If you missed the first part of this post be sure to Read Part 1 which covers 1-5.

6.  LEAD CAPTURE – DOESN’T EXIST, LACKS APPEAL, OR ASKS TOO MUCH

Think like a searcher.  When you are browsing the net and come across an interesting offer, how much are you willing to do to get it.  Personally if the form asks for my address, they don’t get my info at all.

  It’s just too much work, plus I fear they are going to spam my email to death.  They’re is usually no need to collect addresses from your market unless you plan on showing up for dinner one night.  Email and name most often are all you need satisfy future marketing efforts.  Read more about lead capture here

7.  LURED BY FLASH – YOUR SITE LOOKS COOL BUT WHO IS GOING TO FIND YOU?

The only language guaranteed to be search engine friendly is HTML /CSS.  Flash programming which typically is what moving objects are written in, is virtually invisible to search engines and will render your efforts to earn a top spot in search results, futile.  If you must have moving graphics, keep them in the header of your site, sparing the other areas especially the navigation.  Search engines crawl your site much like humans, but if they cant read your navigation – guess what? They can’t get to other areas of your site.  You’ve basically blocked access for them and success for you.

8.   FAILURE TO THINK LIKE A USER IN BUILDING/DEVELOPING NAVIGATIONAL ASPECTS OF WEBSITE.

These types of things are always better left to professionals.  Sure you may think your site is easy to navigate because you know it well. Have a couple people who don’t know it well take it for a test drive.  Things you think are obvious are not for fresh visitors, seeing your site for the first time.

You’ll be amazed by the feedback.  Make sure this person is also not familiar with your business model.

It’s just like writing.  We may proofread our own work thousands of times and are absolutely 100% certain there are no errors.  Then we give it to someone else who sends it back to us showing several errors.  I don’t know about you, but I am certain they added those errors to sabotage me, because those were not there before. Truth is, they were there, we just didn’t notice them because of our familiarity with what we wanted or meant to say, each time rehearsing it with the correct usage of words. This is an almost identical scenario.  Think simple, and dumb it waaaaay down.

9.  UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS ABOUT THE INTERNET

I will guarantee you that success will not find you on the internet.  Despite many misconceptions that the internet is magic, it is in contrast, very deliberate.  It provides access to a virtual roadway and that is it. We are responsible for navigating our destiny and thus our success.  Doing nothing will continue to push your site and presence farther down until it’s “virtually” invisible. Without hard work and dedication on an ongoing basis,  success will run away from you along with your market and search engines.

10.  SKIPPING OVER  SEO OR USING A DIY METHOD TO SAVE MONEY.

I have referred to SEO on many occassions as “the core of all marketing strategies” Similar to the foundation of a house, if your SEO is weak, the rest of your marketing strategies will suffer.

1. DOMAIN NAME SELECTION – (LACKS KEYWORD)

Exact match keyword domains are worth their weight in gold.  It’s the sure thing to acquiring a top spot.  The second best is getting one that has the keyword somewhere in it.  I don’t recommend buying a domain name that doesn’t have your keyword in it.  You will be making things a lot harder on your self.  Many people think they have to buy the domain name of their company?  Why, so people who have never heard of your company can find you? That was a joke.  Unless your company name is Coca Cola or unless your company name already contains your keyword sure buy the domain but also buy a keyword domain related to your business.  This will be the domain your site is hosted upon and you will direct the other domain that is your company name to the keyword domain.  So when all your fans and customers type your business name into the browser “yourcompanyname.com” they will be taken to your site at  “yourkeyworddomain.com”  So those who aren’t familiar with your site/business  ie, YOUR MARKET, can find you easier when they search using keywords related to your industry.

2. SITE IS NOT BLOCKED DURING THE DEVELOPMENT STAGE

I learned this the hard way.  When you are in the developmental stages of your website design it is very important to block all search engine access to it using either a robots.txt file or if using wordpress you can do it from the backend under “privacy.” Failure to do so could negatively affect your performance  long term in the SERPS.  It will make an already difficult project even harder.

3. TARGETING GENERAL  KEYWORDS WITH  MASS SEARCH VOLUME

This is fairly self explanatory and very popular mistake.  Here is an example.  Someone searching for “shoes” probably doesn’t know what they want, or have any intentions of buying, they are “browsers” also known as “tire kickers”, “time wasters” or in this landscape “bandwidth wasters” Sure you may drive more traffic to your site targeting general keywords, but it’s useless traffic and will probably cost you more in the long run, since their presence on your site is not completely cost free.  These tend to be the ones that like to call and ask you thousands of silly questions.  They start eating into your soft costs after a while, and your nerves.  Someone searching for “high heels” is a much more targeted market and maybe still a bit on the general side.  You get the idea.

4. POORLY WRITTEN OR NON EXISTANT META TAGS

I cannot stress enough how important Meta tags are for many different reasons. How they are written can also heavily influence your ranking.  Don’t attempt to do these yourself, and don’t look to the internet for information on how to write them.  It’s an unsolved mystery as to why there is so much inaccurate info on Metas or why no one has stepped up and announced the correct way except for me and maybe one or two others.  Understanding the dual purpose of Meta tags ie what they are used for, will help you to better understand how to write them.

5. FAIL TO DO COMPETITIVE RESEARCH

Chances are your competitors know something you don’t if they have been online for more than a season.  Use that to your advantage.  Mostly, just learn how to do it better.

Yep I know, there is supposed to be 10 critical mistakes….and there is! Stay tuned for Part 2.  Want a reminder sent when the next post is published?  Subscribe to my feed.

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The answer is YES!

Think of  SEO as the foundation of internet marketing.  It is where everything is drawn from and where everything comes together.  It is the core of ALL your strategies.  Why?  Because it is the home of your keyword.   Keywords are a universal point of reference on the net and in other marketing strategies such as pay per click.   A website, is where we tie all of our efforts in other places on the internet together.  Through the continued use of our keywords with our brand, helps search engines to also make that connection.

This is why it is important to continue the use of  keywords within social groups  or any other places you peruse on the internet.  For example, when you sign up for Twitter they ask you to write a short bio or description.  This is an excellent place to include your main keyword(s).

Also known as “offsite SEO” these strategies seek to strengthen on site marketing but are performed in other areas of the web.

Later when search engines crawl the various social sites like twitter, your keywords and brand are also crawled (again).  This helps search engines  to start bridging the gap and confirm that connection of your keyword with your brand.  I created a very short animation to help you visualize this process, it’s literally not over a minute, check it out!

From an SEO standpoint this is your main goal.  You want your keyword to be synanamous with your brand because until that happens you are just a spec of sand on a very large beach.  You will know when search engines have made this connection because you will rise to number 1 in search results.

While this is a fairly strong argument indicating the importance of SEO, it isn’t the only one.

 SEO starts from the very beginning of a website’s conception.  Although SEO can later be implemented, at times it can be difficult, requiring so much reconstruction one would virtually need to rebuild an entire new website to make it SEO friendly.  With that in mind, having an SEO specialist working with the programmer and web designer to make sure all of the necessary SEO components are built into the design and the text is optimal.  Although due to cost this approach isn’t always possible, it ensures an SEO driven site with the necessary SEO components built in.

The general design of the site can be a critical feature on the readability of your site by the major search engines. Though sites programmed with flash animation tend to be eye catching they originally were unable to be indexed by Google.  So they were eye catching if you could actually find them.  A recent article put out by Google states of an improvement in their search engines ability to read flash animation but not something I would even risk if your goal is to be found in the search results.  Despite the good idea to leave flash animation out of the body of the site having your header with such programming adds a similar appeal yet remains SEO friendly. This is just one of the many things to keep in mind while building an optimized site.

Another factor of SEO that can be incorporated into web design is the ALT image Tag feature.  Here the web designer would enter a keyword within the programming of each graphic that appears on the page.  This lends additional opportunity for keyword instances that attract search engines for user search.  Because this is not easily done by an SEO Consultant after the site has been completed and most often requires the assistance of a web designer it helps to instill these features during the initial construction.

Keyworded urls are also an important feature for SEO.  Sometimes this offers an excellent opportunity to drop keywords/phrases in for added optimization assuming your domain name has the keyword in it and if it doesn’t this feature is especially important.  Let’s look at an example of a keyworded URL and how we can maximize keyword usage.  Remember any link that has our keyword in it is worth twice its weight a keyword.  So let’s say the keyword is “Button Jewelry”  the domain name is www.uniquebuttonjewelry.com/  and one of the pages on her site found by clicking on the navigation button that says “browse our shop” has a url that looks like this www.uniquebuttonjewelry.com/buybuttonjewelry.html   The keyword “button jewelry” has now appeared twice within the url  and although by itself may not lend much weight in terms of optimization, when used in conjunction with the many other urls for your website this can have a strong affect on a sites performance in the search results. 

While there are many more SEO tactics that one can incorporate into the initial design of their website these are some of the basics and ones that will lend assistance with a site’s performance in the search results.  Remember to talk with your web designer about building these features and more into your website.  This could save you a lot of work later.  http://www.contentwriterseo.com

  Often times ranking can be a difficult task especially if our keyword is a competitive one.  Here are some ideas to lower the competition and still get your desired result.

Now assuming all of the other page elements of SEO are present including keyword within in the content writing, links and other basic SEO factors already exist, it is time to start writing city pages.  City pages are designed to focus on a smaller market share and compete within a particular city instead of your current national market you have been struggling in.  Often times a business such as a doctor’s office will likely already compete locally because his clientele has to be within a certain number of miles to make them a relevant market,  however for someone who either sells something on line or sells something which does not require face to face with its consumer then the market is endless.  For example someone selling seo services sells nationally because most of the time all communication can be done over the phone or email.  Someone selling babysitting services would only be competing locally within their city of residence for similar obvious reasons.  They physically could not babysit for someone outside of certain range of distance. When we compete on a local level versus a national one, our competition is greatly reduced and for obvious reasons, much easier to achieve the desired ranking within organic search.  

If you are currently competing nationally and are struggling, my advice to you is: break your market up and begin competing in smaller sections.  How is this done?  It is rather simple actually.  Here again is where content writing proves to be king.  Start writing content using your keyword with the city of designation so for example my keyword may look like this:  SEO Services Phoenix or Phoenix SEO Service.  Then proceed to write content using this keyword as you would normally for optimization.  Your metas for the pages would be something like this:  SEO Services Phoenix | Get Seo Services Phoenix……  Now so as not to also disturb you current content where you would like to still compete nationally, place these pages in the footer of your site as links.  Don’t forget the opportunity here to keyword your link!!!    Keep writing them for each city or state that you would like or until you are satisfied with the results and amount of traffic to your site.  You can never do too much!!

When searching for information, via written content on the web, one must learn to create their own ideas from what they absorb and give their best effort at remaining objective  to the content being read.  Unlike encyclopedias or dictionaries, web content  is not regulated nor weeded through for accuracy.  On the internet, anyone can post anything, any time of the day.  The answer to your question on the internet’s great world wide web, is, most conveniently, whatever you want it to be.  You might say the internet is starving for accurate information; fact based statements on subjects that can be supported by either scientific evidence, experimental trials or some other means of credible measurement.  Something we can rely on to tell us not just a viewpoint, but something concrete, sparing the “I thinks, or most likely’s or In my opinion’s.”  While this type of written content becomes more scarce it naturally becomes more important in the eyes of the only “regulators’ of content currently existing - search engines, namely google.  As google strives to be revered as a legitimate  deliverer of  quality content,  it will favor those sites whose data is more of the objective nature.  Content Writing that is opinionated or subjective in nature will likely fall in a category below that, regardless of  SEO, keywords and other tactics once used to gain popularity in organic search.  Ranking will have more to do with quality and reliability of information than it will amount of backlinks from high page rank sites. 

Isn’t this what the internet needs? Maybe so, but what does this mean for SEO professionals and many others, who have clearly, or rather unclearly created what I like to call Gray Hat SEO, a hybrid nickname I coined from the popular Black Hat vs White Hat oppossing technique types.  Referring to anything that is SEO related as black and white seems out of character, even humorous considering the amount of unknown associated with its very practice.  I am not sure what color you get from your web investigations.  I most often get grey, which appears to be the area of vast majority! 

What affect will this demand for straight forward provable content have on the internet as a whole?  Will it stifle the many brilliant minds that although offer mainly subjective content,  have a gift of initiating action or provoking thought and ideas in groups of people?  The limited intelligence of the sub human search engine will most certainly lack the ability to spare such a crop. Will they be lumped in with the other conversationlists found on every corner?  Probably not, when considering their daily flow of worthwhile ideas that change to the tune of algorithims,  we will most likely find them gracefully chaired when the music stops. 

If you’ve done any research on the internet,  you’ve likely heard oppossing data on your topic of choice no matter what the topic might be, especially if you were thorough in your research.  Did you come to a conclusion about your topic?  Were your questions answered most definetely?  The reality is, probably not!  For every yes there is almost always a no.  You get the idea!  And that’s really all you’ll get.  It’s up to you to form your own answer.  How do you see the future of web content?

When most of us think Pay per Click we think ad campaigns that got out of hand, dollars wasted and not too much of anything to show for it. It can be a scary option for the more conservative business owner whose budget is tight and whose ideas therefore are much the same. Truthfully, however, Pay per Click is no more a risk than a fierce battle in the search results and will only become fiercer as more websites flood the internet. While search result ranking is important for longevity and continued business success, Pay per Click is an excellent short term option in the interim, to bring revenue during the lull.
What small business owners should know is that most of the time a pay per click campaign will cost you less money up front and bring about the most immediate revenue/results than would fighting your way up in the search results. Assuming you are able to secure a worthwhile spot the time to get there can vary depending how competitive your keywords are. One thing is almost always a guarantee; it will take you no less than a month and up to a year to earn a favorable spot in the search results. On average a safe estimation is 4-6 months to earn a decent ranking within the top 5. Now consider the amount of money spent on seo efforts within that time frame to get a worthwhile spot in the search results.

THE MANY BENEFITS OF PAY PER CLICK ADVERTISING

The biggest benefit found in Pay Per Click advertising is the ability to get immediate sales or conversions without too much effort, in essence the campaign most often pays for itself as in the case of product sales. Most often one sale thru a pay per click campaign could pay for a weeks worth of marketing for itself. In addition, and to clear up anyone’s preconceived notions, limits on amounts spent can and most often are set on each campaign, each ad, or each ad group. The chance of wasted dollars getting out of hand is slim. Most pay per click services have safety features built in to prevent such occurrences. If optimized most efficiently your campaign dollars would also generate enough profit that could potentially be spent on the ranking efforts. So why wouldn’t you have both?
Carefully consider both options as a means of growing your business. Search results are a long term option for growing your business and once achieved its results are long lasting as long as the website is kept current and fresh. However, Pay per Click is a great short term or long term approach at driving immediate traffic that can and often does convert into sales or dollars earned, very quickly. www.contentwriterseo.com