Stephanie Sharp's Plexus Blog

Leaving a bad taste

Stephanie Sharp — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:15:02 GMT

I'd heard the phrase "Domain Tasting" but had never had any personal experience with the concept. This week I learned a valuable lesson...if you want something, buy it right away. Well I guess this doesn't apply to everything but it does apply to domain names.

Domain tasting as defined by Wikipedia is: the practice of a domain name registrant using the five-day "grace period" at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated second level domain to test the marketability of the domain. During this period, when a registration must be fully refunded by the domain registry, a cost-benefit analysis is conducted by the registrant on the viability of deriving income from advertisements being placed on the domain's web site.

So what's the story? Now I have personally been building web sites and purchasing domains for over 10 years through the same registrar. I always check the availability of a domain at my registrar, report back to the client what is available, and a few days later will return to purchase the select domain(s). Well this past week I did just that and got a wake up call.

We recently launched a new web site for Bulldawg Illustrated (www.bulldawgillustrated.com). We thought it would be a good idea for the client to purchase www.bulldogillustrated.com because of the possibility that someone might not know it is "dawg" instead of "dog". So like always I performed the search and it was available. I let the client know to let me know if they wanted us to register it.

Later that night, when the client decided to purchase it, it was no longer available. It had been registered it that very day.

Now let me go ahead and say we do not use Network Solutions, Godaddy, Register.com or any of the other major registrars - many of who are being investigated for the very practice of registering domains that have been searched on their sites for a variety of reasons they feel are ethical. The registar we use have never used any of those practices - again we have a 10 year history with them.

I immediately contacted the registrar to find out if there had been changes to their system that would have allowed for a breach of their search data. They assured me that is not the case and that they have never had a report of a domain being sniped during a search query.

Well since it was obvious that this domain was indeed sniped for the purpose of "tasting" the best thing we could do was NOT to go to the site, and certainly not to click on any of the ads that immediately showed up on the site as soon as the domain was sniped.

About 5 days later I searched to see if the domain was available again, and it was. I was able to register it, which I did for 5 years. Luckily this domain wasn't one that would get alot of accidental traffic and ad click throughs. Had it generated enough traffic and click through revenue it would have been lost forever.

Our registrar still isn't quite sure how a breach like this occured through their system but they have assured me that they are conducting a thorough investigation. But the simple and affordable lesson is, if you want a domain name, and it is available, buy it right away. At $15 or less per year, its a gamble you can afford to take!

High Rankings gets a high ranking from me

Stephanie Sharp — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 02:55:22 GMT

Attended a small Search Engine Optimization (SEO) training session hosted by Jill Whalen at High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Firm. We tried to attend a conference in Denver in 2007 but our flights were cancelled so Jill and her staff were kind enough to let us apply our tuition to her smaller training session.

I highly recommend this session to anyone who has an interest in learning how to gain rankings on competitive keywords. Jill is a goldmine of information and can tailor the learning to any level of knowledge.

The Plexus SEO staff have had great success with all of our SEO clients, but we wanted to validate some of our thinking and gather a few more helpful tidbits to give a little more boost to our clients.

We came away from the session with everything we hoped.

Small Steps with Big Results in Search Engine Optimization

Stephanie Sharp — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:03:33 GMT

The main strategy of your web site if you are focused on optimizing it for certain keywords in search engines should be focused on content building and link building. In and of themselves both of those strategies are beneficial for your site and your customers, but they provide an added benefit of making your site more search friendly. I have identified several tips as Content Building or Link Building tips. I will add to this list as I find new opportunities for either.

Content Building: Add a blog to your site. Blogger is a free tool for creating a blog and it has the capability to publish your blog to your web site with FTP. If you are a client of Plexus, you can also purchase pxBlogger and have a blog built into your site.
Link Building: Get your blog added to Technorati
Link Building: Buying words at The Big Word Project. $1 per letter. Make sure to buy words that you are trying to get ranked on. While this site is new and has no google Pagerank yet, it has promise considering the viral aspect of it, and that it is being linked to from many sites.
Link Building: Check out Andy Hagans list of Social Media sites to consider when trying to build organic links.

Search Engine Benefits of Tagging

Stephanie Sharp — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:43:01 GMT

Tagging is quick and easy way to annotate and categorize content. Tags are used in many different ways on many different web sites now. Examples include Flickr, Amazon.com, Blogger, etc.

Let me give you a good example of how powerful tags can be. Lets say you are trying to find photos of Athens, GA. Where do you even start? You could go to Google and type in "Photos of Athens Georgia" and you will get back 699,000 results. Each of those results may have a photo or two of Athens, Georgia but you would have to spend an enormous amount of time to find anything useful. Or you could go to Flickr.com - a photo sharing site - and use their search by tag feature. Thousands of Athenians and tourists have posted photos of Athens Georgia and each of those people took the time to tag their photos with "Athens Georgia". In one action, and on one web site you can see every photo that was "tagged" with Athens Georgia.

Because tags are so prevalent, and usually have very good relevance in relation to content, search engines see them very favorably. When applied to the concept of search engine optimization, tags become an invaluable tool.

Because of the way a tag works, when you create a tag, a new page is created. So each unique tag you make becomes a new page. If you made 1 blog post and tagged it with 10 individual unique keywords or keyword phrases you essentially created 1 page for the blog post itself, and 1 page for each of the unique keywords. In a very short amount of time you have amassed 11 pages for your site!

Because ONE of the factors in how well your site is ranked compared to other sites in relation to a particular keyword is the volume of content in your site, the faster you can create relevant content, the more competitive you can be.

If you have worked with us on building your site you have the capability to add any of our tools which have the tagging capability to your site. Here is a few of those tools.

If you do not have a site built by us, and would like to talk to us about building your site please contact us at (706) 353-2048 or through our contact form

Do It Yourself Search Engine Optimization

Stephanie Sharp — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 02:34:38 GMT

Not every company needs to hire a search engine optimization specialist. Chances are if you have a well seasoned and mature domain, a good number of other industry relevant and reputable sites linking to your site, frequently changing content, and competitive number of pages in your site, you are probably just a few tweaks away from being able to achieve some reasonable goals.

If you fall into this category, you probably just need to focus your efforts on optimizing the content on your homepage, your title tags, and your metatags.

Keyword research is your next step. There is a tool called Keyword Discovery that can help you focus your efforts on the most appropriate keywords. The key is to start broad. For example if you are a company that provides a service like career counseling, you should start your keyword research with a broad term like "Career". This broad search will show you every variation of keyword phrases using the word "Career". The reason for doing this is that while you might refer to your service as Career Counseling, you may find that Career Counseling actually gets less search traffic than Career Coaching. By researching broader terms you will stumble on other phrases that consumers use to find your service than you refer to it just as an industry professional.

Once you come up with 2-3 keyword phrases, make sure to place those keyword phrases in the first few positions in your title tag and provide links from your homepage to relevant content using those keyword phrases. Additionally if it is possible, request those companies that already link to you to change the words on their site that are actually linked to your site to a keyword phrase you are focusing on. For example instead of linking to you by just using your company name, have them link to you using for example, "Career Coaching with Company Name".

If you find you can't achieve your goals after addressing these key areas, you may need a professional firm to help you establish a link building or content building campaign.

Working Board Meetings

Stephanie Sharp — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 21:27:33 GMT

I attended my first board retreat with the Jeanette Rankin foundation this past Saturday, 26th of January 2008. Surprisingly, having been on half a dozen boards this is actually my first board retreat. It was from 9:00a - 3:00p.

I am amazed to say the day actually flew by. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, the debate, the support, the energy and the excitement I experienced. This board is made up of an astounding amount of talent and commitment.

At the end of the day, as I am sure all boards that have retreats are faced with, we were left with some answers but more questions than we came with. One accomplishment we did make was to decide that the very next meeting of the board would be a working meeting where we would put in place atleast a number of the ideas and initiatives we hope to undertake in the next year. We will actually show up with laptops in hand, and spend our day writing, programming, calling, and mailing. It is exciting to think of spending a day with a group of talented individuals in more than just conversation and find out what kind of creation can come from actual work!

Holiday shopping done right

Stephanie Sharp — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:54:07 GMT

I was one of the brave, or some might say, crazy, folks out shopping on Black Friday. I got a jump start on the game by going to the Midnight shopping extravaganza at the Tanger Outlets.

I shopped at dozens of stores at Tanger. The worst experience was at The Gap. There was a line just to get in the store. I stood there for about 10 minutes before running out of "patience" - the ever diminishing resource of all adults.

My shopping party happened upon a lineless J. Crew. I thought maybe they didn't get the memo about the midnight shopping but I peered in to find employees happily waiting for the rush of customers. My shopping party started a four person line, and within minutes the line at J. Crew began to grow, though not to the likes of the line at The Gap.

I found a few bargains there, and started the register line. With all the different specials, discounts, midnight extra specials, etc. it took forever to check out because of trying to figure out what was on sale, what was not, and so on. But I left with a bag full of great deals.

After wondering through a half dozen more stores I made my way around to Polo. I walked in and glanced through a few sale racks. I made it across the back of the store and was startled by what must have been a line more than 100 people long waiting to check out. What is going on? How could the line be soooo long? Didn't they have enough staff to handle the crowd? I left in a huff, expecting the same in every other store.

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a Banana Republic with a line that was clear! Banana Republic knows how to do shopping right. Their sale was 40% off across the board - no exclusions. That is the primary reason they had no lines. There were no questions at the counter - the price was 40% off whatever was on the price tag. As a result I made three complete trips to Banana Republic. Had I been in Gap or Polo or any other store, I would have stood in line for an hour or more and left swearing never to return. I spent the majority of my money in Banana Republic as did anyone else who shopped there.

Bravo to the brilliant people behind that sales strategy!

How do you measure up? See what Locos Trivia is like

Stephanie Sharp — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:37:23 GMT

Locos Grill and Pub has trivia night on Tuesdays at all the Athens Locations. It's alot of fun if you happen to store alot of useless information in the inner sanctums of your brain.

Here is a helping of the trivia from Tuesday, September 25, 2007. If you feel so compelled please feel free to comment on the blog with your answers and ill be glad to send you the answer key to see if you are right! (No cheating!!)

What was the name of CHarles Lindbergh's Plane?
Which business newspaper uses the slogan "All the business news you need"?
The monopoly board properties are named after address in which US city?
What is the name of the first Czar of Russia?
What was the last war where a foreign country's government occupied a US territory?
Who invented the "Game Theory"?
Who played Atticus Finch in the 1963 rendition of "To Kill A Mockingbird"?
What is the name of Krusty the Clown's pet monkey?
Name the top 5 countries who have the highest population of people who have Spanish as their first language?
Who was the first person to win the Heisman Trophy in 1935?
Who was on the cover of the first Rolling Stone magazine?
Who was the first billionaire in the U.S.?
Name all three shows which were spin-offs of Happy Days?
In 1983 EA Sports created a popular basketball game that featured two basketball stars. One was Julius Irving, the other was...?
Who wrote "The Devil Wears Prada"?
Which tv show featured a group referred to as the "Daliks"?
Steve "the Colonel" Cropper, Murphy "Murph" Dunne, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Willie "Too Big" Hall, and Alan "Mr. Fabulous" Rubin were all members of what Band?
Plato was Socrates most famous student, Socrates was Aristotle's most famous student...Who was Aristotle's most famous student?
Name all 8 countries that begin with the letter "E"

Google Continues to WOW!

Stephanie Sharp — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:06:50 GMT

There’s nothing new about singing the praises of Google but...what the heck. Plexus has only been using the Google Analytics tool set for about a year and a half to evaluate traffic, customer trends, and sales figures for the sites we build. In that short time Google Analytics has undergone many vast improvements which has positioned it as the leading Web site traffic analysis tool if not for its wide array of reporting menus, then for its extremely cheap price – FREE!

Most companies extremely undervalue and underappreciate the knowledge they gain from properly analyzing their site traffic. Everytime I ask a potential client that already has a Web site but comes to us for help, what they know about their visitors and their site traffic, I get some variation of the following answer: "Yeah we have about xxx hits per month and xxx percent of our visitors are new each month." They smile, feeling proud they are armed with an answer to a seemingly simple question. Bravo to them for at leat knowing how to start to answer that question but...the question they can’t answer is “does your site produce results, and how do you know?” It’s as simple question to answer if you are using the right kind of statistics. Introducing Google Analytics.

Aside from the normal statistics you can get from any other Log Analysis software, Google Analytics takes special care in allowing you to answer the questions of “does your site produce results, and how do you know?” It does this with Goal Conversion Tracking. Every site should be equipped with some kind of lead generation tool whether it be a simple contact form, request a quote form, schedule an appointment form, or newsletter sign up form – som way to gather potential client contact information. Goal tracking allows you to create up to four goals. Just by having one block of Analytics code in your site and setting up your goals (takes about one minute), you can find out just how much of your traffic converts to a lead for your business.

For example, if you made a decision to purchase a Web link on the Yellow Pages Web site or, you were running banner ads on the local newspaper's Web site, and you wanted to know if that spending was brnging leads you could check the Goal Tracking report to find out. The Yellow Pages and Newspaper staff will be eager to tell you how many people clicked to your site through their ads, but don't trust this number to tell you anything besides the fact that someone actually made it to your homepage. You need to know how many of those people stayed on your site long enough to convert to a lead. Google Analytics Goal tracking does just that. It tells you how many leads your site generates, and where those viitors come from whether it be from the banner ad on your local newspaper site, your online yellow page ad, or some other source you may not have even known about!

If you have an e-commerce site where you actually make sales online, you can track every penny you make and find out what sources are sending the sales to you. E-commerce tracking is especially important for retail sites because most retail sites use different marketing methods to achieve sales goals. How can you make decisions about wich efforts are working if you can’t tie every marketing dollar to your sales? For instance, if you purchase a number of Google Adwords and you want to know which words perform and which words don’t, the e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics will show you which words bring in the most revenue.

Look at the following keyword report. This is a real report but we have replaced the real keywords to protect client information. Notice that for Keyword 1 (which is a paid keyword) the site received 1925 visits. It brought in over $1500 in revenue from that paid adword. The report also shows that the average sale for that keyword is $28.84. Now, you can compare that against what was paid for that keyword over the same period to find out if you are making money off that keyword. If you make a decision to discontinue that keyword, you are making that decision armed with knowedge instead of instinct. Many companies make the mistake of thinking if their sales aren’t strong during a particular quarter when they happen to be using Adwords, that their selected Adwords aren’t performing, so they suspend their campaigns. Then their sales really take a dive. If they had been using Google Analytics, they may have found their sales from other traffic sources were down and Google Adwords were the only thing that were producing. Armed with that knowledge they could have prevened losing more sales.

To sum up, if you are using any kind of traffic tracking software, kudos to you. But if you can’t answer the question “Does your site produce results and how do you know,” you might want to think about switching your preferred statistics tracking software to Google Analytics. Call Plexus if you would like help with getting it set up with your site and learning how to use it.

Local Business Owners Start Restaurant Tour

Stephanie Sharp — Wed, 09 May 2007 01:09:15 GMT

Every Tuesday night a couple of Athens' local business owners have dinner and then bowl on a league at Showtime Bowl. We have been bowling for 18 months straight so we decided to skip summer league and eat our way to stardom. We are taking a 12-week tour of some notable Athens Restaurants and writing our own amatuer reviews.

So, if you are interested in finding out what a few Athenians think are A list restaurants and read what we think about each dining experience, check out the EATS Tour Blog. For all the restaurants we visit, we will dine then post the health rating, average per meal cost, and reviews of food, atmosphere and service of the restaurant.