SEO can be tricky. The search engines are doing their best to index your site’s relevant content, but there are things you can (and should) do to make sure they are successful.
Read MorePosts Tagged ‘seo’
The dominance of search
Last night I attended a presentation for web professionals in the Chicago area. It was organized through meetup.com. The presenter was Matt Moog, Founder & CEO at Viewpoints. You can see his slide deck here.
Among his many relevant points was the notion he referred to as ‘the dominance of search.’ Matt’s focus for the evening was specifically on sites that serve up social commerce, but I think the search issue is something any site needs to consider seriously. What Matt was referring to was his claim was that 50-80% of traffic across the web comes from search. This was a…
Read MoreLeno, Conan and the Flashfire Influence of Viral Marketing
Pretend for a moment you have never watched TV past 10:00 PM. Now go on Twitter or Facebook and type in “The Tonight Show.” (more) Just from seeing that, would you believe that guy was forced out of his show because of low ratings? The Internet was covered in Conan paraphernalia and he was one of the top trending topics on Twitter for almost the entire month of January. What could have gone down as a career low point for a cult comic on the level of The Chevy Chase Show, The Magic Johnson Show and a dozen other forgotten forays…
Read MoreUsing Search Engine Marketing For Local Advertising
When I was working as a freelance copywriter for a particular ad agency a few years back, we worked with an office supply company in California. This company had a great looking website that I would guess cost them a solid $20,000. The only problem was that no one was going to it. No one was going to it because no one could find it. No one could find it because the name of the company was…Office Supplies. That name, along with being a good subject for an old time comedy routine, is a really bad name for a company…
Read MoreThe LUSH Life: Interview with Chicago’s LUSH Wine & Spirits’ Rachel Driver
Two years ago I studied abroad in Florence, Italy where the wine is cheaper than water, and certainly cheaper than Italy’s version of my usual drink of choice, Coca Light. After four months under the Tuscan sun, I returned home somewhat plumped from copious servings of everything and teeth, to my dentist’s disdain, tinted purple from habitually making the more economical choice of hydrating myself with the house vino—a thrifty decision in terms of saving Euros. And the more fun one.
Part of this wine-drinking four month rendezvous can be attributed to the fact that I was enrolled in my Italian…
Read MoreThe Bottom Line on Creating Website Content
The online world is all about content. What brings people, whether consumers or business clients, to a website? The obvious answer is: new ideas and information that solve their challenges and needs. Print, TV, radio and online ads can drive traffic to a website all day long, but what good is it if they get to the site and are bored or unsatisfied with the breadth of information and leave.
Or for that matter, what if they come once and like what they see and read, and then come back a week or a month later only to see the same…
Read MoreGod is in the details – so is credibility
This is just a reminder to our readers and clients that one of the most critical pieces of building a great brand and great web site rests with copywriting. It is the single greatest persuader on any web site despite all the advances in multimedia, social networking, etc. As an example of how things can go terribly wrong, I’ve grabbed this site from an able competitor in UK and highlighted some of the problems they’ve created for themselves that impact their credibility.
My first point is that they should be especially careful when proofreading their display message on their home page.…
Read MoreOptimizing PDF files for maximum SEO performance
We’ve been advising clients for some time to optimize their PDFs before placing them onto their web sites. We recommend this because PDFs can contribute to a site’s overall SEO performance. Here is the kernel of what we advise.
Before you create a download link for that PDF on your html page and drop it in your site’s directory, know that there are ways to optimize that file which will actually contribute to a stronger search engine performance for your overall site – and possibly more customers for your business.
If you’ve ever done a search for something very specific on Google…
Read MoreFlash & HTML Website Integration – Best Practices
Recently at Billups Design we built a fully functional HTML replica of a client’s flash site and were puzzled as to the latest and best practices for integrating that HTML site with the existing Flash site to ensure the greatest usability and SEO results. We had a few options that came to mind first.
- A splash page to allow the user to choose the HTML Site or the Flash Site.
- A separate directory for the HTML Site to live that only Google would see.
- A flash detection that would redirect the user to the HTML site if it didn’t have Flash, Google included.
None…
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