At the beginning of the week I thought it would be a good idea to create an anonymous poll for other SEOs and Internet Marketers, to find out a little more about their current clients and processes.   The survey includes questions about the client sales cycle, monthly budgets, marketing strategies, client communication, managing SEO clients, and reporting. Below are the results.

Have you ever heard of Conversion Rate Optimization?  I hope most of you are already aware of it but for those who don’t. Here is its simple definition - Conversion rate optimization is a process intended to increase the percentage of visitors who are converting in to customers by enhancing the website’s capability to pursue its visitors. Few years back, nobody used to pay any attention to Conversion rate optimization. Getting large amounts of traffic to the website was the only aim of almost all online marketers.  Companies used to spend huge chunk of their marketing budget in PPC and SEO...

I thought it would a good idea to create a short poll to ask SEO’s about their everyday clients.  I’m sure there are a lot of Internet Marketers out there, wondering how they stack up against other agencies and interactive firms.  This is a great way to get anonymous feedback from other SEO’s in the industry. Take 60 seconds and fill out the poll. The results of this poll will be posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010. This survey is powered by SurveyGizmo’s online survey software. Please take my survey now The results of this poll will be posted on Friday, January 29th,...

It can be difficult to know which directories should be restricted from search engines and which should be allowed.  I thought it would be a good idea to create a robots.txt reference guide for popular content management systems and shopping carts.  Depending on what backend you are using, all you have to do is copy the the text into a robots.txt file and upload it to your server.  This should help manage the issue with duplicate content pages on your site. Wordpress Robots.txt File**If your blog is in a sub-directory, prefix the below with the blog directory name. (ex: /blog/directory) ...

SEOmoz launched a new link analysis tool yesterday, called Open Site Explorer which leverages the Linkscape index to provide comprehensive link data.  Currently it will provide up to 1,000 backlinks and link metrics in its analysis.  There is also an API that you may use that allows you to do almost anything you would like with the data. For the first 48 hours, you may try the new tool with full functionality.  Once the free preview is up, you will have to purchase a PRO member in order to use Open Site Explorer. To get started, just enter a url and Open Site Explorer will provide complete...

Lauren Varges, Community Manager at Radian6, was nice enough to take time and lend her expertise and insights into questions regarding social media and online reputation management.  For many businesses owners out there, I’m sure you have wondered how you can get started with social media and how it can help your business. Well Lauren gives some useful information you can apply into creating your social media strategy. Are there certain types of companies that could benefit from social media more than others? Any organization has the potential to benefit from social media if their culture...

Recently I wrote a post on how much knowledge a client should have, but along with knowledge also comes responsibility.  For any internet marketing agency to work well with their clients, there must be a mutual understanding of the overall strategy, and most importantly the execution.  Regardless of how effective the strategy may seem, if everyone is not working together to execute the strategy, it will fail.  Some clients may be under the impression that once they hire an agency, that all of their problems are solved and that the responsibilities solely lie on them.    This is far from the...

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger recently wrote a blog post encouraging people to write a ‘Bloggers To Watch’ post, to promote bloggers in your prospective industry.  I thought I would do my due diligence and make a list of 10 SEO bloggers I feel you should follow for 2010. Lisa Barone Lisa is Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Outspoken Media, an internet marketing company and consulting company.  Besides contributing to the Outspoken Media blog, she also contributes to SmallBizTrends, Search Engine Land, and Sugarrae.Ann Smarty Ann is known for providing useful tips and tools...

With all of the new communication tools and technology being introduced, the way that companies handle customer service has been transformed into a more effective and efficient manner.  Users want to be able to receive real-time support and have multiple options to contact a company.  So in order to meet the demands of customers, you need to be able to adapt and embrace these new forms of communication. Here are some examples of how companies are using Web 2.0 and Social Media to increase their level of customer support. Customer Service using TwitterMost people would think this is a bad...

Back in the May 2008, I wrote a post that analyzed what the best screen resolution size was for designing a website.  I thought it would be a good idea to see how screen resolutions have changed in a year and a half.  You can see the results from 2008, along with updated statistics from late 2009. May 2008 Results Websites Analyzed: 6 Total Visits: 185,637 Date Range: January, 2008 – May, 2008Resolution Visits %1024 x 768 82,351 44.36%1280 x 1024 29,989 16.51%1280 x 800 28,790 15.51%800 x 600 10,858 5.85%1440 x 900 10,242 5.52%Other 23,407 12.61%January 2010 Results Websites...