The link pointed to an article called “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists” by Derek Powazek. In a nutshell it is tirade against Search Engine Optimization and companies offering SEO which includes our company, Anduro Marketing. I couldn’t resist reading the post and responding.

First Derek gives a quick history of the search engine industry:

“First came the web, and it was a mess.” “Then came the search engines. First primitive indexes of dumb keywords, then Google…” “The ascendancy of Google has meant that, if your goal is to get the most eyeballs possible (as any ad-supported media business’ goal is), then prominent placement in the search engine results became a top priority.”

Not a bad history actually. He should post that to Twitter. But then Derek loads up the page with name calling and loaded language to emphasize his point. His labels for Search Engine Optimizers include: “goat sacrificers”, “snake oil salesmen” and “a new breed of con man”. He then makes 3 points and elaborates on each.

1. The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.
2. SEO is poisoning the web.
3. The One True Way.

Actually, Derek is right on each point but beyond the basic point Derek seems tarnished, tainted and terribly mislead or misinformed.

1. SEO is Obvious.
In many ways Derek is correct – much of SEO is obvious. Picking keywords, adding them to web pages and getting any type of link back to the website is free and relatively easy. But so is cooking a burger or changing oil in a car. I can do both but I don’t except occasionally. Why? Lots of reasons. I don’t have time. I’m too lazy. And the chef at BrokenCity does a much better job. Besides, I don’t have buns, burgers, condiments, fries and a stove at the office. Why should I cook a burger at lunch time when I can pay someone to do it and talk with customers, colleagues and friends instead? Sheesh.

So what are customers buying when they hire a firm to optimize their website? Where is the value in hiring a company like ours to optimize their website and boost the home page on search engines? The answer is simple. Our customers don’t want to spend time doing tasks that would take them a month of Sundays. We can do SEO faster, better and often cheaper. We have the tools, processes, and know-how to get the job done quickly and effectively.

One of the basic principles of running a successful business is to do what you do well and focus on that. People buy value. If you focus on providing value then customers will buy. But if you spend all your time learning and doing things you don’t have the aptitude, training and skills for then you won’t be able to provide quality products on time at a reasonable price. Trying to do everything sounds like failure to me.

Let me give you an example. Let’s take Dell – a large company with a large budget for brochures and online ads. One would assume that their website would automatically work well with the search engines. Not so. A couple years ago we got an email from a business manager for the business unit focusing on small and medium business. He thought there was untapped opportunities for Dell to rank well on search engines. His rationale was that paid ads on Google cost money and high listings on the organic side of Google are free. Good point. We “messed around” with the URLs, source code, anchor text, internal links, external links and strange things started to happened. Pages on the Dell site start ranking at the top of the SERPs. Dell.com is still in top spot for “business laptops”, beating out 25 million other pages. It’s in 3rd spot, out performing 109 million other pages, for “servers”. The end result – our contact at Dell got promoted. Nice.

But what about small companies? What value do they get from SEO? About 5 years ago Wayne Thomas came to us. He runs a small company called CleanSuite Software Inc. His company produces software for dry cleaning businesses. He wanted to have more visitors come to his website. He had some ideas of how to do that but wasn’t confident and simply didn’t have enough hours in the week to optimize his site and pursue inbound links. We talked. He hired us to help him out and he is a very happy customer. CleanSuite is a small company that is building its reputation and success on our talents. If you go to Google.com and search for “dry cleaning software” his site is listed in 2nd spot beating out 1.3 million other pages. He was in first spot until recently. Wayne, give us a call.

In summary, yes, SEO is obvious to some people but not everyone. For companies that want to reduce their marketing risks, an SEO firm is a good bet.

2. SEO is poisoning the web.

Derek’s complaint is that Google’s search algorithm is based primary on building links back to a site. Then he goes on a rant about “SEO cockroaches” and “SEO bastards” doing all kinds of devious techniques to get links which have temporary value. He is right. If you use black hat tactics and try to trick Google you will get caught and the website will likely be tossed out. But who uses black hat techniques? Any SEO who has been in business for more than 3 years and can prove results never tries to trick Google. What we use are best practices.

1. Picking keyword phrases that will drive qualified visitors to a site – people looking for what companies are offering.
2. Optimizing a web page by adding the keywords in the right spots so that the search engine crawlers can find the phrase. This isn’t secret or hard but it has to be done correctly.
3. Building a web of reputable industry related links back to the site. Not really hard but time consuming so we can’t waste time going after useless links. No one is going to pay us for work that doesn’t produce results.

Derek, what’s wrong with using best practices?

3. The One True Way – Good Products and Good Content.

Derek’s point that many writers create “dumbed down content” is valid. It is sooooo true. I see tons of crappy content on the Internet every day. But I read fast and I can spot dumb content very quickly. Here’s the rub. I doubt that I’m the only one with a critical eye. The folks at Google aren’t stupid either. They know what good content looks like.

Thanks Derek for a stimulating article and your point of view. Ultimately, you and I can agree on something. Create good products. Create good content to let people know about it. Repeat.

Speakers included:

• Social Media Victories – Real Businesses, Real Campaigns, Real Results by Patrick Schwerdtfeger, Tactical Execution
• Cause Marketing by Shauna Causey, Comcast
• The Power Triumvirate of 2010: The Convergence of Social-Mobile-Local by Gillian Muessig, SEOMoz
• Investor Relations 2.0 – Using Social Media to Reach Investors and Support Your Stock by Doug Lacombe, communicatto
• Fatal Mistakes that may Destroy your Internet Marketing Campaign by Dennton Fahl, BlackSun
• Taking Facebook Connect to the Next Level – Social Context by Ryan Merket, Facebook Consultant
• XRay Vision – Using SEO-Browser.com to Diagnose Problems with Your Website, Jeff Nelson, Anduro Marketing
• Conversation Marketing by Ian Lurie, Portent Interactive
• A Picture Is Worth 10,000 Words by Alli Marshall, Strix Insights
• Alternate Reality Games by Kevin Franco, Francomedia
• The Power of Web Video for Businesses by Tish Bell & Stacy James Fry, BizBOXTV
• Social Media & Gaming: The Untapped Market by Evan Fishkin, Portent Interactive

We are all looking forward to next year’s conference.

Here is a link for more details: Internet Marketing Conference – Calgary 2010.

Great line-up of speakers. So far 60 people have registered. Ends on St Patrick’s Day – March 17th.

Topics include Social Media, Gaming, Videos, SEO, Pay-Per-Click and Industry related news.

Anduro is offering a discount. Call our office and we will give you the promo code.

Let me outline how our company is using this tool to help our clients. We have a few clients in the industry of global positioning systems (GPS). One is a manufacture of industrial hardware and applications, www.novatel.com and the other is a retail seller of mobile GPS units for consumers, www.gpscentral.ca. For both clients we are preparing a “gap analysis” to determine how their website is ranking for terms related to “gps”.

Note: The following data is aggregated industry related data, not data specific to GPSCentral.

Our analysis for companies like GPSCentral is a typically along the following lines:

• Enter the search term “gps”
• Adjust the filters to your specific interest: Web Search / Canada /  All subregions / Last 12 months / All Categories to get the resulting page and graph
• Click on News headlines to see related news
• Click on Forecast get future trends (you must select 2004 – present for this function to be available)

If you login using your Gmail account you can get additional detail related to search volumes. When logged in, the y-axis becomes a percentage scale with 0 being zero and 100 being the highest volume during the selected time period.

For the gap analysis example, our next step is to review the Top Searches and Rising Searches and determine how the website is performing for these specific terms. For example, the top search term listed is “gps garmin”. When we look at Google.ca we can see that the website is performing well for this term – 2nd and 3rd positions. The website is also listed on the first page of Google.ca for the next 4 terms including “garmin”, “gps canada”, “magellan gps”, and “magellan”.  But when we search for the 6th term on the list, “gps review”, www.GPSCentral.ca is not listed in the first 10 pages – room for improvement.

By using the “site” command in Google we can quickly determine that a pages has not been specifically optimized for “gps review”. A few pages on the website contain this term but none of the pages have “gps review” in the title of the web pages.

At this stage we have a few options:

1. Select one of the existing pages and optimize the page for this term.
2. Develop some new optimized content and add that page to the site.
3. Start a linking campaign to improve the performance of the existing page or the new page

We haven’t started yet, but we will over the next few weeks.

Contact me if you have comments, questions or suggestions.

Jeff Nelson

In online marketing the key is to gently coax website visitors through an evolution into website participants.  Whether we are talking about Pay Per Click platforms or ecommerce sites, visitors need to be participating – clicking – in order to increase the conversion rate and, hence, the ROI.  As evidenced by the 2 million Google Search results, this process is not a hard science with tried and tested methods – it is an art.  There are a lot of web users who are more than happy to simply be visitors – just hoping to pass GO and collect their proverbial $200.  After reviewing a few of the Google Search results and thinking of my own online experiences I have identified two key concepts that website owners should keep in mind when trying to entice visitors to take that first step toward earning the highly esteemed blue Participant ribbon.

• The need to participate:
  • In today’s fast paced world, people do not take the time to do things they do not need or want to do.   The end goal of the conversion must be valuable and secure for the visitor as well as for the website owner.  Nurture the desire to participate by clearly communicating the value of the conversion to the website visitor.  Encourage return business by adding an additional thank you page after the conversion step is completed.
• The ability to participate:
  • Expand on the concept of the Big Orange Button (BOB).  Keep the visitor on task by ensuring that the information, design and feel of the website are consistent from the landing page through to the actual conversion step.  Limit distractions, make the next step(s) obvious and encourage and enable the visitor to act quickly.

It is well recognized that higher conversion rates can translate into higher ROI and a few well executed website adjustments can help to increase conversion rates.  So, welcome to all visitors.  Now, ready… set…participate!!

- Jenn -

Guest post done by Jenn. It just so happens that Anduro Marketing offers what we call an “Increasing Conversions Session”. To find out more, contact us.

He has done some research and has come to the conclusion the Tweeting less and posting a fewer number of  links actually gets you better results in Twitter.

Read his first blog post here and the follow up one here. The follow up blog post talks about which times of day and which days of the week are most effective. Really interesting blog post!

-Stefanie-

They titled it “Is This Stamp-Worthy?”. Seth Godin did a blog post about the evolution to email marketing campaigns from mail outs. When companies still used physical mail-outs more readily than they do now, the marketing team would have to think twice about who they are going to send the mail to since it cost them per piece of mail. Now that email is essentially “free”, it is much easier to hit send.

His example was that he received an offer to buy diapers online from Drugstore.com. He explains, “I’ve never purchased diapers online, since my diaper purchases predate online diaper shopping and my hope is that I won’t be buying Depends for another fifty years or so!.”

This is now a completely irrelevant product for him but because email doesn’t really cost a company anything, he got the mail out anyways. Now he has become an un-subscribed customer!

So next time you think about sending out a big email blast, think about whether you would pay for the stamp that would have to go on the mail out!

Simple diagram. Great descriptions. Easy to navigate. Clear. Well put together.

Enjoy!

Essentially, if you are looking to make changes to your account, you can click on this tab and it will give you suggestions on how you could improve the account. The tool is new so right now there are only Budget and Keyword changes ideas but there is a promise that there is more to come.

I tried this tool out on a client of ours and found that, of course, Google wants me to increase the budget and add keywords. What was surprising though, is that the increase was only $0.60/day! This really won’t make them a ton of extra money but according to the tool, will increase the traffic by an estimated 121 clicks/month.

I am always a bit skeptical of new Google tools because I am never sure if the tools are meant to help the advertiser or Google but this one seems to be not so terrible – if you always keep in mind that Google is a business and they need to make money!

Here is a link to some more information about the Opportunities tab which I have actually used a few times. There are good keyword suggestions which you may have missed. For the most part though, it is just a way to check you are on the right track.

There is also another blog post about this that I received a while ago and would like to share.

Now this is obviously personal preference but there are real reasons why there should be a form on the contact us page – a short form that is, followed by a separate page with a thank you message.

There are a number of Analytics programs out there but for simplicity sake (and because I am most familiar with it) I will use Google Analytics as the analytics program of choice. It is free and collects really great, useful data.

Say you have a website, you have added all the Analytics code to the pages of your site and you are just sitting back, collecting data. Now let’s say you don’t have a form on your site. You can collect endless amount of data but at the end of the day, what have you learned? How many visitors are coming to your site? How long they stay? Which page they like the most? Which page they like the least? This is all great data but so what! Have they bought anything? You don’t know. Have they contacted you? You don’t know.

Of course, you can keep track of how many phone calls you received and how many emails Joe got on Tuesday but you have no idea where these leads came from. You know that you received 100 visits from Google Organic. OK, that’s great. But did any of these people contact you?

By simply adding a form to your site and adding a goal in Analytics, you take away a lot of the guess work. You will now be able to see where the people who competed the form came from, how long they spent on your site, which pages they enjoyed etc. etc. etc.

This is especially true if you are doing any paid advertising. Google AdWords, Facebook – all of these can be tracked in Analytics but you will only know whether your efforts are worth it if you can see conversions and how much you are paying for each conversion.

Forms are simple to add and you will get a lot of value out of them!