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

August 29, 2007 by Vinny

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.

Filed Under: SEO Tips

Sending PPC Traffic to Homepage Vs. Landing Page

August 28, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing

Search Engine Submission Myths

August 20, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: SEO Tips

Landing Page Design – Converting SEM Visitors for Top ROI

August 3, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing

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

August 2, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Link Building

SEO Content Creation – Search Engine Optimized Copywriting For Websites

August 1, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: SEO Tips

Professional PPC Management – Best ROI For Your Business

July 31, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

If you are running your business online, and are tempted to dive into search engine marketing (SEM), we strongly recommend that you choose a professional pay-per-click (PPC) management firm instead of trying to run the campaigns yourself. There are going to be some rare cases when having a great deal of expertise in the setup and maintenance of SEM campaigns and landing pages will not be necessary, but a reputable PPC marketing company will set up your accounts properly, ensure that you aren’t wasting your money, and are targeting the traffic that is going to get you the best possible return on investment (ROI).

If you want to run the campaigns yourself, at least have a marketing firm set up the accounts for you. Their thousands of hours of trial and error with marketing campaigns will help you immensely from the targeting of the best keywords for your business to the creation of offer-specific landing pages which are built with the latest in marketing techniques and layouts.

If you feel totally comfortable setting up and running the campaigns on your own, then do yourself a favor and at least have some professionally designed landing pages or landing sites set up. They will maximize the number of conversions from your PPC/SEM traffic.

For more information on professional PPC management practices and services, please contact us using the forms on this site; we will happily provide you with a free initial consultation.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing

Blog Site Setup – Fast and Easy Business Websites

July 30, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

When businesses come to us looking for marketing, and don’t have an existing site, they need a place to start. The first question we ask many business owners is “do you really even need a website?” If spending thousands on website design and development isn’t within their means, or even justified for the small size of their business, then blog sites are the way to go. The are not only quick to set up and customize, they are super SEO-friendly, and can be updated very easily. Here’s a breakdown on the process of a blog site setup (which is usually much faster than a website):

1. Selection of domain name and host.

This process can take as little as a half hour to do.

2. Setup of blog software.

In most cases, the host already has WordPress or another blog program already installed on your hosted domain; it’s just a matter of turning it on!

3. Selection of design template.

Blog software like WordPress make it so easy to pick out a template and apply it to your site.

4. Customization of widgets.

Widgets can be just as easy to set up, requiring just a basic knowledge of how FTP clients work to install.

5. Launch!

Of course if you have a trained professional setting up your blog site it will perform better with the search engines. Should you need our assistance, we are happy to provide a free initial consultation.

Filed Under: Blogging

Landing Site Design – Giving Your Visitors More Freedom to Convert

July 27, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

Landing pages are of course a vital part to any SEM/PPC campaign, but one thing that can be limiting with them is that they are very specific and need to be simple so that the visitor is given exactly what they are searching for. But what about cases where your Pay Per Click traffic is of a more general nature, or you’re unsure as to which “call to action” is going to be the most effective for your business? Well, then you’re probably going to be better off setting up what’s called a landing site instead.

Landing sites are simple websites, with several pages, that present the visitor with several opportunities to convert. Much like a landing page, in order to access the full site, the visitor must at least opt into taking the first step in converting for you. The multiple pages will contain information tied to specific offers, and forms custom created for those offers. You can still put a healthy amount of information on these pages and give your visitors some navigation choices, but ultimately they must start to convert for you to see the full site.

These landing sites work extremely well with people looking to buy expensive items, as the multiple pages give you several chances to establish yourself as an authority on what you’re selling. These pricey products often carry a lengthy research phase with them, so having the extra marketing real estate to deliver that info really helps gain the trust of potential clients.

Should you have any specific questions about landing site design, how it can drive you more business, and examples, we would be happy to provide you with a free initial consultation.

Filed Under: Paid Search Marketing

Domain Name Consultation; Picking The Best URL For Search Engines

July 26, 2007 by Vinny Leave a Comment

There are several things that will help your cause with Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines when you are picking out a domain name. There are also a number of things that are critical to consider for your branding. Marrying these two sometimes contradictory marketing facets can be tough. Ultimately, your domain will probably embody more branding or SEO optimization, but the best names do both. Here are four guidelines to help you ensure that when you pick a domain, you choose having taken both sides into consideration.

1. Is the domain name short?

The shorter your domain name, the more likely it is that it is easier to remember, quicker to type in, and faster for the search engines to see your content. Every character counts! Make your domain compact.

2. Is it easy to remember?

This kinda goes hand in hand with the first consideration. Still, there will be cases where your short domain is just tough to remember. Avoid abbreviating words in your domain name; that’s a common way to make short domains harder to remember than they need to be. Also, dashes can make the difference between someone finding you or finding your competition (by using the non-dashed version)! So if your domain contains dashes… well it better have some PRIME keywords in it to justify the damage it will do to people trying to find your site for a second time or off the top of their heads from a radio ad you placed.

3. Does it contain highly relevant keywords?

This is the most important thing from a search engine optimization standpoint. If your domain contains your most important search phrase, it already sets you up as a potential authority on whatever it is you’re in business for.

4. Is it an established domain?

This is often overlooked, but those who spend the time to hunt down an existing relevant domain (or entire site) with existing links and buy it out will be handsomely rewarded. Your new content will get indexed faster because of the trust built up with that domain to the search engines.

Hopefully these tips help you land that dynamite domain name you have been looking for that will not only brand you well, but also help drive some free natural traffic your way through SEO. If you have any questions, we do offer domain name consultation as a service to our clients. We’ll give you a free initial consultation if you fill out one of our forms.

Filed Under: SEO Tips

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