Back in May, I spoke to the St. Louis Small Business Meetup Group about getting traffic, climbing the search engine rankings and beyond. It was a great meetup in a small restaurant in Kirkwood – a terrific atmosphere and I think you’ll enjoy this video. In it you’ll learn:
Since the mid nineties, I’ve owned a web hosting company. Although I rarely promote it, it is a terrific complement to my SEO business.
One of the great things about having my own servers is that I can control many of the things that a typical hosting company won’t let you do. One of those is IP addresses. Click to continue »
The following is a post by Tim Biden. Tim runs an SEO firm based in Los Angeles, California. His contact info is at the end of today’s post – make sure you check out his website and follow him on the Twitter!
So you have a website but you’re not seeing the business roll in like you keep hearing that it should. There could be a number of reasons for that but today we’re simply going to focus on being found by your prospective clients. This part of the equation is simple enough… If they go to Google, Bing, or Yahoo and your website doesn’t come up in the first page of the results, you’re not going to get their business.
Your website is not a farm in the middle of nowhere and the Internet is not the “Field of Dreams”. You need build it, and apply the principles of SEO, before they will come.
With that being said, please allow me to ask you a few questions. Write down the answers on a piece of paper. We’ll be wrapping everything up at the end.
Click to continue »
Are you feeling the crunch of the economy? Seeing less and less customers come through your door? Tons of great businesses have closed up shop, and others have been forced to put the little emergency marketing budgets they have into use.
Yesterday I heard a commercial for a small steel company in town and found myself wondering why they’d spend a few thousands on a radio campaign. I think it’s simply that they don’t know. They’re feeling the crunch just like the rest of us, and probably listen to that particular station. So they put together an ad about how great they are, and paid the radio sales piper.
Reactive instead of proactive. Click to continue »
Way back in 1997 I started a company called Lighthouse Technologies. The business was basically web design, and soon after launch I added on hosting, which is now the main breadwinner for that business. In 2007, shortly after I started doing SEO professionally, I bought both WillHanke.com and WhereIsMyBusiness.com with the intent to someday turn them into their own entities. Well, WillHanke.com has grown into what you now read (all the time, right?) today. And WIMB, well it just kinda sat there.
But no more. New things are coming. Good things. Click to continue »
Have you been looking at your website lately and wondering what on earth you were thinking when you first had it built? And now that the ‘redesign bug’ is in your mind, are you freaked out by the overwhelming choices and decisions required to get your new website online, looking pretty, and search engine friendly?
As my kids say – Relax, I got this. Click to continue »
In every business, there comes a point when you finally decide that you either need a website, or that you need a redesign to the website you had built years ago. Either way, it’s more important now than ever to make sure that the project is done in a way that accurately reflects your company, is easy to navigate, and brings customers.
There are many many web designers out there. But there aren’t many that know and understand the importance of good structure, easy navigation, and the ability of a website to turn a visitor into a lead. So when you go to interview your next designer, here are some important questions to ask them (and the answers you should receive!)
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As if you needed yet another reason to get your business to the top of search engines, check this out. Some Google users are complaing that they are unable to get to page two of any Google search. The numbers, normally clickable at the bottom of each SERP, are not working.
I’ll tell you who these complainers are not – the people that are on page one!
It does make me wonder, though – how many businesses are focusing on ranking for one or two huge keywords, all the while missing the thousands of long tail crumbs that are out there? Nearly every call I get for potential SEO work goes something like this:
Customer: “How long before I rank for widgets?”
Me: “While I can’t tell you how long it will take, we can certainly put some effort towards helping you rank for that keyword. However, the real gold is in keyphrases like blue widgets and left-handed widgets. Both are phrases that are much more specific, thus bringing in a much warmer lead/customer. “
They’re missing the big picture, trying to put all their efforts (and budget) into ranking for something they may never be able to attain, while missing out on the thousands of customers just begging for their products.
If you love Google, but hate your Enter key, you’re in luck. Today Google rolled out a new ‘tool’ called Google Instant. While it’s really nothing groundbreaking, it is kind of cool to see your results immediately as you type.
Try it yourself: Go to Google’s homepage and start typing in a query
So what’s the big deal? Nothing, really. It’s results without the Enter key. I assume over your lifetime it may save you a minute or so of wait time, but really? A minute over a lifetime? That’s some savings.
Also noted are the posts I’m already seeing on Google Instant meaning that SEO is dead. Really, SEO is dead because someone doesn’t have to hit enter? How does that work? The results haven’t changed.
Lastly, something cool – type in ‘w’ and you get the weather from your location. Or at least from your IP address’s location. Kinda cool, I guess.
Overall effect on business owners? Trivial. Carry on.
This story was inspired by a recent broadcast on WMR with Dave Naylor, one of the industry’s well known and most vocal SEOs. My good friend Russ told me about it, and after hearing it I just had to write a parable based on Dave’s comments.
Once upon a time there was a man who lost his job. Because of the economy and his go-getter attitude, Joe decided to start his own company. Joe was eager to get his new business going, and a big component of it would be online. So Joe went to his favorite search engine and typed in something like ‘buy my .com‘ and minutes later he had registered his business name’s .com address. During the checkout process, he was offered a few other things, including .net, .org and .info extensions for his business. He figured the .com was the only one worth having, so he didn’t get the others.
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