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Beginner SEO/SEM: You’re Worth More Than That

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

 

I bargained with life for a penny
And life would pay no more
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store

For life is a just employer
He gives you what you ask
But once you have set the wages
Why, you must bear the task

I worked for a menial’s hire
Only to learn dismayed
That any wage I had asked of life
Life would have willing paid.

– Jessie B. Rittenhouse

For those of you just getting started in SEO / SEM consulting, listen up.

Earlier this year I partnered up with a business colleague to do some revenue share for him.  Basically it was this: I do SEO for him and I get a percentage of the revenue that the website creates.  I actually do this for several local businesses, but I’m not sure that it’s the best option.

While small businesses love to ‘partner up’ with other business owners, I’m really having second thoughts about doing this in the future.

Here’s the deal.  You offer a great service, one that can propel a business (literally) into a new revenue stream. You have the know-how and understanding to create wealth.  And wise small business owners will see this and want it.  However, most small businesses lack one thing – money.  While this isn’t always the case, it has been my experience that a lot of small business owners want a lot, particularly things they can’t pay for.  Of course, who wouldn’t.

If I owned a coffee shop, and in came a guy with a laptop, having meetings, talking to business owners, I’d want to know what he offered.  I’d want him to market my business.  But I’m just a little coffee shop owner, I don’t have that kind of money to throw at marketing.

Just a word of advice – RUN!

My wife often tells me that I’ve got this soft spot for people in a pinch.  For some reason I feel bad when I see a business owner struggling, and I want to help.  I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes – perhaps they’re really bad at accounting.  Perhaps they are funding useless causes.  Perhaps they have no idea what’s going on at all in their business.  Whatever it is, all I see is the outward sadface, and I offer to help.

Most often she’s right (dammit!).  She sees me working for these people ‘in hopes of a future return’.  She sees the kids wanting new this and that, and she sees me working away, but the bank account doesn’t increase.  I can’t blame her for getting aggravated.

So if you’re good at SEO, and you know it, don’t fall for these things.  You offer a damn good product, quality advice and the power to increase sales.  Don’t let it go for cheap.

Disclaimer: There are plenty of reasons to help out a small business.  I am in no means telling you to avoid these altogether – rather I’m telling you to be wise.  If you have a friend that needs help, throw him some link juice. Do a small link building campaign. But don’t go overboard just to prove yourself.  If you want to do that, do it on your own website, not someone else’s.

Posted in beginner sem, customer service, money, networking, site ranking, small business | No Responses »

Link Building on Five Minutes a Day

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

Most small business owners don’t have time to run a full out SEO campaign by themselves.  Yet there are a few things that any SMB owner can do on just a few minutes a day that will help their site rank (albeit slowly).

Let’s take a hobby shop owner.  He sells die cast cars, pinewood derby kits and model trains.  On any given morning, our owner could go to Google and search for hobby shop directory and then visit each result, adding his link where indicated.

If you did this just three or four days a week, over time you’d build up a decent backlink list.  While these links aren’t the best, its at least a start.

Posted in beginner sem, link building, small business | No Responses »

Web Design and Internet Marketing/SEO Intern

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

My company Lighthouse Technologies is now in need of a part time intern. I’m looking for someone who is interested in and understands basic web design and wants to learn SEO. Candidate would be willing to work in exchange for knowledge transfer of Web Design skills, Internet Marketing and SEO.

Applicants do not need to live in the Saint Louis area, but must be actively online and respond to email/IM in timely manner. All work will be done virtually.

What you must have…

  • A serious interest in web design
  • Knowledge of web editing software (Dreamweaver preferred)
  • Working knowledge of PhotoShop
  • Knowledge and understanding of Search tactics
  • An interest in marketing and social media
  • Honesty, integrity and a willingness to learn

What we offer…
This is not a paid position, however there are many benefits:

  • The chance to develop your talents and portfolio.
  • Experience that will look great on your resume. Our web site has an excellent reputation, and potential employers will be impressed.
  • A progressive management style that allows you to take on a great deal of responsibility and provides a supportive, stimulating and fun interactive environment.
  • Letters of reference for future job opportunities.
  • The opportunity to gain significant knowledge in the Internet Marketing field

Possible assignments include…

  • Build new pages for various industry web sites.
  • Assist in the development of new websites.
  • Offer input and assistance with new design ideas for these sites.
  • Potential revenue sharing on
  • Create landing pages for SEO campaigns
  • Participate in split testing

How to Apply…

Send your resume, the URL of at least one web site that shows your editing skills (be specific about the role you played in developing the site, versus what was done by others) and a cover letter that answers the following questions:

  • What are your career goals and how would this internship help you achieve them? What do you hope to gain from this internship?
  • What kind of coursework and/or experience do you have that would make you a valuable intern?
  • In what areas are you most interested in attaining experience through this internship?

From the applications, we will select interviewees. Deadline for applications is November 28, 2009.

Mail cover letter/resume to:

Lighthouse Technologies
1243 Water Tower Place
Suite 180
Arnold, MO 63010

You may also email us your resume to sales@techlh.com. Please use the subject line INTERN JOB. We will reply with a confirmation of receipt.

If you want to really impress me, email your items then follow up via direct message at twitter or Yahoo! IM. ID at both of those locations is ‘techlh’

Posted in beginner sem, jobs, Marketing, personalities, web design | No Responses »

Getting to Second Base with a Small Business

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

Many small businesses are clueless about Internet Marketing – particularly smaller Mom & Pop businesses.  For many (and in some cases many many may) years, marketing meant spending money on a Yellow Pages ad and perhaps sponsoring a local baseball team or getting a booth at the Home & Garden Show.  These things may still work, but it’s not the 60′s any more.

These hyperlocal businesses have relied on the uniqueness, and have never even considered taking on the big guys.  They are run mostly by older folks who are not yet ready to embrace the Internet, nor the technology related to it.  Heck, even talking some of these people into getting a website is a chore.

This is all about to change, as these ‘older’ small business owners start to retire, they are going to either

  • Close up / go out of business
  • Sell off their business
  • Give the business to a child/relative

No matter what they choose to do, the younger small business owner crowd will be more adaptive to the newer technology.  While some of these new owners may still be older than the Apple IIe generation (remember using that in school?), a majority of them are going to be more receptive to websites, Internet Marketing and even Social Networking.  That means you still have a shot at getting their business, but you’ve gotta take it slow.

Posted in beginner sem, local marketing, Marketing, small business, yellow pages | No Responses »

Don’t Go to SEO War Unprepared

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

There’s nothing more exciting than landing that first client and jumping right into the link building/onpage SEO immediately. But hold on there, sir knight – you’ve got some work to do before you even think about doing actual SEO stuff. Below is a list of preparations I think you should make before putting any time into link building/onpage changes.

Prepare a baseline

Every SEO campaign must show improvement – whether that means more traffic, more leads or higher rankings. If you don’t get a baseline established from the start, you won’t be able to show improvement over time.

  1. Keyword Research
    Duh.  Know what you’re wanting to rank for before you start making changes.  I’m hoping this was a no-brainer.
  2. Add an analytics program to the website
    Whether Google analytics, AWStats, Webalizer, whatever. Just start getting some numbers on current traffic, keywords etc. Even if there is little or no traffic to the website, establish that up front so that you can show improvement over the months to come.
  3. Identify the competition
    It’s important to establish who the big players are – online and offline – and there is a difference. Some businesses have no clue what SEO is, but they may have a big marketing budget that they waste on billboards, sponsorships, etc. Make sure you identify them, along with any “online only” competition who may be ranking well but perhaps aren’t as widely known.
    Know where these competitors are ranking so you can track their progress (or regress) as your campaign kicks into full swing.
  4. Run a keyword ranking report
    Run a report of all the current ranking positions with at least the top 20 keywords you are preparing to tackle. Even if it’s blank, this will show that when you started, the website did not have any rankings. I run AWR, and use it against the three major SE’s only.
  5. Run the same report for at least two of the competitors you want to beat
    When I recently started an SEO campaign for a real estate client, I first found out who the two “biggest” agents in the area were online, and I ran the same keyword report against their domains.
  6. Make a link baseline
    There are several ways to do this, from programs that will do it for you, to a simple Excel spreadsheet that you make yourself. Find out just how many backlinks your site currently has, and do the same for the competitors you identified above.
  7. Make an index baseline
    Do the same as above but for the amount of pages the search engines currently have indexed for your website.

Wake Up the Spiders

Now that you’ve got your baseline, you’re going to need to get the spiderfood ready.  Since most likely you are going to be dealing with a site that has probably had little or no updates in some time, the bots aren’t exactly knocking down your proverbial website door to get your new content.  Since your client may be on as much as a six week visit cycle, you need to help them realize there is movement in your camp.

  1. Add your website to Google Webmaster Tools
    This simple task can reveal some things that are broken and yet easy to fix on your site.  It will also “tell” the Googlebot that a real person resides behind this domain.
  2. Create a robots.txt file
    You’d be surprised how many websites don’t even have one of these.  Help the bots know what to feed on.  At the same time, make sure you tell the bots what not to feed on. (admin, images, includes folders)
  3. Make an XML sitemap
    You can generate these fairly easily using sites like xml-sitemaps.com.  Download it and put the xml file in your domain’s root folder.  Then make sure you go tell Google Webmaster Tools where it’s at.  You can also add a line to your robots.txt file telling the other search engine bots where to find it.
  4. 404 for the win
    Over the course of the next few weeks, as you start to see stats from the program you installed above, make sure you start to fix any dead links you see.  You should also consider creating a nice looking 404 page that helps the customer find what they may have been looking for.  A page of top-level links would work, or you could even get fancy, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.
  5. Decide what URL is best
    Adding a few lines of code to your .htaccess file (what? you don’t have that either?!) can surprisingly help your search engine rankings improve rather quickly.  Decide if you want your site to always show as domain.com or www.domain.com.  I’ve heard theories on both, and personally I always use the www version.

Assuming you follow most of these suggestions, you are now armored and ready to start actually modifying and changing your clients’ website.  Go ye – take thy rankings and climb to victory!

Posted in beginner sem, competition, Marketing, SEO | 2 Responses »

The Epic Dash vs Underscore Battle

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

For a long time I’ve read that there is a difference in how search engines see and index filenames and URLs that contain dashes or underscores. For a long time the general concensus has been that the search engines consider a dash to be simliar to a space, whereas they consider an underscore as no space. If that’s true, then your new page called will_hanke_wins_lottery.htm is going to rank as willhankewinslottery. Had you named it will-hanke-wins-lottery.htm then you’d theoretically have a better chance at ranking for a mixture of those individual words.

But c’mon, do you really believe that with all those algorithm nerds in California can’t figure out how to differentiate between a dash and an underscore?

Posted in beginner sem, content, Marketing, SEO, site ranking | 1 Response »

Diapers and Groceries? No! Rankings, Leads and Sales!

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

In my recent SEO seminar, most of the attendees were surprised to hear me tell them that starting a blog is a great way to connect with their customers. Since blogging is becoming more and more popular every day, getting mentions on nationally syndicated shows, being quoted in the news, etc, more and more people are getting familiar with the word ‘blog’.

Problem is, once people hear it enough, they go online or ask a friend what exactly a blog is. Most definitions fall in line with something like “an online diary or journal. people post thoughts about news or events that affect their lives”.

That’s a good definition, but we’re missing something there. When people hear that definition, the words that hit home are ‘journal’ and ‘diary’. They immediately pigeonhole the concept into nothing more than an online version of what they did that day.

When I mentioned blogging as a great way for your website to start ranking better, particularly for long tail searches, they were pretty surprised. Why? Well, they were thinking along the lines of “I changed the baby’s diaper today. Went to the store. Got some turnips” instead of “Saw a great opportunity for one of our widgets to help an elderly lady today at the store” or “ten great ways to use blue widgets when cutting the grass“.

There are plenty of reasons to start a blog for your business, no matter what the industry. Blogging about industry trends will help get you noticed as an industry leader. Blogging about some of the bigger competitors will get you ranking for their name. Blogging about upcoming events and products (in a non-salesy way) will lead you to more customers. Blogging about local happenings, concerts, trade shows, whatever, will get you noticed in your community.

Think beyond the diary mentality. There is an endless amount of material right there on your desk. Keep it fresh, don’t give up, and you’ll see positive results.

Posted in beginner sem, business blogging, content, site ranking, small business | No Responses »

Really Small Business? You Still Gotta Have an Address

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

This post is for those really small businesses (that are usually based in someone’s home).

I’d define a really small business (RSB) as one that operates out of someone’s home or other residential location.  The RSB does not have a ‘main office’ or even a place for customers to drop off checks or view products.  A majority of these businesses have a website, and rely on it for most, if not all, of its revenue generation.  Most of these businesses have one to five employees.

Since these RSBs rely on their website, and thus their marketing/ranking of their website for a majority of their income, it would make sense that they need to rank well for local terms.  It would also make sense that they would prefer not to use their local address (ie home) on places such as Google maps, Yahoo local, etc. – yet they really need to be listed on these sites.  Plus, these websites won’t accept PO Boxes for addresses.  They want a real physical location.

Well, these businesses can have a ‘real’ address, not a PO box, and can use that street address to add their business to these sites.

Everyone knows that the UPS store will ship things, but you may not know that they also provide post office-type services as well.  They have PO boxes, but with a twist.  Instead of your address being PO Box 123, you can use their street address and then use a Suite # or Room # to distinguish your business.  This gives you a real street address for your business.

For example, my hosting business is run from my house.  But I don’t want people showing up at my house, and I don’t want to list my house address for my business on Google maps.  So I went up to the UPS store and bought a box, at a whopping $8/month, and now I have a real address which I can list on all the various websites.

Lighthouse Technologies Web Hosting
1243 Water Tower Place
Suite 180
Arnold, MO 63010

I could also say

1243 Water Tower Place #180

or even

1243 Water Tower Place
Room 180

The goal here is to get a physical street address, which this accomplishes.

I should also mention that there are other companies that do this as well.  MailBoxes Etc is a good example, and there are other local ones that may work for you.  The trick here (pay attention) is not to get the cheapest one, but to get the service that is physically located the closest to the center of your town, or the town you are targeting.

Why? Because when someone searches Google maps (for instance), they may type in something like ‘widgets in Utopia KS’.  If your fake PO Box address is located closest to the center of Utopia, KS, chances are you’ll be the first listing for widgets in the area.  This, of course, means you’ll have to optimize your business listing to have the word ‘widgets’ on it, which isn’t a hard task.

So how do you find the ‘center’ of town? Easy. Simply type in the name of the town into Google maps.  This will give you what Google maps considers to be the starting point of reference for anything related to that town.  In most cases, it will actually give you a street address.

Now you can go do a search for local mail box providers (make sure you weed out mailbox manufacturers and sellers, like hardware stores), then get a box there.

It should also be noted that it’s not necessary to get a box in your town.  If your ‘target town’ is one of more affluent people, then get a box in that town!  Wherever you think more people will search for your products or services, that’s where you need to list your address!

Lastly, there’s no rule that says you can’t have more than one address, neither.  If you can afford it, get a box in several target towns!

Posted in beginner sem, Google Maps, local marketing, Marketing, small business | No Responses »

Five More Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Ranking

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

As a followup to my first post Five Things You Can Do to Your Website Right Now to Achieve Higher Rankings I thought I’d give you another five. Hopefully you’ve already done those, and you’re ready for a few more. Here goes:

  1. Add a meta description tag to your home page
    Really you should add a custom description to every page on your website, but at least you need one on your home page. Put in a few keywords, and remember that this description is what shows up in the ‘summary’ area of a SERPS page. So you’ll want to make it something that encourages searchers to click, yet it needs to be accurate and informative as to what your website it about.

    <meta name=”description” content=”Find custom widgets in various colors. Build your widget online and have it in a week. We offer free shipping of widgets to all US locations.”>

  2. Modify your .htaccess to avoid duplicate content penalties
    Many people don’t realize that yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com can be considered two separate websites to the search engines. So just publishing a website creates an instant duplicate content issue – one you can fix with .htaccess

    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^post$
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301]

    What? Don’t have the ability to modify or add a .htaccess file? You need to get a better host. May I suggest my company, Lighthouse Technologies? Very SEO friendly and customer support is awesome </plug> =)

  3. Add text navigation
    Many businesses get caught with this one – they build a nice website with pretty navigation buttons along the top or left and don’t have any text versions of the navigation. This can cause problems – search engines can’t ‘see’ graphics.
    While the page looks good, and it functions well, the search engines really need to assign a text name (or anchor) to each page of your site. It can do that if you have a text link to each page.
    If you have a site with the scenario above, consider simply adding a sitemap, a page with text links to every page on your website. Another easy way to fix this is to add text links to your main navigation pages along the bottom of your website. Not many people scroll that far down, it won’t look that bad, and the search engines will be happy with you.
  4. Add (and verify) your site to the search engine’s “tools” programs
    This is an easy one. Submit your site to Google’s Webmaster Tools and Yahoo’s Site Explorer. They’ll give you a little snippet of code to add to your home page, or a file to FTP up, and then you’ll be verified as a ‘real human owner’ of your website.
  5. Remove staging files/sites that are online
    Here’s a good one for web developers. Often we create subdomains or own entire domains that are particularly for staging/building new sites. We send these links to our clients and have them check out the site, submit changes, etc. Then when the real website launches, we forget to go back and delete the staging version. Suddenly, we’ve got more duplicate content issues.
    NOTE: A good developer will add a Disallow to their robots.txt file for the subdomain anyway, but I’d be willing to bet few do.

I know these aren’t the easiest 5 things you can do to help your site rank, but they aren’t all that hard either. Do some or all of these things and your site will continue to creep up the SERPS.

Posted in beginner sem, SEO, site ranking | 1 Response »

Improving Your Income Stream by 2000% – Without Quitting Your Job

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Many people stumble across SEM and think that it’s too hard, or too saturated to make any real money.  After a few months of pushing through something you’re probably not really interested in, you give up.  Small checks come, but it’s not the big payday you thought you’d get.

Well I’m here to tell you that hard work and persistence pays off.

In October 2004 when I stumbled across an Internet Marketing ebook, I started promoting timeshares, lemon laws, and teleconferencing.  None of them ever paid, but I kept at it.

In Feb 2005 I met Derek Chew, then a self employed (and single) SEO.  We hit it off, and I mentioned to him that I was averaging $5/day between Adsense and the few little things I was trying to promote.

Cutting to the chase, I’m now averaging over $3000 a month in side money.  That’s right, I’m still working part time on an Army web design contract, which provides me a nice steady income, and making that money on the side.  I recently bought my wife a nice GMC Denali and have my eye on a Cadillac STS.

If some country boy from Arnold MO can do it, so can you.

Posted in beginner sem, money, SEO, SERM | 3 Responses »

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