I deal with customers every day that want their website to be perfect.

They’ll spend a year trying to get everything exactly like it needs to be.

But they’re missing the game.

They’re sitting on the sidelines trying to get everything perfect on their website and they are not even on the field playing the game.

Think about this!

If you had a choice between two restaurants let’s say one was in the middle of the desert but it’s nice.

Leather sofas, gourmet cooks the works.

If the President of the United States was looking for a nice restaurant this is where he would want to go. However, the last car that drove by there was six months ago.

Or

You had a choice of a restaurant that was sitting in the middle of New York in the middle of all the action, downtown New York. This restaurant had one big fat ugly waitress with a big wart on her nose and a cigarette in her mouth and the cook has worn the same shirt for the last 10 years.

It’s a rundown piece of junk hole in the wall restaurant, but it’s always full of customers.

Which one would you rather stick your life savings in?

The first step is getting traffic to the site and the site making money, then you can start testing fine tuning and tweaking the site from there.

Most people believe their website needs to be perfect before it goes live, but my question is, perfect from whose perspective?

I had a lady the other day that was driving my employees crazy!

Every time they would get the website like she wanted, she would come back with another thousand changes, most conflicting with what they had already given us.  I was forced to get involved. And I say forced, because if I am not interested in the website, customer or topic, it’s really difficult for me to care one way or the other how the site turns out. All that matters is that the customer is happy, and we get paid. I am sorry but that’s just me, but I’ve got to pay the bills.

You see, I believe it is the fine tuning and tweaking that goes into the offer, business model, and website that will make or break a business.

I am talking about the tweaking and fine tuning that can only be done after the site has gone live. When a business launches there should be a group of people driving traffic to the site, analyzing how that traffic reacted to the site, and then tweaking, and fine tuning that website before running another group of test.

The problem is that a lot of companies do not want to be associated with an inferior product or one that is lacking in capabilities and the ones that don’t care about their credibility normally don’t have the money for the testing, tweaking and fine tuning that has to been done daily forever.

I’ve been making my living online for the past 10 years and I can tell you, that without the desire and dedication to push a project through, it would be difficult to start a business from nothing with nothing and it become a success.

The desire that motivated me to start, build and continue running Geeks on Steroids has always been money. The problem is that as the need for money declines you begin looking in what areas your time would be best spent, and normally fighting a new start up isn’t the best use of time.

It’s the reason I started this project and dropped the ball.

At this moment and time I do not have the need, time or desire to start a new project. The amount of time it takes to start making money with a new business could be better spent working with one of my older already established businesses.

However as I write this I am reminded of one business I would be interested in, just for fun.

Here lately (lately being for about the last year or so) I’ve been getting bombarded by these so-called local SEO gurus.

Their idea is, you can find people to market your business to off-line, in your local area and tell them how great the online world is. From there you sell them an SEO package worth thousands of dollars.

My problem with this is that if you knew what you were doing you would be marketing your business online and not offline.

You see, small business owners are not stupid.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got no doubt that with all the professionally written scripts and emails going around these guys can get some small business owners interested, and even sell a couple. But the majority of small business owners will go online and do some research first.

While these guys are killing themselves running around educating potential victims, I’d like to go online and wait to educate that person before they get ripped off. As the lazy local SEO rolls out of the bed, I am sitting online researching, studying, watching and learning about them. While they are meeting potential victims at local breakfast, lunch, and dinner places, I am buying domain names and building websites. By the time they’ve cold called 200 people to get the first person to agree to meet them, I’ve already gotten their spam email, written and article about them and ranked for their name.

They get the local business all excited about the online adventure and when that business owner gets his credit card in his hand and goes online too make that purchase he’s blocked by my site.

My only problem is I have no desire to do SEO, Outsource SEO or Consult with people.   

But done correctly I think I could get a ton of traffic to the site. I guess you could build a website that reviews SEO’s and enforces the good ones and downgrades the bad ones. You could have a back office that allowed the good SEO’s to write articles and leave comments on articles but have it invitation only.

Other words, you would need three people to vouch for you before you could become a member of the site. Once you became a member you would have access to all kinds of free tools, as well as the ability to write blog post that would show on the site under your name or carry on private chats that are not shown to the outside world. You would also have access to a staff of professional SEO’s as well as SEO and conversion tools.

And while all these tools will make the site a home away from home for most SEO’s the fact that the website is getting thousands of visitors per day who are looking for SEO’s will make it a must have for anyone looking to start an SEO business.

Now I want to set up a couple plug-ins for the website.

First thing we need to do is to go into our plugins folder.

And now you should be in a page that looks like this, give and take some of the plug-ins.

If you want to add more plug-ins or even search for a certain kind of plug-in then just click the “Add New” link.

Now you should be on a page that looks like this.

And from here you just type in what you are looking for and you should get a page that looks like this.

If you click install now a window should pop-up and ask if you are sure you want to install the plugin.

Once we click okay we should be taken to a page that looks like this.

Okay, what I would like to do know is walk you through some of the plugins I am using and why.

My Plugins for 2011

1. W3 Total Cache – Great WordPress plugin for two reasons. It makes your pages load faster. And it stores a static version of your website. This means it requires less processing power then using WordPress by itself.
2. HeadSpace: WordPress SEO Made Simple- HeadSpace provides you with the features you need to drive your site to the top. I am not going to spend very much time on SEO because that time would be better spent writing kick ass content.
3. Gravity Forms – This is currently the best WordPress plugin for forms. It’s pretty cool and hopefully they will get some competition in the future but at the moment this one is so good that they do not even have any competition.
4. WP-DBManager – This is great for backing up your website. It has quite a few functions that it can perform one of those is emailing the entire WordPress database every day.
5. SEO Smart Links – This allows us to link within an article to other articles. It is great for moving Page Rank around the website and it’s a great way to increase readership and rankings.
6. Revision Control – Revision Control so I can limit the number of post revisions that remain in storage.
7. Tweet Old Post – I am going to be building a community of friends on Twitter, so I’ll be using this plugin to sprinkle my posts into tweets.
8. Widget Context – I can use this Widget to pick and choose which pages I want my sidebar widgets to appear on.
9. WordPress Editorial Calendar – This plugin provides a crisp, clean editorial calendar of your posts both past and present. I can drag and drop articles from one date to another, edit them and much more.
10. ReplyMe – This plugin sends an email to anyone who leaves a comment only when someone comments as a direct response to them. This is a terrific way to help continue the conversations that you’re working to build on your site.
11. Pop Up Domination – I will be using Popup Domination for capturing leads. It’s loaded with different themes and theme option to match the look and feel of your site and I’m telling you that there are absolutely no popup software available that compares to the style and effectiveness of Popup Domination.
12. Styles with Shortcodes This is to add in the custom styling. You see I do not need to know PHP , CSS or Javascript to have some cool features on my site. This WordPress plugin allows me to customize content faster and easier than ever.

In my last post I talked about how important keywords are for your business.

By knowing which keywords are relevant to your business and what keywords your potential customers are searching for when trying to find the type of products or services you offer, helps you increase the chances of being found by the people who are searching for the things you sell. This means you get quality traffic to your website.

It is difficult to know exactly which keywords will get the most relevant people to your website but by determining the popularity and competitiveness of those keywords and testing and analyzing how effective the keywords are in drawing the visitors to your website, you can figure it out.

So the first thing to do is to make sure that the right people are finding your businesses online.

Unless you are a big company like Coca-Cola your business name is not going to be what people are searching for when looking for your services and products.

So…when you choosing keywords based on relevancy, for example; if someone wanted to start a web design business a good keyword would not be design.

1. It isn’t very relevant. Someone could be looking for car designs, boat designs, house designs, so chances of someone not becoming overwhelmed and redefining their search is pretty slim. About as slime as someone searching for designs who is actually looking for a web designer.
2. As a small to medium-size business we want a less competitive keyword. Something more specific and more related to our business. A lot of people refer to these as longtail keywords. People determine how competitive a keyword is by how the number of searches that are being done on that keyword every month.

There are a lot of tools online that can be used to determine how competitive a specific keyword is.

An important factor in picking a keyword is how relevant it is to your business. But ranking for a keyword that no one is searching for is also a waste of time because chances are it’s not going to driving traffic to your business.

It’s about finding a balance between being relevant and being difficult to rank for. To start with you need to find the best ten keywords that match your business, really well.

There is not a day that goes by that I don’t have to stop what I am doing to answer the phone while some stupid SEO tries to sell me his services. And too make it worst there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get at least two spam emails from some SEO company trying to sell me their services.

Since these guys have decided to drive me crazy I figured I might as well put their information to good use.

So here’s the thing, I am taking my SEO Watch Dog website and I will start doing website reviews for companies that either call or spam me.

If your website isn’t set up correctly then I would think twice before spamming me and since the statics for online SEO vs. Offline marketing look something like this.

1.  80% of consumers research online before buying offline?

2.   70% of people searching Google never click past the first 3 links?

3.   60% of all traffic on the internet is now video?

4.   YouTube is the #1 search engine?

Since you are calling me and sending me spam email instead of using the search engines to drive traffic to your business I can only guess that the reason for this is that you yourself don’t know how to market your own business online.

So you have resorted to offline marketing to sell and online service that you cannot even do.