But in a business where there is no clear pricing opportunity– for example, a lead-generation site where the deal is still amorphous at the time the customer contacts you, or a B2B site where the price is negotiated over several months and proposals, what can you do to add spice?

• Don’t discount the customer, discount the customer who is like your customer. Show a typical offering with a reasonably competitive price, and perhaps reinforce it with a short-term ‘lock in before prices change’ offer.

• Offer something else entirely. A local dentist advertises a free iPod with a brace plan. You don’t have to compete on price there, as it provides a reason to move independent of price. It can backfire if the buyers have gift-from-vendor policies, but they can be avoided by making the gift part of the package offered– free training, a more robust service contract, or peripheral products where the percieved value exceeds their cost.
• Sell benefits, not costs. A phrase like ‘our services paid for themselves after week 19′ does not mention any specifics, but still reinforces the concept there’s good value there. Indeed, many times, it’s exactly the message expected for major purchases where there’s a budget case to be made.
• Incentivize the lead, not the sale. A downloadable white-paper or free t-shirt might be enough to get someone’s attention enough to fall into your sales funnel. If it’s clear that it’s a limited commitment, there’s less resistance and a small reward is an acceptable choice.

While obviously, price-related calls to action are best, when you can’t do “free shipping” or “30% off”, you can still build a page with a solid call to action.

Don’t stuff pages with zip codes and city names. It’s spammy and frequently chasing no-volume searches. A rank for a popular -search term- in Mesa beats ten low-volume -search term- in 85215 rankings.

Do use secondary means to imply your locality. Make sure the phone number, especially a local one, appears in text. Licence numbers are a good excuse to mention local authorities. Reference local codes, or charities you support in the area. It helps with semantic analysis– these words go with your address, reinforcing your relevance for the area.

Don’t get too wrapped up in trying to handle out-of-area leads. Some firms believe they can turn into a firm that sells business to others- if they rank for every city. Good luck unless it’s a full commitment thing. Finding shops out of town can be a hassle, and you can end up spending all your time running the side business.

Do claim your business in local sites. Aside from adding link value, it ensures they’re under your control to see reviews and spam.

Don’t buy any services from local sites. Most of them are just selling Google traffic, and you can outrank ‘em and get users directly.

Do promote cross-media. Search is big, but some businesses still benefit from brick-and-mortar messages or social-network activity to put the service in front of a visitor at their need. The more emergency your service is, the less non-search brand you have to build, but there’s still merit in being the brand a visitor recalls from other media.

Don’t go for excessively labor-intensive promotions. Give the visitor a coupon; don’t expect him to Like you on Facebook before you’ll cut him a promotion. It becomes analogous to the shops which demand 20 page forms for their discount-club card.

While it often makes sense to make a shopping cart, or a blog, the central aspect of your site, you do have to recognize the tradeoffs.

Many canned back-end systems are designed for easy template-driven management of specific info. A cart “sees” data as products and orders. A real-estate system “sees” listings and neighborhoods. As a result, it’s simple to expand a cart from 3 items to 4. To streamline those tasks, you give up power when it comes to adding, say, a streaming video showcase and downloadable press releases- it doesn’t fit the back-end metaphor.

So why not use a non-specialized system like Mambo or Joomla instead? Because you don’t want to try to emulate that special ’streamlined’ functionality. It might be coaxed into doing property listings or products, but it’s hardly the most efficient way, and leaves you more prone to errors and inconsistencies when the paradigm isn’t built into the software. Such an incomplete vision often means empty templates and incomplete entries, as there aren’t the needed sanity checks you’d see in a system built for the task.

Sometimes the alternative to insufficient control is overkill. Some packages try to do it all. Magento offers a fairly sophisticated page editor. Add the right modules, and WordPress will make tea and biscuits. These packages, however, often end up being complicated to operate. Metaphors mash poorly when you need to read blog posts as property listings, or generic pages as a live catalog. Moreover, you end up fighting the divided needs– templates ideal for a cart are suboptimal for corporate information pages, or you have to suppress blog links on your main page.

For many users, the right answer is a hybrid system. Multiple tools for different jobs. Static pages or a non-specific CMS for their main content, but harness a specialized tool for the big “moving parts” of the site– the cart, the blog, the searchable inventory. In such a way, you minimize the time spent dealing with the specialized product’s limits, and still enjoy its strengths.

Many of our larger projects work so at Web-Op. For example, Belleza Olive Oil can use the full power of a cart to sell their wares, but never show the cart’s ugly category or home pages. Static pages ensure they get the image they want with no compromises.

Of course, it’s got its costs– more development time, and sometimes more of a learning curve, but it’s often worth it to ensure you’re not trying to drive nails with a spoon.

It’s important to recognize that client-side and server-side analytics never match exactly. Since a client-side system cannot record traffic by robots, and some limited users– like mobile users with no image or script support, it tends to undercount by a few percent. Server-side systems often mis-classify users based on browser headers- many obscure browsers emulate IE or Safari.

Moreover, even inside a category, disputes occur. Does a visitor who sees a second tab on one page count as a bounce? Is a user who hits a Bing ad driven by Bing or the Microsoft ad network? Analytics vendors have many judgement calls. An important guideline is to use analytics data for month-to-month comparison in a single vendor. Google Analytics for June compares sensibly with Analytics for May, but trying to reference it against AWStats for June leads to confusion and bad decisions. Occasionally, a disparity between packages can reveal unusual user behaviour, such as a denial-of-service attack seen by the server-side system and not Google Analytics, but it’s more often statistical noise.

However, even innovations in data import technology, like TransparentRETS and dsIDXPress, allowing you to import MLS data in bulk onto a familiar, easy-to-install backend, are not a cure-all for top rankings. It’s all about the brains on top of local data.

Realistically, if someone wants to just see or search the MLS, odds are, they’ll do it somewhere else. However, a savvy agent can help ’steer’ a customer by providing pre-made landing pages and searches which provide real value. If you can promote foreclosed properties less than five years old as suitable for those who don’t want the full renovation hassle, it moves from a simple canned search to a start for customer interest. Or add useful resource guides. Surely, it’s not a crime to tell out-of-towners if the utility on the east side of town is 10 percent more expensive, or the month to move to saddle the current owner with the property taxes.

Building your site on processed and analyzed content also helps you hedge your bets. While the real estate industry has done a good job monopolizing property listings, there’s a danger at hand. Their costly, complex data license rules have left the door open for other firms able to offer a better deal for non-agency firms interested in the data. Why wouldn’t, say, Google like to add a ‘homes for sale near…’ box to their Maps service?

One of the most likely changes I see in the future is a truly national service. It’s an obvious road to entry for a new alternative data source– No more patchworks of local MLS boards, and websites that abruptly cut off at an arbitrary boundary. There are also likely to be means for ‘for sale by owner’ vendors to get their properties in the system and cut a listing agency out entirely, and add non-conventional homes– manufactured homes sans land, timeshare rentals, and such.

In such an environment, your local knowledge and customized content becomes even more important– after all, who’s likely to have a better listing interface, you or a firm like Google with an endless development budget? The listings alone are a commodity– only the value-add matters.

It’s a bit of doom-saying, I admit, but having to treat listings as a commodity can only be good news for real estate agents who play the SEO game smart– depending on becoming a resource with real content. It will cause the ‘I posted listings, it’s enough’ competition to sink.

The next level of sales boosts comes by a broader target. Maybe an optimized selling effort is moving 15% of 500 customers per month, and it can become 15% of 5,000 instead. Here’s the method to expand your target audience:

• Recognize the nontraditional applications. A dealer offering estate auctions, for example, could re-target their services towards storage unit owners and landlords who often have abandoned assets to sell.
• Find low hanging fruit. Especially on a non-traditional market, there’s often cheap ads and easy rankings to be had. $50,000 in SEO may only move you up one or two places in “Real Estate”, but “buy short sales in Scottsdale” might cost only $5,000 to get to number 1.
• Manage risk using landing pages and sub-sites. If you’re a trusted expert in one market, you don’t need to rebrand totally to reach for another.

Apple has steadfastly avoided the Netbook trend– the sub-$400, 7″-12″ laptop which now represents a significant amount of all PC sales. No surprise– a $399 iNetbook would cannibalize sales of their $1,000 and up machines.

Instead, the iPad runs a limited system most reminiscent of an iPhone scaled up to twice its original size. Among the major limits: limited developer access, crippled multitasking, and the same interface conventions.

Limited Developer Access doesn’t sound like a big fear. Get anything you want from the App Store. It’s all pre-vetted and safe too! Consumers initially like the concept of a ’safe’ source for software. Apple drools over a cut of every sale. But what happens when there isn’t the App you want, because of Apple’s policies? We’ve seen it plenty of times on the iPhone platform already– Google Voice was delayed and hobbled, turn-by-turn navigation arrived late to the party. Unfortunately, the truly breakthrough products– from the open-architecture PC to Facebook– have benefitted from an ecosystem which allowed someone to bring out the “out of left field” application.

Why does multitasking matter? The more hardware resources you have– whether it’s screen pixels, processor cycles, or memory– the less likely you’ll need them all the time. Moreover, the more convinient it can be to have something else in the space. If you have a big monitor, you probably don’t keep one window full screen all day– so it becomes worthwhile to have media players, IM clients, and such which can fill in the extra space. A device like the iPad will be fundamentally limited if you have to stop and go to a different program every 5 minutes.

Finally, the interface conventions. Once you get to an 8″ or 10″ screen, you’re making excuses if you can’t have a decent keyboard. In such a situation, it seems like you’re really just trying to keep the device a toy– if people can’t write a document on a touch-screen, they’ll buy that $1,000 MacBook.

All in sum, it means Apple delivered a compromise device– built more around their desires and product-segmentation aims than a real consumer desire. It also means thaat it’s unlikely to become a true “platform” the way the iPhone and iPod systems did.

For the person who wants a full-scale device, the Asus EEE Tablet can do anything the iPad can and a thousand things more. For the customers who want a little less, single-purpose devices like the Kindle offer a experience built around a single need. The eBook sales logic for the iPad seems a little weak when you realize the Kindle offers 10 times the battery life and a text-friendly screen.

Finally, how does it fold back into the whole web thing? Simple: The “Our Company is an App” thing will not scale past a certain point. Yeah, when it’s a mobile phone, fine, but when you’re looking at bigger screens, bigger memories, and bigger expectations, you’d better return to the basics of the Web:

* There won’t be one master device to emulate the behavior of. The iPhone apps which follow Apple’s style guide are fine. But a website designed to match the feel of OSX looks out of place on Windows XP. It’s true even on “midsize” devices like netbooks and tablets, which may run the iPhone OS, Windows XP, Vista, or 7, Linux, or potentially even Android.

* Users will expect an experience on their terms. Their MP3s are running in the background, so don’t load music. They may be leaving an instant messenger or video open, so don’t hog every pixel on a display.

* Compatibilty is still king. Yeah, it works in Mobile Safari on the iPad, but for the people who bought someone else’s tablet and are running Firefox or, help us all, IE8?

* There’s no master storefront to get on everyone’s desktop. even if you make apps for the main mobile and “pad” systems, it won’t reach a lot of people, and especially the desktop. Instead, appeal to normal search behavior and live inside their browser. Or do you prefer deliberately reaching only a small percent of the market?

New internally developed software allows Web-Op to promote site and brand recognition on Twitter and other social mediums. Fused with current online marketing strategies it provides the ultimate in online media presence. This new marketing strategy covers all online sectors including organic search, pay-per-click, social media, and bad press. Providing an optimum balance between automation and human involvement is our goal.

Social mediums such as Twitter are packed full of opportunity. The problem is it would cost far too much attention to hand manage a marketing campaign. The common solution is to say, “Follow us on Twitter!” and periodically post updates to a Twitter account. This isn’t effective. Our solution provides incentive for interested users to opt in though keyword targeting and friendly conversation. The video shows a more detailed view.

Another strategy is through improving organic search and indexing. Organic search rankings can be frustrating for all. The keys to improvement are having a steady and strategic linking campaign while carefully monitoring the changes over long and short periods. Our time proven solution for search provides sustainable long term growth. Malicious or slanderous online press can be buried with higher rankings and the promotion of positive press.

Our strategy also includes pay-per-click campaigns managed in detail with constant tracking and split testing to maximize gains and performance.

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About Web-Optimize

Web-Optimize, LLC is a leader in internet marketing campaign management and software development for both new and established businesses. Our industry expertise and forward looking strategies help businesses grow and gain positive recognition. We deliver hand crafted solutions to businesses to maximise return on investment. Unlike traditional SEO’s, our services are well documented and transparent with solid results. Web-Optimize is based in Mesa, AZ. For additonal information, please visit web-optimize.com or call 1 (866) 937-7082.

A frequent theme for these titles was, about 80 percent of the way through the game, your character’s love interest ceases to be an adorable 20-pixel-high maiden, and turns into a screen-filling ball of evil spells and tumors which must be dispatched to move forward.

What does it have to do with the Internet?  A lot.

Often times, you’re the one responsible for your beloved website turning into a similar screen-filling ball of evil.

The tumors tend to come from poorly imagined scope.  What started as a dispatch system for employees grew a login for external contractors.  Then direct sales emerges.  Finance demands to be grafted in.  Within a few years, the original software is barely there beneath the addons.

Now, it’s normal for software to evolve and grow.  However, if allowed to grow randomly, you find yourself wrestling with limitations which made sense in one context, as they become unwieldly.  Perhaps, for example, your order system was product-based.  Each order has one item, one payment method, etc.  Works great until you realize people want to add a split payment.  Or two items on one order.  Soon, you’re making dozens of exceptions to keep the monster alive.

When do you draw the line?

Can you now succinctly define what you need– in terms of data storage or workflow — and does it differ largely from the decisions you made when the site began?

• Are you doing the same job multiple times to keep different parts of the site in synch?
• Have you passed on desirable enhancements to the site since they can’t fit the established layout and data structure?
• Are everyday operations done primarily as “special cases” bolted on later?
• Have you been forced to “hunt down” specialized hosting or developers to keep the site operational?  PHP 4 is dead, yet many people are tied to apps which bomb in 5 or 6.

Slaying the beast can be hard.  You have to fight your locked-in work processes.  But sometimes you can’t move on until you do.