General Web Marketing

Baltimore SEO Meetup # 4

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Okay so its been two months since I’ve last posted and even then it was not very frequent. I think I’ve come to the realization that I just won’t be able to give much time to maintaining this blog. As such, it will remain a home for my random commentary about SEO, entrepreneurship and pretty … Read more

Our Comcast Nightmare – Comcast SUCKS!

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Executive Summary: Six months after we moved out of our old office and “transferred” our Comcast internet service to our new office, we were still receiving invoices for the old office… plus those for the new office. Finally they’ve stopped sending those invoices, though we’re still waiting on the refund we were promised. To make things worse, we just got an invoice for Cable TV at the old office. That’s right, we’ve been gone from there for 6 months but somehow we decided to order Cable TV for that office? Unbelieveable.

Detailed Timeline:

Timeline of Comcast’s Ineptitude:

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SEO Meetup Groups

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In follow-up to the launching of our recent Baltimore SEO Meetup Group (my post | press release | group page) I’ve recently seen a few more groups start up.

Rebecca over at SEOmoz gave us a plug in her recent post about meetup groups, and it looks as though her town of Seattle now has its own group, as do Portland and Charlotte (organized by Keith), as well as Virginia – which, truth be told was my inspiration.

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DC / Baltimore SEO Meetup Group

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Hi all – I just created a “meetup group” for those interested in SEO in the DC / Baltimore metro area. Check out the page via link below and sign up for updates if you are interested. We’ll give it a couple of weeks to judge the interest and then try to schedule something. Click … Read more

Q&A: Getting a Website Crawled and Indexed

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One of my associates recently sent me an email requesting:

One of the questions during the [recent sales presentation] was: “How often do search bots visit a site?”

I know this is a “it depends” kind of answer, but I’d love to get a paragraph from you on that so I can send it to them.

A paragraph or two? Nonsense. A half dozen? That I can do 🙂 My response:

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Q&A: Banner Ads and New Website Revenue Models

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Its been forever since I’ve written, but that’s how it goes. Here’s another Q&A from an email I got today:

Question:

Jon –

I found your site from a general search of website developers. I am helping my wife build a rough pro-forma for a potential business. What I am curious about, and hopefully you might be able to share some insight with me, is an expected revenue target from advertising on a site (money made from a firm to post banner/ad on her site). Is there a rough ‘guesstimate’ on what “X” traffic would yield in terms of monthly or annual revenue from an advertiser? Can such a thing be a assumed?

Thanks in advance for your time.

My Reply:

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Thoughts on “Flash Websites” and SEO vs. PPC

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Here’s another one of those cases where I copy and paste my reply to a question a new client has asked of me:

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Q: (Asks about his 100% Flash site – meaning its all one Flash file and thus in essence a 1 page website where you can’t easily track page views, conversions, user behavior, etc.)

A: There are several ways you can go about it:

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Video Professor Update

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I just approved a few new comments and posted a few more links on the Video Professor post I put up about a year and a half ago.  This post has stirred up alot more attention than I thought it would have when I originally wrote about it. On another note, not many posts lately … Read more

FindLaw’s Templated SEO Services & How Its Not Custom, Top-Shelf SEO

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I was recent asked to evaluate a FindLaw contract for a firm I work with, who has a prospective client that uses FindLaw and is considering more custom SEO services from another vendor. Specifically, I was asked to discuss what the contract included and what is what lacking with regard to SEO. While this is specific to this one instance (and I cannot share the contract for privacy reasons), I think there are some points here that go across the board for all of these law firm online marketing services.

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Google Checkout

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So I just tried to order a couple of Google T-Shirts through the Google Store.  Not surprisingly, the store uses Google Checkout.  To my surprise, however, it does not seem to want to work – at least not in the IE 6.0 browser I tried it in (which is what like 80% of the internet … Read more

FindLaw, Template vs. Custom SEO

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Its been a while since I’ve written, as I’ve been swamped. Here’s an excerpt from an email I replied to the other day with regard to how custom SEO services are different from those provided by a larger firm with a template approach. In this case, FindLaw.

_______(removed)_______ is right on. Just to add my two sense, SEO boils down to three things:

1) Technical / Site Structure Issues (10%)
2) On-Site Content (30%)
3) Off-Site Components aka Link Popularity (60%)

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Craigslist Scam – My Personal Experience

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Its always a bit discomforting when you realize someone has tried to scam you. Sure I get the normal load of tons of emails from Princes and Kings in Nigeria who want to give me $5 million in exchange for assisting with the money transfer needs. Those are easy to spot as scams. Why in the world would they email me to do that? Why would they offer so much money? Even if all that was understandable, how would I explain the unusual income spike to the IRS? Clearly an easy scam to spot.

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Marvelous Link Bait / Online PR Idea

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Brett Tabke’s Bot Blog.  Its his robots.txt file which has a blog in it as a .txt file.  Dorky, yes.  Old school, yes.  Terribly interesting and different.  Indeed. The blog is about bots and blocking them, etc. (which is most commonly done with a robots.txt file), so what more appropriate way to launch a blog … Read more