Posts Tagged ‘seo’

The toughest thing small businesses run into when building a presence on the web is getting traffic. The web site is up there, but no one’s going to it.

One surefire way to get immediate action on a web site is PPC advertising. The downfall, obviously, is that the cost per action associated with that advertising can be overwhelming. Another problem is that most small businesses just don’t get PPC.

The best investment of time comes from building organic traffic. Organic traffic is visits generated from the regular listings within a search engine. You pay nothing for it and it gives you a huge boost in credibility. That’s one thing PPC can’t buy — credibility.

The first step in building organic traffic is to add valuable, keyword-rich content to your web site. This can be in the form of blog posts, articles, tips, guides, tutorials, and so forth. The second step is to keep growing that content. The third step is to evaluate and analyze whether or not you’re making any headway in search engines.

Start today and keep doing it. It takes many small actions to generate big results.

Small businesses everywhere are clambering to get on the SEO express. However, many are missing the boat when it comes to expectations. People want instant results. They want to be number one for impossible keywords in an unrealistic amount of time.

Part of the blame goes to unethical SEO agencies who feed these insane beliefs, but a majority of it goes to uneducated small business owners.

SEO requires immense patience, dedication and ingenuity. Anything short of that will bring upon failure. Learn from your mistakes, get yourself familiarized with SEO tactics and try again.

Search engine optimization is tricky business. It’s part art and part science. No one knows exactly what needs to be done to achieve optimal results. The hardest part of SEO is keyword selection. You have to research how people are finding your web site, what terms they use and patterns they follow. It’s not easy. However, the good thing about SEO is that those patterns do exist. You just need to find them and optimize your web site to take advantage of them. This involves implementing the correct keywords throughout your site in a meaningful and effective manner. (more…)

What turns prospects off of your web site? We’ve compiled our own top ten list of tried-and-true reasons why a prospect will leave your web site. Beware – some of these are harsh.

1. Your web site looks like it was sloppily put together by your 10-year-old son or daughter.
2. Your web site has old, even ancient content that makes one wonder whether your organization still exists.
3. Your web site has slow-loading, irritating graphics and gizmos that look like they’ve been transported from 1995.
4. Your web site is disorganized and hard to navigate, leaving visitors lost and confused.
5. Your web site lacks content of any real substance, and as a result, any value.
6. Your web site has no call to action or "next step" instructions for visitors to follow.
7. Your web site is missing pages, has bad links or non-functioning tools.
8. Your web site doesn’t work in other popular web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari.
9. Your web site has nothing for visitors to interact with.
10. Your web site doesn’t have a problem with prospects leaving – it has a problem with prospects finding your web site in the first place.