If you’re like me, you’ve got passwords written on post-it notes, in text files or in the “master” excel spreadsheet that was created to solve this but just hasn’t been updated in 6 months or so. Hey, we aren’t all blessed with perfect organization skills. Here is a way to at least secure those passwords or sensitive notes to give you some peace of mind that at least they can’t be stolen. This will only protect a text file so be aware but it’s a start!Steganos LockNote

I’ve posted before on choosing keywords and thought the subject of niche keywords might be of interest. Niche websites are all the buzz in the search marketing world right now but my topic deals with niche keywords especially how they apply to the industry you may be targeting. Within every industry there is the generic keyword, i.e. Trucks and the niche keyword, 72 red Ford F150 trucks. Finding niche keywords that apply to your segment of an industry is a very effective way of driving traffic with usually limited competition.

When developing your keyword list look very hard at what you bring to the market, do you offer a service that can be applied to specific model or part? Does your service fit well with a niche market within a larger industry? After answering those kinds of questions you will begin to find additional words that fit your main keywords. Again, Trucks is a good generic fit for you but you found that Ford F150 trucks was as specific as you could find for your niche so expand out and you can use F150 truck, Ford F150, f150 Pickup Truck and suddenly you have 30, 40 or maybe hundreds of niche keywords that your product or service relates to. Let’s look at my little demonstration after some very basic research using Wordtracker.

“trucks” returns an estimated 6,480 visits with 139,000,000 competing web pages.
“f150 truck” returns an estimated 57 visits with 94,000 competing web pages and the other 90+ keywords that are related return over 250 visits with competition no more than 178,000 and many in the hundreds of competing web pages. Any good SEO would tell you that getting great rankings in a market that has 178,000 competing web pages is very obtainable.

Sure if you look at just traffic you’re at 5% of the generic keyword but the point is not numbers but targeted traffic and so the 5% you are getting is probably 90% targeted as opposed to the 95% that would probably not be targeted if you were going for the generic keyword and ignoring the rest. Also the opportunity to get great results is increased significantly with your niche words so your overall investment in time would be reduced.

Niche keywords are a great way to become competitive online and should always be discussed when the subject of keywords is on the table.

If the word Google does not come up in the first three sentences of any conversation I have with clients or potential clients I immediately go play the lottery because it’s a sign from the Big Kahuna that’s it’s a lucky day. Don’t get me wrong I have somewhat of an obsession with Google not only from a work standpoint but also from a personal standpoint. I love to see sites we work on ranked well in Google and I love to mess with anything new Google puts out. HOWEVER, during those conversations and at times during any optimization campaign, I must take a quick breath and remind myself and others that Google is not the be all end all in search. The fact is if you are not paying attention to what your site is doing in Yahoo, MSN and several other engines you are missing out on significant traffic. Let’s look at a case in point.

I recently optimized a site for a good friend of mine. He has a business that operates on a local level only and the only competition he has for his main keywords is Yellow Pages of which he not only advertises through but because he bought their advertising they gave him a website for free. (Note: TANSTAF - there ain’t no such thing as free) Sorry I digress. His site is brand new and as part of our agreement I’m not doing all the grunt work so the content is limited but growing and the links are few but growing and with that in mind he’s not ranking in Google yet for his main keywords, in fact he’s still fairly distant in Yahoo for his main keywords but in MSN he has achieved top rankings on numerous keywords. So should he be upset with the results so far?
Let’s see:
Before he ranked in MSN -

• Traffic was about 2 visits a day
• No emails being generated from website
• Phone calls were about 2 or 3 a week

Since he ranked on MSN -

• Traffic is about 25 visits a day
• 1 or 2 emails a week from website
• 4 or more phone calls a week

Let me clarify this is not all due to MSN as the site receives traffic from several secondary directories, local directories, etc but there is a definite connection to at least 70% of the traffic and at least 50% of the phone calls and emails. He told me the other day he had compared his business to date to last year and it was up about 80% and this is his slow season.

The point here is obvious while Google is king and probably will be for a while, concentrating all of your efforts to rank well on Google at the expense of the rest of the engines is a big mistake.

From time to time I’m reminded that everyone starts at zero when it comes to web design and I try to pass on a tip or two to help those who are creating a site for the first or second time or are maybe versed enough to be considered novice at html but know nothing of php or other scripting languages. My tip in this post is: Stop using your email address as your means of contact on your website. My reason is selfish… I want to stop the spammers from obtaining more addresses to spam.

To that end I found a very simple program that will generate a php file to allow you to use a form on your site and not have your email address harvested. I tried it out and it was easy to use, has a nice help section and offers a free as well as paid version. The features are very cool and allow a beginner or novice to create sophisticated forms that can print to a database, auto respond and much more. The program is called The PHP Form Wizard.
As with any free program I offer this advice. If you use it and you are satisfied, purchase it and help out the developers.

I’m not a cat lover so maybe that’s why I thought this was funny. I would encourage anyone who puts stuff on their cat to send in a photo, hmmm… I wonder if putting my dog on a cat would count.

All too often when speaking with potential clients the subject of guaranteed rankings is raised. While the sales pitch is nice the reality is no one can guarantee a site can be ranked in a certain position for a certain keyword unless the ranking includes pay per click results. Sure I’ve read the sites that “guarantee” results and if you carefully read their pitch you’ll see dozens of loopholes that allow them to make the claim of guaranteed rankings. So let’s briefly put them under the microscope.

One litmus test I like to apply to any SEO company is where do they rank themselves? So taking that test and doing a search for guaranteed rankings on Google I used the top results. (Sorry, I’m not going to reveal the site, as the point of this post is not about bad mouthing a competitor) The title tag on the homepage of the first result, which should contain the keywords or phrase that the page is going after, is “Search Engine Rankings | Search Engine Ranking”. Doing a search on Google for the term Search Engine Rankings and then Search Engine Ranking pulls zero top 50 results for the top ranked site that guarantees rankings. Take that test to Yahoo and the results are the same, MSN does return front page results for the plural version and page 4 for the singular version. So if they were clients who had been told they would have guaranteed rankings for their main keywords and saw these results what do you think the reaction would be? Sure, they could probably show results on several of the secondary engines they list as part of their guarantee. Engines like All The Web or Lycos. While traffic is certainly generated from these type engines a consumer looking for SEO is expecting results on the big three and our conversations would tell you that most of them want to be front page, excuse me #1 on Google.

So the top ranked company for the term Guaranteed Rankings has nailed down a front page listing for one term on MSN and zero in the top fifty on Google and Yahoo, since I’m scoring this test I’ll give it a 30.

Another guarantee several companies use is performance based. “You only pay for top results”. Again this sounds great but let’s look at that a bit more closely. The guarantee is usually for a set number of keywords. While the number varies, 20 seems to be a frequent number that is used. So in essence if you only do pay for front page results and they are only concentrating on twenty keywords and if they perform twice as good as the example above you are still only ranking a few keywords on a couple of the main engines. Now you could probably convince yourself that 4 or 5 top 10 rankings is great but consider that a effective optimization company would be working on hundreds of keywords for your site that while most of them are not the highly competitive keywords they are also likely to be significantly less competitively allowing the site they are optimizing for to receive top rankings on probably most if not all of the main engines and the subsequent traffic from that wide of a spread. That is and always has been the true power of optimization, getting rankings on many keywords not just a few.

So if you’re set on getting a guarantee you may get lucky and have tremendous success, in fact I hope you do but whatever the results make sure you understand upfront exactly what kind of guarantee you’re getting and see what the company you’re considering working with has done for themselves… like the old saying goes “If you can’t do it for yourself how can I expect you to do it for me?”

Do you want to test us? Our main keywords are Search Engine Optimization Dallas, SEO Dallas, Search Engine Marketing Dallas, Web Design Dallas and Website Design Dallas.