I applaud HubSpot on producing a funny video based on a good song. It has gone viral and brought significant attention to HubSpot, an online marketing , which is not to be confused with the social media site, HubPages.

But is an online marketing system such as HubSpot, with a suite of tools and training, a solution to your marketing needs?

I have not seen the demo, though my comments below are applicable to any suite of SEO tools. A set of tools being sold to automate analysis of keywords, pages, and links, with access to a blogging tool, bookmarking tool, and buzz tracker would help a lot of search marketers and DIY’ers.

For $250 or $500/month, in the case of HubSpot, you would gain access to these tools. But wouldn’t the implementation of any suggestions the software produces still be up to you?

Tools like these are not substitutes for human analysis of websites, keywords, and competitive factors, and these tools likely have a fairly significant learning curve. I suspect that even with a customer forum, training videos and webinars, and training classes, whether free or not, the tools will require additional time and resources. Purchasing blocks of consulting would primarily focus on understanding the tools and would not include implementation, right? So that promotes the tools and the value received from those tools, but still does not market your website without human inputs.

Not to be all gloom and doom: many SEO tools are quite decent! HubSpot’s tools, based on screenshots, do not appear to be any worse than many other similarly priced tools. However, for all of the great information produced by these tools, I believe automated tools may also cause an inexperienced SEO to focus on areas that are not of high value and still not address the HOW of implementation.

The smarter way to do SEO is to hire a consultant to provide recommendations and perform the implementation, even if the cost seems higher. When hiring an SEO, ask questions about what tools they use, and what tools they do not use, introduce your consultant to new tools, and ask for training at every juncture. Some SEOs will be more than generous in teaching you how to do what they do!

1. Use a service like RingCentral to have people call a voicemail box that will email you the voicemail messages.
2. Use Google’s GrandCentral for voicemail sent to your email after you miss a call.
3. Use GotVoice.com which may be able to download messages from my cell phone and email them to you.
4. If using a Verizon cell phone, create a speed dial that uses the *86 number to call Voicemail, then add two pauses, your password, and pound. So your speed dial should call *86PP[Password]#

The motive is hidden in the language, and revealed through a Google employee in the comments stating “we would prefer to see a ‘messy’ dynamic URL instead of an incompletely [sic] or incorrectly implemented static-looking URL scheme.” Many webmasters are implementing URL redirects and URL rewrites incorrectly, it seems. Google is looking to improve URL structures, but not by telling us how to do them, just telling us not to structure them incorrectly.

Google’s Matt Cutts, in 2006, stated that not all search engines will read dynamic URLs; and further stated, “you definitely can use too many parameters. I would absolutely opt for 2 or 3 at the most…and try to avoid long numbers because we think those are session ids.” The importance of keyword rich URLs and page names is not lost upon the Google crowd, however. Within the recent post is this gem: “static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls…”

The post that Google should have written would have better covered usability and information architecture. URLs that begin to describe the location and content of the page through plain English, utilizing keywords, have historically been indexed and ranked higher than their dynamic URL counterparts which are often riddled with multiple query attributes, parameters, and session IDs. This is why a big part of the SEO arsenal has been about creating keyword rich URLs. But besides the search optimization elements of not using parameters in URLs, the best URLs are memorable, easy to read and understand, and give users a sense of how deep they are within a site. Proper URL structure is an element of strong information architecture and web development with usability best practices integrated.

Creating those semantic URLs in dynamic, database-driven websites is completed through a variety of technical means. Some CMS’ have plugins to automatically convert the URLs, and others need a programmer and server administrator to integrate. It is important to note that automatic plugin conversions to static URLs may in fact be part of the problem if they leave unnecessary parameters in the URL, though. It is critical that any URL structure be evaluated by a professional.

What Google is saying, (contradictory to many SEO analyses and experiments) is that dynamic URLs can be indexed and rank as highly as static counterparts. However, once you get your top search engine rankings, people are more likely to click on your website if it does not have dynamic URL parameters. Ultimately, the lesson from Google is to do redirects and URL rewrites correctly, or not at all; the lesson is not to just leave messy dynamic URLs alone.

So what is a reasonable management fee? Honestly, I don’t know that I have an answer. But I can say that agencies don’t all work solely with PPC. If an agency works in site design, copywriting, SEO, social media, and a slew of other services, and are good at what they do, they often charge premium fees for the quality of their work and their expertise. What would be a reasonable management fee for a prospective client looking to spend $1000/month in the PPC ad networks with no other work for the agency? Say an agency decides to charge 15% of the PPC ad spend. In that agency, they will see revenue of $150/month. If the person managing that PPC account can be billed out to clients on a site design for $300/hour, the agency would effectively lose money on the PPC client if the employee spent more than 30 minutes managing the campaigns over the course of the entire month.

Employee on Site Design Job = $300/hour.
Employee on PPC Management = $150/month.
Half an hour on site design job = $150.

The employee above would not want to spend more than 1 minute per day managing the accounts to stay profitable for the employer.

I can tell you from experience that managing a PPC campaign takes more than 1 minute per day. Even with Google’s Adwords Editor, or a 3rd-party PPC management tool, it takes longer than 1 minute to understand the top-level numbers, and reporting on them or making changes is time on top of that.

So if you’re going to pay even the industry rate of 15%, it begs the question of how much time will the PPC manager actually spend on your account? If an agency charges $30/hour for all work, they might be able to spend enough time on a $300/monthly PPC management fee (on a $2,000/monthly PPC spend) to make your campaigns work. Similarly, an agency who bills some tasks at $200 or more for consultations probably won’t make money on you as a client if they spend too much time on a $300/monthly fee, and might be doing you a disservice.

Certainly you should not be purchasing PPC management from an agency based on pricing alone, but it’s important to understand the agency side of things. Now, it’s also important to understand that an agency who does charge 15% fees may be willing to “lose” money on a client, as it’s really the opportunity cost that is lost. If the agency does not do a whole lot of site design at $300/hour, they may gladly spend the time and energy on a PPC campaign that is effectively a $20/hour job.

And that’s not to mention that agencies may pay their employees accordingly. Perhaps PPC management does not cost as much, but the employees are similarly not compensated as well as one who can do site design. Agencies often have very distinct roles for employees, so they don’t run into the issue of wanting to put an employee on one job as opposed to another.

So when selecting a partner for PPC management, find out more about the process and what is included in the management fee.

I could tell you what keywords I will use to achieve those rankings.

What I can’t tell you is how long it will take to rank.

The firm I work for won’t guarantee rankings, and I agree with that, but let me put my take on the guaranteed rankings debate anyways.

Some companies still guarantee rankings, but even they can’t tell you how long it will take. (If they do, it should never be less than 2-3 months, as Google indexing and other crawlers may not come around any faster than that, regardless of what the firm says. Sitemaps, paid inclusion, and linking strategies can speed things up, but indexing is still different from ranking (which is another topic altogether)). Some of these companies say that you don’t pay until you rank, or maybe you pay but you will get your money back if they don’t achieve rankings. I can understand the attractiveness of free service until results are seen. As new sites popup every day and are optimized for keyword rankings, and your competitors are already ranking for keywords you want to rank for, why spend the money on someone who doesn’t guarantee?

A guarantee of rankings is a performance-based business model. If the SEO firm does not perform, they will not get paid. Based on that, they should only take the clients where they believe they will achieve top ten rankings quickly. This means that they should analyze sites prior to signing a contract or they risk losing money. As comparison, an attorney may take some forms of cases on a contingency fee, meaning they only get paid if they win. If they do not win, they lose the time and money invested in the case, and they might just permanently lose the client, all when they could’ve been working on a winning case. My understanding of social security/disability insurance (SSI/SSDI) cases, is that attorneys cannot be paid by the government unless they win. That is why these attorneys spend money on PPC ads and television ads; they must attract the cases that are most likely to win or they don’t get paid. An unscrupulous lawyer might want to do SSI cases like these in volume, hoping that 1 out of 100 cases wins, but for the most part, they won’t be able to focus on that winning case. They might actually lose some cases that can be won but didn’t come into the lawyer already a winner.

Some SEO firms likely work the same way, either (1) take the clients most likely to achieve rankings, or (2) take on volume (many clients) and hope that some of them will achieve rankings and pay the firm. But others (3) simply guarantee rankings and you can purchase their services on their sites without ever speaking with them. I’d be much more inclined to go with the first kind of firm who guarantees, than the second or third. But even more than that, I want to know about the strategy and process the firm goes through, and I want to know that they’re actually doing work to achieve rankings.

And most firms work in that way: they get paid for services rendered, not for results achieved, and that is why they don’t guarantee rankings. It’s not necessarily about the impossibility of guaranteeing rankings, it’s about using a different business model.

Jennifer Osborne, in her first of a five part series on how to sell a client on a blog strategy states, “In addition to it being an opportunity to talk to your client in a different tone than the rest of your site, it’s a very Search Engine friendly, Social Media friendly infrastructure.”

Blogs are not very search engine friendly by default. I suppose it is an accurate statement for a search marketer to say the infrastructures are, because they create and refine them so they are, but as a general statement to a client, it’s just plain wrong. WordPress, my blogging tool of choice is generally considered to be a search engine friendly infrastructure. But by default, it creates posts that look like this: ?p=123, instead of /keyword-rich-title/. I don’t recall exactly what it does with Titles and Meta Tags out of the box, but I know I don’t start a blog without first installing the All-in-One SEO Pack and the Dofollow plugins.

And does a blog have a social media friendly infrastructure? In my post on blog improvement tips, one of my priorities was to make sure there were buttons on this blog for submission of my posts to social media sites. These buttons aren’t there naturally. The option to comment is certainly social, and is turned on by default, but to truly make a blog social requires more than a comment form.

So if you’re a potential client to a marketing agency, or are thinking of building a blog on your own, blogs are not necessarily search engine friendly or social media friendly until they’re modified.

Today, I would like to remind everyone to check their search query placement report in Google’s AdWords program, as you never really know where your ads are showing unless you check! Why the reminder? Because a well-targeted(?) ad came into one of my Gmail accounts. I was perusing the spam folder for anything I might have missed recently, and at the top is the following ad:

Now perhaps a recipe site doesn’t much care that they’re showing up for “spam” in my spam folder. They may even like that. It certainly got my attention and gave me a chuckle. But still, do you know where your ads are showing?

I submitted to:
Digg
Care2
Mixx
Propeller
Stumbleupon
Reddit

Now, with the political and election focus these days, and that Obama is arguably the frontrunner, I thought it would do decently well on Propeller and Digg. I figured the dark horses were Mixx and Care2. Now, because I have no access to analytics data on the site I submitted, I certainly don’t know which one drove the most traffic, or the most quality traffic, but the results are as follows:

6 Diggs.
18 Notes on Care2.
0 Votes on Mixx.
2 Votes on Propeller
0 Reviews on Stumbleupon.
0 Points (2 Comments) on Reddit.

This was submitted on a Friday evening, perhaps the worst time to submit to social news sites. Regardless, based solely on votes, it’s clear that you must submit content to sites that have a niche focus as well as to generalized sites. And why must we submit sites that we have no control over? Because if we don’t, social news site algorithms can de-emphasize the power of your submissions, and you’re less likely to gain friends and votes.

I’m always looking at websites and monitoring potential “competition” to my employer’s growing business. Today, I come across a marketing agency that offers SEO services along with a “proprietary content management system.” Now, there are plenty of capable open-source content management systems, and some very capable, well developed commercial solutions. Usually, one or the other serves the purposes of companies and nonprofits alike. Any proprietary solution as part of a marketing team would need a closer look. Who is the developer? How often are updates made and how simple is it to modify things? And amongst many other questions, what type of code does it create? Is it valid code?

This agency uses the CMS for their own website as well as the clients who need a new CMS. Being a curious person, I took a peak under the hood at the resulting code. I was surprised to see massive numbers of blank lines of code! The code had over 3800 lines, and at one point, there was a gap of 2000+ blank lines. When I removed the blank lines, I was able to get the code down to an even 600 lines, and I probably could’ve pushed it into fewer than that.

Now, I’ve been through an SEO course (or three), and do this stuff for my employer all of the time, and we always encourage proper structure of code, including minimizing code bloat and excessive blank lines. But never, have I come across documentation that says a spider won’t read blank lines or that poorly constructed HTML code will affect your SEO efforts. Flash, Javascript, and forms may (and DO!) cause issues, but I’m talking plain HTML without that stuff.

So I reached out to some industry colleagues to ask them, “Have you ever found evidence or read anything that says the length of code affects spiderability and SEO efforts? I’m referring to massive amounts of blank lines.”

Response? No evidence, and no documentation, but it can’t be a good idea. Spiders can be programmed in different ways, and because we’re not the search engine spiders, we can only guess what a search engine spider might do. It’s possible that when a spider comes across a slew of blank lines, that it may be programmed to stop or give up. And why risk what we don’t know for sure? Best bet: Reduce the code and don’t give the spider a reason to stop moving about your pages.

Thanks to Simon and Liana.

The Google News results are similar. Nothing notable at all prior to January 8, 2008. Since then, over 150 articles have been written about her.

How’d it all start? Jane Hambleton, first described as a disc jockey in local papers, and later self-described on national television as a copywriter, Jane wrote less than 50 words to sell a car she had in her possession.

The ad read as follows:
OLDS 1999 Intrigue. Totally uncool parents who obviously don’t love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for three weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700/offer. Call meanest mom on the planet.

And where did she advertise these words? Not on a billboard, not as part of a massive marketing campaign, and not exclaimed over loud speakers to a large live audience. Ms. Hambleton posted a classified ad in the Des Moines Register newspaper.

If good copywriting isn’t part of your marketing mix, it certainly should be. Just look at the results!