Archive for February, 2009
Friday, February 27th, 2009
I’m trying some experiments to see how my personal SEO efforts will pay off. I’ve done some research about how many time specific search terms are used and compared those terms and numbers with the amount of pages that exist on the web to be found for those search terms.
I created 3 sites based on 3 search terms. According to my research the ratio of the number of times the terms is searched for in a month, divided by the number of existing web pages that contain the terms seemed reasonable. I was looking for a term that gets more than 1,000 searches a month with less than 10,000 other pages. That divides out to 10.0. Anything less is good. Anything more is bad. There were some in the thousands, that is, for every single search in a month, there are more than a thousand pages that contain it. I’d rather compete with 10 pages than 1,000 pages.
The 3 sets of search term ratios are:
3.63
5.44
9.75
I worked on the first one first, since it had the lowest ratio. I wrote up some content and was shocked to see it on the front page of the search results when I checked today. I was even more shocked to see my cat fever site on the front page of the results page.
Our poor little kitty had some personal problems recently and I did some research on his condition. It seems that there are millions of sites out there about cat diarrhea, but not very many about cat fever.
So I created one. I’ve been doing some research about fever in cats and other cat related health problems. Learned more than I expected. Never give your cat Aspirin. It will kill them.
I linked to the site from www.survivor.com and updated the XML site map for Google. I’m still working on writing articles, when I checked and the site is on the first page of the search results, at number 9. I bought the domain name a week ago. It’s only been live for a week and I’m already on the front page. I was actually shocked by that progress so fast.
So, my first big push is on this cat health site. I am only using AdSense to monitize it for now, but soon you’ll be able to buy an ebook on cat health.
I mostly just wanted to say that SEO actually works. These principles that we all talk about will put your site on the first page of the search results pages.
Now, if anyone wants to trade links with my cat health site… let me know!
Quoting from How To Treat Your Cat Fever
Does your cat have a fever?
If your cat is generally lethargic and has no appetite, it might have a fever. If your cats ears feel hot to the touch it might have a cat fever. Most people think that a cold, wet nose is a sign of a healthy cat, and that a warm, dry nose is a sign of a fever in a cat. This is NOT ALWAYS TRUE! It’s possible for environmental temperature and the cats hydration to affect how cold and wet their nose is. The only reliable way to determine if your cat has fever is by taking their temperature.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.catfevertreatment.com/
Posted in SEO |
Friday, February 20th, 2009
“Though 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online.”
Less than half of all small businesses have a web site. Nothing. Even a car repair place or a plumber can have a web site for FREE these days. It takes a little time and effort, I can help, and you can have a FREE small business web site.
It WILL help your business. If it brings one more customer, how much is that worth? I’m not even talking about a lot of SEO or content or anything. It’s basically a free phone book listing. This, what you are reading right now, is the new Yellow Pages.
I need to think about how to address this better. I can’t wrap my head around it (and I have a huge head).
Posted in web site build |
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
This is amazing. This is exactly what I can do and want to do for small businesses.
Quoting from BuzzMachine The local ad opportunity (and the danger of losing it)
The promise of local ad support for news will come only if a new population of very small businesses can be served in new and effective ways – before Google beats everybody else to it. That’s apparent in the results of Webvisible and Nielsen surveys reported by MediaPost (via Marketeting Pilgrim and Frank Thinking), which show that local marketers are leaving newspapers and the yellow pages but are still dissatisfied with – and don’t pay enough attention to – internet marketing. Factoids:
* 42 percent of small businesses say they use the local paper less and 23 percent use yellow pages less – while 43 percent use search engines more.
* “Though 63% of consumers and small business owners turn to the internet first for information about local companies and 82% use search engines to do so, only 44% of small businesses have a website and half spend less than 10% of their marketing budget online.”
* “Only 9% are satisfied with their online marketing efforts.”
* Mediapost found a disconnect in how small-business owners act as business people and marketers vs. how they act as consumers. That is, as consumers, they use and are satisfied with the internet and search to find other local businesses, but as marketers themselves, they use online less.
In these stats lies a big – but fleeting – opportunity: serving local businesses by helping them use online well. By this, I don’t mean doing what local newspapers have been doing: trying to sell them display or directory ads, just as they did in papers but in a new medium. Instead, I mean redefining what it means to help them succeed online. This might mean helping them place ads smartly on Google with good SEO (see Fred Wilson’s tweet out of our New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY). It might mean finding was to help local businesses interact more meaningfully with their own communities. It might mean enabling armies of citizen sales people – neighbors who really know their local businesses – to serve and sell those advertisers. It might mean providing tools to help local businesses create better (more informative, more SEOed) online presences and providing them data to show them their return on investment. I might mean finding other means to efficiently sell local businesses (can phone rooms ever work?). And so on…..
The assumptions I so often hear about local advertising – it doesn’t work; it doesn’t pay enough; small businesses are ignorant – need to be updated. The assumption that most needs to be updated is that a business needs an ad. It may need other tools to be found in search and to reach the right people and to improve relationships with them. All that may count as marketing, but not necessarily with an old ad in a new medium.
Read the entire article at:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/02/16/the-local-ad-opportunity-and-the-danger-of-losing-it/#comments
Posted in marketing |
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
I wrote an article a while ago, expressing the opinion that SEO should be free. I stand by that, but now want to add a disclaimer.
I’ve got some clients that want to control everything in the site. I’ve got some that just want me to do it all.
I would like to see a client completely involved in their site, knowing all of the details. I would love to see everyone know what I know about web sites and SEO. If they did, then SEO would be free.
But they don’t.
I have to remember that not I’m not like everyone else and they are not like me.
I have to remember that not I'm not like everyone else and they are not like me.
A business owner needs to know their own business. They need to be an expert in what they do. I am the expert in what I do. I think it’s reasonable for one person to pay another to manage the details of a task, even when that task is SEO.
The small business owner needs to have the keys to the office. They need to have access to the books. They need to have their name on the office rental agreement. They need to know, at least on a high level, what’s going on in their company and have access to it all.
But the small business owner can hire a plumber if they want someone else to fix the toilet. They can pay someone else to vacuum the floor. The small business owner might as well pay someone to do their SEO for them also.
If you pay a plumber to fix the toilet, then he leaves and there’s water coming from the bathroom door, maybe you should check it out. If you pay someone to keep your books for you, but when you check your bank account, there’s only $12 in there, maybe you should ask some questions.
It’s OK to pay someone to do your SEO work for you too, as long as you know what’s going on, what the SEO expert is doing and have some understanding why they are doing what they are doing. As long as results can be measured, I’m OK with you paying me to do your SEO for you, instead of me just teaching you how to do it.
SEO should cost between $100 and $300 per hour, depending on the specific task. I charge $150 per hour.
Posted in SEO |
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
I did some research on our competitors. The main one has a pretty nice web site with a lot of depth, that is a lot of content that is just filled to the brim with juicy keywords. They have a “Resource” section that they put all of these pages into.
They also went from a page rank zero last week to a page rank one this week. We need to get on the stick so we can crush these guys.
A “Resource” section is a good strategy for a small business. Put all of your sales pitch on the home page, easy to get to. Build a Contact Us page, maybe the obligatory About page. Photos of the staff always seem to go badly, so I’d think twice about that. A section for products and services is good. Build your normal site.
The best SEO section should be a bucket of pages that are all about the background of your industry.
Then the best SEO section should be a bucket of pages that are all about the background of your industry. These should all be interlinked with “related articles” links on each page. They should touch as many related subjects as you can get. They are really a big, old SEO Google trap that should lure your unsuspecting users onto your site with relevant information.
This should all be good, valuable information. It should be so valuable that it will make people link to it. If you put up bogus pages filled with shallow information sprinkled with keywords, you are not doing anyone any favors. If your users get there and hate your stuff, they’ll leave. You want them to see those links to your product page where they can give you money.
It seems to be that more people are coming to sites from search engines to pages other than your front door. Build a bucket of resources for them to come in through.
Posted in SEO |
Sunday, February 1st, 2009
I did some research on my new client, his site, and his industry. He has, or had, a web site built by someone else. I did some checking around to see where we stand before we begin. Here’s what I did.
Using the “SEO For Firefox” plug in and the Google Toolbar in Firefox, I found out that it’s been around for about 6 months. That will help us get out of the Google sandbox.
by NeilsPhotography
Using the “links:” search term in Google, where you type in “links:www.domainname.com”, you can find out how many other sites out there are linking to you. These are your “incoming links”. This one has 10 at the moment. That’s a cool place to start from.
It’s got a page tank of 0. That means there’s opportunity to improvement here! It’s got a good solid base, with a little history and some links to it, so when we start to optimize it, it should really respond.
This is much better than starting from a brand new domain name and new site, with no incoming links. Google doesn’t like those newbies. They could be spammers or child abusers or some kind of perverts.
Just like in the real world, they want to get to know you a bit before they trust you. It’s all about the reputation. Now that this site has been at the party for a little while, it’s time to make sure our hair looks good, that we don’t have bad breath, and there’s no food spilled on our shirt. Then we can walk over and introduce ourself to the host of the party, Google.com.
Posted in SEO |
