All Entries in the "Advertising" Category

Throw Away Your Phone Book – SEO and Social Media is how People Find You

Yeah, for those of us beyond 30, or in my case, way beyond 30, the Yellow Pages was something you had to have in your house if you wanted to find a business that had products or services you wanted. Then, you actually called them on the phone or got into your car and drove there. Things have surely changed, haven’t they?

Now, when someone wants to find a business, they go to their computer, browse to a search engine, go to a website, and order their product online. They have it mailed or delivered right to their door.

The phone is still useful at least. If they need to, they call the number listed on the website. Or, they email you, using your contact form. They don’t even need to be at home now. Cell Phones have come a long way from the big bag you had to carry around when they first came out.

The car is still useful for visiting a local business, but likely they found that local business through a search engine or a recommendation on their favorite social media website. Well, there are still other uses for the car too.

The point is, the way people find your business has changed. Have you changed your marketing strategy to take advantage of new technology yet? If not, we offer a free SEO Consultation with no obligation to buy anything. Call us at 512-322-9566. We’ll help you develop an online marketing plan that will help people find you.

Overdeveloped Websites – Are you guilty of this mistake?

Over time, has your website started loading slower? You need to empty your browser’s cache to see how fast your website loads. If it is saved in your cache, it loads faster for you than for your first-time visitors. How fast your website loads affects how well you rank in search engines and most importantly, it affects your sales. People will not wait for your website to load no matter how important you think your information and products are to them.

As you develop your website, you add a new graphic here, an image there, maybe a video, a new cool snippet of javascript, maybe a little flash and pretty soon, you have created a slow-loading website one little piece at a time.

It’s easy to get into adding a little bit to your site frequently. You find cool new things you want to share with users. Those little facebook, google plus and twitter icons and plugins for your blog, a cool new flash header you’re sure your visitors will just love and of course you have to add that new video you just made.

Adding freash content to your website is a great way to improve your rankings in the search engine. But add that new stuff on new pages you add to the website. Don’t keep over-developing your home page or any other page. If you slow down your website, your rankings will suffer.

Take a fresh look at your website. Look at each item. Ask yourself, “Do I really need this here?” and “Is the time it takes to download this worth it if it is going to affect my SEO efforts?” Trim the fat and you’ll be much better off.

There are some really big companies online that could use this lesson. Those slow-loading flash ads on some news sites, sports sites, gaming sites and others are annoying to users. Those ads that expand when you mouse over them might look cool, but they are annoying to your users and they slow your website down.

Most importantly, they do not convert any better than an adsense text ad that loads really fast. I’m not saying start promoting adsense instead of the ads. But use the fastest loading ad possible, not the one you think looks really cool. Your conversion rate will actually improve.

Related articles

• Web design tips – things to avoid (marketing.yell.com)
• Flash and SEO: why it’s best to keep it simple (marketing.yell.com)

A Website is just an Ad!

I know some people will disagree with that statement, so let me qualify it with an explanation. Websites that do not sell anything, those that were not built to generate leads or get someone to sign up for something are not ads.

Business websites are ads though. First you had print advertising, then radio advertising, then tv advertising, now the Internet is the next in that line of progression.

people call their websites their online business, their home on the web, etc. But it isn’t. it’s an ad for your products or services.

There is an old saying on the web. “You build your first website for show and the rest for dough.”

When you buy print, radio, or television advertising, you know that repetition is the key to successful advertising. You don’t buy one ad in a newspaper or magazine. You don’t buy one radio or tv spot. They sell them in bunches.

The Internet is no different. Of course you want your one “corporate website” or base, which has information about your company and everything you sell. But is that all you need to do?

Many seo services and webmasters focus on that one website and continue to make changes they think the search engines will like or because they learned the latest “google trick” or something they read on someone’s blog.

The truth is you should adopt a build em and leave em alone philosophy. Cover all the bases when you build your website. Make sure filenames, titles, keywords, alt tags, anchor text, and everything else is covered. take the time to build it right the first time around.

Then go build more sites! Here is an example. You run a website that sells tools. In your main website you have all the tools you sell in a shopping cart and ready to be purchased. maybe you were smart enough to have a page for each type of tool, like hammers.html, screwdrivers.html, etc.

You can now take each of those categories and build a microsite. Each microsite is about just one category. So you get a domain name that is like hammersforsale.com or buy-hammers.com and build your microsite. You need an about us page, a contact page, a terms of service, and a privacy policy just like any website.

Then you optimize the index page for the same key phrase you targeted in the domain name. Then you can add a page for each brand or type of hammer and optimize those for those specific phrases. Then when someone searches google or other search engines for a particular type of hammer, you have a chance of being one of the top results.

The cool thing is that you do not have to put a shopping cart into each microsite. You already have one in your main website, so all the links from the microsite for a purchase go back to your main website to complete the deal.

The second cool thing is that these microsites are ads that never expire and they are extremely cost-effective.

We build you a basic 7 page microsite for just $600. Additional pages are just $50 each. If you want to learn more about how microsites can help you advertise your products or services or how they can help you generate more leads for your business, call Chris McElroy at 786-317-8774.