Austin SEO and Web Design

Now that we are almost a month into the new decade it’s time to look at a couple ways SEO may change going forward.

1. Search engine content: Google, Bing and Yahoo are clearly making strides to keep eyeballs on their pages longer. Everything from website snapshots to sampling content. If this trend continues, you may see people spending a lot more time within the search engine without clicking through. However, this could also increase quality traffic if you provide compelling targeted information at the onset.
2. To Tweet or not to Tweet: It’s still unclear how much emphasis Google and other search engines will put on social sites going forward, but the shift is hard to ignore. For about a week, Google integrated real time Twitter results directly into their organic search. Even though they have since backed off, Google is clearly interested in the possibility of real-time search. Additionally, more people are, and will continue to use the search feature in Twitter as a source of information.
3. Dramatic increase in SEO spending: More and more business owners are becoming savvy to the latest trends in internet marketing. Increasingly, SEO and SEM are acronyms that people actually know. Marketing dollars are tight and traditional advertising is on the decline. Companies looking to reorganize their budget will turn to SEO.

Every struggling web designer and marketing company is looking for a way to capitalize on the booming search engine optimization business. The demand for this type of internet marketing continues to rise even as marketing budgets are slashed. This is because SEO costs a fraction of the amount spent in traditional advertising—equating to a return on investment that makes search engine marketing a no-brainer. Advertising costs for Yellowbook and other print directories remains high even when circulation continues to decline. Companies are wising up to these trends and shifting funds to progressive internet marketing—and saving loads of money in the process.

“But my company gets all its business from word of mouth.” Our Austin SEO firm hears this from time to time as many small business owners believe that WOM is the only marketing they need. This is a great way to maintain business, but companies looking to really expand should consider their untapped internet community. Niche markets offer some of the best SEO results because nobody is doing it. For example, a dog walker would be flooded with requests if their website reaches the top couple positions on Google (for their local market). Next thing they know, they are the premier dog walking service in their city.

Remember when pop-ups and flashing banner ads where you throw bananas at a dancing monkey were effective forms of Internet marketing? No? Well I’m not sure that they ever were. Certainly today’s web users have become more savvy to where they either gloss over these forms of advertising or circumvent them completely by changing their browser settings to block ads.

This type of broad untargeted advertising may work on radio and television, but the Internet provides a unique opportunity for targeted marketing with high conversion rates. The easiest way to achieve this is for the customer to find your product/service when they are ready to purchase. By launching a well-researched carefully calculated SEO campaign you can ensure that your site appears on organic search results for targeted keywords. Organic results are more credible to the consumer because they are not an advertisement, rather the answer to their question.

The most aesthetically pleasing website is useless when nobody is viewing it. Of course you want a site that catches the reader’s attention, but you must not neglect content—meaning, the actual words that appear on your page. These series of words and sentences are what the search engine reads when they stop by for a visit. Unfortunately, search engine robots are not impressed by fancy flash graphics of zoo animals. But, what does impress them, is original grammatically correct content relevant to your site. They should read and record text about pandas, giraffes, kangaroos, and repeated mentions of zoo—including your geographic region. This will improve your rankings when people are searching for zoos in your area.

One of the main determinants of site ranking is the amount of links to your site. There are several techniques you can use to increase the number of backlinks to your site. One of the most common is reciprocal linking. This is where you agree to put a link to someones site and they return the favor. This can be an effective way to increase traffic, but less helpful to improving search rankings. Most search engines give one-way links a lot more weight (ranking wise) than two-way links (reciprocal links).

So how do you get sites to link to you without linking to them? One of the many ways is to regularly send out press releases. Look up distribution systems and draft up a few releases for the free services. Additionally, you want to post content that may catch the attention of bloggers–a little controversy will often gain their interest.

Some of the most basic optimization tools are overlooked when creating a website. Title tags and meta tags tell google’s minions (search engine robots that spend their entire lives crawling from one site to the next) what your site is all about. If you are selling antique dog collars, for example, than you want to make sure that phrase appears not only throughout your website’s content, but in the source code.

Let’s start with title tags. This is what you see at the very top of your browser next to the little logo. Not only is this the title of your page, but, this is what appears in search results. So make sure it is relevant and inclusive of your most important search terms.

Now move on to meta tags. Meta tags are one of the original tools used by search engines to rank pages. All you have to do is insert “description” into the code, followed by a brief, no more than 250 character, description of your site. For example, “Antique dog collars are bark in style. Collars from every time period: Renaissance, Middle Ages, Dark Ages, World War II, Stone Age, Mesopotamia, and the Space Age. Buy unique collars for your favorite pet.” Make sure not to repeat the same phrases in this block of code or your site will be penalized.

Once you optimize your site with these title and meta tags the metaphorical robots will report their findings back to google and you will start to steadily climb the list.

We see it more often than not, a small or even a large-enterprise size company that approaches optimizing their website without following some basic marketing principles. Before you begin down the road of seeking website rankings, your website will not convert visitors into clients if it does not entice, persuade, and energize visitors to contact you and/or purchase what you are offering. Most website’s generate leads and sales from website contacts. One of the most common rule breakers is not having the contact information prominently displayed - to STAND OUT.

If your primary revenue driving source is to get visitors to sign on and shop instead, then your website home page needs to have a simple and effective layout. A summary of items to think about include - 1. Keep it short and sweet (like a bullet point on a resume), 2. Have ‘call to action’ items listed such as “buy now”, “monthly discount”, and “Sign up Today!”, 3. Test for quality and typos, 4. Define your simple and short message, 5.  Do not structure your website’s navigation to have too many sub-pages, a visitor and potential client will loose interest if they have to drill down into too many sub-pages to find what they are looking for.

Whether you live in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, or even Austin - the top ten tips for finding a reliable Search Engine Optimization Company remain the same. It is not a good idea to engage in SEO until you have the ‘big picture’ or how to shop for it! The top 10 shopping tips are as follows… 1. Ask for FULL Search Engine Optimization. Most companies only optimize the home page, or do not create backlinks. You must have all of the pages of your website optimized, and have a significant number of backlinks created for a successful campaign… 2. Find a reliable company. A reliable SEO company will provide you with report examples, actual rankings examples, and demonstrate an understanding of your business… 3. Inquire about specific numbers for the work that is performed. Your SEO specialist should be able to provide you with specific number of how many pages will be optimized, what is included in your monthly report, and what type and how many backlinks will be created/submitted. 4. You should be able to speak with your SEO specialist by PHONE. Even if your SEO specialist is in a different city or state, a good company will be accessible by PHONE. 5. They should care. When you speak to your potential future SEO advisor, your SEO company should demonstrate an understanding or your business and your businesses’ market, services, and/or products. 6. Look for examples and testimonials. They should have examples and testimonials. 7. You should receive a FREE comprehensive analysis that includes your competition. Your report should include information about your competition. If it does not, then your SEO company may be feeding you some bait, without giving you the necessary information about your future success. 8. Ask your future SEO firm how they are staying ahead of the search engine learning curve - that’s right - put them on the spot! If they answer correctly, they will tell you that they are increasing their efforts to maximize social media exposure. Search Engines are not increasingly putting more emphasis on social medial sources such as blogs, forums, press-release, bookmarking, article sites, and other dynamic sources. 9. Some suggestions should be made for improving the customer conversion of your website. SEO efforts are realized, when your website successfully turns visitors into clients. Your SEO firm should have the necessary website marketing experience as well to make suggestions for changes to your site. 10. START NOW - Now that you have the information needed to make an informed decision - START YOUR SEO Campaign.