New Orleans Internet Marketing

When I moved almost all of my websites to a dedicated server at LiquidWeb about 4 months ago, I thought I would be getting some peace of mind, but I had no idea about all of the other great things that would result from having a managed, dedicated server of my own.

Here are some of the things I find really advantageous about dedicated servers as opposed to typical shared hosting that I was handcuffed by before.

1. Incredible Response Times – granted these differences are in milliseconds, but obviously there is a significant difference here. These two charts are my site monitoring results from my dedicated server at LiquidWeb, and my Gridserver (shared hosting) account at Media Temple. If you look at the scale on the left, you will see that the LiquidWeb dedicated server is about twice as fast on average. I should also mention that the Media Temple account has regular unscheduled downtime, still to this day.
   LiquidWeb Dedicated Server:
   
   MediaTemple Gridserver:
   
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If you’re involved in the internet marketing profession, there is eventually going to come a time when you will need a picture of yourself for a bio or “about us” page. Especially if you’re a blogger – a good picture helps readers to connect and get a feel for who you are; Problogger has a good post on the benefits of using your picture on your blog.

My time had come. I needed a picture for our firm’s website. I’ve been getting along with some crappy old pictures that I cropped from random photos for too long. So being the internet marketing hacker I am, I hit Google up for some “New Orleans Photographers,” and that’s how I was lucky enough to find George Long.

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Being the webmaster of a site with over 400 direct advertisers (who are therapists), I often get asked about stats, and currently I don’t have anything set up to deliver stats to my directory’s advertisers. The population I advertise for are therapists who, for the most part, are relatively new to internet marketing. Since I also manage a few individual marketing campaigns for therapists, I have a good idea about the kind of traffic that converts into referrals for them, and the kind of traffic that doesn’t. I even get to see how good my site’s competitors do at sending conversions to therapists. It’s a really unique vantage point, and here’s what I’ve come to learn from it.

The truth about what people are selling you in terms of advertising, is that the bottom line is the price you pay for each conversion. In the case of the therapists who advertise on my website, a “conversion” is a referral for counseling services. With that being said, statistics on visitors and pageviews that people send their advertisers can potentially be meaningless due to the fact that conversions are highly dependent on how targeted the traffic is. Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t even know about managed DNS until I read about it on John Chow’s blog a long time ago. I could relate to the stress of DNS propagation issues though, and I thought it would be a good idea to try it out.

Today, I’ve been using externally managed DNS for about 4 months, and I’m very happy with the results. For my more important websites (the ones that make money), I decided to keep backup copies of them on a less expensive hosting account just in case my dedicated server ever goes down. I realized the need for this type of setup after years of dealing with shared hosting and unscheduled down time (inevitably at the worst possible time).

Under normal circumstances, a backup copy of your website on another server won’t do much good, because if you need to switch to the backup – you can expect a 24hr delay as DNS propagates. Not with externally managed DNS though. Now I can switch between the two servers in 5 minutes. No more having to wait until the next morning to find out if my site is functioning properly on the new server. Read the rest of this entry »

Title tags are one of the most important aspects of on-page search engine optimization. While there are a lot of aspects of a web page that help it to rank well for keywords, the title tag is undoubtedly one of the most important.

The title tag is the html code that looks like this: <title>Title Goes Here</title>

It is contained within the <head></head> section of the html document and shows up at the top of the web browser. It is also the link that shows up at the top of your site’s listing in the search results. Here are some important considerations that will make your use of title tags more effective.

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I do a lot of pay-per-click management for the firm I work for, and I think I’m pretty good at it. I can build out good ad groups and ads, lower click costs, improve clickthrough rates, build good content match campaigns etc., etc., etc., but every now and then I do a consult for a client that’s thinking about using us for SEO. Here’s where I shine. SEO is my one of my favorite topics, and I have been doing it with success for many years now. These are the top 5 reasons I think SEO is one of the best investments you can make in your website:

1. Improvements to the way you organize your site and it’s content, will help the Search Engines to find and index your site better for the rest of its life. Best of all, it should help visitors as well.
   


2. The suggestions that your SEO gives you will be “best practice” standards that you and your designers can use for any future work you do.
   


3. New, original content that you add will be yours forever, and you can bring in search traffic from it for as long as it’s there.
   


4. Many links that you get will be permanent links, that will continue to exist, drive traffic, and help your search results for as long as the linking site remains online.
   


5. Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.

SEO is a great long term investment in your website. I like to look at a website as a piece of property, and SEO is not only home-improvement, but it also puts you in a better neighborhood.

I have about 15-20 websites that I manage, and most of them are database driven these days. Managing databases adds another whole level of complexity to moving and backing up websites that didn’t exist when everything I managed was plain html years ago. Only having to deal with MYSQL databases these past few years, admittedly, I’m not a pro. But I’ve managed to get the hang of things, for the most part.

So the old process was really cumbersome. At times, I had to install PHPmyadmin if it wasn’t already on the server, then worry about conflicting versions or settings between PHPmyadmin on different servers. Frequently, I got errors when importing SQL files that were dumped from another server. It really became a nightmare when I was trying to move sites from Media Temple to Liquid Web recently.

Then I found Navicat (http://www.navicat.com). Navicat is a program for Windows, MAC, or Linux, that allows you to manage MYSQL databases with a nice GUI and easy to use, straightforward features.

Have you ever purchased software, when you really didn’t want to spend the extra money, and then afterwards you thought to yourself, “wow, that was the best investment I’ve made in a long time?”

That’s how I felt after purchasing Navicat. It stores al of my DB settings, and I can backup, transfer, sync, edit, import & export, all with just a few clicks. It’s literally cut my DB management time by about 75%. Talk about “making an amateur feel like a pro.” Another good thing was that they had a fully functional 30 day trial available for download. So I got to use it for a while before I actually made the purchase.

I just wanted to pass this on because Navicat is “good stuff.” It seems rare these days that I run into products that work out of the box, and help me to accomplish my goals easier.

After struggling for years with the frustration of poor technical support, latency, and down-time, it appears that I’ve finally found the solution to my web hosting woes. Liquid Web’s Dedicated Servers have been nothing short of excellent for me so far. If you’re serious about your websites, and they are a source of income for you, it’s not worth the savings to buy cheap web hosting.

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Today I did a little work on a privacy policy I have been writing for a website. Privacy policies are something I have ignored in the past, but they are becoming increasingly important as more people on the web these days actually read them, and they can give more “trust” to your site from certain parties.

I started it off with the information gathered from Google Analytics that I use for various purposes. Google Analytics is a really great analytical tool, and it is an effective way to run pretty reports that clearly show visitor trends, effectiveness of marketing, search queries, etc. I’ve had a few clients ask some pretty tough questions in the past, and on occassion, I’ve had to dig deep into Analytics to find the answer. Did you know that Analytics tracks visitor stats down to browser type, OS, geographical location, Java version, network location, screen resolution, and more? Read the rest of this entry »

I recently upgraded to MS Office 2007, not really because I wanted to, but because there were some glitches with Office 2003 that were giving me trouble and I was sick of fighting with them. I tend to avoid new MS products for a while when they first come out due to their mass quantities of bugs and patches…

So the upgrade goes smooth, then I notice the slowdown. OMG every time it does a send / receive, it’s like my computer locks up for 5 seconds! How can Microsoft screw up a simple POP3 connection? Shouldn’t innovative new updates to existing programs IMPROVE their efficiency? Why do we keep having to get bulkier programs that use up more system resources with each new version? This is why I need to buy a new computer every year, to keep up with the trash that MS puts out. Done venting.

How much per month do you spend on SEO, not including on-page stuff like content and changes to your site? Is it enough? How much would you need to spend to be comfortable with the SEO effort?

I do SEO for a bunch of sites, some for other people, some for myself. I think I spend around $700 / mo. on link building for my own sites. Although I’m really not happy with that. I would like to spend $1000. If I spent $1k / mo. on link building I think I could totally dominate the keyword phrases I want. But I do have top rankings for like 7 out of 10 kw phrases I want (see the correlation there?) :)

Without going into details that would help my competition devour me (I think they probably spend twice as much for not nearly as great results), my budget breaks down to about an even split of several different forms of link building. Including the occasional email from yours truly to the more exceptional websites I want links from.

For my clients, I find I can hit moderately competitive keyword phrases for around $600 / mo., given about 6 months time if they were no where on the charts before I start. By “moderately competitive,” I mean the top results have some well optimized PR4 sites, maybe a PR5 or two. It seems like a PR5 is more difficult to attain these days than it was a year ago.

What do you guys spend on link building, and how competitive is your market?

This morning I ordered a new battery for my digital camera through a company called MemorySuppliers.com, they have a really good online store where you can buy all kinds of memory, batteries, etc. I got an email an hour later stating that my order had already been shipped! Great service!

Then I get this email from them, and it says:

We have a special money saving offer for you today: If you would like to receive a $15.00 credit back on your credit card for this order, simply post a link to MemorySuppliers.com on your website, blog, personal profile page (i.e. myspace) with a short one or two line description of our website and products. When finished, email us the web address where the link is posted and we will give you a $15.00 credit back on to your credit card.

This is a great idea, that I have actually tried in the past. The only problem was that I tried it on my marriage counseling directory, for new therapists who signed up to advertise. That population is not very tech savvy, and I got so many questions about how and what to do in the first few weeks, that I abandoned the campaign completely. It wasn’t worth the time it took.

Still, a great idea if you’re in an industry that deals with tech-savvy people. Try it out!

I currently have many of my websites hosted on Media Temple’s Gridserver. If you click on the link, don’t get sucked into their slick marketing and hyped up “Grid Hosting” talk. Today my sites on those servers have been dead slow to respond all day long. About 15 websites. Since moving them to the gridservers they have also been plagued with database errors, even after upgrading to “dedicated” memory for my db’s (Grid Containers). I’m now spending a around $80 / month for two accounts, and I don’t feel safe keeping my sites there much longer. I lose money every time something like this happens, and it never fails, that it happens at the worst possible time (like the day you spent a bunch of time and money doing extra marketing to get people to your website).

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I have a website with excellent organic search engine rankings for moderately competitive keywords that are well-targeted for a lot of advertisers. I run Adsense on this site, and it has always done well for me. But in the past 6 months or so, Adsense revenues have been declining somewhat, so I decided to take action.

The best performing Adsense ads are usually showing up at the top, so I did some research and found which two had the best paying affiliate programs. One paid around 30% per sale, and the other had a very good per sale payout that wasn’t dependant on the percentage. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a few popular article places where you can get your content published online if you follow their guidelines. On some you can add different types of content like graphics, rss feeds, affiliate links and more. Articles submitted to many of these websites typically rank well themselves in search results.

http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://knol.google.com
http://www.squidoo.com
http://www.associatedcontent.com
http://www.helium.com
http://www.buzzle.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.e-topic.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com
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There are many article directories on the web these days, and many websites that accept free article submissions as well. But how do articles help your website rank for keywords?

Ok, here’s an example: I have a website about cats, and I know that building quality relevant links to my website will help it in the search results. But most of the time, that’s eaiser said than done. Writing articles about your topic is one way that you can accomplish this. Here are some ideas for keyword rich articles for my “cats” website-

• Caring for Your Cat
• Feeding Cats: What’s the Healthiest Cat Food?
• Grooming Your Cat

I have a list of general article directories I will publish in my next post, but most are free, and they all accept articles that are allowed to have an outbound link near the bottom (the Author Bio). It will be even better for my “cat” articles if I can find niche websites about cats that accept article submissions. If you’re considering a website for submitting an article, make sure they allow a link to your site, and make sure that the link doesn’t contain the “rel=’nofollow’” attribute. That attribute tells Google not to pass PR down to the site that is linked to.

Some people will submit the same article or slight variations to hundreds of article directories… I don’t think that helps much. Search engines today are very aware of “duplicate content,” and work hard to weed it out. They try to determine the original source of the content, and then copies get penalized in the search results. So I say, submit your articles once to the most appropriate website. Quite often, the articles themselves will achieve decent search engine rankings, and can bring in natural traffic to your site that way as well.

I used to do this using Google’s API, and it was very tricky. Now, it’s a cut and paste operation that takes less than 5 minutes:

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I get this a lot. I talk to so many people all over the country in the line of work I do. An advertiser wrote me tonight and at the end of her email it said,

PS.  If you have time, I’d be interested in hearing a post Katrina report.

From the Second Most Likely Area To Flood Out Sacramento, CA.

So tonight I took some time, and since so many people want to know, here was my response:

As far as New Orleans goes, overall I’d say the city is doing well considering what happened during Katrina. The good part is that most parts of town are “back to normal” I guess one could say. The bad part is that the poorer parts of the city are still deserted and not making much progress. The people with the least resources are the ones that were hit the hardest. There’s this “Road Home” program that the State created to give out the federal funds that were allocated to help rebuild, and over the past few months people have just STARTED to get that money – 2 yrs. later. So you can imagine, what low income person, who has already settled down in another state, is going to get that money and want to come back to rebuild? New Orleans didn’t treat them that great. Only the ones who really loved it here will come back, and even for some of those, the thought of returning and not having their community here will be too discouraging.

We have a lot of migrant workers here helping rebuild now, so there’s been a big shift in the racial / ethnic makeup of the city. After a while, abandoned houses will be torn down and new ones built. Some areas of the city have already gotten “facelifts.” So there has been some good and there will be more to come of it. For tourists, everything good about New Orleans is still here, and one probably wouldn’t notice much difference. I love the city and I guess you have to take the good with the bad anywhere you live, but for me the good here, really outweighs the bad.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past year. Although I’m sure there were hundreds of other signs that Google’s image was changing, for me it started when Google “local results” started showing up in search above the natural search results.

Here we had our beloved “Google,” created by two Stanford students infatuated with search, beginning to venture into the realm of the “content providers” by adding local yellow-page-type listings in with their search results. Let’s see, how do we edit our listing? Has anyone ever tried it? If you have, you know that it’s next to impossible. Who knows where Google gets this data, or how they decide which businesses get the privilege of showing up on the front page.

Now we have “news” results showing up in regular search results. Was I looking for news? If I was, wouldn’t I just add “news” to the search or search “Google News?”

The problem as I see it, is that my favorite search provider is turning into “content provider.” This is further evidenced by acquisitions such as YouTube. The search engine we grew to know and love is now directly competing with more and more webmasters around the globe. This hasn’t happened without a backlash though. “Search” used to be the primary means I would use to find the content I’m interested in, but now I have many new alternatives.

Looking back at the evolution and rapid growth of social networks and media, I see a relationship between Google’s “sandboxing” of new content and the growth of popular sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon (SU). For those unfamiliar with the term, Google’s “sandbox” refers to the inability of new websites to rank well for competitive keyword phrases in Google. If I can’t find the newest, best content on Google, I’m going to go elsewhere; and Digg and SU provided a great means of delivering the newest and best content to users.

The recent tryst with eBay is a symbolic event that reminds me that Google is a competitor, more so now than ever. Google wants to be “everything to everyone.” By providing content that it’s too big to manage (local listings), and e-commerce solutions (Google Checkout), it’s no longer just our friendly search provider.

There was a front page thread on WebmasterWorld about this recently, and it’s something that’s frequently asked. Probably because it’s so infrequent that someone gives a good answer. I posted on the thread, but I’ll go into more detail here.

So what’s the good answer? “Maybe,” is the best answer.

This is what I consider when I’m thinking of listing a site in Yahoo!

1. How deep is the category where the site will be listed?
   
   

   Is it a deep category like this?
   
   Regional > U.S. States > Louisiana > Cities > New Orleans > Business and Shopping > Business to Business > Communications and Networking > Internet and World Wide Web > Web Site Designers
   
   If so, it will have much less value than the upper level categories that get more traffic and have higher PageRank.
   
   

2. Is the category relative to the keywords you want to show up for?
   
   

   In most cases, the category will be relative to the keywords you’re targeting. If it’s not, you should consider changing or adding content to your site that represents those topics.
   
   

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I haven’t talked much about MyBlogLog in the past, but I really like it. The site widget is neat because you get to see who’s been visiting your blog, and you can explore their blogs and get to know them better. So if you’re not in “the wagon” you’re missing the train.

This little experiment, I found on Chris Sandberg’s blog when I was looking at my backlinks. So I thought I’d give it a try:

***Start Copying Here:***
Here are the rules:

1) Write a short introduction about how you found this list and include a link back to that blog.

2) COPY the rules and ENTIRE list below and post it on your blog.

3) Take “My New Community Members� and move them into the “The Original Community Members� list.

4) Find 3 new blogs, join their MyBlogLog Community and add them to the “My New Community Membersâ€? section. Remember to also add the “Join the Community” link next to each blog. (Example: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/ReformatThis/ )

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I “should have” started this blog 9 years ago. That’s when I got interested in designing websites. I can’t imagine how many transformations it would have gone through by now. I wonder how many links it would have going to it, or what I would have talked about back then. It sure wouldn’t be “sandboxed” by Google, like this one is.

I tell everybody I know, if you’re interested in anything, start a website on it. Let me help you with it. Just put something out there, and sooner or later, if you work on it a little bit, it will make some money for you.

It’s also neat having a blog and being able to sit down and write something that I know a ton of people will see tomorrow. But it’s also like owning property. The fact is, advertisers need relevant space to advertise. They need to reach their audience, and with all of the blogs out there, it’s hard to believe that sometimes I can’t find one on the topic I’m looking for. It does happen though.

Look at the new text ad products popping up: ReviewMe.com, V7N Contextual Links. They need bloggers.

So if you have something you like to talk about, what are you waiting around for? Put yourself out there…

http://www.stumbleupon.com

If anyone hasn’t tried StumbleUpon yet, I strongly suggest it, not only for bringing additional traffic to a site, but also because it’s really good entertainment and a great way to find the kind of stuff you’re into on the web.

SU is kind of a mixture between MySpace, Digg. and Del.icio.us. Sign up for a free account, download the toolbar (usually, I’m very against adding toolbars, but this one’s worth it), and choose your topics that interest you.

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This contest is easy if you’re a blogger or a webmaster, a little harder harder if you’re not as experienced in “web world.”

All you need to do in order to enter this contest, is to post a link to this blog from another website. On July 30th, at 1:00 pm CST, the winner will be the person whose link shows up the highest in Yahoo’s Site Explorer Inlinks for this site.

Yahoo! Site Explorer Example:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fneworleansinternetmarketing.com&bwm=i&bwms=p&bwmf=u&fr=yfp-t-501&fr2=seo-rd-se

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Link building has long been a source of success and frustration when doing SEO. When it first became known that links form other sites affected search engine rankings, immediately FFA (Free For All) sites appeared that allowed users to add their links for free. There was no editorial discretion in the placement of these links and commonly, they were all thrown together on one page with no relevance between them.

This is when the search engines became charged with the task of determining link quality. I’ve long said that “a link to your site is like a vote for your site, but all links are not created equal.” Obviously, Google and other search engines found a way to devalue FFA links over time. So much so, that FFA sites are virtually non-existent today. Then came link exchanges, which are also not nearly as effective these days.

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Conceptualization
I started Independent Layout & Website Design while in graduate school. I had a passion for designing websites, and I wanted to have my own business so that my hours could be flexible. My goal was not to create a large design firm and have to hire employees, but to market myself as a freelance designer and find jobs that were within my realm of knowledge and ability.

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My first check I got from Google Adsense in 2003! $260.40, not bad for a first time Adsense user!



That was when the light bulb went off. I had done something I enjoyed doing (building a website), and I had earned money from it that would contine to grow. Keep reading this blog, and you’ll eventually find out exactly how I did it every time. Here are some tips to make money from Adsense: Read the rest of this entry »

What is PageRank?

If you’re completely new to search engine optimization, then you may not even know what PageRank is. Start by downloading the Google Toolbar. You may have to enable the PageRank display in the settings. Below are some examples of what PageRank indicators look like on a page form the Google Directory, viewed through a web browser with the Google Toolbar.



PageRank is displayed on the toolbar as a scale from 0 – 10, with “10″ being the “most important” pages on the web, and “0″ being the “least important” pages on the web. On the toolbar, PageRank is only displayed as an integer; however, in reality, PageRank is an infinite scale from 0 – 10. It is important to differentiate between “Toolbar” pagerank, and “actual” pagerank.

Actual PageRank is the factor that is computed by Google’s algorithm to determine the “importance” of a web page. While the toolbar PageRank is only updated about once every 4 – 5 months, actual PageRank is dynamically updated as changes occur in Google’s index.

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Not all Web Directories are Created Equal.
These are a few I know about, as well as some links to other lists. Getting your site listed in web directories is a small way to help your site’s relevance and link popularity in the search engines.

Most Important:

Yahoo! Directory

ODP – Open Directory Project

Best of the Web Directory

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— This Contest Has Ended! Congratulations Jess, a visitor from MyBlogLog who won! —



This image came form a recent news story on a popular news site. To win this contest, you must name the headline of the news item, or send a link to the page.

The winner will receive a $20 itunes gift certificate. You must leave a correct email address to get your prize. Answers must be given as comments on this page. The prize goes to the first comment with the correct answer.