Internet Marketing Consulting

I was doing some research today on the concept of building your own website using services that offer everything for non-programmers. There are several and at first glance some of them seem to have it all.

They offer 1000’s of templates in every category, easy to update content systems and lots of images to paste into your site. They even offer built in search engine optimization tools that create the appropriate meta tags for you.

To the uneducated it all seems so simple and accessible. Just select your domain name, select your template, add a few words about who you are, what your business service is, how to contact you and you have a full functioning website.

One of these “build your own website” services I found was really quite impressive. It offered form builders, e-commerce modules, and the ability to select from 3 different formats in case the basic one wasn’t exactly what you had in mind.

So, you might ask…”What’s the problem?” Well there are a couple of concers I found as I dug deeper and here they are.

• The cost of some, although not all of them increased with the number of modules and added services to the point where it became quite very expensive to actually build an effective website.

• All these services have domain registration and web hosting services built in. While this might appear convenient to the untrained eye, there is one aspect of this that really concerns someone like myself who is a proponent of open source software methods and the freedom of choice they offer.

I believe strongly that every website owner should also own the rights to all the components of their web design, including the graphics, the content, the domain name and every aspect of their website development process. You should be able to leave and take it with you.

So many times the restrictions placed on clients who come to us with website development problems originate in the control their website developer, hosting service or templated website service use to keep them paying the subscription fees they place on their customers.

Imagine building a website that you want to upgrade to a more modern format and ending up not being able to do so. You decide to move your domain name to another host, take the graphics and content with you only to find that you can’t transfer the data because it is all plugged into the service provider’s database. You own nothing and the minute you try to escape, your website disappears. If you have succeeded in getting traffic to the site, promoted your URL and gotten a reasonably good page rank on the search engines, it can all be eliminated by simply moving on.

While there are many more technical aspects that can negatively impact using this approach, I have to recommend you  register your domain with a hosting service like 1and1 where you own your domain. Then avoid the built in services they offer as well, so that you can move data if something goes sideways.

While they do offer many additional built in products the same rules apply. Instead, Build a WordPress website or a real HTML/CSS website with a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress to run it.

Then you will be in complete control.

Google Chief Economist Hal Varian states “An ad that had a 1.0% conversion rate in the best position would have about a 0.95% conversion rate in the worst position, on average, Varian writes. He explains that ads above search results convert within ±2% of right-hand side positions.”

Didit VP Mark Simon says the New York company sees similar conversion rates occurring with its clients. “Not all traffic is converting traffic,” he says. “The trick is to offer the creative and post-click experience that draws in the right searchers and drives them to convert, while also targeting the right market segment to convert on a given term.” Read more in this article here by Lauri Sullivan .

I recently read on another Internet consultant’s website that we have to be able to practice what we preach to verify that we are capable of providing quality service to our clients. I fully agree with this statement which is why I have been running the Calgary search engine optimization experiment since  March 2009.

Since then I have been tracking the results of a number of keywords 0n 3 search engines in one of the toughest categories to crack in the search engine optimization industry. The category I am referring to of course is the SEO industry itself. It only follows that the experts in this industry, whether located in Calgary, or anywhere else in the world should be able to get a page 1 position on the search engines in the city in which they work.

Of course many companies are sending out massive numbers of emails to us, promoting their SEO services and promising to “get you on page 1 for your keywords or industry”. Let me clearly state once again – Anyone promising to put your site on page 1 without interviewing you, assessing your website and basically analyzing every aspect of your competition is someone to be avoided. My experience with clients who have paid $1000’s of dollars for these types of services suggests they usually get a high ranking with search words that do not benefit their business at all.The same is true for Pay Per Click advertisers. While they may show up on page 1 remember that simply means they are bidding higher than their competitors for the same keywords. It does not verify that they are actually effective at search engine optimization. More about that on another post.

One test you can run to evaluate a consultant of any type is to see if they are successful in achieving the goals for themselves that they promise to you.

While my search engine optimization experiment has not been 100% successful to date, I have been achieving significant progress and recently made a major breakthrough. In order to achieve success as an Internet marketing consultant in the highly competitive high tech city of Calgary, one category that needs results is search engine optimization. You can design a great looking website and have all the bells and whistles, but if nobody can find your site on the search engines, whatever you have invested in your website is not going to as valuable as it could be.

The breakthrough came in the keywords ” Calgary SEO ” and “Calgary search engine optimization“. While I have achieved major success with other keywords, these ones were the hardest to optimize for and i was obviously competing with the most experienced and effective SEO experts in Calgary. Something you need to appreciate is that page rank and position are impacted by the age of your website, so if someone created  a Calgary based search engine optimization website 4 or 5 years ago, they would now rank quite high.  My site is newer.

So here is a comparison of my results after 6 months:

While these numbers are not exceptional for the last 4 rows this is the first week that the site has appeared in the top 100. I hope to see continued progress in this area.

Stay tuned.