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.

I’ve been working on a link exchange management service lately and its now ready for production. There are still things that need to be done on it but its now operational and ready for public consumption. The service is called, LinkLuna, and you can use it to manage your link exchanges. Best of all its a free service that anyone can use. It integrates easily into your existing site using our simple api and I even had a Wordpress plugin built to save you time integrating it into your blog. Try it out for free and let me know how I can improve the services.

I was surprised to come up empty handed when searching for a Google Base Rails plugin. I wanted something that would allow me to easily create a feed into Google Base using their API. I didn’t find anything so I took the quick and short term solution and created my own Google Base xml feed. Its based on RSS 2.0 so its not incredibly difficult but I could have saved a few minutes if it was already written for me so here it is. My Google Base xml generator in Ruby on Rails. Its not complete and only has the fields that I specifically wanted for my products. Your feed will likely contain other fields so check the Google Base docs for more information on customizing it. You’ll notice that I thought Google Base was going to pull my xml feed when I initially wrote this but it turns out I have to use the API and this is just good for generating the xml file which you then have to manually upload to Google Base.

First, I added this to route.rb

Then I created controllers/google_controller.rb

And finally, I create views/google/base_feed.rxml

There are obviously calls to helper methods in the base_feed.rxml file like product_url and photo_url. I use those so I can easily generate pretty seo urls anywhere I need them. You’ll need to replace those with however you create your urls.

This should suffice for at most 31 days when all the products I just added will expire in Google Base. I doubt I’ll bother creating a Google Base Rails plugin unless I see a noticeable increase in traffic and sales so don’t hold your breath.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite a long time but somehow never seemed to get around to it. I started a SEO, online marketing, and web development company called Onomojo a while ago. I’ve just been so busy since its conception that I found it hard to find the time to blog about it. I’ve decided to take a break from the hustle and bustle of the routine and say a few words about us.

We offer a complete marketing package for online businesses who are looking to increase their exposure and increase their revenue. A lot of businesses throw money at expensive marketing firms and end up with little to show for it. We found that in most cases the marketers weren’t developers and the developers weren’t marketers. Onomojo is different. We are all programmers, designers, and marketing professionals. This gives us an edge and the ability to offer complete marketing packages that complete the necessary learning loop to achieve success.

Any successful business must learn from what it does right and learn from what it does wrong. When your marketing agency has to communicate their wishes to developers the intentions are often lost. Programmers aren’t typically interested in the marketing aspect of development. Marketers usually have no clue how to program or design. We are different. Our developers have a passion for SEO, marketing, graphics design, and everything else it takes to make a company successful. Our feedback loop of what works and what doesn’t is extremely short with a complete package. We learn from the marketing and SEO and we directly apply that learning to your site design and content. We take learning from CPC ads and traffic analysis and we apply those lessons learned to make your site more effective. Onomojo offers complete online marketing packages for business looking for a competitive edge. Visit our site at http://onomojo.com and fill out the contact form for more information on what Onomojo can do for you and your company.

I’ve been ranting and raving lately about how Google’s search sucks. There are numerous reasons but lets just focus on relevancy of the results for this rant. Anyone using Google lately has seen the spammy websites that come up on search results. By spammy I mean those sites which are nothing more than screen scrapers, web directories, google adwords pages that use search results to generate static pages with scraped content mixed with more adwords, and on and on. Most of these junk sites have tons of Google adwords all over them and so of course why would Google care if they are ranked #1? They don’t and that’s precisely the problem.

I’m rambling on about Google because anyone with a profitable website knows that Google is your primary traffic driver (most of the time of course). Google used to weight external links to your site very heavily. As a result, people started creating link farms and easily getting around that. External links still count of course but more for going from one tier to the next in their ranking scheme. Yes, there are multiple tiers. Relate that to primary and secondary indexes and you’ll know what I mean. Since everyone realized how easy it was to fool Google with external links to your site they altered their algorithm ever so slightly over the years to make internal linking much more important. That’s why you see all these junk sites now a days. They’re is a very straight forward way to create a site with a good internal linking structure. Think of tags, relevant tags, and similar concepts along with your traditional site hierarchy type linking structure as the way to create a well connected internal linking structure. Google will eat this up and the junk sites that employ this sort of design are proof that they rank internal linking much higher than external links to your site.

Now what’s one to do about all this mess? People and business are always going to find ways to get ranked high in search engines. Its the name of the game in online commerce. As a result, there will always be junk sites like the millions that Google is indirectly creating (because their algorithm favors them). The solution that I see is a combination of ideas that are already present in their own forms in one way or another. Search results need to learn who I am and what I mean when I use certain word. For instance, searching for the word ‘rails’ might mean I’m looking for trains or it might mean I’m learning about Ruby on Rails. A good search engine of the future would learn from my search behaviors and somehow be able to pick the context out of the words I’m using. It needs to learn what sort of sites I favor over others. I hate Google adwords junk sites yet I get them all the time. This sort of site structure along with its abundant links to Google’s Javascript for adwords could easily be understood as something I would rather not see. Learning will be key to the future of search.

I mentioned understanding the context of my words without me providing context (rails). That implies that search engines will need to figure out some type of semantic meaning from pages other than just words and what words are near them. That’s a problem that some are already attempting to solve. Its a huge scalability problem though since parsing semantic meaning takes much longer than a simple dumb indexing of words like Google does. The future of search will definitely include semantic meaning whether it just be a more sophisticated word indexing that effectively achieves semantic understanding or one that truly parses out sentences for parts of speech and such. Combine that with a little machine learning and you have yourself a pretty good search.

Finally, some suggest that social bookmarking and rating sites such as Reddit are the future of search. I disagree. Mob rule is never good. However, if it were to create a hidden set of like minded individuals for me (based on who means what with their search terms) it could get a better understanding of who I am and what I mean when I say lisp. Then again, what happens when I’m a geek all my life and I suddenly have a kid who has a lisp. Will it always be up to the user to figure out how to find their results? Will businesses and individuals always be able to ruin search engines with junk sites that have figured out the algorithm? So far that’s the case. A little learning and a little semantic understanding should do the trick though.

Microsoft has a spam filter that once it thinks you’re a spammer will pretty much never allow you to send legitimate emails. For any internet based company, emails are critical to the operation and need to get through or there’s no business. Microsoft has developed an approach through Sender Score Certified where they’ll let you pay them to be whitelisted. Its pretty much the only way I found to get off their shit list. The cost is about $1500 in all and has taken me 3 months or so to complete. The whole process was a big run around over and over sending me to different people and sites to do silly tasks. People rarely responded to any emails or phone calls I made and I had all but given up on it when they finally responded with a few minor changes I needed to make to our site in order to complete the process. Email has always been a free thing to deliver. It seems to me that Microsoft has found a way to capitalize on the fact that online companies must be able to send emails by forcing them to pay to get added to their whitelist. Basically, if too many people click on this is spam then you’re learned as spam and you’re screwed. You’ve got to pay to get whitelisted at that point. Sucks for online companies but its a great, albeit sleazy, business strategy for Microsoft to make some extra cash.