| LED Digest 2105: Drop-Down Menus |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. February 27, 2006 Issue #2105 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ======= NEW ===================== --== Drop-Down Menus & Search Engines ==-- ~ Sandy Keller "My question is about drop-down menus." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Outsourcing ==-- ~ Tom Aman "And local companies are, in many ways, just victims..." --== Directory Pages for High Rankings? ==-- ~ John Barendrecht "...you may want to read Matt Cutts’ article..." ~ Chris Nielsen "I was just called yesterday by a company that also seems to fit the TP profile..." --== AOL & Yahoo to Charge for Email? ==-- ~ Andrew Bourland "...a postage stamp strategy would be fairly effective..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== US Website Maintenance Rates? ==-- ~ Chris Nielsen ~ Michael Linehan ~ Mark Roberts --== The LED Archives ==-- ~ Steve Pronger ========== NEW =================================== From: Sandy Keller Subject: Drop-down Menus and Search Engines I first want to thank all of you who contribute to this list. I have learned so much since I first began receiving it and I've avoided spending some big money with a couple of SEO companies that I was warned here to avoid. My question is about drop-down menus. My site is being professionally re-designed, for one reason, because I discovered that the previous designer has my left navigation as images and so all of those words are not helping me in search engines at all. I am concerned because while the company I hired is in Colorado, the person doing the work on the site is in India and I'm not convinced he knows how to maximize what I am trying to accomplish. I've been looking at a lot of sites which have been recently updated, and a lot of my competitors are using drop-down menus, which I understand are accomplished with Java script. Do any of you have any suggestions for how to maximize the SE friendliness of the Java script necessary to have my navigation in drop-down menus? I was told that the first level is most important, the second level is somewhat SE friendly, but after that, whatever keywords we use will really not help us except in navigating the site. Sandy Keller Advantage Bridal http://www.advantagebridal.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Tom Aman Subject: Outsourcing > In order for things to change a ENORMOUS fundamental > shift would need to take place within the USA. We as a > nation cannot continue on the paths that brought us > past success... - Rick Gortatowsky, LED 2101 Speaking as a non-American (I am a Canadian), I think the outsourcing problem is, like many other problems in the US, a symptom of too many believing in "the American dream" as sold to us by movies and TV. Too many people aspire to that big home in the suburbs, two cars (or more) in the garage (preferably at least one SUV), the 52" wide screen TV, etc., etc. Realistically, does a family with two or three kids really need a 3 or 4 or 5000 square foot or larger house? Bear in mind that just after WW II, 1000 to 1200 square foot bungalow with a basement was considered right for a family that size and a 17" or 21" TV was considered BIG (23" was enormous). And because we see a lot of US TV, things are not much different in Canada. Wages are a bit lower so some of the outsourcing from the US is to Canada - at least when a support call is directed to Canada, the person who answers will speak understandable English (usually). But similar problems exist - such as buying the "Made in China" because it is cheaper, to leave some money to put toward the big TV or new SUV forgetting that, by doing that, it helps put someone local (meaning in this country) out of work. And local companies are, in many ways, just victims - in order to generate the profits expected by shareholders and to be able to pay the wages and salaries expected by employees (or demanded by unions) and to be able to sell at anything like competative prices, they attempt to save money by outsourcing. Rick is right, an ENORMOUS fundamental shift would need take place to change this. If shareholders would settle for less and employees would forget about that next raise and both would forget about that new SUV or bigger house and settle for a little less, the company could afford to have work done in house or at least locally so that the jobs and money would stay in the country where everyone would benefit. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com ------- new post - new topic ------ From: John Barendrecht Subject: Directory pages Perhaps DIP's are not spam pages but you may want to read Matt Cutts' article "Confirming a Penalty." Google says "you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire." In the article, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/confirming-a-penalty/, he states, "I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines." Best regards, John Barendrecht Centralhome.com Company Inc. http://www.centralhome.com ------- new post - same topic ------ From: Chris Nielsen Subject: Directory pages I was just called yesterday by a company that also seems to fit the TP profile, so I thought I would also let people know about them. They are Aeonetinc.com and seem to be based in the Philippines. They are very aggressive and while $5 a keyword per month is not that much, they recommend buying 20,000 keywords which IS a lot. They insist they don't use doorway pages, but when they described their methods, it's clear they do, along with adding client links to their network of sites. They claim to have about 20,000 sites to make things work for clients (20,000 page-one SE listings), and I don't doubt they do since I have a list of about 200 of their sites that I found. Here are some of their sites and if you look at the source on their home pages you will see many things that should raise a red flag: www.world-expos.com www.webfinancialadvisory.com www.assetmanagementconnect.com www.assets-tracking.net www.aeonetinc.com www.corporate-internet-branding.com When I say they are aggressive, I mean that they don't take "NO" for an answer. I had to hang up on them 3 times before they gave up. Thanks, Chris Nielsen http://www.mesothelioma-search-engine.com ------- new post - new topic ------ From: Andrew Bourland Subject: Email charging > Assuming a membership of 75,000 being emailed > their LED Digest "fix" 5 times a week, this would cost > the list owners $195000 a year at a penny a pop. - Reg Charie, LED 2095 There are a few problems with that argument... First of all, ALL of the subscribers to this list are not on AOL or on Yahoo. A good portion of them are, but nothing in the ballpark you are talking about. Second, speaking from my own experience as a list moderator, most of the bounces and email problems emanate from two sources: AOL and Hotmail. Most moderators would not fret over their absence. Third, if this were an imminent reality, it would behoove the owner of the list to ask all of his AOL / Yahoo / whatever subscribers to resubscribe from another domain. Most of us have them. I have my own vanity domain, plus a Yahoo address and a GMail account. At some point in time, the windows would have to be shut to subscribers from those domains, as harsh as that might sound. None of us would like it, but those services who choose to take that route give us little choice in the matter. I agree that we should let our views be known, but let's face it: a postage stamp strategy would be fairly effective for those spammers who add as many as 400 spams to my Yahoo mailbox every single DAY. It would take all the profit out of spamming, which I truly believe is their objective. If they happen to make some money off of this approach, that's fine. It will be offset by the loss of users like us, who chose to go elsewhere for their free email services. Andrew Bourland http://www.bourland.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Chris Nielsen Subject: Web rates > Can anyone tell me what sort of per-hour rates are the > norm in the US for website maintenance work such as > content amendments, addition / deletion of pages, images, etc? - Gurdip Singh, LED 2102 We love doing web maintenance and there seems to be no end of it since it is "below" many designers and SEO consultants. If you can find someone to do it, then you can expect to pay whatever the going rate is for what I would call "skilled" but not so much "expert" rates. It's also not hard to find someone still in school that can do the work and be inexpensive, but with less experience people you may run into changes not being made correctly, and work not being proofed before it goes on the site. Getting into that habit takes some time after you screw up some things and don't check your work (guilty!). The other thing that you can run into is the person not making a backup of the page or entire site before getting down to work. If you as the site owner don't have a backup of your site (let's see the hands now...), then you could be looking at some extending down time while they fix problems they caused, or contacting the original site designer for repair or a backup copy of the site. I'm sorry I can't give you an exact figure, but I wanted to try and point out that there are a number of factors that can affect the cost, and many are not clear on the surface. If it helps at all, I would expect to pay between the standard web designer rate to about half of that. We charge our full hourly rate as an SEO because what the work does not demand in technical ability, we feel we make up in speed and quality. We also don't charge for every small change if it doesn't take very long, like updating a phone number of address. Thank you, Chris Nielsen http://www.consultant-directory.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Michael Linehan Subject: Web rates Personally, I didn't answer because I don't think there is anything remotely resembling a "norm". You can have your site built by your plumber's nephew for $200 in a Front Page template, or you can use a real graphic designer. Similarly for programming. Similarly for maintenance. Does the maintenance truly only involve addition and deletion of content? Probably it's also going to involve optimization of that new content. The client might also want some editing advice on how to make that content truly effective --- and even whether it should be in the site at all. In other words, does the client just want a keyboard puncher to put content in no matter what? I'd suggest that is part of why so many people have sites that do nothing. The site owner doesn't know what content works for the search engines or to make a sale. Neither does the keyboard puncher. They just stick it in. Maintenance, if it's going to be worth much, should probably be much more than mere "maintenance". So I wouldn't quote for maintenance without really understanding a client's needs and what I can offer them. Since there's no norm for that, there's no norm for maintenance - not if it's actually going to be useful to the client. If price is the deciding factor, you're pretty much doomed as far as I can see. False economy is rife. What's the use of spending $500 and making nothing when you can spend $1,000 and make $20,000. The question becomes not "How much does it cost?", but "How can I find the latter $1,000 person?" Michael Linehan http://www.marketing-alchemy.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mark Roberts Subject: Web rates Ok, i'll bite here..... I have 3 ways of charging: 1. Hourly Rate. If someone wants just a few simple things every so often, I charge $25/hr. Minimum 1 hour. Note, I am a developer, not a graphics designer, I outsource that type of work and generally just pass on the cost. 2. Flat Rate. If it is a relatively low maintenance, but regular, and will avg about 5 hrs/ month, I charge $30.00/mo flat rate + $25.00/hr over that (however that is negotiable). Some months I may put in 6 - 7 hours and maybe the next month 0 hours. This works out great for the customers budgeting of expenses. For customers whose average requirements are 10 hours / month I up that to $60.00/mo flat rate. 3. Job Rate. For customers who need a new site built from scratch, I always work off of a well defined quote stating that I will do a, b, and c for $xxx. After the job is complete, I usually revert to a flat monthly billing rate for taking care of future modifications. I have been working this way for several years now and it seems to work well for me and I have never had any complaints from any of my customers about service or rates and they keep coming back for more and send referrals to me. Mark Roberts Roberts Computing Systems http://www.robertscomputing.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Steve Pronger Subject: LED archives > And they are being indexed by the search engines. > http://snipurl.com/mvyj [google.com] - Michael Martinez, LED 2104 Ah, interesting. I was searching for actual URLs, rather than keywords, which produces a "did not match any documents" result. I couldn't find any of the archived issues in Yahoo or MSN though. Can anyone identify these archived pages as a backlink to their site? I'm still drawing a blank, so I still believe that generally they are not SE friendly. Maybe you should bundle them all up, Adam, and sell them as an e-book ;-) I don't have any doubt as to their potential value as backlinks. Hey, I'd take the link. If only I'd put some keywords in my domain name.... Steve Pronger http://www.stevepronger.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. "Originality is the essence of true scholarship. Creativity is the soul of the true scholar." - Nnamdi Azikiwe |
