Few things here.  Keep in mind these factors are just my opinions based on my experience as a web designer. 

To start off, alot of people hear the website lingo of "optimization".  "You have to optimize your site for the keywords you want to rank on Google for..."  Just because your website is optimized does not by any means mean that you will rank high on Google.  You could have the most optimized website on the web and rank pretty low on the search engines.  Ranking high on search engines requires a number of things. 

First and foremost, in my opinion, is inbound links to your site.  Google counts up the number of links coming to your site and says, "Oh since this site has 10,000 links to it, it must be a pretty important site, we will put them up there at #1 or #2."  How do you get inbound links? There are numerous methods, but in my opinion the best way to get true inbound links is by providing quality information that people want to read.  It doesn't matter whether it's helpful information, gossip, news, etc.  If people find it helpful or interesting, they might post a link on their site linking to yours.  In my opinion, a blog is a great way to do this.  But, the blog has to be incorporated into your site.  It can't be a website of it's own because the inbound links would go to some other domain and Google wouldn't see them as one in the same.  Now, there are ways to get links to your sites that Google frowns upon such as what Google calls "link farms".  Link farms are websites that charge you to put a link on their website or other websites.  If Google catches you buying links, your website could be blacklisted and not appear in the search engines.

One side note about links is the quality of links that you get linking to your site.  Google actually rates your website believe it or not.  Your website has a rating of 3/10.  So if a higher rated website lets say a 9/10, link to your website, that link is worth more to Google than a link that's lets say 4/10.  No one knows the exact math, but 1 link with a rating of 9 or 10 may be worth 50 links of 3 or 4 quality.  Know what I mean?

Second, is traffic, which can come from any source... social networking sites, adwords, email marketing, etc.  Why traffic though? Because the more traffic you get, the more people that get to see your site, the more chances you have at getting people to link to your site and show others.  And the obvious reason, the more traffic, the more money you make.  But making money really doesn't contribute to SEO in any way heh.  So all in all, traffic helps everything, SEO & sales.  Because if Google sees a site that's getting 100,000 hits a month and there is a site that only has 1,000 hits ranked above it, Google will say, "Oh, well obviously this site is more important because it has 99,000 more visitors per month so we will bump them ahead of the other site." 

Third, is optimization.  When you do get ranked after getting enough links and traffic, you want to be ranked for the right keywords.  That's where optimization comes in.  You optimize your site so that you are ranking for the right keywords that you want to rank for.  This is a catch 22 though, the more people that search for a keyword on Google, the more competitive it is to climb the rankings.  So you have to really decide what keywords you really want to fight for.

One exception to these SEO factors is domain names.  If you go out to Google and type in "Cincinnati Golf Apparel" and there is a website called exactly that, "cincinnatigolfapparel.com" then typically you will see that site ranked higher than anything else regardless of links, traffic, and optimization.  That's not always the case, but you will see it majority of the time.

Hope this helps!

In my blogging experiences, I have learned quite a few things that I decided to share.

1.) You have to provide value to your visitors.  This is in my opinion, the most important concept to keep in mind when writing on your blog.  If there is no value, no one will come back or visit in the first place.  This means, don't just go on rants about your products or services.  If you are writing on your golf store blog, post tips for golfers, post videos for golfers, post recent golf news.  Whatever it is that will grab a person's attention and make them want to come back.  But the bottom line is, provide value.

2.) Don't forget the importance of blog titles and tags.  I didn't realize how big of a deal these really were.  But you want to cater your blog titles towards what you think a person would type into Google if they were trying to find this kind of information.  Why? Because that's one huge source of traffic, it's as simple as that.  As far as tags go, whatever tag you use the most Google will likely recognize as what your blog is mainly about.  However, I would not list tags on your posts that aren't really related to the content of your post.  You will just frustrate your visitors and they may leave or not come back.

3.) Learn what ping services are.  Ping services are basically how you notify the blog directories that you have posted a new post on your blog. Most of the major blogs have a section dedicated to ping services in the blog admin section.  Make sure the major ones are included, Google, Yahoo, etc. Why? Another source of traffic to your site. I have posted a list below of some of the ping services we use.  Feel free to use any of them.

4.) Lastly, I just wanted to point that Google if not already, probably will incorporate ranking criteria based on how frequently you update your site.  I mean this obviously won't be the only factor in their huge equation, but it will be important.  So if you are posting a blog entry once every few days, your site could rank higher...

Hope those helped!

Chris

This is the subject that frustrates me the most out of all web design topics.  Some companies just refuse to either upgrade their 1990's website or get one all together.

I don't think business owners really realize how big of an impact a website has on their sales.  I'll list a few reasons below.

1.) When's the last time you picked up the yellow pages? I can actually remember the last time I picked up the yellow pages and that was 7 years ago! Stop advertising in the yellow pages if you are and get on Google!  Google is the new yellow pages.

2.) I can't tell you how many times I have heard something along the lines of "Well, let's not stay at x hotel because the website looks really crappy.  Oh, y hotel looks good, let's stay there!".  Congratulations x company, your losing business everyday because of your website.  Don't be that company.  That goes for all types of businesses too, not just hotels.  I actually see this happen a lot for restaurants as well.

All I'm saying is that you are hurting yourself more by NOT getting a website than you are by getting a website.  The internet is here to stay, are you?

We have come across this a few times now where clients have e-commerce stores and they use adwords, but they don't use the "conversion" functionality that is part of adwords...  A conversion is when a person comes onto your site through clicking an Adwords link, and they end up purchasing something on your site.  You converted an Adwords click to a purchase.  If you aren't tracking this, then how are you tracking Adwords' effectiveness? The answer is... you're not.

You track a conversion by simply setting up conversion tracking inside your Adwords account.  You go to the Reporting drop down and then select "conversions".  Once inside conversions, you simply hit "New Conversion" and walk through the guide.  Once you have a conversion set up, you take the code from the conversion and put that code on a page that your customers will see AFTER a sale.  Usually this is a thank you page or a confirmation page.  That way, when a person hits this page that came in through adwords, adwords knows to record this as a conversion or sale.

Once that's done, you obviously collect the data over the next month or so and then you can see which groups or keywords are effective and which ones aren't.  You can also see how much each keyword costs per conversion.  You may want to do away with the expensive ones that have high costs per conversion because that means not many people that are coming in through that keyword are making purchases.  It's completely up to you what changes you make, but this should shed some light on your Adwords' effectiveness.

First off, some may not even know what canonicalization is when referring to domains.  Canonicalization is to refer to a webpage consistantly by one URL.  For instance, http://www.cincinnatiwebdesign.com and http://cincinnatiwebdesign.com are two different URL's that lead to the same place.  So what's the correct URL or canonicalization to use for SEO?

The answer to that question is, it doesn't really matter which you use, but it's important that you pick one and use it CONSISTANTLY.  I'll explain why this is important.  Let's say you have 10 links pointing to http://www.cincinnatiwebdesign.com and 10 other links pointing to http://cincinnatiwebdesign.com.  Google sees that as 2 different URL's with 10 links each.  And of course, depending a little on Pagerank, a person with 20 links to 1 URL will rank higher than a person with 10 links.  Got it?

One last note, let's say you choose to have the www.yourdomain as the primary URL.  Well, you can redirect the http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com and Google will eventually see that as 1 URL and not 2, but this does take time depending on how fast Google indexes your site.

Lastly, remember also when linking to your homepage from within your own website to use http://www.yourdomain.com and NOT http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html.  Google will see those as 2 domains again and you will not get that internal link counted for your URL that you are using as your primary.

Hope that helps! Happy coding

Let's just start out by saying even I underestimated the power of links.

Do yourself a favor, what keyword do you want to be #1 on? Go out to Google or Yahoo and type in your keyword to find out where you are in comparison to everyone else.  Let's say you come back as #10 for "New York Hot Dogs" and you want to be #1.  Now, look at the #1 person on Google and copy that sites web address.  Now go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG7zeeyStMVEoBHfnbl8kF?p=&y=Explore+URL&fr=sfp and type in "link:" + their site address.  So for instance it would look like "link:http://www.yourdomainhere.com" and hit enter. (make sure http is included)  Look at the number of results in the left hand column.  Now, hit back, and type in the URL of your web address.  More times than not, the person that is #1 will have more links coming into their site.  The only exception I have found is when the actual domain name is the keyword.  For instance if there was a website named www.newyorkhotdogs.com it will probably rank pretty high regardless of the amount of links.

Now, another thing to note is that if you have 5,000 incoming links to your site and the person that's ranked 1st on Google only has 4,000, there may be a few reasons for this.  First, perhaps your content is not optimized for the keyword you are trying to rank on.  Second, maybe the person that is 1st is linked by higher quality sites.  For instance if the New York Hot Dog #1 website has a link coming from The Wall Street Journal and you have a link coming from Joe Blow newspaper, Google will rank the Wall Street Journal linked site higher because it's a higher quality site.  You can tell what Google thinks of a site by looking at the "PageRank" google assigns to each page.  If you download the Google toolbar you can easily see this.  Google ranks a site from 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, 1 the lowest.  So for instance a site like the Wall Street Journal is probably ranked above a 5 and the Joe Blow newspaper would be ranked a 1 or 2.  No one knows the exact math behind it, but what I am saying is that having 4,000 links that are ranked a 6 is a lot better than having 5,000 links ranked a 2.  Get my drift?

More to come soon.  Next I'll cover linking strategies.

High rankings in Google search results are coveted by nearly all webmasters, but Google is constantly making changes to keep them on their toes. Actually, Google is said to make roughly one change per day.

One recent change in particular, however, has gotten some webmasters riled up. It's being referred to as "Mayday," and some claim it is costing them money.

Ex-Googler Vanessa Fox, who spoke on a panel with current Googler Matt Cutts at Google I/O last week, quotes Cutts as saying, "this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back."

She also says Google told her that it was a rankings change, as opposed to a crawling/indexing change. This, she says, "seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before."

"This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with 'item' pages that don't have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them," says Fox. "For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database. Of course, as with any change that results in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite."

This is not the first we've heard about "Mayday". There's been discussion about it around the SEO community all month, but this is the first we've seen it really addressed by Google.

Most savvy webmasters have learned by now that they can't rely on Google rankings alone to drive traffic. This is why social media opportunities presented by networks like Facebook and Twitter have become so attractive. The way people search and obtain information is becoming more and more diversified, not only spread out around different applications (largely due to increased mobile usage), but also within search engines themselves.

For example, Google recently rolled out its big SERP redesign, which gives users a great deal more options for filtering their results (or at least puts these options in the spotlight). The importance of ranking in a completely natural, organic search has become greatly diluted over time. Don't get me wrong, it's still nice, but it's getting harder to rely on as well as less critical for discovery.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/

We are starting to see a lot of business owners really hesitate to get into social marketing.  Well, I want to assure you that the risks of NOT getting into social marketing far outweigh the risks of getting into social marketing.  I listed a few reasons below of why your business should definitely get into social marketing.

First and foremost, since there is already a huge demand for social sites, of course search engine's will want a piece of all that information.  It's only a matter of time until Google and other major search engines start indexing social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Second, it's all about visibility.  The more people you get in front of, the more people will naturally find your site and your company.  It's the exact same thing as networking in person, just over the internet.  Giving a person a link or having them find a link to your website is the exact same thing as handing out a business card in my opinion.  It's free, it's convienant, and it's easy.  What are you waiting for?

Lastly, and this ties into visibility, but think about how people are finding companies these days.  First, in my opinion is word of mouth, I value anyone's personal referral for a business far more than finding anything on the internet.  I can't tell you how many times someone has said in an email something along the lines of, "Yeah, they are good people.  Here, check out their facebook page and give them a call".   Anything after the referral process in my mind is simply a Google search.  I don't look in the yellow pages, I don't call the operator, I go to Google and type in "Plumbers, Cincinnati OH 45205".  I first use the Google Local search to find the closest plumbers.  Are you on Google Local? I hope so!  Second, I look at their websites, does it look like a website that was made in 1980?  If so, I move on to the next one.  In my opinion, if a owner can't pay for a decent website, their company isn't a solid company and I don't want to do business with them.  You just have to think like a client or customer.  How are they finding you? That's my typical process for finding companies.  I would assume other people's would be similar to some extent, but everyone is different.

As I mentioned before, the risks of NOT getting involved in social marketing are far higher than getting involved.  Just think about it, if you aren't out there, your competitors probably are.  How many clients or customers are you going to give your competitors?

Why Twitter is Becoming Increasingly Important to Marketers

1. Twitter Lists
Twitter Lists are changing the game. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are more than likely going to be related to the niche you are in anyway if you have the right audience on Twitter.

2. The Openness of Twitter
The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, pretty much means that your messages on Twitter won't be limited to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will bring tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people, but it's not necessarily only the people on Twitter that will see those messages.

3. Building Valuable Relationships
Laura Fitton, the author of Twitter for Dummies, chalks up success on Twitter to four basic concepts: listen, learn, care, and serve. Basically, if you listen to the community, you will learn, and if you show that you care, you are more likely to get more out of your efforts. Serving means providing something of use to the community. If you what you're not doing that, you may be setting yourself up to fail.

4. Traffic That Cares
Twitter can bring you not only random traffic, but traffic from people who are actually passionate about the niche that you are a part of. Retweets are huge in this regard. Guy Kawasaki calls retweeting the sincerest form of flattery. He has a point. He notes that people are willing to risk their reputations by retweeting your content.

5. Staying Current
Being found in Twitter searches (not to mention real time search in general, which is starting to become a main area of focus for all of the big search engines, not to mention all of the standalone real-time search sites) provides a lot of opportunity for exposure. Check out tips for getting found in real-time searches.

6. Connecting with Local Customers
There are a variety of ways you can connect with local consumers and customers using Twitter and Twitter-related tools. There are tools which let you find Twitterers in your area, for example. Another thing to keep an eye on is Google's new Social Search. It's currently just a lab experiment, but could become more. It certainly has potential.

A recent Search Engine Land article made some good points about the potential of local marketing with this tool, which delivers Google search results based on the communities you are a part of. It draws from Google profiles, which include the networks that people are connected to (based on what any person includes in that profile).

7. Going International and Multi-lingual
Twitter is expanding into more languages. If you thought Twitter was important to marketing already, consider that for most of its existence, it has only been available in a couple of languages. Now it's in Spanish, and many more languages will follow. That's not only going to be huge for international and multi-lingual marketing efforts, it's going to be huge for Twitter's growth, and the more Twitter grows, the more potential customers are out there.

8. It's Still Young
Consider that Twitter is just getting started in the grand scheme of things. It's still young. There are no doubt going to be a lot more features added in the future. And don't forget about the thousands of Twitter apps that are already out there that can make Twitter useful in different ways to different people and businesses. Take some time and explore them. Fitton's site OneForty.com, which is like Yelp for Twitter apps, is pretty good for that. It has reviews, and people tell why certain helps have helped their businesses.

Resources from: http://www.webpronews.com

There have been a significant number of studies released recently indicating that email marketing is doing quite well. Epsilon shared some findings about how email marketing is driving offline purchases. The same firm also found that email open rates increased for the fourth quarter in a row (up 18% YoY according to the most recent study). Forrester Consulting and ExactTarget found that email marketing is the most popular channel for consumers. Earlier this year, Forrester Research reported that email marketing in the U.S. alone was expected to reach $2 billion by 2014.

Is the email landscape changing? Yes, without a doubt. Social media has become a very large part of the online lives for many Internet users. Earlier this year, social sites were even said to have surpassed email in usage. That said, Facebook has come significantly close to matching Google in terms of unique visitors, but that doesn't make Google any less important does it? The two can co-exist, and so can email and social media. They are co-existing.

We personally have been trying to push more for online newsletters.  Everyday less and less people are paging through newspaper ads and more and more are signing up for email ads.  It's easier, less clutter, and if you want to purchase something, it's 1 click away instead of a drive to the store.  A few of our clients see it's a good idea, but their first objection is, "How do we capture the emails?" We tell them that this is actually one of the most painless and easiests tasks.  Think about it, unless you are capturing emails in a sneaky fashion, people will want to sign up.  They want to hear about your special deals and promotions.  So a simple button "Sign up for our monthly newsletter" would do.  Or, you can add it to a sign-up feature with the option to opt into receiving the newsletter.  The second objection is some business owners relate email marketing to spam.  There is a complete difference between the two.  Spam is un-wanted emails.  In my mind, email marketing is the same as putting an ad in the paper.  People will be looking for them.

Some information from: http://www.webpronews.com