Crouch Consulting

Higher Education Consulting

Dan Crouch — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 19:07:38 +0000

Having worked at Oregon State University for over 12 years in web and IT, I have the background to help you achieve your goals. My experience working with multiple departments and stakeholders, limited resources, and specific timelines, I understand the challenges working in the higher education environment and can bring fresh perspective to your project.

Small Business Websites

Dan Crouch — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 18:51:22 +0000

Being a longtime resident of Corvallis, Oregon, I am pleased to offer affordable web solutions to this community. We’ll work together to ensure you have a leading presence amid your competitors with a fresh design, current information, and a top search result. Serving Corvallis, Albany, and Eugene, Oregon.

Social Media Strategies

Dan Crouch — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:12:47 +0000

Feeling behind with your presence on Twitter and Facebook? These increasingly important arenas are a required place for your business to build exposure, illuminate your specialties, and create long term relationships with your customers. Let me set up an actionable plan for you to follow on your way to 10,000 fans!

Calapooia Brewing Gets a Facelift

Dan Crouch — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:01:06 +0000

This year we wanted to start things off fresh with Calapooia Brewing, and we’ve implemented the Colourise Theme from Theme Lab. With a few minor tweaks, the design really pops and the website has never looked better. Plus we’ve added some new pages and features, like Feedburner delivered email, better post summaries, and more active blogging.

If you’re driving by Albany on I-5, you should stop in and have one of the best microbrews in the Willamette Valley at Calapooia Brewing. The pub features hand-patted burgers and all the latest brews, and a very friendly and knowledgeable staff. Stop by today and see what all the buzz is about!

FireFox 3: Get it on Download Day!

Dan Crouch — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:11:31 +0000

I’ve been using FF3 for nearly two weeks now and it is a much faster rendering browser. Comparable to Safari for Windows, and faster than Opera.

Click above to help Firefox break a Guinness record for downloads in a day!

Assisting the best Ducati Community in the Northwest: DesmoNorthwest!

Dan Crouch — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:48:26 +0000

I’m very excited to be working with DesmoNorthwest, the Pacific Northwest Ducati Owners Club! Their membership is very active on the club website forum and I’m very pleased to be assisting them with the membership registration functions. Stay tuned for some fantastic improvements!

Introducing CleanAirLawnCareNW.com: Portland Solar Powered Lawn Care

Dan Crouch — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:24:53 +0000

Crouch Consulting is proud to be the website manager for ClearnAirLawnCareNW.com Clean Air Lawn Care NW is your source for the latest in green, solar powered, sustainable energy, and environmentally responsible lawn care in the Portland, Oregon metro area.

Environmentally responsible lawn care serving all of southeast and southwest Portland, Oregon, including: Lake Oswego, Beaverton, Milwaukie, Tualatin, Tigard, Sherwood, Oregon City, Cedar Hills, and Raleigh Hills neighborhoods. CleanAirLawnCareNW.com is offering a special for a free month’s worth of mowing with a 12 month contract!

This website features the fantastic Xplosive Reloaded WordPress Theme by Jai Nischal Verma.

2008 Portland SearchFest Notes

Dan Crouch — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:52:46 +0000

The SEMpdx Searchfest continues to be one of the best conferences on emerging search industry related topics, and we’re so lucky to have it right in our backyard! Many of the full time SEO professionals have already posted their notes. I’m posting mine here to share with my co-workers and clients as well. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Presentation slides can be found here and will make the notes more relevant.

Keynote

Temporal Link Analysis: Tracking when and how many incoming links were created to a given site. This analysis makes reciprocol linking very obvious to Google and site rankings will suffer as a result. (This was later proven in the Hot Seat Panel discussion.)

VIPS – Vision Based Page Segmentation. Search engines now look for patterns in web templates of where to find the actual content within a website compared to the header, footer, and navigation areas. Links and content within these areas are given the greatest attention.

Tracking Page Rank is less and less important due to predictive and personalized search results. Rand’s advice was to monitor traffic rather than Page Rank.

Rumor: Google can crawl the entire “fresh” web in 4 hours?!

The new sought after inbound links are those based around community and content. Referred to as Editorial Linking.

Site Architecture, Usability, and SEO Analysis

Internal linking:
- ‘you may also be interested in’ content related links
- use analytics to drive popular and related links
- avoid an easy duplicate content issue with your index pages by linking to just the directory containing the index page

Search box is most often looked for in the upper right hand portion of the header.

Keyword analysis: Consider # of page viewed, Time on Site, and Bounce Rate to create actionable intelligence from analytics. For instance if the bounce rate is very high but the time on site was 5 minutes, the user was actually engaged reading the page whereas just considering the bounce rate might suggest the page was a failure.

Google Internal Site Search – provides reporting on what terms are being searched within your site. Very helpful for determining what is either missing or hard to find on your site.

Links: Gooruze, eMarketingPerformance, TubeMogul, SMXWest, BusinessOL, Online Marketing Summit, Sphinn

Link Building

Ideas for link building in today’s search engine climate:

Page rank sculpting with NoFollow

Sharing promotional badges

Yahoo Site Explorer – Get competitor links

Yahoo Hub Finder – Very cool!

Easy link baiting example with a photo and caption on Digg

‘Techtarded’ – Definition of a person not technologically inclined.

Links: WebConnoisseur, Pounce, Twitter, SEO for Firefox extension,

Marketing with Social Media

Mini and Micro Blogging = Ubersyndication. Make the machines do the work for you.
Twitter App for FaceBook

“Make visitors fans of your product.” They’ll post content and links because they’re fans.
“Web 2.0 is now.”

Set up Google Alerts on anything of PR concern and subscribe to the corresponding .RSS feed. (So easy and obvious!)

Links: Bringr, SearchMob, Tumblr, TwitterSearch, SocialPoster, Flock, KickApps, Jott

Hot Seat Tips

Unique title tags per page

Make sure copyright year is actually correct on all pages.

Spam resistant contact forms should include a ‘how did you hear about us’ field.

SEOMoz Crawl Test

Replace %20 with hyphens as much as possible in URL’s

Search results on enterprise sites should include results based on entry-to-site search string, navigation history, and related pages.

Chat now icon’s should have an image of a person, and one that evokes and a positive emotional response.

Webmaster Console

Boss Autos Has a Huge Year with Crouch Consulting

Dan Crouch — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:38:23 +0000

Boss Autos and Crouch Consulting worked early in 2007 to remodel their website and apply tried and true SEO techniques to increase organic traffic. The results were stellar as we increased traffic 2100% in only 2 quarters!

Working with Dan at Crouch Consulting has been a fantastic experience. As an automotive enthusiast and a web specialist, he understands what makes my inventory unique and how to position my content accordingly on search engines. The increases in traffic to my site speak for themselves. I would not hesitate to recommend Crouch Consulting to any other small business if they want affordable, understandable, and effective results. -Clayton Boss, owner Boss Autos

Thanks for the kind words Clayton! I’m looking forward to achieving even greater success with you this year!

In 2008, I’d like to add more clients in the automotive and motorsports industries to my list of successful partnerships. If results like these appeal to you, please feel free to email me about how I can work with your team to dramatically increase your presence and conversions on the web.

Crouch Consulting Year in Review 2007

Dan Crouch — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:31:55 +0000

This blog has received woefully little attention this past year, and I’m starting 2008 by posting my year in review a month late. Not a great start and a blogging sin is what I would describe it as to my clients to be truthful! But just like a great mechanic, the projects you are most likely to neglect are your own because you’re busy performing for your clients. (How’s that for a thinly veiled excuse of an apology?!)

But in all seriousness, as we begin 2008, I have many people to thank for what has been a most successful 2007 at Crouch Consulting:

+ At Oregon State University, the Office of Enrollment Management and the Office of Admissions; my boss and my main clients. I am really fortunate to work with a truly dedicated team of professionals that are striving to do the best job they can. I’m inspired all the time by their efforts and I look forward to successfully completing even greater projects with them in the coming year!

+ The professional organizations of PACRAO and PNACAC, as well as Academic Impressions for inviting me back again for another year to speak at your conferences and workshops. It is always rewarding to communicate with other professionals in our field and continue our growth together.

+ To Pacwest Engineering LLC in Albany, Oregon, for being a great friend and resource to Crouch Consulting.

+ Stephanie at ATI Wah Chang for the opportunity to chew the fat with the big boys once and a while.

+ I have been fortunate enough to work with BossAutos for 2 years and I’m grateful for the work and exposure Clayton!

+ To Mark and Laura, owners of Calapooia Brewing who give me far more latitude than I deserve!

+ No thank you posting would be complete without a big thank you to Millholland Conrad for continuing to trust me with their business for over 7 years!

+ And to the new relationships made this year with the following clients: Albany Massage Center, Mark Stevens Photography in Denver, and WornBy in London. I have enjoyed working with all of you and look forward to our work together in the coming year!

Here’s to our success in 2008 and I pledge to make this blog active and useful moving forward!