The Internet and the technology behind it is constantly expanding at a rapid rate. Having a website simply because everyone else is getting one is no longer the reason to develop your own. Companies and organizations are using their websites to expand their influence online using their own website, social media, video, and other expanding mediums to get their message out.
Why do you have a website? If your primary reason for having a website is simply because your competitors have a website and you feel like not having one will hurt your business, then I’m willing to bet that you haven’t updated your website in weeks or even months. Mr. Business Owner, this is doing you more harm than good. Your website is a sales tool, and quite frankly, one of the most powerful ones that you’ll ever have. Gone are the days of having a website and not updating it for weeks and months. Not OKAY! You may not see this because you are still thinking about the good ‘old days of direct mail marketing where you got a 4% return one year on a direct mail piece that you really liked.
Gone are the days of the homepage. True, every website has one, but the days when website owners expect their homepage to do all the heavy lifting are gone.
Thanks to the evolving science of search, the search engines have made our lives easier by providing the consumer with relevant search results for specific keyword queries. Visitors now stream directly into websites via side doors and back doors. They can magically teleport into a website without ever seeing the homepage; they are practically flying through the windows to land directly where they want to be.
For a consumer looking for a specific product or service, this is fantastic, but for site owners and operators, the importance of optimizing each and every individual page you would potentially want a searcher to visit is magnified considerably. When visitors can enter a site and land anywhere, there are brand implications. If it’s not immediately apparent where they are, and why, they might not stick around. The same thought and energy you put into the homepage of the site to brand the product or company must be put into each page that you intend to be searchable for the consumers that you want to be on your site. Read more
Search Engine Optimization is the foundation, the bedrock of online marketing. It is the foundation of all Internet marketing.
Launching a website without actively marketing it properly (and professionally) is like buying a new car, never putting gas in it, and then complaining that it doesn’t work. The potential for leads and sales certainly exists, but without some direct focus on Search Engine Optimization and Internet marketing, you’ll never see those leads.
You see, search engines have taught consumers how to search. They have redefined how people shop and find the services that you offer. And when someone types a keyword into the search box and presses that search button, there are only two possible outcomes:
You can’t afford to allow your competitors to hog all of the search results in Google, Bing, or Yahoo while you spend advertising dollars on avenues that cannot justify a positive return on investment. Read more
While eating some chocolate donuts this morning with my son, it dawned on me that each miniature donut was identical. All the same size, shape, taste, etc. I thought to myself, “what if all web content developers put ample, and equal time on each web project dedicated to search engine optimization for the site?” Well, it would definitely make the fight to get on Google’s first page much more difficult. The content online everywhere would be so relevant and the searches would be so close together in similarity that one listing would not stand head and shoulders above the other searched results, as it does now.
Well, the truth is, most web designers do just that – they design websites. Developing a website entails much more than just throwing some files on the server and invoicing the client. Proper SEO practices are not followed by all. One firm that we took over a website at the request of the client put together a really nice site, but even after it was launched for over a month, there were no title tags, no descriptions or key words; just nothing but some text and some graphics. When I asked him why they didn’t do any of it, his reply was, “We kinda ran out of time.” 2 weeks after we optimized the site, it was all over the first page of Google and the other major indexes. That company is no longer in business. Read more
