Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

I couldn’t help but share this one.  In March we were fortunate enough to be nominated for the Greater Lansing Business Monthly’s Entrepreneur of the Year…and we won!  Up against tough competition like Justin Caine and Good Fruit Video and Sam Hogg of GiftZip (one of our clients), it was truly one of the best nights in our company’s history.  Here’s Chris Holman introducing Joe and I, and then our completely off the cuff acceptance speeches.  Honestly, the running joke at the office that week was, “Have you practiced your acceptance speech yet?”  We had no notion whatsoever that we would win.

Adam Henige and Joe Ford Win Emerging Entrepreneurs of the Year from Netvantage on Vimeo.

Nothing is worse for the budding online businessman than to see their traffic numbers plummet…particularly their search numbers because they are often the least understood form of traffic.  Often search traffic is oversimplified as, “Work hard in SEO and link building to get top positions and the traffic will magically appear.”

But like any business, it’s just not that simple.  I was working with a site earlier today and was a bit puzzled as to why their would be a pretty substantial drop in traffic over the last week after a rising tide of gains.  Knowing that my observant client would have questions, I dove in to see what the deal was.  Here was my approach.

1. Did our rankings take a dive?

This has to be your first thought in this situation.  A simple rank check can usually give you the answers to this one.  However, the site I was working with is a very new site that just recently got out of the sandbox and started climbing the ladder for competitive terms.  So with largely long tail traffic (and over 3,000) products, I had to be more creative.  Another extremely valuable tool here can be Google Webmaster Tools - which will allow you to see historical trends of your most visible terms week to week.

2. Did we get a penalty or lose site authority we had gained?

I went back a few weeks in analytics and grabbed several hundred random listings of long tail terms and ran those through rank checker.  The thought here was that even though I hadn’t been following the rankings for these terms, that most of them should maintain high rankings if we were getting clicks only a few weeks ago.  My sample showed that the vast majority of the terms still held solid first page rankings.  So this wasn’t the culprit either.

3. Is this a seasonal trend?

This was a new business for me and my client, so I had no historical data to work with myself, so it was time to start looking at competitors.  Quantcast can be great for this if you have competitors who have quantified sites and share their results.  You can get accurate traffic numbers and really look for trends.  Sure enough, after a pretty substantial search I started finding trends in quantified sites (as well as extremely high volume non-quantified sites) that seemed to tell me that this was most likely a seasonal issue.

While I will continue to keep my eye on the search traffic trends, I thought the thought process here would be a valuable thing to share with online business owners and small businesses investing time in SEO.  It’s easy to panic and start making changes to a strategy when it appears you’re not getting results.

Be sure to do your due diligence, as this example shows, the strategy might not always be the problem.

I am not a programmer.  Hell, I’m not even a designer.  With that in mind, please know that in a lot of instances, SEO friendly redirects are REALLY easy to perform and can be very beneficial for your SEO efforts.

What is a 301 redirect?

I won’t assume everyone knows what a 301 is, so let’s start here.  A 301 redirect is basically a signal telling browsers and crawlers that destination A has moved to destination B.  A good example situation of this would be when an online store stops carrying Brand X cat food, but begins carrying Brand Z instead.  Obviously you don’t want old customers going to a dead page once you remove it, so you can set up a 301 so when visitors type in the URL for Brand X it sends them instead to Brand Z.

More than people friendly

So while this is obviously good for human users, it’s also good for search engines.  Keep in mind that search engines are in the business of giving users high quality results.  If they find that you have dead pages, that’s probably not going to help your site’s rankings in general.  Secondarily, if people are linking to your dead pages, you’re effectively wasting all of that delicious link juice.  In the previous example, any links pointing to the now defunct Brand X page are completely wasted.  Once the search engine sees your redirect, it will credit the new page with the link juice and your Brand Z page will reap the rewards in the rankings.

Another valuable use of 301s is consistency.  What SEOs refer to as canonicalization - meaning that your site can be reached at both http://www.yoursite.com as well as http://yoursite.com.  While search engines seem pretty capable of dealing with this now (there’s always a concern that one of the pages could be seen as duplicate content which is not a good thing).  This can also come in handy if your site has a home page that’s available from multiple URLs - sometimes you’ll see this as a /index page or a /home page.  This is problematic for two reasons - 1)  It’s another possible duplicate content issue and 2) If other sites begin naturally linking to these pages, you’re not maximizing the links to your home page.  Instituting 301s can solve these problems.

Instituting a 301 redirect

So you’ve found a couple of dead pages on your site, what do you need to do?  First off, you’ll need to know what type of site you have.  Our site is done in .php so if we wanted to redirect a dead page to a new location, we would just add a page where the dead page was and insert this:

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.wheremynewpageis.com” );
?>

That’s it!

Depending on your type of site, you can do a google search and find all kinds of resources, just try something like “how to create a 301 redirect in html“

If you want to redirect all of your pages to the www version, you’ll need to do a little more work (but not much).  You’ll want to get into your cpanel file manager or ftp and look at the root folder of your domain for a file called htaccess.  If one exists, just add the following text to the file (you can edit it in notepad - just replace “yoursite” with your domain).

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^yoursite.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

If you don’t have an htaccess file, just make one in notepad and save the file without the .txt extension and upload it to the root folder via ftp.

SEO isn’t always hard, and there’s lots of things that you can do to improve your site without a ton of SEO knowledge.  If you have a question on implementing any of this, just shoot me a question by filling out the contact form to your right.

Here are some other valuable redirect resources:

• http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
• http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/0405/redirects.html

I don’t have kids myself, but I’ve heard the term “terrible twos” more than enough to know that a two year old can be quite the ball of untamed fury.  I’m not sure how that relates to a business, but I’d like to think that we can continue to grow in our own way without causing the laundry list of headaches that come with a typical two year old.

It’s been a great run thus far, and as we celebrate our second birthday on May 12th I just wanted to run down a list of lessons I’ve learned as a small business owner over the course of two years, and hand out some much deserved thank yous to the people who have helped us be successful thus far.

Lessons learned

1. Stick to what you know.  The dollar bills have been wagged in our face more than once to go outside of the core services that we offer but we never took the bait.  That wasn’t always easy when clients were few and times were lean, but we stuck to our guns and it was, and will continue to be, the right thing to do.
2. Get organized!  One thing we continue to work through is developing and maintaining consistent processes.  This isn’t easy when your staff and client roster keep growing while the methods you employ from client to client keep changing as well.  Be aware of process at all times and try to institute them at all times.
3. Bend over backwards to maintain your reputation.  I had an instance where a very small client came to us with a small project to help push their organic traffic over the hump.  For the limited scope and size of the project, I felt we did a pretty bang up job, but it didn’t quite make the splash the client had hoped.  They came back, not upset, but wondering what else they could do given their limited resources.  They were good people with a good business, so I put in a few extra hours of work to show them what they should be doing to help themselves.  I guess I could have blown them off, but one loud unhappy voice can be heard for miles…
4. Put yourself out there!  The Search Marketing Community is full of incredibly smart and talented people, but it’s good to get yourself known in whatever field you choose to follow.  So do your homework and try to contribute to your industry.  I don’t have a ton of time to guest blog or do white papers, but I love when I have the chance to.  I even uncorked some of my old statistical skills that I hadn’t used since 1998 to baffle some people over at SEOMoz with my guest blog on term vector theory.
5. Work smarter, not harder.  As our capabilities grow as an organization, we’re able to do some far more interesting link building tactics.  Make something cool, and the links will come (sometimes…if properly marketed!)  Here’s some fun stuff we’ve worked on recently - Are you smarter than a football player? and in honor of National Boating Safety Week, a boater’s safety quiz.
6. Have fun.  Our office is extremely fun.  People laugh and joke a lot.  Surround yourself with smart, motivated and fun people and good things happen.  That’s science.
7. Good partners make good business.  Where to start?  Traction, Nicholas Creative, ICS Marketing Support Services, Visual Hero, Mighty, and a handful of wonderful contractors who we have fabulous symbiotic relationships with.  The same theory applies here as does with our own staff - surrounding yourself with good partners leads to good results.

Random thanks.

1. Whoever the hell nominated us for the Greater Lansing Business Monthly Emerging Entrepreneurs Award.  We honestly did not see that coming but are very grateful for the recognition.
2. My parents, who I did not invite to that event because I was certain we weren’t going to win.  My bad.  If I get nominated for anything else in my lifetime, I’m bringing you no matter what.  Also thanks for not thinking we were out of our mind starting a business in 2008 and giving up awesome jobs at another great company in Spartan Internet.
3. Joe Ford.  My partner in crime continues to be an excellent face to our company and the perfect compliment to my skill sets.  Synergy, Joe…synergy.
4. All the excellent staff and interns who have already worked for us.  We do our best to make your time with Netvantage valuable, and you have been instrumental in our success thus far.
5. The local media.  The Great Lakes IT Report, Capital Gains, WLNS, the LSJ and of course the Greater Lansing Business Monthly have all been very helpful spreading the word when notable things happen at Netvantage (and with many of our friends and partners).
6. Shaun Anderson.  One of my favorite big time SEOs (I’m still a relative nobody), who in a round about way helped me name this blog.  He’s located in the UK and during an email string pointed out that based on the hours of my communications, I must not sleep.  I like the title, so thanks for the help!
7. Last but not least - our clients, past and present.  It took some guts for clients to sign with us as we started with none.  For every company that rolled the dice by working with the new guys, I can never thank you enough.  We will continue to do our best to provide value to you.

I can’t wait to write another one of these next year, hopefully chock full of more learning experiences and new people to thank.

As a growing company, inevitably we have to reach out to contractors from time to time to deal with surges in demand for our services.  As I come up on my second year of ownership here at Netvantage, I’ve learned a couple of hard lessons, and right now I’m learning that dealing with unreliable contractors is downright infuriating.  Enter my experience with writer Chris Kyalo.  I initially contacted Chris in 2009 to develop some articles for a client of ours and despite being a little behind schedule, he did a bang up job delivering exactly as he had promised.  More recently, I reached out to him for a larger project, and it’s been a painful experience.  Since this man has my money and hasn’t found it fit to return it, I suppose I will publish our correspondence as a lesson learned for other possible SEOs who run into this situation.

When Contractors Go Bad

Below details the string of communication that lead up to this post (with 4 very slight semantic edits to protect the identity of my clients).

— On Mon, 1/4/10, Adam H wrote:

From: Adam H
Subject: Re: Fw: Articles
To: “Chris Kyalo” <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Date: Monday, January 4, 2010, 7:55 AM

Hi Chris,

Sorry for the delay, but I just sent the money over from our new corporate paypal account.  Please let me know when you’ve received it.

Thanks,

Adama

— On Wed, 1/6/10, Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Fw: Articles
To: “Adam H”
Date: Wednesday, January 6, 2010, 7:24 AM

Hi Adam,

Thanks. I received the Paypal funds.

I will keep you posted

warmly,
Christopher Kyalo.

— On Thu, 1/21/10, Adam H wrote:

From: Adam H
Subject: Re: Fw: Articles
To: “Chris Kyalo” <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Date: Thursday, January 21, 2010, 9:07 AM

Hi Chris,

Just wanted to get in touch and see how things were progressing.  Thanks.

— On Fri, 1/22/10, Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Fw: Articles
To: “Adam H”
Date: Friday, January 22, 2010, 5:49 AM

Hello Adam,

You should start looking at some articles before end of next week.

warmly,
Chris.

— On Tue, 2/2/10, Adam H wrote:

From: Adam H
Subject: Re: Fw: Articles
To: “Chris Kyalo” <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010, 2:58 PM

Hi Chris,

Any update on our articles?

Thanks,
Adam

— On Thu, 2/4/10, Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Fw: Articles
To: “Adam H”
Date: Thursday, February 4, 2010, 9:47 PM

Hello Adam,

Articles coming up. Some technical issues that had slowed everything considerably have just been resolved a few hours ago.

warmly,
Chris.

— On Mon, 2/8/10, Adam H wrote:

From: Adam H
Subject: Re: Fw: Articles
To: “Chris Kyalo” <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Date: Monday, February 8, 2010, 4:09 PM

Thanks Chris, any further ideas on the timeline for these?

Thanks.

— On Fri, 2/12/10, Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Fw: Articles
To: “Adam H”
Date: Friday, February 12, 2010, 12:52 PM

Hello Adam,

Really sorry for the delay. I have to confess that underestimated the backlog of articles I had to clear.

Still I am working on your articles and will be able to give you an accurate timeline as soon as I send you the first batch in a few days time. Please don’t worry, the entire lot will be done pretty quickly without compromising the quality in any way.

warmly
Christopher Kyalo.

— On Sun, 2/21/10, Adam H wrote:

From: Adam H
Subject: Re: Fw: Articles
To: “Chris Kyalo” <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Date: Sunday, February 21, 2010, 12:23 PM

Chris,

To say I’m a bit concerned as to whether I will see these articles is an understatement at this point.  I sent payment more than a month and a half ago and have nothing to show for it.  I would like to resolve this one way or another this week - either with a completed project, a partially completed project with a refund, or a refund.  Please let me know how you would like to proceed.

Thanks,
Adam

— On Fri, 2/23/10, Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Fw: Articles
To: “Adam H”
Date: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 12:49 AM

The project will be completed by the end of this week. I underestimated the backlog I accumulated and the truth is that I really wanted to give your articles my best rather than just complete them for the sake of completing them.

Still I am really sorry for what has happened. It should NOT have happened.

Chris.

— On Sun, 2/28/10, Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Subject: Articles
To: Adam H
Date: Sunday, February 28, 2010, 2:21 AM

Hello Adam,

Thank you so much for your patience during my crisis.

Below find the initial articles I have done. I am eager to know what your honest verdict is on this articles. Let me know as soon as you can. I will send more articles later.

warmly,
Chris.

I*Edited out the completed articles - 2.5% of the total contracted work - which was quality work, I won’t deny that*

— On Tue, 3/9/10, Adam H wrote:

From: Adam H
Subject: Re: Articles
To: “Chris Kyalo” <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Date: Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 7:20 AM

Chris.

I understand you’ve had some troubles on your end, but from my perspective, I have been promised a product multiple times that has not been delivered.  If I don’t have my articles by the end of the week I want my money back.  I’m servicing clients and if I can’t produce the articles then I’m to blame.  I can better use that money elsewhere.

If I don’t receive payment, I will be forced to disclose how this played out publicly.

-Adam

— On Sun, 3/9/10, Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Chris Kyalo <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Subject: Articles
To: Adam H
Date: Tuesday, March 9, 2010 8:49 PM

I have been trying to pace myself as acurately as possible because I did not want to give you a date that won’t work out this time. By Wednesday next week all your articles should be done without fail. I will start sending the complete batches within the next 2 days.

— On Thu, 4/8/10, Adam H wrote:

From: Adam H
Subject: Re: more articles
To: “Chris Kyalo” <ckyalo@yahoo.com>
Date: Thursday, April 8, 2010, 10:37 PM

Chris we are now at nearly three months for less than 20 percent of our required work.  Some of the articles I had previously requested aren’t even in line with our needs at this point.  Do you have any timeline for all of the work to be complete or are you just going to continue to string this along into 2011?  I simply don’t have forever for this.  I have tried to give you deadlines, but I keep getting a slow trickle of work.  Previously you finished your work in a very timely fashion, so I know you’re capable of this, yet somehow this just isn’t happening.  Give me a timeline you can stick to that’s within the next 30 days or give me the rest of my balance back.  This is very disappointing.

*End transmissions*

I understand that you can’t make every client happy.  As a business owner myself, I have worked hard to maintain the stellar reputation we have thus far been able to achieve.  However, while sometimes expectations might not be properly communicated or met, when you deliver an end product there’s really no excuse for taking someone’s money and providing them 20% of what you promised.  Needless to say, this is what it is to get ripped off.  When dealing with contractors such Chris Kyalo, just remember to proceed with caution.