Most business owners have dealt with a myriad of phone calls with annoying automated messages asking them if they want to “rank #1 on Google”. You may have been one of them or will be in the near future but lets take a look at what this article says is a “sure-fire” sign to avoid in an SEO company.

“Mass Directory Submissions, Article Submissions, Social Bookmarking, Forum Comments”

Well some of these things aren’t always bad like social bookmarking or directory submissions but the issue isn’t the links in general but where the links are coming from. A lot of these directories and forums exist as “webspam”. They aren’t actually contributing to the flow of information on the Internet. This works against you in the sense that you aren’t generating relevant content within your keywords thus forth making your SEO campaign a “straw house”.  So beware of these offers claiming 100s’ and 1000’s of back-links for a low priced package, I can guarantee that what’s best for you is not included. Businesses need to approach SEO with a solid strategy and understand that a quality campaign takes time, what works for one business might negatively affect the next. That is why it’s important to take your SEO seriously and consult with a company that takes their time to get to know their client. So many factors come down to what keywords a business needs to focus on and can’t be summed up in a single click. For all you contractors and home maintenance people, It’s like giving an estimate to a potential customer and them coming back claiming another company can do it for half the price but you know good & well that there is no way that estimate covers everything they need. Just remember that with SEO, as like everything else, you get what you pay for.

The Client Center is able to monitor:

Google Pay-Per-Click Campaigns- See that keywords are getting the most attention and bringing in leads.  Giving you the insight to see what’s working and what isn’t, helping us streamline your budget and work towards maximum efficiency.

Search Engine Keywords and Rankings- Watch in real time the results of a proper SEO campaign at work. No more hoping and trusting that SEO really “works”but now you can check your sites rankings for individual keywords and better yet how many competitors you are competing against!

Website Analytics- Follow the record of who is coming to the site and see who they are, where they are coming from, and how long they were on your website.

Social Media- Sync up all of your business’ social media accounts and manage them from one simple dashboard giving you the ability to connect with your social audience more than ever.

If you’re ready to get the most from online advertising and to have campaigns that are driving as many leads as possible then contact The Idea Center today at (804)264-3067 or reach me at Travis@TheIdeaCenter.com

You might consider two main alternatives to Explorer: Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Both are free, load webpages more quickly and do a better job of rendering web graphics. Their interfaces are intuitive and they offer a slew of options and customizations (called “extensions”) which enhance the user experience and increase productivity. Both browsers can trace their lineage to the defunct Netscape Navigator, with Firefox being a highly adaptable internet-browsing workhorse and Chrome putting more emphasis on pleasing aesthetics and minimalism.

If you are familiar with Apple products, you might also consider Apple’s Safari for PC. It has some neat features, and if you are a Mac user at home and stuck with a PC at the office, it at least provides you a familiar interface.

It is important to keep in mind when building a new website that your visitors are using a variety of web browsers and may be seeing things differently that you’d hoped. You want to make sure the website is designed so that your message seamlessly flows through all the different browsers, the last thing you want is to spend money on a website only to have 30% of the visitors be able to see if full glory. Another reason to consult a professional web designer before venturing into a new website.

The original article is a long (and wordy) read, but here are the consultant’s main points:

• In order to compete, insurance agencies need to become familiar with a key customer demographic – Gen Y (people born after 1980). They are web savvy and the internet enables them to do what independent agencies have always done – shop around for the best values in insurance, although they typically lack thorough knowledge and understanding of what they are shopping for.
• To reach this demographic, insurance agencies will need to leverage the web and technology more fully. A website that has your business address, hours and telephone number amounts to just hanging out your shingle, and isn’t going to cut it. Websites will need to be engaging, interactive, and provide full service.
• The big direct writers have the advantage nationally, but independent agencies can compete locally by better implementing technology and the web.

I think this holds true for many other service industries where large national corporations compete with smaller, locally-oriented companies. How do you start competing with the big boys at the local level? Taking advantage of a free consultation is probably not a bad idea.

1. Slipping metrics – site visits, sales (if e-commerce) and visitor interaction decreasing could be indicative that interest in the site has “worn off”. Properly monitoring your website analytics should give you a heads up of what visitors are interacting with and what they aren’t. Use this data to innovate what your site offers in the future, the data is there you just have to use it!
2. Customer feedback – if you’re customers tell you your site is difficult to navigate or ugly, you should take note. Sometimes they never get a chance to tell you because they have already moved on to your competitions website, don’t let this happen to you. This could be a staggering amount of potential earnings lost.
3. Site repair costs exceed the cost of replacing it.
4. It looks old – remember what websites looked like 10 years ago? Web aesthetics are constantly changing, and some design styles do not hold up over time. Fortunately for small business’ an elaborate website isn’t always necessary. Provide customers with the proper information quickly and give them the option to get in touch with you right away and you should be fine.
5. Its been more than 12 months since a refresh. A refresh can mean anything from new sales copy to a new batch of professional pictures. Just remember that you always want to take a step forward with better quality nothing hurts a business more than going backwards.

1 through 4 are good rules of thumb. 5, not so much, particularly for small business. You should realistically get a couple years out of a well-designed site, and so long as you post fresh content with regularity (i.e. fully implement social media) it will still interest visitors even if the site itself has a little age on it.

I would add to this list:

• Your site isn’t optimized for search engines. It important when building your website to have a clear focus on what it is trying to achieve, reasons vary depending on the business. Figuring out exactly what you want from the site will make it much easier to build in the optimization instead of going in after the fact.Remember that there is 2 types of optimization online and offline. Don’t make the mistake of just doing one and neglecting the other because to make SEO(Search Engine Optimization) work(and worth the money) they need to work hand and hand.

Every business wants a site that looks cool and has slick features, but the “nuts and bolts” of the website shouldn’t be neglected. A properly built website will ensure that you’re easily seen by the search engines and appear in search results for products and services that you offer.

Wall Street Journal has a piece on the different Twitter strategies employed by Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods and Best Buy. Southwest cross-trains communications and customer-relations personnel, Whole Foods entrusts their account with a single person 24-7, and Best Buy leans on 3,000+ employees to tweet corporate news, deals on products and answer customer service and help requests.

Small business’ can really learn a lot from how these companies engage their social audience!

Online reviews looked decent, and lots of decent restaurants manage to survive in this economy. What I found more interesting was their website. Its presentable and has all the information required, but its effectiveness as a promotional tool is limited. Its one of those budget website deals, where you pay a company a low monthly fee to host, and they provide you with software and you piece the site together yourself. The problem is, the site doesn’t get built to web standards, and its difficult for search engines to find your site. I Googled “restaurants shockoe bottom” and didn’t see a listing before I gave up after page 7 of the results. Without going into too much detail, certain techniques and bits of code (robots.txt, XML sitemaps, valid W3C) are required to make any site “search-engine friendly”. Unfortunately, the website in question was built with a disregard for nearly all of these standards. When you are choosing to have a new site built you need to keep these things in mind when someone presents you with a cheap price, it should be common knowledge at this point that the cheapest is hardly ever the right way to go. Something as important as your website shouldn’t be risked in this new information economy. What does it matter if you saved a few hundred dollars up front when you lose thousands in the end.

The website also lacked proper tie-ins to social media. They had a pretty active Facebook page, but getting to it through the site was a bit of an ordeal. Search engines like social media, and activity on Facebook, Twitter, et al, helps your site get found. Also, their dining menus were in .doc format, which is a little annoying and completely unreadable to search engine spiders as well as impatient diners trolling the bottoms’ restaurant selection while walking around.

I really can’t say that having a site built to web standards would have saved their business, because there are many other factors at play, and its easy for a restaurant to get lost down in the Bottom. But their site probably wasn’t helping them the way it should have.

Flash can be a powerful tool for enhancing presentations. Too often though, Flash is used for core website content, leading to bloated pages that are slow to load, seemingly seizure-inducing, or just downright tacky.

But there are even more critical flaws to Flash when it comes to search engine marketing:

• Flash cannot be read by search engines such as Google – if a lot of your core site content is in Flash, its lost to search engines.
• Not everyone has the plugin required to view Flash – while its estimated that only 5% of PCs lack the Flash plugin, Apple’s popular mobile devices Iphone and Ipad do not support Flash, and Adobe recently announced that it was suspending development of Flash for mobile devices. Site visitors without the plugin (including Apple smart device users) see a blank space where your Flash presentation, slideshow, or video should be.

Flash works great for corporate presentations (much better than that old dinosaur PowerPoint, in fact), and so long as YouTube retains it for online video, there will still be a use for Flash. But its days are numbered.