Small Business Website Design & Development
Want to network and learn Search Engine Marketing from the pros in Houston, TX? Check out my article, SearchHOU Building a Community the Right Way | DFWSEM.
Very honored to have my first prominent guest posted picked up by DFW SEM. Looking forward to helping Internet Marketing groups in Dallas and Houston work together as Texans.
The beginning of any new year gives each & every website developer super powers. Yes, super powers. Come January, website developers everywhere can tell you exactly which website design trends will appear in the next 12 months. After these super visions settle, we like to take a look back on the year & see exactly which website design trends flourished and kick to the curb the ones that flopped.
The beginning of 2014 did not experience much innovation. Still riding on the coat tails of 2013, we saw bloggers write about simple designs, special typography & responsive websites.
Been there, done that.
In our last blog post, we talked about the basics of A/B split testing – what it is and what to test. More crucial than knowing the basics though is knowing what to avoid. Mistakes in A/B split testing make it more likely that you will misinterpret results from your experiment. It also often times leads to more testing that may not have even been necessary to begin with. Below we present to you the top three mistakes people make when A/B split testing and how to avoid them.
As a business owner, one of your main goals is figuring out what your customers want and need. The art of deciphering what your customers want is a tricky and sometimes impossible task. The list of ways you can get feedback from your existing customers is almost endless. However, how do you figure out the needs of people who are not your customers yet? Web developers pondered over this dilemma and developed A/B split testing – a website optimization technique designed to target potential customers.
In our last blog post, we gave an overview of third party commenting systems. If you do take your commenting system to the next level, you will then need to actually pick a third party commenting system. Just as your business is unique, so are the commenting systems, so it is important to choose one that best fits your needs. Here we have outlined a list of the most commonly used third party commenting systems and the benefits of each.
Blogs are instrumental tools for increasing the amount of traffic on your website, and as a result a growing number of companies are implementing blogs onto their websites. Blogs also provide a great medium for customers to interact with your company, mostly through comments. Now more and more blogs are implementing third party commenting systems to make the most out of customer interactions. Third party commenting systems have advantages over standard commenting systems including increased visibility on social media, their ability to engage audiences, and preventing spam on your blog. But beware – not all that glitters is gold.
SEO is one of the hottest topics in the web world today. It is the reason your website is at the top, or bottom, of the search engine results. It is also the reason the number of visits to your website has either skyrocketed or, in some cases, plummeted. When looking at how effective your website is though, it is important to go beyond SEO. Website developers have a number of factors they track to determine how successful your website is. Today we’ll examine bounce rate and exit rate.
According to Wolfram Alpha there are an estimated 625.3-million websites and 10.82-billion pages of indexed content on the world wide web. The State of Search conference is all about how to stand out, and be that one in a million website.
The days are over when you just throw a website out there, and expect the money to come rolling in. The social media world has also rapidly matured. Setting up a Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest page and waiting for people to flock to your account are as probably rare as lightning striking in the same place twice.
In order to be found, a website needs a strategic combination of search optimization, paid advertising, social media and often times strong local strategy elements. The State of Search conference brings in experts from around the United States to the Dallas metroplex for a no holds barred, four track, all day conference.
My State of Search strategy was to learn a little bit of everything. Therefore, I used the morning to bounce from the Local Search Track to Social, and then the Paid Track. Once lunch was over I went to the Data Track, SEO and finished with the Social Track. Add in keynotes from industry titans like Rand Fishkin and Duane Forrester and what do you have? You have a recipe for a full day of bleeding edge Internet marketing strategies as told by the people that live, eat and breathe it. What else could you ask for?
Now more than ever, your presence on the web determines the amount of business you get. 71% of consumers start all their purchase decisions by using a search engine. Another 18% use a search engine to narrow down their choices. That leaves you with a whopping 11% of customers who do not use a search engine, which means it’s a good idea to learn exactly how does SEO work.
With so many people using search engines to make buying decisions, it is important to learn how to get your website at the top of any Google search. Since 70% of consumers ignore paid advertisements on search engine results, you need to be able to rise to the top without buying your way to the top. The concept of search engine optimization piqued the interest of website developers and small business owners alike. It all began in the mid 90’s, when two Stanford students began wondering “How does SEO work?” In the 10 years since then, SEO has changed and developed dramatically.
