SEO in The Desert

By Lena Morrish and Dima Nikolayenko

Are you looking to boost the flow of positive traffic to your business website? Using Google AdWords can not only help you to boost the flow of traffic to your website but can help you to target your advertising to the key web searchers who are more likely to find your offered lineup of products and services useful. AdWords is also an excellent passive income opportunity that can help you to boost your revenue; the following list of tips will help you on your way towards finding success with Google AdWords.

1. Be Persistent And Remain Patient

It is important to be patient with your campaigns and also to be prepared to see slow-results until you have figured out to how best adjust and customize your Google AdWords to target your key audience.

2. Track Your Traffic

A key tip to successfully using Google AdWords is to ensure that you are carefully tracking your click through traffic so that you can gain an understanding as to your return on investment (ROI). This is fairly simple to accomplish by simply viewing the number of click throughs from your pay per click advertising and comparing them with the number of fresh new sales or sales leads that you have received since starting up your Google AdWords campaign. read more »

By Michael Jenkins

Most everyone starting a new e-business struggles with their website. Either they pick an awkward web design, are unfamiliar with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), know little about rankings, or fall victim to other mistakes that will make their grand entry into the exciting world of e-commerce difficult.

It is true! Some websites are horrible and their performance underwhelming. This makes you wonder what they are doing wrong as their competitors, who launched their websites at the same time are accelerating just fine.

The web would be boring if all websites were alike and fortunately for us, many offer variety and differentiate themselves well in their industry. Unfortunately for those who don’t seem to get the hang of it, many bad websites have been observed over the years and still exist today. Some have been designed by small businesses, while others belong to large corporations – this shows you that generous funds, as well as the expertise of designers and developers, does not always guarantee an incredible conversion rate. Take, for instance, online computer sales giant Gateway and electronics favourite Radioshack. Gateway averages a 0.25% conversion rate, while Radioshack is not doing much better with 0.75%. That means that this major electronics retailer receives only about 7 orders per 1000 website visitors. Ouch!

Low conversion rates can be worrying but are certainly not the end of the world, as they can be turned around with the right action. It will require some of your spare time, but with dedication, the tips offered here, and a bit of extra work, you too can create a well performing website. read more »

By Richard V. Burckhardt

I’ve had my eye on an external hard drive for back up purposes for a while and when I got the opportunity to review the Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB USB drive, I jumped at it. With a few exceptions, it hits the mark for my purposes.

The drive itself is in an attractive upright storage case with a light indicator (a very BRIGHT one) giving you an indication of how much space you have used on the drive. The case also includes cooling vents (no fan), cable lock port, power and activity lights.

Hooking it up is a breeze, just plug it into a USB port on your computer and then into a power outlet. The WDSmartWare software installs easily, setting itself up as a virtual CD drive (which could become a problem if you use more than one My Book), and is intuitive and easy to use, but basic. You can schedule backups, retrieve backed up files and see the status of your drive in your taskbar.

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By Richard V. Burckhardt

This is The Web Optimist’s Top 10 List of SEO Tips from the recent BlueGrass LA conference held in Marina del Rey. Vanessa Fox and Adam Audette provided incredible search engine optimization presentations and these are what stuck out above everything (at least in my opinion).

1. The TITLE tag is the most important tag. Ask someone NOT involved with your site to review your title. Is your title what they would be searching for?
2. Build your site based upon what people are looking for, NOT the other way around.
3. Clarify your business goal, brand objective and value proposition. These are extremely difficult to do, but essential to your success. Answer these first!
4. Make sure what is ranking for any given keyword is relevant and not a 404 or non-related page. We’ve all seen these pop up in the serps.
5. Solve a problem for your customer. Make sure the page does this with proper SEO and a call to action. It comes down to answering user questions.
6. Don’t put SEO front and center. Ditch the the huge list of links. Good SEO is unseen and should be an invisible layer. Make the best user experience, then leverage SEO.
7. Give the SEO team the power to do things.
8. Give the SEO team their own development resources (This is my FAVORITE!).
9. Make SEO part of the work flow, but don’t bring it into the development cycle too early. However, make the SEO team aware of product and value development as they progress.
10. Great content + Great User Experience + SEO = Traffic

Thanks to Loren and the whole crew at BlueGlass LA 2010. Fantastic conference!

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

By Richard V. Burckhardt

Does your business have multiple locations? Does each local location want to do its own PPC marketing? Then each local site needs its own domain to do local paid search marketing.

This is a tip from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

By Richard V. Burckhardt

I’m preparing to do a presentation as VP of Search for FramesDirect.com  for the Performance Marketing Expo in Miami this September and would like a local Palm Springs area test audience for “SEO Tips Even Mom Would Love” – a roughly 20-minute Powerpoint show.

Ideally, I’d like to do this for a business or organization group of at least ten people in a conference room. Yes, that’s the catch. You will need to provide the facility. A projector or large monitor that can be connected to a laptop will also be required.

And, of course, I am offering to do this free for the lucky group. I’ll take questions regarding the presentation and general SEO afterwards. read more »

By Richard V. Burckhardt

It’s been a while since my last post about WordPress plugins, so it’s about time to update some of the top ones on my current list. I haven’t had a chance to test all of these on WordPress 3.0, but all work fine in 2.92.

WPing.fm - This plugin, as you can probably figure out, works with Ping.fm. Every time you edit or publish a post (you decide to do one or both) it is sent to Ping.fm, which sends it to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, MySpace and a ton of other social sites (again, you set all of these up). Great for pushing out new posts across the social world.

Raw HTML in WordPress - For those of us blogging about SEO, web design or development, this plugin solves a world of headache. Since WordPress won’t allow you to display raw code in a post without totally borking it, this plugin wraps itself around the HTML so that it displays as, well, raw code in your post. For example, take a look at my post Top 10 SEO Must Do Tips and you’ll see this plugin in action in tip #4.

Page Links To - This one is a must for any blogger’s toolkit. This plugin allows you to redirect a page or post somewhere else. For instance, let’s say you want to create a link to an external site in your main menu where your pages are listed. You can create the page, name it what you like and have this plugin redirect the link to that off site location. The link in your main menu will have whatever text you set up for the page, but when clicked on, the link will 301 redirect to the URL of your choice rather than open the page (a 302 redirect is available, too, for those rare times it is needed).
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