You publish a business website to achieve a business outcome - usually to generate a lead or make a sale.

But you need to get visitors to your website first, and in most cases you want to maximise the amount of relevant search traffic to your website. Particularly Google (and in most cases, all people focus on is Google because the other search engines don’t have the market share).

When we launched the Kalbarri Edge website (a tourism website targeting visitors looking for Kalbarri accommodation), we were able to trace the performance of the website using analytics.

For any new website, there are some important things to look out for:

• Indexing: is the site indexed by Google yet? If you ain’t in the index, you ain’t in the race. The best way to speed up the indexing process is to earn links from other websites (and the more popular and higher authority the better).
• Titles: are the page titles unique and do they include your target keywords? If you ever want to rank for searches on antarctic suntan lotion, you better have a page that has those words in the page title.
• Descriptions: if your page is listed on a search engine result page, the meta description is probably going to be displayed under the title. A good description will help persuade more people to click through to your website.

Do you know how to check whether your site is indexed and what titles have been indexed? Go to Google.com and enter this query in the search box:

• site:yoursiteurl.com

Google will return a list of all the web pages it has indexed at yoursiteurl.com, showing you the indexed page title and description.

If you don’t see any pages indexed yet, go and earn some links.
If you see pages indexed and the titles aren’t unique or don’t include your keywords, fix them.
If you see page descriptions that won’t help click throughs, fix them.

We use the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress to allow titles to be over-ridden where necessary. If you aren’t using one of our sites, you need to find out how to adjust your page titles and meta descriptions.

So there you have it, that is how to launch a site and get initial search rankings. If you find that your pages aren’t ranking for target keywords, in the main you will need to look at the content (is it relevant to the title of the page?) and getting more good links to your site.

Getting good links is hard work, but very powerful. The topic for other other blog posts.

So there it is, to launch a new site and get it ranked, follow the instructions above. Use the site: command mentioned above and check out the analytics to see when visitors start to find you with keywords.

I’ve used Guru.com to source freelancers previously, and have found it a useful service.

However recently Guru.com have announced they are updating their feedback policy:

Feedback reviews are now more reliable.
Feedback is a valuable tool to help you find the pro you need. However, on rare occasions it can be skewed due to personal bias or even abused when used as retaliation or as a threat. To ensure that feedback retains its integrity and value, both Employers and Freelancers may now choose to remove a limited number of feedback records from their profiles.

(my emphasis)

So you can remove feedback you don’t like. And the bigger users of Guru.com can block more negative feedback than smaller users.

Now it seems to me that people will just use this to block negative feedback whenever they can, not just on ‘rare occasions’.

Feedback systems on the web are much harder to manage because there is often a global marketplace involved. If a business fakes negative feedback about a competitor in a local newspaper, there is a good chance they can be tracked down and sued. Online there may be no practical legal redress.

So will this change make feedback on Guru.com more reliable?

I don’t think so. It gives me a reason not to trust the feedback that I see there.

So how could Guru.com make their feedback system more trustworthy? I don’t know about you, but an unblemished record doesn’t always look trustworthy. You have to ask yourself ‘Is it real?’ I want to see the footprints of a real business, and a real business doesn’t get everything right.

A more trustworthy feedback system might allow a way for employers and service providers to make an effort to fix things if they get them wrong. This happens in business all the time, if a customer is unhappy a business will often go out of their way to see if they can change that around.

Taking the real story out of the web isn’t the way to earn more trust.

When business owners head out to buy a website, they often don’t understand what is important and what is not.

That isn’t surprising - there is no one size fits all approach to running a business online, and there are so many different tools and techniques it can be overwhelming.

Mike Moran, in his post The Most Important Part of a Website points out that the most important feature is being able to update it yourself.

Early generation websites relied on coding the website in HTML and then uploading the website files to the web server (and this technique - while dwindling in popularity - is still used today in varying forms).

Content management systems store the information on the web server. When content management systems were first released, they were often expensive and you paid a special license fee for them.This is no longer the case.

Open source content management systems are available - free of charge - that let you update your own website in a user friendly way. We use Wordpress, but you can also get a website based on Drupal, Joomla or many other open source software platforms that won’t come with a hefty licence fee.

If you can’t update your website yourself you are at a big disadvantage.

WordPress 2.7 has just been released. James is doing some testing on the upgrade and will apply it to all OM4 sites soon as the testing is finished.

There are a lot of new features that you will notice when using your dashboard that will make it faster and easier to update your website:

• overall you can complete tasks faster (less clicks)
• the Page Editor is customisable so you can put the buttons you use most frequently where you want them
• your dashboard can be arranged with drag and drop
• comments are now threaded and you can reply to comments from your dashboard

I’ve included a link to the WordPress video at the end of this post if you want to see a demonstration.

When we first started working with WordPress it was relatively new. Some people looked at me a bit strangely when they asked what we were building our web platform on and I said WordPress. Even if they had heard of it, it was open source, and not everyone gets the idea of open source.

WordPress has proven to be an exceptional platform for business websites.

One reason is that it is used by so many people. Over 3 million people downloaded version 2.6 (to install on their own server), and almost 5 million blogs run on WordPress via WordPress.com. With such a large user community, bugs get ironed out quickly. One of the more popular WordPress plugins has been downloaded almost a million times.

According to WordPress, for release 2.7 “over 150 people contributed code directly to the release, our highest ever, with many tens of thousands more participating in the polls, surveys, tests, mailing lists, and other feedback mechanisms the WordPress dev team used in putting this release together.”

So in hindsight, choosing to build our business website platform on WordPress looks like a pretty good decision. By running on WordPress, you will continue to benefit from the R&D and testing that goes into the platform, and we can focus on configuring it to work as a platform to run a small business online.

Mike Bullen is a specialist in affiliate marketing, with some amazing experience in high end affiliate campaigns under his belt.

This year he has launched his own consultancy Eurisko where he specialises in lead generation campaigns. Mike and I are planning some joint services to help smaller businesses benefit from affiliate marketing.

I asked Mike some questions about affiliate marketing and what leads to the most effective campaigns.

Glenn: In your experience, what kind of affiliate offers attract the strongest affiliate followings?

Mike: Affiliate marketing is going through a transition period right now as affiliates are focusing on how they can turn their website into a legitimate full-time job rather than just a hobby site or side earner.

As a result affiliates are looking for offers that have a high ‘earnings per click’ (EPC). The ‘earnings per click’ is a measure of the average revenue received from each click on your website to a merchant offer. There are two characteristics that can increase the EPC for a particular offer and they include either a high paying commission per lead or a very high lead conversion rate.

Glenn: What are the affiliate offers that you have seen that are most successful at converting to sales or leads? Why have they been so successful?

Mike: Competitions and brand promotion campaigns are good at driving leads while credit cards would be one of the most popular sales products.

Credit cards campaigns offer a commission rate of between $25 to $190 per lead but a conversion rate of under 5%. While we see some of the competition and brand campaigns converting between 40% - 50% from click with a commission rate of under $2 per lead.

The success rate of the Merchant offer is really impacted by the creative and a simplified sign up process. When looking to build leads, merchants should make the sign up process as simple as possible. By that I mean that the sign up form should have a limited number of fields, just enough to begin a relationship with the lead.

Glenn: Can a good banner make a campaign, can a bad banner destroy one?

Mike: Definitely, good creative should have a strong proposition and great call to action. Historically this has been difficult to do with GIF based banners as you’re trying to sell the brand, the message and call to conversion in 5 slides over 15 seconds.

Some of the best banners that I’ve seen are interactive flash banners. The user can engage with the brand and get a better understanding of the product. Rather than feel they have been sold the product, users feel like they have been engaged and understand the product a little more. Banks are good at this with some fun examples from:

ANZ What Do You Want
NAB Portfolio Package

Simple, interactive and engaging.

Glenn: Thanks Mike, your insights are appreciated.

 

We are welcoming an exciting new client this week. Landscape oil paintings from Ken Rasmussen are a feature at some high profile galleries around Australia. Ken has been painting the West Australian landscape for some time - his images are rich in colour and capture the essence of the landscapes. 

Having spent some time in the Margaret River / Geographe Bay region of the South West, and also the Pilbara and Kimberley regions in the North West, I relate strongly to the images. And I can see why collectors would be attracted to his works.

We still have some more work to do on the site, but I’m keen to see it launched and starting to develop some link equity. Ken was very fortunate that his name was available for the primary domain combinations.  But the art world is competitive, and I would dearly love to see Ken’s work rank organically for some of the highly relevant niche terms that are in wide use.

Enjoy the art, and consider how beautiful these oil paintings (and new limited edition prints) might look on YOUR walls!

So as the famous Chinese saying goes, we live in interesting times.

But are we talking recession or depression? Well, at one level, it doesn’t matter, as a small business owner you get out there to your customers wherever they are, and if you need to make changes, you make them. Now.

But I’ve been interested in following the recession vs depression story. And it made me wonder what people are really thinking.

So I turned to Google Trends and Google Finance to see what I could see.

Google Trends traces how often keywords are used in searches AND how many times they appear in the online news. Google Finance traces stocks.

The figures tell a bit of a story (click the image to see a larger version).

What happened was:

• in September searches for depression double, while searches for recession increase, but nowhere near as much. Media references to recession and depression increase sharply for a week - references to depression rapidly plateau, while references to recession continue to increase rapidly.
• October 1, the market (already dropping for some time) goes into freefall. The crisis is clear and present.
• From October 1, searches for depression clearly peak and fall. Media references to recession continue their surge well into October.

The rising search activity around depression in the lead up to 1 Oct is what interests me most. When the market tanks, the searches tail right off. The wisdom of the crowds moves on to greener pastures!

Personally I am optimistic that this time around (compared to 1929) the policy response is going to be a lot smarter. This will hopefully avoid dropping economies into a prolonged, deep recession (aka depression). Anita Campbell points out in It’s A Recession, Not a Depression that the US has already been in recession for 12 months. If you go by the historical lengths of recessions, the start of the climb out might not be too far off.

Do you know which businesses do well in a recession? I didn’t, until I read about Recession Proof Small Businesses from Scott Shane at Small Business Trends.

Scott analysed those business segments that did well during the 2001-03 recession and the 1990-91 recession. Doing well was defined as a segment growing by more than 20% across each of the following indicators: number of establishments, number of employees, total payroll. (Data: US Census).

The take out at the end of the article is that “insurance, health care, and consulting tend to be recession-resistant industries for people running small businesses.” Reading the article is recommended, as there are 42 individual industry segments Scott identified that beat the 20% hurdle in all three areas.

So there you have it. 3 stand out segments for recession business.

Are you in one of these segments, or do you serve some of these segments? 

Do you have an online strategy for these recession businesses?

Paul and Jenny’s Ocularist website has done particularly well for them. So much so that they have asked us to help them launch another website.

The new website is all about Artificial Eyes, and (quite logically) is at the domain ArtificialEyes.net.

A few things are worth noting about this new site.

Paul and Jenny collaborated with a distinguished clinical psychologist who specialises in trauma response to create a peer support training programme. This means that people who have already experienced eye loss can provide peer support to others who are going through the experience. Not only did they produce the peer support training, they asked Jane and Sharon Genovese to prepare an Adjusting to Eye Loss Mind Map.

The mind map presents a lot of information that is useful to people experiencing eye loss. It is a resource  Ocularists all around the world can draw on. Over time, a significant resource like this should earn the new website links that bring new visitors to Paul and Jenny’s site.

It is also worth noting that Paul and Jenny purchased the artificialeyes.net domain. This is a valuable exact match domain for their industry, and the value of the domain is likely to appreciate substantially in value over time. Because it is an exact match domain (for searches on artificial eyes), it is well placed to rank well in the search engines.

In the near future Paul and Jenny will be offering Ocularists from around the world the opportunity to have their own page on artificialeyes.net - to do this, we have developed a new Wordpress plugin that will allow Ocularists to sign up with a monthly subscription, and then edit and update their own page.  This is a powerful plugin, and I hope that we can make it easy enough to use so that it can be easily deployed on other sites. At this stage, we still need to be involved in doing the setup.

Every now and then Google’s PPC machine serves up some irony.

Google will penalize a website found to be using ‘black hat’ SEO techniques. But that doesn’t stop the ad machine from making a bit of money out of them