No beef, just advice
I love Foot Locker, and enjoy shopping at their stores; heck you might see me walking down the street with some fly Adidas or Nikes once in a while before I get ready to play some B-Ball.  However, being a search engine optimization Guru – I feel that they have dropped the ball when it comes to SEO and search engine friendliness.  This obviously is nothing against them, yet simple advice that can save them lots of money!

They have a great looking website, but no search friendliness
Their website is very appealing (appearance wise) to the users, however unfortunately the search engines natural crawler could really care less to give them top rankings – even though a website of their caliber with large amounts of popularity should have top rankings.   I also understand that they probably invested a huge amount of money in to their website application, and it may not be easy to change; but I am almost positive that they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on PPC advertisements, and that could be greatly reduced if organic results were producing better returns.

They aren’t coming up in Google search results
I searched for Mens shoes, womens shoes, nike shoes, adidas shoes and michael jordan shoes. They are nowhere to be found in Google, and that presents a major problem! A website with such massive Google trust and website popularity should be able to easily dominate most of these terms. 

Now let’s get to the problem areas
Now I want to break down areas that they failed.  The main problem is link flow, and navigation! Plain and simple!  The website is pretty easy to use from a users standpoint, however if they changed around some words “here and there” and made some other adjustments, in a few months they would be livin’ large and selling lots of Jordan shoes through free search results!

I understand it’s easier said than done
I understand that they want to keep the top navigation simple and they probably don’t want to change around text.  I also know that changing the structure of a large software application isn’t cheap.  They need to implement more descriptive links within their website – like Zappos has done (they don’t even need to go to the extent that Zappos has to make an impact)

I personally would recommend they give it a trial run by creating a quick links section to popular areas low on their page, with links like this:

Mens Shoes | Womens Shoes | Nike Shoes | Michael Air Jordan Shoes

Long URLS many categories deep

Now! Next issue that needs to be address, they are using extremely long URL’s that are many folders deep, and Google doesn’t seem to like that – because they aren’t even passing page rank to these pages. An example URL I found for their Mens Shoes section is:

footlocker.com/catalog/modelsummary/supercat–mens/mvp–prod_tp/gender_age–Men%27s/path–y/id–54552/

Solution – They should have a url like this (in my opinion): footlocker.com/mens_shoes or footlocker.com/nike_air_jordan_shoes – This can be done with advanced mod_rewrite techniques

Lack of Title Tags
If you visit the mens shoes link, they don’t even have Title Tags – which is a big mistake as many of you know.

Solution – Find or invest in a way that will allow the use of title tags in sub categories.

Bad navigation within sub-categories
Another major problem that I found was that they use Javascript menus! As you can see from my below screenshot comparison, Google isn’t even following links to find their shoes categories because of the use of Javascript, ouch!

 
If you pull a Google Cache of their website’s sub pages and then obtain the text only version – Google doesn’t even see their categories for Shoes, Clothing, Accessories, etc… The mis-use of this code defeats any potential of success in the search engines. Making a slight change to the website’s code and doing away with the javascript menus could probably save (or make – however you want to look at it) the company millions of dollars. I would also recommend that within sub categories, the links include the definitive factor within the links.  For example, Mens shoes, instead of just shoes. Or Mens clothing instead of just clothing.

Solution – Stop using javascript for navigation links.

Linking to their search engine instead of categories
Another major problem that I found is this; They almost always link to their products using their search engine as a functionality to link to products. I understand that they can probably show their website visitors more relevant results doing this, however it is ruining their website’s search engine friendliness. Instead they should be creating new “hidden” categories that link to the products and that link back to the main categories to help improve the websites link rhythm. In all reality, the best methodology is to link to main categories – passing on the “link value” to the important pages so the search engines deem them credible. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless it is over done and used as the only internal linking method.

Solution – Do away with linking to their search engines, start creating categories for individual product lines. If a product applies to more than 1 category, place it in both categories.

Just found another issue, that I would do away with personally. I am not sure if it makes an impact, but I am always careful of this. They have a lot of junk CSS code sitting on their pages, that should be thrown in to files that are fetched from the server.

Now, let me get a few links promoted in this article that I am working on obtaining top ranking for. DataFlurry is your Professional search engine optimization experts and some of the best SEO consultants out there!

Take care,

Joel McLaughlin

We aren’t the type of company that gets excited when we have a large number of new clients. We get excited when we have web site’s that are performing well in the search engines! Below is a statistic preview of natural search engine traffic for our current client AutoSoundCentral.com

Call us web geeks or computer nerds! But watching our customer website’s succeed online is what we really enjoy to do.  It looks like AutoSoundCentral’s website is on track for long term profit and success, is yours?

Not a bad improvement from 10 daily organic visitors up to 390 daily organic visitors in just a couple months. Plus we are still on a path to further success!

Of course we can’t guarantee online success, but we can promise to implement the best strategies and implement the smartest tactics to help you succeed!

Joel McLaughlin

DataFlurry Proven Search Engine Optimization & SEO Services

DataFlurry has created a new program to allow our clients to receive regular updates as to the progress of their search engine optimization campaign.

Joel McLaughlin

DataFlurry Search Engine Optimization SEO

DataFlurry was chosen (along with a select few talented organizations) to compete for top SEO company of the year by Promotion World. The top SEO competition helps determine who the readers believe is the most talented search engine optimization firm in the industry throughout the United States. We are excited to be selected out of thousands of service providers in this industry. Being our first year officially in business, we are honored to even compete! If you believe in DataFlurry – please vote for our company by going to this URL and voting. http://www.promotionworld.com/top10year2008vote.html

Joel McLaughlin
DataFlurry Internet Marketing

When it comes to Paid advertising, there is a lot to know and a lot to focus on before you begin your campaign. Ultimately, you want to improve website conversions and lower pay-per-click expenses while increasing website traffic and sales.

The beautiful thing about Pay Per Click, is that you can obtain highly targeted website traffic that is easy to track.  You can obtain reports of which key terms are converting and which are not converting. 

I don’t always believe that having the number one listing is the best, you may obtain a lot of impulse clicks that are not necessarily reading your ad – which can be very costly. 

Conversion Rates
Conversion rates always vary dramatically depending on multiple variables. For example, higher priced services and products typically have a lower conversion rate.  Website’s that are not optimized properly will have lower conversion rates.  Many companies will design “landing pages” around specific key terms to help put the user in front of content specifically geared towards their search. 

Conversion rates can range from 0% up to as high as 30% (very rare). Typical conversion rates are around .3% to 2%.

Tracking Paid Advertising Campaigns

The beautiful thing about paid advertising internet marketing is that you can use programs like Google Analytics to track what keywords are converting in to customers at a higher rate, and then determine where to better spend your money.  Google Analytics is an amazing program with endless possibilities.

Obviously you need to find out the campaigns cost effectiveness by determining profit obtained and branding accomplished, however branding isn’t always an easy factor to track – because certain website’s will brand better than others.

Research Your Competition

You need to view your competition’s web sites and determine whether you need to take online marketing inspiration from your competition – to ensure that your website is going to convert well and stands out from the crowd.  Look at what ads are in which order for your competition. Get a feel for the industry you are getting in to. Often times the number one ranking advertiser isn’t making much money, and some times they are throwing away a large amount of money. You don’t need to compete for the #1 position to succeed and be profitable.

Fine Tune Your Website Before Starting Your Campaign

If you already have website visitors that are finding you under targeted keyword searches – you should research your conversion rates and attempt to reduce your website bounce rate as well before implementing a pay per click campaign. I also recommend performing online surveys and asking others to give you input to increase conversions.  Most website’s will have a 50-70% bounce rate, which is very high and can be very expensive if people are clicking your advertisement and leaving. If you are a larger business, you can always hire conversion and usability experts like DataFlurry to improve website conversions.

You always want to answer several mental questions for your visitors to make sure they don’t have any mental blockages to inquiring or purchasing from you, such as:

1. Why are you the best provider of this product or service?
2. What set’s your product or service apart from the competition?
3. Why should this individual trust your company to provide quality services or products?
4. What is the incentive to act now?
5. Provide a personal touch – whether it be videos, testimonials or something like this.
6. If you charge noticeable more than the competition, you must make website visitors understand why your quality is worth the cost.

You Probably Won’t Be Profitable To Begin

A large amount of clicks that you pay for will not result in a sale, inquiry or anything. If you only have a 1% conversion rate and you are paying .50 per click, that means that you will pay $50 on average for one client or customer. When you begin your Paid advertising campaign, you must understand that often times you will not be profitable immediately.  Also you will be spending time trying to improve your website to result in higher conversions, so their may be a delay before you start obtaining online conversions. You should always be improving your website to accommodate your paid advertising campaigns.

Pay Per Click Can Help You To Determine Where To Focus SEO Efforts

Many companies decide on keywords for their search engine optimization campaign to increase natural search engine traffic without any type of research.  You are going to probably spend several hundred or thousand dollars on a search engine optimization campaign, so you better make sure you are focusing on the right words! Pay per click is a great way to do this. (DataFlurry always performs in depth keyword research before starting search engine optimization campaigns).

Why Should You Use Pay Per Click Advertising?

Pay per click advertising can provide more targeted leads than any other marketing medium – because you can pay for website visitors that are looking to buy exactly what you are offering at the time they click on your paid advertisement. This is an amazing marketing and branding medium that is highly effective.

How Many Pay Per Click Companies Are Available?

There are a large number of paid advertising providers on the internet. However, I recommend new individuals use Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing for beginners.  The reason I recommend these 3 search engines is simple, they have a very large visitor base so that you can obtain fast response to advertisements – and you can also track results more accurately and the limit to advertising is almost limitless.  Another great factor is that you can often times start with these companies by only paying for $5-$20 of advertising without large advertising minimums.

There are many other paid advertising companies online such as Business.com, Facebook, Myspace, Ask, Enhance, 7Search, Miva, Kanoodle, StumbleUpon and so many more.

How Do I Design Landing Pages?

Design your landing page with out a large amount of junk, make everything to the point and easy to view.  I recommend only using text that is very convincing and promising. Make major points you need to prove stand out with different color text, Bold Text and images that prove a point.

In order to lower your bounce rate, you should use Large Bold Text showing the keywords being searched for. For example, if a customer was searching for Shade Tents, you should use text similar to the below phrase – in a very prominent position at the top of the page.

Find Shade Tents Below!

How Do I Create & Write My Ads?

You must locate keywords that are specifically focused on your product or service!  Make sure to put yourself in your potential visitors shoes and think whether or not you are targeting the right visitors. You should also think outside of the box for keyword ideas to select. Doing this can help you save a lot of money if you shy away from only competing for popular keywords. If you implement more elaborate keywords in to your pay per click advertising campaign, you will save money – and can sometimes obtain even higher targeted visitors!

Writing a great title for your ad depends on your type of audience and product or service. You can come up with great ideas by watching newspaper and magazine ads headlines and slogans.

Writing of the title – However, often times – simply having the phrase you are targeting as the title will obtain higher click-thru rates than making something up.  Plus, if using the keywords within your advertisements title, most search engines will bold the words that were searched for – so that it will stand out more than your competition.

When writing the description, start with something action invoking, and then also include the keywords that are being searched for.  For example, if someone was targeting shade tents, I would create an ad like this

Title:
Tent Shades

Description:
Stay Cool With Quality
Tent Shades, Act Now.

Longer titles aren’t always better, people want to find what they are looking for, and they don’t always need to be impressed with our creativity.

I always recommend creating landing pages for your keyword campaigns, this will help to focus on selling each visitor to the best of your ability. However if your website already has an excellent conversion rate, maybe it isn’t necessary.

Hopefully this has helped you to learn more about pay per click advertising campaigns. We manage PPC campaigns for customers that want to hire seasoned professionals. Make sure to stick with it and work hard to improve your conversion rates, it’s very possible to be profitable with pay per click, but it takes time.

Joel Mclaughlin

Today I want to talk briefly about Conversion rates. If your website is bringing in 60,000 unique visitors per month and your average customer spends $100 per order – increasing your conversion rate from 1.25% to 1.75% will actually increase sales by $30,000 per month, or $360,000 per year!  If you are in a situation like this, it is probably a great idea to invest in a usability expert, or invest time in to interviewing your customers to decrease bounce rates and increase usability.

Also a customer in this situation should look in to up-selling opportunities for website customers. Tracking your bounce rates and determining the reasons that people are leaving your website could be an excellent way to swiftly increase conversions and sales. 

The typical website we work on has around a 55% bounce rate, because commercial or sales driven website’s often times have more picky visitors. However you can easily reduce the bounce rate by up to 15% or more if you perform some quality research and determine what your visitors want to see when they land on your website.

This was a semi-random post, but I wanted to make sure that my blog visitors are thinking about also improving website usability instead of just obtaining more visitors.

Joel McLaughlin

DataFlurry Internet Marketing

I work with several attorneys, and a major issue is that they always want their name to be represented properly online.  Therefore, some times we are called upon to help attorneys represent their name properly in Google’s search results.  If you want your name to get listed in Google, I recommend performing one or all of the following methods to do so.

1. Create a page on http://www.linkedin.com – Linkedin is a business networking website that allows you to interact with other business professionals easily online. In order to make your name show up towards the top of the search engines, you need to start adding friends and interacting on the social website.  Depending on the popularity of your name will determine how much time you need to spend on this website.
2. You could become an expert writer on a website like http://www.articlesbase.com and create your author page tailored to yourself. If you submit one article every 2 weeks this will build up your author pages link popularity and the result will be a high Google ranking.
3. Facebook is a great place similar to LinkedIn where you can create a profile about yourself to help your rankings, the only negative thing is that people must become your friend before they can see your information.
4. Create a blog on http://www.WordPress.com with the URL http://yourname.wordpress.com – if you post occasionally and use tags in your posts, your blog will start to show up.
5. Lastly, you can always buy a domain name like YourName.com and talk about yourself or post your biography. However you will need to get links to your website from other website’s for this to work.  This is a slower method, however some people prefer this over other options.

Or else you can always hire an affordable search engine optimization marketing company or an organic seo consultant to help!

Hopefully this helped!

Joel McLaughlin

Phoenix Arizona Internet & Search Engine Marketing

Everyone must read this article by the trusted Bruce Clay. It jumps in to discussing the potential changes in the search engine optimization industry in the near future. You must make changes and improvements now to help offset any negative effects.

Google is planning to unveil an updated algorithm that will place much more emphasis on user’s experience within your website. We are believing that the best ways for Google to determine whether a website is high in quality will be by tracking users experience with cookies, tracking repeat searches, tracking bounce rates and more.

Search will be changing forever, you need to innovate, improve bounce rates, implement video content and improve your website experience for visitors. You must spark more interest and be creative to excite your users. If you fail to impress your visitors, the search engines may be able to find this out by tracking statistics from traffic delivered to your website. You must keep users on your website and get them looking around so your website doesn’t run the risk of losing valuable search engine rankings.

We highly recommend you checkout this article to learn more

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/11/17/seo-about-to-get-turned-on-its-ear

Joel McLaughlin
Phoenix Arizona Search Engine Optimization

So many of my website visitors currently have blogs, or are considering obtaining one. If you don’t have one yet, I highly recommend a WordPress blog.  With that in mind, you should only create a blog if you are willing to update it on a regular basis. Now I want to talk about what truly makes a blog successful from my personal research. First, you must create a blog that is unique and that you are passionate about.  Your blog must offer something unique, that isn’t just like all the rest!

Second, you need to brand your blog so that it stands out as well. Promote your own name or your blogs name repeatedly all over.

Third, Integrate dynamic content, pictures or video! This is a big plus, because most all people are visually stimulated, so you need to meet their hunger for visual content. I noticed when my blog was complete text, my bounce rate was really high from search engine visitors. Once I started integrating videos and images, more people were staying and looking around. More people were also signing up to obtain the email feed and commenting on my posts.

Fourth, Make it easy for users to promote your blog! Give your blog the ability to easily social bookmark posts with the click of a mouse. Also promote your blog on popular blog feed website’s such as Technorati and sites that promote blogs within your niche!

Fifth, Don’t be lazy when posting and try to just throw something up on your website for the sake of posting. Put some thought in to your posts and do some research! This is huge to online success with your blog!

Sixth, Submit your blog to popular blog directories. Also make sure to submit your RSS feed URL as well (if possible). This will help to obtain syndicated links throughout the web!

Seventh, Post regularly and with frequency! Make sure that you aren’t the blogger that posts 5 days in a row and then doesn’t make an update for 2 weeks! That will be an easy way to ruin your blog from the start!  The more often you can update, the better. However keep everything in reality, you need to maintain a personal life as well! If you are consistent, your readers will understand this and be eager to visit your website regularly knowing that there is something new.

Eighth, I recommend signing up for FeedBurner and activating RSS Feeds via email.  Blogger’s that truly love your blog will be eager to sign up to receive regular email updates about your blog.  I know I personally love this feature when available at a great blog. It is just like having your favorite news delivered to your inbox every morning!

Ninth, Make sure to integrate all search engine friendly add-ons or updates to your blog. For example, in WordPress you should integrate search engine friendly URL’s to make sure that your blog posts are more likely to be listed high in the search engines. A URL like http://www.yoursite.com/?p=12 is way less likely to succeed in the search engines than a post with a URL like http://www.yoursite.com/search_engine_friendly_blog_posts/  -  This is because search engines value friendly Titles, URLS, Meta Descriptions and Content.

Tenth, Encourage Communication! Ask your visitors to respond with their input, don’t be shy. This will help to also get people reading only via a feed to visit your website and respond. Make sure to always try to incite a call-to-action.

Eleventh, If you wish you can remove the No-Follow comments on your blog and tell your readers about this. If you have a blog that has a reader base who understand the value of quality links – You can derive a large number of comments because everyone will want a link to their website.

Twelve, Create an internal linking campaign. Link within your posts to other posts, this will help to build up the popularity of your blog pages so they rank higher in the search engines.

Thirteen, Use catchy titles! A title such as Make a cool blog, won’t do nearly as well at sparking potential visitor interest as a title like “Put Your Blog On Steroids, Simple Tips To Obtain Great Blog Success”.

Fourteen, I recommend you try to promote people to follow you on sites like Twitter (Follow Me Here), LinkedIn (Follow me here) or Technorati (Follow Me Here), StumbleUpon (follow me here), Youtube (follow me here) – or more! Also please subscribe to my feed at the top of the page (have it emailed to you or use it how you’d like). This will allow people to become more connected to you as well as promote your Twitter, LinkedIn, Technorati and other website’s link popularity.

Fifteen, Get some traffic to your blog. Once you have a solid blog that is ready to succeed – you can always jumpstart your website traffic by paying for visitors on websites like StumbleUpon. I was able to get 600 visitors for like $20 one day. That in turn got people talking and linking to my blog which will help build traffic, blog popularity and link popularity.

Sixteen, I recommend if you are wanting to obtain financial gain from your blog you decide to monetize on it. This can be by promoting your own products or else by integrating quality advertising services.  Some great advertising services are listed below.

• Google Adsense – Great advertising solution that pays a large percentage per rumors. Unfortunately you cannot control the content that is shown in these ads though, however their analytics usually provides pretty relevant content.
• Text-Link-Ads – Great service for selling link space within your site for monthly recurring fees. The amount you are paid is determined based on your website’s popularity. They take in to consideration a variety of factors when determining your popularity.
• Selling Ad-Space – Create your own section of small 125 x 125 ads or even sell standard banner ads. If your website has enough popularity or visitors you can demand money for this space.
• Find affiliate programs that your readers would be interested in.  For example, I could probably sell affiliate SEO software with a monthly fee and obtain monthly dividends if I wished from this blog. If you owned a blog about website hosting, you could probably link to a hosting company that would pay you monthly or a lump sum for referring a customer.

Seventeen, Start interacting on Social Media sites and obtaining friends and commenting. Also comment on other peoples blogs – within weeks you could be receiving hundreds of visitors a day from the connections you have made.

Eighteen, Keep up the Good Work.

Nineteen, Link to DataFlurry’s Blog if you like what you see :-)

Twenty, Please follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Youtube and More!

I appreciate you guys reading this. Please comment below with your opinions.

Joel McLaughlin

DataFlurry Phoenix Arizona Search Engine Optimization

Hey Everyone! I compiled this list for about 4 hours this morning (got up at 4am)! I wanted to share this list with my website visitors to our recently released blog. The list is under construction, however this is a great tool to help promote your blog or website by obtaining easy and quality links!  In the list we probably have over 150 free submissions of 3PR or above directories. I also included links to paid listings in case you are willing to spend the money. There are some real gems in here, Hopefully this helps!

Let me know if you find problems or have some high quality directories to add to the list. Now that it’s 8am I need to start working on my customers sites. Good luck with your search engine optimization marketing campaigns.

We recommend all free links, and we also recommend many of the paid listings. Especially Yahoo, DMOZ & Chronos

More Directories Below (Mostly Free)