Welcome to SageRock.com Web Marketing Blog

I got to hang out with Thomas Mulready a week or so ago. He’s a fun guy.

He featured SageRock pretty heavily in this issue:

CoolCleveland.com - Links

He’s doing video these days and got me featured here:

Sage Lewis CoolCleveland.com Video

And in the section:
Emissions from the blogsphere
he featured the SageRock video blog.

Thanks Tom!

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be moderating the upcoming web association event. You can read about it here:

Pimp My Site With SEO - The Web Association

The search engine optimization events at Web Association are always the best attended. This event should offer a lot of interaction and should be a ton of fun. If you are in the Cleveland area… consider checking it out.

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Search Engine Optimization Expectations

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com. As the president of a search engine optimization firm I know how hard it is to set realistic, honest expectations with a client while starting a new search engine optimization campaign. Here are some up front expectations, the facts of the trade. Expectation #1: If you have a brand new domain, you are not going to come up in Google for any of your key phrases for from anywhere between six months and a year. That is the way it is, there is an aging delay on that and you can not expect to come up for any phrases in Google for that amount of time. There are other things you can do in the meantime. Expectation #2: Getting good positions in Google is harder than ever. They have a seriously confusion algorithm. It is very tricky; it is all about the links. You have got to get good quality links pointing into your web site, and you have to have a good site to get those links. You can’t buy links anymore; you just have to deserve good links into your web site. The ROI on getting a good position in Yahoo and Google is better than any ROI out there. Expectation #3: Google owes you nothing. You think you might deserve to be in Google. They can throw you out of Google; they can bring you in to Google. Google is private property, they owe you nothing. Expectation #4: You have to have content, and typically lots of it. If you have a three page web site in a very competitive arena you are not going to come up for your targeted phrases. You have to be a resource, you have to be relevant, and you have to offer something that other people don’t offer. Expectation #5: You have to use phrases you want to appear for in your content. If you are a franchise and you want to come up for franchise you have got to use the word franchise. Expectation #6: It takes as long as it takes. It doesn’t take two months, it doesn’t take one month, and it doesn’t take six months. It takes as long as it takes. Every industry is different, the more competitive your industry the longer it takes. The older your site the easier it is, the newer your site the harder and longer it is. Expectation #7: You do it until. If your search engine optimization firm has set up a good key phrase research strategy, they are building links for you, they are building content, you are on the right path. You do it until. Expectation #8: Stop it with the multiple domains. Multiple domains are not the solution to your success. They make your project exponentially more difficult, because now you just have to go out and get more links pointing to multiple domains. You have ONE site, focus on it; this is how you will do in the search engine listings. Expectation #9: Don’t hide content. No white on white text, don’t put something on the z access on your dhtml. Write content, your visitors want the content. The search engines are trying to put stuff up there that the visitors want. Visitors want more information, you don’t have to have 5,000 words on one page, but you do have to have good content throughout your site. Expectation #10: Trust your SEO for at least a year. This is a hard long slog. If they have done good key phrase research for you, if they are building links, if they are building content and it is all targeted around this key phrase research you are on the right path. Give them 365 days, listen to what they say, trust them. Don’t push them and challenge them; don’t make them scared and afraid. Trust them; they know what they are doing. I’m sorry that I can’t offer any better news, but that is the way it is. If you do these things you are going to be successful, have a good day.

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Technorati – A Search Engine Blog

Hi, this is Sage Lewis from SageRock.com. Have you ever checked out a blog search engine? Blog search engines can be kind of interesting because the focused content is the blogosphere. This has its benefits because it is a little more live. If you need to do a search on information that has just come out, you want to see something about a sporting event or something that has happened recently in the tabloids? A lot of times it is being talked about in a blog. A blog search engine can be really handy to get that information. One of these search engines for blogs is technorati. You can search for a lot of interesting things, but one of the more fun things to search for is your name or your company name. I was doing that today, typed in the word SageRock. This does have business connotations as well; you do want to monitor what people are saying about your company. Anyway, I typed in SageRock. Here is a blog I recently did. Then, here, I came across a posting that says “Ranking 50 top blogs in the search space”. That is kind of interesting; I clicked on it and went to the site. The site is SEONews, they decided to put together a piece about the top 50 blogs in the search space. Here the top four, really great ones, you really want to check them out. Then, what did my wondering eyes appear, at number fifty SAGEROCK BLOG! I’m on the list, so that’s good. I honestly didn’t even expect to be on a list right now, we haven’t been posting for awhile. There you go you might want to check out SEONews or Technorati if you want to see what other people are saying about you. Have a great day.

The Open House at the cool new Taylor Institute For Direct Marketing at The University of Akron.

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Web Marketing Strategy

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com. I would like to talk to you about your overall web marketing strategy. When I’m talking about web marketing strategy the first thing that comes to mind is the second habit from “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. The second habit is start with the end in mind. If you understand what exactly it is you want your visitor to do on your web site, it is going to significantly help you craft your web site, design your web site; lay out your web site. Every element you add or remove from your web site is going to be put up against this factor. Is it helping or hurting this end goal? Really, I don’t see a lot of people doing this. Start with the end in mind. Now, if you are an e-commerce site you might say that your end in mind is for someone to buy something that is very well and good. Obviously that should be your ultimate goal. However, it is very rare that people will buy on their first visit to a site. Simply because the web has changed the entire shopping experience, instead of someone walking into a store someone can visit your site and then go on to another to compare service and cost, the buyer is in more control than they have ever been. So, you might not want your end goal, for the first time visitor, to buy something. Maybe it is to get information, to sign up for a drawing, to play a game, the more creative the better. Something to get them engaged in your overall marketing strategy. There might be some very small ticket items that the most wanted response is to buy on the first time. It can be done, it’s going to be hard, you have to have really compelling copy, great testimonials, great price and shopping experience. It has to be seamlessly perfect almost. The more expensive the item, the longer the buying cycle. You should also not assume they are going to bookmark or remember you. You have to get them into your marketing cycle. If you are a service business, most likely you just want to get information from them. When you have an online form always keep in mind, the smaller the better. Do you really need to know the name of the company or their title? You don’t need that stuff on the first time visit. You just need a way to reach out to them. It has been my experience; if you can get a phone number you are in a better position than if you just get an email. I typically find that if somebody gives an email on a whim they don’t always return an email response. If you can ask for a phone number that is really ideal, so you can call them and see if they are interested. I like short forms, a name, phone number, a comment field, maybe an email address field, and that is it. You can get all of the other information in future visits. Even that isn’t going to come free; you are going to have to do something that compels a person to want to give you their information. This could be free information, a free consultation, something that is valuable to the visitor. It is worth honing this; you paid for the visitor one way or another. If you are doing pay per click you paid an actual dollar amount to get them to the site. If you are using search engine optimization, your optimizer cost you something. You can equate that out to what every visitor cost you. If you just wrote out an article, sent out a press release there was time in that, there is a dollar, a value to every single customer that comes to your site. People often ask me what percent of people they should expect to do their most wanted response. I typically say that the industry average is about two percent. So, if two percent of the people who come to your site do your most wanted response, I think you are doing well. That is certainly not to say that you can’t do better. I have seen up to ten percent, but that is a well crafter, well honed site that has been massaged over years of time. I would not anticipate coming out of the gate at even two percent. If you are starting a new site, even half a percent is realistic. Two is a good goal to get to, if you are above two keep working on it. If you are below two you are probably missing something, your message isn’t right. I hope that helps a little bit with your web marketing strategy. If you have any more questions feel free to call us at 330-379-9000, or you can email me directly at sage@sagerock.com. Thank you so much for listening, have a great day.

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Key Phrase Research, part two

I have gone through and copied and pasted each of these phrases into Google, remember I put them in quotes, found my number and pasted it back into excel. On the left hand side we have our count number, the number of times it was searched for in Overture.com. On the right side we have our competing number, this is the number of pages that have that exact phrases in them. Comparing the two numbers we will have a better sense of what our strategy will be. I want to mention, this tool is not precise, it lumps different phrases together. All singular and plural phrases are the same as far as Overture is concerned. Also, if you see a phrase completely out of whack you can feel free to move it around so it makes more sense, be aware of that. Our search is still organized from the most searched to the least searched, but looks over here. Cleveland real estate, 19612 people searched on that, 408,000 competitors. It is the most competitive of all of the phrases on this page. If you are a large realtor in the area you very well might want to compete for that. If you are smaller I would recommend starting with something less competitive, you will want to start with something you will see results for. Other than that phrase, the other competing numbers are really quite doable. What you want to do is make a list of most likely phrases to optimize for. Print off the list you want, put it by your desk, and as you are writing content for your website you can go through and say which phrases are good for which pages. Keep in mind this is a very abbreviated list phrases researched, you would want to do something more extensive. I would try to aim for about 100 phrases just to get a feel for the market, but it is well worth your time. Once you understand this, and you understand what your audience is searching for it will make complete sense as to what you need to write your site to, and what pages you need to have on your web site. You will do better on the search engines and get better results from your web marketing pursuits. I hope this helps, if you have any questions feel free to give us a call at 330-379-9000, or email me directly at sage@sagerock.com. Have a great day.

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Key Phrase Research, part one

Hi, this is Sage Lewis from SageRock.com. One of the most important parts of web marketing is key phrase research. If you get your phrases wrong all of your work will be for naught. It’s both going to be too competitive and you won’t rank well. Or you will miss the mark all together, you might be number one for a phrase and you just don’t show up. There are numerous key phrase research tools on the market today, but there is one that is free. It is at Overture, which is Yahoo search marketing; you can get to this tool at inventory.overture.com. You are going to come to a page that looks like this: keyword selector tool. You enter in a word or two; this tool will show you the top variations of that phrase that have been recorded in the last month. This is a great way to see what variations of your potential key phrases people are searching for. I’ve looked at Cleveland real estate; these are the results that I got. You can see the count, the search was done in July of 2006, and there are 19612 people who searched for Cleveland real estate, 7227 searched for Cleveland OH real estate, 4766 searched for Cleveland TN real estate. That right there is interesting because, a lot of times when you are in your own market, you don’t think there might be variations or someone searching for someone who seems like you, but isn’t. Cleveland real estate is a good example because there are numerous Clevelands throughout the country. When we are crafting our phrases to optimize for we want to pay attention to that. A visitor will probably type in “Cleveland real estate”, realize they are in the wrong state and go back to refine their search. Now we want to start developing a spreadsheet. If you used a tool like Wordtracker, which is a great key phrase research tool, this process would be a little bit more automated, but it certainly isn’t out of the realm of possibility. All you do is highlight the phrases you are interested in as well as the count numbers. Then you right click and hit copy. Now, you might think that you will just be able to paste that into excel, but, believe it or not, you can’t. Excel jumbles it all up. What I do is go into notepad and paste the phrases. From here I copy and paste them once again into excel. Now you can see the search numbers are in the C cell, and our phrases are in the D cell. We can go back and forth, doing this for a lot of different phrases. We might also want to look at Cleveland realtor to see what variations of that there are. Here we can see that the numbers are a lot less than Cleveland real estate, but clearly people are still searching for it, so we will take these and paste them into the spreadsheet as well. Now you can see we are developing a nice little list of key phrases. This tells you half of the story; this tells you how often a phrase is searched in comparison to another phrase. There are some things to keep in mind here, these numbers are strictly from Overture.com, this is not across the internet. The value here is in comparison to other phrases. Now we want to know how likely we will come up for these phrases, we want to see how competitive they are. Now we will go to Google and search these phrases and find out exactly how many competing web sites there are for each of the phrases. I am just going to start pasting these phrases into Google. I am going to put the phrases in quotations, this is not how most people search, but this will tell me how many pages have this exact phrase on the page. If I don’t have the quotations I’m going to have a much larger number because it will show me every page that has these words anywhere on the page. What I want to show you is, results 1-100, you might have your browser set to 1-10, of about 408,000, This is the number we are interested in. So, we are going to copy this number and then paste it into this cell, E. Then we are going to do this will all of these phrases.

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Why I do SageRock

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of Sagerock.com. I wanted to spend a little bit of time just giving you a brief background about me and why I’m here, why I’m doing SageRock. Something you should know about me is that in a political persuasion I am liberal. I am very interested in humanitarian causes. I think that I have plenty of money, I’m not money grubbing, and I’m not even particularly interested in money. I don’t need the help of the government to save me more money. I think that there are some bigger causes in the world or our country that could use our help. That is the basis of how I act in business. I am trying to contribute to society. Having a marketing firm isn’t exactly the most socially heightened profession in the world. It does give me the opportunity to work with companies and organizations that are contributing in interesting valuable ways to society. That means a great deal to me. Even the Red Cross needs marketing. They need the money; they need to get the word out. I like to be able to help in that way. The other thing about business is that it is a great laboratory for life. You learn a tremendous amount about yourself and about other people. Those lessons you can’t really get anywhere else. Just being in business makes me a better person. I hope that it makes our team better people. We have one core value at SageRock, the care, concern, and respect of the individual is our single core value. We have a saying; SageRock is the oasis for the individual. I don’t feel that I am destined to make a particularly huge impact on the world. I don’t know how many people really can make a huge impact on the world. I think you make an impact on a few people in your life. That is what I am trying to do, I am trying to make an environment that adds value and meaning to our team. I’m trying to create a place that I would want to work at. So, that is what motivates me, which is the only reason I get up in the morning. I am hoping that I can do something that contributes to our team, which in turn adds value to our clients and community. That’s it. That is basically what we call the SageRock experience. I thought you might be interested in knowing that. Have a great day.

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Link Building

Hi, I’m Sage Lewis the president of SageRock.com. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about link building. Do you know that there are some search engine marketing firms that all they do is build links for people? They don’t touch any content on your site, they don’t touch any titles. They just go out and get links to your web site. That is how important links are. It was very evident in the 2004 presidential election because the number one web site for the word failure was the George Bush biography page on the WhiteHouse.gov site. The number one listing for waffle was John Kerry’s web site. Neither of those guys had those words on their web site; it was just all about other people using those words to link to them. There is no denying the power of link building. You can use that information for good. My strategy for link building is completely above the board, I do not recommend doing anything sneaky or tricky. I do not recommend buying or trading links. I certainly do not recommend link farms, where you put your site in with thousands of other sites and you put those sites somewhere buried on your site. That is a guaranteed way to get removed from a search engine. It is all ethical, ethical, ethical. The search engines hate the fact that people are manipulating an otherwise great way of ranking their web sites. If you think about it, link building is how we work in the world. So, somebody comes to you and asks for a recommendation for a good restaurant. You aren’t going to recommend a terrible restaurant, it’s your reputation. You are going to tell them about the nice little Italian place they should check out. That is what link building, link popularity was. This was the basis of the theory, if somebody, an important web site, linked to your site; you are probably of some importance too. This was how Google changed the entire search engine landscape. Before Google it was mostly about what was on the web site. Then Google came along, you went to Google, you typed in a phrase you were looking for, and then the results you wanted came up. It was a novel thing, that search engines actually worked. In the future we are probably going to see artificial intelligence based on link building as well. It is how we relate to the world, and it makes sense that that is how machines relate to the world. Obviously, search engine optimizers who are less than ethical have realized this and are trying to trick the engines, get links they don’t deserve, so it is an ongoing fight. From our standpoint, when we are doing a link building campaign, the first thing you need is something worthwhile that people want to link to. If you have a three page site about your company that is not interesting at all, you are not going to get links. Who wants to link to that? You need to have some sort of resource, some sort of valuable information that people would find useful to link to. So, you get that, you get something creative and useful. This is not a build it and they will come type of thing. I have tried that and it doesn’t work. You need to go out and ask for the links. You go to related sites, sites that would want to link to you and you ask them if they would consider linking to your web site. Get a little spreadsheet and go out to the engines and start finding potential web sites that might be good candidates for linking to you. So, in one column you put all of the sites, in the next you put the date submitted, the next column any comments, then a resubmission, finally a date accepted column. That way you can keep track of these sorts of things. That is how I would go about it, it’s not rocket science, it’s just good old fashioned hard work. You can do it, and it’s crucial. If you don’t get links, you are not going to do as well as your competitors who went out to get them. So, start up a link building campaign, you are going to be glad you did because you are going to get traffic from these web sites and you are going to be rewarded on the search engines. I hope this helps, if you have any other questions you can call me at 330-379-900 or email me directly at sage@sagerock.com. Thank you for listening, thank you for coming to our site, we have a lot of great information here. I hope you find it useful. Have a great day