very.

It would have made a poignant message to end this post after the first word, but, as the saying goes, “why say in one word, what 500 will say just as well?”

Something that is a common theme for web-marketers, especially when working with smaller, less experienced clients is the concept of “efficiency”.

A new business, or perhaps a small business that grew up without utilizing the web for gathering leads or closing sales, is often nevertheless aware of the traffic they receive to their website, and often acutely aware of a competitor outranking them for a keyword phrase they consider important in google, yahoo, bing, or other search engine.

At this point, most enterprising entrepreneurs will either tackle some rudimentary search engine optimization (seo) or pay per click (ppc) work, or assign someone in the organization to “get them some more traffic”.

Typically, after a steep learning curve involving some link-building, on site seo, or adventures in analytics and adwords, the business owner is very aware of the cost of the project but has yet to see any directly quantifiable gains from the effort expended.

This is often a result of several ‘issues’

1.) an inefficient website

2.) no definitive goals

3.) no systematized tracking in place

An Inefficient Website

By efficiency, I mean the effectiveness at which the website generates your desired result.

If we were to think of the website like a ‘black box’ machine, how good is it at taking the raw input (traffic for instance) and turning it into the desired output?  Examples of the desired output may be lead generation, sales, foot traffic (in a physical store), etc.

The back-ass-wards way of approaching the online marketing problem is to assume that ‘more traffic’ is the answer.  But if you are feeding more and more leads into a system or ’sales funnel’ that has holes in it, your money and effort is usually better spent on fine tuning your conversions (or efficiency) first.

So how efficient is your website?  Without a system for monitoring progress you’ll never know — which leads us to our second point:

Lack of a system for systematized tracking of traffic & conversions

Entrepreneurs are busy.  However simple this one thing seems for those of us who live or die based on traffic, cost of conversions, lifetime value of customer, it can seem amazing.  But, there are plenty of small business websites out there that either don’t have tracking installed, don’t follow it, or don’t know how to analyze the results in a way that benefits their bottom line.

No Definitive Goals

This one *should* be a no-brainer, I guess.  But, I frequently see examples of this with business sites.  They are an electronic representation of a brochure.  There is no call to action (whatever that may be), and even if they are using the site to (theoretically) generate foot traffic, there is no reason for the user to shut off the computer and come into the store.  And, of course, no real good way to track that traffic that came into the physical store after seeing their website

One of the comical things about this post, to me, is the fact that corporateraiter.com exhibits all of these ‘don’t do’s’.  However, this is because I’m not in business yet.  Right now, my site is merely a way for me to share information with friends who need a nudge in the right direction with their own web properties.  Rest assured, when I start pushing prospects to my site, I will have mechanisms in place to capture those leads, and systems in place to monitor my site’s effciency at doing so.

Please keep this post in mind if you are looking for a way to boost your own bottom line!  Tuning up your website’s ability to convert with almost always pay better than paying for more traffic.

In this post, I’m going to talk more directly about some online marketing tactics versus high level strategy.

I usually stay away from talking about too many tactical details.  They tend to bore or confuse a company’s decision makers and in the game of search engine optimization or seo, the tactics that will work today, often will become outdated, stop working, or worse, counter-productive as the search engines change their algorithms to provide better results to their users.

Although I purposely don’t “seo” my corporate site, I decided to use this site in a controversial, ‘real time’ experiment, and report the results to you here as they happen.

As it so happens, my corporate site is a virtual ‘unknown’.

To whit: In the last week, I’ve gotten four (count ‘em, FOUR) visitors to my site   The site is indexed by google, but it has a pagerank of zero, and an alexa rank of 26,374,163.  In the world of the web, that just North of non-existent.

So, let’s talk about the ‘Test’

It’s ‘common knowledge’ in web circles that you want to get as many incoming links to your site as possible and reduce the amount of “link juice” that flows out of your pages through outgoing links.  This has created a trend towards common blogging software and other content management packages automagically appending all outgoing links with the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

The “nofollow” attribute is an attempt to stop “link juice” from being passed where you don’t want it passed.  Savvy web developers and Internet marketers attempt to “shape” their link weight by external and internal linking schemes designed to increase the weight of a given page.

I am going to fly in the face of convention and make this site’s blog postings accept comments with followable links.  In other words, outgoing links in comments that pass link juice out.

While more knowledgable search marketers will tell you that even outgoing links on a page will help with relevance and theming, the challenge here will obviously be trying to carve and theme the links when it’s a veritable free for all.

By doing this, I”ve joined the nascient DoFollow link-love community.

In executing this ‘test’ we’ll be watching my traffic flow, alexa rank (which has some flaws as the sample is skewed) and my pagerank (which is a dreadfully lagging indicator).

Now, of course, this isn’t a great “test”.  The reason is, of course, I’ve got no ‘Control’.  Well designed testing would have a control of sorts.  The reason is, the mere fact that I am creating a post to report on the ‘results’ will effect the results to some degree.

However, I’m too lazy at this stage to create a side-by-side example of www.corporateraiter.com with the same word-count, incoming link count & quality, and posting schedule.  I’d need to take great pains to have identical keyword counts and avoid duplicate content between the two sites.  Not to mention, one site would have a greater URL age, etc.

All that considered, I will run the ‘test’ and be reporting on the results here, including any frustrations or impossiblities that arise out of telling the world that this is the comment spammer’s version of nirvana.

I hope my experiences will help some others decide whether accepting outgoing links on their comments and joining the DoFollow revolution is right for them.