Optimized Web Strategy

THE WEB IS FREAKING SCARY
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important to the success of a website.
Can’t figure out why your web page won’t rank in Google or Yahoo? Probably because you’re not using comprehensive keyword research, optimized content and proper technological structure that gets you ranked on the major search engines for maximum exposure.

How does Search Engine Optimization work?
Search engines such as Yahoo and Google use algorithms (big, big mathematical computations) to rank websites. Those algorithms calculate data that is supplied to them by search engine robots. Search engine robots “crawl” the web, traveling through links on websites, collecting data about the content and wording on pages and how that content matches up with the page’s headings and titles and its inbound and outbound links.

These robots also look for things like how long a domain name has been active, for how long it has been purchased, and the ratio of fresh content versus longstanding content is on a website… and this is only the beginning. With careful consideration, technical and SEO planning, site rank can improve in a pretty short period of time. You can have the prettiest site in the world, but if no one sees it, you’ve got a problem.

SOCIAL MEDIA OPTIMIZATION
In an ever changing internet landscape, the term “Social Media” has staked a claim. What is Web 2.0? It is the new generation of web development, armed with technologies that facilitate communication, secure information sharing, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. This website, for example, is a Web 2.0 technology. Be sure to understand the landscape of Web 2.0, and how it can help you to grow your business.

GOOGLE ADWORDS
AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads.

What is a  pay-per-click Google Adword?
Go to www.google.com. Search for “tractors”. See the links to the right and up top? They should say “Sponsored Links” next to them? These are pay-per-click ads.

Every time you click on one of these ads the company that placed the ad pays a few cents. Seems like it could get steep, eh? Well it can, but the good news is that if you place the ad correctly, the more clicks you get, the more conversions to sales you should have.

Here’s why: When you place an Adword campaign, you place it using keywords. If you’re selling dog collars, you wouldn’t use “tractors” as a keyword, right? So you place your ad, with optimized keywords, and direct the link in the ad to a landing page* on your website that is SURE to catch the link-clicker’s interest. Hypothetically you should only have people clicking your adword links who were searching for your product in the first place, so if your landing page is great, your clicks-to-conversions should be great too.
*Your landing page is the page on your site where the user is ditrected to after he or she clicks your adword link.

Still worried about all those cents adding up? No worries! You can put a budget on your adword campaign. If you budget $50.00 a month, Google will launch your ad until you run out of money, and it will relaunch it at the beginning of the next billing cycle.

Your goal is to optimize the keywords through metrics like funnels, goals and conversions, so that only truly interested people are clicking on your adword link, and optimize  your landing page to maximize your sale-conversions.

I told you the web was scary.