Perhaps one of the most valuable tools for evaluating your web marketing efforts is the use of web analytics tools. One such tool in wide use today is Google Analytics for the primary reason that it is a very powerful and free tool. Probably the single most underused and misused part of Google Analytics is setting up and using Goals. Because Google Analytics is a Google product does not mean it only tracks Google searches. Google Analytics can be used to collect data on all types of web traffic regardless of the source.
Anyone with an email account today gets a barrage of emails offering instant ranking on the top search engines. Most emails can be eliminated at first glance because they are sent from Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts with no company website that you can visit to evaluate their claims. Those are the easy ones to toss into the spam bucket.
ACS Group and now our sister company SEO Panda has been in business a total of 20 years in the IT Industry providing custom software and web site solutions for a wide variety of buinesses and industries. In that time, a question that many small and medium businesses struggle with is whether to use in-house or outside expertise to get their IT Project completed.
Creating a buzz about your product or service that turns out to be a bummer experience for those that visit your site “high” based on what they read about your company on a social networking site is the equivalent of a buzz kill. The experience leaves a bad taste that lingers. They won’t be coming back and more than likely the end result of the less than 5 seconds they spent on your site will have lasting negative impact.
Many potential clients come to us with sites they have done using Wordpress. Wordpress which was designed and developed as blogging software has now become the software du jour for building small and medium businesses to develop their company web sites. Is this a good idea? In a word, NO. Wordpress is blogging software not web site development software. It does a great job at letting you quickly create a blog that supports your web site. However, the purpose of a blog is to support your web site not replace it. Wordprss does not provide a complete and robust platform that is needed
Speaking of measuring your web site traffic, one of the most common and important metric is the "unique visitor". We want to know how many individuals visited our web site versus how many clicks or hits occurred. A unique visitor is an individual who comes to your site and is only counted once during a given period regardless of how pages they visit, clicks made or actions taken while on your web site.
Should you include PDFs in your optimization strategy for your web site? The answer is a definite Yes. PDF are the standard for sharing and displaying documents on the Internet. The question is: Can Search Engines find them and optimize them accordingly to a specifc strategy?
If you have been hiding under a rock and hoping that none of your customers, ex-employees, or chronic complainers will write negative reviews and comments about you or your business, think again.
Keyword Stemming, a concept often used in the field of linguistics, is also of great value in optimization of your web pages. In a nutshell, keyword stemming in SEO is the addition of stems to a keyword that allows one to create multiple variations of that word or phrase without appearing spammy or keyword over saturation. This usually involves pluralization and the use of prefixes and suffixes. For example, stems for the keyword "investigate" could be investigator, investigation, investigates, pre-investigation, uninvestigatable, reinvestigate.
Probably one of the hardest questions for any SEO Guru or even your favorite search engine company spokesperson to answer is "When will I see my web site on page one of the search results for my keywords?" Professional SEO has a better track record of answering the question of "How" do I get on page one than "When". The most common answer given is six to twelve months.
