A Powerful CMS Unleashed

For all the small business owners who claim that building a profitable ecommerce site is out of reach, here is a new book launched "A Powerful CMS Unleashed".

I was just reading an article that had the headline "Six reasons not to try to be an online retailer" and I think it reflects the current market. Not only does a business owner need to know his business in and out, he needs to have some technical knowledge too.

Some of the online retailers whom I provide service for, have a "list of tasks" they want me to do:

Submit my website to search engines every two weeks
Write 2 articles a day (yea, thats right, a day) and submit it to ezines

The most common one, I would laugh if it was not sad - I have a $100 budget, get my site on top of Google in a week.

At the risk of sounding patronising, you need more than that, in terms of time and money to do it the right way.

So how about an offer to get an ecommerce site up and running. One that is search friendly, all for under $100?

With the amount of information available, consumers are looking for more and more way s to get their dollar to go a long way. Yes Sir/Ma'am, I agree SEO firms are not cheap. But how about spending sometime online and doing it yourself? It can't be that hard. Considering the fact that there are millions of web design firms that sprout up everywhere.

So why did an SEO firm take this suicidal step of getting into this already saturated market? Go to ebay, someone is selling a website for under $10.

Lets just say that the headache of putting together a shopping cart, changing the hosting provider because the IP was a virtual one and causes the risk of spam if done by another site sharing the same IP, installation of tracking with analytics on other shopping carts are sometimes near impossible or hard to figure out and it all goes away if you make any changes on the webpage... yadda yadda yadda... I think this is reason enough to just get it done cheap by yourself.

No hassles.

You can change the webpage any number of times.
Add a video
Add an image gallery and upload photos
Add meta tags, change the title of the document
Create a survey for your visitors
Do a poll to see what they are thinking
Display products for sale
Create a sitemap

And the list goes on...

Want to try it out?

Come on! Dont just sit there cribbing about how exorbitant the firms are these days.

Go on, give it a try.

If not anything else, you get your money back.

Did I mention you get 90 days of free technical support while you are creating that dream website?

"A Powerful CMS Unleashed"

Creating A Search Friendly Website At Fraction Of Cost

A client of mine for whom I was managing his internet marketing was using a CMS package . At first look, it was really impressive. It simplified the inventory control, shopping cart, managing multiple stores, automatic installation and tracking with Google Analytics. All good stuff.

I asked him to edit his content and add some keywords and relevant content on this web page and here's what he told me - it costs $40,000 to create the page... !! I thought I had heard him wrong, mine being a VOIP phone and all that, he repeated it. Yes, it costs $40,000.

Well, I thought, I created my website for under a couple of hundred dollars. So I offered him a package deal where he could get the content written, optimized and all the graphic design and logo done at a fraction of that cost. The CMS I used - Drupal.

Drupal is a wonderful wonderful CMS package. The problem is that it is all over the place. You need to spend time and have the patience to figure out what goes where and personally I feel it is under used.

So we at SeoEcom, created a video tutorial with more than 20 videos that show users how to create a website that is search friendly.

We have also added some free resources that can be downloaded and has features like creating polls, surveys, blogs, sitemaps, webforms, image galleries and plenty more. Its been a month long effort, with us techies going to long lenghts to keep it simple so even my grandmother can understand.

It also comes with automatic updates, modules and information to help keep the owner of the video tutorial upto date at all times.

We are ready to roll out this video tutorial, which is an instant download, in 2 days time. Watch out for this space.

Web hosting and ecommerce websites

I was just browsing ebay the other day (I guess I had too much time on my hands). But really it is amazing to see the number of sellers providing cheap web hosting for under $10. So the first thing that comes to my mind (as any buyer browsing ebay), WHATS THE CATCH?

Well, here it is. These web hosting providers give you a "virtual" IP address. This means that you are sharing the same IP address with multiple users.

So what does it mean for you as a website owner?

If one of the other sites that you are sharing your IP with, does spamming or any black hat SEO, there is a possibility that the search engines ban that IP address. So many of the innocent ones also get caught in this vicious cycle. As we all know, getting out of the "bad neighbourhood" or being banned by one of the world's most popular search engine Google, is not a good thing.

So ask questions and try to choose the right web hosting provider. This is an important selection as you may have to enter into contracts and there will be a fine if you break the contract with your web hosting provider.

Choose your web host provider wisely.

How to drive traffic to you Squidoo Lens

Here are some Squidoo Lenses I created in the past one week:

The SEO Firm

Womens Clothing Stores

Magic Store

Squidoo lenses are great for driving traffic to your site. You need to provide information-rich content and this helps you rank higher up.

Joining some groups helps bring visibility to the Squidoo lens.

Tag it in delicious.com and other social networking sites.

Blog about it.

Write an article on it.

That should give you a start.

Directory Web Site Submission

What is the online substitute of Yellow Pages?

Yes, you got it. Web directories.

There are thousands of web directories online and some of them cater to specific topics while others have every topic under the sun. Some are free and others have monthly / annual subscriptions. Surprisingly, I find that some directories in Australia charge anywhere between $200 - $300 for a one-time inclusion. When compared to US where the competition is high, the subscription fees can be anywhere between $1 - $19.99. Many of them are free. Some ask for reciprocal links which may or may not be mandatory.

Some tips when doing directory web site submission:

• Before submission, ensure you have your keyword, title, short description (100 words), long description (1000 words) kept handy. Type it in a Word doc and do a copy and paste when necessary instead of typing it all over again. This will save you time.Here is what a submission will look like:

URL: www.yourwebsitename.com
Title: This is the title on the blue bar of your browser
Description: Use keyword rich description of your business
Email address: Use a generic one (info@websiteaddress.com) as you will get a lot of mails from these sites. You can unsubsribe them later.

• Ensure your site is fully operational and there are no broken links. Here is a free tool to check for broken links on your site.
• The best ones to go for when getting started are the free ones
• Get one way links and avoid reciprocal links if you are not going to be able to show them prominently on your website.
• There are tools which do the job. If you are a website owner who needs to use this service once or twice a year, it may be adviseable for you to get an external agency to do it for you. It will work out cheaper.
• Some directories require a human to validate and type in the security code. In these cases, manual submission is the best.
  

This may be a time consuming task but you will get rewarded in the long run. You not only have links to sites which have a high page rank but you will get a fair amount of traffic from them.

You can submit your site or add your url to as many as 200+ directories on the internet which do not charge anything.

Flash Vs SEO

This topic has been written about ad nauseam but….

Many website owners want Flash on their website (many that I know, at least).

Designers are willing to do it for them. When the time comes to do online advertising, the Search Engine Consultant tells them that search engines cannot read flash files.

Now the website owner is confused. Why didn’t the designer tell him? Does this mean that all the money and time spent on having Flash files has gone down the drain?

I will attempt to answer some of the questions here.

Many designers do not know about this. Their job is to code/design and many of them do not know about the search engine marketing aspect of it. Would you ask your IT department to do your marketing for you? No. One group is logical and the other is creative. Two different worlds.

SEO must go hand in hand when designing the site. This saves time, money and frustration for both the designers and the website owners.

Whenever I see website owners going in for Flash, I caution them. Search engines look for certain things in a website:

• The website must load fast
• The back button must work especially if you are going to do Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
• No redirects to another page – This is considered as spam by search engines.

When you use Flash files:

• It often takes a long time for a website with Flash to load.
• Many flash files disable the "Back" button on the website
• Flash files often redirect to another page

Look at it from a user's perspective, if I come to a website with extensive flash in it and I have a dial up connection, I am not going to wait for the site to load. I just press the "Back" button and move on, as do many users. (Ouch, that hurt, didn’t it?).

The reason why search engines do not read Flash files?

Optimizing a Flash file includes creating text which has to be hidden so it cannot be seen by the human eye. This is easy to abuse and manipulate to hide spam, porn or other redirected sites.

Google has started indexing Flash files (at least the latest version of Flash) but it should be designed to have text in them. It is still a mess when it comes to getting ranking and generally advisable to avoid Flash files.

Separating each page of the Flash movie into separately crawlable pages is the advise of one consultant. More about the pains of optimizing a flash site is here.

If you still have not got the message, here's a flow chart that might convince you.

If you are still not convinced, here's something you can use…

Google expanding in Australia?

The latest blog on Google's Australian blog site is interesting. The line which caught my attention was the "growing Sydney office". Google is expanding its offices in Australia which is fantastic news!

The recruitment of professionals at the Sydney office was a little slow some months ago. One of my friend applied for a job and was told that someone in US will contact him, which never happened.

They have also conducted a roadshow for their product Adsense in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Auckland. Adsense are the advertisements which show on top, right and left side of any web page you vist these days. It is titled "Ads by Google". Many website owners use it to generate additional revenue. You provide space on your website to run the ads and Google sends you a cheque. These ads can be text or video.

Here is a useful tip when using Google Adsense on your site:

Make sure the colors on your site blend with those of the Adwords advertisement.

SEO war for keyword Andrew Kontra

The other day a close friend of mine was challenged. The interesting thing that caught my attention was that it was SEO related. The challenge was to rank for a keyword "Andrew Kontra" who is an employee at Pacific Brands. Mr. Kontra is going to be getting a lot of publicity thanks to this challenge.

So taking this as an example, how exactly do you make someone famous (in the eyes of search engines)?

Blogs for Andrew Kontra
Links to similar sites

Now wait, if I reveal all, I might spoil the fun! Watch Andrew Kontra's space in the coming months, years.....

And while you are at it, buy Mr. Kontra a coffee!! ;)

Advertising and Marketing – The New & Old

Some years back, advertising and marketing were in the form of –

Media

• Television
• Radio

Print

• Newspapers (average cost of a classified AUD1,500)
• Magazines (average cost for half page AUD 15,000)

Outdoor

• Billboards (AUD 50,000 and above depending on the size, fabric etc)
• Ads on trams (especially in Melbourne)

Direct Mail (Mailing lists cost around AUD 14 - 50)

These methods cost a lot of money and a lot of time and effort went into creating them. Big corporations still do all of the above with a combination of some of the below forms of advertising.

New mediums of marketing which are cheaper or even better FREE!

With the advent of the internet, information is available and free. There is freedom to share knowledge and information. You do not have to pay for it. Better still, it allows small businesses to get publicity and traffic by paying very small amounts or nothing. It is no longer possible to
approach anyone with an aggressive sales pitch and hope to convert them. People are becoming blind to blatant forms of marketing and something new always interests them. The below methods are more subtle but the result is more effective.

Some of the newer and popular forms of advertising and marketing are given below:

Viral Marketing

Blogs (Blogger.com, Xanga.com)

Social Bookmarking sites (Digg, delicious)

Social Networking sites (Ecademy, Linkedin, Xing)

Online Press Releases (PRLog.com, PRLeap.com) - I provide services in this field

Article writing – I provide services in this field

Email Newsletter

Other paid forms of online advertising gaining popularity are:

Banners

Websites

Newer Marketing Technologies

Pay Per Click (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing) – I provide services in this field

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Electronic Brochures

Streaming Video

Direct Response questionnaires

HTML presentations

Analytics – I provide services in this field

A combination of all of the above based on the industry you are in and the type of visitors you want to attract, all the methods mixed and matched form a great campaign.

Choose-your-domain-name-carefully!

It is widely known in SEO circles that choosing a domain name right is one of the important things. The reason is simple.

Imagine going to a networking event and meeting a potential client. You dont have a pen and paper and oops! you forgot to get your business card or ran out of them. Is it easier to say a name which relates to some aspect of your business? Or is it easier to say my url is: something-or-the-other.com with a lot of dashes?

Choose a domain name which relates to some aspect of your business and a name which is easy to remember. Over a period of time, you can create a brand around it and it goes a long way in getting a keyword as part of your url name. This helps in ranking higher especially in Google.

An example is my site which has the word "SEO" in it: http://www.seoecom.com.

Importance of online press releases

Press releases are an integral part of most company's (those who can afford it) PR campaign. From an SEO point of view, it is used as an integral part of our link buildig exercise.

Our lives have been made easier by the free online PR sites as it is light on our pockets. For small businesses who want to do some link building, PR is an ideal way to do it.

I-Newswire fell into Google's bad books after a 15-year old (Thomas Vendetta) played a prank by releasing a fake press release to the free site. You can read more here.

It remains to be seen if Google will drop all the free press release sites from their list or this is a one-off case which I hope it is. If not, then Google will be alienating a lot of small businesses or freelancers who cannot really afford to pay the exorbitant charges of the big boys.

An example of a free PR that I used recently - Website Owners Want Their Business To Be Found Online

Little Add Ons For Your Site

Do not forget to add a "Tell a friend" or "Bookmark this page", so they remember where you are located.

Viral marketing is an effective way of selling products and services. Customers who like your product or services must be encouraged to give testimonials and tell their friends about your business. Ask your customers to leave a comment on your site. Testimonials helps to build trust as they cannot see you and this is a good way to gaining trust.

Does Your Website Have Good SEO & User Experience?

Does your website have good SEO AND user experience? - that is the first question I like to ask business owners.

You have included your tags, meta tags, keywords and did your link building like every good website owner has done. What next? Will the search engines beat a path to your door and get you enormous amounts of traffic that will crash your server? The answer is no.

The above is just one tiny step towards achieving your business goal. First of all, sit down and write your goals. What is it you are looking for? Is it leads where you just want visitors to leave their names and contact information? Or is it more lofty, like earning some dollars while they are on your site? How do you get them to loosen their purse strings?

As a consultant, I always tell my customers, know your goals. Knowing what you want to get out of your visitors will help you create a targeted ad and a relevant landing page for the customers. If you are a mortgage broker, have a form on your site where interested customers can leave their contact information. In this way, you can make follow up calls and sell your products to them.

If you are a business selling multiple products, it is a good idea to have relevant keywords on the landing pages. In addition to that, you can upsell or give information on related products with a search function located in your site. So when a customer lands on a page selling, say, a softwares, you can have relevant add ons or similar products with the words "if you like this product, you may like these too" or something along those lines. You not only give the customer a good user experience, they may come back later too. And don’t forget to add a "Tell a friend" or "Bookmark this page", so they remember where you are located.

Just as in real life, where you don’t forget the friendly waitress who served you in one of your favourite cafes, and you want to come back for more, a user experience has to be made pleasant. There are no sales people to sell or give your customers information and it has to all be done by a silent website. So being intuitive, knowing your customer, having wish lists which you can refer to, remembering their birthdays, having live support on the site or a good help manual, all these go in creating a good impression and goes to increasing the bottom line.

As important as it is to have good search engine optimisation (SEO) like keywords, relevant landing pages and relevant url's, once the user lands on the page, it is important to make sure all links work, pages load quickly and makes the customer want to come back for more.

What to expect from a Search Engine Consultant

There are many self-proclaimed SEOs out there and it is difficult selecting someone suited to your business needs. Apart from hiring someone who knows some technical aspects of the business, an SEO must also be intuitive. Understanding the business makes an SEO more successful than someone who deals with their clients with a "one size fits all" attitude.

There are several ways to get ranked higher and quicker. There are fast ways of doing it, where you fall down faster too or you can do it the slow, hard and longer lasting way.

Here are some tips on what to expect

Building links from your site is important. The links you have per keyword, the higher your rating in the eyes of a search engine. Beware of link farming. The idea of link farming is to have reciprocal linking with other sites. The quality of these sites are important. If the link quality is not good, Google can label you as a 'bad neighbourhood' which means that Google has determined that you are swapping links in order to manipulate page rank. Adding links that your visitors can use is a good way to avoid this tag.

For example, if you are selling clothes, it does not make any sense to link to a website selling cameras, would it? Moreover, outbound links are always better than a link exchange. Of course, linking to a complementary site is good, if it drives some traffic your way. A partnership is better than linking to just anyone.

Before building links, it is important to optimize your website for certain keywords. Remember, one keyword per webpage. It is not always nice to find out that you ranked high in the search engine for words like "free" or "welcome to our site".

Relevant keywords are important and over time, you will come up higher.
Search engine optimisation is still a growing field and as long as Google, Yahoo and MSN is used to search for websites on the web, it will always be an important exercise to follow.

It is always better to have a website designer with SEO knowledge design your website, as it goes a long way in increasing your website's visibility to search engines.

SEO Tips For The Day

I had a client once who was a CPA. He was not worried about being number one in the search results of Google, Yahoo or MSN. All he wanted was to rank high in his area when someone typed a relevant keyword and his website showed up for that search.

If you are a small business owner who wants to be found locally, you can choose the area that you want to target through your Google Adwords Pay Per Click. In this way, you will minimize your advertising spend and have targetted advertising only for that particular area.

Also be sure to have a form on your site which captures all your visitors names and contact information.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves finetuning and constant link building to get to your goal. Each business has a different goal and an SEO needs to use intuitiveness to deliver the best service for his/her customers.

Online SEO Tools

There are online tools which you can use to track customers who visit your site. It gives you information of -

Which country they come from?
The screen resolution they use
Which sites do they come from?
IP addresses of visitors
How long do they remain on the site?
What pages do they visit?
If buying, when did they change their mind about buying the product?
How many visitors per day?

With all this information at their fingertips, it revolutionizes the way businesses can influence their customers. They can take advantage of customer behaviours, likes, dislikes, wishlists (if any) and enhance the user experiences in a thousand ways.
An example of an online tool is the Google Analytics. All you need to do is put the code that Google gives you, to each page of your HTML code which is important in the user experience. Then track it by using the maps and graphs that Google provides. It has information suitable to a marketing person, an executive or a webmaster. With the varied level of details, it is easy to select what you want to see, monitor it for some days and then make necessary changes to your site.
This is a powerful way where website owners can get to know their customers better and in the long run increase sales and convert leads by optimizing their site. Search engine optimization for ecommerce sites is a powerful tool that all website owners are beginning to see value in.

SEO for Australian businesses

It has taken the western world by storm. Some years back, all you had to do was create a website and you were assured that your friends and relatives will look at it and be impressed. However, the functionality of having your own website has changed. From exchanging ideas and advice to using it to make money while you sleep. The function of a website has come a long way.
So what exactly is this search engine optimisation? If it were that useful, why aren’t all companies jumping onto the bandwagon?
The truth is, all the big ones already have. Companies are spending millions of dollars so their customers can find them on this gigantic World Wide Web. It is also used by biggies to silence controversies (like the Coca Cola case) by putting in pay per click ads defending their stance.
Coming back to SEO, it is the method where you tweak and fine-tune your website in various, so the search engines find you when they type in a certain word or sentence. For example, you are a business selling hamburgers, you can optimize your web page for the word, hamburgers or more specifically, you can specify what type of hamburgers you specialize. Bottom line, it comes down to the fact, that when a customer wants to buy a hamburger, if he types in stores which sell hamburgers in the search, your store should come up in the search results. Moreover, if you make a sale, say thanks to the SEO who helped you with it.
This is of course, more like a beginners guide to SEO and there is much more to it. It takes days or even months to come up in the first five pages of a search result for a specific word especially if there is lots of competition. It is easier to rank higher in a specific area, locality or country (excluding the USA).
There are a million ways to make money on the internet nowadays and optimising your site brings you closer to your goal.