Thesis 1.5.1 Problem with Openhook 2.2.4 using custom css

This is an OpenHook problem and what they changed during the update.

Anyway we are of course using custom.css to make one of our blogs (not this one) look really awesome. Well, if you go in to change ANY element of the CSS through Thesis Custom Styling after doing the upgrade to Openhook 2.2.4 it adds a / in front of every “

So for example if you have a CSS style that calls a specific font, IE “Times” it adds the / and it becomes /”Times”/

Example:

.style {

font-family: “Times New Roman”;

font-size: 18px;

font-style: italic;

Becomes:

.style {

font-family: /”Times New Roman”/;

font-size: 18px;

font-style: italic;

That unexpected syntax kills all the CSS below. We also use tag specific CSS calls like:

Img [align="left"]

which defines what the CSS does every time an image is set to align=”left”

And of course this changes to:

Img [align=/"left"/]

Which of course means that all of the tags stop working with the addition of /

Openhook 2.2.4 Workaround:

The only thing that does work seems to be uploading the changes to the custom.css file in Dreamweaver and uploading through FTP. Those changes stick, however doesn’t that nullify some of the benefits of Thesis?

Honestly think about the last time that you actually picked up a yellow pages to do more than move it from your driveway to the recycle bin… Or even better yet to provide that extra 4” you need to reach something off of the top cupboard. However, with the constant decline in advertisers it’s getting even less effective for that purpose as well. Still good for leveling out the coffee table maybe?

Financial Wo-es Me

If you’re like me, many investors, or anyone under 55 (hey my mother and grandfather still use them – so somebody is), it’s been years since you considered these as effective mediums for finding local goods and services. The exodus of “eyes” and overall consumers, especially in the critical buying demo of 18 – 45 year olds,  has become more and more evident with the collapse (read: bankruptcy) of these once giant yellow page conglomerates. However, even online, in local search, the yellow pages is no match for local search. When you lose consumers you lose advertisers. Simple supply and demand.

But what exactly are people searching for? Simply put they’re searching for everything. Whether it’s for a phone number to a local hair salon in Irvine or to a plastic surgeon in Miami, local searches are now king. But why are more and more consumers heading to their PC and Mac instead of their Yellow and Penny? The answer is simple: Faster access to more abundant information.

With one simple search you can see lists of reviews, contact information, as well as company history and other business affiliations. When it comes to offline ads all you get is just that — an ad. You’re relying on what the company wants you to read. However, when searching online you get to see the good, the bad and the ugly.

Manage Your Rep or Your Rep Will Manage You

This has become a proverbial godsend for those companies, both large and small, that are embracing organic local and geo search. They are experiencing new resurgence in the midst of economic woes. Those companies who can build a good rep, for example, a restaurant that has a good looking up-to-date website, top organic ranking for their local city + food type like “Irvine Italian Food” are bearing the real fruit of those labors. No pun intended. When you add to that a proper social networking campaign where reviews on sites like Yelp! are encouraged, you can expand your reach to consumers that may have never known about you any other way.

However, it has become an absolute nightmare for many business owners who are not taking advantage of that 70+% of their local market. And it’s become that nightmare because they either have not been made aware of what is going on or have just been reluctant to take that next step because they wrongly feel that the internet is not applicable to their business. Unfortunately what many are now finding is that the internet is not only applicable, but critical, to every business, one way or another. Especially with so many people using review sites to post reviews. If you’re not at the very least using these sites for quality assurance you’re missing out on a wealth of information.

I Understand The Words That Are Coming Out Of Your Blog

For business owners understanding the market, the different online and offline models, and how the world is changing is critical to surviving. I have been saying to colleagues for years now that it’s going to come down to businesses such as your local neighborhood restaurant having to have a website that is optimized for local and or geo search terms in order for them to survive. We are now closer to that day, especially in this economy, than ever before.

That’s why I wanted to create the quick crash course on the difference between local and geo search for small business below. While my original intent was to create this specifically for small business owners and professionals like attorneys, doctors, dentists, etc… It really applies to any size business or corporation that wants to take advantage of localized search.

Local Search Vs Geo Search

What defines a local search term and what defines a geographic search term?

A local search term can be a geo term and a geo term may be a local search term, however not all geo terms could be considered local. Confused? Nice, then my job here is done.

Ok, ok, Here’s how it works… (in my brain anyway)

Local Search Terms

Let’s assume that we are working with an attorney that is located here in Irvine. He or she has an office right down the street from us and is located firmly within the city. This makes our attorney very much local to us if we were to search for an ‘Irvine Attorney’. Now when meeting with this attorney we would discuss his/her area of expertise and what areas he/she would like to target. In this instance we’re going to assume that our attorney is a business attorney. Sure I could have made our legal eagle an entertainment lawyer, sports law attorney, DUI attorney, etc… but we settled on Business attorney and there’s no going back now.

So at any rate, we would then begin to discuss the geo targeting of our business attorney’s services. This would include keyword terms such as Irvine business Attorney, Irvine business lawyer, Irvine California business law, etc…  As these would definitely be local to our legal ace.

Now our business attorney is also in Orange County, California. Which means this attorney could easily go after keywords such as Orange County business Attorney, business Lawyer orange county, and a whole host of other Orange county keywords and still be targeting “Local search terms.” The attorney would also be expanding his/ her reach to clients that could easily drive the 20 minutes to the attorney’s offices. By expanding to the county local search terms our attorney is exponentially increasing the amount of local clients that he or she puts his / her services in front of each month. This is primarily because there is four times the amount of searches on the county level over the cities’ actual search terms. More searches + more people searching = more potential clients.

Geo Terms (geographic search terms / keywords)

Now Irvine Business Attorney and Orange County Business Attorney are local search terms, however they are also geographic search terms as they are, of course, physical geographic locations. This shows how local searches can be geo searches, but what about those geographic searches that aren’t local? Well, using our attorney friend from above let’s move outside of Irvine and Orange County and go one step up and move to California. Technically Irvine is a city in Orange County and Orange County is a County inside of California, but while our business attorney is still within California they could in no way be considered local to “California”. The reasoning is while, yes, it’s POSSIBLE, that someone from Irvine or even Orange County uses a search term such as California business Attorney (it does carry about ten times the amount of traffic) realistically, odds say most of that traffic is going to be outside of that local area. If someone in San Francisco searches for a California business attorney and an attorney in Irvine is one of the top sites to pop up in his search, how is that local to that user in San Francisco? It’s not. That’s what makes a geo term, when applied to a local business, a geo term. It’s based upon the location of the person performing the search.

While I wouldn’t necessarily deter this attorney from wanting to target California I would place it as a third tier priority with local search domination the first up on the plate. If “California Business attorney” happened to get rankings through ranking osmosis, great, looks good on our stats, but it wouldn’t be targeted traffic that the attorney would ever want and/or need.

So in recap a Local search term is a search term that is local to the person searching.
A geo search term is any geographically based search term used by a search engine user.

For my argument sake anyway…

How does that help local business?

Especially in a struggling economy it’s critical for local professionals and small business owners to understand, at least in part, the internet and its place in establishing their local business. Understanding that consumers are using traditional media less and less and new media more and more to search out and find local businesses is essential to understanding where marketing is going. For the same price that most small businesses are spending on direct mail pieces each month they could be accessing, literally, large multiples of the amount of people that direct mail piece is hitting, but here’s the difference. When you utilize local and local geo search terms you are actively targeting people who are searching for services that you provide. This is a concept that I don’t think a lot of people yet understand. When you’re #1 on Google, for example, you’re not just #1, you’re #1 in a place where people who WANT YOUR SERVICES are actively SEARCHING to find you.

When local consumers search to find movie show times, local restaurants, and, yes, even a business attorney, they’re not watching TV waiting for your ad, they’re not waiting for the mail man to drop off a postcard (it’s called junk mail for a reason), and they’re certainly not using the yellow pages; They’re turning to Google, Yahoo and MSN daily to find what they need.

Are they finding you?

SUPERFLUOS PLUG!
If they’re not finding you, may I suggest that we might just be able to do something about that?
Contact a sales rep for a free quote

I was reading an interesting article on business week discussing Time Warner, and other cable companies, testing tiered pricing for internet usage. It mentions that Time Warner specifically is going to be offering customers predefined levels at different cost points consisting of 5, 10, 20, and 40GB levels all costing from $29.95 to $54.90. To top that off they are going to charge an additional $1 per gig of overage each and every month for anyone going over their allotted limit.

I know WHY the cable companies are doing it. It’s simple really. More and more people just aren’t watching television. They’re simply becoming more immersed, by the day, in online activities and/or they’re watching television online at places like hulu. So while their overall viewership declines, so does their ad revenues, but at the same time their broadband usage is increasing exponentially and they’re not seeing a dime from it. That makes them angry… and as you can see from the above pricing you wouldn’t like them when they’re angry. It’s not that they turn green, it’s just that they want more of it.

But here’s the rub. When you have a recession, or even a depression, the first thing people do is ditch luxury items. Vacations, boats, nicer cars, fancy clothes, etc… Lastly when things get really bad (IE NOW) they start to cut out things like auto insurance, eating out, and yes Cable television, all of which has already started happening. Imagine if you now hit people strugging to pay that bill with a bill that is double or triple in size?

Now maybe, just maybe, it’s because I’m in an industry often dictated by the use of broadband, but as I was reading this article a lot of things occurred to me (as well as some of those people that commented) that apparently didn’t occur to ANYONE at Time Warner, or any of the other cable companies for that matter. What’s the first thing that occurred to me? That this is the WORST idea in the HISTORY OF IDEAS. I’m not sure if there is any possible way of honestly putting that in a more constructive way. I can think of a lot worse ways, but for the sake of argument, none more constructive. The ramifications to the cable companies will be devastating to say the least, but apparently they cant see that??

Problems with Tiered Cable Internet Pricing

• A Great exodus of consumers away from cable to more suitable alternatives
• A short term blow to the broadband development community
• A decline of user experience on sites across the web

The Great Exodus

So I get it, I really do. Cable companies are losing viewers and their costs are increasing, from that stand point it makes perfect sense to find new sources of revenue.  The problem comes from the fact that once you go to make a move such as this where you start taking more and more money from those who can barely afford it (or who can’t afford it but they are doing the monthly bill shuffle to pay for it) you are going to end up losing customers in hordes who will find a more suitable alternative or just simply go without.

Why would you pay $29.90 for 5 gigs of data transfer when you could pay $19.95/$29.95 for unlimited data transfer on DSL? Verizon FIOS is $49.95 at its low end, but it gives you speed as fast as you will ever find with cable. I’m in fact pondering their 50mbps for the home office, something cable doesn’t offer, but imagine paying the same price for that 50mpbs dl speed just because you streamed a total of say 10 movies in a month and checked your email at 2-8mpbs. To me there really is no comparison at all.

If I were a phone company, directv or any other satellite provider, I would be sitting back and smiling right about now as the cable companies would be doing all the work for me.

Broadband development / Decline of the User Experience

Imagine a world where YouTube has nothing more than 10 second videos. Facebook doesn’t allow, well anything that makes Facebook, Facebook. Hulu along with Netflix streams are ancient history. Say goodbye to online gaming.  Do you like playing WOW? Not anymore you don’t.

While I predict there will be a hefty toll that the cable companies will have to pay for this massive oversight into what the consuming public wants, it will take time. You see they are rolling out this program slowly, going from one community to the next, creeping along to see just how much usage is being used and how much they will actually end up making.

Lets take Hulu for example and Time Warner’s new $29.90 plan. Do you like Heroes? House? Any other live hour long show? You wouldn’t dare watch them now. Why? Because you will most likely go over your monthly usage in that one hour session. Watch two shows? One less meal this week. Four or five shows, or music downloads? Time for a second job. Use the internet as most families currently use it? You’ll need a second mortgage. Run a company online? You can always sell a kidney…

Now that’s bad for the consumer, but what about Hulu, and companies like them, who survive based on the very few commercial breaks that it plugs into the shows? Unfortunately it would most likely mean the end of their service and services like theirs. It could also just mean a scale back on growth (depending upon cash on hand) until more people abandon cable in favor of unlimited alternative broadband sources such as DSL, FIOS, or satellite. But can these companies survive during that time? Really only time will tell.

The user experience, at least those on cable, will definitely be altered. For example, having to pick and choose which sites you can go to based upon how much bandwidth you will use. It could severely stunt growth and development of many online communities.

When you stifle growth online you stifle the economy and creativity. Imagine all flash websites essentially being eventually banned by the cable companies because it’s too intensive to DL the file. Ok, ok, in some instances that’s not that bad of an idea, but losing freedom of choice and experience always is. It really becomes a slippery slope that we are working with when you start being controlled on where and when you can go someplace and how much time you can spend there.

It’s this kind of “thinking” and management that makes it crystal clear why we are in the mess that we are in now.  After a move like this I see “bail out” in the very near future.

Client Expectations. Whether you are a web designer, SEO, or any other person in a service industry, each new client you acquire is going to have their own set of individual expectations. Many of these expectations will be standard, but varied, depending upon your industry. If you are a web designer, well your clients are going to want a great looking site. If you’re an SEO, well your clients are going to want results. If you’re a lawyer, your client wants to win and not end up owing you their left hand and right leg for the trouble.

The point is there is always going to be generic standard expectations that you should come to expect with each new client. However, it’s those other “expectations” and even the potential “demands” that come up that you need to work to mitigate prior to work even beginning.

Here are some examples and how you can avoid running into these scenarios:

The Setting / Expectation:
Currently in home page mockup stage – delivered new mockup for review 10:50am
Client returns with changes at 5:45pm via email
Client repeatedly calls and emails starting at 10am the next day looking for next mockup.

The Solution:
Now if you’re a web designer, with any kind of experience, than you know this scenario like the back of your hand; it’s all too common. This client has VERY unrealistic expectations and demands. You can try to explain to your client that you are working on the file, you can even put it back on them, in a way, and explain that you received the new information after hours (if it was after hours) and that you, or the designer, have just started working on the site itself. This may quell some clients, others not so much. So what can you do to mitigate this from the get go?

Within your contract simply outline time frames for every stage of the design process. For example:

For Revisions (which cover mockups)
“Revisions Received Prior to 12pm on any business day will not be made available prior to such time as 48 business hours from the time that client revisions were received and confirmed in house.”

You just gave yourself 48 hours. Will every client read all of this? No, but this is where your sales team, whether that’s you or someone else, should take the opportunity to go over that section and highlight these terms in a positive way. For example a lot of clients always ask us “How long will the design process take?” and our response is always the same, “However long it takes for you to get revisions back to us” and we kind of say it with a little smile, but honestly that is the scenario nine times out of ten. Clients are busy with their businesses and can take days or even weeks to get back to you. When they finally do, because now the “process” has taken so long they expect you to jump through hoops to get their changes made.

Pointing out time frames of revisions to clients, before you start work, saves you from having to use those terms as almost a defensive weapon such as “well it says in the contract”. Using lines like that is NEVER a good place to be, and should only be used as an absolute last response to an overly abrasive client that just doesn’t get it.

YOU need to set the expectations ahead of time. If you give unrealistic expectations that you can’t deliver on, then you leave only yourself to blame. If you let the client dictate those expectations, again you leave only yourself to blame. However, be conscious of your client and their needs. Two weeks for revisions of 5 changes to a mockup is NOT realistic.

The Setting:
New client comes on board. Client knows enough about SEO to really rank a website, in 1997…
Contract started 1st of the month. Client has a 100 page website, you made client aware that off page optimization (link building) would not start until the onsite optimization was complete. Client also knows to expect 30 days (22 business days) until onsite optimization is complete.

The Expectation / Demand:
Day 31: Client asks why they cannot see more links in Google when they check the link: command. They also want to know why their site isn’t already ranking #1 for all of their keywords.

The Solution:
Ah yes, I think we SEO’s have it worst of all when it comes to dealing with unrealistic expectations. First most clients have NO CLUE as to the value proposition of your services. Sure, you can explain and explain, you can even try to relate your hourly rates to what they charge their own clients, but you will never, or rarely ever, be deemed worthy of that, or almost any, dollar amount to that kind of client.

So what can you do to mitigate this kind of unrealistic expectation?

Education.

As an SEO you should be educating your clients to the generality of what you will be doing, time frames to complete them, and to the simple fact that you do not own the search engines. While you are confident in your long term ability to achieve top search engine ranking (I hope you’re confident in it if you’re charging people for it) time estimates to achieve noticeable positions are just that, estimates. You’re going to run into stubborn keywords. You’re going to get that one keyword that the client really wants that you, no matter what you try, appear destined to forever hold the #11 position. That’s why instilling realistic expectations is critical prior to starting any optimization campaign.

There is also something to be said about how you “choose” your clients. I know it’s hard to imagine, (shock and awe) but you can say no to a perspective client. If you’ve been doing this long enough you’ve experienced exactly what we have found; Clients that push the hardest for a “deal” are often the clients with the most unrealistic expectations. They want Lamborghini performance on a Yugo budget and my apologies to anyone still driving a Yugo, but let’s be realistic here even the Pinto had Mustang parts…

This is also another area to bring your contract and sales people into play. Put in all of the provisos that help to cover you on the SEO end, but make sure your client is fully aware. One of the things that we are constantly running into is business owners who have been burned over and over again by so called “SEO companies” that promise the world, but deliver nothing more than a bill. Most clients appreciate honesty more than you will ever know and when you can deliver honesty, service, and results you can mitigate just about any unrealistic expectations.

In Closing
In closing if you set the expectations through verbal and written communication and make sure that the client, at each step where it is critical, knows ETA’s and what to expect, you can keep the client, and just as importantly, YOU, happy.

Now after you figure out your target “fish” (webmasters with those juicy links) you of course have to know a few more of the basics.

Where to fish
Do you do it onsite with a new page, blog post, or article? Or do you use offsite resources such as an article on another site, guest blog post, or something like a twitter run?

When to fish
Is your link bait newsworthy and topical to something happening right now? Or are you just providing more of a how-to or informational post?

And last but certainly not least…

HOW to fish
What content works to get the most QUALITY links? Do you add a blog post on your site and then use offsite methods such as twitter to engage a captive audience?

These, I think, are the absolute basics of link bait. Sure we could go into all kinds of nuances, but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about WHY you’re building links in the first place and how you can use duality in your link bait techniques to kill two birds with one stone.

(Sorry for jumping from a fishing analogy to a hunting one, I’m going back to fishing now.)

First you have to ask the very simple question, “Why am I using link bait?” and of course the appropriate answer is, “Uh duh, inbound links to my site.” I would ask, “Why do you want inbound links to your site?” and once again the appropriate answer would be along the lines of, “Uh duh, so my site can rank higher on Google (Yahoo, MSN, fill in your favorite!),“ and I once again respond (seeing a pattern here?), “Well, why do you want to rank higher on (fill in favorite engine here)?” and one last time the appropriate answer is, “Because I want more sales / clients / leads / people to point at in analytics”. This is where the “Ah Hah” moment should occur. Your ultimate goal with any good link bait technique is most likely to increase your overall search engine ranking through the acquisition of more and more links. However if this is the only reason you are using link bait for your site or company, you are missing out. Link bait can, and should, as often as possible, have a duality about it.

Whenever you are writing content for your site with the primary goal of attracting new links, why not try to write it in such a way that it can also attract potential clients? By bridging the gap between content written to attract links and content written to attract new clients, leads, etc. you are creating a true marketing synergy.

Let me give you an example: Track marketing efforts using cheap 800 numbers

I wrote that post back in early December about using 800 numbers through sites like RingCentral to track your individual marketing efforts. The page has not only brought us inbound links, but two clients to date who found the post while looking up information on 800 numbers for their company. Not bad for the 100 or so unique users that have come from Google to that post in the past two months.

This post not only gives information to other marketers who are looking for ways to track their marketing efforts more efficiently, but to business owners who are just looking for information on getting an 800 number for their business.

It’s working with, and writing, this kind of content that can help you reach the duality of your goal; additional inbound links and more internal clients / leads / sales. Sure you may get a few less links and a little less often, but if you’re ultimate goal is driving new clients or sales each and every month, and your “link bait” is getting that done, do you a few less links really bother you?

Tracking your marketing, effectively, is essential to establish your ROI, help better plan future marketing strategies, and over the long term, minutely tune your efforts, to maximize your profits. That’s why your marketing should always be fluid. You should always be testing, always be optimizing, and you should always be striving to achieve better returns.

These aren’t new concepts and in fact they are true whether you consider your online marketing or offline marketing strategies. But what are some of the ways to effectively track your different marketing efforts?

Within this post I hope to shine a light on one of the better and most inexpensive ways to track your efforts. By using inexpensive toll free numbers you can minutely track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

How This Works

Whether you receive a virtual dedicated number through a company like Ring Central or Got Vmail, or just pick up, from any number of sites, a 800 number that can be forwarded to your primary line, you need the ability to track those calls.

Virtual Dedicated Lines

The virtual dedicated line is typically the least expensive option and can give you immediate access to the stats that you need. For example with Got Vmail you can pick up their “Grow plan” for $49 which comes with 2 toll free our local numbers and you can just pick up additional numbers that connect to that account for $5.00 each. While I haven’t tested it with Ring Central (who coincidentally is who we often use) Im sure something similar is available. There is MANY different companies out there offering these kinds of services.

They offer immediate online stats that you can even download. This comes, as you can imagine, very handy when tracking marketing results.

Forwarding numbers

I’ll be honest and haven’t done enough research here as the initial investment is typically cost prohibitive, but if this is the route that you are going to go make sure that you find something that offers you direct stats of some type. Waiting till the end of the month to track your results does not allow your marketing efforts to remain fluid by any means.

How To Use This Tracking Ability

Really this can be used so many ways that it really comes down to your imagination, but some of the ways that we have used them is:

- Pay Per click
If you are using landing pages on your Pay Per click campaign for products that you might not normally carry and just want to test out the market throw one of your toll free numbers up on that PPC page and track your results. By combining the results of the call sheets and your actual online sales or leads generated you can test keywords, ad descriptions, and conversion rates.

- Radio Ads or Television Ads
This is where it really comes in handy since you will be able to better track the individual ads. You may have noticed a lot of commercials now offer different URL’s in their advertising like http://www.widgets.com/offer19 They do this in order to track the response to that specific ad. Many times “Offer 19″ is actually code for “Southern California” and /offer20 may be “Miami, Florida” etc… My initial research on that front shows that most people will leave off the “offer19″ and just type in the primary URL. However by using a different telephone number you can track it each and every time. This is also a great spot for a vanity number.

- Direct Mail Marketing
With the cost per conversion of direct mail marketing being around 5x higher than just about all ‘print’ based marketing tracking every lead is essential to tracking results.

There are many others, but these are just a few that should be immediately thought of when running a campaign.

Why Should You Use Toll Free Numbers To Track Your Marketing

When looking at the cost of even the smallest direct mail run somewhere in the area of $2,000, spending an extra $50 to track results should not be somewhere you would skimp. If you can make adjustments on the fly to your PPC account based upon the amount of calls you are getting think of how much you could save… If you are targeting a specific demographic with cable TV you can know daily what areas are producing for you and where your marketing dollars should leave from and where they should go.

Remember keep your marketing fluid and keep your marketing dollars, especially in this economy, where it is going to do the absolute best for you.

Side Note
Many of the virtual dedicated online companies offer free trials. Try it out and see if its right for you. You might just be amazed at the difference it can make to knowing and tracking all of your marketing efforts.

Defining how you, as a marketing specialist, survives this recession is key to your ability to help your clients do the same through this rough economic time.

White Hat SEO’s Turning To Spam For Clients
This brings me to something I’ve been noticing a LOT of recently. On just about all of my sites, even ones I would consider “Hub” sites that rank very well, I have been receiving a daily barrage of new Spam. However this time its from SEO companies, some that are known and even pretty active in the “SEO” community. I am use to being blasted by the rogue SEO “companies” (that term used VERY loosely) based in India and abroad, but this new slew of US based companies made me really start to think about the future of the SEO world as a whole. How will the down turn the past couple of years in the amount of consumers seeking search engine marketing interact with the recent economic position?

Google Trends

The House Cleaning of the Search Engine Optimization Industry
Our industry as a whole is starting to go through a bit of a “House Cleaning” similar to what the real estate industry has experienced the past few years. Four years ago just about everyone went into real estate as an agent or a loan officer. The market was red hot and people could literally jump right in and start making money. Well, with the housing market taking it’s beating (read: complete obliteration) recently those thousands of real estate agents and loan officers are now out of business and making up a large percentage of the jobless Americans. (Though those with high ranking websites appear to be stemming the tide a bit better just from the shear amount of traffic they receive). The same thing is coming down the line for SEO companies.

Cut Rate May Be Cutting Out

The biggest “cleaning” I feel will be in the cut rate, primarily spam oriented, “Guaranteed Google rankings for $29 a month” type of companies. If you sell search engine optimization or search engine marketing services than you are well aware of these firms. You may even have had to try to “defend” your pricing structure against these kinds of sites. It’s frustrating, especially when the buying public as a whole does not understand the industry and what it entails (read: time and money) to achieve ranking. This really becomes evident in heavily optimized industries such as real estate. It amazes me personally when I see companies offering those kinds of pricing and services since I know there is no benefit to their service. But how do you get that across to potential clients?

Information and Education. Simply put the SEO companies that are going to survive the down turn are going to be the ones that not only can give their clients information and an education of sorts on the world of search engine optimization, but also those companies constantly working to stay a step ahead, working on new content, seeing trends before they happen and constantly working to gain more and more knowledge. The cutting edge can only be the cutting edge when the edge is kept sharp.

Recently some family of mine received a letter in the mail from their local chamber of commerce asking them to “Buy in Garden Grove!” The letter explained that 25% of the cities revenues come from the local small businesses. The direct mail piece is asking residents to try to keep all of their money within the city. Buying cars, groceries, etc… Makes sense. I mean everyone is hurting and I can’t even begin to tell you how many shops are empty and how many “for lease” signs are now up when I drive through the city.

However they made one really large mistake that is actually quite prevalent by many small businesses today. In their direct mail piece they are asking residents to go to their website (ci.garden-grove.ca.us) and click on the link “Buy In Garden Grove” so that the residents of the city can see all of the participating businesses and the deals that they are offering. The problem? There IS NO LINK, anywhere on their site that says anything about their recent promotion or “Buy In Garden Grove”. In fact the word “Buy” doesn’t even exist (except as part of the word “buyer”) on their home page at all.

This doesn’t surprise me from a government agency per se. I am assuming that they will put it up sometime this week as the mail piece did get delivered today. However the execution of this plan is very flawed. The “Buy in Garden Grove” should be up PRIOR to sending out any advertisements especially very expensive ones like direct mail. It should be up as it is a way to help out the local businesses. However this isn’t just a government problem. I have noticed more and more small businesses using direct mail in this very same fashion. Many small businesses are using the more expensive direct mail to send visitors to their website and than offering no follow through with information about the direct mail on their website.

What’s worse is that direct mail has a cost per conversion that is generally 9+ times HIGHER than the cost of search engine marketing. Now in terms of the city of Garden Grove they had to do the direct mail, really not much better way to make notice of their services to the people because of the government agency and Im sure being a government agency they get some kind of a deal when it comes to bulk mail.

However what small businesses need to take from this is to be diligent when it comes to the execution of your marketing program. If you are going to use offline marketing to advertise web specific ads make sure that your site is updated and ready to go before the first piece of mail or offline marketing even goes out. 

When installing version 2.6.2 of Wordpress through Fantastico it adds your domain name directly to two fields within the options table in the Wordpress database. If you are like us you probably install Wordpress, Install a base theme, than get to work customizing that theme to fit your needs. You probably like to have a live version to check revisions, changes, etc… prior to going live with your site.

For example we install and view our new site via IP address prior to changing over the nameservers. This allows us to make all applicable changes to the site, get client approval, as well as do all of our browser checks. If using 2.6.2 with Fantastico the automatic install will actually redirect to your primary domain, even if you are trying to access the site via IP. This is also helpful if you wish to test prior to your DNS propagating.

Wordpress Fix

It really is a quick fix. It really is going to depend on your version of Cpanel and your theme, but it should be relatively the same.

1. Login to Cpanel
2. Go to “MySQL Databases” (look for the Dolphin Logo)
3. Scroll down the page and find the link that says PHPMyAdmin (click that link)
4. Look for the Wordpress database. It’s probably something like _wrdp1
5. Click the Wordpress database
6. Click the “Browse” icon next to the WP_options table
7. Click the Pencil Icon next to the siteurl under “option_name”
8. Remove the URL showing there and add in the URL in which you want the blog to show up on. For example for us its something like http://(yourIP)/~yoursite You should know what URL you want it to go to. Than click “Go”
9. Now depending on how many fields are showing up you may need to go to page 2 or page 3. You are looking for the “home” under “option_name”. Click the pencil icon, change the URL, and click Go.

That’s it. You’re done. You should be able to test the site. Make your changes, adaptations, and customizations.

Changing the Redirect URL in Wordpress

To change the URL back to your primary domain just follow the same steps that you did to change it the first time around.

Hope this helps some of you that may run into this problem like we did and need a quick fix.

The Title Meta Tag describes the pages content. It works something similar to how the title of a Book works. Primarily due to the fact that a webpage is essentially like any literary page, even some of the formatting crosses over. Header tags, font stylings, and more are just some of the crossovers.

The description Meta tag gives you an idea of what may be found inside the content of the page. It should be descriptive, to the point, and should have been thoroughly thought out to maximize your search engine ranking and how someone viewing the description via a search engine might be induced to click through to your site.

The HTML used: Start: <title>

End: </title>

Example: <title>Search Engine Optimization</title>

A couple of tips with the Title Tag:

- Keep it short and to the point.
66 characters is the MAXIMUM that Google will show in their search engine results. This should be used as your guide. Though you can use up to 90 total, I always recommend trying to stay within the 66.

- Do Not Repeat Your Keywords

Repeating keywords is seen as spammy and is never good for your end users anyway. Build for them and honestly Google tends to follow.

Bad Title Tag

<title>SEO – Search Engine Optimization– California Search Engine Optimization– Arizona Search Engine Optimization – Florida Search Engine Optimization – Colorado Search Engine Optimization</title>

Better Title Tag
<title>Search Engine Optimization - SEO services</title>

You may think that the kind of Title tag that is highlighted in the “bad Title Tag” doesn’t exist, “No one would ever do that” but trust me there are plenty of title tag spammers out there still today. The title tag in my opinion is one of, if not THE, most important Meta Tag to your search engine optimization campaign. Choosing the right title will not only enable more click throughs once you’ve reached the top of the search engine results, but can also help you to obtain that ranking in the first place.

All in All your Title tag should meet the above criteria while accurately displaying the title of your pages content.