Of course, if your business is strictly local, you can network face to face, such as through meetups and networking groups. But if you want to draw customers from outside your local area, or you want to reach more local people than you can likely meet through face to face get-togethers, you can:

• Use online networking such as FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, et.al.
• Start a blog
• Become an active commenter on others’ blogs
• Contribute to a wiki
• Become an active participant at social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, Mixx, Digg, etc.

In my opinion, the most effective approach for a local business is probably some combination of face-to-face and online. Best of both worlds.

In any case, the point is to get out there, whether “there” is a real-world meetup or a virtual space. Don’t discount online social media just because it’s “new” or because it seems frivolous at first glance.

Effective use of social media can drive significant targeted traffic to your traditional website. Recently, a friend told me his company gets 25% of their traffic from Twitter, for instance. A strong online social profile helps builds trust, establishes you as an authority/expert in your field, strengthens existing relationships and forges new ones. Just like building a network in Real Life.

Bottom line, you need to be where your customers are. It’s not about you. It’s about them. If they’re using MySpace, you need to be on MySpace. If they’re Twittering, you need to be Twittering. If they’re active in the blogosphere, you need to be active there (whether you have an actual blog, or you’re just a frequent/active commenter on theirs). There are many ways to be active in the social media space. You need to find the one(s) that are best for reaching your customers.

The conversation is going on all around you. You can participate, or you can sit it out. But if you decide to sit it out, you need to know that [i]somebody[/i] will be participating, and it will likely be your competitors.

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Fortunately, a roadmap is now available.

While attending the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference recently in Houston, TX, I had the privilege of hearing Matt McGee’s presentation on his SEO Success Pyramid.

By working your way up to the top of the pyramid, you’ll naturally build a website that’s good for human visitors and search engines. One tip Matt gave during his presentation is to take each layer of the pyramid and work on that layer all the way across as a whole, rather than attempting to take it on individual brick-by-brick.

The steps of the first layer take place before you even start designing your website. Commitment, Planning, Product/Service, Education, Planning: these “bricks” have nothing to do directly with building a website. Rather, they deal with the basic foundations of your business itself. Without a strong business foundation, putting the effort into building a website is a waste.

The second layer covers the first steps to building your online presence. Design/Usability, Keyword Research, Analytics, Tools: these are the basics you’ll need in place to create, optimize and evaluate the performance of your site. Without these, your site is not prepared to move ahead to the next steps.

The third layer is what Matt calls the “nuts and bolts.” Crawlability, Content and Links: anyone who’s familiar with search optimization will recognize these as the three main components of an optimized site. With these in place, you’ll have a site that’s friendly to both your human visitors and to search engines — and one that’s bound to do well with both.

The fourth layer takes your online presence to the next level: reaching out. With your business on firm footings, all the core components of a strong website covered, and basic search and conversion optimization taken care of, you’re ready to become even more active in engaging your customers. Social/Local Findability and Reputation Management make sure you know what’s being said about your business and that you’re a part of the conversation.

The top of the pyramid is the Holy Grail: Trust. When you have all the other things in place, you’ll have a business and a website that is trusted by both customers and search engines. And at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.

For more information about the SEO Success Pyramid, read Matt’s article about it. Highly recommended!

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Almost everyone who’s been online for any length of time can tell stories of colleagues (or perhaps even themselves) victimized by bogus SEO service providers — who charged an arm and a leg yet delivered next to nothing in terms of real business results.

It’s Wild Out There

Anyone who’s seen a few Westerns probably has an image of gullible townspeople, gathered around a patent medicine salesman’s wagon, listening in rapt attention as he extolls the virtues of some magical elixir guaranteed to cure everything from insomnia to athlete’s foot.

Of course, none of these amazing remedies actually cured anything. The snake oil peddlers realized early on they could make a fortune by bottling worthless ingredients, promising naive customers the moon, and selling their concoctions at a premium price.

Just so with some SEOs. They package together worthless “services”, promise their clients amazing results (which they cannot possibly deliver), and charge an exorbitant fee for the whole mess.

So how can you tell the difference between a snake oil seller and a real SEO?

Let Common Sense Be Your Guide

Here are a few tips to help you evaluate if the provider you’re contemplating has the potential to provide a real service, or if they’re simply peddling miracle cures off the back of a buckboard wagon:

• Gravitate toward firms focused on improving your sales and revenue. Remember, it’s revenue, not rankings, that pays the bills. Unless maybe your mortgage company accepts rankings reports in lieu of cash, that is. But until that happens, you’re going to want to focus on business revenue as your goal, not rankings. If all your SEO firm wants to talk about is rankings, their interests are not aligned with yours. Find a different firm.
• Avoid anyone whose services consist primarily of submitting your site to “thousands of top search engines” every month. Now, don’t get me wrong: just because somebody says they submit your site to search engines as a small part of a comprehensive optimization package, this doesn’t mean they’re a bad firm. I’m talking about situations where this is the main or only service a firm offers.

  Why is this bad?

  Well, to start with, there aren’t thousands of search engines worth being listed in. Think about what search engine you, your friends and your relatives generally use. I’ll bet even if you have a very diverse set of friends and relatives, you won’t come up with more than (at best) a handful of engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, maybe AOL or Ask, and perhaps one or two niche engines. Aside from pointless bragging rights — what’s the use of a ranking well in a search engine no one uses, or even knows about?

  In the second place, submitting your site is unnecessary. It’s not harmful, just not needed. Representatives from the major search engines have all said they’ll find your site faster and more reliably through links pointing to your site.

  Submission per se is not a problem. When submission is the only or the primary “optimization” technique, you’d do well to look elsewhere.

• Gravitate toward companies who tell you the hard truth. The snake oil salesmen promise miraculous, immediate results with no extra work on your part. The true professionals will tell you it’s going to take time and effort. You may have to make changes to your site — possibly extensive changes. All this hard work may not sound as attractive as effortless overnight success, but it’s the truth. I dunno about you, but I’d rather have a service provider who gives me the unvarnished straight scoop than one who sells me a bunch of pretty fairy tales. Living in Fantasyland might be fun for awhile, but it’s a heck of a lot less profitable than the real world.
• Avoid firms who guarantee rankings. I’ve heard some claim a “special relationship” with the search engines that allows them to place sites at the top of the results. The fact is, no SEO company has a relationship with any legitimate search engine that allows the SEO to dictate search rankings. Others claim they’ve developed some sort of proprietary technology that allows them to place pages in the rankings at will. Unfortunately, no matter how persuasive and plausible their sales pitch might sound, there’s no such technology. Bottom line, no SEO company can guarantee you any specific rankings.
• Gravitate toward firms that take a balanced approach to site optimization. There’s an old saying, “When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Unscrupulous firms and unskilled practitioners tend to zero in on one aspect of optimization as the “end all and be all” of online success. Usually it’s the easiest thing for them to do (these folks really don’t like hard work). Sometimes it’s simply the only thing they know how to do. In any case, the site that only needs one thing for optimization is as rare as hen’s teeth. The fact is, for virtually every site on the Internet, effective optimization takes a balanced approach. Content, site architecture, usability, links, code, navigation, advertising, public relations, etc. — it all works together to build a strong, well-performing site.

  Anyone who tells you the only thing you need to succeed is get more links, or start a blog, or write more content or whatever, is selling you a bill of goods. Building “success” on one factor only is like building a stool with only one leg. You can try it, but the results won’t be very stable. Find a firm that recognizes the need for balance.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, of course, but I hope it will prove useful as a start. If you’d like a “second opinion” to help verify your SEO firm’s recommended tactics and strategies, contact us to find out more and arrange for a site audit report. We’ll give you the straight scoop.

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Do you make any of these mistakes?

RugSale.com’s original checkout process took seven steps — which they reduced to two. Each new page your customers have to click through in order to check out, you lose additional sales. Make sure your shopping cart doesn’t require any unnecessary steps.

RugSale.com used to force customers to type in duplicate information. For instance, customers were required to enter both a shipping address and a billing address, even if both were the same. Now they automatically populate the billing address fields if the customer indicates the two addresses should be the same. If possible, configure your shopping cart to eliminate duplicate data entry requirements.

RugSale.com used to require customers to open an account in order to purchase a product. They found customers didn’t really want to set up a user ID and password; they simply wanted to (in the words of their CEO, Charley Kaoud) “check out quick and move on.” If you want to give your customers the option of setting up an account, that’s fine, but to maximize your sales you shouldn’t require account setup.

It pays to test

No matter how good you think your shopping cart is, there’s a good chance you can find some way of streamlining the checkout process. Evaluate the steps your customers have to go through, the information you require them to enter, and eliminate anything that isn’t strictly necessary. Then test, test, test and see if there’s any improvement.

If there is, you know you’re on the right track. If there isn’t, try something else.

The important thing is this: don’t assume that your checkout process is already the best it can be. It’s likely there’s room for improvement — and as RugSale.com found out, the improvements can be significant.

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I don’t agree, at least not completely.

Go into any general-interest bookstore, look at the "business" section and count how many books you find on the subject of marketing. Review the catalogs of most local universities and colleges for business courses related to marketing. Search online for sites offering marketing advice and information.

From my observation, as much information as there is out there covering search engine optimization, I’d say there is much more information available on the topic of general business marketing. Which only makes sense — after all, SEO is only one part of an overall marketing campaign.

And since so much information is so widely available, and since marketing and advertising have been around in one form or another for thousands of years, you’d think it would be pretty much down to a science today, wouldn’t you? Basically, any business owner or manager should be able to do a quick search or two on the Web, go down to the local bookstore, or attend a class or seminar and learn everything he or she needs to know to be able to optimize their Real World marketing and advertising for maximum ROI.

Everyone and his dog should have a well-written, budget-conscious marketing plan and be able to effectively implement that plan, with no need for professional assistance, right?

And yet, and yet… there are still literally thousands of marketing, public relations and advertising agencies and freelance specialists in the USA alone. And there are many more thousands of small and mid sized businesses operating without any marketing plan at all, much less a well-thought-out, ROI-maximizing one.

This is because marketing — whether "Real World" or online — is not a paint-by-numbers exercise. You can’t simply slavishly follow a set of steps in a formula and hope to achieve significant, lasting success.

There is a measure of art involved, and some of that art can only be learned "hands on" by actually getting out there and running a real-world campaign or two (or ten or twenty). It takes time and practice and a bit of innate talent to become really good at it. And despite all that, sometimes even the top professionals miss the mark.

To my mind, "search engine optimization" is not a goal, it’s a never-ending process. I’ve said for a long time now there’s no such thing as a "finished website," and I’ve come to the conclusion over the past few years there’s no such thing as a "completely optimized site," either.

There’s always something that can be improved, especially when you move beyond thinking of "optimization" strictly in terms of rankings — when you start considering usability and the customer experience and conversion maximization as part of a holistic optimization process.

One thing I do think: there will be less and less demand as time goes by for those "SEOs" who think it’s only about rankings. Those SEOs can (and should) go the way of the dodo.

But for true site optimizers — the folks who truly "get" the holistic approach — the demand should remain strong for a long time to come.

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Is this a good assumption? This article explores the issues of search engine penalization and banning and offers some (perhaps surprising) conclusions.

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Google will sometimes alert a site owner there is a problem through their Webmaster Tools. That, and the fact that the Tools give a lot of good information about how Google views your site, makes it well worth signing up for the Tools and validating your site(s).

But in general, they don’t tell you that you’ve been penalized. If the SEs told everyone when they’d been penalized, and exactly what it was they’d done to earn the penalty, it would only make it easier for SE spammers to do an end-run around the SE algorithms. So it’s to the SEs’ benefit to keep things as vague as possible. Frustrating for the site owner, but there’s not much to be done about it.

Bans vs. Penalties

There’s a whole range of things the SEs can do to sites that engage in practices they don’t like. In the very worst cases, they can ban the site — i.e. drop it from their results entirely. This is very, very rare, and generally only happens when someone’s been extremely naughty.

For lesser infractions, they could penalize the site. There are a whole bunch of penalties they can apply — from simply indexing the home page and ignoring the rest of the site, to listing all the pages of the site, but only displaying them toward the very end of the results, to knocking the pages of the site down slightly in the results for certain specific search queries. Basically, what penalties they might choose to impose are up to them and limited only by their imaginations, the laws of physics, and corporate policies.

However, in many (most?) cases of suspected penalties/bans, it turns out there are technical issues (malformed robots.txt file, unspiderable site navigation, required cookies or sessionID, etc.) — or in Google, simply the normal aging delay for new sites — that are causing the problem. They may look very much the same as a penalty or ban in the results, and it’s often difficult to determine what’s really going oin without a bit of investigation.

Another common cause of poor ranking is — and how shall I put this delicately? — (ahem) "overly optimistic" evaluation of the webmaster’s site optimization skills. I can’t begin to tell you how many times on the High Rankings Forum we get pleas for help from webmasters who swear their sites are "fully optimized," have no technical difficulties, and yet are still not indexed well. And, of course, their immediate thought is that a penalty or ban for "over optimization" must be in place.

The problem is, usually within a few minutes (often within a few seconds) of visiting their site, we can all identify many areas that have not been "fully optimized." It generally becomes apparently fairly quickly why these sites are doing so poorly in the search engines.

As with banning, penalties are generally fairly rare (although not as rare as an outright ban), so when a site isn’t performing as well in the SEs as we’d like, generally it’s best to first look for technical issues and make sure everything is squeaky-clean in that respect. All too often, site owners jump to the conclusion they’ve been banned or penalized when the problem is actually a technical issue on their site — which could be very easily resolved.

The second thing to do is to honestly take a look at the site optimization. As a site owner you might want to take a look at this excellent thread at the HighRankings.com forum to learn more about what really works for site optimization.

The SEs don’t go around handing out penalties like candy. You generally have to have done something pretty seriously bad to earn a penalty, and generally site owners who get penalized know just what they’ve done (whether they choose to admit it publicly or even to themselves is another matter).

Bottom line: it’s usually fairly difficult to accidentally incur a penalty or ban. Not to say that it can’t be done, but — like penalties and bans themselves — accidentally getting in trouble with the search engines is rare. If you’re having trouble, it’s much more likely either a technical issue or simple poor optimization to blame.

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Web analytics can tell you these things and more.

With proper web analytics reports, you can make informed decisions to help maximize the effectiveness and profitability of your web site. But what sort of information will help you make those decisions?

Here are a few useful statistics you might consider tracking:

• Unique visitors: More useful than simple "hits." Be sure to exclude spider visits, and this can give you an idea of how many people are visiting your site. Hint: don’t worry so much about absolute numbers; for really useful information, track visitor trends over time.

• Bounce rate: How many people enter your site and leave again within just a few seconds? If your site is attracting targeted visitors and doing a good job of capturing their attention right away, your bounce rate should be fairly low. If you have a high bounce rate for one or more pages, try testing new page layouts or updated content to see what effect it may have.

• Search terms: You know what terms you may have tried to target on your pages. But what other search terms are people using to find your site? If the people who use these terms regularly turn into paying customers, you may want to consider optimizing one or more of your pages to even better target these terms. If the terms are not relevant to your product or service, you may want to consider "de-optimizing" your pages so they don’t attract these irrelevant searches.

• Conversions and conversion paths: What is it that you most want your visitors to do after they arrive at your site? What percentage of your visitors actually do this? What paths do they follow to get there? Do they seem to proceed fairly confidently through the site, or do they seem to wander for awhile? The goal is to shorten and smooth the visitor’s path so that more of them will make it to the goal.

So how do you track these and other informative web site statistics? A simple page counter will not give you the information you desire. You need web analytics software or a web analytics service. Here is one of each:

• Google Analytics: This is a free service from Google, based on the popular Urchin web analytics software. It offers many advanced reporting options and a cool graphical interface.

  It requires the use of JavaScript, so it won’t track search engine spider visits (search engine spiders don’t run JavaScript) and it won’t track visitors who have JavaScript turned off (most visitors will have it available and turned on).

  Some webmasters have questioned whether it’s wise to let a search engine — or any third-party company, for that matter — have access to the kind of detailed visitor information that Google Analytics will collect about your web site.

  If you’re of a suspicious mindset, have many sites to analyze or are in a hurry to start analyzing your visitor traffic, you may prefer a software package that you can install and run on your own computer. But for most of us, this is an excellent (and free) tool to track your site traffic and conversions.

  Sign up for Google Analytics

• FastStats Analyzer: This software package is not free, but it is an excellent value. You install it and run it from your personal computer. It can handle an unlimited number of web sites.

  I personally use this analytics software on a daily basis for tracking site statistics for several business web sites; the reports and analyses I get are comparable to those from packages costing ten+ times more. It’s fast, complete, and produces output in both HTML and comma-delimited format.

  FastStats Analyzer is easy to install, set up and run. I recommend the Gold version for the most complete set of reports. It requires access to your web server log files.

  Order FastStats and save 10% — use the discount code nineyards

Do you need help interpreting your visitor statistics? Do your web analytics reports indicate areas needing improvement, but you’re not sure what steps to take next? NineYards.com offers a comprehensive Web Site Audit report to ensure your site is as effective and profitable as possible.

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This new article explains why I think most people would do better to turn off the Toolbar PR display and focus instead on things that really matter to their site and their business.

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You know, I suppose I can understand to an extent why some people are so obsessed with that little green bar. It does seem as though it should mean something, doesn’t it? And it does apparently come from Google, so that must mean it’s important, right?

Here’s the bottom line, folks. The PR number you see displayed on the Google Toolbar is a worthless number.

Notice I didn’t say PageRank is worthless. Certainly, the "real" PR that Google uses internally has some value. It’s one of the hundreds of factors that Google uses when determining a page’s positioning in any given seach results.

The main problem is, those of us who don’t work for Google have no way of knowing what that "real" PR number is. And the PR number we see on the Google Toolbar is not a fair substitute. Here’s why:

• Toolbar PR is rarely updated. "Real" PR fluctuates constantly. Toolbar PR is only updated a few times a year — and when it’s updated, there’s no way of telling whether the updated number was based on the "real" PR from yesterday, last month, or sometime last year.

• Toolbar PR is (at best) a rough approximation. "Real" PR is a fractional number somwhere between zero and one. Toolbar PR is a whole number between zero and ten. Google has never told anyone how they handle rounding issues. So, for instance, if the "real" PR is, say, .451, would the Toolbar PR be rounded down to 4, or rounded up to 5? If we assume that it would round up to 5, what would happen if the "real" PR dropped to .449? Would the Toolbar PR stay at 5, or would the change of .002 in the "real" PR cause the Toolbar PR to apparently drop all the way down to 4? Nobody (outside of Google) knows for sure.

• Toolbar PR may, in fact, be a made-up number. "Real" PR is based on links. Nothing more, nothing less. But what is Toolbar PR based on? Many people seem to assume it’s based in some way on the "real" PR. But to my knowledge no one from Google has actually said this is true. Without access to the "real" PR numbers for verification, we have no way of knowing where the Toolbar PR number comes from. For all we can prove, it might as well be randomly generated.

Worrying about changes in the Toolbar PR number is a waste of time and energy that could better be spent on more productive activities. While "real" PR is used by Google, the Toolbar PR number has nothing whatsoever to do with your page’s rankings. Nothing. It is — at best — a rough estimate of what your "real" PR might have been at some indeterminate point in the past, and is totally unconnected with any of the ranking algorithms.

In any case, to my mind, focusing on "improving PR" as a goal is misguided (especially if you’re talking about Toolbar PR, but even if you’re talking about "real" PR):

• Since we don’t know what the "real" PR number is, we have no way of measuring the success (or lack therof) of any efforts we might make.
• Since PR is only one of many factors used to determine a page’s position in the search results, increasing the PR may or may not have any actual effect on rankings.
• Even if our efforts are successful in increasing a page’s PR, what tangible benefit will this bring to the business? No one I know has yet been able to pay their electric bill with PR.

(And, of course, PR is a Google-only number. Even the "real" PR has nothing at all to do with rankings on Yahoo, MSN, Ask, or any other search engine. "Improving PR" cannot possibly have any effect on any other search engine.)

It’s much smarter in my opinion to focus our limited time and energy on the factors that matter — finding ways of getting better targeted traffic, and of better converting those visitors into customers — not wasting time chasing the PageRank will-o-the-wisp.

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