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:

• Why Shotgun Marketing is a think of the past
• Why You need a CMS
• What Google Thinks About Your Site
• How to Spy on Your Competitors
• Plenty More Tips

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.

A Really Dumbed-Down Explanation of How the Internet Works

When you’re sitting at home, and you decide to order pizza online, you pull up your browser on your computer.  Then you type in a URL, such as pizzahut.com.  Your computer then sends a message to your DNS, normally your local ISP (the company you pay for your Internet connection) asking for a translation of pizzahut.com to an IP address.  An IP address is simply a block of numbers (like a physical home address) that identifies where the pizzahut.com information exists on the web.

Your ISP then identifies that address online and requests the default HTML file related to that particular address (the pizza hut home page).  Once received, that file’s contents are sent back to your browser, and your browser translates that code into the web page you see before you.

All of that happens in a matter of seconds.  As soon as you type something else in, or click a link, the process starts over again.

Shared Hosting

Most small businesses are hosting their websites on a shared host.  That means that there’s a server with hundreds (maybe thousands) of websites, all housed on the same hard drive.  Every one of those websites share the same IP address.  Shared hosting is a terrific, cheap way to host your website.

But there’s a problem.  A few, actually.

1. You have no control over what else is housed on your server.
   If there’s a porn site (or hundreds) on the server, the server could be blocked or banned by companies like Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
2. Your load speed could be affected.
   If there are some popular sites on your server, its possible that the server can’t handle the load.  This means some websites could not be displayed, or the websites will take a long time to load.  Not good.
3. Spammers can screw up your day
   If someone on your server decides to send out an unsolicited email blast, your server and emails could be blocked by companies like Barracuda.  This means a ton of your clients may not receive the emails you’re sending out.
4. You’re just another website in the mix
   Being on a shared host could mean that you’re one of ten, fifty or hundreds of other similar businesses.  You aren’t set apart.  You’re just part of the mix.

Fixing the Problem

The easiest way to fix this problem is to get a dedicated server.  A dedicated server is just what it sounds like – a server that only houses your website.  Problem is, they’re darned expensive! Hundreds of dollars per month.  Since most businesses don’t need a complete server, there must be another way.

There is – a static IP address.

A static IP gives you your own ‘address’ on the Internet, not shared with anyone else.  Basically putting your website on an island, you’ll no longer share the same reputation as the many other websites probably hosted on your server.

Some hosting companies will let you purchase a static IP address, others will not.  The average price for a static IP is around $4/month.  It’s one of the best low-priced things you can do to set yourself apart, and the SEO benefits are worth $50 bucks a year.  Well worth it.

By the way, if your hosting company doesn’t do static IPs, you’re free to switch over to Lighthouse Technologies

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.

What is your website address?

That is the thing that looks like http://www.localbusiness.com. If there is an @ symbol in it, it’s an email address and not what you’re looking for.

What is your business?

What do you make, sell or provide? Do you sell cow bells to rock drummers? Do you sell shoes to old ladies? You know your business so you know what you do.  Write down 20 things that you sell and who you sell them to. Order them by either how profitable they are or which are the most popular.

How do people describe the products or services you provide?

Do they call them comfort shoes or orthopedic shoes? I don’t give a damn what the real name or technical term is. You aren’t selling your products to professionals in your own industry, you’re selling to the general public and you have to sell to them on their level so start by using the same terms that they use. Write down 20 terms that you hear people use to describe your products and services.

What city or cities do you do business in?

Do you work in St Louis, Los Angeles or somewhere in between? Write down the names of all the areas that your clients come from. If you are a mobile service, write down the areas that you are willing to travel to.

What other businesses in your list of cities have websites?

Do your friends have business websites? Do your kids have their own blogs? Write down any website owner that you can think of that you’re friendly with or if they’re in a similar industry. That will help a bit down the road.

What professional or civic organizations do you belong to?

Again, write them down, each and every one of them. If you don’t belong to any, you’d better join some. We’ll talk about that shortly.

How many links are there coming into your website?

If you’re asking what a link is, don’t worry. Many business owners don’t know and very few know how many links they have coming into their site. So let’s get educated. A link is the picture or text on a web page that you click on to move to another page. You need as many of those links as you can get. They should be coming from other websites and linking to yours. In case you’re wondering why you need links, links are power and currency in the popularity contest that is the Internet. The more incoming links you have, the more important Google thinks you are, therefore the higher they are going to rank you. If you have no links, you’re just like the fat kid in gym class. Got it?

Now that we have the major questions out of the way, let’s put it all together.

1.      Your website address is the address that they need to link to you. Memorize it!

2.      Now look at the list of items that you sell. Pick the 3 most important ones and number them. These are what people search for and what makes you the most money.

3.      Look over the words that people use to describe your products or services and see which ones describe your top 3 items. These are your keywords and you tell people that these are the words that you want them to link to you with. Some people will do it. Others won’t. Don’t worry if they don’t. It’s just an added feather in your cap if they do.

4.      Now for the city or cities that you work in. Those are alternate keywords or additions to your previous list of keywords.

5.      Look at your list of friendly website owners and tell yourself “I am going to call 5 of these people per day and ask them for links from their website to mine”. Then act upon it! Give these people your website address and the keywords that you want them to link to you with.

6.      Find out who the webmasters are for your professional and civic organizations and ask if they will give you a link on their “Members” page.

7.      Keep track of everyone that you ask for a link. You’ll want to check back every month or 2, just to be certain that your links are still there. Some people may want a link back to their site and that is okay. It is better if you get a 1-way link but a reciprocal link is better than none.

With these 7 steps, you are ready to hit the ground running and building links from local businesses. Remember, the Internet is a popularity contest and you want to win it, but you have to do it honestly without buying links. The search engines are smart enough to know when you bought the Prom King/Queen election and they will smack your site back down below where it was before.

Tim Biden is a Los Angeles SEO Professional and the owner of Village Ads. You can follow his nonsensical ramblings on twitter: @villageadsseo.

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.

Reactive advertising (“sales are way down, we’d better advertise!”) rarely works well.  It’s done in haste, usually without really focusing on the target audience.  Reactive ads are easy to find – they mention ‘what they do’ and ‘heres our sale’.  They beg for immediate response and most often miss the target.  Wasted money.

And now they’re even further in the hole – no customers and their marketing budget is shot.

And it’s not just radio.  Other examples of what I term ‘shotgun advertising’ include billboards, newspaper ads and TV spots (especially these new local spots on shows like ‘Show Me St. Louis – very expensive and provide real short term results).  And I won’t even mention PPC (whoops).

Being Proactive in Good Times and Bad

Proactive advertising should actually be considered an investment instead of an expense.  Putting money and time into building your Facebook Business page is a good example.  Building a following on twitter will help you build your brand – if you do it right (consistently).

SEO falls in this bucket too – it’s a long term investment that doles out great benefits over a long period of time.  A smart SEO campaign will have a very nice ROI which only compounds over time.  Imagine if you ranked for ten great phrases this month. Then next month you ranked for twenty. Then thirty. The first ten are still bringing you customers, and now so are the others.  Keep your foot on the SEO gas and you’ll dominate the web.  And domination means revenue.  Your proactive investment is producing lots of fruit over several seasons.

If you’re business is in trouble now, or you’re starting to feel the economic crunch, do something proactive today that helps you climb out of that hole. Start blogging. Create content.  Read some blogs that give great advice. Attend meetups from business leaders in your community. Invest something and reap the benefits.  Then do another.

There are businesses that have seen record years in 2009 and 2010 because they invested in a long term approach back in 2008.  Had they put that money into a radio ad or TV spot back in 2008, would it still be producing results (and driving sales) today?

But no more.  New things are coming.  Good things.

Within the coming weeks, I’ll be relaunching both the Lighthouse Technologies website and the WIMB site.  They will both be WordPress-driven sites (who doesn’t love WordPress?).  Watch for the announcements on this site and in my newsletter.

Also, many of you found out about my business, and maybe even SEO because of the teaching I’ve done at the local library over the last 5 years.  Many of you folks have asked about more classes, a wider range of topics, and a bigger place (the library only holds ten people at a time).

Well, I’ve taken a step in that direction, too.  I’ve started a MeetUp group, and I’d love for you to join.  The group will meet monthly, in limited seating amounts (around 50) and will each month feature a different topic related to SEO, link building, social media, etc.  From time to time we’ll have featured speakers and workshops.  I want to help you get your business to the top of Google, Bing and Yahoo!. The meetups will not cost, although at some point I will be adding on some in-depth teaching sessions & workshops that may require fees.

To join the meetup, simply visit this link and throw your name in the hat.  You’re not required to attend every month, but rather if you see a topic that you want to learn, join us!

Lastly (for those that are afraid of people), I’ll also be announcing a new series of webinars that you can attend right from your PC at work, home or on the phone.  I’ve already done a few and they were well received.  I think you’ll really enjoy the content you get from these, so stay tuned to my newsletter for the upcoming dates and times.

I’m excited about putting all these things together for you.  And I look forward to helping your business completely dominate the Google, Bing and Yahoo! rankings.

More traffic, more customers, more money!

As my kids say – Relax, I got this.

Getting Started

The day you looked at your website and decided that it needed help was the day you realized that your competition was passing you by.  And no one wants that.  So let’s find out what you need to do from this point forward.  Let’s make a plan, execute, and (ultimately) profit.

The Design

Many business owners come to the decision that their site is old and out of date because they are active online, visiting other websites, and ultimately they end up comparing theirs to their competitors. That’s not a bad thing, it’s good.

You’re always going to have competition. What you need to do (and you already are) is to make sure you stay ahead of them. Visit their websites, see what they’re doing right and take notes.

Do a search for businesses in your industry that are in other states. See who is ranking at the top, visit their sites, and once again take notes on what you like and dislike. Write down the URLs of sites that really impress you, because you’ll want to pass these on to your designer.  Make sure you take note of colors you like, fonts and layouts that are pleasing to you.

The Designer

The next thing you’ve got to do is find a designer – and there are lots out there! I recommend you visit your local Chamber, talk to friends, or ask someone in the IT industry who they recommend.  Get their URLs and check them out.  Is their site SEO friendly?  Run a quick Website Grader on it to see how they rank.  Visit their portfolio and run similar tests on their clients.  How do they stack up?  How do their portfolio sites look? Are they all the same? Completely different?

Stay away from designers that offer templated websites. You’ll never rank well with them, because you’ll have the same code as many, many others. A custom design is the only way to go.  This also applies to offerings like GoDaddy Websites, Intuit, and many others.  Don’t get sucked into some easy to design scheme, you won’t be happy.

More Reading: Five SEO Questions You Should Ask Before Hiring a Designer

The SEO

Today there’s no question that building a search engine friendly website is imperative for your business to succeed. This leads you to three choices when building your new website:

1. Hire a designer that knows SEO.
   But don’t take his word for it – ask him the questions I mentioned above.  Most web designers don’t understand SEO.  Nor do they want to learn it.  They want to build you a website and hand it over.  This is just what I did (unknowingly) for seven years.
2. Hire an SEO during the design phase.
   This option is recommended- if you have the budget.  Hiring an SEO expert to join in during the creation phase of the website can give you a nice advantage come launch day.  You’ll have a search-engine friendly website that can climb the rankings quicker.  The SEO will already know the ins and outs of your site, and will be able to help you get those conversions and calls-to-action right from the start.
3. Hire an SEO after launch.
   This is what happens most often.  It either happens because simply of budget issues, or because the website owner just found out that they needed SEO.  Either way, it’s not a deal killer, but you’re definitely at a disadvantage.  Since your site is already launched, and the search engines are already indexing pages on your site, the things that you did wrong (from an SEO standpoint) will have to be re-done.  This can cause a serious lag time between when you fix them and when the search engine spiders come back to consume those updates.  Changed URLs and updated heading tags are just a few things that can cause problems.  And problems mean longer engagement of an SEO expert.

The most common scenario I come across is definitely number three.  While it’s not the best, in most cases it’s just the way it is.  Shake it off and keep pressing on.

The CMS

I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to mention the content management system (CMS). This software allows you to make changes and updates to your website on the fly – taking away the need to rely on your designer for future updates and changes. Those days are long gone – and any designer who tells you that you’ll need to pay them for updates should be crossed off your list.

The most common CMS’s are WordPress, Joomla and Adobe Catalyst.  If you’re building a shopping cart, you should check out Magento and osCommerce.  If your designer tells you he wants to hand-code your website from scratch, he better have a really good reason.  Really good.

The Decision

Once you’ve decided which way to go, have fun with it.  Be specific up front with what you want and what you don’t want.  If you haven’t signed up for a newsletter service, I recommend doing so.  aWeber is what I use.

Your designer should contact you within a week or two with a mock-up of your new site.  You’ll probably get a home page preview and an internal page preview. Go over them carefully, take notes about changes, but understand that major changes may incur additional costs.

Consider your SEO options (listed above) and you’re on your way to a new site!