Website design Brisbane Australia, web site design Brisbane, blog design Brisbane, Australia, web copywriting Brisbane, web site hosting Brisbane by Flip Interactive

Here’s an article I wrote for the print version of a local newspaper The Westerner, intended as a primer for those just starting out in the confusing world of online marketing.

MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS ONLINE

How successful are your online marketing efforts lately? Are you getting a good return on investment from your web site?

To maximise your results you need a sound strategy based on three key elements. First, make sure you have a great product or service to market. If you don’t think highly of what you’re selling you probably need more than a marketing strategy at this stage anyhow. Read the rest of this entry »

A subject we are asked about more and more frequently by clients and prospective clients is search engine optimzation, or SEO. To many it seems SEO is something of a black art, and achieving top search engine rankings is akin to distilling the fabled alchemical gold. And perhaps it is.

Now although SEO is not a dark art - sorry, I meant service - that Flip Interactive offers, it is a subject we pay a lot of attention to. We think you should too.

So when it comes to expertise in this area, we pay close attention to what SEO guru Jill Whalen has to say.

Today’s post comes courtesy of Jill’s most recent newsletter. For those of you looking for guidance on engaging an SEO specialist, Jill provides sage advice on ensuring you engage a real search engine optimization specialist, not a quack. So, over to Jill.

10 Signs That Your SEO Is a Quack
By Jill Whalen

There are so many SEO/SEM firms cropping up that talk a good game but don’t
deliver results. This is in part because there’s so much information that
is freely available about search engine optimization. On the surface, SEO
sounds easy — and it really is — once you’ve had a number of sites to
experiment with. What’s even easier than SEO, however, is discussing SEO as
if you know what you’re actually doing (when you don’t)!

Here are 10 signs to watch out for that may very well indicate that your
potential SEO is a quack. Please note that one of these individually may
not be bad, but if you notice more than 2 or 3 of these when speaking with
any SEO company, you may just want to head for the hills!

1. Your SEO company talks about Meta tags and Google PageRank (PR) as if
they are the magic bullet to high rankings.

For the most part, there’s no reason to even bring up the keyword Meta tag
nor toolbar PR in a discussion about what needs to be done to get better
search engine exposure for your site. Both of them are issues that quack
SEO companies will talk about because they actually believe they are the key
to SEO success. They are not. I’ve discussed in previous articles the Meta
keyword tag’s lack of importance, so I won’t go into that again here. In
regards to PageRank, increasing the little green bar graph’s number should
never be the ultimate goal of a professional SEO campaign. A good campaign
will automatically increase your real and true PageRank (as measured by
Google) without your specifically setting out to increasing it on your own.
Since PR doesn’t bring you traffic and sales (nor rankings), increasing it
should not ever be the main goal of your campaign. This fact is of course
lost on SEO quacks.

2. Your SEO company’s site (or those of their clients) has the same Title
tags on every page. Sounds crazy I know, but I’ve seen this more than once!
I once got a client who had previously used a very major SEO company that
most people have heard of. They had been with this firm for a whole year,
and yet the Title tags on every page of their site were all the same (the
name of the company). Since Title tags are probably the most important (and
easiest) thing to change on a site, any SEO company that can’t do this one
basic thing for their own site or their clients’ is most definitely a quack!

3. Your SEO company talks only about optimizing for the “long tail.” Now,
don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with long-tail keyword phrases, as
they can bring a lot of traffic when all is said and done. But you don’t
need an SEO company if those are the only phrases you’re interested in –
you can do it yourself just by writing articles. Your SEO company should
not be afraid to optimize for the actual keyword phrases that most people
would use at the engines to find your site. Yeah, it’s gonna take time and
money to go after the most competitive keyphrases, but there’s usually a
happy medium. Most sites have plenty of phrases that are somewhere between
long tail and highly competitive. Those are the ones you definitely want to
target.

4. Your SEO company tells you it’s ALL about links (or ALL about content).
SEO isn’t ALL about anything. It’s about lots of things all added together
to make the perfect combination for your site. A linking campaign alone
will never be as effective if you neglect your on-page content, and vice
versa. Be sure that your SEO company looks at your site from all angles and
makes sure all your bases are covered. Otherwise, they’re probably a quack!

5. Your SEO company tells you that you need a linking campaign even though
you already have tons of links and are a well-established popular site in
your niche. Not every site needs every SEO service out there. Just because
your SEO company likes to sell link-building doesn’t mean you actually need
it for your site. Why should you pay for something you don’t need? The same
thing goes for sites that already have great, well-written, optimized
content. If you’ve got that, perhaps you just need a linking campaign to
help boost your traffic and sales. Don’t allow an SEO quack to fix what
isn’t actually broken.

6. Your SEO company is almost surely 99% quackish if they tell you that they
can rank your brand-new site in Google for keywords that will bring you
traffic within a few months. In fact, if they claim they can do it in less
than 9 months, they’re either inexperienced or lying. Google has an aging
delay that is most certainly related to the age of the site, as well as a
certain trust factor. It is only the very rare and wonderful site that can
get around this delay. But if your site is like most, you’re going to have
to look to the long term for your Google results, regardless of what the
quacks might try to convince you of.

7. Your SEO company never mentions that they may very well need to redo your
site architecture so that your important pages are prominently featured
within your site navigation. In this case it’s very possible you’re dealing
with an inexperienced, quack SEO. This is usually something that is not a
quick fix, so most quacks are reluctant to discuss it with you (if they even
know it’s important). But if your site architecture is not
search-engine-ready, everything else you do will have much less impact.

8. Your SEO company can’t provide you with any quality references. This one
pretty much goes without saying, but do be sure to get references, and do be
sure to actually call them. Yeah, a reference may very well turn out to be
their cousin, but you should be able to get some feel for the company you’re
choosing if you can at least talk to some references.

9. Your SEO company tells you that you have to have a DMOZ listing or your
site will never be able to get high rankings. Sure, a DMOZ listing is
great, but it’s a link just like any other. Submit and forget about it. If
you don’t get in, it’s no big deal — there are plenty of other links you
can get instead.

10. Your SEO company’s site mentions that they’ll get you high rankings in
AltaVista, Fast, Inktomi, Lycos, Excite, HotBot and the like. If it does,
you are 100% positively dealing with a quack! ‘Nuff said!

Jill

*******

Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. Jill’s handbook, “The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines” teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.

Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports, SEM seminars and is the co-founder of the new search marketing and website design company, Search Creative, LLC.

It’s been awhile since our last post. So why the hiatus?

Well, we’ve been busy readying a new service for introduction, ah ……. now!

So I’m excited to announce …….. Ascent Hosting, our new business-class web hosting service. Ascent Hosting offers its clients premium web hosting services - powerful servers, peak uptime, performance and, importantly, a strong dedication to great customer service and support.

For more information check out Ascent’s web site.

Although we’ve been hosting and managing web sites for our web design clients since 2000, until now we haven’t offered hosting as a distinct, stand-alone service under its own brand. Ascent represents a translation of that experience to providing excellence in web hosting services to a broader clientele.

And our existing web hosting clients will also reap the benefits of our investment in a world-class network, servers and expertise.

Do you or your organisation make use of the Google Alerts service?

What is a Google Alert? Well essentially it’s just an automated and scheduled Google search of Google News and/or the Google web site index, the results of which get sent periodically to your email address. You get to choose a frequency of daily, weekly or ‘as it happens’ for each alert you set up.

Many individuals have a Google Alert set for their own name, enabling them to find out who has been slandering / praising them online this week, and sometimes why. Also often watched for are the names of loved ones, family, friends, and favourite footy team. Google Alerts is probably perfect for celebrity stalkers too.

Businesses use it to monitor what’s being said online about them, their competitors, supply chain partners, channel partners, their market segments, and so on. It’s a very useful market intelligence tool if you want to use it that way. The possible applications are many and varied, it’s free, easy to use, and here’s but an example. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you own, build, study or have an interest in web sites that goes beyond just surfing? Maybe you just like to keep up to date with new technologies and trends relating to web design and development.

If so, chances are good you’ve already stumbled across Vitaly Friedman’s The Web Developers Handbook. If you haven’t, the WDH is an absolute must-have bookmark. The site claims bookmarks to over 730 resources for web designers and developers across an impressive range of topics, all vetted and useful to practising designers and developers.

Nice design too - very Web 2.0.

I wanted to list on a one single page the most useful web-sites, which make the life of web designers easier. If you ask the old uncle Google where you can find proper web design-instruments he shows an infinite list, whereby “his” links aren’t actually that useful. At the same time really helpful pages aren’t shown at all…

Vitaly has the story on the Handbook and its development in this blog post.

Thanks Vitaly

The Economist has a short piece about the BBC’s future on the Internet, following announcements of the Beeb’s plans to unlock their archives by providing access via the Internet to a treasure trove of programmes going back to the first half of the last century.

Its most ambitious idea is to go ‘on-demand’, making the million programmes it has produced since 1937 available to viewers online, mostly for free. Soon it plans to introduce a new service, BBC iPlayer, to allow people to catch up on programmes they missed on its main channels.

Potential downsides: some private sector players are pointing to the potential for this digital flood of Biblical proportions to have adverse effects for themselves, such as:

Opening up the BBC’S archive, mainly for free, could amplify the corporation’s market-distorting effect. Lots of popular past programmes will suddenly be available alongside its current shows. People have a limited time to goggle, and if they spend it watching old BBC favourites such as ‘Smiley’s People’, they will skip something else, which might include pay-TV or DVDs or TV financed by advertising.

Continuing our run of Google-related posts, if either of the following statements is true, you may be interested in taking advantage of Google Sitemaps:

From the Sitemaps FAQ:

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your web server, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

Many of you will have hosting packages that come with the Webalizer statistics package as a standard feature. Those of you who track your site’s performance carefully will already know this stuff, and can skip this post.

But for those who may need to get reacquainted with their site stats, I thought a brief refresher on the terminology used in your Webalizer reports might be in order.

This extract comes courtesy of the Webalizer Quick Help page.

Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).

Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache.

Tip: By looking at the difference between hits and files, you can get a rough indication of repeat visitors, as the greater the difference between the two, the more people are requesting pages they already have cached (have viewed already).

Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the server. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many ip addresses so it should be used simply as a rough guage as to the number of visitors to your server.

Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

Pages are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested, and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips). Some people call this metric page views or page impressions, and defaults to any URL that has an extension of .htm, .html or .cgi.

A KByte (KB) is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount of data that was transfered between the server and the remote machine, based on the data found in the server log.

Common Definitions

A Site is a remote machine that makes requests to your server, and is based on the remote machines IP Address/Hostname.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator. All requests made to a web server need to request something. A URL is that something, and represents an object somewhere on your server, that is accessable to the remote user, or results in an error (ie: 404 - Not found). URLs can be of any type (HTML, Audio, Graphics, etc…).

Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to your site or caused the browser to request something from your server. The vast majority of requests are made from your own URLs, since most HTML pages contain links to other objects such as graphics files. If one of your HTML pages contains links to 10 graphic images, then each request for the HTML page will produce 10 more hits with the referrer specified as the URL of your own HTML page.

Search Strings are obtained from examining the referrer string and looking for known patterns from various search engines. The search engines and the patterns to look for can be specified by the user within a configuration file. The default will catch most of the major ones.

Note: Only available if that information is contained in the server logs.

User Agents are a fancy name for browsers. Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, etc.. are all User Agents, and each reports itself in a unique way to your server. Keep in mind however, that many browsers allow the user to change it’s reported name, so you might see some obvious fake names in the listing.

Note: Only available if that information is contained in the server logs.

Entry/Exit pages are those pages that were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the last requested (Exit). These pages are calculated using the Visits logic above. When a visit is first triggered, the requested page is counted as an Entry page, and whatever the last requested URL was, is counted as an Exit page.

Countries are determined based on the top level domain of the requesting site. This is somewhat questionable however, as there is no longer strong enforcement of domains as there was in the past. A .COM domain may reside in the US, or somewhere else. An .IL domain may actually be in Isreal, however it may also be located in the US or elsewhere. The most common domains seen are .COM (US Commercial), .NET (Network), .ORG (Non-profit Organization) and .EDU (Educational). A large percentage may also be shown as Unresolved/Unknown, as a fairly large percentage of dialup and other customer access points do not resolve to a name and are left as an IP address.

Response Codes are defined as part of the HTTP/1.1 protocol (RFC 2068; See Chapter 10). These codes are generated by the web server and indicate the completion status of each request made to it.

The Google Bigdaddy Blues (In G minor)

Well, woke up this mornin’
Page Rank was gone
Yeah, woke up this mornin’
My pretty lil’ Page Rank was gone
Well if you see my baby Page Rank
O’ please, won’t you drive it on home.

Trad. arr: Blind Lemon Brin.

(With humble apologies to any hardcore blues guys and gals reading this. )

Right. I’ve had countless discussions with colleagues and strangers in pubs alike about Google’s apparent determination to become a ubiquitous presence in our online lives. They (Google) sure have the avid attention of just about every web entrepreneur or code hack I know.

Google enjoys this privileged position largely thanks to:

All of these points are worth exploring, but it was the second that became most topical recently. If you didn’t already know, search engine optimization is a big industry and a deadly serious business to a great many web site owners and entrepreneurs, as you’ll see.

We pick up the story on January 4, 2006 here on Matt Cutt’s blog. ‘Bigdaddy’ is revealed to be a new Google datacentre geared for a major update of the key Google search infrastructure and algorithm. In fact, Bigdaddy was/is intended to become the default source of Google web results. Witness Matt’s responses to these questions:

Q: Do you expect this to become the default source of web results? How long will it take?
A: Yes, I do expect Bigdaddy to become the default source of web results. The length of the transition will depend on lots of different issues. Right now I’m guessing 1-2 months, but if I find out more specifics I’ll let you know.

Q: What’s new and different in Bigdaddy?
A: It has some new infrastructure, not just better algorithms or different data. Most of the changes are under the hood, enough so that an average user might not even notice any difference in this iteration.

OK. So Google proceeds to roll out Bigdaddy. Then the fun begins. It seems either some of those improvements under the hood do not play nice with quite a few of the search optimization techniques and principles applied assiduously out there over recent years to an ungodly number of web sites, or there’s a major shift underway in how pages will be ranked into the near future. Actually there most likely is, but that’s another story for another day.

Fast forward to this thread over at webmasterworld.com. That gut-wrenching wailing and teeth-gnashing you can hear is coming from a great many unhappy web site owners who have placed maybe too many eggs in the Google basket. Take these comments excerpted from the thread referenced earlier - in some the desperation and angst is quite palpable:

I’ve been frantically going over all the things i can do to explain to my boss what has been going on with google. Unfortunately we have not only lost several thousand pages from googles listing but also substantial numbers from MSN and Yahoo.

Two weeks back we had 18000 total pages listed over google, yahoo, msn and alltheweb. Last week we dropped to just over 6000. Checking today we are at 5700.

and

Phah! 500,000 down to 44,300 right here! All turned supplemental after two years of good rankings. No I ain’t spam, no I ain’t scraper, no I ain’t MFA [Ed: means Made For Adsense] and no I ain’t an espotting affiliate …. even those are still ranking better than me! ….

… unless Google has raised their unique content filter to “must have at least 90% unique content” I don’t have an explanation.

Ouch. The take-home lesson is once again to build for your audience, not for the search engines. Which is not to say don’t optimize your sites for good rankings, but make sure you are catering properly for your human visitors first, not the bots and spiders.

I know, that is much the harder type of optimization to do, but the alternative it seems is to risk being left high and dry when Google decide, as they will and probably must periodically, to change direction every once in a while.

OK Blind Boy, bring it on home. One last time, with feeling …..

Well if you see my baby Page Rank
O’ please, won’t you drive it on home.

What Alfred North Whitehead really said was:

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Nuff said. We agree! Thanks Alfred.