Ask CWS: Should I buy links to my web site?

I have received a couple of questions about paid links and whether one should consider them. As you may know, inbound links are an important element in search engine optimization. However, the priority should be to have quality links to your web site and not just quantity.

The offers that I have seen claim to be from many web sites and websites that they own. To be honest, links from a lot of web sites can help only if the sites are truly different (content, design, and links) and are on different web servers.

Google even has guidelines about paid links and link schemes. One article states that:

"Examples of Link Schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate
  PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods
  on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive
  link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
• Buying or selling links that pass
  PageRank"

Google and the other search engines have started to seriously focus on the issue. In cases where they have good reason to suspect links being bought and sold, both the selling and the buying web sites are usually dropped in rankings or have a penalty which downgrades the ranking. This may mean nothing to the big company that has 1000's of web sites, but most small companies have one site. To be dropped in the rankings for a domain means, transferring to a new domain, or reworking your links and that can be a long process.

Google does not forbid paid links. They have this to say about links for advertising:

"Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file"

I have read posts and emails that say there are ways to hide the paid links, and experts show that the search engines cannot see all of the paid links. Google has made it easy for just about anyone to report paid links. They have an anonymous form to point out a web site that someone suspects of buying or selling links. There are two way to do this:

1. Sign in to Google's webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form, then include the word "paidlink" (all one word) in the text area of the spam report. If you use the authenticated form, you'll need to sign in with a Google Account, but your report will carry more weight.


2. Use the unauthenticated spam report form and make sure to include the word "paidlink" (all one word) in the text area of the spam report.

Paid links can help a web site move up in search engine rankings. A sudden increase in inbound links can looks suspicious to the search engines and hurt your ranking. In SEO there really are no set rules to abide by right now. The search engines all operate under slightly different guidelines and what they like and don't like can change more than daily. Most SEO experts frown upon doing something that is questionable now and could cause a drop in rankings later.

What does this mean for me and my web site? Well, some paid links can help your rankings, be very wary of getting a lot of paid links. If a company offers to have links on a number of "their" web sites for a fee, remember that a sudden increase of links from a couple of web sites may look suspicious to the search engines. Trading links are not the best way to go, but if you are doing your own SEO, it is the most cost effective and safest way to build links.

THIS IS A SOLICITATION

OK, it's not. I selected that title for this article because it is important to know these four words and look for them on all invoices you receive. Two years ago there was a Search Engine Optimization scam that people asked me about often. Today, I've had two customers send me emails asking if the "invoices" they have received are legitimate. Take this one for example:


Now one might say to themselves, "this looks an awful lot like a bill." However, if you read carefully you'll see the following mixed into the text:

THIS IS A SOLICITATION FOR THR ORDER OF GOODS OR SERVICES, OR BOTH, AND NOT A BILL INVOICE, OR STATEMENT OF ACCOUNT DUE. YOU ARE UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO MAKE ANY PAYMENTS ON ACCOUNT OF THIS OFFER UNLESS YOU ACCEPT THIS OFFER.

Well, that's nice of them to make their "flyer" look just like an invoice. The only reason they put that text in there is because it's what keeps them out of prison. I checked out their website, which had no phone number to contact them, and they are located in Nassau, Bahamas.

Apparently they don't have jails in the Bahamas... because that's where these guys deserve to be. Their legal disclaimer may make this type of activity legal, but it's far from morally correct.

SEO Yourself?

After the last post about SEO, we received an anonymous comment about the article which said:

Hello, I agree with you, Alan, that it is important to use SEO, but I do not think that it is neccessary to hire a SEO Firm.

This got me thinking about the perceived value of hiring a professional SEO firm. Is it really absolutely necessary to hire a firm like CWS for search engine optimization?

Amazingly, the answer is "No."

I must concede that one can perform SEO on their own website and not hire a professional firm. With enough research, analysis, and a little bit of luck any intelligent person could achieve measurable results without professional help.

However, I'll also argue that a professional can do it much better and faster than any novice who doesn't have the software or knowledge that comes by working with it every day. For example, a few years ago I decided to build my own deck. I studied websites on the subject, I reviewed the requirements of my local planning and zoning department, and I carefully built a deck with the help of a few friends. It took me nearly a month but turned out satisfactory.

A few weeks later my neighbor had his deck built by a professional deck builder. It took them only 3 days to finish a deck similar to mine, as they knew exactly what they were doing and were highly skilled.

To strengthen this point, I received an email from one of our hosting customers who had been doing his own web design and search engine optimization for the past few years. Frustrated, he turned to us for some help. I think his thoughts sum up the situation best:

"I just wanted to mention that working with Jon on SEO objectives and with Ryan on design for my website has been a real pleasure. I am very happy with the results so far both in terms of current rankings, which are greatly improved, and functionality of design.

For the past several years I and my wife have designed and optimized our site. This was the first year that I decided to hire professional assistance and I am very glad to have had your firm fulfill our current objectives. I came to you because of your consistent hosting of an older site, ascencionrecordings.com, which has been with you for several years."

Gordon Kreplin
Ascencion Recordings/Photography

This is an excellent example that not everyone has the patience, time and tools to perform SEO themselves. Just as some will never try to build their own deck, finish their own basement, or fix their own car. Some things are best left to a professional -- the choice is yours.

Importance of Search Engine Optimization

For anything and everything, the Internet users today go to search engines, and type in what they want to find out. They get the result pages (SERPs), and click and visit some of the first results. This is what is happening everywhere; millions and millions of users access Google every day for information.

When a website offering a particular service gets a hit (traffic), it has a chance to make a sale. So, all of the companies out there try extra hard to make their websites hit the top of the search engine result pages. The simple set of procedures for this purpose is known as Search Engine Optimization, the art of getting a website to rank high on search engine search result pages.

Search Engine Optimization is done through various steps, and if not done properly, it can backfire.

Basic Steps of Search Engine Optimization

For a site to be well optimized for search engine traffic, its content should be understandable to the search bots (the program used by search engines to index a particular site; also called web crawlers, search spiders, etc.) The content in the site has to be generally useful to the reader as well as understandable to search engines; keywords and descriptions in metadata help you achieve this. An important step of Search Engine Optimization is creating Meta tags for each page, with keywords and descriptions. Also the title tag should have your most important keyword.

Search Engine Optimization requires keyword-rich content. People search for keywords on the search engines. And the search engine bots look for these keywords on the indexed pages. So, keyword-dense content easily scales up the search results. However, overuse of the keyword will blacklist the site as spam. Search Engine Optimization, hence, requires an expert to prepare good quality search engine-optimized content. Also, highlighting the main keywords with such formatting as bold, italics, underline, etc., is very advantageous.

A minimum keyword density of about 2-4% is effective. And the content is best optimized targeting only one keyword or two at the most.

Another important aspect of Search Engine Optimization is the number of incoming links to the page. The incoming links convince the search engines that the page is important enough to be displayed as a result. The incoming links, however, have to be from reliable sources (there are unreliable sources like link farms, which are websites solely made for linking to other sites). So, it is very important for Search Engine Optimization to create some links to whichever page you try to optimize.

These methods just introduce you to what you should do to achieve good Search Engine Optimization for your sites. There are, however, so many other important aspects in Search Engine Optimization. Google itself is known to count hundreds of different metrics to calculate the PageRank of a site (Google's measure of the importance of a site).

Conclusion

The potential business a firm can acquire on reaching the top of search engine results is amazing. Search Engine Optimization, as I said earlier, is an art by itself. It should be done methodically and painstakingly. If done properly, you will enjoy great profits from it; on the other hand, malpractices can get you undermined very easily. Hence, it is important for you to hire a reputed, reliable professional for the purpose.

Walking a Mile in Someone Else's Shoes

One of the values we try to live by at CWS is user-centric design. That is, we believe that websites and Web-based applications are most effective when they're designed to make the tasks performed by end users as easy as possible. This may sound obvious, but in reality it's much easier said than done.

People tend to assume that others basically think like themselves, and it's very difficult to overcome that feeling. In the same way that a filmmaker might have a hard time watching a movie without analyzing the lighting and camera angles that the rest of us take for granted, the different groups of people using a site will come with different sets of assumptions.

This can be a trap both for the people who create websites and those who own the content. Programmers can think of a site in terms of infrastructure, or let technology drive design in place of experience. Business owners or other stakeholders may be more concerned about what they want to say than what the end user wants to know. Thinking about a site solely from our own perspective can handicap a great idea.

This principle applies both to design in general, content writing (the most overlooked component of good design) and to search engine optimization. There may be a big difference between the search terms that a business owner thinks are applicable to his website and those that his customers actually use. It doesn't do any good if a site performs well for searches on "mechanical contractor" but consumers are only looking for "heating repair." In the same way, a site that gives a passionate description of product benefits but never answers questions about price may drive away people who are doing research to build a shortlist of potential vendors.

There are many formal processes and tools to help you put yourself in a user's shoes (personas and use cases, for example), and we can help you walk through these, but the best way to start is simply talking to the people who will use the site or application being designed. Find out what people love and hate about the tools they use now.

Customer loyalty comes from giving people what they want. As Zig Ziglar has famously said, "You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want."

When was the last time Google visited you?

You probably visit Google several times a day, but do you know how often Google visits you? There are ways to find out. Google offers a free tool that will not only tell you when it last "crawled" your website, but what pages it looked at and any errors that were found along the way. Google Webmaster Tools are a great way to find out what your site looks like to a search engine. They can help identify problems, learn what search phrases are being used to find your site and which ones actually result in clicks from the results page.

This valuable information can help you adjust the wording of text on your site and fix errors that could prevent search engines from indexing your content and giving your site a better ranking. Webmaster Tools can also show what sites are linking to and from your own. Google considers the value of a site that links to yours when it's determining the value of your content, so it is important to monitor those and try to collect links from valuable sites. These considerations are some of the basic elements of search engine optimization.

Another great feature of Google Webmaster Tools is Sitemap creation and submission. Not to be confused with the "site maps" you view in a Web browser, Google Sitemaps are special XML files that describe your site to search engines. Essentially, they allow you to give advice to Google about how your content should be treated. You can say how often a particular page changes (daily, weekly, monthly) and describe the relative importance of different pages. For example, you might prefer that someone searching for the name of your CEO should land on his official biography in your "About Us" section rather than a press release from three years ago, even if the press release mentions his name more often. Google Sitemaps allow you to give such instructions. They also allow you to specifically list pages on your site that might be hard for Gooogle to find by looking at links.

Webmaster Tools also allow you to verify the structure of your robots.txt file, which is another specially-formatted file giving instructions to search engines. This file has the opposite purpose of a Sitemap -- it exists to tell the spider what parts of your site should not be indexed. Google Webmaster Tools can make sure your robots.txt file properly follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

See the quick start guide that Google provides for more in-depth coverage of the available tools. If you find that your site needs some changes to be more accessible to search engines, drop us a line at support (at) cws (dot) net.

Site Launch: KASInvestment.com

CWS is pleased to announce the launch of kasinvestment.com, a Rochester, MN company established to operate three glass and glazing subsidiary companies: Ford Metro Inc., Architectural Contract Glass Inc., and Swanson Glass Inc.

There is a definite art in designing glass, and we wanted to emphasize this by developing a unique site that reflect the architectural splendor and talent that goes into creating residential and commercial glass projects, while maintaining the quality and ease of use you expect from CWS websites.

Throughout the site you will find information on doors and hardware, retail glass, commercial glass, and much more. There's an extensive photo gallery showcasing the work and craftsmanship of FMI, ACG, and SGI.

It was a pleasure working with Mitch and Kevin of KAS Investment Co., and we look forward to our continued relationship as we further expand their web presence with our search engine optimization services.

Our Web Design Guarantee

Recently we've been thinking about the kind of guarantee we want to offer to our customers. You may be thinking to yourself, "Who cares about a silly guarantee?" We do. In fact, it's been several months in the making as we have been re-analyzing our mission statement, business values, design values, and vision. We feel that we are one of the most effective web design firms in the Midwest and we're proud of the work we do. We felt it was important to let the world know and that meant taking a hard look at ourselves and where we want to go.

Before I get to our new web design guarantee, let me take a step back and tell you what makes us tick. These are our core beliefs:

Our Mission: Our mission is to produce expert web solutions through constant innovation and inspiration. Nothing is more important than delighting our clients through delivering exceptional web solutions.

Our Business Values: We have a profound respect for our clients and each other. We deliver. We care. We innovate. We do web. We enjoy the process!

Our Design Values: It must be inspired. It must be user-centered. Form follows function. Consider every click. Create superb customer experiences.

Our Vision: To be a nationally recognized organization for providing superior web-based solutions, interactive marketing, and effective search engine optimization.

I know you're probably thinking that Mission Statements and Vision Statements are silly corporate stuff, but I encourage you to do this for your own business. It forces you to reflect and determine what you're all about.

With that said, we feel it's important for our potential clients to know that we'll do everything possible to make them happy. Hence the reason we decided to draft an official web design guarantee. We wanted it to be bold. We wanted it to be valuable. We wanted it to push us to be better.

So, without further ado, here's our promise to you:


We hope you like it as much as we do. Tell us what you think.

How to Get Your Site to the Top

The Internet, once only the home of computer nerds and hackers, has long since exploded into mainstream business. A new profession has sprung up in response - Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a service industry based on getting your site to the top of the search engine rankings and keeping it there.

The truth is that SEO boils down to three simple steps:

1. Build a great site
2. Incorporate keywords
3. Get other great sites to link to yours

That's the recipe that will continue to work no matter how often Google reprograms its search algorithms. Following these steps won't catapult you instantly to #1 in the rankings; it's more of a "slow and steady" strategy. But it's a lot better in the long run than resorting to shady SEO tactics that will put your site at the top of the results page... only until Google bans your site!

Building a great link structure has been a part of SEO for some time. However, thanks to Google's changing search algorithms, the ideal type of link structure has also changed. Here are some tricks that will help you build useful links.

Note: Throughout this article, Google is cited as the target for SEO. There are two reasons why it's best to focus on Google. First, it's the most frequently used search engine, so optimizing for Google will tend to bring in the most traffic. Second, Google has the most stringent requirements and elaborately programmed algorithms, so if you're doing well in Google- you're likely doing well in the other search engines.

Not all links are created equal
One strategy you should not rely on is soliciting links right and left. Links from important and reputable pages build your own site's reputation; links from less important sites help a little, but not as much; and links from certain shady sites are no good at all. An example of the last is the link farm, a site that's designed solely for the purpose of providing links to other sites in exchange for money. Google hates link farms with a passion and refers to them as "bad neighborhood" sites. Associate your site with several "bad neighborhood" sites and Google might decide your site is in that neighborhood, too.

On the other end of the link quality scale are the major informational sites and directories. Links from directories like DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) and Yahoo! can provide an impressive boost to your ranking. So can links from extremely reputable sites like CNN.com.

The quick rule of thumb when deciding if a site would be a good source of an inbound link is to look up that site's Google PageRank. You can get this information simply by installing the Google toolbar on your browser. Once the toolbar is installed, click on the Options button and select "PageRank display." Then you can browse to sites and their PageRank will display in the toolbar. As a rule of thumb, don't bother soliciting links from sites with a PageRank of less than 4 (PageRank works on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest possible rank).

Get those links
So how do you get important sites to link to you? Start with having useful and relevant information on your site. If you have a page that's relevant to another site, just bringing this page to their attention can get them to link to you. After all, these sites want to be useful resources for their visitors and providing those visitors with great sources of information will keep them coming back.

Once you've identified an important site and have produced information that's useful to them, search that site for the webmaster's contact information. Call or email that person and suggest that they take a look at your site and, if interested, provide a link to it. This strategy isn't likely to get you a link from MSNBC.com, but it can work very well with smaller sites. Don't limit your searches to .com and .net sites, either - Google tends to look with particular favor upon .edu and .gov websites, so getting links from these sites can give your ranking even more of a boost.

Another way to build links fast is to set up reciprocal links - in other words, contact a webmaster and tell them that if they link to you, you'll link back to them. Having a few reciprocal links is fine but if you have too high a percentage Google will get suspicious. To be on the safe side, try to have at least 3 one-way links for every reciprocal link you build. This will create what Google calls a natural link structure.

Patience is a virtue
The techniques described above are not a magic bullet. Don't expect your site to immediately shoot up the results page. But if you take the time to build a solid, "natural" link structure, you will be able to get your site highly ranked, and you'll be able to keep it that way.

Site Launch: UltraShopRochester.com

CWS is pleased to present you with The Ultra Shop's new home on the web - http://ultrashoprochester.com Nestled within the heart of Rochester, MN in the Kahler subway; this world famous boutique offers an extraordinary selection of interesting and fine merchandise. From mirrors, tables, and frames, to jewelry, hats, and rainwear - if you're looking for high class merchandise, look no further than The Ultra Shop. And now -- with the development of their new website -- finding that International Traveler Shiny Cow Print luggage you've been after is quicker and easier than ever! It was a pleasure working with Pat, and we look forward to our continued relationship as we help further their online success with search engine optimization.

5 New Year's Resolutions (for your website)

It seems like just yesterday that I was working on a Top 10 List of New Year's Resolutions (for 2007). Since another year has come and gone, we now must look to 2008 for the opportunity to complete our aspirations.

"This year," we say, "I'm going to lose 10 pounds" or "I'm going to exercise twice per week." While these goals are fine and dandy, I personally think it's time to set a few resolutions for your website. Yes, it's true, you've been neglecting that website since 2004 and it's time to give it some love in 2008.

Without further ado, here is the list of the Top 5 New Year's Resolutions (for your website):

1. Install Google Analytics


This year, it's time to learn more about who is visting your website and what they are doing when they arrive. The easiest way to do this is to install tracking code from Google Analytics. Don't worry, it's free to use and it will provide you with a wealth of information about your users. Once you sign up for a free account, they will provide you with a few lines of code to place on each page of your website. This will keep track of users as they navigate your website and tell you helpful information such as:

• How many visitors came to your site


• Average time they spent on your site


• % that were new visitors


• # of pages they viewed


• Average # of pages viewed per visitor


• Bounce rate (# who left immediately)

This information is essential to knowing how well your website is performing. For example, if your bounce rate is a whopping 85%, that tells you that the majority of your traffic feels that your website is irrelevant to what they were looking for. They bailed on you before you even had a chance to show them page 2. Maybe it's time to think about modifying that homepage?

2. Track Conversion Rates

Every website has a purpose. You want your customer to pick up the phone and call you, you want them to request a quote, to fill out your contact form, or request a free report.

But do they?

Once you have your tracking code installed, you can set up "goals" to answer this question. If one of the goals for your website is to have users "request a quote", then you can use your Google Analytics account to tell you what percentage of visitors actually do that. If you're like most people, you'll be disappointed with the answer.

However, with this new information at your disposal, you can start to make changes to improve your conversion rates. For example, maybe your "request a quote" page is hard to find. Maybe you should have a big bold graphic on the homepage? Maybe the form is too long and you should try to make it easier and quicker to complete? All of these things are possible to remedy once you know there is a problem.

3. Determine Your Search Phrases

Once you are tracking your visitors and know that your website is converting those visitors into leads, it's time to work on getting more visitors. The first step in this process is to determine which search phrase(s) are relevant for your line of business.

The easiest way to do this is to pretend you are a customer sitting at Google.com. What phrases would you enter to find a company/service like yours? For example, if you are in need of an attorney to represent you for a dog bite, you might search for "dog bite attorney in rochester mn" or "personal injury attorney in rochester mn." What will people enter to search for you?

It's important to think about location when determining your search phrases. Very seldom will someone just search for "attorney" or "personal injury attorney", and if they do, they will usually end up trying again because they won't find someone who is local.

Determining your search phrases is all about knowing who your customers are and how to reach them. When you have highly targeted traffic to your website your bounce rate (see #1 above) will go down and you'll have higher conversion rates (see #2). This leads to more sales which will make your boss want to give you a big promotion in 2008. OK, maybe not.

4. Optimize Your Website

Now that you have determined which search phrases will bring you the most targeted visitors, it's time to optimize your website for them. You do this by putting these search phrases in the page title(s), text, and alt tags of your website. I know, this sounds complex, but stay with me for a moment and I'll show you how.

First, open up your homepage and look at the text in the very upper left of the browser window. For example, on our home page it says "Web Design Web Hosting SEO Video Production Graphic Design - Rochester MN". Wow, that looks an awful lot like the search phrases that someone might use when trying to find the services we provide. Coincidence? I think not.

Next up, you need to add your #1 search phrase to the text of your homepage. In order to tell the world that this is what you do, you want to make it big and bold. For example, at the top of our homepage, we've added all of the main search phrases again, and even added some links and bolding to them. This is something you'll want to do as well. You should also bold, italicize, OR underline maybe 1 or two instances of the keyword. Don't go crazy with this. Just provide natural emphasis to the words that best describe your business.


This is a very basic how-to for optimizing your website. If you'd like more details on how to optimize your website check out Brad Callen's SEO tutorial or drop me a line.

5. Update the Content

I know, you're probably thinking... "Please Stop!... You've already given me enough to do in 2008 and 2009." However, I have one more simple resolution for you to make in 2008.

Keep your website up-to-date.

If you have outdated photos on your website that include employees who left in 1999, it doesn't reflect well on your company image. Resolve right now to make someone in your organization accountable for maintaining your website in 2008 and keeping it up to date. Jon's end of year maintenance post gives you six areas of your website to watch out for when it comes to outdated content. Check these areas of your website once per month and make sure they are up to date.

So, there you have it! 5 resolutions for your website in 2008 that should not only educate you but also turn your website into a profitable marketing machine. You never know, with all this extra knowledge you might get that big promotion after all!

A little D.I.Y. SEO

A recent marketing research study lists SEO as the tool with the second highest return on investment, just behind an in-house mailing list. So putting in even a little elbow grease can go a long way towards improving your online marketing plan. Here are a few quick and easy SEO tips that you can use to get better results from your website.

1. Find the right keywords for your website. Pick a small list of words that are relevant to your business. If your market is a local one, include the town and state. In particular, think about the words that people would normally type into search engines to find a business like yours. Pick a few of these phrases and include them throughout your website.

2. Put the keyword or phrase in your page title. Don't put just a list of keywords as your webpage title. Combine your search phrases and business in a way that makes sense. For example: "Plumber Business - fixing and repairing your plumbing in Rochester, MN" Keep it short and make it descriptive.

3. Put the keywords in your meta tags. Web pages generally have extra information (metadata) in their headers that's intended to describe the page contents to other software, like search engines. If you have the ability to edit this area of site, updating this content is a must. Keep this short as well. Focus on your main keywords.

4. When updating any page on your site, think about including keywords. Always make the text readable for human beings first, but when you can do so naturally, include a keyword or search phrase. This will help communicate to search engines that the page is really relevant to those specific topics.

Remember that you must give search engines time to find your site and pick up changes when you make them. It may take a while, but each change can help boost your ranking little by little. These are just a few simple ways to help improve your online marketing. If you're interested in learning more about your website's ranking with search engines, let us know.

Site Launch: www.tru-tain.com

Tru-Tain approached CWS requesting a new website with the ability for users to make purchases online. The final product featured a fully functional e-commerce solution along with a modern design to focus on products, and to emphasize customer service and information.

Tru-Tain offers a wide variety of products in orthodontics and dentistry in their new online store. They are even offering an additional 10% off all orders placed online!

We've enjoyed working with the friendly and courteous staff at Tru-Tain, and look forward to helping them achieve further online success with our web marketing services.

Are You Listed in Google Local?

Have you searched for a local business in Google and discovered a map with the business locations on the page? Is your business on that map? With Google Local Business Center, you can put your business on the map and not pay a dime.

Google Local is a feature to help find local businesses, even when they have a web site. These listings show companies who have entered business information in the Google Local Business Center, advertised with companies like CitySearch, SuperPages, DigitalCity, or other local portals, or simply have a Yellow Pages listing. Even when you have the top search result listing for a specific phrase, the Google local listings may still show up first, so it pays to be included there as well.

Major Factors
What are the major factors for being listed first in the local results? Currently your business location, local internet advertising and a listing in the Yellow Pages are the top three. Having a well-optimized site also helps with these results.

Location
The distance from a business to what the Yellow Pages considers the "center" of your city can play a big part. Try a search for Minneapolis pizza. The majority of local results are located in the Minneapolis city limits. Physical location plays a big part in many different Google Local searches and it makes sense that they will continue to consider this a valuable factor.

Getting Listed
Adding yourself to Google Local can be done for free by signing up at the Google Local Business Center. You can write your own description, list your business hours, the kinds of payments you accept, and you can choose to show contact information including an email and link to your website.

Getting your business into Google Local Business Center can help with your online advertising. It is still most helpful to have a well optimized site for search engines. Updating and maintaining your site so customers continue to use your business is also a big asset. A listing in Google Local is just one more great way to reach out to new customers looking for your business online.

Site Launch: AdlersSportingGoods.com

Adler's Sporting Goods recently asked CWS to redesign their website. The finished project will allow users to find information easier and includes an updated design.

Adler's Sporting Goods has been in business for over 50 years. They offer quality equipment to area teams and also specialize in custom embroidery and screen printing. Adler's also offers promotional products for businesses across the the area.

It has been a pleasure working with the staff at Adler's Sporting Goods, and we look forward to continuing to work with them on improving search engine rankings as part of our Business Online Solution package.

From Garage Business to Household Name in 5 Years

You probably use it every day, but did you know Google is now a word in the dictionary? How can a search engine be so popular that it influences how nearly all businesses market themselves on the Internet? Google's secret was the development of a unique algorithm to not just index the contents of a page, but to help ensure that you get the most relevant results for a particular search. From this starting point, Google has evolved to become a household name and sets the standard for all search engines.

Google was started by Larry Sage and Sergey Brin in 1996. Initially named "Back rub," their search engine started to gain popularity on the Stanford University campus. In 1998, the founder of Sun Microsystems gave the two a check for $100,000 after a quick demo. Sage and Brin leased office space in a friend's garage and started Google.com. 1999 brought dramatic change and growth to Google as the company moved twice and got bigger.

By 2000, 18 million user queries every day were being answered by Google. By 2002, Google had expanded to advertising, search appliances, Google News and Froogle. In 2004, Google had indexed 6 billion items (plus 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of book-related information pages). Google has continued to grow and expand its technology, now offering PDFs of public domain books for download, for example.

Google has made vast amounts of data accessible to the public, such as: years of historical film footage, U.S. Patents, Maps (Earth, Moon and Mars), pictures, video, music, and of course their staple: websites. Google ranks in the top 3 sites for internet traffic, so most internet marketers give serious thought to how Google will see their site.

Google is a big part of the Internet. The public uses it to search, and companies use Google to advertise, or to analyse the competition. Optimizing a site for Google to help your company show up higher in search results can have a big impact on your bottom line, and the effect can carry over to other search engines as well. This has become a fact of life in the web development industry and will continue to be so in the future.

Search Engine Optimization - SEO

Have you ever wondered how, when you search for something on Google or Yahoo!, that some websites are listed above others? Search engines list the results by examing their databases of website content to find the sites they consider most relevant to the search term. There are ways to help a website move up the list for a particular term, and that is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play.

Websites can use many different methods to get a search engine to notice them and list them higher. As more site administrators are becoming aware of this, of course, it is getting harder for a site to move up. It takes research and effort to get results.

Corporate Web Services (CWS) has a new program that allows our team to do this kind of research more quickly and make improvements. When using search engines, many people never go past the second page of results. With this new program, CWS can review a current website, advise and make changes to help a site stay high on the list and reach those crucial first two pages of results.

A second factor that influences the ranking of search engines results is the way that other websites links to yours. By analyzing how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about (by comparing its content to the context of the original page) and how "important" the page is (if many other popular pages link to it) -- and thus deserving of a boost in ranking.

SEO can help get your website noticed -- by ensuring the site is relevant to your subject, includes key phrases, and is connected to related sites. There many other factors that can help your site's ranking; these are only a few. Contact us today for a detailed consultation.

Welcome... Jon Bernhardt

CWS welcomes the newest member to our team, Jon Bernhardt. He comes to CWS from Charter Business where he was a Customer Support Specialist. Most recently, he returned from Iraq where he was deployed with an Army Reserve unit. The company transported fuel across the country. Jon worked as supply for those troops, providing soldiers with clothing, tools, and food. Thankfully, no one in the company was hurt.

Jon lives in Rochester with his wife and two cats. He enjoys watching the Minnesota Twins play, and follows Big Ten football closely. Jon and his wife recently went to Washington DC for vacation. There they saw many of the sites and museums. On the return trip, the two ran into the "O'Hare monster" in Chicago. After staying in the airport for 14 hours, their plane finally left for Rochester.

Jon's role within the company will be to provide fanatical support and outstanding customer service to our existing customers. In addition, he will be expanding our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program. CWS has a new system that allows our team to research quicker and find better ways to move sites up the search engine list. With this new system, CWS can look at a current web site, advise and make changes to move the site up to the first results page. Jon is currently training to receive his CIM Certification.

Jon can be contacted (507) 289-2229 x208.

Lesson 6: Pay Per Click

Congratulations, you've made it! This is the final lesson of our website marketing series. By this point, you're learned to analyze your website statistics, modify your pages to include keywords, increase your inbound links, and improve your search engine rankings. But what can you do if this process is going too slow and you want immediate results? You may want to consider starting a pay-per-click campaign.

Advertising your services or products on the Internet is both extremely effective and extremely competitive. There are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine optimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and SEO are targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of search engine results as possible. One of the differences is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign versus months for a good SEO campaign.

Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that most search engines, including some of the largest ones, now offer. It requires a bid for a "per-click" basis, which translates to your company paying the bid amount every time the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your website traffic, your site often appears in the results of other prevalent search engines.

As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very effective. One of the greatest advantages is that you never have to tweak your web pages to change your position in search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click campaign is pay a fee.

Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click process. You just bid and you're up and running. It doesn't demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more you know about search engines and keywords, the easier - and more effective - the process will be.

The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding war. A higher bid than yours will lower your position on search engine results. This means that you will have to raise your bid to regain your position - which can obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are bidding on a popular keyword.

In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective form of marketing for your business, you must do some computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site is worth. You can compute this value by dividing the profit you make on your website over a given period of time by the total number of visitors for that same time period. For example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were 2,5000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50 cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.

The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show a profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you are aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click.

Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be paying too much for each individual hit.

The key to success is to learn everything you can about search engine keyword research. The good news is there isn't a limit to the amount of keywords you can add to your bid because additional keywords do not add additional cost. This translates into a lot less hassle for you because there is no need to optimize your site to index a particular set of keywords.

In pay-per-click, the keywords you choose and the written description is crucial. You must understand that the object of your description is not to generally attract visitors, but to be as specific as possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy your service or product go to your site. You must use expert marketing copy to guarantee that your description is both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal candidates to your site. This description is your most powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.

When you have selected affordable keywords and written specific descriptions, the next step is to choose your landing page. If you're running a pay-per-click campaign, you want customized "landing pages" for your visitors. Do NOT send them to your homepage! The first page a pay-per-click visitor receives should be a page relevant to the specific search phrase they used. This is the most common mistake made by novice pay-per-click advsertisers, and it costs them plenty.

Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is that you constantly monitor your bid. It is very important that you bear in mind that the results of the top search engines providing pay-per-click advertising, which are Overture (Yahoo)and Google Adwords, usually appear on other popular search engines. Because of this, the competition for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click to yield a profit.

If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on that particular keyword and try another one. Remember: when you pay too much per click to make a profit, you are in essence losing the bidding war.

Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in place to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword. It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least a monthly basis.

Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about consumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business needs, and will also insure that your pay-per-click campaign is a success.

Lesson 1: Analyzing Your Website Traffic
Lesson 2: Evaluating Website Performance
Lesson 3: Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking
Lesson 4: Increasing Link Popularity
Lesson 5: Monitoring Search Engine Positions

Lesson 5: Monitoring Search Engine Positions

Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.

This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.

Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.

In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It's the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.

Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes - many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking - your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch "the market" closely.

Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn't become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.

You must also deal with your competition - a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor's position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor's position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.

Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.

This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present!

People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out SearchEngineWatch.com for a current list of favorites.

Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations - this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things.

If all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders - those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions - have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.

Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.

Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders.

On the contrary, it could be that the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground. Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. It costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture - your long-term marketing campaign.

Lesson 1: Analyzing Your Website Traffic
Lesson 2: Evaluating Website Performance
Lesson 3: Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking
Lesson 4: Increasing Link Popularity

Lesson 4: Increasing Link Popularity

In the previous lesson, we learned how Search engines are the gateway to the Internet; they are the first tool that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. This is why link popularity is so imperative. If the customers do not find your website, you have no possibilities of making any sales.

You're probably wondering what the blazes is popular about a link! Well, in a word - plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. So, you're probably wondering, how do I make my link popular?

Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It's a simple formula, but a very important one. Google created the PageRank system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.

The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don't be discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords.

There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not achieve link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than "link farms" - pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!

The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have reservations about your visitors seeing. The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it.

So let's get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and improve your rankings to stellar status on all the popular search engines.

The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your site is business-related, you will want to be listed on Yahoo, and despite the fact that it will cost you around $300 a year, it will be money well spent. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it will take time and follow-up to actually get it listed. Open Directory is gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed.

You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships Alpaca wool from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to "Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State." BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper - and submit your listing to the "Fine Alpaca Wool" category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.

The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site's visitors. Let's look at the Alpaca Wool site example. Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website's traffic, you are increasing both of your site's business prospects - and both of your sites' link popularity.

Not all sites want to link to other sites, so you will have to do some research when you are looking for possible linking partners. Google is an excellent starting place for your search. Make sure you enter keywords that you think quality customers will also enter to find your own site.

Remember, your criteria are quality, highly ranked, non-competing websites that have a links or resources page. Go to these sites and objectively assess them. Look at the quality of the product, the graphics, and the ease of use. Then check out the other sites they are linked to, and determine if your own site would fit in with the crowd.

When you decide you have found a good prospect, you must set out to woo them. The first thing to do is to add a link on your own links page to their site. This is an essential first step; it shows good faith, and ups your chances significantly of their reciprocity. After you have added their link, you must contact the webmaster of their site. Since this is almost always done by email, you want to make sure it is immediately clear that your message is not junk mail. This requires that you tell them right off the bat that you have added a link to their page on your site. A hook like this almost always insures the reader will read on.

Next, be sure to be flattering and let them know how much you appreciate their website. Make sure you emphasize that you have actually visited their site, and that their site is not just a random pick. Give them the address of your links page, and ask them to check out the link for themselves. It's a good idea to mention that they will not only benefit from the increased traffic your website will direct their way, but you will also increase their link popularity. Briefly, explain why link popularity is so essential, but do this in a sentence or two so you don't sound like a professor! Finally, tell them you would greatly appreciate if they would reciprocally add a link on their own links page to your website.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have emailed all relevant sites, be sure to check these website frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it about a month, and if no link appears, try another charming email. Then give it another month, and if your site is still absent from their links page, it's time to remove their link from your own links page. The only time you want to pursue a link further than this is if you believe a site is crucial to your link popularity and your business needs. Just remember to keep all your communications complimentary and cordial.

Then set up a schedule to check your ranking in search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. This is not achievable in the blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance.

By the way - make sure you have a beautiful, streamlined site or you will never persuade anyone to link up to you. Be prepared to keep plugging away at this process, as long as it takes, until you achieve link popularity stardom!

Lesson 1: Analyzing Your Website Traffic
Lesson 2: Evaluating Website Performance
Lesson 3: Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

Lesson 3: Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.

Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.

To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

There are many free link popularity tools available to see who is linking to you. In the case that there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out t