What is the Value of Quality SEO?
The small business sector should be paying close attention to how their website is performing on the WWW dot. Why? Reason: To find missed opportunities. Small business owners are faced with particular online challenges that their larger competitors may not and that is of having an in-house SEO (search engine optimization) expert or even a SEO budget all.
A website contributes little to no value for its owners if it doesn’t bring in a steady stream of business. Have you ever heard business owners saying “I have a website but do not know how much traffic it generates” or “in this industry clients do not come from the internet”? I have. One has gone as far as said “I have a website but don’t know what the website address is”. Believe me, that one drew a facial expression of absolute horror.
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New project maximizes real estate appraisal company’s marketing
This past year TW Resource Group has grown to provide pretty cool services to some awesome companies around Washington. This time is for a Seattle real estate appraisal firm Lamb Hanson Lamb Appraisal Associates, Inc. This is the largest single project done and the strategies use take advantage of the many solid Wordpress plugins to achieve excellent results.
A little about LambHansonLamb.com
Strategy and hierarchy were the two most important items of this site and would dictate how the rest of the framework would be laid out. LHL provides services across Washington state but those terms would be to difficult to target due to scale so and leads generated for broad terms would yield little. So it was decided to geotarget Seattle since it is the largest metropolitan area.
The homepage and navigation where built to maximize presence within the Seattle market; some examples are the residential appraisals, commercial appraisals, agricultural appraisals and litigation appraisals pages. Notice the title tags and page title match and this allows for greater keyword density while not overloading and spamming the main text. Clear and concise titles make a page more indexable and favorable with search engines.
Pairing these two items take more than just a standard site using the Wordpress platform. Plugins are essential and can only be used by a site hosting its own site not like the free versions that a person can get by signing up at Wordpress. Here is a quick list of the plugins:
– Contact Form ][
– SEO Title Tag
– Automatic Update
– Worpress Stats
They are probably the best, easiest and efficient plugins for a Wordpress blog. My thought is never crap up a site with junk that is found on every other website on the web. Let your competitors annoy consumers with advertisements and framework that is junk.
Another strategy built into their site is the static homepage with the – blog posting being placed directly on the /blog/ url. Many Worpress blogs fall short will this one because they are not set correctly under the Options panel. Making this work takes the website from being a blog to the next level, blogsite. Incorporating the traditional static homepage of a Web 1.0 site and adding the Web 2.0 blog feature.
The site is going to be a dynamite in the search engines due the framework construction and the staff utilizing the blog feature. Publishing original content, like what is done here, will grown the site into a Seattle real estate appraisal monster.
Upgrading to Wordpress 2.5
The other day I tried to upgrade from Wordpress 2.1.1, I know…the platform was quite old, to version 2.5. It was all going good until I followed some instruction on a forum which I did not completely understand. After going through the steps, which called for deleting some files, I tried the new install and got a nasty error message on the homepage.
Not what I expected and really got my anxiety level up. The thought of loosing a years worth of content almost made me puke. But fortunately luck was on my side once again. I logged into my BlueHost account and went back into the Fantastico auto installer and low and be hold there was an upgrade to 2.3.3. Crossing fingers I clicked the upgrade link and viola! It all worked, whew…much better. Everything seemed to be in perfect working order so onto try the 2.5 upgrade again but this time using a much different approach, a plugin.
Download: http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-automatic-upgrade-plugin.html
This plugin automatically backup and upgrades Wordpress with flawless ease. So if you are like me and are not the most experienced on server side upgrades then this plugin is for you. Upgrades are sometimes painful and lesson learning experiences and thanlfully there are solutions to get us through them.
Do not let updates hold you back from improving your blog
Through a website’s lifecycle there will be many updates, changes, themes and links that may change or affect the way the website ultimately functions. These probably seem more common now-a-days since the majority of people using blog platforms increases. From experience themes are the easiest item to install. Just download a theme and install it using a ftp site and then select it from the Presentation tab at the top of the Dashboard.
But unfortunately not all up dates are that easy. For instance, when we customized the urls on this site it affected how the navigation worked as well as links to internal blog postings. Those affects are actually still being felt around here as it takes time to locate and correct all the links.
A blogsite needs to function and be optimized from the very beginning and not be delayed by problems like: blogs on the homepage, dysfunctional contact form, no customized title tags and/or sub par navigation. Here is a quote from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines regarding the use of text versus images.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
Many updates are unavoidable and are necessary for the long-term success of a website. Browsing the blogosphere for a few minutes will produce a lot of website that are in desperate need of updates.
What a great lead into our next round of blog postings: how to customize a Wordpress blog.
Becareful not to spam the people you are trying to target
The more time I spend moderating blogs, checking emails the more I reflect on: what drives people to try and spam their target audience with the hopes of increasing business? It is probably ignorance, relying on bad information and/or desperation that these tactics are used. A year back or so I was sending unsolicited emails to a target audience trying to recruit from the job pool and the responses I got ranged from “remove me from my list” to “I am happy where I am”.
So I got to thinking what could be done do to improve the conversion of the recruiting emails and then the light bulb went off; am I spamming my target audience and just annoying the target audience? The obvious conclusion was yes! From that time on I have not sent any unsolicited emails no matter how much the temptation was.
But spamming is not just limited to emails but takes another form on blogs and any blog knows what I am talking about; the bots that run automatic comments on blogs with the hopes of generating a backlink to increase their SEO. On an average day this blog receives 40 spam comments from programs that are looking to do this horrible tactic. It is a waste and an annoyance that is clogging the internet with a bunch of junk.
I have also seen spam commenting by individuals on their peer’s, or what could be determine to be their peers, website. Comments like “nice post”, “great information and “I am bookmarking and reread later” are spam comments in my opinion. These comments offer the author, readers and other blog participants any sort of value and are just used to get a link on another person’s website.
Blogging and commenting generates discussion which can sometimes out weigh the content in the original post. Discussion is what makes blogs valuable because of the thought provoking discussion that comes out of it. But not all blogs have to generate alot of discussion to have value. This blog does not do a lot of comments and that is perfectly ok with the owner, because that is not the goal of the site.
It may seem that we are stuck with email and comment spammers for ever but thank goodness that is not the case. Spam.Abuse.net is a website that is taking spam fight to the front lines with there Stop Spam on the Internet website.
Just be watchful of your actions and you should be ok. A simple question to ask yourself: is what I am about to do be construed as spam by a larger community? If you answer is yes or maybe then it is time to rethink the strategy.