A lot of business owners tend to get the wrong idea about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and how it can help their websites. Years ago, when every web page in your site was built by hand, your web developer had a dramatic impact on the search engine performance of your website. But today, the complete opposite is generally true – Content Management Systems (CMS) tend to have fantastic optimization for search engines BUILT-IN. This puts more of the burdon and responsibility of search engine performance on the website owner/author, and less on people actually coding up your website.

More details after the jump

Can more be done beyond writing good content to help your site’s traffic? Aren’t there little secret tweaks that can be done to your site’s code to make it come up higher in Google and other search engines? Well, sure. But it doesn’t work like it did in the past.  Years ago, you could focus on a dozen or so key strategies to optimize a website for search engines. But those key elements (i.e. page titles, heading tags, link titling, sitemaps, etc) are now just considered best practices, and are generally built-into the CMS that your site runs on. So it then becomes a garbage-in = garbage-out type of thing in regards to your content’s quality, uniqueness, and frequency of updates. Choosing the right mix of keywords, using analytics, and managing content in a more proactive way are crucial to your website’s performance, yet most companies are too lazy to do this work.

There ARE other things that can be done to help SEO, but they are tedious, take a lot of work, and may still not make your website come up higher. Why? Because instead of a dozen main things that Google and other engines look at, they are now looking at HUNDREDS of aspects of your pages, including traffic, age, inbound links, page speed, and off-page SEO factors that a small business owner can’t easily change. What is the easiest way to hit all of those attributes at once? Write good content. There is a lot more to it, but it isn’t just keywords any more. We tell our customers all of the secrets to help with this.

But business owners don’t want to hear that there isn’t some magical SEO trick. In their mind, there MUST be a magic silver bullet that will make their website come up high in Google results. All they need to do is find the right developer to make that happen. This myth is the reason why there are countless search engine optimization, search engine marketing, campaign management, and other firms out there that will take your money, promise the world, and they won’t back their services up with guarantees of any kind. It is simple supply and demand. And from time to time, these firms call us to work on their client’s websites, and in 5 minutes we can tell that they don’t know much at all about SEO. They are simply selling hype. And people are buying it, so they churn through their dissatisfied customers with no end in sight.

Mark my words, as we move from the Information Age (relying on geeks) to the Participation Age (creating your own voice online with content), search engines will continue to show “live” results for websites that have a pulse. So your website beterr be “alive”. Also, just because you might get some traffic with a higher search engine result, that doesn’t MAKE PEOPLE BUY. You still need a well-designed website that has the necessary design features and applications that help people to use your website. It takes time, management of the site, analytics, and a strategy.

We are great at SEO. It is built into all of our applications. But instead of looking for a keyword strategy that might get you a few more hits, we would rather help you to design an online marketing plant that will get you more SALES. Sales beats HITS any day of the week.

Three years ago, I came up with an idea to get a little more local exposure for us, and to also help out area chambers of commerce. The idea was to have a business-to-business (B2B) trade show, where businesses that sell to other businesses could mix and market. On March 5th, we held our third one. It went great!
Thanks to all of our customers, friends, and partners that attended the Third Annual Delaware Expo Trade Show. The weather was perfect yesterday and we had over 1,000 attendees at the show. The exact number was close to 1,200. Our show is now the largest business-to-business networking event in the state of Delaware, with over 120 exhibitors. We got a lot of positive feedback on the show, and some ideas that we will use to make the 2009 show even better.

I was interviewed by WHYY television from Wilmington, and there were also several newspapers that were present that did stories on the show. We landed a spot on the front page of today’s edition of the Delaware State News. We are waiting for the pictures to come back from the photographer, and once those are available we will put them on the web site.

This show was planned and executed entirely by the Delaware.Net staff. We also sold all of the booths using our new Store-Logic Ecommerce engine.

We gave some presentations on search engine optimization, blogging, and more. Here is a picture of me giving my presentation:

Here is Greg, our SEO guru giving his presentation:

One of the coolest surprises for us came when Monster Racing brought their new NASCAR race car to the show, complete with a Delaware.Net logo on the side of it. They will leave our logo on the car for the rest of this season, so in a way we have our own race car.

We used a new thermal name badge printer this year from Zebra, and it really helped us get the name badges printed faster. We didn’t anticipate the number of walk-ins that we had, so for 2009 we will get a second Zebra printer so we can print them even faster. Those printers are like $600, but they really made registration faster. Special thanks to the Central Delaware Chamber of Commerce for bringing additional badge holders when we ran low.

As usual, the staff at the Dover Downs Hotel and Casino did a superb job. We also used a new pipe and drape company called Diamond State Party Rentals. They did a great job as well.
Our team did a fantastic job pulling the show together.

The examples in my presentation included AJAX, ColdFusion 8 tags, Spry widgets, and more. I demonstrated how we are using these technologies in current web projects, and I also spent some time explaining how we win projects, how we manage them, and how we bill for them. Typically this is an area most web development shops don’t like to talk about, but we don’t have any secrets in this regard.

I demonstrated a couple of Delaware.Net’s latest on-demand applications, including our AJAX-powered email newsletter management program called Mail-Logic. During my first web design presentation with Adobe, there were a ton of Q&A questions about our web-based project management system that we use to help us manage our projects. With this presentation, I got into a little more depth on how we use this tool to manage over 100 projects successfully. That system is called Team-Logic, and yes, we do sell it.

A lot of folks sent me emails after this last presentation asking me about the CSS design resource links that I mentioned in the presentation. If you would like a copy of those, shoot me an email and I will send them to you. Sign up for this blog and I will send an alert when the on-demand version of the presentation is also available.

One last thing – the Adobe Acrobat Connect product that Adobe let me use for the webinar is straightup AWESOME. I highly recommend this product for giving webinars.

There were over 1,000 attendees watching the presentation who had lots of questions about the project. I demonstrated how we build the new web site and how we managed the project from beginning to end, from prototyping the design, through using our Team-Logic CRM system for managing the project, to integrating AJAX and building mass-eMail eCards using Flash.

The presentation was delivered over the web using Acrobat Connect Pro (formerly Breeze), and I really liked the interface and the performance of it. There were about 5 Adobe employees who helped me with giving the presentation, and we did a trial run of the presentation last week. I couldn’t have done the presentation with out their help (Thanks Adobe!) This was my first time using Adobe Connect for a webinar, and I must say that I am very impressed with it as a webinar tool. The VOIP quality and desktop-sharing worked without a hitch. I am running dual 23″ monitors on Vista, and it still ran great with no issues.

I answered close to 30 questions from attendees, and I still did not get to answer every question that was asked. There were a lot of questions about our Team-Logic project management system, and other questions about what CMS systems we recommend for small web sites. If you attended the seminar and you still have a question about it, feel free to post a reply to this thread and I will answer it.. All comments on this blog are moderated, so I will have to answer your question before you can see it posted here on my blog.

Once again, I would like to thank Adobe for the opportunity to share how we build web sites and how we use Adobe tools for our work. I hope to do more presentations for Adobe in the future for some of their other products that we use, including ColdFusion, Illustrator, Photoshop, and more.
The presentation should be available next week to watch after they have edited it and uploaded it. I also posted a PDF of the presentation here with this post. The link at the top of the article should forward you to a copy of the webinar once they post it.

Here is what you will learn:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Coming up high in search engines for free
• Common Misconceptions about SEO
• What you can do to your site
• White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Paid Search Campaigns
• Social Networking for Business Marketing
• Blogs and Why you should care about them
• Networking sites for businesspeople
• Your search engine questions answered live
• and much more!

For more information, please contact me at my office: 888-432-7965 x100