It's that time of the year again where we find ourselves in the hustle and bustle of the holiday season. There's decorations to hang, shopping to do, and a million other things on our plate and it's easy to get overwhelmed by it all. I regret that I have to remind myself why we celebrate at this time of the year...
I often get asked questions like "If I only could do one thing on my site to make it be better optimized for search engines, what would it be?" Well, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is the 3 most important tags that you need to address on your pages in order to be properly indexed by search engines...
Are you a client or friend of Page Progressive? Become a fan of us on Facebook! :-P
We just launched a new free tool for those who want to make the most of their title, meta description and meta keyword tags on their website.
Click here to check out our SEO Title and Meta Tag Tool - SEOMetaTagTool.com.
As you may know, there is a certain number of characters you should optimally shoot for for each of these fields, and yes, we know that the meta keyword tag is virtually useless for SEO anymore, but we felt it was best to include that while we were at it 
Just put in your information, keeping an eye on the counter to stay out of the red, and when you're done hit the "Generate Code" button and get the HTML to put into your site. It's that easy. Check it out!
One of the aspects of link building that we tackle for our clients is making sure that they are effectively using social media apps like Facebook and Twitter. These are the two really hot social media apps right now and not getting up to speed on these fabulous services can be a detriment to the success to your business. One of the things I hear a lot is "Those things will never impact my business" and I cringe a little, because the people usually saying that know very little about what these websites actually do. I'm not saying that these sites or any social media is going to double every business's revenue every time, but it could...and it's free touse, so why not at least give it a try? Here is a basic description of what these services are and a few reasons why all business owners should be in the know regarding the two currently most popular social media sites out there.
Here we are a good way through 2009 and an interesting trend has emerged. Despite the national economic resession, studies show that online advertising has not decreased despite most other traditional advertising means such as television and radio ads have dropped by approximately 15%. Many attribute this stability in the internet marketing industry to the fact that most website advertisments are charged per-click rather than a blanket charge per month regardless of success, as is the case with other advertising avenues.
That means that advertisers aren't spending money if potential customers are not clicking on their ads, and anyone that has run a TV or radio ad knows that there are times when it's questionable whether your ad is getting noticed and if it's worth the significant investment. Another advantage of online advertising is the wealth of statistics you get on clicks, amount of time someone spends on your site, what time of day the most clicks occur and more. That allows advertisers to make more educated decisions on how they run their online advertising campaign.
So if you've not already taken advantage of the wonderful advertising programs that Google, Facebook and other internet advertisers have to offer, it may be a good time to get in the know.
Technorati is a directory of the most popular blogs on the internet. If you have a blog, make sure that it's set up to ping Technorati when you post to make sure that your posts appear on their site. Most content management systems such as Wordpress, or my personal favorite ImpressCMS, offers modules or plugins that will do this.
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Stepforth is a great website with tons of resources on online marketing. Here is a a page of theirs that lists seven really good articles on link building. If you have any interest in improving your ranking in search engines by building links to your website, give these a read:
http://www.stepforth.com/blog/top-posts-on-links.php
Google's Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains in this 10-minute video the basics of advertising with Google's Adwords program. Some of the key concepts covered include bidding against competitors, click-through-rate, or CTR, the ever-elusive quality score of an ad and how that all affects an ad's "Ad Rank."
What many people don't know is that you can outrank someone who bids more on a key phrase than you if you have a better quality score. Quality score is determined by how closely your key phrase, ad copy and website's landing page relate to one another. Google wants people to get relevant results when clicking on advertisements, so this is how they achieve that.
The video is very basic, but it s a wonder illustration of how a very complex system works.
According to a recent poll done by Webcopyplus, the aethetics of a website design has a significant effect on how long users stay on your website. Almost 25% of web users indicated “poor visual presentation” as the number one element that drives them away from websites, up from 6.6% in 2007.
When users were asked what’s most likely to drive them away from a website they said:
One of the best ways to market your website and get more traffic and links pointing to it is by writing great articles about your field and then syndicating them. We're always on the lookout for good places to syndicate content. But there's so many sites to choose from...how do you know where your time is being well spent? Read on to find out!
Google has just released a new product called "Google Apps Sync for Outlook" that allows people on Google Apps to continue to use Outlook, but not need a Microsoft Exchange server. See the details here. That is a great new addition as this could save businesses a lot of money by not requiring an Exchange server anymore to sync up company contacts, email and calendars.
The only bummer is you have to have the Premiere Edition of Google Apps and not the free, "Basic" edition. 
Google recently added an addon feature for Google Apps called tasks which shows a list of to-do items in your mail view. You can turn it on by going to Settings --> Labs and look for "Tasks." I love this addon because it puts a list of to-do reminders where I spend a good portion of my time - in email. Tasks can even be viewed on your phone.
Even more recently, Google added task integration with Google Calendar, so you can schedule tasks and easily refer to them when in Calendar view as well - here's more information from Google about it.
Did I mention Google Apps is free for 50 accounts or less? Once you see what it's capable of, it will revolutionize your workflow.
Social bookmarking is a relatively new concept that allows people who visit a website to share information that they find with their friends or associates that they are connected to in a variety of social websites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious and more.
This post will cover 5 ways that you can get more traffic to your website using social bookmarking as well as bleed over into link building in general as the two are closely related.
Page Progressive is now offering article and press release writing specifically geared towards drawing more traffic to your website. This is accomplished by writing interesting articles and press releases that include key search phrases that you want to build an association with your website and then syndicating that content on the internet in order to get as many incoming links as possible to your site.
"Well-written press releases and articles are one of the best ways to build quality links to your website," says Daniel Trimpey, CEO of Page Progressive.
For a limited time only, Page Progressive is offering 10 articles or press releases for your company for only $500! This new service adds to the list of several services available for small businesses in Raleigh, NC who want to use internet marketing to acheive better exposure for their company.
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For more details, you can contact Page Progressive online here or call at 919-374-3014.
On June 30th, at 9:30 AM at the Capital City Club in downtown Raleigh, Daniel Trimpey, CEO of Page Progressive, will be providing a workshop geared towards orienting small businesses in Raleigh, NC to the importance and capabilities of using the internet to market your business.
The workshop will run for approximately two hours and there will be a lunch afterwards at the club for attendies. The topic will be "The Basics of Internet Marketing for Small Businesses" and will address very broadly the aspects of search engine optimization (SEO), link building and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in the efforts to generate more traffic and business. "All three aspects of internet marketing is key to getting the best results," says Daniel Trimpey. There will be plenty of time built-in for questions, since this has been a very hot topic for people in the past.
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If you'd like to RSVP for this event, please contact the Capital City Club at (919) 832-5526. The event costs $15 and includes lunch.
We have recently added a new server for web hosting clients and we are happy to announce that there will be several perks of this upgrade:
Things you should know:
Again, if you have any questions or concerns, please let us know by filling our out online contact form here or calling us at 919-374-3014!
Well, I'm sitting in a workshop on blogging this morning. Although I've been blogging for years, I figured it's always a good idea to keep learning and it never fails to surprise me how much there is to know, even on a topic that you consider yourself an expert in. I figured I'd take the opportunity to blog out it :-) The speaker for this event was Denise Tawwab and you can check out her website here: http://ncconnected.org
This project needed the ability to easily add downloadable products, offer the ability to upsell on checkout and it neded to easily work with Paypal, which was the client's payment preference. Since OSCommerce downloadable products were not real user-friendly (files have to be manually uploaded via FTP and linked to, which is more complicated than most non-techies want), and I've never been really a big fan of OSCommerce's attribute handling, lack of search engine friendly URLs and no built-in support for upselling, I figured this project wold be the perfect opportunity to give Magento a try. It claims all of these features "out of the box."
So we attempted to install Magento on the client's webhost, which was a cheap shared service (I know, not ideal for ecommerce sites, but this client was on a very tight budget). Well Magento
We have a client that recently moved their web hosting from one crappy web hosting service to another. The main reason was price, I beleive, but right out of the gate, it was obvious that this new host wasn't going to go any extra mile to help. They would not help with the site migration, for starters, but later when the website was hacked in to, they refused to help and simply said that the hack was do to an old script that needed updated. While, it's possible that was the case, I later found that this particular hack has affected a number of CMS systems out there and not only that, the host's install of phpmyadmin was also compromised. So, I had a pretty good hunch that the server was compromised outside of our client's CMS and more that likely a host issue. So, although that was most likely the case, they refused to help and our client paid us to go through each of their files and remove the virus their site was infected with. So even though their hosting company has a cheap monthly charge, they still had to pay in the end...since their hosting company had crappy support and defaulted to point the finger rather than take an honest look at the situation and try to help.
Cheap web hosting companies typically host their servers where bandwidth is cheap, as that is the main cost for a web host. The bad part for the customer is those servers are often geographically very far away from them (Often California or Canada, which stinks for us southeasterners), meaning every time someone visits their site, the data has to travel a LONG distance and back for every page load, which means loading time is usually slow and sometimes times out completely, especially if the site uses a database. Going with a smaller, local hosting providermay cost more, but they usually host their servers closer to their clients.
It's not unusual for cheaper hosting companies to be late adopters of technologies. I still run into hosts that have yet to offer PHP or MySQL 5 support...come on, they've been out for a couple years now...get with the program! Since many systems out there require new technologies, you may find that software you want to run, may not on your host. Cheap hosts also severely limit the amount of memory and bandwidth that you get - even though they mayclaim unlimited bandwidth, you're getting only a trickle at a time, which can hurt your site's performance if you have a lot of visitors. And if you have a piece of software that requires a special setting on your server or a decent amount of memory (ahem, Magento)- you can forget about them working with you, as they have to macro manage their system since they probably have a bazillion other people on that same server. And it's easy to overlook a system requirement for something and not find out the host doesn't support it until you've gone to the trouble of moving all your files over and setting up databases, emai accounts, etc.
Let's assume the host does decide to do an update to their servers. They've got hundreds of thousands of customers...are they going to let you know that they just changed a setting that is going to cause your website to go down? Nope! You get to figure out that yourself when you put in a help request ticket and wait 24 hours to hear back from them... many cheap hosts don't offer phone support at all...and then you have to figure out how to fix the problem yourself much of the time. If you're lucky enough to have a host that offers phone support, I'll bet a nickle that the person you talk to knows English as a second language...and I use the term "Know" loosely. If a company wants to outsource their technical support to another country...fine (I guess), but make sure they can speak English coherently if the majority of your customers speak it!
When you are one out of a hundred thousand customers, you better beleive that the company won't know your name, what content management system you're running, what version it is, or the fact that you are on a different time zone than them. And you'll rarely ever speak to the same support person twice. So this means you have to"Do theTechnical Support Dance" every time you call and answer the same questions and listen to the same suggestions that have already proved not to work again and again.
So if you take your company's website seriously, don't skimp on your hosting....you're going to end up paying for hosting one way or another. But a good hosting company will make sure you aren't paying with your sanity as well.
Like to Twitter and use Google Apps? Here's a gadget that lets you update and view Twitters from within your Gmail interface:
Not bad.
As you may know, it's important to get incoming links pointing to your website in order to improve your ranking in search engines. But you can take that one step further by making sure that the person who links to you formats the link in such a way that creates a relationship between your link and several key terms. This is usually done using the title tag, like:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com" title="your keywords here">Your site title and keywords here</a>
For those of you who are not HTML-inclined, we've created a free web app and placed it on our search engine optimization page to make properly generating this code a snap. Just enter your website address, website title, and several key phrases and viola, out pops the proper code, which you can copy and pass along to the people that you want to link to your site.
Check out our FREE link building generator tool here!
Back in November, Google announced themes for Gmail so that you could customize the look of your webmail. While this was a great addition, I hated that I didn't have it in our Google Apps. Well a couple days ago, I finally noticed the new "Themes" option in my email setttings! It's pretty neat...I was getting tired of the default look, so this was refreshing....so now I'm sporting "Green Sky."
Keep in mind that Google is rolling this out slowly to users, so if you still don't see the option, just hang in there.
Pay-per-click advertising is an amazing way to advertise. For a very resonable amount of money you can get a world-wide audience to know more about your business. This post is going to talk about what is PPC advertising and why it's important.
Many websites offer pay-per click (PPC) advertising on them, but not all of them are necessarily a good investment. It's hard to know where is the best place to advertise on the web, but starting with Google is never a bad thing. The next thing I'd do is look at what other websites appear near the top in searches for your targeted key phrases and then see if they offer advertising on them.
When you search on Google, for example, the PPC advertisements are the listings that show at the very top and also on the right side of the page. Research shows that the top left, followed by the top right is where most people's eyes start out on a search result page, so placement is critical.Of those ads, when you set up an advertisement to trigger when a person searches for a particular phrase, you are competing in an auction against anyone else who also set up an ad to trigger for that same phrase. So the logical conclusion is the more broad the phrase, the more people competing for it and the more it will cost per click. This is why it's critical to be as specific as possible when coming up with your key phrases. Ideally, your ads should link to a specific page on your website that talks about the same thing that the person searched for, so pointing to your home page is not always best.For example, if you own a shoe store and one of your key phrases is "Nike 330K Running Shoe" then you ought to link to your product page for that specific shoe. That improves your quality score in Google and keeps the user from having to search for the specific thing they want all over once they get to your site.
So what is "Quality Score" in Google? Google wants advertisements to be as relevant to the search term as possible. This results in a better experience for the user. If someone searches for "Roses in Raleigh, NC" and lands on an auto parts store, that would tell the person that Google advertisements don't deliver. And Google doesn't want that, since that is how they make their billions of dollars. So they rate all key phrases with what they call a "Quality Score" in order to encourage more relevant advertisements. You make an advertisement relevant my making sure that your key phrases match wording in the ads for those phrases and point to a page on your site which also contain those same key phrases. In order to do this, you may need to break your key phrases in Adwords into several groups and get specific with the ad for that group and the landing page that the ad points to.
One of the best parts of PPC advertising is you don't have to concentrate so much on search engine optimization and link building and you get much faster results. And sometimes no matter how hard you try, you just can't get a page to rank well for some phrases, but because you know it's a killer phrase, you'd be willing to pay to show up for it.
Another advantage to PPC advertising is you can get TONS of analytical data on how many clicks you get, how many times your ad appears to people, how long does someone stay on your website when they search for a particular phrase, what country they are coming from, etc. Unlike traditional advertising, you have a lot of numbers to work with. Unfortunately, with all those numbers comes the complexity of analyzing those numbers to interpret trends that work in your favor. That is where an expert in search marketing comes in handy.
It is not uncommon for people and automated bots to snap snippets of text from your website and then use it for their own diabolical purposes. Here's a script that will let you know when that happens and it also automatically adds a link to your site in the snippet anyone copies, so you can get an incoming link which helps improve your ranking with search engines. Cool, eh? The best part is it's free and very easy to set up. Check it out!
Tracer:
http://tcr52.tynt.com/
There are a lot of places you can spend your money advertising on the web. Some places yield better results than others. Find sites that rank well in searches, and don't forget you can advertise directly on search engines using Google Adwords or Yahoo Online Marketing. Often it's easier to pay for an ad for a key phrase than to rank for it organically. This is especially true for highly competitive phrases. The best part is you get almost instant results with paid advertising, unlike link building, which takes months to see the full benefits of your labor. Also think about sites where your target demographic are. Facebook Advertising, for example, has a great advertising program that let's you target specific demographics.
Last post I discussed the importance of developing good key phrases and optimizing your website for search engines. This post is going to cover the basics of link building.
Now we need to get a lot of high quality links pointing to your site. Start of by searching the web for your key words and see what comes up. Take note of which sites seem to come up again and again. Those are sites you want to get linking to you. Also look for local business directories or directories that specialize in your industry as well as forums where you can post as an authority on a topic. Put a link to your website in your profile and signature. Write up several articles about your industry, include your key phrases, and post them on the web at online article syndication websites. Make sure to include links back to yourself. Post online press releases. Sign up for social media sites and find a few you really dig and set up camp. Build a network of friends and colleagues and link back to your site. Find other companies that are synergistic to what you do and contact them to see if they will link to you.
Rinse and repeat.
SEO can be broken down into two things:
Come up with a list of key phrases that should land a potential client or customer to your site. Go ahead...I'll wait. You may come up with 10-20, if you're good. Now we need to multiply that by ten :-) Think like a layperson. You may need to include terms that aren't really accurate but they are what the general population might think to search on. Now think like an expert...a person in a desperate situation that may need your product or service right this second (Think emergency 24-hour plumber). Now look at your competitor's websites. Notice any key phrases being mentioned that you didn't think of? Try viewing the source of their site and look for key words in META tags, the title, or as ALT names for images. Now pull out a thesaurus and come up with alternate synonyms for your words or concepts. Now plug in some adjectives that describe your terms like "free" or "best" or "cheap" or "friendly." Now think of geographical names for areas you marks to. Now mix and match all of the above. Your list ought to be rolling now. Note, there are tons of tools on the web that help with combining phrases or identifying new ones.
Getting keywords in the right places may mean checking with your web designer, but basically, it means putting them in body copy, headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.), in the page title, as ALT tags on images, in TITLE tags for links, lists, in bold and italic. Also, put absolute links on your pages to other pages on your site and make sure each page of your site uses different keywords in the title and META tags. Many people use the same info for all pages and that is not ideal.
So now you should have a bunch of key phrases and your website should be optimized for those phrases. Stay tuned for the next post, where I'll discuss link building!
Twitter is basically a micro blog. So instead of writing a long, thought out post, you can keep it short and sweet. In fact, you have to as each "tweet" is only allowed 180 characters. You can tweet text, links and even photos and you can do it from your computer and even from your cell phone.
So why tweet? Good question. It's a great way to let friends and family know what you're up to and share the little things that happen in your day. Often people use it for sharing a random funny thought or a great website link or a photo of their kids. Professionally it's a great way to find other people with similar interests and learn from them and share things you've found to be helpful too. Often people use Twitter for posting questions to friends and colleagues as well.
Recently Twitter added the ability to search tweets. This is huge. Now you can see trends of what people are talking about right this second, unlike searching on Google and finding pages that were indexed days or even weeks ago. It's like a giant, world-wide chat room. For example, your wife may be a huge American Idol Fan (This is all hypothetical, of course). You could search on the term "Idol" and find what a bazillion other people are talking about right that second regarding American Idol. And it's usually pretty amusing.Will Twitter replace Google....I doubt it, but it does have it's place for searching for things that are very time sensitive, like news.
So anyway, it's a very interesting piece of technology and definitely worth checking out. if you'd like to follow Page Progressive on Twitter, click here, or to follow Daniel Trimpey, Click here.
