New Orleans Internet Marketing

BP has ruined our environment with one of the worst oil spills in the history of the world. President Obama is playing golf and entertaining musicians in DC while oil coats our coast and kills our wildlife. His biggest action? Ordering the closure of offshore drilling that deepens our devastation by killing off thousands of LA jobs.

The past few months for us has seen a federal government that is enmeshed with BP. It has been over a month since the tragic blowout that killed 11 workers, and the US Attorney General just decided that criminal charges need to be investigated, something I’ve been saying since the first 7 days of this.

I hate to say it, but my blog has pretty much become useless the past few years. The reasons I started this blog were to provide quality helpful content on SEO and SEM, but I’ve had to pretty much strip out all the really good useful stuff, and stop writing new stuff altogether due to the competitiveness in my niche.

The Family & Marriage Counseling Directory is my main income producing website, and TalkAboutMarriage.com is its “sister” site where people give each other free marriage advice. I started The FMC Directory about 7 years ago, and shortly thereafter a competitor started another directory targeting the exact same keywords and copying my backlinks as closely as possible. Since then, a new directory like mine springs up every year, and there are now at least 5 other sites trying to do what mine has done (drive an enormous amount of referrals to therapists) and failing miserably when it comes to SEO (the best way to do so). Amongst the ranks are Counsel-Search.com, Goodtherapy.org, FixmyFamily.com, Theravive.com, and MarriageFriendlyTherapists.com.

I’m sorry to say, that with all these guys nipping at my heals constantly, I just can’t write good SEO stuff like I intended on doing when I first started this site. There’s plenty of quality SEO information on the web, but the good thing for me is that there’s plenty of bad info out there as well, and my competitors don’t know who to follow. At least if they were following me, they’d know what I’m doing works. But I can’t give away that kind of information because it would cost me my business.

So if you’re ever wondering why I don’t post anything here these days, this is why…

Congratulations to the New Orleans Saints for their first Superbowl win, and to all of the new fans and long time supporters. I grew up in this city and always dreamed of the celebration that would take place if our Saints ever won the Superbowl. Last Sunday night, I got to witness it firsthand and it was better than I ever imagined.

A few great things that happened as a result of this win:

1. The Saints proved that they were the best team in the NFL this year, proving all the naysayers wrong at last.

2. The Saints gave the people of New Orleans hope that yes, it CAN happen to us.

3. The Saints Football Team provided the most positive press to the city of New Orleans and State of Louisiana that we could have ever asked for, and in doing so put an exclamation point on the recovery of our city and left a lasting impression in the minds of all viewers.

If you or someone you know has a business in Haiti; I will offer my time and resources to help with their website. I can help with simple design work and website updates. I can host your site for free on my new server. Contact chartwell (at) inlayout.net.

I just posted this LiquidWeb announcement on Dedicated Server School, two minutes later I googled the text to see if it was posted anywhere else on the web, and I was amazed to see that my post was already indexed.

See the screenshot:



Notice the text to the right of the URL that says “2 minutes ago.” While that in and of itself isn’t very impressive, the fact that I posted it 2 minutes ago, the blog pinged Google and it got crawled and indexed that fast is pretty amazing.

I was just browsing through some of Bing’s search results for “dedicated server” because I have a site in that niche these days, and I came upon something pretty interesting:

If you notice, the last search result for LiquidWeb’s homepage is indexed with an affiliate tag! I wonder how much commission “sdawkins” is getting off of Bing for this? How many search phrases is it showing up for? Must be nice!

If you look at the backlinks for the URL, it’s nothing but link directories and such. Lucky guy. Bing needs to work on their canonical URL issues here. It wouldn’t hurt for LiquidWeb to have a good SEO on staff either. I can almost guarantee you won’t see this in Google.

Earlier this week, WebHostingTalk.com, one of the biggest forums on the web for web hosting discussions, was maliciously hacked. According to a WHT representative, the attacker got in through their backup, deleted it, and moved onto the main server from there. Apparently the reason they lost so much data was that they weren’t making “backups of backups,” something I posted about the importance of a while back. Just more evidence that you can never be too careful.

A long time ago, I remembered that I forget a lot, so I started making lists.

I realized that I had plenty of great ideas to market my business, but if I forgot them, it could be like losing the winning lottery ticket. How dumb would that be?

The thing that’s really sad about it is the fact that probably 99% of my best internet marketing ideas come to me at a time when I’m completely unable to act on them, and the ones that I can act on right away, usually wind up costing me a lot of money because I don’t let them hibernate on a list for a short while!

How could such a simple, intuitive task escape me for so long?

So I started making internet marketing to-do lists, and to-date, I have 3 running to-do lists (general, blogging topics [this wasn't one btw], and press release topics). I keep them on my PDA phone, so that wherever I am, there they are. Now, I never forget my good ideas, and I actually get most of them done. I can’t begin to tell you how much this has increased how productive I am. I rarely sit at the computer board, trying to think of something to do when I feel like working. Nowadays I just check my to-do list.

The other good thing about the internet marketing to-do list, is that it makes things easier to prioritize. Instead of starting and stopping different tasks I know I should be working on, I just look at the list, and it’s usually pretty obvious what I should be working on.

In the past, if you tried to contact MySpace about advertising, you’d be lucky to get a response. Then if you did, you probably wouldn’t be considered unless you spent $10k / month or more. Well that’s all changed with MySpace’s introduction of “MyAds Beta.” I recently tried out MyAds by running some banners to promote my forums, and here are the results. Read the rest of this entry »

and stick to Fox News Channel. It’s amazing to me that even though the Clinton administration is almost singlehandedly responsible for the financial mess we’re in today because of the pressure they put on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to expand mortgage loans to low and moderate income people in 1999, networks like CNBC never mention that kind of stuff. Instead, they support the filthy rich Wall Street crooks who blame George Bush for everything and use smoke and mirrors to shake down the American public.

Well, maybe not masses. Not now at least :)

Over the past few days, we launched a new site that I am very excited about. This is a project that I’ve been wanting to do for years, and once I got the ball rolling, like with my first real blog, I had this nagging realization that:

1. It was something I should have started long ago.
2. There is no doubt that it will be successful.
3. That it has tremendous profit potential.

My interest in dedicated severs and the market began back in the Fall of 2007 when I was looking for suggestions for a new hosting company. If you follow my blog, you know I did my homework and ended up with my current dedicated server at LiquidWeb.

Since that time, the topic of servers has become of great interest to me, and I noticed that it was a niche not often written about in the blogosphere, but there are plenty of people out there looking for information. There are also plenty of dedicated server companies out there trying to reach these people.

This is where Dedicated Sever School fills its niche and accomplishes its task. The goal of the dedicated server school blog is to create a library of blog posts and information for the public on web server FAQ’s and solutions, while at the same time referring visitors to the dedicated server company best suited for their needs. We have a professional staff writer with experience in the industry, and brand new partnerships with the best and brightest server providers in the industry. Over the next few months we will be networking with other bloggers, to create a well known oasis for server information. So if you are someone who has an interest in the industry or a related blog, let us know! We should connect!

If you’re a small business who can’t afford to have a professional PPC management company run your Adwords campaign, then use this simple guide to get started on the do-it-yourself plan:

• First and foremost, make sure you can track conversions so you know how your Adwords campaign is performing. Start by getting a cheap 1-800 number from Kall8.com and forward it to your regular number. Replace your phone number on your website or Adwords landing pages with this one so you can check your call detail to see which calls came from your Adwords campaign.
  
  Then make sure you set up conversion tracking in Adwords, this usually only requires putting a small bit of code on your “thank you” page.
  
  It also helps to have Google Analytics installed on your website, with “Goals” setup properly. With “goals” in Google Analytics, you can easily track conversions whether it be a lead submitted through a contact form or purchase through an online shopping cart, and Analytics allows you to see quite a bit of information about the different types of traffic your website receives, much more than what you will get form the Adwords interface.
  


• Second, make sure that your site is conversion-friendly. Internet users have short attention spans, and some may not visit more than one page of your website. Since you are spending your hard-earned money to get these people to your site, it’s of utmost importance that you can turn a visitor into a conversion on that first page.
  
  This may mean setting up landing pages that are targeted for each type of ad you’re running in Google. For shopping carts, the ads should send the visitor to the specific product page or category that they are targeting. For lead generation sites, the ads should send the visitor to a page that deals specifically with the ad and keywords you’re targeting. Most importantly, web pages should have your 1-800 number displayed prominently on the website, and if it’s a lead generation site, there should be a contact form on every page.
  
Read the rest of this entry »

In the past I’ve done a few posts about PageRank that may help newcomers understand the difference between “actual” PageRank and “Toolbar” PageRank, along with some of the anomalies you will see if you look at the Google Toolbar for a long time (no, not visions of Mary either, just the little green bar).

One of the things I discussed in my post “Anomalies with Google’s ‘Toolbar PageRank,’” was the fact the sometimes search results will look strange when there is a site with low “toolbar PageRank” ranking high for competitive keywords. This is sometimes due to the possibility that Google has penalized the website’s “toolbar” PR for selling links.

This appears to be what happened to Blog Catalog today. Blog Catalog used to have a PR 6 or 7 homepage, and many interior category pages that were PR5, but if you check today, you will see that they’ve been bumped down to a PR4. Is Blog Catalog really selling links? You be the judge – have a look at the top right of the “Health” section page (click here).

Will this affect BlogCatalog’s search engine rankings? Probably not.

Although it has been argued both ways, I am of the opinion that it WILL affect the “link juice” that gets passed down to all of the blogs listed in their directory.

WebhostingTalk.com members vote LiquidWeb, Best Managed Dedicated Server Company (see poll)

If you’ve ever spent any time researching web hosting, at some point you probably ended up on WebHostingTalk.com, one of the largest forums on the web for hosting related discussions. If you venture there at any point in time during a weekday you might find 1500 or so users online reading and posting to the forums. The dedicated server forum in particular, can provide a wealth of knowledge due to the fact that many industry experts routinely answer questions there for newcomers.

It’s been over a year now since I signed up with LiquidWeb for a managed, dedicated server, and I knew it was a great service for me, but since I frequently recommend them to others I wanted to get a feel for what the web hosting community thought as well. Because who knows? Times change and so do companies. I decided to take a poll of WebHostingTalk.com members in the dedicate forum area to see who today’s leader is. Click below to see the poll results:

Best Managed Dedicated Server Companies: Poll

At the point I last looked at it, LiquidWeb was clearly in the lead, even ahead of well-known industry giant Rackspace. In fact, the only company that was even approaching their votes was a company called Softlayer that was put in the poll by mistake (they don’t offer managed dedicated services).

The poll requirements asked that people who vote had used the company for at least 3 months prior to voting, so if they are accurate, I think this serves as a good customer approval rating for LiquidWeb. The only thing I don’t like about these polls are that they are un-scientific – limited in generalizeability due to the fact that the forum software’s polling features are so limited. Another thing to consider is the fact that few so-called “experts” out there would actually use managed services. The real hosting gurus manage their own server if they have the time.

I’ve long known about email marketing and Aweber’s Autoresponders, but until recently, I didn’t have any ideas on how I could integrate one into any of my own personal websites to make them more profitable for me.

Email newsletters are great for reminding customers and potential customers about your products and services. If the newsletters give something away – like high quality free information, discounts on products, or news about something the consumer cares about, they will generally stay subscribed. And when they keep getting that reminder from you, they’re a lot more likely to turn to you when it comes time for them to make another purchase. They also do great at generating conversions from potential customers who were reluctant to buy when they first found your website.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m posting this because I Googled it to death this past weekend trying to find the code for it, and it was nowhere to be found. I’m positive I’ve used it before in the past too, but the code was not in any of my old projects either. After hours of googling for what I knew was a simple mod rewrite for .htaccess, I submitted to defeat and asked (more like begged) an expert on the subject. Here was the problem:

301 Redirect every URL from www.domain1.com to the coresponding URL (keeping the trailing file path intact) on www.domain2.com, when both domains are being pulled from the same directory on the same server, and respecting URL canonicalization issues (www vs. non-www).

This should be a readily available mod rewrite written about on SEO blogs worldwide right? Wrong.

I offered to pay my expert for the consult, but he refused, probably laughing at the trivial request I submitted. So here it is – hopefully good ole Google will pick up this post so the next guy coming along will find this, no problem:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain2\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain2.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Cut, paste into .htaccess file, use notepad, must have Apache server with mod rewrite enabled, works like a charm :) It worked the first time in fact, not like when I do a mod_rewrite and have to test it out 20 times to get it right!

I wrote this because I was explaining PageRank to someone today, and I realized that my first post on PageRank didn’t do a good enough job of explaining some of the strange things you will see from time-to-time. I also added it into that post.

Anomalies with “Toolbar PageRank”
Another important aspect aspect to consider is that there are a few anomalies associated with the PageRank scale as it’s shown on the Google Toolbar. One is the fact that it’s only updated every quarter, and sometimes less often than that. Because of that, sites that are new, may take a while to get “Toolbar PageRank.” I’ve also seen a lot of cases where the initial toolbar PageRank was higher than what they ended up having in subsequent updates.

Another anomaly is the fact that the scale seems to change over time. If you think about it, it makes sense because the internet is constantly growing while the scale remains a number 1 – 10. That being said, it should follow that websites who were at one point a PR5, that don’t build links over time, will see a decrease in their PageRank as it’s displayed by the toolbar over time. This is something I’ve seen on older websites I own. I used to be able to get a PR5 from the toolbar with just a few hundred average links, whereas these days it takes significantly more link building effort to achieve the same toolbar PageRank. The “kicker” is that these “toolbar PageRank” changes may not be associated with loss in rankings at all.

It’s because of the concept of internet growth mentioned above, and penalties that I will discuss next, that I’ve often seen a website’s search rankings go up, even though their toolbar PageRank went down!

The last anomaly I should address about the toolbar is that occasionally you will find websites whose toolbar PageRank has been penalized. It’s something that is most often noticed when you’re looking at competitive search results, and you find it strange that the top results are all well-optimized web pages, yet one on top has a significantly lower PageRank than those beneath. While this can usually be attributed to on-page SEO factors, sometimes it’s because Google actually penalized the toolbar PageRank of the site because it was selling links at one point in time. The strange thing about these types of toolbar PageRank penalties is that they seem to only affect the toolbar and not the website’s actual search engine rankings. This would indicate that “actual PageRank” has not been affected. Sometimes these penalized websites can get their “toolbar PageRank” back through appeal, but that’s not always the case.

As you can see based on these anomalies, there are quite a few reasons that the toolbar may not be indicative of how a website ranks in the search engines.

I’ve been seeing some ads around for therapysites.com for a little while now, and I thought it seemed like a great idea for therapists who want to have their own website built. They provide a lot of tools that make website creation easy, using their customizable themes and their pre-built content management system.


For a FREE Month, use coupon code “promoFMC”!

If you read my post entitled “How Much Should My Website Cost?” you already know that decent web design can start in the $2k range, and go up over time with different cost factors. The thing I like about TherapySites.com, is that while more expensive than just plain website hosting, you save all of the money that’s usually spent on the initial design process. Plus you get their content management system so you can easily make your own changes to the site.

The other thing I like is that the company seems focused on the business of therapists, which means they will likely be equipped to deal with common problems that therapists face when it comes to web design; usually companies like this improve over time also.

I haven’t tried their sites out yet, and I haven’t heard any feedback on them from my advertisers, but they offer a money-back guarantee, and a free month if you mention that you were referred by The FMC Directory (my other website), so it may be worthwhile to try if you’re in the market for a new site.

About a year ago, I got my first Hilton Honors credit card for my business and started making the most out of the money I spent on advertising by getting rewards points that went towards hotel stays at any Hilton resort. It’s worked out so well for me, that I now use another HHonors card for my personal expenses as well. I try to pay any bills I possibly can with the credit card, and I end up getting at least one free hotel night every month! Since I was never the type of person that was good at saving money for vacations, this has worked out very well for our family.

With the monumental rise in gas prices this past year, credit cards with gas rebate rewards have become increasingly popular. Keep in mind that there are many cash-back reward cards available, and they typically give you 1% – 2% cashback on any purchase. Well for gas, your savings can be much higher. Some of these new gas rebate cards are offering as much as 10% off for an introductory period! The Discover Open Road and BP Visa offer 5% for the life of the card. These are huge savings (0.20 per gallon on $4 / gal. gas) compared to traditional rewards cards. It really makes it worthwhile to get one just for fueling up, especially if you’re someone who drives a lot.

To help make these cards more available to the public, this weekend I launched Gas Rebate Credit Cards.com, a site with the top gas credit cards and my other favorite rewards cards as well. I plan on keeping it updated with the best cards as they become available, so check it out if you’re in the market for a rewards card!

It’s no secret that I’ve been a big fan of LiquidWeb’s dedicated servers since I started using them last year. I got my invoice this month, and read a little further down the email where I was surprised to learn that they now have Zero Latency, Solid State Drives available for their dedicated servers! “What is that?” I first though. I put 2 and 2 together, because I know what latency is (and “0″ is a good number when you’re talking about it), and I know what “solid state” means (usually refers to circuitry as opposed to moving parts), so it became clear that they’re offering these brand new solid state drives (SSD) on their servers. Wow!

What’s the Big Deal?
One of the biggest bottlenecks on a computer is the hard drive. If the PC needs to access your hard drive, it slows things down considerably. This is why having enough RAM can speed things up significantly – with RAM, you eliminate the bottleneck of having to search and rescue data from a spinning hard drive. Well, Solid State Drives work like RAM. It’s like replacing your hard drive with a giant RAM chip :) the data becomes instantly accessible to the processor.

Can you imagine how great this will be for websites? Especially forums like mine. It should make them blazingly fast.

I had to call LiquidWeb to find out more. I talked to one of the sales guys, and he confirmed that “yes, the solid state drives are available for the dedicated servers, and LiquidWeb is currently one of only a few dedicated server providers in the world that have them available.”

So the almighty “RackSpace” doesn’t even have these things yet, and when they do get them, RS customers should be prepared to whip out their pocketbook. LiquidWeb will do the upgrade for $150 / mo. right now, with discounts for volume. Not cheap by any means, but I would imagine that it’s a nice performance boost for database driven sites. While it’s not in my budget right now, I can’t wait to try them out. Hopefully anyone with experience with them will post a review.

For more info on LiquidWeb’s SSD servers, click here.

Paid blogging services can make it obvious that your buying links if you’re new to using them, or they can make it look like your site is generating buzz and natural links in the blogosphere. The second of which, is the desired outcome when optimizing your site for Google. While many paid blogging services don’t give much control to the media buyer, PayPerPost has many options that can make your posts look more natural to the search engines. Here are some tips for using PayperPost. Read the rest of this entry »

A common question I get is, “Chris, we got a quote from this company for our new website and they want to charge us $XXXXX – is that too much?” “Well, what are they going to do?” I counter. “I don’t know, design our website!”

Simple “Brochure” Type Websites
The fact is, $2,000 can be too much or too little, and so can $20,000. It depends on what the purpose of the website is and what type of functionality you want it to have. The simplest websites to build are like “brochures” or “business cards” on the web. These have static content, meaning that if you want to change anything you need to have web design experience or have your designer make the changes. These types of sites generally go for $1k – $5k, depending on the experience and quality of the designer, and depending on if it will have flash, and how many pages it will have.

Content Management Systems (CMS)
The next upgrade is a site with some form of “content management.” CMS allows the site administrator or anyone else with permission, to login to the site and make changes to content and pages using a simple text editor. Website owners like CMS because it makes them less dependent on their web design company for changes. Changes to content can be made quickly and easily by the site owner or admin. Read the rest of this entry »

A few years back I decided to start using website monitoring services, and I’m grateful that I did. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about hosting and how good or bad the services I was paying for were. This was part of the progression that led me to get a dedicated server last year, which was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made as a web designer / developer. Website monitoring is also vital if you’re running a search engine marketing campaign.

What do website monitoring services do?
They check your website from different locations around the world during the course of the day to make sure that it is up and functioning. You can usually choose how often you want them to check, and different services have different options. These days I use a company called Alertbot, and I’ve been pretty happy with them so far, but there are plenty of others out there and it’s good to shop around to get the features you want.

Why is monitoring a big deal? Don’t you know when your website is down?

1. The problem is, I didn’t always know… you just can’t be on your website around the clock. Especially when you have multiple sites.
2. For search engine marketing campaigns, being unaware of downtime can cost a lot of money and skew conversion data.
3. Downtime is money. When you have profitable websites, you lose money while they are down, regardless of whether or not you’re running pay-per-click campaigns.
4. I had no idea how unreliable shared hosting was. Once I started monitoring my sites on the shared accounts, I realized that I was having regular weekly downtime of anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour.
5. Monitoring services give you information that can be used to diagnose problems through support. When I talk to support about downtime, I now have a record of exactly when it occurred, with the IP of the test site(s), and the length of time it occurred. This information can go a long way in helping to get to the cause of the problem, and it gives credibility to your complaint – especially with shared hosting providers.

I’m glad I started doing this because it’s standard practice for me now. At our firm we always recommend that clients monitor their sites, and set it up ourselves if necessary. If you’re running a search marketing campaign for someone else, how do you know if you had a bad day conversion-wise, or if their site was down for a few critical hours and no one knew about it? Things like that could mean the difference between keeping and losing a good client.

I posted about George Long a few months ago when we met and I was inspired by his excellent photography and his ability to capture the heart and soul of New Orleans through the lens.

At the time, he showed me a preview of his upcoming book entitled “Katrina Days,” which was a visually stunning look at some of the pitcures he captured following the storm. If you’re the type of person who likes the Time / Life “Year in Pictures” type-books, that highlight the great events of our time through photography, then this is something I think you will like. It’s also for the dedicated New Orleans residents who want something tangible to remember the events surrounding hurricane Katrina by.

I just got word that the book is now available through his website, and I placed an order. That’s what prompted me to write. It’s something I had been eagerly awaiting. To order a copy, visit: http://georgelong.com/book.htm

In the Fall of last year, Francis Ford Coppola’s computer and backup hard drive were stolen, and he lost 15 years worth of data, including writing and family photographs. He offered a reward for its return, but he never did get it back.

On a much smaller scale, last month I had a backup hard drive fail, which under normal circumstances should be no big deal. I should be able to buy a new one and just replace it, but the problem was that I had stored some data on it which was not stored anywhere else – so it’s now gone for good. I have the option of spending a few hundred dollars on data recovery to see if it can be recovered, but I haven’t been able to decide if the data is worth the price.

What About Your Websites?
Just 2 weeks ago, there was a terrible fire at The Planet, one of the largest web hosting providers in the world. The fire interrupted thousands of servers, but supposedly no servers or networking equipment was damaged. Let’s suppose there had been damage. Suppose that your web server and its backups at your hosting provider were destroyed. Most people who work on static websites have copies on their local machine that they FTP. But how many websites these days are database driven? Are you backing up your databases? I don’t know many people who do, unfortunately.

Here’s What I Do.

I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve lost too many irreplaceable files over the years. I now have a library of digital pictures of my growing family from the past 5 years on my computer. Losing these files would be a great loss for me. So here’s how I’ve come to handle local data. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot of ways to get links for most SEO campaigns, but one thing I almost always do is hire some outsourced personnel who contact related websites asking them to link to the site we’re promoting from their “Resource” pages. This can be very time consuming work, that’s why most of the people I’ve met who do this are from India. The value you get for your dollar is very good in India. We pay these link builders anywhere from $5 – $50 for a link, and we get a one-time fee, permanent link from another website. Outsourcing companies, like OutsourcedLinkBuilding.com are getting more and more popular due to the cheap price of labor overseas. Outsourced Link Building dot com in particular, has secured tons of valuable links for me in the past. Granted, there are times when I wind up paying for a few I wish I hadn’t, but the overall service is incredible for the price you pay.

The value you get from one-time fee, permanent links is so great, because when you specify a decent part of your budget for that, the links really build up over time. So does your PageRank, and so do your rankings. I’ve found so many ways to get permanent links these days, that it’s rare that I rent links. To me, renting links (paying a monthly fee) is little different from pay-per-click advertising in that you’re renting your space at the top. Don’t rent! Own!

First let me say, that Google does not recommend changing domain names, and neither do I. My next disclaimer is that I can’t control what Google does (the classic SEO disclaimer that every long-term SEO has had to resort to at some point in time). So if you try this at home and it doesn’t work, it’s not my fault.

The internet marketing firm I work for recently ran into a problem that is likely to happen to anyone who names their firm after the partners – one partner left, and we had to change the name. So “Foreman & Pike Consulting” became “Reciprocal Consulting,” but that was the easy part. We had top search engine rankings in Google for “Internet Marketing Firm” and “Internet Marketing Firms,” which had been two productive keyword phrases. How were we going to change our domain name and retain our search rankings?

I’ve been doing SEO since 1998, so I had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done (301 redirects) without looking anything up, but this was a big deal, and the other guys in the firm were depending on me! I’m the only SEO guy, and I needed to get it right!

What helped things out, was that I had done some research for a consulting job on this very thing not long ago, and I tried to find out what Google’s “official” recommendation was on the matter. Here are a few good snippets that I found: Read the rest of this entry »

Ever “Googled” yourself? If so, what do the search results show? If you have social media profiles and web pages with your name on them – there’s a good chance these will show up. This is what the concept of reputation management is built around – managing your online reputation. For people who do business on the web, their company name frequently comes up in social media circles….potentially on forums and blog posts, and it has become increasingly difficult for businesses to deal with negative statements about them. Although the best defense in good customer service, we all know you can’t keep everyone happy all the time.

Worst case scenario is having sites like these (click) pop up about your business. Who wants a whole website devoted to attacking their reputation?
:(

Sometimes the best defense is an early one, and here are two simple ways you can monitor your online reputation:

1. Alerts: Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have alert services that will let you know when the top 10 or 20 search results change for a search you choose. Here’s where to set them:
http://www.google.com/alerts
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/alerts/
http://alerts.live.com/Alerts/Default.aspx

2. Search Blogs: Use Technorati.com to monitor the blogosphere by subscribing to RSS feeds of the searches you want to monitor.

Many people are aware that I work for an internet marketing firm called Foreman & Pike Consulting (used to be www.ForemanPike.com). We have now changed our name to Reciprocal Consulting (www.ReciprocalConsulting.com). I am happy to say that we will continue to be able to provide the same top-notch service that we are well known for in the industry. Here is the letter from John Pike on the change:

As the internet advertising market changes each day, so must we.

Foreman & Pike Consulting has always been on the cutting edge of growth, development and performance; and this will not change. We will continue to offer Internet advertising solutions, successful conversions, increased sales and most importantly, a return on your investment — all on a pay for performance basis. However, we benefit from your success as much as you do because after all, without you we would be without purpose.

It is for this reason that Foreman & Pike has changed their name to Reciprocal Consulting.

We believe that Reciprocal better describes who we are, what we do and what we offer, as our relationship with our clients is mutually beneficial. We want to stress, as we always have, that we are Partners with our clients. We take on your vision, make your goals our goals and our success is measured only by your success. This is the difference between an Internet Marketing firm and Reciprocal Consulting.

Nothing has changed and nothing will except for our name, which we feel better represents us and our relationship with you, our clients.

Sincerely,

John E. Pike, Owner & President

Reciprocal Consulting