A blog to discuss web marketing…
Posts tagged SEO
Five Simple Ways to Increase Website Traffic
Nov 5th
1. Thoroughly examine the features of your website. Ask yourself if some things are totally necessary, and if there is anything that might be missing. More importantly, is your website user-friendly? Imagine yourself a user visiting the website for the first time. Is navigation easy? Can you find what you are looking for quickly? It’s understandable that you might be proud of your website and object to making any changes, but at the same time, ego should never stand in the way of progress.
2. Keep information fresh, concise, and interesting. Visitors to your site don’t want to wade through several paragraphs of information to find the one key element they might be searching for. Cut out the fluff and give them exactly what they want.
Additionally, maintain an area of your site to provide interesting, industry-related news, expanded product information, or articles and press releases. This type of rich, informative content is what keeps users coming back, and also serves to increase brand awareness. It also reinforces your image as an authority in your relative industry.
3. Analyze the best and the worst of your site, and make any necessary changes. Utilize your in-house website technician or an outside source if necessary to analyze your site for things like broken links, pages that display incorrectly, pages that load slowly because they might contain too many pictures, movies, music, etc., and other factors that may annoy and frustrate visitors.
Additionally, analyze what areas of your site appear to be the most popular: which pages are users visiting the most, which pages do they spend most of their time on, and perhaps most important, how are they discovering and arriving to your site. Knowing these things can give you greater insight into what paths to take to ensure your website traffic remains consistent, and what steps you might take to keep it growing.
4. Build a community. Whether you utilize the advantages of social networking, or pass out business cards at a tradeshow, or even if you start a conversation with someone in passing on the street, there is potential to build your community. Consider everyone you meet, speak to, email or connect with a potential visitor to your site. Remain active in your community. Engage, interact, ask and answer questions, send out newsletters, start a blog, leave comments on other blogs (with a signature linking back to your site), etc. There are endless possibilities enabling you to build and expand your community.
5. Repeat steps 1-4. Regardless at how successful your efforts might be to increase traffic and improve your website, there is likely still always room for improvement. Set dedicated intervals to refocus your efforts on the above steps. The Internet is constantly changing, and competition is always active, possibly engaged in the same thorough examination, analysis, and community building as you. You must remain ever vigilant to ensure that your website traffic does not decline as you lose visitors to the competition or as a result of other factors, such as outdated information or lack of contact with the community.
Russell And Miller, National Clothier Supply, Shopsalesigns, and More Go Live on ‘Superengine’ Website
Nov 2nd
New Century Direct (NCD*), a manufacturer and direct marketer of archival quality storage products and printed merchandising products, through its strategic partnership with Active Web Group, converts five websites to New Century Direct’s new ‘superengine’ web technology.
In addition to creating the ‘superengine’, the Active Web Group helps supports NCD’s team in building three main marketing platforms of improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO), managing Pay-Per-Click (PPC) programs, and creating targeted email blasts with unique and compelling promotions.
Findley continues, “Each one of the ‘superengines’ marketing efforts have a positive ROI. We will continue to drop catalogs in a manner that supports the dual approach of a modified catalog circulation plan with aggressive web marketing techniques.”
Want To Only Pay For Results?
Jun 12th
I am really excited to tell you about a new service we are offering at Active Web Group called Pay-Per-Ranking. It is a win-win alternative to SEO with no up front costs, no long term contacts, and no development fees. We wanted to allow our clients to gauge their progress, cut down on expenses, and pay only for results. The only time you pay is when you are on the top ten listing on Google
We are really excited about this new service and are receiving great feedback from our clients. We already have about a dozen clients signed up.
If you are interested in learning more call me at 1-800-978-3417. Have a great weekend!
Got 60 minutes?
May 8th
We have 30 tips for increasing your SEO. Tips include #6 No Hidden Text, #22 Keywords As Links, and #29 Keep File Sizes Small. For the remaining 27 tips visit our website to download the pdf.
Search Engine Secrets Revealed
Apr 9th
Here is another article I thought you would enjoy. It is written by David Montalvo, Senior SEO and Director of Business Development at Active Web Group.
While often very complex in their calculations and data processing, the critical operations performed by the major search engines in order to rank websites isn’t as lengthy as one might think. The processes they use to provide relevant results when a web search is undergone can best be described in the following four steps.
- Send out the Web Crawlers
Search engines use invisible “bots” or “spiders,” which are really programs or automated scripts, that browse (or “crawl”) the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Search engines use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data. This type of technology is necessary because the rate at which people create new Internet documents greatly exceeds any manual indexing capacity. In fact, an estimated 20 billion web pages exist, and search engines have crawled about half of them. - Index the Pages
After a spider crawls a web page, it makes a copy of it and adds it to its database. This process is known as indexing. With so many search queries submitted each minute, it is very important that search engines are steadfast in their index management so that they can search and sort billions of documents in fractions of a second. - Process Queries
Search engines process hundreds of millions of search queries every day. When someone keys in a search term and clicks “Search,” the engine retrieves from its index all of the documents that match the query. It determines a match by finding the same terms or phrase entered into the search bar. Entering a multi-word phrase by itself can return literally millions of results, but entering that same phrase in quotes can greatly narrow the results, giving the user a more accurate listing of websites that relate to their particular search. - Rank Pages
A very closely guarded mathematical equation, called an algorithm, is employed by each search engine to determine how to sort and rank search query results. This algorithm allows the engine to rank the most relevant web pages first, and the rest in descending order of importance to the user.
What You Can Do for Your Website: Avoid Speed Bumps & Walls
You may not know it, but you could be hindering or preventing your website from being crawled by search engine spiders. As spiders crawl the web, they rely on the architecture of hyperlinks to find new web pages and revisit those that may have changed. Complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may act as “speed bumps” in the process by slowing down the spiders. Even worse, data that cannot be accessed by web crawlers are really like “walls” in that they completely prevent your web pages from being ranked.
Beware of the Following “Speed Bumps”:
- URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors)
- Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one)
- Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages)
- Pages requiring a “Session ID” or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can)
- Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.
Beware of the Following “Walls”:
- Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button
- Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them
- Documents accessible only via a search box
- Documents blocked purposefully (via a robot meta tag or robots.txt file)
- Pages requiring a login
- Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic)
In order to avoid the above pitfalls and ensure that your website’s contents are fully crawlable, be sure to provide direct, HTML links to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember to make every page of your site accessible from the home page, since the home page is usually the place spiders begin their crawl. It’s also a good idea to add a sitemap to your website in order to increase its navigation.
Developing Good Links
Feb 6th
Developing and buying links that point to your site or to sections of your site is a great way to improve search rankings. Sites such as Best of the Web and DMOsearch get indexed often and deeply. When you put a link on a directory such as this, the search spider will follow it back to your site or the specific site section you pointed it to. You win two different ways. Most search engines including Google count quality links that point to your site in your favor. They also spider these sites very quickly. We recently put a site up called www.perduechickencoupons.com. The link was put on www.dmosearch.com while the site was being built and a “Coming Soon” place holder was put up so the URL could get indexed. Within 7 days the site was ranked 8th in Google and it was indexed with the “Coming Soon” place holder! This is brand new URL and there are 13,900 other sites going for this term. This site will most likely fetch a #1 to #3 ranking when the content is indexed in the next week or two.
