AuraDev is a web design, seo, sem and internet marketing firm based in Wilsonville Oregon.

For those do it yourself types or those just interested in learning the ropes of website design and internet marketing, AuraDev offers expert website tutoring at an hourly rate of $65.

We have many clients that prefer to update and maintain their own websites, but get “stuck” from time to time.  They don’t need high priced web redesign proposals, they just need an hour or two with an expert website tutor.

We have a great relationship with customers who just need a little website tutoring from time to time.

Typically we spend a couple hours a month, one on one teaching web design tips and tricks you don’t find in the Dreamweaver or Frontpage instruction manual.  It is mostly little things, but those little things add up to a lot of time savings when you have an expert advisor sitting right next to you… guiding you through the intricacies of web design.

In your personalized website tutoring sessions you are the boss.  Simply tell us what you want to learn and what questions you have.  We’ll be able to identify where you are at almost immediately and start building upon your existing web design knowledge.

A great example of our website tutoring is Bill Berry of Berry Media Works.  Bill is an expert video producer who just needed a little help putting his website together, dealing with code, CSS, flash and learning how to stream video over the web.  After about 6 2 hour sessions Bill had the skills and training needed to put together a fantastic website, BerryMediaWorks.com.

“Chris Chong, the founder of AuraDev is a great teacher.  He is very patient and knows how to communicate in a way that makes sense to me.  In the process of building my website it was great to have a reliable web design consultant who really knows what he is doing and isn’t overpriced.

There definitely was a learning curve and Chris helped me get my site up and going, saving me time and headache.  It is good to have a web design and internet marketing expert to advise me on the best way to implement my web marketing ideas.  Now that I’ve got the basics down, I just keep a log of all the questions and things I can’t figure out, and have Chris come over to my home office once a month to go thru it.

As a result of my efforts plus a little website tutoring from AuraDev, I’ve been able to connect with customers locally, nationally and internationally as a direct result of Chris’s internet marketing ideas.  Thanks Chris for solid web marking advice and taking the time to enable me to maintain and expand my website.”  Bill Berry, Berry Media Works

A personal note from Chris Chong, President of AuraDev:

I have a passion for helping others build their business.  The internet is a relatively new and extremely fast changing marketing medium that has the potential to place your message in front of millions almost immediately and for an extremely low cost (compared to print, radio and TV).  Staying on top of quickly changing trends and learning which factors will cause one web site to rank higher than another for a specific search term has enabled me to help others connect with customers online.

All of the search engine optimization (seo) and search engine optimization (sem) methods we use are implemented and refined using our very own website as a guinea pig.   Many of our clients choose to be on seo retainer plans, so when we come up with an effective new strategy, it gets implemented across our client base within three months.

If you are willing to put in a few hours per week marketing yourself, I will gladly tell you our search engine optimization secrets in our website tutoring sessions.  The bottom line is that to get good search engine rankings, you or your sem consultant must be diligent and consistent: willing to put in the time to craft unique content and revise it multiple times until it both ranks well on search engines and compels a potential customer to contact you.

Hard-working hands gain control, but lazy hands do slave labor. Proverbs 12.24

The best pop3 mail server hosting is provided by AuraDev, a Portland based web and email hosting expert.

We offer pop3 mail servers based on VPS (Virtual Private Server) technologies.  Unlike a shared server where everyone shares a pool of server resources (ram, processor, hard drive) VPS pop3 mail servers divide up a dedicated portion of web server resources.

This means that your email speed and reliability are consistently fast, because if someone else on the server does something stupid like send out a spam email blast through their pop3 mail server account, it won’t affect you at all.

For the best pop3 mail server hosting check out AuraDev.

A great way to connect with customers online and get first page search engine rankings is through a blog.

Blog is short for weblog, you could think of a blog as a mini site about your products and services.

At AuraDev one of our SEM strategies is to use blogs to get first page search rankings for a variety of terms.

From a search engine optimization perspective, it is difficult to target or optimize a web page to more than three phrases. If your web pages are either poorly written or not optimized, Google won’t be able to determine what your page is about and you won’t be listed on the first page. Our SEO strategy is to identify high value keywords and try to rank in the top 5 results for those keywords.

A high value keyword is a search term that a customer who is ready to purchase your product or service would use to find your site.

For example, someone searching for “search engine optimization” could be anybody. But someone searching for a “portland seo consulting company” is a person who we want to connect with.  We will help you identify a long list of phrases that will bring in targeted, qualified visitors.

What we do at AuraDev is craft pages using a specific type of verbiage that will rank well for a specific phrase. It is mostly the writing (content) that will get picked up by search engines, but there are a variety of other factors.

Now because there are probably a hundred phrases, maybe thousands, that you would want to rank on we need some kind of content management system, with out one it will be a pain to manage all your web pages and keywords. This is where the blog software comes in.

We prefer Wordpress, because it is the easiest to work with and has almost every tool needed either built in or available as a plugin.  Over the years Wordpress has become the #1 blog/content management system.

Step One: Install Wordpress

First we must setup Wordpress on your server and then customize the look to make it look like your existing website.  We do this so that visitors will be familiar with your branding, and the blog should tie into your main website seamlessly.  If your website has no e-commerce, sometimes we will recommend that you use Wordpress exclusively for your website.

Step Two: Identify a list of high value phrases (keywords)

We will work with you to develop a list of which keywords to work on.  These will be both general and specific.  We want to get in the mind of a potential customer and pick words that they would use to describe your business if they did not know your name.  If you are a service business this is often your services plus a geographic term like the cities you want to work in.  If you are a product then the keywords are often the product name, or the benefits your product offers, like “custom teak furniture” or “handmade wedding invitations”.

Step Three: Start writing search engine optimized blog entries

Now that we have setup Wordpress and identified keywords we will create new, unique web pages that will rank well for specific search terms.  Depending on how aggressive you would like to be and your budget we can do one blog entry per week or one entry per day.  We don’t recommend doing more than one a day, because Google is watching the frequency of updates, and they really like to see a few updates every day.  Regardless of how much time/money you want to put into SEM, it needs to be consistent over the long run.

Step Four: Monitor Results

Using Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics we can see how people are finding your web pages and what they are doing once they find them.  Analytics Content Drilldown will help us spot areas in your website that could be improved, to convert a higher percentage of visitors into paying customers.

We monitor results on an ongoing basis, typically daily, to see which blog entries are bringing in visitors and what those visitors are doing.

Blogging is a great SEM strategy

Starting around December 12th I began an aggressive blog writing campaign for myself because we were snowed in and I was bored.  It paid off almost immediately with over 150 visitors the next week.

Blogging doubled the number of visitors to our web site

From this screen shot of our Analytics you can see that starting around Dec 14th we started getting nearly twice the amount of normal visitors to our web site, from a variety of different keywords.  December results are in blue, November in green.  Keep in mind that this is also during an ice storm in the pacific northwest AND the week before Christmas.  I would expect to see a long term bump in website visitors over the next 6 months.  You can call me anytime after the new year if you want to find out what actually happened.

Another interesting thing is to see that for the month we were up 207% in visits, and up 71% in average time on site, but only down 9% on Pages/Vist and 15% on Bounce rate… that statistically proves that I am a good blog writer and search engine marketer.

This is an area we take pride in because you could hire people to do seo and write content for less money than what we charge, but the question is “Will what they write compel your visitors to read more and stick around long enough to become paying customers?”

If you notice a higher bounce rate, lower average time on site and lower pages per visit after hiring any seo consultant, that would be an indication that your content is not well written and they aren’t as good as they say they are.

It’s pretty hard to be up across the board, but I’ll take a 9% hit in Pages/Vist and a 15% hit on Bounce rate for a 207% increse in visits and 71% increase in average time on site any day!

If you are looking for a local expert to help you connect with customers online, contact Chris Chong at 503 830 4313.

Paid blogging starts at $30 per 600-800 word blog with a minimum one blog per week contract.  For an example this post took 1 hr to write and contains 1400 words (Wordpress tells me… I love Wordpress).

Our initial setup fee is $1000 to review and become familiar with your company and existing website, install Wordpress and customize it to match your site.

Step Five: Mini Web Sites - optional

Google frowns on this practice, but its a great way to establish your site.  If you are seeking an aggressive SEM campaign one tactic we use is to create multiple blogs and then cross link them.  Google doesn’t like this and can sometimes figure it out.  They have said publicly that they don’t recommend doing it unless the sites are relevant to each other.

If done right, it can work, but this strategy runs the risk of possibly outranking your main website for a search if overdone.  The key things to keep in mind here are:

1. that by creating a mini website, you are adding a “competing” website into the search index, unless you can develop content that is not directly related to your product or service.  An example of this would be if a BBQ manufacturing company started a mini site that was dedicated to BBQ recipies and cooking techniques, and then put a bunch of product reviews, comments and links about how great their BBQs are in that mini site.
2. the content must be unique, so there can be no need blog entries about other stuff.  Not every blog entry can be a review of your product/service.  This might mean finding a couple friends who also own businesses to go in on it with you

If you want to go this route what we do is setup a series of blogs on different servers and then start making posts that link to your main website.  We have found that this is not a very good tactic to use with a service business, but can be really good for product manufacturers and online store owners.

We would probably only recommend this tactic in an extremely competitive niche, as it can be extremely time consuming and expensive.

AuraDev provides professional web design in Tualatin.

Whether you are looking to update an existing website or design a new website for your business AuraDev experienced professionals will help you take your business to the next level.

If you are looking for a Tualatin Web Design expert, contact AuraDev at 503 830 4313.

AuraDev provides affordable web hosting for companies in Tigard, Canby, Oregon City, Lake Oswego, Wilsonville, Tualatin, Beaverton, West Linn and the Portland Metro Area.

AuraDev’s affordable web hosting does not sacrifice uptime for low cost. We are not the cheapest web hosting company in town, or on the internet, but instead we focus on web hosting value. This means reliability and customer service. Plus it’s nice to know that the people that support your website are just down the road from ptown, not across the world in India.

Contact AuraDev for affordable web hosting.

As a marketer that has been around the block more than a few times, I have seen fad’s and trend’s come and go. Some work and others don’t and there has been an awful lot of trial and error along with blind faith in sales pitches and promises.

But of all the SEM strategies that work the best are the ones that are cultivated over a period of time. A well thought out plan implemented with a series of short term goals to be met have made some of my most successful SEM campaigns.

What is SEM?

SEM is a well structured series of steps to paint you and your company as experts in your given field. It is a way to become the hunted instead of the hunter. Whatever business you’re in, your SEM campaign will make you the first person a prospective client thinks of when they have a need for something in your service industry.
Writing articles is one way to do this and it’s free. Sign up for ten or so top article submission sites and regularly submit keyword rich content. Your SEM campaign should always include an aggressive article writing and submission program. What this accomplishes is that when someone conducts a search with your keywords, and you have submitted keyword enhanced article everyday to numerous submission sites, your articles will be included in their search results. The more articles that you have written, the closer you will be to the top of the search engines.

But measurable SEM results do not just happen overnight, it is a process and it takes time. Generally a series of good keyword enriched, well written articles can get you on top of the search engines with ninety days of diligent work.

To put together a successful SEM campaign using article writing, one of the most important steps to take is developing your keyword list. Words that can sum up your company, product or service in a couple of words or a simple, common phrase. Something like the keywords; work at home, if your business is perhaps a home based business opportunity.
Your SEM efforts will show great results if you follow these simple steps. Always remember though that the results will take time to see. Make a plan and stick to it, giving it the proper time necessary to accurately gauge the results before you start modifying your approach.

I have seen SEM campaigns that start off on target but end up going nowhere because of impatience and not allowing the campaign to take off before the marketer starts tweaking and adjusting, making their SEM efforts run in circles.

Article writing, in conjunction with other SEM techniques, can maximize your businesses profits by giving you the exposure that was only available to companies with large advertising budgets, for free, which is why SEM has such a wide appeal and is growing in popularity among small business owners each and every year.