Website-ROI-Guy.com

Bing vs. Google, a side-by-side comparison

Want to see how searches on Bing and Google compare side-by-side?  Check out Bing-vs-Google.com.  Type is a keyword or phrase and compare the results of the 2 SERPs side-by-side.

Something I learned while looking up something else!

-- Kurt

Dirty Campaign Tricks or Stupid Search Engine Optimization?

There has been some chatter online about a bunch of hidden text discovered on Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison's website StandbyKay.com, which promotes her bid for Goverrnor of Texas.

The Austin American Statesman newspaper broke the story and is reporting that a vendor put the phrases there.  Supposedly there is a program that puts the phrases in on an hourly basis, all of which revolve around 3 phrases; “Rick Perry,” “Kay Bailey Hutchison” and “Texas.”  The are apparently 2,200 phrases (My Word count says 6,591 words)

I noticed a bunch of Texas counties listed in the background code and the names of state and national politicians.  There appear to be references to Republican events, both past and present, and issues important to both of the major political parties.

There were phrases containing the words "Rick Perry gay," "texas grape growers" and "african americans in texas."

With all the references to Mrs. Hutchison alone, I would think the site would get banned or penalized for keyword stuffing.  But the use of non-visible keywords may be problematic too.

So, is it dirty campaign tricks or stupid search engine optimization?

We'll need a referee for this one, I think.

Search Engine Submission Pages

One simple way to boost website traffic is to get listed in search engines.  When people search for terms related to your site, hopefully they'll find your site listed in the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) or two.

Many sites are found by the 'spiders' the search engines use to travel from site-to-site and page-to-page.  The odds of them finding your site increase with the number of inbound links you have to your site.  (That's a whole chapter or course that we can address some other time.)

It can be difficult to get inbound links for the spiders to follow to your site, especially if it's new.  But you can submit your site to most search engines so they know that you exist and will begin the process of evaluating your site.

This is especially important for the new Bing search engine from Microsoft.  If you were indexed on previous iterations of Microsoft's search engines, you'll likely show up on Bing.  But it's always a good idea to make sure the major search engines know about your site as well as any boutique, vertical market or niche search engines that would be appropriate for your site.

Keep in mind that you can often test to see if your site is indexed by a particular search engine by going to it and typing, "site:mydomain.com" where mydomain.com is your website address. (No spaces between "site:" and your domain.)

Google Webmaster Tools also has an application for checking the status of your site.

If your site does not appear to be indexed, you'll want to submit your URL to the search engines.

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Bing: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

These 3 search engines account for roughly 90% of all Internet searches and many of them feed their information to smaller search engines.

Just because you've submitted your site to search engines is no guarantee that you will be indexed or that you'll receive a favorable ranking.  There are other factors that will affect your rankings.  Find what I've written on that subject by searching through the 'Search Engine Optimization' category on my blog.

Understand that it may take some time for the search engines to crawl your site once you've submitted it, and it may take additional work to get your pages indexed for coveted keywords.  We recommend that you have a sitemap on every site.  But by submitting your sites to the search engines, you've made a pretty good start on getting a return on your investment!

Kurt Scholle, the Website ROI Guy

Read This Article, Become a Search Engine Guru

I have a friend who recently sold his company but wants to stay involved, probably because of pride, a desire to be engaged and to make a few bucks. Not necessarily in that order.

So he pitched the new owner on doing search engine optimization for several of the acquiring company's websites.

Trouble is, in my opinion, he knows diddle about SEO.

We discussed it a few months ago.  Just talking with him you know he's not even close when it comes to developing a strategy, selecting keywords, optimizing properly, reviewing the results and revising the tactics.  There are no procedures in place.  I don't think he's even using a spreadsheet to track results.

He once asked me what article he could read to become proficient at SEO.  An article?  Seriously?  An article?  I don't know if I was more offended or amused by his query.  That would be like saying the year I spent working at Amling's Flowerland selling trees and bushes qualified me to be a landscape architect.

I told him that I've read at least 4 books on the subject, I have attended seminars related to SEO and PPC over the years, I read several blogs daily.  I've worked on and learned from dozens of sites.  And that all pales in comparison to the experience of our search engine specialist at Web Asylum.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised.  My friend once told a mutual acquaintance that there wasn't much to search engine optimization, that it's just "throwing some keywords up on a web page."

It's much much more than that and each of the points I'm about to outline would take more than a single article to fully explain. (Maybe an article and a Tweet! heh heh)

1. There are easily a half dozen places on a web page that affect search engine rankings.  They are both ON the page and in the code BEHIND the web page.  Learn what usually needs optimization and develop a strategy to adjust all those areas.
2. Knowing which keywords to optimize for is extremely important.  When we ask customers what keywords and phrases they think people will use to find them, they often list very broad terms that would be difficult to dominate; words like "business", "financial", "eye doctor", "snow" and "builder" are recent examples.  Some of the ones I cited would work better with supporting words, especially if a GEO (geographic location) was added.
3. Understand that different pages should be set up differently.  One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to use the same meta keywords, descriptions and titles on every page of your site. For any number of reasons (a weeks worth of articles, at least) you should concentrate on different keywords for different sections of your site. Even if you optimize for similar products or services, each of those pages should be unique.  But there are obvious differences between a product page and About Us.
4. Search tools can help select proper keywords that your prospects are using.  There are free tools to help, but if you're really serious about optimizing your site, I would encourage you to acquire 1 or more of the paid tools.  Your ROI will be much higher.
5. Linking is an important element of successful website optimization.  Keyword-rich inbound links from authority sites is unbeatable.  But even internal links can help rankings and improve user experience.
6. Continuing your education is also very important if you want to be competitive.  Read books, subscribe to newsletters, attend a conference or two, check out the forums.

Another important thing to keep in mind is to write good content!  Google especially seems to value great content.  It will also help your conversion and ultimately your ROI.

This is all very simplistic.  Like many things, achieving an ROI on your efforts requires an investment of time and resources.  In the case of SEO, it might be a significant investment. 

It might be a better value to have it done for you so you or your staff can concentrate on other things.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to my landscape architect job.

-- Kurt Scholle, Website ROI Guy

Website Makeover Recommendations

I post case studies from time-to-time on this blog.  Hopefully the suggestions are useful to everyone.  If you have questions of concerns about your website please contact me at your convenience.

We usually change the names to protect the guilty.  And this is no exception. "Frank" has a website that sells services and information.  He gets some, but not a lot of traffic, and is not selling much of anything.  The site was built by a graphic designer friend of a friend.  That said, the site is not very attractive.  Different font sizes, styles and colors make it look un-even and disorganized.

There are several misspellings on the Home page and even more on interior pages.

The message on the Home page does not give visitors an instant clue as to what the site is about and how someone would benefit from Frank's services.

There really is no good call to action on the site.  He does have a phone number listed and offers "free estimates."

He claims to be "the biggest and the best" of what he does in his area, but offers no concrete evidence to support those claims.  He has one testimonial on the site on a "Testimonials" page.  Nobody reads testimonials pages, but testimonials are powerful influencers, so I recommend spreading them thruout a website.

The title tags, description tags and keyword tags are all the same on every page.  They should be different for EACH page.  There are some very broad terms that will be difficult to rank highly for and there are too many keywords in his keyword tag, not that the major search engines put much stock in those tags anymore.

He does not rank at all on the 3 keywords he says are his most coveted.  I suggested that he test all his keywords to see how popular they are, how much competition he has for each and recommendations for other keywords and phrases to consider.  There are free keyword discovery tools for this.

He has 3 incoming links to his site and none are authority sites or have much pagerank.  I recommended that he register his site with search engines, especially Yahoo! and Google.

I hate being negative, but I really can't find anything positive to say about this site. I feel like Simon Cowell.

Despite the site being built by a graphic designer, it really needs to be re-done to look halfway attractive, which will help build trust with prospects.  A written plan should be developed that outlines his specific goals and the exact techniques that will be used to achieve them.

He asked if he should be doing pay-per-click. Not until the other issues that affect conversion are addressed.

The bad news is the site fails in so many ways.  The good news is he has many opportunities to fix all the failures.  And as Terry Savage would say, "That's the savage truth."

-- Kurt Scholle

Best of the Website Success Blogs (April 8, 2009)

Marketing and conversion are the two most important elements of a successful website strategy, in my opinion and I have focused significantly on Social Media Marketing in the past year.  I've noticed that I spend more and more time on SM in this blog and have been developing more social media elements into strategies for our Web Asylum customers.  And they are succeeding!

I'm also a big fan of Guerrilla Marketing, which incorporates low and no-cost marketing techniques.  GM and SM go together like PB&J.

This week, we have links to great posts about search, e-commerce, social media and other interesting, important topics to achieve website ROI.  I've included a post on Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires and finally, some 'hits and giggles'.

I hope you find these useful.  I'm gratified by your tweets (@KurtScholle) and emails (kurt at webasylum.com) and look forward to more suggestions of blogs to include on Best of the Website Success Blogs!

Google AdWords:
Analytics and AdWords Tips, Part 1 of 4
Learn how to use Google Analytics to improve AdWords results

Search Engine Journal:
Google Expands One Line SiteLinks: Little Blue Links in Serps

Webdesigner Depot:
10 Tips to Design Usable Shopping Carts

Webmaster Resources has a couple of posts worth reading: Factors That Affect Your Website Usability and SEO and Ten Things That You Should Know About Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Get Elastic's take on Price Guarantees: No Substitute for a Unique Value Proposition

Social Media is surpassing e-mail as a top marketing initiative. WebProNews has a great post on how Twitter can drive traffic to your site.  Writer Chris Crum followed up with: Facebook Can Drive More Traffic Than Google  Read about the apps, including how to post to Twitter from Facebook.

One of the big stories this week was the release of Seesmic, a Twitter application similar to Tweetdeck. TechCrunch has this review.

Reuters MediaFile:
Twitter older than it looks
What demos are hanging out on Twitter?

Chris Brogan:
What an Executive Blog Editor Needs to Know
Chris will be a featured speaker at SOBcon09 Chicago. I'm attending and really looking forward to meeting Chris and others.  Consider attending!

Advertising Age:
Google Uses Twitter to Sell Ads
Intuit Is First Marketer to Have Its Tweets Streamed Across AdSense Network

aimClear blog:
2009 Social Media Optimization: Back to Basics?
A nice report from SES New York

Who doesn't want to be a success?  Reader's Digest has a good article on the secrets of successful entrepreneurs. Secrets of Self Made Millionaires.  I also recommend the Elker book that is mentioned.

And for 'hits & giggles' check out Funny Twitter Cartoons and yourlogomakesmebarf.com

-- Kurt Scholle, the Website ROI Guy.

Best of the Website Success Blogs (March 12, 2009)

This week on the Best of the Website Success Blogs, which includes blogging and marketing, there are several good posts on using keyword research to boost organic search traffic.  Carrie Hill, the SEO Mom, provides us with a list of Free Keyword Research Tools, but if you want to do it best, you need to eventually graduate to the paid services.

 Then there are tips for setting up an SEO campaign and improving website usability.

I also offer some places to find good ideas, including 5 Marketing Secrets from Infomercials and headline writing inspiration from Cracked.com.

SEO Mom:
Free Keyword Research Tools

WebProNews:
Tips For Organic Keyword Research And Selection

Wordtracker Blog:
New Wordtracker Keyword Tool is Coming

JeffWoelker:
Starting your SEO campaign? Call in the SWOT team!
Jeff's a good guy and I love this headline. Wish I'd thought of it.

Adwords Daily:
AdWords Ad auctioning EXPOSED and Explained — in simple terms

Get Elastic:
My Top 5 Must-Haves for Ecommerce Success

Webmaster Resources:
Factors That Affect Your Website Usability and SEO

Influential Marketing Blog:
5 Marketing Secrets from Infomercials

Traffikd:
10 Tips for Using a Blog to Promote Your Own Services

Social Media Explorer:
My Pitch Log Mashup, Vol 2
Good stuff from Jason Falls.  Read Vol. 1 too!

Dr. Mani:
Best Twitter Tips

10,000 Words:
The Top 7 Mistakes New Twitter Users Make

I was coaching one of my customers this week on writing headlines for sales letters and their website.  I told them someone once suggested using Cosmopolitan magazine covers for good examples.  "10 Tips for the Best Sex Ever", for example, might become "7 Tips for Saving Money on Insurance."  The person who suggested it even puts old covers in a swipe file.  Great idea!

This week, @emailcopywriter recommended Cracked.com for the same reason.  I think they may be right!  Check it out for at least a few 'hits & giggles.'

-- Kurt Scholle

Why Websites Need Search Engine Optimization Every Year or So

I recently had a conversation with a client whose website we built several years ago.  She's interested in getting more traffic to her site to increase her business.  There are many success keys to a successful website and attaining ROI.  One of the most important is getting traffic to your web site.

There are many ways to get site people to visit your website.  I've blogged about it here and will do so again, I'm sure.  And it's always important to monitor your site traffic and see where its coming from, and maybe where traffic isn't coming from!

If you've optimized your site for keywords and phrases you covet, you need to monitor the success of your plan.  Getting it right takes time.  The search engine spiders will only visit your site so often and once they do, you need to guage your success, adjust your tactics and wait for the spiders to return.

We did a very basic optimization for our customer when we initially built the site.  She declined an ongoing Search Engine Optimization program because they were busy enough and their goal was to simply improve their appearance online and incorporate some new branding.

Times being what they are, she recently had asked about an SEO program, but noted that we had done the basic SEO when we initially built the site, according to the website project plan.

I explained the differences of what we did initially vs. an ongoing SEO effort and how SEO techniques change over time:

• A few hours spent researching keywords is not as effective as an ongoing effort that takes metrics into consideration when adjusting the strategy.
• Search terms change over time and are seasonal.  What terms they may have coveted in 2002 might be vastly different today.  Monitor the terms people use to find your site. (You are using analytics or "hit tracking", right?)
• Individual pages need to be optimized separately.  Products pages are different than services pages.  Individual products and services need to be optimized separately.  New products and services will dictate a review of SEO efforts when added.
• Search engine algorithms change over time.  We don't know exactly what (100?) datapoints are used by what search engines to what degree when they calculate a ranking.  But we can make educated guesses.  In our customer's case, we spent time optimizing keyword meta-tags, which many engines discount or dismiss entirely today.  New techniques are needed today.
• Marketplace changes will affect your rankings.  If you attain a rating of 8 for a particular keyword, but 2 of your competitors adjust their SEO to move ahead of you - guess what?  You've moved down a couple of notches and maybe get bumped to the second page.

I doubt that most websites are optimized on an ongoing basis, even once a year.  And if you seriously want to generate revenue and profits from a website, you need to be thinking about your marketing every day, but that doesn't mean you work on SEO every day.

If you're watching your website traffic on a regular basis, you may see the percentage or numbers of visitors coming from search engines fall.  (Where your traffic ISN't coming from) That may be a sign that more effort needs to be made optimizing your site.

Web Asylum offers SEO services with an initial effort to research and set up customer programs and then monthly adjustments to the SEO tactics.  I suggest you do the same.  We document those efforts and results on a monthly basis, but may assess data that becoomes available more often.  (It's good to get SE spiders to visit your site more often than they have)

When we do competitive analysis for customers, we note that many websites have never been optimized for search engines.  Even the ones who have, rarely update pages.  So, if you can address SEO on even an annual basis, you have a fair chance of doing more than 95% of your competitors.  But I would really, really, really recommend that you update your online marketing efforts on a quarterly or monthly basis.  Schedule it as you might schedule sending out monthly or quarterly invoices.

It'll increase your website ROI. (And result in more invoices you'll send out)

-- Kurt Scholle

Best of the Website Success Blogs (Feb 28, 2009)

This weeks Best of the Website Success Blogs begins with a warning to make sure your Google Adwords account is linked with your Google Analytics account.  We found good posts on improving site navigation and understanding buyer motivation by analyzing keywords the use to find your site.  We follow with six key tips for organic search success, a 25-point website usability checklist, 10 Twitter Tips and the Ten Commandments of Social Media Marketing.

Pour yourself an Arizona Pomegranate Green Tea (my new fave beverage) and read this stuff!

bg Theory:
Make sure your Google Analytics & AdWords accounts are linked by March 3rd, 09

Ophir Cohen:
Linking Google Adwords and Analytics 101

Rich Page:
10 Ways to Improve Site Navigation That Your Visitors Will Love

invespBlog:
How to Understand Buyer Motivation Without Telepathy: Start With Keywords

Search Engine Guide:
Six Key Tactics for Organic Success
The basics, but always a good start.

Inside Adwords:
A Change to Our Display URL Policy

FutureNow:
Are Your Existing Customers Messing Up Your Analytics?

UserEffect:
25-Point Website Usability Checklist
A pretty good list.  I have one I have adapted over the years.  Should do a blog post on this.

ProBlogger:
How to Grow Your Blog to The Next Level With SEO
Part of a series.

Twitip:
Ten Top Twitter Tips from February

Social Media Blogster:
The 10 Commandments of Social Media Marketing

The Viral Garden:
Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs
Weekly list.  Worth a look from time to time.

Entrepreneur:
65 Indispensable Websites for Business Owners

And finally, for "hits and grins" a neat cartoon on the hubub that erupted recently when Facebook announced a change in their terms of service.

Do you have any recommendations?  What blogs posts do you find interesting or value? Share with us!

-- Kurt Scholle

Build Inexpensive Website Traffic and Increase Recurring Sales

Case Study: I have a customer with a pretty decent offer on their site but very low sales.  There are a number of ways to increase traffic profitably, which results in an improved website ROI.

"Pat" has a website in a decent niche that would seem to be profitable. Pat has a significant background in the field, is passionate and provides information that can significantly improve circumstances for site visitors.  Like many information marketers, Pat would like to increase sales of monthly membership and related products and services.

But Pat is busy and may not have the desire or resources to spend significant dollars promoting the site, so what could Pat (and others) do to increase the number of prospects entering the online sales funnel?

Let me count the ways!

1) Pat has a goldmine in a Goldmine database - nearly 1,000 names of people who have done business with Pat.  Some may just be fans or others within Pat's network, but 978 names and almost as many addresses is a significant resource.  Pat should consider sending letters to them announcing the benefits of the site.  And for additional 'frequency' (see below), I recommend that Pat send out postcards to this list.  How big is your goldmine?

2) Pat could also ask these brand loyalists to refer their contacts to Pat's website.

3) Pat is a pretty decent writer and has a whole hard drive of resources that could be re-purposed into articles that could be uploaded to free article submission sites like www.ezinearticles.com.  Each article has a resource box that would link back to Pat's website.  The inbound links might help with search engine optimization, but traffic from sites that post Pat's articles will add peeps to the funnel.

4) Pat could post free articles on the site, which would improve Pat's online offering, but also provide more link bait for search engines to find, therefore improving Pat's reputation and rankings with the search engines.

5) Pat might improve natural search engine results with a modest Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program.  It's one thing to guess at the terms people use to find a site, but it can be really illuminating to competently research what people are looking for.  An example is a customer who wanted to be found for "telephone installations," but research showed that people hardly use the word 'telephone' in a search - they use "phone."  Another client is a guerrilla marketing coach, but people have come to his site by mis-spelling "guerilla marketing" and "gorilla marketing."  The downside? You need to understand what you're doing and SEO can take several months to build rankings.

6) Sites can get immediate traffic using paid search (also known as "Pay-Per-Click" or PPC.) One of the other benefits of PPC is that you can set up campaigns for very specific keywords that might not be broad enough for SEO, but collectively account for dozens or hundreds of visitors.  Again, proper research is the key, and managing the bids is important to keep costs under control. It's probably more cost effective for Pat to hire someone to do this.

7) Sometimes, just submitting your site to the major search engines, can improve your rankings.  Try these:

Google          MSN          AskJeeves

Just understand 3 things:

1. The services that offer to submit your site to hundreds of search engines for a modest fee (say $39) rarely help build your ROI.  The big search engines will not accept automated submissions.  And while some niche search engines may be effective, especially in some vertical markets, your efforts are best spent trying to rank in Google, MSN, etc.
2. Even when you submit your site to search engines, it could take weeks before you see a benefit.
3. Search engines put alot of creedence in sites that are updated frequently.  You need to freshen it up weekly for best results.

8) Pat can re-purpose more of the stuff on the hard drive into blog posts.  Search engines love blogs and blogs can easily be updated by nearly anyone.  It might take a commitment of 30-60 minutes a day, or Pat could develop several posts on the weekend that could be scheduled to go out a regular intervals.  Blogs are often read in news readers by subscribing to the blog's RSS feed, a free service that distributes site content.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

9) Pat can develop another revenue stream and initiate a system by creating digital content and selling it on sites like Clickbank, where information and other digital products are sold by others for a healthy commission.  The buyers of, say a $7 or $19 e-book can then be upsold to the monthly membership product or other higher priced products or services.

9b) Pat could offer Clickbank products for sale on Pat's website too!

10) Inbound links improve search engine rankings and the sites that link to you can also provide traffic.  Pat should consider contacting other sites for a link, especially "authority" sites.  I'd recommend that Pat use the best keywords that were researched for the SEO and PPC suggestions above in the links the other sites post to Pat's site.  Pat would also benefit from using free link popularity tools that can be used to determine who is linking to Pat's competitor sites and asking for a link.

11) Pat should also link OUT to authority sites as that can improve search engine juice too.

12) Public speaking is an excellent way of promoting a website and hundreds of organizations need keynotes, workshop leaders and seminar presenters.  Some will even pay!  We've built websites for public speakers and almost all of them book more business as a result of public speaking.  Back of room sales help too!

13) Hosting a radio program, either online or on-air, can be an effective means of building your brand and filling your funnel.  But Pat might also benefit by being a guest on a radio or TV program.  Sending letters or emails to program hosts and producers should net interviews.  (I was in major market radio for 25 years.  I have some tips and tricks to help get more bang our of an interview.  Maybe I should jsut blog about it!)  Pat should shoot for Oprah or the Today Show.  Anything is possible. 

One speaker we know tries to schedule a media appearance anywhere he speaks in the country.  His approach? "Hi, I'm going to be in your town speaking to (whoever) and would like to offer (my valuable expertise) to your (listeners, viewers, readers, members.)"

That's 13 good ways to build online business!  Pat may also get even more ideas from reading any of the dozens of guerrilla marketing books that are available.  Guerrilla marketing is all about low-cost or no-cost marketing.

But, it's important to test a number of ideas to see which ones work best.  They can easily be done in your spare time, but serious marketers think about promoting their products and services daily.  And repeat, repeat, repeat.  You'll have much more success promoting to someone on multiple occasions that just once.  It's best to do it 5 times to a list of 100 then just once to a list of 500.  Use your initial success to ramp up the program.

But, by all means, put together a plan.  If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.  And if you fail to do anything, with or without a plan, you will (and should) fail.

* I feel like a sequel to this post will be coming soon.  There are just too many inexpensive, but effective ways to market your website than what I've presented today!

Got any ideas of your own?  Share them!

-- Kurt Scholle, the Website ROI Guy!