February 20, 2007 at 11:32 am · Filed under SEO
As the SEO Debate rages on, many SEO’s figured it would be funny to create a contest where they would try to rank for the term Dave Pasternack, essentially flogging him from the SERPS. Dave has been talking some nonsence about the industry, so many search marketers jumped into the forray (the $1000 payout was just a bonus). I have not participated in one of these contests, but it did sound like harmless fun at the time. However, at the same time the industry was trying to remove one Dave Pasternack, it effectively removed another as well. Web Guerilla Greg Boser has given the SEO insutry a slap with his Dave Pasternack post. It’s a good dose of reality if you ask me.
What do you think?
January 11, 2007 at 11:59 am · Filed under SEO
I have been reading a few posts on various blogs about the “usefullness” of SEO. There have always been different camps and opinions on things like White Hat / Black Hat SEO practices as well as Paid vs. Organic search marketing. I am sure that the Social Media group will also put in their two cents into this debate as well. It makes for some interesting reading, but what REALLY interests me is that when people get fired up about thier opinion and feel the need to defend their position, they certainly link a TON to other blogs / sites. Debates are great “link bait”. You can catch a good summary of the debate (and the history of it) here. (I had to link somewhere) 
My Opinion?? Learn as much as you can…constantly expirement with every aspect of search so that you know what works and what doesn’t. If you want to try concepts that are “out on the edge” of SEO, do it on sites that you are willing to lose.
January 5, 2007 at 10:19 pm · Filed under SEO
THe success or failure of your site depends on how you define your website goals.
What do you want your site to accomplish?
Customer awareness…online sales…lead generation? Without goals to help guide in your planning and monitoring site metrics, your website is just an online announcement that you are in business.
So what are the steps to making your site function at peak efficiency?
First, find out how many visitors are coming to your site in a given period. A month is usually a good measuring timeframe. It is also important to choose a month that you are not doing any special “offline” marketing that would drive visitors to the site.
Now that you have your traffic stats, what are your visitors doing on your site? What do YOU want them to do? Buy something? Fill out a form to request further information? Once you have your “action” that you want your visitor to take, you can start tracking your conversion ratio. To figure out your conversion, take the number of visitors to the site/ page, and then figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action that you wanted them to. For example, if you have 2000 visitors to your site, but only 25 of them performed the action, your site/ page conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors that took action. Then divide that result by 100.
Once you have your current conversion rate, you can start setting higher goals or different goals for your site/ page.
Here are a few things that you can focus on during the next phase…more to come in future posts.
Search Engine Optimization - Either Paid or Organic
Copywriting
Web Design
Comments off
