your link to better business solutions

Archive for September 2008

Five tips for a Web 2.0 start-up

by on Sep 18, 2008 (0) Comments

I’ve talked to a lot of Web 2.0 companies in the past month, some big and some small. A few themes have developed in how to make a successful Web 2.0 company – here’s a few ideas.

1. Build a real team. There are so many Web 2.0 companies that are either run in a virtual environment or with just a few people in a basement somewhere. It’s not a good strategy because any ideas that could germinate with a larger team – and I mean about 5-8 people or so — will be stagnated with just one or two employees. If you can’t afford a real team that includes a developers and designers, folks in marketing and accounting, and a sales agent or two, you might just have an idea, not a company. It reminds me of my experience this week with a rental car company staffed by just a couple of people. (Yes, I was trying to save a buck.) One of the employees was out sick, so that left one person to transport people to and from the airport, do the paperwork, and deal with frustrations. In the same way, one person can write a blog, but it takes a company to make a real Web 2.0 product that actually does something.

SEO Ethics Are In The Eye Of The Beholder

by on Sep 18, 2008 (1) Comments

True story. I was sitting at one of my computers, a bit flustered because I was trying to solve yet another CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) browser incompatibility, and I received the following email:

I would be pleased to buy some text links on your website. Let me know if you are interested so we can proceed for further negotiations. I can really offer you a smart and competitive package.

Smart and competitive package? This guy had to be kidding me, right? Anyone who knows me can reasonably assume that I will respond to most search engine optimization (SEO) and/or link buying pitches with one of the following responses: (a) Hit the delete button, or (b) Report search engine spam. Of course, the delete-button decision would have been more efficient. But I was in one of my moods. I really hate CSS browser incompatibilities.

Search Engine Mannerisms

by on Sep 18, 2008 (0) Comments

When you constantly crawl thousands of search engine result pages daily (just to understand the behavior of cause / effect and the search engine algorithm) you start to notice the mood swings of search engine mannerisms which are the residual fragments, routines and traces the algorithm leaves behind.

In light of all seriousness, following are some of the “in-house” SEO nicknames we have dubbed these occurrences around the water cooler to identify these phenomenon.

Just like wine, pages get stronger with age, so the more pages you have about a topic (aging) in your site, the better chance your sites pages have when real page rank, trust rank and website authority is achieved.

Are Your B2B Paid Search Campaigns Trying To Serve Two Masters?

by on Sep 17, 2008 (0) Comments

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a seasoned Google AdWords mentor was to “not try and serve two masters within a single campaign.” If your campaigns are like most, they have a fixed budget and are ROI driven. In this situation, we are constantly trying to ratchet down the cost per lead while still using up the budget to get as many leads as possible. But beware! At some point you can almost be guaranteed that you’ll be requested to “fill up the pipe” by ramping up volume (and spend) for the short term. Unfortunately, trying to jockey between the two is a recipe for long-term frustration and compromised results.

This may seem trivial to many, especially at the outset of a campaign when everything is new, shiny, and exciting. But as I and my clients have learned, as a campaign matures — and you are looking to improve upon current and past results — that lingering question once again rears its head. ROI or volume? It’s very hard to run disciplined, scientific campaign tests and optimizations if that question isn’t clearly answered and adhered to.

Shockweb aggregator Fark.com feeds our link lust

by on Sep 16, 2008 (0) Comments

A friend of mine asked me to write about Fark.com, the famously shocking news aggregator that has even more loyal followers now that they don’t include porn links. I usually avoid the site, not because of the shock value, but because I don’t want to burn up an hour learning about the so-called Obama race war, violent crime rates in Detroit, and the abysmal US economy. And those are the more serious links. Usually, headlines are more like “Ike survivors may have to wait weeks for baths. France shrugs” which is just cheeky enough to get you to click on it, even though the actual report has nothing to do with France (a pet topic for the site owner). It’s what I call a force-pull headline, one that you just can’t help clicking on.

How Social Media Can Help Your PR Efforts

by on Sep 16, 2008 (0) Comments

The emergence of social media has been a game-changer for newspapers and magazines. On the one hand, they have seen their print numbers continue to drop as more and more people turn to the internet to get their news and information. On the other hand, they (the smart ones) have seen that by embracing social media and leveraging the different opportunities it offers, they can drive more traffic to their sites, engage in open dialogues and react quicker. So what does this mean for you? More opportunities than ever for you to build relationships and get publicity. Here are a few things to keep in mind when trying to leverage social media for PR purposes — and that’s PR as in public relations, not PageRank!

Start Small

Many times when people think about getting publicity for their business, their wishlist goes something like this:

The Importance of (KPIs) Key Performance Indicators for SEO

by on Sep 16, 2008 (0) Comments

When it’s time to determine how effective an SEO, advertising or marketing campaign is, the need to establish KPIs (key performance indicators) as benchmarks to measure goal conversion, time lines and tactical objectives.

Performance benchmarks exist for a very specific purpose, to measure conversion and marketing objectives, but KPIs also allow us to extend beyond one-dimensional thinking and truly develop long-term strategic and pivotal advantages.