Web Data Source » performance

Hating on Apple? Take a number.

admin — Wed, 19 May 2010 13:44:32 +0000

While there are a variety of reasons folks hate Apple, many of the most often repeated reasons boil down to two general problems: 1) Hypocrisy and 2) Draconian, closed methods.

Let’s take a little gander at these two general categories and see why Apple is so well described by these titles.

Apple’s hypocrisy takes a variety of forms, but one of the easiest to see is the advertising. Apple’s ad campaigns, ever since the first, “throw the computer at big brother,” ground breaking ad have been about the “little guy” versus the “big guy” and about the smart, cool apple user versus the dull, witless and completely uncool user of any other products.

There was the “Think Different” campaign and the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” campaign, along with the “Switch” campaign, all of which imply that Mac users are somehow inherently wiser, more innovative and just generally have better judgment than those who use PCs. This is ridiculous, smug and arrogant. Clearly, the type of computer you use has nothing to do with how intelligent or innovative you are.

Apple advertises trouble free, crash free computers even though they also have crashes, and they also have notoriously high fail rates on certain pieces of equipment. Somehow, those problems keep getting byes from technology gurus and the public.

Apple consistently exaggerates speeds and device performance ability, with seemingly no consequences, while at the same time they aggressively call out any one else who does the same kind of exaggerating.

And another of the Apple hypocrisies leads directly into my next point. Apple professes to be innovative, individual and unique while at the same time aggressively crushing innovation and individuality while operating on notoriously closed architecture.

That closed architecture is the root of the claims of draconian techniques. Apple keeps it’s developers at arm’s length, keeps a tight leash on developers both by denying applications to it’s app store and by giving developers only limited access, and carefully managing its image in the outside world.

They act as a bully – see stories about them suing college kids for leaking info to the press and having the apartment of Gizmodo’s Jason Chenn searched by police and having his equipment seized after he bought an iphone prototype which was inadvertently left in a bar.

All these techniques leave a bitter taste in the mouth of many, especially those who would like to see the promise of Apple’s professed aura be reflected in the reality.

Content Management System

Akshay Sura — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:53:32 +0000

The current explosion in eCommerce has highlighted the advantages of and excellent Content Management System (CMS) like Sitecore.

For businesses that consider their website and their customers who contact them online to be an integral part of their business, using a content management system is only logical. It will allow those businesses to provide a seamless, high quality online experience that open source or low-end solutions simply can’t provide.

For many of our customers, their website is a strategic part of their business. The added security and performance features of a CMS allow these businesses to focus the website and the usability features that make the customer experience truly superior.

By giving developers and content providers a simple to use and intuitive system, a CMS allows the marketing department or the sales department to create website content and design elements of the site. These professionals understand the customers and their needs better than developers or IT departments. With a CMS, the control goes to the people with the ideas, not only to the people with the programming expertise

The easy integration with business applications also provides a great opportunity for businesses to provide a better integration of Customer Relationship Management software and Enterprise Resource Planning software, as well as any analytics tools.

Because you, the company, are in control of the content and the programs and tools that you use on your site, you are able to better tailor your customers’ experience on your website, offer them seamless integration of eCommerce products and Web 2.0 feature, and fully optimize your site for search engines, so current and new customers can find you easily.

With so many advantages for developers and for the end customers, its easy to see why Content Management Systems are increasingly popular.

We think we offer you the best possible CMS with Sitecore. While there are still features they can improve, as we’ve mentioned here before, overall they provide a powerful program that is fully scalable so it can grow with your company. It’s also easy to use and forward thinking, constantly updating the product and forecasting the next trend, then responding to it.

Their “Gold” partner status with Microsoft ensures continuing support for all its best features.

If you haven’t utilized the power of a great CMS to provide your customer with the best possible experience online, I’d suggest giving it a try today.

20 Ways a Company can Retain Website Visitors

K.Singh-Kronik Media — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:56:46 +0000

A company’s website plays an important role today. Companies today have an active strategy to attract customers to their website. A company often spends vital resources to maintain a professional website. It is common for a company today spend resources to market its website. It is hence important for a company to ensure visitors remain on the website long enough to generate sales or leads for the business.

A conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who take or complete a desired action on a company’s website. A company often uses conversion rate to measure the performance of its website. It is not standardised and it varies from company to company. It can include anything from a direct sale on website, lead, customer enquiry or online registration. Achieving a higher conversion rate is one of the key objectives of an effective website strategy. Retaining visitors on the website for longer has a direct impact on conversion rates. The longer visitors stay on the website the greater the chances of conversion.

There are a number of factors that affect conversion rate of a website. A website’s usability is important as it ensures users remain on the website and are able to find the information they are looking for. This article discusses the important factors that can improve a website’s conversion rate.

There are many ways for a company to attract visitors to its website. Studies show that a majority of the visitors will navigate away and leave the website. Retaining visitors on a website is thus crucial for a company in order to increase conversion and generate sales or leads.

Here are some essential tips a company can use to keep visitors on its website for longer:

1. Simple Professional design of the website. A simple but professionally designed website encourages visitors to stay and read its content. The trend today is for simple, appealing & minimalist designs. Attention to detail is important to build trust among customers. The design of the website should reflect the market it targets. Different designs may suit different situations and context.

2. Quality of content. A simple objective of a successful company website is to keep visitors on the website long enough to generate sales or leads for the business. The internet today is full of websites that offer poor content of little value to readers. In order to encourage users to remain on the site for longer, it is vital for the website to offer quality content that is well researched and presented.

A combination of mediums such as text, images, videos or podcasts can be useful to present content effectively and make it interesting for visitors. Simple issues such as spellings and grammar can be easily overlooked and have a negative impact on conversion.

3. Offer up to date & fresh information. Visitor loyalty is important for the success of any website. Very few websites rely solely on new visitors only. If you want your customers to visit the website again it is important to update the website frequently and offer new up to date content. After all a visitor will seldom find the reading the same content again and again of little value or interest. Adding new articles and content to your website will keep your existing users interested whilst attracting new ones.

4. Provide detailed information on products or services. Promoting products and services is one of the key objectives of a successful company website. Research suggests that offering detailed descriptions and images about a product tends to improve the chances of sale via the website. This especially important on the internet as customers have to decide based solely on the product information available to them. It is better to provide more information rather than provide only the important ones. If there is too much information it can easily be separated into brief and detailed descriptions for the products.

5. Offer free resources or benefits. Offering resources or other benefits for free on the website is another effective method to attract visitors and convert your prospects into online customers. Offering free tips and articles related to your business can make your company’s website more appealing to customers who can get additional information related to your products and services. Offering related tips and articles can supplement the information on your products.

6. Offer simple navigation. The navigation or menu on the website plays an important role in usability and ensuring visitors remain on the site and are able to find what they are looking for. Many studies have shown that poor or complex navigation drives visitors away to competing websites and thereby negatively impacts conversion rates.
Navigation should be clear and prominent. It is also important for navigation to be consistent across all pages so users do not have difficulty in finding it.

7. Provide pictures where appropriate. Pictures can speak a thousand words. From design point of view pictures make the site appealing to users and thereby encourage them to stay for longer. However graphics should not be overused as it can have a negative impact. If you are selling a product then offering product pictures is crucial to promote the product and encourage sale.

8. Add a blog. This is related to some of the points discussed earlier. Blogs can be beneficial for the website in more than one way. Blogs offer an easy way to add new content to your website and encourage participation from users. Blogs are very easy to add. A web design company can add a bespoke blog to your website quite easily or you can create one free within minutes using one of the many free blog platforms such as blogger or wordpress.

9. Provide Testimonials. Testimonials are effective in building customer confidence in the company. Confident customers are more likely to be retained or buy products or services.

10. Engage the customer. A successful website takes a number of steps to ensure visitors remain on the site and spend more time. There can be few better ways than to allow customers to interact with the website and the company. Blogs, forums and other Web2 areas have proved effective. Simple techniques such as customer feedback form or guestbook are also effective in involving visitors. If you are selling a product then allowing customers to review the products is another useful method.

11. Offer Variety of Information. It has proven effective to offer a variety of information on the website and not just information about your company. As much as you may want to promote your products and services directly; your website visitors will not remain on the website to read pages and pages of information about your company and products. If you want retain visitors for long and revisit the website again, your company’s website should offer a mix of information. It is a common approach for successful company websites to offer a range of independent information related to their market. In order for a website to be successful and build a community, a company’s website should not only offer self promoting articles but also independent well balanced information that adds value for visitors.

12. Encourage opt-in email registration. Collecting email address of your website visitors can be an effective marketing tool for your company. This can be achieved easily by offering email or newsletter registration feature on in a prominent place on the website. The list can then be used for a variety of purposes including newsletters or direct marketing.

13. Allow visitors to bookmark your website. Providing a simple link or graphic ina prominent place of the website can have a surprisingly great impact on number of visitors bookmarking the website. This is very easy to do and will promote repeat visits to your website.

14.Offer something new. An average internet user comes across a wide range of information on a day to day level. There are over 40 million websites today and new ones are launched every day. Whilst it may not be possible for every aspect of your company’s website to be completely unique and innovative, there should be something new or unique on the website. Offering something new to your users can be important for conversions as it adds interested for your users and will encourage to visit again.

The internet today is full of marketing gimmicks and piles of hyped up information content to make it attractive to users but ultimately failing to deliver something of genuine value to the end user. Offering new information or services that have genuine value for users will build confidence in your customers and prove an effective branding technique even if the information is not directly selling your product or service.

15. Provide a site map. It can be quite difficult to find information on large websites. Any website can grow large with time. Providing a sitemap clearly accessible from all pages of the website promotes usability and prevents users form getting lost. It prevents users from leaving the site due to these reasons. Sitemap also promotes better indexing of pages on search engines which can in-turn lead to improved conversion rates.

16. Respond to statistics. Many free website statistics and reporting software such as Google Analytics provide useful information on visitors but also and content on the website. This information can be used to monitor and test the effectiveness of the various website elements. The information should be used to determine what features are appealing to users and what are not.

As we have discussed in this article once our website starts receiving visitors it is important to retain visitors on the site and generate sales and leads for the business.

Remaining points to be added.

Keyword Exercises for SEO

Jeffrey Smith — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:09:44 +0000

Don’t be fooled by people trying to tell you that tracking SEO metrics based on keywords and keyword performance is obsolete. Keywords and the traffic they produce are alive and well and depending on the position (above the fold or below the fold) and the percentage of traffic they receive is tangible to assess conversion and performance benchmarks.

Over 80% of consumers hot on the trail of a product or service have a higher propensity of clicking the top 3 search results when presented with the top 10 websites for their query. If a user has to scroll below the fold the click through numbers taper down to the remaining percentages.

However, depending on factors such as:

1) the competition for the phrase

2) the relevance to the searchers intent and

3) the emotional click-triggers from the snippet/description in the search result (and how sticky it is) impact who gets the click.

Obviously, the more keywords that encroach on a topic, the higher percentage for conversion you have from those topics, when each of the pages becomes buoyant after gaining some authority in search engines (typically 2-4 months).

In closing, here is a brief SEO keyword exercise you can use to spread your semantic net a bit wider to funnel and capture more broad and exact match traffic for your pages.

This phenomenon is based on keyword stemming and Pair phrase indexing. The translation here; the more related keywords you have on a page or that reference a page, the higher the relevance for the related keywords.

I have mentioned before that any word on the page is a keyword when combined with the right synergy of on page and off page factors.

So, you never know what may emerge from the vacuum when a query is executed and just how Google, Yahoo or MSN may extract content and keywords from 1 page, 3 pages 10 pages or more from your site to combine an aggregate relevance score for your website vs. your competition.

It is not always clear cut and dried as this (such as the chronology of content and sheer volume) to outrank your competition. However, if you are constantly producing quality content in quantity with this in mind, the likelihood of your site hitting hub status as a resource for search engines to share with their readers is only a matter of time.

Keyword stemming is the premise of topical content reaching critical mass and sending key indicators to search engines that the subject is thoroughly present and saturated within your website.

The more semantic derivatives that exist in your pages, the higher your relevance for the keywords or niche in question.

As an example, just think of Wikipedia and how they virtually rank for every imaginable keyword as a result of (a) their massive internal index of pages and (b) the way they structure their site and (c) the way they cross link to their own content using synonyms and exact match anchor text (the text in the link).

As a result, the topical pools of information they leave behind in the cloud (via cloud computing) drive traffic to related web pages based on this basic premise. We know from SEO that When a keyword is present on a page, the density, frequency and prominence all have an impact as well as how many related pages on the topic exist in your site.

What we are proposing is, since semantic phrases overlap and reinforce relevance, the idea is to use the additional keywords discovered from a thesaurus to shore up islands of content for search engines.

For example, by adding 15 new related keywords to a page that already has relevance for related keywords, the amount of broad match traffic you can attract is exponential.

Over time, new relationships form between pages and phrases to raise the bar for how your site fares in search engines.

Now, for the exercise

1 – pick a keyword you want to reinforce.

2 – use the search command site:website.com keyword in a Google search box to find the target page with the highest occurrence of the keyword (to serve as the preferred landing page since search engines already have opted for that page).

3 – open the thesaurus tool and type in the keyword to find alternative phrases

4 – from the pages below the first result from step 2 (the other 9 below the number 1 spot), edit the page and add or change content to include the new keywords from the thesaurus.

5- from those new / related keywords, link back to the preferred landing / target page.

6 – use this tactic to funnel more traffic, it works since search results often combine a word from the title, another keyword from the description, a word or two from the actual page when searching for the top 1000 websites for any given query.

This is like discovering traffic you never knew existing, since it was latent within your website from lack of expression. More synonyms mean traffic with a very specific intent can find you when they need it most (when executing a focused search).

Are Your B2B Paid Search Campaigns Trying To Serve Two Masters?

Todd Miechiels — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:07:18 +0000

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a seasoned Google AdWords mentor was to “not try and serve two masters within a single campaign.” If your campaigns are like most, they have a fixed budget and are ROI driven. In this situation, we are constantly trying to ratchet down the cost per lead while still using up the budget to get as many leads as possible. But beware! At some point you can almost be guaranteed that you’ll be requested to “fill up the pipe” by ramping up volume (and spend) for the short term. Unfortunately, trying to jockey between the two is a recipe for long-term frustration and compromised results.

This may seem trivial to many, especially at the outset of a campaign when everything is new, shiny, and exciting. But as I and my clients have learned, as a campaign matures — and you are looking to improve upon current and past results — that lingering question once again rears its head. ROI or volume? It’s very hard to run disciplined, scientific campaign tests and optimizations if that question isn’t clearly answered and adhered to.

A Practical Example

Case in point, a niche player in the crowded web-based CRM space relies on Google AdWords for a good percentage of their inbound lead flow. The client is primarily interested in volume of leads within a reasonable cost per lead (which fluctuates based on the health of the pipeline). For instance, one month he may get 100 legitimate sales leads at an average cost of $50 per lead.

The person running the search campaign begins implementing tactics necessary to bring the overall cost per lead down (improve ROI). Things like:

Pausing or bidding down on phrases that aren’t converting
Pausing or bidding down on times of day that aren’t converting as well
Changing the days of the week that ads are shown
Restructuring campaigns to improve performance

Methodically, over time, the cost per lead goes down significantly and they can get more leads with the budget. Mission accomplished right? Not so fast.

The phone rings. It’s the VP of Sales. “What the heck happened to my leads? They are way down!” And the search marketer replies, “But we’ve lowered the cost per lead from $50 to $30.” To which the VP quickly snaps back, “Just get us more leads!”

It’s easy to just cave and turn up the dials to satisfy the demand. But that still, quiet voice in us wants to push back and do what we know is the “right” thing for the long term health of the campaign.

As a dear client/mentor of mine once said, “Todd, you need to learn, the ‘right’ thing to do, isn’t always the thing that gets done in a corporate setting.” In other words, even though we would like to believe (and sometimes are even told by the boss) “it’s all about ROI,” often times it’s simply about filling the funnel.

I know for a lot of veteran sales and marketing executives this paradox is nothing new. It isn’t specific to the Internet. But for those readers who may be climbing up the business ladder coming from the search marketing side of things, I wanted you to know you are not alone in facing this issue! So what can we do about it?

The Easy Fix In The Perfect World

The easiest solution of course is to force all stakeholders to agree to stick to one goal or the other. You’ve got to try and be steadfast. Stick to your guns, Kimosabe. When we jump between the two goals we inevitably end up paying a “stupid tax” that more disciplined campaign managers seem to be exempt from.

Meanwhile, In the Real World

Unfortunately, we know that even in ROI driven campaigns, you will probably need to ramp up the volume/spend any way in the short term to appease the boss/client. Still, remember and try and explain to the client:

In a fixed budget environment, a temporary ramp up in spend will undoubtedly cause your total lead volume for the month to decline and the cost per lead to increase.

I’ve provided a link to a spreadsheet that illustrates this concept.

Every Cloud… Search Industry Opportunities Caused By Credit Crunch

Kelvin — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:16:46 +0000

At the moment doom and gloom seems to surround the economy, whether or not search marketing budgets are going to fall remains to be seen though.

We’ve had a few clients get more pragmatic with their spend; but generally it doesn’t seem as bad as everyone feared. Though that could easily change.

But with every negative situation there comes opportunities. And in the search sphere there are few you’d be mad not to take advantage of.

Buy up failed businesses Domains

When there’s a downturn it’s inevitable a few businesses will hit the wall. In the past if your competitor went bust you might by up their stock at discount, nowadays top of an insolvency sale shopping list should be the company’s domain.

At the very least you could 301 redirect the domain to your client’s website. Eventually the link equity should transfer over and you should see a corresponding uplift in the rankings.

Alternatively you could keep the site as a going concern and differentiate the sites with slightly different marketing messages. Or maybe you could remove all commercial content and develop a semi-independent community; it would teach a lot about your clients customers and build a strong relationship.

PPC Costs Should Fall

One of the biggest problems facing the PPC management sector in the last few years has been bid inflation. If people are blindly throwing money at PPC it’s harder to create a campaign that creates great ROI while still doing good volume.

If belts tighten; then those spending more than they makes sense will either have to switch their campaigns off or become more realistic. Those who were bidding based on their margins should make more as their volume increases.

Performance Billing Will Become Even More Popular

As an agency, taking a client purely on performance billing is always a risky business, do they have a secret cachet of bought links from MFA in the casino sector which has set of a filter? Or has the marketing department promised complete freedom over the site only for the web developers to have completely different ideas?

However when you get performance billing right and you are confident in your abilities it can create great revenue for your agency. Some of our most rewarding relationships aren’t with our best known clients, it’s with businesses who know the value of a lead and are willing to reward us based on those leads.

The clear KPIs motivate our team and when the performance billing is uncapped it pleases the accounts people too!

The Optimization Process

Jeffrey Smith — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:13:58 +0000

SEO is a combination of distinct processes designed to improve search engine placement for your website, but what does that really mean when you break it down to performance and performance benchmarks?

Do higher rankings always translate to higher sales conversion? The answer depends on how thorough your research was in determining the appropriate keywords and search behaviors of the target demographic best suited for your offering.

Developing your brand amidst the constant noise in the marketplace is a key factor for standing out from the crowd to distinguish your website. One common method for accomplishing this feat is to dominate a series of semantic phrases all derivatives of action words, keywords or modifiers, also known as qualifiers that a prospect might use to find your site in a search engine.

When you consider the impact of how much traffic a lucrative keyword can yield, the only real factors for consideration are (1) relevance (2) the competition for the keyword and (3) the time it takes to acquire it.

Assuming that you have performed due diligence and investigated 3-5 of the top ranking websites to create a base for your assumptions, if the keywords they use that comprise a large percentage of their traffic, then under the same premise, those same keywords can work for you and deliver relevant traffic to your pages.

Search engines have been around long enough to determine what quality is, short-cuts that may have worked in the past are now falling short of producing viable results.

This is primarily due to engineers making refinements and adjustments to search relevance and relevance score in the search algorithm (the systemic programs that monitors quality and assigns relevance to each query).

What this means is, optimization, in order to be effective, involves a grasp of multiple variables that must coincide with the conversion objective. In addition, such variables should mutually appease the search engine spiders and humans (who actually pay the bills) to elevate your online brand.

Based on that objective, you must measure the impact it has after implementation (do you receive more calls, leads from your contact forms, a higher RSS subscription rate for your RSS feed, etc.).

When considering organic optimization, it really boils down to targeting as much low hanging fruit as you can (less competitive keywords with traffic), so you can chip away systemically at the root phrases (one and two word keyword combinations) that typically yield higher search volume.

Once your site gets in the index (in the top 10 results) for one keyword or key phrase, then it becomes easier to move other related keywords into the picture to drive traffic to your website.

The typical process of optimization may resemble some of these facets:

1) Perform a sweep of the site to determine prominent ranking factors such as;

a) Does the website have sufficient content on the subject?

b) Is the content crawl-able and accessible from each page in the site through proper navigation?

c) Are the keywords present in the title tags and meta data or tags for a CMS system?

d) Are the internal links optimized or just saying “click here” if they are even using links at all?

e) How old is the site? Fresh out of the box? A few years old? Online for 5 years or more?

Finding the Right SEO Company for the Best SEO Services

Jeffrey Smith — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:40:01 +0000

Search engine optimization otherwise known as SEO, is comprised of multiple disciplines. Each has its roots in improving a websites performance by streamlining facets ranging from site and information architecture, content, internal / external links, the programming platform / code selection, site analytics and the hosting environment.

Each facet holds a holistic piece of the puzzle for a finely-tuned web presence and for competitive search engine placement, each must be refined to be functionally lean and efficient and calibrated to serve the whole.

Regardless of which criteria is the target for refinement, one common thread exists (the goal of optimal performance). However, although theory and application are like two sides of a coin, when it comes down to the “hands on” part of SEO, not all SEO companies are not created equal.

Just because a firm wears the moniker of SEO does not instill proficiency across a broad range required skills. In fact, it is important to know which skills a firm excels in to determine the benefits of their own strengths and weaknesses when considering the type and scope of your campaign.

It is important to know what an SEO company specializes in, some SEO companies specialize in pay per click marketing, others in creating optimized database driven websites, other firms may specialize in SEO web design or content creation and link building services. If you requested services from any of them for the wrong specialty, then ultimately your sites performance would suffer.

To simplify, this can be classified as on page SEO (anything pertaining to the content development, pages, titles, tags, internal links to connect the site i.e. navigation) or off page SEO (link building from other sites, custom program development to move information in and out of a database, optimizing server performance, creation of .htaccess or robots.txt files and dozens of other IT related functions).

The extent of their knowledge in a field should be part of the due diligence process, so make sure you get plenty of examples prior to making your decision about selecting the best firm to fit your needs.

This is not a criticism to any firm, but just as each has a distinct specialty (competitive placement, conversion optimization, analytics and tracking, etc.) so to are the needs of each client unique. A mom and pop shop based in a local region will not require the same amount of optimization as a national company vying for thousands of competitive keywords with a massive content management system or shopping cart.

Why SEO Should Never Be An Afterthought

Jeffrey Smith — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:31:58 +0000

SEO should never be an afterthought, there are essentially two ways to rank (1) as a result of clear planning with deliberate intent and a master game plan developed over time or (2) hey is it too late to fix this site and eek some performance out of it?

How many times have you ever thought, if I only knew what I know now years ago (when you first started your website) and wished you could simply turn back the clock and start fresh, then you are not alone.

In case you ever wondered how to essentially rank for everything in your niche, then you could take a few pages from the SEO play book of the site we stumbled across earlier today. In fact, it was so inspiring, I had to write about it to commend them on a job well done.

Search engine optimization is constantly evolving and with it the semblance of design, content and site architecture are fusing into “the ideal delivery system” to entice traffic, user engagement, viral marketing and conversion.

This mutation / new generation of hybrid sites (part e-commerce, part blog, part affiliate site) are emerging frequently and blazing a trail to the top 10 of multiple industries. Webmasters (much like scientists) understand that when you properly combine the right elements and streamline content, links and information architecture for a common goal, the result is an authority site designed with a distinct purpose that gains momentum daily.

You can learn a great deal from looking beneath the hood of other websites (to see which layers are worthy of emulating or modifying from other SEO’s or web developers). Here is an example of a site that is truly a masterpiece built to virtually dominate its industry through layers of overlapping optimization, content development and site architecture.

The site, www.like.com holds top ranking positions for thousands of brands, has millions of pages indexed, hundreds of thousands of links and yet has a cool demeanor and impeccable design with a strong visual call to action. All of the components were so balanced, that I simply could not shake the sites blueprint after observing the amount of thoughtful planning and advanced SEO tactics that went into developing and maintaining such a pristine web creation.

This is clearly an example of SEO done right. If anyone ever told you that a theme cannot be modified to encapsulate multiple product lines within a broad market category, then this site is an excellent case study, not to mention, it has style to boot.

The fact is, acquiring positioning for each and every keyword is a task unto itself. Each page should be treated as its own site (then again you never know how many sites were 301 redirected into this one). In any case, it is important for a site to constantly utilize the mechanisms of self-referral (internal linking) to cement relevance from within.

This when combined with an optimized CMS (content management system), the proper use of titles and tags and links results in a ranking juggernaut that expresses itself like a dynamic time-released capsule through SERP (search engine result page) domination.

SEO is Not The Only Solution

Jeffrey Smith — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:57:19 +0000

Search engine optimization is not the only solution, SEO, like a tool, serves a very specific purpose and function, which is to increase exposure for your website. However, just because you gain exposure and drive traffic to a page or a website, does not ensure success alone.

Factors such as usability (navigation, image placement, font selection, color choice), having a clear call to action, having impeccable content and using the right triggers to engage your target audience are all part of achieving a successful online marketing campaign.

The tendency to rely too heavily on one marketing medium is a crutch that must be balanced and evaluated for its overall performance, it either works or your attachment to it prevents you from letting it go and finding other alternatives.

SEO is inevitably chained to the calculation of relevance and the whims of engineers who program the search engines to return the most relevant results. The parameters are based on the search query and the ability for the search engine to find relevant information on a topic.

As a result, search engines constantly scour the web looking for websites and solutions to quell such inquiries and provide the ideal solution to each proposed impulse. The obvious attraction to search engine traffic is, if you understand what the search engines are looking for, and your content provides that, then you are a likely candidate for high placement and visibility in their index.

The key is, understanding “how to create and position your content” and how this component is entirely up to you. This is where most fail to see how they can take control over search engine positioning. The days of the 5 page website ranking as the most relevant result are coming to a close, if you want the spotlight, you have to earn it with useful information or immense link popularity from a highly trafficked and trusted site to vouch for your pages.

Topical relevance, trust of the domain (how long has it been around, who links to you, who you link to), site architecture, proper titles and tags, proper use of keywords and context and link popularity all comprise relevant factors that have impact.

Although you may not have control of some of these factors, when you start and how you refine your website is still under your control. No amount of SEO is going to make someone purchase a product they don’t need, just like no amount of SEO or keyword positioning is going to appeal to a person who is not interested in the topic.