Business

I’ve never claimed to be much of a writer. And I certainly didn’t think I’d ever be one. I disliked writing in school and didn’t take it seriously at all. However, one of the keys to being successful online is creating great content. Since I love working online, I’ve learned to love writing. Okay, maybe I don’t love it, but the better I get at it the more I like it.

I know I still have a long way to go, but I’m working very hard at improving.

Recently I released my first eBook, A Practical Guide to SEO. It’s a book aimed at helping individuals and businesses focus on the important aspects of search engine optimization. The writing is probably no work-of-art, but the information and tips provided therein are extremely helpful. It’s a great starter book for anyone interested in search engine optimization. If you would like to know how to drive targeted traffic to your website from the search engines, you should download the e-book and let me know what you think. I always appreciate any feedback I get. Once you download the reference guide you’ll also be subscribing to SEOrankings.com, so you’ll never miss our regularly updated search engine optimization tips.

With the growth of the Internet and stay-at-home businesses, the demand for SEO services has grown significantly over the past few years.

So what exactly is SEO consulting? I think it’s important that we break it down into three parts.

First lets discuss what the definition of SEO is:

SEO, short for search engine optimization, is typically thought of the process of improving a website’s natural search engine ranking for some specific keywords.

What most SEO companies claim to do, and of course, what some actually do. However, I think SEO is a lot more than this, but I’ll go into that in a minute.

Now let’s l examine the definition of a consultant:

“A consultant is someone who provides value through specialized expertise, content, behavior, skill, or other resources to assist a client in improving the status quo in return for mutually agreed-upon compensation.” – Alan Weiss

Alan Weiss is a well-respected consultant to the consultants, and author. The above definition was taken from his book Million Dollar Consulting, 4th Edition.

Now, if we put both of those two definitions together we might derive something like this:

An SEO consultant is someone who assists a client by helping them improve their website through content, design, user-experience and marketing to enhance the quality of, and increase their search engine traffic.

Not everyone will agree with this definition, and perhaps most SEO companies wont. But that’s the difference between hiring someone to just go through the motions of a project that you (the inexperienced search engine marketer) dictate, and hiring a real consultant who brings value-added to the job.

Do you find ever find yourself saying one thing yet doing another? What about just flat out lying?

Al Gore, perhaps the biggest con-artist of our time, has once again been caught in a blatant lie. While I am not an expert on global warming, and have no idea about the truth, I find it difficult to believe there is such a thing any more. I certainly don’t believe the experts are all that concerned. Otherwise, why would the leading proponents not live by their own words?

Global warming may be a valid threat, one we should all plan for, however it has been so difficult to siphon out the hypocrisy and lies, I don’t take it seriously anymore.

I wasn’t a skeptic two years ago.

Are you a liar? Do you ever find yourself being hypocritical – telling people to do one thing while you do something else? I see these foolish acts in my industry every day. Someone will say something on their blog, and then two days later tell something completely contradictory. Makes you wonder if these “experts” have any idea what they are talking about, or if they even care.

Be careful what you say or do, people will take notice. If you’re not living by your own words, they’re not going to do business with you.

Starting a business doesn’t have to be hard, unless you:

• Start with no money
• Don’t follow your heart
• Do something you know nothing about
• Don’t write a business plan
• Aren’t committed
• Don’t like change
• Don’t learn from your mistakes
• Like doing things the hard way
• And don’t want to listen to those who have gone before you

These are only a handful of business start-up issues; at least four of them applied to me along the way. That has made this a bumpy ride down the entrepreneurial road to success.

Starting a business isn’t something you should learn the hard way. Unfortunately, most of us still do. That’s why about 50% of small businesses fail within the first five years. Only a few people get it right the first time.

Do you have a business failure success story?

We don’t always know what we’ll regret or not later. However, nine times out of ten we probably knew we would. So why do we do it anyway?

Usually we say things we know we’ll regret when we react to a situation emotionally rather than taking a step back and reacting logically. There are a few things I have said that I wish that I can take back, but I can’t.

I’m not just referring to our personal lives, but things we do in business too.

For instance, I have responded negatively to other peoples’ industry-related blog posts. While some constructive criticism is okay, at times, I have probably crossed the line from opinionated to just plain rude. Regrettably, those careless remarks will likely follow me around Internet for years to come.

In today’s day and age, you really have to be careful about what you say and do. Once word hits the Internet, goes viral, and multiplies – it will be nearly impossible to retract and defuse.

Have you ever discredited your professionalism by saying something you shouldn’t have?

Awhile back I helped put together a blog that was geared towards celebrity gossip and scandals. On this blog we used Google AdSense to help pay for the cost of running the blog. Within the first couple of days Google AdSense stopped displaying ads on the home page, but showed them just fine on most of the other pages.

Public service ads and blank spaces showed where the AdSense ads should have been displayed.

Apparently this was because there were several AdSense “stop words” on the home page.

Obviously, Google “red flags” based on pages and not site-wide. At least at first any way.

Like most things Google, they give little insight regarding which words these are. You can read the AdSense content guidelines if you would like, but there isn’t much help in there.

In any case, by just using a bit of common sense you should be able to alleviate most of these words from your pages.

Once we removed any words we thought to be stop words our ads start displaying properly again about 24 hours later. In our case the words were s*ex and n*ipple.

Well if you’ve come to this blog post you’ve probably tried to password protect your wp-admin directory in WordPress and received a 404 error.

The likely reason you are having this issue is because of the rewrite engine WordPress uses to make search friendly URL’s puts a .htaccess file in the root folder of the WordPress installation, and the code in the .htaccess file causes WordPress to take any unknown URL and serve the appropriate page or error. Your file should have code similar to this:


# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress


In my case the password protected page wants to tell me about the 401 situation I am in (authentication) but my server has a default location for this, and there is no file there. So WordPress passes us a 404 error.

The solution is to download .htaccess file where WordPress is installed via FTP, open it using notepad or similar and add the following code before the WordPress entries, or modify the current ErrorDocument 401 line to the following:

ErrorDocument 401 default

Save the file, then re-upload it via FTP. Now, when you try accessing the protected folder you should get a pop-up box asking you to enter your user name and password.

Note: After I fixed my wp-admin password protection issue, I was no longer able to use the flash file uploader within WordPress. I now have to use it in browser uploader mode, by doing so it works just fine.

Finally had a chance to create a Facebook page for the Seattle Web Services company website. Facebook pages have a lot of potential, but at the moment they are very short on usability.

You can check out our new Facebook page below:

For the longest time I marketed my SEO business using a thin website that contained only two pages: a home page, and a contact page. Even with only the two pages my conversion rate was pretty typical for a site in this industry. In general, it just goes to show getting visitors to your site is more important to your online success than having a fancy site with all of the bells and whistles.

I’m not implying having a fancy site is bad in any way, but what I am saying is you don’t have to have one to convert visitors to customers. However, you’re more likely to have long-term success with an information filled website than a thin one. That’s because you’ll typically attract more natural links that way, and those natural links go a long way towards achieving top search engine rankings. But if you have a tight budget and not a lot of time, having a little web presence can still go a long way. So don’t be discouraged if you cant’ hire a fancy web designer, you can still get plenty of business from the Internet with a super simple one or two page website.

The new Seattle Web Services website is still pretty simple. It still contains less than 10 pages, but has a bit more information on it. I implemented clearer calls-to-action using tips I got from Tim Ash’s 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design.

I still have a lot of resources and information I’d like to add, but at least the major changes have been made. You can check SeattleWeb.net out and let me know what you think.

Before you begin an SEO project, make sure you know the statistics! As you can see from the 2008 top search engine list, optimizing for anything other than Google first is not really sensible. My recommendation is to always optimize for Google first, because that optimization alone will most likely increase your rankings on other search engines anyway. 

Here are the top 4 search engines based on US Internet usage, ranked by volume of searches for the 4 weeks ending December 27, 2008.

Source – Hitwise – December, 2008 – based on volume of searches.