Yesterday, paidContent.org discussed how government intervention may be part of the strategy to save news reporting. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) takes on that question today in their workshop From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? . You can follow the workshop on Twitter (#ftcnews).

While journalism may or may not survive the next 5 years, journalists will flourish. For years now Google has been telling us that when it comes to internet marketing, content is king. Of course, as an SEO company, we have always known that unique, newsworthy content will drive traffic and links. So we work with clients to produce a consistent content strategy in order to produce larger websites based on our keyword research and content written by an army of North American writers.

But a shift is developing that will change the shape of the content industry and increase the value of  talented journalists. Large companies are hiring journalists by the thousands in order to produce content sites that will dwarf the little guys and provide themselves with massive platforms to sell their display ads. In an interview with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit 2009, Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL discusses how he recently hired up to 3,000 journalists and expects that number to grow rapidly as they scale up a content based platform.

2010 will be a year of massive change at maximum velocity.

On Tuesday I spent the day at Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2009, helping Max Haroon in the Society of Internet Professionals booth, I was was really surprised with the lack of foot traffic coming into the Expo Hall, I mean it was quiet.
During the times while the crowd were in the learning sessions I chatted to some of the other vendors. The common answer I heard was “there was 5 times the traffic last year”.
As I was working in a booth I could attend a seminar for free, so I chose ‘Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic’, last session of the day and it could have potential clients looking for SEO help. I walked into a 300 seater room to see 20-30 people attending, that’s a lot of empty seats and it’s not as though the content was bad, it was very good. The panel ruffled a few feathers with their comments, but they were honest.

What everyone is missing is, this is the time to win in the search engines, whilst everyone else is cutting their Internet marketing budgets and slowing down, your SEO company should be picking up and gaining that hard earned ground in the search results, this will pay off 10 fold when the economy picks up and you are at the top for your key words!

A potential new client emailed us saying that his new website just launched and the web company currently doing his online marketing had been bought out by another business who are ONLY interested in doing web design and he would like to know more about our services.
I almost fell off my chair, what company would ignore Internet marketing? Surely they go hand-in-hand. I mean, who has a website build today that doesn’t want it to be found in the search engines? Or am I missing something?

It gets better…
We had a good look at the potential client’s website, it was build using a custom CMS system, on the surface it looked okay. The web company had a great video showing off how wonderful it all was, drag and drop capability, ease of use etc. Looking at the code we can all pick holes, but the big shock came when we checked with Google.
If you type site:www.yourwebsitename.com in a search box Google will show you the pages it has indexed of the site.
The results showed 325 pages, but this was only a 40-page website!
When we looked closer there were only 3 pages that were actual pages from the website, the other 322 where CMS template problems. We got the client on the phone and showed him, he went silent with shock. We offered some solutions, which he asked to be emailed to him and he would take to the current provider.
Next thing his site is down with an ‘Internal Server Error’. Not a good sign!

Everyday we are asked to take a look at someone’s website, they all have the same problem, their site can be found in the search engines, but only for their website name eg joesplumbing.com, but they want to be found for what their customers are looking for, eg plumber in Toronto. Joe has spend his hard earned money having a website build it looks great, now he is calling us and we don’t have a great answer. Typically we find that 40-60% of the site needs rework!

The html code is way too bloated, the pages haven’t been optimized, the navigation is using very generic terms and we have to undo what their web guys just finished.

How frustrating, time and money wasting is that!

SEO firms also build websites and build great websites, we know what the search engines are looking for, how to make the search engine spider grab the key phrases and ignore the unimportant information. We understand how to bring the search engines spider back to visit your site on a regular basis, and what information the spiders are looking for so they rank your site for the right key phrases. We know page design, what to present on each web page and how to beat out your competition.

The key to reduce rework is to start with the end in mind, the end result being your website attracting new customers and making you money.

Engage a search engine optimization company at the start, they will build an Internet marketing plan that will have your website found, engage your audience, and be able to give you feedback on what your customers are doing every month on your website.
So don’t fall into Joe’s trap, engage the right people from the start of building your new website.

I have attended a few conferences of late and I have noticed an underlying theme among presentations, lunchtime discussions, and even water cooler talk. ROI, and how online marketing companies are forced to utilize a strategic combination of tracking programs to give clients a good indication of how campaigns are working. Even these combinations of programs, however, don’t give enough detail and really pinpoint what are the best places to spend their money. They want more detail, more follow through, more integration with online and offline campaigns.

At Wolf we are always testing, improving and trying to deliver what the market wants. In this case specifically, that would be better marketing ROI.

Save money and cancel the pay per click keywords that you had previously raised the budget on because they had good click through rates, but now you know just tire kickers coming to your website. Stop the monthly magazine ad that isn’t even paying for its placement costs.

We have new technology that will enable our clients to track what print, radio, TV advertising campaigns are bringing new customers to their company and what keywords in natural search or pay per click are making the phone ring! This is huge, now you can spend your marketing/advertising dollars only on what’s bring you new customers and cancel what is eating your budget with no return.

The web site design is done in photoshop and the writing for all the chosen keywords is 90% complete.
We are now into coding the site taking advantage of all the on-page factors search engines like to see.

Having perfected our code over the years, we write it as simple and light as possible. <Table>s got thrown out a couple of years ago, although it’s surprising how many people still use them and weight down their code, plus restrict their creativity to lay out a page. We can predict what is going to happen when the css renders the file each browser, however just to be safe every website is checked in all the major browsers on Mac and Windows to make sure the end user has the same experience regardless of the platform. Each browser has it’s own little quirks that we have to be thoughtful of. Images are only used for pictures or logos, always with alt tags, and never for text or navigation bars. We have also started to replace pixels with ems, so that the site has maximum flexibility. If an end user has his fonts set to a larger size than normal the whole site enlarges, not just the text!

The site is now bullet proof, works in all bowsers, all font sizes and has maximum searchability, what more can a client ask for!?

The title and meta tags also need to be researched and written, nothing is guessed we do our research and write most optimized title tag and meta tags with the most compelling words to entice the user to ‘click’. After all the end user will scan the title tags in the search engines and will often click on the one that is the most enticing, which is not necessarily the first one!

I need to get more photo’s this week for each landing page and start to shoot testimonial videos, so that can be edited very soon and sent out to all the video sites with tubemogul.

Okay, we have picked victim #1, a cabinet maker/woodworker who has built a successful company that is celebrating 20 years in business.
Garren Dakessian (Owner) has built his business by giving great service, craftmanship and happy customers giving great referrals. When the chief editor of Style at Home magazine chose Malibu Woodwork to build new cabinets for the basement and lounge of her own home, it shows he is the best in his business.

Over the years he has expanded his skills and offerings from clients requests that he, finish their basement or renovate their lounge. But now he wants to go back to his true skill, cabinet making, and to get the word out that Malibu Woodwork will make custom cabinets for your Kitchen, home office, bathroom, or basement.

Malibugroup.ca has a simple site today, made up mainly of pictures showing the Style at Home spreads, home and contact page.

After doing keyword research we found traffic, and a lot of it, searching for his services as a cabinet maker. Add in his local town and the competing sites in natural search come down to either single digits or none!

After looking at competing websites in this space, we noticed of lot of them have a local amateur feel. We only found three that stood out with any style, content and ease of navigation.
What do we do with these you ask? Knowing that the average web surfer doesn’t just visit one site, we need to stand out and be remembered over the others, even if we aren’t in position #1. So we take the best of each and combine them into the ultimate site. Not only will the site rank well, it will also convert well.

Next steps: refine the final keywords and have content written. Build the new layout. Get video and pictures of happy customers.

Yes I know it’s a play on Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares (which I love), and yes the idea is similar. Growing a business’s bottom line from getting new customers through Internet marketing. No we won’t be having the dramatic scenes of confrontation or dropping the f-bombs, but we will be showing both the online results from Google Analytics, and offline results from keeping notes of how each new customer found the business.

Yes, these will be real companies and yes, we will show real results.

Each business we help may not be hundreds of thousands in debt or on the edge of bankruptcy, but they do realize advertising in in Yellow Pages, magazines, or the local papers is becoming a tougher place to get a return on their investment and the Internet is a massive source of potential new customers.

Like a large proportion of todays business owners they are working hard, focused on running and growing their business. Added to this, they have either dabbled in seo, spending hours glued to their computer getting more confused by the numerous articles, blog posts and forums with all sorts of fast track solutions to get a #1 listing, and changed their web pages countless times hoping one of the changes will show some results.
Don’t have the time to learn how to take advantage of the confusing world of search engine optimization, or the worst stories, where they have parted with thousands of their hard earned money to an SEO company who promised the world and over several months delivered nothing, with the unsuspecting owner having no clue of how to measure anything they have done.

So join us each week and follow our adventures in Internet Marketing Nightmares!