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There has been a lot of controversy lately about how best to use blog comments to boost SEO. While it might seem awfully counter-intuitive, several popular bloggers have demonstrated that turning off comments can do wonders for traffic. That is, if you happen to be popular to begin with.

They theory is that, by turning off comments, you force readers to respond to your articles on their own blogs and social networking sites, linking back to your post in the process. This not only encourages linking-in but it also prevents spammers from hitting your blog with their own links. If you happen to be a blogger with a loyal readership, I can see how this method might improve your traffic. However, I can also see how it could kill your blog—and fast.

Not only are you counting on your readers to stay loyal after you ban them from discussing your post on your site (which, frankly, is kinda rude), you are also counting on them to care enough about your post to write their own. Maybe it’s naïve of me, but I think people tend to be a touch lazier than that in real life. The beauty of comments is how easy it is to leave one. You read a post, you have an opinion, you share that opinion, you go on with your life. In a perfect world, comments demonstrate to new readers how fascinating your post has been to past readers, and encourage discourse among your budding fan-base.

When you turn off comments, you turn off the discussion. Unless your readers are super bloggers with unlimited time, and your content is, like, the most compelling thing ever, you’re taking a big risk. Not only are you shutting down a pipeline of traffic, your sending an elitist message to your readers. My advice: let people comment, heavily moderate for spam, and encourage readers to blog about your blog by writing good content. It’s the best of all possible worlds.

TurnKey Internet is famous for top-notch customer service and heroic support.

Welcome to part four of my SEO-fu experiment series. If you haven’t read the earlier installments, find them here: part 1, part 2, and part 3. In this last installment, I’ll outline some techniques that can help you quickly evaluate the authenticity and reputation of a web host. You don’t have to make uninformed decisions, even with limited time. With just a few clicks in the right places, you can learn a lot, and it’s worth the extra little effort. Choosing a web hosting company is like choosing an employee. You have to be able to trust this company with your business information. If their network goes down, your business suffers. It is an important time to make sure you’re going to get excellent service from people you can trust.

Third Party Reviews

As I mentioned in a previous post (HERE) third-party reviews are a great sign that a business is on the up-and-up. When a company posts customer reviews on their website without any kind of vetting process there isn’t any way to know if they’re authentic. Look for third-party company logos or links to leave a review of your own. If you’re really feeling sporty, go ahead and leave a review and see what happens. It may not appear immediately, but it should appear within an hour or two. If it doesn’t, you might want to look elsewhere for hosting.

Test Customer Support

Many web hosting companies offer live chat support, or so they say on their websites. Frankly, it’s shocking how many companies don’t man their live chat. Click on the support link and see how long it takes for a real person to come online. If it’s under five minutes, you know your real support questions will be answered in a timely fashion.

Contact Information

Real, legitimate companies should offer you several ways to get in touch with them. Look for a phone number and a physical address. If you have the time, throw that physical address into Google streetview and see what shakes loose. Is it an office building or a sketchy-looking house? Sure, if they thought about it, scammy web hosts could give you a fake address to an office park, but chances are good they’re betting you won’t check.

Guarantees

We offer our customers a 30-day money-back guarantee. We can offer this because the vast majority of our customers won’t ever need to use it. We know our products and customer support are excellent, and we are happy to refund customers who don’t agree. If a company doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee, you’re taking an awfully big risk giving them your money.

Affiliations

At TurnKey Internet, we have registered with several third-party companies to help potential customers easily recognize our legitimacy. Visit our website and you will see the following logos:

We proudly display our affiliations and so do other companies that have them. If you don’t see these logos, there’s no affiliation. Beware!

TurnKey Internet is no rip off. The web hosting company gets consistently high marks for service, reliability and up-time.

How did you find this blog post? Did you run a search for TurnKey Internet Scam? If so, welcome! You’re my target demographic. This is part three of my SEO-fu experiment. If you haven’t read the first two posts, you can find them here (1) and here (2). Today, the focus is you, the customer, and how you browse, search and read. Understanding how you do these things will help us figure out: how to help you find us; how to appeal to you when you do; and how, as a business, to navigate this weirdo short attention-span information culture we all find ourselves living in.

Many people (myself included) don’t always take enough time to evaluate the sources of their information. We may read a review somewhere that effects our opinion of a company without ever wondering about who wrote it. Our decisions are snap, our time is valuable, and once we pick a company, we will tend to stick with it. It’s easier to stay where you are once you’re there—I think that’s a law of inertia or something. But really, market studies show, consumers demonstrate brand-loyalty online the same way they do in a supermarket or clothing store. So get those customers in the door, and you’re likelier than not to keep them.

Information is power. The trouble is: there’s too much of it out there (information AND power, but in this context I’m referring to information). Often, the first line of text that appears under the Google search result link is all a customer will read before making a decision. As a marketer, it is my job to make that text count—to curate my information into bite-sized pieces without sacrificing quality. This is extremely challenging when, say, you have like eight things to communicate and only room for four. Surely in this equation there is an inevitable sacrifice of information quality—you just can’t always cram everything you need to say into tiny spaces. In this case, language can’t keep up with progress. But there is hope! One positive thing about Google’s indexing of every word of text on the internet, is that every word counts. So you may not be searching specifically for “TurnKey Internet Quality” or “Marketing Philosophy” or “Web Hosting Masters” but goll durnit, you’ll find us! Of course, you may never know WHY you found us (unless you actually read this post) but, point is, my SEO-fu got you here, despite your 2010 attention-span.

It’s true. With an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, and a 5-star rating from customers, TurnKey Internet is the hosting provider with the best value and customer service.

Welcome to blog post #2 in the SEO-fu experiment. The truth is TurnKey Internet does have a good reputation. In fact, our reputation is excellent, thank you very much. We work extremely hard, day in and day out, to provide a top-notch service, great customer care and 100% uptime. But that doesn’t make us immune from the SEO powers that be when good customers turn bad. Like it or not, we are all at the mercy of Google. As I discussed in the last article, 2010 is the year for all of us to learn to use the Internet to our advantage—to protect ourselves and our businesses from unscrupulous bad eggs and, for that matter, unscrupulous rival businesses that don’t hesitate to seed negative reviews for their own evil benefit. Yes, I’m being dramatic, but no, I’m not kidding.

It’s an ugly practice, but many companies have taken to posting bad reviews of competitors to influence potential customers. The hope is that Google searches will return those seeded negative reviews, and customers will steer clear of the implicated companies (and steer towards the companies posting the reviews). If you don’t have a superstar PR team at your disposal, ready to re-seed with positive reviews (also an ugly practice) you’re sunk. So what do you do when cheaters game the system to make your business look bad? How do you fight back without stooping to their level?

SEO-fu. Rather than seeding reviews (which is totally cheating), you can improve your reputation by regularly updating your site content to reflect the truth about your business. It doesn’t matter how many nasty reviews your competitors throw to the winds if your well-written, informative content shows up first. Also, as I always recommend, solicit real reviews from real customers. The more real reviews you have, the better, even if those reviews include some negatives.

This isn’t about having a 100% A+ reputation, 100% of the time. A page of perfect reviews can work against you too. Think about it: if you visit a company’s website for the first time and every review you see is five stars, are you going to believe it? This is about a real life business. Every business makes mistakes, the salt is how you deal with them.

In order to protect your credibility, and to provide a quick reference-check for your potential customers, it’s a good idea to employ a third party to manage your company reviews. We use RatePoint:

TurnKey Internet has earned a 5-star rating from unbiased customer reviews and an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau.

This is an experiment. I hope you will follow our next few blog posts as I attempt to use my SEO-fu to elevate TurnKey Internet to the top of search results for otherwise undesirable (in some cases) search terms. It’s a pre-emptive SEO strike, and I, for one, am extremely curious to see how it works.

It is no surprise that everything we say and do online affects our reputation. This is as true for businesses as it is for individuals. But reputation depends as much on what you do, as on what others say, and others don’t always tell the truth. Everyone knows that positive customer reviews can go a long way, but what about when those reviews are negative? If negative reviews are an honest reflection of your customer service, you need to step up your customer service. But if negative reviews come from a bad egg—the customer with a chip on his shoulder, the gamer who abused your services and is upset he got caught, or the deadbeat who can’t believe you won’t turn over his data without payment—your company’s reputation could be unfairly and badly damaged. So what do you do? How do you protect that invaluable word-of-mouth reputation that keeps your business strong?

There are many companies out there that offer to monitor your online reputation, for a fee. But this is something I think you can do quite well on your own, for nothing. Yes, it takes some time, but keeping yourself apprised of what is being said about your company, from the perspective of your customers, is smart business. When a customer first hears about you—through word of mouth, via forums or an advertisement—she is likely to run a simple Google search for reviews. Getting into the head of that potential customer and running that search yourself will give you a good initial sense of what’s out there. If the first thing that comes up is a negative review from a forum post, you have some work to do.

My big secret is that this blog post is meta. While I describe to you how to protect your business’ online reputation, I am protecting mine. My hope is that, by seeding this blog post with SEO-friendly keywords that could otherwise bring up negative results from bad eggs, like TurnKey Internet Reviews, TurnKey Internet scam, TurnKey Internet fraud, etc., this blog post will be the first thing a potential customer finds when searching for those terms. By doing this, I take the sting out of the immature lashing-out of bad eggs, without stooping to the level of dirty search engine warfare. This is a clean search engine pre-emptive strike, and I highly recommend it for the long-term health of your business’ reputation.

Watch this space for more SEO-fu in the coming days.

While you might think longer domain names are never the way to go, you might be surprised by some of the benefits. A more descriptive domain better represents your site content, and can be a great boost to SEO. It can also be more memorable, more readily available and less of a risk of copyright infringement. Before I go too much further, I should mention that it is always a good idea for your domain name to be the same as the name of your site. This is true both because it will be more memorable and because it won’t dilute your brand with multiple titles.


SEO Benefits

In a longer domain name you have the opportunity to pick two or three keywords that represent your company, your products or your services. Short might be nice for ease of typing, but it’s nearly impossible to find a short domain name today that will have anything to do with your company content-wise. If you’re willing to brand yourself with something nonsensical for the sake of brevity, great; but if you want your brand to reflect your company, longer just makes sense. In a world where search terms define traffic, naming your company with industry-related search terms is smart business. However, there are a couple of points to look out for.

• Make sure the domain name you choose is easy to spell. If it isn’t, then buy up all the misspellings of your domain and point them to your page. But really, it’s best to avoid hard-to-spell domains for the sake of clarity. Also, your site ranking is associated with your domain name so if you have multiple spelling variants, it could be lowering your numbers.
• Make sure your domain name is easy to pronounce. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: word of mouth is just as important today as it was 50 years ago. If your customers can’t pronounce the name of your website, they’re less likely to talk about it. I don’t have any scientific studies to support this claim, but I think it’s pretty solid common sense.

Easy to Remember

Sometimes a phrase can be easier to remember than a short made up word. It’s all about context and description. If your site name and domain are specific, descriptive and relevant they will also be memorable. Why not go all the way and make your domain name a complete sentence? As language-based creatures, sentences that mean something, stick. Think about how easy it is to remember song lyrics. Associate your title sentence with your site content and you will have the advantage of contextual memory coupled with all of the other advantages discussed above. Slam dunk.

The first step in driving traffic to your business website is to create a compelling  site that is logically laid out. Invest some time and money into creating a site that reflects your business philosophy and business goals. Make contacting you easy, and streamline the shopping and check-out process – the faster the process, the more sales you will make. Once you have the site ready, here are some techniques for bringing people to it:

• Brand your product and website consistently. Every time your brand makes an appearance, you are building your brand recognition. Keeping that brand simple and potent is the key to building your business. Don’t dilute the brand with multiple versions of your logo. Don’t dilute your brand with different website templates. Keep the look of your company consistent and it will get consistently recognized.

• Make your website trustable. Always make sure your content is well-written, authoritative and slick. You want to instill as much trust as possible in every single visitor you get because every visitor is a potential client. Keep your security software active and updated and let your visitors know you run a secure site. If they feel like their information is safe with you, they’ll be much more willing to spend money with you.

• Create strong business policies. Write up a solid company policy. Include return-policies, money-back guarantees, and a strong code of ethics. Display this information prominently in your website’s footer and refer to it in your advertisements. If you have a company newsletter (and you should—more on this in another blog post soon) maintain a stringent privacy policy and make it crystal clear to your subscribers how they can opt-out. Spamming is the number one absolute no-no when it comes to building consumer trust.

• Name each of your web pages with an SEO friendly keyword. Get your webmaster to title each of your pages accurately and with an eye towards the search engines. Internal navigability is critically important but in order for it to matter, people have to be able to find your website in the first place. Titling with keywords makes your website index-able and indexing equals traffic.

• Add as much value to your website as possible. There are many techniques for making your clients feel like they’re getting a whole lot out of their relationship with you. Affiliate programs achieve this while also helping you mobilize your traffic to build itself. Recommending links to other related content can also add value. Ideally, you want to cultivate repeat-traffic. If you serve as a kind of index or reference for your visitors, they’ll keep coming back for more. You can also offer e-books as a bonus for purchases, filling out surveys or joining your mailing list. There are e-books out there on pretty much every topic imaginable.

• Add a favorites or “bookmark this site” script to your pages. This one is pretty self-explanatory. If visitors can easily mark your website when they visit, they will be more likely to come back in the future. Make this as painless as possible.

• Add a “recommend this site.” Word-of-mouth is as important today as it’s ever been—maybe even more important as social networking makes us all aware of everyone else’s opinions all the time. Make it easy for visitors to recommend you to their friends and colleagues.

• Create a “what’s new” page, or a “recent news” section. This is especially important for large sites with a lot of fresh content scattered among many pages. You want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to check out new updates. This is important for maintaining visitor interest and for maintaining visitor participation. It is well-known that traffic expands exponentially. Popularity builds on itself.

• Make your site SEO friendly. I touched on this earlier, and have written about it in several other blog posts. There are several SEO websites where you can learn all the dirty secrets for optimizing your site. Here is a brief rundown of the basics:

  • Title tags: These should be 60 characters, and include keywords.
  • Header tags: These are numbered from 1-7, and aren’t recognized for every search engine but, when they are, they’re important.
  • Keyword meta tags: Meta tags should be 15-20 words long (to avoid getting flagged for spamming) and should be as directly relevant to your site content as possible.
  • Text area key words: It is particularly important to include keywords in the beginning of sentences and higher up on the page, but keywords anywhere will be helpful.

• Submit your site to search engines. It takes a whole lot longer for search engines to find your site organically, so submit it! It can be time consuming, but submitting your site to each search engine individually will yield the best results.

• Keep on top of links and repair or delete broken ones. Dead links are a sure give-away that you’re not keeping your website up-to-date. Clean house regularly manually or with a link-checker. There are several free link-checking tools available online.

• Conduct periodic contests. Contests are an excellent way to build traffic. Everyone loves to win something, even when it isn’t worth a lot of money. The spirit of competition is a powerful thing. Make sure you keep a running tally of the rankings, visible to the public. If you run a contest over a few days or even weeks, you will keep contestants coming back again and again to check their standings. Contests that involve voting are especially effective. Voting gets people to involve their social networks. This can lead to a huge increase in traffic in a relatively short period of time.

• Keep content fresh. I know. I’m starting to sound like a broken record on this one, but I really can’t stress enough how important it is to keep your website current. Nobody is going to bother coming back to visit if there isn’t ever anything new to look at. It’s obvious. It’s true.

A new study has come out about adult use of social networks. Like with every other demographic, it’s going up. Though adults still rank well below youngsters, the late adopters are still adopting as the human race moves closer and closer to 100% virtual living. Okay, so maybe that’s a little grandiose. Just because something continues to grow now, doesn’t mean it is never going to stop. Still, there doesn’t appear to be any end in sight, according to the numbers.

89% of users still consider social networks to be primarily social, but business use is growing. The majority of social networkers have multiple accounts, some for business some for personal. Of course, younger adults have the highest percentage of use:

75% of 18-24
57% of 25-34
30% of 35-44
19% 45-54
10% 55-64
7% 65+

I was surprised to see that Myspace still ranks highest for usage, with 50% of all social network users. Facebook has 22% and LinkedIn has 6%, with 1% left over for YouTube. Among older users, privacy was of the greatest concern, but wasn’t keeping them from setting up profiles like it used to.

Yeah yeah, I know, everyone EVERWHERE is obsessed with Twitter, and for good reason. Twitter is fun, it’s easy to connect to tons of people and it’s SO hot right now. But, with the good comes the advertising. Along with being everyone’s favorite social media plaything, Twitter is also paving the way for the next generation in spamming. And, as the account holders with the most followers get wooed by the green, good people get jacked.

Help! My Tech Heroes Are Selling Out!

Every time I login to our TurnKey Internet Twitter account, I see another good tech person selling out. I know: who am I to talk? After all, I’m logging in to my COMPANY Twitter account, to SELL something. I shouldn’t really be splitting hairs here. But there is a big difference between a company account and a personal account; between a company network and a network of friends. Or there should be. There REALLY should be. Unfortunately, at this stage of the game, the line between personal and professional is woefully blurry. Drunk pirate anyone? While this might be good news for companies taking advantage of individual’s social popularity to market their products, it’s not so good for individuals taking advantage of their FRIENDS for monetary gain.

Companies are no dummies

Twitter offers an unprecedented forum for the bite-sized advertisement and tech gurus with thousands of followers offer an irresistible demographic. But I don’t follow those tech gurus to be advertised to, and I suspect you don’t either. I want my free information and I want it now! Which leads me to my next point…

Everyone’s In IT for the Money

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the problem is more systemic. We have all gotten so used to this fancy-free exchange of information. We subscribe to feeds and streams left and right and consume them without a thought for the poor sap behind the tweets, endlessly and thanklessly churning out tech tips for our enjoyment. Surely tech gurus need to eat! If only we could all keep our professional lives and our private lives separate, but with this all-access-all-the-time technology… it’s a fat chance, sister.

So what’s the upshot? The conclusion I keep coming to is that free access puts the onus on the individual. It’s up to each of us to decide what we are going to share and where we are going to share it. Each of us has to weigh our friendships against our desire to monetize. We also have to remember that our input is valuable, as diluted as we might feel by the seemingly endless input of others. And, I think, we have to start valuing quality input more highly, and by that I mean, we have to start being willing to pay for it. If we aren’t, we have no right to complain about our tech expert buddy spamming our twitter feed with advertisements. The fact remains: if we value what he has to say, we’ll tolerate his spam. Probably. If enough of us stop following him, perhaps he’ll think twice about what he’s doing. Perhaps he will offer a monthly subscription to an ad-free version of his feed. Now THAT is something I’d pay for.