We Do Search Engine Optimization.

I love reading CNN for news as it has the most updated articles and good reporters. They spend way too much time reporting on Britney Spears and other Hollywood starlets, but that is not the focus of this post. Instead of trying to bait web surfers into pop culture they take a giant leap backwards in usability and web functionality.

Today I saw an article on CNNmoney.com reprinted from prnewswire that was informative and well written. However all the real information was hidden in non clickable external links. Yes this major website keeps you from accessing external information by purposefully disabling hyperlinks. This is not how the web was won, and if CNN is worried about sharing information they could nofollow the external links to retain usability.

Here is CNN’s link notice:

http://w ww.go7now.com/nb/0123Y (Note: You may have to copy this link into your browser then press the [ENTER] key.)

WTF CNN this is a huge disservice to your users. All I wanted to do was view the content from the Seven Summits strategic investment fund and you put up as many barriers to entry as possible. This is not a way to inspire user confidence and trust.
You can view the CNN newsfeed here and see the glory of unusable links.

The stompernet ship has sailed, and SMARTS is now officially a launch success and closed.

Social Marketing would be a timely topic and generate some serious buzz in the market and several thousand search engine marketers are now part of the club.

Join the search engine optimization faculty at this web based training seminar.

A study by the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future reports search engine users shows that people don’t believe everything that appears in the top 10 results.

The survey found that only 51% of people trust information provided by search engines, down from 62% in 2006. Google, as the most popular search engine in most of the world, isn’t trusted by nearly half (49%) of the people who use it.

How can people be so cynical – that result for shady SEO’s creating spammy affiliate site typosquatting a premium brand is part of Google Goodness (remember no hand edits)

The Internet is perceived by users to be a more important source of information for them — this over all other principal media, including television, radio, newspapers, and books.

So over half of all people really distrust media in general. This is a healthy dose of skepticism, but why do people still fall for politicians’ ‘promises’ and still buy all the questionable products advertised?

Results from the USC study:

Read more at Techcrunch.

In a bid to boost it’s search features and try to reverse its fortunes Yahoo partnered with Paypal to provide payment icons in the search results. Google has been displaying their Google Checkout icon in their sponsored search results for one year, and once again Yahoo is having to play catchup with its search featureset.

See this screenshot of a Yahoo.com search for used cars – It insinuates you can buy a car from AutoTrader using paypal!

PPC search engine marketers take note – if your e-commerce website accepts paypal you will likely get a boost in ad click throughs from Yahoo Search Marketing if you add paypal to your payment options.

We just got back from the 3rd social networking group Twiistup, held at the Air Conditioned Club in Venice, Los Angeles. Twiistup is a for technology focused networking group that lets startups, web 2.0 companies and tech firms mingle and display their businesses. It was a very fun event, and I made some good connections and talked to many dedicated and passionate business owners.

We don’t have the luxury of the Silicon Valley uber networking community like Tech Crunch 40, but this kind of event makes up for it. Heavy on the social, with lots of entertainment, including an appearance by Perez Hilton who gave away a copy of the video game Rock Band (which no one seemed to have heard about)

Here are some of the web companies i talked with. If I missed you please

magentocommerce.com open source shopping cart software. I have to say this looks like an order of magnitude better than oscommerce.com and will be the php cart to beat once it is out of beta.


Speeddate.com – I met Dan the CEO who said he started Speed Date right after graduating from Stanford University. He wanted to escape the real world and create a tech startup Silicon Valley style. Online dating is definitely a good niche to enter and the combination of instant video chat in a safe environment should be a winner. No current monetization on this site, kudos to them for having a no ad site.

Thembid.com – Elmer is the owner of Them Bid and he is very animated when talking about his company. It’s clear he loves what he does and is very involved in social media, including being a figg top 100 user! Elmer described his business as Craigslist.org meets ebay.com on priceline.com where you list products and services for free and people bid on them. Want to sell your 1980 toyota? List it and let people name their price for your car. This should work well once the site has significant traffic. I created my profile and love the free directory listing (to activate this you must select your business category in the profile section)

RubiconProject.com – There was a swarm of people around this booth all night so it was hard to talk to the founders but this statup company has huge momentum and is getting a lot of attention in the online publishing world. This web service uses algorithms to automatically optimize ad serving to website visitors. From their site “First, our system gets the ad impression from the publisher, analyzes it and then selects ad networks based on their strengths. Then, the ad impression is redirected to your system to serve the ad to the visitor. So, nothing changes, it’s just like working with any other publisher.”

toolstolife.com is an online coaching service by Devlyn Steele. I’m usually not a fan of online self help services, but this one is well done, free and has no advertising. I asked Delvyn how he could devote so many resources to a free service and he said it’s his passion to help people. Hard to argue with that, I’m signing up to test it out.

One thing that struck me is that none of these web companies I talked with had advertising. They only spent money and didn’t make any. I sincerely hope this pays off for them because these seem like great companies and all have something positive to offer the world.

Stompernet Mastermind search engine optimization coaching and web based classes is about to change. The biggest change is a price increase, so you better signup now. Read more for the stomper press release to the online SEM’s:

Checkout the discount price on SMARTS sem system.

Only The Stomper gives you access to this multi faceted online marketing program. Signup today and don’t be left behind.

Stompernet has created a new video player to display search engine optimization tutorials and seo training clips. Unfortunately they call this SquamBido, which sounds like “spam libido”. Fortunately the video player works much better than it’s name, and the content is very helpful.

The best part of the SEO video player is it allows you to embed your affiliate link into the player, giving you auto tagging and creating an auto generating cookie on the users computer. Yes, you now have my affiliate id, just by loading this page. Don’t let me have all the benefits to this search engine marketing program, signup for yourself and make hundreds of dollars per sale.

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What would happen if your ecommerce shop cancelled all advertising and offered customer free shipping instead? You may be petrified at the thought of stopping all pay per click ads, online banner ads and targeted ads but there may be better ways to virally create business and fortify your sales.

Offering customers something special can create a viral word of mouth campaign that will ensure unprecedented exposure and create a truly unique selling proposition.

Read more about Jeff Bezos’ genius strategy of giving away 600million in free shipping to its 72 million customers.

Many web development websites and search engine optimization blogs are posting year end statistics, and who am I to not be a slave to convention, so the Naked SEO guide will be baring all.

Below is a graph showing traffic increases and I must say I’m extremely pleased at the increasing trend line.

Visitors are on the rise, up 290% since the beginning of the year. Thanks guys!

I find it quite interesting that China is my #2 referrer. No one else I have talked with sees such a large percentage of Chinese visits but I sure have a lot of Red State love.

Top 5 Referrers:

1. http://www.stumbleupon.com/
2. http://searchengineland.com/
3. http://www.techcrunch.com/
4. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
5. http://schools.connectionsacademy.com/

Ask.com crawled this site 12455% less than MSNbot and 6313% less than Googlebot. I know Ask is a 4th tier search engine but seriously how can they present authoritative results on anything with such an infrequent crawl rate? I predict Ask.com will drastically change their service model, perhaps becoming a niche search engine for IAC web properties.

All told 2007 was a great year and I appreciate all the fantastic discussion and positive and negative comments. 99% of the visitors had something positive and helpful to say and were great contributors to this SEO blog.

All web design customers want and need to know true web development costs. Creating a website is not an option for businesses, and since all businesses need an online presence the number of online design/development firms is growing exponentially. The question for consumers is how much does a website cost and how much should I pay for a site?

Here we can use an analogy from racing: “Speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?”

It should come as no surprise that you get what you pay for, and a site that your friend’s college kid did for $1000 will not be the same caliber as a website designed by a professional ad agency for a large corporate client.

In general sites that have more pages, more functionality, interaction, dynamic components, multi user access, content management system and targeted landing pages will cost more than a simple 10 page brochure website.

Company $10-$50 million:
Advertising & promotion Client annual Web site campaign budget: $50,000-$110,000
E-commerce Shopping Cart: $45,000-$80,000
Search Engine Optimization: $40,000-$100,000/yr
Splash/landing/home pages (per page): $3,000-$6,000
Banners, Buttons, Flash animations: $2,000-$3,000

Company $1-$10 million
Advertising & promotion Client annual Web site campaign budget: $30,000-$60,000
E-commerce Shopping Cart: $30,000-$60,000
Search Engine Optimization: $15,000-$50,000/yr
Splash/landing/home pages (per page): $2,000-$4,000
Banners, Buttons, Flash animations: $1,000-$3,000

Company Under $1 million
Advertising & promotion Client annual Web site campaign budget: $15,000-$35,000
E-commerce Shopping Cart: $15,000-$40,000
Search Engine Optimization: $8,000-$25,000/yr
Splash/landing/home pages pages (per page): $1,000-$3,000
Banners, Buttons, Flash animations: $500-$2,000

This is a large spread, and you must be wondering why small companies generally get websites done cheaper. The main reason is friction, cronyism and job security.

Friction: large corporations have a long sell process that involves making multiple presentations to multiple individuals and internal groups and it an take a long time to get specs to begin a job. Also there are more hurdles and regulations to getting work signed off and making sites live. I know that at Disney.com the web design process is glacialy slow, with multiple layers of bureaucracy for each change and new feature.

Job Security: Larger companies have less room to risk on smaller, unproven design firms. It is much more likely a larger corporation will select a well known agency even if they are 50% more expensive than a smaller designer, just because of the agency’s track record. Also a corporation naturally understands multiple layers of management and may feel more comfortable working with this kind of vendor.

Cronyism: It is easier to hide costs in a large company. If the person in charge of hiring a web design firm has a friend or associate who works at a big design firm like Avenue A/Razorfish you want to give them the business even if it costs your firm more, because it could pay off for this person in the future. This selection decision may not be in the best interest of the corporation, only the selection committee.