Danaly Design Blog

If you are not marketing your business on the Internet yet you are possibly losing out to many others who are.

Just having an online presence might already be enough to advertise your business or service on the Internet. There are lots of potential customers that are using the Internet to search for your type of product and your website might just have enough online presence to attract some of these customers

Just think about it: You may only get a few visitors to your website each day, but you might find that it is enough to generate interest in your products. It is also a form of passive marketing in the sense that even if they do not actively contact you or buy your product or service, you are still building your brand.

You might inadvertently already be advertising your business through your website if you have a link to your website in all sorts of places - such as in your signature at the bottom of your emails. You ARE including your website address in your email signature aren’t you?

Other places where you can usefully use your signature are in forums. Forums that are set up for your specific product and/or service offer an invaluable opportunity for two things:

1. If you take part in discussions and offer valuable advice it will help to establish you as an expert in your field and you might get some inquiries that way

2. Your signature can contain a link back to your website. You do know that building links back to your website is important to establish your website as an authority in the eyes of the search engines, not so? Using a website link in your signature is an easy way to get links back to your website and if you are doing this already you are already inadvertently advertising your website and gaining a better Internet presence.

But most importantly - Are you updating your website often with good content containing keywords that are relevant to your industry or business sector? If you have answered yes to this question you are miles ahead of other business owners who have simply put up a static website a couple of years ago and have not since updated it with any content. This is over and above the benefit that you will enjoy by having industry related keywords in this content. An important part of SEO is to use the keywords that are relevant to your industry in the content on your website. If you have been doing this as a matter of course for your website you already have done a lot to increase your website importance in the eyes of the search engines. Please note, however, that using important and relevant keywords in your website content is only one small part of the whole business of SEO and Internet Marketing, but if you ARE doing it, it will definitely be beneficial for your website and your business.

Do you have any way for your customer to contact you online? Do you offer various ways of contacting you to make it easy for customers to do so? We are talking here of online contact forms, your telephone numbers displayed prominently on your website, online survey forms or polls, and even live chat. All of these mechanisms make it easy for your customer to get hold of you and will maximize your online presence, however small it might be.

If you are executing any of these strategies you are already marketing your website - without realizing it. In order to get the maximum benefit out of marketing your website and your business online, it might a good idea to contract in a professional Internet Marketing company to help you further boost your website presence.

I got into search engine optimization back in 1998. Of course back then SEO was a lot simpler than today. All the tricks like keyword spamming and invisible key phrases worked like a charm. Better still, little tricks like these were acceptable. Not anymore.

In fact, most old-school tricks don’t work today and many can get your pages banned. This is great news for you. Over the next few minutes I’ll show you how to make Google absolutely LOVE your web pages and help you jump to the top!

This is all you need to know… Search engines today place 90% or more of their ranking priorities on content and links. Keywords are still important, but more so in the text of your pages than in any sort of META tags.

Simple, right? It really is. The first step is to find the best keywords and place them just right in your web page text. Next you need to get great inbound links. And finally, you need to monitor your progress closely (and that of your competition.)

Part 1: How to Find the Best Keywords

Google gets more searches than any other search engine so let’s peek into their database. Check out https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and type in any keyword or phrase you can think of that you believe your target audience is looking for. Not only will it give you tons of data on that and related keywords, it will also provide “Additional Keywords to Consider”, which is a section at the bottom of the page.

BIG TIP: Try to use specific keyword phrases whenever possible. Let’s say you have a web-page dealing with floral delivery. Instead of just the word “flowers”, which has 233,000,000 competing pages on Google, try “send flowers”, which has 1/10th the number of competing pages. Better still, think like people speak (I.E./ I’m sending flowers to my mom.) As it turns out, a lot more people are searching for “sending flowers” than are searching “send flowers” and - here’s the best part - “sending flowers” has less than 1% of the competing web-pages as the search term we started with, “flowers”. Now that’s impressive! You have an advantage over about 99.5% of your competitors with just that single tip.

Now take the top three or four keywords (and keyword phrases) and list them in order from best to second best and so on.

Part 2: How to Develop the Best Possible Content

Content is king! If you take nothing else away from this article, make sure you take this. Producing search engine friendly, optimized real-person content is key to your success. Today’s search engines can read a page just like a human would. And thanks to natural text algorithms, they can easily tell if you are writing your pages for real people or just trying to get better ranking. With this tip, you can do both!

First, call a good friend and describe exactly what you want to tell your web visitors. Now write it down, word for word, as close as you can remember it. If you can record it, that’s even better.

Now go back through your text and fit your top keyword as close to the beginning of the first sentence as possible. Now place your number two keyword someplace else toward the beginning of your first paragraph. If possible, try to get your third keyword into the end of your first paragraph or the beginning of the second paragraph.

Repeat this concept using only one of your keywords for each of the next three paragraphs. Try to make it fit naturally toward the beginning sentence or two of each paragraph.

Now do the reverse for the very last paragraph. Put your least important keyword at the top of the paragraph and end with your most important. This shows consistency.

Finally, try not to repeat any keyword more than three or four times per page. Make it flow naturally.

Part 3: How to Get Great Links and Monitor Your Site

Having quality inbound links can account for more than 75% of your search engine optimization success. Getting these links is the crucial step that will get you over the top. Next you need to monitor your progress and your site’s status (how search engines really see it). This will tell you not just where you are - but where you are likely to be. In the old days, we used to do all link work and monitoring by hand - and it took a long time (I averaged about 16 hours per week - per site!) My advice to you is to find a good SEO tool and let it do the work for you. If you get the right product, it’s the best money you’ll ever spend.

original article by: Michael Small

Got a website? Not enough visitors? Ready to rank higher on the major search engines but don’t know how to do it?

This article is for you — we’ll have a look at the basics of optimization for the major search engines, covering the key points for getting better rankings naturally for your site. Enough reading countless blog postings by folks simply speculating on search algorithms (I know, I’ve spent countless hours doing it myself, to no avail!).

Statistical analysis of the major ranking factors used by the search engines has been performed — there’s no reason to do more. The factors and their weighting have remained relatively constant for years. Focus on these important points, then spend your efforts building a better, more attractive, more easily navigated, more informative website — for once these visitors actually arrive, you’ll want them to enjoy themselves while they’re buying you out.

Let’s start with the all important formula, the 40:40:20 ratio. Through statistical analysis of thousands of sites, these numbers appear to be fairly accurate across the major search portals: 40% of rankings are a result of ‘on-page’ factors, 40% a result of off-page factors (backlinks and same site links), and 20% a result of the page URL (the exact percentages vary slightly between engines). The beauty of this is data is the resultant simplicity of the approach to achieve better search results for your important keywords.

First, on-page factors: Get your keywords in all the right places, with the right density, for each important page on your site. So what are the right places and right density? Get the keyword in the title tag, the description tag and the keywords tag. DO NOT STUFF these tags, be elegant and think about your reader. Experience has shown minor variations to be insignificant in terms of rankings, and more often than not, it seems folks go overboard with their keywords.

Let’s look at the latest data for the ’sweet spots’ for on-page ranking factors. A 10 to 20% density keyword density for the tile, 10% for both the meta keywords description is optimal. The keyword at or toward the beginning of each of these is optimal, but not necessary. What’s this mean? If we use the term ‘essential oils’ again, an optimal title tag might be ‘Pure Essential Oils and Accessories for Natural Health Professionals Health-Problems-During-Travel ‘.

The keyword list would be ten to twenty words, comma separated, with the most important words at the beginning, and ALL words should appear in the body text of the page. The description can be (but doesn’t have to) a well written, attention grabbing sentence — it will likely be displayed in the organic search results, so you’ll want it to be both SEO and customer friendly. Again, 20 or so words, keyword near or at the beginning.

Keywords can appear twice, but no more than that. Body text: 1000 words or so (+/- a couple hundred), with a 2% keyword density, and the keyword (or words) appearing near the beginning, in the middle, and near the end of the page code (not just the output text). Excellent free tools are available on the internet. Find one, plug in your site and evaluate the numbers yourself.

Briefly, other notable on-page factors are image alt tags, H1-H6 tags, bold and italic text, and the number of outgoing (inter and intra site) links. Here’s the scoop: Alt tags matter. Get your keywords in them, but don’t overdo it. Don’t use H tags, as according to the data, they’ll bring your rankings down. Use bold and italics if it suits the design and readability of your site; they may be a positive factor, but not a huge one, and don’t stuff your keywords in them. The higher the number of links on a page, the better. One hundred links seems optimal, but don’t sweat it. There’s no reason to sacrifice a customer-friendly interface for optimization. Having javascript on the page appears to be a positive ranking factor.

Finally, page size (all the text, minus the images) is optimal at 50-60k. This number is shown adjacent to the page in search results. A note on on-page code in general, a balance is important — the search engines don’t care what your page looks like from a design standpoint, they only see the code. But your customers do. And while data is not available, it is more than likely the major search portals are noticing how long a visitor stays on the page, recording whether they return to the search results to find another page. Strive to make your site clean, useful and engaging — this will pay off in more ways than one.

Off page factors — these include links from within your site and ‘backlinks’ from other websites. You MUST get backlinks to rank well, and it’s probably the most challenging of all search engine optimization to do. You’ll need to continuously acquire backlinks, or your rankings will stagnate, or even slowly drop. Optimally, you’ll get a few links a day, with a steady increase in the total number. The two most often used routes are link exchange (asking for links from other sites, and putting their links on your site in exchange) or article distribution. There’s lots of information on the web about exchanging links, read some, develop a plan and stick to it. Once you’ve got a system in place, you’ll likely be able to hire someone to help you.

Article distribution is another matter. Articles should really be quality, readable, helpful information for prospective customers. You’ll get to post links within the author resource box, which serves both as an enticement for readers to visit your site, a means to give credibility to your internet business, plus search engines will also see these links and use them in their ranking algorithm. The best methodology will be gathering backlinks from the widest variety of sources possible. Remember, it’s not the total number of links, but a consistently increasing number that has the greatest long-term results.

Some caveats about links — links from within your own site should be text links with the keyword in the link. So the Aromatherapy site would use “essential oils” in all the links to their essential oils page. Off-site links should also use keywords in text links, but not always the same words. Mix it up. Here, for example, some of backlink text examples would be “pure essential oils”, “organic essential oils”, “aromatherapy essential oil”, and “essential oils”. Further, about 30% of your links should just include the webpage address, like “www.johnnysessentialoils.com” or www.bestbathproducts.com/essentialoils.php”. This helps your backlinks appear naturally created, rather than machine made search engine spider spam. A final note on backlinks, all pages that link to yours are not weighted equally. The older and more relevant the page, the more weight your link will garner.

With that we’ll describe the last 20%: the URL. Web pages with the keywords in the address, be it the homepage or any other page on the site, rank better. For new websites, try incorporating your most important search terms in the web address — this can have a significant effect on rankings. If not, and it makes sense to do so, use keywords in the filename like www.homepage.com/essentialoilspage1.html. Again, it appears better if the file does not have only the keywords in it, like the title and meta tags. Use a 301 redirect if changing the names of ‘old’ pages. Hyphens are still questionable — short filenames and shallow directory structures appear best.

A few final notes — each search engine has different algorithms and different update frequencies. According to the data, ALL follow the 40:40:20 formula closely enough for you to ignore the differences. A site or page that begins to rank highly on one engine may take months before it ranks highly on another. Patience and persistence are crucial. The age of a page is a factor; wasting your time on minor tweaks, rather than writing a quality article, will lead you nowhere.

‘Close enough’ is close enough with the on-page factors and urls. When these factors are covered, focus on increasing the pages count at your site with regular additions of worthy information, and adding backlinks steadily — don’t obsess — once this is happening, get back to other business development strategies. Traffic is only part of the equation for a successful internet business.

Visitors plus a well-designed site, excellent products, competitive pricing and superior customer service is the real formula for success.

original article by: Misty Rae

Want a business on-line but you are not sure where to start? Well… the following is an overview of the things you need to consider in the initial phase of creating a website that makes money. The initial phase is about the actual set up of the site just before it goes on-line.

The main considerations in the initial phase of web design are:

• creating a structure for your website
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This article will deal with the key processes involved with SEO. Search Engine Optimization is the process you need to go through to ensure that search engines are able to drive traffic to your site. Most people in searching for a site will use key words or phrases through a search engine. The most effective way to drive visitors to your site is to get a high listing on the Google search engine So effective SEO in essence is about the process you employ to ensure top rankings in the search engines for the most relevant search terms on a website.

From the setting up of the website until it is listed and hopefully then making you money, there is a particular time frame i.e. anywhere from 12 to 18 months, depending on how hard you want to work. This is what you can expect to do in the initial phase.

Initial Phase - Month 1 to 3 - No direct sales from the web site

The initial stage is about putting your site together and putting it on-line. See below.

• Plan to build a site with a 100 pages of content.
• Choose a domain name that has branding and name recognition in it. Putting keywords in the domain name is no longer important to search engines.
• Design your site to maximize simplicity and speed for your surfers, where your site responds instantly to a request. The response rate locally should be no more than 3-4 seconds. More text content than html content. Pages should be usable in all browsers i.e. keep it close to HTML 3.2 . Avoid Flash, Java and Javascript. Arrange the site in a logical manner complete with keywords throughout the content.
• Keep pages small - over 5k and under 10k if possible. Search engines and surfers alike work best with this. Build a page of content and put 200-500 words per day on-line. Use a keyword suggestion tool to help you isolate the core keywords for your topic area.
• Put the keyword once in the following places: title, description tag, heading, URL, in bold, in italic and high on the page. Keyword density should be around 5 and 20%. Use correct sentences and spell check.
• Use outward bound links from every page linking to high ranking sites and put the keyword in the link text.
• Cross link within your site. Linking across pages within your site helps to improve your Page Rank (PR) score in Google. You may wish to search out for information on how Google ranks pages.

When putting your website on-line go make sure you have an individual Internet Protocol (IP) number. Make sure you link all your pages to other pages on your site. A menu on every page should link back to your main ‘topic index’ pages. Surfers should be able to logically navigate their way around your site. Settle for nothing less than a quality site.

This initial phase is important as it is the crucial preparation period to maximize the potential for search engine spiders to come and find you. Without the spiders no search engine listings, no listings no visitors or customers. It is an intense period of work with little reward immediately in visitors or money. Patience is important. Remember there are many resources on-line to help you with effective Search Engine Optimization.

original article by: Michiel Van Kets