We have quite a few clients that use blogs on their site. Here are just a few that I’m going to talk about:
Health Positive – http://www.healthpositive.com/blog
Brodbeck Seed – http://www.brodbeckseed.com/blog
Halderman Farm Management – http://www.halderman.com/blog
Health Positive: You’ll notice that a majority of the posts deal with massage therapy which is what Health Positive focuses on in their business. You’ll also see that they tag their posts which is helpful with the search engines because those could be used as search terms. So for example if someone searches for “Massage Business Marketing” then it’s possible that this blog would show up as a search result.
Brodbeck Seed: Brodbeck Seed focuses on Agronomy articles for their blog. Usually an article is posted each month with up to date happenings in the farming world. This information can be helpful/useful to the farming community.
Halderman Farm Management: Halderman focuses on land values, economy, leasing etc. with their blog articles. They also post articles in regards to their auctions as well which is just another way for people to find more information about a particular farm auction.
In conclusion all three of these companies use their blog in a very useful way for their consumers. Their articles can certainly help them with their search engine rankings for particular keywords. If you ever need a blog setup on your site please feel free to contact us @ 877.569.0260
It seems everyone is talking about Social Media or Social Marketing today. So what can you do as a small business owner who doesn’t have time to even keep up on your web site, let alone working on setting up a blog or a Facebook page? Well why not do all three at once?
This idea of writing something once and using it in multiple ways is what the web is all about! These new technologies are supposed to make your life easier not harder!
How do we do this?
Let’s start with our website.
By setting up a blog on your site you can have up to date content that is changed daily or weekly if you prefer. Different people from your organization can add different posts to different categories eliminating the need for only one or a handful of people managing the entire site. Administrators can approve blogs giving them editorial control.
The blog can then be added to the home page or your site or any page you wish providing new, updated content to each page of your site.
So the first step above takes care of two issues at once – keeping your site content up to date and providing a blog for your site.
The next step is to make a Facebook page for your company or a Twitter page for your company. Once this is done you can link your blog directly to both of these allowing your blog to update both!
How is that helpful?
Well now we have a blog that is being edited in one location and is updating itself, your site, your Facebook page AND your Twitter account.
If this is a strategy you would like to employ to update your site and get better results in the search engines and better communication with your customers – give us a call today – 360-569-0260 – we can help!
Over the years SEO has definitely changed on getting to the top in the search engines.
Below are a few of the things that you had to worry about before:
1. Meta tags
2. Links to other websites
3. Title Tags
The above items are still important but there are other things to consider now as well:
1. H1, H2 tags for important keywords
2. Pay per click advertising
3. Keeping content fresh
4. Blogging
These are just a few things to look at when you’re optimizing your site.
Please give us a call @ 877-569-0260 if you need help optimizing your site for the search engines.
Google Analytics is a free tool that tells you how your visitors found your site, where they came from etc.
It provides a variety of different reports including an executive overview, E-commerce summary, a conversion summary and many more.
An executive overview shows the visits and pageviews, percentage of new and returning visitors, a geo map overlay which shows exactly where the visitor came from, and which site the visitor was on when they found your site.
An E-commerce summary shows the total revenue that you have accumulated from visits, the average revenue per transaction, the cities which have accounted for the most revenue etc.
An conversion summary shows the conversion rate for your site. It provides if your conversion rate has increased or decreased for a certain date range. This summary is very valuable if you have made changes to the site recently and then you can see if those changes have made an impact on your rate.
Sign up for Google Analytics now to analyze your sites’ productivity.
Andrew, Mark and I are attending a Search Engine Seminar in Chicago at the Hilton on December 5th, 2006. It should be very beneficial to our company as we’ll be attending some conferences and getting information from Google, Netscape, Ask.com etc.
Stay tuned on what we found out in Chicago.
If anyone is using Wordpress to blog you might wonder how do rewrite your urls from http://www.domain.com/blog?p=73 to http://www.domain.com/blog/post-name? We have the answer.
It includes mod rewriting and permalinks. Under the “Options” in the wordpress admin area, there is a tab called Permalinks. Under custom structure I used this “/index.php/archive/%postname%/”. And then make the change to your .htaccess file with the rewrites. It will look something like this
“RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^.*$ – [S=34]
RewriteRule ^feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /blog/index.php?&feed=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /blog/index.php?&feed=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^page/?([0-9]{1,})/?$ /blog/index.php?&paged=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^comments/feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /blog/index.php?&feed=$1&withcomments=1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^comments/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /blog/index.php?&feed=$1&withcomments=1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^comments/page/?([0-9]{1,})/?$ /blog/index.php?&paged=$1 [QSA,L]”
A good resource if you have any questions regarding rewriting urls is modrewrite.com
This will help in your search engine ranking because the spiders will be able to read those urls. They have a hard time reading anything with a question mark in the url.
Also are you receiving numerous amounts of SPAM in your comments? What can you do? There is a anti-spam image plugin that helps tremendously. It cut our spam from about 300-400 to about 15-20. Here is a link to the plugin. Very easy to install.
Do you need search engine optimization for your website? If so Visionary Enterprises can do the work for you. We are a professional Web Design and Development company that has been in existence since 1997.
We can submit your site to approximately 50-100 search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Lycos, etc. If we designed your website we will make that submission as a part of the web design contract. If you would like pay-per-click search engine placement all that you need to do is to signup and add money to your account and we can monitor the keywords for you.
Just give us a call at 877-569-0260 or stop in and see us.
You might be wondering how we have Google ads on our site. I’ll tell you. This is Google’s Adsense program. It is easy money for you and your company. It works basically the same way as a pay-per-click search engine. You get paid for people clicking on the links.
After you sign up for your account and enter all of your business information etc., you can customize on how you want your Google Ads to look like. You can choose either an ad unit or a link unit. An ad unit could be a text ad, an image ad or both that relates to text on that specific page. And a link unit is just list of topics that relate to the information on that page.
One thing that you want to be careful of is posting competitors on your website. If you are a business that sells office supplies, you don’t want a bunch of other websites that sell office supplies on your website. So what you can do is Google has a “Competitive Ad Filter” area where you can enter a website address to be filtered, and then it won’t show up on your site anymore.
We have used Google Adsense for almost a year now, and it has been very beneficiary to us. We suggest if you aren’t enrolled in the Google Adsense program to sign up now.
All webmasters and businesses should want to see their site listed in Yahoo. It is still one of the more popular search engines out there and Google, for instance, takes your placement in Yahoo seriously.
Paying to be in the Yahoo directory is a really good start to getting your site listed on the search engines. It is a $299.00 yearly fee to be in the directory.
You want to be sure to pick a relevant category and have a good description because Yahoo might not list your site. That’s right, Yahoo has the right of not adding you to the directory. So you don’t want to get sneaky and putting some irrelevant keywords in the description because Yahoo might see your listing and throw it away. Also you want to be sure to not tricking the search engines. For instance, putting text the same color as your background color just to increase your placement of your page is not a smart thing to do. Because if the search engines figure out that you are doing that, they might flag you and drop you from their engine.
So the tips you want to remember are:
1. Be smart
2. Choose a relevant category
3. Have a short, precise description not just filled with a bunch of keywords
In my opinion stylesheets are one of the best things ever. It makes things so much easier to update if you use stylesheets for your website.
For example if you want to increase the font size of the site, you only need to change it in one place, and it will change it everywhere in the site:
“BODY, TD {
font-family:arial,helvetica;
font-size:14px;
}”
We have also started to use them for making layouts instead of using tables. So the site is made with layers. One of the examples that you can look at is Pirates Cove Marina. There are many other sites that we are working on right now that are using layers.
One of the main reasons you want to use stylesheets is for search engine placement. The reason is because of load time. The more html code that you have in the page, the longer it takes for the page to load. So instead of having all of the font tags, bold tags, etc., you would want to use a stylesheet for these things.
So in the end, everyone should use stylesheets in making his or her own web site.
