Posted on: October 23, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
Nope.
Saying SEO is dead, or doesn’t work can make a great PR piece to grab attention.
Effective SEO involves not only an understanding of technology and users, but an interest in adding to the Internet in a good way. From all of the people I know at Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, there is one strong common thread in what makes search work, and SEO can add to this. The common thread is to bring useful information to people on search engines. It is to help people find what they need. Not every Website is built and marketed well. SEO can involve:
- UI
- Emails
- Content
- New technology rollouts
- New Websites
- Landing pages
- Code tweaking for important tags
- and much more
My experience with the SEO component goes far beyond coding and marketing. It is crucial not just to understand Website analytics, but also how people think and take action. It is important to understand business, design, radio, TV, and other concepts. A huge number of strategies can be combined in my experience to run a highly effective SEO program. Two goals I normally see companies have with SEO are increased traffic and conversion rate. I always have at least another three important goals, which include high visitor return rate, referrals to friends, and viral marketing.
Posted on: October 2, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
I often find it interesting how useful vs. useless forum posting can be as a marketing strategy. For example, one of the message boards / forums I run has quite a large number of people that apply to become members each day. Of these applications, I find that 92% have no intention of posting relevant content. They just want to market their product in categories that are not relevant. I deny these people becoming members as clearly these days there are online tools to see who is going to be a real participant on a forum. These tools search existing forums to see if particular members, based on their email addresses, are relevant or not.
My thought on the best way to market on forums is to not waste time. If you have a product to market and want to talk about it on forums, have something to say. Sure, SEO strategy and keywords can help, but most importantly have a point. By posting on forums with relevant helpful information to others, a link to your product can be clicked more often when trust is built. People figure things out. If a person is just thinking they will be smarter than everyone and find clever ways to sneak in selling, it will rarely work. Conversion rate will decrease, other members may not interact as much with you, and the message board moderator may even remove any member that is detracting from the point of the message board.
I’ve posted on forums over the years, testing conversion with many techniques. Although quite a lot of strategies help, a base belief in adding to the forum is needed for success.
Posted on: July 23, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
To feature a business online is an important step these days. There are 15 elements that are very important in getting your new Website online with success. Reading up online, talking with experts, and reading books
are all effective, affordable ways to build up knowledge. Here are 10 top steps with resources and tools to help bring your business online in a very effective manner.
- Select a domain name. Go Daddy and aplus.net have good domain name selection tools.
- Select a company to host your Website. As you research hosting companies online, ensure you check samples of their clients to see how well the Websites rank on search engines and how quickly their Websites load.
- As you plan your Website, a good architecture with strong Web standards and usability, is best written on paper before it is coded.
- Either hire a team to build your Website, use a tool, or you can code it yourself if you have the time to learn. Wordpress and Drupal are my favorite tools. Wordpress is good to build a blog. Drupal is good to build a Website.
- Write great copy to ensure you have the attention of search engines and users / Website readers.
- Build SEO into your Website to ensure you get traffic from good online marketing.
- Make sure you can create images as needed. Adobe Fireworks is a great image tool and there is some excellent documentation on using Adobe Fireworks out there.
- Get a great coding tool to use quickly or in detail as needed for Website posts. Adobe Dreamweaver is terrific and there are very good books one can use.
- Work on conversion and optimization techniques to ensure people don’t just visit your Website, but that they do convert to a lead or sale.
- Leverage landing pages into your website.
- Bring your selling online as well as offline.
- Test, test, test. This means look at your Web analytics and optimize what you do based on your Website statistics.
- Roll out useful, creative new Website enhancements as often as you can.
- Listen to user feedback.
- Keep track of new Web trends.
Tags: business online, new website, Online Marketing, results, SEO, usability, web architecture, web hosting, web tools Filed Under: Building a New Website, Businesses, Online Marketing, SEO, Sales, Website Analytics, Website Sales, Websites
Posted on: June 26, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
Over the years I’ve done a lot of work for companies in regards to either helping them get the right Website built, or hiring the right vendor or team to do this. A website can cost in the thousands to millions to build, depending on a number of factors:
- Is this website being built from scratch with proprietary software?
- Is the website being built based on an existing CMS platform and code tweaked/customized? An example of an open source platform is Drupal.
- Has a team been hired just for this project?
- Is this project being done by a vendor?
- Have you or the vendor done a project such as this before?
To me, for a small to medium sized business the perfect website is based on existing tools and platforms but edited and tweaked to have:
- A unique look
- Unique content
- Necessary branding
- Updated content
This way, the Website will be affordable, in the thousands of dollars and not hundreds of thousands. The website should also be built on a platform where sitewide rollouts and navigation updates are easy and possible. The website can hopefully be updated by anyone with a login. And, of course the website should be built so that online marketing / SEO elements and keyword strategy can be worked throughout.
For larger businesses, this website style can still work well plus scale. Or, a large website can be built from scratch. If you have questions, let me know as I’ve dealt with hundreds of types of top performing websites, from thousands to millions of pages.
Posted on: June 26, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
SEO is a component of online marketing. Online marketing can include SEO, SEM, press releases, social media optimization, blogging, article writing, online promotion, website roll-outs, and more. SEO can include any of these items as well in my opinion, since almost any public change to an online website can affect SEO. Here are some examples below. In these examples, “you” or “your” stands for a random person I may have met here or there.
- A new version of your website rolls out. It is missing some pages or some code has changed. Search engines index the site differently based on better or worse coding and inclusion of pages.
- Blog entries are deleted. Google may have given your website a higher pagerank based on the dates and number of entries on your blog. Now things have changed and pagerank drops.
- People are talking about you on social media websites. Search engines note various information about this and include that in their ranking for you.
- Your website is coded with non SEO friendly elements. Your competitor has their website coded with well done SEO. Even if you are the better business, your competitor has a better chance of being crawled well by search engines and indexed better.
- You have a writer that decides to copy text and cut corners. Search engines find this and ping the website.
These are just a handful of examples, but they do show it is ever so valuable to have good SEO in place. I’ve done consulting as well as worked as an employee for companies, managing SEO /online marketing departments. To do it well is both an art and a science. It is necessary that one never tries to trick search engines, but rather understand what will help both users and search engines.
Posted on: March 14, 2009 by Jordan Hardy
UI (user interface) Design is closely related to SEO in my opinion in terms of results. Proximity of elements on a page, what those elements are, how SEO keyword strategy integrates into those elements, and which UI Design changes drive more trafic and conversion, all affect results. As I consult for companies, it is impossible to ignore UI Design when focusing on SEO as there are always UI design elements I find that can be improved.
