Jun

20

The Top Reasons Your Online Business Competitors Leave You In The Dust…

Filed Under Online Advertising, ROI, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, business brand, content optimization, drive traffic, online store, search engine marketing, search engine marketing strategy, search engine optimization consulting, search engine strategy, seo consultation, seo consulting, small business strategy, traffic conversion, traffic optimization | Leave a Comment

By: Michael Plante

Does your business have an online website? If you do, how much time is spent making sure that the website is actually performing at optimum levels, and driving visitors and potential customers for your business? How much time is spent performing search engine optimization, or, SEO maintenance to those websites?

You might be surprised to know how many business owners don’t pay too much attention to this very important issue. In fact, you may even be more surprised to learn how you can actually take that little fact and turn into a HUGE advantage for YOUR business.

A lot of business owners are hip to the fact that if they have a website, they open themselves and their business up to a whole new level of people who might be interested in the products or services that their business has to offer. And, as savvy as a lot of people are overall about using the internet, and buying product online, a lot of business owners are not yet as savvy at getting those customers in the “virtual” door of their business.

I am not saying this in a negative sense, purely because I am quite sure that most business owners don’t purposely set themselves up to fail. In fact, business owners set up websites for the express purpose of improving their bottom line revenue numbers. So, why do so many of them ultimately not achieve this goal?

Like so many things in life, it boils down to this: FEAR. Fear of the unknown, and in this case, for a lot of business owners, that fear is directed at this one concept - search engine optimization. Why do they fear it?

Simply put - they don’t know search engine optimization. Or they know of it, but don’t understand how it works, or how to perform it. Again, I am not saying this in a negative sense towards the business owner, I am simply stating the facts.

But, if you, as the business owner, are willing to look at this situation from a business standpoint, and address it in the same light that you would address any part of your business that could be performing better, then you are already in the correct mindset to not only take corrective action,  but you can also position yourself to take advantage of this situation by taking the steps that your online competition is not taking.

In other words - your online competition more than likely is also not taking full advantage of search engine optimization concepts, and if that is the case, adjustments on your website now could pay huge dividends for your business down the road, and in the long term.

Why is this? Simply put, the major search engines will almost always favor a well optimized site over a site that has little or no optimization each and every time.  Every time that the search engines review and refresh their page rankings (organic search listings),  your site will have the opportunity to move higher in those rankings. 

Do you know where your business ranks for search terms you may be trying to rank for? Are you in the top 10 results in Google for your search terms?

Are you aware that, if you are not in those top 10 rankings (1st page of search results) that your chances of being seen by potential customers drops dramatically?  And more importantly - if you are not on that first page of top 10 rankings, who is?  Your competition?  How did they get there?

These are all questions you, as a business owner, need to be asking yourself, and assessing accordingly, if you own a business website.  I would like to provide you with a FREE white paper that addresses in great detail about why businesses fear SEO,  and how you can take advantage of this situation today.  Click HERE to download our FREE whitepaper entitled, “Why Busnesses FEAR SEO” today and start to position your company to overcome and overtake your online competitors  - and start getting some of that business your missing out on today!

Enjoy your weekend!

Michael

Jun

16

The Top 3 Optimization Items To Check For When Someone Else Builds Your Business Site

Filed Under ROI, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, search engine marketing, search engine marketing strategy, search engine optimization consulting, search engine strategy, seo consultation, seo consulting | 1 Comment

As an SEO consultant, one of the things I find most disturbing when I am performing a competitive analysis for a customer is the lack of basic “behind the scenes” work on business web sites.

Having come from “the ground up” in regards to my background and education in this area, I find it rather unnerving that a business will spend good money to have a web site built for them, in the hopes that it will help them level the playing field in their market, when in fact the web site that they probably paid top dollar for will never even get off the ground.

Sure, the website most likely will get indexed in Google, and the othe major search engines. But, based on some of the things I see - these websites will never rank for any keywords and therefore will probably never rank against their online competitors websites. You really have to ask yourself: What’s the point of having the website out there if it’s never being found?

I look at some of the fundamental aspects of what I consider to be competent search engine optimization in this issue. On page optimization is one of the keys to a web sites ability to rank well for search terms (keywords) and those search terms are the life blood of any web site. Without that - your web site is pretty much dead in the water.

So, here are the first three things I look at in regards to the “fundamentals”:
1. META TITLE TAG - This is the tag that puts the title of your site up in the little blue bar at the top of your browser. This is also the primary link (in blue) on a Google result.

2. META KEYWORDS TAG - This is where your site keywords are stored, and these should associate with the keywords being used on your sites pages. There is always some debate going on somewhere in the SEO world about the viability of a Keywords META tag - Some say use it - some say it’s not necessary. I believe that there is some use for the tag, and I do believe it assists in search results, which of course, translates into visitors on your site.

3. META DESCRIPTION TAG - This is the descriptive field that describes your sites pages. I find that the time spent to customize this for each distinctive page on your site will pay huge dividends in the long term in regards to ranking. Proper use of keywords in this field will help you to dominate the search engine rankings, as this field is in most cases the description part of the same Google search result we mentioned in # 1 above.

Like I said, there is some debate in certain circles about the KEYWORDS tag - and there has been some debate about the DESCRIPTION tag as well. I don’t subscribe to that debate too much, because to me the results of using the description tag are obvious in the search engine results.

Getting back on point: When I do competitive analysis for a lot of my clients, and potential customers, I am finding a LOT of websites with neither the KEYWORDS or DESCRIPTION tags in them. We’ll save the lack of other META tags for another discussion. These two alone are worth a minute here.

When I complete the competitive analysis for sites that are missing these tags, in almost every case what I find is no linking, no demographic data available for the site, and almost always, I find low traffic counts.

The site itself may be a really well made, well designed site. But - it’s pretty much dead in the water. And without the traffic to inflate those stats and demographics I just mentioned, that’s pretty much where that web site is going to stay. DOA.

So, my advice: If you own a business web site, and someone else built it for you, or you built your own site, but are not too sure what I am discussing today, perhaps you should take a moment, and check the HTML code for your site (go to your website, then go to VIEW on the menu, and then look at “SOURCE”). META tags are usually installed at the top of the code page, between the HEAD and /HEAD tags of the code. If you don’t see these META tags installed, you need to see about getting them installed ASAP.

If you would like to get assistance in finding these and other potential issues with your web site, contact me at Go Article Marketing LLC’s Contact Page, and we help you review your site’s performance and potential.

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