New Orleans Internet Marketing

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 SiteUptime, 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 »