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Archives for August 2007

Why Doesn’t My Home Page Show Up In The Search Engine Results?

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A common question we get with clients is why specific content pages might show up in the search engine results pages (SERP), but not the home page. The answer to the question actually first needs to nip the whole idea that having your content pages showing up on the first page of any search engine is bad. There’s no reason to prevent the search engines from indexing your site’s content pages, so you shouldn’t try and stop them; valuable traffic frequently enters websites on content pages in the search engine results.

As much as it would be ideal to have your polished branding be the only entry point into your site, the reality of it is that there’s no way to make your home page specific to all the phrases you want to show up for. That’s what the SEO content pages are for, to increase your chances of being ranked on all those specific key phrases. That’s not to say you can’t target 1-3 specific phrases for your homepage, in fact we encourage it through use of the title, META, h1 tags, bold emphasis, URL optimization, content, etc. But you can’t expect your home page to ever be the most relevant result for the dozens of phrases you’re targeting with your SEO campaign. If you don’t want the specific content pages to show up in the results anymore, they can be removed from the site and eventually the search engines will phase it out of the natural rankings. But you will lose any ranking associated with it, because that’s a page that the search engines value highly enough to rank for a reason.

Pay-per-click is the only way to force the search engines to connect a phrase to your home page. Optimizing your home page for the 1-3 phrases that are most critical to your business is the best way to go about promoting yourself to the search engines for natural ranking.

Sending PPC Traffic to Homepage Vs. Landing Page

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With interactive Flash and offers to convert by it, any home page could be an effective landing page. But the reason why we send people to a landing page is because it is more simplistic with its navigation and more aggressive in its approach to lead generation. If you’d rather just have qualified eyes on a site with PPC, you could send your PPC traffic there, but you probably won’t get as many people filling out the forms. Which we know from years of experience that if you aren’t getting inquiries, you probably won’t be happy with the results from your search engine marketing campaign.

Need help building a killer landing page that will yield a much higher ROI than just sending your PPC traffic to your site’s home page? Fill out the contact form on our site and we’ll be in touch about how we can help you out.

Search Engine Submission Myths

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It is a myth that submitting hundreds of search engines makes any difference in the search engine rankings. If you’re marketing with us, when your site goes live we submit it, as a courtesy, to four major engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, and DMOZ. There are other smaller engines that you can submit it to, but these four account for over 90% of the search volume on the internet so they are the only ones we bother with. Aggressively re-submitting your site to any of them also makes no difference; one time is all they need to include your site in their indexes. Multiple re-submissions can actually get your site blacklisted from the engines if done to an extreme.

Expert Online Marketing Advice

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Online marketing can yield the highest return on investment (ROI) of any form of advertising for your business. Knowing how to get started without sinking a lot of money down the drain can be risky, however. Finding reliable SEO/SEM experts to provide you with sound online marketing advice is very important.

How do you know a firm is reliable?  Here are several factors to consider:

  • Do they offer anything that sounds too good to be true? In the search marketing and search engine optimization world, this can take the form of promising top placement for terms for what seems like a ridiculously low amount of money. Legit marketers usually can’t offer “bargain basement” pricing. Chances are if it sounds like a smoking deal, they are engaging on “black hat” techniques that can get you potentially blacklisted from the search engines altogether. And like a recent shake up in the real estate industry illustrates, the search engines can blacklist swiftly and harshly against those they feel violate their trust.
  • Do they have a solid track record? What are their certifications? What sites have they worked on? Can they provide solid references? The answers to all of  these questions will help give you a feel for how much you can trust a company for expert online marketing advice.
  • How responsive are they to your inquiries? This can be very telling. A company that doesn’t respond quickly and thoroughly to your requests initially probably won’t give you better service as time passes. We recommend picking a company that is consistent in its communication with you.

These are three things that will help you decide who to go with if you need help running your online marketing campaigns. For additional information on internet marketing and how it’s set up professionally, please use our site as a resource. And don’t hesitate to contact us using our form if you have any questions; our initial consultation is free.

Landing Page Design – Converting SEM Visitors for Top ROI

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You may have heard the term “landing page,” or may be quite familiar with it already. Either way, you must know this about them; landing pages can make or break your PPC/SEM campaigns! No matter how well your Adwords text ads target the right key phrases with the right marketing language, if your visitors end up on the wrong page when they click on your ads, then all is lost from a business standpoint.

Professional landing page designers know how to make a highly-relevant, attractive page that delivers specific, attractive offers that will make your potential clients interested in what you have to offer and cause them to respond. Different industries require their own unique tactics to convert, and having someone certified in setting everything up can make the difference between sinking thousands of dollars a month in SEM or getting a great ROI from your PPC campaigns.

Landing page design is an art form, requiring knowledge about human tendencies, effective marketing strategies, and technical expertise. In concert, all these things make your pages look great and give them a lot of value (a high “quality score”) to the search engines. Google and Yahoo take into account how good your landing page is; if it’s not coded right, or set up with relevant information to the keywords you’re bidding on, your campaign will be punished by higher costs for your terms. But well-made landing pages actually drive down the cost of your bids. This will make your advertising more cost-effective, and therefore give you more bang for your buck.

We’re of course happy to provide you with a free initial consultation if you’re wondering about having some landing pages set up professionally. One of our specialties is custom landing page design, so fill out one of our forms and we’ll be in touch soon.

Link Building Solutions – Getting Search Engines Votes For Your Site The Right Way!

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Are you inundated with online marketing ads promising first-page placement for ridiculously low monthly fees? Well, chances are if you’ve done enough investigating to find this page, you are not likely to fall for that trick. Those types of services are usually provided by “black hat” SEO companies which will give you a great short-term gain only to be slapped down in the SERPs soon after by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other major search engines because of the shady techniques used to gain those temporary high positions.

Most “black hat” companies are a series of affiliated “link farms” and “junk web directories” that use the marketing power of hundreds of low-quality sites (some with a temporarily high PageRank) to artificially inflate the number of inbound links to the sites they are promoting. These one-way inbound links that establish the receiving site as the authority, act as votes in the eyes of the search engines. The more votes your site receives, the higher in the SERPs you can expect to climb.

But like a corrupt election campaign, anyone creating fake votes from ineligible sources will eventually get punished. The punishment for link schemes can be quick, harsh, and meted out with no notice whatsoever. One day, your business operation can be on the first page, and then the next, be taken out of the search engines altogether permanently. This amounts to blacklisting, and it’s very hard to get reincluded once your site falls out of favor with the search engines. That is because they know you were doing something wrong.

With so much on the line, of course you want to get up there in the search engines, but also do it the right way. The “white hat” way. We know all about safely building your online presence (and position in the engines) by making your site an online authority in your industry. Link building campaigns are not simple, and have a high-cost associated with them, but they are critical to your internet business. If you’d like more information on “white hat” link building solutions, please take us up on our free initial consultation.

SEO Content Creation – Search Engine Optimized Copywriting For Websites

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It’s very important that you have a lot of content on your website, whether your site is for a book store or something more visual like an art gallery. The reason is that the search engines can’t see content that is not written out! And how are they going to index your site for the things you want to show up when you are virtually showing them a set of relatively blank pages?

Our goal with SEO content is to establish your website as an authority, one that the search engines will happily promote, by making your site a great resource to web surfers. By installing lots of pages of uniquely branded relevant content, your business will be taken seriously by Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines.

For some businesses in some industries, all it takes are several pages of finely-tuned SEO content to see first-page results on the SERPs. By targeting specific key phrases with their own pages of content, we make sure that the information on your site not only educates your visitors (and helps persuade them to choose you for their needs), but that it also is indexed properly by the search engines so that more natural (organic) traffic will reach your site in the long-term.

SEO content is a “white hat” technique that only adds value to your site. We don’t recommend (or engage in) keyword stuffing of your content. The search engines are getting very good at figuring out what kind of content is copied and pasted, derived from other pages, etc. So those who have the best writing in their industry are usually rewarded, so long as that content is installed on your website properly, which is an art form in and of itself.

If you have any additional questions about SEO content creation, we are happy to provide you with a free initial marketing consultation. Simply fill out one of the forms on our site.