There are things you want to consider in an inbound link campaign:

1. The quality of links is more important that quantity.
2. Make sure you’re being linked to by relevant sites with solid content or information.
3. Make sure your site has link bait and appeals to the other site owners you’re trying to attract.
4. Don’t forget blogs and forums. Some may have nofollows set up automatically, but not all do.

For more resources I recommend the following:
SEO Book’s Link Building Ideas for Small Businesses
SEOMoz’s How to get Links from Your Linkbait

And on to Mexican food! I like Mexican food, but unfortunately I have trouble finding restaurants that make Mexican I can eat. Chain restaurants are definitely a bust. We stumbled across Guajillo’s in downtown Durham, and I love it! It’s in walking distance from the American Tobacco Campus, and it’s very small, but the food is excellent and priced well. I like how well the meat is flavored without being overly spiced, and I like how fresh the produce and cheese are. They do not have a website, but you can find them at 325 W Main Street, Durham, 27701 or call them at 919-688-9462.

When I begin keyword research I look at three things:

1. How relevant is the keyword or term to the subject matter?
2. What is the competition for the term?
3. How many people are searching for the term?

From here I make a list of terms I think are relevant to the client’s website and industry and then begin on individual page research. I also make sure the client is involved in my process. I believe that no one knows my client’s industry as well as he or she does, so it’s important to me that I get feedback in order to make sure I’m on the right page.

I look at high search volume versus longtail. If my clients have a small footprint I consider local rankings to help build up page rank that will allow them to rank for more difficult terms. I do page revisits approximately every six to eight weeks or longer as needed while taking advantage of analytics feedback to determine what keywords visitors use to find the pages, what the bounce rate for those pages are, and what the average visitor time is per page.

More importantly I think that it is vital for any website to not only do page revisits, but to do keyword list revisits. Users change. The ways they used the web a year ago are not the same ways they use it now, and as the economy or needs change so do the ways users try to find information- including the terms they search with. Ranking for the same terms month after month are great, but if users aren’t looking at those terms to find your website, then you’re wasting your time.

Speaking of new possibilities, a place that came to North Raleigh that I’m fond of is the Savoy. I had the pleasure of going for my boyfriend’s stepfather’s birthday. The way it works is you order a three course meal- appetizer, side course, and entreé. The food was wonderful, and there were a lot of things that impressed me. For instance the tables are surrounded by sliding screens so the wait staff can discreetly wait on everyone at the table without having to walk behind anyone. Plus the screens help block out the sound from other diners. The portions were small enough to be able to eat every course without leaving hungry. And on top of that, we made a special request of a Black Forest Cake for Nob’s birthday, and everyone at the table had their very own little cake. Drizzled in honey. It was amazing. Like any fine dining restaurant you’re going to end up forking out some cash, but believe me, it’s worth it.

That said I think it is my responsibility to vote, so in order to live up to my end of the bargain, I need to buckle down and learn what’s going on. I owe a lot of this to my significant other, Jeff, who practically inundated me with everything he could find on all candidates and issues I needed to know about. I was moving and starting a new job during the start of the election madness, and was really clueless. I’m not going to say who I voted for, but I’m glad for who won, and I thought Senator McCain’s concession speech was beautiful.

I was able to take advantage of North Carolina’s early voting, and one thing I was especially glad about was that even though I missed the registration deadline to switch my registration from Georgia to North Carolina, I was still able to take care of it through the early voting process. When I got to the polls on Edward’s Mill in Raleigh, the line snaked around to the parking lot, but I was still in, registered (the longest part), and out in less than an hour. The volunteers were tireless and focused, and I hope they know how much they were appreciated.

Thank you, and we will return to our regularly scheduled programming next Wednesday.

• Client calls and wants more information.
• You send marketing material, demo, and link to your website (assuming the client didn’t find you online).
• You arrange a call or meeting to discuss what they need and what you can provide.
• You create a proposal.
• More meetings and calls ensue to finalize proposal details.
• A contract is signed, and voilá! You have a new client!

This seems fairly rudimentary, but somehow the lines always blur. The client calls before the initial proposal goes out and wants you to “look into something” (like analyze their PPC AdWords). Beware these words! They can lead to dangerous free time leechers. You should always have restrictions on how much you’re willing to do for prospective clients up front, for instance, most designers caution against offering design comps before signing a contract. I do an initial site analysis (to get an idea of what I’m working with and to make recommendations), but I won’t offer consulting services for free. The important thing to remember is don’t be afraid to say no. Otherwise you risk devaluing your time while creating unrealistic expectations for your client that they can get any information for the asking.

Durham is opening the Durham Performing Arts Center, a state-of-the-art performing arts center. If you live in the Triangle and enjoy concerts and theater, sign up for the Friends of DPAC, a free mailing list that gives members early ticket sales opportunities (like B.B. King or Fiddler on the Roof, starring Chaim Topol, the original Tevye). The building is beautiful, and parking in downtown Durham is always convenient thanks to the parking decks around the area.

Analytics are not difficult to understand. The concept is incredibly helpful from a site administration and an SEO perspective, so let’s break it down into my favorite basic components:

• Bounce Rate: The bounce rate tells you how often visitors “bounced” off your site- in other words, they entered the site on a specific page and left without visiting any other pages.  On the one hand, an incredibly informative landing page may give your visitor the information they need so checking out other pages isn’t necessary. On the other hand, maybe they didn’t find what they were looking for and gave up. How do you solve this? Most analytics programs can identify pages with the highest bounce rates and tell you the top keywords visitors used to find these pages. Are these terms relative to your site’s content? How about your site design- can users find what they’re looking for?
• Page Traffic Patterns: Most analytics programs tell you the top entrance pages (where a visitor entered your site), exit pages (where a visitor left your site), bounce rates, and keywords used to reach each page. All SEO’s know that keyword research is an ongoing effort, and the ability to identify what keywords visitors use to reach your pages is a big help. In addition, you can identify your traffic sources whether from a search engine, referral, link from another site, or just direct entry into an address bar.
• Goals and Conversions: Even a static brochure website has a goal. You ultimately want your users to find some piece of information, take some type of action. For e-commerce this is a sale, for a consulting firm this is the request for a quote, for an informational site this is the click through to the page with the final piece of information. These are goals, and it’s part of your job to see how many users reach them. Some analytics programs use funnels that measure how well visitors follow the path you set to the goal. The end result is that as users achieve your goals these numbers become conversions. Much like the sale that takes place at the cash register, these conversion measure your ROI (Return on Investment) to measure how effective your website is in achieving your personal or business goals.

When starting out with analytics and marketing basics, these are some of my most important analytics markers. As your site grows and develops, you can identify the elements of your analytics program that provide the most useful information for you.

Metro 8 Steakhouse in Durham is quickly becoming one of my favorite places. Every Wednesday their wine selection is half price per bottle, and my friends and I usually take up the heated outdoor patio to enjoy cigars, amazing food, and phenomenal service. It’s a great place to relax, unwind on hump day, and enjoy a nice Malbec or Prosecco.

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it is to find the whereabouts of a Content Management System (CMS) that support good SEO practice. It has to be easy to use and set up.” Crackle, crackle, hiss, pop.

“… and customizable…” Crackle, hiss.

“… and FREE. The agency hates paying for anything.” Yeah, my empty bank account proves that.

“This tape will self-destruct in 5 seconds. Good luck, Mr. Phelps….. What a sucker! Oh wait. Are we still recording?? Crap! Ok. Self-destruct starts now!” The tape player slowly winks out existence and is replaced by a copy of Windows Vista. Coincidence? Hmmm.

So I start assembling my team, I know just the people for this.

There’s Natasha the Web Designer, a former Soviet who single-handedly photoshopped Boris Yeltsin into power. Expert still disagree on whether or not he was alive or a bunch of oddly-shaped pixels.

Next there’s Trent “Hack & Snack” McDonald. Trent is the best web programmer in the business. He can also put away more Pringles in one sitting than the entire city of Birmingham, Alabama. Trent’s claim to fame is being the first programmer in history to create an e-mail order bride entirely in JavaScript. Shortly afterwards, she left him some AJAX based Social Media platform.

Finally, there’s Guy “Inner Glow” Frank. Guy is our Marketing… well… guy. Not only is Guy the smoothest talker alive (his little black book is the size of my Buick), he can market fleas to a kennel and make them think they were a new kind of pet.

“Everyone, I want you to check out the CMS packages over at www.opensourceCMS.com and report back your findings.”

After everyone left, I took a trip to my favorite mad scientist, Frederich vonCoder. If you could take the DNA of Albert Einstein, Paul Allen (the other Microsoft guy) and Harvey Fierstein, mix them in a vat of beer and sauerkraut and let it sit for a million years, you’d have Dr. Freddie (he hates when I call him that!)

“So, Freddie. Tell me. What the H-E-double hockey sticks is a CMS?” I asked as I was popping the top off a cold one. Freddie always made the best beer, being a mad scientist and all. This one was strong enough to get the populous of Minneapolis s-faced.

“My dear Phelps,” he started, “you mean to tell me you do not know what a CMS is?”

“Humor me vonCoder. Talk to me as if I were one your college flunkies.”

“Yes, yes. Well then. Ok. CMS stands for Content Management System. It is a tool website owners use to store and manage content for their site. A CMS makes it easier to add content to your website because users of the CMS do not have to learn HTML or any complicated programming, they simply add their information. Even someone with as puny brain as yours is capable of using a CMS. A good CMS has an easy to use interface which let’s you enter your content and organize the pages.”

“The CMS will then take the content (which is stored in a database) and applies the appropriate HTML/CSS and Javascript to make a web page. Some content management systems have extra special features such as blogs, RSS feeds, Forums and nuclear fusion. Ha! Maybe not nuclear fusion, but some day!”

“Most CMS packages are customizable. With a little skill, or the right lab assistant, you can change the design of your web page, add features to your website and even make a wonderful cup of cocoa. Many scientists will share their CMS formulas in the form of plug-ins and widgets.”

Days later (which included a few trips to the store for pepperoni pizza flavored Pringles), we met.

“Ok, Natasha, you start.” I barked, as the stench of body odor, half eaten turkey legs, stale mead and stuff that looked like potatoes once (before the mutation began). Note to self: stop having meetings the morning after Renaissance Gorgefest.

“Vel. Ve have looked at many systems and none of us are agreeable to the other.” Those english classes on tape are really working out.

“She wants some looks-good, pretty interface with lots of graphics and some easy to use templates she can whip up in Photoshop! She doesn’t give a borscht about clean code and cool features!” Trent was talking through an empty potato chip tube like it was a megaphone again. Geez, programmers.

“Like, he reaaaally makes sense duude. I mean, search engines really love clean code man. Give Google good code and good content and she’ll give you a lot of lovin’ baby.” Guy gleamed.

“Bah! Men and their clean code and google loving. What good is all that if everyone vomits at your ugly websites?” Natasha loves to emphasize her point with that damn riding crop.

“Ok, ok! So we need a CMS that has a plethora of pre-built visual designs (and is easy to create your own), that is easy to add features to via plugins (and also easy to write your own) and that lets you put in your meta stuff and content easily. Oh yeah, and it’s gotta generate beautiful code for search engine goodness. Fine. I get it. What are your recommendations?” Man I could really use a bourbon and a steak the size of granny’s poodle.

“Ve need to go vith WordPress. You can have all your so-called plugins for your ESS EE OH. There are hundreds of templates for downloading so we can do avay with your imperialistic vomit web designs. And most of the templates are free.”

“Oh boy, if I had a dime for every time someone said wordpress, I’d be able to buy Microsoft and run it my way. WordPress is just a blog software and to do anything serious, you have to download a bunch of plug-ins. I say we go with Drupal. It’s a REAL CMS, with multiple authoring, security features, RSS feeds, ATOM feeds, there’s email, there’s security features, anti-spam…..” After of a few minutes of spouting out feature after feature, Trent fell silent, breathing heavy and a smile like he had a one night stand with the Spencer triplets.

“Like noooo way duude. It won’t matter if the site’s like all sparkly or if the CMS can cook steak the way you like it. It’s all about google maaan. If you can’t rank, then no one will find your innerHTML goodness. Like we really need MODx. It’s like so totally awesome for SEO dudes. You can add your own page titles, keywords, meta tags and descriptions yourself. It will also change your URLs on the fly to make them more Google-licious.” Did he just say ‘google-licious?’

“Great, I’ll pass this along to the Agency. Good work everyone. Let’s go and have some dinner. Guy’s treat.”

“Duuuude!”

We head on over to Sullivan’s Steakhouse. This place really take me back to the time when you could get a good bourbon with a cuban cigar as your appetizer, main course and for dessert. When you walk in, you can see the lobster tank where they keep lobsters big enough to go toe to toe with Joe Lewis for three rounds. On the other side where Glenda the Good Witch of cigars and single malts you can see the humidor of happiness. Those little gold-brown sticks of joy are what I came here for. As Glenda led us to our table, I caught a glimpse of the head chef off in the corner interviewing a steer for the position of tonight’s main course. I mean talk about standards.

I ordered a triple dirty martini and a filet the size of a pteradactyl. One bite into my steak and tears streamed down my face in sheer ecstacy. It was like angels came down and kissed me on the cheek and lit my cigar. It was that good!

After dinner, we sat around sipping our cocktails and listening to live jazz. It was good. Very good. Sullivan’s is pricey, but worth every nickle.

I’m not going to get into the design virtues of CSS versus tables in this post. I would rather talk about the benefits from a search engine optimization point of view, namely that of code reduction and crawlability*.

A factor you should consider when coding your website is the content ratio, or amount of text to code. Spiders only index text- content, headers, anchor text. While algorithms have gotten much better at being able to crawl pages more quickly, muddy code slows their ability to reach the far corners of your site in addition to affecting your load time. Incidentally, when shopping around for a CMS it’s very important to keep this fact in mind. Open Source CMS is an excellent resource for researching and playing with various systems.

Where CSS comes in is it provides you with the ability to remove all of the table markup and style attributes. If you have a layout that is completely done in tables, each tag of the table often comes complete with font attributes, width, height, color, padding, etc,. You can drastically increase your content ratio and give yourself a small boost in the rankings while allowing faster load times for users by removing all of that extraneous code into an external stylesheet.

Then, after saving all that time and energy, you should have brunch at Vin Rouge. Vin Rouge is a French bistro in downtown Durham complete with charming decor, indoor and patio seating, an attentive waitstaff, and one of the best brunches I’ve ever had. I could rave for hours about the crépes that melt in your mouth or the six inch stack of french toast, or the wonderful coffee and mimosas. I could ramble for days about the thick slabs of bacon or the perfectly tossed field-greens side salad. Instead I will strongly encourage any readers in the Triangle area to enjoy this extremely affordable and delightful experience for themselves.

*The Author reserves the right to make up words

I truly love beautiful designs, and have great respect for the talent behind them, but there’s more to a good site than just the layout. In order to really take advantage of SEO capabilities you need to consider a few things, not the least of which are content placement, source code, and use of Flash and JavaScript.

Take the Sony website for instance. Their site is all Flash embedded with Javascript, which, to date, Google is still unable to crawl. However, they created a non-flash version of the site complete with HTML links and provided an option for it on the home page (which I like because not everyone has a flash reader or wants to be dazzled with magnifying icons and links). As a result the interior pages can be crawled, and since the pages are called with PHP, the non-flash version is an extension of the regular page, thus taking out both duplicate content and indexing issues.

Incorporating JavaScript for major aspects of your site like the navigation may seem like a good idea, since the scripts allow you the capability of making one time changes across the entire site, but spiders can’t crawl JavaScript. You lose the ability of having your interior pages crawled without some type of breadcrumb navigation in place.

Content is another major issue. Not every site needs a thousand words, but if your home page does have content in it, do you know where that content shows up in the source code? Websites done with tables or with massive amounts of JavaScript tend to shove the content to the bottom of the site, where it is the last thing a spider sees. As your site stays online longer and longer without content refreshes, the content begins to lose value. Wouldn’t it make more sense to use CSS to position to your content in order to always keep it at the forefront of the spiders’ eyes?

And while we’re on the subject of source code, how many SEO’s have analyzed a client’s site only to find it was generated with a program that incorporated massive amounts of scripts, tables, and extraneous code? The two that have become the bane of my existence are Frontpage and Yahoo Site Builder. Extraneous code can bog down your server and increase your page’s load time, which, in addition to being a nuisance for users, increases the likelihood of your entire page being crawled. If you’re going to use a CMS, please use one like Magento or Presta Shop that will create clean code, and allow you to add Meta tags and title tags. Also, please make sure your CMS includes UCF-encoding and meets W3C standards.

A place that appeals to critics everywhere is the 42nd Street Oyster Bar in Raleigh. I love seafood, although in general I’m not a fan of oysters, and this restaurant was fantastic. The fish was cooked perfectly, I now love Oysters Rockefeller, and their oyster bar is extremely well laid. For non-seafood lovers they also have a wonderful selection of steaks and poultry. Make sure to go on a Thursday, Friday, or Saturday when you can enjoy the live jazz.

We noticed a trend at my company. I don’t know how many other SEO or SEM companies also saw it, but all of a sudden our phone is ringing off the hook with people calling for our services. Why are we turning them down? Because they want results overnight for next to nothing in cost.

It’s not that we don’t want to help them- we really would. But two things are happening that are beyond our control. One is that they really don’t understand how good SEO works, and the other is that they’re being targeted by black hat SEO’ers or scammers (pro tip: Before you send someone an email that you can optimize her site and make her rank on the first page in Google in 10 days, take time to read her “about me” page that says she’s an SEO). Good SEO takes time and work. You don’t see the results overnight. Sometimes you have to make code and site changes to really increase content visibility while you make sure your site appeals to engines and users alike.

It also costs money. SEO is not a magic trick or rocket science. There is nothing mysterious about it. Because we educate our clients on our process, we have long-standing clients who could probably optimize their sites as well as we can. They don’t because it takes work and time, and that time is money. No, we will not optimize your site at 10 pages a month for $500 a month. No, we will not optimize five pages only and then be held accountable when you don’t rank in the first two weeks after working with us.

We also have expectations of our clients. When I tell you your navigation is all in Javascript and you need to convert it to HTML, and I explain that spiders still cannot crawl Javascript, please don’t argue with me that it’s the best solution for you, and you don’t see the point in at least including breadcrumb navigation that spiders can crawl. We do an initial site analysis when putting together a proposal for a client, and one of my red flags is when the client argues about the site. I don’t mean the argument that “I’m locked into this by my CMS”. I mean the argument that “Well, people who finally check out and buy something don’t have a problem with it, so why should I change it?” Well, because your conversion rate is really low, and if you can’t see that, then I can’t help you.

In my opinion, you hire an SEO for the same reason you hire a bookkeeper. You can learn how to do it. SEO tutorials are everywhere (my favorite is at SEOmoz). You hire an SEO because you don’t want to spend the time doing all of the keyword research, tweaking content, and writing meta tags. You don’t want to spend hours on a link building campaign or directory submission. I’m sure there are a lot of people who would disagree with me on this, but I think that trying to cling to the illusion of some mysterious process hurts us in the end and prevents us from getting the clients we should have.

If clients are really getting you down and you want an overdose on cuteness, check out the Duke Lemur Center. They are a Lemur preservation center on the Duke University campus, and it was so much fun! Something important to remember that’s not on the website, the tour they advertise is just a walk around the main lemur cage in the center of the preservation. If you really want to get close to the lemurs, get a group of four to six people together and opt for the hour long tour. Make sure to request it specifically when you set up the reservation- it’s the tour that takes you into the preserve itself. It costs $100 per tour (but that cost can be split up among your tourmates), and takes you into the woods where you are literally face to face with the lemurs, no cages or bars between you.

Also, if you live in the Raleigh/Durham area and love working with animals, the center is always looking for volunteers to help out with tours, cleaning, and maintenance.

One way you can really work around this particular challenge is to really know your target audience better than they know themselves. Selling bathing suits? Target cruise takers or resort visitors in the winter. Outdoor fireplaces are great all year round, including on balmy summer nights. Most people travel in the summer, but with gas prices on the rise think of how much better gas mileage is from the fall to the spring- when you don’t have to run your air conditioning. This is a good chance to promote a vacation spot.

Don’t forget some of the more subtle hits either. In one scenario, now that the real estate market is becoming increasingly worse, people are moving less. At one point a trend leaned towards a “moving season” covering late spring through early fall. During this time home improvement ecommerce from renovation supplies to home alarms to renters and home owners insurance saw a significant jump in traffic, but now the jump isn’t as high as it once was. This is as good a time as any to turn the focus from preparing to sell to fixing up your home for yourself- for example, I loved this concept of turning a garage into a man-cave. The advantage here is you can go from home improvement to home perfection for you and your family.

While the above example was less reliant on seasonal limitations, it shows how trends are more deeply entrenched than we may think. Chances are if you know your product than you know how to sell it and use it, so think outside the box. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to compete with the economy, let alone your online competitors. The trick here is to make people realize that they can still use your product even when they think it’s not a traditionally practical investment.

If you want a good example of a place that focuses on catering to all seasons, I love Parker & Otis. I love their wine selection, that, while not huge, seems to focus on vineyards I don’t find anywhere else. They have a great beer selection, especially if you like Belgian beers, a deli with fantastic food, a coffee bar, and an area to shop for gifts and treats. The staff is incredibly helpful, and I really enjoy sitting on the huge wrap around porch with a bottle of wine and friends. While they are at Brightleaf Square, they don’t validate for parking, so make sure to take that into account if you check them out.