One of 2 questions arises when a lot of people venture into the world of search engine optimization or when they get one of their first websites. Both of these questions mean the same thing but are slightly different:

I Can’t Find My Website on Google

or

My Website Doesn’t Show Up on Google

Many people ask one of these 2 questions because they don’t understand some of the basics of SEO. The first question that needs to be ask is what are they searching for that their websites isn’t showing up in Google or one of the other search engines. A lot of times website owners “assume” that just because they now have a website and it is on a specific subject or topic that it should immediate show up in the search engines. They go to Google and search for “XYZ widgets”, the topic of their website, and they don’t see it and assume that it can’t be found or it just isn’t showing up.

Search engine optimization takes time along with a bunch of other basics I’ll outline. One of the quickest ways to see if Google has found your website is to use the search operator “site:”. Here is an example on how to format this in Google and an example of Twitter’s index:

site:domain.com

This will show you if Google has your site in their index. Notice right below the search box there is a line that says “About 1,230,000,000 results”. That means that Google has index around 1.23 billion pages from Twitter.com. The search engine’s index is their catalog of the pages they’ve crawled on a particular site. Crawling and indexing are the first steps to getting your website to rank. Once the search engines have your site in their index, the search engine can then run the pages through their algorithms to determine where they rank amongst all the other pages on the internet that are similar. As long as the number that Google displays is 1 or more, then Google has found your website!

Now, that only answers half of the problem because you’re probably more interest in why your site doesn’t show up for the general phrases or keywords that the website is about. This is a little more complicated to diagnose right out of the gate because there are a lot of factors that go into this like the content of your website, the number of links and the quality of those links that are pointing to your website and all the other SEO basics. Two easy ways to find out if your website is ranking for more general phrases would be to either using a ranking program or checking your analytics.

Ranking Program

A simple ranking program is called Rank Checker by SEOBook.com. Its a Firefox plugin that allows you to put keywords into it and run them to see if your website is found. If it finds your website ranking for a particular keyword or phrase, it tells you the position of that ranking. The key here is that you need to know they keywords that your website is ranking for, or the keywords that you’re targeting.

Analytics

Analytics is a better way to see what your website is ranking for. Most hosting providers give free stats with your hosting service. The stats would either be AWStats or Webalizer. These stats programs will give you a very basic look into what people have found your website by. There is a keywords or a search engine section that shows you the referring keyword terms. Another analytics program that you can get for free is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a little more robust feature wise that the other 2 programs and can be installed fairly easily.

These 2 things should show you if your website is showing up for general keywords and phrase. If not, go back to the basics with creating unique content and building links to your website.

I Can’t Find My Website On Google is a post from: Corey

Android has really grown as a mobile OS in the last year. I’ve had a few android devices including a Droid, Droid 2, Droid Charge and the Motorola Xoom. My current 2 devices and the Samsung Droid Charge and the Motorola Xoom. There are a few applications I run that are indispensable. The nice thing about Google’s Android operating system is that the applications I have on one device, easily install on my other device.

Evernote

Evernote is an amazing application for notes and To Do’s! I’ve tried a bunch of applications for To Do’s and note taking, and I haven’t liked any as much as Evernote. With Evernote, it syncs with just about everything including my Mac. It also has browser clipping that will actually take a snapshot of an entire webpage. I’ve replaced(mostly) my Google Bookmarks with Evernote since I can read the whole page in the note, just in case the page goes down or goes away.

Links for Evernote:

• Evernote website
• Firefox browser add-on
• Chrome Tool
• Evernote in Android Market

TweetDeck

TweetDeck, which was recently acquired by Twitter, is my Twitter client of choice. Like Evernote, it not only syncs with both my Android devices, but it also syncs with the desktop on my Mac.

• TweetDeck website
• TweetDeck in Android Market

LastPass

I’ve used Chrome and Firefox’s internal ability to remember passwords for a long time. For those that know me, I’m an abussive internet user. I normally have at least 10+ Chrome windows open, each with multiple tabs. Throughout the day then, I use different browsers for different tools, or for different Google account sessions. The problem becomes that I then have to have the passwords in both locations, which initially becomes a royal pain. Why I explain that, is because when I’m mobile, I then have ZERO access to those password. That’s where LastPass came in! It saves passwords, fills out forms, similar to that of what Chrome does, but it has cross browser capabilities and its Android ready!

• LastPass website
• Firefox browser add-on
• Chrome Tool
• LastPass in Android Market - requires premium account

Trillian

I’m not 100% sold on Trillian, but it has been a solid im client for both my Mac and my Android. The cross device sync, again, has been clutch for me being that I’m mobile a bunch and need access to not only my AIM contacts, but Jabber and Google as well.

• Trillian website
• Trillian in Android Market

TouchDown

Android has built in email support for Exchange, but I needed something with a little more features. TouchDown has been really good. The first time I tried it, it seemed buggy, but ever since upgrading the the premium version, I haven’t had any issues.

• TouchDown website
• TouchDown in Android Market

DropBox

DropBox is a newer tool I’m using but it’s been great! Getting files while on the go is a must, and I had been relying on Google Docs for most of it. DropBox has also come in handy with moving files from my desktop to my server.

• DropBox website
• DropBox in Android Market

My Top Android Applications is a post from: Corey

In this day and age, anyone can be a social media expert. Jeff Foxworthy of Blue Collar Comedy does his famous redneck jokes. Here are the social media expert versions:

You know you are a social media expert if….

• You’ve played with Twitter for 5 minutes
• Your friends, coworkers, or bosses forced you to join or learn Facebook and you created one of those, you think
• A blog is state of the art and your pages still end in /?p=123
• You’ve uploaded a video of your pet to YouTube
• You can rattle off 5 social networks with out stuttering… those are social networks, right?
• A bookmark is something you literally still put in a book
• You’re learned how to create multiple social profiles, have them all linked together and post the same message to all of them at the same time, every time.
• When someone asks you for a digg you ask where the hole is
• All your social media strategies consist of just Twitter and Facebook
• You went to a chamber of commerce meeting and knew more than everyone there about social media
• After attending a 1 hour social media bootcamp, you now can teach others everything there is to know about social media
• Your Twitter ratio is 50 followers to 1,000 following, maybe they will recognize you and follow back
• All of the posts you make on Twitter are to your own stuff, and as always, you’ve posted the same thing to all of your profiles
• You use the words Facebook and Twitter so much in conversation they end up losing their meaning
• You say I just joined ‘insert latest and greatest Twitter-killer social network name here’  more than once a week
• A website is optional in your social media strategy, you have Facebook, right? Who needs a website then.
• You’ve charge anything for the creation of a free Facebook page, the value is in just having one, people will just find it then
• You have your own workshop or seminar that you promote and teach the same stuff over and over again
• Your previous careers were either insurance, recruiting, landscaping or you just graduated college with a marketing degree and now you do social media marketing
• You approved a comment on your blog where someone let you know your RSS feed was broken in Google’s Chrome browser when it first launched and you thanked them and then spent 2 hours trying to fix it
• There is nothing in the social space for you that is older than 14 months

Social media is constantly changing and there is always going to be something new. Just because it is new, doesn’t mean its going to work either. Its fine to jump on the bandwagon and learn a new social network but to promote it too early wouldn’t be fair to whoever ends up using it thinking its going to be effective. There is a lot of wasted time in social media because people are either on the wrong social network, promoting to the wrong people, or using social media improperly. There isn’t a wrong way with social media, a strategy may work for someone, but it doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. There are a lot of best practices you can find online but take everything you see or hear with a grain of salt. You need to test and prove everything for yourself with your situation, product, industry, etc.

A social media expert is a really hard title to hang your hat on. I feel I know a TON about social media, and have been referred to as a social media expert at times but I feel I’m more of a social media enthusiast over anything else. I do join all the latest and greatest social networks when I can, I do try to participate and everything else. With my new role at Upright, I’m slightly removed from the day to day need of keeping up like I used to, but I still do it because its a passion. You can tell when someone really knows their stuff by digging deeper past the buzz words and the facade that people put on.

Bonus: A good friend of mine started an AWESOME hash tag on Twitter, right when I started writing this post. He has some hilarious tweets about the social media challenged. #youmightbeSMchallenged

Everyone is a Social Media Expert is a post from: Corey

I’ve been working with a fair amount of ecommerce websites lately and there are some themes I notice all too frequently when dealing with them at the time of the website launching. Most of the problems are on the development side of things and can easily be avoided.

Some of these are fairly broad topics with ecommerce website and there can be a lot of different scenarios that people miss. Here are a few I’ve seen come up:

1. Robots.txt disallow the whole site

You laugh because this seems simple but it happens ALL of the time. Developers might have a robots.txt on their development server and forget to take it off of the newly launch live website. Total FAIL.

As an SEO consultant, it’s important that you check the site over at launch and ensure you know what you’re looking at. It would be a shame if you reviewed the site, saw the robots.txt disallowing the site but didn’t know how to read it to know.

2. Don’t have a payment gateway or payment processor setup

The entire point of an ecommerce website is to sell product, right? With that in mind, to be able to purchase, you need to be able to take a payment, right? I’ve seen sites launching with either poor or no payment gateway which means you cannot check out and you cannot make any money.

3. Forgetting analytics

This one might be less obvious to some if you aren’t thinking about marketing your ecommerce site at the time of launch but it is pretty vital to have. Information from your analytics is vital down the road even if you don’t plan to use it initially. Google Analytics is a free option, throw it on there to at least track something.

4. Shipping

Free shipping for all products – This isn’t a terrible thing but sometimes a client or site owner loses money with free shipping. There are many situations where a site can get into trouble and the biggest reason could be by not knowing the margins on the products. A site will say “Free Shipping”, the shipping costs them $10 and they were only going to make say $5 or $10 dollars on the sale.

Shipping not tested properly – Shipping cost can be determined through an API and if you don’t have something setup right and you don’t test it, it could be bad news. I saw a site auto defaulting to overnight shipping on at least 75% of the site’s products. On a $10 to $20 item, no one is going to pay $60+ on overnight shipping. Shipping cost is the #1 reason why people don’t purchase online or why they abandon a cart.

5. Little to no products

This is another one of those head smacking moments. Ecommerce websites are meant to sell so if you launch them, ensure there is product in the store. Some clients have ecommerce functionality added to their website after the initial website is built and that is fine. Since it isn’t the main focus of their site however, they have a store page with little or sometimes no products.

The best advice I can give when launching an ecommerce website or any website is to audit the site before launch, even to the point of having a check list. Sometimes the simple things are the most over looked. If you’re a developer, help your clients out by pointing some of these things out. Let them know that if they launch an online store with only a handful of products that their expectations of success could be missed by a long shot. People could be making a sizable investment in their website to add ecommerce and will not make it up with out the right things in place.

5 Ecommerce Website Launch Must Nots is a post from: Corey

Social media is an ever evolving part of internet marketing. There are thousands and tens of thousands of social networks out there with sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg being some of the bigger players. A lot of companies want to just run head first into social media without having any sort of plan. One of the first steps someone should take is to learn the lingo. Twitter is the best one to use as an example since there are things like URL shorteners, hash tags and tweets.

Before jumping into a social network, or maybe even signing up, start running through the public timeline. See how people are structuring their messages and pick out things that aren’t familiar. If you quickly scan Twitter, you’ll see messages with things like this:

• # – Hash tag, used for tracking and other things
• bit.ly or ow.ly – Examples of URL or link shorteners, allows you to fit a longer URL in your tweets
• FollowFriday – used to tell your followers about people on Twitter you find useful
• @ – Use this followed by someones handle or username to reply to them
• RT – Stands for Retweet, passing on or forwarding someone else’s tweet

These are just a handful of unique things to Twitter. If a scan had be done, someone could pick these out and find out what they mean so they use them properly. It would be embarrassing for something to jump in and start tweeting to then use the lingo wrong and look silly. Something as simple as saying “FridayFollow” when the correct terminology is “FollowFriday” can put egg on someone’s face and let everyone on Twitter know they’re a newbie.

Social Media Step 1 – Know the Lingo is a post from: Corey

As most know, SEO traffic is something that gets built up over time. You spend upfront time doing research, picking your targets, then getting your hands dirty with the details. It is very rewarding to be able to take a site and start making improvements to see the traffic increase from the search engines. The #1 most annoying thing that can happen is a robots.txt gets uploaded that starts to tank your search traffic. To give some background, a robots.txt file is a simple text file that gives the search engines instructions like where to find your sitemap and what not to crawl. You might use a robots.txt file to disallow a search engine from crawling your content management system’s (CMS) admin or another password protected part of your site.

An example of a robots.txt file that would disallow a WordPress CMS admin would look like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin

Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

If I didn’t want any search engines crawling my site, I would do this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

That simple little / can get a whole entire site removed from the search engine results pages (serps). Time and time again I’ve seen sites fall to this terrible problem. One of the ways I’ve seen it happen is the development company uses a server where they test new features, code, etc. They use a robots.txt to tell the search engines to not index the development site since it would be a duplicate of the live site. When they finish their programming, they copy files from the development site to the live site, forgetting about the robots.txt and taking it live. Weeks or even months later, someone is putting something together and finds the site not ranking for even their brand name.

How To Ruin SEO Traffic – Robots.txt is a post from: Corey

All I have to say is 2010 is going to be a crazy year! I can’t believe its already July! I wanted to post an update on what I’ve been up to thus far and where I’m going next both personally and professionally. I’ve been away from my blog for some time, but I’m going to try to keep posting more frequently. There were circumstances up until this point that I just refrained from posting in my free time. I’ve been thinking of topics and just creating draft posts, even if I don’t finish them right away. I’ve even been posting these from my Moto Droid with the WordPress app so I don’t forget the topic or idea. Hopefully this will help me keep on track and be able to share more ideas as they come up!

Personally

Some know I got engaged last summer and am getting married in a little less than a month! July 24th is the wedding day and I’m super excited! It has been a lot of planning and preparation, mostly taken on by my fiance Lisa.

Besides wedding planning, Lisa and I have just been getting everything set for life after the wedding. We also added 2 members to the household, first Murphy and now Weazy our bearded dragons. I’ve ALWAYS wanted lizards, ask my mom. For the longest time I wanted to get an Iguana and she would never let me, which is probably good because fresh vegetables every day would be a pain.

Oscar, the beagle, is still here as well. He’s about 5 years old now and still very active. He ceases to amaze me and seems to be getting smarter and more mature. He always had trouble listening and over the last year has started to behave better and be calm. His new trick is escaping from the kitchen after he has slowly destroyed one of the gates.

Professionally

I have recently left The Karcher Group (TKG) as of July 2nd. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at TKG and learned a lot in the process. It was a hard decision to leave but ultimately for the best. I’ve taken the position as COO of Upright Publishing. I’m so excited about this opportunity to continue to grow and develop. This kind of takes me out of the day to day SEO game which I’ll miss, though I’m sure I will still keep up on things and be working on my skills. Upright will still keep me in the internet marketing space though. At TKG my primary focus was on organic SEO and social media where as now, things will be more diverse and it’s not an agency.

I’m really excited not only for this month (July 2010) but for the rest of the year! Look for more posts to come as well, I hope I can start sharing things I’ve learned and continue to learn!

What Has Corey Been Doing is a post from: Corey

Guest Post: Colin Brimfield

So I need to write a post about a charity to get into a charitable poker tournament. After doing some research and considering my options I am choosing The Sierra Club. As a kid I grew up on camping in California. We spent time in the western, southern and eastern sierras. Places like Owen’s Valley, Big Bear, and Yosemite are some of the most beautiful spots on earth. It’s truly awesome how many great ecological wonders are available in California and the western U.S. in general.

The Sierra club represents people like me, environmentally conscious regular people who love nature. I am no saint when it comes to the environment but I do what I can and I try my best to protect and enjoy what we have. The Sierra club is one of the oldest and most well respected environmental organizations and clubs and it makes an impact. I would encourage anyone I meet to do 2 things: go to California to see Yosemite and the Sierras and read about The Sierra Club.

Colin’s Charity is a post from: Corey

I’m super excited! I’ve wanted to go to Pubcon for a few years now, almost went last year but was super slammed and couldn’t escape to Vegas for it. We’re leaving today, flying out of Cleveland around lunch time and will be in Vegas early this afternoon.

There are a ton of awesome events at Pubcon. My good friend DK really goes all out I hear with the poker tournament, burgers, fight clubs and more! Check out his overview here. He has 2 Fight Clubs this year: Fight Club at Randy Coutures’ gym and Fight Club with Robert Drysdale. Drysdale is a really awesome dude, super laid back. I got to meet him at ThinKTank this summer. Check out his site for more on Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in Las Vegas. He is also in the video below which is pretty slick.

Can’t wait to connect with friends at Pubcon! Brian has a bet going that he can out drink both the Madhat and Streko. He better not back out, its going to be absolutely hysterical to see!

Pubcon 2009! is a post from: Corey

Leading up to ThinkTank this year DK and Andy ran a contest to benefit a charity. The charity they were promoting was Future Hope. I had never heard of this charity before but I read into it when DK and Andy were talking about it. You can see how Andy has been involved with this charity in the recap that DK gives here. Guys like Shoe, DK, and Andy are real inspirations to me for the work they do and giving back.

This is what Future Hope does:

Future Hope provides education and career opportunities to poverty stricken communities through the use of technology.

The Mission of Future Hope is to provide education and career opportunities to poverty stricken communities through the use of technology. Future Hope will:

Utilize technology and the Internet to provide training and support through local mentors, online training, and person-to-person communication. Local mentors would be trained by the local church community network.

Introduce basic business skills to the communities.

Introduce opportunities for the communities to accept contract technical work from established firms.

Aid the communities in achieving self-sustainability of the program in a few years time frame.

I would check out their site and get involved. It’s really amazing what people are doing to help out!

Future Hope Charity is a post from: Corey