St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Search Engines’ Category

All my clients know I’ve been saying this for years.  “Put your #1 key phrase in your domain name.”  Well it looks like everyone else is catching on.  I’m sure these gentlemen can explain it better n their interview format:

Every now and then it’s a great idea to follow up on a web site’s progress.  Even if the client wants nothing more than a economical small web site placed up and can’t afford to purchase any marketing for the web site.  Today we’ll following up on a company, Pateco, that just wanted a basic web site and had absolutely no budget for marketing the web site.  That’s ok, because we always throw in our Basic SEO package for free with every full site web design package.

The Basic SEO package is quite extensive.  It won’t get you to the top of the Google pile for very competitive key phrases like “Health Supplements” , but it will help separate you and help you out-compete the other web sites that haven’t done any on page SEO.  Our Basic SEO is basically a full site run, professional on page SEO effort.  This is more extensive (at least at Dream Designs it is) than you think.  The process is partially secret but here’s the things we do that we can publish:

Read the rest of this entry »

When talking about Search Engines with clients, trainees and others, it’s good to speak the same language.  Here’s a growing list of SEO terms and their definitions.  All you other Search Engine Marketers out there . . . Please contribute by commenting below.

• SEO
  • Search Engine Optimization:  The science/art of ranking well in the organic portion of a Search engines results page.
• IBL
  • InBound Link: A link to your web site from another web site (usually).  We could write a whole article about what makes a good IBL and a what makes a bad IBL and maybe we will, but not in this post…
  • A link can be considered an IBL if it comes from your own site if it’s written in an “absolute” versus “relative” manner.  This means the path, if absolute,  would begin with “http://”.
• SE
  • Search Engine
• SERP
  • Search Engine Results Page
• Key phrase (aka keyphrase)
  • A phrase typed into a search engines search box. It’s also called a search term. a search term may be only one word though, a phrase has to be more than one word.
• Purchase related key phrase
  • A key phrase with one or more of the words in it:
    • buy
    • store
    • price
    • purchase
    • or other synonyms for the above
• Bing:  The latest Search engine from Microsoft.
• Double Up:  When two pages from one site are listed one after another in a SERP.  The second is usually indented.  Yahoo pioneered the SERP double up.

I just published another Florida focused web site. This isn’t tightly focused on St. Petersburg but instead on the general FL market. And yes, to a search engine, FL is different than Florida, but their getting lots better. In fact if you search for most terms using FL, instead of Florida, just about everything you get will have the word Florida bolded in the descriptions and the url’s as well as the rare instances of the “word” FL. It’s good that that the SE’s are catching on more and more to the way people write and search. I’m guessing the competition from Bing has had a lot of influence on a lot of the fixes to long time flaws Google has made recently. Including the one where incoming links aren’t so important anymore and the words on the page are more important.

Anyway the new web site is targeting the Fl Fishing market, Read the rest of this entry »

This guy makes some great points about competing in the local search market. Remember, it is a competition, not an automatic thing. You’re not going to be automatically listed #1 on Google for Florida Web Design just because you submitted your web site to Google and you are actually in Florida. On a smaller scale it’s the same for St. Petersburg Web Design. just because you are in St. Petersburg and you tell Google doesn’t mean that the national companies aren’t fighting hard for your spot.

He doesn’t really give away a lot of tips but he does highlight the challenges that most small businesses don’t understand.

Sometimes instinct and timing make a link building campaign just taking off. There are thousands of established directories with good page rank out there. Most of them pass far more page rank to the first links that are added. The ones that fill up the first page of each category. Most link building directories give these coveted spots to websites by the order they join. The first sites that are added to the database of inks are the ones that get listed first in the directory. Since this page is closer to the index page of the directory, it usually has a high page rank. To make a long complicated scientific story a short one, if your performing a link building campaign that involves directories (most do), you want to be one of the first to add your website to the directory.

Most ink builders are put off by the low page rank of these new directories. They are new after all that means there aren’t a lot of links to the site. Our research tells us that a great deal of these sites will fail or close or switch content focus within a year however. Our research tells us that this failure rate isn’t as high as one would think and that the ones that do not fail provide links that pass on lots of link juice within a year or less.

If your going for the big bang, i.e., a proper text link from a related directory, that has a high page rank, well it’s hardly ever going to happen, even if your willing to pay top dollar for these links. The best bet, is to get in on the ground floor of a web directory that you think is going to gain some good page rank (and be there for more than a few months).

With this in mind, I present: Deck Boards Directory, a collection of links to sites that related to the decking industry. Deck builders, decking supply companies, information about the decking, etc. I know it’s going to take off because of the market research and I happen to know the guy who made it, so I know it’s going to stick around for a while. So if you’re marketing a site related to decking or deck boards in some way, go there and get a link form them. They require a link back to them on a page of theirs somewhere, but that’s what you have to give a directory, is a link because they need link juice, just like you!