Jordan Hardy

How to Find the Best SEO Services

Posted on: January 26, 2010 by Jordan Hardy Comments Off

Small and larger companies have so many options in choosing a company or consultant to take care of their SEO that it can be dizzying. From consulting and running marketing agencies, I’ve seen a lot of what is out there.

It is not easy to find the best. Items to look for in hiring the best:
1. Client list – they should have worked with good clients in different verticals to have extensive experience.
2. They should be willing to show spreadsheets of work done and articles or URLs secured.
3. They should be able to analyze results in front of you and explain what is happening.

IS SEO Dead?

Posted on: October 23, 2009 by Jordan Hardy Comments Off

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.

Marketing on Forums

Posted on: October 2, 2009 by Jordan Hardy Comments Off

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.

15 Steps to Bring Your Business Online and Get Top Results

Posted on: July 23, 2009 by Jordan Hardy No Comments

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.

1. Select a domain name. Go Daddy and aplus.net have good domain name selection tools.
2. 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.
3. As you plan your Website, a good architecture with strong Web standards and usability, is best written on paper before it is coded.
4. 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.
5. Write great copy to ensure you have the attention of search engines and users / Website readers.
6. Build SEO into your Website to ensure you get traffic from good online marketing.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Leverage landing pages into your website.
11. Bring your selling online as well as offline.
12. Test, test, test. This means look at your Web analytics and optimize what you do based on your Website statistics.
13. Roll out useful, creative new Website enhancements as often as you can.
14. Listen to user feedback.
15. Keep track of new Web trends.