Adding new content to your website on a regular basis

1. The search engines LOVE to crawl new pages.  There is competition for every key word and phrase.  With so much competition, one of the only ways to differentiate sites is to give credit to those sites that are adding content on a daily basis.  New content will be indexed and this can place you ahead of your competition.
2. Adding new content to your site on a regular basis keeps the search engine spider “interested” in your site.  Search engines like sites that add new content and so do your visitors.  When search engines find a site that is continually adding new content, they tend to crawl it more boosting your rankings.
3. More pages mean more content is indexed.  Perform any search on Google yahoo and bing and you will be hard pressed to find a site showing up well with just a handful of pages.  Sites that are rich in content do well in search.
4. Content also promotes more inbound links which help your ranking.  The more inbound links the higher you will be ranked against your competition.

Whoever is writing your content should completely understand SEO. When writing any content weather it be for a web page or a blog your writers should be including keywords. Don’t forget to teach them that the more times they use a specific keyword the better. It’s also a good idea to stress the importance of press releases to your writers. Putting together a release at least once a month will drastically help SEO. This release like any content should focus on specific keywords and use them as often as possible within a release.

As part of your SEO strategy you should have 5 or 10 keywords from your overall keyword list you’d like to focus on each month.  Focusing on these terms for a period of time longer than a month is fine, however this list of terms should always be shared with people throughout your company. This way they can be used on a daily basis in blogs, press releases, or whatever other content is being posted online.

Remember, the more people within your company who understand SEO the better. The first step to getting SEO deployed throughout your entire company is education.

1. You need to understand the technology and what drives rankings.   Here at Kirk, we have helped invent technologies like Jungle Torch.  Jungle Torch gives us unprecedented insight into what is happening on a site from a search perspective.

2. We have a process that works!.  Our average client will see a 200% jump in qualified traffic in the first 6 months and an additional 100% 6 months after that.

3. We eat our own dog food.  Do a search for Website Design and Development companies and Kirk is 1# or 2# at any given time.  There are over 542 million web pages competing for this term.

4. We have the people.  SEO is tough work and with out a large staff to do that work good SEO is impossible!

So, before your hire an SEO company, let them tell you what their SEO plan is and prove their worth.

The Dos:

1. Learn as much as you can about SEO. Your web design and development company is there to help you and offer expert advice when it comes to SEO. Like anything else the more you understand about SEO the more you will be able to help your SEO Company create the best ROI for your business. After all SEO has one of the highest ROI’s in marketing.
2. Set realistic goals that you are able to measure. Examples of these are increasing sales, generating more leads, increasing conversion rates, and improve brand awareness
3. Build a mobile strategy. It is worth taking the time to research how many of your visitors are using mobile devices to visit your site. Although all websites should be accessible via mobile devices it might make sense to build a separate mobile version of your website if you have a high number of visits from smart phones or tablets.
4. Content is key. One of the most time consuming aspects of web design and development is the process of getting content. All your content should not only explain what you do, but should be written with SEO in mind. To steam line this process and ensure you’re using content to improve SEO we suggest having a writer who specializes in SEO create your content.
5. Write with calls to action in mind. Remember that a call to action is an easy way for your customers to decide what they want to do next.
6. Ask yourself how often you will want to update your content. If you see yourself adding or changing content on a regular basis, which by the way is very good for SEO, than you might want to include a CMS system on your site. This would allow you to easily change and update content on your own.
7. Check out your competition! Visit the sites of a few of your competitors and write down the things you like and dislike about their sites. This will help your web design and development company create a site that works best for your business
8. Trust the experts! Your web design and development company knows best, it’s what they do.  We have found that when people enter the web development process with an open mind we are able to build a site that not only meets their expectations and goals but also exceeds them.
9. Ask Why! If you want your customers to do something specific on your site tell them why they should do it.  For instance is someone follows you on Facebook how will they benefit from it? If it’s daily updates on your products or access to discount it will always help to remind them why they want to sign up.

The Don’ts

1. DIY! Do it yourself websites often look outdated and shockingly like you built it yourself. Since your website is typically the first experience people have with your brand you want to create the best possible experience that conveys the most professional feeling.
2. Use flash.  A site built entirely in flash is not SEO friendly and can’t be viewed on most mobile devices. This means that not only can people not find your site but also a lot of people won’t be able to view it even if they do.
3. Use vague testimonials. Testimonials can build credibility especially if your customer can relate to them. Having a writer contact the individuals giving the testimonial will allow the writer to ask specific questions. This will enable them to put together a testimonial that is specific and easy for our customers to relate to
4. Make people think. Most people visiting your site know exactly what they want, it could be as specific as info on a product or as basic as wanting to learn what your company does. If a visitor can’t figure out what to do next within 3 seconds you need to rethink the ease of use of your website.
5. Expect Customers. We often see people who assume that driving traffic to a website involves nothing other than putting a site up. This is not the case and often times creating traffic on a new website takes along time, SEO or course can help to speed up the process and create new visitors.

1. Massive Market Share Decline – If you flew or were at a conference two years ago, chances are the person next to you was using a black berry. At that time according to comscore, they had almost 43% of the market, today that share is down to 19% and falling, fast.

2. Executive Flight- Executive teams can make or break a company and that is true especially in turbulent times. Now is no time for RIM employees to be wondering who is guiding their ship.

3. Stock Drop – RIMs stock has plummeted almost 70% in the last few months, this makes them ripe for a take over.

4. No Innovation- The bottom line is the competition is producing, better, faster,sexier and more functional products that consumers want.

Given the unprecedented speed at which the market place is changing, and the lack of innovation from RIM, we see a take over as imminent within the next year or the company going out of business within two.

Measurement
A good SEO consultancy will be able to measure a dramatic increase in qualified traffic to a persons website. Don’t be fooled by keywords that you might rank high for but that have no search volume.

Bad SEO Tricks
Many SEO consultants will simply add on geographic descriptors onto a clients keyword. For example, lets say you are looking for appliances. If you are an appliance center, key words like wash machines for sale might be a good key word because of its high search volume. An SEO consultant with few resources might add in wash machines in NY. This is an easy term to rank well for, unfortunately, there are few searches for this word.

Staff
SEO is hard work. A good SEO consultancy should be able to demonstrate that they have real employees working on your behalf.

Trust
There is a huge lack of trust in the industry. A good SEO consultancy should be able to show plenty of video testimonials of happy customers and also show a huge roster of long-term clients.

Technology
A good SEO consultancy will employ technology at all levels of their SEO process.

There is nothing earth shattering about this algorithmic change from Google. Any company should always be keeping content fresh. There are a few ways to do this.

1. Get a Blog! Blogs are an easy way to keep your users or customers up to date on what is happening.
2. Update your site! update your website with new and interesting events that you company will be attending.
3. Get others involved in content. Relegating content to one person can be a tough job, try to get others to contribute to content development.

1. No Mobile - Any site designed today needs to be viewable on a host of machines and devices. That includes Android devices, Apple devices etc. Most website design and development companies do not have the staff to adequately

2. SEO – SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a term that is loosely tossed about by Website Design and Development Agencies. Most Website Design and Development companies might add Meta tags but do so with no input on what are the correct key words. This type of junior SEO will do nothing for the clients web traffic.

3. Website Design and Development - What is the point of a fancy website if no one can find it? We see this happen again and again. Sites that takes 12 months to build, with fancy graphics and the site is invisible to the outside world.

If you are thinking thinking about the Website Design and Development project, you need to take a careful look at these three points so that your website can be a success.

1. No one cares that you’re a “global leader”
Consider this opening sentence at one b-to-b website:

“Our products are used throughout the globe for an extremely wide variety of applications. Through constant innovation we stay ahead of the competition.”
You’ll find this one (or a variation of it) as the opener on millions of b-to-b websites. Well ho hum…It says nothing unique. Indeed, it is so not unique that it can apply to just about any company on earth that supplies a product in more than one country. So why would you open with a sentence like this, rather than a benefit you offer, or a problem that you can solve?

2. “I can do the website copywriting myself.”
The truth is, if you’re a fairly good writer and you can find the time, you might be able to do your own web copywriting—at least for the initial copy for your site. But as countless sites on the web with one or two 3-year-old press releases and an ancient blog entry from 2009 prove, you probably won’t have the time. Hiring someone who is good at website copywriting is cheap money, given that you’ll take a lot longer to do it and your time is probably worth more than someone who is an expert at website copywriting.

3. Website copywriting that favors features over benefits.
Consider for a moment these features: It’s quieter, it has automatic temperature control and sleek new styling: It’s got to be a new car, right? Actually, it’s a refrigerator.
Food stays cold so it doesn’t go bad in a refrigerator. A car gets you where you want to go. Both are benefits and they’re the main reason people buy them. If you’re selling abstract or esoteric web-based services, you’ll need to get the benefits across quickly and clearly lest your prospects bounce right off your site because they can’t get past the features to find out how you can help them.

4. “I can do my own SEO copy writing”
You’ll notice a few words highlighted in this copy. Frankly, they’re the keywords for search engine optimization that will get our website ranked higher on Google. While you can likely come up with some keywords that pertain to your company, good SEO copywriters don’t guess, they use analytics to find the best keywords and to determine keyword density. For example, I know that the keyword phrase “website copywriting services” got 5,400 searches on Google last month and that there are 1,330,000 web pages that have this keyword phrase, yielding a search/competition ratio of 0.00406. Compare that to the keyword phrase web site copywriting, which got only 2,900 search, but has 19,600,000 competing pages and a search/competition ratio of only 0.00015. That small change in wording makes for a drastically different result in your success at climbing search engines.