that Google Analytics is a must have for any webmaster, no matter how small or big.
However lately we have begun to question its reporting accuracy. We were quite shocked to observe large descrepancies in our clients local hosts stats and Google Analyitcs. While we are confident of trusting my host stats, since, they are more precise in reporting bot visits, page load time, page view time, etc. We are finding that several of our clients are really getting a higher volume of traffic and more importantly….goal conversions being reported on their back host management as to opposed what Google Analtyics tells them.
Our advice to you? Don’t count Google Analytics out. It provides extremely valuable data of where your main traffic sources are coming and easy comparison benchmark function that allows you to measure your website promotion performance. However if you really concerned about getting accurate variables, such as cost per acquisition (how much you spend to acquire a lead or sale) we recommend using a paid third party software such as web trends.
You want to start an online business. Who do you first turn too? Thats easy; a web designer. What is the first mistake you will likely make with your web promotion campaign? Even easier, hiring your designer as your SEO expert. Why do we say this? Very simple; it’s about time.
A bona fide web designer must devote untold amounts of time learning html, php, xml, asp, css and long list of alternative design codes along with the applications to actually apply these skills (dreamweaver, frontpage, etc).
A true SEO also must invest copious amounts of time to learn and understand the up to date functions of search engines and predicting future changes. Google is rumored to change their algorithm (how they rank websites) every 24 hours. This was confirmed by famed Google Engineer Matt Cutts during a recent live question and answer session held by real Google staff.
How often does your search algorithm change?
Matt Cuts: “We change the algorithms all the time - last year we had over 450 changes.”
Would your superman web designer have the time to research and keep up to date with these changes? Unless he never sleeps and has an attention span of a buddhist monk, this is highly unlikely.
True SEOs also must have excellent writing and copywriting skills due to the fact a large component of effective optimization requires content writing. This includes direct onsite optimization, article writing, press releases, blogging, etc. They have to understand technical structures of websites and know which codes/urls are easier for search engines to read and rank. They also must understand external promotion tasks including effective link building.
What should you do if you plan on getting your website designed? Have your SEO communicate with your designer. He or she maybe able to identify and correct major problems before your web design is finalized. This will save you time, money and headache down the road. Also hire an independent SEO to promote your website after it’s finished, but make sure he or her has a open relationship with your web designer. The SEO will often make suggestions that will require the web designer’s assistance.
Remember the SEO Industry would not exist if the web designer could do such an “easy” job. Make sure you take the time to find the right person for the job. It’s worth it.
The 2006 youtube explosion resulted in a huge volume of hobbiest and business flooding the search engines with new full motion (often homemade) video promotions and commercial ads. The only problem is, not everybody is a hollywood producer. A professional video producer can run anywhere from $5K and up How do you record, edit and promote a commercial ad without breaking the bank? SEO Prodigy is the process of providing clients with low cost video ads ($500) or less. Sure they are not your super bowl half time commercial ad quality, but they get your name out there.
A while ago we wrote our theory about “seach marketing in one sentence”. Our editors took some time to rewrite this. Here’s the updated theory:
SEARCH MARKETING IN ONE SENTENCE
For the past few years of a full service web marketing firm our team has more than often heard (beyond exhaustion) the infamous question.
How do you get websites ranked higher or how can I get more traffic and more sales???
Being that is usually coming from a business owner/internet entrepreneur this question is economic in nature. This person or company is actually asking “how do we make more money” with our website(s)?
While we are not stock brokers or financial experts, don’t be naive to think that the internet is exempt from the universal laws of economics. The supply and demand of your product or service CAN and WILL influence your search engine positioning and ultimate success. If you change your perspective to fit one economist you can actually boil down a mountain of books, blog advice and lectures into one simple answer. SEO may be an art…but true success in internet business is a economic science.
So here it is point blank
DEMAND (MONEY + TIME) = Your Website’s Online Visibility
That’s correct. This simple algebraic equation is a baseline approach that intelligent Internet marketer must consider when promoting a website. Let us explain the variables to this formula.
Variable #1: MONEY
DEMAND (MONEY + TIME) = Your Website’s Online Visibility
We are mean and green. Welcome to the NOW generation. Most businesses are impatient and will quickly turn to paid advertising for quick traffic and sales. This includes spending on paid advertising, paid linking, press releases, anything that costs money to get visibility on line. It could take months to rank for a phrase like “New Balance running shoes” where it takes only 15 minutes to setup a Google Adwords campaign and start getting traffic immediately. However you must be willing to pay anywhere from $0.01 to over $50 a click for this traffic. Once your out of money, tough luck.
There is nothing wrong with spending money on paid advertising as long as your business is producing a positive ROI. Paid traffic can also bring you repeat business that will likely go directly to your website. Also considering this primary way search engines generate revenue (in fact Google makes 99% of its revenue through Adwords) it’s unlikely the paid online advertising will ever go obsolete. Our suggestion is to make sure you are carefully managing your paid accounts…or hire a professional to manage them for you. Many people are clueless when it comes to setting up and managing pay per click campaigns. Similar to hiring an accountant to save money on taxes, hire a legitimate search engine marketing professional to save money on pay per click and/or other forms of on line advertising
Variable #2: TIME
DEMAND (MONEY + TIME) = ONLINE VISIBILITY
It’s possible to generate on line visibility without spending a dime on paid advertising. This is usually accomplished through countless hours of search engine optimization, blogging, social networking, etc. This is often more common with hobbyists/part timers who are under less pressure to generate on line revenue. The problem it may take several months/years to learn how to naturally promote a website and much longer to actually apply these tactics. A common problem (and sometimes fatal error) beginners may succumb to taking bad advice and end up using questionable tactics that end up hurting their online positioning. Plus it isn’t just about SEO anymore, there are newer web marketing options such as blogging, video promotion, mobile advertising and social marketing that smart businesses are embracing to gain new customers. Not to mention the organic listings on search engines are finite, where the competition is growing every minute.
Devoting your effort to promoting a website/blog can be very rewarding if you are diligent in your work. However remember the old cliché “time is money”. Do you really have extra time to devote to your project? If the answer is “yes” great, if no find someone to do it for you (unless you want to become a SEO professional).
VARIABLE #3: DEMAND
DEMAND (TIME + MONEY) = Your Website’s Online Visibility
In the not too distant past, the venerable web marketing guru Danny Sullivan commented at SES conference in Chicago that when it comes to web marketing “it is much easier to have the search engines pull your product or service….then trying to push it”. Just face it, some services or products are in more demand than others. And some industries are more or less complicated. If you are trying to promote a website for general keywords related to mortgages, real estate, viagra, etc you are likely going to have demand variable that is far less than 1 ( < 1 ). This variable will unfortunately lower the return on your efforts involving TIME and MONEY. So for instance your product/service demand is 1% then your equation might look like something like this
(1%) multiplied by ($100000 x 200 hours of work) = ONLINE VISIBILITY RETURN
Not to be discouraging, but just realize that if you have a low demand service/product you will end up investing more time and money. You may also have to focus more a certain niche for these markets. For example, you may next to impossible for a newbie to get ranked on the first page of Google time getting ranked on the first page for “New York Real Estate”. Considering your brutal competition your demand variable is going to be very low for this phrase. However if you try promoting our website for “Ashland New York Real Estate” (Ashland is a small city in NY state) your are much more likely to get higher returns and placement for this specific phrase.
Also don’t forget to mention hot topics that are being noticed by the media/public. Have you found the cure for cancer? Did Oprah endorse your book/product? Do you have something special that none of your competitors can offer (and your customers truly want) If your honest answer is YES your demand variable will increase exponentially. So the little money/time you devote to a high demand service/product will be significantly multiplied.
The tricky part about demand is that many business owners often overestimate the true demand for their service or product. You need to seek unbiased information about popular your service/product is.
You also need to protect yourself against copycats, imitators and knock off artists. If you have a great idea make sure to file for a trademark/service mark immediately with the United States Patent and Trademark Office
So you may be saying to yourself “well I get your point….so now what?”. Well every situation is different. First off except the fact that there are NO SHORTCUTS in online marketing business, but you can make better educated choices. Just like any long term investment you must stay optimistic because you will eventually get what you pay for.
SEO Prodigy understands that there is no best answer for online marketing, but there are better answers.
Well here is the second thing people do to screw up there web marketing campaign, not 301 redirecting their old domain to their new one!
So it turns out that your painfully long old domain name (e.g. www. toptenthingtoscrewyourcampaignrightnow.com) wasn’t the right domain for your old website. Very often businesses will change the names of their companies or find a domain that is shorter/sounds better. This is all fine and dandy, especially if helps with your word of mouth marketing.
However more often than not some webmasters abandon their existing domain and just upload their new website to a brand new domain. Who cares about that old domain, it was silly idea right? Wrong. News flash: When it comes to search engine positioning domains age like wine! The longer your domain is around the more likely it will help Google gain trust. So what happens if you are not going to use it anymore? You need to permanently 301 redirect it. This helps you out two folds:
1. The obvious: Your return visitors from the old domain will be easily be redirected to the new domain
2. The somewhat obvious: the search engine crawlers will be able to find your new domain easily when they crawl your old domain (that is already indexed)
2. Not so obvious: 301 redirecting will help pass off Google Page Rank and Trust Rank to your new domain
Be careful here, many hosting companies such as Godaddy will offer an automatic domain forwarding service. There is evidence that this is not a true 301 redirect. When it comes to SEO don’t take the risk, make sure ot have your webmaster create a permanent 301 redirect to the new domain.
Remember when in doubt, 301……
To better serve our clients SEO Prodigy staff periodically attends web marketing conferences to stay abreast with newest developments and strategies in the ultra radical online marketing industry.
On August 14th SEO Prodigy marketing director Chad Klingensmith along with future SEM manager Rachael James ventured to the Online Marketing Summit to learn about the newest Adv
anced Online Marketing tactics. The summit was hosted by online marketing bravado Aaron Kahlow who is currently a managing partner of Business Online. Kahlow humorously commented that this isn’t “your daddy’s conference” since most of the topic convered the newest developments in online media including social networking and video marketing.
While many good ideas were discussed at this conference, there was one prevailing concept; website usability. Unfortunately many webmasters invest tremendous amounts of time, money and effort promoting their website but make careless oversites that could seriously inhibit the performance.
Fact of the matter is that the industry website conversion rate is 2%. Simply put for every 100 visitors, 2 of them are either filling out a lead form, making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter/membership. Obviously this number fluctuates depending on the industries and whether the conversion is hard (spending money) or soft (providing information i.e. signups/leads).
However there is any entire analytical science behind about how visitors behave while visiting a website. Webmasters who are aware of this can acheive improved conversion rates. Here are a few quick tips.
1. People are attracted to people.
Studies have shown that visitors first look at images of people on their site while scrolling over websites…then they at the text. So if you are selling a service such as health insurance it may be a good idea to have the images of the smiling family redirecting to the quote page.
2. Move it to the right
Make sure the call to action button is strategically place UP and TO THE RIGHT of your website.
3. Use those curves
The human eye is attracted to an oval. Make sure that your call to action icon, images or letter are very big and well rounded
4. Remove the clutter
Make sure that on your sales/checkout page that you have absolutely no distractions/outgoing links that may confuse the visitor. We suggesting having one link back to the home page. That’s it.
5. Use contrast
Make sure that your call to action link/banner has a darker contrast (with light background). This is also makes it easy for seniors to read what you are trying to promote.
Those were just few small tips from the conference. Stay tuned; Rachael and Chad will likely share with us.
After years of optimizing and promoting websites our team has seen about every web promotion fumble, roadblocks, hindrances possible that can limit a webmaster from reaching their online saturation goals. The fact of the matter is that many of these problems could have been easily avoided.
We are going to review the top 5 bloopers webmasters can make when they are trying to promote their website.
Here is number 1:
Web Designers who still use frames
Absolutely amazing that this problem still exists. In the late 90’s the use of “frames” became very popular in web design. You can tell if a website is using frames by viewing their source code and finding the script that looks like the following:
<frameset rows="*,1" frameborder="no" border="0" framespacing="0"> <frame src="home.html" name="mainFrame" id="mainFrame" title="mainFrame" />
Frames are usually used to accomplish some web design goals/tricks. The most often is to include an audio file/music when you visit a website.
The problem is that frames inhibit search engines from crawling necessary content and information needed for indexing. They also limited an entire website to just one webpage which severely limits search engine saturation and internal link popularity.
When I was first introduced to this issue in early 2005 I believed that the majority of the web design community understood this mistake and would cease using frames in web development. However in the last 6 months our company received web marketing requests from three different websites using frames. It turns out that some amateur web designers are still using frames/framesets to acheive aesthetically pleasing designs but are clueless of the consequences.
To save some time, headache and money make sure to communicate with your web designer about how SEO Friendly your current (or future) website is. If you have your doubts make sure to look through their source code for the word “frames” or contact us at info@seoprodigy.com to take a look at the website.
While frames are not the only web design structure problem you can have when promoting a site….they are certainly one of the biggest.
And yes, we have a full web design team that can make SEO friendly websites 100% frame free.
In the next post I will blooper number #2: Not 301 redirectly to your new URL.
VARIABLE #3: DEMAND
Demand is the secret sauce to the online visibility equation.
DEMAND (TIME + MONEY) = ONLINE VISIBILITY
In the not so distant past, the venerable web marketing guru Danny Sullivan commented at SES conference in Chicago that when it comes to web marketing “it is much easier to have the search engines pull your product or service….then trying to push it”. Just face it, some services or products are in more demand than others. And some industries are inherently more or less complicated. If you are trying to promote a website for general keywords related to mortgages, real estate, Viagra, etc you are likely going to have demand variable that is less than 1 ( < 1 ). This variable will unfortunately lower the return on your efforts involving TIME and MONEY. So for instance your product/service demand is 1% then your equation might look like something like this
($100000 x 200 hours of work) = ONLINE VISIBILITY RETURN
Not to be discouraging, but just realize that if you have a low demand service/product you will end up investing more time and money. You may also have to focus more a certain niche for these markets. For example, you may next to impossible for a newbie to get ranked on the first page of Google time getting ranked on the first page for “New York Real Estate”. Considering your brutal competition your demand variable is going to be very low for this phrase. However if you try promoting our website for “Ashland New York Real Estate” (Ashland is a small city in NY state) your are much more likely to get higher returns and placement for this specific phrase.
Also don’t forget to mention hot topics that are being noticed by the media/public. Have you found the cure for cancer? Did Oprah endorse your book/product? Do you have something special that none of your competitors can offer (and your customers truly want). If your answer is “yes” than your demand variable will increase exponentially. So the little money/time you devote to a high demand service/product will be significantly multiplied.
The tricky part about demand is that business owners often overestimate the true demand for their service or product. You need to seek unbiased information about popular your service/product is.
You also need to protect yourself against copycats, imitators and knock off artists. If you have a great idea make sure to file for a trademark/service mark immediately with the United States Patent and Trademark Office
So you may be saying to yourself “well I get your point….so now what?”. Well every situation is different. Our best advice is to accept the fact their are NO SHORTCUTS to success in web marketing. Stay optimistic because you will eventually get what you pay for. However watch out for charlatans/fly by night gimmicks that promise your website “a 100000 visitors for only $29.95″. True SEOs understand the value of white hat optimization.
Variable #2: TIME
Demand (Money + Time) = On line Visibility
Time which is often synonymous with money is fundamental variable of a successful online marketing campaign.
It’s possible to generate online visibility without spending a dime on paid advertising. This is usually accomplished through many hours of self taught search engine optimization, blogging, social networking, link requests, etc. This choice is often more common with hobbyists/part timers who are under less pressure to generate on line revenue. The problem is that it may take several months/years to learn how to naturally promote a website and much longer to actually apply these tactics. Another problem (sometimes a fatal mistake) is that beginners sometimes succumb to taking bad advice and end up using questionable tactics that end up hurting their online positioning. Plus it isn’t just about SEO anymore, there are new marketing options such as blogging, video promotion and social marketing.
Devoting your effort to promoting a website/blog can be very rewarding if you are diligent in your work. However remember the old cliché “time is money”. Do you really have extra time to devote to your project? If “yes” great, if no find someone to do it for you (unless you want to become a SEO professional).
In part 3 we will discuss the third variable and the “secret sauce’ to online visibility: Demand.
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