They don’t have to do that though and usually it’s much more effective to put a meaningful phrase in the “click here” link but seemingly they can’t be bothered to put that extra little bit of effort into their marketing. That’s a shame really as search engines generally look at the information within the link and “click here” doesn’t give them anything to work with.

Obviously it’s not always possible to put a truly meaningful phrase in the link but, usually, it is.

Nowadays it’s quite different of course with untold numbers of small enterprises considering that it’s essential to be online. This change came about through the wonders of geotargeting which basically lets search engines present you results that are more local to you than they would ordinarily be.

To do this they need to come at the problem from two directions. First off, there’s you: your IP address (assigned by your Internet provider) gives them your broad location. Secondly, there’s information from the web pages themselves thus you see for example, charlotte dentist being mentioned prominently on the relevant website. That second one isn’t so obvious though as many websites don’t bother to quote a physical address, relying instead on contact pages which also omit this information in many cases and thereby throw away untold numbers of customers.

Of course, there’s the perennial problem in that nobody really knows what search terms people out there will use to find a given business.

For one thing you need to remember that a consultant may well come with a wealth of experience behind them but on the other hand they’re only “yours” for a fairly short period of time. The DIY approach means that you get to gain experience with an seo tool yourself. Sounds complicated? Sure, it sounds complicated but that doesn’t mean that it is complicated as many of these tools are very, very easy to use.

Where you’ll generally need to sit back and do some thinking is with the results of these tools running over your site. That said, even here it’s a lot easier than it used to be and definitely isn’t something to be scared of.

Free doesn’t mean low quality either. There are excellent tools around to analyse the keywords on your site and compare it with those of your competitors. In years gone by that would have cost your serious money but these days very good tools are around to do it free.

In fact there are a whole raft of excellent free tools. The problem is working out what to do with them, what the results mean and what you can do to correct any problems that are thrown up. Take, for example, the incoming links. Although more is better, how many is “enough”? That depends on what your competitors results are (you can use these tools on them as well as on your own site). If you don’t have “enough”, what do you do about it? That’s easy too: just subscribe to one of the many directory listings services and stand back as the incoming links start rolling in.

This is quite a busy time for us in a lot of different areas and for a variety of reasons.

Since we weren’t too pleased about the approach taken by our UK hosting service re the above, we took the opportunity to move the key blogs over to America where the First Amendment gives writers and free speech generally a whole lot more protection than the UK does in some areas. That was a surprisingly seamless transition but has had the effect of seeming to change the composition of our readers for reasons that aren’t readily apparent at the moment (it’s not the geotargeting of searches as that usually doesn’t affect blogs that much).

That move has had the side-effect of creating another blog for us back in the UK should we want to use that though we’ve not thought a whole lot about that as yet.

Separately from that we’re starting to gear up for John starting school here in September. It seems like a long way ahead at the moment but already we’ve a couple of appointments at the school in May relating to that.

I’m still plugging away with the Child Development course (ED209) which seems to have ramped up the quantity of work required of us over the last few weeks. At the moment it’s almost as though it were a 90 point course rather than a 60 point one. I’m still currently sticking (just!) to my schedule which is running 4 weeks ahead of the official calendar but I can’t see me keeping up that lead much longer if the quantity of work doesn’t go down a little. On that front, the next book is on children’s learning of language which I did a lot of during the English course last year so, in theory, that should be easier to get through. What it has taught me is to investigate further when comments on a course say that it’s “hard going” as this one did. Fortunately, next years course doesn’t have comments like that!

Tomorrow’s a public holiday here so we’re heading off somewhere or at least hope to if the weather is reasonable which, at the moment, doesn’t seem too likely (after all, it is a public holiday so what do you expect?).

Fair enough, but no matter how high the traffic to the site may be, it doesn’t mean that you’ll actually make any money from it simply because the high traffic doesn’t equate to high conversion of viewers to customers. That’s where conversion rate optimization comes in.

That’s a big term for a big area. What’s entailed is a very full analysis of your site to ensure that it’s properly planned, the text is professionally written to maximise the impact for potential customers combined with analysis of how well it’s all working. Even small enhancements can mean quite substantial improvements in the effectiveness of your site in terms of converting views to actual customers.

Garden and household furniture is one of the most surprising that I’ve come across lately which are a whole class of item that I’d never have thought would have been economic to ship any kind of distance (which goes to show that we’re getting ripped off by the house movers!). At the other end of the scale there are Christmas cookies which sound like they’d be that little bit fragile to arrive in one piece but then again my last backup drive arrived in just that way with minimal packaging so either stuff is a lot more sturdy these days or the mailmen don’t handle the packages nearly so roughly as the joke assume.

Anyway, whatever you’re looking for at the moment, it’s worth having a look online. Large, heavy and fragile no longer seem to be showstoppers for shipping.

Consider a car for example. Whilst the car companies try to create a sexy image for their cars to sell them, most of us in reality are looking for a car that works, keeps working and which seems to give us a lot of car for our money. So, if you saw an average car priced at a price well below average that was from a manufacturer with a reasonable reputation then chances are that you’d buy it and so would a lot of other people too.

That would obviously create a backlog of orders for the car which might be taken by the manufacturer as an indication that it was very popular. They’d be right in this instance, of course. But what if they doubled the price? They might still have the backlog of orders but few people would actually buy it when their turn came up.

SocialSpark are doing the exact opposite of this at the moment and seem to be living in some other world divorced from reality. They’re advertising opportunities to write sponsored posts at quite good rates and thereby ending up with a waiting list on, seemingly, all of the opportunities that they offer. Their system is using the length of the waiting list as an indication of popularity (fair enough) and reducing the price paid based on the popularity (not a good move). So, for example, they had an offer on at $27.50 a couple of weeks ago (quite a reasonable payment for 250 words). Two weeks later when that queue was cleared the price was now $5.50. Thus, a lot of people who were interested at $27.50 were offered $5.50 for the same work (and, like me, turning it down).

Yes, you can use the waiting list as an indication of the popularity of your product, but don’t forget that one key aspect of that popularity is the price. Change the price significantly and the popularity can change dramatically.

If you want to you can check out most of these easily enough. Sufficient patience or a very high speed Internet connection will let you fill up all that webspace and if you load enough videos you could even check out the bandwidth fairly easily.

What’s less easy to check out is the customer service. Most of the time it’s something that you really don’t need as most facilities on a hosting system are fully automated these days. When you do need it is when something goes wrong and that’s where the cheapo hosts can really let you down bigtime.

Try searching for “3ix hacked” for instance. You’ll find site after site that’s had problems thanks to their rather lax backup policies and apparently poor security which let the servers be hacked in the first place (note that the majority of those sites are talking about a hack of the 3ix hosting service rather than individual sites).

OK, so you should be doing your own backups but that’s something that many people expect (with good reason) their hosting service to do. In some cases it appears that 3ix only do a once a month backup which isn’t really adequate but then as 3ix only charge $1/month you’re obviously not going to get a top of the line service and it would appear that backups are one area where they save money.

So is the answer to go for a more expensive hosting service? That’ll help in some ways but you should note that most hosting services have something buried in their Terms of Service to the effect that it’s your responsibility to take backups. The only foolproof way seems to be to do your own backups which isn’t the pain that you may think as they can be scheduled to take place when you’re not using the computer.

The problem with many of these schemes is that there are minimum payment amounts so in many ways it pays the companies running the schemes to have a thousand affiliates each bringing them one sale rather than one affiliate bringing them a thousand sales. In the first case the only cost to running the scheme is the administration as there’s often no sales commission to be paid whilst in the second case they’d end up paying out the commission at the highest band.

In general terms, that problem usually applies to companies running their own schemes therefore it’s usually better to sign up by way of one of the affiliate marketing companies such as TradeDoubler or CommissionJunction. They obviously take a slice of the commission that would otherwise go directly to you but at least you avoid the problem of having a series of small payments due yet none of them above the minimum for a payout.

Clearly there are some affiliates who go all-out in their marketing of the products and they do very well as you’d expect but it’s far from the easy job that many people seem to think. For example, even though I run a series of travel accommodation websites and religiously place affiliate links for car rental on pretty much every appropriate spot, in reality I get under $100/year from the affiliate links from those sites.

In fact, car rental doesn’t pay a massive amount (usually around $10/rental) but there are other affiliate links that pay quite substantial chunks of cash. Of those, probably among the most lucrative are house sales and online casinos.

The link on this page probably isn’t a fair test of the affiliate schemes but, on first sight, you’d think that at least some people would click on it and buy something. Frankly, I’d be very surprised if anyone did, but if they do, I’ll update this post. Go on… ruin my day and sign up for an Amex card (free to you, few dollars to me).