NetSpeak

How do we pick a company?

Who do you turn your web site over to?

Who do you trust?

When and how will I see results?

How come it takes so friggin long to get ranked? (allot of this depends on what time you spend feeding them information)

What are the tools, other things I can use or look for that my web developer uses? (lots but you really can do with only a handful)

• Yahoo registration
• Trust Mark
• Google Adwords
• Automatic Site Map
• Dreamweaver (all dreamweaver tools)
• Email news tool
• SEO-Friendly Ecommerce tool

Should I pay to consult in the design of a web site? (depends, you will find out soon if you wish not to work with them)

Is Search Engine Submissions for $60 bucks a month worth it? (no never)

Let’s face it, Google is the standard that most SEO experts work at targeting and the rest tend to follow. Even with that known, it can be very tricky and downright frustrating to get your web site or commerce store found indexed. Poor website design can result in only the home page rank being indexed..?

Why? The answer is structure content relevance, and a whole lot more elements. Poor design is like bad food for Google or the Search Engines,… They get a taste and find another place to eat that is inviting. (Search engine have electronic spiders that crawl the site and use complex antilogarithms to decide if it is worthy of continuing.

People who are getting a site built tend NOT to be concerned with how the site foundations are made, and only how it looks.

Once quoted a price that seems outrageous, they then seek out to find a brother, family member, and someone that does not have a clue how to build that good foundation.  This is a repeated footprint that we see on a regular basis.

To the average customer, looks are most important over mindful layout, heading labeling, content, placement, usability, etc. They still tend to miss that most important fact.

The key to a good SEO friendly site is to find a design team that is well versed in the layout and design as it relates to SEO, and they instruct you on what needs to be on the pages and how.

So, how do you pick a company that knows there stuff and won’t load you up and rob you blind?

It is not easy when we get clients that come to us with some real sad stories. We know that we they are hypersensitive and we treat them with that understanding until we have built a trust based on doing what we say we will do and seeing results.

More later….

Eric Kirkhuff SEO, Search Engine Optimization Automaticsitemap, Email, SEO, tools, Web Site Design

We would like to open a discussion about custom shipping options and your experiences.

Eric Kirkhuff Discussions

Yahoo started out like lots of Ecommerce offerings, simple and basic. I am getting feedback that it can be a real pain to deal with.

Feel free to comment on Yahoo stores.

Eric Kirkhuff Discussions, Ecommerce

The good news is, you can. The hard pill to swallow is that you will probably be using a CRM templated Ecommerce system that is dynamically driven, which won’t help you get found by the customers you want.

What do I do?
Find a shopping cart and design system that will allow you to found using static pages. Shopsite challenges the Web developer to do just about anything they need on the front end, PHP, ASP, CSS, FTP, MySQL,….etc. and ShopSite itself just does not care and plays well in the sandbox.

In reality, what will I end up paying for my Website? Just remember NFL (No Free Lunch), the more you set your self up with a good solid foundation, like with anything in life, the better the Return On Investment (ROI).

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Eric Kirkhuff Ecommerce, General not catagorized, ShopSite ASP, design, dynamic, Ecommerce, FTP, NFL, PHP, ROI, static ecommerce, success, traffic, webdesign

Search engine Optimization (SEO) is more challenging today than every before. Many Web professionals are taking advantage of SEO software to get the most out of their website, especially for their commerce stores and how visitors respond to the site.

There are many SEO solutions out there and more are fast approaching. These are all items you can bolt on to your Hosted ShopSite solutions with YourHost.com.

Beware when picking a commerce solution that will not allow you to FTP and interact with the basic page, checkout codes using CSS and other forms of tagging. You are basically screwed for SEO and natural search ranking if your source is closed to these options. Closed solutions will not allow you to get most out of your website in respect to ROI.

Web CEO offers a free edition of their SEO software, SmallBiz, and Professional Editions range from $199-$389 (one-time initial fee) . There are many others like RankSense, starting at $29.95/mo., and SEO administrator which range from $129-199 (i believe one-time initial fee). These are all one time fees and you can count on paying for future upgrades on most of the products or they will become stagnant.

LotusJump at $24-$49 per month is a robust SEO software solution that is generating some attention.

Most of these solutions are for smaller sites (What constitutes a smaller site? Many different factors so this is a general statement to be defined when your selecting an SEO solution) and the prices jump up considerably ($250-900/mo.) when looking for some Enterprise for larger websites. These Enterprise systems will allow you to do so many different critical functions, like granular testing and t is too much to mention in this article.

Manticore Technology, Web Side Story, and others like these, are very stable and robust, allowing the web developer to do some pretty amazing things. Be careful when you start mixing your email system with a hosted SEO tool, it can affect your internet email reputation if it is not well managed.

By far, your emails where they come from and how they are sent should not be overlooked.

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Eric Kirkhuff SEO, Search Engine Optimization hosting, ROI, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, success, traffic, website

Over the years we have been seeing basic improvements with Constant Contact’s online emailing tool. Recently, after some major upgrades, YourHost.com has began offering Constant Contact as a economical alternative to the Market Manager – Blue Hornet solution. Both systems have their place, but Constant Contact is by far more user friendly and less frustrating to the basic user. Write us if your you want info on the differences.

Last month we rolled out the unique Constant Contact – ShopSite Pro API integration tool. We are now offering this tool to our customers  Constant Contact.  CC API allows their ShopSite customers who purchase products to be automatically added to email list at the Checkout. This will save the web developer many hours of export – import time.

In addition to the API tool, we have found that Constant Contact can be very fluid yielding a positive customer experience. In testing and supporting Constant Contact, we want to point out one item that can come up that the average person might miss when sending out the final email. First thing you want to do is to add your friends or office associates to the test group and then start composing your email. Remember, before you send, test, test, test your emails. A real pro takes from 2-7 hrs to prepare, test, and send out a quality offering or newsletter. When you’re done composing an email you might find that the "text" part of the message receiveds into the inbox appears jumbled-up and does not look professional. This is a common occurrence with any good email system as it is just that "text" which the system is electronically producing text by stripping out all the HTML from your composed email… get it? Don’t worry about it as you soon will and just follow the next steps. What you need to do is go to your Constant Contact text editor, select the "advanced" link and turn on text editing. Then reformat your text so it looks decent with the proper spacing and layout. Then, pick a person in your test group, select to send text only, and send a a number of tests emails until it looks good. We are also finding out that Constant Contact offers  city and statewide classes to teach the  basic and advanced usage and most of which are free. It is ok to pay for some of these as you know you get what you pay for.  We are encouraging our readers to use a  good solid email system so you can regularly touch your groups of customers and organizations. Enjoy your use of Constant Contact and happy emailing.

Eric Kirkhuff Constant Contact, Email Add new tag

Every time we turn around the cost of sending a letter has gone up. 41…42….44 cents. Bulk mailing has also increased in price.

More and more people have email on their phones and PDA’s, which helps you to keep your customer’s informed about the products and services you are offering. Email can cost as little as 1/2 cent  per email to send, which is far less than postal fees.

How do you write a good email or newsletter? There are many factors that go into continuous successful email campaigns. It all starts with the email system that you use. ISP’s are keeping close track on who is sending junk and abusing the way they get mail. You want to find a host that uses a system that has a good solid ISP reputation.

Bounced emails? Most people gauge the quality of your sending email system by how counting many get successfully opened and how many get bounced. Now days most ISP’s , Corporate systems are filtering email that have bad reputations into a type of "Black Hole" that does not show up as a bounced email. They also build their own database of who does not play well in the sandbox, and make sure they are penalized for it.

So, how do you make sure your system is working properly? Test it. There is only one true way to test it how effective and safe your system is and that is by letting your hosting company send emails from different seed email boxes. Sounds complicated? It is not but it really opens your eyes to how successful your campaigns can be.

So, Don’t Go Postal on your Customers, use a good solid email system that uses best practices and has a good reputation.

We will talk more about Reputation, and sending.

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Trivia -

Question: How long does it take to make a solid email campaign from start to finish, not including testing?

Answer: 6-12 hours!! Really? Yep it does.

EricKirkhuff Email blasts, Email, email filtering, marketing, sending, traffic

With the expansion of the Internet, consumers all over the world can now have access to your business. They can now shop or learn more about your services from the safety and comfort of their own homes. There is only one problem, now consumers have access to all of your competitors as well. Products that people used to go to the a store to buy can now purchase products online with little effort. How can you stand out from the herd? Through well thought-out and intuitive web design.

Whether you are trying to get a visitor to your site to make a purchase or to call you, presentation is key. How would you present yourself on a first date, or perhaps a job interview? A homepage to your companies website is no different. The way you present your company will be how people view your company. A lot of care and consideration needs to go into the appearance and functionality of your site.

Do you already have a site up? Has it been up for many years? Just like in fashion certain styles of websites design themes will go in and out of style. It never hurts to update your look from time to time.

Function over style .
The way you may personally feel about this may vary depending on the nature of your company. A cutting edge technology firm will most likely want to have a website that mirrors their company model. For most of us simplicity is best. How does the navigation on your page look? More importantly how easy is it to use? Is it consistent throughout the website? In shopping online I have personally been to websites that were not easy to get through, and more often then not I can get the same product elsewhere. Not only will a well designed and easy to use site keep your customers interest but, it will also be much more search engine friendly.

Browsers:
Opera, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari. Which browser do you prefer? I personally am a fan of Firefox. Have you tested your site to see how it looks in different browsers? It’s always good to have a third party check things out in this regard. Keep in mind that most people around the world still use Internet Explore and that of all the browsers I.E. seemed to be the hardest one to please.

If you would like to know more about how to streamline your internet presence feel free contact me or any other professional designer. Good luck and Godspeed.

EricKirkhuff Web Design ecommere, SEO, tested, traffic, Web Design

Tracking is key! In the book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” Stephen  Covey used an analogy of a woodcutter who was sawing for several days straight but was becoming less and less productive. The process of cutting dulls the blade. So the solution is to periodically sharpen the saw. That same line of reasoning can apply to both brick and mortar and online stores.

Many companies will launch different campaigns when it comes to marketing. They will try sending out emails to their current customer base, They will advertise in different places, both  online or in local areas,  some companies will cold call to generate leads, and others will launch PPC (pay per click) campaigns. All of these methods are effective “tools” for the job done. “Tools” however can lose their edge.

Tracking tools a very important to any website in any spaces. When using tracking tools also known as web analytics you can find out information such as where your customers are coming from, or how they are finding you in the first place. You can find out how long they stay on your web page and what they do when they’re there. You can also find out how many people visit your site versus how many people actually make purchases on your website.

With all this knowledge any business owner or marketing director can find out exactly where your customers are coming from and can focus on making that aspect more effective. In effect “sharpening that saw”.

Marketing also takes time, money, energy, and resources.  With these tracking tools companies also find out what just plain doesn’t work for you business and therefore know what is mot worth the extra time and effort.

I urge everyone to go online and try out Google analytics. Google Analytics is a free service with some tracking ability that all companies can benefit from. It is great for basic stats.After using a low end tool like Google analytics you should have an idea of what statistics are most important and from there you can step into a better solution.

In this industry knowledge is power and the know a company knows about their customers the better they will be able to serve them. Never forget to sharper your saw. It never hurts to have an edge.

EricKirkhuff analytics, marketing analytics, google, information, internet, marketing, statistics, tool, tracking, traffic, web

Previously I touched on a few common things that SPAM filters look for in all  incoming messages. Understanding how these filters work is the first step in learning how to reach your customers and avoid having your good emails deleted along with the bad. One of he big things that can get an email marked as SPAM is content filtering.

Content filtering is when emails can be named as spam based on the words that are in either the email or the subject line. Check your own personal email junk box and see how many of those emails have the word “viagra” in them. That’s content filtering at its finest.

What about spammers who try using clever ways of spelling things. Luckily these filters over time become smarter and smarter. In the past words like “mortgage” and “refinance” would automatically get you filtered. Now these filters will monitor the emails you send to your junk box and adjust themselve to filter out similar content.

How does this affect someone sending emails? Once you are aware of the pitfalls that go into email marketing you will know exactly what to do to reach your loyal customer base. With YourHost.com on your side you can have succesful email marketing campaigns.

EricKirkhuff Email content, Email, email marketing, filtering, internet, marketing, sending, spam