Archive for Featured

Top SEO Mistakes

March 24, 2012 Cory Ellis Featured, Search Engine Optimization, Web Marketing, Website Design

Your website position in the search engines will fluctuate and needs regular monitoring to make sure what you are doing is appropriate. Below are some of the most common search engine optimization mistakes.

Website Title

If any part of a website was of the highest priority it would be the title of each individual page. The title needs to be relevant, proper length and unique to every page. Many web designers don’t understand search engine optimization, or claim they do, but they don’t optimize even the simplest of areas on the web pages.

Website Description

The description tag is important because it’s what Google can use to give a brief synopsis of your web page. It’s not guaranteed that Google will use it, but it’s a highly percentage rate that they do.

Website SEO Keywords

There are hundreds of articles that say search engines, including Google, do not use the keywords meta tag. I will disagree with them 100% because I have tested the theory. Even if it was a “fluke” it doesn’t hurt to use the tag and I have seen results that contradict the articles saying it’s not valued.

No Relevant Keywords on a Page

If you page doesn’t mention your product or service you aren’t going to have good ranking within any search engine. With this being said it doesn’t imply that you should stuff the keyword all over the page to make it work, that will actually have a negative impact on your page. You need to be sure that you have mention of the page specific keywords on the page but that the page still makes sense to read.

Number of Back Links

Do you know how many other websites link to your website? Search engines do. The more links to your website from trusted website, the better. The quality and source of the links are highly important to search engines. You can have thousands of links from other websites to yours but if they are from sites search engines classify as controversial you will have a negative impact. If you suddenly gain hundreds of links overnight, this can also trip the alerts at the search engines and you can end up worse than before.

No comments

Anatomy of a Perfect Website Part 1

March 16, 2012 Cory Ellis Featured, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Web Marketing, Website Design

Long gone are the days where you can have your nephew create a website for you and hope that all goes well and you get business leads. Technology is evolving at such break neck speeds that you need to have a perfect website instead of a “good enough” website. If a user comes to your website and has any issues or any concerns they will immediately leave. Studies show you have approximately 15 seconds to capture a user and keep their attention. With this being said how do you know you have a perfect website?

First you need to ensure you have a captivating and fully functional web design that truly represent your company and the image you wish to provide. If your web design is mediocre or has limited functionality the user will find that out quickly and bail on you. Your web design needs to include several key features including navigation, usability, functionality and quality content.

Website navigation is the central nervous system of the website. If you don’t have a functioning and consistent navigation throughout the site your user will surely become frustrated and leave. The hierarchy of your website should be such that “parent” pages should be within a single click from anywhere from your site. Secondary pages should only be two clicks away, tertiary and below pages should only be three clicks away. If a user has to click more than three times, you have lost them.

Usability is just as important as any other portion of web design. If your user can’t easily use your website without being frustrated then it’s guaranteed they will leave. A user will not put up with frustrating websites especially when you have hundreds of competitors that might have an easier website.

Functionality is also a very important aspect of web design because without any functions your user won’t feel like they are benefiting from using your website. Your website might only be a news portal, but you still need some sort of functionality so the user is intrigued and wants to come back or stay longer.

Quality content is one of the most important features in a website. You can have great navigation, superb usability and excellent functionality but if your content is a copy of someone else your users will find that out and you will lose trust. Users want unique content with the company perspective and not just cookie cutter information they can find anywhere.

Stay tuned to learn about how social media, search engine optimization, tracking and analytics are also crucial to a perfect website.

No comments

Why Keyword Research Matters

February 21, 2012 Cory Ellis Featured, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Web Marketing

Keyword research is undoubtedly the most important part of SEO. If you try to implement a search engine optimization strategy without doing keyword research you might as well be shooting yourself in the foot.

You need to research what it is that people might be searching for to find your business. For example, are they going to be searching for “buy apple pie”, “make apple pie”, “sell apple pie”, “eat apple pie” etc. They are all about apple pie, but if you don’t have recipes on how to make apple pie then there isn’t any point to rank on it. Same goes for selling apple buy…if people want to buy apple pie and they find your site but you tell them how to make it then it’s a waste of ranking. You have put focus on a rank that isn’t providing conversion, thus rendering no value.

Once you have determined what keywords people will be searching to find your website you need to determine your audience. Demographics, age groups, religions, societies, cultures etc all can play important roles in your SEO strategy. You need to know if your website is targeted towards middle class stay at home mothers or high school drop out gothic teenagers. These are two very different target audiences that will expect two totally different websites.

SEO companies need to first determine the keywords that are relevant to the website, then the target audience/visitors and then search for keywords that are relevant to that target audience.

Understand that keywords are dynamic and will be ever changing with trends and vocabulary. What sounds good today might not be appropriate 6 months down the road. This means that keyword research should be a continuous process to ensure you are ranking on the correct searched keywords.

Keyword relevancy in content is a must, however it must be done tactfully and where it makes sense. You can no longer “keyword stuff” and expect the best result. Search engines have evolved past that and now penalize those websites whose content has too many keywords and doesn’t read properly. On top of that, if a user find your content but can’t read it because every other word is a keyword then they just hit the back browser and move on…fail.

Keyword research isn’t simply looking at your competitors and trying to rank on their keywords. It requires a methodical approach and continuous evaluation in order to be effective. Keyword research is sometimes described as being the most difficult to be effective at because it can be the most time consuming. Good keyword research is another piece of the search engine optimization puzzle.

No comments

Proper Landing Pages Generate Leads

February 19, 2012 Cory Ellis Featured, Search Engine Optimization, Web Marketing, Website Design

Landing pages are a very important puzzle piece with search engine optimization and are essential in funneling and engaging your customer. However, you can’t optimize landing pages for the search engines…you have to optimize them for your readers because the search engines aren’t going to be the ones to use your service or buy your product. While you do need to be found, once you’re found you have to be able to convert that into a revenue of some sort.

How to Build the Landing Page:

These are numerous guides and books available on the web about building landing pages. One of the more important common themes among all these available guides is that you need a “call to action” above the fold. Most SEO companies will say that they want text at the top of the page and all the other stuff can go below it because search engines like it that way. Once again, your customers and end users should be your target when building landing pages…not the search engines.

Before you create landing pages you need to have a purpose. Your website certainly has a reason whether it’s to sell a product, educate people, provide funding, deliver a service or whatever it is…it has a purpose. Now you have to determine with that purpose how do you want to attract people and convert them into customers.

Once you determine that you move on to grabbing the attention of the users and keep their attention while you push them towards your goal of converting them into a customer. You can do this with an attractive first paragraph with an almost immediate call to action. With this though keep in mind you need to attract not only the visual and mental users. Some users prefer images (visual users) and some prefer text (mental users).

So on your landing pages make sure you don’t mislead a user in any way. You need to provide them the information, product or service they are looking for and if you do that without making it difficult to find they will keep coming back to your website.

No comments

SEO and Social Media Are Intermingled

February 10, 2012 Cory Ellis Featured, Search Engine News, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Web Marketing

Whether you are a website owner or a business it’s imperative that you are involved in both search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing (SMM), also known and social media optimization (SMO). SEO and SMO go hand in hand and you need to be sure that your strategies work together to accomplish the same goal.

Search engines exist because they provide users the best possible search results based on a users input. They base results of matching hundreds of different evaluation points on any given website, then assign a rank to it and display those in a ranked order to the user.

Search engines don’t inherently trust website owners because not all website out there are legit or have a purpose. Some website are built solely to attack your computer so obviously search engines use extreme negative impacts on those sites to keep visitors away. One way to build trust within search engines is having your website linked to in a manner that makes sense. This doesn’t mean links farms or spamming links across the web. It means providing quality links from other websites so those surfing the other website can find your website and find it relevant.

Inbound linking has never been an exact science and unfortunately black hat SEO companies used spam tactics such as paid links, link farms and link exchanges to play the system. Search engines needed a better procedure for establishing which web pages were trusted by human visitors.

Social media was the answer that search engines were looking for. As popularity continues to grow and corporations started using it to share information and communicate with target audiences, the search engines took notice. Social media networks are an entire framework in which people share links to content they found useful. This data provides insight to the search engines as to which links are “valuable” based on “social signals”.

With this creating of “social signals” social media marketing and search engines optimization are now intermingled. This doesn’t mean that the same company has to do your social media marketing that does your SEO work, it simply means that the two need to communicate and be sure they are working towards the same goal. Social media content needs to be optimized and SEO content needs to be sharable so it will be shared across social media networks. Social media now has a major influence and its impact on search will allow for a more productive overall online marketing strategy.

No comments
« Older Entries  
  • RSS
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube