Maximizing Website Traffic Online
Is Your Website Getting The Necessary Traffic it Needs to Be Successful?
In this current era of the internet, getting tons of visitors to your website isn’t as easy as many people think, it takes a well diversified skill set and usually involves the helpful expertise of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With loads of users researching and looking for products and services every single day on the internet; the majority of users turn to a search engine to begin their search. Having a website for your business is a good start however, the ultimate goal of a website is to actually have people visit your site. If nobody is visiting your website, the chances are that you’re unlikely selling the amounts of products or services that is sufficient for the website to be an effective revenue driving marketing tool. With that being said, to get visitors you MUST make sure that you’re getting in front of the right people, being in the spotlight where people are actually searching for the majority of products and services on the internet. This means being visible in the major search engines – specifically, Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you’re website is not visible (on the first page of the search engines, specifically in the TOP 5 search results), you’re missing out on all kinds of business traffic and this basically means your website is a waste of space. Optimizing your site for the major search engines should be your #1 priority. Therefore, in order to drive large amounts of traffic consistently to your website, think about implementing the right SEO strategies!
Search Engine Optimization will ensure that you’re not missing the boat on being successful within the search engines. Below are a couple of strategies that will ultimately lead to greatly increased rankings and business.
First things first, your current website must be analyzed! This can be done in two ways: One: With regards to Search Engine Optimization – make sure your website is relevant for the keywords you’re trying to target for your products and services. Are they located in the HTML code and meta tags on the page? And Two: Is the site useful to the web user and do they find the information on your website informative and stimulating? Having great useful content on your website is a bigger factor that leads to higher buyer conversions (greater sales).
Secondly, do you know who your audience is? In my opinion, I consider this one of the most vital components you need to figure out so you can effectively structure the message of your website. Think about what your potential user issues may be (if any) and why they would want to visit your website. Consider the age bracket, sex, marital status, education level, and location you are attempting to target your customers (local, national, etc). These will ultimately be the deciding factors on how you’re going to approach and speak to your potential customers. Also, ensure that the layout and wording (specifically the keywords) resonate well with your target audience.
DO NOT put a lot of work into keywords that no one is look for. Look at the search traffic and competition of relevant keywords to see if they are a good fit.
Third Step: The Competition. Look at who’s competing with you in regards to your products and services and do an analysis of their internet site. Why are THEY in the TOP 5 of Google and you are not, what makes their sites rank better than yours?
After doing some much-needed research on both your competition and your own website, it’s now time to decide what keywords you’re going to target for your website and what coincides with what you’re trying to sell. Really get down and dirty with your keyword research, be a stickler. It is your duty to choose the most pertinent keywords related to your business because this will be the foundation of your SEO efforts. After a stylish and intellectual selection of relevant keywords, make sure that the content within the website reflects them accordingly. You may need to rewrite paragraphs and the content on your site so that your keywords are being used. It is a well-known fact that both SEO experts and Search Guru’s alike have had many successes in search marketing with 3-5% keyword density across a web page. Having the proper keyword density increases the relevancy for your keyword targets and ultimately boosts your search engine rankings. However use your keywords wisely and don’t overdo it. Over utilizing your keywords within the content of your site and “stuffing” keywords into the tags of your site will only get your hand slapped by Google and the search engines. Manipulation is a common occurrence when attempting to rank well for certain keywords. The search engines may penalize or remove your website from their indexes if you don’t play by their rules, this especially holds true if you go beyond 5% keyword density. By over employing keywords on your website, you can distort the message and flow of the content. This doesn’t resonate well with readers because the content may be read weirdly and sentences may be awkwardly represented – perverting the structure of the grammar.
Now that your web pages are properly structured and you’re using the proper keywords within significant areas of your website so the search engines pick them up – it is now time for a link building strategy. One way links (or inbound links, back-links, etc.) are a crucial element for top rankings in the search engines, especially Google. To get more one way links to your web page, a great way is to write great quality content and update it regularly. Numerous amounts of people will link to your site if they find info that is applicable or useful to them. Writing unique information and providing useful copy to individuals looking for a particular subject matter is merely just one way to get back-links. Bottom line, having lots of high quality and relevant links to your website from many different link sources is going to be the beneficial second phase of SEO that will push the rankings of your website to new heights. Please Do It! Link building itself can take up an entire blog post, something I’ll leave for future postings – something to think about for next time.
Thanks for Reading!
~JAWS
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Your Missing Piece To The Puzzle!
In the competitive world of the internet, there are so many online marketers and websites for any particular business vertical and just a handful of them are successful with their marketing efforts. The goal of pulling in that precious targeted traffic and business from a website is somewhat elusive and can be quite challenging for a lot of marketers. The fact of the matter is that many businesses are just not making it in the world of “virtual-convenience” where anyone can find anything with just one click of a button. With that said, a lack of knowledge is one of the major reasons why the majority of websites fail. One of the vital parts of internet marketing is of course search engine optimization (SEO); properly optimizing or structuring a website is extremely necessary with regards to driving traffic to your website via the search engines. The webmaster section of the major search engines is a good place to start for great tips, advice and assistance with issues that may be occurring on your site. I would specifically focus on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing since they get the bulk of all search traffic online. The Google Webmaster Tools is one of the most popular tools and is being used by many online marketers and professional SEO companies to assist with search engine optimization. The Old Saying, “Be There, or Be Square”: Yeah, don’t miss the boat on this one – Google Webmaster Tools offers a wide breadth of information that is very valuable when trying to find out what Google’s doing on your site.
Google Webmaster Tools provides priceless data about a website such as:
1) The amount of impressions your website has received during any given period. Google Analytics can tell you everything you need to know about who’s clicking through to your site, but Webmaster Tools sheds some light on how many clicks you might be missing.
2) How many clicks a website has received from the search engines, and how you click numbers varied depending on your ranking on the search results page.
3) The average position ranking for your particular keyword phrases in Google.
4) The amount of internal links going to your website and other sites linking to you.
5) Crawl Errors (The problems Google comes across while crawling your site).
If Google has identified any Malware on your website, or if you are linking to any Malware-infected sites.
9) Crawl statistics (like the number of times and the number of pages of your site that have been crawled by Google).
10.) The ease of uploading and keeping track of your XML sitemap, as well as an indicator telling you how many of the pages submitted as part of your sitemap are actually getting indexed.
What’s also cool about Google Webmaster Tools is that it points out any dilemmas with the content on your site that you might have, say if you have any duplicate content or if you have any problems with your page title and Meta tags, etc.
In order to be successful with Search Marketing, it is crucial for internet marketers and SEO professionals to make use of Google Webmaster Tools so they are aware of any problems with their website. Using it can most definitely help to enhance the rankings of your website in Google. Google Webmaster Tools is also helpful in the debugging of your website and does a great job in pointing out certain errors on your site that you may have overlooked earlier. The Mecca of advantages that this tool also offers is that it allows webmasters to figure out if their website has been penalized or banned by Google and thrown into their sandbox. Google Webmaster Tools is a vital instrument and is effective in submitting or resubmitting your site for reconsideration so that your site reappears in Google’s index. Great Stuff…
Thanks So Much for Reading!
~ JAWS
kickstartsearch
Professional SEO Company - Google Webmaster Tools
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Your Key To Success!
For many, traveling the road to superior rankings within the search engines takes many hours of time and resources. The online arena can be very saturated across many verticals at times due to the economy and the level of competition for products and services. With less “pie” to go around, companies are now vying for consumer business more than ever… If you’re looking to get a leg up (or dominate) your competitors, a majority of business owners are now turning to the assistance of search engine optimization professionals to help them combat the ever-changing internet and the entire suite of technicalities that go along with it. It is the SEO specialist which has the SEO knowledge, skills and experience to make an SEO campaign succeed and this is what every business owner wants. Whether it is staying ahead of the game with innovative search marketing trends, social media, or walking that fine line of being ‘in compliance’ with Google’s infamous search algorithm, great SEO is coveted now more than ever. In many cases some companies just don’t have the time, know-how and/or ‘In-House’ man power to take on such a crucial undertaking for their website. Thankfully there are folks out there that specialize in SEO that can help lead you through the whole process so you come out on TOP!
The relationship between a website owner and SEO Company is really important. Without a doubt, the site owner will have high hopes and expectations for their SEO campaign, and the SEO professional will equally want to achieve the best results possible for their client. For these two goals to be met, both parties must work together in successful harmony. With the world moving online, a large portion of a company’s livelihood relies on successful marketing of their website. The healthier a relationship between site owner and the SEO professional, the better the results.
Below are a couple of things a company can do to help this relationship develop into a flourishing marketing campaign where everyone wins:
First and foremost, it’s really in a site owner’s best interest to do their due diligence when looking for the ideal SEO Company to work with. They must explore their website thoroughly, looking at the various services they provide. Make sure you do some online research into their business and approach them for further information and offer a free consultation (if available) before agreeing to do anything. By obtaining information about what the SEO company does and how they do the things they do, can give you a better idea on the types of realistic expectations you can anticipate. Knowing how the SEO campaign will be conducted is EXTREMELY important! Many business owners that are inexperienced in SEO look forward to overnight miracles and become disappointed and irritated when this is not possible. Remember, SEO IS successful but it takes time. Vital components that are successful in moving your website from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ must be spread out over time so that there aren’t any red flags drawn by Google and the other search engines, thinking that you’re trying to manipulate their index. The supplemental index is NOT a place you want to be in.
Once you have located the right SEO Company that fits your needs, you need to provide them with all the information they need. It is important that the SEO consultant research each company’s needs in order to personalize each campaign. Every company is different. The site owner or company’s marketing individual is the person with the valuable information and must be willing to share it clearly and carefully with those SEO professionals working on the campaign so information can be used effectively.
Not only is this information important to be given to your SEO company, but it’s also important for information to be communicated the other way too. If a site owner has hired a professional SEO company to work on their website, they must be prepared to listen to what they have to say, do and suggest. It is the SEO Professional who has the expertise and knowledge with industry specific advice that must be followed and respected. If you have chosen to trust the company who you are now working with, you must implement any changes they suggest. It will be these changes that will make or break your success with indexing high in the search engines.
With all the SEO companies out there, which one will actually produce the weighted results you’re looking for? Communication is essential in SEO and working together with your chosen marketing firm will only achieve the desired success you’re looking for, tangible results that you can see.
Thanks for Reading!
~ JAWS
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The world of search engine optimization (SEO) is so powerful that whoever enters its realm, enhances the volume and quality of traffic to their web page, website or in successful cases both. In contrast from other forms of search engine marketing that mainly deal with paid insertions; search engine optimization gives the user 100 percent organic (natural or un-paid) search results. The principle idea of SEO is simple – the higher your website is on the search engine results pages (SERPS), the better increase in volume of web traffic to your website.
With that being said, SEO can help you get more visitors to your website. The ONLY thing this process unfortunately can’t do is convert your visitors into buyers. For this component of SEO, one needs the implementation of conversion optimization. In my recent experience, many folks have a tough time understanding the difference between search engine optimization and conversion optimization. While the SEO process indubitably gets visitors to your website, conversion optimization is all about getting tons more business by converting those precious visitors into buyers.
The process of drawing those web surfers to your website through superior search engine rankings and exceptional SEO is fine and dandy; however, if you’re not doing your part to convert them into consumers once they’ve arrived to your website, (not to be the bearer of bad news but…) your site is going to fail miserably. Conversion optimization is so crucial if you’re looking to run a successful and very lucrative online business. STOP: Your first step in this process should be to learn as many tricks-of-the-trades as humanly possible. Below, I have established four super useful components you should take under your wing and make your own ASAP. This is really for your websites own good 
1. K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid) – People who visit your site shouldn’t have to jump through a bunch of unnecessary loop holes in order for them to get to your money page to buy what you’re selling. In this current era of technology people want convenience, especially Internet browsers – people hate waiting. There is a HUGE demand for user-friendly, organized and easy to navigate websites. Now, stop and take a good hard look at your website; is it optimal for converting visitors into customers? If you’re having second thoughts, it’s time to start rethinking your site’s overall feel and design, ultimately coming up with one that will make your visitors’ lives effortless. You heard me, EASY!
2. Have a Gripping Call to Action – Phenomenal Calls to action are, without a doubt, one of the most crucial elements on your site with regards to conversion optimization. If visitors are uncertain about how to progress on your site, or about what you want them to do – they’re going back out and go someplace else; Most likely to one of your competitors. In an ideal world, you should take an extraordinary amount of time when designing your website’s calls to action, and navigation in general; everything should be convincing and clear-cut. Your site should allow your customer to get specific information they need in as quick a manner as possible. The ultimate travesty is your users running into frustration while simply just looking for information.
3. Offer something that is complimentary – If there’s anything you MUST take away from this excerpt, it’s this: People absolutely love getting free stuff – FREE, FREE, FREE. Create something that people can download or some other type of inexpensive gift to give away to the people who visit your site. If you’re a service based company, give away a free consultation or consultative appointment so you can talk to the potential client to see what their needs are. Have a form for them to fill out and simply ask them for a valid email address, phone number and their name. This scenario will convert many visitors into active leads to go after; at the very least it will allow you to gather a number of email addresses that can be used to remind folks of your products or services later down the road.
4. Have Live Support on your site – The least thing people are looking for is “shady” business and being left in the dark. There are a few options available to you – you can either invest in live chat software to offer live help on your site to your customers in order to increase the conversion rate on your site. Having a phone number works just fine though, customers will call if they have a need and it’s just not being taken care of via the website. This also meshes well with #2, your Call-To-Action; subliminally you’re telling your customers to CALL you. Excellent, we LOVE that!
Setting your website up to convert well isn’t rocket science, it just takes a little bit of time and a tad bit of strategy. When people visit the home page of a website and then immediately and suddenly leave the site because they don’t get what they were looking for, that’s a business’s worst nightmare. Components range from poor website design to a confusing navigation, and information on a website. The role of conversion optimization helps convert visitors on your website – whether it’s to sell a product or request a consultation for your services, the end result is the same. Make it so visitors STAY on your site…
Thanks For Reading Our SEO Company Excerpt!
~JAWS
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.jpg "Google Caffeine")
After nearly a year of speculation as to when Google would unveil their new “under-the-hood” search engine, Google Caffeine, they finally announced on Tuesday evening that Caffeine has officially gone live: Google Caffeine goes live!
What does this big change mean? In essence, this move by big “G” appears largely to be a response to Microsoft/Bing and their “decision engine.” Caffeine promises to crawl the web faster, provide better results, and show the latest items on the web in “real-time”.
The sound byte from Matt Cutts of Google is: “Fundamentally the change is as soon as a document gets crawled boom, it gets indexed,” Cutts said … rather than updating the index in a staggered process. “This essentially makes the entire index closer to real time.”
Some of this isn’t entirely new. We’ve been seeing a gradual increase in universal search results (images, video, news items, shopping results, real-time search results like Tweets) within the regular Google web results over the last couple of years. Additionally, you can now view search results by time segment (look at the left hand column of a results page). This means that for many search phrases, the entrenched organic results (usually big brands), become less prominent if you view results for a keyword through a lens such as only ‘the last 24 hours.’
Even on a more long-tail keyword, the time-segment option can provide strikingly different results. For example, a search for baseball ceiling fans looking at regular web results brings up an array of various e-commerce stores (Amazon.com, Overstock.com, etc) that one would expect to find. However, looking at results for only the last 24 hours brings up results rarely seen anymore on page one such as Craigslist postings and more! When conducting a search for discount duvet covers and setting the time parameter for “latest”, I could view pages that had only just been added to Google’s index today.
Personally I think this change will have the biggest impact on e-retailers and news providers more than anything. I’m not convinced that people looking for B2B services like preventive maintenance software or document control software are really going to want to look at results only from the last 24 hours because they want to see whats just been Tweeted or discussed on LinkedIn about the subject. That being said, i could be totally wrong.
We’ll keep an eye on how things develop over the coming weeks and months.
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Google Caffeine
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For many webmasters and business owners with websites, so much focus is placed on user experience and aesthetics that understanding how a ‘Google Bot’ or a search engine ‘spider’ might be reading the pages gets overlooked. In this post I’d like to talk about the things you should keep in mind when thinking about SEO for your images and your Heading tags.
IMAGES
It’s been said that a “picture is worth 1,000 words.” Well, this may be the case, but search engine spiders can’t read images and interpret their meaning. So if you’re site relies heavily on images, and doesn’t utilize much text content, you may be getting little love from the search engines. Here’s an example of a home page from a Bay Area Remodeling company that mostly consists of images. One of the primary images on their page is pictured here to the left:
When a search engine spider comes through and crawls the web page, it does not process this image and come up with a description of what it is seeing. That would be very difficult to write an automated program for. Instead, there is an attribute you can assign to an image, known as “alt text,” or “associated text.” If you pull up the html for this image on the website it was originally hosted on, it looks like this:
<a href=”kitchens.html” class=”highlightit”><img src=”wpimages/wp2bd40c4c_05.jpg“width=”254″ height=”258″ border=”0″ id=”pic_10″ name=”pic_10″title=”" alt=”Bay Area Kitchen Remodel”></a>
Now, most of the content in that snippet of html code for the image doesn’t need to be discussed right now. However, when a search engine spider crawls this page, that section of the code that I have made bold and red instructs the spider to index the text: “Bay Area Kitchen Remodel” instead of having the image just come up as nothing.
A good way to see how search engine spiders are reading your pages is to use the Google Toolbar. Once you have the toolbar installed, bring up a ‘cached snapshot’ of the page you are viewing. This will show you how the page looks the last time it was crawled by Google, along with the date/time at which it was crawled. Additionally, if you then click the link that says “text-only” version, you can see the page in a format more similar to how a search engine spider would read it.
HEADING TAGS
Heading tags also are a way to help search engine spiders read your page the way that human users are. For example, most pages will put ‘headings’ or headlines in bold, large, font. However, unless that text content is in a heading tag, it looks exactly the same as the rest of your text to a search spider. Here’s an example from a website that offers baby bibs, trumpette socks, and other baby gifts. On the ‘trumpette socks’ page, the headline and first paragraph of text appears to an ordinary web user like this:
However, because the text “Trumpette Socks” is in an H1 or “Heading 1″ tag, it appears very prominently in a text-only cached snapshot of the page (i.e.: more of how a search spider would read it):
So… remember that if you have keyword-rich headlines on a page, use H1 tags to ensure that search spiders will recognize that content as the headline of your page. By paying closer attention to your heading tags and images, you can easily make your pages more relevant for your targeted keywords.
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Bay Area Kitchens
Trumpette Socks Text
Trumpette Socks Heading Text
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So we recently engaged in a lot of debate and research here in the office regarding a ‘canonical URL’ issue involving one of our clients. Normally when we talk about canonical URLs, it has to do with common issues affecting websites like this one:
- www.website.com
- website.com
In the aforementioned example, if one version of the domain is not either selected by way of a 301 re-direct, or through a webmaster account with each search engine (Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer, Bing Webmaster Center), links can be acquired and visitors logged through both versions of the domain. Why is this a problem? Because Google and the other search engines will begin crawling both versions of the page and separating out the visits and links to both versions rather than consolidating them. The end result is that you have much lower search rankings.
Here’s another common canonical URL issue:
- www.homepage.com
- www.homepage.com/index/
Many times will also see this second example cause problems. A user might arrive at the first example of the home page, only to get taken to a slightly different URL (the ‘/index/’ one) if they click on the “home page” link in the navigation tab from another page in the site. For the reasons stated in the ‘www’ vs. ‘non-www’ example, this can also be problematic from an SEO perspective.
However, a new kind of canonical URL issue recently emerged that we previously had not thought of as a major issue. One of our clients, who specializes in magazine subscriptions, had rankings that were experiencing major volatility for terms such as ‘Playboy Magazine,’ ‘Smooth Magazine,’ and ‘WWE Magazine‘ (Sorry- had to give them some blatant link love there). After looking back at a couple months of rankings reports, an interesting trend emerged. The rankings that were most volatile, seemed to consistently have changes in the capitalization of the URL string. For example, over a 2 month period, we would see the following different versions of the same page getting ranking:
- www.website.com/Magazines/Maxim
- www.website.com/magazines/Maxim
- www.website.com/magazines/maxim
Additionally, there were links pointing to every different version of the same URL depending on the capitalization. This appears to be a problem that only affects websites on Microsoft IIS servers (the URL’s are not case sensitive in IIS). With many sites, like those on an Apache server, putting in the wrong capitalization of the URL will automatically cause you to get re-directed, or generate a 404 error. Unfortunately, in IIS, you can go crazy with the CAPS lock key when inputting a URL, and the search engines will potentially index every version you try. Due to the use of different versions of capitalization in press releases and other company materials, inbound links, user traffic, and ultimately search engine spider were going to all of these different versions of the URL of our client’s site.
In this instance, the standardization of lower-case only throughout all future linking including company PR was the first step. The next was using 301 re-directs to re-route any links and traffic to our preferred version of the page. While there is some evidence that suggests that link juice can be lost through a 301 re-direct on some occasions (http://searchengineland.com/cutts-redirects-dont-pass-full-pagerank-more-takeaways-38064), it still appeared to be the most logical solution.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and the results seem to validate our suspicions thus far. Rankings are up, and substantially in some cases, and we are hoping to see much less volatility (cross our fingers). So if you’re on a Microsoft IIS server, hopefully this post helps explain your SEO frustration if you’ve been experiencing a lot of it.
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Duplicate Content
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A new Google penalty? What can you do against it?
Google finally adds hacking notification
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