Blog entries

How to Keep Your Pagerank When Launching a New Website

Alexa Ellis — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:42:53 +0100

Want to build a new website, but worried you'll lose your hard-earned pagerank after you launch? Have you heard horror stories of companies losing hundreds of leads every month after launching a new website because they lost their search engine credit with a new site?

Without a highly-skilled web development company looking out for SEO when launching a new site, you might actually be doing your internet marketing efforts more harm than good with a new site launch. After all, how good iRead More...

Top 10 SEO Mistakes People Make, Part III: SEF URLs

Calen Fretts — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:06:50 +0100

One of the richest areas of your site to beef up your SEO is in your URLs. Search Engine Friendly, or SEF, URLs contain words in the URL instead of ID numbers or other information that is useless to human readers. For example, see the URL for this blog post; it contains the same words as the title of this post.

Use URLs that are accurately descriptive and keyword-rich. Use only alphanumeric characters, and a small set of other allowable characters such as dashes or underscores. Use dasRead More...

Tips for Effective Website Messaging Part II: Know Your Target

Alexa Ellis — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:20:27 +0100

The second consideration when writing your website copy is understanding your target audience (who is going to your website and why). You'd be shocked to learn how few companies actually take their target audience into consideration when writing website copy. Here are important questions to ask yourself before you start writing copy for your website:

How many target audiences does my website have?
Who is my target audience, and what are they looking for?
What questions do my target audiRead More...

Top 10 SEO Mistakes People Make, Part II: Broken Links

Calen Fretts — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:10:25 +0100

Usually in the course of making changes to your site, you will come across some pages whose URLs need to change - say, in accordance with an updated page title - or which need to be removed completely. Making your URLs more accurate is fine, but many people forget to follow through on updating all of their links - big mistake!

The first step after changing a URL is to update all of your other pages which link to your old URL. Most CMSs like Joomla and WordPress will update all of your Read More...

Top 10 SEO Mistakes People Make, Part I: Missing Sitemaps

Calen Fretts — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:18:51 +0100

A sitemap is, simply, a list of all the pages of your site. When creating a website, one mistake people make is forgetting to create a sitemap for search engines. Sitemaps allow the search engine to easily index all pages of your site without having to spider through your site and try to discover each of the pages individually. This is especially useful for any pages of the site that may not be linked from any other pages, and therefore might not be found by the usual spidering process. It isRead More...

Tips for Effective Website Messaging Part I: Know Your Keywords

Alexa Ellis — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:03:02 +0100

Much of the time marketers focus so much on driving traffic to their websites through social media marketing that they forget about the copy on their websites. Website copy can be a deal breaker for many of your prospects: if you don't target them effectively with your copy, you will fail to convince them to take action. Even worse, poor website copywriting often equates to missing search engine traffic because your copy isn't search engine optimized (SEO). In this blog series, I'm going to tRead More...

Top 10 SEO Mistakes People Make

Calen Fretts — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

On the web, SEO is the big game - but not everyone knows how to play. Here are the top 10 mistakes people make when trying to increase their site's SEO.

10. where can I go?

Your site should generate an xml sitemap containing all of your site's pages. This sitemap should be submitted to all major search engines.

9. where did you go?

Every so often you will need to relocate a page on your site to a different url, but don't forget to update your links! Search engines cannot follow Read More...

Joomla vs WordPress

Calen Fretts — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:45:35 +0100

In this post I would like to expand on some ideas touched on in my last post, How to Choose a CMS, which gave a brief overview of the top three content management systems: Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal. Here I will go into a more in-depth comparison between Joomla and WordPress.

Roles

Joomla and WordPress both have user permissions or roles with certain capabilities assigned to each role, managing whether they can perform certain tasks. In both core systems these capabilities are rigidRead More...

Google Sidewiki: The Future of Online Reputation Management?

Alexa Ellis — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:36:09 +0100

Online marketing is a constantly changing arena, and the area of Online Reputation Management (ORM) is no different. Customers are constantly finding new ways to spread their experience about your company online, and one of the newest ways they are doing this is by using Google Sidewiki.

Google's definition of Sidewiki is that it "is a browser sidebar that lets you contribute and read information alongside any web page." However, the implications of this are much farther reaching. Now,Read More...

How to Choose a CMS

Calen Fretts — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Many website owners who do not currently utilize a content management system, but are interested in converting to a CMS, find themselves asking the question: Which CMS is right for me (or my company)? Well, a considerable amount of research has already been done for you, and three content management systems have risen to the top for a number of reasons, including community support, extensibility, and ease of use.

The 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report is a very in-depth and comprRead More...

How to Bury Negative Search Engine Results

Alexa Ellis — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 18:11:49 +0100

Negative search engine results are a growing problem for many businesses. It is so easy for a competitor or an unsatisfied customer to file a Ripoff report against your company or write a negative blog rant. We've just gotten our second reputation management client in the last two months, which tells me that this is a growing issue for many companies.

In my last blog post on online reputation management, I wrote about how to address these negative comments. But how does one bury Read More...

Staying Ahead of the Ever-Changing Web Landscape

Calen Fretts — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:19:38 +0100

Over the last decade, we have seen internet marketing and commerce increase drastically. But recently, the way companies do business online has been changing more rapidly than ever. Twitter, Facebook, and the Web 2.0 movement have been changing the face of the web over the past few years, finding new way to solicit customers and draw their attention. And as if that wasn't enough, Google is now bringing a whole new set of technologies to the table.

Two weeks ago, Google launched SidewikRead More...

Online Reputation Management III: Addressing Negative Comments

Alexa Ellis — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:46:41 +0100

Most companies have at least one skeleton in the closet when it comes to negative comments online. An unsatisfied customer, who may or may not be justified in their opinion, is more than happy to post negative comments online as a form of retaliation. The negative comments might not even be from a customer- the source might be a competitor making false accusations, an ex employee or someone who just doesn't like your industry. While you can't control what others say about your company (these Read More...

Google Suggest and SEO Impact on User Behavior

Calen Fretts — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:19:06 +0100

Google Suggest is the Google feature that gives you a dropdown with suggestions as you type your query into into the search box. While this is very helpful and has become even more accurate since it was implemented, it has a number of impacts on SEO because of the way it impacts user behavior.

The first and most obvious impact is that a user may end up searching for a different term than what they originally had in mind. For example, I might want to search for "atlanta seo servicesRead More...

Online Reputation Management II: The Best Paid Brand Monitoring Tools

Alexa Ellis — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:54:51 +0100

While it's great to be able to monitor your reputation online for free, paid tools are usually worth the additional investment if you have room in your budget. Paid tools can alert you about negative comments more quickly, see where your negative comments are coming from regionally, analyze social media marketing efforts in relation to your other online efforts, the sentiment behind comments and even show you whether your brand is perceived positively or negatively online. The customer servicRead More...

Creating a Website with SEO in Mind

Calen Fretts — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:04:54 +0100

When creating a website, many people focus on design first, then content. During this period, other considerations such as functionality and usability can become an afterthought, when in fact these principles are extremely important - not only to visitors to your site, but also to SEO. We know by now that content is the most important factor in SEO, but here are some other factors that should be built into your site, not built onto your site.

valid code

I continue to insist on this fRead More...

Online Reputation Management Part I: Free Tools & Techniques

Alexa Ellis — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:29:08 +0100

One of the fastest growing concerns for marketers is online reputation management. The amount of data available online about any given company can be astounding, and customers are quick to post something positive or negative about your company's product or services. Failing to monitor your reputation online and ignoring negative comments about your company can cost you thousands, even millions, in lost revenue- just ask Domino's!

While there are a lot of great paid tools available to Read More...

Online Reputation Management Part I: Free Tools & Techniques

Alexa Ellis — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 04:00:00 +0100

While there are a lot of great paid tools available to hRead More...

The Importance of Clean and Valid Code

Calen Fretts — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:57:01 +0100

Coming from a development background, I can attest to the fact that, in general, developers have their own methodologies and do not like to be forced to do things in ways that are not their own. However, when it comes to creating or editing a website, there are certain requirements that you should insist your developer meet.

Although good content is the greatest contributing factor to your website's SEO, there are a number of coding strategies which can also help with your SEO, as I toRead More...

How to Start Your Own Blog

Alexa Ellis — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:33:38 +0100

B2B blogging is a hot topic in social media marketing these days, and its a great way to connect with and educate your audience. Many companies have or are considering starting company blogs, but they don't know where to begin or what to write about. On the topic of blogging, I am often asked "What should I write about?," "What if I run out of topics to blog about?," "Will blogging actually give me a positive ROI," "What happens if you write one bad post?"... and the list goes on.

I bRead More...