Web Designers and SEO

Most web designers will admit that they and SEO are like Army-Navy; in the military but with different functions.

For one, the web designer creates a functional, aesthetic product to please the client. Web designers are creative and have learned their craft. SEO is produced for the Search Engines. It is more science than art. No aesthetics.

The owner thinks that because the keywords are on the website and in the source code with metas, he has been optimized. Not even close. Maybe the website is strictly for credibility and a location to drive customers through sales teams and advertising assuming they will purchase if they like what they see. Good enough.

The next step is the giant one. Reaching for the millions of people who are looking for your service, assuming you don’t cater to only local clientele. What the optimized site lacks first, is knowing what the competition is driving.

Say you wanted to race in the Sunday sweep stakes so you bought the car your budget would allow and you show up to see what happens. It’s one way to go. Or you show up at a party late and ten guys are standing around the prettiest girl. (or visa versa) So you still want the girl and you are calculating the best line or approach. You notice four guys next to you and by the looks on their faces they are thinking the same thing.

That’s what makes it so exciting to win.

SEO usually becomes an after market add-on. Without it, you don’t get access to the sweepstakes. The best way to build a car that wins is to build it piece by piece and test it. Each time around the track it comes in and you adjust it. At the end, maybe only four or five cars have a real shot at the prize. That’s really being in the game. See more on Search Engine Optimization

Big Budget or Small Budget SEO

One common ingredient shared by most companies as the result of the recession
is retrenchment.

It’s crucial to cut costs but the way out is more business.

Two ways out are healthier customers or more customers. The internet cannot
make customers healthier but it can help find more customers. It can help
you find the customers that are already there that you are missing.

Most companies have three of the important beginning ingredients for search engines.
They have been in business for more than 5 years, own domain names
for more than a year out, and have their key words in their URL or title.

Three things they miss. The words span two different categories without being
supported by the site. Let’s say your title or description is Cold Storage Shipping Logistics. This is a great tail. A tail is adding descriptive words to a key word to narrow the focus.

Now, if the rest of the site supported these words and they were repeated several times, the site might be first in page ranking for the words. Usually what happens is the content and everything else abandons the words or only follows one, so the dilution hurts page rankings.

Secondly, the phrase used in the description is diluted with too much meaningless copy. This is what occurs when web designers not familiar with SEO have created the descriptions. And the site content does not support the words in the URL, title, headlines, description, and metas.

The third common error is that the words selected do not have relevance to the way most customers search for the business. Understanding which words are used is important. Taking a stand and committing to a narrow focus of words is important to being selected for their query. Trying to cover everything gets nothing.

So with a big budget or small budget avoid wasting money by at least put some money into getting the primary ingredients for page ranking.
See more at Search Engine Optimization

Understand the importance of Source Code for Page Rankings

Image via Wikipedia

When search engines look for the best sites to present to customers who have entered key words or phrases, they base their selections on several criteria.
One of them is the placement and use of the keywords on your site. The first indication of how you have used them is found in your Source Code.

You can see the Source Code on your site's landing page (home) and on most any other site by right clicking the Home page and then clicking “View Source”. This is a description of the words on your site. It indicates which words you have put in the most important places. The Search Engines look at your URL, your Site Title, the Meta Description, the Headlines, the Body content, the internal links, and the titles of each of the pages on your website.

Search engines know that sometimes the description that appears on the internet does not always match what is on your site. They want to know what you really are emphasizing. Your title is your most important headline and it describes the "core" of your site message. If your URL, your Title, Your Meta Description and the first line of your content copy and last line of your content copy all use the same words, it is a very strong message for the engines.

You have a better chance of being matched for these words with a customer's use of the words.

In the body content, you should use the words as well without distracting from the interest of the content. There should be images on the page that also use the words in the image descriptions.

Finally, each page of the site should have keywords as part of the title. For example http://www.FulfillmentCo.com/order fulfillment.html

The words you use will not express your whole business, but once you are on top of the page rankings for these words, visitors will see your other services in your title bars. Once you are on top of rankings for one word or phrase, you can start using more phrases to appear at the top of more categories because you will now have more authority.

This is just one ingredient to getting to the top but it is the key ingredient for companies just beginning to optimize. The other way would be to have hundreds of other authority sites pointing to your site with links, but that requires more time and is further down the road in the optimization process.

3 Essentials of SEO

Image by ok_qa via Flickr

Increasing Business from an Internet site requires a strategy to accomplish the following three tasks.

1> Optimize the website for reader interest, retention, and conversion.

2> Optimize the website for search engines. Each has a different criteria.

3> Attract customers to the site by using traditional and 2.0 tactics.

Businesses trying to drive business quickly can engage in Pay per click advertising. The ROI can be enhanced by using analytics to test for key words and target markets. At the same time the site has to be enhanced to retain and convert the visitors to the desired action.

Organic growth is achieved by synchronizing the business, key words, and queries so that visitors get what is promised and what they expect when they arrive. Secondly, it is achieved by using Social Media practices to create followers from the community at large. This can be achieved through blogs, articles, videos, pod casts, press releases, referrals from other sites, and interaction with social media sites and forums.

A well coordinated effort produces maximum effectiveness and ROI over the long term and will yield noticeable short term improvements.