You might have seen the Chipotle Honest Ingredients ads.  I’ve been obsessed with them for a couple of weeks.  I finally had to make the Honest Cow-O-Matic.

FastWebUpdates.com announces the launch of ReturnTheBS.com, which allows you to return BS with actual BS. That’s right! 100% pure BS, straight from the bull! Visit them at www.ReturntheBS.com.

This is usually the first question our small business customers ask us: how much?

It’s a fair question. We post our website maintenance prices where everyone can see them.

Now, we choose to work by the hour. (See this feedback about our hourly work.)  Why?  It’s the best way to make sure that everyone is on the same page about updates.  That means that updates that only take 10 minutes only cost 10 minutes.  You never have to worry about getting a quote that seems reasonable to you but is, in fact, ridiculously high.

The only way hourly billing works is if you keep track, detailed track, of how long something really took to complete.  That’s where our site TeamClock.com comes in. It helps us track and report on everything we do.

The best way to find out if a company is a good fit for your website maintenance needs is to talk to them.  If you think there is a fit, have them do some work.  If you like the work they did, then they’re a fit for you.

You can contact FastWebUpdates.com at 888-627-8888.

Just checked this morning and, finally, FastWebUpdates.com has broken into Google’s top 10 results for “website maintenance”.  PHEW!

This has been a long journey.  I started the special website in mid-2004.  Back then, my only choice was to spend about $1k a month on advertising.

It just goes to show that the formula for better search engine rankings works.  It’s pretty simple:

1. Be patient.
2. Add quality content.  Regularly.  That people read.
3. Format that content in a way that Google et al can understand it.
4. Repeat.

That’s it!
For most industries, it won’t take that long.  Website maintenance takes longer because we have hundreds of companies around the world trying to do exactly the same thing: break into Google’s top 10.

Some mistakes we made:

1. subdomains that pointed to the same content as our main domain.
2. non-user-driven content.  our content was originally designed more for people like us than for our readers, people like you.
3. pages that were, essentially, duplicates on the same domain.

…and a whole lot more.  The thing is this: you have to do things above board, no tricks, and then just stick with it.
One final thing: this may be a fleeting victory.  We may drop off the list at any time.  So our only choice is to keep adding good content.

So you jumped on board and created a blog to promote your website and it’s not working. The blog just isn’t attracting traffic. What’s wrong? The first place you should look is the content. Chances are, you’re not creating content that’s meaningful and accessible to your desired audience.

I add content to three blogs on a regular basis and I can always tell when I’m not putting enough effort into one of them. Visitor count goes down. And then I look at the last entry and it was from more than a week ago, or the content isn’t focused enough on the topic at hand. What do I do?

First, I re-evaluate my priorities and see if what I’m putting effort into is what is really important to me. For example, it might be fun for me to write my Pizza Thursday entries but that doesn’t really draw traffic to the website maintenance news site.

Next, I look at the topics I’m blogging about. For example, I can write about the technical nitty gritty of website maintenance. But do my customers really care about that? My customer is looking for someone to maintain their site because they don’t want to deal with the details. My ponderings on some obscure topic (XHTML special character codes, for example) don’t matter to my desired audience.

Finally, I look at the headline. Is there something in the headline that will grab my desired reader’s attention? Is it something that will stand out on a list of search engine results? If not, I rewrite it. For example, the headline for this entry has gone through three revisions so far.

A final tip: make your blog entries “skim friendly.” A reader in a hurry needs to be able skim the article and get the main ideas. Keep your paragraphs short, bold the main entries and make sure your text is readable.

Blogs can be a good marketing tool, a way for you to connect with new customers, but you have to add content that’s interesting from their point of view. If your marketing efforts aren’t working, take a hard look at what you’re writing about and how you’re presenting it. Chances are a few tweaks will make a big difference.