When I first start on a site, especially if it’s already built, there are a few things that I check for,  www. vs non www, i.e. checking that only one version of their site resolves, or make the appropriate entires into their .htaccess file and creating 301 permanent redirects, and insuring that they have either 100% uptime or 99.9% uptime.   A few of the clients I’ve picked up over the past year have had hosted applications for  their professions (i.e. online scheduling systems, or industry related services as a hosted application) and have found a few with DISMAL uptimes….  97% uptime, 98% uptime, etc.   A few percentage points as far as uptime can have huge consequenses as far as the ability to rank a site.  It a search engine spider goes to your site repeatedly and the pages either take a long time to load, or even worse, your site is down, you need to do something immediately about it, or assume you aren’t going to rank where you want to rank.

There are a few tools out there and uptime monitors you can use to over time, find out your actual availablity.  One free one is www.uptimedog.com .  When checking uptime, the more frequently they check, the better off you are.  The paid service I’m using now checks every 5 seconds.  I’ll find out what the name is and update the post with it, but I’ve found that a few of the sites I was working on wouldn’t rank regardless of what I was doing because of their downtime…  The paid service I use is called Service Uptime.  it’s very reasonable, will send e-mail notifications, and it’s been a HUGE help, both from my own standpoint, and being able to provide documentation to my clients from a neutral third party.

You need to make sure you have a hosting company who either has 100% (or 99.999% ) uptime or find one who does.  It’s not asking that much these days for those percentages of uptime.  Check to see if your hosting company has SLA’s (service level agreements) in regards to uptime, or see if they monitor or guarantee in any way.  If not, find someone who does.  The hosting company I use has awesome uptime, and I frequently have clients move over to them now.  The hosting I use and recommend can be found here.  I’ve used it for the past years and host literally hundreds of sites on it, and it’s rock solid, good uptime, and very reasonable.

“we would like to get your website on first page of google. all of our processes use the most ethical white hat search engine optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized. please reply and i would be happy to send you a proposal.”

Someone had posted some comment spam containing the above string.  The post had since been deleted, but it was on my page for a while and got indexed.  When I searched Google for the above string, it returned 71,000 results (at least it did about 30 min ago), and most of them were places that I could easily put my link.  They were forums, blogs, etc.  Most of the heavy lifting of finding a place to post comments to gain incoming links had been done.  All of the sites were laid out right there for the picking.  I’m going to check into them a bit further later on, but I’m sure I’ll get some nice incoming links.

There are all sorts of good things you can find by checking your referral logs, search terms people land at your site with, etc.  Link Building is just one of the things you can work this angle on.  What other places can you find information you can use to build your backlinks?

I’m working with a developer right now on a tool that will help with this.  it’s pretty simple really, but you just put in a search string, and then it will return the results, check the PR of the homepage of the sites listed, and then link the links in order of PR of homepage.  You can then go through the list, click on a url, and either post a response to a blog, create a social media account and then publish links, etc.  It should be available very soon, check back..  It will literally provide tens of thousands of high pr sites where you can post your links.  I’m anxious for it.

When going down this line of thought on building backlinks, what would be the easiest ways to find the most amount of available links?  What platforms are routinely used to create the sites that you can post on, what terms are used in comment spam on your own blogs that you could maybe search for to find other places to post links?

You can pass this information along to someone and outsource the creation of backlinks, or if you have time, do it yourself.  Get ya some links…..

If you have a question you’d like answered post it here and we’ll get it answered for you…  What’s been on your mind?  What is holding you back?  Also, if you have a question that may need a personalized answer, or if you have a question which we may need to clairify, please use the e-mail address that is easiest to contact you with, so that we may give you the fastest answer.

We also have a similar post about internet marketing.  If you have an internet marketing question post it here:  http://coolbubba.com/blog/what-is-your-number-one-question-about-internet-marketing/150/

Post your question here and we’ll get an answer for you.  Also, if you have a question that may need a personalized answer, or if you have a question which we may need to clairify, please use the e-mail address that is easiest to contact you with, so that we may give you the fastest answer.

If you have search engine marketing question, we also have a blog post for that.  Go here: http://coolbubba.com/blog/what-is-your-number-one-question-about-search-engine-optimization/151/  with search engine optimization questions, and we’ll get those answered for you as well.

In other words, if your business is named My Business, you’ll want to decide if you want to be listed as “My Business” “My Business, Inc.” “My Business, LLC” or “My Business L.L.C. “.  You’ll want your information formatted identically both on your web site and in the local business listings, in the yellow pages, and everywhere that you are listed or identified.

There are MANY factors to consider when trying to rank in and attack the local search market.  One of the first steps is to check to see if you are already listed in Google Business Center, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local.  If you have a current yellow pages listing, or your business is listed on InfoUSA and/or Acxiom, you will most likely get picked up by the three major search engines’ local listings.

If you ARE currently listed, you will want to claim your listing immediately.  You will also want to make sure that your company information is listed as you want it to be, and correct it so that it is in line with how you want to be listed.

The meeting ran from about 6pm to about 9pm, and then moved into the bar area of the hotel, where the discussions there were better than the actual meeting, which is frequently the case.  Not taking away from the meeting at all, which was good.  I stayed and enjoyed the conversation in the bar area until well after 11pm. 

On the way home, I ran into Dennis Hart in the parking lot of a gas station, and had another good conversation.

The content that was presented was basic, which was the premise for the presentations, which it hit right on the head.  The material was solid and definately worthwhile to attend.  Next month’s meeting, Feb 17th at the same location is going to be about back to basics PPC, which I can’t wait to hear, and the March one is about local search.

DFWSEM is most certainly worthwhile to both those involved in the SEO/SEM/etc industries, as well as people looking for information for thier own sites or companies.

I will be signing up as a member in Feb for sure, at least as an individual, and I”m considering getting a company membership for Coolbubba.  I hope to see you or meet you at one of the upcomping meetings.

One inportant factor to take into consideration is comercial intent.  Microsoft has developed a tool to determine commercial intent for a keyword/keyphrase.  You can also use this tool Market Samurai: http://bit.ly/vSRj4  to determine the commercial intent of keywords as well as MUCH more information.  I use this tool with every client and project I work on.  I consider it mandatory pretty much.   Check out more abouit commercial intent at Microsoft’s site:  http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/   Basically it tells you the percentage chance that someone typing in that keyword or keyphrase is going to buy.  You can use Market Samurai to determine this for large groups of keywords at a time.

Besides the “commercial intent” of a particular keyword pharse, you have the PPC values for it, or pay per click values.  How much others are currently paying to rank for a specific term.  You can also get these values in the  Market Samurai keyword module here, and you can get them also at the Google Adwords keyword tool.  With the google adwords tool, select average PPC values from the drop down menu on the right.

I’m going to do a more complete post about how I work with clients to determine the value of an SEO campain with them soon.  Sign up for my e-mail list to the right to be notified when it comes out and good luck.