Something about you has been bothering me for awhile now and I don’t know if this relationship is working out for me anymore.  I’m not talking about our relationship, because I do in fact love you.  But you have some quirks that I need you to work on.

I’m talking about the relationship that you have going on with Royal Oak, a city that I have grown to love over the last decade of my life.  It seems that you have been cheating on Royal Oak for quite some time now.  You’re even calling Royal Oak the other municipality’s name from time to time which further strains your relationship.

So that there are no more embarrassing situations for you in 2012, I wanted to be a friend and give you some advice.

I live and work in a city called Royal Oak, Michigan.  I take my family to places in this city and I recommend to others that they hang out here.  It’s a great little town full of restaurants, boutiques, bars and culture.  The city is also full of tech start-ups, small mom & pop businesses and a very diverse middle to upper middle class population.

To the south of us, in a much different part of metro Detroit, is a small township called Royal Oak Charter Township.  Between Royal Oak (city) and Royal Oak Charter Township, are several other small cities. I’ve used my favorite map service to show you the difference in the location of their city/township halls.

The Royal Oak Charter Township, while I’m sure its a very lovely place, has an entirely different vibe, culture and population. You see, it’s not just geography and distance that separates us.

So, what I’m trying to figure out, Google, is this: in all of your vast experience, knowledge and greatness, why is it that every time I try to check-in with G+ to somewhere in Royal Oak (city) and often when I try to give directions to someone … you say Royal Oak Charter Township?

My home, agency and life are not located between 8 Mile and 9 Mile. I assume that people in Royal Oak Charter Township are equally confused as theirs is not located between 10 Mile and 14 Mile.

Your issues seem to only be in a couple of services still.  Google Maps seems to have gotten better, but still has the occasional glitch.  G+ is definitely broken.

Look, Google.  I know that you have a lot of relationships and data to figure out, but this can’t continue.  The people of Royal Oak and Royal Oak Charter Township deserve better from you.  You don’t want to be known for screaming out the wrong name, do you? This cheating has to stop.  Let’s see if you can get your relationship issues fixed soon.

Love and Best Wishes from a faithful follower and minion,

DDJ

We are a small, busy and dedicated team who love what we do! We’re not new; we’re small on purpose. We believe in establishing a close rapport with our clients and enjoy giving them our personal attention while helping them succeed online.

We are a full service web development and online marketing firm.  We do it all and we’re good at it! We like to play, live and work with winners…people who want to succeed and always want to be better. We’re not a “corporate” environment–we have fun here–but we get dirty when it’s time to get dirty.

We are looking for people who:

• Take responsibility for their tasks
• Pay attention to details
• Work well with a team or independently
• Love what they do
• Are good at what they do
• Love a challenge
• Work with minimal instruction, but can take direction, advice, constructive criticism and instructions, too
• Are able to follow our processes and help improve them if there is an opportunity

If you’re a web genius and are looking for a career–not just a paycheck–then you should send us your info for consideration.

We currently have openings for highly qualified individuals in the following positions:

• PHP Web/Software Developer
• Front-End Developer & Designer
• Copywriter/Social Media Coordinator

In case you’ve been under a rock for the last twelve weeks, Google began beta testing their new social media platform, called Google+, about three months ago in an effort to continue to be awesome and relevant on the web.  Google+ is a feature-packed social media platform that allows users to add the people they know to “circles”, like family or friends.  You can also do an on-air hangout via a group video chat with any of those circles and pull in streams of articles on things that interest you.  These are just a few of the features that Google released on Google+ and that they’re continuing to improve.  In fact, over the last three months, Google has released 100 new features to its platform.

The 100th feature?  They’re open to the public!  Google announced yesterday that the proverbial flood gates are open and anyone can “join the project and connect with the people they care about”.  All you have to do to join is visit google.com/+ and sign up your account.

Out of the 100 features that Google+ has released over the last three months, Facebook is doing their absolute best to steal…erm…”copy” every single one of them, and to be fair, come out with several of their own new features.

Not to be outdone, Facebook announced yesterday that it is doing a complete redesign of their profiles and will be formally announcing it later this week at its f8 developer conference.  There aren’t many indications about what exactly will be changed on the new, updated profiles, but inside sources are saying that the changes are going to be “major”.

It’s expected that Facebook’s new updated profiles will be incorporating its new media platform, which is also going to announced at f8 this week.  This component is expected to keep track of what users are actually watching or listening to on a service such as spotify and then posting it on their profiles for their friends to watch or listen to.  This is a little too Big Brother for me. :/

There is also talk of making content on Facebook profiles more “sticky”, which would make people stay on their Facebook profiles longer.  Because we all need to spend more time on Facebook?!?

Other suggestions are that they will be getting more into social ecommerce, using special Facebook credits and that there may also be some moves in preparation for the new HTML5 mobile platform called Project Spartan, which is supposed to be launching soon.

With everything going on in the social media war between Google+ and Facebook, one thing is certain; this is a divisive battle of heavyweight proportions.   A social media civil war if you will.  As time goes on, you’ll see more people jumping off of the Facebook ship and moving to Google+.  Is there enough room for both to exist?  Will people use just one of them?  Are Facebook fiends going to have another addiction to feed?

What’s going to happen next?  Look out for Facebook’s big announcement and release of the new profile format tomorrow.  I’m interested to see what happens and how Google responds.

If you have ever used or seen Google Analytics or another analytics program, you know that there is a tremendous amount of data available and reading and understanding it all can be difficult for some.  You could literally spend days looking at every possible “this means this” and “that means that” scenario from that data for a single website.   To make things easier for you, I want to explain a couple of simple and basic Key Performance Indicators that will help you out the most.

Percentage of New Visitors

By looking at how many of your website’s visitors are new visitors, you’ll be able to tell whether your recent SEO or marketing campaigns have been successful in generating new traffic to your website.

If you find that your percentage of new visitors is steadily increasing month after month, you must be doing something right.  If you find that your percentage of new visitors is declining or is pretty standard across the board, you may want to take a look at your online efforts and what you could be doing more of or be better at.

Also take into consideration big events that your business or website has seen this month that might cause a spike.  Or, if you’re a seasonal business such as a golf range or furnace company, you can expect to see seasonal deviations.

Visitors per Lead or Visitors per Sale

This Key Performance Indicator could be very simply explained as “How many visits does it take for my website to achieve its goal?”  Whether your goal is to sell something, generate a sales lead or get someone to join your membership, you need to know “Out of every 1,000 visitors, ‘x’ convert into a lead.”

This KPI is a great way to determine whether your website is accomplishing its goals.  If you’re seeing thousands of visitors and only a couple of sales or leads, you probably have a problem.  What is it?  Are the prices too high?  Are shipping costs too high?  Site too slow to load?  Is the contact form hard to find or broken?  The list goes on and on, but this KPI is a good place to start.

Cost per Lead

Once you know your Visitors per Lead or Visitors per Sale, take a look at the next Key Performance Indicator which is your Cost per Lead KPI.  If you’re spending $5,000 per month in pay-per-click advertising and another $5,000 in SEO services, and combined they’re generating 22,000 visitors and 7% of them are buying or contacting you once they get to your site….what is your cost per lead?

7% of 22,000 is 1,540.  So essentially, you received 1,540 leads or sales at a cost of $10,000.  10,000 divided by 1540 is roughly $6.49 per lead in this case.

Obviously the next step is to calculate out how much profit each of those leads makes you.  If you’re only making $5.00 in profit for each of these leads and they’re costing you an acquisition fee of $6.49…you’re losing money and you’ve got a problem (sometimes…maybe you don’t care if your goal is to create brand awareness)!

But, if you’re making $20 or $1,000 in profit on average for each lead, you’re still turning a positive ROI.

Stickiness

The last basic Key Performance Indicator that we’ll cover for right now is “stickiness”, which is an indicator of how much of your website visitors are viewing during their visits.

By looking at the level of involvement your visitors have with your website, how long they’re spending on each page, etc. you can determine a number of factors about the value of your content.

If they really like your content in a particular section of your site (like your blog), they’re likely to spend more time in that part of your website.  This is a good indicator or content that’s working!  You should create more links to this content throughout your website and also analyze whether this “style” of writing should be used in worse performing sections.

If visitors used to spend a lot of time in a section of your site and don’t anymore, it probably means that it’s time to update your content.  If you find that they aren’t finding particular pages of your website, you may have issues with linking or navigation that you should look into.

Are they finding a high value page and quickly leaving it? Why?

KPIs at a Glance

There are many other Key Performance Indicators for you to consider, but knowing the basics of these four KPIs can do wonders for your online performance.  More importantly, they can help you make educated decisions about your web presence and keep track of whether what you’re doing is working.

As always, we’re happy to help if you need help with understanding these Key Performance Indicators, learning about other KPIs you should know about or if you don’t even have analytics installed.  Feel free to contact us at anytime to chat!

First, H3 tags, or even h4-h6, can also be used outside of the content structure to point out other important sections of a page.

For example, the orange heading below this post that says “Leave a Reply” and all of the headings in the sidebar of this page are H3s. They’re used in this case to indicate to search engines and users that “this is a section of important information” as opposed to being supportive content of a previous H2. While this is somewhat of a misuse of the heading in relation to the content structure, it is still an applicable and acceptable use for the tag.

In practice, we rarely ever use headings past H3s because if your page contains enough content that it needs h4s-h6s, then it probably shouldn’t all be on one page. Instead it should probably be divided into a new category of the site or a main page with sub-pages of supporting & stand alone content.

Just to point out a couple of more things to readers, heading tags don’t have to be large and bold to be a heading. We can make a h1, h2, h3, etc. tag look like anything we want it to…even like this paragraph text that you’re reading now. But, they are very important structural elements of any web document and should be used correctly.

Also, headings should never be used for presentational purposes. Too many people and agencies use heading tags because they need big red text and they think that since headings are big and bold…they’ll just use that! Don’t ever, ever, ever do this. Use a paragraph tag instead and use CSS to make it look how you want.

In short, headings are structural indicators…just like when you’re writing a paper in school. h1 is Main title of the paper, h2 is a section of the paper, h3 is (generally) supporting content or a supporting idea of the h2 and its child content.

Answer? No.  Absolutely false, 98% of the time.  Choose a single point of contact to be responsible for the website redesign.  Someone with the skill set to bring a great project to fruition and someone who can filter the team’s feedback and make the final decisions.  “Design by Committee” is the biggest delay to projects and most of the time it results in a horrible outcome.  If the whole management team needs to be involved, choose a decision maker to filter the “great ideas” and feedback from the Accounting Manager’s wife.

Here’s a great video to show you how a project typically goes when a company involves the whole team…most of whom don’t belong making decisions.  Let’s see what happens when a corporation tries to design a stop sign!

A: Of course there is!  There are several ways to get feedback from your site users.  Here are three of the most common and most successful options.

Usability Testing

Usability testing, simply explained, is the hiring of a focus group to perform a list of prescribed tasks on your website  and then answer a list of questions about their experience.  While they’re performing their tasks, we capture a video of their actions on the screen and record the audio of their commentary.  At the end of their test, you receive a video of their experience and their comments as well as their completed questionnaire.

Some example tasks they can perform are:

• “You’re an incoming student.  Try to find information on your degree program of choice and then ask for more details.”
• “You’re a business owner looking for a widget.  Find the blue widget on our site and purchase one.”
• “You’re planning a vacation.  Find a hotel and car rental on our website that you like.”

Some sample questions you can ask are questions like:

• “Do you think information was easy to locate  on the website ?”
• “Was there anything about the website that you found difficult to use?”
• “If you were looking for blue widgets, how likely would you be to buy them on this website?”

Usability testing is the best way to get feedback from site users and you can even define specific demographics for your testers.  You can use an agency like us to help you come up with your tasks and translate your results or we can simply run a test with your guidelines.

Even if you’re not having conversion problems, you can use usability testing before or after designing your website to find out what people like or dislike about your site.  The possibilities are endless and although it may sound complicated, it’s relatively easy, inexpensive and invaluable information to have.

Customer Feedback and Ratings

Another great way to get feedback on your website is to just ask your users!  I’m sure you’ve seen feedback and rating systems on several websites that you’ve used.  Some of the most common ways are:

• “Was this information helpful?”  A simple yes or no rating on your pages will tell you if your website’s content is as good as you think it is.
• “Tell us what you think”  You can allow your website users to comment on the pages of your website and even display those comments on the page for other users to read.  This is easiest if your website is using a Content Management System (CMS), but is possible to implement on any website.
• Customer Rating – You’ve seen them before, the little five star rating system that allows a user to rate a page or product on a website.  Studies show that when customers give your products or services a rating on a scale like the “5 star system”, and especially when you use the ratings with comments, other site visitors are more likely to take your customers’ recommendations seriously.  They call this Social Recommendation and it can do wonders for site conversion!

Customer Surveys

Obviously your website is getting some kind of conversion.  Either you’re selling a product once in awhile, site users are filling out your contact form or people are signing up for your newsletter.  Ask them what they think!

1. If you’re selling them a product, when you email them a receipt include a link to a customer satisfaction survey and ask them to answer a couple of questions about their experience.  You can even offer them $5 off of their next purchase with a coupon or some other incentive such as a free blue widget with their next order.
2. When users are filling out your contact form you should be sending them a thank you email or at least having some communication with them in the future.  Again, give them a link to a satisfaction survey or when you talk to them on the phone or meet with them say, “Hey, what did you think of our website?  Was it easy to find what you were looking for?”
3. If you’re collecting email addresses from your site users, use them for something other than selling them stuff!  Send them a quick, personal email.  Remember that people’s time is valuable to them.  “Dear Bob, I know that you use our website and I really value your opinion.  I was hoping that you could give me some feedback on how we can make it better or easier for you to use.  I really appreciate your help on this and I’m willing to give you 10% off of your next order for your help.  Thanks….”

So, it’s definitely possible and very easy to find out why your website isn’t converting.  Usually when a website isn’t converting it’s because the content sucks, there are bottlenecks in the order process or there are performance issues that you’re not even aware of.  Any of the above options will help you identify your issues and turn your traffic into sales.  And of course, we can help with any of them.

I hope you found this post helpful and that you all have a fun and safe holiday weekend!

If you don’t have time to read the full article, then skip to the area that interests you the most:

• Website Content Writing – General Tips
• Finding & Writing Content for a Personal Website or Blog
• Finding & Writing Web Content for a Service Based Business
• Finding & Writing Web Content for a Product Based Business

Website Content Writing – General Tips

• Know your target audience - Are you writing for high school students, soccer moms, lawyers or scientists?  Use a vocabulary that is appropriate for your readers.
• Use a common voice – Determine whether your message should be in the first person (I, we, etc.) or third person (Bob’s Tax Service, Sally’s Taxidermy, etc.).  Use the same voice throughout your website with the exception of blog postings or other personal pieces which can switch to first person.
• Write for people, not search engines – A long time ago, in the 90′s days of Alta Vista and Dog Pile, websites and web pages were given relevance and ranking based on the “keyword saturation” of their content.  For example, if your page was about “coffee cups”, the more you said “coffee cups” in your content, the better you would rank.  There was even a 9-1 ratio as a “magic number”.  This is no longer the case and in fact, you can (and probably will) be penalized by search engines for trying too hard. Search engines like unique, topic specific, human targeted content. Try to trick them and the pie will be on your proverbial face!
• Have someone proofread for you – For whatever reason, the brain plays tricks on us.  Even if we think our content is perfect, chances are that it’s not.  Once you’ve written all of your website content have someone, besides you, proofread and edit for you.  Hint: This doesn’t mean Microsoft Word…it’s usually wrong too!
• Make sure you have the right amount of content – If you’re describing your company’s history, one paragraph is probably too short.  If you’re writing a short product description for an e-commerce site, 4,000 words is probably too long to get to the point.  Keep in mind the average attention span of your target audience and be as concise (or detailed) as you need to be for the topic.
• Don’t steal (or imitate)! – In case your parents didn’t tell you, stealing is bad.  And in case your English teacher didn’t tell you, using someone else’s words or ideas is plagiarism…which is also stealing.  Google and other search engines hate stealing or even “re-purposing” content and they will punch you right in your face for it.  Want to get banned from search engines, this is a good way to do it!  Even if a product manufacturer gives you permission to use their content and product descriptions, there is a good chance that 954 other people are using it too.  Be unique and you’ll get much more lovin’ from “The Google” (and the other search engines that don’t matter as much).

Finding & Writing Content for a Personal Website or Blog

This is a pretty easy one, so I’ll keep it short and sweet.  If you’re running a personal website or blog just make sure that you:

• Follow the general writing tips above and organize your content like I said in Succeed Online – Web Content and Structure
• Set a schedule for yourself! The biggest mistake I see in the success of personal websites is being too stagnant.  A website is a living, breathing animal and has to be fed and watered regularly.  We all get super busy but a website is a commitment.  Wake up a little earlier than your spouse or kids and write when the house is quiet, write on your lunch break, whatever it takes.  Search engines and people like to see new stuff every time they come to your website.
• Plan your topics in advance – We all run into writer’s block.  Whenever you think of a new topic to write about write it down on a list somewhere.  Maybe even write a paragraph or two about it so that you can remember what you were thinking.  Then, next Tuesday, when you can’t think of anything to write you can go back to your handy list and already have a topic.
• Get your facts right - The goal of any website is to become an expert or voice on your topic.  If you’re writing about other people, things or technical stuff do a couple minutes (or hours depending on your topic) of research and make sure you’ve got your facts straight.  People will call you out if you’re wrong.  Be an expert, keep and grow your readers and hopefully increase your revenue too!

That’s about all you need to know!  Good luck!

Finding & Writing Web Content for a Service Based Business

You would think writing content for your service based business would be easy!  How hard could it be to write about yourself?  In my experience, if you’re writing content for a service based website you are typically one of two people;  either you’re the business owner/manager with very little time or you’re an employee of the business that got the task of writing content for the new website dropped into your lap.  In either instance, finding and writing content for your website can be a daunting task.  Here are some pointers to make it a little less painful:

• Schedule interviews – If you’re having difficulty describing your services, the company’s history or other information for your website, schedule interviews with other people in your company that may be able to fill in the blanks.  The company history can probably be answered by the owner of the company.  Services can be described by people in your company that perform those services.  Schedule a 30 minute interview with each of them and send them some questions that you’ll be asking about the topic a few days in advance.
• Make it a team effort – Similar to the suggestion above, assign different pages of the website to different people in the office that can write the content for you.  Give them guidelines and deadlines such as “Bob, I need 300 words on our company’s history by next Tuesday” or “Sue, I need you to explain Debt Collection to me in customer friendly way by the end of the week”.  Once you’ve gathered everyone’s input, rewrite it so that it has a common voice/message.
• Look at examples – Visit some of your competitors’ websites or the websites of companies that perform the same services in a different part of the country. Do not copy or rewrite their content, but get an idea of what other people are saying.  Also, you can do a search in Google for the service you are trying to describe and look at the top 5-10 results.  What are they saying that’s making them show up as an “expert” on the service?  How can you be similar or better?
• Don’t get too “industry” - It’s great that your company calls it a “debt consolidation and remuneration”, but what are your customers going to call it?  If your customers are going to call the service “debt assistance” or “debt help”, then you need to use varying names and K.I.S.S. You may have to convince your boss some on this one.  Remember the tip from above to write for your audience.
• Don’t be too ambitious - As I mentioned before, start smaller and grow regularly!  If you have twenty-four computer networking services that you can perform, maybe you don’t need a page on each of them to start with?  That’s twenty-four pages of content you’ll need to write!  Maybe break them into logical groups and summarize them into four or five pages to make things easier.  Then when you have time, make a page for each and turn your original page into a category page.

Out of all the websites you could be writing for, a service based business can definitely be the hardest business to write for.  I hope that these tips will help you some and good luck!

Finding & Writing Web Content for a Product Based Business

Finding and writing content for a product based website or e-commerce store is the easiest of all!  The amount of information available for any of your products is huge and I’m willing to bet that you haven’t considered some of the alternative sources of website content for your products or are doing it completely wrong right now.  Here are some tips for finding and gathering web content for your product based website:

• Don’t use their content! – This is the big mistake that most of you are probably making!  If you sell products made by another company, chances are that other companies are selling that manufacturer’s products online too.  Why does this matter to you?  Because chances are that all of you are using the same product descriptions and wording for your products and categories.  Remember the point above about not “stealing” or “imitating”?  This is exactly what it looks like you’re doing. If you manufacture your own products, but other people are selling them for you online, you’re going to have the same issue because they will most likely be using your product descriptions!  Hint: Take a sentence from one of your product descriptions, copy it, paste it in the search box on Google and put quotes on both sides of the sentence.  Click search.  How many other people are using the same content?
• Other sources for product content, part 1 – Look at the product packaging and other marketing/sales material and utilize the wording from there or even rework it some.  You can also look at the user manuals if the product has one.  You’ll find that the wording and product descriptions should be somewhat different than the “generic” description that the product manufacturer released.
• Other sources of product content, part 2 - Every time you talk to one of your colleagues, sales people, spouse, friends, whomever about one of your products or product lines…record it!  Take that digital recording of your discussion and send it off to a transcribing service.  For a very small investment, you’ll receive several hundred words about your product.
• Other sources of product content, part 3 – Content doesn’t mean just the words.  Have someone use your product and take pictures while they use it.  Have them shoot a video of them using the product and end with them giving a description of how easy it was to use, how beneficial it was, how nice it is, etc.  Post these on the website with your products.
• Other sources of product content, part 4 - Customer reviews of your product will provide a lot of valuable feedback and content for your products.  Allow your website users to submit feedback or testimonials about how great the “x-14 super widget” is and post those to your site.

The list of alternative sources of content for your product based website could go on and on.  Use some of the suggestions that I’ve provided or come up with some creative ideas of your own.  Keep in mind the general tips from above and avoid the big no-no that I pointed out in the first bullet and you’ll do great!

I hope that this article on finding and writing content for your website helps you succeed online!  If you have any questions about something, please contact me on my profile page or comment on this article below and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

My next How to Succeed Online articles will cover keyword selection, competitive analysis and internal site SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  Thanks for reading!

I’m going to assume that by now you have read the first two articles in my How to Succeed Online series, “How to Succeed Online – What’s your Plan?” and “Succeed Online – Leave Your Crayons at Home“.  If you haven’t, you should go back and read them really quick to get up to speed!

Once you’ve established a plan for your new web business (yes, a website is a business) and you have found your professional web developer or have your own resources in place, it is time to start working on putting together your site’s content.  After developing hundreds of websites, this is typically the place where people have difficulty.  Including me.

If you run a service related business or a blog this is going to be a little more difficult for you to accomplish. Most people find it difficult to talk about themselves or don’t know what to say. If you sell products, it will be quite a bit easier because the resources already exist.  We’ll cover this more in depth during my next article.

Step One to Killer Content : Organize Your Thoughts

Remember high school English class when they made you write an outline for your papers?  Ugh!  I hated those things!  But as it turns out, they actually serve a purpose in real life, unlike quadratic formulas which I still haven’t found a useful purpose for.

The first step in determining content for your website is to put your thoughts down on paper and organize them into logical sections and pages.

What do you need to talk about or say on your website?

Chances are that you will need content for your homepage, your “About Us” page and your contact page.  I’ll give you those three as a freebie.  But what about the rest of it?  Does your website offer services or products?  Figure out what those products or services are and what you need to say about each of them.  Is your website a blog?  Figure out the topics of discussion you’re going to write about, plan a category for each topic area and some “starter articles” for each topic.

Don’t forget the supplemental or ancillary pages!  Does your website need a terms of service or privacy policy?  Do you want your customers to submit product warranties to your website?  What about testimonials, press coverage, or product returns?  You really have to spend some time thinking this through!

How can your content be organized into groups or categories?

Organizing your content into logical groups is very important for a website’s structure.  Think of it like folders on your computer.  You have your “My Documents” folder and inside of there you have a bunch of other folders that organize your life into logical groups.  When you build a website it’s a good idea to do the same thing.  Besides keeping your website’s files organized it gives us some help with search engine optimization by allowing for additional keywords in your URIs (file addresses and names) and it can also help us avoid some canonicalization (c14n) issues down the road by naming files correctly and establishing a standard for your website.

Web geek stuff aside, break your content into logical groups.  You might determine that your “about us” page needs to be an “about us” section which contains several pages such as Company History, Our Staff, etc.  Organize your products or services into groups too!  Naming your categories something such as: ‘Widgets’, ‘Gadgets’, ‘thingy-ma-bobs’ and ‘doohickeys’ will make it much easier to organize your products or services and make it much easier for your site’s visitors to find what they’re looking for.

Think, Analyze and Rethink Your Website Content

Once you have your content laid out for your new website, sit and think about it awhile.  Did you miss anything?  Are you trying to do too much to start with and maybe you can cut back and keep adding over time?

Can each page stand on its own?  Depending on the website, only about half of your traffic will actually come in through your homepage!  If someone were to access your Red Widget or Company History page first, could it stand alone and support itself?  Does that content maybe need to be moved to another page or can you give it a boost with some links to supporting pages?

Depending on the purpose of your website, you want to shoot for around 400 words per page (give or take 200).  Does each page have enough wording or supporting images, videos, etc. to mandate its own page and if you’re going to move it, will it make the other page too long?

Keep in mind that internet users have a steadily decreasing attention span and if you put too much content on your page without telling them what they want to know, they’re probably going to leave.  Do you need to be concise or thoroughly informative?

And with that, I think we’ll call it a day.  My next article will cover gathering and writing content for your website in, how to find time to write, various resources where you can find or create content for your website and how to keep it fresh!

Leave Your Crayons at Home

As website owners we have a tendency to become too involved in the design of our websites. We let our personal feelings and things we like ooze into our website’s design.  Some website owners are wise enough to leave website design and usability to the professionals, but far too many of us make our websites blue or pink because it’s our favorite color, use flash or other animations on our sites because we think it looks cool, or want to be “different” then everyone else.

Am I saying that your website has to be uncreative?  No!  But websites are designed, structured and built the way that we build them for a reason.  Several reasons in fact.  Here are some examples:

• Flash, silverlight and excessive javascript animations look cool but they are not SEO friendly (javascript can be if used correctly and no matter what people try to tell you, flash is not crawlable by search engines.), they increase page load time  (users will typically leave your site after four seconds of total load time), they are not accessible (generally not mobile friendly, unaccessible/readable to some people with handicaps), they typically cost more to develop, maintain and change in the future.  We do not use flash or silverlight here, except in very minor instances, for the reasons above.
• Your favorite color is pink and you like elephants?  Great!  You want to put 900 products on your homepage?  Great!  What do your customers want? Look at your big competitors websites.  Do you think that their website looks like it does by coincidence?  Did they possibly spend a lot more money than you to do some research and find out what works?
• You don’t want a standard navigation like all the other websites have because it’s “typical”.  Navigation, content and site structure are generally placed where they are for a reason.  One, it is what people are used to using when they surf the web..having cool images or icons, fashioned in some random place on your page might seem like a good idea to you, but can your website visitors easily navigate your website?  If they can’t find their way around, they’re going to leave with a quickness.

It’s important for you to understand design and usability to a certain extent so you know when your agency or developer is steering you wrong.  Work with an agency that isn’t afraid to tell you “no” and explain to you how your decisions could impact your website’s usability and conversion rates.  Most importantly, trust the professionals and leave your crayons at home…let the architects design your house and let the mechanics fix your car.  True web professionals are always willing to educate you and help you make good decisions, let them.

Being a success on the internet is relative to how you define success.  But usually when someone says. “I want to succeed online”, they mean I want more traffic to my website, I want more leads and/or I want to sell more stuff. I’ll assume that if you’re reading this that this is your definition of succeeding online too.  If it’s not we need to talk so I can give you some different pointers.

So what is this magical game plan and what’s really involved to make your website rock and making yourself rich and famous?  Well, I’m not going to give you all the answers because everyone’s situation is different.  But, I am going to give you some really good pointers to get your website headed in the right direction.

Because of the amount of content to go over, I’m going to make this a series of articles so you don’t get burned out.  If you want to talk about these pointers some more or need help filling in the blanks get in touch with me on the bottom of this page or fill out the quick contact form to the right of this article.

Ready to get started?  Stand up and stretch, grab yourself another cup of coffee, and find some paper and a pen.  We’ve got some work to do!

What’s Your Plan?

This is a tough one and it requires a lot of thought on your part.  Almost every website owner I know, myself included, is guilty of skipping this step or taking it too lightly.  Why?  Because it’s hard and it takes awhile and we all want things to be easy.  Success is not easy. Don’t think that you’re going to just launch a website with this “great” idea you had and be rich and famous in a year.  It’s not going to happen.

Starting a website or online business is just like starting a brick and mortar business.  I’ve said this a thousand times, let’s make it 1,001…you have to plan your website just like you would plan any other business venture.

• What is the purpose of your website (business)?
• Where’s your business going to be located? (domain name and hosting = address and neighborhood)
• Who is your competition and what makes you special?  This doesn’t mean your competitor Bob down the street…who is your online competition?
• What’s your budget, both for starting your business and your marketing/operational costs?  A website is not a one shot deal.
• How many man hours do you need to dedicate to your website?  Do you have enough time?  Do you need employees?
• Are there any legal or accounting considerations for your website?  Do you have the resources to get these done?
• How are you going to monetize your website?  Is a positive result sales, leads, or sign-ups?  How many?
• Do you have good tracking tools put into place to see if your website is getting the results you expected?  A dedicated phone number?  Analytics?

These are just some of the questions you need to ask yourself and know the answers to…inside and out.  You should put together a business plan and a marketing plan for almost any website and then talk to us or some other professionals to help you fill in the blanks.

First up was Shari McConahay from Extreme Halloween, Inc.  She and her family have a network of 13 costume websites and it was great to hear how her company has generated content and driven sales to their business on a shoe-string budget.  She has engaged in several low cost campaigns including maintaining her own company blog, making videos of her products for cheap, using “Mommy Blogs” for contests and of course, Social Media.

She reinforced many things that we tell to our ecommerce clients, and unfortunately, they seldom do.  If you’re on a low budget, that doesn’t mean that your Ecommerce website has to suffer.  She’s effectively run her ecommmerce blog and talked about all the right things and in the right proportion.  She’s utilized internet software suites to create videos of her products and run contests on Mommy Blogs for her customers to win the chance for matching costumes for them and their kids.  Shari is a very smart lady and is doing everything right.   People like Shari make me wish that all ecommerce “clients” were created equal.

Next up was Paul Boisvert, the Lead Product Manager from Yahoo! Merchant Solutions.  He also reinforced a lot of things that we’ve been telling our clients for years and some of his analogies were hilarious.

Paul discussed the importance of paying attention to detail.  Proofreading your site’s content, large buttons and the right images on your site.  He also encouraged the audience to get back to basics, not to “fear the phone” and how to properly use product cross selling on their stores.  A very good presentation.

Paul also reinforced the need for good data mining and carefully reviewing the relationship between your customers, your orders and your products.  Knowing how these three interact with each other and making your decisions based on the numbers and not your personal feelings.  I know far too many people that make changes to their site based on what they think they should be doing….and not what analytics and their reporting features in their store are telling them to do.

Next up was Rob Snell from Gun Dog.  I saw him speak last year as well at PubCon and this dude’s got it down.  He has great techniques for generating content for his ecommerce products and site from just about anything.  If you want to see how things should be done…check out his website.

I loved this session, just as I did last year.   There are a lot of mistakes that ecommerce and shopping cart owners make and we love teaching people how to make things right.  I wish that some of the people we know would take us up on that offer. (hint, hint).  If you would like us to review your ecommerce website or online shopping cart, please contact us.  We’ve got lots of knowledge to give and can help you make your e-commerce site convert in no time.

I started out day one with my first session, In House SEO.  This session covered consideration companies should make when deciding to take their SEO and other Internet Marketing to an In House Team.  I admittedly should have read the class description better, but there were some very valid points brought up in the session and it’s always good to hear how others view things.  Right?

First up was Chris Hooley of MCP Media who discussed hiring your team based on its needs.  Determine the SEO tasks that your company needs to achieve and hire people with those skill sets accordingly.   He broke SEO talent into four major players; link builders, content writers, web developers and management and covered what type of personality or individual a business owner should be looking for to fill these key spots.  For example, a link builder will need to be a social butterfly and maybe have some sales experience.

What I liked about Chris’ presentation the most was that he covered some good HR and management points in general.  He covered the consideration of cost, managing the team, splitting up workflow and how to sell the idea of having an in house SEO team to the upper management.  One of the biggest points I took away from his presentation on In House SEO is that “people and jobs can be optimized too”….spread SEO tasks around to the entire team and cut dead weight from your team often.  It’s very easy to replace an under-performer on your team by finding someone with the right personality and traits to fill that spot.

Alex Bennert, SEO for the Wall Street Journal, also presented and covered how to get the rest of your staff and management on board with SEO.  I like that she reinforced to her audience that SEO is a team sport, and Alex certainly has a big team too manage and train at the Journal.  Alex says that she has broken her team into several groups and approaches and trains each of them differently.  For example, she has divided her training amongst the IT department, content developers like journalists and bloggers, management, and the business development team.  She holds regular 20 minute SEO training sessions with each group and explains to them why SEO is important, in terms that each will understand, and then tells them how they can help.

For example, the IT team doesn’t really need to know about keyword saturation but she tells them about 301 redirects, analytics, duplicate content, url parameters, sitemaps and Webmaster tools.  Business Development on the other hand, is taught about content sydication, integrating content into the website, leveraging site assets and reusing microsites that were previously used for promotion.  I enjoyed her presentation and took away some good pointers on In House SEO and addressing different teams with different data.

If you would like to talk more about what we know and what we learned about building an In House SEO team, drop us a line.  We’ll be back in Detroit next week and are always available for SEO and business consulting.

One of our personal blogs was hacked and so far we have found two clients with older versions of WordPress that have been compromised.  With regular maintenance and monitoring, this could have been prevented but the truth is that far too many people don’t think about maintaining and protecting their website until it’s too late.

Our blog that got hacked was one of DZ’s personal sites that hadn’t been touched in months (we all have sites like that here…we own a lot of web real estate).  By the time we were aware of the problem, Google and all modern web browsers had blocked access to the website because it had been designated as an “attack site”.  A hacker or team of hackers had compromised the blog software installation and injected code into the website that was downloading a virus onto the site’s visitors computer.

So far we have found two of our client’s blogs that were running outdated software and have been compromised as well but we were able to catch it before any damage could be done.  Why did we catch these two?  Because those particular clients had maintenance contracts with us which means that we regularly spend time on their websites “checking it out” and “tuning it up”.

We have issued a mass email to all of our clients that have older versions of WordPress blogs so that we can get their permission to spend a few hours securing and updating their blog software.  Unfortunately, out of the 20+ clients we’ve contacted, only a few have responded.  Maybe people don’t understand the severity of the situation?

The truth is that all software is susceptible to hacking. The adage says, “If it can be built, it can be unbuilt.”  Fortunately for us and our clients, we use well built Open Source software on our projects which means that there are thousands of developers, all over the world, who have a vested interest in the security and well being of that software…we don’t have to wait for companies like Microsoft to send out a memo, hold meetings and do a bunch of bureaucratic BS to get a security hole patched.

If the software we use is found to have a security hole, it is fixed immediately and the updated web software is available for updating almost as quick.  So how does web software get compromised if it’s always being updated and fixed?  By a failure to update and protect your investment.

If you spent a lot of money on a car, you would take it in for regular maintenance, right?  Regular oil changes, checking the air pressure on your tires, regular tune ups and adjustments to keep it running in top form.  Why wouldn’t you do the same for your online software?

Unfortunately, too many people buy or build a website and think they’re done.  Keeping your website on a regular maintenance schedule, just like you would do with your car, is super important.

If you do not have a maintenance contract with us or haven’t talked to us in awhile, I strongly encourage you to come in and have a chat with us.  If you received our notification about the security of your software and you ignored it, don’t!  Call us or email us with questions.

Not maintaining your website and protecting your visitors is bad for business. Running an unprotected or outdated website is like running a restaurant and not caring if your guests get food poisoning.

My intention is not to scare you or be crass, but I hope that something in this blog post set off a bell in your head.  Be a responsible website owner and take it into the “mechanic” once in awhile.

My goal in writing this post is to try to make a contrast of the online vs. brick and mortar world of traditional business so that people not as familiar with the internet can better understand what these three pinnacles of the online world are and how they can have a positive or negative affect on their online presence and success.

For once, I am going to try to keep my blog post concise (I can’t promise anything).  So if you have any questions or if we can help explain any of these better, please let us know.  We’re always happy to help.

Clout and Search Engine Optimization

In case you’re not familiar with the term, clout is the amount of “pull” that you have.  It’s the ability to get things done by knowing people and people knowing you.  It’s a matter of respect, knowledge and recognition and it takes awhile to build.  If you ask me or anyone who has been around business for awhile, clout is the most powerful and long lasting of these three and search engine optimization is much the same.

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is a matter of being relevant and an authority on the topic at hand.  SEO is organic, or happens naturally if the right seeds are planted and can take awhile to grow.  Much like becoming known as the “go to guy” at city hall to get things done or for accounting issues, you want to become the “go to guy” for [insert your product or service here].  You have to build a name for yourself and it’s going to take time and commitment.  Maybe even a little bit of money to create the opportunity to be introduced to the right people by the right people.

Your goal is long term recognition.  Just like clout, it’s not always the easiest to get, but once you’ve got it, you’ve got it and it’s yours to lose or build upon…start pulling some shady stuff, make a series of vital mistakes, stop giving people what they need, or have someone else become more powerful and respected than you and you can lose it faster than you gained it.  But if you build a solid base, gradually build on it and take care of people, it’s yours forever.

Search Engine Optimization is the strongest of these three, just like clout.  You should put your investment into organic SEO for any of your mid to long term online business goals.

Money and Internet Marketing

If you’ve just opened your business, have a sale coming up or a new product getting ready to come out, you know that you’ll need to invest some money in advertising.  There are also ongoing costs for advertising and marketing for the day to day functioning of your business.  This is where an investment of your money in Internet Marketing comes in.

If you need to get the word out quick to get business through your doors in the online world, you spend some money on Internet Marketing or “Online Advertising”.  Technically aspects of SEO, which that I discussed above, are a part of Internet Marketing.  But because it generally consists of a lower percentage cost up front and has a longer term and relatively stable ROI, I separated it into its own section.  Some other forms of Internet Marketing that you may or may not be familiar with are:

• Pay-per-click, or PPC advertising, also referred to as Search Engine Marketing, or SEM
• Affiliate advertising or banner programs
• Email marketing campaigns
• Link “Building” (Buying)
• Sponsored blog posts
• Sponsored web pages
• Online Public Relations or Press Releases
• And several others

The combination of Internet Marketing tools you use is dependent on your need and budget.  Some of them might not be right for your situation.  But if you have to get a quick result and have some money to spend, Internet Marketing is the route to take for immediate results and the most trackable and immediate ROI.

Internet Marketing campaigns need to be monitored, analyzed and changed on the fly.  If one campaign is performing better for you than another, someone should notice it and switch your spend accordingly or make adjustments to make the under-performer perform better.

Make sure you use the right team if you go this route.  It can be a high stakes and risky game in the wrong hands.  You wouldn’t do a high stakes stock trade with a new broker, right?

Internet Marketing is the fastest of these three, but will cost you a more substantial investment, especially at start up.  You should put your investment into Internet Marketing for any of your short term online business goals.  You can slow down or eliminate this budget over time if you’re gaining clout (SEO) and are getting a sufficient amount of leads by organic or viral means.

Friends and Social Media

With all this talk about Twitter, Facebook, et al. what is the purpose of Social Media and how can it help your online business?  This is where your “friends” come in.  In the real world, your friends are likely to help you move or recommend your business to some of their other friends.

Social Media is much the same way as friends and should be thought of in that exact manner.  They’re friends, be social!  They’re likely to send you some business on occasion, but not oodles.  If all you ever do is talk about work, they’re not likely to be your friends long.

The truth about social media is that it’s not right for everybody, but it’s cheap and a great way to be a part of the “community”.  The time needed to commit to social media is much longer than the other two and I still haven’t seen how to track Social Media’s ROI.  I don’t know about you but my time is worth as much if not more than my money.

If you have a good cause, if you’re a NPO, a “green” company or have a loyal customer base chances are that Social Media will work for you.  If you sell widgets or one particular type of service that people generally don’t think about until they need it, Social Media probably isn’t for you.

If you go the Social Media route, first consider if it’s really for you and your business.  If you do it yourself, there is zero cost involved.  Who wants friends they have to buy, right?

Social Media is the cheapest of these three, free if you do it yourself, but can cost you a substantial amount of time and very little trackable ROI.  Unless this is for your situation, and done correctly and consistently you can end up with a whole lot of time committed and nothing in return.

In Conclusion

I hope I was able to clear up a few things about the online marketing paradigm.  There are a lot of details involved in accomplishing any of these three but I hope that now you can, at least, make a semi-educated decision about which path is right for you and your business.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss anything covered here in more detail, please contact us or email me directly at dean [ at ] tmprod.com.   Thanks!

Microsoft recently released it’s new search engine, Bing.  Bing is being touted as the new generation of search engine, that they are calling a “decision engine”.  To be honest, I haven’t used Bing a whole lot because I’m generally unimpressed with Microsoft’s products.  I have heard some feedback that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for sometimes, but maybe these are glitches that Microsoft will work out over time.

With the Yahoo and Microsoft deal, it has been announced that Yahoo will begin to use Microsoft’s Bing engine for it’s internet search.  In return, Yahoo is going to be able to keep 88% of all paid advertising revenue for the first five years of the deal (it’s a 10 year deal) and Yahoo will also have the rights to advertise on some of Microsoft’s websites.

So now it appears that we only have two major search engine algorithms to worry about.  Google which has always been in the forefront and Bing which will be running Bing.com and Yahoo Search.

Is this going to hurt your online presence?  If you’re one of our clients, probably not.  If anything it should make our job a little easier and help us rank you a little bit better.  But from what I understand about Bing, this reinforces the need for you to have good relevant content on your website and continue to build up your authority with a good linking strategy.

Yahoo search has been going down hill for years and MSN Search was garbage.  But together, they may have found a winner with Bing.  Will they beat Google?  Probably not.  But they may change the game just enough to get us to pay attention to Microsoft for once.

But, for now, Smashing Magazine, which is a pretty good blog that a couple of us read has a great post this morning worthy of a backlink.  Check it out and if you have any questions or need further explanation, feel free to ask us.

So without further ado, check out Web Design Industry Jargon, Glossary and Resources.

It’s hardly a secret (we hope) that the internet is the most effective medium for spreading the word about your business, getting found by your consumers, and seeing an almost guaranteed return on investment (ROI) for your marketing dollars. We hope that you’ve made a progressive move of your marketing dollars from expensive yellow page ads and traditional TV, radio, and print media to a great website and digital marketing campaign. If you haven’t, please contact us so that we can show you why you should.

So let’s assume, for the sake of this article, that you’re one of the smarter ones and your company either has an investment online or you’re planning on making one.  There are several ways to make a lot of money online, but there are even more ways to waste your money online and not see an effective ROI.  Here’s a Pro Tip that most advertising agencies or traditional marketing firms don’t know or won’t tell you: Building a website and putting it online, in itself, will not make you any money and will, in fact, be a huge waste of your investment dollars.

While I’m sure that I could write all day about ways to waste your money online, I’d like to cover some of the biggest and most common mistakes that I see nearly everyday.  While we hope that you aren’t one of the people making these types of mistakes, if you find that you are or you’re not sure, you should ask us about it.  Even if you’re a past or current client of ours, don’t assume that this article doesn’t apply to you.  Out of our 200+ clients over the years, I can only name 20 of them that this article doesn’t apply to.  So, chances are….

Let’s get to it.  Here are five of the top ways that you can, and probably are, wasting your money online.

1. Just Building a Website

We’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:  Anybody can build a website, very few can do it correctly.  If you have a website built by a website design company, your traditional marketing agency, your IT guy, a company in India or somebody you found on Craigslist, you’re probably wasting your money.  Even anybody on our team, by themselves, could not build you a phenomenal website.  A team of specialists is needed to build a good website.

Chances are that you don’t know what questions you should be asking or the magnitude of work that goes into a great online presence.  Chances are that they don’t know either.  Even if they talk a good game and use a lot of terminology that you don’t understand, they probably don’t know how to actually do what they’re saying correctly.  I know that’s a little rough, but it’s the truth.

It has been our experience, when dealing with hundreds of those types listed above, that you will get one or two of the list for your investment:

1. A Pretty Site – You will get a website with a great design that looks very pretty on the screen. BUT:  How is it built?  How will it be found after you launch it?  Can it be used in any other browsers besides yours?  Etc.
2. A Well Coded Site – The code of your website is half decent because the person you used took an HTML class or built a few website before.  BUT: Is the code valid and semantically correct so that it displays correctly everywhere and is loved by Search Engines?  Is the CSS and javascript of your website separated into external files and not inline with your markup?  Will the code still work next year? Etc.
3. Some Basic “SEO” – The person building your website will add titles and meta data to all or most of the pages.  BUT: Was keyword research conducted in formulating those titles and meta data or did they guess?  Where did they get that information?  Does each page of your site have a unique and keyword optimized title, description and keyword tag? Etc.
4. Good Usability – The flow of the website works well and is easy to use by the masses.  BUT: Are people finding your website in the first place?  What about Accessibility for the handicapped?  Target just paid $2 Million after losing a lawsuit over a non-accessible website.
5. A Lower Cost – This person already works for you or can build you a website for a lower price than a full service digital agency.  BUT: Like everything else, you get what you pay for.  Why use an attorney when you get sued when you could just handle it yourself?  Why hire an electrician, it can’t be that hard, right?

The truth is that you need all of these things, and more, have to be addressed to have a successful online presence and see even a meager ROI.  In order to accomplish all of these things, you must use a professional digital agency with extensive experience in modern web development practices and search engine optimization.  Anyone else is doing it as a side gig or an ancillary service.  Please don’t fall into this trap!

2. Making Too Small of an Investment

An online presence should be thought of as a new business venture.  New businesses of course need significant startup capital.  The most common mistake that I see people make is having too small of a budget to have a successful online presence.  Buying a website for $2000 or in some cases, even $5000, and hosting for $20/mo. and then walking away isn’t going to get you the results you think it will.  You need to thoroughly understand your investment, what’s required to be successful and make sure that you are properly utilizing your budget to get the best out of it that you can.  If you can’t afford to do what you need to do, then don’t waste your money by doing it half baked.  Determine what needs to happen and what a reasonable cost is for those tasks to be properly completed.

Would you buy a house in a bad neighborhood or with less bedrooms than you needed, just because it was what you could afford?  Would you open a store with no inventory, phone lines or staff?  No!  You’d reevaluate your finances, find more money somewhere and come back to the table when you could afford what you needed.  A website should be thought of the same way.

Not only are there startup costs involved with a website, there are ongoing maintenance costs, just like a brick and mortar business.  You must continually update your website with new content, you need to keep track of your site rankings and performance, you’ll need hosting and email support if something ever goes wrong, you’ll come up with new ideas or things that you want to add to your site, etc.  Make sure that plan ahead for an ongoing monthly commitment to your website.  One of the biggest mistakes you can make is launching a website and forgetting about it.  A website is a living, breathing thing.  It needs food, attention and love.  The bigger the site, the more it needs.

You need to invest money into building your website properly, doing keyword and competitive analysis research, doing SEO to your site’s pages and content, buying or cleaning up good imagery for your site, getting good, dependable hosting for your site, and on and on and on….Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.

There is a process that should be followed to make sure you’re not wasting your money and whether we complete your project for you or not, we can offer you consultation on what needs to happen and help your team through the entire process.

3. Making the Wrong Investments

There are a lot of ways to make a wrong investment online.  Here are a couple of them:

1. Trying to do what your “competition” does. You have to do what’s right for you, your business, and your website.  Changing your website all of the time based on the changes that your competition makes will keep you chasing your tail.  If your site is relatively new or your competition has 10-100 times the budget and resources that you do, don’t try to keep up with your bigger brethern.  Again, a website is just like any other business.  You have to build up your reputation and customer base over time.  If you have a small “Ma and pop” corner grocery store, don’t try to put in a clothing, pet, cosmetic and electronics section just because Meijer or Target did.  Instead, evaluate what your customers are doing and how your website is being used.  Make improvements based on the facts and the numbers that are available to you.  What is the biggest impact you can make with your allowable budget?
2. Buying Lists and Services Online - If you want a list of the keywords you should be targeting or a list of emails to send email blasts to, don’t buy it blindly from an online service.  There are dependable resources available to accumulate these types of lists that aren’t “farmed” or put together by a computer program.  Don’t buy any SEO service that’s guarantees search engine placement, there are no guarantees.  Choose affiliate and “value added” services carefully.  You might make a couple cents by putting something on your website, but if it annoys your site’s visitors and they don’t complete their purchase or don’t come back, it’s a pretty dumb move.  Again, if you’re not sure what to do, ask.
3. Jumping on the latest badwagon - So the bandwagon, “cool” thing this month is social media.  The newest, greatest thing changes regularly.  We’ve seen umpteen evolutions in “cool” stuff that never panned out.  Most agencies will try to sell you whatever the coolest thing is, but unless there are numbers from multiple sources that show a return on investment and generated sales, don’t waste your time or your money.  We only do what is tested and proven aren’t likely to ever jump on a bandwagon to make a buck.
4. Choosing the Wrong Technologies – Know what languages and technologies your site is going to use, maintenance costs and potential downfalls.  Explore the advantages of using open source software for your website…their base code is free, they’re updated regularly and the modules and plugins are usually top notch.  Be careful about building your website in Flash (for multiple reasons), using Microsoft servers, software or languages.
5. Going the Cheaper Route - Invest in good quality hosting for your website.  Depending on your website, you can expect to pay anywhere from $30-$150/mo. for good quality hosting on a dedicated/controlled server.  Buying hosting for $5-$25/mo. is probably going to land you in a shared hosting environment.  That means that your website is on the same computer as 300 other websites and anything those sites does, effects your website and that your website shares the computers resources with all the other websites.  Have you ever tried to open 30 programs on your computer at once?

4. Not Maintaining your Online Presence

You might not know this, but just launching a website won’t guarantee that it gets found.  Imagine opening a business at a considerable cost and then not getting a yellow pages ad (ick), doing any marketing, not hanging a sign out front, …you get the picture.

Once you put up your new “building”, you have to do some ongoing promotion.  You have to tell people you’re there and keep reminding them why they like you, or should like you.

It takes awhile for search engines to consider your website legitimate, assuming that your site was built and optimized correctly in the first place.  You need to continually add new content, interact with the online community, check the rankings of your website and continually make improvements and progressive moves to help improve your online visibility.

For most of our clients, we recommend an ongoing monthly maintenance and SEO package so that we can monitor and make these improvements for you.  Unfortunately, many less people accept the package than should or don’t allocate a good budget for this maintenance.  This is a fatal mistake for your website.  You just bought a great house, in a great neighborhood and then didn’t cut your grass, let your roof leak, your pipes freeze, and left the gas running on your stove.  You might as well just light a match and collect the insurance money.

Oh, wait….websites don’t have insurance policies.  Soooo, you should probably protect and take care of your investment.

5. Design and Build by Committee

This one is fairly easy to prevent.  Who is the real decision maker in your company?  They are the one that should be making the decisions for the website and the only one interacting with the development and SEO company.  If you have a management team and everyone is putting in their input and making decisions, it is guaranteed that your web project is going to take ten times as long to complete, the vision of the project is going to be changed a hundred times and the cost of the project is going to go over budget.  You can not satisfy everyone on your team.  All that should matter to you, is what your customers are going to think and how those thoughts are going to convert to revenue.

Back to the house analogy…designing and building a website by committee is the same as inviting your inlaws, your cousins, your friends, and all of your extended family to help you pick out a house for you and your husband or wife.  And then letting them decide what color to paint the walls, what flowers to plant, what furniture to pick and what sheets to put on your bed.  Everyone’s opinion and likes/dislikes will be different!  Your rooms will end up being painted different colors 87 times, your furniture won’t match and it will take forever to get done!

In Conclusion

Be smart.  Whether you want someone to build your website or you want to do it yourself, hire a professional digital agency that specializes and has years of experience on the web, either to do the work or to consult you on the project.  Don’t waste your money on an ill-planned or ill-conceived online presence….you might as well go to the casino and throw your money down on the hard bet….your chances of ROI are about the same.

I know this post was long, thanks for hanging in there.  I hope you have the ammunition that you need to make an informed online investment.  Give us a shout if we can clear anything up for you!

The brutal truth (I’m good at this part)?  IT CAN’T.  DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME OR YOUR MONEY.  And if you already are, STOP!

Something you should know about me before we proceed I guess…I am a fairly irritable person.  It takes a lack of a whole lot of logic, and just a little bit of ignorance to irritate me and for me to tell you how I really feel.  If you like “get rich quick” schemes, magic tricks that affect your business, fuzzy math, or believe that the Easter Bunny is going to bring you eggs next Sunday, you should probably stop reading now…I’m a logic person and I hold back very few punches.

It seems like nearly every week we have a new customer come to us and ask us about setting them up a facebook account or how to utilize twitter to capture them new business.  Before stumbling down that rocky path, drunk, with a broken leg and a midget (or ‘little person’, whichever you prefer) on your back, there are some things you should know and some things you should ask yourself.

First, Social Media websites and applications are used to be social.  This means that you can keep in touch with people, tell them what you’re interested in, what you’re doing, what you had for breakfast, how drunk you got the night before, that you just had a baby, invite people to join your cause, whatever…

What does it take to be social?  I’m not great at this one, but I hear that it means that you have to have some friends.  People that are truly interested in who you are and what you do.  People that care about you.

Have you ever had a friend that tried to sell you a xr-1798 widget (or insert your products/services here) every time you talked to them?  What about a friend that called you all the time and every time it was to tell you they could save you 10% on their newest product?

Seriously?!?!  Are you even still thinking about considering this as your marketing method?  Who would want to be your friend?  Are you honestly that interesting?  Do people love you enough to read about your widgets everyday?  Do you honestly think that this is going to bring you business?

So let’s say I still haven’t proven my point.  Let’s say that your traditional marketing company has already eaten your brain, or the brain of one of your business buddies and you’re convinced that social media is the new holy grail of business and you’re going to be rich any day now…..

So you use all of the social media platforms the way that the “pros” tell you too.  You don’t talk about yourself all the time, you show real interest in your network/community and you share valuable tips with them all the time from other sources.  Let’s look at this a second….Who’s your network?  They’re going to be people that are interested in what you’re talking about….SEO, widgets, engines, HVAC, clothing, whatever….chances are these people are “industry people” that do what you do and aren’t likely to send you any business.  Maybe they want to learn something from you or keep up with what you’re doing.

How does this generate you business?  What is the ROI on this work?  For all the time you’re investing in tweeting about very interesting things, what is the return?  Is it honestly going to be worth it?  Social Media takes A LOT of time and A LOT of calculated commitment…is the money you’re getting for your efforts, worth the time that you’re wasting?

So my final point (for now), unless you have a following in the real world (like MSNBC or Al Gore or Matt Cutts or CNN or Britney Spears or …..) or you have a cause that people care about (saving the environment, saving baby seals, stopping ignorance, curing cancer, etc.) are consumers really going to listen or want to “follow” you?  The brutal truth is that people look out for themselves and we live in a “give it to me now” world.  People probably aren’t interested in your product or service until they think they need it or decide they want it. Do you really think that they’re going to get on twitter and see if they can find somebody who sells the xr-1798 widget they’re looking for?  With everything else going on in consumers’ lives, who are they going to follow on twitter or facebook or…?  They are going to follow people and brands that they already know and causes that they believe in.

Are they going to try to find you on their favorite social media platform?  Probably not.  They’re going to get on Google and search for you or god forbid, they’re going to get out the yellow pages.  This is why SEO/SEM and a great website will always beat social media for generating business. Don’t drink the kool-aid. Stop trying to make friends and get back to business.

For more doses of the truth, please contact us.  We’re happy to help and clear things up whenever the garbage the marketing bandwagon is dropping doesn’t make sense.

After many years in the business and several hundred (maybe thousand) interviews and meetings with clients and potential clients, we’ve come to realize that there are some gaps in the conceptualization phase of web projects between most clients and most web companies.

There are ideas in your head about what you and your team want out of your website project and there are probably a few aspects of your project that maybe you haven’t thought of.  To be honest, there are probably some times when we forget to ask some pretty important questions in our first meeting with you too or we misunderstand each other because of different terminologies and such.  (You’d be amazed how many different names people call a homepage.)

So what does all of these years of experience and this realization lead to?  It leads to us developing the Trademark Client Worksheet.  The Trademark Client Worksheet is a quick document that you can download and fill out by yourself or with your team to make sure that all of your ideas are brought to the table when you meet with us.  This will help us greatly in determining the best solutions for your project and within your budget.

Any web development or SEO agency that you work with should have something similar to make sure that none of the vital details of your project are missed.  Walking into a website planning conversation about what colors you like isn’t going to cut it anymore.  Because in the end, it’s not really about how pretty your website is….it’s about how your website gets found, how users use it while they’re there and how those visitors convert into revenue.

So when you get a chance (right now, while you’re thinking about it is good) click on the link above to download the Trademark Client Worksheet or you can download it on the homepage of our website.  Take an hour or so and fill it out with your team and then blast it over to us in an email.  We’ll take a look at it and give you a call back to talk about your project and get it moving along correctly.

• Generally, a very clean and crawlable code structure
• The capability to generate unique meta data for each of your pages or posts.  Many also provide you with automatically generated meta data (which I recommend against), BUT this will provide you with generally unique meta content.
• The availability of additional plug-ins for your software which extend the software’s capabilities.  These include advanced SEO plugins, tag clouds, custom menus for adjusting link structure, etc.
• Categories and Archives to sort and organize your posts
• Comments and “Ping Backs” which add even more new content to your posts, with little effort on your part.  These comments and ping backs, when used properly, provide you outbound links to other relevant sites as well as usually providing some inbound links to you from other relevant sources.
• Bunches of other stuff, but you get the point…

All said?  Blogs and Blog SEO are all good!

Dwight and I recently attended PubCon in Vegas.  PubCon is a conference for web masters with a particular emphasis put on SEO.  The entire experience and trip was great!  I got Dwight to fall in love with craps, he taught me about Caribbean Stud Poker and it was my first trip to Vegas.  But most importantly I learned a lot about SEO and got to interact with some other very smart industry folks.

One of the best things about doing a conference like PubCon is that I learned a lot of new things, re-learned a bunch of old things and remembered a lot of things that I didn’t know I had forgotten.  Taking new information, old information, and forgotten information and connecting all the dots is a pretty cool experience too.

One of the “Duh! I’m an idiot” moments happened when I sat in on a couple of sessions about Blog SEO and I would like to share some of the finer points or my revelation with all of you.  I’m going to assume that you have a basic understanding of SEO practices and if you’re confused, you can read some other posts in our blog or check out some other resources to get up to speed.

Biggest Blog SEO Mistakes

There are a lot of SEO mistakes that you can make, but these are just big silly ones that most people never think of.  I’m even guilty on some of my personal blogs. I’ll try to cover the top five blog SEO mistakes that you’re probably making on your blog and try to write another post about another five mistakes as soon as I can. If you want us to evaluate your blog’s SEO or want to learn more about what you might be doing wrong, please contact us.

Automatically Generated Meta Data

Remember up above I said that most blog software automatically generates meta data for you (but I recommend against it), this is one that I am certainly not guilty of.  Never allow a computer to make your decisions for you.  A blog is not going to write optimal titles, keywords and descriptions for your blog posts or pages.

Concentration on keywords in your title and description will never be done by your blog software with as much love and consideration as you can give it.  You know what your post is about and you should know what you’re trying to rank for.  Taking an extra couple of minutes to think about your pages content and what you want to rank for and then inserting those keywords into a well thought out title and description will always be worth the time.  We recommend WordPress blogs to our clients and WordPress has a couple of great plugins that you can use to accomplish this custom meta.  My favorite plugin for this on WordPress is the All in One SEO Pack.

Having Multiple Homepages

There are many pieces to SEO that “new media” advertising agencies and crayola toting web designers don’t know.  But they love telling their clients about “SEO” don’t they?!?!  This is one of them.

All websites, directories, pages, blogs, posts, etc. have multiple addresses.  Usually four addresses each.  Zuh?  What does that mean?  Let me break this down.  The domain for our website is tmprod.com and it has four different addresses for our homepage.  They are:

• http://tmprod.com
• http://www.tmprod.com
• http://tmprod.com/index.php
• http://www.tmprod.com/index.php

The file is the same; index.php which sits in our root directory of our website.  Because it’s called index and is located in the root of our website, this indicates that it is the homepage of the website.  But how are those four addresses different?

Two of them include the www Cname, which is technically like a subdomain of our website.  It specifies that the site is on the world wide web (that’s what www stands for).  Other cNames could be things like mail.tmprod.com, ftp.tmprod.com, webmail.tmprod.com.  Each of these is different than the rest and serves a different purpose.  In fact, each of them is a different “website”.  Typically, when a domain is setup like tmprod.com, it is setup to point to the same IP as the www. prefix.  BUT, they are in fact two different domains.

Two of these addresses also contain the file name, index.php.  Google and other search engines will look at http://www.tmprod.com/ and http://www.tmprod.com/index.php as two different pages.  Even though the file is in fact the same.  If you go to http://www.tmprod.com/ it will load the index.php (homepage) into your browser.  But the address doesn’t specify it.

Why is this bad?  Mostly, because it creates duplicate content in the search engines.  It looks like you have four different pages on your website saying the exact same thing and which have the exact same meta data.  That’s BAD!

What’s the solution?  Do a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file to control how your website and pages are served up.  The correct address out of those four is, http://www.tmprod.com/index.php.  It uses the www prefix and includes the page name.  Make sure that all derivatives of your addresses point to the correct address and whenever you link to one of your pages, make sure that you use the correct format.

Posting in Multiple Categories

This is a point that is often overlooked by bloggers. We were even guilty of this at one point. When writing a blog post, sometimes it can very easily fit into more than one category of your blog.

While as an author and site owner you want to make sure that your masterpiece is categorized correctly and read by as many people as possible, this creates a pretty common SEO problem, duplicate content.

What is duplicate content? Duplicate content is when you have the same content and/or meta data on multiple pages of the internet. Sometimes duplicate content is the result of site scrapers (people who copy your content and post it on their own websites), sometimes it’s due to Black Hat SEOs who are trying (usually with a negative result) to get ranked for certain things, and sometimes it’s the result of an overzealous website owner or blogger.

Duplicate content under those first two situations usually results in all of those duplicate pages, OR all but one of those pages getting de-listed…meaning that it doesn’t show in the search results. There can also be severe penalties imposed by search engines in these situations.

But what about the third situation? When you’re an overzealous author or site owner? Google will not typically de-list you for duplicate internal content, meaning content that is the same within the same website. However, they will devalue most or all of your pages. Meaning that they won’t give them as much rank or authority as they could potentially have if they were a standalone page.

So here’s the problem and why it matters to your Blog’s SEO. If you write a blog post and place it in four different categories you are creating 7 duplicate pages on your blog.

• The post itself
• Each category page (four pages)
• The archive page for that month
• The homepage of your blog

When Google or another Search Engine sees that you have the same content listed multiple times it will de-value your pages or even worse, give the better rank to a page that you didn’t want the rank given to.  Obviously you want the most rank on the blog post itself, not on a category or archive page for your blog post.

Use your categories wisely, in combination with rel=”nofollow” links and Optional Excerpts which are described below to help prevent these duplicate content problems.

Not Using Optional Excerpts

As I mentioned above, every time you publish a post on your blog, it creates duplicate content on other pages of your website.  So let’s assume you did everything right and only posted in one category.  You still have at least four pages that have the same content (post, category, home, archive).

Blog software, at least some of them like Word Press, allow you to create optional excerpts for your blog posts.  This is basically a synopsis of the post, but in different words.  You can then have unique content on your blog post itself and modify the category and archive pages (and home page if you chose to) to display the optional excerpt instead of the first XXX number of characters of your blog post.

As far as the homepage goes, you can use the first XXX characters of your blog post, or the optional excerpt, but my recommendation is not to use either.  I prefer to have no blog post content on the homepage of my blog, instead just having a list of links to the newest 5 or 10 posts for each category (for site deep crawling) and some other relevant site content.

Our blog is guilty of committing this heinous Blog SEO sin!  Our blog was built before I took this into consideration and one day I will go back and fix it.  But retrospectively writing optional excerpts for 100+ blog posts and modifying our blog templates is going to take a little time.

If your blog is new, small or you have enough free time on your hands, I recommend that you plan and fix this wherever you can.

Not Using rel=”nofollow” Links

“nofollow” is an (x)html attribute value for the rel attribute (or simply put rel=”nofollow”) that can be applied to links on your website.  It was designed by our buddy Matt Cutts at Google to help with search engine result quality and to help combat those pesky Black Hat SEOs.  So what is a rel=”nofollow” and how can you use it to help your Blog SEO efforts?

A nofollow says do not crawl this page.  What happens when a page is not crawled?  It’s not indexed in the SERP.  There are many pages throughout your site that should not be indexed.  Why?  Because they repetitiously display the same content and links that a lot of other pages do.   Pages such as your archives and tag pages shouldn’t be crawled and indexed.  Your posts are already crawled from the category pages, home pages, rss feed, etc.  Using rel=”nofollow” on links your insignificant or repetitious pages helps you identify to the search engines what pages are important and which ones they should crawl and rank for their primary index.

The important pages of your blog are..the homepage, any other static page, category pages and obviously your blog posts themselves.  So you want to utilize the rel=”nofollow” on any links that point to your your tag pages, your archive pages, etc.  This way you can have a little more control over what pages of your website are getting ranked and indexed, and which ones are not.

Get the important ones to the top of the heap by using rel=”nofollow” in your blog SEO efforts!

My theory behind this is that our clients whose sites are an online store physically see the results of our work several times a day…every time they receive an order.  This hypothesis is further backed up by the fact that the busier the particular e-commerce clients is, the more we are in contact with them.

The truth of the matter is that sites that are not e-commerce stores or are smaller e-commerce stores could see the same results as our larger e-commerce clients if they were as proactive.  We could generate them just as much business, be able to track the ROI for our efforts and measure every bit of it.  BUT, they choose not to invest as much time or money in their website because they are not physically seeing the thousand or $10,000 in orders coming through their website everyday…if they only knew.

But enough of my observations and online investment hypotheses, let’s talk about e-commerce optimization and why a lot of e-commerce stores (even some of our DIY clients) get it wrong.  If you don’t have an e-commerce site, keep reading and you might still learn some things that are relevant to your website.

If you’re already one of our clients and you find some points in this article that aren’t happening on your website, you should contact us.  Isn’t it about time you took your site to the next level?  BE PROACTIVE!  WE CAN HELP!

Alright!  Let’s get to it!

First of all, this article is not about Search Engine Optimization, its about e-commerce optimization.  You have an online store.  How do you increase sales and improve the user experience to…increase sales?  If you want to check out a great article on Search Engine Optimization, check out Dwight’s post, SEO: Not just Keyword & Meta Description Tags or come back in a week or so and check out my next post which will be about e-commerce keyword discovery and selection.

Site Search

Having a Site Search on your e-commerce isn’t just a nifty tool, IT IS A REQUIREMENT.  Believe it or not, not everyone thinks like we do or calls your products the same names that we do.  If you want to increase sales, you MUST have a site search on your site so that your customers can find the product they’re looking for.

Another great benefit of having a site search on your website is that (if you have a good piece of e-commerce software) you can see what people are searching for, the keywords and keyword phrases they’re searching for and how your customers use your website.  You can then adjust your site’s meta data accordingly and make sure that you putting the most desired products right in people’s face.

Gain Your Customer’s Trust

While a lot of people are coming around, many are still scared to shop online.  Its important that you establish trust with your clients online.  Especially when selling them a product and asking for sensitive financial information.

There are several ways to gain customer’s trust on your online store.

• A good way to start this is to tell them about you – Tell them how long you’ve been in business, where you’re located, why you do what you do, GET PERSONAL and tell them about your love for your product.
• Keep your site verified and secure and most importantly, SHOW IT – Have an SSL?  Show the logo and link showing that your site is secure.  Been verified by HackerSafe?  Show it!
• Show credit card logos and payment gateway options – Show your customers what credit cards you accept, other payment options and what payment gateway you use on every page of your website.
• Make your customers confident in your business -
  • Have a privacy policy on your site that lets your customers know that you value their confidentiality.
  • Guarantee customer satisfaction and use terms like “100% Satisfaction Guaranteed” and back it up.
  • Reinforce how secure and safe your website is.
  • Inform them of your shipping policies

Have a Great Checkout Process

One of the best improvements that you can make to your e-commerce website is to make the checkout process of your online store very easy to use.

• You want to eliminate any last minute distractions by eliminating your sidebar ads or other links that might take them somewhere else, except to keep shopping.
• Show your customers their progress as they go through the checkout process.
• Make sure that you have proper error messages that are easily recognizable and that look good.
• Reduce shopping cart abandonment by simplifying the process and reiterating your shipping, privacy, and security.  Also make sure that your software has an Abandoned Cart module installed so that you can reengage any customer who has left your site with items in their carts.
• Pay attention to detail.  You’ve got them in the checkout lane and they’re ready to give you their hard earned money.  Make sure the “cashier flashes them a smile”â„¢.

It’s Not Over Yet!

They’ve purchased your product and given you their money, WOO HOO!  First, make sure that you’ve done everything that you said you are going to do.  Ship their product on time and keep their information private.  Be as protective of your clients private information as you would be of your teenaged daughter.  “It’s not getting out of my house.”

On the checkout confirmation page, keep them engaged and loving you.  THANK them, reinforce what you’re going to send to them and when.  Ask them what they thought of your site and if there was anything they couldn’t find.  Ask them what other products they might want to see.  Offer them a “special deal” for being such a great customer.  Make them come back!

There is a lot more that we could cover discussing e-commerce or online store optimization.  I have a lot of other tricks and tidbits of information up my sleeve.  Maybe I will find the time to write another blog post about them?  Or maybe you should come in and talk to us to find out what you’re doing wrong and how you can do better.  We are always here to help. Please contact us at anytime for consulting or e-commerce optimization help.

So in playing with my new Twitter account I started looking for desktop apps to quickly update my twitter.  The problem that I faced is that I already have at least four different programs open at all times to keep track of both my personal and professional life.  I really didn’t want another one.

I tried a few Firefox plugins for Twitter since I always have Firefox open anyway, but wasn’t satisfied with the results.  And then….I found Digsby!

Not only does Digsby handle my twitter account, it handles all of my IM clients (Yahoo, AIM, etc), my Gmail and Yahoo Mail, my POP3 corporate mail, my MySpace and my Facebook account, all in one spot and with one program.

I’ve always used pidgin for my instant messenger program.  I still love pidgin.  BUT, Digsby is just as effective and handles more in the same small space.

What does this mean to me and to anyone else in the “attached to my computer, getting things done, more, faster world”?  It means that instead of needing my Outlook open for my email, Pidgin for my Instant Messenger, and either having multiple tabs open in Firefox for my personal stuff (Gmail, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook) or checking them incessantly throughout the day….I now have everything, plus Twitter, all in one spot and in one program.  It checks all my accounts for me regularly and allows me to just hover over the service in my little IM window to see what’s crackin!

Oh, and when a new something happens like an IM, you get a cute little pop up in the corner of your screen that notifies you and let’s you quickly respond to a message without having to open another window.  Just one of many cool features…

It’s not often that I promote other software or services, so there’s probably something to it.  You can check it out and download it at digsby.com. Check it out and let me know what you think.

As of January 1st of this year  they have become the first newspaper in the world to cancel their daily printing of the paper and taken their entire newspaper online.  Personally, I hope that this is the beginning of a trend and that other newspapers and publications follow suit.  Trees get saved (’cause everyone who knows me, knows what a tree hugging hippie I am)</sarcasm>, operating costs for the publication are less, and their target market just grew exponentially.

The newspaper, which was started by Sweden’s Queen Kristina (I bet she was hot)  in 1645 to keep her citizens apprised of the happenings in the government, enjoyed the astronomical subscription rate of just over 1000 people.  They anticipate, and I suspect, that their reader base will be much higher from now on.

I hope that this is just the beginning.  I hope that all publications, especially those pesky yellow pages, go digital.  Who really wants to get off the couch to find the phone book or walk to the porch to get the newspaper anyway?

There’s only one potential problem with all this…next time I move, I can’t wrap my dishes in a website.

The study analyzed information for over 10 million web users and their searching habits.  Some of the other findings of the study find that belly button lint, elbows, and ceiling fans are people’s top fears along with social rejection and intimacy.

In a book, “Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters”, author Bill Tancer says surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

The most notable decrease is in porn and adult site usage and searches by users in the age range from 18-24 years old.  As these users spend more time on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, they have less time for the adult oriented sites.

These statistics, along with some others noted in the articles I’ve read are very interesting and I may have to go pick up a  copy of the book and read some more.

Obviously, for most businesses, advertising on adult websites has its issues.  But with social marketing websites being somewhat more clean cut, there is a great opportunity for most businesses to target that key young demographic.  Can your business benefit from targeting this audience?  Think about it!

We have vast experience with social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.  If we can help you utilize the new king of the internet, let us know!  We’re happy to help you advertise on this new prime real estate

Anyway, I’m setting up the Google AdSense campaign on my new website and click each of my ads once to make sure that everything is working well.  One of the ads that I click is for E-Trade, a fairly large company and I’m pretty sure that they have a pretty large online marketing budget, what do you think?

So what happens when you click on an ad online?  You’re usually directed to what’s known as a “Landing Page”.  This is a specially built page that Online Marketers use to seal the deal.  It usually has great graphics, some quick, inspiring content, and a great call to action to inspire the ad clicker to do something…like sign up.  This is kind of an important factor of a good landing page.  Converting that click (which costs your company money) to a sale (which makes your company money).  Otherwise, you’re just wasting your advertising dollars.

So to the lucky bastard’s (who get a piece of E-Trade’s generous marketing account every month) benefit, there is a landing page.  Decent looking enough.  So what’s the problem?

The first call to action I see is a “Get Started Now” button in the pages banner.  GREAT!  Let’s click it….nothing!  I can’t click the call to action to sign up.  E-Trade just spent $1.47 or some other ridiculous number for me to click on their ad.  And I can’t sign up so that they can make their money back.

The problem, while trying not to sound too geeky…the button is part of a larger image.  It has a link Absolute Positioned on top of the button.  This means that you position a box shaped link (to the signup page) at a certain coordinate based off of the container that’s holding it.  The link is positioned wrong, about 20 pixels below the button!

How did this happen?  Chances are that the people who get E-Trade’s marketing dollars every month are great at advertising.  They can probably put together some great press releases and design some great magazine ads.  But they don’t know enough about Web Development and Search Engine Marketing to build a landing page correctly.  They have some Designer who graduated from CCS or his local community college building their landing pages, who does phenomenal things with Dreamweaver and Photoshop and can make you tingle with his usage of color.  But can’t program an effective landing page to save his life.  His page probably works in Safari or Internet Explorer.  But they didn’t have the knowledge or experience to test their landing page in other browsers.  I’m sure their page works great on their Mac, in Safari.

Great work “expert’!  You’re wasting E-Trade’s money and eventually, your company will lose that account.

The long and short of this story?  Use a real expert that knows what they’re doing.  Hey E-Trade!  We’d be happy to talk to you and show you how to do it right. We’d even be happy to show you a better ROI on your campaign.

If you don’t like wasting your money with “experts”, contact us and we’d be happy to show the right way to do things.

If you were starting or planning a new business, what are some of the things you would need to consider?

1. Why do I want to start a business?
2. What do I want to name my business?
3. Do I have the knowledge and resources to start and run my new business?
4. Do I have enough money or investors to help me get started?  What is my budget for different aspects of my business?
5. What exactly is my business going to do and why will it be better than my competition?  Do I have any competition?  Who are they?
6. How am I going to market my new business and what do I want to say about the business and our products or services?
7. What do I want my business to look like when potential clients come to visit?
8. Do I have a logo or color scheme that I like?
9. Can I do the work myself, or do I need a staff to help me get things done?
10. How much time can I dedicate to my business?  Is that enough time to make my business successful?

I have planned several businesses, and if you have planned a business before, you know that this list of questions is just the start of the hundreds of questions that you will ask and answer yourself.  The key to a successful web presence is to approach it in the same manner.  Ask yourself these kind of questions, try to answer them.

The trick is to write them all down, answer what you can, ask others when you can’t.  The next step in developing your online business is to establish an Online Business Plan.  If you’re comfortable doing your own we’d be happy to review it with you, or help you when you get stuck.  If you have no idea how to get this done, put together a list of your questions, answer what you can, and we’ll build your Online Business Plan with you.  Just ask, we’re happy to help.

Having a successful online presence can be difficult.  Don’t think that it’s going to be easy, or that you’re just going to give us some money to build your site and be rich and famous next month.  It is a business, all by itself.  It will require just as much dedication on your part, as it will on ours.

Imagine that you had a business that was a partnership.  If you came up with the idea but tried to make your partner do all the work, how successful would your business be?  How good would your relationship be with your partner?  Eventually, hopefully, you would realize that your business isn’t as successful as you thought it should be, that you’re paying your partner a bunch of money, and that you’re not rich and famous yet!  Would you blame this on the partner or would you realize that maybe you didn’t do your part towards that success?  Your web project should be approached in the same way.

We know what it takes to be successful online.  We’ve done it for many people. We are more than happy to help you be successful online, to be your business partner.

We also appreciate your business, we like getting paychecks around here.  But mostly?  We love helping people succeed in their new business.  Your success is our success.  But what are you bringing to the table besides your checkbook?  Do you know what you’re trying to do?  Do you know why you want a website?  Are you approaching it as a new business or as just some thing that businesses do?

Your website is a new business or a satellite location of your existing business.  Instead of being on a street somewhere, it is everywhere. Accessible to most of the world.  It’s in every home, in every business, on every corner.  What are you going to do with it and why?  Think on it some and when you’re ready to get started, give us a shout.

This article is part of a series about doing business online.  View the rest of the series here.

If you want to learn more about the web, how it works, where it’s come from, and where it’s going, check out the video below.  I dig it.

*Side note for clarification so that Eric will quit crying, the internet is technically over 10k days old, if you count ARPANET, the original DOD ‘internet’.  This video, this post, and this timeline is about the World Wide Web, not the internet.  The World Wide Web being the advent of hypertext systems by which pages and content could be linked together, creating the basis for what is commonly referred to as ‘the web’.*

It seems in most every business, maybe even yours, people always want something more than they can afford or think that the value of the item isn’t worth the price it will cost them.  Obviously, this isn’t true of all products and services.  People generally know how much they will be paying for the new car they want, how much a 2 liter of Faygo costs (it’s a Detroit thing), or what they would expect to pay their attorneys per hour, and perhaps that’s where our type of business differs.

The internet, still relatively in its infancy, is still new to many people.  When developing a new website, there is a lot to consider, and much more work involved than most people will ever realize (a story for another time).  It’s important that when deciding that you want a website that you approach it as a new business venture, complete with a business plan, a great drive to succeed and work hard, and of course some start up capital.  You should look at TM as your business partner and advisor for you new business, because that’s how we look at each of our clients, as our partner.

On that note, let’s look at some of the things that you will want to consider and plan for before approaching Trademark to build your successful online presence. Hopefully, this series of articles will bring up many questions in your mind, write them down, and feel free to contact us when you’re ready to discuss them.  As the articles are written, you will be able to access them via the links below for each post.

1.) Planning your New Online Business (Think on it some):

a. Also see Eric’s Post on this topic, You Get What You Pay For

2.) Developing a Business Plan (Put it on paper):

3.) Determining a Budget (You get what you pay for):

4.) Project Discovery and Planning (Let’s have coffee and chat):

5.) The Process (Masterminds at work. How you can help, and what to expect):

6.) Getting People in the Door (Advertising your new business and rotating “product”):

1. Faster page load times, whether being crawled by a “spider” or “bot” for indexing in the SERP or being loaded by a user in their web browser of choice.
2. Accuracy in presentation across different media types and web browsers.
3. Page content relevancy based on the use of proper semantic code and markup elements.
4. Higher control over presentation and specificity through CSS and less room for error in layout and styling.
5. Ease of use for individuals using screen readers to access your website.

We normally use XHTML Transitional on our projects because it allows the markup to be completely separated from the styling and layout of the content using CSS, helps maintain presentation in older browsers, and helps with future development and maintenance time by not making it too difficult for other programmers, old school or new school, to maintain or add to the site.

When deprecated elements, excessive classes or ids, or inline styles or javascript are used in the markup it creates what is known as “code bloat”. This means that the markup is not “clean” and can be interpreted infinite different ways by infinite different computers and browsers, including search engine algorithms. By removing these extra items and keeping markup clean and semantically correct, you are truly ensuring the best results in search engine indexing and usability for your viewing public.

Another benefit of using clean and accurate code is that as new popular web browsers and technologies are released they are all built (for the most part) to understand the standards or “rules” of markup. The added business benefit of having great markup is that your site will not have to be rebuilt to display correctly every time a new web browser is released, at least not for a few years.

There are many other techniques that can help you ensure that you are getting the most out of your code.  I will be writing several more articles on this and similar topics, so check back often.  If you have any questions or would like Trademark to assist you in evaluating the code of your site, please feel free to contact us. We’re more than happy to help!