Search Engine Optimization Archives - Ramirez Creative Solutions

Bad Websites Create An Invisible Audience

It’s inevitable to know that bad websites will create an invisible audience. Most people believe that if they can just get a website online, then their business will start to bloom. Well chances are, that if your website is not giving the potential customer a call to action, then you won’t earn customers. If your website is horrendous, it’s going to serve as a direct representative of your actual work. Don’t be a victim of bad websites, you want to have a website that not only looks good, but has a healthy conversion rate. Let me explain.

What’s The Point of Having a Website?

Granted if you’ve paid for something as a business, then you want to see a return. It’s an investment right? Understand what you are getting a website for. What is the actual need? Why is it important? What should my website do for me to create revenue for this business? These are questions that I ask myself every day, and these are questions that you should ask yourself, when you are in the market for a website. Even if you already took the website adventure, and you’re in the market for a redesign, do your homework. Having a website means that you have an online representation. Once you have a website online, you have just given your business an identity, a heartbeat. It’s alive. Be careful though, because as easy as it was to make it alive, it could lose its life without the proper maintenance and continued vision for the website. You have to nurture and care for your website like it’s your baby. Technically it is your baby. It’s your job to make it grow, or work with your web developer so that he can make it grow. Your web developer will serve as your professional gardener. The smart thing to do for your website, after you’ve developed the vision for your website, and have put that vision into code, is to now re-evaluate your website on a regular basis. Capitalize on the good that you see coming from the website, and make changes to tackle your efforts for damage control.

Nobody Hits the Ball Out of the Park the First Time!

By reevaluating your website regularly, you’ll be able to see and to know what has worked and what hasn’t. Do yourself a favor, and scan your competitor’s websites. See how they are advertising. How do they draw attention to their prices? How do they introduce their products or services? If you study the people that have done things before you, then you are most likely not going to make the same mistakes as they have. You want a winning formula, so study those that have a winning formula. Work with other entrepreneurs to see how they manage their business through their website, and take notes. No matter what field it is in, business is business. As your website grows, continually add to it, build it up like it’s a strong tower, because again this is the identity of your business. Before a potential customer calls you, they are most likely going to scout your business through the internet. A bad website is like not having one at all. Matter of fact, it’s probably better not to have a website, then to have a bad website. At least, if you don’t have a website, then you can gain customers through good word of mouth, but bad websites will deter customers from using your services because of the quality. The quality of your website should measure the quality of your actual work.

How Do You Track Your Website Efforts?

There are plenty of tools to track your website efforts. I prefer Google Analytics because with Google Analytics it will show you where your traffic is coming from, what links they clicked on, what operating system their using, what countries their coming from. Google Analytics is the best free tool out there to track your website efforts. It talks about bounce rate? Your bounce rate is how long a visitor stays on your website. It tracks new visitors to returning visitors. How many pages are visited per visit. It tells you how many actual page views you have, and it will break down the actual source links for you so that you can know where your traffic is being driven from. If you don’t have google analytics attached to your website right now, you are missing out on a vital part of your business. In order to evaluate your business, you have to be able to have a measuring point to compare it to. Google Analytics gives you this measuring point so that you can track your success or lack thereof.

Conclusion

Bad websites will murder a company’s internet marketing campaign. Make your website work for you. Partner with your web developer so that they can help you strategize to attack your target market. This is a war, and you are at war against the search engines. In order to win, you have to put in the work to manipulate the search engines to bite on your Search Engine Optimization efforts. If your SEO is in place, it will make your website a lot more successful. Allow your web developer to help you with this, so that you don’t get stuck trying to manage your website, but you become the brains behind the strategy.

God Bless!

Free Websites Are Headaches for the Consumer

Warning: To anyone searching for free websites, you will find what you are looking for, and you will get what you pay for. In my years of developing websites, I’ve had the unfortunate opportunity of scrapping many free templates for a more effective website. Though I’ve made money on these ventures, which is always a plus, but it burdens me, that companies will sell a hosting service to a customer, and then give them a free website builder. It’s criminal because most customers don’t know what they are doing, so when they’re done, the website will be horrendous. Secondly, they are stuck to that layout, which stifles their creativity. Thirdly, the company will then charge the consumer for layout changes and separate themes. So my point is, that if you are serious about your business, then you should be serious about avenues that you take to advertise it as well. If you have a template builder that you just plug your information into, chances are, there is probably 100 other people with that same free website template within your demographic.

Be Willing to Invest in Your Website

When you think about advertisement, you think of business cards, flyers, posters, anything that you get printed to display to the public. Well, this is true, print advertisement is good advertisement. Your website is part of your advertisement as well. The same way you invest money into your print advertising is the same way you should be willing to invest in your website. Count it as an investment, because with investments you should see some kind of return, Correct? If your website is designed properly, it should be able to expose you to the public enough that you at least have people signing up for an email list, which will be potential customers.

Determine What You Are Willing to Invest

Set yourself a budget aside for your website. The same way you budget your bills, roll your website into your bills as part of your business expenses. Don’t be afraid of the price, most of the time you are not paying the whole bill up front. Most companies will take half up front and half when the job is finished. Your best bet is to go with companies that have design packages, so not only are you getting your website designed, you are also getting some other benefits with the package, such as logo design or some initial Search Engine Optimization done, and etc. Once you are willing to invest, then you’ve already bridged the gap from consumer to business owner.

Do What You Do Best

Whether you know what you want, or you are not sure, do what you do best, and that is run your business. The reason you chose to hire a web developer to develop your website is because 1.) You probably felt overwhelmed with the whole web design thing. 2.) You don’t have time to work on a website or to manage it. 3.) It was just easier to go with a professional. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than being disgruntled with any aspect of your business, because it makes you disgruntled in other aspects of your business. If you are disgruntled, it’s probably because you are trying to tackle a project that isn’t in your skill set. Someone along the way said that doing “this certain thing” would be a great idea, and they were probably right. What they failed to mention was that they didn’t do it all by themselves, they had help. Be willing to outsource the things that you don’t know how to do, so that you can concentrate on the daily operations of your business.

Conclusion

As you can see, trying to upkeep a free website could be your worst nightmare. You will lose sleep, with how much time and effort it is taking you to build and construct this website, and it’s not as beautiful as you want it to be. After you finished it really is just a website, and it’s not doing anything for you. Hire a professional. Sit down with them, and tell them what websites you have seen that you like. What things you would like to see in your website, and what you hope that your website can do for you. Sky is the limit. I hope this helps retrain your thought process on why free websites are probably not the best idea. I pray I help save you from a future headache, and I encourage you to hire somebody to take care of your website for you.

God Bless!

5 Valuable Tips to Increase Your SEO Ranking

When developing a website, one of the first things you should have in mind is, “What is my game plan for the SEO Ranking of this Website?” Most likely, the first question that a customer usually asks before having a website designed is, “Am I going to be able to be found?” The answer to this question is conditional. It could be “yes” based on the amount of work you as the customer are willing to do, or it could be “probably not” if you’re not willing to update your information on a regular basis.

1. Keeping Your Information Fresh

The best way to keep your information fresh, is for you to make up your mind, and say that I’m willing to do what it takes. So if you’re willing to do what it takes, then the same blog that you are reading now, is what you will do to keep massive amounts of information coming to your website. What if you’re not a strong writer? There are individuals called Content Managers and this is what they specialize in, is Content Management, writing and editing information. The best person for this job is probably the same person that developed your website.

2. Why Is It Important To Blog?

Not only does blogging keep massive amounts of information coming to your website on a regular basis, but blogging keeps relevant information coming to your website on a regular basis. Blogging relevant information to your website is significant, because it increases the amount of keywords that are in your website. When your web developer develops your website, he should develop a keyword or key phrase list that will be imbedded in the source code of your website. The more times these keywords or key phrases appear in the content of your website, the higher the possibility of your website ranking within the search engines.

3. Driving Traffic To Your Website

Once you’ve established a writing schedule for your blogs, once a week, twice a week, once a month, then you are going to start posting links to your blogs via social media. I truly believe as a business, that social media makes blogging all worthwhile. Every time you blog and you post these blogs through Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, you are creating what is called back links. Back links are exactly what they’re called, links that lead back to your website. This starts to create traffic. With back links available, this increases the validity of your website. The more back links that you can get back to your website, the more your traffic will increase. Thus, increasing the possibility of your website ranking within the search engines.

4. Video and Picture Tags

You may ask, “Is there any way that I can label my pictures and videos, that would help my SEO Ranking?” Absolutely! With pictures and videos you can add titles and alt tags to them to make them SEO friendly. Your title tag is going to be the label of the picture when someone rolls over it, and your alt tag is what will show, if the picture doesn’t show when being viewed on the browser.

5. Basic SEO Rules

When the search engine spiders or robots are scanning through your website, there are some basic things that they are looking for. Side Note* If there is a whole bunch of useless code in the header of your website, then it will take the search robots too long to get to the content of your website resulting in a low SEO Ranking. That’s why it’s important to use external style sheets and external files for your javascript and jquery files.* The first thing that the search engine robots should see is your list of keywords or key phrases and your meta-description. Secondly, your keywords and key phrases should be used in your heading tags. Naturally, the order of importance matters based on the chronological order of the heading tags, with H1 being the most important, and H6 being the least important. Then after you enter your heading tags, you want to make sure that your content is saturated with your keywords and/or key phrases.

Conclusion

So as you can see, developing SEO for your website isn’t just one thing, but a group of things working together to help create a ranking for your website. Working together with your web developer to help you manage these task, will help your website begin to appear in the search engine rankings. If you do these things continuously, then you are setting your website up for a very successful campaign, and more importantly increasing your public visibility. Warning: Do not get complacent or satisfied with where you are currently ranked, because chances are, you won’t be there next week!