Archive for September, 2010

Your SEO Strategy Is Your Online Marketing Strategy

Thinking of the two as different strategies is like keeping product development and marketing in separate silos. Good marketing is when the product is the marketing. Making a crap product and then trying to position it as something very cool and needed is an expensive and uphill battle, likewise making a site and then working on the SEO strategy is also very short sighted. If you’ve ever done an SEO audit before you know its pretty much like saying, “let me evaluate how well your online marketing is done”.

Is the purpose of SEO to get more traffic or get more customers? The two don’t necessarily co-inside. If you build your SEO strategy as an afterthought instead of it being your marketing strategy, you’ll probably get more traffic but not more customers. A separate SEO strategy usually sounds like, “I want to rank high for this keyword.” To which the answer is usually, “what makes you think you deserve to rank high for that keyword?” If your site is built to offer the best information, service, resource and user experience then it will rank high for that keyword. If your site doesn’t meet that criteria then doing a bunch of “link building” will just cause more people to come to your site and quickly leave again because you don’t offer what they are looking for.

So when designing a marketing strategy online think of it as an SEO strategy and results are bound to be more effective.

Leave a Comment

September 22, 2010 · Filed under Internet Marketing, SEO

3 Sites Designed By Someone Who Is Not A Web Designer

I think these 3 sites I made are pretty decent especially since I don’t know how to do web design. There don’t have a lot of flare but when it comes down to it, I think a small business’s site should be more functional and informational then wow you with design.

All these sites are made in WordPress. When I first started learning WordPress it was a revelation. With little programming knowledge and design skills I could make totally decent looking websites. Not only do they look decent, they are structured to index really well and easily in Google, there are a plethora of free themes and plugins to use, the amount of answers to WordPress questions in fourms is so extensive that just about any problem in one search away from an answer and it’s all free.

There is a learning curve on how to hack a theme to get it to look how you want. If you start out with a theme that closely matches what you are going for in the first place than all you really need to do is change colors, the header image and little things like lines or sizes that you don’t want. I use the Firefox plugin Firebug to figure out which part of the code needs to get changed and then I use ctr + f to find that code in the editor to make the change. It pretty much just takes patience. Now I can churn out a simple site like these in a few hours.

YoxallCreekllc.com was built on the Green Flower Theme.
ElementGlassInc.com was built on Valentine Kiss Theme.
ToppersHairStudio.com was built on the new default Twenty Ten Theme.

Some Plugins and tips on how to design a website when you are not a designer:
1. A good looking font can go a long way. I use dafont.com for cool free fonts.
2. Contact7 Form plugin makes forms for the Contact page as easy as cut and paste.
3. Inline Google Maps plugin allows for a nice interactive map of the business location.
4. Google Fonts plugin is an easy way to change fonts on the site without any work.
5. WordPress Gallery Slideshow is good for slick rotating images on a home page.
6. I use this color scheme app for coordinating colors to use on the site.
As far as other non-visable plugins go, you need All In One SEO plugin, Google Analyticator for installing Google Analytics and Google Sitemap Generator to instantly make a site map to submit to Google Webmaster Tools. Also big helps are Page Link Manager which lets you turn on and off pages really easily and My Page Order that lets you drag and drop the order of pages in the nav.

Leave a Comment

September 15, 2010 · Filed under Web Design