Search Engine Optimization – the process of making your website “friendly” to the search engines.  If you follow these guidelines will dramatically increase the likelihood that your customers will actually find your website.  Stray from these techniques, or worse yet embracing tactics that in years past helped your cause and now will drive your site out of search results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often disregarded altogether by websites here in southern Oregon.  What this means to you is that even a little bit of work on these points will bring your business real benefits in comparison to your competition who is probably missing the boat on SEO.

SEO tactics have evolved over the years as site developers and the search engines have worked through the process of putting the “most appropriate” information at the top of the search results.  There are a number of tactics that you can – and should – implement on your website right away.  Need to know what they are?  Let’s start with the most important one of them all. (more…)

I say “might want to know” for two reasons.  First, I’m surprised at how many business owners/managers have a website – even a nice one – yet don’t know the basics about how much it benefits them to have it.  Second, I’m actually OK with that decision at a certain level.  They don’t usually know any specifics about any of the other marketing that they are doing, so I think its OK that they don’t choose to hold their website to a higher standard than, say, their TV or Radio commercial.

 Here’s the deal though.  It’s actually pretty easy to hold your website, and by extension any internet marketing that they might do, to a higher standard.  And its also pretty easy to create incremental improvements in both your own website and your online marketing campaigns through some very powerful and very free tools available to them. 

Here are the three lowest hanging fruit available to you as you leverage the internet for world domination. (more…)

You know your company needs a website. What many small business owners, don’t know however, is that you can sink a LOT of money into developing one that doesn’t help much at all. Gone are the days where a fancy logo, an “about us” page, and a list of your products will get you noticed. Build It and They Will Come is no longer acceptable on the internet.

While what gets a website noticed is a constantly evolving set of features, the upside is that your ability to quickly and inexpensively meet today’s requirements is relatively easy and getting easier all the time.

With today’s search engine logic, there are four keys to moving your site up the search rankings. Importantly, these not only help you in the “organic” listings, but can also decease your costs should you choose to pursue a pay-per-click ad campaign as well.

Relevant Content

The days of “key word stuffing” – where you load up your site in some way with the common search terms your customers may use – are over. As search engines such as Google and Yahoo are becoming more sophisticated, they are actually penalizing this very behavior that a few years back they were rewarding sites for.

In the current environment, your goal should be to continue to use these key words in your content. However, they need to appear in context and on pages that will read as well to your human audience as they do to the search engines.

Search engines grade your site against your competition based on this relevance. If your site (more…)