Tips For Bringing People To Your Web Site

There is a great mystery out there in the world known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is the Holy Grail for web site owners. It is the phantom that they try to capture in their attempt to bring more people to their web sites.

SEO isn’t hard. It is time consuming and, if you don’t know what your are doing, can be a real headache without a lot of return on your investment. No one ever built a successful web site and did nothing with it. The good news is there are ways that you can help your web site yourself! Below, you will find some very good answers to having people find you online:

Building Your Web Site. When you begin to design your web site, the first thing you should consider is how SEO will factor into your marketing plan. What keywords and phrases will you use? How will content urge people to come to your web site and link to you?

Content. This is the single most important factor to any self-serving web site. Your content must have good keywords and phrases – the same ones you want people to find you on when searching the internet. Search engine spiders love that text!

Renew Your Content – and often! The search engines love it when you start making changes to your pages. If you cannot do this, then you can always blog. Blogging creates an RSS feed that allows spiders to find your web site. Make sure you follow proper anchor text linking in your blogs and tag keywords to help find your web site.

Longtail Keywords. Short, common keywords won’t get you anywhere. There are other web sites out there using the same keywords for a lot longer than you. If you have a web site that does video production, you might find it hard to get onto the first few pages of Google with words like “video”. Instead try Cincinnati Video Production. This will help you get your business found more easily. Remember: Be precise in what you want your keywords to be. They will help bring people to your web site.

Links. Right behind content, you have to build up a group of links back to your web site – using those keywords and phrases that you are using in your text. Another important thing about links: If it is on a page that has nothing to do with your web site – it won’t really work that well for you. Make your links relevant! For example: If I wanted a link to my web site from this article, I’d put it as Web Site Design and Marketing.

Anchor Text. When you create links within your web site between pages, make sure the links are using specific keywords in which you want to be found. For example: I might put the following as a link - Web Site Hosting.

Title Tags. First, make sure you have a title tag on each page. Then, make sure it doesn’t say HOME PAGE. Your title tags should contain relevant keywords that will bring people to your pages.

Avoid Flash. I know. It looks nice. It is cool. Search engine spiders find this inedible. They hate it! Why? Because Flash is pictures and they like text. If you must use Flash, use it sparingly. Also note, not everyone has the latest update of Flash, so all that fancy design work may look like nothing on some people’s browsers. If you just have to have Flash, make sure you add some text below the movie frame. This is known as “below the fold.”

Javascript. OK, while you’re avoiding Flash, avoid drop down menus, too. The search engine spiders just don’t see it. Use it at your own peril.

Alt Tags. Every picture you use should have text associated with it to let the search engines know what it is about. These should be keyword rich words, as well. The text is referred to as an Alt Tag.

Social Networking. Use it. What is it? It is mySpace, Facebook, sta.rtup.biz, Linked In, and many others. Make sure you put your link back to your web site and make sure you comment on as many other member’s pages as possible. Social Networking will help your web site tremendously.

So, is that all there is to it? Nope. This will give you an excellent starting place, though. In addition to these things, look into a strong Pay-Per-Click marketing campaign. Some people will tell you that Organic Search Engine Marketing is the only way to go, but a homogenous blend of SEO (what we’ve been talking about) and PPC (pay-per-click) will give you the most bang for your buck. Additionally, PPC offers the most obvious way of tracking where your money is going, so your accountant will love it too!

Good luck on this endeavor. It takes time, but it will definitely help you build your web site’s success.

WHAT WILL $5000 IN ADVERTISING GET YOU?

WHAT WILL $5000 IN ADVERTISING GET YOU?
Playing it by the numbers…

NINE THOUSAND BLACK AND WHITE MAILERS. These have a 1% - 5% chance of NEVER being opened.

or...

TWO HUNDRED CLASSIFIED ADS - one every three days for one year. These have about a 3% chance of EVER being read.

or...

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY SECOND RADIO SPOTS in Cleveland. Are you targeting the right audience and are they listening? 95% will never remember…

or...

FIFTY 10-SECOND TV ADS mixed throughout the day on a local cable station. Did your audience get up and go make a sandwich? Again, 95% will never remember…

or...

SEVEN NEWSPAPER ADS – 3 columns x 3” (a little more than half the size of a note card).

or...

TWO TRADE MAGAZINE ADS in which you advertise TO your competition.

or...

A YELLOW PAGES AD about the size of a drink coaster for one year.

or...

ONE WEB SITE.
A web site professionally designed and online 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, no holiday pricing changes.

Located on a place that people actually go to get news and information – their computers.

A web site that will allow you make changes to your text and pictures when YOU want the changes made…

AND the best part of all…it won’t cost you $5000 to have a web site. You’ll have plenty of money left over to use on other marketing endeavors: Pay-Per-Click, Search Engine Optimization, your web site added to your business cards, letterhead, and invoices.

You’ll have money left over to advertise in other traditional marketing methods or even have a video made of your products and services. Why wouldn’t you want a web site that attracts customers to you? For more information: www.mywebsource1.com

The Ugly Truth about the Beauty of Flash

Nothing creates a chasm between SEO experts and Web designers, like Flash. Flash is a wonderful program that brings moving pictures, cartoons, and total aesthetic license to web site design, but it is a nightmare for search engine marketing. The reason is pretty simple – search engines cannot easily index the contents of a Flash file and unless you create plenty of readable text inside a Flash movie, you can simply count this a lost cause for boosting your rankings. There are ways to work around this, but they are not easy and until search engines start indexing Flash movies as plain text, they are only a band-aid to the real solution.

The reason search engines do not index Flash sites is that they are too complex for the spiders to comprehend. The spiders do index the file names, but they cannot touch the most important parts that search engine marketers rely on to make a web site work.

Flash movies are made up of an extension owned by Adobe (called a *.swf file) that search engines cannot read. All search engines really dislike this format but they will index small portions of these files.


As a general rule, keep Flash files to a minimum on your web sites. You can use small movies in certain situations, but less is definitely best. This is not for just optimization reasons. Flash movies also take up me a lot of bandwidth on your computer.


More importantly, all people cannot view Flash. This means that unless the person trying to view your web site has the current Flash viewer on their computer, they cannot even view your web site! You want all people to have access to your site. There is a prompt to download the viewer when they come to your site, but not all people will add the file to their computer. This can potentially turn customers away from your business.

This is not to say that Flash should never be used in your web site. I personally think web sites designed with Flash are beautiful, but it should be used to add to your web site, not to define the site. It is wonderful for visual representation to your site, the majority of your web site still needs to be text for optimization.
So, how do you solve a Flash dilemma? The following is a list of fixing some of the issues:


Alternative Pages: Offer a duplicate HTML version of your web site that does not force the viewer to watch the Flash movies. This will ensure that your site will be indexed and people can view your web site.

Metadata: This allows you to input information into your Flash files that can allow search engines to read your web site. Flash offers the development tools necessary to do this.

Search Engine SDK: Adobe offers a tool called swf2html that allows you to extract text in your swf files and change them to html – thus making them searchable! While this isn’t foolproof, it puts your web pages much farther along for search engine optimization.

While all of these ideas cannot replace setting up proper search engine optimization from the start of your web site, it also means that you do not have to take your aesthetic site and scrap the whole thing.

Confessions of a Search Engine Marketing Professional

by James Fowler
www.mywebsource1.com

A year ago, on July 1st, I started my business, www.myWebSource1.com. I had been doing search engine marketing (SEM) work for some time, but I thought it was finally time to make it official and start doing this for local businesses and non-profit organizations.

My first thought process was to design web sites for people and do them in a way where they had a good start with search engine optimization. Some of the web sites I saw out there were horribly optimized and relying solely on pay-per-click marketing (PPC) –or nothing at all!

After some time of this, however, I realized that many people already had a web site built for them by a nephew or cousin and they weren’t happy with the results. Some asked for a re-design, but others wanted to know how to fix what they already had. People understood a tangible web site, but finding out the non-tangible – what we do – was difficult for them to grasp. The needed a something to show them a way to make their web site matter. And thus, my SEO report was created.

This was something I was able to grasp!
I had a service to sell!

The SEO report is a search engine optimization paper, consisting of about 40 methods and suggestions for local businesses and non-profit organizations to examine their web pages, find the broken links, the misspelled words, the non-indexed pages and other problems that show poor presentation of a web site. It isn’t necessarily the aesthetic feel of your web site that is the problem, it could just be the way it is presented to the world.

Some things I tell every one of my customers is that to succeed on the internet, you need to do certain things for the search engines to find you. These can be done by yourself, if you have the time, or by a search engine professional. Here is a list of ten things you can do:

1 Have a Site Map – not just the Extended Markup Hyperlink (xml) that Google asks for, but an HTML one, too. This is especially helpful with search engines like Yahoo!

2 Use keyword metatags – these are words that describe to search engines what is on your web page.

3 Make sure that every page has a title. Nothing is more disgusting than finding out your web page is called “HOME”.

4 Create a blog. Most people think a blog is a kid’s thing or something done by musicians. There is nothing further from the truth. A blog can build your business on the web very quickly. More on this at another time.

5 Take those keywords I told you to use in Tip #2 and use them as hyperlinks in your blogs. This entire blog post is a good example.

6 Write articles and press releases. Submit them to web sites that will distribute them for you. Make sure to include plenty of links.

7 Submit your site to search engines. Make sure that each of your web pages is indexed by at least the top three search engines. (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN).

8 Join bulletin boards and online groups associated with your business or service. Post to these. Make sure to include a link back to your web site when you write in them.

9 Ask companies that are associated with your business to include your link on their web site. They may ask for you to do the same. If they do, make sure you add their link to your site.

10 Finally, don’t quit adding new content to your web site. The search engines love this and they will scan your site more often.

I hope you find these ten points useful. If you have any questions or would like to use my services, please contact me at www.myWebSource1.com or by email info@mywebsource1.com .