It is amazing how many people who have websites for their business ask this question. They do not understand why they are not seeing a drastic change in their business just by putting themselves on the web. They think, “Billy from We are Web Designs said all I needed to do was get my business on the web and I would see results”. Well in this day and age it’s just about having presence on the web, there are many other factors.

Let’s start with design, when was your site developed? How is the user interface? (by user interface I mean how easy it is to navigate through the site and find what you are looking for) Would you say that it has a modern look or can you tell what year it was made. You should be asking yourself these questions all the time. With the age of the internet you have to be constantly be upgrading your look. I am not saying that you need to redo your website every year but you need to change with the tides. Think about your favorite websites, is your site up to par with their design? Not only are you up to par with design but is it easy to get the information you are providing? Are you sending a clear message?

I have been reading lots of marketing books lately and they are all saying the same thing. Consumers have changed the way they buy things. Push marketing is no longer effective, we cannot tell our customers to buy our product because they need it, we need to use the pull method. The pull method is to draw the customer in with information, and lots of it. Think about yourself as a consumer for a second, when you decide to buy something now, like a digital camera, do you just go to your local electronics store and buy the first one on sale or do you research all of the latest trends and then you research who has the best deal, not just in town, but on the web. Well this is what everyone is doing. Consumers want to look for the information on what they are buying and they want to be able to get the information at any time. So what should your site do? It should draw people in with readily available and easily accessible information. When they go to your site they should be able to find what they are looking for in two clicks of a mouse. If the information is further than that they will move onto the next site. Same thing goes for look and feel of your site. If they do not like the way it looks than they will also move onto the next one. Isn’t it amazing how many things you have to think of when developing you website (this is why there are professionals, this is what they know so you don’t have to!)

The last thing that has impact on people coming to your site is finding you on the web. This subject could take pages and pages to talk about, but I will be brief. People need to be able to get to your site easily and fast. Here are some things to think about: what kind of domain name do I have? Is it long, or confusing? Is it hard to spell? What do I talk about on my homepage? Do I have any content on my homepage? Have you searched for yourself through a search engine like google or yahoo? What page were you on? These are just a few of the things to think about.

People do not realize all the different things that account for their ranking on a search engine. This type of marketing is called SEO, or search engine optimization, and the whole point of SEO is to get your site on the first page of the search, because as we all know, no one really moves on to the second page. We are talking prime real estate here people!

Since SEO is such an extensive subject and even I am yet to have a full grip on it, I will wait to expand until next time.

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You probably think I am crazy to make such a statement, we are a company offering SEO services to our clients, I am in charge of online marketing, and I tell you that there is nothing new? Let me explain…

Yesterday night a friend of mine told me that he wants to get some videos up on YouTube, for SEO, so I asked him what these videos will be about and he answered it doesn’t matter.
“Well”, I said, “it actually does matter, even when you manage to get some hits from there, what will they be worth? How qualified will the traffic be you can catch like this?”

These are the kind of things I find frustrating, there is so much bs in this industry, so many self-proclaimed SEO experts announce new techniques to catch some hits every other day, without any understanding what the real deal is, wasting the money of their clients or giving worthless advice.

I think in the last couple of years not too much has changed in the world of SEO - it was and it still is all about the distribution of quality content - adding value tothe site, giving the visitor a real reason to come - and Bingo! The “me too” strategy won’t work.

If you want to optimize your website for search engines you have to think like a search engine. What is it what a search engine wants to accomplish? It wants to deliver relevant results to it’s users. Why? Well, delivering relevant results means the user will come back resulting in more possibilities to show paid advertising which equals more money. Google makes more then 90% of it’s profit with paid advertisement.

So, we shouldn’t optimize our pages for search engines, we should optimize them for the visitor, we should provide quality content, and we should make it easy to find the quality content on the site. This also means the search engine will find quality content on the site - and it won’t have a problem to find it.

Optimize your site for the visitor, and you will automatically optimize it for search engines. And all SEO really is about is the distribution of quality content, and to make sure that everybody can find it, and a huge part of SEO is actually to optimize the usability of your site.

Now you probably think I am even more crazy, because what I am telling you is you actually don’t need an SEO expert? Well, if your business is running by itself, then yes. But this is very unlikely in most cases, and the creating quality content and making sure everybody can find it is way more tricky than it sounds. Do you really have the time to stay on top of this game to know where and how internet users are actually looking for quality content? Probably not. So why don’t you do what you do best and run your business, and leave it to the SEO expert to figure out the online marketing part for you?

Talk to the SEO expert you trust, and if he/she can not explain in detail what he/she wants to do and why and is talking gibberish instead, well, then I recommend to reconsider your choice.

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I just found this in Technorati, seems to be a quick and dirty way to increase the popularity of your blog:

EzineBlog.ORG is a site that talks about everything from politics to sports. If you review their blog, they’ll link to it and help increase your page rank!
Ohh, and while you’re at it you can browse through the 100% ad-free postings about current events, commentary from posters, and more.

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I recently read this quote in the Marketing Sherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2007:

Organic and paid clicks convert at fairly similar rates. If you can get a good organic ranking for critical keywords, your resulting traffic will be far higher than all but top position paid campaigns (”PPC”) on the exact same keywords. Therefore, if you can shift traffic to SEO, it’s better for your traffic volume and cost per click.

Well, not really, unless you focus your Search Engine Optimization efforts only on directly converting keywords, and leave out all those potential site visitors who don’t know yet that they are in buying mode. In printcountry’s case case for example we optimized the site for keywords like “free hp printer driver download“, it’s easier to get a good ranking for these kind of keywords compared to critical keywords where you might have to face way more competition depending on your industry.

The traffic generated by those keywords is less likely to convert as the visitor is obviously not in buying mode yet, but maybe there is still a chance for a conversion. It’s easy to generate traffic with not directly related keywords and when you have enough of them it makes totally sense, this traffic is almost free!
Of course you wouldn’t run a Pay-Per-Click Campaign on these keywords.
So no, for a well optimized page and a well set up PPC Campaign conversions won’t be the same, as you target way more keywords with SEO.

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Ok, so here is my first official post for the Jupiter Labs blog, and as the online marketing whiz in our organization I will take care of the online marketing / search engine optimization section in our blog.

This is pretty exciting for me, I am teaching online marketing for undergraduates and graduate students here in San Diego, so I am used to talk about search engine marketing, but writing a blog is kind of new to me, and at this point I would like to take the chance and apologize upfront, as a native German it is obviously twice as hard for me, so my first couple of post about seo will probably read kind of rough, but rest assured, I’ll work on my style and write as entertaining and informative as I can - I am sure we will get there.

Ok, so why this blog? Well, we recently discussed in an internal meeting that honesty and transparency are definitely core values of Jupiter Labs, so we would like to use this blog as a medium to keep our customers informed about what we do, and share our knowledge with the rest of the world.

Why is Jupiter Labs doing SEO - Search Engine Optimization? As we see ourselves more as a service provider, we want to provide our customers the best service available, meaning we don’t want to sell just web applications, we want to help businesses to grow, and search engine marketing is obviously one of the most important parts in making an online business a successful online business.

Let me give you a synopsis of Marketing Sherpas ‘E-Commerce Benchmarks 2007′:

“2006 was another good year for ecommerce as the industry continued growth of nearly 25%, matching 2005 almost exactly. Growth in orders continued apace, with a slight shift down in hyper-growth of more than 20% toward strong growth of 10% to 20%, barely 5% report a decline in the total number of orders for 2006 compared to 2005. A drop in orders may not be a bad thing for all organizations. Some companies have restructured their offerings to reduce the overall number of orders while increasing the size of each order. The most common method is to institute a free shipping over $XX policy. For these companies, less is indeed more.

Five years ago, ecommerce represented slightly less than 1% of all retail. It has grown in every quarter, and by every measure. That growth has been about 25% every year since, and for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2006, ecommerce hit a full 3% of the total. That may sound like a small number, but it’s 3% of $991 billion, or $29.73 billion.

This data is consistent with benchmarks gathered around the industry, although it is somewhat higher than U.S. government estimates. Overall, domestic online retail grew by nearly a quarter from 2005. If there is any discrepancy, it’s likely that the research undercounts the expansion of ecommerce by auction selling and smaller sites that may elude the methodology. In other words, ecommerce may be even healthier than it appears.”

So, there is a lot of business out there, but just having a well designed website won’t bring you any - search engine optimization does the trick.

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