There are a tremendous number of factors at play in determining the success and health of a website, particularly if that website is the web presence of a retailer or organization with something to sell. As entrepreneurs, we want our businesses to perform the best that they can, and we are generally willing to do what it takes to improve in any areas we find in need of bolstering. An incredibly important aspect of being able to make a determination as to what areas in your search engine optimization campaign could benefit the most from is harnessing and understanding data collected from various sources that relates to your website: traffic flow, back link status, and keyword ranking status being three primary cyclical reporting methods that can be analyzed and put to good use to boost organic search engine rankings. This post will be primarily concerned with traffic flow (as it relates to organic search engine placement), with subsequent posts to follow detailing the other major reporting types and how they benefit the clients we’re associated with.

Our experience working with web analytics and diagnosis tools such as Google Analytics and Google Webmasters allows us to make informed decisions regarding the choice of resource allocation in a given cycle that yield the best possible results for the keywords we are focusing on together. These reporting tools allow us to see data such as where the flow of traffic is coming from; organic search engines, pay-per-click advertising, direct traffic, referrals, and so forth. In addition, one of the features of this report allows us to see which keywords have been driving that traffic to the website in question and we can then bolster efforts thereon– or spot a ripe opportunity to pick! The reports generated by these tools also allow us to gauge the results our efforts have borne during that cycle and the one(s) preceding it (although it should be noted that some of the effects of our organic search engine optimization methods are exhibited not only in the short, but also medium and long-term) relative to traffic flow overall.

We use another set of analytical tools to help intially determine what will best improve search engine rankings when we get started with new clients, but for month to month focii and performance tracking web analytics tools are where it’s at. Thankfully both the web and these tools have become robust enough in recent years to glean accurate impressions from relatively complete data sets (for example, compare Google Analytics/Omniture/WebTrends web data to a Nielsen TV survey in terms of accurately capturing the whole) that allow us to gain actionable insights that ultimately strengthen our clients’ projects.

The caveat, of course, is that truly informed decisions cannot be based on one set of data alone. In the near future, I’ll write about some of the other tools we use to track results over time and enhance search engine ranking performance for those we work with– check back soon!

Between March 18 and May 7 over 16,000 people from 46 countries took a moment to vote for their favorite beer city in the USA.  When the dust settled only two cities were left standing, although maybe a little bit wobbly.  The poll which was conducted by beer guru Charlie Papazian ended up calling the contest a tie on May 8 awarding the happy title to one east coast city, Asheville, NC and one west coast city Portland, OR.

As a resident of Asheville I am so happy to see our city get this acknowledgement.  I can remember an interview I once did with the owners of Pisgah Brewing Company, when I asked the question, “why Asheville?” I was told “because Asheville is the most beer drinkingest city in the country.”  It says quite a bit that Asheville was held up with a city eight times its size.  As I write this Buncombe County, where Asheville is situated, is home to 7 breweries and we have 2 more currently in the works.  That gives us more breweries per capita than even Portland, OR.

I myself am a great lover of our local beer scene.  Heading over to Pisgah Brewing Co. on a Thursday for a Pisgah Pale Ale is one of my favorite times during the week, going to chill out after work at the Asheville Pizza and Brewing Co. with a Shiva IPA and the great regular crowd is hard to beat, and my fiance Kati, who isn’t really a big beer drinker, could never turn down a Gaelic Ale from Highlands Brewing Co.  Our local beer and breweries are just a fundamental part of the Asheville culture, it is one of those things that makes Asheville Asheville.  Not to long ago an NPR journalist named Asheville the “happiest city in the nation”  and now we have “beer city”, I am willing to bet there is some sort of connection there.

Something that any small business with ears to hear is bombarded with these days is that you must take part in social media.  Over and over again these words are sounded, leading many business owners to start exploring sites like Twitter and Facebook, of course once they have set up their profiles and found all of their ex-girlfriends from high-school they usually start to stagnate, not really knowing what to do or where to go from there.  And although there is gigantic value to really working tools like Twitter and Facebook many business owners overlook what should be your first step in leveraging social media which is creating a company blog.

A blog for your business can serve you well in many ways, not least of which is that you and your employees will be able to easily add new content, thus updating your website often.  And because your blog is focused on your services it will be easy to generate content that organically targets your desired keywords and phrases.  Search engines love fresh content, especially content that is pertinent to the subject of your site.  My favorite analogy is that search engines are the bees of the Internet and your blog is a sweet sweet flower, the more you add content to your blog the more those bees will return and naturally the more they will spread your marketing seed all across the web.  There is nothing to loose by taking advantage of this enourmasely powerful marketing tool.

Google has recently shown off an amazing new product out of it’s labs: Google Wave. The hour-plus long demo is actually captivating the whole time through, in part because of the exciting new methods of streamlining and optimizing of so many communications protocols and technologies. It may be a long watch, but I heartily recommend the viewing for anyone that is interested in where the web is going relative to where it has come from in terms of mass user adopted messaging and communications standards of today and the recent past.

Waves can serve to replace traditional emails in that they allow users participating in the Wave to reply to the message sent by a familiar thread-like response system. Waves can also replace instant messaging chat dialogs in that responses and changes made to the wave can be seen in real time. Waves support embedded video, images, widgets, and more– they can be collaboratively edited like documents and by proxy can be easily adapted for wiki-like use as well as blogging and live blogging. In the demo, users subscribed to the blog on which the Wave was published could respond as the blogger was blogging! This obviously holds great potential value for business efficiency not only in meetings and the dissemination of information across an organizational body, but also in planning, coordination, and implementation of data driven perogatives– especially once the spreadsheet collaboration capabilities go live shortly after public release.

Another fascinating aspect of Google Wave that particularly relates to Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Services is that it can be used interactively and extensibly with existing social networking technologies, such as Twitter. A Wave and a Tweet can work synchronously in a manner that produces a ‘Twave’, a thread-like conversation comprised of both contributions to the Wave, the Twitter page of the participants, and any and all Twitter clients involved.

What will be interesting to see is exactly to what degree users embrace this new avenue for communication and collaboration. From what can be seen in the demo even the fledgling iterations showcased seem to make exciting use of the strengths inherent to Google Wave, and given that the code is open-sourced, we’ll be getting our hands on even more implementations of the exciting new Wave technology. Will end users abandon their comfortable emailing/messaging/blogging/Twittering clients in light of the unified and concentrated communicative capabilities of a more robust and established Google Wave? Time will tell…

Every now and then something comes along to shake up the world of search and search marketing. Microsoft has just launched a new service that they hope will be one of those big things to shake up searching, and they call it Bing.

Bing is not a normal search engine– instead, it bills itself as a ‘decision engine’. What this means is that instead of searching for a general keyword or key phrase and getting info from any number of angles as they might relate to that keyword or phrase, a user might type in a keyword that they have a query about in order to find out the answer (not just general information surrounding the term). This means everything from ‘Fitness’ returning results for calorie calculations and workout routines because it intuits the user wants fitness advice to ‘LAX to LaGuardia’ returning online booking options and itineraries for flights from LA to NYC.

How exactly SEO and Organic Search Placement factor into the results presented by this new ‘decision engine’ will be fascinating to develop understanding with, and it can be assured that the search community at large (not just us here at Search Placement!) will be diligently reverse-engineering the results of thousands of searches to gain such familiarity– and how it can be put to use for our clients.

What will also be interesting to observe will be the marketshare Bing stakes out for itself as a niche ‘decision engine’ in the world of Google’s hegemony and the type of searching users have gotten used to. As it stands, Bing is outpacing Yahoo! in terms of search volume; however, some of that flow can be attributed to the ‘new and shiny’ effect that loses its lustre in relatively short order. Will Bing hang on in the #2 spot? Microsoft surely hopes so, and we’ll see for ourselves over the next few months.

Social networking has been one of the largest trends to appear on the stage the last several years.  It has given rise to sites such as FaceBook and MySpace, and now much attention has turned to Twitter, the newest icon of the digital age.  Since Twitter came on the scene in 2006, it has grown to be the third most trafficked social networking site with an estimated 55 million monthly visits.  Twitter’s rise to fame is nothing short of spectacular and awe inspiring, a recent post from Neilson.com showed Twitter as having a growth rate during the month of February 2009 at 1382%.  There is really only one major issue darkening the massive success story of Twitter, it has a terrible retention rate.   By all accounts coming from the self proclaimed Twitterati, who have bee using the service for over a month, Twitter is amazing.  They say that Twitter is a powerful marketing tool, a great networking medium, and even provides valuable perspective into your own life.  So, with such positive claims and reviews why do 60% of new users abandon the service within a month of joining?  That is a question that Twitter is surely grappling with right now, but while they are busy hashing out that issue, here are some tips to make the most of Twitter so that you can get past that initial problem (whatever it may be) and start sharing the boons of the service along with the millions who have come before you.

1.    Setting up your Twitter Account and Finding Friends

Getting you account started is as simple as most free online services just hop on over to twitter.com and get started.  Once you have your new Twitter screen name in place it is time to start finding the people you may know or find interesting to “follow”, which is sort of a one-way friendship.  There are several tools you can take advantage of to do this; the first two are on the Twitter site itself. Twitter’s friend finder will let you search for people you may know by name, email, or location.  Twitter also now provides a real time search of “tweets” you can use this to search for topics that you are interested in and follow their writers.  If you would like to get more in depth with your friend search there are some third-party sites set up to help you with your task.  TwitterGrader.com rates peoples twitter profiles; after you have rated yourself or others the site will provide suggestions to you of people you may be interested in following.  Another of the most popular third-party sites is Twubble. Twubble cross references the folks you follow and the folks those folks follow, the end result is a list of people that you do not yet follow but perhaps would like to.  This provides a very organic way to expand your network.

2.    Getting Set Up With Twitter Clients

I would wager that most of the twitterati, even the most prolific, rarely go to the site itself on their browser.  Most of us use desktop or mobile phone clients to post and read tweets.  The SMS style of Twitter’s service leaves no love lost between its site and mobile phones.  The list of mobile clients is enormous and somewhat dependent on your phone and carrier but rest assured that there is one out there for you.  For your computer there are likewise many options, but two clients have risen to the top.  These two clients are Twhirl and Tweetdeck.  Which one is for you is really a matter of preference and I encourage you to check them both out, as they are both great applications.

After you have these basic steps done and out of the way you are poised to receive the many benefits of Twitter.  Take some time to get a feel for Twitter, day by day you will see your network grow, and in time you will be able to really harness Twitter’s energy for marketing, networking, and branding, more to come on how to make the most of each of these.

Marketing in a recession is do or die for most businesses. While many stop, smart marketers just get more picky. Having been direct marketing & internet marketing for 10+ years I’ve come to realize a few things. The need for marketing services don’t dissipate when recessions hit, business owners just stop throwing money at the ones that don’t work.

Having previously worked at a firm that did direct marketing for mortgage banks I’ve seen this first hand. When interest rates were low and the housing market was booming, all kinds of mortgage banks would see success with our marketing efforts. Many banks would throw money at any possible marketing campaigns o see what sticks. However, when interest rates would rise, banks with bad loan programs and no niche would go out of business or stop marketing all together while our more successful clients spent even more on marketing campaigns that worked.

Having been in the search marketing industry for 4 years now I’ve seen the same thing with this recession. Many of our previously successful clients that sold low quality or non niche products have put a hold on their marketing spend. While our clients that provide quality products or services are only spending more.

Successful business owners and marketers are putting more effort into evaluating marketing campaign results, analytic and conversions. We have seen many of our successful clients cut their PPCbudgets in half while increasing SEO and social media marketing.

This trend isn’t limited to us, this recent study shows how most businesses allocate their online marketing dollars and what will change in the future.

Search marketing is forcasted to grow over the years, possibly reaching as much as 24 billion in 2013. This is a significant jump from the 12 billion in 08. SEO expenditures will grow from 1.5 billion in 09 to as high as 3.85 billion in 2013 while pay per click is forecasted to grow from 7.7 billion in 08 to 14.7 billion in 2013.

Like many SEO firms, Search Placement has numerous internal websites that allow us to test new methods for optimization before we apply them to client sites. We just recently received an email from one such website promising to “put your site at the top of a search engines listings“. We get plenty of these emails but this one in particular caught my attention. Let’s take a look, shall we?

First, let’s look at the site. The email came from KeyPlacementSEO.com. The website’s SEO page talks about how keyword placement and inbound links can improve your site’s search engine placement. It also offers a “free website analysis”. Here’s my free analysis of the basics for KeyPlacement.com:

• Title Tag - Their title tags aren’t optimized…”Seo Engine Optimization“?!
• Meta-Keywords - None
• Meta-Description - None
• Headers - Page headers are images instead of text formatted with H1 tags
• CSS styles are not linked in an external file
• JavaScript is not linked in an external file
• No discernible tracking software

These are all elementary elements for search engine optimization and should be addressed even before launching a website. Furthermore, a quick check of the domain registration shows that the domain was just registered less than a month ago.

While this is all somewhat amusing to me, far too many website owners have gotten burned by ‘fly by night’ SEO companies like this one. In fact, many of our clients have had previous experiences with SEO firms that left them in a mess.

When considering working with an SEO firm, make sure you check their background! Ask for references and link building details. Make sure they provide regular, detailed reporting. I can’t stress this enough. It’ll save you from spending thousands on wasted marketing and potentially jeopardizing your web properties.

Last month, Google unveiled some new features to its Webmaster Tools. Two of the most significant changes are a new degree of control over Site Crawl, and the other is a completely redesigned Webmaster’s Help community for English and Polish speaking users.

The new Site Crawl tool will allow users to exercise more control over the rate at which Google’s Site Crawlers index the content on their sites. This is a boon for those who add fresh new content on a regular basis, but may be otherwise too far ‘under the radar’ to be crawled with a degree of regularity. Conversely, if the content of the user’s site is relatively static, they can indicate this via the control panel and economize on bandwidth.

Also new are user forums that replace the older style of Google Webmaster’s Help– this is a great way to assist those individuals who are delving into the wealth of tools and reporting Webmasters can provide. At the moment, only English and Polish help groups have been transitioned to this new format, but other major languages are sure to follow.

Thankfully, Google is always working to improve the end-user experience for those that are involved with their products. These new features are another step forward in being able to understand and control the variables that comprise the universe of searching!

The New WordPress has been released, and it brings with it a huge number of changes and new features. Some of these are designed for greater usability, but the vast majority of the updating has been done to the dashboard and the overall look and feel.

The most significant change from an end-user point of view is that all modules and widgets of the interface can be dragged and dropped in any number of arrangements. I’ve included the video from WordPress themselves illustrating some of this new flexibility.

For clients, this new release is wonderful. Not only are many of the features much more intuitive than they were in previous versions, but direct-from-dashboard posting, replying, and editing is a huge boon for those with limited time (all of us). Beyond that, the new auto downloader/installer will be a blessing for those who have been frustrated by manual FTP-based installs of new releases in the past.

Overall, I’m enjoying the new version immensely, and I look forward to discovering all the new ways to utilize this very powerful tool.