New Website Designed By RealWebMarketing.net for Big Trees Inc.

Pacific Northwest Tree Nursery Aims to Expand Further with Updated Online Presence

LOS ANGELES: RealWebMarketing.net (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and online marketing company based in Southern California, has just launched a new website design for the northwest tree transplanting and nursery specialists Big Trees Inc. (http://www.bigtreesupply.com), located in Snohomish, WA.

The new website offers a comprehensive overview of the company’s services, an expanded gallery of photos of different tress offered by the company, and the latest news on what the company is doing in the area. Other features include several Flash animations, a Wordpress format, and easy access to their other online sources of information: their Facebook and Twitter pages, their online newsletter and the company’s partners in the Seattle area. RealWebMarketing.net also performed search engine optimization on the new site and is managing pay per click advertising for the company.

Ross Latham, owner of Big Trees Inc, stated, “We’re very pleased with the new site. We wanted an improved online presence for our business, a better looking, more functional web site and for people to find us more easily. So now we can continue our main focus of servicing the Seattle area with beautiful trees and know that we have bigger potential than ever.”

John Eberhard, President of RealWebMarketing.net, stated, “Promoting your business is never more important than in a time of economic downturn like we’re seeing today. The key is promoting more, not cutting back. We kept in mind during the design that Big Trees Inc. really wanted to improve and expand their online presence.”

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for a wide variety of businesses for 22 years. RealWebMarketing.net was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area, and has clients all over the U.S, in a wide variety of fields such as direct mail, health care, consulting, construction, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, dance instruction, tax consulting, plumbing, dentistry, pool remodeling, tree nurseries, landscaping and many others. The services offered by RealWebMarketing.net include web design, blog design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization, link building, article syndication, optimized press releases, RSS feeds, and video production.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Comment Spam on Blogs

by John Eberhard

If you have a blog, one thing you’re almost certain to run into these days is “comment spam.” These are comments that are posted to your blog posts that are generic in nature, meaning they could have posted that same comment on any blog in the world, and the comment is posted only so the person could also post his web site address. It is a rather cheesy form of link building. The person is trying to improve the SEO of their web site by creating a link back to it.

While I am totally in favor of link building as an important activity that raises your search engine rankings and increases traffic, I am not in favor of comment spam.

The whole idea behind blogs and especially the feature of allowing others to comment on a blog post is to start a conversation. And the etiquette of commenting on a blog is supposed to be that you post a comment if you have something of value to add to the conversation.

You can tell comment spammers because their comments tend to be things like “Love your blog,” “This is a fantastic blog, can’t believe I have found it,” or “I really agree with your article here.” While I’ll admit that these types of comments are better than “Your blog really sucks,” they are purposely generic (not related to your post) and so they don’t further the conversation in any way. You will usually not find any part of the comment that specifically mentions you blog post or the content of the blog post. And terrible spelling and grammatical errors are the norm for some reason.

Here’s what Typepad says about comment spam:

“Spam comments are unsolicited and anonymous, and often contain links or offers. TypePad AntiSpam catches most spam; however, if you do receive one, please mark it as spam immediately.”

There are software programs that facilitate this type of comment spam, i.e. help people post comments on lots of blogs.

I supervise several blogs and these types of comments have really increased lately, and I had one client email me this past week asking what to do with these comments.

First of all, I recommend setting up your blog so that you can moderate blog comments, meaning you will get an email when someone leaves a comment, and it will not appear on the blog until you log in to your blog and approve it.

Second, make a decision yourself on how you want to handle comment spam. You don’t necessarily need to delete these comments, as most of them are complimentary at least (or they are complimentary of some blog somewhere anyway).

The sheer proliferation of these types of spam comments on the blogs I am supervising has caused me to decide to delete them all. So I look for whether or not the comment is totally generic, meaning it does not mention anything in my article and the same comment could have been posted on a hundred other blogs (and probably was). With any comment that does relate to my article or does mention specific things about the article, I publish it.

There are plugins for Wordpress that assist with the handling of comment spam, but I have not checked any of them out yet.

A blog is a powerful vehicle for getting your message out and driving traffic. And it is fun to see people responding to your articles and posts, and to see how what you write has an effect on people and helps them. Comment spam, however, is an annoying thing that you just have to put up with and deal with at this point. 

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Landscape Marketing

by John Eberhard

Landscape Websites: Getting Your Web Site Re-Designed

Right now is an excellent time for landscapers to get their web site re-designed, because every landscape designer or contractor knows that the spring is the busiest time of year. So you want to have a good looking web site so that clients can find you online.

One of the most important parts of landscape websites is to have a photo gallery showing your work. Review of site statistics on numerous home improvement sites has shown that the photo galleries are usually the most highly viewed parts of the site.

Google Maps

Google Maps has radically changed the online landscape (no pun intended) for searching for local businesses.

Google Maps is a feature of Google whereby when Google perceives through the nature of your search that you are searching for something local, it will bring up a map on page one. The map will have balloons on it showing the location of different vendors, and there will be listings shown to the left of the map.

So the Google Maps feature is a great way to get your business listing onto the elusive page one of Google. And with the graphic, it pulls your attention right to the map, which is partway down the page.

The tendency is to think that if your business is listed somewhere in Google, that you will automatically be put onto Google Maps. Not so. You have to go through a whole process to get your listing up there, and the link will click through to sort of a mini web page for your business on Google, with your contact info, a map, description, pictures, and customer reviews.

Part of the process of getting your business on Google Maps involves “claiming” your listing, then putting up all the information, and uploading photos. It also helps your placement of your listing (how close it is to the top) if you also have listings on Yahoo and MSN, and on other sites such as Yelp and Hotfrog.

Once you have your listing claimed for Google Maps, then the trick is to get it up to the top. There are a number of steps involved in this, but the most important is to get lots of online reviews for your business. In one of my past articles I cover a system I have created to assist with getting lots of online reviews.

Landscape Advertising: Google AdWords

You should consider using Google AdWords and putting up some campaigns, and run them at least through say July. You can run them all year long of course, but it is good to make hay while the sun shines, as they say, and the sun is shining particularly bright for landscape designers and contractors until July or so.

Google AdWords campaign have the advantage that they can be put up quickly, and since it is almost late in the spring now, it is an advantage that you can start a campaign now and have it up in a few days.

I recommend working with an experienced person who knows how to work with AdWords. I also recommend not getting involved in AdWords unless you can afford a monthly budget of at least $800. Less than that and I don’t think it will generate enough activity to make it worth it for you. But over that and you can generate a good number of leads.

 

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Attack of the Googleheads

by John Eberhard

Last week I discussed a book I am reading called “Inbound Marketing, Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs” by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. In it I discussed how I felt that the authors’ assertion that outbound marketing, or what they and others call “interruption marketing,” which includes things like display advertising, direct mail, cold calling, radio and TV ads, is broken and that the era of outbound marketing is over.

In that article last week I said that that assertion doesn’t work in practice and that you have to have a combination of both inbound marketing (search engine traffic, pay per click, blogs, social media) and outbound marketing in order to be viable.

Now in fairness I do want to say that I think the book has good stuff in it such as how to run your blog and how to put calls to action on your web pages and so on, but there is another glaring falsehood in this book which I think has gained some widespread agreement in the Internet marketing field.

This is a falsehood that is promoted by Google, and in this case the authors have taken up the baton and are promoting this falsehood.

The idea is that in order for you to gain lots of links to your web site and thereby gain good search engine rankings, you should create “remarkable content” and put it up on your site, and then wait for people to notice it and then link to it. Here’s what they say:

“Remarkable content attracts links from other web sites pointing to your web site. In other words, you want your content to prompt other content producers on the Web to ‘remark’ about your products and services and link back to your site.”

“It’s important to recognize that spending lots of time creating content on other people’s web sites with the sole purpose of getting SEO (i.e. link building) doesn’t work very well.”

“You should avoid SEO practices that rely on tricking Google and distorting search results. Here’s out rule of thumb: if a given technique is not improving the experience for a user, and it can be detected by a human doing a review, then it’s probably a bad idea.”

I’ll translate. What they are saying is that you should create really good content and put it up on your web site and/or blog, then wait for others to notice it and link to it. You should not engage in any proactive link building of any kind, such as article marketing or press releases or putting links on your blogs to your main site. This is what Matt Cutts of Google has been promoting for 4-5 years. He stresses that this creates a “natural link pattern.”

(Actually the authors do recommend one type of proactive link building, called reciprocal link building, which Google discounted the value of over two years ago. They spend a whole page on that. Book was published in 2010. Hmm.)

While this idea from Google and that the authors of this book (and quite a few other Internet marketing consultants) have adopted and promoted may sound appealing or make some sort of sense, I will explain why it is COMPLETELY FALSE and does not work in the real world (where we all live I think), and will actually hurt you and your company if you follow it.

I think that the only way this strategy would work is if:

1. You are already a well known company or person, or
2. Your company is in an industry or field or niche that contains less than 10 competitors

ALL of my clients are in competitive markets, some with hundreds or thousands of competing companies. How about you? Do you have less than 10 competitors in the whole country?

If you are in a competitive market, and you follow their advice here regarding link building, putting up remarkable content on your web site and then waiting for people to notice it, I can say with fair certainty that no one will notice it and no one or hardly anyone will link to it. Certainly not enough people to give you a competitive number of links.

I have drawn an analogy to this idea before. It is like telling a pretty girl to dress up really nice and put on makeup, then sit in her living room. Don’t go outside. Don’t use the phone. Guys will start calling you up and asking you out. Maybe they will see you through the living room window or something.

Not only have a lot of Internet marketers adopted this crazy idea, the idea has to some extent been equated with “ethics,” like it is ethical to do this and unethical to do anything else, like proactive link building. Some “experts” don’t even ever question anything Google says, as if to say that Google says it so that makes it right.

A few years ago I saw an article by someone who discussed this issue and said that you have to differentiate what is ethical from what is good for Google. I think that the reason Google has disseminated this idea is that it is good for them. It is easier for them if a few companies make it to the top, and nobody tries to mess with that by adding a lot of links through various techniques themselves. Because if people do things to add links on other web sites to their sites, it sort of upsets the apple cart and Google has to decide whether they should do something to discount that technique.

But is it good for you? Well, I have seen companies put up lots of great content, and literally nothing happened. I suppose we could discuss whether or not the content was “remarkable” enough, but I think you get the point. My point is:

You have to be proactive with link building if you want your site to have a competitive number of links, to rank well for keywords and to get traffic.

And that’s good for YOU.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

by John Eberhard

I am reading a book now called “Inbound Marketing, Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs” by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. The authors are founders of HubSpot, makers of online marketing software.

The book has some really good stuff in it. Good advice about how to run your blog and things like that. I’m about a third of the way through.

But their second acknowledgement in the beginning is to Seth Godin, author of several books including “Permission Marketing.” I have written about him before. Let’s summarize by saying that I consider Godin’s assertion that you have to have permission from someone before you can send a marketing message to him to be nonsense, equivalent to saying “Oh pleeeeeaaaaase Mr. Prospect, would it be OK with you if I communicate?” Since I don’t consider the sending of a marketing message to someone to be offensive or bad or a crime, I don’t think we have to bend over backwards to get permission to do so.

Back to “Inbound Marketing.” The concept of the book is that we now have two types of marketing. One is called “inbound marketing,” and that is when you have someone actually reaching or looking for the type of product or service that you offer. So you put your message out there where he will see it when he starts looking. In the category of “inbound marketing” we find search engine organic (non paid) listings, pay per click advertising, blogs, and social media.

The other is “outbound marketing,” or “interruption marketing,” and this is where a marketer puts his message out there and it “interrupts” the prospect who is currently doing something else. In this category we find such things as display advertising, direct mail, radio and TV advertising, promotional emails, and even banner advertising online.

The authors write “Our conclusion was that interruption-based, outbound marketing techniques were fundamentally broken and in order to successfully break through the noise and connect to people, companies needed to rethink the way they marketed from the bottom up. In other words, they had to ensure their customers could find them using inbound marketing.”

“… The outbound marketing era is over. The next 50 years will be the era of inbound marketing.”

They go on to say that ten years ago, you could use all these various outbound marketing techniques and they worked great. But now they’re all bombing.

I agree with this assertion only up to a point. First of all, I agree that the Internet has changed the way people interact with companies. The Internet basically brought about this type of marketing which the authors call “inbound marketing.” If you can put your message in front of someone who is actively looking for your product or service right then, that’s great.

So I think inbound marketing is important and that nearly all companies should have an inbound marketing component in their marketing approach.

The problem with saying that the outbound marketing era is over, is that I don’t think that it works in actual practice. All the clients that I have use a combination of inbound marketing and outbound marketing. But if they tried to rely only on inbound marketing, I don’t think they would get enough business to be viable.

Businesses, in order to be viable today, particularly in the current economic scene, have to do everything they can to generate new leads and sales. I particularly think that with new businesses or small businesses, that you have to incorporate more “interruption” type media in order to establish yourself and survive.

Is it true that most outbound marketing methods don’t work today the way they used to? Yes, I would say so. One of the biggest challenges in marketing today is to find the type of promotional media (ads, magazines, Google AdWords, email, radio, TV, etc.) that will be productive and cost effective for a given type of business. My experience over the last five years has been that sometimes we try new things and the results are mixed.

So it is a major challenge in marketing, not only to find the right message that will motivate people, but also to find the right medium in which to communicate that message.

I believe that the best way is to utilize a combination of inbound and outbound marketing methods. Is the outbound marketing era over? No, I think that is a premature statement. Is it on the way out? Maybe. Time will tell. But for right now, I believe it is vital to utilize both.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Statistics for Measuring Link Building and SEO

by John Eberhard

When one is engaged on a campaign to do search engine optimization and build up links to a web site, how do you tell if you’re doing a good job?

The purpose of SEO and a link building campaign, first of all, is to create thousands of links to a web site from other web sites, so that the ranking of that site will improve on Google and other search engines. Google has stated that its main criteria for deciding how high to rank your site is the number of links to your site from other sites.

And we want the rankings to improve ultimately in order to increase the amount of traffic to a web site coming from search engines. So unfortunately it’s a little indirect. We build links, so we can improve search engine rankings, so we can get more traffic. And we of course want more traffic so we can get more leads or sales from the web site.

So the first thing we use to measure whether we are doing a good job is the number of links to your web site. With my major link building clients I measure this monthly. The way to do this is to go to Google and enter a string like this:

“realwebmarketing.net” -site:realwebmarketing.net

That’s your web address, in quotes, a space, a dash, a colon, and the web address again, not in quotes. Every time I talk about how to do this I get complaints that it doesn’t work. But if you do it exactly the way I explain above it will work. Make sure the dash doesn’t get turned into an em dash.

I frequently get asked “How many links do I need?” That depends on what industry you are in and how many links your competitors have. In some industries you might do really well to have 3,000 links, while in others you might need 20,000 or 30,000 or more to compete effectively.

Google makes constant changes in how they count links, so it is not unusual for the number of links to drop off dramatically occasionally. The correct action is to continue the link building campaign and the number of links will shortly come back up to where it was and continue higher.

The next step in determining the success of a link building campaign is to take your list of keywords that you are targeting, i.e. that you want to be ranking well for, and checking how well you rank for them on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I run a report on this monthly for clients, usually checking 100 or more keywords.
And no, I don’t sit there checking each keyword manually. I use software called Market Samurai for this. The final report looks like this:

Keyword – Monthly Searches	Google Mar 11	Yahoo Mar  11	Bing Mar  11
Keyword 1	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 2	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 3	5	7	62
Keyword 4	1	1	1
Keyword 5	1	1	1
Keyword 6	6	23	24
Keyword 7	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 8	16	50	50
Keyword 9	1	8	8

Then I count up the total number of #1 positions, top 10 positions, top 20, top 100 and top 500 positions. I track these month to month. Some people wonder why I bother to check the top 100 and top 500 positions, as anything lower than say position 20 is not going to result in additional traffic. That’s true, but by tracking it this way I can see the results of the campaign, and if the number in each category is improving each month I know the campaign is going well. If you only tracked the top 20, there would be all this improvement occurring that you’d never see until those keywords arrived in the top 20 down the line.

Finally, we make sure when we start with a client that he has Google Analytics on his site and we then track the number of visitors and page views on his site month to month. And we want to see that traffic steadily increasing over time.

That’s what we look for to tell us how well the SEO and link building is working.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous