How to identify bad SEO companies

If it wasn’t so irritating, it would be funny.

I just received an email forwarded by a client from an SEO firm trying to contact me. The SEO firm sent an email to the client’s “info@” address to try and reach me to solict SEO services.

I admit: I’m baffled.

I’ve received plenty of phone calls for SEO services directly, from firms obviously mining WHOIS information, but this was the first time someone had gone through the trouble of locating an email link on the client’s web site, and then sending the client an email to try and reach me. I mean, if you’re going to take the trouble to go to the client’s web site, which many firms of this nature do not, why not spend a little time on the “Contact Us” page and email the marketing director, well, directly?

I suppose I could be giving them too much credit… They may have just taken a stab with the “info@” address & not visited the site at all. Either way, I don’t think we’ll be working together anytime soon.

Here’s a tip: While you need valid contact data in your domain registration information, it might make sense to have a unique email address for your registrant and domain contact info. Or even unique addresses for each contact type like “admin-contact@,” “technical-contact@,” etc. Doing so will help identify firms mining WHOIS information for their leads.

Big Caveat: Don’t change information on existing domain registrations unless you have to!  Some search engines pay attention to changes in domain registration information.

My New Year’s Resolution: 1024×768

Screen Resolutions

And it might be yours too!

It’s worth taking a look at your analytics “Screen Resolutions” report from time to time. The last time I heard someone quote a statistic on how many people used 800×600 resolution the number given was 40%. I did some checking, and while some of our web sites had numbers near 40%, many sites were much lower. Some sites had numbers as low as 5 to 10%.

(I believe that these numbers will drop even further, now that some of the 800×600 crowd have received new computers for Christmas.)

While there’s no absolute rule on when to drop support for 800×600 browsers, it’s probably a safe bet once the traffic is under 5%~6%. If you have an high-traffic web site, and 5% is still a large number of visitors, it may make sense to stay compatible for a while longer.

For the most part, fixed-width sites can now enjoy some extra screen real-estate by making 1024 the new “minimum width.”

Happy New Year!

More on Yahoo store “404 error” pages and Google. (Analytics this time…)

Ok, now that everyone has had a chance to develop a “content rich” super-converting 404-error page, it’s time to put it to good use.

And what better use for an error page, than to have it give us some indication of what link may have *caused* the error to occur in the first place. Thankfully, Alix Obitz posted just how to do that on the Google Analytics blog the other day. So now we can:

  1. Serve up a custom, “content rich” 404-error page in our Yahoo! store.
  2. Track which links are causing the error page to show up.
  3. Surely, you didn’t think we were done yet, did you?

Once you have the new code in place, you’ll have access to the URLs the visitor was originally looking for. Depending on what the URLs look like, you may be able to determine the visitor’s original intent. A page URL of “http://mystore.com/gensym23.html” is not going to reveal much about what type of content was at that URL previously. A URL of “http://mystore.com/soft-blue-widgets.html” is much more helpful. (I know Rob Snell has a page on “Why You Should Always Create New Pages from the ‘Contents’ page” but I can’t find it right now… The tip is also on pg. 179 of his book, Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies)

Anyway, when you *do* come across information laden broken links like the “soft-blue-widgets” example, one possibility is to go create a new page at that location that will redirect the visitor to an existing relevant page. This can be valuable for 2 reasons:

  • Your visitor will now end up on a page even more relevant than your “content rich” 404-error page.
  • You now have another *working* link to your site. (Your PageRank should skyrocket any minute now…)