My therapist client thought he had backlinks from three prominent therapy directories: Psychology Today, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), and the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT).

In general, when you can get your website listed in a directory that’s full of content that’s related to your targeted keywords, it’s a good thing. But when I used a backlink checker tool, I didn’t see any of these links coming in to his website. So I did some checking and here’s what I found:

1. Redirects – Psychology Today has a big directory of therapists and if you pay them some money they will list you too. They’ll give you your own page with your picture information about your practice and a link that’s entitled “Visit My Website”. When you click on it, you go to the therapist’s website. So it’s a link right? Sort of. If you hover your mouse over the link, you’ll actually see it looks like this:

http://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/mywebsite-verify.php?profid=12345

It’s not really a link to your website. It’s a link to Psychology Today’s subdomain “therapists.psychologytoday.com” and it’s building a redirect command based on your profile id. While clicking on the link takes you to your website, this kind of link does not pass any authority or “link juice”. It does nothing in terms of your search engine rankings.

2. Only Accesible via a Form – The AAMFT actually uses a service called TherapistLocator.net – but when you try to search, you first have to click on an “I accept” link that then takes you to a form. In order to access the page, you have to fill out the form and click a button. Search engines can’t do this. They can only find their way to webpages by crawling around links. Therefore while a human might find your practice, a search engine will never find your page on TherapistLocator.net. The ABCT has the same setup – you must fill out a form to get to the therapist’s page, a search engine roadblock.

3. Whoops, There Is No Link – On the ABCT website I tried to location my client’s page, and found it, but whoops, there was no link to his website. So if you think you have a link to your website somewhere, just double check it to make sure.

4. NoFollow – Another type of search engine roadblock, are links that have the “nofollow” attribute attached to the anchor tag. You have to view the source code of the page (which is really easy, just click “view source” in your browser) and see if the link code has this attribute. This is an instruction for a search engine bot not to follow the link, therefore, you don’t get any link juice. I didn’t find this in any of the examples for this client, but I have seen them before on other directories for other clients.

So in summary, backlinks (links from other websites to your website) are really important to search engine ranking. They are like a vote for your website and pass some authority or “link juice”. But just because you think your website is listed in a directory, doesn’t mean that it’s helping your search engine ranking:

First make sure the link to your website is actually there.

Next, make sure you can get to your website’s link by clicking on other links, and not by filling out a form.

Once you get to your website’s link, make sure it’s a real link directly to your website URL and not a fancy redirect.

And if it’s a real link, make sure it doesn’t have a “nofollow” attribute attached.

If it passes these tests, it’s a really good link and will help your search engine ranking. If not, it might still help humans find your website, which is better than nothing but not as good as a valid healthy backlink.

I adhere to Google’s Quality Guidelines for Webmasters. While it’s true that Google’s massive search engine algorithm is secret, they publish detailed guidelines for those of us who design websites to tell us what to do, and what not to do. Web designers who don’t follow these are creating websites that may be penalized or removed from Google’s index. Being removed from Google’s index could cause a small business, who relies on Google’s traffic, to go belly up. Violating these guidelines can have serious consequences.

One of the big quality guideline violations, is known as “doorway pages“. Here’s how Google defines doorway pages:

“Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.”

Here’s an example of a doorway page scheme I ran across recently while doing some search engine optimization for a client. For the sake of this blog article, let’s say my client makes widgets in Seattle. When I was investigating other websites that ranked well for “widgets Seattle” I noticed this one site, let’s call it “SeattleWidgets.com” (not it’s real domain name) that was ranked highly. When I looked at their backlinks, I noticed they had several links from websites that should have been competitors. But when I looked at these websites, they were all actually doorway pages that had links back to the main SeattleWidgets.com site.

How did they do this? They purchased domains that included the names of different neighborhoods around Seattle and added “widgets”. These doorway domains looked like this:

pioneersquarewidgets.com
lakeunionwidgets.com
belltownwidgets.com
southlakeunionwidgets.com

You get the idea. When you went to these doorway domains, they were nearly identical in appearance, all made from the identical template. The content was similar, except stuffed with keywords about widgets and the neighborhood. But when you clicked on the links, you got redirected to the main website SeattleWidgets.com.  They even tried to make it sound official, and had “A subsidiary of  Seattle Widgets” in the banner area. But the phone number and address was identical. All links led to the same “real” domain. Thus, these domains were doorway pages, and violated Google’s quality guidelines.

So what do you do if you’ve discovered that a competitor has created many of these doorway pages or multiple domains that all direct traffic back to their “real” website? Answer: Report them to Google. Follow this link to report spam in the Google index. It’s quick and easy, and helping Google to get rid of these junk websites is a good thing. You’ll be helping your own business and helping others. It’s all good.

What do you do if you have one of these doorway page scam? Stop it immediately. Remove the content and set up redirects to your one “real” domain and pray that you did this in time before Google caught you. And don’t do it again.

Re-read my previous article and take a good look at the screen shot. See how the top two are the same company, and I’m in fourth place? Take a look at what I noticed today:

.

I can’t believe my eyes! Did Google actually read my blog article and fix this issue? Or was it because I posted the issue in their Google map spam forum? Or is it completely unrelated?

I guess I’ll never know for sure, but what I can say is that something changed, and if you see that there’s a company that’s spamming Google maps, you should report it in their forum and if you have a blog, write an article about. I do believe, now more than ever, that Google does try to give you the most relevant search results and tries to fight fraud and cheating whenever they can, so if you see something amiss, report it and maybe you’ll get lucky too!

Recently my beloved website traffic tracking company, Web-Stat, announced a new feature: Geo-Targeting. This nifty feature enables your website to automatically detect a visitor’s location and do neat things like showing a particular banner ad or other location-specific content. It also  allows website owners to block all kinds of traffic to their websites by country, state, zipcode…and many other things. I thought, hmmm, why would someone want to block traffic? The answer: Spam Prevention!

There are two criteria that you should meet before you think about doing this. First, your business should have a defined region. There may be certain countries that you are 100% sure you don’t have clients in, or maybe don’t want clients in. Secondly, you get lots of spam from those same certain countries.

I meet both of these criteria. The vast majority of my clients are in North America. I’ve got one in Latin America, one in the UAE, had one in France…but in general, they’re in North America. And I routinely get lots of spam from two countries in particular: India and Russia. Spam costs me money because it takes me time to read and delete messages from these folks, and it’s also just plain annoying.

Take this example of an email I got yesterday afternoon from “Abubakar” with an email address of  “abu@cattechnologies.com”:

“Hello,I have visited your web site but i found some of drawbacks i.e:  1)your website has low Back links.  2)your keyword rankings are very low.  If you assist me to introduce our SEO services.Ihope you get more sales for your current website. I will be waiting for your reply…  Thanks & Regards,  Abu.”

First off, I hate spam. And I detest spam that actually tries to frighten me or actually insults me in order to get my business. I’ve worked very hard on my own website’s search engine rankings, and this particular spam just sent me over the top. When I looked in my Web-Stat account, sure enough, the person who filled out my contact form was from India. And then I remembered seeing the Web-Stat notice that they had a new Geo Targeting feature!

Now, I get spam from India and Russia all the time. In fact, if you look at my website statistics, 3% of my website traffic comes from India. And I get solicitations several times a week asking me to outsource my work to India, join in a back-linking scam, give them SEO work, etc. The only people who call me on the phone, asking me to outsource, are people from India. I confess I’ve been annoyed by this incessant badgering -  all from people in one particular country.

Russian folks seem to love to spam my blog. I don’t know why.  But they just do. Most of the time Akismet catches the spam, but some get through. They have all these funky Russian characters in the comments. Again, I have to read them, and delete them, wasting my time.

I did a bit of quick research and learned that Russia was the third worst spammer country behind the US and China. Looking at the Click Fraud Index by Click Forensics, Russia also scores quite high, with India being medium. TrendMicro.com has Russia at #2 and India at #7 for worst spamming countries. So my personal experiences aren’t that much out of line with what’s going on out there in spammers and fraud world.

So today, I’ve decided to take Web-Stat up on it’s offer and block my countries of choice: India and Russia. Sure I’ll give up some of my traffic, and also give up the possibility of having a Indian or Russian client, but I think it’ a good trade-off to make to avoid the wasted time and aggravation. I’ll let you know how it goes!

First, a quick lesson in Google Maps. In order to get your small business listed in Google Maps, which is an excellent thing to do, you have to register your business and enter things like an address, a phone number, and a website address, as well as other information about your business. It is a directory of local businesses, linked to regular Google searches. When someone does a search for something, like “website design seattle” in Google, you will often see a section at the top of the organic listings that shows a map and a list of businesses. These businesses are from Google Maps.

Now, I often look at “website design seattle” because those are my keywords. I’ve watched my own position in the Google Maps listing move around. For a time, I was ranked #1, and was happy.

One day, I was doing some research for a client, and discovered that a competing company had developed multiple websites with duplicate content  (this is called “doorway” pages). Someone then registered all these “fake” companies in Google Maps. I looked up the web design company to see who does this sort of thing because I was curious. I refer people to other website design companies, and if another company is trying to cheat the search engines, I don’t refer folks to them. I made a mental note of the company name.

Later, when I Googled “website design seattle”, as I am prone to do, the name of this very company came up, one once, but TWICE in the Google Local listings. Here’s what it looks like:

See the listings for A. and B. ? See how the phone number is identical? I’ve blurred out the company name and all but the last two digits of the phone to protect their privacy, but the domain and phone are  identical. In order to add a duplicate listing, they’ve created a subdomain, “website.theirdomain.com”, and added it as if it were another unique business to Google Maps. Also notice the generic names of the business “Seattle Website Design Firm” and “Seattle Website Design” – note, this is not the name of the company, but rather the keywords. It’s interesting to note that this seems to be a common practice as C. has “Website Design and Web Design Company” as the name of the business, when it’s clearly not. Is it the reason they’re ranked ahead of me? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Now, I like Google Maps, and often use it with my iPhone. I wanted to find out what the official rules were regarding how businesses got ranked. Admittedly I was much happier when I was number one, and wanted to know how to get back there, but I also wanted to know why and how other companies were cheating the system. Remember I used to be a Quality Director for Motorola – and I think it’s important to follow good rules that are set up to benefit everyone.

Here’s the official answer to “How does Google Maps rank business listings?“. Here’s what it says:

All Google search results are based primarily on relevance, and Google Maps listings are no different. Google Maps ranks business listings based on their relevance to the search terms entered, along with geographic distance (where indicated) and other factors. Sometimes our search technology decides that a business that’s farther away from your location is more likely to have what you’re looking for than a business that’s closer.

Google Maps and the Local Business Center are a free service, so there’s no way to request or pay for a better ranking. We also can’t provide additional details about our ranking algorithm. We do our best to keep the details of the algorithm confidential in order to make the ranking system as fair as possible for everyone.

“…as fair as possible”…that sounds good. So Google wants it to be a fair system, that’s great.  Fairness is their product, after all – we use Google because it represents the most relevant search results, which money can’t buy and cheating can’t get.  In theory.

Next I went in search of help. I found the “Google Maps Help Group for Business Owners To Report Spam on Google Maps“. The instructions say that if you’ve found Google Maps Spam, to reply to the thread with the relevant information and they’ll address it. (UPDATE, I do NOT recommend using this forum because your reporting is public – and in the end, I got harassed. Use this new private form instead to report Google Map Spam)

So I did. I subscribed to the thread and posted a message about what I’d found. And I waited. And I started getting other folks complaints – around 3 a day were coming in – after a few days I unsubscribed. There are tons of folks complaining about Google Map Spam and honestly I have no idea whether these complaints are ever resolved. So far, mine hasn’t been, but I’ll keep Googling “website design seattle” and see if the duplicate listings for the same company disappear or not.  It will also be interesting to see if the business names get changed from keywords, to the actual business names. I believe in Google’s desire for fairness – let’s see what happens over time.

UPDATE: Read what happened next.

The email was from farica.seo@gmail.com:

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are a Webpromoter Company with primary focus on

1. Affordable Link Building
2. SEO Services
3. Search engine marketing (SEM) consulting to Clients
4. Directory Submission

We have a dedicated team of professionals to serve you in Link building and SEO.Our Link Builders who specialise in getting theme based targetted links for Client’s website.

We strictly work on performance basis and can assure you of getting qualitylinks for your site as well.

We offer the best part of our sincerity and would help you achieve your goal for top ranking and online business development.

We are looking forward a long term business association with your organization.

Assuring you of our best services at all times.

Thanks and Regards,
Farica

Let’s go over why you should probably not respond to this email.

1. Where’s the name of the company? Hmmm, not mentioned.

2. Where’s the company website? Hmmm, nowhere in sight.

3. The return email is a Gmail account?! That’s professional!

4. “Dear Sir/Madam”…always nice to get personalized emails.

So just for the heck of it, I emailed them to ask them whether they were a real SEO company.

No response

Emails from “real” companies will clearly state their company name, and usually have their address and phone number. “Real” companies,  will have a website – especially if they’re in the SEO and link building business. “Real” people from “real” companies will have an email address that’s based on their website domain, not a free email service like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.

I guess some folks fall for these email scams – which is why I’ll keep posting articles like these – to help warn folks.

When new websites are “born”, it make take a while for them to start getting search engine traffic. And you can’t get search traffic from a search engine until they have visited your website and “crawled” over it’s pages.  It’s important for new website owners to know how to tell if and when search engines, like Google, the most important search engine, has come and crawled around their website. But how do you tell when Google has visited your website?

The best way to tell, is by using a neat feature of the Google search page. To use this, you can either go to Google.com, or use the Google search field in your browser’s toolbar. The important point here, is to use the Google search field, and not the browser’s regular URL (this is what website you’re on now) field.

In the Google search field, type in “site:” immediately followed by your domain name. No spaces.

So if I want to see the results for my own website, I would type in “site:AldebaranWebDesign.com” and hit the return button.

I’ll paste my own results below, so you can see what these look like:

A few things to highlight. First, you only see results if Google has crawled at least one page of your site.  Google won’t crawl your entire site on the first visit – it might take several visits, over a period of time to index all the pages in your website.

Take a look at the results. In the above example, the first line of each snippet, is the title of the page. This is set by the web designer by utilizing the “meta tag” for title. The second line is the page description. This is also set by the meta tag for description. If these look funny or don’t make sense – contact your designer to get these fixed.

See on the last line of each snippet, how it has a link to “Cached” ? The cached version is a snapshot of the page as Google captured it during it’s last crawl. If you click on “Cached” you can see this snapshot as well as a timestamp of when the crawl occured. Fascinating stuff!

How long will it take Google to find my website and pay it’s first visit?

Good question, and the answer is: it depends. When I develop new websites, I always inform Google (and MSN and Yahoo) of the new site’s existence. If you find evidence your new website hasn’t been crawled yet, you can always use this link to submit it to Google. Submitting more than once does nothing and may annoy Google, so don’t do it repeatedly. Another way to get Google to visit your new website, is to make sure other websites have links to your site. When Google crawls them, it will follow those links to your site. I’d say if you have a new website and have submitted it to Google, it should take around a month to get crawled for the first time.

How long will it take to get my whole website fully indexed by Google?

It may take several weeks after the first crawl to get fully indexed, assuming your website is fairly small, under 50 pages. The larger your website, the more time it takes to get fully indexed.

Why is getting indexed so important to getting traffic?

Because you need to be indexed by a search engine before they will send you any traffic, just like you need to have your business published in a phone directory before folks can look you up and find your business. Indexing is a page by page activity – and most likely your home page will be indexed first. But until a page is crawled and indexed by a search engine, that search engine won’t be able to show your page in the results of searches.

What if I have a blog or an online store – will they be indexed?

If you have a blog or an online store that’s written in PHP, yes, they will be indexed as well. I don’t work in other languages, so I don’t have personal proof, but I do believe that most kinds of dynamic website pages are crawl-able and index-able by Google. To verify this, simply check yourself. If you have 100 products in your store, or 100 blog articles, they all should eventually be indexed by Google. But it’s a good question to ask your web designer to prove this to you before you invest in a particular blog or online store or other database driven online application.

What about Yahoo and MSN?

You can use the same technique to see if Yahoo and MSN have visited and indexed your website. The only difference is that like Google, MSN shows you the crawl date via “Cached Page”, while Yahoo doesn’t. Just remember you’re typing “site:yourdomain.com” in the search field.

So if you have a brand new website, or an old one that isn’t bringing you much search engine traffic, take a look and make sure your website has been crawled and indexed by the major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. You can’t get free search traffic until you get crawled.

Now remember, I’m a web designer. And that what I’d be looking for was a link from a website that was about…oh, I dunno, website design. Remember that search engines evaluate links in context, meaning the content that surrounds the link to your site matters in how much this link will be counted towards getting your website ranked for your keywords. You want links from pages that have your keywords in them. This is link building 101. You want links from pages whose main topic matches your website’s keywords. Here’s the email I received:

Link Exchange Request for Discount-pet-superstore.com PR 1+

Dear Webmaster,

First of all let me introduce myself – I am,Rokshar Link Manager

I handle online marketing for my client http://www.discount-pet-superstore.com

To increase the link popularity of my client’s site , we are now looking for triangular Link swapping with some good quality sites. You are already aware that Triangular Link swapping is much more popular and beneficial than Reciprocal Link exchange . This way both the sites gets the benefited . I would request you to place my client’s link at your site.

Please add my links on minimum Page Rank 1+ (otherwise it will not acceptable by my client) and use the following code for linking to us

Here are details of my site :

Url : http://www.discount-pet-superstore.com
Title : Discount Pet SuperStore
Des : Buy PetSafe Wireless Dog Fence, Dog Doors, Dog Crates, PetSafe Electric Dog Fences, Pet Containment Fencing, and Discount Pet Supplies

Or you can simply use the following Linking code:
a href=”http://www.discount-pet-superstore.com” Discount Pet SuperStore /a Buy PetSafe Wireless Dog Fence, Dog Doors, Dog Crates, PetSafe Electric Dog Fences, Pet Containment Fencing, and Discount Pet Supplies

Your link will be added within 12 hours at
dogfence-shopping.com (PR3)
OR
horses-shiatsu.com Within 12 hours.

Please forward me your linking details along with confirmation where my link have been added by you .

Hoping an early and positive response from your side.

Have a nice day ahead

Bsest Regards
Rokshar
Rokshar.anjum@gmail.com

Let’s dissect this request:

1. Website Conflicts With My Values: First and foremost – I believe that electronic dog fences are completely inhumane.

2. It’s a form letter: Meaning to me that this person probably didn’t even visit my website, otherwise it would be “Dear Jill”. Call me crazy, but I just don’t respond to form letters. I think they’re spam and treat them as such.

3. Triangular Link Swapping Is “Black Hat”: This means that whenever you try something that tries to fool search engines, it’s bad news. This is just like reciprocal link swapping, which is better than nothing, but not good as one-way links. The best links are those that folks give you because your content is worthwhile, not because “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”. Google is smarter than you may think.

4. No value to my website or my visitors. As previously mentioned, having a link to my website from a dog fence website or a shiatsu for horses website is of absolutely no value to me or the people who might be on my website. You should add links to your website because your customers will find the information useful. Other people will add links to you because they find your website information useful.

Bottom line: If you are going to hire a company to perform link building for your new website, find out HOW they plan to do this. If they are going to send out terribly written cookie cutter emails to random website owners – take your money elsewhere. Real quality link building is much more than hiring someone to send out spam on your behalf.

I often receive requests from people I don’t know asking me to exchange links. Exchange means that they’ll put a link on their website to me if I put a link on my website to them. Then we’d become one big happy link family. And the more links to your website, the better, right?

Well, it depends.

Let’s do a refresher on what makes links from other websites valuable. First, they should be coming from websites that have a good “pagerank” with Google. There are tools available to check out a website’s pagerank, like this one. Compare the website’s home page “page rank” to the page they’re saying they’ll put your link on. If the page rank is “n/a” or 0 (zero), look elsewhere for links.

The second thing to remember, is that the page they’re putting your link on should have content that’s relevant to your keywords. For example, if you’re a dog trainer, you should try to get on dog related websites – the links are evaluated in context with the content that surrounds them.

The third thing, is understand how unethical folks will promise you a link, but in reality attach a “nofollow” value attribute (HTML) that in essence, tells search engines not to follow the link, thereby rendering the link to you worthless. If the page has other links on it, view the source code and find the code that’s got the link, and look for a “nofollow” attribute. If you see it, it means this person is trading worthless links. (I’ve added them to the links below, so if you view the source code of the page, you can see what they look like)

So, with these three rules in mind, let’s look at an email I received recently asking me to exchange links. Here’s the email:

Hello,

I was looking at your site and it’s very interesting and well structured. I also have a website, please take a look at it:
http://safecofield.stadiumhotelnetwork.com

I was thinking if you would like to make a link exchange, this will be a benefit for both of us, don’t you think so?

Here are my site details:
Title: Safeco Field Hotels
Description: Stadium Hotel Network offers great rates on over 50 hotels near Safeco Field.
URL: http://safecofield.stadiumhotelnetwork.com

The reciprocal link of your site you can find at:
http://safecofield.stadiumhotelnetwork.com/resources

If you accept my link exchange invitation please add my link on your page, and I will put your link to my site as soon as possible.

Kind regards,
Tanya

Now, let’s test Rule #1.

1. What’s the PR of the home page and the page the link is promised?

The home page has a PR of 3, which is fine. However the page that the link will be on has a PR of zero. Not good.

Let’s look at Rule #2.

2. Is the content relevant to my business? “Safeco Field Stadium Hotel Network”? Um, I’m a web designer, so no, this is completely irrelevant.

And finally, Rule #3.

3. Since there are no other links on this page, I can’t tell if there are “nofollow” tags

So in summary, this is not a good deal for me. In general, as a rule, I don’t add links to other people’s websites because they ask me to – rather I add them because I think they’ll be helpful to my clients and blog readers. Understand what I’m saying, that links should somehow add value to my web page, a source of additional information – not simply a link to someone else’s website that is not at all relevant, like the Safeco Field Stadium Hotel Network.

Now, why you ask, would someone send me this email. The answer is, because they’re engaging in a link building campaign, trying to get as many links to their website as possible. Apparently, they don’t care where the links come from, as I imagine not many folks who are looking for a hotel will also be interested in web design services.

If you’re going to send folks unsolicited emails asking for links, at least tell me WHY a link to your website will be of value to MY website visitors. Convince me. Don’t try to flatter me with a generic complement like “I was looking at your site and it’s very interesting and well structured”. Not good enough. Although I do love flattery, it won’t get you a link from me.

Another tip to getting links from others, is to post VALUE ADDED comments on other people’s blogs. If you join the conversation and have something that really is going to improve the quality of the conversation, go ahead and include a link to your website, or relevant article. I frequently do this, and since many blogs are monitored by humans, they let my links remain, because I’m careful not to look like a spammer, but rather someone who is participating on the conversation and ADDING VALUE.

Happy link building!

Here’s a link to the tool so you can try this out for yourself: Google Keyword Selection Tool.

The tool is designed to help people, primarily those who use Google AdWords Online Advertising, select the best keywords for their campaigns. Here’s an example screenshot (click on the thumbnail to see it full size):

It’s truly incredible data to behold. So if you’re wondering how many people search Google.com for specific keywords, give this free tool a try.

One of the cool things to check out, is clicking on the “Choose columns to display”. In the view above, I’ve chosen to show Volume Trends. No wonder I’ve been so busy lately – look at how searches for website design have gone up over the summer months. Very, very cool data. Maybe I’ll use it to plan my next vacation!

Here’s the first email:

Dear Website Owner,

70% of POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS searching the Internet will never find your web site unless you’re ranked on first page of Google, Yahoo, or MSN. If I assist you to achieve at least 4 times more INTERNET traffic to your website by getting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?

Our internet marketing company is ranked on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search phrase “SEO Company.” We would like to do the same for your Company’s website so you can come up for your main keyword search phrases as well? All of our methodologies use the most ethical Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your site banned or penalized.

This proprietary SEO service includes:
• No setup costs
• Cancel at any time
• Guaranteed increase in traffic

Please reply to my email and I would be delighted to supply you a custom proposal
Warm Regards,
Don H.Ritz

5021 VERDUGO WAY, STE 105
CAMARILLO, CA 93012 – USA

Wow, this sounds pretty good doesn’t it? But wait, let’s look a little closer. Where’s the company name? Where’s the company website? Hmmm.

Let’s look at the email address: pencilling80370@gmail.com

Now, why would someone who has a legitimate SEO business use a junk email address from gmail, rather than a more professional email address, like Don@TheBestSEOCompany.com?

Because it’s fake. This is a good example of an SEO scam email. This person got my client’s email from her website and sent her this message, in an (weak) attempt to get her to pay him money for nothing.

Let’s look at another example. The same lucky client of mine got an email from Jen@bigwavetraffic.com. Here’s the email:

From: Jen Evans [mailto:jen@bigwavetraffic.com]
Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 4:10 PM
To: Info
Subject: your website

I can get your site to the top of a search engines listings.
If you’re interested, reply with the web addresses you want to promote and
the best way to contact you with some options.

Thanks in advance,

Jen Evan

So I looked up BigWaveTraffic.com. What did I find when I looked it up?

Coming soon? The page title reads “Absolute Listings SEO SEM” so I know I’ve gotten the right website.

So the moral to the story is this: If you’re a small business owner and you get a email from someone you don’t know, claiming to be able to boost your website traffic – do a bit of research. Look at the website of the company. Put in the keywords they should be targeting and see if you can find them on the first, or second, or third page of Google. If you can’t, they are not a legitimate SEO company and it’s simply one of the many email scam attempts.

Be careful out there!

UPDATE: I just received the exact same email above that starts with “Dear Website Owner”…but this time, the return email is for “Barry Burn” and the email address is listed as fanciable44243@gmail.com – it’s a SEO email scam alright! And another one, this time from borneo90856@gmail.com with the name Joseph Samules.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My client just received another one, this time from “Blaze Web Design Inc”. Here’s the email:

Hello,

My name is Mark J. Blazick from Dade City, Florida and previously from Akron, Ohio and I think you have a great looking website.

I am an SEO that has been attaining and maintaining top search engine placement in Google, Yahoo, MSN and many other search engines for businesses across the USA.

We help companies get ranked at the top of the search engines so that they can spend less on sponsored links and Google AdWords. Our prices are very affordable and we have references as well as 12 years experience in Search Engine Submission and Website Optimization.

Did you know that only 20% of people searching will click on a sponsored link or Google AdWord while 80% will click on a ranked listing in a search engine?

You can bring in much more business via your website by getting your site ranked at the top of the search engines in their ranked listings. Google is always our main target followed by Yahoo, MSN and Ask but we do submit to many other search engines as well.

Your site has meta tags but they are not optimized strongly. We code strong page specific meta tags so that the title, description and keywords meta tags for a specific page work together. The title, description and keywords meta tags are coded so that they have a synergy with each other in order to give very strong emphasis to your most important keyword phrases.

We also work with you to get a synergy between the page specific meta tags and the page specific text content of your websites pages. We assist in getting pages to support other pages as well so that the site can rank well when ranked as an entire website.

Please phone me at 352-458-9217 and we can talk about your site and how to make it much more of an asset to your business.

Thank you.

Best regards,
Mark J. Blazick
President
Blaze Web Design, Inc.
352-458-9217
blazeman@tampabay.rr.com

Notice the similarity? A website designer without a website? So I googled “Blaze Web Design” and found a website and looked at their “Promotion” page. A long list of mostly extremely minor search engines that they’ll submit your website to – nothing more specific. And by the way, submitting your site to different search engines is FREE, you don’t need to pay anyone for this.

So here’s a test you can do to see how good a company is at SEO. Start with their home page. See what their title is. The title is visible at the very top of your browser window.

My title starts with “Aldebaran Website Design Seattle”. So just Google “Website Design Seattle” and see where my home page is ranked. As of the writing of this post entry, I’m ranked on the first page at #3. Not too shabby.

Do the same with this company. The title on the home page is “Search Engine Optimization”. Let’s see where the home page is ranked. I use a tool on GoogleRankings.com to search for where a website is ranked for their keywords because it can search the top 1000 automatically. The result? This website is not within the first 1000 results for the very keywords they should have optimized their own website for.

Now, perhaps it’s harsh of me to pick on this particular company. But they sent one of my clients a unsolicited email. So this blog article is fair play I figure. I’m protective of my clients, and of all small business owners who may not know much about SEO and respond to emails such as these.

So if you get one of these emails, just do what I do. Look up the website, if there is one listed. Look at the home page title and Google it. If they’re not on the first page, delete the email and forget about them.

UPDATE 8/20/08: I just got another SEO Scam Email:

Dear Business Owner,

75% of POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS searching the Internet will never find your web site unless you’re on the first page of Google, Yahoo, or MSN. If I could get as much as 4 times more INTERNET traffic to your website by promoting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?

Our company is consistently on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search term “SEO Company.” We would like to do the same for your Company’s website so you can rank for your main keyword terms as well? All of our techniques use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization methods that will not get your website banned or penalized.

This search engine optimization program includes:
• No upfront fees
• A month to month program (no long term contracts)
• Guaranteed increase in traffic

Simply reply to this email and I would be delighted to send you a custom proposal
_________________________________________________________

Warm Regards,
Erroll

2060 AVENIDA DE LOS ARBOLES, STE D
THOUSAND OAKS, CA 91362-1361 – USA

I guess they never learn. They keep sending me spam SEO emails, I will keep posting them to my blog to help warn other folks.

UPDATE: 11/10/08

I’ve just received another email, same words, different name: Neal SamulesDear Business Owner,

75% of POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS searching the Internet will never find your web site unless you’re on the first page of Google, Yahoo, or MSN. If I could get as much as 4 times more INTERNET traffic to your website by promoting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?

Our company is consistently on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search term “SEO Company.” We would like to do the same for your Company’s website so you can rank for your main keyword terms as well? All of our techniques use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization methods that will not get your website banned or penalized.

This search engine optimization program includes:
• No upfront fees
• A month to month program (no long term contracts)
• Guaranteed increase in traffic

Simply reply to this email and I would be delighted to send you a custom proposal
_________________________________________________________

Warm Regards,
Neal Samules

2060 AVENIDA DE LOS ARBOLES, STE D
THOUSAND OAKS, CA 91362-1361 – USA

They never learn. I guess they don’t read my blog

UPDATE: 1/02/09

Just got another one last night:

Dear Website Owner,

65% of people searching the Internet will never find your web site unless you’re ranked on first page of Google, MSN, or Yahoo. If I help you obtain as much as 4 times more WEB traffic to your online business by promoting you to the first page of the search engines would you be interested?

Our company is on the first page when you search on Google for our primary search term “SEO Company.” We would like to do the same for your web site so you can come up for your main keywords as well? All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.

This special SEO program includes:
• No upfront fees
• A month-to-month program
• More traffic guaranteed

Please reply to my email and I would be happy to send you a proposal.
______________________________________________________________________
Sincerely,
Deave Leave

501 VERDUGO WAY
WESTLAKE VILLAGE , CA
91362 – USA

Many of my website clients, after watching their website traffic statistics, are dismayed to see many people coming to their website leaving after only visiting one page (this is called the “bounce rate“).

They also often see visitors who may look around at several pages and then decide to leave without purchasing anything.

They even see people who were very close to a purchase. Visitors who after adding items to a shopping cart and starting the check out process, left before completing the purchase ( this is called “shopping cart abandonment“). While all of these visitor activities are normal and expected, what’s often surprising to my client is how often they happen.

This begs the question: how much traffic does it take to make a sale, or have a prospective client fill out a contact form? This metric is known as “conversion rate“. It can be used to measure any desired behavior of your website visitors. If 100 people visit your site and 1 fills our your contact form, your conversion rate is 1% (1 contact form / 100 visitors). Since most new website owners have no experience with website statistics, I’ll share some of the data from my own website and from what I’ve seen on some of my client’s websites.

Conversion Rate:
How do you measure conversion rate? Some website traffic tracking tools have built in ways of tracking this for you. All that is needed is to label the appropriate target page. The website tracking software tracks how many total visitors you have and what percentage of them hit the target page. Each time they hit the target page, they are considered to have “converted”.

Different Examples of Target Pages for Conversion Tracking:

• Shopping Cart “Thanks” Pages (last page after sale is completed)
• Contact Forms
• Newsletter Subscription Pages

On my website, I have two target pages, my contact form and my online ecommerce demo store.

Let’s look at my conversion statistics for my contact page:

Google	1,244	45	3.6 %
Direct Access (no referrer)	287	17	5.9 %
Google-Intl	227	6	2.6 %
MyClients	29	3	10.3 %

This data indicates that visitors who come from Google in the US, convert at a rate of 3.6%, while visitors who come from the websites of my clients, convert at a higher rate of 10.3%. (This data was collected using the Web-Stat.com traffic tracking tool.)

This makes sense doesn’t it? That the people who are following a link from one of my clients’ websites are more likely to convert than a complete stranger who found me on Google?

Measuring Quality of Website Traffic

Conversion rate tells us something about the quality of the website traffic source. If you are paying for traffic by utilizing pay-per-click online advertising measure the quality of the traffic that you’re paying for is super duper important to determine your return on investment. It’s easy to label your paid traffic sources and categorize them in Web-Stat so that you see if one ad has a higher conversion rate than another. This is one of the really neat things about the web and online advertising.

Remember, The “Real” Conversion Rate May Be Lower

If your conversion target is a contact form, then your “real” conversion rate will be lower than the conversion rate measured by the contact form conversion rate. Why? Because not everyone who contacts you will be converted into a customer.

Tiny Numbers

Now you’re thinking, hey, these conversion rates are getting to be pretty small numbers. Let’s say out of the people who contact you, 25% are converted to clients/customers. This means your real conversion rate is 25% of 3.6%, which is 0.9%. This means, to get a new customer, you need to have 100 people visit your website from Google, for example. Think about that. If your contact form to client conversion rate is 1 in 10, then you will need 277 visitors to get 1 client. Tiny numbers.

Setting Expectations for Conversion Rates

So don’t expect to have every visitor turn into a customer – it’s just not the way the web works. It’s a percentage game, and you will need a certain level of good quality traffic to turn enough of those visitors into clients.

I recently had a good friend ask me to figure out why her friend’s website was not coming up in Google. After a quick review, the answer was obvious: the site had no text content, it was 100% flash. It also had zero backlinks. There was no reason why Google would rank this site, in fact, it wasn’t even in the Google index at all. It had a splash page, and played the same music on all pages. Which leads me to a familiar theme that keeps running in my head: who should you select to design your website: an Artist or an Engineer?

Ok, so I’m biased because I’m an engineer. Not just someone who calls themselves an engineer, but a real one with an engineering degree. I’ve created concepts, designs, prototypes, tests, and finally production quality products. Engineers might not be the most aesthetically driven sort of folks, but they sure do care about how things work. And websites are not just static pictures that you look at like a painting. They are dynamic. They are part of a living, breathing organic network called the Internet.

Now I agree that websites should be pleasing to look at, after all it’s a visual medium for the most part. They should also be easy for people to use. But the purpose of the internet is the sharing of information.

I typically design websites for small business owners. Not artists, musicians, entertainers or media companies. Small business owners are not in the entertainment industry. Their websites have one main purpose: to get more paying customers. They do this by communicating information about their products and services in a compelling and clear manner.

Artists create art to convey messages, stir emotions and inspire us. They are experts at creating beautiful things. But, they are not driven to create things that DO something. Websites must do many tasks. They need to capture your attention, lead you to perform certain behaviors (like checkout out a shopping cart or filling out a contact form). They must run and get content from a database and serve it to your visitors at lightening fast speeds. They must process credit cards securely. They allow you to create virtual communities by utilizing blogs or forums. They are very, very busy, and anything but static.

And they must be designed in such a way that other people can find them. Do you want your website to be a piece of art that hangs in a museum that no one knows the address of? Or do you want your website to be available to the entire world? Focusing exclusively on what your website looks like, and constructing it entirely of images or Flash, makes your website appear to search engines like a blank page.

Remember what “HTML” stands for? Hyper TEXT Markup Language. TEXT, TEXT, TEXT…it’s about written words. This is how search engines “see” the content on your website. They can’t “see” images, they can’t “see” Flash movies…but boy can they read text!

See how many times this is mentioned on the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Note they said text links, not images.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.

Again…Google is telling you to use text, not images.

If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

And again…the more plain, regular, standard text, the better.

Still not convinced? Read this article from Google on “Working with Flash, images and other non-text files“. Here’s the very first few sentences (the bold is added by me):

In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn’t mean that you can’t include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won’t be accessible to search engines.

Why then, given this clearly stated rule, do some web designers still create websites who have literally no content in text? Why do they make websites that are 100% flash, like the one my friend asked me to review?

Perhaps they simply don’t understand how the internet works and have never cared to learn. They are artists at heart and like to make eye candy. Or maybe they know and simply don’t care about whether or not their website customers EVER get any traffic.

Either way, as I’m sure you can tell by now, this annoys me to no end. How someone can call themselves a web designer and take people’s money and then give a 100% flash website that is completely invisible to search engines, not to mention people with visual impairments who rely on text readers, is simply beyond me.

So before you hire your website designer, figure out whether they’re more like an artist, or like an engineer. Do they focus on appearance to the exclusion of functionality? Are they knowledgeable about even the most basic search engine principles? Ask them, and look at the sites in their portfolio. Is there more to it that just shallow surface flashiness? Do their websites WORK for their clients?

Use this handy tool to check out their portfolio – it will show you how a website looks to a Search Engine

1. Enter the exact website address of the page you want to view. (eg. www.iwebtool.com)
2. Enter keywords you want to search for.
3. Click the “Show Me Search Engine Spider View” button.
The results will be displayed the the box below.

Powered by iWEBTOOL

Look at what’s in the window above. (If it’s not working, you may have to come back later and try it, the iwebtool.com site that provides this tool is very busy!) What you see is exactly how the page looks to search engine spiders as they crawl over your website. If your website has no or little visible text in this box, then you need to add content that is text…simple as that.

ADDENDUM: To Folks With Flash Sites Who Are Paying For Clicks

For some reason, I’ve been recently contacted by several folks who have 100% Flash websites who are looking for Google AdWords (Pay-Per-Click) consulting. I sent them this article in the hopes that they will understand that while I’m more than happy to help them with AdWords, I also feel that ethically I should tell them about how poorly their websites are performing in Search Engines.

There’s absolutely no reason that people should have to pay for all of their website traffic – search engines like Google are continually trying to find websites that are relevant to what people are searching for. Why have a website that’s designed to be invisible to Google and then turn around and pay Google for traffic? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

So if you have a website that’s Flash, and you’re thinking about Google AdWords or another Pay-Per-Click service, please take a moment to learn/read about Search Engine Optimization – I think it will be well worth your time and possibly enable you to ween yourself off of Pay-Per-Click and attract some free traffic that your competition, who doesn’t have a Flash website, has been getting.

Like blogs, forums are a way for people to attempt to get backlinks to their own websites. This is typically done by leaving comments that contain links to their website URL’s. If you’re honestly helping others and truthfully representing yourself, there is nothing wrong with having a link to your website, say, in your signature, or possibly to a relevant article you’ve written. But when you simply fake who you are, put in a useless comment in the hope to get a backlink to your website, you are considered a spammer.

This morning, my partner’s forum received a posting that said this:

Hi my name is collins and I look forward to learning about dogs from all of you. My older dog attacks my young puppy. Is there a way to train an old dog to like the new puppy?

Sounds like someone asking for help doesn’t it?

Except that the person added a link to a website in the signature. Where did the link go?

Take a guess.

A dog trainer! On the dog trainer’s home page, it had this statement. Brace yourself, it’s not modest:

Although she does not claim the ability to “read your dog’s mind”, her knowledge of canine behavior is so vast and her experience is so extensive, that when you describe your pet’s problem, she can not only tell you how to solve the problem, but why the problem exists.

Does the trainer have no idea how to solve dog issues like the one she posted, and she’s misrepresenting herself on her website? Or is she just looking for ways to get backlinks to her website by pretending to be a person looking for help. My guess is that it’s the latter, which is why I wrote this post.

If you want to get backlinks by posting in people’s forums, don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. If you are knowledgeable about the topic and can offer good advice to others, then simply do that. If you are indeed helpful, the forum owner will probably let you post your link, because you aren’t a spammer.

In this case, the forum owner looked at the posting and the link and quickly determined that it was another dog trainer trying to get backlinks to her website by pretending to be someone looking for help.

Now, what the other dog trainer SHOULD have done was to RESPOND to another person’s post who is looking for help. In this way, the other dog trainer was ADDING VALUE to the forum, not just simply trying to exploit it.

So a word to the wise: there’s nothing wrong with looking for forums where discussions are going on that are relevant to your business. Feel free to post and join the discussion. But don’t be a spammer and try to get undeserved backlinks. Be honest, be yourself…contribute!

I’m a client of Aldebaran Web Design and Jill kindly invited me to post in her blog about my YellowPages.com pay-per-click advertising experience. This story is for you, the small business owner with a website, who might be contemplating hiring a company to do pay-per-click advertising for you. Please don’t do it! Please repeat after me: “I promise I will use Google AdWords exclusively, and consult Jill at Aldebaran Web Design for guidance if needed.”

I started my Seattle based private psychotherapy practice in the fall of 2007, and soon after Jill and I went live with my new website, it got noticed by online advertising companies who emailed me with business offers: “Sign up on our therapist listing and double your clients!” they’d say, or “The smart therapist hires us for internet advertising!” I deleted most of them, but made the major mistake of taking calls from a sales rep at YellowPages.com.

The YellowPages.com sales rep had seen my website—and he proved he had by describing details about it—and said it was great. (Yes, I’m sorry to say I responded to cheap flattery.) He talked at length about the importance of pay-per-click advertising. At the time, I was experimenting with Google AdWords on my own, but I didn’t feel adept at it. I wasn’t sure I was really making effective ads or getting new clients from it. So…I agreed to hire YellowPages.com to do pay-per-click advertising for me, for quite a lot of money per month.

For a month or two, as the YellowPages.com sales rep warned me, nothing happened. They said they needed to “set up” my account. (Note that with Google AdWords, you can start immediately, and you have full control over your own ads, keywords, campaign themes, everything.)

A month or two later, I got an email from my sales rep with a screen shot of one of my ads. It had a typo in it. (!!) And the text didn’t sound like me. “Run into some trouble?” it said, as if my work as a psychotherapist is to help people who just broke their shoelaces. Most of my clients haven’t “run into some trouble.” They’re wrestling with deep stuff, hard issues, painful problems.

When I asked them to fix the typo, I was told that it would take several days to roll out the fix. (Again, with Google AdWords, it gets fixed the moment you yourself go in and fix it.) And they didn’t want me writing ads. “Run into some trouble” it was, and “Run into some trouble” it was going to continue to be. *sigh*

But the best (worst) was yet to come. In January of 2008, Jill began helping me with my Google AdWords campaign. Part of that included careful review of my website statistics. She started noticing some weird traffic on my site. (I followed her recommendation and use Web-stat, so I could see the weird traffic too.) Jill can recognize invalid clicks and fraudulent pay-per-click traffic, and so Jill emailed me and asked me if I hired someone to do pay-per-click advertising for me. I was embarrassed to say yes, I had hired YellowPages.com.

And here’s what we discovered: my YellowPages.com ads were showing up on odd search-engine sites (odd because they weren’t legitimate sites—they were “made for adsense sites“, sites filled exclusively with sponsored ads, and no real content), and the ads had text like this: “Run into some trouble? Puyallup Therapist. Call today to schedule an appointment.” I boldfaced the word ‘Puyallup’ because it was boldfaced in the ad, and because my therapy office is more than an hour away from Puyallup. The link in the Puyallup ad (and the Bellevue ad, and the Federal Way ad, and on several other ads) was a link to my site.

Turns out YellowPages.com uses dynamic ad-title generation techniques. If someone enters the keywords “Puyallup therapist,” my ad will pop up as a sponsored link, with the word ‘Seattle’ changed to ‘Puyallup.’ This is false advertising. Jill and I found that well over 80% of the clicks on these ads were bounces—the person would click on the ad, see that I don’t work anywhere near Puyallup, and bounce away from my site. And I was paying for the clicks!

I started emailing YellowPages.com, and what followed was a series of email exchanges that would be funny if they weren’t so infuriating.

They tried everything: “Those aren’t our ads.” Oh really? So someone else is paying out of their own pocket to post ads for me that say “Run into some trouble?”?

Their next tactic: “Our ads are performing better than you say.” No, they weren’t. I emailed them bounce-rate data and more screen shots of fraudulent ads.

By this time I was three or four levels of supervisors above my YellowPages.com original sales rep. Each time I would email YellowPages.com, it seemed, my email would be forwarded to someone’s supervisor, who would then try to calm me down and convince me that I wasn’t being taken for a pay-per-click fraud ride.

In the end, they canceled my YellowPages.com pay-per-click account. I didn’t get a refund for the money I had already spent, but they did stop the campaign and have not taken any more of my money.

I hope that if you’ve read this far, you are now a true believer: you have now resolved to stick with Google AdWords, and only Google AdWords, and consult Jill at Aldebaran Web Design if you have questions or want to learn more about doing pay-per-click advertising yourself. Take it from me: I went in another direction, and wow, did I ever run into some trouble!!

—Stephen Crippen, StephenCrippen.com

Footnote by Jill:Stephen is now managing his own Google AdWords campaign and in complete control of his online advertising. I offer Google AdWords Campaign Consulting services to my small business website clients to help them avoid situations like these – this is not the first client of mine that has been caught in a poor quality pay-per-click scheme. I got trapped in one myself with CitySearch before I learned about how easy it is to get caught paying for invalid clicks. My goal, is to teach small business owners how to manage their own Google AdWords accounts – knowledge is power

This video tutorial takes you through the basics looking at your website statistics using Web-Stat, my favorite website traffic tracking service. If you want to sign up for Web-Stat, click here, they have a 30 day free trial. Enjoy the video!

Bounce rate is typically defined as the percentage of visitors who leave after visiting only 1 page on your website. If 100 people visited your home page, and 50 of them left after only viewing your home page, then your bounce rate is 50%.

Why is Bounce Rate Important?

Because bounce rate can tell you something about the quality of the particular webpage or particular traffic source. Let’s look at some example from my own website traffic statistics:

Bounce Rate For Different Pages On My Website.

You can see that my home page has a bounce rate of 42.3% while my Citysearch click fraud article has a bounce rate of 50.7%. (I’ve just changed the look of my home page, so we’ll see if this rate changes for the month of Feb). Blog articles often have higher bounce rates than “regular” website pages. Look at the different bounce rates for your webpages and investigate what the differences are between pages with low bounce rates and pages with high bounce rates.

Bounce Rates For Referral Sources.

You should also look at the bounce rate for the different traffic referral sources, especially if you are paying for this traffic. Notice that for my website, Google US has a bounce rate of 52.9%, while traffic from websites of my clients has a bounce rate of 34.7%. This makes sense, doesn’t it? If you are using pay-per-click advertising, be sure you’re watching the bounce rate of traffic from your ads, because a higher bounce rate means either your ad isn’t attracting the right buyers, or your ad’s landing page isn’t good enough to capture them.

What Should Your Bounce Rate Targets Be?
Obviously, the lower your bounce rate is, the better. Looking at the web traffic tracking statistics of my clients, the lowest bounce rate for a home page is around 22%. Remember, other things can affect your bounce rate – such as whether folks are searching specifically for your business name (ie: “Ahimsa Dog Training”) or generic keywords (“dog training seattle”). If people are looking for your specific business, due to your advertising efforts, your home page bounce rate will be lower.

I found an article that reported different bounce rates for different types of websites. The following is a quote from their blog:

“Retail sites driving well targeted traffic 20-40% bounce. (One vendor told us anything above 33% should be a flag)

Simple landing pages (with one call to action such as add to cart) I’ve seen bounce at a much higher rate, anywhere from 70-90%.

Content websites with high search visibility (often for irrelevant terms) can bounce at 40-60%.

Portals (MSN, Yahoo groups etc) have much lower bounce rates in our experience 10-30%.

Service sites (self service or FAQ sites) again usually lower 10-30%.

Lead generation (services for sale) 30-50%

Bounce rates on a blog is something I think is misleading. By their very nature a blog is a long list of posts and articles. I think bounce could quite easily be 80-100% on blogs because people tend to be reading one article or post at a time. However that doesn’t mean that people aren’t finding value which is why i think it’s misleading.”

The above guidelines are based in this one company’s experience, so your bounce rate may differ, but I think it’s a fair guideline to use.

Want to learn more? Here are more resources on Social Media:

ProBlogger’s Social Media Category

Five Reasons Twitter is an Essential Social Media Tool

I often encourage my small business clients to add WordPress blogs to their websites. WordPress blogs are a wonderful way to add relevant content that attracts visitors. Before visitors can find your WordPress blog article though, the search engines, like Google, need to crawl over your blog article and index it. How long does it take for search engines to become aware of a blog article, crawl it and index it? Read on…

I wrote an article last night on “Dynamic Ad Titles“. The article was posted at around 8:00 PM last night as you can see from the timestamp below:

The next morning, I did a search on Google for the keywords I had targeted in the article: “dynamic ad title”. Here’s what I found:

My article was listed fourth, out of 1,520,000 articles (wow!) and was crawled 13 hours earlier.

This means Google crawled my blog article around 10pm the previous evening. So if I posted the article at 8:00pm, this means that Google crawled and indexed my article 2 hours after I posted it!

I should also note, that searches in Yahoo and MSN did not yield evidence that either of them had indexed my article. No wonder Google is the #1 search engine.

If you’d like to read more about adding a blog to your website, visit my blog page. Blogs are a wonderful way to help attract traffic to your website as long as the articles are written on ONE topic and the blog’s title has been optimized for search engines. Keep blogging!

Perhaps you’ve heard about the latest craze on the internet: social bookmarking. I keep reading about how people are using one social bookmarking site called Stumbleupon.com to drive traffic to their websites, so I decided to run my own experiment on December 11, 2007. Amazing things happened.

As of the writing of this blog article, I typically get around 40 visitors each day to my website, and because I have a great traffic tracking system (read more about traffic tracking) I know exactly where these visitors come from, where they go once they get to my website, even how long they stay on each page.

Here’s what I did. I created a Stumbleupon.com account, entered some personal information, uploaded an image of myself, and tried to appear a part of the Stumbleupon.com community. I then rated my most popular blog article (about Citysearch Click Fraud). Next, I searched for other Stumbleupon users who might be sympathetic, people who read about pay-per-click, search engine marketing, web design, or even just the internet. I sent these people a message from within Stumbleupon, and asked them to rate my blog article. I only contacted three or four people.

Within minutes…literally…the Stumbleupon traffic hits started coming in. I was glued to my traffic tracking monitor – I was mesmerized. There were 4, 6, 10 people on my website at the same time! I wondered whether my server would crash. I watched, completely amazed. For around two hours, the visitors kept coming, and then the traffic slowly stopped. Here’s what the traffic for that day looked like (it’s the huge spike):

Amazing isn’t it. I received nearly six times my normal website traffic: 200 extra visitors. Impressive you say? Yes, it certainly is. And if all I cared about was getting visitors, I’d say the experiment was a success. But when I looked more carefully at what the visitors did once they got to my site, my heart sank. Out of the 200 visits, only two people went to other pages in my website. That’s a whopping 99% “bounce rate”, and it’s not good. It means folks didn’t find what they were looking for.

The traffic died down eventually, and after a few days stopped. In order for your webpage to keep being served up to folks that use Stumbleupon, it needs to be continually rated “thumbs up”. And I guess my blog article wasn’t that compelling. I was trying to explain this phenomena to one of my website clients and I used a balloon-in-a-crowd metaphor.

Here’s the metaphor: If you have a crowd of people and you throw a regular balloon to them, the balloon stays aloft as long as folks give it a little bump to keep it in the air. But if not enough folks bump it, it eventually falls to the floor, gets stepped on and pops. That’s apparently what happened to my blog article.

My wife did a similar experiment with some of her dog training articles, and they are still up in the air and being Stumbled. Her data suggests that around 0.5% – 1.5% of people who Stumbleupon her articles rated them with a thumbs up and gave them a bump. This was enough to keep her dog training articles in the Stumbleupon loop.

So her experiment was more of a success than mine was, and while we’re not sure exactly why, it may simply be that her product “free dog training advice” was found to be more useful by the Stumbleupon.com folks than mine was. I’m trying not to take it personally

If you have a Stumbleupon.com experience getting more traffic to your website, I’d love to hear about it.

AN UPDATE: 12/28/07
As an extension of my Stumbleupon experiment, I threw this article into the Stumbleupon mix as well, and it’s doing much much better than my Citysearch Click Fraud article. As of right now, this article has gotten 277 visitors, and has been kept in the Stumbleupon loop now for 5 days. While people are reading the article (average length of stay is 1 minute 39 seconds) the bounce rate remains very high at 96.5%.

Why is this article doing better in Stumbleupon than my Citysearch Click Fraud Article? Well, it’s about Stumbleupon for starters, a topic that’s perhaps more relevant to Stumbleupon users. Secondly, I put it in the “Stumbleupon” category – there is no “Citysearch” category (at least a main one), so I presume that I’ve done a better job at matching the article with the audience. As of right now, I’ve gotten a total of 10 good ratings – 3.6%, and these ratings have been enough to keep me in the loop.

Take Home Message: It is certainly is possible to drive a fair amount of traffic to your website using Stumbleupon.com, given that you can appropriately match your article with an audience, so that enough people will give it a good rating to keep it in play. However, at least for my business (small business website design) this traffic has a very high bounce rate, meaning that I’m very unlikely to get new clients as a result of someone reading this article. I’ve read that bounce rates for blog articles are higher than for other types of visitors, but I don’t have any actual data to support this. However, it’s possible that for a different kind of business, you would get a lower bounce rate, and if all you want is traffic (for advertising) then it might be just what you need.

Another Update: I’ve read another article about Stumbleupon traffic in which some folks claim it improves search engine rankings. This is simply untrue.
Keep in mind that I’m talking about traffic. Traffic and search engine rankings are two different things. Someone visiting your website will NOT increase your search engine rankings, period. Search engines have no idea that your site has been visited, they are not psychic. Likewise, people StumblingUpon your website will do NOTHING to increase search engine rankings.

Search engine rankings are driven by many factors, but traffic isn’t one of them. The only way that a visit can contribute towards your search engine ranking, is IF that visitor has their own website or blog and IF that visitor is so impressed with your page that he/she adds a link to your page on their site.

Now, given the bounce rate mentioned above, the probability of this happening is ridiculously remote. Getting people to add links to you is not easy, and it usually takes a heck of a lot more work on your part than passively just letting traffic come in. So just like traffic might lead to new customers – IF the traffic source is full of people looking for what you’re selling – and that’s a big huge IF – traffic might, if all the stars align, lead to a new link, it’s a very, very remote possibility, and I wouldn’t count on it to improve your rankings a nit.