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Advice At The Airport

Slouched in a chair at the Las Vegas airport waiting to board a flight, I noticed the man across the aisle appeared very interested in the book I was holding.

We eventually made eye contact and he asked, “What do you think of that?” pointing at the book.

I explained I was just a few chapters into Free by Chris Anderson and could not make a recommendation either way.

After exchanging some casual banter he mentioned that he owned a consulting firm that specializes in marketing for auto dealerships. Needless to say, this set off alarm bells and immediately began to pry for advice with my own SEO business.

He made a number of points that stuck with me and I wanted to share them with you here.

Turn Your Clients into Salesmen

In almost every call with a client he makes it a habit to ask this series of questions:

  • Is there anyone you know that could benefit from my services?
  • Would you recommend me to any of your customers or business associates?
  • Who have you contacted recently to recommend my services?

The man explained how he’s always training his clients to look for new opportunities. If he doesn’t, the client will rarely think to make a recommendation even when they’re happy with the services provided.

This is a great tip you should put into action today to develop more leads for your business.


 

10 Things Your Small Business Website Should Have

If your business doesn’t have an online presence today, you are definitely missing a lot!  A business website is more like your business card, brochure and advertising rolled into one.  In this digital age where competition is as fast as the speed of type, knowing the principles of a good web design is only a piece of the marketing pie for your biz.  It is crucial for you to know the elements that make a good website great by knowing what you should have on it in the first place.

Ten Things Your Business Website Should Have

Your website is like a blueprint of your business and you need time and resources to build it.  If you’re clueless about it, you may outsource and hire experts to help you.  Still, it is vital for you to know what elements must be included to make you look less of a startup.  Your website must have:

1.  A Clean and Simple Site Navigation

You don’t want visitors to your site get totally confused.  Having a clean navigation is not only easy for your audience, but it is also friendly to search engines as well.  Make sure that you have clear links and a site map.  Google gives importance to site upload time so steer clear of flash, scripts and frames on your site.

2.  A No-Nonsense Homepage

You must have a clear description of who you are, what your offer and what you do right on the homepage of your website.  It is what people see first.  Don’t make them try to figure out who you are.  You may also write an overview about your business and leave your mission statement and company history on your ‘About’ page.

3.  An Easy-to-Remember Web Address

‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ may be cute for a song, but making your domain name this long is a major no-no!  Think of your domain name as your brand, something a user type in the web browser or searches.  Make sure that your domain name ( www.myname.com ) is not only simple and easy to remember, but it shouldn’t contain numbers and special characters too.

4.  A Visible Contact Page

There are many sites out there which make it hard for people to find how to contact them.  You can allot a separate contact page where you include information such as email, address, and phone.  You can also include a contact form, links to social networking sites ( Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter ), or an instant messaging widget ( Skype, Yahoo, etc ).

5.  A Well-Written Business Blog

On our last post, we taught you how to write a knockout corporate blog and having one on your site is a great way to engage your readers ( who can be your potential customers ).  With Google Caffeine looking for fresh content, having a blog is a brilliant way of keeping your site updated.

6.  Seals and Testimonials

One of the best way to gain trust is to flaunt honest and positive customer feedback, testimonials or reviews.  There are also many who look for industry seals from respected third parties which assures your visitors that they are dealing with a genuine business.

7.  An FAQ Page

This is something that’s self-explanatory.  You need to help your visitors understand your products and services better on this page.  You may also include your site’s privacy policy, plus terms and conditions here.

8.  A Call-to-Action

If 90% of visitors on your site will go there without buying a thing, at least get them involved!   You can place a ‘Subscribe to RSS’ or email box on the header or the footer of a page, just make it visible for everyone to see.  You may even ask your visitors to follow you on Facebook or Twitter.  The options are endless in keeping the flames of their interest burning.

9.  Optimized Content

SEO, or search engine optimization, will help people find you faster on the Web.  In fact, you only need to come up with the right keywords related to your industry and make sure you practice something that’s acceptable by Webmaster standards.  If you will hire someone to do your site’s SEO, make sure that you watch out for these SEO red flags.

10.  A Unique Brand

If you want your website to stand out, invest some time and money in making sure that you have a unique logo and website design that don’t look like another copy from a free template found online.  What colors speak for your business?  What message does your brand name impart?  How can you enhance user experience on your site? These are just a few questions to consider.

Your website is the very mirror that reflects your business image.  Now that you have the vital elements, the next step is to use them so you can maximize sales and build meaningful relationships with your visitors.


 

Oakleaf Ads Special

We are not going to build a fancy, as seen on TV, limited time offer, deal of the century, etc. type of page here for you. You got here from the Oakleaf Plantation Classifieds website, didn’t ya? Well for you, as long as you’re a small business owner, we have a pretty good promotion going on. Our standard monthly fee for our website optimization services (Local Internet Marketing) is $500.00 flat, which is the absolute lowest in the industry! For you, Oakleaf Ad clicker, we are going to knock $250.00 off of the first month!!! To learn more about our Local Search Optimization you can go here.

If you would like to discuss more in depth contact us and we will set up either a face-to-face or a phone consult and find out what we can do for your business website! PERIOD!


 

Google Ranking and Meta Description

Meta descriptions (the text snippets of the webpage you see in search results) used to be an important ranking factor. Until not too long ago both Google and Yahoo! officially announced they no longer used Meta-descriptions in their search algorithms. But recent developments in Google’s search algo bring Meta description back to life as a ranking factor.

No, Google did not back out of their decision to discount Meta descriptions as a ranking factor. However your site’s search snippet can now significantly affect your rankings. Here’s the deal.

Google and Personalized Search

Early this month Google announced that they would be tailoring everyone’s search results based on their search history even when users are not signed into Google. Personalized results are nothing new on Google. The search giant has been customizing peoples SERPs (search engine results pages) for quite a while already, but until now it only happened when you searched while signed into your Google account. Today, signed in or not everyone gets personal results.

Here’s How It Works

Whether you’re signed in or not, all the searches you run on Google are stored in your browser cookies. This data is referred to as your ‘Web History’ and Google uses it to customize your search results. If you’re not signed in, your Web History is stored for 180 days, then old data is replaced with new searches. If you’re signed in, there’s no time limit and you can manage you Web History. Either way the searches you run and sites you visit will affect your future search experience.

The sites you visit more often will be pushed higher in the search results on related queries. For example if you search for ‘cat food’ and visit www.petfood.com, next time when you search for ‘dog food’ you may see www.petfood.com in top 10 results even if it doesn’t rank there in the general impersonalized search. You can tell that your search results have been personalized by the ‘View customization’ link in the upper right hand corner.

The personalized search results can differ significantly from the general SERPs. I ran a couple of tests searching for related keywords and clicking the same site each time. I also checked this site’s rankings with a rank checker to get a list of impersonalized rankings. In one of the tests a few click-throughs to a site pushed it 26 positions up on a highly competitive keyword. That is from the 31 position on page 4 straight to the 5th spot on the first page in personalized search results (I was signed out).

How Meta Descriptions Can Affect Your Google Rankings

Although Meta descriptions are no longer part of the ranking algorithm they can affect your site’s positions in the personalized search results. Your Meta description is a crucial factor that determines the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling your description is, the more searchers will click it. When they click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History. Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear high up in their personalized search results.

Since everyone now gets personalized results, the scope of the effect your Meta descriptions have on your rankings can get really huge. That’s another reason why you should invest some time into testing and optimizing your Meta descriptions.

Meta Description Optimization

There’s plenty of advice out there on writing compelling titles and descriptions, so I won’t go there. Just keep in mind one thing. Google doesn’t always show the Meta description you provide. Sometimes it just compiles a random text snippet from your page that contains the keywords used in the query. But you can easily locate the keywords where your own Meta description shows up by searching for them on Google.

In Conclusion

There’s been a lot of criticism coming down on Google for introducing personal search to everyone. Some people are worried about privacy issues. Others don’t like it because the whole concept will help the rich get richer and keep the small guy out of the game. And some SEOs are just whining that this makes Search Engine Optimization success harder to measure.

Although I don’t think it is the best idea Google had either, I prefer to embrace it and run with it. And I suggest that you take this news as a call to action. A strong motivation to actually do something that’s going to help your SEO, your sales and your business. And that is to take a look at your Meta descriptions. Go and see how your website appears in the search results and find ways to improve it. With personalized search or without it, having a catchy compelling text in your search results snippet will get you more clicks, more traffic and more customers.


 

Organic SEO vs PPC

The preferences of web users have witnessed a sea change recently and the tilt is towards organic results over paid links. A study on this sensitive subject by Jupiter Research-a renowned search marketing advisor has brought to light the fact that net users search doesn’t go beyond the first three pages of search engine results.

According to the study more than 70 percent of web users have the habit of clicking on a link in the first page, while 92 percent select a web site from the first three pages. The survey is a testimony of user preference and shows that fewer users are clicking on results beyond the first three pages; In 2008 the figure was 8 % more than half when compared with the 2002 figures which stood at 19 %. It is heartening news for all online businesses retailers whose web sites have a high rank in the organic listings, and also highlights the need for an effective SEO strategy.

Every online business has two options when they are in the course to develop an internet marketing strategy; They have to decide which alternative guarantee higher return on investments, besides being more easy to manage.

If you take the case of PPC (Pay Per Click) there are an array of plus points that can be associated with it. A pay per click search engine advertising produces instant results as it allows quick leverage of search engine traffic by placing bids for keywords associated to your product or service. The flip side of this campaign is that it’s expensive and to get good results you have to spend lot of money.

When you take up the case of Organic SEO it’s not that much simpler task as it requires optimizing your web page and enhance its position in the naturally occurring search results. An organic SEO campaigner has to make sure that the search engine spiders are able to crawl and recognize what is on the web page. Once they understand the succeeding task becomes very easy. You just have to continue supplying relevant content and forge more inbound links from other web sites. In this way you boost your web site ranking easily and cost effectively.


 

Google Adds Page Load Speed to Ranking Algorithm

Google announced on Friday, April 9th, 2010 that it added page load speed to its all-important page-ranking algorithm. This move has been rumored for more than a year as Google ramped up an emphasis on speed with new product releases and focus like Chrome (its fast browser), SPDY (its new fast protocol for transporting web content) and pushes into ultra-fast broadband products. In this post we explain what this addition means, how Google determines speed, and what you can do to both test your page load speed and find ways to improve it.

We think adding page load speed into Google’s ranking system is a great addition to the list of items that Google considers in determining which pages should rank highly for keywords for primarily two reasons:

  1. Page load speed is incredibly important to user experience. Studies have shown that there is a subconscious clock ticking in a web surfer’s mind as he or she waitson a page to load. As Internet speeds have increased, the expectation of fast load time has also increased. Click here for a post from Google on its internal testing on speed and impact. Fast pages are good.
  2. Page load speed is something that developers can measure, monitor, and optimize. While there are many things in the Google Algorithm we have no control over, this is one of the items we can do something about. We’ve listed some tools below to help analyze page load speed and 6 tips for improving you page load speed to rank higher.

How does Google determine page load speed?

Two major methods are being used to assess page load speed:

  1. The page response to the GoogleBot. The GoogleBot is Google’s agent that crawls links all over the Web to categorize pages and content and then sends all of the information back to the Google mothership for processing using its proprietary algorithm. The GoogleBot is simply an information collector and doesn’t make any judgments or conduct analysis. It does, however, have some limits to how much of each page it will crawl because crawling billions of pages takes a lot of time. This is one reason we recommend having “clean” code, putting good content higher up on a page, and moving repetitive code like CSS to separate files.
  2. Load time as measured by the Google Toolbar. Google has been very aggressive in distributing and popularizing the use of its free toolbar. One of the reasons is Google’s ability to use the toolbar as a measurement platform for individual sites and pages.

Tools for Measuring Page Load Speed

There are many free tools and plug-ins for measuring the speed of your page load time. Here are a few of our favorites:

  1. If you have a Google Webmaster account (and you really should) there is a page speed tool in the Labs section. It gives you a general idea of how fast your pages load in relation to other pages on other sites that are measured.
  2. Page Speed – This is a plug-in for the Firebug/Firefox browsers that measures load performance of web pages and gives recommendations for improvement.
  3. YSlow – This is another Firebug/Firefox plug-in that looks at speed and provides recommendations.

What the Change to the Algorithm Means to You
In terms of importance, improving the page load speed of your site is not as critical as creating good title tags, developing URL structure, unique page content, and high quality inbound links. The page speed will provide an advantage to pages where most other items are equal. There is no doubt that a faster page load will also improve user experience and result in changes like increasing numbers of visitors, reducing the bounce rate, and providing more page views per visit. Either way, it is a good idea to take a proactive stance towards improving page speed.

6 Tips for Improving Your Page Load Speed to rank Higher

  1. Optimize images : Large images can be cut-up, compressed, and loaded more quickly.
  2. Use background colors instead of images: Instead of loading a large background image, use a background color.
  3. Use caching: Caching provides repeat users with a better user experience as the images and other static files are loaded the first time someone visits the site and do not need to be loaded on subsequent visits.
  4. Load external Javascipt and object calls last: One of the worst things is to make your visitors wait for remote or synchronous content to load onto your pages. Set up the site so that your content loads first and then external content is loaded subsequently where possible.
  5. Use separate files for code that is repeated: Most commonly used with CSS style sheets, separate files allow the html code of the page to be lighter (less lines of code) and gives you a central, distinct file to make changes to important code (like style sheets).
  6. Use CSS styling instead of HTML tables to organize your webpage: Web browsers (IE, Firefox, etc.) wait to load all of the content of a table before loading the table. CSS makes this process faster (and easier to update).

What to do Next

  1. Pick one of the tools above and install it
  2. Run the page load test against your homepage, one category page, and a form page
  3. Get an idea of what elements can be improved. Discuss with your tech team and webmaster
  4. Run the same tests against a competitor’s set of pages to see how you compare.

I hope this helps you take the vital steps towards improving page load speed for your users and the search engines.


 

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