Austin SEO and Web Design

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.

One of the biggest rule breakers still - for optimized content is plagarism. Funny enough, we remember well when having to write school papers that our content needs to be unique. However, I still run into this so often. If your search engine optimization company is with the times or ahead of the learning curve, they will be writing articles for you, or requested you to write an article for your website’s topics. These articles are then submitted to article websites to help boost your website’s rankings. Of course, in order for this article submission to help, they must also be done properly which requires ancor tag knowledge and not repeating the important keywords too many -OR- too few times.

I often receive article writings that are either copied or still have some information copied from different sources. It is well worth the effort the quick write an off the cuff ‘unique’ article for your business.

What happens if you do not have unique content? There is some dispute about the level of penalty a search engine might apply to your website - BUT, long story short, if your content has been crawled by a search engine before, then it does not help you - AT ALL.

How do I review for duplicate/cached content? It is pretty quick to find out if an article is completely unique, I can manually search different parts of the articles on the net, or I can use some tools/utilities that will search the web for me to see if the content has already been published on the Internet.

Still bad… In some cases, half of an article will be uniquely written, and other parts will have sentence fragments that have been copied from other sources. AGAIN, if even a string of a portion of a sentence has been copied - that means that a search engine out there has already cached and recorder - that piece of a sentence. A search engine does not just crawl for content, but also caches/records/saves the order in which your content is written. It is a little hard to grasp that the world wide web can actually store, save, and even keep multiple copies of your website amongst a gazillions others - BUT IT DOES!:)

A robots.txt file (inserted on the root of your website) is a file that prevents search engines from crawling your entire website. You may want to prevent certain parts of your website from being exposed and searchable to the world. Additionally, as it relates to SEO, several folders and files may not be related to the website’s targeted keywords.

Without a robots.txt file, a search engines assumes it can crawl your entire site for content.

A robots.txt file can be created with a simple notepad editor. Following the standard format, you can choose what files and folders to exclude. You can additionally use a robots.txt file to tell search-engine spiders were your sitemap is located.

You may find that there are some online robots.txt generators that will do the job for you. You can google ‘robots.txt generator’ to find one. After generating your robots.txt file, you would need to save this file and upload, via ftp or your host control panel to the root of your website’s folder.

Simple example of a robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /directory/file.html

As always, it is recommended that may want to check with some experienced help on how to setup your file correctly. SEO(search engine optimization ) is a gimmick if not applied correctly. Every file, directory, and image of your website needs to be carefully reviewed for content in order to determine exclusions.