We Do Search Engine Optimization.

Five steps to search engine happiness. Your site will get better rankings, and this will make you very happy.

1. Know Your Target – You need to have clear goals and an understanding of the potential users. Is it a young male in his 20’s looking for hip clothing, a middle aged mom looking for health products for her family, an executive looking for high quality with an unlimited budget? These questions may sound simple, but just like writing a business plan it is essential to know the answers.
2. Keyword Research – Don’t put the horse before the plow. You need to know what keywords your customers will use to find you. One trick is to run a short PPC campaign and do basic conversion testing. Testing with Google adwords can potentially save you thousands of dollars by engaging in natural optimization for high converting keywords. Good keyword research tools are Wordtracker & Keyword Discovery.
3. Create Pages – Write good content and use your keywords appropriately in the text. In general, the more words you use the better, but it must be readable and logical. Search engines can detect poor quality writing and keyword stuffing and will downgrade you for it. Write title tags between 6-12 words that use your keywords. A good tip for penning titles is to write Jeopardy style: in the form of an answer to a question. If you have a niche insurance website a good title might be “Find Out How Green Cars Lower Your Auto Insurance Premiums”.
4. Site Architecture – Intra site links and page structure are key. Link keywords on your pages to related pages. For example if your page lists the keyword “green car” link this text to a page describing environmentally friendly products. Create a navigation structure that includes all the links you will need to each subpage. Strive to make all pages less than 4 clicks from the homepage.
5. Link Building – Get quality, relevant links to your site. This is a very tedious and time intensive process, but the reward is top rankings. The 2 main ways to get links are to ask for them or create linkbait. Asking for links requires personal emails or phone calls to be sent to site owners, and the success rate is generally less than %25. Creating linkbait has the potential to attain larger numbers of links from the linkerati: bloggers, journalists, webmasters and content creators. These people look for interesting and unique content and write about it.

Dave Young has written a post about the value of copywriting and how creating quality content and persuading users to take a desired action. Quality is immediately apparent, regardless of your industry, and it is not possible to fool people with a low quality service.

The point with the weather report is that you should always negotiate the price of hard goods, but take great caution in negotiating the price of services. Your very existence could depend on the results.

Let’s say you saved over $2,000 on your copy, but your copywriter couldn’t connect with even 20% of your visitors. Have you really saved money?

I had a potential client who chose to setup a Google Adwords account themselves instead of paying me to do it. They thought they would save money by researching keywords, writing ads and setting bids themselves.

Google Adwords is deceptively simple, but the system relies on having strengths in all 3 areas, something a new user does not have. It takes at least 3 months of trial and error to begin to make profitable campaign.

The person who initially declined my services came back to me after 6 months begging for help complaining they spent over $2000 and only made about %10 of it back from sales.

In a ruling sure to please ignorant site owners and lazy webmasters everywhere, a Texas judge has allowed a ruling forbidding deeplinking to content. Instead of using a simple referrer redirect, the site owners spent thousands of dollars suing the website for linking directly to content. Now, these site owners will have much fewer inbound links, and substantially worse ranking. These corporate owners have chosen to isolate themselves from the web and are hurting themselves and web users in their community.

Suing to stop linking is nothing new

Deep linking is a time-honored practice that has existed since the very beginning of the web. Indeed, deep linking was one of the fundamental design principles that helped the web grow as quickly as it did, by making it easy for people to directly access individual web pages.

There is even a DMOZ category devoted to deep linking and link law. I’m sure Jim Boykin the self proclaimed link ninja would agree

Many people have taken advantage of buying traffic through Google Adwords and sending it to a site full of Google Adsense ads. This is not new, and has been done in many other markets for as long as finance has existed. Arbitrage is taking advantage of price discrepancies through a market imbalance. Buy clicks for .05 and sell clicks for .30. In this example, as long as at least 16% of visitors click on your adsense ads, you’re in the black making money. The problem is when the adsense sites are intentionally misleading and contain no useful information. In these cases Google is banning made for adsense websites. Chris Winfield and the New York Post are reporting on notices sent to Adsense publishers that their accounts will be suspended june 1 2007.

Eric Enge was lucky enough to receive a coveted invitation to Google Searchology 2007. The most interesting quote at this event was from Google’s Udi Manber who stated that 20 to 25% of the queries that Google sees in any given day are queries that they have never seen before.

A quarter of all DAILY searches are unique! The next time a client asks to be ranked for a particular set of predefined keywords I will point them to this article. SEO clients: your potential customers are searching for word combinations you have never thought of using. The way to capture these long tail searches is by having a lot of varied content on your site.

If you sell herbs, have content pages that focus on growing herbs, Chinese herbs, herbs in foods, herbs in tea herb gardens, herbs as vitamin replacements, herb clothing, herb decorations. If you are feeling adventurous and want to test your luck create pages of herb the comicbook character, herbie the lovebug, attack of the killer herbs, George Herbert Walker Bush etc.

Photo of Herbology at Google’s outdoor hydroponics facility (sic)

Nobody likes ads, and people really resent intrusive and irrelevant ads. SE Roundtable reports a post by SEO igloo where she laments on the excessive advertising on SearchEngineGuide.com

I think that Jennifer Laycock is one of the best writers in our industry. Beyond the basic SEO subjects she addresses for beginners, the questions she asks about facets of the industry always strike me as important, fresh and worthy. I love reading her articles. Unfortunately, I’ve found myself going to searchengineguide.com less and less lately because of the abundance of Flash advertising on the site. Right now, in the top spot on their pages, there is an ad with a guy popping around a screen. This one isn’t as intrusive as the last one that ran for weeks and featured a rapidly morphing image of people’s faces that had a flickering, flashing effect to it.

I agree 100%. I have tried reading articles on SEG & SEOchat.com and have been completely driven away by the signal to noise content. Sorry, I know you guys need to make money but try selling links, creating worthwhile sponsored reviews, or reduce your expenses.

Netpaths does not recommend businesses start and manager their own pay per click campaigns through Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter or Yahoo Search Marketing. There are too many pitfalls that belie inexperienced bidders, and like a rookie at a poker table in Las Vegas, you will loose your shirt. An article in the SF Gate compares one company that blindly handed Google their credit card number,while the other researched PPC before starting online campaigns.

As Louis Pasteur said, chance favors the prepared mind, or in this case the prepared pay per click advertiser.

Charles Chocolates, a small artisanal chocolate manufacturer spent $3,000 on pay-per-click ads over a three-month period last year and sold fewer than five boxes of chocolates. So this resulted in a cpa of $750, as each sale cost $750. Some companies can make money spending $750 per sale, but not a chocolate company.

Lake Champlain Chocolates, an upscale Vermont chocolatier, sells about 30,000 pounds of chocolates each year from pay-per-click ads. It doesn’t say what their spend was, but I assume they achieved a more reasonable cpa of less than $30 to remain profitable.

Steps that helped Lake Champlain:

• bid on a large list of keywords (70,000)
• do not use the Google content network
• judicious use of stop words (free, gift card, and my favorite: chocolate covered scorpion)
• dynamic keyword insertion
• writing compelling ads that targeted specific users, in this case upscale chocolate buyers
•  include key selling points in ad text

Do you have what it takes to make money using PPC?

Excellent managers have 12 things in common. When you manage a web based business, it is easy to overlook the people aspect and only focus on online demanda.

These 12 items can help predict employee and workgroup performance and should be used as a starting point for quality leaders. Managers need to be trusted leaders that foster teams that work well together and care about other people in their workgroups.

1. I know what is expected of me at work.
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
4. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
8. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
9. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
10. I have a best friend at work.
11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

A company is only as good as its employees.

On Friday Microsoft purchased Razorfish webdesign company for 6 billion in cash. This is their largest acquisition ever, and it was done with cash not stock so this means they actually have to pay for it.  I cant believe it, 6 billion dollars for a company that saw its fortunes mirror the internet craze of the late 1990’s and crash with all the other web companies in 2000.

Microsoft just wanted an outlet for Expression, their webdesign replacement for the horrid frontpage. With this purchase they can now force a leading web design company to use Expression and hope all of us follow suit. A good buy for 6,000,000,000?

Actually, the real reason Microsoft wanted to buy Razorfish web design is for their ad serving unit Aquantive.  This is a defensive move from Google’s acquisition of Doubleclick, as Microsoft can’t stand not having the same toys as Google.

So for more money than God Microsoft has purchased an interactive banner ad program that they will use to control advertisers on their networks. Net income from Aquantive was $54 million last year, so it’s going to take a while to make money on this investment.

The online advertising world is as stunned as I am.

Be careful your webhosting company doesn’t block search engine spiders. Companies such as Dreamhost.com has been found guilty of blocking Googlebot for some web accounts. Dreamhost claims this is for your benefit, and recommends blocking googlebot from your site.

Here is a copy of the Dreamhost.com email:

This email is to inform you that a few of your sites were getting hammered by Google bot. This was causing a heavy load on the webserver, and in turn affecting other customers on your shared server. In order to maintain stability on the webserver, I was forced to block Google bot via the .htaccess file.

[Limit GET HEAD POST
order allow,deny
deny from 66.249
allow from all]

You also want to consider making your files be unsearchable by robots and crawlers, as that usually contributes to high number of hits. If they hit a dynamic file, like php, it can cause high memory usage and consequently high load…

Huh? Block search engine traffic? This is as crazy as shutting your webserver off at 5pm when you leave work and restarting it at 8am when you start work. Blocking Google will cost you money.

You need a reliable host, and Netpaths will never throttle or block search engine spiders from indexing your content and ranking your websites.