All Articles Tagged "search engine optimization"
Website No-Nos: Clean Up Your Online Presence
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Websites are great to promote yourself or your company. But a website done wrong could cost you work. According to Inc.com there are common mistakes that people make when designing their websites.
In this age of smartphones, you have to take into consideration if your site looks good on a cell phone screen. “Mobile now accounts for 12 percent of global Internet traffic, and it’s scaling faster than the desktop did,” reports the site. “If your website is not mobile enabled, you’re going to miss out on a growing population of users.”
Keywords are a great way to optimize your site in search engines, but too many keywords are just overload. “It may be a natural impulse to load up your website with keywords and keyword hyperlinks, but what you’ll probably create is an SEO nightmare,” says the article. Speaking of search engines, don’t forget to register with the local search engines. “If you do the majority of your business locally and you’re not taking advantage of free listings in important go-to local resource directories such as Google+ Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp, or others, you’ll have to pay for better visibility through advertising,” advises the article.
Keep your designs simple; skip using too much flash. “Flash is really cool for visuals, but it doesn’t work well with search or Apple devices,” advises Inc.com. Tech expert Toi Barnhardt, associate publisher of the Women of Color in Technology STEM Conference agrees that visuals are very important. “Unless your site is about ‘The Team of Me,’” jokes Barnhardt, referencing Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins. “[B]e sure not to inundate it with too many pictures of yourself. Stick to content relevant pictures.”
Another major mistake is burying or omitting contact information. “How many times do you visit a website and want to call the company, only to find the only option you have is to complete a form? Do you become suspicious of the company’s legitimacy or interest in helping you? Make all contact information–including social-media icons–readily and repeatedly accessible,” says Inc.com.
It is also equally important, adds Barnhardt, to have user-friendly payment options. “PayPal and anything backed by Verisign are normally trustworthy methods of payment,” she tells Madame Noire.
And it may sound basic, but decide what type of site you want to have. “Be sure to know the differences between the needs of a products site and a services site,” says Barnhardt. “Products sites should always should always be updated to reflect true inventory. Services sites should thoroughly list descriptions of services and when they are offered.”
Once your site is up and running, make sure to keep up with your maintenance fees. “The biggest mistake I find that small business owners make is not preparing for the monthly maintenance fees that come with site hosting. If you don’t have the payment set up to recur permanently, your site host will absolutely pull it down,” Barnhardt says. “There is nothing worse than going to a business site only to get an error message regarding the domain.”
Google Changes Leave Small Businesses Searching
(Wall Street Journal) — Burned by Google Inc.’s recent changes to its search formula, small businesses are experimenting with strategies to recover lost Web traffic while seeking out new ways to generate sales—some even scaling back daily operations. Seeing a 40% decline in sales since Google adjusted its algorithm, online ergonomic-products retailer Ergo In Demand Inc. in Central Point, Ore., reduced its 17-person staff to five, moved to a 4,500-square-foot office space from one more than double in size and cut $4,000 in monthly software subscriptions. With the savings, owner Peter Scholom hired a search-engine optimization firm to do an audit of the 11-year-old company’s website, ergoindemand.com. He hopes to learn how to regain the site’s previously high Google rankings for search terms like “keyboard trays” and “TV mounts.” ”We are fishing for any straw,” Mr. Scholom says, whose business had $6 million in sales in 2010. Many small but growing Web retailers say they have been punished since Google, which handles nearly two-thirds of all Web searches, moved in late February to weed out “content farms,” or sites that post information without attention to quality or by copying text from other sources such as government websites.
Google’s Code Switch Moves around Billions
(CNNMoney) — Google’s recent change to its search algorithm has dramatically shaken up the businesses of websites that moved up or down its search rankings. Sites whose rankings rose to the top found that their traffic and revenue soared — but the adjustment had an equally devastating effect on those that were dropped. The Online Publishers Association, a group of content producers comprising many of the Internet’s largest properties (including CNN.com), estimates that the algorithm change shifted $1 billion in annual revenue.
Some of the losers felt the hit immediately. Mahalo.com laid off 10% of its workforce last week thanks to what CEO Jason Calacanis called “a significant dip in our traffic and revenue.” The stakes are high in the Google-placement game. The top spot on a search page typically attracts 20% to 30% of the page’s clicks, according to Adam Bunn, SEO director of Greenlight. After that comes an enormous tail-off: Positions 2 to 3 generate 5% to 10% of the clicks, and links below the fold receive less than 1% of users’ attention. Fall off to the second page and your search-engine-driven clicks will be negligible. With control of two-thirds of the U.S. search market, Google (GOOG,Fortune 500) steers a tremendous amount of traffic to websites. Many of them rely exclusively on advertising dollars to make money.That means that positioning in Google’s search results can be a life-or-death issue for a business.
Increase Your Google Ranking
(Entrepreneur) — To increase your visibility and authority on the web, you need some knowledge of Google rankings. Learning how Google’s ranking system works can help you make important changes that can move your website up the ranking ladder. What follows is a quick primer on need-to-know basics for improving your site’s Google ranking. When it comes to your web pages, two different Google rankings are at work: your search result ranking and your site’s PageRank. They are related, yet distinct measures of the value of the content on your site in the eyes of the search-engine giant.
Searches: Your search ranking refers to your position on the results page for a given keyword query. Because Web users usually want quick answers, they are more likely to click links at the top of the first page of results. For that reason, you tend to get more site traffic if your site is included in the list of the top five or so search results.
Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
(Businessweek) — Today people are more connected to the Internet than ever before. That may sound obvious, but the numbers are truly staggering. Every day, Google receives around 500 million search requests. Approximately 110 million unique websites are in operation—and more than 1 trillion URLs. The challenge for owners of businesses big and small is to be found in this enormous haystack, and the solution is search engine optimization, or SEO. An effective SEO campaign puts a website at the top of a search engine’s results, ensuring that it is seen and visited by a large audience.
How To Choose The Best SEO Firm for Your Business
(Inc) — Once upon a time, in the early days of Internet, before sites like AltaVista and Dogpile gave way to the almighty Google, getting a top page rank on a search engine was as easy as repeating a keyword over and over again on a webpage. Well, the Internet’s search engines are a whole lot smarter now. So are their scammers. Google’s PageRank system is their way of determining which websites are the most applicable and useful for every search term.
