I’ve noticed an alarming trend recently:

You’ve picked an industry. You want a website. But you have no meaningful value to add.
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I’ve become a huge fan of the AMC TV show Mad Men. The show centers around a character named Don Draper – a 40 something advertising executive working on Madison Avenue. Don’s character has a knack for simplifying a marketing message down to the essentials – identifying the underlying motives behind the decisions we make – and speaking directly to those perceived needs. I’ve always been more interested in the technical aspects of SEO instead of the nitty-gritty sloganeering involved in branding and marketing but this show has started to change my focus. I can’t help dissecting slogans, the tone of a message, and the various call to actions barraging us from all sides.

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Everyone has a shopping cart on their site. Odds are, it’s been 5 or 10 years since the first time you bought something online. You’d think by now, they would have ironed out the kinks. However, year after year, new website owners continue to make the same mistakes. Before you unpack that ASP.NET Storefront or Zen-Cart archive, why not take a moment to plan a strategy for your cart to search and sell well. (more…)

If you’re starting a web presence from scratch, there’s a significant chance you’re about to waste $5,000.

Many businesses are keen on the concept of the “premium” domain name– in particular, short, generic names. Why not be “loan.com” instead of “SmithMortgageCompany.com”, or “roses.com” for your nursery? Even long after the domain market peaked with the multi-million dollar sales of names like business.com, people are still paying four, five, and six figure prices for attractive sounding names.

The problem is, like many Internet-based profit plans, it’s based on dated logic.
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Whether you have a canned blog install or you’re developing a completely custom content management system, many website owners don’t really consider the consequences of their policy decisions. By making smart choices, both users and search engines can do better.
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I’m a big fan of Google Chrome. While working on one of our travel websites located at Hawaii Tours I stumbled onto this gem. Not only does Chrome automatically suggest using a site’s Open Search engine when typing in the same domain you are on in the search bar – now apparently Google can identify standard search features such as search.php and serve them up in the same way. The site in question has no open search xml file and chrome still gives the option to use search.php. Check out the screenshot below:

You can verify for yourself that I never got around to making an open search xml file by trying the following link: http://hawaiitours.com/opensearch_desc.xml – which of course doesn’t exist and never has. If you want to check if Google has found your site’s search feature and included it just visit your domain and start typing the domain name sans www.

I’m personally not sure whether or not I think this is a good idea. I could see several potential problems where a site had several search features and it could be a bug as opposed to a feature. I suspect that simply adding an open search meta tag would resolve it.

For a while now webmasters have wondered why PPC spending generally mirrored a slight bump in rankings. Mounting evidence suggests Google is following closely the visitors to your site (think google toolbar, google analytics, doubleclick etc). As a result, buying traffic via pay per click can have an impact on organic rankings albeit indirectly.

PPC spending generally mirrors a slight bump in rankings

Over the years I’ve read countless webmasterworld/digital point threads questioning whether buying adwords contributed to organic search engine ranking success. I was skeptical that Google would so blatantly provide a pay for play way for website owners to buy their way to the top. Indeed it would be a disservice to their clients if their was a direct correlation between the two as smaller, interesting competitors in the search space would be crowded out by multinational corporations. An indirect, traffic-related metric however makes sense to this SEO as organic traffic is at least as good an indicator of noteworthiness as an editorially given third-party link. So is Google juicing adwords advertisers?

In November of 2008, QuadsZilla of SeoBlackHat stumbled onto an interesting correlation between bounce rate and Google traffic.  In January of this year Rae Hoffman (aka sugarrae) wrote an interesting case study that confirms something most of us in the search game have believed for a while: Google is paying attention to traffic as a trust factor. This should come as no surprise to search engine marketers. Google rose to prominence by incorporating third party links into its algorithm. With the recent threat posed by sites like twitter and friendfeed – and their ability to shake up the interwebs with the stream of real time data provided by their userbase – it has become necessary for Google to augment their algorithm.

Relying solely on links is what causes Google to be monolithic and slow in noticing new trends. Indexing the web every second isn’t feasible – despite Larry Page’s recent musings. Traffic on the other hand is extremely easy for Google to gauge. Google can track visitors from a variety of platforms: Google Analytics, the Google Toolbar, DoubleClick, Adwords and more. While Google doesn’t have much in terms of real time offerings at the moment – it does have the tools in place to utilize traffic volume as a component of their search engine algorithm. Don’t believe me? Try buying keywords to pages that have a decent bounce rate, time on site etc. Follow your keyword rankings and find out for your self.

(PS After reading this think how using a 3rd party hosted ppc management company like Reach Local becomes less and less attractive as Google pays more and more attention to traffic)

If you’re looking at the website of a SEO company, it’s probably not the only way you’ve considered building traffic. No doubt, you’ve been bombarded with spam from people eager to show you how to get “50,000 hits on your site every month for $100″ or similar promotions.

While it might, at first, sound appealing to be able to say, “I’m getting 50,000 visitors per month to my site”, it’s the quality of visitors that matter far more than the number.

When people are willing to promise you specific quantities of traffic, your first question should be “how can they do that?” Although we may know, for example, that 500,000 searches per month are made for a given keyword, real customers do not come in neat boxes of 1,000 users that can be blindly pointed to your site. When you see guaranteed traffic packages, it usually comes from one of a few sources:

• Malware. A classic symptom of undesirable software installed on your PC is when the browser starts popping up windows you didn’t ask for. Those windows don’t choose their destinations for fun. If you have an army of compromised computers opening whatever pages you order them to, it’s easy to ensure that your site gets 50,000 hits this month.

• Automaton Users. A similar story to malware, but with user cooperation. I’ve seen programs where they’ll basically pay users to leave their PCs on a special homepage, which uses browser-scripting to shuffle from one paying customer’s site to another. No matter how compelling your content is, it’s unlikely a user will be willing to turn off the automatic cycling”and his 10 cents per hour credit”to read it, assuming the sponsored browser window doesn’t turn into background noise altogether.

• Sham sites. It looks like a search engine, or legitimate directory, but the results have been partially, or completely stacked, to ensure that users end up at the sites that paid for their position. There’s nothing wrong with paid directories in and of themselves”Yahoo! is a shining example of how one can be a legitimate and trustworthy resource, and many of them represent strong B2B presences”but there’s a thin line which seperates “legitimate resource” from hall-of-mirrors scam. And “Hall of Mirrors” here is more than a cute metaphor: I’ve seen sites where “Page 2″ of the results are almost complete duplicates of “Page 1″! They’re serious about moving people to those links.
• Domain parking and forwarding. This is, in a sense, a cut over the sham site, in that it doesn’t promise to be anything but a dead site. There’s a little more integrity there. However, the user who typed in the dead site’s address probably wasn’t looking for you.

What do all these traffic sources have in common? Two things:

First, they’re going to be fountains of poor-quality traffic. If the user didn’t even want to go to your page, the odds are extremely high he’ll bounce. Meanwhile, “sham” search engines and directories have a motivation to ensure every user clicks something, even if it’s not a really useful site for his needs. The sham-search may consider your site relevant enough to promote, but the customer probably won’t.

Second, they have terrible reputations. Nobody wants to be associated with spyware or attempts to decieve users. Users may do more than bounce- they’ll remember who was associated with their frustration.

Still, many people will respond to the siren-song of guaranteed traffic, believing “even if a handful of those 50,000 visitors explore my site, I’ve gotten business I didn’t have.” Wrong. You’d be astonished how low click-through rates can be with low-quality traffic. I can quote statistics from a site using one of these programmes: over 80,000 visits to their front page in one month, and less than 50 visits to all the other public pages combined. The click-through rate, overall, was approximately one-twentieth of a percent. Notice I’m not saying “conversion rate”, or “sales rate”, just “rate of visiting a page other than the site’s front page!”

Basically, it’s a rehash of the old “pay-per-impression” advertising model, except instead of paying for uninterested customers to ignore your banner, you’re paying for uninterested customers to ignore your entire home page, plus the additional hosting expenses associated with the extra “junk” traffic.

Moreover, it diverts your web budget from places it will do good. $100 might buy you 50,000 low-quality clicks from a guaranteed-traffic service, or 1,000 hits on a smartly-targeted pay-per-click advertisement campaign which lets you choose, to a much greater extent, who you’re paying to bring to the site. Once you consider the conversion rate of advertising clients, versus the guaranteed-traffic client, the advertisements become an undeniable bargain.

You might be tempted to say “Isn’t SEO very much the same as a sham site or parked domain” fooling customers into clicking on your site?”. The answer is a resounding no. Ethical” and productive” search optimization is about attracting customers for the services you’re actually offering. The visitors SEO produces are customers who already were interested in what you’re selling. Optimization ensures that they know you’re offering it. That’s a far cry from the world of bought traffic, which would merrily hand out the same site to viewers actually seeking information about European vacations, reptile care, and new video cards.

After all this invective, I must admit that there is a potential narrow niche for bought traffic: if your site actually benefits from impressions above all else- such as a site swimming in pay-per-impression advertising- then, by all means, shovel those low-quality clicks on. Just don’t be unsurprised as advertisers grow increasingly sophisticated and wonder why 500,000 views of their banner produce zero clicks.

There are a few basic things any website owner should know if they’d like the world to find their website. If you have already built a website and have never used the term “SEO”, we have a problem. SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and is as important to a website as water is to man. Millions of visitors a year use search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN to find information on a particular topic. The search engines are equipped to have a web visitor input complete or partial phrases into the search bar to find information on specific topics. Google is the “search engine giant” at the moment has over over 75% of the searches worldwide. Google has published many articles and guidelines to take in to consideration when constructing a website if you’d like to be found by potential customers in their search engine. Every search engine is a little different in the way it displays it search results. Google has 10 positions on the left column of their site that display search results for no charge. The first page results on Google for certain industries can be worth thousands of dollars in revenue if taken advantage of. There is some more reading you will need to do regarding how the search engines decide which sites to display first.

My goal in this article is to make you realize the potential your website has if optimized correctly. In years past, if the neighborhood boys accidentally hit a fly ball into your living room, you would get out phone book and find a window replacement company. While the boys were figuring out how to pay for the window, you continue to go through phone book hoping that you can somehow differentiate the best company based solely on a phone number. These days are visions of the past for most folks. Search engines are now the replacement. They offer an organized list of companies that fit my exact search terms in seconds. The search engines also offer a very good overview of the company you are thinking of giving your hard earned money to. The website of a company can tell a lot, and allows you to do some quick comparisons without leaving your house. Since the search engine wave started, companies have been targeting those 1^st page positions. With the search engines possibly providing thousands to millions of visitors a day to your site, the profit potential is huge. This has lead to some fierce competition and a willingness to understand how Google works more than ever. You’d probably be money ahead to hire an SEO company rather than try and understand the algorithms. If you choose to “do-it-yourself”, you can simply start researching through the search engines themselves. This has been a quick and brief overview of SEO, leaving much more to learn. My goal with this article was to bring an awareness to a tool that could possibly make you millions, or simply keep you competitive with the rest of your industry. Happy searching!

Brett Mitnick

Business Development

At Web-Op, we’ve heard some prospective clients look at our bids and announce “We’ll get ourselves a $200 commercial template”.  Wow!  Think of the up-front cost savings!  Of course, that’s ALL you get with a $200 template.

First off, a canned template is likely to need customization immediately to fit your logo and corporate colours, unless your name is “The Lorem Ipsum Corporation”.  The sample images may show your competitor’s products, or nothing useful for your business.  Chalk up 10 to 20 hours of graphic design time, at $50 an hour or more, to fix these problems.  In tne end, the requisite changes may be so severe that your purchase ends up only a “skeleton” of tables and boxes that you can hang appropriate imagery on.

Running Tally:  $700-1200

Now you have a website, but it’s a shell.  That template probably only came with enough text to stretch the boxes on the screen to their intended width, or generic copy.  Someone has to write it, and in addition, someone else should read it.  It’s always worth the expense to have a second set of eyes scanning that content.  You need someone with the guts to say that “Interactive Business Synergy Solutions” is a lot less clear than “Wholesale Janitorial Supply and Uniform Service”.  If you hire professional developers, they’re reading and checking the content as they put it into the new site.  But if you have to stick with in-house staff, it’s worth paying a few users fifty bucks a head to be in a focus group.

Running Tally:  $800-1300, plus the cost of copy

If you knew you had a specific need ahead of time, you might have started with a template designed to work with a back-office system like Drupal or Zen-Cart to do the heavy lifting.  This decision shows some foresight.  You’ll have the facilities to manage an updated news site or a shopping cart.  However, even the easiest to use of these systems requires you to do a significant amount of setup to ensure that when you go live, credit card payments don’t get sent to the Central Bank of Zimbabwe.  An experienced developer may well have done this several times over, so he knows the catches and the correct choices.  You can either spend $300 to eat the first order that went astray or locate a press-release that disappeared, $300 worth of extra time testing and bug-fixing these components ahead of going live, or pay an experienced developer $300 to do things right in the first place.  The choice is yours.

Running Tally:  $1100-1400, plus copy

Finally, all web development contains significant amount of repetitive work.  It could be fixing the bad HTML Microsoft Office dumped into fifty documents.  It could be describing 30 new products for a shopping cart.  But these are hours that you won’t get back with a template.  If you earn a reasonable $20 an hour, expect to spend between $200 and $500 on this, for a small site.

Running Tally:  $1300-1900, plus copy.  You’ve already spent over a thousand dollars more than you originally planned, and the site isn’t live yet.

Finally, spend $1,000 to hire someone to go through your site, add keyword-focused your titles and headers, and remove the boosted Wikipedia article copy to ensure that Google sees the site in a reasonably positive light.  Now, at last, you can go live!  Once you buy hosting and set the site up, of course.  Depending on the type of backend you’re working with, this can easily be a day’s labour.

Running Tally:  $2100-2900 plus copy and hosting.   The site is finally ready to go live, but now every corner you cut to get it even THAT cheap will begin to show.

After a few weeks, you’ll probably find you long for certain features, perhaps ones you wrote off in order to accept the affordable template.  Either you’d better start learning PHP, or you’re going to have to hire a new developer.  Since he’s new to your particular project, it might take 20 hours for him to do what someone who had built the site from zero could do in ten.  So add another $1,350 to cover that extra ten hours of labour.

Final Total:  $3,450-4,250 plus the cost of hosting and acquiring copy.

You chose to accept a wide range of compromises, little if any on-going support, and only minimal expert guidance, and it still ended up costing in the same ballpark as having professionals do it right the first time.

Building your own website should be approached like other do-it-yourself projects.  While many of us can change an oil filter and save $20, or even add a new phone jack to save $75, few of us would try to replace our transmissions or install central heating.  We simply don’t have the skills to do the job.  Producing a quality web page requires at least four distinct skills:  research, programming, graphic design and writing.  Many smaller organizations, and even some larger ones, don’t anticipate that they’re going to have to call in professionals when they reach their limits.  That’s when $200 turns into $3000+.