When people need a website designed, what percentage of those people do you think approve the first and only estimate they seek out? I’d say pretty close to zero. Same goes for buying a new car or a new home – don’t assume the first thing you see is the best you can get, because 99% of the time, it isn’t. The same goes for SEO and web marketing work.

One peril of investing in SEO is a customer’s ignorance of what comprises a well-rounded SEO package. We often see SEO or web marketing as an ‘add-on’ option to a web design or offline marketing packages, and because these packages are advertised with the magical words “listed number 1 in Google”, people jump. But what they don’t realize is that just like many other things in life in that they are full of empty promises.

So, how do you weed out quality SEO from empty cash-grabs? You do your research. First, do some poking around to see who seems to be offering SEO that is catered to you and not presented as a cookie-cutter template. Here’s a big warning – if you see the words “SEO for X amount of keywords for X amount of money” you best steer clear. This is a templated SEO package that is a cash grab – they promise you the world and they give you nothing. Ask yourself this – how would these “companies” even know how many keywords you’d like to optimize your site for before even speaking with you or knowing your website?

The best thing to do would be to speak with some SEO representatives to see what kind of package they can put together for you. This should be completely customized for your needs and not the needs of the masses. Make sure they understand your business and your market so you’re both on the same wavelength, and when this is done, feel free to ask for an estimate, and don’t assume you’ll get one on the spot. Most high-quality SEO companies will have to take some time to do keyword research into your desired search phrases so they know exactly how much time it’ll take per month to execute an SEO campaign to ensure you’re getting traffic for those search phrases. Again, most high-quality SEO companies will give you a free estimate.

The last thing I want to mention is that a personal touch and a custom SEO package, even if it seems to be more expensive than a templated package advertised on a website, will do you exponentially more good than a cookie-cutter package. You have my guarantee that a cookie-cutter package will do you little if no good, and you’ll be throwing your money away. For an extra hundred dollars or so, a custom SEO package will likely net you thousands more in return. So don’t be fooled.

If you’d like a free customized SEO estimate, please contact us.

When doing an SEO and keyword research proposal for a client, I often ask them what keywords they plan to be on the first page for. Almost always, I find that the client does not fully understand the value of search in relation to their target market. I have discovered that more often than not, the client will propose keywords applicable to a global market, despite their market being local (for the most part).

Take one client of mine, for example. When starting their SEO campaign, they mentioned they wanted improved search rankings for terms like “gates”, “driveway gates” and “aluminum gates”. After doing a bit of background, I found out that they do not market globally, but only locally to the Vancouver, BC geographical area. This tells me first of all, that if I were to help them gain first page placement for the terms they asked for, it would require a lot more time on my part and a lot more of an investment on their part for little or not return, as someone from San Francisco, for example, would have little need to ask for an aluminum driveway gate from Vancouver that is not sold anywhere but to the Vancouver market. Therefore, I gave my recommendations for expanding their desired keywords to a more long-tail, local approach. For example, the term “aluminum gates” they initially wanted to place for was recommended to be changed to something like “aluminum gates vancouver”. This way, the competition is significantly lower (meaning faster SEO results) and the marketing is fully targeted, on top of a much less costly investment on the part of the client.

The flip side to all of this consequently means less traffic, as “aluminum gates vancouver” as a keywords is going to bring in much less traffic than a keyword like “aluminum gates”. However, there are ways to compensate for this loss in traffic…pay per click advertising. When a PPC service like Google AdWords is supplemented, a client can capitalize on additional search traffic not necessarily searched with a geographical specifier, like “Vancouver”. To do this, we simply tell the PPC interface to only generate ads from within the clients’ target market, including only the keywords we choose. For example, if a searcher types in “aluminum gates” into Google, but is located within the Vancouver area, we can ensure our ads appear in front of their search results. Together, integrating the proper SEO terms into a website as well as capitalizing on PPC traffic will help ensure a successful online campaign.

Need help with your search market or putting a PPC campaign into place?

Strange title, right? Well those of us in the web world know what I’m talking about – web traffic.

The word “hits” is often used, and mis-used, when describing website traffic. If you have a stats program integrated with your website like Google Analytics, take a look at your numbers, specifically those under the “Visitors” tab.  Though Analytics doesn’t show how many “hits” a website gets, they do show “visits”, which is similar to hits in that it incorporates both human and non-human traffic. Before you get weirded out by what you think has transformed into a blog post on the sci-fi subject, let me explain. Human web traffic is described as traffic funneled to a website through a possible variety of sources (search engines, referring sites, direct URL typing, etc.) denoted by a particular IP address (think of the IP address as the human visitor’s name, in a way). Non-human traffic is defined as bots or spiders (like search engines going through your site looking for content on how to index your site properly). Believe me when I say this happens more often than you think – your site could be visited by dozens of different bots and spiders on a daily basis alone.

In addition, a “hit” or a “visit” is not a good measure of the amount of different people visiting your site. Each time you visit your site (which you most likely do every day), that is counted as a hit or a visit. If you have a few people working for you, each of which work through your website, every separate time they see your site they register as a visit. Now you can see why depending on hits or visits as a method of tracking web traffic is faulty.

Alternatively, I recommend measuring “unique visitors” or “absolute unique visitors”. Over a selected time period, say the past month, each human visitor will only register as one absolute unique visitor no matter how many times they visit the site. If I were to query your site 100 times today and 100 times tomorrow and you ran a stats compilation over traffic during the course of this month, I would only register as one visitor. This drastically helps out businesses whose employees are consistently viewing the company website. It helps give these people better insight into true visitor behavior as well as trends.

For an advanced look into statistics, you can also filter out internal traffic from certain sources so they don’t count as visitors at all – making this extra helpful for compiling a statistic like “average time on site” – something we’ll look at next time.

Now that you’re abundantly familiar with this, as you’ve no doubt witnessed it hundreds of times, you might be interested to know how important it is to have your business listed in these local business listings. First, think about where this map appears in the search results: at the top of the page occupying prime real estate, just below the top-level sponsored ads and above the regular organic search results. Obviously, Google is sending a message about the importance it’s placing on it’s local business listings – for specific industry searches, Google is saying that its local business listings are even more important that its conventional organic listings, upon which it made its name.

If that isn’t enough to persuade you to ensure your business is listed in the local business listings, consider this:  after recently doing a mid-term site analysis for a client, I found that local business listing traffic coming to this client’s site vastly exceeded regular organic traffic. Seeing as it is absolutely free to add your local business listing, it would be nonsensical to say no to significant and targeted traffic.

Also keep in mind that many Google users are ‘visual’ searchers, meaning they’re much more likely to observe and take action with a visual search representation, like a map. Google recognized this when they conceived the idea for local business listings, and have had great success after implementing this strategy.

To take advantage of Google’s local business listings and to help gain more traffic to your website for your business, contact us and we’ll make sure your local business listings is optimized and set up properly.

Can you remember typing in a URL into a web browser, clicking ‘Enter’ and seeing that bring you to a page’s URL completely different from the one you typed in? Every curious how that happened? The answer is through the use of a web/server based redirect action.

In the web world, there are 2 types of redirects: temporary and permanent. Typically, a temporary (302) redirect is not something most webmasters will need to use. It tells web crawlers that the redirect is only there for a limited time and data from the initial URL should not be passed on to the new URL, leaving the new URL high and dry for search engine rankings. It would be like starting all over again.

On the other hand we have the permanent (301) redirect. This tells web crawlers that the initial page will no longer be used, and all gathered data from that page will be applied to the new URL which is being redirected to. This way, the new URL won’t have to start from scratch to gather search rankings. Keep in mind, however, that if the content on the new URL is significantly different from the previous URL that the new URL will be re-indexed and your search rankings could change.

In any regard, redirects are a great tool to have especially when changing/applying SEO to your file names. For example, if the initial URL was something like www.yourdomain.com/page1.html and you decided to change that to something like www.yourdomain.com/seo-redirects.html, all you’d have to do is place a 301 redirect on /page1.html and every time that page is called, visitors/web spiders will end up on /seo-redirects.html.

There are a few different ways to implement a redirect on your site, and they can vary depending on the language used (HTML, PHP, ASP, etc.). The most effective way to implement a redirect, however, is to modify the .htaccess in your root folder to tell web crawlers about the redirect data.

For instructions on how to do this, check out this page.

Also keep in mind that any incorrect action in modifying your .htaccess file can severely inhibit the functionality of your site, so if you’re not trained in such modifications, definitely hire a professional.

SEO is a business, and one that can provide both the client investing in SEO and the SEO professional with substantial income. Search Engine Optimization has become one of the hottest and most effective marketing tools available, and business owners are lining up to invest in such a service.

Most business owners hear about SEO from a business partner or a colleague who knows a little bit about the strategy, and inevitably their first question is always related to cost – How much? How long? What is the bottom line?

Like most industries, costs and fees can and will vary. When looking at hiring an SEO professional or an SEO company, get an idea of who they’ve worked for and take a look at their successes with their previous/existing clients. If they’ve shown proven success, chances are you will also see success. Only then should you start looking at cost. If a large company in the heart of downtown has the same success rate as the work-from-home SEO small business owner next door, chances are the latter is going to charge you a lot less than the corporate giant.

Many, if not most SEO businesses charge an initial fee, sometimes called an “Initial Analysis” fee or something related to this. Keep in mind this isn’t a cash grab – its the rate of the average amount of time it takes an SEO professional or business to take an in-depth look into the client’s site to see what has been and what needs to be done, as well as taking and in-depth look into their competitors’ sites to see what they need to do to exceed their competitors’ SEO efforts. This initial fee can range from a few hundred dollars to over three thousand dollars, depending on how in-depth the analysis is and the overhead required to be covered. Typically, an initial fee will be in the one to two thousand dollar range.

Additionally, many SEO professionals will require a client to commit to an SEO contract, where they are required to invest X amount of dollars per month for X amount of months. Generally, SEO businesses get most of their work done and revenue received from their monthly work for their client. Typically, the client will agree to either X amount of hours per month at X dollars per hour, or X tasks completed each month for X price. Again, such a contract is not a cash grab. From the moment and SEO business starts work on a client’s website, it can take up to 12 months for that site to be properly indexed/re-indexed in Google’s search rankings, and the ranking of all other search engines. This is something we as SEO professionals and businesses have absolutely zero control over. All we can do is start work as soon as the client gives us the go ahead. Again, committing a client to a contract is a matter of protecting their interests. If a client decides to stop investing in SEO services 4 months into a job because they’ve seen no ranking improvement, it is because the search engines have yet to re-index their site and cutting all SEO work is just going to make things work as they’ll end up with an incomplete site.

For an idea on what you can expect to be charged, most SEO businesses start monthly rates at around $200 for single-page websites and can range upwards of $3K per month for large-scale, multi-product/service sites.

If you are worried about what you’re being charged or quoted, contact us and we’ll be happy to give our advice.

This is the dilemma for many smaller to medium sized businesses.

As traditional advertising is realized to not be as effective as targeted online advertising, many business owners and department managers are making the move to hire online marketers to boost their bottom line with as little cost as possible. Unfortunately, many decision makers are not very well-versed when it comes to the amount of work necessary to manage their company’s online campaign.

Over the years, I’ve often had businesses calling me asking about SEO or internet marketing help, and when I ask what they need specifically, they spurt out a combination of words like “AdWords, keywords, Google, Yahoo, rankings, social media, Facebook, link building, etc.” Unfortunately, these are all words they’ve heard relate to SEO and internet marketing, but they’re not quite sure how all this is integrated into the realm of online marketing. So, I’ve learned to not ask what businesses need specifically, but instead ask what their goals are for their online campaign. This way it’s easier to understand where they’re coming from and where they want to be, and it’s up to me, the professional, to propose an online marketing campaign and put it into action.

Still, not all businesses understand whether or not they need someone full-time in-house to execute their online campaign or if they can contract outside firms to do this for them. Typically, traditional businesses will go the full-time route as this is what they’re used to and this is what they assume to be necessary. This isn’t always the case, however. Take a look at the numbers:

- A full-time online marketing specialist with at least 3 years of experience in SEO, PPC management and Social Media Marketing is likely to demand a salary of greater than $50K per year. Under no circumstances should a business cheap-out and hire less-experienced employees for less money, unless they’re interested in throwing money away. In reality I would recommend looking for someone with a minimum of 5 years experience in the industry, as that shows they’ve witnessed the ups and downs of different online tools and they know the trends of online marketing all together.

- A firm contracted to manage a company’s internet marketing campaign will vary in cost depending on how competitive the keywords are the website is competing for and the breadth of the campaign in general (what level of social media marketing and if PPC management is required). I’ve seen firms contracted to manage online campaigns for as much as $3-4K per month, and as little as $200 per month. However, hiring a full-time specialist may be more efficient when it comes to businesses with highly competitive keywords and highly involved campaigns – they’re able to devote more time to the campaign over less cost per hour.

All in all, it comes down to the amount of work required on your website. Though most business owners do not know exactly how much online marketing work is required, they do know that they need help. The best starting point is to source out some contracted firms and gather some quotes as far as what they’d suggest doing as well as what they’ll charge you per month. Then weigh that out with the prospect of hiring someone full-time in-house and make your decision accordingly.

Looking to hire for SEO/internet marketing?

Apologies for the vague title, but for all of you who know a thing or two about SEO, you know what I’m talking about. For everyone else, this just means that if you start doing SEO on your site today, you’re not going to see your rankings jump overnight, or over-week, for that matter.

For new sites, there is a term for the latency period in which a site is indexed properly in Google according to its keywords, assuming it has some semblance of an SEO strategy in place. This term is called the “Google Sandbox”, and similar to the time it takes to find your plastic toys buried in a sandbox, there is time that has to go by before your site can be found in Google. There’s not finite length of time in which we can say it will take for this to pass, but new websites typically experience a period of around 6 months to be indexed properly for their keywords.

Existing sites go through a similar sandboxing process, though not as sever. If you have a site that has recently been overhauled as a result of an SEO strategy, you might see your rankings drop for a period of time while Google re-indexes your site. Again, there is not finite length of time this will take. Typically, this adjustment period is shortened in accordance with the quality of links pointing to your site. If you’re site is being linked to from an authority site like CNN or the BBC, your sandboxing period is going to be severely shortened. Think about this logically – if authority sites are linking to your site, people are obviously very interested in what you have to offer, and it is in Google’s best interest to provide people what they’re looking for as soon as possible, and will prioritize your re-indexing process.

This brings me to my next point…No SEO company, no matter how famous they are, where they’re located or even how big their office is CAN NOT expedite your sandbox/re-indexing period. Google has ZERO affiliation with all SEO companies and regardless of who makes your SEO changes, you’re latency period will be the same. If you ever come across an SEO company or individual who promises you results in any length of time, I strongly suggest you steer clear of them. In the web marketing world, unlike many industries, hearing guarantees is an indication of illegitimacy and an indicator of someone who just wants to pocket your money. Don’t fall for it – do your due diligence and hear what people have to say.

That said, don’t be afraid if you hear that an SEO company will require you to invest in their service for a minimum of 12 months. Don’t compare this to something like a mobile phone contract – this is set up to protect you. If you’re a new website, you won’t be seeing any results from your SEO campaign until 6 months anyway, and even then your results will be shaky at best. If you allow at least 1 year to see where you’re at, you’ll assure yourself that your investment hasn’t gone to waste and you will definitely be reaping the rewards.

As we continue our segment about marketing online video, one of the most effective ways of doing so is encouraging video viewers to take action by including clickable links. In YouTube, annotations can be used for such purposes – however, annotations can only contain clickable links within the YouTube/Google umbrella, drastically reducing your ability to market outside this.

To overcome this challenge, some services have begun to pop up that give us the ability to include clickable, external links within our videos. One of these services is BubblePly, which can be found at http://www.bubbleply.com/. The process is quite simple, and follows these simplified steps:

1. Go to bubbleply.com.

2. Enter the URL of your video you’d like to add clickable links to and press “next”.

3. A new page should open and your video will begin playing on the BubblePly platform. When you’re at the right moment in the video to insert your link, pause the video player.

4. Click on “add bubble” and drag the bubble to the desired part of the video screen.

5. In that bubble, type the text you want to include in the bubble, and at the top, select the ‘link’ icon to link the selected text.

6. Enter the URL of where you want the viewer to be taken once the link is clicked.

7. Click “done”.

8. Test out the video and the link, and if you’re satisfied, copy the code to embed that video into your site.

Note – there is a great tutorial of how to do this located here.

A tool like this will help you shed the rigidness of YouTube’s linking policy and help provide your viewers with the ease and convenience of clickable external links within videos.

Need Help With This?

Check out any of the millions of videos on YouTube, and you’ll find the overwhelming majority are pretty hastily-put together productions – just quick uploads to spread the word about a fun video for the sake of public production and not much else. However, if you’re a business, or an individual for that matter, looking to separate yourself from the pack, consider using YouTube’s free annotation tool in videos uploaded on their platform.

In short, YouTube annotations can be used to flesh out more about a particular video, add speech bubbles to actions or people shown in a video, or even to link the video in question to other videos or searches within the realm of YouTube.

To create and integrate annotations into a YouTube video, here is what you have to do:

1. Go to www.youtube.com and login to your account.

2. When logged in, click on your account name and select “My Videos”. This should take you to a page where the “uploaded videos” tab is selected.

3.  Find the video in which you wish to create annotations, and select the “Annotations” tab below the video in question.

4. Drag the play head on the bottom to the point in time of the video where you’d like your annotation to start to appear.

5. On the right, you will have a choice of what type of annotation you’d like to integrate (you’ll have a choice between speech bubble, note, spotlight, etc.)

6. Once you know what type of annotation you wish to use, click that selection and it will appear in the center of the screen. You have the ability to enlarge the dialogue box at your will, and input the text you’d like to use. Remember, you don’t want to cover too much of the screen with the annotation as viewers won’t be able to see the content of your video very well beneath the annotation layer.

7. On the right, you have the ability to edit the text you’d like to be used in the annotation, as well as the start and end time of the appearance of the annotation. You also have the ability on-screen to input links in your annotation, change the color of your annotation, or even change the type of annotation you’d like to use.

Once you’ve inputted the content you’d like to use, save that to file and if satisfied with how it plays, go ahead and publish that. Remember, you can use more than one annotation (separately or at the same time) within the same YouTube video, so play around until you get the right combination of annotations in the frame of the video. Once again, make sure the annotations don’t impede too much with the play of the video – the delivery of the video content should be your first priority.

Need help with YouTube annotations?