As an online marketer, I am constantly approached by people who have a great idea for their small business, but terrible ideas on how to establish themselves online. Usually, a good business owner will have the energy, resources, and drive to take their business online, but they lack one key element. Experience.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

At this point many businees owners try to take their online marketing efforts into their own hands an the result is something similar to a high school science student testing out his home made jet pack…disaster. Everybody has been to that website. There is often blinking text, annoying animated graphics, and a picture of some creepy guy posing for the camera with a mullet (feel free to check out this website if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

So, as a favor to all small business owners who would like to take that very first step of buying a domain name for their website, I have compiled a list of rules to follow. Hopefully, this will prevent colleagues from performing the infamous “facepalm” gesture (as seen above) when you tell them the name of your “awesome” new site.

1. Short is Better

I promised “rules” so here they are. Try to keep the url at 3 words or less, but more importantly, I usually say 5 syllables or less. Despite the fact that your website or blog lives on a computer, mere humans eventually will utter is name. If you thought ReallyGreatDiscountCowboyFurniture.com was a good idea for your site’s name, think again. With domain names, less is more. Even less is even more.

Envoca.com is better than EnvocaDesign.com. Why go shorter? It leaves less room for a spelling error and frankly people are lazy. Plus, you can always go buy up those variations or your domain name and just have them redirect to your shorter url.

2. Keywords Are a Want, Not a Need

In the early days of SEO (mid to late 90’s) search engines placed a lot of imortance on the keywords in your site’s URL. StevesKnives.com always ranked better than StevesCutlery.com for the keyword “knives”. Today, this is not so much the case. Sure, Google will often favor exact matches on a domain name but having a website address of http://www.KeywordKeywordKeyword.com just doesn’t help as much as it used to. Therefore the rule is, “If you can fit keywords into your domain name for the site then great, if not, no big deal.” Try googling the phrase “shoe store“, you’ll see what I mean.

3. Avoid Hyphens

Once again, this rule comes back from the 90’s. Back in the day, when having a keyword in your address meant a lot, spammers took hyphens to the extreme. For spammers, not only would you set up KeywordKeywordKeyword.com, but also Keyword-Keyword-Keyword.com, and Keyword-KeywordKeyword.com. You get the idea. The reason real websites generally didn’t use hyphens at the time was because of website users.

For example, when you give someone your phone number you don’t say “five zero three dash four eight one dash…” You just say the numbers. Well, people do the same thing with websites. If you own a website at Great-Scooters.com and someone tells a friend about it, they will almost always go to GreatScooters.com, find that there is no website (or a competitors website), and you will lose business.

4. Stick to the .COMs

Unless you are a company outside the states your url should end in “.com”. Always. This rule is similar to the hyphen rule in the sense that when someone says “CoolSite.net” the second party almost always goes home and types “CoolSite.com”. The only businesses that can break this rule are the cutting edge tech websites that employ domain hacks such as del.icio.us, whom by the way, also uses delicious.com. Tech websites often have a user demographic narrow enough that they can get away with this sort of thing but your average online business does not.

5. Forget Acronyms

This rule comes down to an issue of branding. If your car dealership’s name is “Super Duper Discount Dodges”, do not try to get people to go to SDDD.com. At face value it has absolutely nothing to do with your brand. The exception to this rule is if your company name is “The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network” but your brand is know as “ESPN”, then that would be the case where you should set up ESPN.com. Aside from that, finding .COM domain names with 4 letter or less that are still available is almost impossible these days.

6. Shamelessly Push Your Brand

If you have put any effort into developing your brand up until this point, then now is the time to push it. Generally speaking, CorporateSuiteShoppe.com always gets more traffic and makes more sales than SuitesForLease.com. Brands that do well offline will always do better online if they use their brand to their advantage. Experience tells us that this is true more and more.

So, hopefully this has been helpful to anyone trying to venture out into the world of online marketing. If you have any specific questions as to what you should call your future website, feel free to contact us online here, or you can find me on twitter as @garrettgillas.

2010 is looking to be a whirlwind of a year for online marketing. With the internet appearing on more devices, as well as more types of devices, than ever before, businesses have and expanding variety of mediums to promote their business with. As always, there will be a select few that lead the pack by drawing hungry traffic to their websites like a pack of stampeding Spanish bulls. The following is a list of people and services to watch that I believe will make a tremendous impact in the next 12 months.

The Cheezburger Network (& founder Ben Huh)

If you have ever seen those cute images of cats with funny captions (like the one above) on the internet, chances are you’ve seen Ben’s work. Ben Huh has almost singlehandedly taken fragments of online culture and organized them into digital cash cows. Owning popular sites like icanhascheezburger and FAILBlog, Ben is able to forecast the types of online humor that people respond to. Following what The Cheezburger Network is up to gives online marketers the edge when deciding what types of content will be popular on their own sites and what will inevitably “#FAIL”.

Reason to watch: Capable of making just about anything with traffic profitable.

Google Webmaster Central Blog

If I had made this list last year this blog would have made the cut then as well. The Google Webmaster Central Blog is by far the best place for beginners to start leading about making websites “search engine friendly”. This blog is also where Google officially announces any news or changes that they might make to their core search service, which quite frankly, happens very frequently. Also, you might want to check out the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel for instructional videos as well.

Reason to watch: Most reliable SEO information for beginners.

SEOMOZ

CEO (and SEO) Rand Fishkin has been doing an excellent job at providing search marketers some of the best advice and tools on Search Engine Optimization. The blog at SEOMOZ features some of the most solid advice around and also features a wide selection of articles written by guest writers. Look to Rand in 2010 as we learn how to leverage the latest changes in real-time search and how to manipulate from them.

Reason to watch: Best SEO blog.

The Oatmeal (aka Matthew Inman)

This SEOMOZ veteran has basically taught us a masters class on what it means to create viral media in the last couple months. The comics an quizzes found on The Oatmeal have been a popular featured item on the news site Digg as well as twitter and the rest of the blogsphere. Although the content may be juvenile and ofter crude in nature with posts like “6 Reasons Bacon is Better Than True Love” you can bet that Inman will make the masses laugh out loud while wasting time at work.

Reason to watch: Linkbait Expert.

Twitter

Despite all of the hype that we have been hearing over the past year or so around twitter, expect to hear more of it this year. 2009 was the year of fruition and widespread adoption of Facebook. Everyone and their grandmother is on Facebook now (mine is and she’s 71). Expect to see the same thing happen for twitter this year. What does that mean for us? Expect to see more companies using it as a marketing tool. This means designing and setting up accounts, initiating and monitoring communications, reputation management, content creation and delivery, and much more. Anything that is of any importance or interest appears on twitter before anywhere else. It is a better form of consumer communication than just about anything else currently.

Reason to watch: It’s “the nervous system” of the internet.

So these are 5 of my major rescources to watch and utilize in the next year. If you are interested in what didn’t make the list or how to utilize these resources, feel free to follow me on twitter or contact us by email.

1. Bing Webmaster Center

The first problem that webmasters usually have with new sites is getting them indexed in the first place. When you submit a site to Bing it can often be slow to index it at first. Often, only part of the site will be in Bing’s index at first. This can be terribly detrimental to a site’s success if a critical launch date is a priority. Luckily, Bing’s webmaster center has an area where users can submit their own XML sitemap (more info here). This allows Bing to crawl a website more quickly and thoroughly.

For example, MTCutters, who sells High Speed Steel Tool Bits, came up #1 for their targeted phrease  ”Line Bore Measuring Tools” in Google the day after launch but not in the first page for Bing. With Bing Webmaster Center we were able to upload a sitemap and see it indexed the next day.

2. Utilize Bing Maps

In case you haven’t checked up Bing maps lately, Bing has been “Stealing The Crown” from Google when it comes to proving an online map service. Their new map beta is most impressive and we can expect them to take market share here if Google doesn’t do something quick.  Make sure that if your website has a physical address that it is listed on Bing Maps. All that this entails is typing in you business name and state into the search bar and see if it comes up.

3. Target Long Tail Opportunities

Bing makes it a little easier to be found using long tail keywords because of it’s “Related Searches” feature. Bing tries to help it’s users narrow down what they are looking for by suggesting more specific phrases that they might be looking for.

For example, Tape Man Blue, an online distributor of Blue painters tape, who was doing 100% of sales from Google and direct traffic. After we looked at the phrases that Bing was suggesting, we saw a 6% increase in sales from Bing within 2 weeks and allows us to diversify traffic for this online retailer.

4. Check Your Outlinks

This is actually a lesser known trick in the SEO world. By using the search operator “linkfromdomain” on bing, we can see all of the pages that a given site links to. By typing “linkfromdomain:envoca.com” into the search bar on Bing (Bing is the only search engine that supports this) we can see the quality and relevancy of sites that we are linking to. This is important for quality control purposes because it is quite common for sites to become hacked or spammed in such a way that they link to “bad neighborhoods” on the internet which will almost always make your site rank lower.

Also, if your site is having difficulty ranking for a specific subject or keyword, use this tool to make sure that the sites you are linking to contain that same subject or keyword. Search engines often judge a sites context by whom it associates with.

5. Tweet it

Bing and Google are currently racing to be the first and best at the “Real-Time Search” game. Bing is trying to establish itself as the engine that indexes social networks like Twitter and Facebook the quickest. One trick we often use to get a new page quickly indexed on bing is to post a link to it on twitter (see the image at right). Because Bing is clamoring to quickly index our tweets, they are also indexing links just as fast.

If you have any questions about the information above or optimizing a site for Bing in general, feel free to email us your question or post in the comments section below. We will be glad to answer any questions you might have.

One of the more crucial factors in getting a site to rank well on search engines that is often overlooked by webmaster is the process of

Not to say that a site can rank for a keyword solely based on how many links it has, content is still the #1 factor in determining what keywords a site will show up for in search results. However, the main purpose of acquiring links to a site is to make it rank higher in the field in which it is already established. This is often referred to as link authority or Google pagerank.

How Links Affect Pagerank

Google’s pagerank measurement tool is a feature embedded in the popular Google toolbar which rates a site’s authority on a scale of 1 to 10. There have been many attempts by people outside the Googleplex to determine just exactly how many links one needs in order to achieve a certain pagerank. Below is a table that illustrates an estimation of how many links you might need to achieve a certain pagerank.

By looking at the chart at left we can see that in order to achieve a pagerank of 5, a site would (in theory) need 555 links from sites with a pagerank of 3 or as few as 3 links from sites with a pagerank of 6. Thus we can conclude that not only is it good for a site to have a large quantity of links, but that it is also helpful if the sites linking are of a high pagerank themselves.

Aside from that, search engines are also concerned that sites are receiving links from a variety of sources. For example, if a Real Estate website has 100 links pointing to it that are all from twitter profiles, it might appear that a spammer is at work trying to promote the site. However, if a competing Real Estate site has 10 links pointing to it from sources such as a chamber of commerce website, an associate’s real estate blog, a home finder directory, etc… it will always rank higher than the site with 100 spammy links all from the same source.

Link Diversity

SEO guru Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ gave an excellent presentation this week on the importance of link diversity and how it affects your site.

Here at envoca, we make it a top priority to make our client’s sites appear as authoritative and trustworthy as possible so that they can rank high in search results. One of the services we provide is “SEO overhauls” for existing websites that need to be revamped in order to generate more traffic from Google.  If you would like to know what we can do to make your site get more search traffic feel free to contact us by email or give us a call.

It seems that Bing was the first to release a product to the public capturing the concept of “social search” by offering the website BingTweets.com which offers a mashup of Bing search results alongside what people are saying on twitter. Then, this past week, Bing officially announced that it would be partnering with both Facebook and Twitter to provide search results followed by Google making a similar announcement quickly thereafter.

With both Google and Bing gunning to be the first at implementing social networks into the core of their search algorithms, we can expect to see major changes in the way sites rank when people search for them. Without a doubt this has the potential to be the biggest game changer in online marketing in over a decade.

To find out more about Google’s entry to the social search arena, search guru Matt Cutts explains below how Google’s new experimental social search feature works.

“Why do I need SEO?” is a question that we at Envoca seem to hear a lot these days. Search engines like Google and Bing are making it easier and easier for normal people to get their sites listed so why should anyone hire a Search Engine Optimizer?

The truth is that while getting listed on search engines is easier than in the past, getting found by potential customers is harder than ever. The basic truth is that the more people that start to market themselves online the competition there is. As this happens, you site gets pushed down the list of millions of results that Google returns when people search for your product or service. Ever wonder who all of those sites belong to? People that haven’t invested the time and money in genuine SEO services.

Many people simply think that they can buy a book or read a blog on “How to Get Your Site to Rank #1 on Google” and suddenly their site will get tons of traffic. This could not be further from the truth. Saying that “Anyone Can Do SEO!” is not an entirely inaccurate term. It’s kind of like saying, “Anyone can rebuild an airplane engine.” or, “Anyone can be an astronaut.” or better even, “Anyone can lose 50 lbs in 2 week guaranteed!”. While none of those statements are entirely inconceivable, they are all fairly misleading. Some sources will even tell you that all you have to do is insert a secret line of code containing keyword into all of your pages and you will immediately see results.

Real Search Engine Optimization

The truth of the matter is that real agency’s that offer SEO services have to do a large variety of tasks to optimize a site to rank well. These tasks involve extensive competitive research, a variety of modifications to the actual website in question, as well as implementing many external features completely outside of the website itself.

Any good search engine marketer will be happy to give you a run-through of the process step-by-step, just as any good auto mechanic will be happy to tell you exactly what he is repairing and why. If you have any specific questions on what your site might need to rank better on Google feel free to give us a call at 888-301-9525 or email us.

1. Verify the Site

This first task is actually easier than it looks. In order for Google to know that you actually own the site, it is required that you prove it by copying a chunk of code into the top section of your homepage’s code of the site in question. You will need (FTP) access to your site’s code in order to do this or, as an alternative, you can simply name one of the files on your site the big, long string of gibberish that Google gives you.

2. Submit a Sitemap

This is another step where you have to work with code but don’t necessarily have to know how to read it. All you need to do is submit you site to one of the many automatic sitemap generator websites and upload the XML file that they give you to where your website is hosted. After that, you will need to tell google where it is by entering the location in webmaster tools (see image).

3. Adjust Your Settings

This step will hep you let Google know how you want it to handle your site. If your site is specifically for a certain country, select one in the “Target users” area. Tell Google if you want your website displayed with or without the “www” by using the “preferred domain” feature. Lastly, if your site has a lot of pages or is new on the internet you might want to increase the crawl rate by using the slider bar provided. You will notice that if you have not verified your site by completing step 1 above, you will not be able to adjust these settings.

4. Check Your Sitelinks

If your site is already getting a fair amount of traffic, you might notice that when you search for your site online, Google will display several internal links for your site below the main one. These are called “sitelinks”. If you would like to change these you can do so by clicking on the sitelinks tab on the side of your webmaster tools account.

5. Crawl Errors

This tab will help you determine if you have accidentally removed any of your files from Google’s index. This is usually not a problem but if you have been tinkering with your robots.txt file this will help you identify any potential problems.

6. HTML Suggestions

The HTML Suggestions panel is where Google helps you identify flaws in your code that might be keeping you from appearing as high as you would like on their search results. The most common mistake that new website owners make is either forgetting to name their pages with the <title> tag or accidentally naming all of their pages the same thing. This panel will help you identify this type of problem and perform corrective actions.

Managing Webmaster Tools accounts is one of the many web design services that we perform here at Envoca. If you have still having trouble with webmaster tools after reading this guide feel free to email us with any questions that  you might have.

Drupal Camp PDX

Drupal Camp PDX 2009 is being held October 9-11 at NedSpace Old Town, right above Backspace at NW 5th & Davis in Old Town Portland. The Conference planners state that, “DrupalCamp PDX is a unconference…developed entirely by the camp participants – you and your fellow Drupalers.”

For those who are unfamiliar with Drupal, it is a Content Management System (CMS) that allows owners of a website to add pages and make changes to websites that have been created by professional web developers. We have found that our clients have been wanting this more and more in recent years and will soon be adding Drupal as an additional CMS option alongside Wordpress and osCommerce for our clients.

IT Professional and Developer Technical Briefing Portland

This event will be the official Portland developers launch event for Windows 7 and will be held on October 14th. The IT Professional and Developer Technical Briefing Portland will be a chance for us to learn some some the new and interesting things that are going on with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. On top of that, it will be a great chance to meet fellow Portland area web developers and hear how they are building their web applications on the Microsoft stack.

Bend WebCAM

The Bend WebCAM (Web + Creative And Marketing) Conference will be held October 15th-16th and will most likely be Oregon’s best web marketing event this year. There are several speakers attending that I have heard before and a handful of others that are very prominent in the web marketing industry. Among them will be online marketing heavyweights Chris Winfield, David Snyder, Jim Riswold and Rhea Drysdale. This is by far the highest quality of speakers that you will find in one place on the subject of online marketing speaking in the pacific northwest. They are among the most successful and prominent web marketers worldwide and they are presenting in Bend of all places.

Startup Weekend Corvallis

After attending Startup Weekend Redmond at the Microsoft Campus this last August, I am now officially hooked on the concept of having to start a company in under 72 hours. Startup Weekend Corvallis is one of a series of competitions where developers, designers, and marketers all compete to create a successful startup over the course of a weekend. This particular event will be held in Corvallis October 23-25.

Edit: This event has been postponed to December 4-6th

The idea is that many successful startups (at least in the web/software industry) are created very quickly by relentless individuals that despise sleep and thrive on caffeine. What better way to launch a company (or at least practice) than to do so with a group of complete strangers, over a short weekend, while competing for thousands of dollars in prize money and/or venture capital? I can honestly say that I learned more about business models, teamwork, coding, and development in one day the last startup weekend than in any other given week of my life.

If you are attending one of the events above or would like to know more about what we are up to, send us an email and we will be happy to talk about it with you further.

Staying Ahead of the Curve – The Hydroxycut Recall

On the morning of May 1, 2009 the FDA announced that the popular diet drug Hydroxycut was to be recalled due to severe cases of liver damage and the risk of death. Several of our clients are law firms who handle pharmaceutical injury lawsuits and wanted to be able to take the cases of people injured by this drug as soon as possible. We have found that these days, when people need a lawyer, they look on the internet to find one. Therefore, it was important to us to make sure that people searching online for a Hydroxycut lawyer found our clients on Google as soon as possible.

Because we are heavily interested in serving our clients, we receive notifications directly from the FDA and the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission) regarding product recalls that could directly affect our clients. So on the morning of the recall we immediately began working on getting the information that consumers need regarding the drug recall and their rights online. Within 24 hours we had successfully created a series of resources across multiple websites that helped Hydroxycut victims find an available personal injury lawyer, depending on their case and the state that they lived in.

With the combination of quality copy writing, SEO practices, PPC ads and a quick turnaround time we were able to put our clients well ahead of the competition. Most competing law firms had to wait several weeks for production after having to “put a call in to the web guy who should have something by the end of the month”.

The trade show was open so I got a few minutes to chat with the folks working on Bing’s up-and-coming mobile search platform as well as WYS from Google who is known online as “that guy who does the Google webmaster videos with Matt Cutts.” In the afternoon I got to sit in on a panel that included 3 of the top 5 people involved in SEO in the world namely Bruce Clay, Michael Gray, and Aaron Wall. Then in the evening, WebmasterRadio.fm put on their Search Bash after party where the industry’s movers and shakers were able to well…move and shake together.

The Latest and Greatest

The most useful session for me so far has to be the panel on SEO tools I got to attend where the top industry experts shared what they are using for deploying, monitoring and maintaining their own personal search campaigns. Aaron Wall’s set of tools is continuing to be one of the most impressive set of SEO resources that are currently available as a side note at one point Bruce Clay admitted that he uses some of Aaron’s tools quite frequently. This was amusing since both parties are directly in competition with one another in some areas. Michael Gray’s presentation of tools was more diverse and gave a lot of good advice on avoiding some of the pitfalls that more intermediate to advanced SEO’s fall into.

The Future of SEO

One thing that everyone seems to be emphasizing is that the saying that “SEO is dead” could not be further from the truth. The obvious trend is that the search landscape is definitely changing and will continue to change drastically in the next couple years. The thing to remember is that search engines will always rank sites and that as long as that is happening there will be a need for SEO’s to get your site to the top of those rankings. The industry leaders will simply be the ones who optimize their clients for these new mediums first.