admin | Website Design and Internet Strategy for Business Owners

Trust Your SEO Company With Open Eyes

In business we have to trust our service providers. SEO companies are our gateway to online success. But it’s a good idea to keep a tab on what they are doing on our websites. Remember in the online world the website is your business store and you wouldn’t want a wrong description or profile projected! Or worse you wouldn’t want to be taken for a ride after paying those dollars!

Ask them for a keyword list and make sure that they get them right.
This is important. Take time off for it or you’ll spend five times over trying to rectify the error. You may not know what words your potential customers are using in search engines to try and find a business like yours. That’s why you’ve hired a SEO company in the first place. But instead of appearing stupid

Ask them for examples of your competitor’s sites
Ask them for a keyword list.
Select a mixture of keywords. Remember that the single word keyword will be the toughest to optimize for and they may not be the most suitable. Though there may be 5040 searches for ‘insurance’ per day there is no point in spending money optimizing for it. ‘Auto Insurance’, or ‘health insurance’ may be more suitable. Some thing like ‘dental insurance’ may be more specific. However, “call center” (treated as one word) can result in huge business.
Ask them the difficultly level of keywords. 45% or less are relatively easy to optimize for and higher the difficulty, the toughness of optimization increases.
Ask your SEO company to prepare a list of existing web pages on your website which target suitable keywords. That way you will know which page targets what keywords and how many more pages of content will be needed on the website.

So you get to control the costs.

Your chance of appearing at the top of search engine results is greatly enhanced if you focus your website optimization efforts on two/three word phrases instead of single words.

Check your webpage title
Now that you know what phrases which webpage is targeting check the title of the l page. You can view it in the top browser bar when you open your website. Your page title on your home page is the biggest indicator to search engines of what your website is all about. The page title originates in the Meta Tags, which are not displayed in the normal view of your website.

A page title should be between 10 to 60 characters long including spaces.
It should preferably be in the format <main keyword>, <sub keyword>, <brand name>

Remember that the company should optimize each page title on each page to get the best result. A random check is sufficient.

Get the Description Right
The description that appears below your URL in Google search engine is the metatag description that was included in the source code of your page. The Description should contain an enticing and informative snapshot of what the website is about and it should appeal to all search engines to appear. While Google takes a page description of 150 characters, MSN often takes the initial 100 characters from the Meta Description. The description should make sense, convey all relevant information about the web page and entice the reader to read the page. It is also worthwhile placing one related keyword phrase within the Meta Description. If possible add a phone number in the description metatag

Web Page Names
If your SEO company is a genuine company, they will most probably get it right. But step in here to ensure that the most important pages of your website can be told over the phone. After all it’s you and your team who will conduct the business. It should not be too long to fit in the business card. There are times when it is technically not possible. Ask them for a redirect.

Let People Find You
Add your contact number and office address prominently. Let people know that you have an office space. Give visitors a number to enquire for business.

Consideration for the Media
You may not be a big company right now, but as your business grows and your brand becomes recognizable the press may decide to follow you. Create a media corner. Put all your press releases, speeches and videos over there all at one place. Keep adding the latest press release to the site. Post your press release on the site a day or two earlier that the official press release.

Some Questions To Ask Your SEO Company To Keep Them On Their Toes

What ‘H’ Tags are you using? H Tags or ‘Heading Size’ were originally introduced to aid the formatting of HTML documents. Because their presence indicates page heading with larger text, many search engines have decided to count this as a significant part of their ranking. Websites should not be designed just for their look and feel. Equally they should not be designed only for search engines. However, with a bit of thought and creativity, web pages can be built with both visitors and search engines in mind.

Are you using the keyword in Alt Tags? Alt tags short form for Alternative Tags were originally designed to contain the text to be displayed on web pages instead of images if a user’s computer did not have the capacity to be able to display images. Alt Tags on images provide a great way of getting your keywords near the top of your pages without reducing your website readability. Alt Tags can also positively impact your internal website keyword linking. For a website to be successful, you have to create a new site entrance by adding Alt Tags to each image to appeal to search engines more effectively. With this, not only you are appealing to more users by using Alt Tags to your images, you will also be complying with website design standards for disabled users of your site.

Is the site navigation in text? As said earlier if your SEO company is genuine they will insist on text navigation and even navigation without menu. Generally, websites have their navigation links on the top or side of each web page. Unfortunately, many website navigation menus are image based. This means that search engines often won’t spider the linked pages as they do with text-based menu links.

Are you using the keywords to link to webpages? In technical parlance the phrases used to link to a particular webpage is called anchor text. They are given a lot of importance by search engines

Are all pages on the website linked by some page? Is the internal linking 100%? Well, we do not like loose ends, neither do search engine because they have been made by human. Make sure all the pages on your website can be reached by some page.

Work In Tandem
No SEO company can work effectively in isolation. They need your feedback, your suggestions (off and on). Ask for a monthly report to check your website’s keyword progress. Remember SEO is a long drawn process. Competitive keywords may be harder to optimize for. Once you reach page 1, the progress becomes slower. If you have found a good company all you have to do off and on is an occasional nip in the toes to ensure there is no scope for complacency.

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Website design | admin May 29, 2009 | Comments (3)

Making Market Testing and Analyzing a part of your Internet Strategy

Overnight online success is extremely rare. Most successes are a culmination of the testing, analyzing, improving and testing cycle.

If you really want online success, or even offline success, then you must understand the importance of correct marketing testing.

Ask yourself these questions as a starting point:

Do I have a website strategy?
What is my ROI on each strategy?
Am I you split testing your content?
Is tracking installed on each page of my website?
Am I monitoring my squeeze pages? If yes, Am I monitoring the results scientifically like following modifications of term and phrases, content and layout and other 2.0 web techniques? Which pages gives give me better returns? Can you analyze why?
Which form placement works better?
What site links are better exchanges?
Do I know the unique visitors, hits, time spent, page hit, etc., etc., etc. for your website?
Do you know all the measures for your website traffic?

This is just the beginning.

Scientifically track headlines, home page, navigation settings, Changes in pictures and graphics, location of certain offers, features, buttons, etc.

Monitor your links- both incoming and outgoing and your automated business functions and above all your list building and lead generation methods.

Always update your prospect and customer communication system and shopping cart.

In his free report on testing Ajay talks about some of the tracking measures and following the visitor profile.
“Here are some of the tracking measures you should be talking to your web designer/builder about. In fact, they should be talking to you about these things. If you have to bring them up you are already in trouble, with a capital T.
How many visitors are coming to the site?
How many of the visitors aren’t visitors (i.e. spiders, crawlers, etc. from search engines)
How many visitors are new vs. old?
How long does each visitor stay on your site?
What does each visitor look at?
What graphics, words, pictures, etc are generating the most responses?
Which search engines are getting you the best prospects?
Where else are your customers coming from
How many pages does the visitor look at?
What are your website rankings?
How much money have you made from the average visitor?
Who are your biggest money-making customers?
If you use PPC is it working and paying for itself?
Which links are bringing your visitors and are they converting to customers?
And so on…”
You can read the total report at http://www.gmrwebteam.com/images/FreeReportTestTrackMeasure.pdf

FUNDAMENTAL: your website should bring in more money than
it costs to maintain it!

Some Tools:

Website Traffic Related:
Quantcast
Google Analytics
Compete
Hitwise

Split Testing Tools
http://www.1shoppingcart.com (paid)
http://www.adwords.google.com (free if using analytics version)

Market Testing Tools and Websites

Google Insights (free)
Google Trends (free)
Survey Monkey (free and paid)
Dneero (paid)

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Website design | admin May 18, 2009 | Comments (3)

Building Links?

Link building continues to be an important part of online marketing and optimizing websites. Google, the most popular search engine, relies heavily on the link popularity of websites to determine the page rank of the site. If your website does not have inbound links from other websites, it will not achieve high rankings in highly competitive categories. Boosting the link popularity of a particular web page or website is known as off-page search engine optimization.

One of the biggest criteria for your website popularity and enhanced ranking in search engines is the quantity and quality of incoming links to your website. Incoming links are links leading to your site from other sites are an important factor affecting how well your site ranks in search engines. It is important to know how many incoming links your site has, their page rank and what anchor text is used in these links.

Probably, the best way to get link to your site is by offering to exchange reciprocal links. This is the process of exchanging links with the webmaster of another site. The procedure is that you place a link to their website and in return, they will place a link to your website. Reciprocal linking is an effective way of generating targeted, topic related traffic to your website. It is beneficial to both webmasters as both the sites benefit from the new-targeted, relevant links. Over time, Search engines will also increase rank after seeing new links pointing from other quality and relevant sites to your website.

But, Google values more on organic link building-building links that progress naturally rather than appearing artificial. One of the biggest things you can do to create more traffic to your website is to create back links from other sites. If you can get hundreds of relevant one-way back links to your website, then you are not only going to get traffic from the links, but also from the increased ranking in search engines.

Link building determines a site’s page rank in search engines. The higher the page rank on the web, the better your placement would be in search engine results.

Tips to build links for website optimization-

Submission to web directories- You can start your link building strategy by submitting your website link to web directory services on the net. There are thousands of directories ranging from the well-respected DMOZ, topic-specific directories to paid-inclusion directories. If you are on a limited budget, you can start submitting your links to free web directories. For example, DMOZ is a free directory, but has a somewhat lengthy process and it takes patience to get a link. On the other hand, if you are willing to pay, Yahoo! will add you to their directory within a week.
Article submission- A great way to build natural and permanent links to your website is through submitting articles to other websites, each of which contains one or more live links pointing to your business site. The fastest way to get your website indexed in search engines is by writing articles and submitting them to other website. Publishing quality content with your site’s link is a good internet marketing strategy for online businesses.
Publishing in social book marking sites- An easy way to propagate your links on the web is to use social book marking sites. You can submit a brief description of your site along with your links to social book marking page. If they find your page useful, they can bookmark it as well.
Press release submission- Just like article submission- you can do press release submissions to all the major press release sources to build links and create more traffic to your website. You don’t have to do press releases on a daily basis, but doing them in a weekly basis will go a long way to getting your website indexed quickly.
Forum Participation: This is another way of getting your link known to the right people and you gain the status of an expert here. Most forums allow a link back to your site after 15 to 30 forum posts.

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Website design | admin May 8, 2009 | Comments (0)

Press Releases for Internet Strategy

A turnaround in internet strategy is the use of press releases to reach out to millions of users who have internet access and subscribe to RSS feeds.

Gone are the days when press releases depended upon a handful of journalists. You can now communicate with your customers directly through Google, Yahoo and other such verticals. Your customers and potential customers should reda about yourproduct on the internet and reach your website directly.

You can write a press release about anything in your company. Do not wait for something big to happen.

Make sure that your press release contains terms and phrases that customers use to find you. This way you may be picked up by search engines.

Tips for Press Release

Always write your press release in third person.
Include a quote or two for authenticity.
Keep the headlines of your press release interesting.
Add a date to a press release only if necessary.
Add a follow-up URL in a press release; if necessary create specific landing pages. Try to track the visits from a press release to your website. It provides a useful insight into your customer behavior and is useful for further press release strategies.
Keep the press release length at about 350 to 500 words
Release the press release on your website and for submission simultaneously
Check for spelling mistakes
A press release that offers a new solution to an existing problem is likely to be picked up by readers.
Add social bookmarking tags to your press release, this makes it easier for a person interested in your product refer the product to his or her group. In short, it helps in viral marketing.

Press Release or Media Section on Website

It is helpful to have your own press release or media section on your website. It has been proved that journalists or even customers often visit the media or press release section on your site to try and get latest information about your company and its product. Additionally, press releases will live on your site forever, but will get deleted from other sites, most probably after three months. You media section can also include informative videos and audios that a customer may enjoy seeing.

A word of caution however. DO NOT ignore the traditional media. They have their own role to play especially in attracting local business. Use the internet aprt from the traditional press.

List of Press Release sites

Fast Pitch Networking

Press-Release-Writing

Press Release Network

Mass Media Distribution

Free-Press-Release-Center

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Internet Strategy | admin April 29, 2009 | Comments (0)

Article Marketing- Internet Strategy for Business

What is Article Marketing?
The writing of articles related to your services, product or expertise and publishing it online for general audience is called article marketing.

How does it work?
Let us take the example of a site that offers weight loss surgery in Mexico. This site publishes a lot of articles online, almost 6 to 7 articles per month. Around 10% of visitors to this site (among 10,000s) come from article sites. This site uses article marketing as a foremost technique in its strategy for online visibility and targeted audience.

The best part is that this form of marketing comes relatively cheaper or even for free if you have a knack of writing.

So how does the site get traffic from article sites? All article publishing sites have an author resource box that lets you say something about yourself and your website. This author resource box is an important place for internet strategy because visitors get to know you and your website. So in the author resource box the site says that “ABC is the founder and owner of XYZ, a company specializing as a scheduling service for weight loss surgeries in the safest city in Mexico at one-third the prices of weight loss surgery in USA because cost of living in Mexico is cheaper than the US.”

After reading the resource box people click on the link and come to the site because they have read your article and want to know more.

Do how does it help you?

Sends traffic to your website through the resource box.
Gets back links to the site, which matters where search engines are concerned.

How to do it?
For optimum results each article should be around 500 to 700 words.

Target only a single keyword in the article, and use synonyms.
Pay particular attention to the resource box. It has the capability to drive traffic to your site.
Do not blatantly promote your site or product.

What is Article Marketing?
The writing of articles related to your services, product or expertise and publishing it online for general audience is called article marketing.

The best part is that this form of marketing comes relatively cheaper or even for free if you have a knack of writing.

After reading the resource box people click on the link and come to the site because they have read your article and want to know more.

Do how does it help you?

Sends traffic to your website through the resource box.
Gets back links to the site, which matters where search engines are concerned.

How to do it?
For optimum results each article should be around 500 to 700 words.

Target only a single keyword in the article, and use synonyms.
Pay particular attention to the resource box. It has the capability to drive traffic to your site.
Do not blatantly promote your site or product.

Article Format
Ensure that your articles are well formulated.

A Headline: that is attractive, arouses curiosity, highlights a problem and entices the reader to read on. Try to ensure that the keyword in contained in the headline.
A Sub-Headline: is an option in some sites. It should offer a light into the problem highlighted in the headline

Keywords: Put the primary keyword first followed by variations of the phrase along with synonyms.
Article body: should be of around 500 words. Try to keep the flow smooth covering all aspects of your topic in brief.

Author Resource Box; author resource box is the most important link back to your website. Your article may be excellent, but if people do not visit your site it’s all effort gone down the drain. The resource box must tell something about you, your website and MUST contain a Call to Action. For example:

My Article Is Ready Now What?

One your article is ready you need to post your articles online to get them across to viewer.
There are two ways to do it.

Use a paid posting service like SubmitYOURArticle that publishes the article on it’s website and syndicates it to publishers further.
Use the repository of free article posting websites on the internet and post the articles at those sites.

In both cases you need to create a user account. Remember, some sites will publish them immediately while others will publish the articles after screening them.

Helpful Hints