Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘website performance’

SEO Strategy: Where is that traffic hiding? Part 1- Be the king of your domain(s)

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

Unless you want to jump right into search engine marketing and buy PPC advertisements to route traffic, you should consider looking for those hidden cache’s of traffic lurking around the Internet. One thing you have to be absolutely sure of, especially if you’re a new online business, is that you or your SEO specialists are using “white hat” techniques to improve your Internet ranking. We discussed white hat SEO and SEM techniques in an earlier post, so you should be aware of how that works.

Our personal recommendation for website businesses is to go the white hat route to avoid being flagged as a spambot, and to establish the same online business reputation as your physical business/product would have. In the range of allowable (and recommended) white hat techniques for finding hidden caches of website traffic are strategies like searching for and registering domain names that relate to your website.

Be the king of your domains! Find out all of the keyword variations on the spelling, misspelled versions, and look for what’s available with your name—.orgs, .coms…you name it. What it boils down to, as an SEO strategy is, if it could possibly, conceivably, even remotely, be construed as your website, head over to GoDaddy, buy it up and redirect it or link it to your actual web business. Otherwise, someone else will buy it and potentially charge you a lot of money to buy back your own name.

SEM Strategy: Y is for Yahoo!—Do You?

Friday, February 4th, 2011

Although Google currently holds the crown in the United States for the most-used search engine, Yahoo isn’t too far behind in its popularity and complexity of search algorithms. The Yahoo! Directory was one of the original and authoritative web directories that online businesses could list their information in to get searched. Even today, website businesses can securely pick up a trusted link from the search engine. Unlike the beginning, you would have to pay to be listed in the current generation of the Yahoo! Directory.

When it comes to optimizing for Yahoo over Google, you need to pay attention to how the keywords in the titles and URLs are important. If you place optimized keywords, relevant to your niche website business in these areas, your Internet rankings will grow faster in Yahoo. Just keep in mind, you need to use 3-4 words keywords, at most, per title, to avoid looking too spammy and getting flagged. Another tip is to use SEO keywording in filenames to score well in organic searches and website performance; Google might not factor this in any measurable way.

SEM Strategy: U is for Usability—Don’t Make Us Think About It

Monday, January 31st, 2011

If your website is too complicated to figure out, your target audience wont spend any time trying to figure it out. Not when there are a countless online business competitors ready to take your place.

Even if you are extremely specialized, if you want to continue growing your Internet marketing business, you need to have an optimized, organized space that is easy to use. If you split the task up into sections, you’d basically have navigation, accessibility and content. We’ve recently extolled the virtues of SEO content, so we’ll focus on the other two aspects of a proper search engine optimized website.

Navigation as a search engine optimization tool is imperative to keeping your customers happy. From the silly things like making sure your company logo always links to your main page, to having a working site map, navigation is how your target audience knows, no matter what part of the website they come in from, where they need to go. As a matter of SEO housekeeping, make sure your links are optimized and working, you don’t have too many links and buttons and flashing things on your site, and your site search is easy to access. Navigation ties in strongly to company identity; you need to maintain a strong theme and identity throughout your website to help your target audience know where to go.

Accessibility is the other major aspect of a well-rounded website. These are the issues like having a reasonable site load speed, easy-to-read text, proper alt text and other things that unify the website’s accessibility to its navigation and content. Another piece of accessibility that would be nice for your target audience is something like a customized error page that redirects them to an interesting or appropriate place in your website, or language translation and audio options.

No matter how great you feel your website business is, just remember, it could be the prettiest thing on the planet, but if it isn’t useful, it’s not going to go far in its Internet ranking.

SEM Strategy: T is for Title—The First Impression

Friday, January 28th, 2011

On a website, just like a news article or any written document, the title describes what is in the document. One of the easiest things you can do with search engine optimizing your online business is to have unique titles for each of your pages. If necessary, you should also create keyword optimized titles throughout the website content, to help break up the ideas.

Ideal titles are 8-10 words at most, descriptive of the content on the website without being too long. Generally speaking, if you want the titles to help improve website performance, they should be unique, describe the important things on the website and in the best situation, be something used as the link anchor text. Descriptive anchor text increases the chance your link will be clicked on.

In order to write SEO friendly titles, either choose from your bank of researched keywords strongly associated with your Internet marketing business, or select the key phrases, issues and familiar buzzwords surrounding your niche website business that your target audience can strongly associate with. The bonus of using popular buzzwords is you will engage your target audience and compel them to select your link, but your web content should relate to your title, or it will affect your bounce rates negatively.

Like any first impression, a title tag gives strangers an impression of what your online business looks like; be sure to put your best foot forward.

SEM Strategy: S is for SEO Copywriting & Content (Our Favorite)

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

We’ve said it before, and because it’s our favorite of the SEO and SEM strategies we’ll continue to say it—when it comes to excellent search engine marketing strategy, nothing tops good, optimized content. Search engine marketing is built on good SEO analytics, and search engine optimization is based on finding the best keywords for your niche online market, and building valuable connections through excellent web content.

SEO copywriting can be done by experienced freelancers or members of your search engine marketing team. Ideally, they should know how to attract your target audience and have a concrete understanding of the keywording you want to see in the online business marketing for your website. You can add valuable Internet ranking points to your website through writing a content-rich and optimized blog for your website, linking to other related blogging sites to your niche market and creating reciprocal links with other relevant Internet marketing blog sites.

Additionally, you should have a website that is easy to navigate with good SEO content in the title, alt and H1 tags, and on the landing pages. Strong copywriting is part of the process of creating an easily understood site map, and increases the overall strength of your website performance and organic search results.

Connecting Buyers With Sellers On The Internet