Saturday, July 29, 2006

Planet Announces New CEO

Attending HostingCon 2006 this year in Las Vegas, will be the new CEO of the Planet / EV1Servers. While we are there we plan to hopefully have an opportunity to shake hands and meet with him. More later as things start to come together closer to the Conference.

———— NEWS RELEASE FROM THE PLANET ——————

The best just got better.We are pleased to announce that EV1Servers and The Planet have merged. Combined, we are now the largest dedicated web hosting provider in the world, providing customers with access to even greater resources, knowledge and technology.
Customers will continue to enjoy the same industry-leading products and service they have come to expect from our companies, but will now be able to tap into a larger network of resources, for even better service and reliability.


Leading the joint effort is newly appointed Chairman and CEO, Douglas J. Erwin, who brings extensive leadership experience and industry intelligence to the companies.

“With EV1Servers and The Planet already representing the upper echelon of Web hosting companies, our merger creates a powerhouse of resources for our customers,” said Erwin. “We have the scope, scale, and financial strength to deliver unmatched service levels and ground-breaking product offerings to existing and new customers.”

Erwin brings more than 30 years of leadership experience to the companies, with a track record of funding, building, acquiring and integrating technology companies. Most recently he was chairman and CEO of blade server pioneer RLX Technologies. Under Erwin’s leadership, RLX’s Control Tower blade management software became an industry standard, leading to the company’s October 2005 acquisition by Hewlett Packard. Prior to RLX, Erwin was chairman, co-founder and CEO of PentaSafe Technologies, a startup that became recognized as a leader in integrated security management solutions. PentaSafe was acquired by NetIQ in October 2002.
Erwin in 2000 was runner up for the Ernst and Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” in Houston. In 2001 he was voted one of the top ten most influential in Texas in the high tech industry.

Guarantee ROI for PPC Management

Key Components That Guarantee a Return on Investment for PPC Management
The Four E’s of a Successful Pay-per-Click Advertising Program
By Kent Lewis (Anvil Media, Inc.)


The good news: you can setup and manage a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program on Google, Yahoo! or MSN within minutes. The bad news: you can setup and manage a PPC advertising program within minutes. That means anyone can set up a PPC program, which has led to higher overall cost, lower click-through rates and conversions. There is hope, however.

The Process

Developing and refining a PPC advertising management process is essential. It enables a company or individual to train, automate and scale a PPC program, compounding the ROI. There are four key components of a winning PPC advertising program: explore, evaluate, expand and enhance. By following the 4E process, you can virtually guarantee an ROI on your PPC advertising program.

Explore

The exploration phase requires information gathering and assessment, which includes historical PPC account data, internal Web analytics data and peripheral research on customers and competitors. Determining the amount of additional keyword and competitive market research depends on the quality and quantity of information collected in the initial research phase. The desired goal is to formulate a PPC advertising program test campaign that runs anywhere from two to four weeks in duration.

Evaluate

The evaluation phase consists of implementing the PPC program test strategy (keywords, text ads and associated landing pages) and monitoring performance. In this phase, the goal is to determine which keyword phrases, ad copy, landing pages and bid strategies have the greatest potential, and will serve as the foundation for the ongoing PPC advertising program.

Expand

The expansion phase focuses on leveraging insights from the evaluation phase to increase the number of keyword phrases in the overall PPC advertising program to generate the desired quantity of leads or sales without sacrificing conversion performance. For example, a test campaign may incorporate 50 keyword phrases, while the expanded campaign may include 500.

Enhance

The enhancement phase involves constant tuning and tweaking of keyword phrases, text ad copy, landing page elements and bid strategies. Typically, this phase incorporates A/B or multivariate testing to ensure optimal PPC program performance. Developing a highly successful PPC advertising program is an iterative process that is never fully-optimized due to changes in the technology, industry and competitive landscape. As such, it is often necessary to cycle back to the exploration phase and test peripheral keywords, ad copy and landing page creative.

Campaign Elements

Once you’ve mastered the “4E process” concept for PPC advertising, the next step is to apply it to the core PPC advertising campaign elements: keywords, structure, copy, landing page, bid strategies and testing. Each of the following campaign elements are incorporated into each phase of the 4E process.

Keywords

There are an abundance of tools and techniques for identifying possible keyword phrases. While compiling your list of keywords for testing in the evaluation phase, don’t forget to explore “tail” terms, which are typically 4 to 6 keywords in length and are highly focused. Although they generate less traffic, they are often more qualified, less expensive and have a higher conversion rate. Always look at your competitor’s sites and PPC advertising campaigns to enlighten your overall PPC strategy.

Account Structure

One of the most overlooked aspects of a PPC advertising campaign is the PPC account structure. An improperly configured PPC account can nullify brilliant keyword selection, ad copy and landing page creative. Key considerations in PPC account setup include the use of campaigns and ad groups that focus on business or keyword seasonality, geographic targeting, branded terms and the buying cycle.

Ad Copy

When it comes to creating PPC text ad copy that generates clicks and conversions, pay close attention to the following elements: messaging, offer and display URL. Utilizing dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) in Google AdWords can be very powerful, but can backfire if not properly implemented. For example, try a search for “scum” on Google and look at the PPC text ads.

Landing Page

The single most important element of an effective landing page is the “scent.” Does the scent, or theme, of the PPC text ad carry through to the landing page? If not, you can all but guarantee low performance. For example, there are very few good reasons to direct PPC text ads to a home page. Beyond targeting each PPC text ad to a specific landing page, ensure that messaging is consistent across campaigns. Also offer limited options to maximize conversion. If you haven’t implemented conversion tracking by this point, you’ll never be able to truly optimize your PPC advertising campaign.

Bid Strategies

With keywords, text ads and landing pages set up and ready to go; the next step is to determine the overall bid strategy. Are you going to manually manage the PPC advertising program, or utilize automated bid software? There are benefits and drawbacks to both, but our experience is that PPC bid software is overrated, even for larger campaigns. Consider PPC platform capabilities such as geographic targeting and day-parting in your overall PPC strategy. Also consider what time of day, days of week or months of the year you will advertise heaviest.

Testing

Virtually every component of a PPC program can be tested, but that doesn’t mean it should be done all at once. An effective approach to optimizing a PPC advertising program includes a structured and methodical assessment of each component, one at a time. Once you’ve mastered A/B testing of text ad copy and landing page creative over time, move on to simultaneous multivariate testing. This requires additional infrastructure and support, but can boost overall conversion in a time-compressed manner.

Conclusion

Utilizing the 4E process (explore, evaluate, expand and enhance) ensures maximum ROI on your PPC advertising program. This process requires assessing key elements of your PPC advertising campaign: keywords, account structure, ad copy, landing page, bid strategies and testing. In the end, you’ll be pleased with the results.

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Search Engine Friendly Flash Web Site

By Scott Goodyear

Most SEOs and many web designers know that Flash based web sites are a challenge not only to get indexed but to even get the site or pages to rank well in the search engines. This article will explore a few of the challenges and provide a few tips that may come in handy if you are asked to work on a site or pages that include Flash based content.

First, consider how Flash is being used. Some web sites are nearly 100% Flash driven. These sites often have non-SEO traditional factors that help create popularity for them and in turn drive inbound links to the site through sources such as a national television/press campaign, a movie or DVD tie in, tremendous industry buzz including reviews, high profile news paper or magazine articles, or other factors that are not easily reproducible.

If your client has a site like this, consider the use of an HTML based landing page under the main URL and/or HTML container for the Flash content at a bare minimum. The object in this case is to at least have a title tag and meta content that can be indexed by a search engine. An example of an HTML container concept would be Warner video’s Gone with The Wind Flash page. Because it does use the term “official” in the title, meta tags, as well as in a brief description of the Flash page in a “no script” tag, this site actual ranks better for a search on official gone with the wind rather than simply gone with the wind.

As noted above, this site uses the ‘no script’ tag to describe the Flash based content. Others have pointed out that you can also use the ‘no embed’ tag as well as a ‘div id’ tag to add content about your Flash content. The goal behind these methods is to provide a bit of content for users who do not have Flash installed, have it blocked/turned off, as well as for search engines to index. This content should serve to represent exactly what is in the Flash file, not as a method to add extra content, keyword stuff, etc. Think of it much like a an alt tag on a normal web site. If I am displaying a gray car that has feature x, y, z in my Flash file, I should describe that… not go into a semi-unrelated dialog. A tool called ‘SWF2HTML’ is available through Adobe as part of a ‘Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK’. This tool can be used to extract the text and links from a Flash file and output this into very basic HTML which can then be used to describe the Flash file. As this is much the same content that some search engines can extract from your Flash file it can help you to tweak the content within the Flash file too, just in case it is being extracted.

If you have a specific font/formatting style that you wish to use with certain portions of your site, consider using sIFR. Normally web designers will use a graphic to replace headline text or cascading style sheets (CSS) to set the font/style that should be used on a given web page or site. The problem with a graphic is that it can not be seen by a search engine, so you loose out on text that might otherwise help describe the page’s content. A problem with both graphics and CSS is that across different monitor/operating systems/browser combinations, the pages will not look the same at all. With sIFR, the same exact content is presented to both engines and site visitors with an improvement for site visitors as the sIFR content scales to the font that the Flash designer wishes to use and scales with the available space specified on the web page instead of relying on the browser/installed fonts to be interpreted through CSS. See this sIFR page for an example of the code in action.

In the most ideal of SEO circumstances, the entire site should not consist of Flash in and of itself. As has been discussed many times in previous articles, search engines rely on the text based content of a web site including on page content, title tags, image alt information, text based links, as well meta information to a much lesser degree, among other factors in order to index and sort sites for relevance. The ideal web site uses Flash to add to a visitor’s experience. There are certainly all Flash web sites that do quite well, but this is an exception and not a rule for the average web site. If you have a Flash web site, try turning cookies and JavaScript off as well using a program like Flash Block to view your site. Make sure that your site can work with out Flash from a visitor point of view. And that any information that would have been in the Flash content is available on the page.

Friday, July 21, 2006

HostingCon 2006 - 07/18/06: SaaS (Software as a Service) on Demand

Don Best, from JamCracker.com was the guest speaker for this informative seminar highlighting one of the most popular buzzwords of the entire HostingCon 2006 Conference, SaaS. SaaS, an acronym for software as a service, is basically the wave of the future for hosting providers. For many years the hosting industry and development community have taken two seperate paths, but w/ the advent of websites like jamcracker.com, the roads have converged. Many hosting companies are now going to be offering specific software applications to their clients based on individual needs and not feeling the urge to hire out custom application work to development firms for various vertical applications. For instance, a development firm like PLETH, that has a particular application that is valuable to widget manufacturers, can really benefit by posting their software into the ecosystem of applications that are available and a hosting company w/out a design department or another development firm might have a client who manufactures widgets who could benefit from this product. In a sense PLETH has already been a part of the ecosystem, providing everything from Intranet solutions to Real Estate MLS IDX to clients across the United States, but I think that since the industry has decided to follow the PLETH business model, things will only be getting better.

In a seperate lunch conversation with Don Best, we shared our business model with him and how we service our clients and he immediately understood where we were coming from. That wasn’t a common thing at HostingCon in talking with service providers from other parts of the United States, in fact I would go as far as to say that most of the ones we talked to probably do not know their clients. The hosting industry as a whole is an inpersonal type of industry that strives to obtain quantity moreso than to provide quality of service. I have to also admit that prior to PLETH I was guilty of having this mindset, but I have seen that Hosting clients that are also development clients that trust 100% of their online presence to us are willing to outsource the technical aspects of managing servers, configuring dns, managing email configurations, etc. to a firm like PLETH than they are to try to hire a full time IT department. These clients also aren’t concerned in the least that they are paying a little bit more for web hosting since it also comes with support that is fanatical and around the clock. I can see many of todays larger firms eventually getting this and transferring the management of their web presence entirely to an outside firm as opposed to an internal staff of IT professionals who clock out each day at 6pm.
A couple of suggestions that we did hear that we will likely be incorporating over the next few months were:


- Offering Hosted Microsoft Exchange as a Service
- Providing a Disaster Recovery and Offsite Backup Solution
- Offering more Services geared toward Mobile Messaging / Applications

One of the other sessions we attended was for recognizing the trends that are growing in todays marketplace and one that I was a little surprised by but shouldn’t have been was mobile messaging. In fact, I was text messaging a friend as the speaker pulled up his powerpoint slide displaying a graph that showed many business’s today are using Mobile Messaging as well as bundled Mobile Applications in tandem with their regular management software. I was impressed that we had thought of this about 6 months earlier when we added SMS to our already robust PLETHWARE Groupware / Webmail solution.

HostingCon 2006 - 07/19/06: Growing Trends in Today’s Business’s

Another very informative session at the conference for me was the Growing Trends session that was put on by a top representative from Hostway, Inc. They had spent a considerable amount of money this past year surveying their clients and identifying the top trends among todays businesses. I was surprised to learn that 43% of small businesses today still have servers and try to host their websites internally. This figure drops every year but is still surprising to me to learn this. I don’t think that this figure is completely accurate, but that’s my opinion. I find that a lot of the clients we see that have hosted their websites elsewhere have predominately all been in another data warehouse or hosting provider and very few try to manage their own servers, etc. I guess a few of the larger clietns we see today that have a full time IT department might still be hosting internally but I bet that they are likely looking to outsource to cut costs and reduce the workload of their already overworked IT departments.

Another trend that couldn’t be ignored was that Text messaging had become a vital part of a lot of todays operations. There was a lot of talk about how email was still considered by many to be the killer app, but there was no real email solution providers in attendance, other than Microsoft, that I could see. We felt pretty good in learning that messaging was earning it’s place in the service offerings arena because we had already been there for over 6 months with our PLETHWARE product.

Disaster Recovery and Offsite Data Backups also were popular buzzwords during the conference, and PLETH is already in talks with a software firm to create the ultimate CYA (Cover Your Assets) type of software application that will completely automate the tasks of backing up critical and sensitive data such as Quickbooks, Microsoft Money, and Microsoft Outlook contacts as well as a host of other software applications popular to todays small businesses and entrepreneurs. Offsite Data Backups for personal use also make a lot of sense to us. Take for example the fire-proofed safe that weighs 600 pounds that our parents use to house important documents and family photos inside their homes. Since most of the photos taken today are digital, it only makes sense to have digital safes to store these items in. A computers hard drive can fill up pretty quick w/ digital photos. Many of todays digital cameras will default to approximately 4mb or higher resolution per image, with the higher the resolution the higher the quality of the picture. This is a sharp contrast to the size of digital images even just a year or so ago, most of which were in the 2mb range with some defaulted to even smaller file sizes. In the event of a fire, or even a stolen computer system, an entire lifetime of digital photos would be lost forever, but with the offsite data backup solution in place, digital photos can be stored a mouseclick away…

Another trend in todays hosting industry that doesn’t really fit into the PLETH portfolio of business offerings was game hosting. Game hosting is extremely popular, probably moreso than any of us had really imagined. It wasn’t until I heard the new CEO from the PLANET, Doug Erwin mention that Insomnia365 was one of their popular offerings that it really sank in for me. In further talks with Julia Morgan, VP of Sales and Marketing for the PLANET, we learned that our network center was equipped with one of the most state of the art centers for game hosting in the world. Cortex, a gaming control panel, is already in place and available for our use should we decide to offer gaming as a service in the near future. We have been considering this pretty hard for the last few days and expect to have an announcement regarding gameserver offerings in the very near future…

Saturday, July 1, 2006

The Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization

by Richard Drawhorn

The fundamental concepts behind Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are understood by most search engine marketers, but those new to the subject should find this article to be very useful. Informative articles on various aspects of SEO have been published here on MarketPosition.com over the years, and in this post I will summarize these concepts and provide links to relevant articles.

Keyword Research

The first step in SEO is to identify the search terms for which you would like your web site to rank well on search engines. We might believe that we know these terms already, but our intuition is often incorrect about how popular or competitive search keywords actually are in reality. People use all kinds of variations of phrases as they are searching for information on the internet. It’s important to identify these terms and use them in your site content exactly as people type them into search engines. To discover what these search terms are, a keyword research tool should be used. There are several free tools available, such as the Keyword Selector provided by Overture, but most of the robust keyword research tools are subscription based.

Web Site Optimization

You now have your well researched keyword list in hand, and are ready to use the keywords in your web site content. How should these search terms be integrated into your web pages? How often should the phrases be used, and in what sections of the pages? Those are excellent questions and the answers are not known exactly because they depend on the algorithms used by search engines. However, it is generally agreed upon that search engines look at several different sections of a page when evaluating its content:

Title tag
Heading tag
Meta Keyword and Meta Description tags
Text within the Body area
Link text and Link URL
ALT attribute for Image tags (the ALT tag may be less significant than other areas of the page)

Search engines look at the various sections of the document for repeating patterns of keywords or phrases. For this reason, it’s important to have a keyword density within a specific range. What should that keyword density be? Software tools like WebPosition’s Page Critic can help to answer that question. The Page Critic works by looking at the keyword density (and other statistics) of pages that are already ranking well on search engines. Since the search engines keep the details of how their algorithms work a secret, a reasonable strategy is to emulate pages that are well positioned.

Web Site Design

Aesthetics and user friendliness are important elements of web site design, but there are a number of other things to consider to ensure a web site will be as friendly to search engines as possible.

HTML Validation

It’s important to ensure that the HTML code that makes up a web page is correctly formatted. If there are errors in the code, then search engine spiders may have difficulty indexing the page’s content. Use a HTML Validator to check the formatting of HTML code, and read this article for more information on why this is important.

Site Map

It’s always a good idea to create a site map to make it easy for search engine spiders to index the site’s content. Link to every page on the web site that has relevant content, and place a link to the site map on the site’s home page. It may also help to sign up for the Google Sitemaps program to help ensure your content is indexed by Google.

Develop a Site Theme

One aspect of web site design that is often overlooked is theme development. If possible, organize your content so that particular themes are reinforced. Read Reinforcing Ideas and Improving Relevance to Gain Better Rankings for ideas to consider when organizing your site content.

Avoid Duplicate Content

It’s important to avoid duplicating content on the web site. Read Duplicate Content: How Does it Affect Your Rankings? for more information on how to avoid penalties associated with duplicate content.

Comply with Search Engines’ Terms of Service

There are several practices to avoid to stay on good terms with search engines. Techniques like cloaking, hidden text, or spamming, for example, violate search engines’ terms of service. If a site is found to be using these types of blackhat techniques, it will typically be removed from the search engine’s index. Read this article for more information about practices to avoid.

Build Link Popularity

The Link Popularity of a page is a term that refers to the number of other web sites that link to that page. Search engines typically consider how many other sites link to a page as a factor in determining that page’s ranking. The idea behind this is that if others link to a page, then they must consider that page’s content to be valuable in some way. However, all links are not weighted equally and it’s therefore important to try to encourage high quality web sites within your own theme area to link to your site. For a good overview of these concepts, read Link Popularity Considerations, and for some ideas about how to start building links read A Review of Link Building Strategies.

Monitor Performance

Once your optimized web site is online, you’ll want to monitor its performance on the search engines. If the site is brand new, it should of course be submitted to the search engines, or perhaps resubmitted if necessary. Monitor the site’s positions on search engines for keywords of interest to identify areas where the site is performing well and areas that can be improved. An excellent tool designed for this is WebPosition’s Reporter feature. It creates formatted reports featuring graphs of positions over time, as well as useful parameters like the Keyword Visibility Index.

A web site that is positioned well in search engines should start receiving a significant number of visitors. To monitor traffic and other useful web site statistics, a web analytics solution such as WebTrends is recommended. Read Measuring Web Site Statistics as Part of Your SEO Strategy for more information about the benefits of web analytics.

Conclusion

The art of SEO is a set of skills that can be learned and implemented by anybody who manages a web site. However, proper optimization and maintenance of the site requires time and effort, and the fundamental elements of SEO discussed above must be put into practice. Those who find they do not have the time or desire to implement their own SEO program, read Outsourcing a SEO Program for some advice on how to best seek out professionals that can help.

Launch: Wal-Mart Kids-Fishing Project

Pleth, LLC announced last month that it had been retained by Kids All-American Fishing, an organization primarily sponsored by Wal-Mart, that puts on and promotes fishing derbies across the United States and promotes the fun of fishing to children and parents alike.

“We are going to be building onto what they already have in place and in some cases just making the site function a little better.” added Greg Smart, Project Manager and Partner in Pleth, LLC.

The website currently features a Derby Locator that enables visitors to the site to go in and enter a zip code and search for a Fishing Derby near them, and at the same time the locator will also display a list of Wal-Mart Stores in that same area.

Click here to Visit the Kids-Fishing Website.