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7 Key Search Engine Optimization Tips

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Good SEO is invaluable to achieving online success. Before you invest in a search engine optimization tutorial here are some tips for getting the most beneficial effects from your optimization efforts.

1. Text is the favorite format of search engine spiders. You can rely on spiders to crawl and read a website that
has sufficient text content. If your website is heavy on graphics or dynamic content, find some way to work some basic body text into your site because spiders don’t really see Flash, JavaScript or image text.

2. When creating content, stick to one topic for each page. Several topics on a single page confuses readers and
leads to poorer relevancy.

3. Use your strongest keywords early on in your copy, preferably in the first sentence. Craft your sentence in
such a way as to help spiders establish a relationship between keywords. Insert keywords and key phrases in subsequent sentences, but avoid overusing them as this might lead search engines to consider it as spam. How do you determine if you’ve overused a word or phrase? Read your copy out loud. If it sounds natural, then it’s probably all right. If, however, there is a noticeable and awkward recurrence of the keywords, then you need to modify your copy.

4. Provide clear trails for spiders so that they can move from point A to point B and so on until they’ve covered the extent of your website that you want them to cover. A simple way to achieve this is by supplying a text-based sitemap with a link to every page on your site that you want the spiders to crawl. This is especially beneficial if your site is relatively new and has few inbound links or if your site is comprised largely of images or other format that is not easily discoverable by spiders.

Sitemaps are of benefit as well to websites that have a large volume of content pages that are not linked to each other. Although they serve more as a directional tool for spiders than for your human visitors, do consider your website’s visitors when creating your sitemap.

5. In some cases, you may not want spiders to access certain pages on your site. This may be due to privacy reasons or, because the pages are irrelevant to the site as a whole or something else. Learn to use “robots.txt” files to instruct spiders to stay away from such content.

6. Make your URL search-engine-friendly. Use two to three relevant keywords in your URL. Use lower case letters instead of uppercase, and hyphens instead of underscores. In general, simple, easy to remember URLs without too much punctuation are the way to go.

7. After the URL, spiders look at the page title. Titles are a very important on-page factor when it comes to ranking because a good title conveys to spiders what your webpage is about, therefore making it easier to index. When composing titles, use two or three strong keywords that tell the topic of the page and that you want to rank for. Keep in mind that the first words of the title are given the most importance, so you want to get those keywords in at the beginning. Your title is also what is shown to searchers in search engine results pages. Google shows up to 70 characters of a page title in their results page. Be sure to make each page title unique, even if topics may be similar. This avoids confusion.

Source: http://www.seo-news.com/7-key-search-engine-optimization-tips/

Advanced SEO Techniques for Website Optimization

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Alt attributes are a way to describe images to search spiders simply because search spiders cannot see them. It is not only an opportunity to add more content (with keywords) to your site, but it also helps your images to be searchable on Google. For best results, all images should also have distinct filenames.

Alt tags were originally designed to be displayed as an alternative text to an image in cases when an image cannot be displayed in a browser. Also, alt tags are displayed when users rest their mouse on the image.

2. Title Tags

A title tag describes an online document and has the most SEO power for establishing keyword relevance on the page. The Title tag appears at the very top of a browser or tab window, in search result pages, and external websites.

At 70 characters or less (including spaces), the title tag should include a few relevant keywords and a company or brand name. Important keywords should be placed at the beginning of the title tag. It is recommended to avoid using stop words such as “the,” “is,” “can,” “and,” “but,” “while,” “that,” “we,” etc. that have no keyword value.

3. Meta Descriptions

Meta tags give search spiders a summary of what the page is about. Meta descriptions play an important role in search results and gaining users click-through. Google sometimes uses this summary to display in search result pages (SERPs) and highlights keywords relevant to the search query.

The optimal length of meta description is between 150-160 characters and should include keywords that are relevant to the title tag and content. Consider this an opportunity to advertise the content of your page to searchers.

Ideally, each page should be optimized around one main key phrase that should be included in your title tag, meta description, and content.

4. Sitemap.xml

Google uses Sitemaps to learn about a website’s structure, which allows a better crawling of your site. Creating a Sitemap ensures that search spiders know all the pages of your site that may not be discoverable through the normal crawling process.

Sitemaps are also used to provide metadata about specific types of content on your site such as video, images, mobile, and news. Sitemap.xml files reside in the website main directory and have to be submitted to Google using Google Webmaster Tools.

5. Robots.txt

In addition to Sitemaps, a robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about access to your site. Before accessing pages of a site, search spiders check the robots.txt file to see if it restricts them from accessing certain pages. You only need a robots.txt file if the directory of your site includes content that you don’t want search engines to index. The robots.txt file resides in the main directory of your site.

6. Rich Snippets and Microdata

High ranking on the search engine result pages (SERPs) is no longer the only problem to solve with website optimization. When searchers glimpse through result pages they look for additional relevant information to their query before they click-through. Rich snippets provide searchers with that information and help them quickly decide if the content that exists on a web page is relevant.

To implement rich snippets web developers have to add additional HTML markup to a website. One of the most used markups is microdata. Using simple HTML tag microdata allows you to indicate specific type of information: reviews, people, products, businesses and organizations, recipes, events, music and video content.

7. Code Restructuring

Though search algorithms have changed dramatically since their original inception, search spiders still don’t search deep into a site and don’t spend much time on any given page. With this in mind, code restructuring of some pages is still a valid addition to any advanced SEO techniques. Web developers restructure a page (without affecting a page layout) in a way that places content higher in the code. This helps spiders quickly find relevant information.

The above advanced SEO techniques will significantly improve your website’s online visibility, but that’s not the limit of SEO optimization that can be done to a website. A website can be further optimized for better usability with accesskeys (use of keyboard shortcuts), tabindex (use of tab key to navigate through a page), and web accessibility for people with disabilities. It might sound like unnecessary optimization, but everything that makes a website more human friendly is highly valued by search engines.

Source: http://www.seo-news.com/advanced-seo-techniques-for-website-optimization/

Behind the Scenes: An Exclusive Interview With Google’s Matt Cutts

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Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, reveals information most of us have never heard before in an interview with Eric Enge, founder of Stone Temple Consulting. Cutts discusses why content does not rank, linking, why infographics may become Google’s next target, and how Google may treat content curation.

Read all the way through—you may just learn something new.

Here are some of the highlights of the interview:

Duplicate Content that is not Duplicate Content

Traditionally, duplicate content refers to pages or copy on websites that are exact duplicates of each other. But in the interview, Eric brings up an even more important issue of which most people are not aware. He asks Matt about content that essentially says the same thing yet it is not an exact duplicate.

He uses this example:

When performing a search on “frogs”, users may see content like this:

Users may not like what they see so they move on to the next website that reveals this content:

At this point users may get frustrated because this is not the information they seek and it is just a copy of the rest. Eric points out that even though the content is not an exact duplicate, it still consists of the same information. And simply being “non-duplicate” is not enough to rank well in the search engines.

Matt agreed with Eric and stated that the second site was not bringing any additional value. He stated that the people who are regurgitating the same old content are not doing anything wrong; however, they won’t rank well.

According to Matt, “Google would seek to detect that there is no real differentiation between these results and show only one of them so we could offer users different types of sites in the other search results.”

When asked a question about e-commerce and aggregator sites, Matt Cutts explains that sites that aggregate content must discover their “value add” and what makes them special.

No Special Privileges for Big Brands

Most of us at one time or another thought Google was playing favorites with big brands—I know I did. Eric asked Matt about his opinion on people who feel Google is favoring advertisers with big budgets.

Matt Cutts’ response:

“First off, I just want to emphasize that whether someone is an advertiser doesn’t help in our web search rankings at all.

Google does try to mirror the real world. We try to reflect the real-world importance of things as we see that reflected in the web. Brands sometimes are an indicator that people see value, but it isn’t the only way that people see value. There are many other possible indicators that something is important and worth surfacing in the search results.

A brand could be potentially useful, but it’s certainly not the only lens to interpret the world. There are lots of signals we use to try to find the results that bring the most value to users. And whether or not someone is an advertiser does not matter at all.

One of the great things about the web is that it still offers up-and-coming businesses opportunities to build their own reputation online. This can enable them to succeed even though other companies may have large advertising budgets.”

Linking

Eric told Matt that he feels linking has misled people to think they must reach a far off place to acquire links, “places where no one ever goes.” In these places, marketers do not care about what they do there. This has become a linking mindset.

Matt agreed with Eric’s example and added that people think of linking as the end goal instead of prioritizing producing excellent content. Once you create content, he says to focus on promoting it.

Eric talks about building a reputation which forces website owners and business to engage in the right types of activities. When you get links from article directories, link wheels, blog networks, and sites that are not concerned with editorial quality, you are not building your brand.

Matt Cutts responds:

“By doing things that help build your own reputation, you are focusing on the right types of activity. Those are the signals we want to find and value the most anyway. Just promoting your site on a spammy blog network that no one would ever choose to visit is not a good strategy.

It’s wild to see some blog networks just repackage the same spammy sites and services and have the nerve claim that their content is ‘Panda and Penguin compliant’ when the quality of the network is clearly not at the level that even a regular person would choose to read it.”

Infographics and Link Bait

We discussed link bait in previous Site-Reference articles and the topic has become prevalent on the web. Link bait is a piece of content that goes viral and causes others to link to the original publisher. SEO greats such as Bruce Clay and others touted link bait as an effective method to acquiring high-quality links, but Matt Cutts had a little more to say about it.

Matt agrees that businesses can use this type of content as a promotional tool, but infographics can blur the lines of spam which we all know Google will not tolerate. Matt doesn’t mind infographics, but he does not like when they are used as strictly promotional and include incorrect facts and unrelated links. When people repost the infographics on their sites, they are unaware of the link’s destination which could be totally unrelated to the infographic. According to Matt, “This is not what a link is meant to be.”

Will Google make some algorithm changes to infographics? It may be on the way…

Matt says:

This is similar to what people do with widgets as you and I have talked about in the past. I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree. The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, vs. a true endorsement of your site.

Any infographics you create will do better if they’re closely related to your business, and it needs to be fully disclosed what you are doing. The big key is that the person publishing the infographic has to know, and agree with, including an endorsement to your site as attribution with the infographic. Even then, there is reason to believe that the link is more about the barter to get the infographic than a real endorsement of your site.

Content Curation

I discussed content curation briefly in my last article, and Google seems to be following the path I proposed it would.

Eric mentioned that businesses are using content curation to increase their content.

Matt didn’t seem too keen on the idea. He questioned whether content cutators are really focusing on a value add, and also whether visitors will want to read others’ opinions on these topics.

In Matt’s own words:

“If the information stream is coming from a third party service and you aren’t involved in anyway, except for providing a place to publish it, this may be something that you might want to decide not to do.

We might not view this as spam, but it’s sort of shallow and we would tend to not want to rank this type of content as highly.”

That last sentence pretty much sums it up. Content curation will most definitely fall under Google’s radar. I suppose that when mixed with fantastic content as part of an overall marketing strategy, it will not hurt a site. But Google will see right through the webmaster using content curation specifically to manipulate rankings.

Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/behind-the-scenes-an-exclusive-interview-with-googles-matt-cutts/

Google+ – Believe the Hype

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Google just celebrated the one year anniversary of its latest social networking endeavor, Google+. While proselytizers and critics armed with competing statistics argue both its success and failure, it is clear that Google+ is the centerpiece to an evolving social strategy that is guiding the development of many Google products. Skeptics site usage numbers compared with Facebook and Twitter to suggest Google+ is nothing but a mirage. Google claims 250 million accounts have been created and 150 million accounts are used monthly with 50 percent signing in daily. In contrast, Facebook boasts more than 900 million active users per month. One study cited in a recentWall St. Journal article claims users spent six to seven hours per month on Facebook, versus three minutes per month on Google+. While comparisons with the dominant social media sites, Facebook and Twitter, seem obvious, they overlook the real strategy behind Google+ and fail a simple apples-to-apples test.

It makes an easy and compelling narrative to suggest that Google launched Google+ as a competing social networking site to an ominous and growing threat from Facebook, Twitter, and other emerging social platforms and is desperately trying to catch up with the popularity of these properties. This fails to capture Google’s social strategy and the unique power inherent in the Google+ framework. As stated by Google social and mobile global marketing director Rikard Steiber, “Google+ is not another social destination, but it’s more sort of bringing a social layer to everything people are doing on Google already today.” They are striving to add social relevance to what billions of people are already using Google for: search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, as well as future internal and third party development. This is a critical distinction – Google+ is not a destination on the web that relies on monetizing users while they are on the site therefore dependent on maintaining and increasing engagement.

Google is a company that has monetized its core service – search – by creating an ad platform that dominates the web; Google controls over 44 percent of global online ad revenues – Facebook controls 3.1%. They have recognized that in order to maintain and expand this advantage, they must harness people’s social, local and real time interactions into search results. Google+ is not a place to hangout, it is a structure and developing set of tools that enables Google to bring all the advantages of social into their existing, extremely profitable, framework. The threat they face is not external, from a social networking behemoth like Facebook, it is internal – failing to evolve their cash cow to incorporate the new social demands of their users.

This competition in the social space has important implications for all of the businesses currently, and soon to be, in awkward pursuit of getting me to “like” their Facebook page, follow them on Twitter, or say nice things about them on Yelp. As I detailed in a previous article, Google is strong-arming businesses both small and large into taking their social framework seriously, and already there are over one million brands with a presence on Google+. Research shows that social cues, recommendations, criticisms, and suggestions from peers have a far greater impact on our consumption patterns than advertising alone. It is estimated that over 70% of branded content online is user-generated. This is why all of the companies in the social space are hyper-focused on incorporating the likes, dislikes, suggestions and recommendations from our social networks into the content, advertising, and search results they are feeding us. There is a huge pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for any company that creates a user experience that fuses this seamlessly, elegantly and inoffensively.

From this perspective, it is hard to argue against Google having an immense advantage over its rivals. Rather than trying to develop ways to monetize the social behavior of their users, Google is faced with compelling its massive user base to use its Google+ framework to build a vibrant social foundation for their existing products and services. If Google is able to stay current with their users’ desires for social influence on the products and services they already rely on Google for, their potential to remain an overwhelmingly dominant and profitable force on the web for many years to come will be very difficult to challenge. Their search network alone answers over 3.2 billion queries a day – even a fraction of a percent of that traffic clicking on an ad, for pennies a click, yields significant revenue to build on.

Source: http://site-reference.com/articles/google-believe-the-hype/

10 WordPress Plugins That Save Bloggers Time

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Featured Article Picture

1. WordPress.com Stats

Personally, I feel it is essential for bloggers to track the activity on their blogs. You can make use of a web analytics tool, but it takes sometime to navigate through all the reports. That is where a plugin will be handy. The WordPress.com Stats plugin is a big help in this regard. Instead of using another application, you can keep track of your blog’s stats directly from your WordPress dashboard.

2. WP-Polls

It is a well-known fact that people like to participate in polls. There are options available to you on the internet, but the WP-Polls plugin will allow you to create custom polls on your WordPress dashboard. You do not have to leave your account to log into another site to manage it. This is only if you want to make use of polls.

3. Sociable

This plugin automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites.

4. Akismet

It is very important to activate your Akismet plugin on your blog. It is a fact that blogs unfortunately get comments that are spam. This plugin checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “comments” admin screen. Your readers do not like to see spam comments. This can easily result in a decrease of your traffic. I cannot stress this enough, please make sure you are using a plugin like Akismet. This WordPress plugin will save you time.

5. Math Comment Spam

In the fast growing era of technology, it is unfortunately a fact that comment spam blocking plugins like Akismet will not always be enough to eliminate all spam comments. By using the Math Comment Spam plugin in conjunction with the Akismet plugin, you will be able to decrease spam comments. The Math Comment Spam plugin will ask readers a simple math problem such as 2 x 3 before they can comment. This is to make sure that it is a human comment.

6. Theme Tester

Editor’s Note: The Theme Tester plugin may not work with newer versions of WordPress. A good alternate plugin is Theme Test Drive which can be found at:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/theme-test-drive/

It sometimes happens that bloggers want to change the WordPress theme. You do not want your audience to see the changes until all is finished and ready. This is where the Theme Tester plugin is of great help. Your readers will see your existing design until all is set up and ready for publishing.

7. WP-Database Backup

I want you to read the following with attention! If your blog is important to you, do yourself a big favor and install the WP-Database Backup plugin. It is most crucial to have this plugin installed and set to back up your WordPress database. This plugin will save the data on your hard drive or it will be sent to you via email. The next important point I want to stress is the following: Please keep in mind that this plugin makes a backup of your database files only. Make sure to make a manual backup of your WordPress content folder from your hosting account.

8. Easytube

This plugin will help you to get a YouTube or Google video published on your blog. It easily makes embedding YouTube and Google videos into your post a snap. Easytube also includes a preview image of your YouTube videos in the RSS feed with a link to the video. If you want to make use of visual media, it is essential to install this plugin.

9. Auto Close Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks

To reduce spam on older posts, you can make use of this plugin. Older posts are targets for automated comment spam bots. After installing the plugin, set the timeframe to a date when you want to close comments on your posts.

10. Google Maps Plugin

Editor’s Note: The Google Maps plugin may not work with newer versions of WordPress. A good alternate plugin is the Comprehensive Google Map plugin which can be found at:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comprehensive-google-map-plugin/

This plugin speaks for itself. If you want to make use of maps from Google to be part of your blog post, this plugin will assist you in the process of creating, inserting and customizing it. This WordPress plugin will definitely save you time.

I really hope these 10 WordPress plugins will save you time and make blogging a treat. Make use of them and enjoy your blogging!

Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2012/07/12/10-wordpress-plugins-that-save-bloggers-time/

Google Over-Optimized Penalty Overview

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Everybody who is involved in internet marketing and search engine optimization has definitely heard about Google Panda algorithm and penalties associated with it. It has been talked about for so long, so people got used to it and in one way or another we are all trying to cope with it, hoping that bad times are behind us. But you know what? It is not over yet.

Now there is a big buzz going around the web that they are about to introduce new penalties for over optimized websites. It means that if you did what was said in SEO books even one year ago, you can end up in being penalized for it. We personally think that Google is becoming too obsessed as they have enough analytics already to recognize dodgy sites. It seems they behave like the one who could not get enough and want more and more until they end up with nothing. World is really need an alternative to this monopolized market, but until it is not there we have to play their game.

So, what they mean by over optimized websites? We will try to analyse it below.
First think you need to check is your title and description. Those are your face for all search engines. Take a careful look at them and make sure that you do not just list keywords there, especially if all of them contain the same short keyword in each of them. The idea is that your title and description should be targeting your readers, but not search engines. The main idea here is that users are more likely to click on meaningful titles rather than on keywords. And if you have already read our Google Panda Overview post, then you should know how important click through rate is.

Second thing you need to think about is your internal backlinks structure. We all know that this is a very important part of SEO and we all use it on our sites. But be careful and do not overdo it. There are a lot of websites there, which stuff their posts with a lot of links to internal pages; they want to rank higher in search engines. Now this is considered as not a very good practice. Try to limit this and add only one or two text links there or even skip them if you have other backlinks in your posts. Especially avoid adding the same link multiple times on the same webpage.
Another tip, related to it is to avoid multiple links in your footer. I believe everyone has seen websites with a lot of links to internal or external pages, hidden in the footer. Stop doing it and find another place for those links on your website. Also, you should not make those links of the similar colour as your background. We all know that the same colour is a huge NO-NO practice, so a lot of webmasters started to use similar colours as a workaround. So, from now on, consider it as NO-NO too, as if you are caught you can lose more then you have gained from it.

Third point is to avoid backlinks from private networks. We think that it is not really dangerous to get backlinks from those if they are placed correctly. You should avoid networks, which contain interlinked members of them, as they can be easily detected. Another type of networks to stay away from those, which claim that, they will place your article to multiple websites. No matter how good your spun article is, it is really impossible to spin the same text even ten times so it cannot be recognized as the same article by smart search engine crawlers. So, if you really want to use blog networks, then you should use those, which allow you to publish one or two posts for the same article. We are planning to open our own network, which we are using for promoting our websites. So, if you are interested, keep an eye on our blog for announcements.
The same tip is relevant for article marketing. Do not publish the same article to multiple article directories. This means you should avoid automated tools like article marketing robot or use them very carefully.

Last thing we want to talk about is a content of your website. One thing you need to stay away from is from adding text to your content, which is specifically dedicated to search engines. Quite often webmasters publish very useful content, which might be difficult to optimize for specific keywords and then they add a paragraph to that article, which is stuffed with keywords and not really beneficial from readers’ point of view. This is going another target for Google in the nearest future.
Another important tip for the content of your website is avoiding multiple webpages optimized for the same keywords. It is fine to have several of them as it can be difficult to avoid this completely if your website is targeting a small niche, but you must avoid having lots of pages optimized for slightly modified keyword terms.

To summarize this, we tried to give you a very brief overview of additional things you need to look at when creating and developing your websites, so you stay under the radar of search engines. You should use these techniques together with all the others; we talked about earlier, in our previous posts. If you follow our advice, you will definitely rank higher than your competition and more importantly, you will be on a safe side from being penalized by Google.

Source: http://www.backlinks4u.com/blog/google-over-optimized-penalty-overview/

 

15 Website Secrets that Will Generate Revenue for Your Business

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Every minute of the day, people are searching online for answers. If they need a new car, it is more than likely that they will first research it online before ever visiting a dealership. If they are looking for a restaurant in a particular area, chances are that they will “Google it” to find it. The internet serves as the perfect matchmaker between businesses and potential customers.

Once a potential customer has stumbled across your company’s website, you have about two seconds to capture their attention. If you haven’t captured their attention within those first couple of seconds, they simply click off of your website and onto the next one down the list. That is why it is crucial to have your website set up for optimal conversion. If your website doesn’t have these 15 elements, then it’s probably not bringing you business. Here are the 15 must haves and must not haves of an effective website:

1. A Bold Headline at the Top of Every Page

The headline should be short and it MUST depict what benefit the customer will get by reading further on. People today are busy and the internet includes millions of other websites that people can move onto if your site does not capture their attention immediately. Too many companies make the mistake of marketing about themselves rather than about the consumer. This is called “Ego Marketing.” To be effective, the headline message must always be about how your company can help the consumer or what you can offer to them.

2. “TMI” (Too Much Information)

No more than 2 paragraphs on a page. In this busy era, people don’t have the attention span to read any more than that. Plus, if you give them too much information, then they have no reason to contact you. The whole idea is to get the website visitor to call, stop in or contact you in some way, right?

3. Have a Call to Action on Every Page

… but have no more than two calls to action per page. Studies have shown that if you give people too many choices then it overwhelms them and that is when they will take no action at all. That’s the point where they will usually say “I have to think about it.” So put a clear call to action on every page and actually tell the website visitor what to do next on each page. Examples- “Click here now” or ” Call 1-800-555-5555 for more information.”

4. Have a User Friendly Navigational Bar

A prominently placed menu bar makes each page of your website easy to use. Keep it simple.

5. A Picture

A picture can easily replace a thousand words. A picture that depicts what the page or product/service is about can capture their attention much more effectively than paragraphs of text which will only send visitors clicking away.

6. Consistent Branding

It is important to have a consistent look and style throughout all of a company’s marketing pieces. This instills a reputable image of your company to the consumer. Avoid having a different style on your website than what you have on your other marketing pieces.

7. Name and Contact Info of the Company on Every Page of the Website

It seems simple, but if you search around, you would be surprised at how may companies overlook the basics.

8. Limit Color to No More than 3 Complementary Colors

More than that is too busy to the eye. It will distract the visitor’s attention away from what you want them to be focusing on.

9. White Space

White space is a breath of fresh air for the eyes. If a person can look at the web page for two seconds, and then look away and be able to tell you what the main subject was of the page, then you’ve got a winner. If not, then go back and eliminate items until the two second rule applies.

10. No Auto Load Music or Video

A sudden burst of noise when a visitor clicks onto your website typically will cause users to click right back off of the page. Let the website visitor click on the video or sound file to play it when they are ready to.

11. An Email Sign Up Form

… on at least one page of your website will provide leads that can be followed and nurtured for months. Even if the website visitor is not ready to make a purchase that day, they may be ready a couple of months later after they have received regular emails from your company.

12. An Interactive Link to Contact Your Company

Whether it be an email link or a form box, make it easy for the website visitor to contact your company with just a click of the mouse. An interactive, simple to use website produces more leads than a site that makes the visitor work for it.

13. An Interactive Map to the Company Location With Directions

With Mapquest and Google maps, this has become the common way for people to get directions. It can be added to a website in just a couple of clicks and it gives the visitor an easy way to find you.

14. Company Business Hours

Surprisingly this is quite often forgotten. It is also smart to add the time zone… remember, this is the world wide web. Visitors to your site are not necessarily in your same time zone.

15. Keep It Relevant

It’s nice to add a personal touch to your website, but remember, people who are looking for a company to do business with, may not have the same personal, religious or political beliefs as you do. So be certain to only include information relevant to the business. Don’t include personal pages on religion, politics or other non-relevant information. No one wants to lose a potential customer due to opposing personal beliefs. Remember, business is business. Leave your personal life at home.

Every year, statistics keep rising on the percentage of consumers that first search online in order to find information on new products or services. In 2011, it was upwards of 85% depending on the type of industry being searched. Don’t miss out on your opportunity to capture that potential business. Follow these 15 tips and then analyze the response that you get. If at first you
don’t succeed, tweak it until you start getting results.

Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2012/07/10/15-website-secrets-that-will-generate-revenue-for-your-business/

The Declaration of Online Independence

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When the founding fathers started this country back in 1776, their idea of sending a quick communiqué involved dispatching a printed message on horseback. Even Ben Franklin, the colonial father of electricity, a talented inventor and printer in his own right, could not have foreseen the invention and proliferation of the Internet. In fact, had the Internet been available in the latter half of the eighteenth century, just think of the possibilities:

Would the “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” have morphed into the “Midnight Tweet of Paul Revere?” Would George Washington have consulted weather.com before attempting to cross the Delaware River on December 25, 1776? Imagine the galvanizing effect that the Boston Tea Party would have had if it had been rebroadcast on YouTube or shown live on Google Hangouts On Air. What do you suppose would have been the British response if the Declaration of Independence had made its debut to Facebook’s 900 million members?

The possibilities are endless and the outcome of the American Revolution could have been very different had the World Wide Web been in vogue back then. But one thing is certain. All those long dead patriots would have embraced the technological advantages represented by anunfettered worldwide communications system with both hands. Which is what makes it so difficult to understand why so many modern business owners still seem reluctant to exploit the obvious advantages of the Internet.

Even though the web has been around for more than 15 years, an Ad-ology survey reported that 46 percent of small business owners did not have a Web site in 2010. Even more startling is the fact that 95% of small businesses who do have a site have little or no presence on page one of the major search engines. Granted, with Google controlling up to 80% of the search market and 260 million websites currently online, it is getting harder to generate a page one result. Still, the single reason that most small businesses have such a poor showing online has more to do with poor habits than poor performance.

In my last two posts, How to Make Google-Ade and The Shortcut to Online Success, I pointed out the fact that not only was there more than one way to skin a search engine, but that there were a number of techniques that could propel most anyone to page one prominence without altering your website at all. Most of these “shortcuts” rely on Web 2.0 technology, such as blogging, social networks and video. Therein lies the rub. While most business people are involved in blogging and social networking to some extent, most do not understand how to properly employ these technologies to enhance their online marketing.

Revolutionary Marketing Technology at Your Fingertips

Take blogging, for instance. While many business owners have a blog, most do not blog on a weekly basis. They either can’t find the time to blog, or they can’t come up with anything to write about week in and week out.

What they don’t seem to understand is that blogging is one of the best ways to reach out and engage both prospects and customers alike. They also don’t realize that the average business owner literally trips over ideas, human interest stories and pearls of wisdom that would be of interest to the public on almost a daily basis.

The problem is that when they come upon these concepts they fail to make note of them by either writing or photographing these gems as soon as they occur, even when they have the perfect device to perform both these chores right on their hip.

That’s right, a smartphone is the easiest way to capture any moment for posterity that has ever been invented. Not only can you photograph an event, most smartphones are video capable. This means you can provide a running commentary that can be used as an electronic notebook which can later be reviewed in order to write your blog.

Better yet, you can cut out the middle man altogether and create a video blog that can then be distributed on your social networks, embedded on your website and blogs and even attached to any printed literature via QR code.

Keep in mind that Google actively searches for mixed media such as video and you can kill two birds with one stone by creating and optimizing videos that can then migrate to page one of the world’s most popular search engine.

While there are a number of other revolutionary online technologies that can provide any business with a competitive edge, the only way that the web will work for you is if you work the web.

The bottom line is that if the Internet is important to the continued success of your business, then you need to start making it a priority to engage and interact with your audience on at least a weekly basis. Whether you perform this task yourself, or you outsource it to a professional online marketer is entirely at your discretion. But, if you want to stop languishing in the backwaters when it comes to communicating with the public, you only have two choices:

1. Embrace online marketing.
2. Buy a horse.

Source: http://www.sitepronews.com/2012/07/10/the-declaration-of-online-independence/

Google Compared To Drug Dealer For Google Shopping Strategy

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Google Compared To Drug Dealer For Google Shopping Strategy

Google Shopping has been at the center of a lot of controversy since the company announced it in May. The paid inclusion approach has brought up Google’s old “do no evil” mantra, the FTC has been called upon to scrutinize the entire search industry on disclosure of paid results (whichGoogle says it would support), and a lot of people are up in arms about Google removing listings for weapons.

The simple fact that Google has moved to a paid model (away from the free listing model of Google Product Search), however, is what really has a lot of merchants angry.

David Scarpitta, CEO of online retailer DasCheap, has gone so far as to issue a press leasecomparing Google to a drug dealer, and indicating that he’s been forced to raise prices on his site.

“I hate to put it like this, but Google is acting kind of like a drug dealer,” Scarpitta said. “They let you try it free, then get people hooked and dependent upon it, and then you are forced to pay in order to survive as normal.”

“It’s a very sad thing,” he added. “Even here at DasCheap! we had to raise some prices in order to compensate for these costs. As so many web users use Google for accurate and instant shopping information, it has become a second nature to search there so we had no choice but to pay if we want to show our discounted items to the masses, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to show our discounted products to online users if we don’t pay. Essentially this forces us to raise prices across the board. So in essence, the finger points back to Google for the raise in retail prices. And even more unfortunate for other online retailers that can’t afford the extra expense will now lose an important revenue stream, that may put some companies in a bad state.”

While it’s certainly a good idea for a merchant to be easily found in Google, I’m not sure about the part about not having a choice. As sites who have relied on Google for the bulk of their traffic in the past have learned upon being hit by algorithm updates, it’s best not to put all of your eggs in one basket, and there are other ways to generate traffic to your site.

Apart from competing search engines, social media comes to mind, and can be effective with the right strategy. It’s also entirely possible to rank in the organic search results with the right strategy, without having to pay for a Shopping listing. People do shop from the regular results too.

One CEO told us that he sees Google Shopping as a very good thing for e-commerce. “We think this is the right direction for merchants and Google,” Amit Kumar, CEO Of marketing app provider Lexity, told WebProNews in a recent interview. “While the free Google Product Search program was great for some SMB retailers, in general the results were hit or miss – there was very little predictability on whether products would show up in search results, how often, and detailed statistics were not available.”

“On the other hand, our customers that participated in paid advertising through the Product Listing Ads program have much more visibility into how their products are faring, and have much more control (for instance, the ability to control which products get promoted more aggressively, which products should not be shown in Google’s search results, etc),” he added.

“In addition, having multiple potential display units showing essentially the same kind of products was very confusing to the users, and also to merchants who were trying to manage their presence on search results,” said Kumar. “Having all of these consolidated into one helps brands manage their presence better, and users get a better shopping experience.”

We’ve heard from plenty of frustrated merchants who express views more along the lines of Scarpitta’s. A WebProNews reader recently commented, “Many small companies have used Google ( Froogle, Base, Shopping ) as their resource for free advertising of their products. This is just an attack on those small companies and only allow companies who can afford to pay to do so.”

“I’ve always respected Google as a company for the great new technologies that they have implemented over the years, however I feel that there is a certain amount of greed here that will not only affect the grass roots retailer themselves but overall the consumer as well,” said Scarpitta. “Despite this grim scenario, we are going to do the best we can for our customers to continue to offer them the lowest prices and the best service in accordance with this new regulation in place. I hope others can do the same.”

Google says ranking in Google Shopping will be based on “a combination of relevance and bid price,” the same as Product Listing Ads today, and those who want to stand out can participate in Google’s Trusted Stores program and/or use special offers.

Google Shopping might be able to help out local businesses. Google certainly thinks it can. At its annual developer conference a couple weeks ago, the company hosted a session on empowering local shopping through Google shopping.

“More and more of consumers research online first before going to a local store to purchase a product and we can expect this trend to continue to rise,” the company said. “Local shopping enables merchants to declare product price and availability per local store.”

In the session, Google discusses how to set up and manage local shopping accounts in the Google Merchant Center, and how to ue the Content API to upload local products and do live inventory updates.

The transition from Google Product Search to Google Shopping is supposed to be complete in the fall. Merchants who create product listing ads by August 15% can get a 10% monthly credit of their total Product Listring ad spend through the end of the year, and current Product Search merchants can get a hundred dollar AdWords credit toward the ads if they fill out a form before that date.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/google-compared-to-drug-dealer-for-google-shopping-strategy-2012-07