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?

» Hire a Vancouver SEO Professional

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.

Need some help with keyword research? »

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.

» Need some help with your marketing?

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

» Request a free internet marketing consultation and proposal

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.

» Is your design effective? Get a free internet marketing proposal

The Ideal Web Site – Part 4 of a Series

The Ideal Website is Attractive Enough

Effective Internet marketing follows the 80/20 rule; where 80% of your investment is ‘Super SEO’ (promoting the hell out of your website and brand online) and where only 20% is the website itself.

• A pretty website without top rankings on Google, Yahoo! and Bing/MSN is pretty much useless.

• An award-winning website without traffic just plain sucks. They cost more money and take more time to design, so without traffic (sales)  they become a bigger liability.

• A drop dead gorgeous website that does not convert visitors into qualified leads or customers has failed as an advertising and marketing medium. Period.

An attractive website is only worth a damn when it provides a positive return on your investment.

Are we against sexy design and design awards? Absolutely not! My own epiphany came about seven years ago when one of our clients received a beautiful award for the website we developed for them. My customer called me to congratulate me on the design achievement, but then lamented over the site’s poor performance on the bottom line. I reminded him that we had proposed an aggressive SEO and online marketing campaign but he had declined. On further reflection I realized it was my fault. I’m the internet marketing professional, I know what really matters when it comes to ROI and I hadn’t absolutely insisted on a program to drive traffic to their site. I had allowed the client to invest their entire online marketing budget on an award-winning design and there had been nothing left for assuring the site had traffic or the ability to convert traffic into customers.

A good website is ‘attractive enough’ that visitors feel they are dealing with a solid, reputable company. When search engine rankings and other sources of traffic are in place, and the site is generating enough sales to more than offset the cost of additional design, it may be time to revisit the design with a facelift. If your site isn’t in the top ten ranking positions for all of your primary keyword search terms, put your money into SEO, social networking and link building, not a flashy media presentation few people will ever see.

» Need a website makeover?

The Ideal Web Site – Part 3 of a Series

The Ideal Website is Search Engine Friendly

Over 80% of the traffic on most successful websites will come from being listed on the first page (top-10) on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The rest of your traffic will typically come from PPC (pay per click) advertising, inbound links from theme related websites and being listed on the second or third page of the top three engines. If your site isn’t listed in the first three SERPs (search engine results pages) your site should be considered ‘invisible’ to the Internet.

Most sites aren’t search engine friendly. They don’t rank well because they don’t deserve a top position. They have very little content and the content they do offer isn’t considered of much value to searchers. Typical ‘toot your own horn’ ad copy on the home and about us page, tables of prices, forms, Flash photo galleries, JavaScript widgets, most short description shopping cart pages, etc. are not good content.

Search engines love fresh unique content that is rich in naturally occuring keywords, internally linked to other theme content in the site. Content should be added at least weekly or even daily. Great content encourages naturally occurring links from other theme-related websites and trackbacks from blogs. Over time a website or blog will accumulate hundreds or even thousands of posts and/or articles.

Developing quality content involves a commitment. Many companies have several bloggers or a designated writer. If your company does not have anyone with the time to create content on a consistent basis, there are SEO copywriting services and web content writers that will help make your site search engine friendly.

» Need some help with SEO?

The Ideal Web Site – Part 2 of a Series

The Ideal Website Targets the Right Keywords

One of the biggest mistakes website owners make is targeting keywords that are unlikely to provide a return. Achieving a #1 ranking on Google for a keyword search term nobody is searching for is a waste of time and money. For search engine marketing, keywords fall into two major categories: broad generic (head) keywords, branded and regional (tail) keywords. The stiffest competition is in the short head keywords.

If you entered the head keywords ’storage products’ into Google today you’d see over sixty-one million pages indexed. That’s a lot of competition. In the top five you’d find Rubbermaid. For a company with almost unlimited marketing resources very generic keywords may be worth pursuing. We have a client in the Vancouver area. By choosing regional (tail) keywords we have been able to secure the top position on Google for ‘vancouver storage products’. The amount of traffic received for their SEO dollars has proven to be a good investment. Pursuing top rankings for ’storage products’ with the budget we had to work with would have been a poor investment, with little or no returns. If you entered ’spacesaver storage canada’ today you would discover that these branded (tail) keywords also returned a #1 ranking for our client.

Whether you’re pursuing organic rankings or pay per click traffic, selecting the right keywords can be one of the primary decsions that determine your online success. Keyword analysis is the starting point.

The Ideal Web Site – Part 1 of a Series

Last week a client asked me to define the ideal website, based upon my 11+ years in the web development and SEO business. I don’t always include all of these components in a proposal or even include them in our own sites. However, if I had to describe a site that would be perfect, where client budget and their personal design tastes and requested features weren’t a factor, here is my definition of the perfect website:

The Ideal Website Delivers a Solid Return on Investment

As a business marketing investment, your website is not on the world wide web as a cultural art experience or to provide free information resource; it’s advertising. Advertising that is effective generates plenty of sales, and it represnts a solid business investment. A business website should bring in more than one dollar in profit for every dollar invested. If it doesn’t your Internet marketing sucks.

Developing a ‘web presence’ without revenue and a positive cash flow is ridiculous and bad business.

The Ideal Website Has Plenty of Qualified Traffic

The greatest myth in Internet marketing is: If you build it they will come. I think that only worked in Field of Dreams . Web design, without a solid marketing strategy, perfectly executed, is only going to produce a business liability. (What else would you call an advertising project that costs more money than it ever generates in revenue.) Over 90% of all websites fail. They have little or no traffic. And the few visitors they receive do not convert into customers.

I attended an SEO conference a while back and one of the speakers opened with, “A butt ugly website with a lot of traffic and effective conversion strategy will always outperform a drop dead gorgeous Webby-winning site with little or no traffic. Some of the ugliest sites on the planet have generated millions of dollars in revenue.”

Bounce and SEO

High bounce rates can hurt your search engine rankings. A bounce is a visitor that takes a quick look and then returns to the search engine to try the next search result. A high bounce rate is an indication that tweaks need to be made in order to more effectively engage the visitor. Google and other search engines take bounce rates into consideration in their algorithms. Why include a website into the top 10 search results when the visitors come right back to try again? The relevance of the site for the keyword search terms comes into question when that happens.

Your ultimate goal is to convert a visitor into a loyal visitor or customer. A loyal visitor or customer is someone who visited your website, likes it and found the information they were looking for. They then returned more than once, probably bookmarking the site in their Favorites. After a few visits they made a purchase, requested information or clicked through on an affiliate link, and they will probably do so again in the future. To accomplish this the site must be user friendly. It must be easy to navigate, easy to search and demonstrate to the visitor that they will find what they are looking for from the home page forward.

Real customers are already actively searching for what you sell on search engines. They are looking for information to help them make a quality purchase decision. They need to be converted into a customer. Effective analytics can provide the conversion ratio information needed to tweak your web site for improved results you can see on the bottom line.

Get your FREE first SEO consultation.

[Posted with MacJournal]