Articles

Having Google, Yahoo, MSN and the smaller search engines find your website is easy if you know where to start.  Over the next ten days I will be posting tips on how to your site to the top of search engine results.

Go to: Tip 1, Tip 2, Tip 3, Tip 4, Tip 5, Tip 6, Tip 7, Tip 8, Tip 9, Tip 10

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director

This is an extremely useful tool, which puts SEO data directly in your search results.  Information provided includes page rank, domain age, links from Yahoo, del.icio.us, Technorati, Alexa rank, Cached, DMOZ, RSS subscribers, dir.yahoo.com listing, Whois.  This is an extension for Firefox, so you’ll need the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Click to get it: SEO for Firefox

By: Chris Randall, Technical Director

How can you become an industry resource with Facebook?

Whatever industry you are in, you may have a great number of resources to share with potential customers

What are some of the things you share?

• Educational Videos and Webcasts
• Blog Posts of Industry News
• Industry insights
• New legislation
• Industry Trends

When you engage your customers and help them solve their business problems , you position yourself as expert in your industry.  Facebook can be an excellent tool to help you show your expertise.

User experience is becoming an integral part of SEO.   Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo are continuously collecting data from users and about web pages and are getting better at interpreting it.    Retaining users on your pages for a certain time period and click through rates (varies with industries) are now an important factor in SEO.

To establish a sites relevancy, search engines looks at behavioral factors in order to learn more about intent:

• Search engine queries
• Prior search queries
• Time interval between those queries
• Semantic relationships
• Click through rates for different listing.  (If users click on a listing and then go back right away, they may remove that listing and artificially lower its position for one or more keywords.)

Links are the hub of search engine relevancy, because links are a leading quality indicator of site relevancy.  Before search engines and web commercialization, it was tougher to find information and all surfers had to rely on was links.

Today Google looks at:

• Anchor text
• The page the link is on: title, authority
• The age of the link
• Location of the link on the page
• Google is biased toward .edu domains since they were the first on the scene, and usually contain quality content and resources

As the web became commercial, links became a form of advertising, where a link could be bought or artificially made by spammers.  This is the reason that Google is biased toward older links and links from trusted domains.

~Chris Randall

Search engine analyze where terms are located on each web page to determine their relevancy to one another just as they do with keyword density.  Terms which are physically closer are generally considered more relevant to each other and therefore the page is considered more relevant to the search.  It is considered normal for keywords to appear separately throughout a page, just be sure to include your key terms together at least once in the title, heading or body.

Keyword density is an evaluation of how often a word is on a page in relation to other words.  Although it was a key player in SEO ranking in the past, it is often over-hyped by many Search Engine Optimization Companies in order to keep revenue streams high.  The better search engines use do use keyword density somewhat but also use the location of terms on a page, word proximity and are putting more and more weight on natural language processing (natural language patterns) for search engine rankings.

Google’s AdPlanner stats list Facebook as the number one web destination with over 35% of all web traffic. They have over 540 million users and have received over 570 billion page views and outranks every other non-Google site.

Blogspot is in 7th place, WordPress.com in 12th, Twitter ranks 18th, Flickr is 31st and LinkedIn weighs in at 56th place with 1.7 billion views.

Constant Contact is a top-ranked email marketing service, which has a comprehensive feature list and a great template designer area.  It has top notch help center and its tutorials and helpful document creation wizards made creating a new campaign a snap.

With Constant Contact you can create your bulk emails through their service and even import your email marketing campaigns from an HTML page.

Comprehensive Feature Set

To build your email contact list you will first create a category and then populate it with your email list, which can be either manually input or imported using Excel, Outlook, Outlook Express or a comma delineated (.csv) file.  You can even customize your demographics by filtering your contacts according to various attributes.

Constant Contact also has the ability to build aliases to show who the message is coming from.  If you want to present the message as from the President of the company, you can place their name in the “from” field.

Constant Contact also helps you stay out of trouble and legal by managing your bounced emails and unsubscribe information and keep your customers happy with permission based campaigning.

Easy to Use

Setting up your emailing list and other features is very simple to do. The design of Constant Contact is set so that navigation is at the top of the screen and consists of seven different tabs.  Just click on the appropriate tab and the program will walk you through the process. There are also some quick links so you can create your email campaign.

Email Campaigns

You can efficiently create an email using one of the templates or use your own HTML source.

Constant Contact includes a large range of professional looking templates that would suit most businesses and a very simple template editor.  All the parts of the template are clearly labeled and easily modified using the “edit” button. You can import your own images and they can be moved around easily with a drag and drop feature for each section of your message.

Ample Campaign Reporting

Constant Contact provides all the basic requirements to create a comprehensive report including bounces, bounced percent, complaints, opt-outs, click-throughs, click-through percent and forwards.

Unsurpassed Help and Support:

Constant Contact includes a comprehensive support center that includes an extensive, searchable knowledgebase; a learning center with tutorials, live demos and scheduled webinars.  They also have knowledgeable and helpful people if you chose to email or phone.

Summary:

You can’t go wrong with Constant Contact, the email designer is a simple, the creation process is smooth via the wizards and if you need help there are the online resources and the contact center.

Visit them online at www.constantcontact.com for more info.

Call us today to begin your e-mail marketing campaign!  (204) 415-6711

“Stop Words” are words found regularly in the English language.  They are words used in every conversation, regardless of the topic like: a, the, all, but, etc.  Search engines will usually ignore these words from searches automatically.  For example if a user were to search for “bird and cat” then the search engine will exclude the “and.”