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Meet Us:

Thalita Ortega – Project Manager
Thalita’s philosophy is to blend the science of rigorous project management with the art of thoughtful and strategic brand innovation efforts. She brings management experience focusing on brand design and management systems; she is ionicNet’s answer to ensuring seamless integration of strategic and creative talent to solve client branding issues. Her talents enable her to bridge strategic insights and creative ideas— with a close eye to the management of project plans, work streams, and resources.

Harrison Ortega – Senior Frontend/Backend Developer.
Harrison Ortega has over 10 years experience with CSS, HTML and many other programming languages. His main advantage is providing only high quality and bug free applications and websites for any size business.

Ian David – Senior Programmer
Ian has six years in software design and implementation. His main expertise lies in business technologies and architecture. Over the past years, Ian has developed a wide range of products included but no limited to ERP, Social Networks, Software applications, Mobile Apps and games.

Mohit Kumar – Senior Programmer

Trying to improve your website’s search engine ranking can seem a bit like the quest for romance. Like people looking for love, websites looking for a high search ranking can find it many different ways and with varying degrees of success. As with romance, you don’t need to spend a lot of money; your intrinsic appeal matters more than the size of your investment. And, as with love, you can’t achieve a high search engine ranking once and then never worry about it again. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing effort, and the more you work at it, the better it will be.

There are many things that any small business—even one with no budget for SEO—can do to improve its search rankings. Here’s a look at some of the most effective ways to raise your profile in search.

SEO Tips: Finding “Link Love”
The most effective and long-lasting way to improve your ranking in a search engine is to increase the number of “inbound” links to your site from other websites. Inbound links represent an endorsement of your site. If these other site owners find your site useful, the logic goes, then Internet searchers are likely to find your site useful too.

Building a search engine based on inbound links (instead of simply reviewing keywords in hidden “meta tags” or website text) is what propelled Google from a late entrant to the search field to its current position as undisputed leader. Google currently has more than 65 percent of searches, and shows little sign of relinquishing this dominance, despite Microsoft and Yahoo’s combined effort to unseat it.

This link-based approach (called “link analysis”) proved so effective that other major search engines followed Google’s example. “Link analysis is at the core of almost all major search engines,” says Aaron Wall, author of SEO Book.com, a search engine optimization education service that, incidentally, is the first website result in a Google search of “SEO.”

SEO Tips: Five Ways to Get Linked
1. Give stuff away. Does your company offer free samples of its product? Do you have any handy applications or an ebook you can let site visitors download for free? There are few more effective ways to get people to link to your site than to offer something for nothing.

2. Share useful information. Links are commonly used to share information, so putting useful information on your site, such as articles or how-to guides will help draw links.

3. Connect with your community. This can be either your geographic community or a community based on your industry. Sponsoring an event at a local charity, interviewing an industry expert and posting the interview on your site or writing articles and blog entries for others to post can all bring inbound links.

4. Reach out to the blogosphere. Bloggers are always looking for new ideas, new websites to link to, and new products to write about, and they can be a great source of link love.

5. Use good old-fashioned PR. Getting mentioned in the press is good for your company in many different ways, and one of them is that online publications may include links to your site or your information if your company is mentioned in an article.

SEO Tips: Finding Search Terms
Words are the cornerstone of an effective SEO strategy, so one of your first tasks is to determine exactly what word or phrase searches bring customers to your site. If your business sells umbrellas and galoshes, do you get the most benefit from searches of “umbrella” or “rain gear?”

1. Think phrase, not word. Search “batik shower curtains” in Google (at press time) and the top result is the site for Saffron Marigold, an online retailer of fair trade, hand-printed linens from India. Searches on various products account for some 60 percent of the company’s business, according to Sandip Sarwate, co-founder. “It would be extremely difficult for us to rank with the search terms ‘shower curtains,” he says. “The key instead is to have ‘long tail’ terms that are very specific to you.”

2. Think buyers, not just browsers. “You should focus on conversions, not just traffic to the site,” Sarwate says. He uses Google Analytics reports to break down keywords and phrases by revenue, so he can concentrate on optimizing for words that lead directly to revenues.

3. Look for suggestions. Several online tools, such as the , can help you come up with terms your customers are searching that you may not have thought of. Starting from “rain gear,” the tool comes up with hundreds of suggestions, including “nylon rain gear,” “golf rain gear,” and “breathable rain gear.” A quick way to get just a few ideas is to start filling in a search text box and see what your search engine suggests. Typing “rain” into Google elicited the suggestion “rain boots,” for instance.

3. Don’t forget to ask. Asking customers how they found you and what made them choose you over your competitors should give you come clues to what your most effective search terms will be.

SEO Tips: Using Search Terms
Once you’ve done your research, you should wind up with a manageable number of search terms that dependably generate revenue. Use these terms in the titles and headings of your pages. (Titles show up on browser tabs, but don’t appear on the page itself, as headings do.) You may be able to gain benefit by varying them. For instance, in our rainwear example above, the title of the page could be “Rain gear and waterproof apparel,” while the heading on the page itself might read “Umbrellas, galoshes, rain coats and wet weather clothing.”

You may have heard a lot about meta tags and search engines. Meta tags are invisible text incorporated into web pages to describe what the page contains and list relevant keywords. Meta tags are read by “spiders,” software applications that search the Web and rank pages for search. Before Google and link analysis, meta tags were an important SEO tool, and unfortunately one that was subject to manipulation. Today, meta tags have lost their luster. You should still use them, but don’t expect them to help your search ranking.

SEO Tips: Making the Most of Search Technology
With a good keyword and link strategy in place, you can use some features of search engine technology to help your search rankings.

1. Refresh content often. Search engine spiders return most often to websites that are most frequently updated. This is one reason blogging is a popular activity among small business sites. “Creating a blog is the one thing that definitely changed our search engine presence,” says David Lewis, president of OperationsInc, a human resources outsourcing company. The OperationsInc blog is updated daily Monday through Friday, he says, and contains information from a newsletter the company also sends to about 1,500 subscribers.

2. Consider a content management system. Created to support blogging, content management systems are versatile website platforms that can allow you and your staff to add content to your site easily, encouraging the frequent updates that can boost rankings. OperationsInc’s website is currently being transferred into Drupal, an open-source content management system.

“Drupal and WordPress are the two most popular content management systems, with Drupal having both a steeper learning curve and more features,” Wall says. Either way, he adds, content management systems make it easy to post material and easy for users to comment on posts, all of which can be good for search ranking.

3. Eliminate underused pages. If pages on your site are out of date or generating little interest, remove them, Wall advises. This will help your search ranking, since the number of links or “link equity” you have can be diluted by a large number of pages. “If a page isn’t generating any real traffic and no one is linking to it, the content probably isn’t useful and you should get rid of it,” he says. Not only will this help your ranking, it will also help keep your site relevant and fresh.

Bounce rate, simply put, is the measure of how many visitors come to a page on your site and leave without viewing any other pages. Really, it’s the most basic expression of dissatisfaction with your site users can give you.

A site’s bounce rate is easy to track with tools like Google Analytics. Such tools can show you the bounce rates on different pages of your website, how the user came to your site (organic search, paid search, banner ad, etc.), how the bounce rate has changed over time, and other data so you can really dig into where you might have a leak.

As a rule of thumb, a 50 percent bounce rate is average. If you surpass 60 percent, you should be concerned. If you’re in excess of 80 percent, you’ve got a major problem.

Realizing you’ve got an issue is the first step in fixing it

1-  Check Browser Performance

The developer who built your site might have worked exclusively in Firefox and failed to check its performance in Internet Explorer, Safari, and Google Chrome. Unfortunately, parts of your site that load fine in one type of browser struggle in others, says Whitmore. Your analytics tool can break down bounce by browser type to see if this is the culprit.

2- Improve Load Times

Is your site plastered with pictures and other bells and whistles? Sure, that might look and work fine on your high-speed Internet connection, but users with slower connections may well be leaving out of boredom. Analytics tools can once again show if your pages often load slowly of break down, and tools can segment these problems by the types of connections your users have.

3- Don’t Interrupt the User’s Experience

Is there something on your site that you think is cool but really isn’t offering any value to the user? “If you have a splash page when users enter, you’re probably causing half the people to leave,” Whitmore says. You should also avoid intrusive polls and surveys.

4- Consider Points of Entry

Once you’ve identified pages with troubling bounce rates, you need to ask yourself a few questions, – Who is coming to the page? Why are they coming here? What is it that they probably want to do? This is where the quantitative side of analytics ends and you need to get to the qualitative.

5- Study Your Keywords

If you’re doing search marketing, look at your keyword report and see which keywords correspond to high bounce rates. “All the time I see people run an ad that promises one thing, gets you in the door and doesn’t give you that,” says Whitmore. Buying highly-searched keywords is ultimately useless if you aren’t providing what the people searching for those words actually want.

6- Take People Where They Want to Go

Along the same lines, if you have an ad promising something and then redirect to your homepage, you’re going to lose a lot of visitors. “If you do that, now I have to learn how to use your site to search for what I was already promised,” says Whitmore. “I don’t have time to search your site over and over. I already searched and told you what I want.”

7- Test Different Solutions

Think you’ve got a solution for your trouble spot? Great. But don’t assume it’s going to work. You should consider performing A/B and multi-variant tests when making even minor changes to your site. “Something as simple as the color of a button and the words you put on it can have a huge impact on your bounce rate,” Whitmore advises.

8- Make Related Content Accessible

Providing related links to other content on your site can go a long way in keeping visitors engaged, but you’ll have the best results the more relevant the content is. But you don’t want to go overboard; users can easily be overwhelmed by too much information. Less is often more.

9- Analyze Searches within Your Site

If you don’t already have a search box on your site, put one in. Let people tell you what they want. Don’t make them navigate and hunt for it. Google Site Search is free, and you can then analyze searches within your site and see searches coming from specific pages. If you have people constantly searching for the same thing on a given page, you can create a link to the relevant search. You can also begin to build content in the form of blog posts or product pages that focus on that search term.

10- Take Action

There are plenty of free or cheap web analytics tools out there, but don’t let the price fool you: These tools can provide a serious amount of data—but data isn’t the end game here. “The value in web analytics comes from taking action,” says Whitmore. “The best tool in the world is only to collect data and give it to you. Understanding what that data means and knowing what to go do and then actually doing it is entirely up to people.”



Is your website causing you to lose customers? Great design, on-target messaging, compelling calls-to-action, and valuable content are just the baseline for engaging your market online. But can your customers make a buying decision solely using content from your site? Too often websites address only the discovery phase of a buying process.

Even the most creative, pithy, or in-depth description of what you do for whom and why you’re the best is not enough. Your prospects must be able to evaluate your offering, believe your claims are credible, and understand what you’re like to work with—all from within your site. Leaving these key purchase criteria questions unanswered interrupts prospect attraction, creating a barrier to buying.

At Great-to-Market Labs, my executive consulting firm in San Francisco, we hit that decision-wall with a vendor last year and ended up buying from a competitor.  We were in the market for an e-mail-marketing tool and were partial to My Emma.  Its website clearly identified our problem and explained how it presented a solution.

The hitch? We couldn’t see the product.  There were no pictures, videos, or free trials. Instead, the site asked us to call and talk to a representative for product details. Yes, we were curious enough to call (although I would argue that most prospects won’t).  We asked why they wanted us to call before we could see the product, and they said they wanted to qualify prospects because they were wary of spammers.

There are plenty of excuses for not giving potential customers exactly what they want to see on your website.  Here are some. We can’t:

• List pricing on the Web because then the competition will just beat it.
• Put demos online because sales people need to personalize the experience.
• Describe the implementation process because each customer is unique.
• Develop FAQs because that will point out unnecessary concerns.

Face it: It’s time to let these go.  In the age of Google, Yelp, and Groupon, customers are in the sales process driver’s seat, and they’re happy to be there.  Your customers want immediate access to information to help them buy. The solution is logical: Put it all on your site.  You’ve got to answer their questions, address their objections, differentiate yourself and do it all credibly. Withholding information might feel safer, but you risk alienating buyers—they’ll think your claims are suspect—and injecting unnecessary friction that extends sales cycles.

So, how do you know what information your prospects need to complete a buying decision?

Start by interviewing your best salesperson to build a map of your sales process in action.   Ask her or him to write down their view of the sales process from the first contact to final contract. Check out all of the materials your sales team members use during the sales dialogue (links to the website, presentations, demos) and at what point of the process they employ them. Finally, ask them to comprehensively note questions that the customers ask and the most effective responses to those questions (objections, comparisons).

Now, step into the role of your most promising prospect. Attempt to look at your website with fresh eyes, and try to make a decision to buy your product or service from your website.  If you can’t be objective, then ask a contemporary or mentor outside your company to be your prospective customer. Follow this path:

1.     Do a Google search to get to your site (it never hurts to check up on the effectiveness of your keywords).

2.     Can you easily identify with the problem being presented and the solution being offered enough to want to continue?  If not, then you need to work on your targeting and messaging. For example, a provider of healthcare services sold to employers, but used by employees, would separate content specific to each audience, emphasizing competitive evaluation for the employers (the buyer in this case), while focusing on service benefits for employees (the users). You can see here where Castlight Health separates its value proposition into employer and employee categories, minimizing confusion and speaking clearly to each audience.

3.     Look at the sales process created by your sales rep.  Does your site enable prospects to easily find information while in each stage?

For instance, while in courting prospects in discovery, you need to establish credibility. Great sites establish credibility by offering third-party validation (product or service reviews, awards won), customer testimonials (short video clips are effective), and lists of customers (think logo walls).  For example, HubSpot is a relatively new vendor to the lead generation space, so it knows that advertising how and which companies are using HubSpot will create credibility. With that in mind, the company actually uses one of the six precious tabs on its home page for “Who Uses HubSpot.”

While in evaluation, the prospect is looking for you to differentiate yourself.  Show photos, screenshots or video tours so prospects can experience your product or service. Demonstrate thought leadership by offering education content for free. Provide frequently updated, valuable insight via your blog and social media feeds. Offer contact information for domain experts within your company. For example, check out how 37Signals uses tours to demo its products.

Customers also want to know exactly what happens after a purchase (implementation, adoption). Have you posted case studies of successful customer experiences? Make sure you describe how you will deliver your product and service as well as what buyers should do for post-sale support. You can see how salesforce.com, one of the pioneers of self-service, has a section of its website dedicated to explaining how to implement.  In addition to aiding the sales process, this is also an effective way to reduce implementation costs and increase user adoption.

4.     Is all of the information that the sales rep is using in the sales process available on the site?  Is it easy to find?  Be careful not to hide information that feels uncomfortable to you just because you haven’t created your answer.  Pricing is a great example of this.  We talk to a lot of clients who don’t want to post it because they aren’t sure they have it right.  Resist the urge to withhold.  By putting it out there, you’ll find out if it’s right or not.  And, you’ll once again move the sales process along for your promising prospects.  See here how Vertical Response makes pricing very clear.

5.     Do your FAQs answer the tough questions provided to you by the sales rep or is your prospect going to get the real truth when they start calling around or Googling you?

This can be an extremely effective test of the effectiveness of your e-selling (or rather e-buying from your customer’s perspective).  When I became the VP of Sales for Vindicia, an online billing SaaS vendor, several years ago, I informally went through this process and found that the customer had to call to talk to a sales rep for nearly everything.  And here we were selling online billing to e-merchants!  It wasn’t that the executive team was opposed to exposing information; rather, it was that the material just hadn’t been created.

Salespeople are still critical to business models, but communicating effectively to prospects online can generate efficiency far more valuable than the risk of exposing too much information, even in wildly competitive markets. Use your website to bring prospects as close to a buying decision as possible and focus your sales teams on consultative, strategic selling, which is really what we pay them to do anyway.

While it seems counterintuitive to lessons of the past several decades, self-service of the buying process will create a positive relationship with your customer.  It is not only what they expect, but also what they need in order to feel comfortable with you as a vendor.  They will view you as current, transparent, and confident about your products and services.  And that will win you more deals.

Here’s a fact worth considering: 97 percent of consumers search for local businesses online. Another: 73 percent of all online activity is related to local content, according to data released by Google.

This has huge implications for small businesses, which often depend on Google—in terms of organic and paid search—to generate phone calls, foot traffic, and overall brand visibility. But while most businesses spend time and marketing dollars perfecting their paid search campaigns and SEO strategies, plenty overlook one of the most valuable (and free) resources that Google has ever offered: Google Places.

Places was launched in September 2009, and ostensibly replaced the Google Local Business Center. On Google’s official blog, the service was introduced as ” a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it.”

Two years after its launch, many companies are still struggling to get it right.

“It’s a very difficult and delicate ecosystem,” says Chris Watson, the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Everspark Interactive, a full-service SEO agency based in Atlanta. “In the beginning, we spent 12 months thinking we had the variables right only to find that sometimes we got it completely wrong.”

The good news is that Google Places is free and fairly painless to set up. The bad news is that it takes more than just a couple of clicks to start generating paying customers. Watson notes that maintaining the Places account is just like any other aspect of the marketing mix, and should not be left to an inexperienced office manager to set up.

Marketing Your Business Using Google Places: Set Up an Account
Adding a listing takes just three steps. They are:

• Submit your information, from basic contact info to photos and video.
• Verify your listing by phone or postcard.
• Wait for your listing to appear on Google.

Marketing Your Business Using Google Places: Avoid the Common Mistakes
“Don’t go keyword stuffing,” Watson cautions. “The biggest mistake I see are businesses that go into their Places account and put in 20 different categories for their business. They think that because they can do it, it’s appropriate. You should nominate just one category.”

It’s also important not to forget the basics—like a company phone number. “People don’t realize that Google Places is predominantly about a phone number. That phone number has to be a local phone number, and shown on your website in a format that the Google spider can see.” In other words, don’t put your phone number in a picture, or a JPEG format.

It’s a bit complex, but “citation building” is a common problem for small businesses building their Places account. As its name implies, a “citation” is another website’s affirmation about your Google Places listing.

“In order to get a valuable citation, the referring website must list the company information as it appears in the Places Profile,” explains one blogger. “That means that the company name and address have to be identical. While that doesn’t seem too difficult a concept, consider this – if your business is listed at 300 S Main Street in the Places Profile, but someone cites the address on their website as 300 South Main Street, the value of that citation is diminished. One could believe that such a difference as negligible (S. vs. South), but in the realm of local search every detail matters.”

But for all the technical mistakes small businesses make, Chris Watson says there’s one major operational mistake that always inhibits the success of a Places campaign: too many cooks in the kitchen.

“It’s a not place where everyone can contribute,” Watson says. “It has to be very closely monitored.”

Marketing Your Business Using Google Places: Optimize Rankings

“Not surprisingly, marketing on Google Places has gotten very competitive,” says Ken Horst, an SEO expert. “It used to be you could simply fill out your business listing on Google and see it in the seven pack a few weeks later. These days, if your listing doesn’t have a 100 percent score, you can forget about being listed in the first seven local businesses that Google displays for local results.”

There are a number of ways to vie for the coveted seven. Watson recommends encouraging reviewers, showing off photos (with keyword-friendly tags), uploading video, and even using 2-D barcodes.

Also, when writing the company description, it’s important to avoid hackneyed expressions, like “proudly serving the community” or “The best hairdresser in town.” According to Watson, being precise—not loquacious—is the key to ranking up high.

Marketing Your Business Using Google Places: Use Local Business Photos

In May, Google announced a new project to complement Places: Google Business Photos, a 360-degree look at the interior of a retail store, a restaurant, or even an office space.

“Millions of users visit Google Maps every day to learn about new places,” Google noted upon its release. “Showcase your business to these potential customers by signing up for a photo shoot by Google trusted photographers. The images will appear on your business’s Place page, and as 360-degree imagery using Street View technology.”

Business Photos is still in its infancy, and will have a limited release in the United States, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Businesses can apply here to have a shot at becoming one of the first businesses photographed. Some are skeptical about Google’s ability to scale the service, considering how time-intensive indoor photograhy can be. Still, Chris Watson is excited about what it could mean for small business.

“We don’t know whether or not it’s going to be that significant,” he says. “But if you look at it from a strategy perspective, it’s always better to show more. You can go ahead and upload your own pictures, but I would suggest that there’s something rather significant to being a Google Business Photo ‘chosen one.’”