TCW - The Complete Website

Posted on 04-24-2008 and filed under News, Web Knowledge

Your business is being talked about online, and often the information is flat out wrong. Find out how to be alerted when your business, name, or industry subject is mentioned anywhere on the web with Google Alerts.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment!

To listen via audio podcast:

 

 From Video: Find out what people are saying about your business [4:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Transcript:

How do you find out what others are saying about you online? How do you know when your business is being mentioned on websites and blogs? And more importantly, what if people are saying things that are flat-out wrong about your business?

How do you keep tabs on that? I just got out of a meeting with our local residential community association. The marketing manager mentioned that she gets an alert in her email box everyday regarding what people are saying about the association.

She tracks websites that post inaccurate address information, phone information, and today, she mentioned that a website had published some landmarks near the community that were just flat-out wrong. They were actually in other towns. So, she was able to go to that website, email back the webmaster and give them some suggestions of landmarks that were more appropriate. Now, how do you do this?

Well, the secret here is to go to “Google alerts.” Google alerts is a place that will notify you of any mention that you have in your business or your person, or perhaps a topic of interest for your business.

It’s really easy. The first thing you do is you go to google.com/alerts. And then, you will be presented with the search box. You have your search terms, the type of search that you want, how often you want to be notified, and what email address to send it to.

So, all you do is type in your search term and in our case, I’ll search for web-knowledge.com. I want a comprehensive search that means I want Google to scan news, blogs, the web, video, and discussion groups. And I want a daily digest and you can choose to have it sent immediately as Google finds a mention of your business or if you have a lot of mentions you might want to put it on a digest that is emailed to you once a week.

Fill out your email address and create the alert. Now if you don’t have a Google account, my recommendation would be to create one. And the sign up page would look a little bit different when you go to it. And there will be a link down here that would allow you to go and create a Google account.

So, let’s create this alert here. This alert has been added to my list of alerts and this is where you can go and manage your alerts. Now, let me make a little mention here. If you noticed, here’s my name, Peter Ericson, I track social media, I track my business, and I track the blog. Here are my businesses, a website address, and here again is the blog address.

Notice that some of these addresses have quotes around them and some don’t. If you put quotes around your search, what you are telling Google is you want those words presented right next to each other. So, in other words, “the complete website” those three words need to be in order, “the complete website” for Google to actually post an alert.

Otherwise, it will look for a document that has a word “the” the word “complete, ” and the word “website” randomly streamed throughout it. And that’s not helpful to me.

So, just remember that little quotes trick. And you can add, edit and delete an alert as you like. Also note that I follow social media, it’s interesting for me to read what’s going on in “Facebook” and “My Space”, and “You Tube” and the social media sites out there. And Google presents quite a lot of returns on this.

But if you are in a different business and you want to say follow things in a real estate business, well, you might want to search for local real estate mentions. By town, by property type, commercial, residential, etc, to start the information flow and you can always go back and edit the alerts anytime.

Google Alerts lets you stay on top of what people are saying about your business online.

Posted on 04-23-2008 and filed under News, Web Knowledge

Many clients contact me wondering if they should purchase additional domain names.

Here is an email from a recent scam (maybe you’ve seen it):

Dear CEO,

We are Asia Domain Name Registration Limited, which is the domain name registrar centre in Hongkong. We have something important need to confirm with your company.

On the April 16 2008, we received an application formally. One company named ” OMS Investment Corp” applied for

The Domain Names:
wovenworkz.cn
wovenworkz.com.cn
wovenworkz.hk
wovenworkz.mobi
wovenworkz.tw
wovenworkz.jp
wovenworkz.co.kr etc…

Posted on 04-21-2008 and filed under News, Web Knowledge

 

 Get found in Google... hire the right seo provider [8:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

…that will get your business found in Google. In this podcast I will tell you about the 3 major areas that your search engine optimization provider must cover… and how much to expect to pay for it. Click play above to listen.

Audio transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about how to get found in Google, or how to hire a search engine optimization expert. This is something you probably don’t want to do yourself and you’ll want to hire out, and it’s not that expensive if you do it right. Now what is search engine optimization? It’s best to explain through an example.

Let’s say you’re a fence installer in New Hampshire and you have a website that you want to get found in Google. Well, your hope would be that a prospective customer would go to Google and type in the keywords “fence installation New Hampshire” and your website would show up, they would see it, click on it and go to your website.

If you specialize in wrought iron fences, you’d want similar results. Someone types in “wrought iron fences New Hampshire,” boom, there’s your website. Or by town, that’s very powerful too–if somebody lives in Lebanon, New Hampshire, they type in “wrought iron fences Lebanon New Hampshire,” and you want your website to show up. That’s what search engine optimization is.

Now in order to hire somebody to do this work for you, it’s helpful to know what the basic procedures are for proper search engine optimization. I’m just going to share with you what we do and get great results with. The procedure we use falls into three basic steps: keyword research, keyword installation on your website, and then proving the effectiveness of the research, the data analysis.

So the first thing that has to be done is your search engine optimization expert has to research the scope of key phrases that people might use to type into Google to find your website. You should know how competitive the key phrases are, and almost more importantly, how popular the key phrases are, because you want to go after the popular keyword searches. When that research is done, you should have a pool of 100 to 300 different key phrases that people might search to find your type of business, and people search very specifically and that’s why this pool is so large.

Second thing is keyword installation. Let’s say you’ve picked 10 key phrases that are real important to your business and you’ve decided these are the ones I want to show up in. The search engine person you’ve hired needs to install those keywords on your site, and they install them in two general segments. One is visible text. The text that you read on your website needs to have those key phrases baked into them: the header text, the link text, the actual plain-copy text that’s on your website–you need to bake that in.

And a little tip here: If your search engine person is a copywriter, that’s a real plus, because you want to weave in these key phrases, but you want to make sure that the copy is still readable–that if a human comes to your site and reads the copy, it makes sense. The second thing for installation is there are hidden areas that most webmasters know about where they install these key phrases. They’re called “title tags,” “meta tags,” and those are the two biggies. There are “image tags” and there are other areas, but that’s the installation process.

The third and last thing you want to make sure your search engine optimization person does is that you want to make sure that they prove the effectiveness of the work that they’ve done. You want to see, after you’ve paid for the work and they’ve done it, that you’re ranking better on the key phrases that you chose, and there are a couple of ways to look at this. One is they should be looking at your analytics, which show you the actual visitor traffic to your website. And two, they should produce a “before and after” scenario for you.

So let’s say you have 200 key phrases that are in your pool. They should be able to give you a report that shows you all 200 key phrases and where in Google each phrase is landing. Are they on page one, are they on page two, page five, page ten? And you should look at that before the work is done and that same report should be run after the work is done, and the “after” report should show an increase in position on a lot of those key phrases. The analytics should show more traffic coming to your site, and it should show you the actual key phrases that people are typing in to get to you. So with a combination of those two reports, you should have a good sense of whether the work actually worked or not, and ultimately, your phone should be ringing.

Here are three questions to ask your would-be search engine optimization provider. One, what kind of research do you do? Listen carefully. Two, how is the installation handled? How do they actually install the key phrases? What’s their philosophy? Three, how do they prove to you that the keyword installation helped? Those are three really solid questions.

Here’s a side note. There are a few directories you might want to submit to as well, or get your search engine person to submit to. One is called Dmoz, one is Google Local Search, especially if you’re a local business, one is Yahoo Directory, and there are several others. But note that today, you’re not submitting to Google, you’re not submitting to Yahoo, you’re not paying somebody to do that for you; Google will find your site. They usually come back–every 30 days, 14 days, or two days, depending on how frequently you update your site–and Google looks for changes. And once the work is done with the optimization, Google will pick it up. Google can pick that up in a day. So just be careful of recurring fees.

Now here’s the big question: How much money do you spend on optimization? Well, optimization really falls into two categories. One is for local search, less competitive. Two is for national search, much more competitive, and you can expect to spend more. For local search, you’ll be spending well into the hundreds of dollars. You’ll probably spend between $500 and $1,000 for somebody who’s going to take you through the whole process.

And think about the payoff. How many new clients do you need to get that money back? One? If you’re a fence installer, you probably need one client. Even if you spend $1,000 on the search engine optimization, you get one new client out of that who found you online through Google, boom, and your money’s back.

Now, national search is a little trickier because it can be very competitive, usually it’s quite competitive. You’ll want to look at– and this is where your search engine provider will help you–how many other websites are competing for you. If you sell PCs and you’re going against Dell and Hewlett Packard, you have a very long fight and you’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars, and still might not come up where you want to be. You’ll talk about things like back links and getting into social media, writing up blogs, article marketing, Facebook, social bookmarking–there’s lots of things to do, lots of money to spend.

However, if you’re a national business and your website has never been optimized or has had very little optimization, even though you don’t end up on the first page of Google with an optimization, you will most likely still generate quite a lot more visitor traffic, and that’s where your analytics really pays off. You can see, “Gee, we have 500 visitors a month, 1,000 visitors a month coming,” and after the installation that bumps to 700, 1,400, 2,000 visitors, and you know that your money has paid off.

As always, please feel free to comment and subscribe

Posted on 04-17-2008 and filed under News, Web Knowledge

Let’s take a look at a real search in Google: Look up a local florist say in Framingham, MA. If you typed in “Framingham florist” you would find a list of Google generated business links at the top of the first results page. If you ran a florist there you would want to make sure your business was on this list. You would also make sure that your business’s website address was included so visitors can link directly to your site. Watch the video below to find out how to get your business in Google’s Local Search in less than 10 minutes.

Posted on 04-15-2008 and filed under News, Web Knowledge

 

 Why you have to publish company news on your website [4:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Your 2 main challenges:

1. Driving visitors to your website
2. Building trust so your visitors will connect with your company

Publishing a company newsletter accomplishes both.

Comments welcome! Hey they might even get answered

Transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about why you have to publish a company newsletter on your website. There are two really great reasons to do this.

One, you have to draw visitors into your website, and doing that is a web marketing challenge. Number two, once visitors get to your website you have to create trust and that trust happens over time so that visitors will reach out and eventually connect with you. And publishing your news and publishing your articles on your website and sending them out via email is the way to solve both of those challenges.

Now, let me tell you a little story. Last Monday we published at 11 o’clock at night our latest company newsletter. It had to do with a new green, carbon neutral server that we just put online for our clients and at 1:47 A.M. Google picked up the news.

The next day I woke up and found an email in my box from the communication department at Rackspace, which is the company where we host this server. A Google alert had alerted them that I had published my news and they wanted to do an interview.

So I responded back, “Sure, hey that’d be great”. And on Wednesday we had a phone interview. That phone interview is going to translate into a case study which is going to go on their website, offering my company free publicity. Now you can’t beat that. And that doesn’t happen everyday but this is what’s happening online today, and you have to take advantage of it.

I have been publishing a company newsletter on the website and pushed out via email for ten years now. And I have to tell you that it has been responsible for a steady stream of new clients. It just works.

Let’s review. If you provide good information on your news website you will build trust over time. Publish what’s happening with your products and services, publish what’s happening with your company and give good, helpful information.

You can create a tips article. If you are in the carpet cleaning business talk about stain removal, talk about chemicals, talk about green products. All these things offer limitless conversation with your customers.

Number two, Google loves news. It just loves news on your website. What happens is, as you write the text that goes on your website Google will crawl it. And the more you write the more often Google will come back to your website and read through your text.

Your text will naturally be filled with keywords that people will type in to find your site. And what will happen is, say if you were a carpet cleaning company and you were publishing news, is if someone was looking for carpet cleaning in a certain geographic area, like Boston. And maybe they were looking for something about green, toxic free cleaning products and you had written an article about that, they might actually land right on your news page. They will bypass your home page all together and after searching on Google land on your news page.

Then you have a chance of them crawling through the rest of your site to see, hey, these guys know what they’re doing. They’re writing articles on all sorts of carpet cleaning topics, and you might have yourself a new customer.

So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to talk to your webmaster about adding a regular news feed to your site. Start by publishing once a month which I know you can do, and make sure that that newsletter also gets emailed out to your list. Now you have an email list, right?

Well, that’s it for now but I promise I’ll talk about building an email list another time.