WDTalk

I read a ton of articles, threads and posts from SEO experts everyday. Why?

Because just like everyone else, I want to increase sales online. For years, SEO practitioners preached a mix of link this and content that, or touted banner advertisements or AdSense ads. Since the onset of search engines, techniques to outwit them to rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) have basically evolved beyond simply obtaining backlinks, providing lots of content or optimizing keywords and meta tags.

FREE versus Paid Traffic

Organic traffic is traffic you receive from free click-throughs in search engines (not sponsored) – the higher your site ranks, the more traffic you receive, thus higher revenues on the backside. Paid traffic would be traffic obtained via banner ads or programs like AdSense. Bottom line to increase profits – reduce overhead – increase productivity. So how do you make your website more productive without forking out a ton of money on paid advertising?

Google Algorithms Put to the Test
For years, I’ve been reading about how complex Google algorithms were. We’ve witnessed a number of cycles or shifts in how Google analyzes and ranks sites, but if you tie in Google’s history of acquisitions and free tools, their core emphasis (today) lies within three (3) PRIMARY variables – all driven by human activity. Much like Bing, they’ve transitioned from being a search engine to being a decision engine.

So What is this ‘FREE Traffic” Big Secret?
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen the phrase, “Content is King” or “Content is King Kong.” I’ve said this myself in a past life. The real KING today is Organic Search Traffic!! Think about this for a second. What does paid advertising get you – a position on a page with the expectation that being seen at the top of that page will result in a click through to your site.

Viewing Patterns Take Center Stage
Numerous studies have been conducted by leading SEO firms to determine viewing patterns and projected click through patterns over the years. Going back to the early 2000’s, banner advertising worked very well, drawing over a 30% click through rate. When banner advertising fell out of favor, the trend evolved to link building, but a ton of black hat SEO strategies forced Google to revise their algorithms.

So what do today’s viewing patterns tell us about paid ads?
Very simply that organic traffic is growing and paid is declining. Here’s a question for you – when you do a search query on Google, do you read the sponsored ads at the top of the page or the ads on the side bar? Studies have shown that those viewers who do read them is on the decline. Consider this – sponsored ads were only drawing 5% of the click throughs in their prime, and even less now. So where are the other 95% of the click throughs occurring?

The answer is in Google’s organic listings – the FREE ones!! Banner Ads don’t even register and sponsored ads aren’t much better. Currently, paid listings that appear above the organic listings receive only 2 to 3 percent of the available clicks with those on the side receiving a paltry 1 to 2 percent. To verify this, you simply have to use Google’s own internal Traffic Estimator Tool.

Organic Traffic is KING
Not only is organic traffic FREE, but it also receives the majority of all traffic. The first organic listing receives over 40% of the available traffic, while the second, or number two, receives nearly 20%. Let’s say you’re running an AdWords campaign and you’re getting 1000 clicks per day (multiply those clicks by your cost per click – OUCH). Compare that to number one in Google’s organic listing at 40%. Your paid 1000 clicks translate to 8000 FREE organic clicks. And viewing patterns indicate the first ten organic search positions outperform even the number 1 paid ad on the same page. OK, you’re saying that you know it’s important to rank high in SERPS, so how is this a big secret?

What does Google look at today to rank organic listings?
While Google doesn’t divulge their algorithms publicly, they do post recommendations and guidance. We do know they look at content, which is essentially the domain name itself, certain meta tags and so. They still look at links, both inbound and outbound, assigning authority to those links. And this should be no surprise – they look at the human element – activity. This consists of traffic, RSS subscriptions, comments on blogs, updates to your site and so on.

How do today’s algorithms differ from years past?

I think we all remember PageRank. Up until about 2003, Google counted the number of inbound links to a site, applied a ranking score to each (based on quality), and the sites with the most quality inbound links ranked highest.

When Google introduced Adsense, a shift to content ensued. The focus was to create a ton of pages with content – then place Google’s ads on them. When visitors to those websites clicked thru on the ads, Google split the ad revenue with the site owners. What happened?  For a few years, content worked well, but the SERPS began to be overrun with spam. Another shift was incorporated to regain relevancy, going back to a more robust emphasis on links. This was quickly countered with SEO tactics like link wheels, irrelevant comments on do-follow blogs, robotic article rewrites that were posted everywhere linking back to a main website.

Enter Google Current Algorithms
Essentially, Google now rewards activity and freshness, meaning more relevance is given to sites that routinely update their content. They still factor in link juice and volume of relevant content, but human activity (social media) is the prevailing trend across all industries.

Over the years, Google has invested heavily in technology that measures HUMAN ACTIVITY. Think about all the programs and businesses they’ve invested in, many that never turned one penny in profit. Why? As long as SEO practitioners could automate strategies to exploit Google’s algorithms, their rankings and AdSense revenue was diluted.

Going Forward
Consider this – with the addition of FeedBurner, Chrome, Google Analytics, Google’s Toolbar and on and on, user statistics are being sent to Google on a massive scale. Google’s algorithms are updated frequently though – with primary emphasis on traffic. Note – avoid automated programs. Google has garnered a wealth of information about human trends and SEO tactics over the years, and can see through most attempts to exploit their services.

It’s best to create organic websites that are highly relevant to the service or products you offer, then create activity on that site by embracing social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc), incorporating a do-follow blog (moderating comments and disabling spam links), then tweak your site as needed.

If done properly, your website will not (realistically) leap to number one overnight, but will rise in Google’s rankings over the first 30 to 90 days. Back links and quality content are still important, but my recommendation is to emphasize ACTIVITY.

Is your mission critical data backed up and protected?

A quick Google search for remote backup software returned 6,810,000 results. I’d say that’s significant. I think everyone agrees that mission critical data needs to be backed up, but how is debatable. In the hundreds of businesses I’ve serviced over the years, most in-house IT departments used DAT tapes. Very few actually physically removed those tapes from their premises every day. Even fewer remotely backed up their data. So maybe the better question to ask would be, “To what degree is your mission critical data backed up and protected?”

As an ex-RMA Manager (for a local networking firm), I witnessed quite a few defective DAT drives doing hard time on my shelves. I’ve also seen my share of managers scrambling to recover lost data following “unscheduled events” like virus contamination or hacks. Do you think it can’t happen to you? Keeping your fingers crossed isn’t the wisest strategy to ensure your business’s continued success.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans are Important
I always recommend incorporating comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plans, then periodically reviewing their effectiveness. One part of that plan should be remote offsite backups. Very often, incorporating a remote backup is as easy as downloading a software client onto your network server or personal computer. Many have setup wizards to walk you through the steps of connecting to the backup server, setting up your backup sets, creating a backup schedule and setting a secret encryption key. Typically, backup sets can be configured to run in a variety of ways – backing up data files at the end of the week or your My Documents folder multiple times per day.

Remote backups traveling across the Internet need to be encrypted so that you and only you have the ability to decrypt your data. I recommend programs that use DES, Triple-DES, Blowfish or Twofish algorithms for encryption.

Measuring the success of the data transfer is important. Look for programs with email notification of successful backups or backups with warnings (with log files attached).

Once your data is remotely backed up
Ok, you’ve backed up your data, but now have a need for one file, or an entire volume of data from two months ago. Is this possible? Simply answered – Yes. There are programs that allow instant access to any version of your data files, from the initial backup to the last incremental backup and EVERY version in between.

Locking down clients
Locking down clients simply refers to implementing procedures to protect critical backup sets from being accidentally changed or deleted, while flexible enough for administers to view and change those settings that control the level of usage each client is offered.

When to backup?
Most organizations schedule backups in the evening, during lulls in their business operations. Some programs allow you to run in silent modes (in the background) without displaying any Windows or Task Bar icons – allowing you to run backups throughout the day.

What if my backup gets interrupted?
Let’s say you start a backup and you lose power. Will the remote server retain the ongoing transfer, or bite the bullet? Features like event managers allow you to resume interrupted backups.

Does remote backup software offer file filters?
Most do offer file filters that allow you to include or exclude files from the backup selection, mostly via file extensions.

Just the tip of the iceberg
There are so many things that can and do go wrong in business every day. One thing is for sure – if you have hardware, particularly IT hardware, it will go down sooner or later. Power supplies fail, memory modules flake out, hard drives crash, DAT drives melt down – stuff happens. Some issues can be resolved in minutes or hours, but others may take days or weeks.

Backing up your mission critical data is – an integral ingredient to averting disaster, but just the tip of the iceberg in developing and managing a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan that will ensure your business’s continued success. Step back and ask yourself, “What if?” What if a disgruntled employee, possibly a sysadmin, corrupted your main servers, then disappeared? What if your building burnt to the ground? What if that DAT drive refuses to release last night’s tape – holding it hostage with a strangle hold on its recording heads? What if?

Every successful business has its niche -  (a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fit). Marketing materials are carefully written to emphasize a business’s strengths and their competitor’s weaknesses. A great example that comes to mind was one brand of typesetter which was capable of producing point sizes in tenths of an inch (unique to that brand).

Another was capable of zooming horizontally independent of vertical - in one percent increments (great for Rx labels). When the time came to upgrade or renew leases, thousands of existing documents had been produced using their unique parameters. To maintain uniformity, all new bids had to confirm to those same standards – effectively locking that client into their brand. In document imaging, one brand of copier can produce banner advertisements. Another can direct print PDF documents without opening them first. My point? There is a niche unique to your industry. Have you identified your niche, and are you marketing what makes your products and services unique?

The niche doesn’t have to be technical in nature
A niche could be how fast you deliver, the quality of your work, the level of support you provide, your pre-sales advertising venues, and any number of other things – anything that sets you apart from your competition. In web hosting, most niches relate to more bang for the buck – in bandwidth, RAM, disk space, add-ons and so forth.

The Web Hosting Industry
The web hosting industry is fiercely competitive, just as in many other industries. Web hosting continues to be a mystery to most new entrepreneurs though, even as prospects are rapidly becoming more computer and Internet savvy.  My own grandchildren are extremely Internet savvy, but couldn’t tell you the difference between Linux and Windows, or ASP and PHP.  Most prospects understand the need for an online presence, but are lost when it comes to how to select a decent provider.

Branding
In terms of mass appeal, branding is paramount. Here again, an integral piece of branding is your niche.  I can think of a few web hosting providers who own their niche, not financially, but in the mindset of prospects, just as Kleenex and Xerox own their niche.  If I were to ask someone if they’ve heard of your company, would they be like, “Yeah, they’re highly recommended,” or “Never heard of them.”  Getting from Point ‘Unknown” to Point “Highly Recommended” requires more than competing with similar packages, which I see a lot of online. When prospects compare your website against all the other sites they’ve just visited, is there anything that definitively sets you apart?

I was talking to one of my friends a few weeks back - just before she was to give a business presentation about paper. I know – exciting stuff. Anyway, she was a little apprehensive, as a lot of us are just prior to addressing large groups of prospects.

This was a presentation to a local IAAP (administrative assistant professionals) meeting addressing how to keep costs down, new products, workplace wellness, and how her company could help them. I knew she’d be fine because she’s a pro.

After the presentation, she wrote, “I have to tell you, the “No matter what kind of job you have, we have the paper for it” and the toilet paper has been a big hit and icebreaker.  I’ve had to leave it for people who weren’t in – I’ve gotten phone calls from people that heard about it.  I tell them it’s the sample of the month and their smile for the day!

I don’t know if she used a story board to compile her main point of view, but she did have hand-outs that definitely broke the ice – the tension between her prospects and herself. And those hand-outs were relevant to her business.

She engaged her audience and made them part of the experience.

Involve your prospects in the process - A large part of giving successful business presentations is involving your prospects in the process – asking questions, looking for a show of hands or positive response. Get out from behind the podium and move about – be accessible, make periodic eye contact, pause for effect and emphasis – take command so that all eyes are upon you.

Pattern your presentation to resemble a conversation. Look at your audience as you would in normal conversation, pausing at the end of your points to allow your audience to process what you’ve just said.

My wife is an instructor and excellent communicator. She’s always telling me to touch my prospects senses of sight, smell, taste, feel and hearing. Appealing to their senses engages their emotions. Give your presentation so that your audience will see, smell, taste, feel and hear what you’re saying.

The presentation itself - In the body of your presentation, tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them. And know what you’re telling them – have it down cold, meaning don’t read – let your words flow naturally. And smile – be excited.

Way way back, in the ’80s, I had to give a four hour presentation to a prospect in a bid situation. I knew the content inside out, but dragged my wife into the living room the night before and rehearsed the entire presentation with her. I still believe that preparation helped me win the bid – for a whopping $152,000.00 (including service).

What to avoid - This is a touchy subject. Have you ever filmed yourself giving a presentation? You won’t believe it’s really you on the playback.

• Avoid fillers – ahs, uhs and extended silence.
• Avoid nervous habits like scratching your head.
• Avoid concentrating on one section of your audience – spread the wealth around.
• Avoid excessive hand gestures.
• And don’t turn your back on your audience.

Call to action - Every successful marketing campaign has a ‘call to action.” That could be an offer that’s exclusive to your presentation, or to a deadline set by upper management. Combining value and urgency drives sales campaigns. A  call to action can be as simple as moving the sale forward by setting up appointments, up to signing contracts for immediate discounts or freebies.

Revised Oct 21, 2011

Private versus Public Cloud Solutions
Let’s face it, there are BILLIONS of dollars invested in existing IT infrastructure. As more and more enterprise vendors step into the cloud arena, will business in general migrate to the public cloud or opt instead to keep much of their investment in legacy code and custom applications in-house via a private cloud?

The future of cloud computing is up in the air (pun intended)
At this point, we don’t really know how cloud technology is going to shake out. Even if cloud technology gets huge, there’s likely to be a split between private and public clouds for the foreseeable decade. I think as the industry matures, you’ll see commodity services migrate to the public cloud and mission-critical stuff linger in a private cloud.

OK, so what is cloud computing?
Essentially, cloud computing is simply another way of delivering computing resources to run websites and web applications. It allows clients to scale their operations, horizontally and vertically, based on the demands of their users, while ensuring that there are adequate resources to support their apps. You can think of it as technology services delivered on-demand.

Traditional web hosting services are offered in packages with set limits on disk space and data transfer, so as traffic fluctuates, data and transfer needs vary resulting in excess, unused capacity during lean times.

Who could benefit from Cloud Services?
Essentially, everyone could benefit from cloud technology. Businesses that experience seasonal spikes, especially eCommerce retailers, where 80+ percent of their business peaks during holiday seasons, are prime candidates for cloud services.Cloud computing offers those businesses enough services to meet their increased traffic demands, then the option to scale back after the holidays, aligning their operating costs with revenue.

Taking the lead from the BIG vendors
Nearly all of the BIG vendors, from Microsoft to HP and IBM to CISCO, are talking cloud, with most listing their top two priorities as virtualization and cloud computing (virtualization is a cloud enabler). Google and Amazon already host public clouds while vendors like EMC are promoting solutions that virtualize existing servers and storage (private cloud).

Types of private versus public cloud solutions
As the following graphic from Microsoft highlights, there are choices to both private and public cloud services. Of course, these are not all inclusive. In the following months, I’ll address different cloud scenarios, demystifying some of the confusion about what cloud services really offer

Keywords are words in the content of your website that are relevant to what prospects would be searching for in Google and Bing queries – leading them to your site. Long tailed keywords are three and four word keyword phrases which are very specific to whatever product or service you’re selling. I prefer to call them keywords, then keyword phrases, and finally – extended keyword phrases.

Why are long tailed keywords or extended keyword phrases important?
When prospects use extended keyword phrases in search queries, they tend to know exactly what they’re looking for, which makes it so much more likely that they’ll buy whatever you’re selling once they find your site.

An example – if your business sells exclusive hair products not found in the major chain stores, search queries for shampoo would lead prospects to millions of results – but probably none of them yours. The search query is simply too general.  And the catch here is that if that prospect is searching for shampoo, they’re probably not a good prospect for your product anyway. Using shampoo as a keyword in Google AdWords will probably cost you a ton in advertising dollars, with little return on your investment.

But if you sell Brocato hair products, a search query for Brocato Volumizing Tonic will rank much higher in the search engines, improving your visibility to the world – and in turn, increase your sales.

Taking extended keyword phrases one step further
To capture discriminating shoppers, you should be creating pages based on extended keyword phrases. If you’re a Salon, Car Repair Shop or Web Hosting Provider, there are hundreds of variations of extended keyword phrases that you could use to create unique pages. Each of these pages should have its own title, description meta tag, H1 header tag and content that emphasizes your product or service.

A word of caution
Don’t go overboard on extended keyword phrases or you may SPECIFIC yourself out of business. Of course, if you have 500 visitors to your site looking for shampoo versus 100 visitors searching for Brocato products, which would you prefer? Site analytics have to be matched to conversion ratios.

How do you know what extended keyword phrases to focus on?
The key here, really, is how to determine which extended keyword phrases have sufficient traffic for you to target. Research is paramount. Fortunately, there are tons of programs available. A recent search on Bing for Keyword Analysis Tools returned over 34 million results!

In today’s competitive global marketplace, it is essential to ensure that your customers can see you at any time, day or night. Even short outages impact your business.

System monitoring services provide everything from simple to very advanced server, network and website monitoring and reporting services with a fast, effective and automated method for checking a variety of services. Whether you are monitoring a single server or hundreds of servers distributed around the world, these packages make it easy to manage your monitoring configuration and view real-time monitoring data.

The number and types of services that monitoring packages track varies, but most offer at least three monitors that are checked in varying intervals (generally one to fifteen minutes).

These services and others should be a part of your disaster recovery and business continuity plan.

Advanced Solutions

If your business depends on your online presence, you need an advanced solution that monitors your entire online infrastructure. Today’s websites are becoming increasingly complex, incorporating dynamic content derived from multiple sources, backend web services, email, chat and other communication mechanisms.

There are lower end packages offered FREE, as well as advanced options that track your entire infrastructure.  Some of the services most commercial packages track are HTTP and HTTPS, POP and Secure POP, IMAP and Secure IMAP, SMTP and Secure SMTP, DNS, FTP, SSH, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server databases, RTSP streaming media, ICMP ping, and arbitrary TCP/IP ports.

Options

The types of options offered are generally shorter intervals between monitoring, the number of monitoring locations, alerts by email, additional monitors, web page content filtering, HTTP password protection monitoring, monthly reports, online statistics, a control panel, DNS monitoring, public statistics, ping monitoring, alert failure limit, custom time zones, error details, web server monitoring, POP3 and SMTP email server monitoring, FTP server monitoring, multiple alert contacts, XML/RSS statistics and a statistics download.

With some you can create user accounts with restricted access. With others you can follow 301 or 302 redirects and monitor the resulting web page.

How far back can monitoring statistics and reports be archived?

Free plans are typically only archived for a few months, but with most packages, detailed statistics can be archived forever.

What about failover?

With many packages, their monitoring infrastructure is architected to withstand failure of any component. If one monitoring node is inaccessible, checks begin immediately from a alternate node and continue until the original node returns to service so that your servers never go unmonitored.

Intelligent Services

Some packages can actually analyze your online presence and intelligently determine the services that need to be monitored. Even with the most basic of online businesses, there can be 15 or more critical services that can impact your business.

What is it you need to know and why?

You need to know the status of your network (network performance) and availability every single minute so you can react immediately to any service disruption. It’ s always better to know first before your clients starting calling with issues. Monitoring packages also help determine hosting company’s compliance with their Service Level Agreements.  (SLA)

False Positives

Are these packages failsafe? False positives have been a problem with some packages, but as global resources become more affordable, confirmation of service outages has become more reliable.

Other uses for monitoring packages

You can extract sales and marketing data about the quality of your infrastructure

Use the same tools to gain more knowledge about the infrastructure of your competitors.

Use as evidence with suppliers of your infrastructure.

As a manager

As a manager you may already have tools for monitoring your infrastructure from the inside, but these packages give insight to the end-user experience. You’ll not only be able to properly analyze the availability of your company’s services and estimate lost revenue, but you’ll also have the information you need to make demands on external network and service providers if they’re not living up to your expectations, or their SLAs.

What are some the packages available?

• NPG   Network Management and Monitoring
• Panopta
• Pingdom   Pingdom Web site monitoring for 100% uptime. Measure your downtime.
• AlertSite   Web Site Monitoring and Web Performance Management Solutions From AlertSite
• Internet Uptime Monitor   Internet Uptime Monitor – Monitoring Server Software for Your Website
• Hyperspin   Hyperspin Website Monitoring, Web Server Monitoring Service
• Site Uptime   SiteUptime – Website Monitoring Service
• Alertra   Alertra Website Monitoring Service
• Uptime Auditor   Uptime Auditor – Check if your website is online now!
• ezwebsitemonitoring   EZ Website Monitoring • Free Keyword Tracking & Uptime Checking
• ServerMojo   Remote server monitoring – check your dedicated or virtual server uptime and get notifications for free – servermojo.com!
• Nagios   Nagios – The Industry Standard in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
• Cacti   Cacti: The Complete RRDTool-based Graphing Solution
• Zenoss  Zenoss Open Source Server and Network Monitoring – Core and Enterprise
• PRTG   PRTG Network Monitor – intuitive network monitoring software
• MRTG   Network Admins’ favorite free tools – Scrutinizer and MRTG
• Hyperic   Systems Monitoring, Server Monitoring & Systems Management Software | Hyperic
• Webmetrics   Website Monitoring, Load Testing & Web Performance Management | Webmetrics