Internet Marketing, Social Media, Business | StuckInTheFunnel

Save a Headache: Design With SEO in Mind

I have been called into many situations where a company wants to achieve that coveted first page Google ranking only to find that their website is poorly designed or outdated. On  top of that, I am told that they have no interest in changing their web presence except for their Meta tags. Ok, no problem, right? No. In fact, search engines do not place nearly as much emphasis on Meta tags as they used to.

If you find a web design firm that has appealing creative work, let them know that you would like your site built with SEO in mind, even if you do not plan on implementing an organic SEO campaign after its initial launch. It will save you money down the road when your budget permits an ongoing organic SEO campaign.

A few tips when building your new web presence:

Design is Important, but its Not Everything

A good design will convey your company as established and credible, but does that design convert visitors to qualified leads? A website is like any investment and should contribute to your bottom line. The days are over when a website was simply an informative credibility statement. Ensure that your messages provide visitors with takeaways that are conducive to producing leads. This can be in the form of an information packet download, presentation or registration for a webinar.

Content is King

Nowadays many sites are built on large scale CMS platforms like Joomla or Drupal. Smaller scale sites can be deployed with a common CMS like Wordpress. At the minimum, I would request that your website be built on the Wordpress platform. Search engines like continuous content updates (relevant content) and those platforms will provide update capabilities for you or your staff.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

If you find a killer design firm without an SEO specialty, hire an SEO consultant and a copywriter. The SEO consultant can perform crucial tasks such as keyword research, competitive analysis and architecture design. The copywriter can write keyword rich/compelling content based on input from the SEO consultant. The web design firm can then tie all of the elements together.

The Bottom Line

Ask the right questions of your web design firm up front and you will save yourself a great deal of headache down the road. Don’t be afraid to let the web design firm now that you may have additional consultants providing input on your site architecture. They should embrace it, especially if they are trying to provide you with the best solution to your problem.

Internet Marketing Day Parting Trends Move Torwards Early Morning

If you are a Pay Per Click manager or Search Engine Marketer, you may have heard that the best time of day to use up more of your ad spend is during lunch hours, as many people browse the internet at that time.

However, according to a recent post by the  NY Times, internet and social media junkies can no longer hold off till lunch time before checking the web for news, friend requests and more:

“This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities”

This goes to show what an important role the Internet plays in the daily lives of people around the world. What does this mean for Internet Marketers? - Start displaying those ads early!

How Google Calculates Twitter Page Ranks

As many already know, Google began indexing Tweets and Twitter profiles not to long ago. Since then a lot of Search Engine Optimization experts have been trying to find the secret behind Google’s ranking algorithm for Twitter content. While observing my Hoot Suite panel today, I was steered torwards an interesting video released by Matt Cutt, a Google Engineer.

Despite speculation, it turns out that Google does not actually apply any special ranking factors when indexing Twitter content. The rules that apply to any web page also apply to Tweets and Twitter profiles. The number and quality of inbound links to specific Tweets or Profiles dictate how well they rank against others.

Google does not provide additional weight to profiles with  a large number of followers due to the ease of gaining followers and the questionable tactics used by marketers on the site.

Bottom line: optimize your Twitter profile and Tweeted content for Google the same way you would any other web page.

Search Engine Optimization Tips for Newbies

SEO or search engine optimization knowledge is a critical aspect of online marketing. Whether you want to blog, run an online store or do anything else successfully online, you need to figure out how to get noticed by search engines so that people can find you. Understanding SEO is critical for anyone who wants to be successful in online enterprise.

An important aspect of search engine optimization is the fact that you need to invest time and effort into your website on a regular basis in order get traffic and keep traffic continuously increasing. If you allow your website to sit and collect cobwebs it won’t do much for you.

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Marketing Your Website With Smart Design and SEO

As a Web Developer and SEO consultant I deal with many existing website owners who are looking to modify or improve their website. I also deal with many people who are looking to start their web presence with a new website. Through both of these interactions there is often a common theme; a misunderstanding or an attitude. I call this a misconception of reality, as often the reality of what the Internet can actually do for the persons business and what they think it can do differ massively.

Often it is presumed that by simply owning a domain and having a website built and published on the Internet, thousands of people will magically find the website, visit it and buy their products. “If you build it, they will come” should be removed from the vocabulary as soon as possible if you are to adjust attitudes to the underlying search technology. As a businessman in the real World, it is obvious that it would not happen outside of the Internet ether, so what is so different online? Maybe it was the Technology boom 10 years ago that caused a rift in understanding or maybe the buzz that caused the meteoric rise in the stock prices of Tech Companies, I can hear the thoughts of the small businessman, “surely this can be replicated for my business” – in answer I would say, “well, it is unlikely, but you should be able to achieve some results over time”.

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Pay Per Click VS. SEO – An Overview

Search Engine Optimization is the buzzword around at the moment. It is the art of getting a website to appear higher up in the “natural” results pages of Search engines like “Google”. Although I highly recommended SEO for any business wanting to push online sales or increase website visibility it does have a few limitations:

Time frame:
Due to the nature of how search engines operate and the vast size of the Internet it may take several months before you “see the fruits of your labour” with SEO.

Cost:
SEO is a very specialized field and this is reflected in the cost of hiring a professional seo company.

Black Hat techniques:
There are still many people selling SEO services that use “black hat” techniques in order to gain high rankings in the search engines. By “black hat” techniques I mean unethical techniques that cheat the search engines, for example “cloaking” or “doorway” pages. These techniques may cause a temporary rise in rankings for a website but you run the risk of being banned by the search engines.

Keywords:
It is very difficult to optimize a website for many keywords. You may be able to rank top for some of your keywords but if you sell thousands of individual products then that is only a small fraction of your market.

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The Truth About Web Directories

Since I started promoting my website, I came across a wide array of web directories, and I have to admit this question has been bugging me since then. Are Web Directories any good for the Internet?

Let’s start by getting the obvious out of the way first. The main purpose of web directories is to promote web sites. This isn’t usually done directly, by directing users through their links, since web directories don’t get that much traffic, but indirectly.

The way this indirect promotion works is that, after a website is registered in several web directories, search engines’ crawlers see the links and count them, increasing the page rank and search results for the specific web page.

Ok, this is fine, but what about the surfers? Let’s be honest, 99 percent of the people that visit web directories are web masters that want to promote their web sites by getting a few extra links. Web directories have never been too attractive to surfers. But can they become attractive? Well, my guess is they can. And the only way to do so is to become more user friendly and to provide surfers with useful content.
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