• Optimization Strategies and More

    Posted Feb 23rd, 2012 By in ADA Compliant, Marketing, SEO With | No Comments

    I’ve written a lot about SEO and optimization in general, and here is one more related post since I often get questions on what I’ve done to get such a high search engine ranking. Like my last post, I wanted to provide you some statistics to help illustrate why these are important.

    Ample Pages and Content

    It is important to have more than just a few pages to ensure that your site is indexed well. The reality is that websites with lots of content (and changeable content) will do better in the searches, one reason why blogs are such an advantage. Moreover, it is important to make it easy for customers to give you their information through forms on your website. Pages with conversion forms are the best way to turn your visitors into leads. Make sure you are providing easily accessible ways for your visitors to contact you, be it forms, chat, and contact information.

    • Businesses with 31 to 40 pages get 7X more leads than those with only 1 to 5.

    SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

    Every web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and blogs. Of course, whether a page draws traffic (and links) depends on whether it’s optimized and how useful and interesting it is. Optimizing your content is a key step to ensure you give your content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web.

    • 46% of daily searches are for research on products or services. The more pages you have, the better chance you have of ranking high.
    • 60% of all organic clicks go to the top three organic search results. You can achieve one of those spots by optimizing your page titles.
    • 75% of users never go further than the first page of search results. Compelling page descriptions can help you stand out.
    • 89% of US internet users search online before they make a purchase, even when the purchase is made at a local business.

    Search engines look for new content, which they index for potential queries. If they don’t index it, results won’t show it. The more new content you create, the more often search engines will come back looking for more.

    Page Titles and Descriptions

    As I have posted about before, the page titles and descriptions are very important for SEO. These should be unique to each page, and the company name should not be featured first (as is often done by inexperienced designers). Remember that the first word in a page title is given the most weight (or importance) by Google. Use something other than your company name to ensure a top ranking for your targeted keywords.

    Inbound Links

    The more sites that link to you, the better you will rank. By sharing good content you’ll keep moving closer to the top of the rankings; but remember, it’s not enough to just get links from other sites – those sites need to be viewed as trustworthy and authoritative, too.

    • Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links than those that don’t. Creating quality content is the key to getting inbound links.

    ALT Tags for Images

    I’ve posted about this before, but since this is one of the important SEO considerations, here is a bit more. It is important to include “alt” tags (a mouse-over description) with your images. This is needed for ADA Accessibility, and it helps with SEO by allowing you to add those important descriptive and keywords. And be sure to check all of your pages, each page needs to be optimized individually.

    301 Redirect

    To a search engine, “yoursite.com” and “www.yoursite.com” are not the same thing. Set up a permanent redirect (also known as a “301 redirect”) so that you don’t get penalized for having duplicate content, and a consequent lower search engine ranking.

    Mobile

    Having a website that displays well on mobiles devices is becoming more and more important as 35% of American adults have a smartphone and 87% of smartphone owners access the internet on their mobile devices. When mobile optimizing your site, you want to take into account smaller screen sizes and slower bandwidths. This means using smaller images and adjustable font sizes, and thinking about how much content is displayed on a single page.

    • By the end of 2012, it is estimated that 50% of Americans will own a smartphone.
    • 86% of C-level executives use a smartphone.
    • 74% of smartphone users have made a purchase from their smartphone.

    Another important considerations of mobile is the need to use the “meta viewport” tag, and to have “Apple Icons”. For Apple Icons you need:

    <link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/filename.png” /> on your homepage, and <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width,initial-scale=1,user-scalable=no” /> on your homepage.

    The meta viewport tag tells a mobile device how to orient a page when it’s loaded. It also determines if a page can be scaled larger or smaller and if it should rotate as the user rotates their mobile device.

    Analytics

    Measuring your successes (and failures) is the only way to know what marketing activities are working for you. If you can’t measure how many visits, leads and customers your different campaigns generate, you need to reevaluate how you’re measuring your activities.

    The data to look for when tracking is:

    • Conversion rate tracking (contact form submission, ad clicking, etc)
    • How many unique visitors do you have per month?
    • What pages are they visiting the most?
    • How long are they staying on your website?
    • What is the “bounce” rate, meaning those who don’t view more than one page?
    • What keywords are being used to find your website?
    • Location of your site visitors

    A final suggestion, keep your visitors engaged with effective calls-to-action.

  • The Social Media Advantage

    Posted Feb 23rd, 2012 By in Facebook, Marketing, Social Media, WordPress With | No Comments

    It is well known that creating, optimizing, and promoting content are the keys to achieving more website traffic and leads. In this regard, to compete in today’s online market every business should consider having a blog in addition to their regular website, and every business should employ the popular social media options. There are a lot of information about the strategies to be successful with each of these (which I will touch upon here), but for those of you who still question whether these are worth the time, I wanted to provide you some statistics that may surprise you.

    Social Networks

    Social media is about more than the number of fans, friends and followers you have. In short, it is about leveraging social media to get more leads and customers. 57% of small businesses say social media is beneficial to their business, which is no wonder since being active on Twitter and Facebook has been shown to increase the number of inbound links, traffic and leads. As a result, 54% of companies increased their investment in social media & blogs in 2011.

    • Nearly 2/3 of US Internet users regularly use a social network.
    • 52% of 55-64 year old internet users have joined a social network
    • US Internet users spend 3X more time on blogs and social networks than on email.

    Blogging

    Blogging is a great way to add interesting content to your site so you can get more traffic and leads.

    • Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic and 70% more leads than those that don’t.
    • Blog posts that were shared on just Twitter had 113% more inbound links than those not shared on social media at all.
    • Blog posts that were shared on Twitter and Facebook got 149% more inbound links than those not shared on social media at all.
    • B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads per month than those that do not.
    • Businesses that blog at least 20 times per month generate 5X more traffic and 4X more leads than those that only blog a few times per month.
    • About 46% of daily internet users read more than one blog every day.
    • Two-thirds of marketers say their company blog is “critical” or “important” to their business. Part of the reason is that blogs are a great way to engage your visitors.
    • 36% of daily internet users read 5 to 10 blog posts per day.

    Don’t forget to provide social subscription options on your blog (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+) etc, and be sure to provide a way for people to email/contact you on your blog. It is also a best practice to engage your visitors, don’t just talk about yourself or your business.

    RSS Feeds

    If you have a blog, you need to ensure that you have an RSS feed link. Even if your website is a static one (non-CMS), you can still provide an RSS link on it that will link to your blog’s RSS. This is in fact what we do. RSS is just another way of saying you make it easy for folks to subscribe to your content.

    Facebook

    Don’t think sharing on Facebook matters? Did you know that Facebook is now the most preferred way of sharing content – second only to email? I have posted before about the importance of providing good content, both text and images, behind the scenes views, Facebook only content, giveaways, etc. It is important to note that Facebook pages often get a high search engine ranking, so I do think this is an important resource for all businesses.

    • 93% of US adult internet users are on Facebook.
    • 41% of B2B companies and 62% of B2C companies who use Facebook have acquired new customers from it.
    • More than 1/3 of marketers say Facebook is “critical” or “important” to their business – and this number has increased 83% in just the last two years.
    • One out of every eight minutes spent online is spent on Facebook.

    Twitter

    • Companies with over 1,000 Twitter followers get 6X more traffic.
    • 79% of US Twitter users are more likely to recommend the brands that they follow.
    • More than 1/2 of active Twitter users follow companies, brands, or products on social networks.
    • Companies that use Twitter average 2x more leads per month than those that do not.
    • 39% of B2B companies using Twitter have acquired new customers from it.

  • SEO Friendly Parked Domain

    Posted Feb 9th, 2012 By in Domain Names, Resources, SEO With | 1 Comment

    I’ve talked some about parked domains in the past, but since so many of my clients are confused on this subject, I wanted to provide a bit more information.  The first thing to understand are that parked domains are additional domains which you host or have pointed at your hosting account by a domain registrar that display the same website as your primary domain. If you’re one of our clients you can learn about managing a parked domain in your hosting platform at: http://support.hostgator.com/articles/cpanel/what-is-a-parked-domain-how-do-i-create-and-delete-one

    As for the reason to use them, parked domains are often used by businesses that want to have more than one web address for advertising purposes.  The important thing to note is that if you have one or more “hosted” domain names parked/pointed at your site it is a good idea to create a permanent 301 redirect for them so for the search engines not to treat them as duplicate content. 

    The best way to do re-directions like this is by using a server-side 301 permanent re-direction instruction. With Unix-hosted sites you do this by modifying the htaccess file. That’s relatively straightforward if you have 2 hosted websites and are re-directing one to the other.

    If you would prefer to have a script create your .htaccess file for you, visit http://www.htaccesseditor.com/en.shtml#a_WWW

    I tested this script and it provided the following:

    <Files ~ “^\.(htaccess|htpasswd)$”>deny from all</Files>
    Redirect permanent http://www.parkeddomain.com http://www.maindomain.com
    order deny,allow

    There are many methods of doing a 301 (permanent) redirect, and here is a sample .htaccess script that will do that:

    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^parkeddomain.com$ [OR]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^parkeddomain-2.com$
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.maindomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    * Note: In this example, two different parked domains are linked to the same new domain.

    Another common option is to direct “non-www” version of a domain to “www” which the following version offers:

    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com
    RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    Ok, so as not to digress, what I wanted to stress today is that frequently domain registrars will point the parked domain name to your primary domain on your behalf; the problem is domain registration services often do this re-direction either by using a 100% frameset or by using fast meta refreshes. Both will cause problems.

    The 100% frameset means that your real website pages get ‘wrapped’ inside another page that uses the parked domain name.  As a result exactly the same content can be found under multiple domain names and so the risk of duplicate content penalties exists. For this reason we recommend you don’t do this. Some domain registration services refer to this domain re-direction method as being ‘cloaked’.

    This is an example of a fast meta refresh (which should not be used):
    <meta HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh”CONTENT=”0;URL=http://www.yournewsite.com/”>

    ‘Non-cloaked’ domain re-direction is the right approach. This means that when someone types the parked domain name into their browser your website gets presented with its normal domain name in the URL and not the parked domain name.  e.g. they type in www.yoursite.org and your main domain www.yournewsite.com gets shown.

    The problem with ‘parked’ domains is they’re not hosted on a webserver with an htaccess file you can modify. So again, simply go to the name registrar and find the option where you can redirect the the old URL to the new URL, don’t choose the option to have it cloaked or masked, etc.

  • Free Mobile Apps Creation

    Posted Feb 8th, 2012 By in General Information, Resources With | No Comments

    If you’ve ever wanted to create a mobile application, you might want to consider “AppsGeyeser”.  In their own words, “AppsGeyser is a FREE service that converts your content into an App and make you money.”

    AppsGeyser provides the ability to convert documents into applications. Supported document formats include pdf, doc, docx, ppt, pptx, and image files up to 25MB in size.  Upon reading their FAQ they also noted that you can use plain HTML code or a content block of your website for your App. You can also use JavaScript, AJAX, and Flash.

    Document App creators will be able to instantly submit their Apps into the Android Market and other app stores to increase their global reach.
     
    “The process is so simple that anyone who has ever signed up for an email account is able to create an App on AppsGeyser” said Vasily Salomatov, co-founder of AppsGeyser. “There are hundreds of millions of users worldwide with amazing content in the form of documents, content that we are extending its reach into the mobile space.”
     
    AppsGeyser launched in early 2011 and has seen over 100,000 application created on its platforms, and handles an average of 1.5 million daily active users.

    AppsGeyser features include messaging, social sharing, tabs and full support for HTML5 enhancements.

    They also provide:

    • Free Distribution
      Distribute your App through our network for Free.
    • HTML5 Support
      Use HTML 5 to add advanced features and enhance user experience.
    • Handy Notifications
      Send pop-up notifications right to your apps.
    • Easy Monetization
      Earn money. We pay you every time someone clicks ads in your apps.
    • Advanced Statistics
      See how many of your apps have been installed and used.Social Sharing
      Let your users share your apps on social networks.

    Visit their website to learn more: http://www.appsgeyser.com/ and check out their blog at: http://www.appsgeyser.com/blog/

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