Let me be clear, I’m not saying that directory submissions are a total waste of time; there are still some very relevant and active directories worth getting listed in. I’m saying that, you need to be leery of companies making claims such as “we submit your site to 1,000 of directories” as they are a complete waste of time and money. If you’re interested in getting fast and effective links, you should focus on blog commenting because it produces better results and can build community awareness around your product or service.

But let’s get back to the test results:

After 3 months we achieved a PageRank of 1 for the website which had links built from directories and Page Rank of 3 for the site with blog comment links. Why is that ?

Observation 1 : We received a 30% submission sucess in directories vs. 80% in blogs.
Why ? Because most directories (the free ones) are dead and no longer updated. We had better results in newly launched directories but those back links don’t have as much weight because the directories are new.

On the flip side we were able to select active blogs which had previously approved comments in the last 48 hours, and 80%+ of our comments produced a back link.

Observation 2 : Links from directories are 10+ per page vs. Links from blog comments are usually more limited. If our link was approved in a directory it always had  another 10+ links on the same page.

Since we were able to easily find blog pages with recent comments and relevant, highly targeted topics, we were ably to place backlinks on a page with only 3-4 out bound links.

Observation 3 : Directory categories are not very exact in describing our site topic with most directories having general categories. Blog posts are usually in the same niche and made on very relevant topics.

Observation 4: Blog commenting lead to higher Click Thru Ratios and further interest and social buzz about our site’s topic.

With blog commenting, you are able to leave very personalized messages that can easily create social proof among your online community.

Conclusion : Blog commenting has a better return on investment in all sections : quantity of back links, link juice and relevant content.

But as my skills as an internet marketer began to progress, I was quickly made aware of the downfalls and lackings in most of these softwares. From a marketing stand point, all the previous platforms I had used lacked necessary features to really “test” your site. For instance, while changing the look of your site is easy with templates, it doesn’t do much to change the feel. By this I mean that moving around whole chunks of information, images, headers and more was not really possible without creating a whole new template. Creating new templates is essential creating a whole new site design, that takes time and money. And without being able to easily change components of your site, it makes a/b testing of your pages and conversion ratio tracking difficult as well.

Magento also has some amazing features on the back-end and inside its admin sections. Options like allowing user generated content in the form of reviews and product tags, user customizable site layout and analytics make this a powerhouse that rivals any of the “corporate store” websites. Honestly, Magento has manage to blend all the best aspects of the previously mentioned platforms into one great package that is still just as free as the others!

Another major factor in my adoption of Magento was the community. While the other open source platforms may still have a large user base and active community, they don’t all seem to be as knowledgeable as the Magento community. Since the software is open source, meaning you don’t really have a support number to call, an active and educated community is a must for helping get over any hiccups you may come across while developing your store.

Now, like everything else in the world there are pros and cons of using Magento but none of the cons have anything to do with the software’s features or flexibility. Actually, the cons are a direct result OF all the features available to you… Magento requires very solid web hosting with lots of power. For many this will mean a dedicated or VPS hosting solution, depending on your stores traffic. While this will add extra expense to your bottom line, I feel it is easily made up for by the fact that your site can literally be the best looking and most functional store in your niche. Not to mention that the upgrade in hosting will allow you to sleep well at night knowing that your store will never be slow loading and losing customers.

The other draw back is that to really unleash some of Magento’s more corporate features, you need to buy the Enterprise edition which will cost a pretty penny… around $12k every year! Some of the features this upgrade would unlock would be extra cool marketing items like private sales, store credits, content staging and more. Obviously these features are nothing that would keep you from having an amazing store and are things that probably wouldn’t be considered by any store owner making less than $250,000 a year in profits.

If your company is interested in developing or upgrading an ecommerce store then Magento is by far the best solution out there. And don’t forget that at Moxie we can help you design your store for maximum search engine effectiveness and customer conversions! Give us a call today to see what we can do to give your website a little Moxie!

Image your website as a new business in a small shopping center or strip mall. You have placed a banner on top of the shop that says “Harold’s Paper Store”, letting the world know who you are. This would be equivalent of using that same text in your website’s Title tag. On your front door, you have a small sign that states “We sell all types of paper products, including …” This would be your site’s description.

Now imagine driving through the shopping center and seeing this large banner and walking up to the door and reading the sign. Well, you know that they have these types of paper products, but do they have the exact one you are looking for? This is how Google and other search engines think. Remember, the goal of any search engine is to be completely relevant to what the searcher is looking for.

Even though the search engines know you have certain paper products, they can’t be sure that you actually have what a searcher is looking for. You could, after all, still have a completely empty store. This is why search engines rely on what we call “social proof” to determine your site’s true content.

You see, ONSITE SEO techniques are only responsible for 15%-20% of your site’s relevance. OFFSITE factors are responsible for the other 85%-80%. If you think about it, this works much better for the search engines.  Regardless of what YOU say your site is about, the search engines get the input of the rest of the world as well to determine what the world thinks you are about. This makes is much more difficult for people just trying to get high rankings to “game” the system.

This isn’t to say that ONSITE factors aren’t as important.

If you labeled your store as a Shoe Shop you aren’t going to get a lot of people looking for paper to come in. Likewise, if someone performs a search for “100lb Gloss Book Paper” and you come up number one is the search results but your title says “Shoe Shop”, I doubt that searcher is going to look twice at your site.

So how does social proof work? Well, links to your site of course. But it is a little more complicated than that. There are different types of links that carry different value with the search engines.  Here is a list in ascending order (more value as you go down the list).

• Random Site Links from Unrelated Sites
• Links from “trusted” sites (.edu, .gov sites)
• Links from Sites with Related Content
• Links from General Authority Sites (Wikipedia, About.com, Etc.)
• Links from on topic Authority Sites (Sites that rank well for related topics)
• Links from MAJOR authority sites (MSN.com, Foxnews.com, etc.)

While links from Major authority sites aren’t typically possible, if CNN.com said your site was about [insert topic] then it is a fairly safe bet that you are about that topic.

At Moxie we take all of the above under consideration and as first step make sure your onsite SEO is in place and correctly configured. We then work on a custom link building plan just for your site incorporating all the link types found above and MORE!

The search engines wisely decided in an effort to curb all the “link spamming” taking place across the net, that they would allow site owners to use a specific tag to communicate to them that a link was not to be counted as such. In other words, even though a site may contain a link back to a spammer’s site, the inclusion of the NO FOLLOW tag would tell the search engines to disregard the link totally.

Nowadays, 90% of all forums and blogs are, by default, protected by this NO FOLLOW tag. Research has shown that it has indeed slowed down the increasing problem of link spammers; after all, what’s the point in wasting time placing links everywhere if they do you no good? So does that mean that those of us doing ethical link building should ignore blog commenting and forum postings as a valid method of link building? Absolutely not!

While not all the links that we post in forums and blogs will count towards our search rankings, they do have an important impact on website traffic. The key is, instead of “spamming” random links across non-related sites, to search out on topic sites and join the conversation.

For example, if you have a site about landscaping then find relevant posts or blog entries on other landscaping sites and make intelligent, on topic responses to them. In essence you are becoming a part of the site’s community.  If you provide helpful information, tips or tell others where they can find such resources then your comment is likely to be seen as insightful and not get removed by a moderator.

The benefit of this kind of link building can be surprising. A review of some of our sites’ analytics has shown that as much as 30% of our monthly website traffic was generated by other sites where we had previously placed on topic links. These visitors are usually interested to know more about your topic or are in search of something you stated could be find at the website you’ve linked to.

At Moxie Search Marketing on topic blog and forum linkbuilding is just one of the many techniques we use to increase your visitors, your leads and ultimately your sales and profit. Call us today and we can begin drafting a customized Internet Marketing plan just for your business.

As you can see, austinshred.com appears on page in three prominent areas. In the local maps search results, as the #1 organic search result, and again along the right as a paid ad. The only way this company could improve is if they reached the #1 position in the local results. And even though there are technically two companies above austinshred.com via the local map results, chances are Austin shred will still receive more clicks.

The reason behind this is simple. Radio ads and billboards work so well because they are repetitive. You hear the same jingle on the radio and you drive past the same billboard on your way home from work every day. They get stuck in your head, even if you have no immediate need for what they are promoting. Our minds take a notice to this repetitiveness whether we like it or not.

In the case of a Google search the user, whether consciously or subconsciously, will see the same company promoted three times. This automatically makes you appear more relevant and thus more promising to the searcher. It also gives you two chances to deliver your promotional message, once in your page description and again in your Adwords text.

Achieving this type of “Google Triple Threat” is very possible if employing local search optimization, adwords PPC management, and organic SEO all at the same time. These are all services that Moxie is prepared to implement in a custom internet marketing proposal.

So give us a call and let us make you the next Google Triple Threat!

We get so caught up with trying to improve our rankings in the search engines that we stop thinking of them as what they really are, businesses! Google became an overnight success by providing more relevant search results than competing search engines. It then became a billion dollar company by providing the most relevant ADs within the search results.

And to this day Google maintains its search dominance by continuing to provide the most relevant results to users. So what does this tell you about your own ambitions to dominate the search results? You must appear more relevant than the next guy to the search terms you are trying to rank for.

This process starts with proper on page SEO followed by good, on topic content. Google will also look at other sites that link to you. Are they relevant to your topic or in the same “theme”? If you can gain enough incoming links from relevant websites, your site will become an “authority” site in the search engines’ eyes. At this point you have structure search engine gold.

At Moxie, all the methods and processes we use for your site’s SEO are intended to turn it into an authority on your topic. We can also show you how to get your target audience involved by use of social media networks such as facebook and twitter. We help you locate popular forums and blogs where you can make yourself known and begin to gain a following. When the rest of the internet starts thinking of you as an authority, it doesn’t take Google long to catch on.

By becoming a relevant and authoritative web site you will be giving the search engines exactly what they want and you will be well rewarded for it.

The problem with most Austin and Central Texas Realtor sites, well most ALL real estate web sites, is that they have no clear purpose or call to action. The majority of these sites take you to a homepage with information about Austin neighborhoods with a brief overview of the real estate company or Realtor mixed into the content somewhere. They totally lack a “Why You Should Call Me Now and Not Someone Else!” statement and purpose. Or even worse, there are 20 gadgets, buttons and “search a home” boxes all over there site.

Consider this, most people looking for a Realtor’s services will likely find the local MLS long before they find your site. So if they want to search for a listing, they could do that elsewhere. Your site should concentrate on convincing your visitors that YOU are the person they should contact to list or help them find a home. And the design of your site should bring this statement front and center.

Take our example client, HoustonAppraisalCompany.com.  Their previous site was full of useful information and had a decent call to action, but it was hidden away by all the “noise” that the rest of the site was creating. By simplifying their site and restructuring the layout we were able to improve conversions 15% and decrease bounce rates by 20%. (See the Glossary if you are unfamiliar with the term Bounce Rate). We placed the clients “Unique Selling Proposition” front and center and we included a brief video reinforcing the statement and introducing the company to visitors.

If you can capture your visitors’ attention quickly and impress or intrigue them they will spend more time on your site, viewing the rest of your pages and soaking in what your site has to offer.

Calculating VPV is fairly simple. First, look at your monthly website statistics and find your total number of unique visitors for the month. Then take the net profit that was generated from your website for that month and divide it by the total number of unique visitors. For example, if you had 2,000 unique visitors and you made a net profit of $10,000, then your VPV is $5.00.

With an accurate value per visitor we can now begin to setup realistic ad campaigns. If you were trying to maintain a 200% ROI, then with the previous example we know that we do not want to spend more than $2.50 per visitor to our website. However, this does not mean that we should limit our Cost Per Click (CPC) to $2.50, only that we want to keep our AVERAGE CPC below $2.50. Since some keywords will be more competitive than others, we will need to bid more on those, while others will have little competition and can be bid on for pennies. In the end, it is the AVGCPC that we are concerned with.

As you can see, Value per Visitor plays a crucial role in assisting with your internet marketing initiatives. If you are not currently keeping track of your VPV, then I suggest you start now. Begin by ensuring that you have website statistics enabled. This could be through your webhost or preferably, through Google Analytics, a powerful and free service offered by Google. Next up, you need to start tracking your sales and gross profits from your website. If your site is an e-store and sales products online, this is very simple. But if you sale goods offline or your provide services it can become tricky to know which sales came from where. We recommend you setup a separate phone number to use exclusive on your website. RingCentral or other call management software can be used to achieve this and it is fairly cheap, around $25-$30 a month. The new number will ring through to your main line, but you can track all calls online to that number. All you need to do is write down the caller’s name and phone number, something you probably already do, and compare the phone numbers of sales to those in your calling software.

You also need to keep in mind that there are three totally different search types, broad match, phrase match and exact match. Each of these match types could bring up totally different search results. Furthermore, each of these could have significantly different commercial potential. Remember, when we are selecting keywords we aren’t just looking for a high volume of searches, but “buyer intent” as well. Take for example the term “Austin Internet Marketing”. The search term may get several hundred searches a day, but the term “Best Austin Internet Marketing Company” certainly shows more buyer intent. Someone searching for a term like that is most likely looking to find a service provider, not just browsing.

So how do we use AdWords to help with keyword selection? The easiest way to determine ACTUAL search volume AND get a better idea of buyer intent is to run a short pay per click campaign in AdWords. The campaign should run for no less than 3 days for high volume keywords and no less than a week for lower volume terms; we need to be able to collect enough data to make sense of it. We will take each keyword that we are interested in and create a separate AdWords group for it. We will then include all three matching variations. In the end, what we will have is actual search volume numbers and click-thru ratios PER KEYWORD. This type of extra research will help confirm the original keyword research as well as reveal some unexpected trends.

We encourage all of our clients to set aside a small budget to test keyword selections. This is not the same as actually setting up an entire pay-per-click campaign and should only require $100 or less for less competitive keywords; and of course, there is no fee for this service as it is part of the initial keyword research that we perform for all clients.

Another trick is to place you at the top of “Sponsored Results” which, as some of you may know, is just pay per click advertising. They spend half the money you pay them each month on clicks to your website and they pocket the rest.

If you have actually been contacted by a reputable company, there are still issues in working with a large company. Foremost, there is a lack of transparency. For instance, when I first meet a client I typically spend 15-20 minutes explaining exactly what it is we do at Moxie and how it is done. All methods that we use are revealed to a potential client and there is no “black magic” or “seo voodoo” involved. In turn we discuss the clients’ company and operations as well. This is crucial when providing internet marketing because so much of what we do for our clients depends on knowing and understanding their market and goals. Case in point, when choosing what keywords or phrases to target we will sit down with a client and go over all the potential selections and help narrow the list down to what should be the most profitable.

Tracking is another aspect to look out for. At Moxie we provide monthly reports on our SEO work that detail your sites progress. We also thoroughly go over Return on Investment calculations with potential clients so that we can insure profitability of your SEO and PPC campaigns. And since getting traffic to your site means nothing if it doesn’t turn into sales, we employ phone tracking and other methods to track conversions of visitors to your website into sales.

Here’s another important thought. Did the person that contacted you speak good English? I ask because most large companies outsource the bulk of their work overseas. While this is acceptable when mundane tasks such as backlink building are taking place, it absolutely cannot be utilized for more important tasks such as article writing, PR campaigns, or Social Media Marketing.

And finally the most important difference of all, the lack of personal interaction. Big companies might call or email you ever so often to check up but at Moxie we can come right to your office. As a matter of fact, if you’re in the Greater Austin area, that’s exactly what we’d like to do. We find that an in-person meeting greatly increases potential clients’ understanding AND appreciation for internet and search marketing. So what are you waiting for, call us now and let’s setup an appointment!