SEO Tip: Incoming Links

Incoming links are a heavily weighted factor in establishing your search engine ranking (your Google Page Rank).  However, it is not the QUANTITY of links that is important (in fact, too many links from bad sources can actually hurt you), so much as the QUALITY of incoming links to your site.

OK, so what is this "quality" I am referring to?  To define that, let's step back for a moment.  To define what are quality in-links for your specific search engine campaign, you have to first have established your objective.  This involves a thorough analysis including:

1. Defining your competition
2. Determining how your competition is being found on the internet (Read, in this context: extracting the key phrases your competition is successfully targeting)
3. Thoroughly analyzing the competition's targeted key phrases to derive similar key phrases and discover targeted words your competition may be missing
4. Performing a similar analysis of the competition's in-links and deriving a strategy including opportunities the competition may be missing

There is obviously a lot more to the above list, but I can stop there and limit the scope of discussion to factors related to in-links.

*Shameless plug: CDLLC can help you through the process of competition analysis and key phase targeting (steps 1-4), as part of an initial, discounted consultation.  Our special tools automate the initial process of checking your key phrases against the reality of how Google sees you and your competition.

Once you have your competition defined and analyzed, it is possible to evaluate the QUALITY of incoming links of your competitors.  Quality factors include:

• The search engine rank of the linking page/site (#1, #5, #50 in Google results page)
• The number of key phrases in the linked text of the page/site
• The Google Page Rank (different from the search engine rank #) of the linking page/site
• The number of quality links (quality defined by the criteria herein) to the linking page
• The key phrases in the TITLE of the linking pages
• The number of relevant incoming links.

At this point, you have a good idea of your competitions in-link situation, and it's time for the fun part (ok, maybe it's not everybody's idea of fun, but I love it): embarking on your link campaign!

-Crockett Dunn
CDLLC

Posted via email from crockettdunn's posterous

Google Blended Search, Revisited

Sometimes clients look at me sideways when they find out they need to be discussing their products on YouTube or Facebook and Twitter. Why bother? The short answer is: Google recognizes and rewards "buzz" about your website.  For the long answer, and an explanation of Google Blended Search Results, a.k.a. Google Universal Search, read on...

Since May 2007, we have been hearing about Universal Search and Blended Search.  Google was the first of the major Search Engines to unveil blended results as part of their main search results in May 2007 with Universal Search.  ASK was second in June of 2007, followed by MSN in July 2007 and Yahoo in October 2007.  Yet here we are two years later and the discussions have died down a little.  When’s the last time you heard someone in your office discuss blended search?  Of course there are exceptions and early adopters, but in discussions that I have with many, they are not yet leveraging blended search optimization.  How is blended search affecting B2B websites?  Should B2B sites be optimizing for blended search? What is Blended Search Optimization? Blended Search optimization is simply the process of developing relevant content in a format other than a typical web page so that it appears as part of the different types of search results within the major search engines.  There are numerous types of blended search results that are now being featured as part of a search engines main results.  Types of blended search results include videos, shopping results, images, news results etc. Why is Blended Search Important? The short answer is that searchers (i.e.. users of Search Engines) are expecting richer experiences.  They are looking to find relevant information that answers their questions and their need for timely, relevant information.  In the past, this need was satisfied by newspapers, print, radio and television.  With the digital age and with the emergence of digital natives (More on Digital Natives here) and millennials, people are looking for dynamic types of content.  Not just a blue link with a somewhat relevant description.  Hence the need for blended results.  Some users relate better to articles and press releases, others to podcasts, images or videos.  The fact of the matter is, depending on the nature of the searcher’s query, the type of results that they are looking for will vary.  This is why blended search is important.  Someone looking for a new CMS solution may be more tuned in with a video demo as opposed to a webpage that describes what a CMS is.  Blended Search results provide a richer experience and search landscape for the user.  Searchers are looking for this.  They are no longer satisfied with ten blue links on a results page. Does Blended Search Work for B2B? The short answer is that yes blended search optimization can work for business to business websites.  It depends on your blended search strategy.  For example, we know that unlike a B2C site that may feature a large variety of products, for B2B sites things such as optimizing shopping feeds to improve visibility with shopping results may not be the best avenue to pursue (for the simple facts that a typical B2B site may not have a series of  "products" to submit).  However, things such as video optimization, news release optimization, image and blog optimization can all help increase the visibility of a B2B site on a search results page.  From an SEO perspective, blended search optimization can work well for B2B sites. The SERP landscape has become hyper-competitive over the past three or four years.  Being found in Google, Yahoo, Live Search or even other vertical search engines is becoming increasingly difficult.  While it is not necessarily about the rankings, it is about the visibility and about the click.  A 2008 study on blended search from iProspect outlines, the continued importance for marketers to ensure that their digital assets are found within the first three pages, if not the first page, of search results. Blended Search provides an opportunity to accomplish this and in some cases effective blended search optimization can allow an organization to dominate the real estate of the Search.  We have clients who actually represent 30-60% of a Google SERP for a given key phrase as a result of strong blended search optimization. The secret with blended search optimization for B2B sites is that there is no secret.  You simply need to understand your audience and the type of content that they prefer to engage with.  For B2B sites, this means testing the type of content that you feature on your site.  Do users engage with videos better than PDFs?  Or is your audience looking for news updates and articles describing your service/product offering?  Perhaps they are looking for content that is updated frequently such as blog posts or maybe they are simply looking for user reviews and testimonials about your brand.  This is where a social network result such as Facebook or Twitter may prove beneficial.  While technically not a blended search result, social network results for your brand are a different type of result that elicit a specific response (participating in a community setting) from the searcher which is why we classify social network results as a "type of blended result".  The fact is, the searcher may be looking for a different type of result when searching for your brand or related key phrase. Past search research dating back to 2004 shows that typically users will not look past the third page of search results, in fact many might not even click through to the second page of results.  As a B2B site, having the ability to "own" multiple results (and multiple types of results) on page one of Google or Yahoo for a non-branded key phrase can provide a great return in terms of intercepting your audience.  This is what blended search optimization can do for a site.  You can have a traditional website result as well as a video result or perhaps a news result to intercept these clicks and gain this traffic. Three Types of Blended Results That B2B Sites Should Focus On While the following is not specific to B2B sites, here are three types of blended search optimization that B2B sites should focus on: News/PR Optimization – optimizing articles and press releases is a great way to find your site within the blended results of Google, Yahoo or MSN.  The Engines (and searchers) tend to treat news results as more relevant due to the timely information that is within them.  Launching a new version of your software or a new strategic partnership can provide useful information to your target demographic.  As a result a well optimized press release can show up in Google News and in the blended search results displayed by Google.  Not to mention that in Google, News results tend to appear above the top organic results of the SERP or after the first one or two organic results meaning that they often occupy prime real estate within the results page.  Furthermore, deeper analysis from the above mentioned iProspect study indicates that search engine users click "news" results more than twice as much (36%) within blended search results as they do when they use the vertical "news search" (17%). Video Optimization – for whatever reason video results seem to appear more often than other types of blended results such as image results, book results etc.  All B2B sites should feature some video content on their site and/or on a video aggregator site such as YouTube that demos a product, explains their service, communicates their unique competitive advantage etc.  Video may resonate better with certain demographics and as a result create more engagement with your brand from the SERP.  The messaging in the video can be more targeted than say the information that a user receives once they click through the "blue link" result from the results page.  Perform a search in Google for "supply chain management".  Depending on the data center that you hit you should be returned with a couple of video results (as well as a couple of image results) in addition to the typical blue link text results that would normally appear. Blog Optimization -blogs, love them or hate them are garnering more trust as a resource than typical web results.  Optimizing your blog posts and posting regularly can be a great way to tap into the blended results for a topic specific keyword query.  Blogs that feature relevant and informative posts about a specific topic have been known to show up in the main search results of Google.  The thing with blog results are that they can appear "blended" in within the normal results, meaning that they look like a typical result, or they can be labeled as a "Blog Result" indicating that they are in fact a blended result.  A search for "online marketing" or "Susan Boyle’ in Google returns both. Blended Search is all about content and the type of content that you optimize for your audience.  Does it apply to B2B?  Yes of course it does, for blended search optimization is simply another way to gain visibility in the organic/natural search results of a search engine.  So while rankings may be dead, visibility is not.  Blended Search allows you to optimize content and different types of content in order to intercept your audience to begin or build a relationship between the searcher and your brand.  So while they may not convert on this initial visit, they will at least engage with your brand and become more aware of what your organization has to offer.   Originally published at marketing.jive.com: Does Blended Search Optimization Work for B2B?

-Crockett Dunn Owner CDLLC

SEM: Does an industrial material handling equipment supplier and forklift parts distributor need a social media campaign?

http://store.hgmforkliftparts.com/

When the on-page optimization is maxed out, and the tie-breakers are all off-site variables, the answer is a resounding "heck yes!"

If you click the link above, I will not give you a free iPad, but Bill Gates will send you to Disneyworld if you forward this to a friend ;).


-Crockett Dunn
Owner
CDLLC

Windows 7 Tip: Easy Tutorial Creator

While Windows 7 was in development, the engineers over at Microsoft had the smart idea to build a troubleshooting tool called, "Problem Step Recorder."

What this tool does is follow your mouse and record screenshots in order to document what you're doing.  You can also enter notes as you go about recording your business.  It even creates an HTML file slideshow for reviewing the actions, screenshots, and comments.

Turns out, this is a great way to document actions for tutorial purposes!



Check it out: Start: psr.exe.

Enjoy!

[source: maximumpc.com ]
 
-Crockett Dunn Owner CDLLC

The Current State of Popular-Inquiry According to Google

A recent study of Google's suggestions for questions of the "WH" variety (who, what, when, where, why, how, which) revealed the following top themes (after normalization for celebrity a television media):

1. Pregnancy, Marriage, Love, and Kissing Skills
2. Weight Loss
3. Poop

The original study can be found here.

























































This is the study.
How:

 Why:

What:

When:

Where:

Who:

Which:

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

Feeding Froogle: Search Engine Marketing for E-Commerce

Remember when the Internet was simple?

The all-important e-commerce beast Google Products was originally known as Froogle. Froogle was a pioneer in compiling products from many online stores and websites into one big "store front."

This idea we call "The Dog Pile" approach (by the way, dogpile.com was a pioneer in multi-engine key phrase searching, way back before Google was . . . Google) to product searching, has resulted in new opportunities for marketing discreet products.

Products are listed in Google Product Search by name, category, description, price, original website, and other attributes—sometimes, even a picture is used and indexed by Google.  The result?  A giant storefront you can be a part of.

Presumably, you want ALL of the information about your products to show up in search engines. And this is in addition to the traditional marketing of key phrases!

Why does this matter? Because, there are OPPORTUNITIES out there you don’t want to miss. Opportunities for not just a second or a third, but many additional store fronts.

Now add this: there's a synergy to be created between your product search results and your key phrase results. Done right, this causes dramatically higher search engine listings for both!

In e-commerce, there are other places to rank high. We don't usually recommend putting a great deal of effort into the "other" search engines, but in e-commerce you create traction for your brands by paying attention to several commerce tracking and promotional engines. These include Amazon, Google Products, Yahoo Shopping, eBay, Bing Shopping, Nextag, Shopzilla, and more!

Getting listed on some of these are free. Others have payment structures similar to Google AdWords and Pay-Per-Click, where you pay for views and clicks, or bid and pay a market-established rate for views and clicks.

To take advantage of these opportunities, you need to know how to feed them. Grossly over-simplified, that means you setup an account, then either manually enter your product data or feed a specially structured data file to each service.

Not a big deal, until you realize that to maintain ranking you need to monitor each service for changes in product listing requirements, or resubmit data after specified expiration periods, which may vary from one service to the next.

Of course, this is one of our areas of expertise. We've been feeding Froogle hundreds of thousands of products since it was a fledgling Google Labs pre-beta product. We've created top ranking for large sites and small, trained clients to manage their own data entry, and done it for them (when they realized that programmatically extracting thousands of products and attributes into specially structured files according to the requirements of each product listing service was something we could do better and more cost-effectively).

We often say that much of what we do isn't rocket science; if feeding the e-commerce search stream is something you're interested in doing yourself, good news: there are volumes of information available online on the topic.

But just because you can do it doesn't always mean you should. If you want someone to get you up to speed, or skip the learning curve and outsource it altogether, give us a call.


Happy Search Engine Marketing.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Albert Einstein On Experimentation, Investigation, and Internet Technology

Albert Einstein didn't just pioneer modern physics with his enduring and revolutionary theory of General Relativity, he also said some smart stuff about the value of independent curiosity and experimentation. Let's apply some of this to how you can use the internet to help your business.

Words of Wisdom

1. "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
2. "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
   

If Al's second quote scares you, fear not; we're talking about research on our dime, not making mistakes with clients' time and money. Here's what it all boils down to:

• Ask, ask, ask, inquire, question, and ask some more.  Then experiment, test and do some more experimenting.
• Investigate and Innovate—don't be afraid to lead rather than follow. Then when you've got it all figured out, be sure to keep testing—and verifying results.
• Never settle into a finalized "method," because the only constant in the internet world is the light-speed change (get it, physics people? light speed... constant?). Yesterday's thinking never works for today's internet.

At CDLLC: we've already done the research. The experimentation, the investigation, the trial and error for you, on our dime. We've got close to fifty combined years of experience with this stuff. And we keep doing the research. It's part of our business.

Tested results are what matter, not just copying what you read in an instruction manual, or delivering the status quo, or doing what everyone else is talking about and doing. With the internet, any documentation on the right way to do something, especially SEM and SEO, is outdated by the time it's published.

And Google's "what matters and what doesn't" rules aren't published at all; experimentation and ongoing research are the only way to ensure the great results we deliver.

We're fond of saying that most of what we do isn't rocket science. Dr. Einstein, tongue planted firmly in cheek, would have said the same about his work. And he's still the guy we all go to when it comes to relativity... and space... and time.

It's time for your business to get serious about its Internet Presence. We're here to help.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President, Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

SEO/SEM: Are People Searching For the Words You're Paying For?

Business owners generally have a pretty good idea about what to say to their customers and what's important to them. Why? Because they know them.

But what about web-based, potential customers? Can you know customers you don't have yet, can't identify, and even once you acquire them might never meet?

Internet search-engine-based marketing (or SEM, of which SEO is a part) is different than making yourself available to people on terra firma. You need to know what people are looking for and how that relates to your business. It's not for the faint of heart, either.  You almost certainly want to hire an experienced, expert SEO/SEM consultant (and yes, that's us)

We could turn this post into an advertisement for what we do, but let's instead point you at a freebie: here is some information on "choosing key phrases". Go ahead and read it; we'll wait . . .

Head spinning? Asking yourself how you can check all that stuff? Let us explain the process:

When you hire CDLLC to do your SEO, the first thing that we do is look at the key phrases you're thinking about marketing. We look at your site, your industry, and similar or competitive businesses, and we create a list of keywords that we know we can use to boost your presence.

Why? because if you're an obstetrician (for example) and want to rank high for the phrase OB/GYN, OB-GYN, OB GYN, or OBGYN you'll find three problems:

1. competition for high rankings on generic phrases is tremendous
   
2. most people who search on any of those phrases are not really the people who are seeking your services
   
3. the four phrases look the same to humans, but are all different to Google.

We address these issues by gathering information on the words that you believe are important. We tell you how many people are searching for these words, and how competitive the fight for each word is.

Here is a simplified version of what it looks like:

Top of the list (competitive, popular phrases):

Bottom of list (unpopular, noncompetitive phrases):

And then the fun begins: we make sure you're spending your money going after the right traffic, in the right way. Which is fun for you because we do it for free, and fun for us because we understand and like this SEO stuff.

It's only after you have a good strategy and can spend your money wisely that we go to work. Yes, that's right; the research phase is on us. Contact us now if you like. We love working this magic.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Avoiding the 6 Hour Windows 7 Hunker-Down, or, "Zen and the Art of Restoring your Work Enviromnent."

BEWARE (see below)*

This month, many power users found their pre-release copies of Windows 7 expiring. As with many software pre-release-becomes-the-real-thing software events, a smooth upgrade (you know—so you keep your apps and settings?), was not an option.

Time for the dreaded custom/advanced installation. The "clean install."

Let's step back a moment and begin to look at this Zen view of upgrading one's OS and restoring one's work environment.  Over the years we've done hundreds of OS installs for ourselves, and hundreds more for clients. So, yeah, we're qualified to speak a little on the topic. Here goes:

Change is painful. We all like to be settled. We have routines we're comfortable with, we like knowing where things are, how things work, to whom what responsibilities apply, and when things happen. This applies in both our "real" and virtual worlds. (And of course, telling those apart seems to get harder every day.)

So when you boot up your computer after a clean operating system installation and see a blank slate (no email, apps, bookmarks, memorized passwords... none of your precious "stuff!"), it can be a little overwhelming. And the temptation is to hunker down and reinstall everything just exactly perfectly right back where it should be.

This is what we call, "The  6 Hour Hunker-Down."

RESIST! Yes it may seem like the right thing to do, but if you can tolerate a little discomfort (that which does not kill us . . . ), you will be rewarded.

Take it easy, one step at a time. If you have planned properly (see below*), there is no rush.

Here's the big secret to keeping your sanity and not withdrawing from the world for hours, maybe days.  This is the trick to a Zen method of reinstalling your work environment:
 
REINSTALL YOUR STUFF ON AN AS-NEEDED BASIS.

Seriously: you will save a lot of time, and likely some misery. And you will have avoided the all-too-common mistake of copying all of your old garbage (you know the stuff you have been meaning to "clean up" on your hard drive, in your bookmarks/favorites, on your email system?) to your new work environment.

Quick case study:

Installed Windows 7. Everything is different; all my stuff is missing. Most of my day is spent in a web browser (hosted software services are no longer just a VC buzz-word and a promise), but there are some things I don't use the web for.  Some desktop apps I depend on.  For example, I still use MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, and a handful of other programs that don't have web-based alternatives I like (hey that's just me).

So this afternoon I reinstalled my favorite business tool, MS Outlook. I configured my email accounts, restored/configured my primary and archive PST files, and then I stopped.  Seriously I just stopped and resumed my business as usual.

There's lots more to do, but none of it is immediately critical. For example, my email handling "rules" included a lot of outdated, no-longer-necessary stuff, so I chose to trash them all and rebuild each rule AS NEEDED, when I see emails come in that would have previously been sorted, moved, or whatever.


This time I even trashed my web bookmarks/favorites and re-built those as I went about my real business (of course I have an emergency backup). Seriously: why carry with you hundreds of links you've long forgotten about, and may even point to resources that no longer exist?  In the physical world, that would be considered a borderline mental disorder.  Compulsive hoarding I think it's called.

Web development software? Graphic design apps? I'll install these when I next use them. And it'll happen, but . . . I don't need everything today.
Back to hoarding.  That's what this all boils down to.  The human desire to hang on to attachments and not lose anything— that's what keeps us stuck and creates a lot of problems.  And letting go of attachments?  That is the key to, "Zen and the Art of Restoring a Work Environment."



That's my $0.02 on reinstalling a work environment. Now please read the fine print that follows.


*Although this article talks about a philosophy for reinstalling one's work environment after a clean OS install, it DOES NOT cover process specifics. Always back up everything on your computer and work with a consultant before performing any software upgrade.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Two Cures for Boring Website Syndrome. Part 2: Content & Function

This is part two of our two part series on Boring Website Syndrome.. Part one can be found here, http://cdllc.blogspot.com/2010/02/two-cures-for-boring-website-syndrome.html

When approached by new clients, there are a few common opening statements, requests, and complaints we hear, such as:

• I need "Help" with my website.
• I need a complete "Redesign" (which a lot of the time has more to do with engineering than design).
• I need "something more 'current.'"

But our favorite opening statement—and perhaps the most honest—is this one:

"My Website is Boring."

The Boring Website Syndrome is our favorite because it presents an opportunity for further diagnosis. We have the opportunity to get to know our client better and probe for unique needs relative to the business they're in.

15+ years experience in internet consulting have taught us that Boring Website Syndrome breaks down into one of the following two categories, and often both:

1) The website looks old.
2) The website doesn't offer or do anything . . . it doesn't engage visitors.


Today we will look at #2 My Website Doesn't Engage My Visitors.



Have you ever thrown a party, only to see your guests milling around for just as long as they felt necessary to appear polite—and then bolt for the exit? More than likely, these people didn't feel engaged.

On the Internet, failing to engage your visitors means they'll be leaving . . . immediately. Let's look at what it takes to keep your visitors hanging around longer:

The first issue is content.  It's possible to have an incredibly ugly website that offers good enough content or functionality that the bad design does not interfere with its popularity. Some long-tail blogs are like this ["long tail," is a term coined by the book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.].

Want examples?  Click this link to see who carries Google's #2 ranking for "growing habenaro". Or look at Authorize.net's members' section. Although slightly updated in past years, the Internet's most prominent credit card processor has lived through poor organization and design inconsistencies, but it always "did the job".

The point? With incredibly valuable content (here content refers to words and functionality), it is actually possible to overcome poor website design (outdated fashion). However, it is the rare & very fortunate company that can simply say, "Click here to buy my stuff, and that's all you need to know," or, "Your eyes will just have to tolerate the pain of horribly designed site if you want my brilliant information." 

The point is, to attract and keep visitors you must offer something valuable, words or tools, and in return they give something; their time.

It can be as simple as offering specific, detailed information about your offerings, or as advanced as leveraging your hard-earned, de-facto, "expert blogger," position on a topic.

Everything above discussed the "words" or "content" part of what a website offers.  Now let us look at functionality.

All of the "stuff" that can be done on a website is a comprehensive enough topic for a week of articles. So for now, let's just list a few website functionality ideas than will engage your visitors, and maybe even get them to return.  Consider:

1. How easy is it to give you money? Do you take credit cards? E-checks? Does your business accept these 24x7x365, from any computer or mobile phone, via an automated, no-staff-intervention-required method?
2. Do you accept reservations and appointments via an online scheduling system? Make it fast and easy for people to schedule with you from anywhere/anytime!
3. Are you taking advantage of an online store front?
4. Are you collecting inquiries from your website? This is the easiest way to convert curious visitors into customers.
5. Does your website include a Help or FAQ section? This brings customers back to your site, helps them solve problems, and converts them into repeat customers.

There are even more advanced offerings that are surprisingly easy to add to your web site, like live, online support, incident tracking/trouble-ticketing, optimizing your products into search-engine specific feeds, and creating password protected areas for "special people."  And people love when you make them feel special.

"Boring Web Site" means out-of-fashion, out-of-date, and/or non-engaging.  The solution?  Consult with a web firm about content, functionality, and style overhaul, using the above list to beging the brainstorming process over what your website should offer visitors.

You can even use CDLLC if you like . . .


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC


-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Two Cures for Boring Website Syndrome. Part 1: Fashion

This is part one of our two part series on Boring Website Syndrome.. Part two can be found here, http://cdllc.blogspot.com/2010/02/two-cures-for-boring-website-syndrome_23.html



We were recently referred to a new client who asked us to make their website more engaging.

The simplicity of the word, "engaging" is terrific. It's more personal than interactive. More descriptive than customer-oriented or useful.

And so the thinking began . . .

Generally, we're approached about existing sites with a variety of opening requests, including:

• People need "Help" with their website.
• Companies want a "Redesign" (which a lot of the time has more to do with engineering than design).
• A request for "something more 'current.'"

But our favorite opening statement—and perhaps the most honest—is this one:

"My Website is Boring."

The Boring Website Syndrome is our favorite because it presents an opportunity for further diagnosis. We have the opportunity to get to know our client better and probe for unique needs relative to the business they're in.

15+ years experience in internet consulting have taught us that Boring Website Syndrome breaks down into one of the following two categories, and often both:

1) The website looks old.
2) The website doesn't offer or do anything . . . it doesn't engage visitors.


Today, let's explore number 1, the Old Website.

This is the easiest one to qualify, but hardest to quantify.  It's very subjective. Website old-lookingness is a function of fashion. There were technologies in style 5-10 years ago that have gone the way of leisure suits and bell bottoms, and these technologies resulted in a distinct look, or "fashion," in the sites that employed them.

Some "old-fashioned" items:

* The gray-background, center-aligned website.
* Embedded background music.
* The 3 resizeable, big-bordered frames/panels.

. . . we could go on and on.

And there are technologies available today that weren't options 5-10 years ago. Some will stand the test of time, while others will go away. And this is one of the many areas in which we can help you. After so much time in the web world, we're pretty good at separating the passing, frilly technologies from the solid, lasting ones.

And, of course, we're well-versed in the latest design fashion—this includes the layout of your website container, global elements like navigation and search, the look of your deeper menus and navigation elements, and the division/layout of the primary page content inside each page container.

All of these, geeky as they sound, come back to the very practical issues of both the way your site looks and its function.

We've pointed out before that getting you set up on a Content Management System (CMS) creates drastic time and money savings by making redesigns and content publication a snap. Now let's add to that:


Making your web site look good, act the way you need, and easy to administer all go together. And we want that to be as simple for you as possible.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Luddites: How May We Be of Service?

Years ago Dad came home from his business and informed us, "They took away my calculator and replaced it with a computer." Like so many others during this time, he was pushed into accepting technology change.

Just last month, Dad-in-law announced something similar. "I got a computer so I could look up specs on our website.  It's quicker and easier than the paper catalog."  Slightly different from the above case, he was responding to the reality that technology makes a lot of things easier.

Do you know the word Luddite? Today its most-used form is to refer to a slow adopter of technology. But historically the term's roots are a reference to the anti-industrial revolution movement in the early 1800's. British textile artisans rebelled against wide-framed looms, fearing for their livelihoods in the face of technological advancement. They took their name from the fictional textile rebel Ned Ludd, and acted out by destroying mills and factory equipment.

Everyone resists change. Answer Guy Central is a whole business devoted to addressing this.

Evolution made us naturally conservative. But with virtually all of our evolving happening before technology we're stuck with this cool but hard-to-understand stuff and a fast-moving economy— and we have built-in aversions to both.

This aversion is no illusion. An interview with the authors of TechnoStress reveals that EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT of the population feels uncomfortable with technology. And there are real and measurable physiological stress responses to technology: sweating, increased blood pressure, elevated heart rate, and dry mouth!

Why is an internet company talking about Luddites and TechnoStress? Because we can help. There are all sorts of stress coping mechanisms, but let's take a lesson from the industrial revolution—outsource difficult change to the specialists (that's us).

Both of the Dads above had the same great reason for being late technology adopters, personally. They each run highly specialized businesses . . . so why be an expert in something else when you can rely on outsourced expert IT support to take care of everything for you?

That's what we do with websites, search engines, e-commerce, back-end business/database systems, document management, forms, online payment... whatever you need chances are we do it.

Anything that makes money, saves money, and/or increases efficiency . . . call us.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results," or, Winston Churchill & Search Engine Marketing IV: Conversion Analysis

If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you'll love what's next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Today, #4:

We know a guy who works in the restaurant business whose entire strategy comes down to one phrase: "Inspect, don't expect." There's an SEM equivalent: Check Your Results.

Traffic comes from many sources. Don't you want to know from where, and which of your efforts are paying off (the question was rhetorical; of course you do!)? Think for a moment about the many ways site promotion happens. Here's a quick list:

• Websites
• SEO
• Off-page factors (linking strategies)
• More comprehensive SEM activities (Adwords, Pay-Per-Click, etc.)
• Blogging
• Newsletters and direct email
• Other offline marketing

We have techniques to measure ALL of these—yes, there are even tricks to measure your web traffic from offline marketing!



Beyond measuring where your website traffic originates, you'll want to keep track of a few important things:



Conversion: What's conversion? Conversion is when a visitor is CONVERTED into something more. It could be a direct sale, a viable lead, a client, an appointment, or even something as simple as an entry on your mailing list.


Aggregation: A fancy word that in SEM terms means traffic origination measurement combined with and compared against conversions to figure out what return you get from each source of traffic.


Fine Tuning: The complexity of what we do at CDLLC starts to creep in here, but here's one simple concept —SEM takes time, both because it's a cumulative process and because you need to resist the temptation to cut corners by altering many variables simultaneously. Change one variable at a time and wait for results. Changing too many things at once as you pursue SEM Nirvana removes your ability to identify the changes that lead to positive results.

And you thought this was easy. It is: Just contact us, and we'll do the rest . . .

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

"We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give," or, Winston Chrchill & Search Engine Marketing III

Enjoyed our riffing on Confucius? You'll love this: Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Today, #3:

At CDLLC we've been building web sites for a long time- since the WWW was just a little baby. And we're proud of our work. Some of our clients have sites designed with very simple purposes in mind, while others are quite complex, and broad in their scope. But one thing they all have in common is that they look good . . . to the person or company they represent.

Hopefully, of course, they also look go to the people who stumble upon them.  And people that we drive there with SEM efforts. But since others' reactions are tricky to gauge, the way a web site looks really does have to reflect the personality of the party displaying their corporate personality before anything else.

The problem with this is the potential for your web site to become a vanity project.

How do you create a web site without it becoming just an advertisement?  How do you create a website that attracts people rather than talking at them?

The answer is simple.  Be honest.  Share information.  Just like life, you gotta give to get.

So whether it's a newsletter, website, or blog, share, share, SHARE knowledge and information.  Similar to this new world community and global economy we are living in, the days of business information protectionism are limited.

Offer something to your prospective target.  In doing so, you get to prove your expertise while increasing the likelihood of winning business... and loyalty.


To echo what we said in our previous post. Publish, publish, publish. Tell people what you know about the things they're interested in, and keep your target audience in mind, rather than writing to existing customers and vendors already in your industry.

People will notice.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

"Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential," — Winston Churchill's SEM Part II

If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you'll love what's next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Today, #2:

In the previous segment we talked about the need to publish regularly. The success of your SEM efforts depends on it. Today, we extend that point to include the way you say things in your published works and what you say:

You say important things repeatedly.

Do you remember how many time you were told "look both ways before you cross the street!" as a young child? The message sunk in. We all know way more about Coca-Cola and McDonald's than matters, but we sure do remember who they are. And like these examples of repetitive message delivery, your job in SEM is to drive points home over and over again.

Whatever you feel about that message, the point is clear, isn't it? Tell a story. Tell it again. Then look for new ways to tell the story and new places to tell it in. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Which, naturally, brings us to budget.

We've seen businesses "do search engine marketing" once, and then stop. And it works! But just like with Yellow Pages advertising, the SEM work you do has a limited shelf life. Buy a Yellow Pages advertisement just once and it will become less useful when next year's version of the book comes out and progressively less useful over time as people replace the book that has your listing in it with a newer copy that has no such listing. And when was the last time you looked in a Yellow Pages, anyway?

The Internet has all but replaced that way of looking for people to do work for you, and a new version of the Internet "comes out" every single day. Churchill was right about that continuous effort thing, don't you think?

Lacking continuous effort, you'll ride an SEM campaign up the search engine rankings, sink soon thereafter, and then then sink even further until you start your SEM efforts again. And each time you allow a sink cycle you make it a little harder to climb back up.

Budget for Adwords, Pay Per Click, Sponsored Links, Off-Page Optimization, Blogging, and On-Page Optimization, implement them all, and stay on top of them.

Or . . . you guessed it . . . let us take care of the whole thing for you.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

"To Improve is to Change; To Be Perfect is to Change Often," or, Winston Churchill and Web Content

If you enjoyed our riffing on Confucius, you'll love what's next. Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Winston Churchill will now address your needs for Search Engine Marketing!

Amazed that a man whose heyday was several decades before there was an Internet has so much to say on the topic? This will take four installments:

1. "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
2. "Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential. "
3. "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."
4. "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."

Today, #1:


Anyone in business—especially the INTERNET business—over the past 15 or 20 years knows that the only real constant in business is that there is no constant; you must count on change being a continuous state of being. Agility in coping with that change is important for all businesses on many levels. In search engine marketing terms that level is your web content.

Search engines like you more the more often your content changes.

Search Engine Marketing is the art/science of getting your content ranked highly, in the places you need it to stand out. While there are many other factors involved (and we take them all into account) in getting you top ranking in Google and other search engines the single most important one is fresh content. An unchanging, static, stale website will torpedo your efforts. And unlike the unreliable German U-Boat torpedoes Churchill so easily countered, this one will sink you fast.

Truly, short of a major offense getting you thrown out of the search engine indexes having a stale site is the worst thing you can do for search engine ranking .

While "perfect" is too strong a word to associate with a single factor of change, I can say with confidence that CDLLC can and will get you a perfect (#1) listing in the search engine(s) of your choice. But it starts with content.

Bottom line—publish, publish much, and publish often. This is the easiest, most common sense thing you can do for your search engine ranking. We can even help you create content if you aren't sure where to start.

And then, we'll take care of the rest. Churchill may not have been willing to forecast the upcoming actions of Russia, but we can forecast better search engine rankings—and make them happen.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

"Never trouble another for what you can do yourself." -Thomas Jefferson and Web Design

In his letter to Thomas Jefferson Smith in 1825, Thomas Jefferson included the following two items in his Decalogue of Canons for Observation in Practical Life:

• "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today."
• "Never trouble another for what you can do yourself."

Just as with our friend Confucius, TJ's wisdom applies to your business web presence.

In web context the translation is this: Eliminate the bottlenecks that slow down and reduce efficiency in your web content publishing process. i.e. : reduce unneeded expenses of both time and resources.

Everyone is a content contributor—or needs to be. Why send word processor documents to a webmaster for translation to "Internet language,"  when you can handle most of the work yourself in your content management system (CMS) , having authors self publish? Yes, there are times when you might want the kind of relationship with your webmaster where he does certain things for you that you could do yourself.  However, if someone's time is more valuable spent programming and working on databases and web servers than acting as an administrative assistant, shouldn't you strive to work that way?

With CMS, you can often publish web information as easily as you can write it on a word processor. That's the kind of process CDLLC implements, and you should ask us how simple it would be for us to do it for you.

Save time. Increase efficiency. Save money. Make your life and those of the people you work with easier and more satisfying.

Or just keep throwing away money instead; your choice.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

CMS is a Beautiful Thing, or Confucianism Part IV

"Good people distinguish things in terms of categories and groups."

In prior Confucianism-inspired posts, we talked about the benefits of using Content Management (CMS) at your website. We've made the case for organizing, ordering, and arranging web pages, so now onto breaking bottlenecks in controlling costs and maintaining efficiency while moving forward with today's standards. With navigation management addressed, here are some other bottlenecks that we eliminate by using a CMS:


1) Without CMS, each time you redesign the website look-and-feel you create a need for extensive programming. This becomes both a people management and a cost issue.
2) Now add the need for multiple contributing editors/authors having to get their content to a "webmaster," and costs explode. Again.
3) Adding functionality, like forms, e-commerce, and online payment? More programming and webmaster skills get added, too. A CMS reduces the costs associated with these—tremendously.

CMS makes life easier by separating/disentangling content editing, copy writing, and navigational elements of your web site, design, and functionality.

1) Design becomes a separate module- a wrapper for the web pages. With CMS you change this design wrapper in one place, and the changes take effect globally throughout every page of the website.
2) As many content editors as you need can login, protect pages, and change just the content they're responsible for without the risk of breaking the design.
3) Applications that "do stuff" are programmed and arranged independently, so modification and re-programming creates no risk to the rest of the website.
4) And while we've already mentioned this, it bears repeating for the cost savings it brings you: changing the order and hierarchy of the navigational links becomes as simple as making a few clicks with a mouse.

Sounds almost like magic, right? With a CMS, the magic comes from putting all your stuff inside a database, grouped and categorized with an eye toward Internet presentation as needed to suit your company's needs relative to customers, vendors, employees, and whomever else stumbles upon it. The pieces are stored separately so they don't get entangled with one another, and "global site elements", like search engine META tags, polls, online payment, and sign-up forms are all grouped separately so changes to them only have to be made once!

And with a database, EVERYTHING is easier to categorize and group. For example, if you set up and write an FAQ section and it grows unwieldy, it's stored in the database so modification of the Q&A is a snap.

CMS is all about simplicity. How much so? Let's take our buddy's words, and summarize them as though he was hosting a radio program, circa 2010:

Confucius, out. (thanks, Ryan Seacrest!)


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President, Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

From Web Pages to Web Sites, or Confuciansim Part III

"Good people order and arrange"

Had enough Confucius yet? 'Cause that old dude had the Internet pegged!

Remember the days of the coal-and-steam-powered internet, when you had to walk miles in the snow to a university to make changes to your website, and ration your disk space usage because there wasn't enough to go around?

Ah, sweet memories. Your personal "Home Page." Your Corporate "Home Page." Build it once and it'll last years . . . just like a when-the-heck-did-they-last-change-that-thing old billboard!

Guess what? They don't make 'em like they used to, and you can't build 'em the way you used to.

That shoddy billboard became the cover page for a leaflet, as you created specialized pages with unique information to grab peoples' interest. And yep: that Web PAGE became . . . a Web SITE!

Content multiplies. Suddenly there are more pages, more information, more content that needs to be grouped and arranged according to context.

Sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? It can be. Without site management tools, or a Content Management System, whenever the hierarchy of the web pages changes, a new navigational menu needs to be programmed. And today a good website has to change fast. Monthly, weekly, even daily, depending on your objective and audience.

This is not your father's shoddy old billboard.

One (huge) benefit of building your site on a Content Management System is the automation of menu creation. Manually programming a navigational menu on every one of those pages becomes a thing of the past. And you can even make the changes yourself, easily, using a method that feels just like using a word processor.

Ordering, arranging, re-ordering, re-arranging, it's all simple.

So why aren't you using a CMS ? It probably comes down to inertia. Your old, billboard-style web site is good enough for your needs.

Maybe, but that's becoming a less-and-less valid way to look at doing business on the Internet. No, you may not need an e-commerce system, because not everybody "sells stuff" online. But if your web site is to be worth any more than your "when-the-heck-did-I-last-use-one, anyway?" business cards, you need more. And without a CMS in place, you're making your job harder, and more expensive.

And that old billboard? You know how you laugh every time you pass it and wonder why its owner doesn't update it? Case closed.


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President, Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

Planning Your Business Web Presence, or Confucianism Part II

The exact quote from our old friend Confucius is "When they do good things, good people plan first".

In fifteen years in this business, we've seen a lot of web development projects, and gained a wealth of experience.

Typical, our clients come to us saying something like "Build me a web site with an awesome design. Make it look sharp/cutting edge/cool/like xxx site".

Then we hear the "secondary" issue; it's usually expressed as "Here's what we want the site to say. This message, that functionality. We want a business overview, employee profiles, contact information . . . you know, all the usual stuff. And here's what we want the website to do: Shopping cart, pay online, FAQ's, password-protected client/employee center, everything categorized in a way that makes sense both to us and everyone who visits, search-able, and with an easily browse-able library of PDF documents. And don't forget user registration!".

Then, as the project is heading toward completion, we hear the big one: "Why don't we come up first in Google? What do we need to do to improve our search engine ranking and get closer to the top?"

Real estate agents tell you that the three most important things in their business are location, location, and location. In the business of creating successful internet presence it's all about planning, planning, and planning!

And the real secret to a smooth and cost-effective website project is to concurrently and proactively plan the above three stages. Not incidentally, this is what CDLLC does.

We used to be shocked when we came across work that hadn't been executed that way, and we come across it often. Of course, it's usually exactly such a failure to plan that leads new clients to us, wondering why their web presence isn't yielding the kind of results they were sure they'd achieve when they hung their bright shiny virtual shingles.

Why does concurrent planning matter?

Businesses that plan their design first and the content and functionality afterward often discover that their content doesn't fit into the design. For example, websites with lots of sections and snippets of information may need a very modular design, while sites with large chunks of content, like publications, reviews, or editorial content are (usually) better served by a wider, vertically stretchable design. Are you selling things directly over the Internet? Designs for special applications like shopping carts or document libraries must be tailored to fit those applications.

Simply put, putting design before content usually results in a redesign, which costs money. Call us crazy, but we like to save our clients' money.

Then, amazingly, it's only after design and content are addressed that the question of marketing and traffic gets looked at!

Did you start your business without a marketing and sales plan already in place? Of course not. So why would you build a website without knowing how you were going to attract the right traffic and deliver your sales message? You can build out your web site and fill it with loads of rich content, and not until months later discover that the site doesn't come up in the right place or rank highly for the for the right keywords in Google.

The result? Content re-writing, and even modification of the design so search engines can find you. Oh: and maybe even a whole new cost item added for search engine marketing, post-budget creation.

The takeaway? Work through all of the steps for creating a successful web presence concurrently and you'll save money and not go over budget with surprises & re-works.

So let's re-work Confucius, with an added slice of Gordon Gecko: "Planning is Good. Planning Works."


-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC, and
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services

A History of Web Content & Confucianism

"Study the Past if You Would Divine the Future"


Confucius would say: The Internet is a Big Deal. And Big Deals Change, but then return to whence they came.

Or something like that.

The Internet has been “around” now for several decades. We can trace its beginning to when Tim Berners-Lee “invented” it (and no, Al Gore was not in the room), but the Internet didn’t start doing anything until 1991.

That's when the first web page went live. Hardly anyone noticed, since if you were on-line at all it was through a company like Compuserve or America Online, but the Internet was starting. What went on line was simple, though: the pages all looked the same, with either left or center alignment throughout, and a single column of text formatted in one font with a few different sizes for emphasis.

A few years later, we had tables, which originally were designed for presenting data in rows of the same ugly text. But them something amazing happened: people commandeered the tables for formatting how you saw things in addition to what you saw, and then CSS (bye-bye tables) came along, and that idea for consistent presentation was adopted by the pretty police, too.

It was a short jump to limited interactivity. First we had Javascript, which when combined with CSS became Dynamic HTML. But at the same time there were problems between different browsers as we all started noticing that Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari didn't do quite the same thing.

Then e-Commerce came along. Site management tools. Software to make creating web pages easy. Everything was exploding by the year 2000, and over the last ten years all the tools, all the technologies, and huge changes in the way people do business evolved into what we have today:

Everyone is a web publisher.

But all the tools and all the ancillary ideas that the tools have created (or is it the other way around?) haven't made this any simpler. "Site Management" has become "Content Management", and while it's more precise, it's also more involved. Distribution of your information is important, too; not everyone who wants to hear what you have to say wants to take the step of coming to your web site, and many people who do so are using SmartPhones with tiny screens. We have blogging, Social Networking, and now the dreaded Search Engine Optimization. Yikes.

So the future is based on the past, and while we all might like to think that we're creating cool new stuff the point of all these tools remains getting your information in front of your clients. A simple task, made far more complicated by technology.

At CDLLC, we manage the technology for you. We know the past, and can future-proof your web/business needs. We use (for example—here's one more piece of "progress")—database-driven web sites separated from your content to make redesigns easy.

You become a content editor, not a programmer. We do everything else.

Because even as things get harder and harder, easy still matters.

-Crockett Dunn
Owner CDLLC

-Jeff Yablon
Chief Operating Office, CDLLC
President
Answer Guy Central Business Support Services