Fixing your web presence is a lot like getting your car tuned up. You really have to make a diagnosis prior to getting your problems fixed.

I recently listened to a radio show where the host was talking about how consumers often self-diagnose their car problems. The announcer related a story where a customer brought his car into the shop and told them to “Give me a tune-up and align the front end because I keep hearing noises when I drive.”  Based on these instructions, the service shop did the tune-up and front end alignment. (more…)

Mike Huber

As the Director of Client Services at Vertical Measures, Mike Huber is in charge of developing efficient processes in order to improve overall productivity and quality of client services including; link building, social media marketing and content development.

Mike has a wealth of experience in marketing and advertising. Starting out in newspaper advertising, he has seen the transformation of print to digital. For the past 15 years, he has been involved in online marketing, developing extensive PPC programs and organic SEO tactics, resulting in a significant growth, traffic, and revenue for clients.

Mike is an accomplished public speaker and presents frequently on advertising and online marketing topics.

+ Mike Huber

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I recently spoke to a group of website owners at Local First Arizona in Bisbee about website design that encourages traffic and repeat visitors.

The presentation was in a workshop format that lasted two hours. I was struck by how the issues they face are not new but they warrant repeating, as many of the improvements they need to make are the fundamentals of a great website. Here are some things distilled from that workshop that will help you increase traffic to your website and repeat visits. (more…)

Mike Huber

As the Director of Client Services at Vertical Measures, Mike Huber is in charge of developing efficient processes in order to improve overall productivity and quality of client services including; link building, social media marketing and content development.

Mike has a wealth of experience in marketing and advertising. Starting out in newspaper advertising, he has seen the transformation of print to digital. For the past 15 years, he has been involved in online marketing, developing extensive PPC programs and organic SEO tactics, resulting in a significant growth, traffic, and revenue for clients.

Mike is an accomplished public speaker and presents frequently on advertising and online marketing topics.

+ Mike Huber

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Last week, three members of the Vertical Measures team attended PubCon, a yearly event where all the latest news on SEO, Social Media and Online Marketing is shared and discussed. Below are some of the more interesting or controversial things that were said by speakers across the various events, and while we may not agree with everything, it might get you thinking about your campaign and where you want to take it.

SEO

• Utilize video and images to target universal search and get more page 1 real estate. Submit both image and video sitemaps to search engines.
• When your rankings jump onto page one for a couple of days, this is the audition period – ensure you have good CTR and low bounce rates.
• End user data, gathered via the Google toolbar or query data, is considered in the ranking algorithm, so ensure good user experience.
• A short URL in the SERPs will get twice as many clicks, which a long URL leads to 2.5 times more clicks for the link below.
• Don’t chase algorithums, but ask ‘What would I do if it were my search engine’?
• Don’t target single word keywords. Aside from the low ROI they are used less frequently due to their ambiguous nature. As more words are included the volume decreases, but conversions increase.
• People search in plural keywords, but buy in singular.
• Put misspellings of keywords in your meta keywords so they are still included on a page without making your brand seem unprofessional.
• The .mobi TLD provides no advantage in ranking for mobile searches, but user detection to serve a different website design is best practice.
• Blackhat tactics are like drugs, you might be able to get a quick boost, but in the long term it will only cause problems.
• The long tail is bogus – search is being used more for navigation with brand queries of short length.
• Don’t limit yourself to link reclamation for your own site, but competitors’ sites too. Keep an eye on any bankrupt companies in the industry also.
• Videos and photos posted to your listings can help give your local listing a boost.
• Many have seen it, but this is a great video on the power of social media.

Website Design and Conversion Optimization

• More people scroll to the bottom of websites than a few years ago (up to 15% from 2%), as scroll wheels have become more common. But 76% of clicks are still above the fold, so put a CTA at the top and bottom of each page.
• Flash slide shows show your business cannot prioritize the best service or message to get across for each page. They are also a distraction and take up too much prime real estate.
• From left to right across your navigation, take visitors through an Engagement Continuum, who you are and why they should buy from you.
• A user can keep 7 things in their short-term memory, design navigation with this in mind and don’t give too many options. Use the 80:20 rule to promote only the top 20% of categories.
• Make your message more obvious, don’t hide it in text, or bury it in the page. Everyone has A.D.D. online and no one reads paragraph text.
• Keep your numbers specific – e.g ‘2 million users’, not ‘millions of users’ to appear more real and tangible.
• Borrow trust from other sources by listing any publications or associations you have with well-known brands. The right hand column is ideal for these trust indicators.
• Test your pages using both qualitative and quantities data, using both Analytics and feedback from user experiences.
• Never let your IT department write copy, keep an eye on error pages, 404s, thank you pages and search result pages.
• Every page can be a landing page, so needs to be designed for conversions. Find the non-converting, high traffic pages and start from there.
• You have 50 milliseconds to give a first impression of your site, which is crucial in the buying decision, so your site needs to look professional. Layout will have a greater affect on conversions than content.
• Too many homepages have too many options, keep it to one CTA with easy navigation. Too many options mean users make no choice at all.
• Page speed is important for users and search engines alike, 49% of rural city visitors are still on dial up connections and page speed is going to become more and more important in future algorithms.
• Conversion rates mean nothing without a traffic source.
• HIPPO = Highest paid persons opinion. Don’t let the boss pick the design – test it!
• Don’t just test, but have a strategic plan and hypothesis based on your target audience and their buying behavior to ensure marketing insight from the results.
• Websites are made to sell, not win design awards – ‘slick isn’t sticky’.
• Automate your analytics to focus on strategy, not tactics. Ignore any averages, as well as pageviews or bounce rates – you want people to find information quickly!

Social Media

• It doesn’t matter if you want to do social media, people are talking about you anyway! Listening to passive conversations about you is the most honest feedback you will ever get
• Companies think they are giving up control by encouraging social media participation, but the illusion of control was just ignorance by large brands.
• When tweeting you ARE the company, there are no departments.
• Use social media to work above Google and keep people away from search. If they know you and trust you, they won’t search for others.
• When Google crawls Social Media data, they are listening to your customers, and what they say about you.
• Forums are unsexy social media, but still important and have large audiences.
• People want to give feedback – make it easy for them.

Future of Search

• Mobile search is the largest growing sector of search, and HTML5 is set to replace mobile applications.
• PC search and 10 blue links will diminish in importance in the coming years.
• If search is the past, prediction and suggestion will be the future.
• Don’t optimize pages for algorithms, but optimize the brand itself for search. Give your customers what they want and make your business stand out, to help your site stand out in the rankings.
• Microformats are going to become more important to provide information to searchers before they visit your site.
• HTML5 will help crawlers better under websites and their layout of content and navigation. Ensure your website is compliant.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.

Marketing online for big or small websites can become daunting if you don’t randomize your approaches. A social marketing campaign, varied in its approaches, will give your client better results in achieving search engine domination. Using question and answer sites can prove to be beneficial if using them properly.

Trulia age Rank 5/10, Get answers to all your Real Estate questions.

Kaila Strong

Kaila is a Sr. Account Manager at Vertical Measures. She works directly with clients to evaluate and analyze their overall Internet Marketing needs, creates sales proposals and recommendations. In addition she regularly reports on client rankings, gives SEO advice to brands in a variety of industries and manages client expectations.

Kaila has a background in social media marketing, link building, SEO and content marketing. She’s an active blogger on SearchEngineWatch.com, and an avid social media user (@cliquekaila on Twitter). She brings her experience to the table with new clients and enjoys writing about her experiences as well here on the VM blog and throughout the web.

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Well we can hardly believe it.  WE PULLED IT OFF!  If this is your first time to our blog you may be asking did what?  For the last month we have documented the process of moving our web site to a new hosting company, redesigning and updating it and integrating our blog Link Building Best Practices in to our new web site blog location you are looking at now.  It was all done at the same time and you are now looking at the new site that went live effective December 7th 2008.

In our last post we shared some of the planning and specific action items we identified to make it happen.  One of our biggest concerns was making sure we don’t lose any of our excellent search engine position and it seems we achieved that goal as well as transferred our page rank.  

I think the best way to wrap up this series is to tell you about what DID go "wrong".   Although we felt like we planned it out carefully and we followed our plan there were things that happened that we just could not have anticipated and maybe sharing this information with you might help your next project as well.

What went wrong

Last Friday night we finished all the "Pre" items and the final step before taking the new site live was to use the excellent built in "export" feature WordPress has.  It exports all your posts, post categories and Authors.  The plan was to export that data and then import it to the new blog (you are on now) so everything is current.  I had already done this once before a few weeks ago just to populate the development version of the blog with some data etc. and I was very impressed with how easy and smooth it went so I wasn’t expecting what happened next.  Before I get in to that though here is where I made my first mistake…I hopped over to GoDaddy and updated the name servers for the site and blog to begin propagation.  Then here is where things got ugly.  I exported all the data just fine, then jumped in the admin panel for the new site and started the import.  It seemed like it was taking a long time but finally it finished.  The first thing I noticed was the post count was twice what it should be (oh oh) so I opened the site and took a look.  The entire site was all out of whack!  Things were not where they should be at all and the main navigation had extra items. HUH?

The next thing that went wrong was where it got REALLY ugly.  The entire site went down!  When I tried to view the site all I saw was "A CONNECTION CAN NOT BE MADE TO THE DATABASE" in big black letters.  YIKES!  This didn’t make sense because the site was just up and no changes were made that would impact the database connection.  I logged in to the database via PHP MyAdmin and everything seemed fine. By this time it was 2:30 am and after poking around a while I decided the best thing to do was change the name servers back to the old sites, get some rest and pick it up again in the "morning" when I was fresh.

All hail WordPress the self healing blogging platform!

At 5:30 am (yeah 3 hours later) I woke up and started thinking about the problem, came up with a few ideas and headed in to the office to attack it again.  Guess what, the site was up! (at the dev address of course) but still out of whack.  After inspecting the main navigation I noticed there were actually just a couple extra items I realized were the PAGES (not posts) from the old blog site.  (Well no kidding because pages are stored in the posts table so those were imported as well) Ok, fine I’ll just log in and delete them because we don’t need them any more.  I logged in and right away noticed the post count was back to normal!  NICE! I have no idea how…so I proceeded to delete the few extra pages.  I went back to the site and just like that the world was a happy place again!  The site looked perfect and the blog was completely populated.  All hail WordPress the self healing blogging platform!  Since everything looked ok I switched the name servers again to make the new site live and since I had no idea how long propagation was going to take I went back to bed for a while.

Oops, another big problem

I woke up checked my email and had a few from Arnie with the most glaring being all the images on the blog were dead!  Obviously I didn’t know  that before I retired for the evening.  All the paths to the images were wrong!  Normally this might seem like an easy problem to solve right?  Just add a copy of all the images to a directory found at the correct path and moving forward all images will be in a new correct location.  Nope, that isn’t going to happen.  The problem is that since we had a 301 redirect in place for linkbuildingbestpractices.com to verticalmeasures.com/blog there was no real physical path that could be used.  We decided the best thing to do (rather than manually change the path on all the images on the entire blog) was was to use mod_rewrite on the .htaccess file to point all the image paths to the correct location. This little beauty did the trick: RewriteRule [^/]+(/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/.+) $1 [R=301,L] It 301 redirects all the image paths to the standard directory in WordPress where all images reside.  Problem solved!

While we are on the topic of mod_rewrite there was another problem we needed to resolve and mod_rewrite came through once again.  On our old site we had a series of website marketing and link building articles and press releases that used an unusual query string path.  (They were dynamically generated from a content system developed)  We needed to make sure they redirected to the matching page on the new site to pass link juice and authority.  Here is an example of the mod_rewrite we used:

Articles:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} articles?Outsource-Link-Building-The-Right-Company-Is-Vital.html
RewriteRule articles http://www.verticalmeasures.com/outsource-link-building-the-right-company-is-vital/ [R=301,L

Press Releases:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Link-Building-Company-Earns-TOP-SEO-Award.html
RewriteRule press http://www.verticalmeasures.com/link-building-company-earns-top-seo-award/? [R=301,L]

Unfortunately we had to write one for each article and press release but it had to be done.  Also for extra fun we had to change the case of the new path on each to lower case as well (since PHP is case sensitive)  and a "http://UrlLikeThis" is not the same as a "http://urllikethis".  They would be considered different pages and duplicate content!  Ouch…

Our video didn’t work either

There was one other small problem that required some fast thinking and innovation.  If you were familiar with our old site you may recall we had a video built using Camtasia studio explaining the importance of natural search ranking.  The video worked great (on the old site) but for some reason on the new site it would stop about 15 seconds in.  Well it was time for an upgrade so we just uploaded the .flv file to the Vertical Measures YouTube account and it worked perfectly there.  Thanks to YouTube we were able to embed it on a new page and the result is a more visually appealing and professional wrapper for the video.  If you haven’t seen it before you should take a few minutes and watch our very informative higher search rankings video.

So that wraps it up!  There were a few other little kinks along the way but we wont bore you with all the details.  We hope you found this post and the others informative and a little entertaining.  Please be sure to take a moment and tell us what you think about the new site. We would value and appreciate your feedback. 

 ArnieK.gooruze.com

Vertical Measures

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