The AWS Blog

It’s not often that someone can make me feel foolish in a conversation related to web technology, but it happened recently. In early December, after spending a week at the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, I jumped into a cab in front of the hotel with a fellow conference-goer that I had just met moments before, and headed to the airport to fly home.

As we drove, we talked about our businesses. I was there to meet other web marketers and exchange tricks-of-the-trade. He was there to find a vendor to handle the web marketing for his construction consulting business.

I gave him my pitch, and I could tell that he understood our value proposition and agreed with what I was saying. I handed him my card so we could talk when we both got home. He happily accepted the card, looked at the back, and pulled out his BlackBerry to check out our website.

He probably didn’t actually see me cringe, but he might as well have. We just completed a website redesign less than six months ago, and making a mobile-friendly website to go along with it has been about the last thing on our minds (client work always comes first, blah blah blah).

He spent about three seconds rolling the wheel down to try to scroll through an 800×600 website rendered on a 320×240 screen, and then returned his phone to his pocket.

“Why would a web marketing firm not have a mobile-friendly website?” he asked.

What could I say?

I thought about telling him that the last version of the site was mobile-friendly. What good would it do? I also pondered telling him that if he browsed to Microsoft.com and looked in the online marketing section, he’d find an article about mobile-friendly web design that is largely about Awecomm. I decided that would really only make me look stupider.

The point is clear. Take the time to create a mini-site that looks good on mobile browsers; it’s really an essential part of any good web marketing mix. You never know when someone is going to hear the name of your company and go searching for more information about you, and it’ll hurt a lot less if you happen to be sitting right next to the person when they do it.

Needless to say, the mobile version of the AWS website will launch within the first week of February.

As the article states, Awecomm has been developing mobile friendly websites for years. We’ll be formalizing our Mobile Website Design service offering by mid-February and pushing it out to all of our customers.

If you’re looking to have a mobile website developed, drop me a line. We don’t even have the pricing formalized yet, so you can probably get a good deal out of me.

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Is PPC the victim of sensationalized news? Maybe.

This happens to me once at the beginning of every winter: my alarm goes off at 5am, I turn it off and turn on the TV, and the coverage is completely focused on the Winter Blast that has hit Detroit overnight. Reporters are on-scene at various points around the city reporting live about terrible conditions, and the traffic girl is warning me to take my time getting to work. I back out of my garage white-knuckling the steering wheel and bracing myself for 5′ drifts and black ice, but there isn’t any of that. The roads are slightly wet, and traffic is moving at a steady pace.

I don’t blame them. After all, they can’t just sit there … they need something to talk about. But this time around I feel that the web marketing industry might be somewhat of a victim of that same sensationalizing.

My business partner walked into my office yesterday evening clutching this week’s edition of Crain’s Detroit Business, and said, “you’ve gotta read this!”  I saw the front page article that he was referring to, titled Costly Clicks, and told him that I had already read it online, and I was in the process of emailing the author.

The article starts off:

When David Zoldowski checked the numbers on his Yahoo search engine advertising account one morning this past June, he was stunned.

In seven days, he’d been charged $8,500, including a stretch that saw him billed $100 every three minutes. It shouldn’t have been more than $70 a week.

Zoldowski owns Brighton-based Auto One Inc., an automotive glass and accessories chain with 12 locations in the Detroit area. His account with Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo Inc.’s Search Marketing division, which is responsible for those “sponsored links” that show up alongside search results, was supposed to be limited to $10 a day each month.

Zoldowski was a victim of a phenomenon called click fraud, the bane of the pay-per-click advertising that accounts for almost all the revenue of search engines such as Yahoo and Mountain View Calif.-based Google Inc., which this past summer announced it’s moving its pay-per-click operations, AdWords, to Ann Arbor and will hire up to 1,000 people there over the next five years.

My first reaction is that David isn’t a victim of click-fraud, he’s a victim of a mis-configured Yahoo PPC Campaign, and a software problem in Yahoo’s ad serving system.

I emailed Bill Shea, the author, with my concerns, and he replied incredibly promptly (I’m assuming that mine wasn’t the first email that he had received). He explained that the click-fraud conclusion was drawn because of the “stretch that saw him [David] billed $100 every three minutes” from overseas traffic. I’d easily argue that geo-targeting (a feature new to Yahoo Search Marketing) and a call to Yahoo about the charges would have solved David’s problem.

Bill balances the article out at the end by interviewing some local PPC companies that do their best to paint click-fraud in an accurate light; as an issue that is manageable, and is not something that should keep a company from exploring PPC as an advertising model.

The positive part of the article is that, in conclusion, David Zoldowski is now working with a search firm to manage his PPC campaigns. I’m sure they’ll be able to limit his click-fraud risk, and show him some good returns.

So maybe comparing the article to the overblown TV weather coverage is unfair, but I’m definitely sensitive to the fact that the only mainstream news coverage that Web Marketing gets is negative at this point, when in reality, web marketing can have an incredible positive impact on a business.

After reading the article, I can’t help myself. I’m going to have to challenge Bill to write an article about one of our many customer success stories related to web marketing … or at least put together a nice follow-up article when David starts seeing some positive results!

Be sure to read the full article on CrainsDetroit.com.

POSTSCRIPT:  My suggestion for an article highlighting the positive impacts of PPC and Web Marketing was denied (got the obligatory: I’ll keep it in mind reply).   What a shame.  One day the traditional media people will begin to understand the impact that the web is having on business

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There are some specific questions that you should ask if you’re planning on hosting a site that will be optimized for search. I won’t bore you with standard hosting criteria (reliability, uptime, redundancy, etc); there’s been plenty written about that.

This list is a break-down of things you should know and questions you should ask a web host before selecting them to host your SEO-focused website.

If you’re a successful SEO, you know that every little thing counts. Finding a solid web host is a biggie.

1) Personal Phone Support

For an SEO, there often needs to be a lot of interaction with the host. You can do a lot using online tools, but to create sub domains, having server-side 301s put in place, or having a server rebooted, you may have to call the host. Because of this, my preference has always been to find a host that’s small enough to be personal. If your support call is dumped into a queue, and you know you’ll never find that same person again after you hang up the phone with them, it’ll be much harder for you to get things done.

Pick a host that’s small enough that you can form a first-name-basis relationship with a few of the support people. There are small to medium sized hosts that handle BIG corporate websites, and are extremely reliable. They’re worth seeking out … unless you love hold music.

2) Find a Host that is Aware of New SEO Technologies

This one should go without saying; after all, people who run web hosting companies are techie people, but it doesn’t. Ask some open ended questions about SEO related technologies such as blogs and wikis, and see what the host says. If you’re co-locating your own server, or getting a dedicated server, it’s not going to be necessary that the host’s support personnel know everything about your services, but the more knowledge they have the better chance you have of getting out of a jam if you find yourself in one.

If you’re going to use a shared environment, this point is extremely important. If you plan on setting up a WordPress blog in the future, ask the host to send you some URLs of blogs that they currently host.

3) Be Aware of Resellers

If you have a problem, or you need a change, and you don’t want to wait forever for a response, it’s important that the host own the data center, and the equipment. Your support call should be received by someone who can physically go touch your server (or shared environment) and solve your problem.

4) Store Your Site Someplace Geographically Safe

If you’re optimizing a website, you’re investing money in it. If the website is down when someone finds it on search engine, that money is wasted. Pick a web host that owns a data center that isn’t going to be leveled by a tornado or hurricane, or crumble as a result of an earthquake.

5) Avoid Spamming IPs

It’s not known how much weight the major engines put on the trustworthiness of an IP, but it is a factor. Have a conversation with the host about their non-spam policy, and make sure they don’t host adult material. It’s not easy to identify blog spamming IPs (common practice for those people includes using many different IPs), but identifying email spamming IPs isn’t hard. Use the Spam Database Lookup tool at http://www.DNSStuff.com to test out the host.

That being said, don’t let one “FAILED” indicator out of 175 tests be an end-all to that host’s potential. Have a conversation with them and ask what the issue is. If they’re not aware that they were flagged, they’ll probably be thankful. If the results page of that test is littered with red, don’t walk … run.

6) Ask about Their Customer Base

I’m a big fan of small hosting companies, so I don’t put a lot of weight on this question, but it’s always worth asking. If you can ask a host who their big customers are, and they can answer with a few names that you recognize, that’s probably a good thing. Ask for specific sites, and the length of the relationship. If you get a generic, “we don’t disclose for security reasons,” answer, be weary. Not everything needs to be that secure.

Many medium to large businesses have very complex needs when it comes to hosting, and very picky people doing IT for them. If the host can cater to the needs of these customers, and keep the relationship strong over the years, then they probably have the processes in place to keep you happy and keep your site up when it counts.

7) Make Sure You Have Access to Your Log Files

Depending on the kinds of web analytics that you use, this can be very important. If you change analytics software, or need to re-import the logs, it’s absolutely essential. Hosts that aren’t SEO-friendly will often only store a certain amount of log file data for your site (e.g. the last 30 days). Log files, after all, take up precious hard drive space on shared web hosting servers.

If you’re co-locating a server, or getting a dedicated server, make sure that log file rotation is setup correctly. If you’re using a shared environment, talk to your host to be sure your log files aren’t removed after a certain amount of time, and that you have FTP access to the log files in case you need it.

Take Your Time

We’ve done SEO for clients with all types of web hosts. Most often we can tell that not much thought was put into picking the host. Take the time to have some conversations with the host, make sure it’s a good business fit, and save yourself huge headaches in the future.

If you can think of anything that I missed, let me know!

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It was a good night for learning at Awecomm Web Strategies. The team stayed late to eat some pizza, drink some beer, and take their Google AdWords Professional exams. We now have four more Google pros, bringing us up to six total! You can check out our Google AdWords Professional Status page for a link to our site, and a look at the cool logo.

Great work guys!!

While they were all plugging away at the AdWords test, I decided to take a shot at the new Yahoo Ambassador test.

I knew I could take it again if I bombed, so I wasn’t too worried, even though I have never used the new Yahoo pay per click management system or read any of the study material.

I wasn’t completely confident with all of my answers, but I ended up passing with a 91%, even after a few beers. This isn’t meant to be a dig at Yahoo, but they may need to make the exam a little harder (if not only to keep up with Google - that one has some pretty interesting questions in it!!).

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