Knowing the Criteria in Finding Good SEO Company

E-commerce presents flourishing opportunities for businesses that recognize successful moves online. Armed with a website with good quality content, you get ready to kick-start the marketing initiatives to ramp up the business activities, its visibility on the net and increasing the traffic and subsequent conversions. The next task on hand is finding a reliable and experienced SEO company to implement those initiatives. And while the selection process may pose some challenges due to the innumerable SEO companies that burgeoned out of the growing demand, there are some criteria set by successful businesses that have benefitted from the wondrous online magic cast by the SEO to their businesses.

Your SEO should :

• Have the experience in the field.

This is the first requirement. If they don’t have the experience, why would you trust them with the herculean task of optimizing your site for increased business activities? You might as well just do it yourself. But since you have target goals and you want to strike while the iron is hot, you definitely need to look for someone with more than enough experience to do the job for you.

Review their track record and check their work criteria. This will give you an idea of how much they put value on quality work. Spend time to know their reputation in the industry by doing some online search and talking with the owners or the decision makers

• Have credibility.

This is another important requirement. A good SEO company will be known to the community for the kind of work they do or service they render. There is nothing as bad than having your website blocked or suspended due to violations of certain laws and policies. If they can give you their previous clients, make an effort to get feedback from them relevant to the work they have completed for them.

• Be cost-effective.

Your SEO should be able to clearly define the charges or costs for the assigned tasks. Transparency in financial negotiations is usually a problem so make sure that this area is cleared of any misunderstanding or doubts. Their costs should realistically translate to high quality of work given for specific projects.

• Have the keyword tools.

Keywords are important to optimization and your SEO should be able to provide you with keyword tools to help in promoting the business and the site to various search engines. They should target good positioning or ranking with SERPs (search engine result pages) with the use of accurate words or phrases. The good quality of your site’s content will be reinforced by the use of these ‘miraculous’ words or group of words which are relevant to your business or site, which are associated with your products or services, etc. The various techniques which may be employed in order to get the desired results will be initiated by your SEO.

Satisfying the above set of criteria, with your selected SEO company, your business is on its way to a high-ranking, frequently-visited website. Your business should start seeing positive indicators and signs of online growth and visibility. You and your SEO should be able to draw up an effective plan or strategy to properly position your business to get the incredibly amazing marketing results. 

Improving Your Blogging Writing for Your Small Business

Small businesses have looked at blogging as an effective way to maintain connection to their customers and to maintain visibility in the net. However, some businesses have failed to achieve their target goals because they were not doing it right.

The following will be helpful in improving your blogging writing and making the blogs work for your business:

1. Good Quality Writing
A good blog is of good writing quality – good English, correct spelling and grammar, punctuations, contractions, etc.  Blog readers are picky. They get turned off by blogs which don’t get the message across and blogs that are badly written. When they click open your page, they would be expecting a good read and not wasted time.

2. Engaging Tone
Most of the time, bloggers have mistaken blogging for business presentations. While readers would want to read information, they would prefer that the information is presented in an engaging conversational tone. This would encourage them to throw in some comments and feedback, making the blog dynamic and interactive. A good way to a reader’s heart is to stick to a conversational way of writing.

3. Informational instead of Promotional
While one of the purposes of blogging is to promote your business, brand or service, blogs are to be structured such that the ‘promoting’ purpose is subtly achieved. Blogs which are obvious promotional campaigns will be trashed by the readers. They need to see the blogger as a good resource person or authority which can help them with the information they are looking for. Make your promotional innuendos crafty enough for the readers not to easily predict the real purpose of your blogging.

4. Readers not the Blog
When writing blogs for your business, effort must be made to turn the article or blog more about the readers and not the material itself. How do you do that? Think of what the readers would like to see from your blog. Useful information? Tips? Opinion on certain products? These are what will engage your readers into staying on your blog.

5. Know What You Want
Determine the purpose of your blog. Are you aiming at creating a dynamic online discussion on specific topics to engage your customers? By being clear on the purpose, you can be clear with the message you are conveying to the readers. By being specific and narrowing down your targets, you are making your readers understand what you want to tell them. For instance, your blog is aimed specifically at customers who have bad customer service experience (from any business, for that matter), your blog should carry that specificity so that those who will engage in the blog will be clear on what they will comment on.

6. Share Your Experience
First-hand experiences shared on blogs are almost always the run-away winners. Why? Because readers can relate to some of those experiences. In more ways than one, people may have encountered similar situations and will be most willing to share the experience to other readers as well. This can make the blog very dynamic and engaging. Everyone expects to learn a lesson or two from those sharings and that’s what makes it count for the readers.

7. Make Technology a Friend
Technology is available for everyone to use for different purposes. Utilize every available tool to measure the effectiveness of your blogs. Make yourself updated with the latest trends in technology and how you can tap those trends into your blogging. Nowadays, blogging is directed towards the utilization of social media networking sites for a wider reach. Check and see if those new trends would be applicable for your purpose. If others are on it, maybe you should be on it, too.

Try and apply some of these tips the next time you write your blog. You can expect to see some variation on the response or feedback you will get from those reading your blogs. They will definitely be favorable to your business.

Web Design Process Explained

Every business aims for maximum online visibility especially those who know the benefits their business will get out of having their presence felt on the world wide web. And this is why most businesses know that having a functional and user-friendly website is the best and fast way they can reach out to their customers.

Creating or building a website entails a process of careful planning that enables a web designer to carefully put in place all the elements resulting from such planning. The amount of time devoted on the design process will define the quality, or lack of it, of the resulting website.

• What is the Website for?

This is the first information any web designer should know. Knowing the purpose of the website will help in setting the goals for the site and determine the target audience.

Setting goals for the website will be helpful in evaluating the performance of the site after a certain period. The results of such evaluation will determine if any improvements or enhancements have to be implemented on the website.

Knowing the target audience will help in formulating the design elements of the site. A website intended for children should not contain graphics and text contents which are hard to associate and understand, respectively.

• Start Planning the Design

The best web design starts with a plan and planning should start even before the first wireframe is built.

The design plan should include details about the information architecture – information is classified and described and will be the basis of structure and navigation of the site; planned structure, a sitemap and other technical details like the need for e-commerce, language, etc.

• Design starts after Planning

This is the core of the entire process – the design phase. This is that part where layout designs, wireframes, colors or color schemes, themes and useful and decorative icons and imagery will be put together on the page of the site.

• Work on the Site Content

As every designer will tell you, this is another important part of the web design process. The site’s content will get your site or page found by searchers or users through the search engines. The content will also be the reason for people visiting your site. A web designer should have a full grasp and understanding of the content to be integrated into the website design and layout.

• Build the Site

This is the part where the HTML and CSS will be required. Other technologies like CGI, JavaScript, PHP and databases will also be integrated.

• Test the Site

While building the site, testing should be done to see if all elements are working and functional. The site should run another test after the design has been completed to make sure that the goals and target audience for which the site is intended have been satisfied and achieved, the technical components are working and the pages are navigating smoothly.

• Upload the Site to the Web Host

This is the phase where the website is ready to go live on the net. By uploading all the files or pages to the web host provider, the website will run 24/7 for the users to find through the search engines.

• Maintain the Website

Even after the website is running perfectly on the world wide web, constant updating, addition of new contents and regular housekeeping should be done to make sure users will keep visiting the site.

While some may find the process unnecessarily long and tedious, it pays off in the end because a website design that is well-thought of results to a functional and good quality page for your business.

10 Easy Tips for Effective Web Content Writing

Article writing and article reading has always been a source of advantage and details for the author and reader respectively. With the passing of time, different search engines arise to provide quality content for individual researchers.  Now it’s the time that we talk about online users in common, would want to study and what they do not want to. There are several aspects engaged in determining what visitors will absolutely want to study, regardless of the topic. 10 easy tips for effective web content writing offer you a way to get all courage for efficient composing and to get good popularity in search engine optimization.

Let us take a look on these easy tips to get things started:

1)   Summary – give a summary to your reader on what they are about to read. Most of the researchers online don’t have much of time thus, it is very important to make sure that what you give is worth of their time.

2)   Get to the Point – use important details and be specific on what you want to convey. Users online don’t necessarily study, they check out. Get immediately to the factor in the least amount of terms possible. The more direct to the point you are to the topic the reader wants to know, the more they’d like to read on. And be sure to avoid redundant words or sentences.

3)   Use Small Phrases and Paragraphs - using lesser phrases and sentences create your articles simpler to comprehend and take in. Internet users will not take time to study long sentences or paragraphs. They will proceed checking down the site. By using brief sentences and you can take them in and work them down the site without making them check out too much.

4)   Use Bullet Points - there are many benefits of using bullet points. Many of which include: easy to check out; crack up the circulation of the site; they sketch users in.

5)   Use Sub Headings - sub titles crack up the circulation of your articles and offer a very user-friendly way for users to check out the site. In addition to, sub titles offer of excellent assistance to SEO. The very best sub titles are illustrative and if possible create use of a few right chosen keywords.

6)      Remain Organized - ease users into the articles and then keep them studying by remaining structured. It is challenging to discuss to someone who is getting from one subject to another. Most of the time you can hardly know what they are trying to say. The same thing goes for on the internet articles.

7)   Customize Your Content - adding a little stylization to your articles will allow you to add focus to key claims. Using bold and italics are both excellent for taking visitor's interest and generating your factor home. Prevent using underline for anything but hyperlinks. Underlining any published text that is not a web link can be very annoying for users as they are preconditioned to think they are hyperlinks.

8)   Use Links Within Your Copy - Remember this is the internet after all and connecting from one web page to another is suitable. Links will also take a position apart amongst the other articles on your web page and help users to easily check out the site and recognize what the site is about.

9)      Use An Individual Tone - writing your articles as if it is a law paper is tedious and will put users to rest instantly. Make your articles personal and users will be able to associate, furthermore enabling them to believe in you. Put your target audience as if they are next to you and you will find a satisfied method.

10)   Be Unique - one of the best methods to take a position out is to be exclusive. Provide your articles some character, create visitors chuckle, and appreciate studying your articles. If you can do this you have hit silver as users will keep come back for more.

After applying all these easy tips to provide great web content, always remember to check and review your article for typographical errors, grammar and spelling check. After all, the last thing you want is a prospective client to come to your website and start directing out your punctuation and sentence structure mistakes. So, always check your content.
           

Responsive Web Design at Its Best!

Everything is taking a sharp turn to mobile devices. Most businesses require their websites to be adaptable to mobile applications. And depending on the mobile technology being used by the client, the adaptability will be dictated by the mobile device’s application platforms – Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, Kindle, netbook – they will have very different web design requirements. So in the very near future, web designers will be scratching their heads to the madness posed by this trending.

For mobile site designs, three approaches are used : building a brand-new web design; use the existing desktop website and building a new website that looks good in both desktop and mobile screens.

Responsive design is the way to achieve the third mobile site design approach. Where web designers are getting to the point of not being able to keep up with the innumerable design requirements for each mobile device, responsive design principle is being adopted and enforced. The principle behind this approach is that the design should be able to adapt to the varying behaviour and environment given by the users in terms of screen size, orientation and platform. It’s basically saying that web pages can be created with stylesheets looking different on a desktop screen but can adjust the design properties to fit and display perfectly on smaller screens of mobile devices. The most important thing to keep in mind is that no matter how the sites look differently on different devices, the same URLs and coding to deliver content are used for all devices.

Some web designers are bent on maximizing responsive web design techniques for practical reasons. Rather than build new sites for each device and user, integrating the elements of the new web design approach will be far more practical and cost-effective for the clients. While the visual element may be dealt with using stylesheets, the issue on coding, on the other hand requires a little more than surpassing the 300kb network download.

Responsive Design Solutions

It is not in any way possible to overturn the trend of continuously expanding code for mobile users. But web designers have found ways to minimize the impact on web designs aimed at mobile devices :

• Make all design components flexible.

§  Resize the images by using stylesheets which can shrink a picture or image to fit the small mobile screen and which can select a different image file with compressed size or kilobytes to get away with slow or heavy download.

§  Consolidate external files and styles. Merge all CSS or JavaScript in one file. If there are less downloads, there will be few server calls which could result to less waiting time for mobile users.

§  Consolidate styles. Cleaning your web design styles of any redundancy will result in a smaller stylesheet.

§  Selective libraries. While these libraries can come in handy in specific situations, only selected data and information are pulled out from them. With a selective library, lengthy download is avoided.

• Showing and Hiding Content

Certain design platforms or applications allow for the ability to show or hide content with ease. In mobile web designs, considerations for simpler navigation, more focused content, lists or rows in lieu of multiple columns are taken in when creating a flexible web layout.

• Touch screens or cursors

This is easily dealt with for mobile design applications because most mobile devices are using touch screen technology.

These changes and adjustments will allow you to have a website design that will continue to satisfy desktop users while self-adjusting the design elements to fit the smaller screens of mobile users. That is responsive web design at its best!

Identifying Causes of PPC Campaign Failure

Most businesses especially the small ones would employ all sorts of cost-effective marketing methods available in order to boost their business’ productivity in terms of generating customers and sales. One such marketing tool is the Pay Per Click or PPC ad campaigns.

PPC advertising is the placement of a small ad on the search results page for a specific keyword for a small fee each time a visitor clicks the ad and diverted to your site. Payment will be based on agreed amount (usually by bidding) and only when the ad is clicked and the visitor ends up in a landing page on your site.

Despite its concept simplicity, PPC tends to fail for the following reasons:

• Recognizing the importance of keywords

Almost every marketing guru will tell you that for online marketing, the use of proper keywords is very, very important and critical to achieving your goals. By using the properly identified useful keywords in your ad copy, your PPC costs will be less. If you don’t use proper keywords, there will be more clicks with less converts. If your keywords present the accurate information required by the searchers, whoever clicks the ad will turn out to be potential customers.

• Landing Spot

This is a usual sticky problem. Failure to provide a comfortable landing page or spot other than your homepage causes the PPC ad campaign to fail. PPC trails should never end to a non-directional page where the users get lost. Make sure that you have provided a good landing spot where users will find a similar ad content leading to the target page (not the home page) in your site.

• Exclusion of Domains thru Negative Keywords

You shouldn’t pay for what you don’t want. Use negative keywords and exclude specific domains which give you traffic that will not make your website profitable.

• Identifying your Target

Clarity is PPC’s number 1 friend and vagueness is its number 1 enemy. You need to have lots of specifically-focused ads instead of just a few. The results for each ad will vary and you can identify which one garners the best results. Top performers will be displayed more often as they would bring in more conversion. For ads that are not giving you the target results, you can easily dump and replace them with another. This is why it is important that you are ready with more ad materials for PPC.

• Targeting Position

The ultimate target is to be at position number 1. However, just being in a position that shows up on page one of any search results will be good enough for your campaign. People are more inclined to click all sites that appear on page one anyway.

• Changes in Panic Mode

Sometimes goals are not met because you missed something on your PPC ads, rendering it not working. Changes should be implemented at a time and not in a rush. This allows you to carefully inject the changes without damaging the content or purpose of the ads.

• Set and Monitor

Some advertising managers set their target and completely forget about it along the way. Targets are set and monitored to know if the marketing methods are working to your advantage.

• Monitor your Competition

What use are ad campaigns if they don’t generate sales. One good way to check what people want is to check your competitors to know the kind of press release they have for their sites and their products. The foundation of PPC advertising should focus on what you can offer that people want.

A wrong map will take a traveller to a wrong destination. Similarly, searchers that are not led to the right direction will cause your campaign to fail and go to waste.

Get Your Business Followed with Twitter Advertising

You’ve been quite successful in all your online marketing efforts for your business – ad campaigns with Google+, Facebook, Google Display Network. You haven’t ventured Twitter advertising so you don’t know what Twitter can do for your business yet. Maybe it’s time to explore what this greatly-followed social media network has in store for small businesses like yours.

Twitter’s goal is to ‘reach every person in the planet and serve the needs of advertisers around the world’. This is quite timely, especially for small businesses that are trying to catch up with the advantages of technology in their advertising and marketing activities.

Twitter has variety of ways to advertise your business:

• Promoted Accounts

If your business needs ramping up on followers and brand awareness, this is the Twitter platform for you. Your Twitter profile will be promoted through “Who to Follow’ module on the Twitter feed. This will help your business earn the media exposure and mileage, increasing the brand supporters and influencers.

Targeting Twitter users who are already following similar accounts as yours, this unique feature of Twitter allows you to determine the exact cost of getting new followers since you are only required to pay when a user follows your account. The concept of cost per follow (CPF) is much like the google adwords pay per click (PPC).

• Promoted Tweets

Ads are created from the tweets sent out from your Twitter account and then promoted to other users based on the specified target which can be on a geographical setting, search or keywords, followers and profile pages. Ads will appear in search results and timelines and the advertiser will only pay when a Twitter follower or user engages with the Promoted Tweet applying the cost per engagement (CPE) concept which includes a click, retweet, reply or favourite.

• Promoted Trends

This requires a rather big budget but for some businesses making big announcements or kick-starting an event or campaign - needing a big awareness boost, it is a worthwhile and good investment. These ads are fixed placements on a user’s home timeline page for 24 hours at a time, on a first come-first served basis, without any other ads displayed on that time frame. Your ads get solo display for full 24 hours.

Regardless of your selected Twitter advertising, there are three other important things to keep in mind:

• Determine your budget

The enormous market presented by twitter is tempting enough to splurge on the advertising budget, if you are an impulsive advertiser. However, as Twitter is also looking at small businesses’ participation in these campaigns, Twitter recommends a maximum bid (or the amount you are willing to shell out for these campaigns) which is based on average across all Twitter advertisers. The minimum bid is set at 0.50 cents and depending on the performance of your campaign Twitter will adjust the minimum required bid. The adjustment will depend on how useful or relevant other users find your ads.

• Cleaning up your Tweets

Through an automatic ad quality filter system built-in with Twitter, five most recent tweets will be taken and used as the ads showing in your campaign. The built-in ad quality filter selects the tweets based on relevance, engagement and the age of the tweet, which will then be used as Promoted Tweets.

On the other hand, third party content which you have retweeted  may also end up being pulled by the ad quality filter, in which case traffic is directed to the third party’s site and not to your site. In order to avoid paying for clicks which are directed to another user’s website, you should have your tweets cleaned up and make sure there are no third party tweets or retweets which may be erroneously picked by the ad quality filter.

For many businesses, the unique value of using Twitter’s paid advertising to harness the power of real-time connections at the precise moment greatly matter.

Know about Google+

It’s the latest from the premier search engine in the cyber world today – Google+, G+, Google plus, however you call it, is the biggest trending online topic recently. And for very good reasons, especially for small businesses – people are talking about the newest strategy which can help improve one’s business.

Before you can appreciate what Google+ can do for your business, you have to know how it works. Getting to know the product better will lead you to several ideas on how you can tap those features to work for your business.

What is Google+?

It is Google’s social media site, much like Facebook where you can share contents – text, photo or video, to a network of contacts – friends, acquaintances, business, work, special groups, etc.  The network is huge. Shared contents are rated. Contacts can be added or blocked and you can make connections to other social media sites easily.

Put all these in a business sense, you will have Google+. You can share your business information (through campaign ads, email marketing, add photos or videos) to a vast network of contacts. Some of these contacts (which are not in your FB groups) may like your ads and will connect with you for further communication. You can also maintain the contacts which are relevant to your business and set aside or freeze those of no value to your business.

It’s a different Facebook from Google

There are features in Google+ which are lessons learned from Facebook like that which concerns privacy issues. Google+ has a better privacy management system which takes care of creating groups for contacts. This allows the users to select the contact according to such groups (business, friends, family, etc.).

Brands and companies have ventured into using Google+ in order to strengthen their relationships and links with consumers which were not quite achieved in other social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Benefits for Business

Many known brands that have migrated to Google+ agree in saying that the Google+ community responds to tailored activities the most. Some businesses venture on strategies to build an engaged community that can both share specific interests through the social media platform of Google+.

Some attributed their growth to the integrated marketing efforts and increased interest largely due to the community’s being update on the company’s announcements , news and even rumors. Google+ audience is greatly diverse. This will offer businesses a wider range of customers to target based on their needs.

Getting Started with Google+ via Google+ Pages

In order to get into Google+, one needs to create a Google+ Page where you can post news and updates about your business or your campaigns, engage in dialogues and conversations with your customers, send customized messages to specific groups of contacts and see the +1’s you have across the world wide web.

Google+ Hangouts

This feature of Google+ Pages allows users to have high-quality video chats with nine customers on a single click. This is good for getting feedback, resolve any problems or concerns, or simply get to know your customers better.

Google+ Circles

You can group your contacts or followers of your Google+ Page into smaller audiences. This will allow you to send specific messages to specific people. A business application of this feature is creating a group of loyal customers where you can send messages (specific to their group only) about discount entitlements. Not everyone in the contacts will receive the messages but only to the target contact groups.

+1 Button

Another feature is +1 button which can be likened to a thumbs up icon for ‘Like’ in FB. Affixing this +1 button is your way of saying that you approve (or like) a post of a contact (text, photo or video posts) and validates it as a credible source of information. As mentioned, very much like Facebook’s “Like” feature.

This feature allows for great contents to be shared with many users. Your customers are effectively endorsing your business when they click this +1 button on Google search. They can recommend your actual brand directly to their friends.

With all of these promising benefits, the best time to drive your business forward is now – with Google+.