Many business owners know the importance of having a website. What most don’t know however is that just having a website is not enough. If you’re expecting to have a website built for you and then watch your business take off and allow you to retire early, you’re in for a big suprise. The reality is that most business websites on the Internet fail to generate any kind of revenue for their company. Why? Because they lack important elements that are common to most successful websites on the Internet today. These three essential elements are:

1. High Visibility
2. Appealing Design
3. Compelling Content

High Visibility: No website can even have the opportunity to help you grown your sales without website visitors, right? If a consumer does not know your web address, the only ways that they can find you is if they find you is through searches on Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK, etc.  or on a web directory like Hello San Diego, Superpages, Yahoo Directory, etc. The reality is you need to appear in the top 10 results for targeted keyword phrases. For example, let’s say you are a personal injury attorney here in the San Diego area. You’d want to appear on the 1st page of the search engines when someone types into Google “San Diego personal injury attorney”. High visibility is essential element # 1.
Appealing Design: Too many business owners have a basic looking website that is not graphically appealing and thus does not keep site visitors on the site. In analyzing web stats, you can always tell when site visitors don’t care for the design by looking at the pages per visit statistic. If most visitors are leaving after seeing only one page of your site, most likely your web site’s design is poor, outdated, or not user friendly. Studies show that website visitors make a decision about your site in under 3 seconds (some studies have shown that people an impression is made on a visitor in a split second). Here’s a tip: Don’t let your wife’s cousin’s son do your site desing for you. Cheaper up front yes, but it will cost you revenue in the long run. Have a professional website design company do your site for you. A visually appealing website will help you keep visitors on our site long enough to read through your site’s content, which is element # 3.

Compelling Content: What is it that people first read about your small business when they visit your website? Is it the same canned content that they see on everyone else’s site? Or does it give them reasons why they should be doing business with you?  Does is simply list what you do or does it give your site visitors more information about you and why you do these services better thatn your competitors? The content needs to be good not only for your site visitors but also for the search engine spiders. The content on your website is also one of the factors in how search engines rank websites. A few lines of text on your site is not enough. Have original, unique content on your site. Be a resource for your site visitors and you will be rewarded in the end.

I often tell my clients how important it is to have unique content, while at the same time warning them of possible negative issues involved with duplicate content. Google has never been perfectly clear on the issues of but yesterday Adam Lasnik of Google posted on the issues of duplicate content. 

Here’s a clip from his post:

“What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin: forums that generate both regular and stripped-down mobile-targeted pages, store items shown (and — worse yet — linked) via multiple distinct URLs, and so on. In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.”

He goes on to mention that if you do have duplicate content on your site(s) and Google perceives it to be created with intent to deceive then you risk potentially being penalized for this. Most of the time however, Google will allow one version of the page considered to be duplicate to remain in their index and they’ll remove the other versions of the page.

So, if you have a paragraph in a page of your site that’s in another site or page of your own site, does that mean it would be considered duplicate content? Not really. Search engines use many other factors to determine duplicity rather than just text in a site. For the most part, the way they treat duplicate content is meant to help combat the spam sites that scrape and use content from other sites. To be safe, focus on creating original, unique content and you have nothing to worry about. Read Adams post, it’s worth the read.

So everyone is always looking for ways to find other methods of generating inbound links. I think we’re all tired of seeing the lame link request emails in our inbox:

“Dear Info,

Your sight is really great. We noticed it’s similer to our site and we wood like to exchange links with you. Please link to our PR 0 page from your PR 5 page. By doing this, we will help each other to get better rankings. My site will be a PR 12 on the next Google update.

 Thank you,

 Brad…errrrrrrrrrr…..Rajeesh”

Makes you want to link to them right away doesn’t it? So are you one of those people who are trying to send out similar emails to other people? Stop. It’s time for something different. There’s a great new invention that may help you get links much faster than emails. It’s called the telephone. It’s a device used to transmit and receive sound, usually over long distances. Find the sites you’d like a link from and make a call. What’s the absolute worst that can happen? They say no. Big deal. You’ve faced rejection pretty much every time you’ve been in a bar anyways. Pick up the phone and make a call. I think you’ll be suprised at how effective that can be. But, before you start dialing you may want to make sure that:

1. Your sites are topically related.

2. You have something of value to offer the person your calling. If it’s a link back to their site, offer to place it somewhere in the body of your content and not in a footer. Links that come from the main body of content are better. Better yet, ask them what page they would like a link from on your site.

3. The page that you’re offering a link from is cached by Google. On the rare occasion that I do read email requests for link exchanges, half the time the page people are offering to place a link on isn’t even cached by Google!

4. You “sell” them on why they should link to you. Bottom line, what’s in it for them? And come up with something better than ”Link exchanges help improve your rankings in the search engines”. That’s debatable, as Matt Cutts mentioned here that Google is getting better at finding reciprocal links and paid links. Are reciprocal links bad? Not really, but ask yourself if the link you’re planning on adding to your site is beneficial to your site visitors.

 Happy cold calling.

I talk to many business owners who are afraid to go with a pay per click advertising campaign because they’ve heard of so many issues with click fraud. The truth is, click fraud is not nearly as prevalent as it used to be. In fact, according to Google, it’s under 2%. That’s quite a discreptancy from other reports on click fraud which estimate click fraud between 15-30%. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim recently interviewed Google’s business manager for trust and safety, specifically talking about click fraud.  It’s definitely worth reading if you’ve been considering using Google Adwords to advertise. The big discrepancy seems to come from what the click fraud detection companies identify as click fraud. Read his post to find out more.

So, should click fraud keep you from advertsiging with Google Adwords? In my opinion, no but every case is different. As with any form of advertising, the bottom line is what kind of ROI (Return on Investment for the cavemen from Geico out there) are you getting? It’s absolutely crucial in my opinion to be able to understand if you’re getting results from your advertising. Whether it’s your SEO campaign, pay-per-click, or your print advertising, you need to be able to determine the advertising that’s most effective for you. When it comes to the web, the use of analytics is crucial to understanding the performance of any website. With Google’s analytics, you can identify your paid traffic from your organic traffic. If you’re spending $5,000 a month on search engine optimization, and it’s bringing in $10,000 in business each month that may be good. What if your pay per click advertising of $2,500 is also averaging $10,000 worth of business each month? That may be a more effective way to advertise. Double your ad spend and make $20,000 a month. Of course, the reverse also applies. If you’re overspending on your pay per click campaign, and ignoring the organic results, you may be missing out as well since the majority of website users click on organic results before clicking on any sponsored listings. A good search engine optimization company can help you with this. The bottom line is that you need to be able to track what is working for you and web analytics can help you do exactly that. If you are going to use the Google Adwords system, don’t even think about it without first installing some type of analytics plan. Test it out, track your results and that will tell you if pay-per-click is right for you.

So the day before yesterday I was heading to some auto body shops to get some quotes for some damage to my car. I was probably 5 miles away from the road I was headed to go find quotes to repair my car. Starving, I stopped off at Rubio’s for a fish taco. Damn was it good. And it was the most expensive taco I had ever eaten too. $500 bucks. Here’s why I say that. As I was parking my car, a guy comes up to me and says , “I can fix that for you today. If you go to a body shop, that will cost $1,700 to repair but I’ll do it for you for $500 bucks”. Apparently the brain cells weren’t working because I agreed to it. To make a long story short, I completely wasted my money. And then some.  When I took it to a body shop that I knew was good, the quote was for $3,300. Part of that cost was to fix the damage done by the idiots who didn’t know what they were doing. Thinking of this story, it got me to thinking that the EXACT same thing happens in the SEO world. Too may times I’ve had clients come to me with the same story. Sometimes I can fix the damage. Other times, too much damage has been done to a website by some clueless SEO who link spammed the hell out of the site. Be forwarned, DO NOT GO THE CHEAPEST ROUTE WHEN IT COMES TO THE SEO FOR YOUR WEBSITE! Most the times you will end up wasting your money or they will do more damage than good. The last thing you want to have is for your website to have a bad reputation with the search engines. That doesn’t mean the most expensive SEO company is the best, but never go for the cheapest price. You’ll get what you pay for. So how do you know that a SEO company is good?

1. Results: Have them show you results they have for either themselves or their clients in Google. Keep in mind, coming up for terms that people won’t search for is not impressive. If they show you something like “Purple Turtleneck Wearing Octopus” and say “Look, # 1 for that term!”, that’s not impressive. That’s not a competitive search term. Showing you something like “California attorneys” that people typically search for everyday is much more impressive if their on the 1st page of Google. Keep in mind, if you’re looking for someone local, type in “(your city) SEO company” or “(your city) search engine optimization company”. If they don’t come up in their own city, that’s not a good sign.

2. Referrals: Ask them for referrals from their current clients. If they can’t provide you with anyone to speak with, probably a sign that you can’t trust them. Anyone who I’ve done work for has always been more than happy to tell others about my work. Unless they’re your competitors, speaking to an existing client of theirs can help uncover the positives and negatives of that SEO company.

3. Honesty: This can be hard to determine but if they’re making guarantees to get you to the top of the search engines in two weeks, stay away. It takes time to get to the top of the search engines but a lot of that depends on the level of competition for the keywords you’re targeting. How can you tell how competitive a keyword phrase is? There are tools to help you look at the number of searches conducted each day. There’s the Overture keyword search tool or Digital Point has a great tool as well. This will give you a better idea of how many people search each day for those terms. The higher the number, the more competitive it’s going to be of course. Keep in mind, if you’re starting out with a brand new domain, in most cases it will take 9-12 months before you start showing up in Google searches for competive terms. Yahoo normally takes 3-4 months. MSN, 1-2 months. Anyone who makes crazy promises to you and doesn’t set up realistic expectations is trouble. If you have a bad feeling and don’t feel comfortable with who you’re talking to, find someone else.

There’s other factors of course, but these are some of the biggest factors. If you can see the results they’ve attained and you speak to happy clients, odds are that you’ll be satisfied as well.

So I love SEO, but being a white hat SEO, I’m not really interested in optimizing for certain things since they are known for being black hat arenas. Gambling, real estate, adult sites, etc, those all have terrible reputations for the worst spam on the web. That being said, I have a buddy who does real estate investments and I’m going to test out the waters and see what I can do for him.

I’m a firm believer in target marketing and I’ve seen many of my clients have great success through target marketing to niche keyword phrases. If you’re thinking about doing SEO in a very competitive arena, it may take a while before you can start ranking for your main terms. My philosophy has always been to target the phrases that nobody else has. One of the most important things that any SEO company can do (and where so many SEO companies fail) is to properly set expectations for your clients. Promise the world, and they expect the world. So, let them know they they are not going to rank for (in my example) “real estate investing” right away. It will happen down the line, but for now our goal is to target niche terms that will bring targeted traffic to the site.