Even before we arrive at the restaurant my family will browse around the store looking at many of the items for sale. My children laugh and beg for pennies – which ends up inflating to nickels, dimes and the occasional quarter when we run out of pennies – to throw at the giant robot crocodile at the entrance. When we walk through the seating entrance we pass under and through a large aquarium. This primes feelings of excitement and when we are finally seated my family will immediately leave our seats to explore the different areas. We talk about nature and what it would be like to live in the country and not the city. Since I grew up mostly in the country on small farms and acreages my children press me for answers to questions that are sparked by our current environment. We generally spend more than an hour listening to each other talk about our likes, dislikes, hopes and dreams of tomorrow.

Then we order dessert. We always get the “volcano”, which is a bunch of ice cream and brownies shaped like a volcano with a 4^th of July sparkler sticking out the top. Once the sparks dies out everyone takes a spoon and fights to get their fill.

I recently had a personal revelation – We don’t go to the Rain Forrest Café for the food and stay for the conversation. We go for the conversation and happen to order food while we are there. Conversation is the focus. Conversation is the draw.

I have a client that was experiencing low conversation rates on his ecommerce site. His site was professionally designed, had crisp bright photos and competitive pricing. The site copy  was also professional. Very corporate. It accurately described the products and was grammatically impeccable. The site looked very much like an ecommerce site with all the trust indicators in the footer – just where we have been conditioned to look.

Having done a lot of split testing I knew that with the type and volume of traffic that was coming to his site that he should be having more orders. So, I asked him to sell me a few of his products. I wanted him to explain to me why I should buy from him. I would pick a product and essentially ask, “What’s in it for me?” The man can sell. I was genuinely interested in a few products because he was so engaging. You could tell he really believed in what he was selling, he was obviously an expert and when you speak with him it feels like you have known him longer than the 20 minute conversation you were having.

I asked him, “Why does your site sound so different from you?” His reply started to explain a lot to me. He said he didn’t write his site, but that he hired a slick web development company to build his website and they had a copywriter on staff that wrote up his descriptions based upon manufacturer literature.

I knew we needed to get the owner to engage his visitors. If we could do that I was sure we could start building conversations which would lead to sales.

We added two things to his website. The first was a message from him that would be prominently displayed on the home page. He would choose this message and update twice per week with a link taking people to all the older messages. This was to be useful information written by his own hand – grammar problems and all. The second thing we did was to add a forum to his site and put graphical links to the forum on all the product pages. We wanted the site visitors to engage in conversation even before making a purchase. We made the purchase almost an afterthought to the conversation. Certainly, we were still trying to make it easy to purchase, but we really wanted people to communicate. I had the owner prime the forum with questions and answers that he had been doing for years through email. It was a goldmine of content that was easy to add to the forum. If a product had any discussion about it we linked to it from the product page. This was much more than the user review that we see on many sites nowadays. This was engaging in 2-way communication with a real expert that would be straight with you about any product he was selling.

His conversion rate more than doubled the first month. When all was said and done the conversion rate went up by 400%. People started coming for the conversation and ordering because of a relationship. The ideas that lead to his increase in sales centered on the conversation. This led to an increase in customer retention and built trust with first time visitors.

It’s about making the customer feel welcome at your site and being more than just a brochure that any hack can spin up.

1. I remember when we could repeat keywords over and over on a webpage and rank for that phrase on AltaVista. It was easy. You would just make the keyword density as high as you could and you would do very well…. Everyone did it. One day it suddenly ended… along with AltaVista.
2. Prior to 2002 it was very popular to put long lists of keywords into the keyword and description tags. Everyone that wanted to rank started doing it and life was good. You want to rank? Just jam your meta tags full of keywords and you were halfway there. One day, Google turned a dial on their algorithm that eliminated the meta tags from influencing the search ranking and overnight tens of thousands of sites died – well, at least they lost their search engine traffic.
3. If you wanted to rank in competitive industries it used to be popular to stuff keywords in various parts of your site. Maybe the most popular technique was hiding keywords by making them the same color as the background. This technique was suddenly turned into a penalty of sorts in early 2004 and many thousands of website dropped out of the search engines overnight. (Strangely enough, these kinds of techniques can still work under certain circumstances).
4. It was discovered that using parts of the querystring to contain targeted keywords would give your website a boost. Everyone began doing it – especially in ecommerce. If I remember correct, Google killed this off around 2002. Again, without warning.
5. It used to be that gaining any kind of in bound link (backlinks) would boost your website in the search engines. It didn’t matter the context of the website – only that you gain links. So, everyone began doing it. You could rank very well in competitive industries by just purchasing links – or even running programs such as log file spammers, guest book spammers or any many of the different programs designed to gain backlinks. Even if you weren’t doing it you were still benefitting from any unrelated natural links because that was how Google worked. Then, along came the Google Florida update (November 2003) that killed tens of thousands of websites.
6. Hyphenated file names worked very well prior to 2005. Just separate all keywords by a hyphen and use that as the filename. Everyone started doing it. One day Google suddenly turned a dial and depressed almost all pages that contained over four hyphens. They eventually backed off from that a bit, but you can still get in trouble if you go overboard.
7. Having keywords in a domain name that were separated by hyphens became a wildly popular technique to rank well in 2004. Again, everyone started doing this. Companies would even stop doing SEO on their main website and switched to a new, more descriptive, domain that contained keywords separated by hyphens and build this site up. This ended around 2007 when the search engines suddenly changed things.
8. Sub-domains were a technique that was very popular with large respectful companies. It worked well. Then everyone, including webmasters that create thin sites, started creating sub-domains because Google assigned the same trust and strength to a sub-domain as they did to the primary domain. It worked very well and everyone prospered. One day in 2007 Google turned a dial and the sub-domains basically became worthless unless they had strong inbound links – which almost nobody had including the large respectful companies.
9. Keyword matching domains became popular for ranking well around 2007 (cellphones.com as an example). They always worked and had been used for years, but they were expensive to buy so most companies went the cheaper and *safe* route of hyphenated keywords until that technique was made irrelevant (along with the websites). Keyword matching domains became even more expensive because of the immediate SEO boost in all the search engines and the decline of hyphenated domains. You could go from position 700 to position #2 or #1 within a week by just switching to a keyword matching domain and redirecting your old site to it. It was great! Everyone started doing it. In 2010 Google was the first to dramatically remove the boost for keyword matching domains. Everyone else followed and (again) thousands of sites dropped in ranking overnight. There is still a boost to a keyword matching domain name, but it’s not as powerful as it once was.
10. Content is king. Everyone says so… and everyone agreed. Everyone was listening to Matt Cutts and other Google zombies talk about how quality content is the most important thing you can do to rank your website. So text based content became king. Everyone did it. More content, unique content, rewritten content – it didn’t matter because it worked. Everyone was especially happy because content generation was EASY and CHEAP. Then in February 2011 Google decided that content itself was not kind and killed millions of site rankings with their Panda update. People still debate the kinds of content that were removed because they don’t know what to look for… Nevertheless everyone was doing it and Google changed things up.

The above is only a small sample. In fact there are many more examples of things everyone did that the search engines eventually discounted.

Just because everyone is doing something does not mean it is safe or even something that will work. At the end of the day you need to test your own techniques and NOT on your client or production website.

Any time there is a major change in the search engines, specifically Google, there is always a loud cry afterward that Google has banned undeserving websites. The fact is most sites are never banned and they are usually not even penalized. Too often webmasters confuse a change in the algorithm as some sort of penalty when it is just business as usual. You don’t have to do anything wrong on your website or even make changes to your website to be caught up in search engine algorithm changes. It’s the proverbial – it rains on both sinners and saints kind of thing.

That said, many sites do in fact at time put themselves in a position to receive a penalty.  I have listed some basic steps to help avoid search engine penalties.   Some of these tips only apply if you have multiple websites that interlink – which is actually quite common – as well as a common way to get penalized.

Watch Your Network of Sites

Avoid the following on your network:

• Using the same Google Adsense accounts across your network
• Same Webmaster Tools on all sites. You may want to avoid using Webmaster tools entirely if you are concerned about your network. We don’t counsel webmasters to break Google’s TOS, but if you do then you should keep away from WMT.
• Using the same Google Analytics account or any analytics account that will leave an identifying footprint
• All your sites use the same domain name registrar
• All your sites use the same hosting account or server
• Having the same domain owner on all your sites
• Same IP on all sites

Here are a few other things to watch out for:

Hacking. You should occasionally fetch your site as Googlebot so that you can see your site the way Google does. You could also view Google’s cache and then view as text only. Look for hiddent text, hidden links, redirects or any content that you didn’t put there. This kind of hack is difficult to discover because it’s designed to only been seen by Google so you have to make an effort to check for it.

I have personally seen these hacks on many dozens of websites that I was hired to fix. The most common problem was an established website making an upgrade to a content manager. Instead of buying an expensive template or having a custom template built they went with a free or cheap template. Often, especially with the free products, there is hidden code that contains links to casinos or pharma sites. It’s usually a quick find, but a long fix.

Check your robots.txt file to make sure you are not inadvertently blocking important files or directories. This happens more often than you think.

WordPress – First, I love WordPress. Unfortunately, there is a checkbox for blocking all search engines. I have no idea why it’s there, but it is and some people accidentally check it and *poof*. Their site disappears from the search engines.

If you have user generated content (UGC) from a blog or forum you need to closely watch any outbound links. Users can drop links to bad neighborhoods that will eventually get you in trouble.

There are many more ways to get your site in trouble (building backlinks improperly comes to mind), but these are some of the more popular.

I have been asked to look at countless websites where the owner felt Google had banned them.  There are many things that webmasters do that can, will and do cause a ban, but most times I look at a site it has not been banned.

Here are three easy tests you can do to see if Google has banned your site:

No Google Traffic

By this, I mean you have absolutely ZERO visitors coming from Google. Obviously, this only works if your site used to have traffic. Going from even a few hundred visitors per month to no visitors is often a sign your site was banned.

Full URL of a busy page in search box

Copy the full URL of a page that used to have a lot of traffic coming to it. Paste that URL in the Google search box and run a search. If the page does not come up that is a very good sign you have been banned.

Use the site:operator

Enter the following in Google’s search box:

site:yoursite.com

Click search and look at the results. If your website is not listed – you have probably been banned.

If you run the above three tests and each test has the same result of your site not being found – YOU HAVE BEEN BANNED.

(for both search engines and visitors)

The major search engines are constantly changing the importance (or lack thereof) of different elements they use to rank sites. Sometimes things change so rapidly it’s hard for the average Internet marketer to keep up with what’s going on. Here are 5 quick tips to build a quality website that will stand the test of time. The search landscape was littered with the wreckage of hundreds of thousands of sites that were recently depressed by the Google “Panda” update. None of my sites were impacted by Panda – here are a few reasons why:

Bad Templates: Too many websites use a template to build out their website. I have seen some very large companies that could easily afford to build a custom mega-site, but for reasons I don’t understand, they use a free template. Each template has a unique footprint that can be easily identified by search engines. If the template you are using has also been used by 10,000 other sites – your lovely website may appear to be lacking in quality. If you can’t bother to have a distinct marketing product maybe you shouldn’t be ranking for those coveted, valuable keywords. Put some quality into your website and don’t use an off the shelf template.

Page/Website Load Time: Yeah, average SEO people have been debating this for several years. Professional SEO people have KNOWN that it was a part of the search algo or that it had a secondary impact on search engines – If your page is slow the search bots will not stick around long and thus will not properly index your pages. Of course, now that Google has admitted that load time is a part of their search technology everyone is trying to optimize their pages for speed.  Load time is a no brainer – if something annoys the visitor it’s going to have the same effect on Google/Bing/Yahoo.

Content Above the Fold: This may be a part of the recent Panda update, but it also may have always had a slight impact on search results. Google does a good job of detecting where content is located on a page. So, if you have a top flashing banner, some navigation links below that followed by two Adsense blocks and then have some content that is sandwiched between two side advertisements – you may have a problem.  Likewise, if your company logo is huge and your home page has giant artwork that take up most of the real estate leaving very little text content – you may also have a problem.  I will repeat the ongoing theme – if something is going to annoy the visitor it will likely have the same effect on Google.

Duplicate Content: This has been a well known issue for many years, but many websites are still built in such a manner that duplicate content is created. Surprisingly, many large company websites seem to be especially prone to duplicate content issues. The most common way for duplicate content to enter a website is from a poorly coded CMS and not having an internal linking policy. Unfortunately, this tends to be the rule rather than the exception.

User Behavior: Having satisfied users is becoming more and more critical to attracting search engine traffic. In the past, a bad experience was not that big of a deal. Maybe some visitors would not return, but good rankings ensured there was a steady flow of new traffic. Today, the search engines track, through their own toollbars installed on visitor browsers, things such as how many pages someone visited, how long they stayed and how much they used the site. When you add that data with the various trusted review site information and it’s easy to see how a search engine could build a strong profile on how useful a website is to its visitors. A poor performing website probably does not belong at the top of the search engines if there are other quality sites availabe.

If you build our your website and try to follow the suggestions above it will go a long way towards ensuring that your site attracts quality search engine traffic. There are many more things that need to be done in competitive industries, but these 5 actions carry a lot of weight in today’s modern search environment.

A Lake Oswego Oregon real estate company is furious after they claim someone stole their domain name. What was once their virtual property and was prominently displayed on their business cards, brochures, letterhead and all other advertising materials – was not going to a website calling them crooks!

View the original story here
Before we go into what happened next let’s take a look at how you can lose your domain name…

Contrary to popular belief, domains do not expire at the listed date of expiration. When a domain name comes to its expiration date and the owner has not renewed the domain it goes into a status called “expired” – okay, that looks obvious, but we will see that the domain is not truly expired. The expired status lasts 40 days and during this time all the domain services are eventually shut off. Some of the better domain registrars will keep the domain name alive for a couple of weeks (meaning that the website and email still work) while they send weekly email reminders that your domain has expired and you run the risk of losing it. After a couple of weeks all services including website and email are shut down. The idea is that if you are even remotely paying attention you will notice something is wrong. During this period the domain owner can renew or re-register the domain without penalty.

After 40 days are up, the domain’s status changes to “redemption period”. During this period all Whois or contact information begins to be removed. Also, the owner can still renew the domain during this time but it will usually cost an additional fee ranging from $80 to $120. At this point, if a domain is in redemption period it is a good bet that the owner does not plan on renewing the domain unless they are just lazy or otherwise not paying attention to their web business.

Finally, after the redemption period the domain status is changed to “locked”. It is now entering the deletion phase. The original owner no longer has rights to this domain. It is like unclaimed land. This phase is 5 days long and on the last day the domain will be officially dropped from the domain database – ICANN. The domain is now available for registration by anybody.

The entire process takes 75 days from the date a domain name expires. Back to our story…

Susanne and Russ Bergeron had invested a lot in their real estate business including their website. After their website expired a Tennessee man purchased it and now has this in large type on the front page:

“Burgeron Properties and its owner R. Bergeron scammed me out of thousands of dollars. They claim to be in the Real Estate industry and will collect large amounts of money upfront as a “deposit”. That will be the
LAST TIME YOU SEE YOUR MONEY!!!”

Wow. That had to HURT! Russ and Susanne were furious and tried to buy the domain name back, but were stunned at the price. According to Russ, the new owner wanted $5,000 for the website. Russ, disgusted at the turn of events refused to pay the $5,000.

Mistaken Identity

As it turned out, the Tennessee man was slamming a local real estate company with the same last name, but the first name is Raymond… which is what makes the front page even more damaging – the names, when abbreviated, look the same.

Russ and Susanne say their image has been tarnished. They changed all their marketing materials, real estate signs, business cards, Internet marketing and had to start over with a new domain name. Any good will they had with the search engines is gone as they are now building up a new website. “We’re not Bergeron Properties, we’re the Bergeron Team” said Suzanne. The switch in business names has already cost the couple more than $5,000 – not counting any lost opportunities.

Moral of the Story

• Keep track of your domain name yourself.
• Do not rely on a third party or the domain name registrar to contact you about your domain name. If your online business is important to you – memorize your expiration date. It should be like a relatives birthday or your anniversary date – always on your mind when the time approaches.
• You should also look at registering it for more that 1 year at a time.
• Keep your contact information up to date with your domain registrar. They will send out emails but if your email address is incorrect you may be missing something important.
• Keep your phone number and home address up to date.
• Keep your log in information to your registrar in a safe place that you can always find in case you forget it.

The keywords you select should be a short list of what your website is trying to promote.  They should also be terms that are used by your potential customers. These keywords should be both phrases and single words that describe your services.  An easy way to get a jumpstart on the keyword research is to see what your competition is using. Gather keyword phrases from the top 5 websites for each of your targeted keywords.

The best keywords for dentists will depend on the type of dental practice that is being promoted. That said, the best keywords are going to be the most popular… dentist is still the #1 term that people search for when looking for a dentist.  Often, people will use a specific location in front of the keyword such as, Chicago dentist.  Ranking your website for a specific location plus your keyword can be very important – especially for dental practices.  Our list of the best keywords for dentists does not have any location keywords added – just the industry terms.

General Dentistry Keywords

• Dentist
• Dentists
• Teeth whitening
• Veneers
• Dental implants
• Dentures
• Dentistry
• Pediatric dentist
• Tooth extraction
• Sedation dentistry
• dental
• dental office
• tooth whitening
• cosmetic dentist
• chipped tooth
• tooth implant

1. Not analyzing existing Analytics data to identify best performing pages, keywords and Internet marketing strategies.
2. Copying content from other sites – potentially tripping penalties. We see this all the time in dentist and other professional websites. Canned or shared content usually keeps websites from ranking as well as they should.

Worth mentioning is the temptation to use navigation menu’s that are bloated with too many links. This can and usually does distract both the visitor and the search bot from the focus of the website.

Chicago Internet Marketing

If your website is under performing – we can help. We can guarantee a 10% increase in conversions with our AB Split Testing process. We will also get your site on the first page of Google for your target keywords. Call us to talk about your unique situation.

1. Add products – This is the number one thing we have been doing for ecommerce sites AND lead generation sites. Instead of selling 1000 products start selling 2000 products! If you offer 5 services think of unique ways that you can offer 10 services. This will naturally increase your sales overall then just wait till the slower economic times are over and you might pleasantly find you doubled your bottom line.

2. SEO-When you add these new products or services make sure you SEO all your new pages very  well while constructing them. Additional optimized content will mean additional traffic and possibly higher ranking in valued keywords or high rankings in new targeted keywords.

3. Email Newsletters- Offer weekend sales, cut prices on inventory/services that are not moving. Get people to your site via newsletters to make purchases.

4. Start a forum or blog- This may enable customers both past and present to share ideas, photographs, talk about how they used your product and even write reviews.

5. Send out a print catalog- Print catalogs are relatively cheap to produce and carry huge returns. Pick your top products and use your customer database to mail out catalogs. People change their email addresses, so emailing newsletter does not reach 100% of people. Sometimes people move as well, so if your catalog delivers to an address where a new person is living you might have just picked up a new customer. A well designed catalog will lay around someone’s house for much longer than an email or a simple direct mail piece.

6. Write additional technical details about existing products and services. Make some how to do videos and post them to You Tube. Not only will your customers love the videos but you will also find traffic on You Tube as well. Make sure you link your videos to related pages on your website and to service pages as well. If you make good videos people might blog about them giving your website extra links and traffic.

7. Get involved with message boards in your industry. Become the subject matter expert and the go to person on message boards that relate to your industry. Answering questions will help bring in traffic and sales.

8. Make a lot of “Do it yourself” instruction pages for products that are complicated to install. Remember, if someone can save $1000 from hiring a contractor verses doing it themselves, that might make or break a sale.

9. Keep an eye on your inventory. If it slows, replace it with something that sells better. Keep experimenting with different products. Test new products, analyze the results and make changes if necessary.

10.  If you are not taking advantage of free marketing things such as Google Base then you should spend some time there. There are other free shopping engines you can submit products to as well.

11. Take advantage of tough times. Buy merchandise from failing competitors. We have seen this happen more often lately. Recently one of our clients was able to buy the books from a failed competitor. It was a lot of business and they even hired several of the former competitor employees saving them further training costs. The company that has cash is able to purchase customers at steep discounts.

12. Keep an eye on your competitor websites. If one of your competitors goes bankrupt and they let their domain go, buy it up when it becomes available and 301 redirect it to your site. We find this is happening more and more lately. This should bring some of our competitors repeat traffic to us.

13. A/B Split Testing. It seems that few Web sites take an experimental approach to their conversion rates. I have found that many times you can increase sales/leads by changing, testing and analyzing seemingly small elements on Web pages. Split testing is a cost effective way to increase the bottom line.

14. Push hard and build.  A falling economy is an opportunity for those that look carefully. Businesses that make it through tough times generally are the industry shakers on the other side of the recession. The weak fail and the strong end up being stronger than ever. So whatever you’ve got to do to keep going-  do it.

15. Pick up the phone. You don’t need a storefront to pick up the phone and call people. This is a proactive way to earn business – rather than just waiting for the phone to ring. Don’t sit around and wait.

16. Call all recent contacts. Reach out to all the people that contacted you in the last 90 days but didn’t make a purchase. In many cases people don’t buy right away but they do after 90 days. You may have been their first contact, but if you’re still there in 90 days to touch them again you may get the sale then.

1. Pick a dot com.

A COM domain name has become synonymous with “established”.  From overpriced commercials to the vast majority of the most popular websites on the Internet, dot com is the most visible domain extension. Most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that’s out there – don’t make the mistake of locking out or losing traffic to these folks. The dot com extension is even more in demand with the release of many new extensions. If you are running anything but a dot com you risk looking like you were late to the party.

2. Start with your top keywords.

Brainstorm your top keywords that best describe your business and then pair them up together or with different prefixes, suffixes or locations. For example, if you have a Chicago mortgage company you could look at “mortgage, finance, home equity, interest rate, house payment” etc… until you have a good list. Try different variations with ‘Chicago’ in the front or other descriptive keywords.

3. Keep it short or memorable.

Ideally, you would have both short AND memorable, but that can be very expensive in today’s market. Be sure you don’t sacrifice quality just to have a short domain. Having a domain that is short but does not describe your business is not going to help your business.

4. Be Unique.

Avoid domains that are similar to other established domains – especially if they are in the same industry.   It can be easy for people to think they are on your website when in fact; they are on a competing site.

5. Avoid Hyphens and Numbers.

Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to speak your domain name without having further explanation, “That’s Chicago Marketing.com…. put a hyphen between ‘Chicago’ and ‘marketing’.  Speaking over the phone can at times be frustrating or embarrassing. Expecting people to remember to type it in correctly when searching can inadvertently lead them to other websites.