Will Hanke

This week Microsoft launched Bing - their latest attempt at search - ahead of schedule.  I’ve been playing around with it just a little bit, and have seen some interesting results.

In particular, it seems that the results that Bing is providing are about 4-6 months “behind”.  By this I mean, certain links to their results are from older page titles, ones that were changed around 5 months ago.

What does this mean?  Well, not a lot if you’ve got a nicely optimized site that has been around for a while.  But if you’ve got pages that are newer than say 5 months old, they may not be showing up correctly, or at all.

And if you have a page title or meta description that you’ve changed in the last 5 months, it may be displaying incorrectly.  It is in several instances for me, at least.

But don’t worry - I’m sure the BingBot (is that what they’ll call it?) will be around soon enough to re-digest your newer content and changes.  In the meantime, you may want to keep an eye on your visit logs to see just when it decides to finally stop by your place.

Will Bing, SEO, site ranking

I think the power of social media has yet to begin to peak.  The potential out there is just incredible.

Today I met with a potential client who owns several Italian restaurants here in the St. Louis area.  They are (just like every other restaurant) wondering how they can tap into the search engine and social media fields to gain new clients.  With the down economy, people are being more and more select about where they spend their money for dining.  Here’s where Twitter can come to the rescue.

I don’t want to go into the whole explain-twitter-to-me thing, but here’s something cool that many people may not know - twitter can link up to your cell phone, and you can receive updates about whatever it is you choose to see updates about.  You can see what friends are saying, or you can get notified anytime someone uses a certain phrase, etc.

So let’s say I’m looking for a good Italian restaurant in St. Louis and I post a quick note to Twitter via my cell. (Just a note here - if you don’t use your cell phone to do that, don’t think others don’t.  A *lot* of people are using their phones for this and a lot more.)

Using their API and search tools, Mr. Restaurant Owner can watch for phrases like “italian food” and “st louis”, “saint louis”, etc.  Anytime one of those phrases come across twitter, Mr Restaurant Owner immediately (or through automation) sends out a coupon for a free drink at his restaurant.  Or a free appetizer.  Whatever.

Using social media, getting clients that may have otherwise never known about you will get easier and easier.  But if you don’t know how to use the social media platforms to do these things, you’re going to be stuck standing on the front porch hoping customers see your sign.

Will local marketing, site ranking, twitter coupons, Marketing, restaurants, social media, twitter

Earlier this week I attended the Arnold Chamber of Commerce meeting for February.  Arnold is a small town of about 20,000 residents, south of Saint Louis in Missouri.

I was surprised to find so many businesses taking part in the Chamber meeting. Several people who had taken my classes were there, so it was nice to see some familiar faces from the get-go.

The meeting included a lunch served by the people at Ponderosa Restaurant and a drink (water for me).  There were a few announcements along with the opportunity to introduce the guests (me and many others).  I met some nice people and had a good time.

Apparently normally the Chamber has a guest speaker at most of their meetings, however this one backed out, so they decided to do a ‘topic’ instead, and this months topic was Marketing Your Business.  Right up my alley, or so I thought.

The first speaker was from DDI Media, a local billboard company.  She promoted her billboards and told of her pricing schedule.  No mention of  ‘marketing’ tips.

Second and third were salesmen from local newspapers.  They talked about their great subscription base and blurted out their inflated circulation numbers, all in an attempt to get more advertisers.  No mention of marketing tips.

Can you see where this is going?

Next up was supposed to be the ‘Welcome Wagon’, a company that puts (imagine this) ads in a little packet that they give out to all the people who apply for residency permits.  No mention of marketing tips.

Last was the good ‘ole Yellow Book.  This lady was even worse than the others.  She simply read from a flyer that she had handed out and told the business owners about all the great things that YB does.  She mentioned (incorrectly) Pay to Click, and Search Ads, although I guarantee I could talk circles around her about her own product.  It was funny to watch her read what she was selling when it was obvious that she didn’t know jack squat about it.

So, since there was no mention of actual marketing tips (the “topic” of the day), I’m going to simply pretend like I was asked to also speak.

“Thank you for this opportunity.  I’d like to share with you seven tips that you can go back to the office and do today that will help increase your business revenue.

1. Add your business to Google Maps.  Take the time to put in as much information as you can, including your products, services, hours and what kind of payments you take.  Add information on what you do, how well you do it, and verify your address through Google’s verification system.
2. Start asking customers to write reviews about your business on Yelp!, Mixx, and other local-based websites.  Don’t fake the reviews yourself, or ask your relatives to do it - those are too obvious.
3. Set up a blog on your website, and publish something each week (at a minimum).  Listen to your customers, and use their questions as fodder for your upcoming posts.  Blogging for business can lead to very nice ROI.
4. Get a Twitter account, and start posting daily messages about your business.  Don’t be boring, post things that people will find interesting. Link your account to your website, and set up an account through twitterfeed that automatically posts your new blogs.
5. Start tracking your website visitors.  Add Google’s analytics program to your site and learn where people are finding you.  Do you know how many people call you because of your website? …which brings me to number six…
6. Consider getting a call tracking service.  Call tracking lets you get separate phone numbers for each of your marketing campaigns.  You can then track that campaign and literally tell how well or poor it did.  Doing a direct-mail campaign? Get a phone number that only shows up on your mailer. When people call, you’ll know just how that campaign did.  And it’s not expensive.
7. And lastly, consider attending a seminar on Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  You’ll be blown away by the amount of things you can do online that can increase your bottom line beyond what you ever thought possible.  There are competitors of yours out there who haven’t heard about SEM yet, but when they do, you’ll be sorry you didn’t get to it first.

Ok sure, some of this may be self-serving in a roundabout way, but hey at least I’m giving real marketing tips.

I look forward to future Chamber meetings, and the topics they’ll cover in the future.  I could definitely use some education on things like accounting and such, so I’m sure it will benefit me in the long run.

Will Marketing, Saint Louis, content, local marketing, networking, site ranking, small business, twitter advertising, chamber of commerce, Marketing, meetings, social media

We’ve all seen the emails, promising us high rankings if we’d just reply.  Personally I’ve deleted hundreds of them, ignoring their great offers of near-world peace.

For some reason though, today I thought I’d just check one out.  The email was just like the others.

From: Jerry Dennison
Subject: your website
Date: January 21, 2009

We can put your site at the top of a search engines listings. If this is something you might be interested in, send me a reply with the web addresses you want to promote and the best way to contact you with some options.

Sincerely,

Jerry Dennison
Big Block Search

So I thought I’d do a little research on Jerry’s website, and his claims to get me to the top of the search engines.  Which is cool, because I really want to rank for the term ‘SEO’.  I’m sure if anyone can do it, Jerry can.

First stop, BigBlockSearch.com.  It’s a pretty generic website, most likely it is the same landing page as all the other SEO-spam emails I get.  There’s a form that I can fill out to find out more information.  No information about the company, no other pages.  There is a little blurb on the page about Christmas approaching.  I guess they mean Christmas ‘09.  Man, this company is on the leading edge!

There’s two contact us links on the page, both going to linda@.  Hey wait, where’s Jerry?

So I fill out the form (Get a free review of your website!) for one of my newer websites, along with the message ‘not sure what you can do but we need more traffic’.  I don’t want to leave a phone number, so I leave it blank.  Whoops.

Guess I should filled that out.  Interestingly, the title bar says Unable to Send E-Mail - CoffeeCup Form Builder. Ah, coffeecup.  FrontPage’s cousin.

So I hit the back button, fill out all fields, and hit Submit again.  Funny thing, I get the same result.  So apparently they aren’t relying on the website to generate many leads, or their site just happens to be down when I visit.  Either way, it doesn’t look like my chances are good for my one-word ranking.  Darnit.

Next stop: WHOIS.  According to them, the site was just registered in December of 2008, its not even a month old.  Yet, it says that the site is climbing the Alexa rankings like mad, and that it gets over 3000 visitors a month.  Wow, really?

The domain is privately registered, so that’s a dead end.  The server is located in China, and when I click through to the 2 other websites hosted on this server, they both come back as Chinese sites.  WHOIS gives them an SEO score of 68% (I know it doesn’t mean much, but still, shouldn’t it be 100%?)

Next stop: archive.org.  It’s a long shot, but what the heck.  Sure enough though, no info.

Last stop: Google.  Maybe they’ll have some info for me.  I really want these guys to help me rank.

Hey, I’m in luck! My buddy jerry is listed here, linda is mentioned here, and here too.  There are some other mentions, but they are all about the same.

Darnit, it looks like my rankings are still far off.

So the big question still lingers, what is the purpose of all of this?  They obviously aren’t getting much business from it.  3000+ visitors? I don’t believe that.  Especially when their forms don’t work.

My only theory is that they are simply using it as a ruse to gather email addresses for other spam-related mailings.  The SEO stuff is just a ruse to get business owners to fill out the form for their email address.

I should also mention here that I could have emailed “Linda” for more info, but I decided that was probably a bad idea. I’m really hoping I’m wrong, and that Jerry (or Linda) will get me to the top of the search engines soon (sarcasm).

What’s your theory?

Will Marketing, SEO, competition, personalities, site ranking, spam