I switched my website (www.mmwebmarketing.com) over from being a  simple static HTML based site to a WordPress – CMS ( Client Managed System) because a friend of mine told me that Google liked blogs better than your regular website.  He mentioned that Google will index your site more often if it is built on a WordPress engine.

So I rebuilt my site using WordPress and, switched it on and then waited to see if Google was treating me any better on the search engines than before.

Lo and behold it is. My site’s search engine ranking is improving significantly.

Compare these numbers to those on my post from May 4th.

The positioning is significantly better that it was before. The bolded results are improved over the last time I checked.

I recently read on another Internet consultant’s website that we have to be able to practice what we preach to verify that we are capable of providing quality service to our clients.

I fully agree with this statement which is why I have been running the Calgary search engine optimization experiment since March 2009. Since then I have been tracking the results of a number of keywords 0n 3 search engines in one of the toughest categories to crack in the search engine optimization industry.

The category I am referring to of course is the SEO industry itself. It only follows that the experts in this industry, whether located in Calgary, or anywhere else in the world should be able to get a page 1 position on the search engines in the city in which they work.

Of course many companies are sending out massive numbers of emails to us, promoting their SEO services and promising to “get you on page 1 for your keywords or industry”. Let me clearly state once again – Anyone promising to put your site on page 1 without interviewing you, assessing your website and basically analyzing every aspect of your competition is someone to be avoided.

My experience with clients who have paid $1000′s of dollars for these types of services suggests they usually get a high ranking with search words that do not benefit their business at all.The same is true for Pay Per Click advertisers. While they may show up on page 1 remember that simply means they are bidding higher than their competitors for the same keywords. It does not verify that they are actually effective at search engine optimization.More about that in another post.

One test you can run to evaluate a consultant of any type is to see if they are successful in achieving the goals for themselves that they promise to you. While my search engine optimization experiment has not been 100% successful to date, I have been achieving significant progress and recently made a major breakthrough. In order to achieve success as an Internet marketing consultant in the highly competitive high tech city of Calgary, one category that needs results is search engine optimization.

You can design a great looking website and have all the bells and whistles, but if nobody can find your site on the search engines, whatever you have invested in your website is not going to as valuable as it could be.

The breakthrough came in the keywords ” Calgary SEO ” and “Calgary search engine optimization“. While I have achieved major success with other keywords, these ones were the hardest to optimize for and  I was obviously competing with the most experienced and effective SEO experts in Calgary.

Something you need to appreciate is that page rank and position are impacted by the age of your website, so if someone created a Calgary based search engine optimization website 4 or 5 years ago, they would now rank quite high. My site is newer. So here is a comparison of my results after 6 months:

While these numbers are not exceptional for the last 4 rows this is the first week that the site has appeared in the top 100. I hope to see continued progress in this area. Stay tuned.

It has been another 16 weeks since I began tracking the results of  my search optimization experiment. I mostly have been letting the project cook awhile and I have not been making a lot of  major changes to the home page. Basically the efforts made in the first few weeks have sustained their early success and my position for the original phrases I was optimizing for have held their positions on the first few pages of Google.

Here are the current statistics:

Keyword Phrase	Google	Yahoo	MSN
Calgary Internet Marketing	34	64	20
Internet marketing Calgary	29	70	12
Internet consulting Calgary	3	8	5
Calgary Internet consulting	7	28	4
Calgary Internet consultant	7	15	5
Internet consultant Calgary	6	8	5
SEO Calgary	n/a	n/a	n/a
Calgary SEO	n/a	n/a	n/a
Search Engine Optimization Calgary	n/a	n/a	41
Calgary Search Engine Optimization	n/a	n/a	24

Some of these phrases have improved while others have declined or remained in approximately the same position. The improved positions are highlighted in red.  Most importantly some of the highlighted phases are appearing in the top 10 pages for the first time. n/a means they are not in the first 10 pages and for all intents and purposes, invisible to most people searching  for them on the web.

While this is by no means perfection, it is important to see progress, especially in an area on the Internet where all the experts live. Search engine optimization experts should be able to position themselves highly in the searches for their services and they are the people who not only understand the system, but need to be able to use it effectively to get resutls for their clients, who don’t.

At Millenium Consulting, we teach you to understand how easy it is be found and you will find this especially true if you are in an industry that does not have the knowledge or experience to make it happen.

Many website owners don’t realize that when visitors arrive on their websites and then leave immediately without  visiting another page, they represent more than just a lost client. We now call these unconverted web tourists “bounces” and Google uses the pages’ Bounce Rates to determine the value of a site for keyword search accuracy and rank. A bounce rate of 75% or more is a disaster while a bounce rate of 25% or less is considered exceptional.

If you score poorly in Google’s evaluation regarding your Bounce Rate, you can slide down in page position and the result will be less traffic which leads to  poor ranking in another of  Google’s criteria. This begins a vicious spiral out of the high traffic search zone on the search engines.

Read this article by Rob Garner to see what the experts are looking at.

Just a short note.

After only eight weeks my site is showing on page 4 of Google for the keywords ” Calgary Internet marketing” and “Internet marketing Calgary” .

This is up from page 8 when I started. Proves that a few simple changes when you understand what  you can do to improve your position.

Five weeks have passed since I optimized my website – www.mmwebmarketing.com – and began writing about it in this blog. Within 2 weeks of making changes to some of my content, my meta tags, some page titles and the menu, I began to see the impact. Ironically, as is often the case with Google, my site actually lost position in some of the searches I was using before. The keywords “Calgary Internet Marketing” and “Internet Marketing Calgary” were less effective and I dropped from page 8 to page 12 and beyond.

Today marks the beginning of what I suspect will be a journey to page 1 before I am finished. The reason I say this is that several positive things have happened and I have not made any additional changes in the interim.  Now that I have proven to myself that my efforts did not in fact get me blacklisted, I am happy to say I will proceed with some other search engine optimization techniques in my attempt improve my position.

What happened to suggest things are working?  Well, the site reappeared on page 8 of Google for both of these search terms. In case you missed it in a prior post, the search for “Calgary Internet Consulting” and  “Internet Consulting Calgary” found the site on pages 1 and 3 of Google, while ” Calgary Internet Consultant” and ” Internet Consultant Calgary” have the site showing up on pages 2 and 3. So the results are not too shabby so far.

Another thing that happened was my first request from another website marketer to add their link to my site. They want to provide a reciprocal link on their site (which recently Google began to frown upon) so I will have to consider the options.

By the way I currently own 3 websites and will be happy to place quality links on those sites if anyone fits the category. You can check them out at www.realestate-canada.com and www.calgaryupdate.com . Just send me an e-mail and I’ll have look.

Didit VP Mark Simon says the New York company sees similar conversion rates occurring with its clients. “Not all traffic is converting traffic,” he says. “The trick is to offer the creative and post-click experience that draws in the right searchers and drives them to convert, while also targeting the right market segment to convert on a given term.” Read more in this article here by Lauri Sullivan .

They offer 1000’s of templates in every category, easy to update content systems and lots of images to paste into your site. They even offer built in search engine optimization tools that create the appropriate meta tags for you.

To the uneducated it all seems so simple and accessible. Just select your domain name, select your template, add a few words about who you are, what your business service is, how to contact you and you have a full functioning website.

One of these “build your own website” services I found was really quite impressive. It offered form builders, e-commerce modules, and the ability to select from 3 different formats in case the basic one wasn’t exactly what you had in mind.

So, you might ask…”What’s the problem?” Well there are a couple of concers I found as I dug deeper and here they are.

• The cost of some, although not all of them increased with the number of modules and added services to the point where it became quite very expensive to actually build an effective website.

• All these services have domain registration and web hosting services built in. While this might appear convenient to the untrained eye, there is one aspect of this that really concerns someone like myself who is a proponent of open source software methods and the freedom of choice they offer.

I believe strongly that every website owner should also own the rights to all the components of their web design, including the graphics, the content, the domain name and every aspect of their website development process. You should be able to leave and take it with you.

So many times the restrictions placed on clients who come to us with website development problems originate in the control their website developer, hosting service or templated website service use to keep them paying the subscription fees they place on their customers.

Imagine building a website that you want to upgrade to a more modern format and ending up not being able to do so. You decide to move your domain name to another host, take the graphics and content with you only to find that you can’t transfer the data because it is all plugged into the service provider’s database. You own nothing and the minute you try to escape, your website disappears. If you have succeeded in getting traffic to the site, promoted your URL and gotten a reasonably good page rank on the search engines, it can all be eliminated by simply moving on.

While there are many more technical aspects that can negatively impact using this approach, I have to recommend you register your domain with a hosting service like 1and1 where you own your domain. Then avoid the built in services they offer as well, so that you can move data if something goes sideways.

While they do offer many additional built in products the same rules apply. Instead, Build a WordPress website or a real HTML/CSS website with a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress to run it.

Then you will be in complete control.

Suuuuuurrrrre you do! Read on and I’ll show you how it works!

Why Grandpa’s Restaurant Died!

Grandpa’s restaurant was his pride and joy. The food was yum! The service was basic, but quick. And the prices pretty much ensured a happy little paunch over time. Yet amazingly, the customers dwindled and the restaurant slowly rode away into the sunset.

I was in shock. That was my goodbye to free meals forever. You may not think much of it, but I was twelve, and in that traumatic instant every single free meal of my impending teenage years flashed before my eyes.

So what did Grandpa do wrong? He had a whole cohort of hungry disciples, yet he never did anything with them.. Here are a few marketing strategies he could have taken that would have ensured my rumbling tummy rumbled no more!

Magical, Magical Data!

Every day, millions of people walk in and out of restaurants. Yet most restaurants know not where they come from, or where they go, or when they will be back.

Wake up and smell the coffee you’ve been selling!

When they eat at your place, they become existing customers. And fifteen seconds after their delicious dessert, they become DORMANT! How the heck are you going to get them back, if you don’t know anything about them? The only way to do that is to collect data, much like this website does. When you know your customers a bit better, you can talk to them personally, and cater to their individual needs.

Can I Have Your Name While You Finish Your Beef Vindaloo?

Yes, you figured it out. You can’t do that. And the time between their eating and walking out, is so fleeting that you may as well not try. So what do you do? You count on a basic human factor — greed.

All of us are greedy and getting something for nothing is what we’d stake our steak on.

Imagine this scenario: You walk up to a more than satisfied customer right after the meal. Instead of the usual moronic, “How was your meal?”, why not ask, “Was the food good enough to come back again?” Now that’s a specific question. If they say yes, you give them a little form, informing them that their next meal is a whole 15% off. Would they like to fill in a form with their email address and postal address so that we can send them a voucher?

Aha! In one second, your database is off the mark, and you can pretty much bet that the yummiest of those seven deadly sins will kick in to get that customer back! Better still, you’ve got their permission to start a relationship. Yippee Doo!

How to Get Your Data Simmering

Once you have their information on file, how do you use it? The worst thing you can do is tell your foodies about how good you are. Tell them what they want to hear!

They are food lovers, remember? How can you entice them? Can you reach out and give them something special? Could you throw in a frequent-eater deal? Reach into their greedy stomach and something snaps in their brain, causing them to eat eight times a year, just to make ‘eat points’. With every trip, they get to know the restaurant system better. They order stuff they like. They feel happier. People know them. They find a favorite table and God help anyone who crosses their path.

They have now reached the level of fanaticism.

How to Turn the Fanaticism Into a Religion

The only way to start a religion is to get disciples. Digging into your database, invite your best fanatics for a special thank you meal. Suddenly, you’ve got an advertising campaign for the price of a leg of lamb with mint pesto and baby carrots.

They are the disciples. Their burps spread the word. You sit back and rake in the moolah.

Besides, by networking like-minded people together, you’re increasing their chances to do business with each other. The richer they get, the busier they become, and the more they want a place that knows and caters to their needs. The friends they bring along reflect their own wealth and status, thus sending the whole system in an unending loop of upgraded customers spreading the good news in double quick time.

Getting the Kinks Out of The System

If good news is a jumbo jet, bad news is a Concorde. However, regular customers get comfortable with you and don’t mind complaining. They nit pick with the loving tenderness of mom and make sure you stay in line. You couldn’t pay for this feedback if you tried.

So, try!

If a regular customer complains, make sure she gets rewarded for complaining. It’s like rewarding a puppy for good behaviour and what you really need is a steady stream of complaints to fix your systems constantly.

Grandpa never heard the complaints. The customers simply didn’t show up again. And his business walked out with them never to return.

Grandpa made his share of mistakes but there’s no reason why you can’t learn from them. The same marketing principles apply whether you’re in the food business or selling coffee mugs.

These are the strategic steps:

1) Throw in The Bait: Entice them with something to part with the data. If at first it doesn’t work, keep trying till you find something that does. Then, repeat it with every customer.

2) Use the Data Creatively: Think GREED. How can you make your customers want to keep coming back? You’ve got to appeal to base instincts.

3) Form a Club: Well-organised disciples are better than random fanatics. If one club gets too big, form another,and then another, till you have a whole series of people who swear by you, and for you.

4) Don’t Be Shy: Make them also swear against you. Get feedback. Encourage it. Pay for it. Just do it!

Which brings me back to me. Why did I choose a restaurant as an example when I could have chosen any other product or service? The prime reason is simply because restaurants involve impulse decisions, and patrons are very fickle. Proving it works in this field proves it can work in almost any other.

But there’s a selfish motive, too. I’m hoping some restaurateurs out there will be so pleased with this information, they’ll offer me free meals forever! That way, I can catch up on the teenage years.

Finally!

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Article written by Sean D’Souza.
Wouldn’t you love to stumble upon a secret library of small business ideas. Find simple, yet electrifying ideas,on website strategy, marketing strategies, copywriting, public speaking, article marketing, sales conversion, psychological tactics and branding. Head down to http://www.psychotactics.com today and judge for yourself.

I suspect I may not be making friends after that statement, but I became a Certified Programmer Analyst in 2000 specifically for that reason. I got tired of bringing quality Internet based solutions to business owners or managers only to have the “resident expert” start rattling off in IT jargon about how they could offer a better solution than my company in a language that the manager and I could not understand nor question.

I have been involved in sales and marketing for over 35 years. I always believed it was my job to find people with problems and provide them with solutions to those problems at an affordable price. Ultimately they would get the results they were looking for and I would get paid and possibly a referral or testimonial to boot.  Many salespeople in the SEO industry don’t seem to get that.

I encountered two situations today that inspired me to write this post.

The first one involves an email I received from one of my recently acquired clients who is struggling right now with a poorly designed website. It is not performing well on the search engines.  While he does have some access to update his content, he has no access to the navigation, meta-data or  page titles on his site and that can greatly impact its performance. I am mentoring him on SEO and he is realizing his choice of website developer, web host and domain name provider (he paid an “expert” to do all these things for him) was not the best.

He contacted a professional SEO company to get a second opinion about what I was telling him.  The “expert” in this organization suggested he get another web development company, one that he recommended, to build him another industry based website. After that he suggested my client hire him for $400 to $1000 per month to optimize the site promising to have him on page one of Google in about 4 months.  So why am I upset? Because every SEO company I encounter uses this technique to take a drowning man out of the water, and then throw him right back in after emptying his pockets.

What should an SEO company do in this case?

1. Help the client determine what keywords will be most effective in getting qualified visitors to the website through in depth research.
2. Make certain that the client is getting a website that is designed to be SEO friendly.
3. Suggest a web developer who builds Content  Managed Systems (CMS)  that allow the client to modify the site including adding new pages with effective page titles, meta tags, navigation and content development instead of templates designed for only one industry.
4. Assist the client in researching competitor sites that perform well in the search engines in selected key word searches.
5. Assist the client developing search engine friendly content.

Situation two was similar but it involved an “expert” SEM company whose focus was Pay Per Click ( sponsored) website marketing. I spoke directly with their representative who contacted me via spam. He claimed his company had a special affiliation with Google and Yahoo and that they could guarantee their clients the first 3 positions in the sponsored ads for Google, Yahoo and MSN.

When I asked him the price for this he said it would depend on the keywords I wanted to be searched and that prices would be set by Google, Yahoo and MSN. Hmmm…isn’t that what happens when you register for a Pay Per Click program? Only this company wanted to set a monthly rate …say $1000 to $2000 per month to keep me in the top spot.

Seems to me if I just bid higher than all my competition, I could get into the number one spot, and if nobody clicked on my ads, I could stay there for free. Of course that isn’t the goal but you get my point.

You see, it isn’t about guarantees and set fees. It about trial and error, test and measure, educate yourself and learn the game.

These guys are not treating the people who are baffled by all the internet and IT jargon like good customers who deserve the best service possible. They are treating them like suckers that need to be taken advantage of.