Brian McQuay
I like to do my part to save the planet and this is just one way in which Onomojo is trying to help. We’ve just recently finished a non-profit site promoting No Plastic Day which is on June 8, 2010. So far we’ve got a decent amount of people joining the event and I’m asking for your help in promoting it further. We all need to do our part to save the planet. One day without disposable plastics isn’t much to ask. Join us and together we can create a better future.
I’ve long been anti-Microsoft migrating first to Linux and then to Mac OSX. I’ve been using OpenOffice since the days it was first released (remember Star Office?). I used Mozilla long before Firefox every came out and even stopped supporting some older versions of IE with Onomojo. Needless to say, Microsoft would have to do something extremely well to catch my eye and even more so to actually get me to use it.
I have a confession to make. I’ve been using Microsoft’s Bing search engine more and more lately. I feel my results are more relevant and less spammy. It seems these days 5 out of the 10 search results on Google are simply screen scrapers reposting content and dumping Google Adwords all over the place. Of course Google is going to rank those higher simply in the name of profits. They of obviously will never admit to that though but think about it. If they generally rank sites with Adwords on them higher, they can make a significant more amount of money per day. Its hard to believe any corporation would ignore that fact. Certainly, a publicly traded company is at the mercy of shareholders who are only interested in the pursuit of more profits. With that being said, Google still has to maintain credibility in its search results so the same game applies but I simply refuse to accept the idea that Google doesn’t inflate rankings of sites that use Adwords onsite. Just do a few random searches and you’ll see what I mean.
I’ve been finding that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is pulling more relevant results and less junk results than Google. I don’t have any data to back that up. Its just my general perception of the results. One thing I really like is Bing’s image search. It does an Ajax call to keep the page scrolling down so you never have to click on the next page. Hover over an image and it magnifies it some with details. All in all, Microsoft is onto something good with their Bing search engine. I think its going to be a major competitor within the next year. I’ve already noticed that I go to Bing first for some types of searches.
People are trendy. They like the latest trends and naturally migrate towards trendy sites. Bing will win more and more search traffic if Google doesn’t up their game. Google long ago stopped actually innovating and instead went into operational mode since there’s no real competition out there. They’ve just been trying to position themselves to maintain that dominance without actually bringing anything new to the table. Bing is coming out swinging. Its only been a few months since it went live and its already making converts out of long time anti-Microsoft people like myself. In my opinion, that says a lot both about the technology behind Bing and the lack of innovation from Google. Take it for what its worth.
I have numerous SEO clients and one thing that I’ve noticed in the past few months is a drastic improvement in Microsoft’s Bing search engine’s quickness to respond to on-site content changes. All my clients are performing extremely well on Microsoft’s Bing search engine first and then the others follow. Yahoo and Google seem on par with each other as far as quickness to update and in rankings in general. Yahoo does seem to occasionally throw in huge random ups and downs but on the most part its in sync with Google’s rankings for most of my clients. Bing’s results however all outperform the other search engines in terms of quickness to respond to content updates as well as its ability to maintain high rankings for new content over time.
I’m not sure what Microsoft did to their search engine when they rebranded it as Bing but it does appear to behave differently as far as rankings for my clients. Despite the low amount of traffic it sends it is positive news either way. Now if only they offered some quality free tools like Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics it might start making some converts.
What I would personally like to see is for a top search engine to publish a detailed description for how to get them to view your site positively. They all keep it behind a black box and let the magic behind SEO consultants do the research but why? Why not just come out and explicitly say here is how to get your site ranked well. Here is what we don’t like. Here is what we do like. Then provide useful tools for optimizing your site to make it better. Offer a free set of SEO tools direct from the search engine. Then have a paid version that goes a lot deeper. I’m sure I’d have all my clients on the paid version in no time. Its not paying for rankings, its paying for the tools to get the site ranked better.
Its a whole new twist on SEO that who ever takes advantage of first might just become the next king of search.
Note: Microsoft didn’t pay me to write this but they should. They need all the positive publicity they can get.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the FTC’s recent decision to fine bloggers for not explicitly stating any compensation received for writing a blog. The FTC will now supposedly fine bloggers for writing reviews of products or services without specifying that they’ve been compensated for it. While the FTC has much bigger problems they should be dealing with like metered cell phone usage, misleading multi-year cell contracts, and software patents in general they are now focused in a direction they have absolutely no jurisdiction over. Will we now have federal blog readers employed with US tax dollars to just read blogs all day and make sure no one is writing reviews without specifying compensation for the review?
The whole logistics of enforcement of such fines is laughable in my opinion. First, what if I host my site in another country? Will these fines still apply? Second, a lot of blog sites have multiple authors with no realistic way for a site owner to ensure every writer is following the rules. Who will be responsible if a writer blogs against the rules? Finally, what will the FTC do if my site in another country and I am marketing specifically for US customer? Are they planning a great US firewall like China so they can excerpt more control over our online commerce and enforce penalties like blocking overseas sites?
Why the FTC even care? Marketing companies have been hiring bloggers to write reviews for years on sites like Pay per Post. My guess is the FTC is really less interested in protecting consumers and instead focused on brainstorming ways to help potentially generate more revenue for the US government and themselves. Its a laughable waste of tax dollars in my opinion.
NOTICE ON COMPENSATION: I received no compensation from the Wall Street Journal or the FTC for writing this blog.
Here is a screencast our account manager, Micah Friedlin, made introducing you to Webster’s Classroom. Webster’s Classroom enables teachers to create free classroom webpages. We just recently upgraded the site to include some new features including password protection, classroom archiving, file dropbox, and more. There were numerous bug fixes and security enhancements made as well.
Over the past few years I’ve worked with a number of different keyword tracking applications. I found that the best reports to send my clients are generated by Advanced Web Ranking. It generates nice PDFs of the keyword progress over time which is an easy to understand visual for my SEO clients. The application allows me to do a little analysis on the competition for our targeted keywords as well. Another thing that I like about the latest version of this application over others is that it allows me to schedule the tracking for all my clients so I can focus on the on-site SEO work and marketing. In addition to that, I can have the application email the reports directly to me and my clients after it finishes. The time saves of using this application over the others that I’ve tried has allowed me to really focus my attention more on improving the website ranking and analyzing the data rather than wasting so much time on simply gathering it. Advanced Web Ranking streamlines things and makes keyword rank tracking easier.
Lately, I’ve been doing more cross analysis of search engine rankings and PPC campaigns to minimize the money spent on search engine ads when we are already ranked #1. Its a waste to pay for clicks on keywords when you’re already ranked #1 for the keyword. One thing I’d like to see in future releases of this app is integration into Adwords and other PPC campaigns so I can easily see which keywords I’m paying for, in what search engine, and what their current rankings are. I’d like to be able to set a threshold ranking to turn on and off PPC ads when the search engine rankings cross a certain placement threshold. Its a time consuming process looking at all the keyword rankings and seeing which ones are in our PPC campaigns and at what CPC. That’s where I’m spending a lot of time these days with PPC management and I have yet to find a tool that does that. It would be nice if Advanced Web Ranking would include that in future releases so I can have just 1 tool that can handle all my SEO & SEM needs.
Besides the missing feature, I still use Advanced Web Rankings search engine ranking software daily to track the keyword rankings of my clients so I can give them quantitative evidence that my SEO techniques work and work well. The maintenance plan that comes with a subscription plan that keeps the search engine parses current in case the search engines change their outputs. Without the maintenance plan, when a search engine changes their search engine output it sometimes breaks the rank checking for that search engine. The maintenance plan keeps them current so you can be sure that the rankings will work for all the search engines you select. I typically use the big 3: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. MSN is basically just Bing now though. If you’re interested in more than those 3, Advanced Web Ranking includes a huge list of other search engines from around the world to choose from.
I recently got asked by a client which top level domain he should pick. His first .com choice was taken so his second pick was a .me domain. I’ve been asked this a few times so I felt I should clear up any confusion.
The only top level domains that have an influence on rankings are .edu and .gov. I have not read anything that contradicts that. The only thing I can think of that would possibly make me want to pick a .com over a .me domain would be purely from a user’s perspective and not SEO related. I think more people are willing to trust a .com or .net domain than a .me , a .biz , or another less obscure top level domain. Other than individual perception of the top level domain, there is no effect on rankings.
I’ve been working with one client for several months now and they are extremely pleased with the results I’ve produced for them thus far. Here is a snapshot of the monthly analytics data for the site over the past year. You can get a larger view of the graph if you click on the image.
I started working with them in July and by August you can see that their traffic more than doubled. From July to now, I’ve continued to work with the client on increasing rankings through seo, link building, and improving visitor retention. The result is that their natural organic search traffic has seen an increase almost 10 times what it was, from 1,800 to 17,000. I’m pointing this out because I like the latest Google Analytics monthly graph view. It really helps in showing trends over time and its encouraging for clients to see the upward results from my seo work.
Its been a long time coming but we’ve finally got our new site design finished for Onomojo. We’ve also expanded our services to include graphics design, logo design, web design, and a whole slew of other graphics related services. That’s in addition to the services we already provided which were primarily programming, seo, and marketing related. Here’s a screenshot of the new design.
I’ve been through the ropes when it comes to SEO and PPC advertising (particularly with Google’s Adwords). Clients come to me either looking for SEO or online marketing solutions. Their objective is obviously to increase their sales and they want it to happen yesterday. The first thing I look at is where a site is currently ranked in search results for their targeted keywords before beginning any SEO or PPC campaigns. I like to also take a look at their Google Analytics data to see what’s already working well for them and to get a perspective of the volume of traffic they’re dealing with. Some business have none of these things setup and are simply trying to make a push to increase online revenue. Whatever their motivation the objectives are all the same and the same techniques apply. Except, however, for my recommendation for PPC ads.
Small businesses which don’t get much online traffic are usually looking for a quick fix and instant gratification. I usually take the time to explain the benefit of SEO and link building to these companies but in the end they usually choose PPC advertising. I’m not against PPC ads but I do have a pretty quantitative reason for trying to dissuade some of my clients from pursuing that route. From my experience, PPC ads only work if you have a high return on a product that has a high conversion rate per click. In essence a high ROI. The problem for many small businesses is that they sell low dollar items which themselves produce a small profit margin.
Lets take a small handmade soap manufacturer as a perfect example of a small business looking to expand their sources of revenue by setting up a shopping cart. A company like this might make a dollar on each bar of specialty soap sold. They aren’t likely to have huge resources like a large technology corporation so their budget for the project is relatively small. Lets say less than 5k USD. Part of that covers development costs and the rest ends up in limbo while I exude the benefits of SEO over PPC advertising to the client. From the perspective of a business if someone tells me to spend a few thousand dollars and it’ll pay off in maybe 6 months but they can’t guarantee first page placement my natural business sense tells me to tell this person where to go. My alternative is to pay per click advertising which will result in instant traffic and likely increase my sales immediately. The choice is simple in that regard and its why many small businesses with little understanding of online commerce end up abandoning their get rich quick online schemes.
Lets dig a little deeper into PPC ads. Lets assume a bar of my handmade soap costs me $3 and my typical order contains 3 bars of soap. Lets also assume I make $1.50 off each bar of soap I sell. Those numbers are pretty realistic examples. I now want to start an online marketing campaign and put in 3k USD to PPC ads for a month. That means I need to sell 2000 bars of soap in a month and have about 666 orders with 3 bars each on average. If we stretch those orders out over the entire month then I need to get about 22 online orders a day to simply break even with my PPC advertising campaign. Now lets look at the budget I have allocated for the month, $3,000. That’s about $100 a day. Lets assume that with my amazing skills I’ve managed to optimized my Adwords campaign so well that I’m getting an average CPC at $0.40. That will give me about 250 visits a day just from my Google Adwords campaign. If 22 of those 250 visitors placed orders that would make my conversion rate 8.8%. Depending on the industry that’s a pretty high conversion rate for online sales. Now take a look at what we just went over. This looks at what we need to just break even and we had to make some incredible assumptions like our amazing CPC at $0.40. A average CPC of $0.60 to $1.20 is more realistic for the targeted keywords but we gave ourselves the benefit of the doubt for this example. We still needed a 8.8% conversion rate which isn’t too probable. Its an example where some simple upfront analysis of the numbers will tell you that my $3,000 is better spent doing some SEO and link building so that I can get natural free search traffic that will last longer than a single month.
Lets take an example of a high dollar product, travel. People spend about $1500 on a travel sale and per sale I may make on average 10% or $150. The example above needs to be modified to have an average CPC at $2.00. If I need to make $100 a day in sales it means I need to make just 1 sale a day or 2 every 3 days. If I’m spending $100 a day on ads with an average CPC at $2.00 I’ll get about 50 visitors a day. If I need just 1 sale from those 50 visitors that’s a conversion rate of 2% which is certainly much easier to get than the 8.8% I needed from selling soap. This campaign has a high likelihood of succeeding and will probably be well in the black at the end of the month.
Travel has a high profit margin and requires a low conversion rate which is why PPC campaigns work for it. Soap has low profit margins and requires a high conversion rate to simply break even so a PPC campaign isn’t likely to succeed. My soap business will end up negative at the end of the month and I’ll likely be bitter at the waste of the small investment I made towards PPC ads.
In summary, SEO is the way to go for small businesses selling products with small profit margins. Its a more calculated and well thought out method of generating sales online. The benefits may take time to show but the payoff is that your online business may actually succeed. PPC ads on the other hand will have you bleeding money with little chance of ever turning a profit.