Exchanging links was once a viable link building tactic. A website would give you a link with the exact anchor text you wanted, you’d do the same for them, and everything was hunky-dory with the world. That was well and good as recently as a couple years ago, but to do that today shows a stunning lack of industry knowledge. Please, if you’re exchanging (bad) links as part of your small business SEO, stop before you get penalized.
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One measurement of website success tends to get overlooked a lot in favor of other, bigger numbers like traffic and bounce rate. That measurement is conversion rate, what percentage of visitors to your website convert into a lead. One of the biggest factors when it comes to optimizing your site for higher conversion rates is usability, if users can’t successfully navigate your site how do you expect to get leads out of them? [click to continue…]
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Google recently added an exciting new feature to Google Analytics. The feature is called Content Experiments and replaces a previous tool called Web Optimizer. The two tools have a similar interface and share some features but there are a few key differences. The biggest difference being the lack of multivariate testing in Content Experiments, for now it only supports A/B testing. Both of these tools allow you to test the design variations on certain pages to see what combinations work best for your online marketing. [click to continue…]
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The process I used to evaluate the following website companies was actually quite simple. It is a balance between potential, results, and education. I want to focus on the latter for a minute: Education. It is an absolute imperative that dealer vendors educate their clients on how to best utilize the products they provide. A 1 hour tutorial on how to use the backend of the system is not education either. It should be the policy of all website vendors listed here to continually follow up and urge their dealer clients to take advantage of free training that should be offered by the vendors.
Next I looked at a scoring algorithm for the actual vendors websites. After all if they cannot build a decent website for themselves why would you possibly believe they would build an effective website for their clients? All but one vendor scored above a 90 in this category. It may surprise you to know that MANY website vendors routinely score failing grades during site evaluation.
Lastly I evaluated what each vendor claimed to be a top client utilizing the best practices and products offered by each company. The following are the results of those findings: [click to continue…]
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Google provides a free analytics solution designed to give you a complete view of every aspect of activity on your website. Possessing the ability to properly analyze and understand all the various data Google provides to you will give you an edge over the competition in terms of your SEO strategy. Additionally, Google Analytics gives you the high level view of your traffic as well as detail about the way in which your users interact with the site. This allows you to analyze the various sources of traffic coming to your site. Once armed with this information you can improve your overall traffic generation strategy for: PPC, SEO, and affiliate marketing or other sources. [click to continue…]
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I’ve said it many times before and you’ve likely heard it from other sources as well, “Content is King”. If we believe this to be true, then link building also called a backlink is most definitely the queen of seo. The reason you must have more than just quality content is that Google (and other search engines) evaluate both the number and quality of websites that link to your web pages. This is a fundamental component (the foundation upon which the search algorithm is built) of how and why one website ranks over another. [click to continue…]
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Forming an online community like a blog or forum on your website is one of the best ways to ensure that you have fresh content, as well as establishing your site as an authority within the endeavor which it represents. Search engines prefer sites that are frequently updated over sites with stagnant content or that contain less frequently updated content. Starting a community is easy and is generally very inexpensive and in some cases – even free! [click to continue…]
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