Archive for December, 2009

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Happy Holidays

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

As Christmas is only days away, I wanted to get in one last quick post before most of us break to enjoy the holidays with friends and family.

As this blog, which is still very new, takes shape and structure, I wanted to inform all our followers as well as new visitors about the direction this blog is taking. Put simply, our goal is to provide all our readers with real value when it comes to getting the most out of their websites. We will be continuing to provide you with free tips and SEO-related strategies, and as a new benefit to our readers, we will be doing free website reviews as far as SEO and online marketing goes. In our reviews, we’ll provide input on what users are getting from your website as well as what they’re not. Additionally, we’ll provide feedback on stuff like how to improve the code and design to improve the searchability and index-ability of the site. Of course, we’ll also provide information on what to do to help your site improve its search ranking and of course website traffic.

As we now have the resources to allocate towards free website reviews, we figure it will provide you the reader with an opportunity you can’t get elsewhere, and at the same time provide us with positive reviews and recommendations.

Periodically, we will update our blog with site reviews selected from businesses who are interested in this opportunity. If you or your business is interested in such an opportunity, send us a message through our contact form.

Consider this our gift to you this holiday season, though this gift will not be ending with the holidays – we plan on doing this for a long time to come.

That said, I extend nothing but the best wishes to you and your family this holiday season. Happy Holidays!

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Landing Pages

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Landing Pages

As a website owner, you’ve probably heard the term “landing page” more than once in reference to online conversions. To many it may seem like a foreign term, but integrating this concept into your website is crucial to ensuring your site visitors are finding exactly what they’re looking for.

Simply put, a landing page is a specific page on your website that is tailored to a unique keyword, or very small set of keywords. If you have a dozen or more products you are selling on your website, creating a landing page for each one of those products can help reduce visitor bounce rate (percentage of people who get to the site and leave without further action) as well as improve conversions (whether that be an online sale, completion of a contact form, etc).

If executed properly with the right SEO, a landing page will rank well in the search engines for the keyword specific to that page and not necessarily the whole site in general. The idea is for your website visitors to get to the exact page they’re searching for without having to click and navigate through your site to find the page they need, which results in many lost conversion opportunities. Relying on your visitors to click around and navigate through your site if they’re looking for something specific is like handing business to your competition. Think of it like going to the supermarket. You want to buy cereal but have no idea what part of the store or what aisle it’s in. A landing page functions like the signage posted in aisles that label what products you can find in each aisle, drastically reducing the frustration undoubtedly felt if trying to walk up and down each aisle to find the cereal. Try looking at it from the searcher’s point of view. If you’re searching Google for a Sony 46” LCD TV, you wouldn’t mind being taken directly to a webpage from the Sony company with a page listing all their 46” LCD TV models. This webpage listing all those models is an example of a targeted landing page. Now, compare this to doing the same search and being directed to Sony’s homepage at sony.com. Yes, you’re on the right track, but you’ll be spending a lot more time navigating through the Sony site to find the exact products you’re looking for – and there’s a much higher chance you’ll flat out leave the site and search somewhere else.

In summary, if you’re a business owner who offers multiple products or services, try making it as easy as possible for your site visitors to find what they need. Investing in SEO services to optimize landing pages for specific products and services is a great way to improve conversion and build increased online traffic.

If you need help creating or optimizing landing pages for your business, contact us now.

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Google PageRank

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

A lot has been made of Google’s PageRank Indicator, as many of you have witnessed if you have the Google Toolbar installed. The PageRank indicator, named after one of Google’s co-founders Larry Page,  is the horizontal white bar on the toolbar, filled arbitrarily in green in accordance with the PageRank of the website you are visiting. PageRannk is a measure of a website’s importance, according to Google, on a scale of 0-10 (10 being a phenomenally important website).

However, when it comes right down to it, the PageRank metric is not an indicator of website quality or ranking. Though much hype was published about it when it first came out, webmasters and those in the know quickly figured out that a website’s PageRank had very little bearing on how a website performed in search results. It is simply an interpretation of incoming link structure, and as Google itself has been quoted saying, PageRank is not something webmasters should be focusing on a whole lot, and its definitely not the most important metric for webmasters to track when it comes to optimizing their site for searches. For many, this was all they needed to hear and jumped off the PageRank bandwagon with arms and legs flailing. Don’t be so quick to judge, though – PageRank can be a handy tool allowing you to make informed web-surfing decisions. When online shopping at a new site, I often find my eyes being drawn to the site’s PageRank, as safer, more secure and more credible sites tend to have higher PageRanks than “riskier” sites. Ultimately, though I wouldn’t recommend focusing on improved PageRank as part of an SEO strategy, I would use it as a research tool. Plus, when any half decent SEO strategy gets put into action, improved PageRank is a natural inevitability.

To put things in perspective, a PageRank of 5 out of 10 is very good for just about any website – the overwhelming majority of sites are ranked 2 or less. Typically, some of the highest PageRank sites are established organizations and institutions of higher learning (consistent with the amount of incoming links pointing to them).

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