This is why it is so important that not only should you have content on your site but you need to have relevant as well. You need to take the time to consider everything you put on your site. You do not want to end up having a site that does not make sense or provides the information that your potential customers are looking for. You do not want to have people commenting on how you have a nice site, but there was no useful information on there.

What You Should Include

You should as always make sure you are including the important information that is vital to your business on your site. Things to include are as follows.

• The vital statistics on your company, items such as location, ways to contact and what it is that you have to offer.

• Create a company history. Let your potential customers know who you are and how long you have been doing what you do.

• You will also want to include the products that you are offering or the reason for your business. This is essentially, why they came to your site in the first place. You should at least demonstrate a working knowledge of what you have to offer by way of the content on your site.

Regardless of what you like to think, people want to know about you and what it is you are about. At least as a small business, this is why it is so important to make sure that what you are telling them through your site is something that will not only keep their interest, but is viable and pertinent to what they are getting.

No matter what you are selling, offering or promoting on your site, if it is not blatantly clear people will leave. This is why it is so important to give such careful and critical consideration to what you are putting up on your page. It may be best to consult a few outside sources before you decide which content you want to put on your site. Once these propel provide input you will better be able to make final decisions in regards to what will be the best things for you to post.

Make sure that what you are posting is relevant and that it does not drag on too long. You need information that is quick and easy to read, preferably providing some sort of benefit to the visitor. Unless the information has relevance or is intriguing, your audience will be bored and click away, just like that! Any time you lose a visitor, you’ve lost a potential customer.

Creating content for your website doesn’t need to be a difficult process. Basically, talk about what your business does and all the knowledge you’ve collected in over the years in this industry. If you now what you’re talking about and the information is clear and precise for readers to easily understand, then the content you created will work very well for you.

• Here are a couple more tips for content creation on your website:
• Make sure it’s original. Search engines are not fans of duplicate content.
• Update the content on your website. Dynamic pages are the way to go, with constant updates and changes.
• Have an entertaining mix between videos, pictures and text. Maybe even slideshows!

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Dotcomweavers are a team of professional web designers located in Paramus, New Jersey. We are committed to helping small and medium businesses find growth online. ASK DCW is your chance to ask questions, seek advice and get the knowledge you need to make your business successful in the online marketplace. Connect with us on Twitter (@dotcomweavers) or Facebook.

This week’s question comes from Robert S.,who runs a textile company in New Jersey.

He asks:

Should I Care About Search Engine Optimization For My Internet Marketing?

No matter how good your site is and how much praise it has received if the search engines do not think that it is relevant that will not matter. That is why it is so important to make sure you know what it is that the search engines are looking for. Be aware of what the keywords are that people think of most often when they are searching for something that relates to your company. However, this does not mean you should let it affect the quality of your content, you need to simply use the knowledge you gain from these various search engines and apply it to the content you have for your site.

In essence, you need to learn what it is that will drive the ranking of your website up and into prominence before you are able to take advantage of being popular. In other words, you can create and improve your popularity and ranking with the search engines based on making sure that you are using the right words that they are searching for. This is why you need to make sure that when you use someone to help provide the content for your site as well as to design and create your site that they are SEO focused. Unless they are using that as part of their criteria, you will have what is simply a normal website.

If you take advantage of the research and the opportunities that are created through proper web research, you will not really be doing what is best to help your small business to grow. Unless you can allow your company to flourish as it should now that you have put it on the web, then you will be doing yourself a great disservice as well as robbing your company of potential income based on the fact that you did not do all you could.

Is This True?

Think about the fact when you look for something online, which site are you most likely to click on. That’s right- the one that was the first to show up in the search engine. This is why search engine optimization is so important when you are putting content on your website. If you do not do all that you can, in order to be able to enhance your position and to get yourself out there, you will be left in the dust by competitors. If that is the case, then some other company will be taking your potential business by virtue of better web position because you did not use the right keyword, or you did not do all that you could to make sure you were getting your name out there to the search engines.

However, you need to realize this is something that changes on a regular basis. Search engine optimization is a not a static aspect of the Internet. You will need to update your site and your content regularly in order to keep up with the ever-changing environment and market for your business. This is why every second and every penny counts especially in the online world where a small change can mean a significant increase in sales.

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Dotcomweavers are a team of professional web designers located in Paramus, New Jersey. We are committed to helping small and medium businesses find growth online. ASK DCW is your chance to ask questions, seek advice and get the knowledge you need to make your business successful in the online marketplace. Connect with us on Twitter (@dotcomweavers) or Facebook.

This week’s question comes from Denard N., a talent agency executive from New York. 

He asks:

How Can I Tell If the Marketing I Do Online Is Working Well?

Just how well is your online marketing doing? It can be hard to tell, even if you are a professional at it. The fact is, online marketing is hard to track. You may not know how much time you are putting into any one marketing method. You may be unsure of how much money you are spending on that marketing venture either. However, chances are good you know if you are seeing more leads or traffic coming in. Unless you are not seeing new leads, though, it can be hard actually to see how effective marketing is working for you.

Analyzing Your Success

As anyone can tell you about online marketing, the goal is to connect with people. You can often gauge your success by how well you are connecting with those who you want to connect with – your potential customer, business partner or investor. The second thing you need to do is to track your marketing and to analyze its effectiveness.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Most businesses need to use more than one marketing method to draw in enough customers. You may have a hard time knowing where your traffic boost is coming from if you are using more than one method, though.
• It can take time to go from one site and tool to the next and trying to calculate where your leads are coming from and how well each type of marketing message you send out is working. Did that promotion of your latest blog post draw people in or was it the comment you made about a service you offered that brought someone to your site off your Twitter account? Tracking all of this down is time consuming.
• Knowing which customers reacted to which types of marketing on various social medial platforms is simply complex. The best way to avoid having to do all of this work by hand (if that is even possible) is to use tracking software. These programs can help you to learn what is happening.

Sometimes, it is best to hire third party professional web marketers to manage your marketing. That party can then submit reports to you about the marketing efforts they took and the results they got from those methods. This could be a solution for some.

In order to know how well your marketing methods are working for your business, you need to measure the right metrics and know what you are looking at. You can learn how to do this but it is complicated because of all the directions information is coming in. Software can help, but you have to use it properly to have success. Also, keep in mind there are many free applications that can help keep track of the metrics you wish to measure for your online marketing efforts.

While it is complex, it is still critical to employ these methods into your marketing campaign. You need to know if it is working, what is working and what may not be. That is the only way for you to know where to put your money and your time in the marketing days ahead. If you do not have this information, you could spend hours doing the wrong thing and not getting the results you need to have to keep your business profitable. Learn how to calculate the right metrics or hire someone that can help you with the process (including the use of software tools.)

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Dotcomweavers are a team of professional web designers located in Paramus, New Jersey. We are committed to helping small and medium businesses find growth online. ASK DCW is your chance to ask questions, seek advice and get the knowledge you need to make your business successful in the online marketplace. Connect with us on Twitter (@dotcomweavers) or Facebook.

It’s true that the perceived quality of a Google search can differ from user to user. After all, the information being retrieved will apply more, or be more ‘relevant’ to some users, than it will be to others. It’s also true that a search query can cover a wide range of subjects. So, how can Google really indentify the correct results for each and every user query? Certainly, it seems like an impossible task in principle.

Let’s use an example. An end user is searching the term ‘Diabetes symptoms’. They receive back a multitude of results, at the top of which is an article by a copywriter who has limited knowledge of the condition. Further down the search results is a comprehensive e-book written by a leading medical professional, who specializes in the area of Diabetes. Instinctively, the end user will view the top results – as they will deem them to be more ‘important’ or ‘relevant’ than results displayed further down the list. In return, they may view information that is out-of-date, or even worse, it could be entirely incorrect. Meanwhile, the information that they really need to read is waiting further down the search result list, undiscovered.

And why does this happen? Put simply, you can think of search engines such as Google like a virtual librarian. You ask for information on a particular subject, and you are referred to the correct ‘book’ (website). However, as some subjects are vast, the information contained in the book (website) may not be entirely relevant to your query. Additionally, the librarian may know more about one particular book, than they know about another. This knowledge can be likened to search terms. If Google detects a large amount of keywords or key phrases in an online document, it will automatically place more importance on the document – and in turn, the document will appear higher up the search results list, even if it’s not exactly what the end user is searching for.

And how can this problem be resolved? It has been suggested that professionals within specific areas (i.e. the medical sector) are consulted by Google when keywords are produced. This would perhaps ensure that more relevant search terms are made public, and in turn, that better results are generated. In theory, this could work – however, the number of queries that can be made via the Internet is literally endless, and it would be impossible to irradiate all ‘rogue’ entries.

So, perhaps the onus should be on the authors/publishers of online content, and on the generation of stricter web publishing guidelines? This would make sense in relation to medical documents or any other information that is currently governed by guidelines in paper form. It’s certainly not going to be an easy process, and it’s unlikely that all searches will eventually be 100% accurate, but with tighter publishing guidelines, perhaps  a large amount of ‘filler’ can be removed from the Intranet, allowing the accurate, authoritative content to really shine.

For the majority of users, Google controls how you search and how websites are found. This is too important an aspect of the Internet to apply rapid, significant change. While all of us understand the need for change, for something so widely used and interconnected with most everything accomplished online, it’s change needs to be small and gradual. That way, when you mess up, half the people in the world using Google don’t throw their hands towards the sky in an uproar.

Do you have a story about the impact of Google’s Search algorithm update? Share it in the comments.

People are genuinely ticked off about it, as they should be. Companies, business owners, entrepreneurs and many more have invested their time and money in efforts to rank well within Google search. We have all played by your game, read your requirements and suggestions on how to make our websites worthy of your notice. Some of these efforts have been drawn out over years. Developers, marketers and the like have hung on your words for the last decade and more, touting your guidelines, buying your products and using your services. How do you repay us? By debunking our hard fought rankings with the click of a button, making all that time and effort for nil.

For the last few months, more and more stories have surfaced concerning websites that used to rank well that have seen unprecedented drops in traffic and ranking, since the Google Panda update.

Some of the victims are individuals that run highly niche blogs, such as Nopy and his Blog:

“Those of you who run your own blogs may have heard about something called the Google Panda. From what I gather, it’s a new algorithm designed to improve Google’s search results. It works by bringing down the ranks of low-quality sites so that when you search for something like “anime”, you don’t get results that take you to a page selling memberships to “Hentai Key” or some other porn site. So what does this have to do with me? Well, 2 weeks ago I noticed a rapid decline in the amount of traffic Nopy’s Blog was getting, right around the time Panda was being implemented. Yes, I was Panda Slapped.”

(You can read the entire post at Nopy’s Blog. )

Others that were affected are long established businesses that are considered an authority in their industry. WebProNews ran an article describing such a business and how it was affected by the Google Panda update. Read about it here. The part of this story about Foner Books that really stands out is this:

“What Foner Books is best known for is my writing on publishing,” says Rosenthal. “Until the recent algo change, I was the #1 result for phrases like ‘book contract’ or ‘book contracts’, many queries related to book sales (I maintain an annually updated study of industry sales), and my page about Amazon Sales ranks, which was pretty famous back in the day, and through which I was able to help Chris Anderson out with some research for his book, ‘The Long Tail.’ And I was always [in the top] 10 in Google for “Self Publishing”, usually around #5. Now I’m maybe #30.”

How can Google justify any change to its algorithm that would knock a website, which is a recognized authority for its subject, from ranking first to ranking well below the second page of results?

Even large companies, such as the New York Times, have been affected by the algorithm update. Their website, About.com, lost a significant amount of traffic due to the update. How much is ‘a significant amount’? Well, according to their data, it translates into a fall-off of just over 1 million points in their Organic Performance Index. That full story can be found at this website.

The point is: none of these websites or their owners deserved the ‘search slap’ they got from Google.

If your website was impacted by the Google Panda update, let us know in the comments below. The more people that complain about it, the better chance of preventing a mistake like this from happening again. So share your story with us, we’d love to hear it.

Well, here we are, several months later and I can tell you now that it was all hype. Despite rumors and Google’s hopeful success of Google Instant, long-tail keywords are still large and in charge for SEO.

For those of you unfamiliar with the long-tail keyword, let me give you a brief overview:

An example of demand behaviours.

The long-tail keyword is simply a combination of multiple words (usually 3 or more), that are specific and relevant to a product or service sold. In essence, long tails are considerably more definitive and often times used to refine the search process by the visitor.

Why are long-tail keywords working so well for rankings and conversion?

Our economy has been making the shift from ‘one-size fits all’ products and marketing to millions of niche markets. The advantages of selling over the Internet trickle down to the distribution level in a major way, removing previous constraints on retailers as far as inventory size and variety.

For example:

Amazon has an unlimited inventory. They can sell any product anywhere in the world thanks to the Internet.

Your local grocery store does not carry every food product available in the world. It doesn’t even carry all of the heavily advertised products in the U.S.

The difference is Amazon is not limited by the price of shelf space and other storage considerations.

Now people search for items and services that match their very specific interests. That means your average user is typing 2 or more words into search bars to find their subject of choice. Statistics from a client’s website tell the story:

• 62,844 Total Visits
• 47,652 Visits from Search
• 23,824 Keywords from Search
• The top 10 keywords made up 4,963 searches
• More than 50,000 visits resulted from over 23,000 different keywords!

Each of the 10 main keywords generated a considerable amount of visits; however, the combined visits from the long-tail keywords amounted to well over 10x as many visits.

Bottom line is the people using long-tail keywords when they search are more likely to convert because they are much more likely to find the exact product or service they needed or wanted. A long term plan of consistently creating quality content using several long-tail keywords, will definitely add tons of keyword substance to your website and increase the conversion rate, albeit slowly.

I hear statements like “No need to search-engine-optimize the content,” and “If it is well written, keywords will naturally flow in the content.” If you are a person that believes a conflict of interest exists between these two tools for search engine ranking, then you are convinced of two misconceptions:

One: that you know more about what people will read on the Internet than a search engine.

And two: without consciously optimizing the content, you or your writer will produce content that will magically be ideal for people and search engines.

We have search engines for a reason

Search engines are highly complicated bits of code, not just an oversized ‘find’ function. They are programmed to find web content that others have found relevant and useful for the keywords entered. Think about it, Google wouldn’t be so popular if it didn’t return useful results most of the time.

The spiders that search engines use to crawl through the web to find useful content for your search terms have been refined again and again to prevent returning spam, farm links and pages that have been oversaturated with keywords. Highly ranked websites have been verified by search engine crawlers and surfers.

What Web Surfers are looking to Read

The way information is shared on the web is changing. These days, people prefer to get their information from a video, rather than read a bunch of text. If you want people to read what you have typed, it needs to be in short, to-the-point paragraphs that are easy to scan.

Nobel-prize-winning writing will not entice web surfers. That is why the Internet has not helped the resurgence of the short story or other literary writing. Matter of fact, the only paper publication to have made a smooth transition to the web, and perhaps see improvement, are newspaper publications. They are written to immediately get to the point after attracting a reader’s attention. That is how web content must be written, as users are not willing and shouldn’t have to spend exorbitant amounts of time reading all the text available on most websites to find the information they want.

Good SEO content makes for Good Reading

The short, precise style of writing for the web is perfect for SEO. Knowing your intended audience and the keywords you want to incorporate are essential to writing good web copy. When people search for terms, they expect to find them in the content that is returned. This is how they find the portion that is relevant to their query.

If you’ve had enough sense to have your web content written professionally, have enough sense to take the advice of most website copywriters: search-engine-optimization for keywords and good web writing are the same thing.

Think about it-just twenty years ago, consumers had far fewer products and services to choose from, and plenty of time to make buying decisions. Today, consumers have a vast array of choices, but much less time to sort through them all. So, how do you reach those impatient, overloaded customers? How do you get their attention and win them over to your products?

If that wasn’t enough, how does a small business owner manage to juggle the many hats of responsibility and still have time to make sure the product or service gets proper exposure?

The answer is to find professional help to get your business online, if it’s not already, and to create a strong web marketing strategy that is customized for your business using innovative techniques, but also remains flexible to account for market research and testing.  Going any other route can lead to expensive print ads that leave you with less chance of enticing your target customer than a craps game does of making you rich. Avoid costly mailings, brochures, billboard advertisements, and other forms of print advertisement. Online, you can make use of other popular websites that are related to your business, but are not direct competitors for you; email lists that reach ideal consumers for your product or service; make use of search engines and many other tools to make it easier to find your website and promote its products.

The advantages of being online and working with professional web marketers are too many to ignore. It’s about time you got wise to the new way of promoting business.

Know your ideal customer and gear your web marketing efforts towards them. You cannot please all of the people all of the time, so do not waste time and money trying to convince someone to buy something they do not want or need. Instead, find the people who are interested and convert them to customers. Test your web marketing strategy over and over again. If you decide to work with an experienced team like the one at DCW, market research and strategy testing comes as part of the service.

The days of playing it safe are far gone. Get your product as much exposure as possible and your customers will find you.

There is a step that must be completed before any business, small or large, begins to sell a product or service. That step is market research. Marketing research can be defined as the process of gathering recording and analyzing the data related to certain products and services. This need for market research is derived from the concept that only by understanding the needs and wants of the target audience and by effectively meeting them, you will be able to achieve the organizational goals and surpass the competition in the specific market. When conducting this research for an online business, it takes a very specific angle. The Internet allows a business to take this information and use it to market directly to their ideal customer base, improving customer conversion and company profits. No other medium can duplicate such a feat, which makes online market research that much more important and useful to every online business.

Proper market research should be able to help you in the following areas:

Make Marketing Decisions – Good online marketing research helps you introduce products or services by ascertaining how customers will receive it. This helps to reduce the risk of new product or service entry into the market.

Survive the Competition – Find out what the competition is doing and how well they are doing it. Analyze their focus and target customers. This helps in surviving and in certain cases, even leaving behind the competition. Moreover, with market research you can also help understand the under-served consumer segments and consumer needs that have not been met.

Decide on Target Markets – Before you start advertising your product or service to everyone, do the online marketing research to find your ideal customer and target them first. By doing this, you will greatly increase the rate of visitors to your website turning into paying customers.

Maximize Profits – You could be underselling your online businesses products or services. Its possible that your customers are willing to pay more. Of course, without proper research, you’ll never know. The importance of finding the threshold of how much your customers are willing to pay will help to increase the profitability of each sale.

Increasing Sales – By understanding the customer’s needs, wants and attitude towards the products and determining whether your products fit the bill, you can increase the sales of your e-commerce store.

For an online business, the marketing research focuses even more on three very important areas for your business: knowing your target audience, key words and phrases, and budgeting concerns. Customize your advertising strategy to reach out to a customer base that is ideal for your product or service. Find out what key words your ideal customers react to best and incorporate them in the search engine optimization of your website and any off-site advertising. Avoid wasting money on advertising and marketing efforts that fail to bring in more paying customers and increase the effectiveness of your online businesses efforts in that area.

If you are having trouble or just aren’t sure how to go about conducting online market research for your e-commerce store, ask web marketing professionals and start improving your profits.

The best way to prevent harming your rankings by having unbalanced SEO is to know exactly what you are looking for in on-site and of-site factors. Lets get down to the business of defining these factors in detail.

On-site Optimization – This refers to the SEO tactics that are under your direct control on your website. It consists of the following areas:

• The text on your web page.
• The number of web pages on your website.
• The number of keywords and related keywords on your web pages.
• The links on your web pages to other pages of your site.
• The links on your web pages to other websites.
• The structure of your website.
• The robots.txt of your site.
• The HTML code of your web pages.

Along with these elements, any Flash or rich media files can also include information that adds to the overall SEO of the website. Realize that the text on your website includes all written content on your website. This encompasses everything from your opening statement to the blog and even page titles.

Off-site Optimization – For the most part, the elements that make up this portion of the SEO are out of your control. They consist of the following:

• The number of back links that point to your website.
• The quality of the back links that point to your website.
• How often your website is bookmarked on social bookmark sites.
• How often your website is mentioned on services such as Twitter and other social media.

While there are not as many elements to off-site optimization, they are complicated and require more effort than is at first apparent; which is why many website owners refer to web marketing experts for it.

Some webmasters invest most of their time in on-site optimization, mostly because it is the most obvious of the two. People are naturally more comfortable working with parameters under their direct control. Others swear that links from other websites are the only way to get high rankings on Google. Depending on the keywords for which you optimize your website, you can achieve good results with both methods, provided they are implemented correctly. However, you will get the best possible results by combining them. If you optimize the on-site factors of your website, then you make it as easy as possible for search engine spiders to parse your web pages and that is the name of the game for ranking in search engines. The content of your web pages should contain the right elements and the right keywords in the right places so that search engines know what your website is about. Links from other websites that contain your target keywords show search engines that other people also find your website relevant to a certain topic and bookmarks of your website on social bookmark services let search engines know that real people like your website.

It is very easy to concentrate on either on-site or off-site factors. Make sure you or the professional web markers you hired, are combining them, with equal emphasis placed on each, to produce the best results for ranking your website.