Should You Hire a Large or Small SEO Agency?
Nov 01Many website owners assume that the larger an SEO agency is the better service it offers. While in some cases, a large firm may be a good choice but this is not always the case. A small SEO agency can offer quality service, and sometimes at a better price. Even a single person SEO agency is capable of dramatically boosting your website’s traffic and search ranking. The following questions can help you determine if a large or small SEO agency is best for your website.
How Big is Your Site?
How much ground will your SEO agency need to cover? Is your site enormous with many sub pages, product pages, and more? A larger firm with more manpower may be a better choice. The best way to find out if a specific SEO agency can handle your workload is to ask. A lot will also depend on their current workload from other clients. A single person can get a lot done, but not if they have five other tasks to complete, too.
What is Your Deadline?
When hiring an SEO agency, it is important to be flexible with deadlines. Search engine optimization from top to bottom can take months, depending on what services you need and how many pages need to be covered. If you have hard deadlines, talk to your SEO agency about them. A small agency may not be able to meet your needs if the deadline is very demanding.
Who Do You Feel Most Comfortable With?
This is more a matter of personal preference. Some people feel that a smaller SEO agency can offer one on one service that they like. Others believe that a larger agency has more resources and can get the job done faster and more efficiently. The truth is both large and small agencies are capable of delivering great service on time. However, if you have a personal preference in terms of customer service, this can help narrow down your options.
It is possible to find an SEO agency that can provide a valuable service at a price within your budget. While evaluating potential agencies, learn a little about what search engine optimization is and how it works. This knowledge can go far in the evaluation and scheduling process.
Common mistakes people make when designing their websites
Oct 251. Not taking common sense from offline to online…
People somehow think that because it is on the web it must be different from offline. Bring the credibility of your business onto your website. You need to create trust with your customers. Credibility offline does not automatically transfer to online. You can help build your online credibility by following some of these steps:
- Publish your physical address and phone number prominently
- Publish testimonials
- Post pictures of you and your employees on your website
- Provide usefull and free information
2. People build their websites for themselves instead of the customer.
Companies focus on what kinds of colours the company likes, what are the kind of website they like, what kinds of photos do they like, inserting a nice flash image, the end result of this will be that you have a poor performing website, because no one cares about you! They only care about what you can do for them. You need to build your website for your customer not for yourself! Ask yourself what does your visitors/customers want and build your website around that?
3. Ignoring content.
You focus on the design and technical issues of the website. For instance focussing on integrating your website with your ordering system or your new crm software. From a design element focussing on your new logo or maybe theres some new brochures you want your website to look like. Whatever it might be the conversation focusses around design and technical issues and no one talks about whos going to write the content and then at the last minute an intern at the company writes all the content and it quickly gets put onto the website. Then the website performs miserably, and you wonder why? From my standpoint content is the most important
4. Not following best practises for the web.
like white text on ablack background, or using fancy fonts. It might work in print but doesnt work online. Remember people scan on the web rather than sit down and read. so remember to communicate in a clear and easy to follow manner.
Using Social Media Marketing For Your Websites Benefit
Aug 31Creating a website that no one visits can be quite frustrating. Social media marketing can make it a lot easier to promote your website. These social media websites are for example, Facebook and Twitter. Using a few web tools and plugins for your site, can effortlessly share your website and your articles with people, who generally are interested in your topic and what you are selling.
There are programs that you can download, such as TweetSuite, and a simple to use WordPress plugin that makes it easy to integrate to your site, on to twitter or Facebook. Using programs like TweetSuite can automatically tweet any updates that you have to your website, and share them with people on the social site.
Create a Facebook page, to drive attention to your website. Once you have logged into your Facebook account, you need to move your attention the Notes application, and have a RSS Feed imported for your website, from Notes. This application will easily have your website added to your account on Facebook for your extra exposure you need for your site. Adding your website to social sites like Facebook and Twitter, can quite easily generate traffic to your website and give it the exposure that it needs.
You can also upload videos of your website onto YouTube. This is also another free advertising tool for your site. These videos can capture the essence of your website, and what it is about. It creates free advertisement for the website and allows people to see all the benefits of visiting your site and what you have to offer.
Creating a blog on your website, can also be a great tool to promote your website and market it to your targeted audience. Creating something worthwhile for people to read is the most important thing, as it makes it easier for them to respond because they are interested in what you have to say.
Bookmarking each of your pages after you created them, can be a great tool to advertise as it allows people to see what you have. This will also generate more traffic, and will bring in a wider audience than just people searching on your specific article topic. An example bookmarking site is Digg.com or Stumbleupon.com
Commenting on other blogs, can help you get a lot of attention to your website. Creating a valuable discussion will give your site added interest. Not only will this attract visitors from the blogs you have commented on but will also provide links back to your website which improves your overall ranking.
If you are selling a product, write up a press release for it. Distribute it on free press release sites like http://www.prlog.org/ this will create a nice buzz about a product that you are promoting and once again provide valuable links back to your website. You can also make use of paid press release services which packs more punch.
Using social media like Facebook and Twitter, can really help promote your website without costing you a cent. Blogs and articles are also, a great way to add the exposure to the products that you might be selling.Start your campaign today and see how your rankings improve and you gain more customers.
The Benefits of Outsourcing Your SEO Services
Aug 24
There are a few benefits to outsource SEO services. For one, if you are not an expert in SEO yourself, an SEO expert can get your websites, articles, and other SEO traffic generation sources to rank higher. Without an SEO expert to do this, you might risk your sites getting buried among the competition.
Another benefit to outsourcing SEO work is time. You will save a great deal of time doing grunt work of search engine optimized websites and articles, which you can then spend on other aspects of your business. Having someone else do the SEO work is faster and easier, provided you select a good provider.
Finally, you can also outsource SEO to learn something new about the practice of optimizing your sites. Having someone else do the work allows you to consult them on how they optimized each article or site. They can teach you something about the practice of SEO itself, or give you tips for next time. You can build a good working relationship with someone by outsourcing in this way.
There are some downsides to outsourcing; cost, of course, is one of them. However, most freelancers will not be unreasonable when it comes to pricing, and many article writing services will actually offer bundles for article packs and link building services.
When it comes to building websites, having an expert for SEO is invaluable. The process of coding a website can be very difficult, if you want it to look polished and attractive. Trying to do it yourself can leave you tearing your hair and frustrated to no end. But having an expert do your website and provide you with an attractive site that is also friendly to search engines is a very good tool for getting more people to buy your products.
In the end, the benefits of outsourcing SEO services outweigh the costs. You can have good websites built, articles written, and Web 2.0 materials created that will attract lots of good-quality traffic to your site, and you can do it at an affordable rate. The trick is to find an SEO service that is cost-efficient and still provides good quality work. Asking friends or business partners who have used SEO services to get their sites to rank higher is one good way to find services which will be reliable, fast, and provide good content.
It comes down to this: you can do good SEO on your own with enough time to teach yourself, or you can save that time and get expert quality SEO by outsourcing. It is a question of time vs. money: do you have lots of time to devote to learning it yourself, or do you have enough money to invest in your business to outsource the work and save that time – so you can use it to build new aspects of your business?
If you are interested in outsourcing your seo services please visit my company at http://www.elevatemarketing.co.za and fill in the contact form for a quote.
A Simple Explanation of PPC Traffic Generation
Aug 17
PPC is a term often heard in internet marketing, and one that can mean both wonderful and terrible things for online businesses. In its simplest definition, PPC stands for Pay-per-click, which is where ads are placed using specific keywords that advertisers place bids on. These ads sometimes show up in the “sponsored ads” column on the top hand of specific searches, and usually on the right hand column as well.
The price of PPC bids can run anywhere from a few cents per click to upwards of $50. These prices are dependent on how competitive each search term is at any given time. Google ,Yahoo and MSN are the major three search engines which advertise PPC ads.
The function of PPC is to generate targeted leads for business. By getting specific customers who type in relevant search terms to what a business offers, many new sales can be generated. PPC is also not dependent on organic search rankings the way normal webpages are, and so can be a good way to get instant targeted traffic.
The downside of PPC is that it can run your budget or your business’ budget into the ground. If you choose the wrong keywords, you can rack up a bill of several hundred dollars per day and not have generated one single lead or sale. PPC marketing should only be undertaken with care.
PPC is ultimately a method of driving targeted traffic to any website you wish. It can be used to generate email leads as well. If you have a squeeze page on which you wish to collect email addresses in exchange for a good piece of information or free product, PPC can work well as a business strategy.
The trick to effectively doing PPC marketing is to get good training before attempting to write ads for it. If you know what you are doing before getting into it, you can quickly rack up many targeted customers, buyers, and people who want to know what you have to offer for your business or service.
Of course it is important to know what keywords you will use for your PPC campaigns, so knowing the exact science behind keyword research is crucial. There are many free keyword tools you can use to find good keywords around your niche or business. You can also outsource keyword research if you wish.
Ultimately, PPC can be an excellent way of getting lots of targeted traffic to your website fast, but make sure you have a generous budget to use for ad creation and marketing. If you also begin your campaigns around keywords that don’t cost as much to bid on, you can ease into pay per click without risking too much at first. To find out how much keywords cost, you can use the Google Adwords keyword tool to find specific bid costs.
To summarize: before you venture into PPC, you should know exactly what your budget is for it, what keywords you want to bid on, and what pages you want your potential customers to see.
If you are interested in generating more traffic to your website to get more leads and sales. Goto http://www.elevatemarketing.co.za to see what their search engine optimization services can do for you.
How To Get A Top Search Engine Ranking
Jul 14Anyone that is familiar with the world of the internet will tell you just how competitive it is. Web owners all over the world are battling for a number one spot on Google. If you are asking why, it is because it has been proven that many people conducting a search on Google, will press on the first result and never go past it.
If you are a website site owner and your website is on page one of Google then well done, however there is still work to be done. It needs to be in the top three positions and for a gold cup prize, it needs to be in position one. So how do you do that?
1 – Most importantly is to conduct an on page SEO analysis. The aim is to try to see your site from the eyes of Google. Google sends a spider through your website however it does not see what the human eye sees. You can pay for some advanced programs to analyze your on page SEO however there are free ones out there. Simply type SEO analyzer or meta tag analyzer into Google and lots of results will come up.
2 – Be realistic about your competition. If your chosen keyword has an average of 500 hits a month then it is possible to get to position one quite quickly. However if that keyword has 200,000 hits a month, then your competition will be high and it will take time and dedication to get it to a top search engine ranking.
3 – Google is the god of all search engine but still pay attention to Yahoo and Bing. It is easier to get a site to position one on those search engines and whilst they will not send you as much traffic as Google, you will still see results from them in your website traffic stats.
4 – A lot of attention is paid to link building however many people get it wrong. Here are the golden rules when it comes to link building.
- Get links from websites that are contectually relevant to yours. They carry a lot more weight than just any random link.
- Typically Google only takes notice of the first 100 links going out on a page, so if you comment on blogs and two hundred people have already commented as well, then likely hood is that Google will not pick your link up.
- Check the page that you are linking from is actually cached by Google. Sometimes Google will only crawl past the first five pages of a site and not get any further.
- Anchor text is the key to link building and driving your site further up the ranks. Your anchor text should be your chosen keyword. One useful way to get anchor texts is to write articles and submit them to article directories such as Ezine or article alley.
It is important to know that number one positions only happen with time. If an SEO expert predicts that he can get you to number one in two weeks, he may be able to do it however it will not stay there. It is better to achieve a top ranking through consistency and time, and then the likelihood of you staying at the top is stronger.
Under no circumstances should you consider “black hat” methods as Google will find out and penalize you for it. Spend a small amount of time every day building your links and analyzing your website stats. Withing time, your hard work will be rewarded.