SEO Tip: Don’t Use Too Much JavaScript

Searchbots are not designed to read, follow or index JavaScript code. If your website contains a few lines of text in the JavaScript code, chances are the searchbots will ignore the entire block of code along with your text.

JavaScript menus are the same as Flash menus; unreadable. The search engines will not follow your page links. It is best to avoid JavaScript menus entirely. If you feel you must have the multi-tier drop-downs, provide HTML text links in the footer or in the content of your home page. Some of the AJAX menu and billboard slideshow code now includes unordered lists of HTML links, and is advertised as being ’search engine friendly’. If the links appear within JavaScript those lists are almost certainly being ignored by the searchbots.

Try to keep the use of JavaScript to a minimum. If the use of JavaScript is unavoidable consider creating an external JavaScript file and link to it.

SEO Tip: Choosing the Right Keywords

Keywords are the cornerstone of your search engine optimization. Getting them right can mean the difference between being a nobody on the Internet and coming up as the first site on Google.

Brand Keywords are associated with your company’s brand, or the product line your market. Many website owners will target a short tail keyword like ‘widgets’, where including the brand XYZ to create ‘xyz widgets’ would increase their visibility immediately.

Regional Keywords associate your location with a product or service you market. Targeting ‘vancouver widgets’ would be more effective than targeting ‘widgets’ alone, and a long tail term like ‘vancouver xyz widgets’ could yield even more traffic.

Demand/Supply Ratio We look for keywords with a high demand (heavily searched) and low supply (not promoted heavily by competitors’ sites as yet). This approach provides the most traffic over the shortest time frame.

» Hire a Vancouver Keyword Research Professional

How Google PageRank Passes from One Page to Another

A page with high PageRank will pass some of its value to a lower PR page through the link. When your website’s pages are effectively interlinked, for maximum relevancy, PageRank is distributed more evenly through your website.

Writing high quality content is the most effective way to ‘court’ links from relevant sites. As more sites link to yours in a natural way, in blog post and article content, your site gains authority.

» What is Google PageRank?

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What is Google PageRank?

According to Google, their PR value defines the “uniquely democratic nature of the web” and “using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.” Google considers links from one web page to another as a ‘vote’ for the linked page’s content. Google believes that a link from a relatively obscure website should carry a lower value than a link from a leading authority site. The relevance of search phrases and traffic also determine the value of the referring page. Google PageRank is the ‘weight’ Google places on a specific web page, based upon it’s authority, keyword relevance and traffic.

Google PR is expressed as a numerical value on a scale of 0 to 10. If a website has a PR0 to PR2, chances are it’s a new website. Websites with a PR3 to PR5 are fairly well established. PR6 websites are generally well established and have a lot of high-quality links to them. You won’t find many sites in the PR7 to PR10 range.

Is Google PR the ultimate measure of a website’s value, quality of content and linkability? Absolutely not! Some of the most useless link farm sites ever constructed, the ones that sell their PR6 links offer no content of any value to anyone, just pages and pages of exchange and affiliate links. Other beautiful blogs and sites with hundreds of well-written carefully researched keyword-rich articles will still receive a PR0 after a several  years on the web.

When we look for naturally occurring links we do consider the PageRank of the site, and particularly the page we’d like our article published on, but PR is only one of the many considerations.

» How Google PageRank Passes from One Page to Another

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It All Begins with Keyword Research

If you target the wrong keyword search term, and rank #1 on Google, Yahoo! and Bing for that keyword, but nobody is actually searching for that keyword term, you’ve wasted a lot of time and money. You won’t receive any traffic from that top-5 ranking. Keywords with high search volume represent the ways your target audience is searching for information about your product or service.

We take a reverse engineering approach to build the keyword lists we target for our clients. Once we know what your customers are looking for all we have to do is target those keywords in your content, article distribution, press releases, pay per click advertising and link building strategy.

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A Sales Funnel That Works In Today’s Economy

Quite a few years ago I spent six months in the trenches, selling vacuum cleaners. The phone girl in the office would set up a bogus presentation with some fabricated story about winning a set of steak knives. We’d drop off the knifes and pressure our way into the house. Once in we’d whip through the canned presentation and hard close the hell out of the unprepared couple until they broke down and bought the overpriced machine. I haven’t seen a vac salesman in many years and I’m sure the world is jubilant to have seen the back of that lot. Always be closing?… sorry, the hard sell is dead.

Contrary to what people selling ebooks will tell you, the internet is not becoming an easier place to market. Every day it’s becoming more competitive as more sites come online, competing for the same top ten keywords. Bold in-your-face advertising is either ignored or frequently turns off the very people you are trying to reach forever. So what’s working? Here’s the sales funnel that gets strangers to like you, grow to trust you and eventually buy from you again and again.

Connection & Relationship Building Through Social Media

The sales funnel process begins by creating connections and building relationships. The top three tools for developing connections today are Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. One of the things I’m hearing from people in sales is that their managers expect them to use outdated and ineffective ‘interruption marketing’ techniques like cold calling, email blast campaigns, annoying follow-up emails and phone calls, while their computer access to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has been blocked. Access to these highly effective tools should be channeled – to keep it on a business and not entertainment level – but highly encouraged, not blocked.

Most of the people who use social media are using it 100% incorrectly. They’re trying to sell to their new followers and friends. Let’s suppose you met a stranger in a Starbucks lineup. You wouldn’t launch right into a sales presentation. That would turn the person off and end the conversation on the spot. You’d probably notice things you have in common and strike up a conversation that did not include what you do for a living. You’d discover that they stop in at Starbucks on the way to work and note the time. The next time you bumped into them you could refer to the last conversation and pick up where you left off. If it felt right you might exchange business cards on the second or third ‘chance’ meeting. On the next meet-up you might ask them some questions about their work and tell them a bit about what you do. You’d mention that you checked out their blog and they may comment that they’d checked your website as well. If they expressed interest in your products or services you might pop out to the car to get them a brochure. Only after cultivating the relationship a while would it likely be wise to attempt to schedule a full presentation. (There are exceptions of course. Sometimes the person is actually hot and bothered for your product and will pounce on you, begging to buy, but I wouldn’t count on that happening too often.)

That’s exactly the way you use social media. Twitter and Facebook are places to meet people. You want them to like you and begin to trust you. You DO NOT SELL there.

Use your micro-blog posts to educate your followers and friends. Give first, don’t take. Give them something that will improve their life or make them money.

Your Central Hub

The most popular central hub format is a blog. Your new social media friend likes you. You’ve had a few chats. Since they like you it occurs to them that they might also like to do business with you, so they check you out. Your social media profile should include a link to your central hub. A common mistake in creating a blog is to be too corporate – or worse – to use it as a platform to launch into a sales pitch.

Your blog should be a friendly place for your prospect to find out more about you. Your visitors should see some of your personality in the posts. If you give back to the community this would be a good place to include a post that thanks everyone that participated in the charity golf event you organized. The information you provide should be informative and interesting, without really selling. It’s a place to educate your customers and prospects. Your blog should establish you as being very knowledgeable about your products, services and industry. Make sure you make it easy for your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed and perhaps a newsletter. And provide genuine value to your subscribers.

Your blog posts can include links to more information on your website. The people that follow these links, or return to chat with you on Twitter or Facebook, are beginning to show some genuine interest.

Your Website

By the time your prospects go to your website they like you, they trust you and they are looking for more information. Make it easy for them to take the next step in contacting you. Include links back to the social networking sites where they found you. Include forms, ‘Get More Information’ or ‘Request a Quote’ buttons on most information pages so they don’t have to hunt for contact information. Also, adding live chat functionality increases conversion on most websites.

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What Happens If I Discontinue My SEO?

One of the most popular questions I’m asked is, “What would happen to my rankings and traffic if I discontinued my SEO plan?”

Most of the sites we work on have never had great rankings before, and most have been inactive, without any new content, for a long time. With the addition of fresh new SEO article content, on-page SEO for existing content, a new blog, social media marketing and link building, search engines will often respond with a very favorable ranking increase within the first 90 days. After that initial peak we work on developing steady sustainable growth in rankings and traffic.

The explosive initial increases won’t continue over the long term and the steep angle on the graph will level off somewhat. It’s common for website owners to consider discontinuing the SEO program when the slope of the curve levels off a bit.

We’ve tracked the rankings of clients with a short term agenda and those who stayed the course with a long term strategy for over eleven years. After aborting the program, the work done in the previous months will continue to yield dividends for a while longer. Rankings will often increase for a while. Web site owners will therefore feel they made a sound business decision, but with no further SEO, new content or online marketing the inevitable decline in rankings and traffic begins. For very competitive industries websites can lose their rankings very rapidly. For certain niches, or for sparsely populated regional keywords the first page rankings may last for many months.

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Old School Marketing vs What’s Working Now

Interruption Marketing

Old school marketing is essentially ‘Interruption’ marketing. As most business owners and sales professionals have discovered, these ‘outbound’ marketing strategies have become considerably less effective over the past few years. Many marketing gurus attribute the decline to busier lives. We just don’t have time to be interrupted during our busy days any more.

Outbound Marketing Strategies
- Trade shows
- Direct mail
- TV advertising
- Radio advertising
- Magazine and newspaper ads
- Telemarketing
- Email blast campaigns

Permission Marketing

We are all striving to gain some control of our time and our lives, yet we need more information than ever to make educated choices. As modern consumers we don’t have time to be interrupted, but we are receptive to information we can turn on and off like a faucet.

‘Inbound’ marketing or ‘permission’ marketing very effectively reaches people who do make the time to research products and services that will enrich their personal lives (B2C) and will add value to their career or business (B2B).

Fortunately, a brand new set of marketing tools have been developed to take advantage of this new trend.

Inbound Marketing Strategies
- Increasing visibility (SEO/SEM)
- Social networking (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Blogging and RSS content delivery
- Offering free trials
- Offering free software
- Public relations
- Permission newsletters

Selling in today’s economy can be very frustrating. If you can’t cold call any more, they won’t read your direct mail or print ads and it’s become very uncool (even illegal) to spam them with email, just how are you supposed to reach new prospects?

Increasing visibility on search engines, blogging and social media have become the vehicles for connecting with customers.

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The Ideal Web Site – Part 6 of a Series

The Ideal Website Converts Visitors into Customers

At the end of the day, the reason for having your website is to increase sales. It’s not about winning design awards (except perhaps for the designer ). It’s not about about developing a large internet audience. If you can’t convert your visitors into customers, or develop revenue from your traffic by other means, your site has failed to provide a return on investment.

Does your website even have a conversion strategy?

Does it provide unique and valuable information? Is your site worth bookmarking for return visits? Do you offer an RSS feed to enable your visitors to subscribe to updates?

If you’re selling something, or wish to achieve a visitor response, do you have effective ad copy? When you change your copy, do you monitor the response?

Does your website take the visitor by the hand and lead them through your content with a planned traffic flow strategy? Are you asking for a response at each step or hoping your visitors read their way through all the pages in the process before taking action? Many of our clients are amazed to discover that their visitors were already sold on page one or two . All we had to do was provide a ‘take action now’ button to dramatically improve sales.

Do you have analytics installed? Are you evaluating your stats each week? Do you tweak your content constantly to provide better results?

We believe that:

Design + Traffic + Conversion = Sales

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The Ideal Web Site – Part 5 of a Series

The Ideal Website Accommodates the Three User Types

Your website will receive three types of visitors:

1) Search-oriented user
2) Menu-oriented user
3) Media-oriented user

The search-oriented user will locate the search field on your site and enter keywords, hoping to be presented with a list of several pages that cover their topic of interest. They will select the one that sounds most suitable. They may then return to the search results to select other pages, or refine their search.

The menu-oriented user relies on a well planned menu and navigational system to locate pages that provide the exact information they seek. Your website’s navigation must be user friendly and logical. Ideally, your visitor should be able to find the page they’re after within 3 to 5 clicks. Home pages that offer a few initial choices in ‘magazine ad’ format, and lead the visitors with a well-planned traffic flow strategy are very affective for these visitors. ‘Breadcrumbs’ are also very helpful, enabling these visitors to retrace their steps to follow different forks in the information pathway.

The media-oriented user doesn’t want to search or navigate through your menus to locate initial information about your product(s) or service(s). These visitors want to watch a short summary presentation on the home page that explains what you’re about and what you have to offer. If they like what they see, they will click the links in or surrounding the presentation for more information. If it looks like they will have to click through a bunch of pages to locate information they will immediately return to the search engine to try another site. The home page ‘billboard’ created in AJAX or Flash is ideal for providing media to these visitors. (Note: A media billboard is not to be confused with the annoying Flash intros that take up the whole first page.)

The most effective websites provide excellent searchability, a logical intuitive navigational system and some media to provide a quick summary of your benefits and strategic marketing advantage.

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