SEO Blog

Every business today understands that today’s marketplace is a highly competitive one and that it’s important to understand who you competition is and what they are doing to keep ahead of the game. The big question is how to keep ahead of them. The most common approach is to make sure your prices are better than theirs and if your competitor is having a sale, you immediately launch a bigger sale.

Rather than having a solid marketing plan of your own in place, this method depends almost entirely on what the “guy next door” is doing then trying to undercut him in order to hopefully get some of that business. It is certainly an easy way out, which is why so many businesses rely on using this approach. Even if you manage to do this on a fairly regular basis, you are still always one step behind your competition rather than creating your own niche and unique brand.

We spoke, in a previous blog, about some common errors that are made when websites are designed if the designer fails to address the factors that make a site, “website friendly”.  We emphasized that websites must be monitored regularly and changes implemented as needed as well as addressing issues relating to broken links, HTML source codes, length of page titles, and the use of keywords and phrases in page titles.

The use of “mouse-overs” is another common issue that arises. While they can certainly add to the style of a website, caution must be used as they can just as easily be a source of frustration for users if not designed properly. Cryptic images that have to be decoded by visitors is a major deterrent and you certainly want potential customers to have a pleasant experience each time they visit your site. If unsure, keeping it simple is the best way to ensure that users will be able find all that they are looking for.

If you are going to invest your time and your money to have a website designed, you want to make sure that you will be getting a site that is search engine friendly. Having a website that incorporates all the information you want potential clients to see and one that is aesthetically pleasing is a waste of your time and money if users can’t find it. And, if users can’t find you, it means that the search engines either can’t find you or you are not ranking high enough to make your site relevant.

In order for a website to be search engine friendly, it must be optimized by an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professional and it must be monitored regularly in order to keep up with constantly changing algorithms, updates to content, etc. There are some common errors that can occur if a website is not designed with SEO in mind.  One such issue is when your site contains broken links. This is the result of having a hypertext reference leading to a document that does not exist. When a spider is reading your site and comes across such a link, it simply turns around and goes back home and never gets to finish checking out the rest of the site. This can result in your site not being added to search engines’ databases.

So, you have a website and it looks very professional; all the information and/or products that you deal with have been incorporated by a designer and everything looks great. Now you just need sit back and wait for people to go to your site. So how come you aren’t getting as many hits as you thought you would be getting? The reason is pretty simple but the solution is much more complicated. Before anyone can see your site, search engines have to see it and that part isn’t so simple.

The Internet can be a deep cavernous cave and search engines can only go in so far. A couple of the reasons that search engines don’t see most sites is because they are ether housed within sites that have been dynamically generated or they are not connected to any other site. If search engines can’t find your site, it doesn’t matter how great it looks or how much you spent having it developed. It’s easy for websites to be “disconnected” and there are several reasons why this happens.

• Although new content or pages are being added regularly, they may not have been submitted or resubmitted.