Sometimes the problem isn’t that people aren’t finding your website on the search engines – it’s that the website doesn’t work.

Let’s say that you have a website which sells (or at least tries to sell) dog toys. Unfortunately, your website isn’t generating a lot of sales. You decide to contact some SEO companies to see if they can help you get more visitors, the assumption being that more visitors will equal more sales. However – more visitors don’t always equal more sales. If a website is a poor performer, adding an extra 10,000 visitors a month isn’t going to have a big impact on sales. Improving a website’s performance, however, could make a big difference right away.

Do you need SEO serivces? Click for a larger view.

Here’s how you can figure out if you need SEO or if you should focus on improving your website first:

1. Is your website working? It might seem like a dumb question, but can you conclusively say that your site is generating leads or sales? Note the use of the word “conclusively” – Google Analytics and call tracking can go a long ways towards establishing:

• If your website works
• How well your website works

Without analytics and/or call tracking that shows your site is effective, it’s sometimes very hard to justify any investment in SEO…and guessing is never a good basis for making a business investment.

2. Is your site working better or worse than average? The average conversion rate for a website visitor is 1-2% (for every 100 visitors, 1 or 2 will buy your product and/or contact you about your service). This average is very low – some website owners have conversion rates as high as 25% (phenomenal), while others have very profitable websites that only convert 0.1% of their visitors.

In my experience, conversion rates of 2% or more are a pretty good baseline. If your site is doing better, you’re probably doing things right. If your site is doing worse, chances are good that you have some questions to ask.

NOTE: If you operate a profitable website and your conversion rates are really low, you might want to re-define your idea of a conversion.

3. Have you tested your website? A great way to determine if your website “works” is to engage in some really simple testing:

• Pay-per-click advertising: PPC will help you determine if your website is working – just make sure you have tracking in place. If you’ve paid for 1,000 visitors and you’ve only generated 2 dog toy orders, you know that your site is converting poorly. On the other hand, 100 orders from 1,000 visits is proof you’ve got a winning formula.
• User Testing: Paying professional website evaluators to look at and critique your website is a good way to get a sense of your site’s effectiveness. It’s not hard-core data, but it’s often very insightful (we recommend UserTesting.com). Try and get 3 or more tests at the same time – that will help you find some common problems with your site without relying on the opinion of one person.

4. Which offers a better return – improving your website or generating more visitors? While the answer to this question will be different for every website owner, it’s very important to ask the question. If your site is already getting a healthy number of visitors, it might be more profitable to focus on improving the performance of your website before you worry about SEO.

Of course, there’s no reason that you can’t work on both.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

First, If you’re not sure about what the title tag is, it’s the text you see at the very top of your web browser window when you view a web page.

SEO title tags in two minutes

Two-Minute Guide to Search Engine Optimized Title Tags

1. Open up the Google Adwords keyword tool.

2. Take a look at your page of content. What’s it about? What keywords does your content best address? Put those keywords into the AdWords tool.

For example, we’ll pretend our web page is about running socks. The keywords might be “running socks” and “socks for runners.”

3. Look at the results that the keyword tool returns. What are the most popular variations of the words you entered? Are they applicable to your page of content?

In our example, the popular results (excluding reverse-order duplicates) are:

• running socks – 74,000 searches per month
• running sock – 15,000
• compression running socks – 3,600
• men’s running socks – 3,600
• run socks – 2,900
• women’s running socks – 2,900
• trail running socks – 2,900

4. Cross off some variations. Take a look at your list and remove any keyword variations that aren’t closely relevant to your content.

In our example: If our page of content is about regular-old unisex running socks, it’s not wise to use “compression” or gender-specific variations in our title tag. On the other hand, if we’re selling compression socks for female trail runners, we’ve got lots of ideas. For argument’s sake, we’ll say that our page is about compression socks for female runners, so here are the relevant keywords:

• compression running socks
• women’s running socks
• running socks

5. String your keywords together. You want to put them in order from highest relevance to lowest, and you want to separate them with an innocuous character like a | or a ~. In our example:

<title>Women’s Running Socks ~ Compression Running Socks ~ Running Socks | Website Name</title>

6. Make sure the title tag isn’t too long. You want the final tag to be 66-70 characters long (or less). We might be a little long in our example, so we’re going to remove the 3rd keyword “Running Socks” since it’s redundant anyways.

<title>Women’s Running Socks ~ Compression Running Socks | Website Name</title>

NOTES:

Q. How do I know what keywords to use?

A. If you’re not sure, you can guess, copy someone else, or hire a professional to help you.

Q. What do I do if the content doesn’t really match the keywords I’m trying to optimize for?

A. Write new web content! Here’s a good web content writer if you need some help.

Q. What if I can’t shorten my title tag to less than 70 characters?

You can, you just don’t want to. Take a look at your content again – unless it’s a very long web page, two or three keywords ought to be enough. If you really believe your page is about more than two or three keywords, consider breaking it into more than one page. Search engines like highly-targeted content.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

Note: You’ll need to know HTML to complete this exercise, and be basically familiar with the WordPress theme editor (found under the “Appearance” menu). I would rank this as an “beginner/intermediate” level tweak. You can’t really screw anything up as long as you have a backup of the original search form, so there’s no harm in trying.

P.S. – This won’t work for Wordpress.com users.

Step 1 – Grab the Google Adsense for Search Code

Follow the directions from last week’s post to grab Google’s code (btw, when I say “grab” the code, I mean copy it into a text editor).:

<form id="cse-search-box" action="http://www.google.com/cse">
<div><input name="cx" type="hidden" value="partner-pub-xxxxxx" /> <input name="ie" type="hidden" value="ISO-8859-1" /> <input name="q" size="31" type="text" /> <input name="sa" type="submit" value="Search" /></div>
</form><script src="http://www.google.com/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&amp;lang=en" type="text/javascript"></script>

Let’s break this up line-by line:

<form id="cse-search-box" action="http://www.google.com/cse">

This is one of the most significant pieces of code, because the form id – “cse-search-box” – is referenced by Google’s watermark javascript (the two have to match) and because it tells us the form’s “action” is on Google.com.

<div><input name="cx" type="hidden" value="partner-pub-xxxxxx" /> <input name="ie" type="hidden" value="ISO-8859-1" /> <input name="q" size="31" type="text" /></div>

There’s an opening “div” tag, and then the first input. The first <input> tag contains your AdSense publisher ID – “partner-pub-xxxxxx.” I’ve changed the code out so that no one gets confused, but the XXXXX will represent your specific ID. The second <input> tag is nothing more than a character set declaration (not really important for our purposes). The third <input> tag is the search query box itself. Google defines the length of this form as “31″ characters, and names the box “q”. Finally there’s the closing “div” and “form” tags.

<script src="http://www.google.com/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&amp;lang=en" type="text/javascript"></script>

Last but not least is the javascript watermark script. The script src tag has a dynamic variable portion that we need to pay attention to later. For those who don’t know, that’s the portion of the javascript source URL prefaced by a ‘?’ (question mark) but before the “&”, i.e. “?form=cse-search-box”.

Grab Your Blog Theme’s Search Form Code

Because of all of the themes available on the market, this portion may not match your particular website. I’m going to use the simplified search form found in the atahualpa theme because it’s currently the most popular theme on Wordpress.org.

Under your blog’s appearance menu, you’ll see a link for “Editor.” The editor will open to the active theme’s main CSS stylesheet, and on the right side of the page you’ll see anywhere from 10-20 file names listed. You’re looking for the one that’s called “searchform.php” or “Search Form.” Here’s the searchform code from atahualpa:

<form method="get" class="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">
<table class="searchform" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td class="searchfield">
<input type="text" class="text inputblur" value="<?php the_search_query(); ?>" name="s" />
</td>
<td class="searchbutton">
<input name="submit" value="Search" type="image" src="<?php echo get_bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/magnifier2-gray.gif" style="display: block; border:none; padding: 0 0 0 5px; margin: 0;" />
</td>
</tr></table>
</form>

I’m not going to break-down every line (because there’s some duplication), but I *am* going to point out the key differences below:

1. Change your theme’s search form “action” and “method” to match Google’s code.

The opening “form” tag for atahuelpa reads like:

<form method="get" class="searchform" action="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">

We need to change the action to match the google form code’s action and we need to delete the method="get" portion.

Change the search form's method, action, and id.

The key here is to change the method and action of your theme’s existing search form while preserving the existing CSS style. We don’t want to change your form’s class or id settings.

2. Fix the form id so it matches up with the javascript variable.

If your theme’s search form does not have an “id” setting (atahuelpa’s does not, for example), all you need to do is add id="cse-search-box" inside the opening form tag.

You’ll recall that the javascript tag at the end of Google’s form code references the form id. SO, if your theme’s form already has an “id” tag (and some of them will), you’ll need to change google’s javacscript to match.

3. Add the hidden inputs from Google’s code to your form code.

This is easy – just take the two “hidden” inputs (one with your publisher ID, one that identifies the character set) and just add them to your theme’s form.

4. Name the search box “q” and the submit button “sa”.

In atahuelpa, the search box is already named “s” and the submit button is already named “submit”, but we need to change them. In this particular instance, changing the names of the search box and submit button will not impact the look of the form. However, changing the name in some themes will cause the form to change appearance. The solution is to change the CSS so that it applies to the new input name.

If your theme assigns style to these elements by name, simply search your theme’s CSS file for the name and change the name on both the search form and in the CSS. I find that most of the time this isn’t an issue.

5. Add the javascript after the closing <form> tag.

Easy.

The final code:

<form id="cse-search-box" class="searchform" action="http://www.google.com/cse">
<table class="searchform" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<td class="searchfield">
<input type="text" class="text inputblur" value="<?php the_search_query(); ?>" name="q" />
<input name="cx" type="hidden" value="partner-pub-xxxxxx" />
<input name="ie" type="hidden" value="ISO-8859-1" />
</td>
<td class="searchbutton">
<input name="sa" value="Search" type="image" src="<?php echo get_bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/magnifier2-gray.gif" style="display: block; border:none; padding: 0 0 0 5px; margin: 0;" />
</td>
</tr></table>
</form>

When you’re all done, your theme’s search form will look the same way as before, but it will use Google’s AdSense for Search rather than the limited search engine provided by WordPress. Enjoy!

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

1. It offers my website visitors the best search experience. Most of the alternatives – like the built-in search engine for Wordpress blogs, for example – just aren’t as good at finding the right content.

2. I suspect it could help Google index my website. I have no proof of this, and frankly I’m guessing that there’s no connection between Google’s AdSense Search program and Google’s main search engine…but there could be, so why not.

3. I can track search queries. Google’s AdSense for Search offers a “top queries” report that shows what people search for when they use my site’s search box.

4. I can brand the results. I can either show results on a branded page with my logo, or I can show results on a page of my website. Either way, it makes users more comfortable to know they haven’t really left your site when they use your search engine.

5. It makes me a little moolah. Not much, mind you, but some. Over the last few months, my effective CPM (eCPM) on Adsense for Search has been between $20-$30. Now if I could get the standard content ads to that eCPM, I could retire…

How To Setup Google AdSense for Search

If you don’t already have one, it’s time to create an AdSense account. Next, click on “AdSense Setup” and you’ll see the “Get Ads” page. Find the listing for “AdSense for Search,” and when the new page loads, you’ll see “Wizard | Single Page” at the very top. Click on “Single Page”…and this is what you should see:

Adsense for Search Single Page View, Top

Selected Sites

Under “search type,” I’ve always chosen the “only sites I select” option because I’m using this to power search for my website only. So, after chosing that option, I would enter www.mysite.com in the “selected sites” box.

AdSense for Search Optional Keywords

Optional Keywords

I suppose you don’t have to enter anything into the optional keywords box, but I would recommend it. Google is going to make up their own mind as to the topics and relevant keywords for your site, but adding some keywords here would certainly help Google eliminate any ambiguity. i.e., if your website is about art glass, it might be useful to enter various types of art glass types (plates, vases, paperweights, etc.).

AdSense for Search Custom Channel

Custom Channels

Custom channels are great for tracking revenue on particular portions of a website. For instance, you could use one search engine on the homepage, and another on all of your article pages to see where users are more likely to search. This can also be a sort of backwards analytics tool, as you can see where your users are more likely to resort to searching your site instead of hunting through your menus.

Adsense for Search look and feel options

Look and Feel

I’m a big fan of the standard watermark option, but the downside is that it requires Javascript. For me personally, this is fine. However, for clients I’m reluctant to incorporate elements that require Javascript to function because about 5% of all internet user don’t have Javascript enabled. Keep in mind that the search box will function for users without Javascript enabled, it just won’t show Google’s watermark logo in the box.

AdSense for Search results page

Search Results Style

If you want to keep the user on your website, you’ll need to setup a search page and add some code to that page to make everything work. If you want to be lazy like me, just choose “open results on Google in the same window”, then place your logo on that page. In addition to being easy, I like this option because I think it’s more familiar to users to see search results on a clean, un-cluttered page (kind of like Google.com).

AdSense for Search ad placement and palette

Ad Placement and Palette

I’m a bad marketing expert, because I’ve never ever bothered to test ad placement on Adsense for Search. I’ve just selected “top and right” because that’s what Google uses on Google.com. My thinking is that if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me…but testing would be wise if you have the time.

As for color pallete, if you’re opening the results on your website, then you’ll want to match the colors to your site. However, if you’re opening on a separate page, Google’s standard palette might be OK.

When you’re all done, you can name your creation and get the code. Google will spit out something like this:

<form id="cse-search-box" action="http://www.google.com/cse">
<div><input name="cx" type="hidden" value="partner-pub-xxxxxx" /> <input name="ie" type="hidden" value="ISO-8859-1" /> <input name="q" size="31" type="text" /> <input name="sa" type="submit" value="Search" /></div>
</form><script src="http://www.google.com/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&amp;lang=en" type="text/javascript"></script>

Now all you have to do is integrate that into your website. Next week, I’ll show you how to modify this code to work with the typical search found on a WordPress-powered website.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

I’m not as organized as I could be. My Citibank credit card payment was due a few days ago (February 12th), and I forgot it.

Realizing this, I immediately went to Citibank’s website, logged in, and attempted to make a payment. Unfortunately, Citibank wasn’t going to let me off that easy. Instead, I had to answer a long survey that forced me to choose between a lot of options that weren’t applicable, and frankly, it was more than a little insulting.

I blog about this because it’s a great example of “How To Irritate Your Online Customers” that businesses everywhere can learn from.

Citibank Screw-up Lesson 1: You Can’t Control My Experience

When I logged in to make a payment, none of the normal payment menu options worked. Instead, I was forced to choose between one of two options:

No problems so far. The only question is, why? It seems like all of those options would be available in a normal menu. Since I have no need for “Special Arrangements”, I selected to “make minimum payment/pay current balance.” Here’s what I saw next (and what really, really irritated me):

NONE of those options applied to me. I didn’t lose my job. I didn’t decide to skip this payment. I just freaking forgot. Instead of paying the $40 late fee and moving on with my life, I have to tell CitiBank all about my recent personal experiences.

Of course, I stopped right here. I picked up the phone and spoke with a very nice woman at Citibank who agreed that this system is, in her words “pretty ridiculous.”

The lesson: When you try and force website visitors to do something, often times they simply abandon the process. If your blog requires me to register before I can comment, or if I can’t buy from your online store without registration, guess what? I’m leaving.

Citibank Screw-up Lesson 2: Required Questions Can Block Form Completion

You’ll note from the screen cap above that I’m required to say why my payment is late. I think it’s ridiculous to ask this of a person who’s barely 1 week behind the ball, but so be it. Unfortunately, my answer “I forgot” is not on the list.

The same goes for the questions Citibank asks about “changes in my financial situation” and “my source of funds.” [Seriously? I'm SEVEN DAYS LATE.]

I couldn’t answer half of the questions honestly because my answers weren’t represented. The only way to get through this form was to lie.

Lessons:

1. If you’re making a field on a form required, do your best to make sure all the possible answers are represented. I would have been much more likely to go through the questionnaire above had Citibank given options that I could feel comfortable answering.
2. If you’re making people answer a question but not giving them all the possible answers, expect them to lie.
3. An “other” option seems like it should be required for a complicated survey like this one.

Citibank Screw-up Lesson 3: Customer Service Is Not On Board

As I said, when confronted by a complicated survey that required me to answer a bunch of questions (some of which would have required me to lie), I skipped the survey and called instead. The phone call was nice – I would name my customer service person, but I’m afraid she would get in trouble. She was immediately apologetic when she found out why I was calling, and very, very nice. She told me that a lot of people have complained, and that when one customer read her the online form, she couldn’t believe it.

Lesson: Your customer service team should be in lock-step with your company policies. If they’re not, either the customer service people need training or the policy needs changed.

Citibank Screw-Up Lesson 4: No Way To Complain To The Relevant Party

I asked who I could talk to about this problem, and I was told that my customer service rep’s boss was available. However, I was also told that this person couldn’t really do much besides apologize. I was also given the number for Citibank’s “Electronic Services Team,” (or something like that), but was told they wouldn’t do much to help me either.

That’s right folks – customer service told me that complaining wouldn’t do any good.

Lesson: When your customers feel ignored, they will respond by going online and complaining about your business (just like I’m doing here).

So that’s my diatribe – hopefully some people read this and recognize some mistakes they might be making online…maybe even Citibank will read it.

By the way, for the 6 people the regularly read this blog: You’ll be glad to hear that I paid the account off today. The Lancaster household is getting by well enough – no need to worry.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

1. The MozBar. This is another SEO plugin that has a couple of nice features, especially if you’re an SEOMoz member.

• First, it will tell you a page’s MozRank and MozTrust ratings. MozRank and MozTrust are proprietary search rankings very similar to Google’s PageRank. Without going into a lot of details, SEOMoz’s ranking systems seem likely to become the new standard in the SEO community.
• Next, it has a nice “analyze page” button that will show you some simple SEO details for any page.
• Last, it has a “show nofollows” button that will highlight any nofollow links in ‘pink.’ If you’re not sure what a “nofollow” link is, check this out.

2. ScreenGrab. Need to send someone a screenshot? This is a decent little plugin for capturing an image of an entire web page or a section of a webpage. I use it all the time.

3. FireBug. This little plugin has changed my life. If you ever have to edit HTML and/or CSS, especially on a live website, this add-on is worth paying a pretty penny for. Amazingly, it’s completely free.

4. DownThemAll! This is a nice extension for downloading really big files. It can prioritize files, you can manage the resources this plugin uses (so it can run in the background), and it really speeds up downloads. If you find yourself regularly downloading big files, you’ll love this plugin.

5. SEOBook Rank Checker. This is great for tracking changes in organic rankings – especially if you want to check a lot at once. I have a few excel spreadsheets worth of keywords to check on a regular basis, and this plugin does it very fast.

6. YSlow. If you’re a web designer, of if you’re a website geek just trying to make your site faster, Yslow is an essential addition to Firebug. It’s not completely perfect, but it does a good job of telling you how to increase the performance of your site by paying attention to a lot of commonly ignored server rules. It’s not a tool for beginners, but if you consider yourself a webmaster then you need this plugin.

7. Smush.it (included with YSlow). This is another cool plugin for making your site go faster. Basically, Smush.it downloads all your images and then figures out how to re-compress them so that the files are smaller, but it doesn’t compromise looks. That’s called “lossless compression” in geek-speak.

8. TinEye. This is a neat add-on that I found out about through Ann Smarty. It doesn’t do a great job (it’s admittedly limited), but if you’re looking for a larger version of the same image, or if you’re trying to see if someone is copying your images, you might want it.

9. FireFTP. The plugin that compelled me to make this list. Basically, FireFTP is the best FTP client I’ve ever used. HIGHLY recommended.

Anyone want to add to my list? Hit me below!

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

Setting Up SEO Quake

If you’re an SEO expert, you use this thing 20+ times a day. However, even if you’re NOT an SEO expert, you might still love this plugin. With a quick click, SEO Quake can tell you how popular a website is with the search engines and allow you to make quick comparisons between sites. Keep in mind this plugin isn’t a substitute for real SEO knowledge, but if you’re a web designer or web content writer trying to get a sense for some SEO metrics, it’s a nice plugin to try out.

For beginners, the key is to have the right setup. SEO Quake has a ton of features and many of them are automatically enabled, which means it can get confusing really quickly. So, here’s a suggestion for the “right” beginner’s setup:

1. Once you’ve installed the SEO Quake plugin, go to the “Tools” menu at the top of your browser, select SEO Quake, and then click on the “Plugins” tab (screenshot below):

SEO Quake preferences screenshot - just enable the SEO Toolbar, and only by request.

You’ll see all the various features that SEO Quake includes, but I would only recommend using one of these features if you’re a beginner. Only enable the “seotoolbar” – and then be sure to choose the “by request” option below.

2. Click on the other tabs and disable the seobar plugin, Adspy, and Keywords density. They’re cool, but they might be confusing. You can always turn them on later.

3. Now that you’ve only got one plugin enabled, click on the “Parameters” tab along the top (highlighted in yellow in the image below):

Select "parameters" along the top, then choose the "basic" preset at the bottom.

and choose the “basic” presets (highlighted in yellow at the bottom of the image). Click OK. If your settings are correct, you should see a toolbar below your Firefox bookmarks or navigation bar.

Reading SEO Quake

Now, whenever you want to know the SEO metrics of a particular site, click on the “?” icon on the left-hand side of the SEOtoolbar. Here’s what you should see if you try this on the SporkMarketing.com home page:

Snapshot of the first few items in the SEO Toolbar for SporkMarketing.com

Here’s what all the items mean, from left to right (starting the Googe PR):

G PR: 4 – This means the site has a Google pagerank of 4. Not bad, but not great. The max possible pagerank is 10, the lowest is 0 or “N/A.” In practice, a PR or 6+ is excellent, 3-5 is good, and 0-3 is OK.

G I:133 – This is the number of pages that Google knows about. It’s not an exact number, but it will give you a good sense of the size of a website. 133 pages is pretty small – CNN.com has more than 176,000 pages indexed by Google. If this number is zero, that’s an indicator of a problem with the site.

Y! I:2,400 – The number of pages indexed by Yahoo, a.k.a. the number of pages that Yahoo knows about. The number of pages that Google, Yahoo, and Bing know about is always different. If this number is zero, that’s an indicator of a problem with the site.

Y! L:3,910 – The number of links to this specific page that Yahoo knows about.

Y! LD: 6,289 – The number of links to this domain that Yahoo knows about. The bigger this number is, the better. In fact, this is the second-most-useful number SEOQuake gives you (besides Google Pagerank).

Y! Dir:No – This means that Sporkmarketing.com isn’t in Yahoo’s directory. We’re not in Yahoo’s directory because that thing costs $300 a year, and that’s a lot of money to pay for a directory listing in my opinion.

(Microsoft-icon) I:514 – The number of pages on this site that Bing knows about. If this number is zero, that’s an indicator of a problem with the site.

(Tree-icon) Dir:No – This means that our site isn’t in the DMOZ directory. Typically, sites with a DMOZ directory listing are older and trusted.

Second snapshot of the SEO toolbar readings from SporkMarketing.com

Continued from above…

(lower-case ‘a’ icon) Rank:585384 – This is our Alexa ranking. Alexa is a company that determines how popular websites are. This ranking isn’t very useful for small sites, but it can often tell you how popular one site is compared to another. CNN.com has an Alexa ranking of 60, and Facebook has an Alexa ranking of 2, for instance.

(Delicious icon) I:2 – The number of times that this site is bookmarked in Delicious. Higher numbers are always better (2 is sort of pitiful, in fact – shame on me).

whois – Click on this button and you can find out who the registered owner of a domain is. Very nice for confirming ownership of domains when working with a new client.

source – Click on this button to see the page’s source code (nice for web developers and designers).

Robo: yes – This means our site has a Robots.txt file.

Sitemap: yes – This means our site has a Sitemap.xml file. Both robots.txt and sitemap.xml are recommended best-practices for search engine optimized sites.

(orange and red icon) Traffic: 169 – This is the approximate dollar value of the organic search engine traffic our site receives. If you click on this number, you’ll see a more in-depth report from SEM Rush on how this number is generated. Keep in mind these are rough estimates only – no one should use these numbers to assess the absolute value of a website. However, it’s an interesting metric for comparing sites.

(orange and red icon) Price: 1185 – This is the dollar value of a website as estimated by SEM Rush. Again, no one should use these numbers as an absolute value. They’re mostly for comparison.

There are three more icons after these, but I find them to be mostly useless for non-SEOs.

Five Uses for SEOQuake that aren’t SEO specific:

If you’re not an SEO, you can still use SEO quake to:

1. Evaluate website advertising opportunities. Let’s say that you’re considering buying an ad on a website or purchasing a listing in a link directory – you can use Google’s PR to determine if a site is trusted by Google. If a site doesn’t have a pagerank (or if the rank is only 1 or 2) then it’s either very new or it’s not very trusted…and might not be worth advertising on.

2. Sell a website owner copywriting services. If you’re a website copywriter looking for potential clients, you might be able to convince someone to invest in new content if you can compare their site to their competitors. Something like “you know, competitor1.com and competitor2.com have 1,000 page websites, but you only have 100 pages – do you think that’s why they’re doing more business?” might just help convince someone to buy some professionally written blog posts, etc.

3. See if your competitors are actively working on SEO. If you check your competitors websites periodically and watch for increases in Google pagerank and Yahoo! links-to-domain numbers, you can often see when a competitor is investing in SEO and/or Internet marketing.

4. Tracking the progress of your own site. Check your website’s numbers every month and see how they change. A sudden drop or increase in pagerank, a big increase in Yahoo! links, or significant changes in other metrics usually correspond to changes you make to your site. Basically, it’s a way for you to track what is and isn’t working.

5. Get a sense for what makes a valuable website. If you want to know how to make money online, check out the Traffic and Price numbers for these three websites (it will blow your mind):

• a1-coffee-makers.com
• dailypuppy.com
• golfcoursesguide.org

With no offense intended to the owners of the sites listed above, none of those sites are very fancy, and every one of them could have been created by a regular person (no special programming, no whiz-kids, etc.). Cool, huh?

6. Teach yourself some SEO. Honestly, this is the biggest and best reason to try out SEOQuake. Search engines are going to be a massive part of online marketing for the foreseeable future – it behooves us all to become more acquainted with how search engines work and what metrics are important.

Questions? Anything I forgot?

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Design your website so that it renders properly (i.e. looks the way it’s supposed to) in all common web browsers

The tricky part of this statement is the phrase “all common web browsers.” There are, unfortunately, dozens of web browsers. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and Google’s Chrome are the major PC browsers, compromising about 96% of the total. So, from that basic picture, it seems like it should be a simple matter to create a website that will look “right” on anyone’s computer. If only that were true.

The problem, you see, is that there are different versions of each major browser, and some of the older version are, in a word, kooky.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share

I can bore you with specifics, but believe me when I say that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer version 6 (IE6) makes proper web design about 20% harder than it needs to be. IE6 often refuses to display websites correctly because it’s a very old program – the original release date was August, 2001! The Internet has changed tremendously in that time, so much so that IE6 simply doesn’t work right when compared to more modern browsers.

IE6 has been a pest for us and other firms that offer web design services. We’ve wasted time and money making sure that our client’s websites will look OK on a broswer that was created before many design standards were implemented. We create special work-arounds for IE6 because it’s still fairly popular (about 6.8% of North Americans still use it)…but that’s about to change.

IE6 Is Dangerous

If you’re a web geek like me, you’ve probably read that Google believes they were hacked by the Chinese government. The hacking attempt is newsworthy in and of itself, but the wrinkle here is that IE6 played a primary role in the attack. According to numerous reports, one single Google computer with IE6 installed was able to compromise the entire network in China.

Again, because IE6 is an old piece of software, it’s not capable of working within the confines of today’s Internet. IE6 is simply not very secure. In fact, Microsoft has urged anyone using IE6 to upgrade to IE7 ASAP because of this latest security problem.

Still, security risks aren’t enough to convince people to act. Many IE6 users have older computers, and I believe they’re still using IE6 because, up until now, there’s been no reason to switch over. As long as most websites continue to design for IE6, a lot of people simply won’t upgrade. Therefore, if we want people to stop using IE6, we need the major web companies to stop supporting IE6. That didn’t seem very likely…until a couple of days ago.

Google Stops Supporting IE6

Imagine my elation when I saw an email from Google on Saturday that said the following:

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance…over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0

This is EXCELLENT news for designers. Google has officially decided IE6 is too old to care about, and combined with the security issues I outlined above, this browser’s days are clearly numbered. IE6 is a thorn in everyone’s side, and Google’s decision to toss IE6 users out into the cold is likely to be the first in a wave of similar announcements. If a few major websites stop supporting IE6 users, the use of that tired old browser should grind to a halt. And that means that we won’t have to worry about it anymore.

Therefore, I’m happy to announce here at Spork Marketing we are no longer considering IE6 in any of our web browser rendering tests. As far as we’re concerned, IE6 is dead.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

Unfortunately, I ran into three problems while trying to track all these tweets:

1. Everyone Tweets differently, with each person using a slightly different text description and/or shortened URL. Therfore, searching for the exact title of the blog post (or the shortened URL) doesn’t find all the relevant Tweets. SO, in order to cover all the bases, I used a few very generic keyword search terms (like “google terrorism”) to try and make sure that I found all possible tweets about my post. Obviously, this added time to my work.

2. Twitter’s search engine has some major problems. First of all, it doesn’t always work. We’ve all seen the fail whale. Secondly, it simply doesn’t show old tweets. I took a little break in searching for tweets about my post, and now I’m not sure if I found them all because Twitter doesn’t show tweets more than a week old in their search results.

3. Google doesn’t index every tweet. This is probably an interesting finding all by itself – if you want to know what Google thinks about your Twitter account, try searching for your old tweets. Search:

“sporkmarketing/status” site:twitter.com – (be sure to use the quotes and substitute your own twitter ID for mine)

and you can see if all of your tweets are indexed. I compared the number of Tweets indexed from my Sporkmarketing account to the number from my TundraHQ account, and it’s pretty clear that Google assesses a higher priority to some Twitter accounts over others. As a result, you can’t rely upon Google to track every Tweet from every user.

So, the question is, how do I track every tweet about a specific blog post? The answer I like is called UberVu.

UberVu allows you to bookmark a blog post and then track any references to that post from Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, etc., plus blog post comments. Basically, UberVu is a conversation tracking tool.

I compared the Tweet data that I collected manually to UberVu’s data, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Ubervu had each and every tweet that I manually found and recorded in a spreadsheet. UberVu’s data is much better than the data I found on Tweetmeme and Topsy (two other “conversation tracking” tools) – Topsy missed about half of the relevant tweets on my post.

So, to sum up, if you want to track tweets about a blog post with accuracy, check out Ubervu.

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.

In the interest of brevity, I left some tips and tactics out of the article that business owners and marketers might find useful. Here are some more notes to go along with the article:

Tip #1) Expand your definition of social media.

This tip is first in the article because it is key – forums, blogs, and niche social networks are excellent sources of high-quality links and related web traffic. What follows are some resources for discovering social media alternatives to the big sites like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.

To find blogs and bloggers in and/or related to your topic area:

• Google Blog Search
• Twingly
• Bloglines

To find forums that might be composed of your customer base, check out these tools:

• BoardReader
• BoardTracker
• Big Boards

Finally, niche social networks and social news sites can be a great source of relevant links and traffic. Active networks are hard to find, but here are a few places you can look:

• Pligg Sites
• Ning’s directory
• List from Social Media Answers

Tip #5) Leverage official info to build authority.

This tip is easy for auto dealerships to execute – simply sharing the contents of official manufacturer to dealer memos, technical service bulletins the minute they’re released, etc. will establish authority in popular owner communities.

For any business that isn’t an auto dealer or a franchise of a notable company, this tip is a little tougher to use. Small businesses often struggle to leverage “official” info simply because they don’t have access to such things. In this case, simple yet well-executed case studies that profile the normal day-to-day operations of a business can be useful. Offering advice to others in your same industry (i.e. competitors) can also be a way to build a reputation, but striking a balance is key.

Tip #10) Approach automation with caution.

Many auto dealers use automated systems to post tweets about ongoing sales and promotions, new inventory, etc., so I’m hesitant to completely dismiss the entire category. However, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone spend time working on these automated tools until they’ve managed to achieve success elsewhere. “Automated” and “social” don’t really go together

P.S. If you like the Ward’s article, please do me a favor and tweet about it, bookmark it, submit it to Delicious, etc. Thanks!

Visit SporkMarketing.com for all your Denver Internet Marketing needs.