If you’re worried about changing your website, webpages or domain name for fear that it’ll affect your rankings on the search engines, first ask yourself do you have any rankings to worry about?!

A few days ago I had a call from someone who wanted some advice on the search engines.

He wanted to setup a blog, and wanted to know if adding it to his current domain name as a subdomain (so it would be http://blog.company.com) would affect his rankings on Google and other popular search engines.

I asked the obvious question, "What rankings do you currently have?".

His immediate reply was "Oh…… actually none at the moment.".

Now this fellow operates in a very competitive online industry. The search engine phrases he would need to focus on to get a high volume of traffic would be nigh on impossible to get good rankings for, unless he was prepared to put a lot of time and effort in (or pay someone good money to do it for him).

He told me he wasn’t going to do any of that (for reasons unstated.)

So after this brief dialogue we both came to the obvious conclusion… why worry about the search engines when his site didn’t stand a chance of getting ranked for phrases anyway?!

As a result he’s going to host his blog where he prefers. He’s not going to worry about Google, and instead is going to focus on proactive ways to drive traffic to his site.

I suspect that approach will generate more traffic, sooner, than spending up to hundreds or hours (or thousands of pounds) and waiting months in the hope Google will send decent volume of free traffic to his site.

Are you unduly worried about search engine rankings?

If you operate in a niche indsutry (not many competitors) or are local then it could be very easy for you to get to the top of Google for key phrases.

But small businesses who operate in broad industries would be better served with paid advertising to bring traffic to their site. I know I am.

My advice to any small business owner — unless you’re either an SEO guru or work inside Google — is to get your sites online, start adding content and use proactive tactics to get targeted prospects on to them.

-Ed.

If you’re working vigorously at getting more result from your web marketing, you’ll already know that prolific writing is one of the key elements to success.

• Reports.
• Whitepapers.
• Product descriptions.
• Articles.
• Sales letters.
• Emails.
• News.
• Updates.
• Press releases.
• Etc.

Prolific writing is important for anyone wanting to increase online revenues.

Posting informative content to your site give you another reason to email your list and increase your ‘return visitor’ web statistics.

And it’s well known the quantity of unique content that appears on your site can also increase how much ‘free traffic’ arrives from the search engines.

But of course writing can take up a lot of time, so anything that increases productivity is welcomed with open arms.

Enter the Darkroom.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been using a new text editor called DarkRoom, which has one simple concept — to facilitate productive writing by removing all of the usual clutter on Windows desktops.

DarkRoom is so called because it inverts the writing area — you end up with light text on a black background.

Nothing else remains on the computer desktop. Just you, the keyboard, and a blinking cursor.

And by reducing the screen to little more than a blinking cursor, you feel strangely compelled to type, and I guess therein lies one of the secrets of why it’s so effective — if you’re suffering writer’s block, just start typing (anything) and it soon goes away. Worry about editing later.

How effective is DarkRoom?

Maybe it’s just because it’s still relatively new to me, but since I started using DarkRoom, I can see my writing speed has more than doubled. In fact in less than a week, I may not have written much for my blog, but I’ve just written a small book which I’ll be releasing soon. I know that would have taken me a lot longer without the ‘darkroom effect’.

Did I mention it’s FREE?

I’ll give you the link in a moment, but first a disclaimer…

I don’t know whether your computer is compatible or not. I downloaded and installed Darkroom without any problems, but if after downloading and installing it your computer turns pale and starts smoking, please revert to the DarkRoom web site, not this one. Thanks.

Check it out here ==> http://they.misled.us/dark-room

-Ed.

Thanks to everyone who commented about my latest blog design.

I’ve replied to everyone who commented by adding my own comments underneath theirs, but the last two comments raised critical issues so I think it’s best I blog about them — because they may affect you also, especially if you blog.

The first issue was one raised by Karin Hermans, who has quickly become my most prolific commentor on this blog.

As well as being an author of an excellent and highly original business book, which I will blog about soon, Karin also runs her own blog (or is that blogs).

So she knows a thing or two about blogging.

Which is why I took note when she mentioned she doesn’t like the fact my blog comments are moderated. (Which means they have to be privately ‘approved’ before they go public.)

Sometimes there can be quite a delay — more than a few hours — after people leave comments on this blog before they’re approved and appear. That can be frustrating for anyone who has taken time to comment.

However as Karin suspected, the main reason I choose to moderate is to ensure comment spam doesn’t automatically appear.

Anyone who has a blog will be all too aware of fake comments that are intended to promote certain ‘medical’ substances.

And then there are comments that say nothing more than “Nice site.” They don’t add any value to the topic being discussed, and are mostly submitted to get links back to the commentors own web site to help their search engine efforts. I get quite a few comments submitted like that, and they’re all filtered out and deleted.

Commenting on blogs to get back links is fine provided the comment adds something to the discussion.

I could simply allow comments to show immedaitely and then delete both kinds of spam later, but sometimes I don’t get to my blog for a few days or more — especially if auto-posting in advance — and the thought of torrents of spam appearing is not something I want on my mind.

To anyone who makes the effort to comment here — I do appreciate your comments and hope you accept my position on this.

The second comments about my blog was made by Cindy King, another top commentor and prolific blogger.

Cindy asked why my blog doesn’t have ‘URL friendly’ addresses. So instead of this blog post appearing as the following in the address bar at the top of the page…

http://www.edrivis.com/?p=320

It would instead appear as something like…

http://www.edrivis.com/spam-comments-SEA

The concept is that Google is more likely to favour my site if my URLs (web addresses) contain words rather than just numbers and codes — that it may rank me higher for those words.

Well the fact is this there was a time when this blog did use ‘search engine friendly’ urls.

However, a later became apparent Google changed their algorithm and no longer favoured keyword rich URLs — if my source was correct, then for a while they actually became a ‘negative ranking factor’ (meaning your hard won keyword rankings/search engine positions would start slipping if your site used search engine friendly URLs.)

So, I conformed, and changed my blog back to non-SEO friendly URLS.

And then… Google changed and once again started preferring search engine friendly URL’s like the ones Cindy suggests.

Confusing isn’t it! And that’s SEO for you!!

As an aside – I don’t think it’s ever clear cut which Google prefer at any one time — SEO friendly URLs or non-keyword rich style.. but check these guys out: Richard Lee and Fred Black. They both have first page Google.COM (USA) rankings on the keyword phrase ‘Internet Business’, which Google.com reports has more than 1 billion pages (or some crazy high number anyway).

And take have a look at what style of URL they use… interesting!

It seems the only reliable approach where SEO is concerned is… stick to the basics.

I mentioned some of the basic tenets of search engine optimisation in my book — like making sure your site has lots of regularly updated text that contains your chosen keywords, getting lots of other sites to link to yours and with links containing keyword phrases you want to be ranked for, and so on.

Beyond that… be prepared to chase your own tail if you start trying to ‘game’ Google.

-Ed.

P.S. And the real truth is I don’t much care for SEO (for my own web strategy – other businesses may differ its just a personal decision.) I allude to that in my book also. I find Pay Per Click, strategic alliances and print advertising a lot more predictable, and a lot less darn frustrating.

P.P.S. If you were wondering, S.E.A. = Search Engine Ambivalence.

On Friday I mentioned a lunchtime conversion I had with a guy who knows so much about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), that he stopped selling SEO services to other companies, and instead used them to create a business worth £10 Million pounds ($20 millon dollars).

After that lunchtime chat, I gave my presentation, (this all happened at a marketing seminar late last year), during which I invited Ian to talk on stage with me. With a twinkle in his eye, he said “perhaps not”, and politely declined.

Of course he wouldn’t divulge his secrets publicly!

For this reason I’m making the blog post this afternoon password protected — only people who have subscribed to this blog (using the form at the top right of this page) will get an e-mail containing the password so they can read a special post from me where I reveal exactly what he told me during our lunchtime chat.

If you’re not signed up to this blog, you better do so before 4pm! (GMT) I won’t ever give out the password again.

This afternoon I’m going to explain the fundamental principles of how he gets such amazing search engine results… prepare to be shocked at the simplicity!

See you at 4pm.

-Ed.

Two days ago I posted how I helped a private client get near the top of Google.Co.Uk for her most profitable phrase. The work I performed took about 8 hours in total, and yet it has greatly increased sales.

Then I strongly recommended that most small business owners forget about their search engine positions! Have I lost my marbles. No.

Here’s why I contradicted myself:

If I had instead said “put all your effort into getting on the first page of Google for your most important search phrases”, most business owners would look to outsource that activity, because they neither have the time, specific knowledge or inclination to do it themselves.

Unfortunately the return on investment of outsourcing that activity to SEO (“Search Engine Optimisation”) agencies would probably never be recovered. The industry is full of sharks, and this has been hammered home to me on so many occasions I’ve lost count.

I’ve heard countless stories of how people have paid so called “SEO Experts” thousands to get them high up on Google and other search engines… and then seen absolutely NO results.

The last time this happened was just last Tuesday. I had a phone call from an old client from years ago — about 12 months ago he paid a SEO company to get him onto Google — they made all sorts of promises, he paid them thousands of pounds… and a year later he’s nowhere to be seen on Google.

Ruddy shocking. It’s one of the main reasons why I decided to write my book.

The real SEO experts don’t sell their time to other people.

During my last talk at an exclusive 3-day marketing seminar, I asked the room how many people “had paid someone to get their site on Google’s firstpage”. A lot of hands shot up.

Then I asked anyone who had got a first page position on Google — and lots of extra sales as a result — to leave their hands up and for everyone else to put their hands down.

Only one person left his hand in the air.

Because he IS an SEO expert — in fact, he used to be one of the people who called companies up and made promises to get them at the top of Google!

And here’s something highly unusual… he really CAN do it! Reliably and consistently get to the first page of Google for any keywords he wants.

Have a guess at what he does these days.

No, he doesn’t do search engine optimisation for other companies (sell his time) anymore.

He simply took his skills and now runs an e-commerce web site that turns over more than £10 Million pounds ($20 Million dollars) annually, and that has thousands (no joke) of first place keyword positions on Google.

It makes a lot of sense doesn’t it.

If someone really can leverage Google results, they can simply take that skill and knowledge and made themselves a lot of money.

I sat next to this SEO expert one lunchtime and had a very insightful chat into how he gets such amazing success with Google and other search engines.

Would you like to know exactly he does it?

I’ll tell you at 4pm next Monday afternoon (14th January).

WARNING: It’s going to be a password protected post, so you’ll need to be signed up to this blog to read it! (You’ll get an email from me on Monday that contains a password so you can see the post.)

Have a great weekend!

-Ed.

One of my long term private client’s sites is currently hovering at the number slot 2 in Google UK for their most coveted phrase “party bags”.

As you can see, that’s out of more than 1 million ‘reported’ results (there obviously aren’t 1 million companies selling party bags, nothing like.)

Here’s how we did it.

1) Keyword Research to find out which phrase produced not only the most traffic but also the most sales. We quickly discovered the search phrase “party bags” accounts for more than 90% of their sales.

2) I tweaked the site’s home page and e-commerce template so it was optimised on the phrase party bags.

3) Create and maintain a link directory (on the site), which now contains a fairly long list of links to closely relevant sites. (And got those same sites to link back to this site.)

4) My client constantly keeps updating the site so it’s fresh. This is not done for the search engine’s benefit, it’s done for the customers so they have more choice.

The result of those 4 activities are an (almost) pole position for the best phrase on Google. And the result is highly targeted and pre-qualified (ready to buy) traffic to my client’s site.

OK, now considering I did all of the first 3 items single handedly, how long do you reckon my involvement was? 12 months, or more?

No, about 8 hours in all.

Keyword research was performed in Google Adwords. After the initial setup of opening an account, writing adverts and pasting in keywords and installing conversion tracking on the ecommerce site — it was more or left to it’s own devices.

It soon became very obvious which was the most profitable phrase.

Then last March I spent about 30 minutes optimising the site for that number one phrase. About another half an hour was spent implementing a system that automatically finds link partners. And the remaining 2 hours was spent adding link partners to the directory and checking they had linked back.

All of this is explained in my book – the Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy. That’s the same book I recommend web site owners don’t put all their money into search engine optimisation (SEO) services. Does that sound like a dichotomy? It’s all explained in the book.

So here I would normally recommend you get my book, but as of about 5 minutes ago I took it off the market. Why?

No, I’m not sadistic! Just that the new paperback version of my book will be out in the next few months. It’s been updated with a lot of new stuff, including all my blogging experiences and results over the last 12 months, so no point in me continuing to sell the old version.

If you’re subscribed to this blog, you’ll be getting a present soon — a totally free copy of the ebook (PDF) version of the book, sometime in the next month. (My private email address clients will be getting a preview of the book in the next few weeks.)

In a nutshell, if you’re not subscribed to this blog then you’ll miss out!

Finally, the paperback version, will be announced here (on this blog) as a 24 hour special with 65% discount for 24 hours, sometime in the next 2 months.

-Ed.

This afternoon I had a phone call from a ‘search engine optimisation’ company.  (One of my private clients received their phone call and because they weren’t sure whether to proceed with them or not referred them on to me.)

I’m glad they did!

Here’s the basis of what this particular company were offering…

“Pay us just £100 a month and we’ll get you on the first page of Google!”

“Wow — that’s unbelievable!” I said… (because it really is unbelievable! ;-)

Getting a web site in the ‘free listings’ (on the left hand side) of Google’s first page of search results is a glorious thing. Sales can easily double or triple the moment that happens.

But the problem is, for the most important keywords any business could aim for it’s usually a pipe dream!  (Or certainly takes a darn site more effort than £100 a month could enable.)

It takes a combination of backlinks (how many other sites link to your and how relevant they are), how many outbound links you have (links to other web sites), internal links to other pages in your site — and especially the text content of your web pages (it’s length, wording, etc) and many other factors… even the domain name (web address) itself can have an impact on search engine ranking.

So just working on a single ‘ranking factor’ (like backlinks or site content) is almost never enough.

For example one keyword I gave the guy as a test — my private clients single most important keyword in terms of generating sales — returned more than 4.6 million pages when searched on Google.

And yet the salesman still said — albeit unconvincingly by this point (I think he had an inkling he was talking to someone technical) – ”oh yes we can get first page Google on that phrase.”

Funnily enough — I’ve spoken to the salesman before. He didn’t remember me — probably because he makes hundreds if not thousands of calls a year (so why would he?)

But I already knew he’d failed another business a few years ago in providing the same service.  I choked the call off early and I’ll remind my client — in fact all my private clients please if you’re reading this… BE VERY CAREFUL.

Don’t get sucked in with hype. Be wary about anything relating to search engine positioning — it could cost you.

For example, early on in the call the guy was saying “it’s only £100 a month” …but later on he happened to mention “minimum contract 12 months!”. In other words the real cost £1,200.

(And you can bet your bottom dollar there’s no money back guarantee if they fail to achieve page 1 on Google.)

‘Scuse the French, but this kind of thing really p****s me off!

It’s what gives the web development industry a bad reputation — it makes it so much harder for the ethical web development companies out there to gain trust and achieve a good client relationship.

In a nutshell… if it sounds too good to be true… it probably is!

[tags]SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, Cons, Scams[/tags]