The Click Depot Blog

Backups are necessary. We just talked about that in the previous post. I talked about Aronis True Image. Acronis is great to get a backup of your computer - incluging the OS, files, applications, Etc. OK, but where do you put your backups? Most people backup to an external hard drive or DVD’s that are stored right in the shelf next to the computer. While that might be OK in 99% of the cases, there is always that unfortunate chance that your entire office or home gets in the path of a hurricane, flood or forest fire. Now we sincerely hope that no such thing happens to you, but you’ll sleep better knowing that your most imporant personal and business data is protected in such a situation. Keeping your backups off-site is the way to go. Sooner done the better.

Cost for off-site backups used to be high in the past. Most often you’d need a dedicated server and end up costing thousands of dollards annually. Now that’s a thing of the past. Welcome to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is a web-service based offering by Amazon. Amazon has a tremendously powerful website as you know at Amazon.com. It gets more traffic than all websites in Raleigh put together perhaps and more complex features than most websites on the Internet and millions of vendors selling their products on their website. A fully automated product management and inventory management capability and the ability to provide guarantees on price, shipping, delivery and a solid feedback mechanism. To run all that is no simple task. They have thousands of servers in state-of-the-art data centers and configurations that few people in the world can image. Such capability meant that they are experts in not just selling online but also on IT infrastructure. They are also experts on webservices and one of the first to bring serious ones to the market that allow other people to create stores using amazon products for an affiliate commission.

As a smart company, they decided to put those 2 fields of expertise to use - web service and IT infrastructire. And that gave birth to Amazon S3 and we’re sure you are going to hear a lot more about it in the future. In essence it’s a service that makes it easy to trasfer your files from your PC or your website to Amazon via a high-bandwidth connection (which is a BIG deal, because uploads over the internet are generally slow, which makes it difficult to upload a large amount to data off-site on a regular basis). And the best part is that it’s cheap. At about 20 cents per GB of storage, it’s really cheap for the kind of protection that Amazon offers. No wonder many are using it already since the launch in 2006.

Several companies such as Seco backup and EzS3 have tools available that make it easy to use Amazon’s service. This is a handy list of amazon s3 tools. Jungle Disk and Backup Manager are perhaps the leading ones in the PC and Mac home backup market.

Another benefit of Amazon S3 is saving storage space. I used to have tons of unused storage space at home. Hard disks, DVD’s, zip drives that are hardly used, etc. Each of them would have some backup that I did at some point and I didn’t want to risk deleting them so they kept taking up space. Another problem with website backups is that once your website becomes slightly larger (500 MB - 1 GB storage or more), downloading the website’s files on a regular basis for backup takes forever and breaks all the time due to network issues. Having automatic backups with Amazon S3 takes care of both of those issues for the most part.

Give it a serious thought. You set it up once and forget. Worth the money and highly recommended!

Marketing for small business often means working with a print company to print some coupons, fliers, postcards, brochures and sending it out to a million people. Of course, you have a website that does nothing for you other than help people find directions to your shop front once in a while. You think most people want to call you anyway so you are OK with that. Well, things have changed.

Small business is not really that easy anymore. Especially in recessions, there are large number of startups from people that have lost their jobs. You need to get creative with your marketing ideas to be able to survive and thrive. And the best part, it’s a LOT of fun. It’s like playing a game of Age of Empires - you plan and implement strategies and gauge results - which means more money! OK, I got a little carried away there - Age of Empires is not as much fun as creative marketing is

So what is creative marketing? Well, it’s trying to stay ahead of the curve. Ten years ago, having a website that was used effectively was creative marketing. Today, that’s a necessity. Creative marketing today is finding ways to reach your clients that few people in your market are doing. Here are some examples:

1. Search Engine Optimization is one such way, which is actually fast becoming  necessity. You optimize your websites for certain key phrases. Create specific content on your site that is targeted at new key phrases that are emerging in your market space. This helps you create new market share on an active ongoing basis.

2. Dynamic businesses thrive in today’s market. Frequent change is liked by customers and they think of you more often that way. You also reach a broader audience since different offers may fly with different people. A new coupon or offer every week on your website or print newsletter.

3. Give stuff away that’s useful in your target market. Easiest way to make inroads in a market that has many players already. Make it fun too. For instance, if you have website, use your developer’s help to create a sweepstakes giveaway that includes  a slot machine. Visitors click on the slots and if they win, they get something from your products or services free. To play, they enter their email - now you can market to them after they leave. Email marketing is not creative marketing anymore - it’s a must. But finding creative ways to get your leads’ email in a safe, non-intrusive manner is where the creativity comes in.

If this sounds like too much work for you, talk to us. We can work out a creative marketing package for you and help you stand out!

There are 2 ways to get a online store quickly. Either get a software product such as CRE Loaded or OScommerce, and host your website on your own domain or get a store using a hosted service such as the Ystore by Yahoo. In recent days, YStore has risen in popularity, for a few reasons.

1. YStore is hosted and services/software, Etc. are managed by Yahoo. Even for tech-savvy webmasters, managing regular security upgrades on the software is a challenge. Additional modules and third party components are great, often free, but ensuring that they work well with your site is really left up to you. And then when the site gets hacked (which does happen to regular sites, trust me!) bringing the site back up is perhaps the craziest time you’ll spend behind a computer. Leaving that up to the experts is often a good idea in the long run. Ystore is a very reasonably priced hosted solution considering that it’s backed by the world’s #2 Internet company.
2. Creating products is a piece of cake with Ystore. Most fields can be entered into a spreadsheet and uploaded into the site. Images can be uplaoded easily as well.
3. Ystore comes with a whole bunch of features for promoting your products online, analyzing sales, search keyword data, Etc. This is a useful thing to have from a single dashboard. As against other offerings where you will need to usually deal with a separate product or third party for many of those features.
4. Optimizing Ystore for search engines is simple. You don’t even need to know HTML. Just log into Store Editor, edit each page, enter the Page title and meta tags into their fields, that’s it. Now, to know what to enter into those fields needs some knowledge of SEO concepts and keyword research. But a good SEO company should be able to do that for you.

Now, not everything is that perfect about the Ystore and you should know that before you jump in.

Ystore makes YStore for novice store owners. Sometimes that can be a bad thing. For instance, it’s not easy to change the URL of a page once you enter it once. According to several sources, changing product URL’s requires changing the product ID and a re-upload of the catalog, which can end up breaking the existing incoming links to the site. To my knowledge, URL redirects for Ystore URL’s is not easy either. We are still researching some of these issues, but as we do that, we are realizing that there is not enough information about Ystore SEO on the Internet. There are several companies that will do it for you, but charge heavily. Yahoo’s help section is not too useful. The help results include items from Yahoo Small Business, Yahoo Merchant Solutions and other sites, so finding the aritlce that applies to the Ystore can get challenging sometimes.

Overall, Ystore is a great offering. Our recommendation is that if you are planning to create a store using Ystore, consult with a reliable online marketing company about SEO upfront. Doing that upfront is much easier.

OK, you have a hundred bucks and want to get the biggest online marketing bang. What should you do? Unfortunately, here goes the answer that you did not want to hear - it depends. And here’s why.

Depending on what site you have and who your target audience is, this answer is going to be different. So let’s say you are Joe The Plumber in Raleigh, North Carolina. And say you have a website that does not get any sales for you at present. Then, fortunately, you don’t even need $100, you just need your own time to get started.

Go to maps.google.com, maps.live.com and claim your business. Fill out as much information as possible on your profile and then send your business’s link in Google Maps to each customer that you interact with, requesting a review. You might even want to include it in your email signature. Soon, you’ll find people that search the internet for plumbers calling you. $100 can buy you this as well. Just call any good small-medium online marketing company and they can do this for you. Or just hire a college student and most of them will know how to get that done. Once you are done with that, seriously, consider revamping your website and getting a nice-looking, fast-loading, effective, simple website. That’s easier said than done, but is guaranteed to take your business to the next level. Once you have that website, call the marketing company and ask them to optimize your website for Google. You are on your way to online fame.

Now, if you are a small business that already has a useful good useful website, then the best use of $100/month is to buy a listing with YellowPages.com or even better, a few niche directory in your domain that get a lot of hits. Some other generic sites are superpages.com, infousa.com, Etc. A good way to find how many visitors these sites get is by going ot compete.com and comparing such sites. Listings in good directories are useful in 3 ways. First, people visit these sites directly to search for businesses. Secondly, these sites often have print publications and you can buy space on that as part of the overall contract. Finally, the category pages on these sites often rank well on Google and other search engines. That’s possibly the maximum that you can get from $100 in this situation.

Finally, if you are a small business that’s already popular and on Yellow pages and directories, then the best use of $100 is possibly to get a good online marketing company to optimize your website for keywords that your potential visitors are searching for. This is more like a $100-$500 per month kind of expense, but if they build a sufficient number of quality links pointing to your website, your site will rank well on Google driving targeted traffic to the site. This is an ongoing cost, but also guarantees a good healthy supply of NEW ongoing leads. If you’ve been in business you know that there is always a cost for acquiring a new customer. Doing is this way is possibly the most cost efficient if done correctly.

Hope these tips will help you take your small business to the next level.

Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing are established businesses these days and there are dozens of such firms in every major city in the US. Well, there are many many more online that don’t even have an office or a registered company. These so called Internet Marketers operate from home and some don’t even have a website. Nothing wrong with any of that, except that many of them also end up scamming you. Long story short, they don’t know what they are doing, claim things that aren’t true, make promises that they can’t deliver and overall, end you up in a mess. Unfortunately, many SEO firms are the same way too.

So, how do you know if your Internet Marketer or SEO firm is scamming you?

5. Do they have a website? Is their website optimized for Search Engines?

You will be surprised how many Internet Marketers operate without a website. A company’s website says a lot about how much time and effort they’ve invested into a business. Especially for an Internet business, their website will reflect what they know about the business too. For instance, if their own website is optimized for search engines and is ranking well for their key search term, then that says that the company couldn’t have been formed yesterday and probably has a good track record. That doesn’t guarantee that they will do a good job for you, but at least gives you one more reason to believe that they are real and professional. An easy way to tell if their website is optimized for search engines is to look for the basics - Are their page URL’s full of giggerish or do they have user-friendly words in them? Do their pages load quickly or do they take forever? Take the first few words from the page title on their home page and search using those terms on google. Do you see their website?

4. Is the firm registered with BBB?

BBB - Better Business Bureau is a good place to look for compaints against a company. If your SEO firm has a whole bunch of complaints, they are obviously not a good choice.

3. Do they have “too many” good reviews?

Back in the day, to review any service, all you had to do was go to Google and type <Service name> review. Not anymore. These days, there are tons or sites that write paid reviews. So, chances are that your SEO firm used some of those paid sites to get good reviews. In fact, if you see too many “too good to be true” reviews or testimonials, I would actually take that as a negative.

2. Do they use good SEO and Internet Marketing practises?

Do they use black-hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, Etc.? Do they buy email lists and spam them? Important - where do they stand on SEO ethics? Do they think that it’s OK to get to the top of the search engine by hook or by crook or do they stand by their morals. The reason why this is important is that most long-lasting SEO companies understand the importance of ethics to thier business. There will always be a gray area, but the ‘whiter’ you are, the better your chances of success. The good SEO companies know that. A good way to find out is to suggest to the company that you WANT them to use black hat techniques. If they agree, you’d know.

1. What does their Internal setup look like?

There are way too many “SEO firms” out there that actually have ZERO employees. The one person shops outsource everything. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, it could be a smart business move. Do they have any sales people? How many dedicated resources do they have internally? Do they offer a timeliness guarantee? These questions will help you determine whether the company can meet your SEO and Internet Marketing expectations.

Do not hestitate to ask these questions to your prospective SEO company. Better safe than sorry, right?

Apple, Microsoft and Google inevitably end up locking horns with each other. Apple and Microsoft have been rivals for over 25 years now and it can be said that, for the most, part, Microsoft won the battle of the computer titans. Apple re-invented themselves with their i-vision. ipods, itough, iphone, imac, macbook pro, Etc. and before you knew, Apple was hot again - how many Apple devices do you and your family together have (including old versions that you upgraded)? You might be surprised to see that most families now have more Apple devices than any other hardware manufacturer. But is all that about to change with Google Android and G1? Well, we think YES. And here’s why.

Search is important to Google and we all know that. They are a $100 Billion market-cap company and 95% of that is from search-related revenues. The mobile business is taking off, we know that because in Europe and Asia, which is generally behind the curve on innovation compared to the US, but when it comes to the use of mobile phones, they are way ahead. As US catches up, there is a huge market here that Google will want to tap. Internal sources in Google  bloggers reveal that they are taking this mobile thing VERY seriously. It’s obvious, as people switch to using the mobile phone for more and more of their general internet browsing needs, searches will move to that area and that’s where the money will be as well.

The PC operating system market went to Microsoft, Google wasn’t even born then. But here’s their second chance, and possibly bigger than the first one due to the ready availability of a huge market with limited competition, compared to Microsoft’s challenge of creating a market for their products 20 years ago. This time Google’s biggest competitor is not Microsoft though, it’s Apple!! Yes, iPhones are amazing and are arguably the most advanced cell phones for entertainment purposes out there. Google is releasing the Andriod operating system which takes that to the next level. It packs entertainment features alongside with great search and easy emailing features. Things that most people also want in addition to just pictures and music. They now have it all - the #1 search engine in the world, ($$$) a great mobile operating system (OS) and the G1 phone (Hardware). Sounds like a winning combination to me. Iphones are great, but when search the ‘net on them, you really don’t feel like clicking on ads like you do when searching on the PC. G1 is optimized for Google Search more than any other device.

So, as I saw the new G1 phone advertised on the Google home page and on the Tmobile phone upgrades site, I was forced to think - is this it? Is this going to change everything. If Google ends up capturing a few million people that are G1 fans and can’t stop talking about it and actually start clicking on ads, this could change a lot of things in the search and mobilie advertising market. And we think it will.

So, if you are a small or even large business and like to stay ahead of the curve on markteing, here’s your chance. Invest in mobile and search advertising today..

Whether or not you have a brick and mortar store, it is vital to ensure your web site is ranked well in searches for your local area. What does this mean? What matters is that your website has organic visibility across multiple search engines when searches are conducted for your most prized keywords and key phrases. We wrote a post about this recently - raleigh internet marketing

With millions of companies competing for top 10 placements for their products and services, local search engine optimization provides a competitive advantage as well as allows consumers to conveniently shop locally as a result of using the web to locate the best deals.

In addition, local internet consumers are prone to shopping locally and prefer working with local businesses. The advantages are options like (a) checking their references (b) performing due diligence (c) establishing trust or (d) meeting in person to finalize deals are easier compared to a national organization.

For example, if you own a dry cleaning business, potential customers want to not only see your prices; they want directions and a map to get to your store. Even in the face of a global economy more and more people are realizing the importance of community and want to give their business to local merchants.

Here are some ideas to improve Organic Ranking of your site on web.

5. Link to Local City Searches

List your company with CitySearch. CitySearch is a major provider of local information for sites including MSN.com, Ask.com, Expedia.com, Ticketmaster.com, and many others. Also consider listing on http://www.superpages.com, http://www.infousa.com, http://www.yellowpages.com, http://www.magicyellow.com and http://www.directorym.com

4. Add Contact information on your site

Have a physical address and phone number within an address tag at least on your contact page and one other page; the best option would be the homepage. By far the best option is to have your address on all pages of your site. Such information builds trust rank value for your web site too.

Search engines pay particular attention to proximity as well as keyword density (the number of times the keyword appears) as well as proximity to other keywords or qualifiers. A qualifier is a term like services, company, professional, expert, affordable, specialist, etc. and are used specifically to (a) add relevance to your keywords or (b) assist your positioning when people use them in search queries.

3. Use the city name and abbreviation of the state in the title or description tag

Pages are interpreted and indexed with the in title, in anchor and in text so understanding this provides one more unique opportunity to construct your pages in accordance to standards which are known to affect how search engines rank and respond to your content.

2. Submit your company’s listing

Submit listing to some top directories like Yelp, Insider Pages, City Squares.com, and MojoPages.com. Submit to Internet Yellow Pages like SuperPages.com, Yellow Pages, Info Space, and Switchboard.com. Submit to Local Search Engines like Google local Business Centre, Yahoo! Local Merchant, and Ask Business Search. Submit your company to Data Providers like Geosign Corporation, Info USA Sales Solution.

1. Add the qualifiers or specific geographic terms

This rule applies if you have qualifiers in the title, description and page, then solidifying the affect of the collective goal of the page for the sake of word density can be accomplished. For an added kick, hyperlink the main terms in the footer on every other page and point them to your about us page, which usually has the highest concentration of local and geographic information.

Bonus Tip: Hyper link the city and function of your web page

When employing links, the less the better for the strength of the link, also the higher up on the page a link is placed, the higher relevance it garners.

First of all, what are backlinks? Backlinks are simply links pointing to a page. So why are they not called just links? Well, you could call them that, but looking at it from your site’s perspective, you have links on your page, for instance, this link to the best raleigh internet marketing company (ok, i had to insert some propaganda, afterall, i want to make money too is an outbound link whereas any links pointing to this page (like the one you should add on your blog is a backlink.

Backlinks are also called inlinks (by Yahoo), inbound links (by Google) and so on.

So why are they so important? Read this post about search engine ranking factors and you’ll see that we said quality backlinks are the #1 factor in ranking pages higher on organic search results. Quality backlinks can skyrocket your website’s popularity and help your drive tremendous amounts of web traffic to your site. If you are serious about your business, whether is is online of offline, you need to know how to generate quality backlinks for your site. For that you first need to know what quality backlinks are.

Here you go, the seven qualities of a quality backlink:

1. Popularity: The page where the link is situated should be popular. In other words, that page should in turn have a lot of quality backlinks itself. It is emperically proven that SE’s look at at least 2 degrees of link popularity to determine rankings. Google page rank is a good measurement of the popularity of a page even though these days its accuracy is being questioned. So, if this is all too confusing for you then just know that you should get at least a few links from pages that have a google page rank that is higher than your page.

2. Outbound links: The page that you are getting backlinks from should not have too many outbound links on it. The recemmended number is 25 of less, in general. This is what makes the links from directories relatively less useful since directories typically have several dozen links on one page.

3. Age: The older the link that is pointing to your page, the better. This way search engines know that you are not buying links temporarily form a website to drive your link popularity.

4. Do Follow: Some websites mark some of their links as NO FOLLOW within their HTML coding or using other SEO techniques. They usually do this to avoid spam. No follow links are basically avoided by search engines when they determine rankings for a certain page.

5. Relevance: The link should be on a domain that is relevant to yours. It is increasingly becoming apparent that search engines understand link neighborhoods. In other words, if you are florist website and get a link from a website that talks about flowers, the link has more weightage than a link from a car mechanic shop. Now, your car mechanic might genuinely love the flowers he buys from you, but say sorry to him, search engines don’t really like his link all that much.

6. Location: Links that are mingled inside content (also called content links) are better than links that are on the footer or the header of sites or on a popup window for instance.

7. One way: Now this should actually rank pretty high up in this list but it’s down here because it is sort of obvious these days. Reciprocal links are less useful towards the link popularity of your website than one way links.

Now that you know what quality backlinks are, your next goal should be to find out how to get them. There are a lot of resources on the web that talk about this, but I’ll give you my 2 cents in a future post..

Pricing Search Engine Optimization campaigns has always been a touchy subject. Even though this field is almost a decade old now, there are almost no standards or regulating bodies. No certifications and no way to differentiate the best from the amateur other than their own claims. Given that, pricing often tends to be the differentiator. Most SEO businesses do not reveal their pricing. And I am not just saying that. A simple google search for “best seo companies” results in several companies. I just picked the first five sponsored ads. Let’s look at these sites -

http://www.rankforsales.com/seo-company.html

http://www.yourwebgurus.com/contact.html

http://www.949inc.com/lp/SEO/Search-Engine-Optimization-Orange-County.php

http://www.clickresponse.net/search-engine-optimization-service.htm

http://www.evisionworldwide.com/

Based on the fact that they show up on the top sponsored ads on Google, you would think that they are on top of their work, right? Well, don’t be so sure. NOT ONE of them provides their pricing information online. When you send them a request for a quote, they almost NEVER return with a $$$ number. It will only be more questions, a sales person calling you and after the same old “we can make you a million” sales pitch, they reveal a quote based on how much you can afford. NOT based on the results that they are promising. That’s what’s so bad about this market.

Based on experience, I can tell you that there are way too many so-called Top SEO companies out there that don’t know what they are doing. This market changes on a daily basis. Most SEO companies don’t take the time to learn, to experiment. They simply lack the passion to stay on top. When it comes to SEO, it is a war out there. #1 on search results is everything. You cannot afford to be with SEO companies that do not realize that.

At The Click Depot, we are trying to level the field. We are trying to make it easy for anyone to KNOW what their online spending is going to be. Our pricing is on our website. It is the same whether you are a millionaire with a hundred websites or a newbie turning to Internet Marketing for the first time. Take a look. If you are an SEO reading this, I would love to hear your thoughts about our pricing and my comments. I invite heated debate.

We at The Click Depot are attempting to mak