More Traffic Better Positioning Greater Relevance

Posts Tagged ‘web marketing sydney’

There is a huge amount of free information out there on how to make your website draw in more traffic and how to market your website more efficiently. Unfortunately very few web designers actually learn these techniques and so most business websites never perform to their potential.We have written lots of posts in our blog to help you.

We can improve your websites performance so why not contact us for a quote.

If you want to see some of the thing you can do or get us to implement for you read on:

You can get a lot of information and also get info overload so why not just listen to the people who list your site in the first place. Once you get an idea of how it all works then branch out.

Background Information

Keep in mind the business objectives of search engines when viewing information from search engineers. Many of their comments come from the perspective of in an ideal world, however the world is not ideal, and search engines offer self serving webmaster guidelines that may hurt your business. If you are in doubt of that fact please also read about how Google deceives webmasters with broken competitive research stats.

To be clear, I think Matt Cutts is a great guy, but he has a hard job which forces him to be hypocritical and act naive from time to time.

http://www.vimeo.com/1235501

Google’s Matt Cutts SEO Videos

Matt Cutts Videos

Matt Cutts is Google’s head of search quality. Keep in mind Google’s bias and perspective when watching Matt’s videos. They want relevant search results and will not openly disclose some of the bigger holes in their current relevancy algorithms.

• Google Sitemaps Questions, DMOZ Snippet Usage & Qualities of a Good Site
  • make your site crawlable & have a citation worthy marketing hook
  • DMOZ snippet usage is query dependent, but you can use the meta NoODP tag to prevent them from using that as your description
• Some SEO Myths
  • most people do not need to worry about footprints (IP address, hostname, Javascript trackers) unless they are bulk spammers
  • when launching a site you may want to soft launch (ie: do not publish hundreds of thousands or millions of pages right out of the gate)
• Should You Optimize for Search Engines or Users & Code Validation
  • Both are important, but they are not mutually exclusive. SEO brings visitors. User optimization ensures conversion.
  • Validation is not necessary. Compelling content is more important than validation. But having valid code may be another reason some other webmasters may be willing to link at your site.
• Geotargeting SEO, Static vs Dynamic URLs
  • PageRank flows the same to static and dynamic URLs. You probably want to use shorter numbers and limit the number of URL parameters to 2-3 max. Mod Rewrite is your friend
  • If you are geotargeting by country treat GoogleBot as a US user, do not make a country just for Google.
• 301 Redirecting a Domain, Information Architecture, Split Testing
  • Most redirects from related sites are fine. If the topics are different then you can run into problems.
  • Organize your site folders based on information architecture more than on keywords.
  • It is best to A/B split test pages which are not cached for Google.
• Supplemental Results
  • Result estimates are highly inaccurate.
  • Supplemental results are trusted less than regular results and are crawled less frequently.
• Duplicate Content
  • There are many stages of duplicate content analysis, from crawl, indexing, to scoring. There is no exact limit to duplication detection.
• Google Terminology
  • Major noticeable index updates are rare since the search index is constantly updated. In the past on old architecture monthly updates were called Google Dances.
  • PageRank is constantly updated. Data refreshes are quite frequent. Large algorithmic updates are quite rare.
• Google Data Centers
  • On one C block IP address most of the results will typically be the same unless one of the data centers is down and you are being switched over due to load balancing.
  • Many new algorithms or data refreshes are rolled out on one data center at a time for testing purposes.
• Lightning Round
  • just random…not lots of stuff
• Reinclusion Requests
  • Sign up at Google Webmaster Central for Google Sitemaps and file for a reinclusion request giving specific information. Also try to convince Google that the quality guideline violations will not occur again.
• SES Tips
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Data Center Comments
  • A fraction of the web is updated every day.
  • Data pushes seem to come out roughly once a month.
  • BigDaddy was a refresh to how they crawl the web and a partially and update to how they index it (as Matt said before here).
• Crawling Patterns
  • Matt Cutts talks about how Googlebot crawls the web and updates page cache dates.
• [AUDIO] Mike Grehan interviews Matt Cutts. Part 1 and part 2.
  • Matt Cutts confirms the Google Sandbox effect as being an accidental side effect which occurred as an artefact of another part of the relevancy scoring algorithm.
• [AUDIO] Matt Cutts with Emarketing Talk Show
• [AUDIO] Vanessa Fox interviews Matt Cutts
  • talks about how results change from searcher to searcher and a couple advanced searching things (like personalized search, and accents vs non-accents)
  • talks about Google webmaster central
  • talks about hacking and link dumping, and catching cloaking by doing an English to English translation of a page

In these tough economical times there are things that can be done to improve your bottom line.

If you already have a website one of the first things you can do is make sure you use some tools to let people know what you have to offer and also where you are.

After evaluating many business websites we have found that this basic information is missing from the majority of business websites.

One of the easiest and most cost efficient ways is to make sure you have a blog incorporated in your web site. Sydney business that we have helped to set up a blog for their business have noticed an increase in visitors and conversions.

What are business blogs?

The word ‘blog’ comes from the combination of the two words, web and log.

Blogs are online diaries or journals created by individuals or companies and stored on the Internet. Blogs generally consist of text and images appearing in chronological order with the most recent entry shown at the top of the page. You are reading our blog right now. It is really just another for of a web page.

According to technorati.com, a search engine dedicated to blogs, there are some 71 million blogs worldwide including more than 250,000 in Australia.

Why blog?

For business, blogs can help you build stronger relationships with important target groups such as clients, the media, the general public and/or shareholders.

Here are some other ways blogs can be used:

• Simple, low cost PR. Blogs are a simple and fast way to put information online.
  
• Establish expertise. Position yourself and your company as the expert and raise your visibility with your target market.
  
• Extend communications and customer relationships. Blogs enable companies to present a human face and voice to the public. Blogs allow you to join customer discussions, respond to concerns, provide tips and insights or receive feedback.
  
• Build community. Use blogs to grow group support around a cause, political issue, technology or hobby related to your product.
  
• Test ideas or products. Because blogs are informal and conversational in nature you can publish an idea and see if it generates any interest or buzz.
  
• Higher search engine rankings. Google and other search engines reward sites with a lot of content that is updated often and have many inbound links.

If you have an existing website and are prepared to add something at least every week or two, then adding a blog to your site is probably a good idea. A good blog can help you build traffic, communicate and, importantly, build trust with your visitors.

Many businesses choose to host their blog separately from their main business website. This can be useful as it separates the formal from the conversational and prevents these two styles from conflicting. But don’t be surprised if your blog starts getting more traffic that your main site!

To join the many businesses in Sydney and Australia benefiting from blogging their Business contact us for a web evaluation and quote on setting it all up for you.