The process of developing successful website starts from the moment your page is laid out. In fact, the structure of your website plays a bigger role than you would think in determining the amount of traffic it receives, and if you start with a flawed template, your page is doomed.

A good web designer will establish your objectives and then lay out your site in a way that will balance what you want with the fundamentals of what it takes to build a highly optimized, search engine friendly website.

Text-heavy, content focused sites (as opposed to flash based ones) typically do best for the simple reason that people (and search engines) prefer content. If you want people to come to your page (and be able to find it) you have to give them a reason, and usually this reason stems from information.

Planning for the future

You can’t just build a webpage and expect people to come to it, you have a plan for promoting it. If your goal is to promote your business to existing customers using offline methods, it is simple. However, if you want to target the online audience that has never heard of your company, you will have to generate traffic.

Of course it takes time and a focused approach, but if you are willing to dedicate yourself to the task at hand you can get your page prominently featured in search engines for the most important keywords related to your business. Contact us today for more information

In order to be relevent, a webpage must stay up to date. The problem is, paying a webmaster is outside the budget of most small businesses. As a result, many companies either build a website and leave it as-is or avoid the Internet entirely. Neither is a particularly appealing solution.

In the past few years, website content management systems have popped up as a result of the increased demand for easy website updating capabilities. Still, most CMS systems thus far have been somewhat confusing and extremely expensive. Not anymore!

By contacting us to schedule a virtual meeting, you can get more information about this unique business website package with no-ongoing costs for hosting and maintenance. While other web design firms try to lock you into a long term contract or charge you hundreds of dollars to make simple changes to your site, a website with a CMS system will allow you to handle everything on your own.

One of the easiest ways to start making your website more interesting to both prospective clients and search engines is by adding a blog.

If you do a web search, more than likely, 5 out of the top 10 results will be blogs.  This is no coincidence.  Search engines like Google and Bing love blogs because they are filled with content and updated regularly—both major factors that affect how your page will rank.

Content is truly king.  If you are trying to build up traffic for your webpage or just improve your ranking for keywords that are already generating traffic, adding a blog is a great first step.  From there, blogs have a number of features that can help you spread you message to existing and prospective customers.

For example, a blog gives you a convenient place to update customers to the latest news and happenings of your industry.  If you are already utilizing email marketing, use your blog as a hub, and each time you add a post, send out a newsletter and alert your customers.   It is a great way to put your business in front of customers and get them thinking about your company.

Another advantage of blogging is RSS (Really Simply Syndication), a feature that is built into all major blogging platforms.  As you add new content to your site, RSS will allow you to ping your feed to various newswires, and hopefully a few will pick up your content and display it to their readers.  Not only can RSS increase buzz and help you reach people that have never heard of your company, it can also help you build back-links, another major component of optimizing your website for search engines.

If you are ready to explore how blogging might benefit your online marketing campaign, please contact us for more information

Building a webpage for your business without  knowing exactly what you are doing can have disastrous consequences. The simple reality is there are many different ways to “build a website” but the way you organize your content and the technology you use can make all the difference as to whether your site generates traffic or sits vacant.

There are multiple places your website design and layout can go wrong, and a small mistake can kill your long term chances of traffic. For example, a site developed primarily in flash has very little text content, and therefore, little chances of getting found by search engines. Or, take the example of a design that incorporates text content or the site navigation into images or the amateurish “click here” instead of anchor text optimized for your most important keywords. Fine examples of seemingly fine details that can have large consequences moving forward.

The technology you choose to build your site will also have drastic consequences for how you manage your site, and by default how much traffic it generated. If you are planning to aggressively market online, you want to make sure you have complete control of keeping your page up to date and adding new content. Why? Adding new and exciting content is perhaps the best way to bring your traffic to your website and keep it interesting for those that find it.

For the inexperienced web designer, we have found that WordPress is usually the best option for a number of reasons. First, WordPress is incredibly powerful and relatively easy to understand if you have someone who fully understands it break it down for you in simple terms. Next, WordPress is dynamic, and will allow you the capability of updating the entire website in just a few short clicks. Third, search engines love it and if you set it up correctly and promote it correctly, you can expect traffic. Last, it is incredibly easy to install plugins that make your site more interesting and useful for visitors.

If you are considering building your own webpage, consider taking lessons with us. It will speed up the process, and allow you to get your business on the web, the right way, in half the time at half the cost.

Turn on the talk radio, and chances are you will hear an advertisement for email marketing. Yes, email marketing is hot, and you figure those companies couldn’t afford to pay for these advertisements if there products didn’t work.

As someone who has been using email marketing for a few years, I can honestly say that the mailing list is the key to taking advantage of the Internet. Yes a webpage is great, but a list of customers you can email and bring back to that website over and over again is even better! If you are ready to set your company up with email marketing, we now have a class that will teach you the finer points. We recently set up a customer who had a list of 500 email addresses sitting around and she netted two sales from her first mailing! Even if you consider yourself  computer-challenged, if you are ready to start email marketing, we can get you going!

Here at BizDetail, we are focused on making your website the best it could be. Whether you need a fresh new design, advice for optimizing your site, or someone to walk you through the basics of email marketing, we have a team of experts at your disposal ready to guide you to success. Please browse through our menu of products and services for whatever it is that you seek, we would be happy to help.

A person looking to get on the web today has a number of options to pick from. Go with the wrong solution, and you may kick yourself knowing that your site could have been even more powerful and easy to manage. If you are going to be building a website for your business, you have nothing to loose by taking a free consultation with us. Whether you are looking to sell things, generate leads or just launch your company onto the web in style, please send us an email and tell us about your project.

Searching for keywords is actually easy and free. All you need to do  is open up the Google Adwords Keyword tool to estimate the number of monthly searches, and then test how many pages on the web are optimized for a given word or phrase.  Once you have a term, simply type:

allintitle: (your keyword or keyphrase here)

Into a Google search, and instantly you are presented with the results for all pages on the web that feature that term within the title. This is a fairly accurate way to access the number and quality of your competitors.

Right now, you might be asking yourself if your business needs a website. Maybe you are worried about the cost, or the time it will take to manage it. Perhaps you think your customers aren’t using the Internet, or that your leads come primarily from word of mouth referrals. The bottom line is that whatever it is that you do, your business needs a custom website because your customers expect you to have one.

Once you have accepted the fact that you need a website for your business, the next step is to find a web designer. Those stuck in this position have lots of options, and selecting the right web designer and technology for your project can make or break your chances of success. The question becomes, how should the business person with no practical knowledge of web design or Internet marketing proceed with the task of picking a designer and building a unique website?

Since times are relatively tight right now, the first thing most businesses are going to consider is the cost, so it is a logical place to start the discussion. Luckily for businesses, there is heavy competition for web designers, you can find sites anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. What is important to consider is what you are getting, and for how much?

If you are going to go the route of hiring a web designer to do it for you, consider most what happens after the site is built, including the fees for hosting and who will manage and improve the site? In addition, you should think whether the site is going to be built from scratch and customized to your business, based off a template, or built using open-source software. Be careful to find a designer that can explain the benefits and drawbacks of each solution.

Once you have found a few designers that are willing to work within your budget, the next item you should use to make a decision is concerning management. Generally, you want to pick an option that will allow you to manage your site independently because frequent updates and content additions is what it takes to make your site a success. Extra points for custom website designers that are willing to provide their online marketing help free of charge!

The more valuable articles, resources and information your site contains, the more places search engine can index it, and people can find it.

Think about it for a second. People that come to your webpage as a result of a web search are looking for “something.” When your page shows up, the content on your page has been deemed to be a good fit for what the person was searching for. Provide them with the answers to what they seek, they will stay on your page and be more likely to come back to it.

Many small business websites don’t get enough visitors because they don’t have enough content, and what they do have is not optimized for search engines. Unfortunately, the vast majority of web designers are more focused on creating an (overly) elaborate presentation, as opposed to the practically of the pages they design. The direct result is less traffic and fewer repeat visitors. The better option is to make content the centerpiece of your traffic generation strategy with a commitment to constantly expanding your site. Your long term results will be staggering.

Other online marketing firms may push something like Pay-Per-Click, and it is an easy way to generate short term traffic, but the problem is, producing a positive ROI, and the fact that the minute you stop paying is the minute the visitors stop showing up.

An even bigger problem is how the costs of your campaign can easily skyrocket as the marketplace is constantly changing. While success with a PPC campaign can be short lived, a content-based marketing strategy is self sustaining. Even if you do run a PPC campaign, what good is sending people to your site if there is nothing to keep their attention when they get there?

Designing your webpage is only half the battle; you must have a plan for managing and expanding it. If your business website is light on information and you don’t have the knowledge or ability to write quality content on your own, hiring a website content provider to expand your site with new information is a very smart move.

The objective of posting content to article marketing sites is generating back-links to your page. When you syndicate content, you are giving other webmasters the right to reuse your writing in exchange for leaving the links that are contained within the body of the article, intact. While getting your page out there can only be a good thing, your time will be much better utilized if you focus on setting your article up to achieve the greatest results for your overall search engine optimization campaign.

Before I go any further regarding article marketing and search engine optimization, I would first like to make it clear that you should always spend your time writing “best of web” type quality content. I fully understand that not everyone is capable of writing at an extremely high level, but at least try to proof read and spell check when you publish because your articles will spread exactly how they are posted.

Grammatical mistakes make you look unprofessional, and webmasters will skip over your articles in favor of others that don’t have such drawbacks. Since the goal of article marketing is getting others to publish your work, a few obvious mistakes can virtually guarantee you have wasted your time.

Getting back to the topic, the single most important factor that will affect your article marketing success is the topic you chose to write about, more specifically the keywords related to it. Don’t just write article for the sake of writing articles, write with a purpose of targeting specific terms or phrases, and make sure to peak the reader’s interest or else they will never click through your links.

For example, if you are targeting the term “soccer shoes” feature the term multiple times in the content of your article, as well as other similar terms closely related to it like cleats, screw-ons, boots, etc. The title of the article should lead with the very keyword you are targeting, as well as the specific words that link bank to your article. Soccer Shoes

Taking it to the next level, the landing page of the links should also be optimized for the same terms. A focused effort of posting numerous quality articles across the web taking these factors into control and finding the right keywords will have your back-links for well targeted traffic spreading across the web, and hopefully your page ranking, too.

If you aren’t yet aware, the Internet is a tricky place filled with misinformation. If you do a web search for article marketing, you will find thousands of distribution sites, and hundreds of different products that supposedly automate the process. While it may sound like a good idea to use automation to post the same article in as many different places as possible, it is not necessarily productive.

First off, the vast majority of article marketing syndication sites receive very little traffic, so they are hardly worth posting to. The bigger reason it is a terrible idea to repost the same article across multiple syndication sites is for reasons of duplicate content, as well as spending your time and efforts in as efficiently a way as possible.

When you use automation, each article is going to look effectively the same to search engines, and they will effectively compete against each another. If Google recognizes the articles as containing duplicate content, they tend to purge the extras from the search results, in favor of the original.

If you are going to use the same article on multiple sites, your results will be much better if you re-edit the article by flipping a few sentences or words around near the beginning and the end of the article, as well as the title and the keywords you are targeting. You only have so much time to focus on article marketing, and if you spend it all re-posting the same article over and over only to have it removed, you will be wasting time when you could be doing other valuable things to increase your traffic.

How Much To Syndicate?

Overall, your content marketing campaign should be focused on adding content to your webpage, as opposed to free article sites. If your page is not filled with lots of optimized content and organized in a search engine friendly fashion, the results of sending traffic to your page will not be as potent.

When people land on your page, you would like them to click through your links and increase the value of your pages for the terms your onsite links are optimized to target. Focus on writing lots of quality content and syndicate maybe 10-20% until you get your page to a level where it starts to receive a steady stream of traffic for the terms you are targeting, and then try to implement other methods of optimization to target these same terms, and then move to a new set of terms for your next round of article marketing.

When you syndicate articles, you also must remember that your competitors can post everything you write on their own page, so you want to be careful not to give too much away for free, and always make it interesting enough that your links are hard, not to follow! At the same time, if it gets too spam-like, no one will post it. Provide good information, and your site will eventually benefit from the articles you have posted.

The single best way to peak interests is by writing articles that are longer in length than the typical article, but only posting a small snippet on the syndication site, while offering the full version from your webpage. If the content you have provided is good, you should see the click through ratio of your links, drastically increase.

Another way to increase the “hype” as well as the effects of your articles is by writing a series of high quality, high content articles and then placing links within the article to the other articles that you have written on that particular article marketing site. This will help your articles to receive a higher ranking, which should also help your site.

Analyze and Improve

Once you have posted a few articles, it is best to go back and analyze your results. Did your articles receive page views? If the answer is no, was it because the article marketing site was worthless (likely cause) or was it because the failed to use keywords correctly in the title and content of the article.  Check to see what % of people click onto your website from your articles, and if its less than 40%, try to make your articles more informative and evaluate the placement of your back links.

Next, do a web search using a sentence or two from the article, and see if anyone has re-posted your article. If no, give it more time and revisit the question. If the answer is no after two or three months, your content is likely not best of web, and you should spend more time writing quality content or hiring others to do it for you.

Measuring results is also very important. Many of the better article marketing sites will also give you the ability to see the number of times the links on your articles have been clicked.

I have achieved click through ratios of 60% using keywords like “Free ________” because everyone wants something for free, but I have also received much lower ratios when the words linked are not in a click friendly place, the signature is borderline spam, or if the content flat out sucks.

Go back and edit the articles and see if you can move the links and update the signature and see if you achieve higher click through ratios from that point forward. If not, your content may be bad or your topic a dud.

On the Internet, CONTENT IS KING! It’s what initially brings in the visitors, as well as encourages them to come back.

Theoretically, the more quality content a webpage contains, the more favorably search engines will rank it. In reality, there are numerous factors that come into play, but all else being equal, the more keyword-laced, search engine optimized text your site contains, the more traffic you will receive for free from search engines.

The way you present the content on your site is also important. Text-based websites typically load quickly and are easy to navigate, which leads to a pleasant visiting experience. People do not typically visit websites to watch elaborate “flash-intros,” they generally come for information. The easier you make that information to find, the more useful your site will be for visitors.

Why text is best: For search engine optimization purposes, a text based style allows us a considerable amount of experimentation ability. SEO is not an exact science, but you can increase your chance of traffic by controlling certain onsite factors, as well as incorporating a link-building campaign to your Internet marketing efforts.

For quality, highly targeted web traffic, a serious effort to go after the most important terms is essential, and BizDetail can show you how to tweak various on-page and offsite factors to increase your chances.