Bing Local Center Is Broken

I went to Bing today to fill out my local business listing info (which I recommend everyone to do). Unfortunately, I can’t fill out my listing because their CAPTCHA is broken. I have a feeling it’s been broken for quite some time.

Before I get too deep into this, can anyone verify this for me? I checked on both IE and Firefox and I can’t see the CAPTCHA. I also checked it out on another computer and I still can’t see it.

If this has been going on since the Bing Local Listing inception, this is quite an oversight. To Bing: Would you like to hire us to double-check your site out for you? We would be glad to be of service.

Anyway, here is a screenshot of where I get stuck:

Engineers at Bing: Please fix this so we can add our businesses to your database. Thanks!

UPDATE:

Our friend Carlos went to check out the Bing Local Business Listing Center on his Mac from his cushy office at Napster.

Shortly after we released our post, he found that the Business Listing Center was down:

He went back a little later and got this wonderful message, saying that the Bing Business Listing Center doesn’t support Mac users. OMG. Great customer service eh?

Please Die

I’ve been doing a lot of web design lately and Internet Explorer has been giving me more trouble like never before. I mean, I’ve been doing web design since 1999 and I’ve never liked that browser. But lately, IE will just not behave. And it never has, but I’m finding myself spending more time than ever trying to figure out why it’s making weird gaps and doing all kinds of strange things…

I was walking to get coffee this morning and this t-shirt idea hit me like a ton of bricks. Please D-IE. Please DIE IE. Please DIE INTERNET EXPLORER! Yeah seriously - who needs you? This stupid browser has been giving web designers hell for over ten years now! Ever look at source code that says “IF IE use this style sheet”? I mean, c’mon, why does IE have to make it extra hard for us? Can’t we all abide by one set of standards!

The only reason why we have to fix these IE “bugs” is because all our clients who are not coders, web geeks, or internet business professionals use IE. They use it because it came installed on their computer. They don’t even know what FireFox is. They don’t know Google has a browser. I always find myself muttering: “Why are you using this!?”

Remember when IE was a security hole for PCs? That should of been the last straw. Thanks. Thanks for giving us a browser that is tied to your crappy operating system that causes a security hole for the entire machine!

I think the only time I used IE exclusively was during that weird gap when Netscape had died, and Mozilla wasn’t fully developed yet. I think it was around 2002. That was the period where there was only one choice for an internet browser. I used IE for about a year back then. But as soon as Mozilla got stable I was on it like flies on you know what. Thank God!

What about that stupid “Active-X” warning that use to always pop up every time you went to a website? What the hell was that for? It’s like you have to click all these extra buttons to turn sh*t off and on just to browse the internet.  Their slogan should of been “Just like learning how to surf in the ocean, surfing with IE is going to be reeeeeally difficult.”

But it’s still around. No one chooses to use it. It’s just there on every new fricken computer that comes out. Sitting there in that bottom menu bar, waiting to cause more pain…

Anyway, I need to get back to check a website out in IE 6, IE 7 and IE 8. Great…..

Oh yeah, back to the T-Shirt. Someone please make it. I’ll buy it off you. I’ll be your first customer

Is Your Business Card Working For You?

A couple months ago I started to run out of business cards. The last time I designed my business cards, I rushed through the process and they didn’t provide the greatest return. This time I wanted to really think about what the best way to market what I do would be:

The Heading

It’s a call to action, but it makes your brain stumble. You have to stop and think about it for a second. That means I got ‘em :). And I figure, that’s what you want. It also provides a reason to talk about the card, and it’s a reflection of how O.C. Search does marketing.

Why I Chose Black With White Text

I like the high contrast.  It makes the message bold, and for me it’s easy to read. I do notice people reading it as soon as I give it to them, and then they give a little chuckle afterwards. So I know it’s working and people remember it.

The Personal Introduction

It’s like the fact that the card is speaking to my prospects now. Instead of it being some boring piece of cardstock with your typical information on it. The card has a personality, and like Jules from Pulp Fiction says;  “Personality goes a long way” (that’s from the scene when Samuel L. Jackson is talking about why he doesn’t eat pork).

Only Two Forms Of Contact

I don’t see the need to have my address, suite number, and fax crowding my card and adding noise. If you need to get a hold of me, you are either going to call or email me. Those are the two most important pieces of information I need to distribute to the people I network with.

The Notes Section On The Back Of The Card

Unfortunately, I would rather have this on the cards I get from people. But it provides a space for them to write down what we talked about. I purposely instructed the print shop to keep the back side not glossy, so that people can write on it. People get hundreds, if not thousands of business cards. It’s helpful for them to remember what was unique about meeting you.

Here is a weird side story to process of the card creation.

I originally had my Google Voice number on the business card artwork. It happens to be a 714 area code which ties in the fact that I work with “Orange County” Search Consulting. However, when I called my Google Voice number to check on my greeting, it still had my test greeting. So I tried to update the greeting to “Hi, you have reach Sean and OCSearchConsulting.com, please leave your name, message and email address”. But for some reason that recording just wouldn’t stick. Google Voice kept reverting back to the original “test” recording which just wasn’t suitable for business. I spent about 2 hours trying to get that old recording off, and there was no such luck. Thanks to Google Voice, I had to call the print shop in the middle of the printing of my cards to have them change the artwork to reflect my old 310 number.  I guess you really do get what you pay for (Google Voice is free)….

I would like to thank DesignPros-Inc.com for printing the cards, the great deal and being there during the phone number change emergency!

Do Old Unattended Sites Break Down Google?

We have noticed in recent years that there is a bit of a flaw with Google search results (and maybe most search engines for that matter).  It has to do with the fact the internet is starting to age. There are quite a bit of websites out on the web, that are rotting, wasting energy and inhibiting better search results.

Quick Introduction To Link Building

One of the biggest drivers that positions a webpage at the top of the Google search results is how many quality and relevant links point to it.  One of the jobs of a SEO specialist is to find relevant websites and try to get them to link to your website. This task requires the SEO specialist to dig through thousands of webpages across the web. It becomes a very eye opening experience as to why certain highly ranked websites are in the first position on the search engines.

The Flaw We See As We Link Build

The one thing we keep seeing is that in certain spaces, there are thousands of old websites that are providing backlinks to top ranking webpages. In a lot of cases, these old websites are no longer being administered or updated.  Effectively, there are thousands of old, outdated websites on the internet propping up top search engine results.  As we contact these old websites, many times the emails will bounce, or it’s obvious the site hasn’t been updated in years.

Do “old votes” really point to the best, most current content on the internet? Probably not. I’m shocked at how many times I use Google to look for important information and find that the first result is ancient and no longer relevant!

Google in particular prides itself on providing the most relevant and quality results for it users. We agree that is the best model for the search engines.  Unfortunately there are plenty of newer sites with better content but don’t have thousands of backlinks from the “Good Old Days”. This makes it tough battle for them to climb the ranks.

What We Think Happened

When the internet was relatively new, a bunch of webmasters got excited and went around linking to other related websites. Over time, the webmasters of these old websites stopped being webmasters (they changed jobs, died, forgot about the site etc.). However, the old sites are still up and pointing backlinks to other sites.  This is our guess as to why these sites are still up and pointing backlinks:

1. The owners of the site have it on reoccurring billing on a hosting/domain name package, but have totally forgotten about the site.
2. The owners of the site don’t want to let the site go, continue to keep it running, and refuse to update.
3. The owners of the site do update the site, but don’t update their external links.
4. The owners of the site have no one to administer their site, but they still find value of it being online. (This happens a lot when your “friend’s brother” builds a website.)
5. Someone bought an expired domain and kept it pointed to the original server and the content is still live.
6. Who knows!

Conclusion

All these old, stagnant sites are still “casting votes” to certain websites that may not be as relevant or helpful anymore. These sites with votes from the “graveyard” are propping up some of the top search engine results. It’s kind of like if every time we had a Presidential election, we let the dead vote based on their favorite party when they were alive

Say No To Dot Zero

Some of this is obvious, some isn’t. Particularly the “.0″ rule (dot zer0). This post discusses a few webmaster rules that your web team should be aware of.

It’s probably pretty obvious that you should not end any URL with .exe, .tgz or .tar (or probably anything that resembles a file extension). The main reason for this is to keep search engine users safe from viruses or trouble that lurks inside an executable file. It was definitely a wise decision upon the part of the major search engines to keep such URLs our of their index.

If for some reason your website needs to link to an application or compressed file, do not link directly to it from an unrelated page. Instead make a webpage that directly talks about the application or compressed file package. Then link to the file from the new descriptive webpage and add a nofollow attribute to the link. This technique is better because you can create a more search friendly landing page with a complete title tag, h1 heading and content related to the application or compressed file package. Finally, the nofollow tells the search engines not to travel to the link destination, which can prevent them from thinking you are hosting a malicious website.

But, what’s the deal with .0? A couple years ago, some folks realized that their search engine friendly URLs ending with “web-2.0″ were not showing up in the Google index. News broke out in the SEO world about this strange phenomenon and Google decided to allow some important URLs ending in .0 back in their index. But for whatever reason, Google doesn’t like .0.

So to keep it simple, don’t have unnecessarily weird URLs. Try to stick to a simple convention like: http://www.yourdomain.com/search-friendly-url

This is one of those strange SEO practices that has no rhyme or reason, it’s just a strange occurrence that I guess you (or your webmaster) should keep in the back of your head, post-it-note or white board.

Business.com Is A Good Link :)

Business.com is one of the few, “search engine respected” paid directories on the internet. Part of the reason is because it’s editorially controlled and they don’t list websites that are related to tobacco, adult or Rx subject matter. Notice that you don’t want your website links to be associated on the same site as these bad boys.

To get listed in the Business.com directory, simply do the following:

1. Go to http://www.business.com/info/advertise

2. Click on “List Your Company”.

3. Create your ad.

4. Use the promo code “sl50″, to save $50 a year off the inclusion price. (It’s normally $299/year).

Not only is the link from Business.com valuable (in terms of SEO benefit), you will also receive direct traffic from your listing. For certain businesses this ad buy is a no brainer, if you get one customer from this listing, it’s already worth it.

How Much Is SEO Worth?

Here is the general formula we use to calculate SEO worth for a client:

The calculation relies on the marketing principle that it takes 17 marketing touches (impressions) to convert someone into a paying customer. A touch is any time a prospect sees your brand name, an ad, a website, or gets a referral about your business.

We are going to assume 1 newly acquired website visitor = 1 marketing touch

We are also going to assume that 1 customer will generally do business with you for about a year. This can be modified to your liking, but considering people move, try a competitor, natural attrition etc. - we figure this may be a good rule of thumb for this calculation.

The next part of the equation requires the client to tell you what the average annual revenue contribution 1 customer brings to the business.

The equation becomes:

1 Website Visit = (Average Annual Revenue Contribution of a Customer) / 17

Here is an example. I eat at this BBQ joint next to my office throughout the year. I calculated that my average annual contribution to this store front was around $99. (Basically I spend $99/year eating there). Divide that number by 17 and the value of one website visitor is worth $5.86.

Now I know what you are saying. “Does the average customer spend $99/year there?”. In my case I would venture to say that I do eat there more frequently than the average customer. However, I always eat from their value menu, which keeps the cost down considerably. I’m going to assume that my annual average ticket does not vary much from the other customers. Again, the client should supply this value for you to make the analysis more accurate.

So, if we increase their website traffic by 1000 more visitors a month, we have created $5,086 worth of future business opportunity for them. Pretty handy eh?

Robots Read Everything, Your Visitors Don't

The point here is that most internet users do not read every word on a webpage. They scan the page and look for words and calls to action. Most importantly, all your attempts to heavily market to them will generally fail and they will ignore those marketing messages. Sometimes it can even drive them away.

Generally, your visitors are on your website because they are looking for something, or they are trying to solve a problem. Your goal should not necessarily be to overload them with tons of textual information, but to help solve their problems or help them quickly find what they are looking for.

Now the opposite holds true for the non-human visitors. Who are these non-human visitors? The Search Engines! All they want is text. And tons of it! They love it so much, that the more you provide them with unique text, they end up rewarding you with more visitors.

So where do you draw the line?

It depends on where your website is at in terms of traffic. If you are suffering from not enough traffic, then increase your on page text. Try to make your on page literature as valuable to readers as possible. Don’t just fill up the page with repeated keywords and meaningless text.

WARNING: In some cases you don’t want to provide all your answers in your website copy. Sometimes you want your visitors to have questions. In these cases, generally you want a sales person to take over and speak to them about solving their problems. In this case have a call to action like: Call Now To Find Out More. Or have a chat option available.

Now if you already have enough traffic, then you are golden. The next step is to monetize the traffic. This is the situation where you may reduce the amount of text on your page, and optimize your pages to convert more visitors into actual customer or qualified leads.

A lot of people think that there are some golden internet rules to converting visitors into more business. Some of these myths are bigger buttons, stronger calls to actions, listing bulleted benefits etc. The most important notion to take away from this post is: These myths may work in some cases, but not all. The only way to increase conversions is to test different elements on your page.

Typical On Page Elements To Test:

And of course the list goes on and on…

Conversion testing is very analytical and it takes a lot of patience. But the rewards are phenomenal. If you think your website can greatly improve from conversion optimization, contact us and we’ll make it happen.

SEO Should Be Done With Care

This mindset is usually prominent in more sales driven people. Their interest in SEO is purely from a profit stand point. They know if they rank high on a search engine results page, that will translate into some sort of dollar return. Naturally, these people are the Google Spam Team’s worst enemies.

Let me clarify SEO right now: Search Engine Optimization is not about manipulating search engine rankings. What it is, is the profession of ensuring that a website is search engine friendly. This means that all the content on the website is easily indexed by the search engines and that the website architecture is crafted in a logical format that search engines appreciate.

When people get it in their head that they are going to “trick” the search engines, that’s when websites get banned or penalized. Remember, the people who work at the search engines are probably a lot smarter than you and it will be tough to slip one past them.

Finally, this is the most important part: Think from a search engine’s perspective. They also run a business. And their job is to make sure they provide their users with the best experience possible. Therefore if your site doesn’t deserve to be at the top of the first page of the search engine results, then the search engines will probably not send their users to your site.  And that is exactly what you should think when you design and build content for a website: “Am I providing the best experience I can with regards to the subject matter my site is based on?”.

2. Keyword Stuffing

This is a common newbie mistake. They think their a simple relationship between what the search engine returns when a keyword is queried. That relationship is:  the more you have a specific keyword on your site, the more likely your website will be one of the top ranking selections in the search engine results pages.

Only if it was that easy, right? Well actually, no. Think about it. If the first site a search engine returned was just littered with the same words over and over again, wouldn’t that be a poor result?

Keyword stuffing includes repeating a keyword in any on-page content, in titles, in anchor text (hyperlinks), or on the source code. There is simply no need to repeat keywords ever! Just don’t do it. It’s actually really easy. All you have to do is write your content naturally. Just make sure the keyword you are aiming for is once in the title, once in the heading and at least once on the on-page content. Finally don’t make more than one page based on the same keyword.

3. Link Spamming

This is where the intermediate SEO person makes mistakes. This includes a lot of so called “SEO companies”. They learn that having many links pointing back to your website increases a website’s search engine rankings. This is partially true. However, it’s the quality of links, not necessarily the quantity of links that make a site climb the rankings. And even more important than that is the relevance of those links.

Anyone out there amassing thousands of links from all over the internet using the same keyword anchor text is doing their website a disservice. Any company doing this is liable for getting their client’s website removed from the search engines.

4. Buying Links

This is a touchy one. Once people realize how hard it is to get backlinks to their website, buying links becomes a tempting situation. But in the eyes of the search engines, this is one thing you can do to be banished to the depths of search engine hell. They absolutely hate it when you buy links. Now you may be clever and get away with it, but if you get caught, boy oh boy you are up that famous creek!

And if you don’t believe me read this article on Google’s thoughts on paid links.

5. Keyword Cannibalization

This one is really tricky. The idea is you only want one webpage on your site per topic or keyword. If you have two pages that are basically about the same topic or keyword, then the search engines have a hard time deciding which one to choose. A lot of keyword cannibalization issues can be solved with a good site architecture.

For instance if you write about the same topic all the time, you would want one main page that is optimized for the keyword or topic at hand and then multiple sub pages that support the main topic page. Think of it as building a mini pyramid for that keyword.

6. Hidden Text

This is an interesting mistake because you may think, “I would never do that, because that’s just stupid”. But sometimes your website design is creating hidden text without you knowing it. I think this is less of a problem these days because designers use CSS to do all sorts of image replacements. However, I tell our clients that if you can avoid it, you probably should. There really is no need to hide text because there are plenty of design solutions available.

Why Should You Make Your URLs SEO Friendly?

A lot of people think that having keywords in your URLs helps with search engine rankings. I would say this true for your domain name. But for any part of your URLs after the domain name, the keywords don’t carry much weight (meaning if the search engines were only to rank your site by your URLs alone, keywords after the domain name wouldn’t count for much). However, there are few reasons why you want to keep your URLs “SEO Friendly”…

First off, what are SEO friendly URLs?  Well here is a simple example:

http://www.yourdomain/seo-friendly-urls

The idea is that your URLs don’t have all sorts of weird characters, number and long strings of meaningless junk in them.

Here is an example of an unfriendly URL:

http://www.yourdomain/?&q345adfasdf-asdf–asdfa234432asdkf

Here are 3 reasons I can think of as to why you want SEO friendly URLs:

1. If People Decide To Link To A Certain Page On Your Site

Sometimes when people link to you, they will use the URL as the anchor text in the link. And for that reason alone, one should institute SEO friendly URLs. Chances are if you place keywords in your SEO friendly URL:

http://www.yourdomain.com/here-are-my-keywords

Then at least your keywords will get picked up in the anchor text.  And having keywords in the anchor text of links is one of the biggest drivers in SEO.

2. Aesthetics

I think there is certain trust issue with long, ugly looking URLs. I personally get a weird, warning (like I’m about to get a virus feeling) when I see URLs that look like http://www.yourdomain.com?&dasfasdjk9o8u34oI*Uojoasdfasdfalskdhfulaishdfkla. I think that can be safely assumed for a certain percentage of internet users as well. So why scare them off? Focus on nicely trimmed, easy to read URLs.

3. Copy And Pasting

Finally, we have all seen what happens to URLs that are too long. Someone copy and pastes the URL and tries to send it to you in an email. And for whatever reason, the URL gets broken apart during the transmission or formatting process, and it’s basically a dead link. Why limit your exposure with URLs that can “break down” and are hard to virally spread?

So that’s all I got for SEO friendly URLs. Anyone else having anything to add to this?