The wind is cranking for our local Hood River wind sports, BBQ’s are bountiful and camping trips are still eminent for the summer, but before we know it, it will be holiday season and great planning for online retail sales starts now.

One of the biggest truths in online sales for the holiday is that visitors decide at a glance whether or not to explore. If someone is looking for a holiday gift to inspire and they don’t see anything relative to the holidays, they’ll leave. Period. Update your product catalog to include your holiday products and specials. Add holiday ideas and creative to your home page storefornt.

Simplicity counts. Your guests have a lot to do during the holidays. Make their shopping experience simple and straight forward.

Be concise about timing. Under promise and over deliver, if it will take 4 days to ship, tell your customers it will take 5 and they’ll be pleased when they see it in 4. Your customers just want the straight scoop.

Understand Lifetime Value of a Customer (LVC). Getting a new customer in the door with a special with a low profit margin works for some businesses. Understand your LVC. If your visitors don’t repeat, know that you have to make margin on the first and only sale. But if your customers repeat, know that your great product, customer service and follow up business have impact to your bottom line and take that into account when you’re defining ROI for an online campaign.

Analyze site metrics. What do your customers do online? If you know that a particular landing page drives traffic, leads and sales, use that landing page to help drive sales during the holidays. Know how your visitors use your site and drive traffic there through natural and paid search.

Reward your customers. What better time than the hollday to thank your customers for being customers? Include a special sample pack or added value item for your repeat customers during the holidays. This simple gesture will gain you favor and loyalty.

And finally, plan now. Don’t wait until the beginning of November to make your holiday plans, then it’s too late. Decide now how you’ll communicate with your visitors during the holiday. Do it now while the sun shines and the thoughts of snow and Christmas cookies are a distant inevitability. You never know how inspired the summer can make you until you try.

View our YouTube for Oregon Winery-Cathedral Ridge Winery and find the answer to getting a free glass of award winning wine at this perfect spot for your next Hood River Oregon Wine Tour.

We have a client who came to us in March to help procure a Reconsideration Request from Google. De-indexing and reconsideration at Google is not a simple feat. Google reconsideration and religion have a lot in common. Many faiths (as with many search engines) have the same premise, be good and you will be rewarded.

It’s not always clear what the rules are or where you stand. Just as in religion there is no real criteria to assess (in real time and with a tracking system) if you’re on the right track. “I’ve been a good person, but I kicked a dog once, lied to my mom and told the neighbor girl I liked her new haircut when I didn’t. Am I still going to Heaven?” “I’ve cleaned up my irrelevant links, removed the offending page and created some great content. Am I going to get back into Google?” It’s hard to know sometimes when good is good enough, in religion and in Google’s index.

So here you are, abiding fairly closely to what you know the Google rules to be then one day BAM, you wake up to find that your site can’t be found on Google…anywhere, not even for your own business name. What have you done to fall from grace?

In my clients’ case they had an SEO (whom they thought to be legitimate) do some linking that turned out to be enormously questionable. The links were no or low PageRank links from irrelevant sites and useless directories unrelated to their industry. In addition, they had a links page where people could submit reciprocal links for consideration. While our client denied all unrelated or spammy links, the people requesting the links often put up a low quality link in advance of the request. This resulted in more low quality links pointing at their site. The links page was removed as soon as the client understood the problem.

So what do they do? They haven’t been de-indexed, they can still be found for their name, but they’ve been at the very least sandboxed. They have been practically invisible on Google for three years despite good rankings in all other search engines. We understand they’re in trouble with Google, we’ve completed a Reconsideration Request following Google Guidelines months ago and nothing has happened. They’re in purgatory, but for how long?

So as a test of the Google Reconsideration Request process (and as a test of faith) here is our Twelve Step Plan That Should Help You Get a Reconsideration (or Out of the Sandbox) from Google.

1) Admit you have a problem: During our initial site review and assessment we knew what the problem was, they have a lot of irrelevant links (initially over 1000 and we now have it down to 644).

I love Rand Fishkin’s link popularity platform question, “If this link didn’t help you gain search ranking would you still pursue it?” That’s a great question to ask yourself. Don’t pursue links that don’t make sense. Know that Google likes for you to have links which are relevant to your business and industry and that add value for your customers. If a link doesn’t fall into this category, don’t pursue it. We needed to admit to Google that, yes, they had pursued hundreds of links that weren’t relevant. Be honest, tell Google what you did. My clients’ intention wasn’t to be fraudulent, it was to grow his business. He was led down the wrong path by a questionable vendor. Maybe he should have known better (if it’s too good to be true it probably is) but he went down this path and now he’s asking to be led down the path of righteousness with only good, relevant, authority links.

2) Get educated: Read reputable online magazines, blogs, forums and guides. Attend search marketing conferences such as SMX, SES and our local SearchFest or SEMPDX Events.

3) Change what you can: We asked for removal of about 1/3 of the links, we removed the offending link page, and stepped up our efforts to obtain relevant links.

4) Create more content: We added a blog, requested customer product reviews and posted relevant and very helpful how to guides.

5) Change your domain: We’re not pursuing this path as the client has a prospering business on the other engines and doesn’t want to lose all search placement. But this has been cited as a viable option.

6) Review metrics: Do what you can to be a good site that people want to visit and transact. Google doesn’t really include this element in their guidelines, but it can’t hurt. This client has a better than average bounce rate, good converting landing pages, a 2% conversion rate, a high approval rating from their customers and repeat visits. Though this may not gain them reconsideration, they can sleep well knowing they are being good and fair business owners.

7) Pursue high authority links: Remember that all links are not created equal. Pursue a link like you’d pursue a friendship or a life partner. I’m going to be stuck with this link, am I sure I want to be associated with this link, everyone will know I’m associated with this link. You’re known for the company you keep, in life and in linking.

Learn from your mistakes: As we right our wrongs, recognize why what you did was wrong. Don’t make the same mistake again as you will be less likely to be forgiven.

9) Get recommendations from industry leaders: Search Marketing is still in the process of having real standardization. It’s still refining itself as a discipline and it’s important to reach out to industry leaders for advice. Attend conferences and get advice from the best and the brightest. Hire a reputable firm or at least pay for some consulting time with a reputable firm (don’t just ask your cousin Harry’s best friend Tim who works with a girl who does some SEO on the side). Don’t leave something as precious as your online reputation in the hands of someone who hasn’t proven themselves in the discipline.

10) Be patient: This can be the hardest part. My client has been “in the sandbox” for three years. He has created a viable business, but doesn’t have access to over 60% of the market. My client has chosen to be patient as he waits for word (which may or may not come as Google does not tell you whether or not you are sand-boxed, or communicate the status of your reconsideration request).

11. Accept the things you cannot change: Pursue as much search traffic as you can on other engines and be in acceptance that all you can do is try to be good enough and be patient. To Google’s benefit, one of the reasons they provide such exceptional results and have such market share is that they don’t tolerate spamming or paid linking just for inclusion. Accept that you’ve done all you can and hope that they’ll eventually respond positively and you’ll get back in their good graces.

12. Don’t give up–Persistence pays: Google isn’t interested in your quick fix. When they return a search result to their visitors they are saying that they trust the site and it is worthy enough to share with their customers. Respect that they are just doing their job and don’t give up. Just as in religion, if you’re a good person and there isn’t a heaven (or removal from the sandbox) you won’t be sorry for the efforts you’ve made to be a good person or good website owner. The payback either way is too big, don’t give up. We’re not sure when good is good enough, but we’ll share our results with you.

Thank you to Rand Fishkin and members of the SEMPDX board for their help and contribution towards our efforts.

Of all the strategies that are used to implement good search engine optimization, keywords are the most foundational and often times the most misunderstood.

Not all keywords are created equal.

The value of a keyword includes how often it is visited as well as how closely that keyword matches searcher intention. The final benchmark for that keyword is the results it yields for your business goals.

Happily, search marketers are moving away from straight keyword ranking and placement and more towards a Return On Investment model. It doesn’t matter if your keywords generate a lot of volume if you’re not matching that searcher intention with your business objective. If this sounds a little complicated, you’re right, it often times is complicated and it takes more than just one pass of keyword research.

Spend some time creating your keyword list. Then continue to spend time monthly reviewing the traffic generated from those keywords and monitor how those visitors use your site. Optimizing your site for a keyword, especially a competitive keyword, is a lot of time and work. You want to make sure that the keywords you are optimizing for are getting you the end result that you desire. Don’t just let your sales team define for you what your website keywords should be. The process of selecting and optimizing for keywords needs to be methodical and it takes time and effort.

You might be surprised to know that keyword relevance is even more important than the volume of traffic that keyword generates. Spend time optimizing for keywords that drive profit not volume.

Investment in good Keyword Research is the cornerstone of great Search Engine Optimization and Marketing.

Delivering 100,000 targeted prospects to your website in 24 hours for just $19.95

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You’ve seen the ads on Google, Yahoo and MSN ad networks, you’ve received the emails. Please tell me you don’t buy this.

As in every profession, there are charlatans. Making promises they’ll never fulfill, it’s to be expected. But what’s not expected is that bright people running successful companies use these outrageous claims to create expectations with reputable agencies everyday.

This isn’t the first time I’ve weighed in on the “it’s our jobs as search marketers to educate our potential customers” platform. So I’m throwing it out there, what can we do as search professionals to create a standard for pay scale and, more importantly, creation of expectations?

Here’s the question. You have a potential new customer. Your job is to take a site with zero search visibility (seriously, zero, they can’t even be found for their own name), create awareness through placement of their top 50 keywords (average KEI of 1.0). These 50 keywords will drive 20K visits per month at a 2% conversion rate which yields them the magic number they need to run the online part of their business. What steps do you take to engage them, help them understand the process and provide a bid and proposal that meet their needs? Okay, search marketers, put your money where your mouth is. The point of this exercise is to get our potential customers to realize the value and benefit of engaging our services. When any of our brethren consider answering the “Page 1 placement on Google for just $24.95″ we’ve not only lost but we’ve de-valued our services.

My position is this. My services for this project cost this. Period. I’m not selling a car. I don’t have to go in back and talk it over with the general manager, you don’t have to choose whether or not you get the clear coat with that. This is the price for these services. Can I get an AMEN?

The most recent statistic I’ve heard for the value of search placement is that 90% of visits for a particular keyword/phrase take place from page one results (do the math-page 1 is 10 results out of maybe 1 million results). This, in and of itself, should command reflection for business owners when they are selecting search engine marketing and optimization services, yet we’re still losing our misguided brethren to “Page 1 of Google results for just $49.95″.

Maybe the bigger question is this, do we even entertain meetings with potential clients who are swayed by the seductive voice of unreasonable expectations? Should we only engage clients who truly understand (and are willing to pay for) the value of exceptional search marketing services? Or is it our duty to educate our misguided friends with a great deal of potential?

As an older, (10 year), but smaller agency it’s my goal here to gain some wisdom. It’s my inclination (as a farm girl and as an SEO who sees the value in our services) to want to help our wayward brethren in their pursuit of search ranking and business growth-but at what price?

I would love to hear strategies from my fellow search marketers as we band together to answer the “whose job is it anyway?” question.
All my best.

Content is King-This is one online truth that hasn’t changed. How do you continue to add fresh, interesting content to your website without hiring a full time copy writer or creating a ton of content by yourself?

Creating exciting new content that will help maximize search rankings, increase visits and grow your business can be a challenge, especially for small businesses. Here are some tried and true strategies for helping you create new content online that will create your brand, improve search and inform your customers.

#1 Start a blog already! Okay, you’ve heard me say it over and over again, that’s because it works. 100% of our clients who have a blog are glad they did. It solidifies their understanding of their brand, explaining who you are and what you do helps that message to remain clear for you and your team. It’s informative for your customers. One of my clients, Columbia Gorge Winery Cathedral Ridge Winery, just celebrated the one year anniversary of their blog and it has become a great source of information about upcoming Winemaker Dinners and Events, food and wine pairing recipes and new wine releases. It helps with page rank because it’s fresh content. It’s fun. In the words of Starsky in the Starsky & Hutch movie-DO IT! DO IT RIGHT NOW!

#2 Ask for product and service reviews-I have a client who sells trailer hitches and bike rike hitches. They use content online to teach people how to properly use their hitches, but they also use it to get product reviews which they share at the product level (great way to improve conversion).

#3 Use content as a way to be helpful-Content online doesn’t always have to be about selling or promotion. Hitchsource used their site to explain how to replace the glass on your iPhone. Nothing to do with hitches, but enormously helpful information for their customers and friends.

#4 Be an authority in your industry-Avery created a direct mail guide that gave great information and resources for creating direct mail, it was a great help to their customers and it was included in the dma.org website.

#5 Create synergy between your business and your passion-My neighbor and talented Columbia Gorge photographer, Vlado (Photovlado.com) focuses on Wedding and Portrait Photography, but he is a skilled Windsurfer and does sport photography mostly for fun. He includes some great wind sport shots on his website, fun for him and his visitors.

#6 Use content to make your site sticky-We are at the tail end of a massive redesign for our hood river real estate client. We are using personalized content, such as a message board, to do lists and email alerts when the status of a property changes (price changes, sold, etc) to encourage customers to use the site for searching for properties. Every real estate site has an RMLS, but they’ve used content to streamline the process and provide information only available from their site. (Site launches next month, we’ll keep you posted on results!)

#7 Do a podcast-This recommendation is meant to inspire. We are launching our first podcast next week. We’ll keep you posted on this effort as well.

The key is to use content as a way to keep you innovating and communicating with your customer and the benefits are limitless. Happy content developing!

The web is an amazing tool for connecting people and ideas all over the world. With the web we truly have a global economy, a limitless think tank and abundant idea sharing. But don’t forget about local. From a search standpoint, it is becoming harder and harder to get page 1 placement. If you participate in local search you’re narrowing your range for reaching out to your potential customer with local search.

The best way to start participating in local search is with the search engine’s own tools, Google Local and Yahoo Local Search. Sign up for an account today, complete your company information, Google and Yahoo (and other engines) will verify that you’re the business owner and your local search reach will go live. But don’t stop there. Go local with your business relationships when possible. Only a small percentage of my business is local, but it’s a great way to raise awareness about your business, potentially do some bartering for products and services and network with local businesses in a more powerful way.

I’ve had a local (award-winning) winery as a customer for 4 years (Award Winning Winery, Cathedral Ridge Winery). They are great people with such love and passion for their jobs it’s hard not to get excited about the product and how we promote it. I take a percentage of my fees in wine, this allows me to understand all of the wine, how we promote it and to truly be an evangelist for the product.

We’re creating a site for a local Icelandic Horse Ranch and the owners also own a mercantile called Red Feather. They carry beautiful furniture, clothing, lamps, etc. We do a percentage of our project in trade (yes I have a gorgeous slate lamp and a lovely new pair of boots) but more importantly I spend time learning about their philosophies and how their business objectives for the mercantile and the ranch merge to create a powerful brand.

We’re doing some search marketing and optimization for a neighbor who is a Czechoslovakian photographer. Hood River Wedding and Portrait photographer, Vlado Skelnar, creates amazing, artistic photography. We’re swapping senior and family portraits for search and direct mail advice and this has allowed me to learn about his style and product so I can promote the business on and offline.

Recently I was looking for a new hosting company, someone local with time in the industry and a great reputation. I queried my friends at SEMPDX (our local search engine marketing organization) and one of my colleagues, Search Commander Scott Hendison, owns a hosting company, PDXTC Hosting. We’re very happily using their services now.

Invest in local business, even if it’s only a small part of your business. Don’t miss an opportunity to create understanding and awareness of your business by sharing who you are with other business owners, either through networking or bartering. Sure it’s a global economy, but it’s a lot of fun to foster business relationships locally, you don’t just grow your business, you share a handshake and a smile (and maybe a bottle of Reserve Pinot Noir;)

Though YouTube is one of the top sites in the world and everybody uses it, only a small percentage of businesses are using YouTube to grow awareness about their businesses. So what are the benefits of using YouTube. Here’s a top 10 list:

1 Submission is easy-Just follow simple instructions on the site

2 Submission is free-A YouTube account and submission is free

3 Universal Search-As universal search expands and takes more positions on Google and other engines, video and image placement will be important to maintaining natural search placement

4 It’s a great branding tool-Even if you don’t think your product lends itself to a video, get creative, It can help people have a great association with your brand if done well

5 It’s a great reputation management tool-When a Dell laptop went up in flames at a conference, the company used video to help be involved and manage the incident and the pr outcome

6 It’s a great way to announce a new product-Use video to grow awareness about a new product or new features of an existing product

7 It’s a great team building exercise-Getting your team involved in a video project can be great team building as well as helping create a cohesive image of your brand internally

8 It’s quantifiable-You can track views and traffic to assess how the medium is helping to grow awareness about your business or product

9 It helps create evangelists for your product-What better way to create a following than to engage your market with video and let them spread the word for you

10 It’s fun-If you’re a small business it allows you to do a commercial you couldn’t afford on a network. If you’re big business, it allows you to be a lot more friendly and intimate than you would on a television commercial.

So sit with your team, brainstorm some ideas, create a video and try a YouTube submission to help spice up your online marketing plans for the year.

Social media usage has exploded over the last few years, but marketplace uncertainty still exists about how to best monetize this tremendous potential traffic source.

It’s About the Audience

Whether starting a new site or adding new social media features to an existing media venue, you must think hard about your audience. The user is at the core of every social media site. Assess the following issues:

Who’s your audience? Spend time defining your target market. Think in terms of the these factors:

Demographics. What attributes describe your market, such as household income, geography, age, education, profession, or household composition?

Psychographics. What other traits does your audience have? Are there special interests that influence their actions? These can be work-related, such IT, or hobby-related, such as knitting.

Behavior. How do users’ online actions reveal their interests? Do they use specific products or content? Do they read whitepapers or watch videos?

How do you want to the audience to participate? Make it easy for users to contribute and share, in addition to providing site capabilities that are intuitive to use. For example, rating content or uploading photographs often takes less effort for users than expressing themselves in words.

What’s the benefit of participating, both passively and actively, for users? The reader is thinking, “What’s in it for me?” Is it being part of a community, getting feedback, having a public forum, earning respect, being heard, or some other reason?
Allow participants to give you feedback about site functionality. This is particularly important during early stages of site development, when your participants can tell you what they want and need from your site as well as complain about what doesn’t work.

Points to Consider When Adding Social Media

Create a strong process for site moderation with well thought out and established guidelines for what’s acceptable. ITtoolbox’s George Krautzel points out that this must be done subtlety; it doesn’t mean becoming an obvious presence on your site.

Have a willingness to fail publicly, because social media requires a level of transparency. For some companies, this can be difficult to accept. Transparency is important to understanding what works and how you got to your current offering.

Understand the speed of change involved. Every day brings new changes and challenges as your site evolves. This can be difficult for some offline media companies to comprehend.

Commit to making it succeed. Social media isn’t “build it and they will come” functionality. It takes ongoing work to nurture and keep the community expanding and evolving.

Recognize that building a social media site is an iterative process. It requires continually testing new ways to improve the site. According to Spiceworks’s Jay Hallberg, it often takes three attempts to get a piece of functionality to work properly for the community.
Different Revenue Models

Social media provides publishers with a variety of revenue models, including:

Advertising. Despite publisher concerns, social media, especially for niche or B2B (define) markets, provides well-developed niche opportunities that can evolve into a variety of offerings. Among the advertising opportunities: banners, sponsorships, lead generation, and behavioral targeting that can be sold directly or through third parties.

Subscriptions. Subscriptions can be offered in a number of ways. For example, they can be used for additional functionality, as with LinkedIn, or they can blur the line between print and online, as with the site for “Engineering News-Record.”

Other forms of revenue. Given social media’s evolving state and the strong online advertising market, many companies haven’t fully explored such options as revenue shares or affiliate-type sales, research sales, and data sales (without revealing personal information). (For other content revenue generation ideas, see “Develop Supplemental Content Revenue Streams.”)
Measuring Social Media’s Impact

Many marketers continue to use older metrics to assess a campaign’s impact. In part, this is because they like having metrics that are consistent across campaigns and that they understand. But other, less traditional metrics are also important. Among the salient factors to consider:

Pageviews. While this is an established indicator, it can put your social media efforts into perspective. For example, McGraw-Hill’s Dora Chomiak pointed to a roughly two- to three-fold increase in pageviews per session from the newer social media sections of the publisher’s site. For an advertising-driven site, this translates directly to the bottom line.

User involvement. This can be measured in terms of time on site as well as activity. For example, how many comments or photographs are added each day, week, or month? Has user time on your site increased due to involvement with these sections?

Advertiser interaction. Does the site enable advertisers to participate in a dialogue with their consumers? For media entities concerned about advertisers that receive negative customer feedback, it’s important to put this in perspective since the conversation is already happening. And these newer formats enable them to address these issues head on (albeit in a public forum). Note: this can also be useful for editorial team members who, until this point, may have only had a one-way communication with readers.

Revenues. As always, assessing revenues and positive cash flow are critical components of any campaign.

Costs. It’s important to track costs associated with these efforts. Remember to consider expenses broadly, because it may touch a number of your organization’s areas.
While adding social media to your site can be a difficult decision, the most important step is starting. Social media features aren’t a quick fix for a boring site. But many online marketers have found they’re great tools for expanding reach, building involvement, learning from visitors, and, yes, even bringing in new revenues.