The power of the Internet and search engine technologies has increased interest in making Web sites appear prominently in search engine results.  According to Opinion Research Corp. for Performics Inc., 58% of adults conduct on-line research prior to making a purchase.  This underscores the importance of a business to have a Web site.

The majority of traffic from a search query will go to those sites listed on the first SERP (Search Engine Results Page).  Those sites have a clear advantage in capturing attention, clicks and conversions on their sites.  Sites that do not appear there will likely be ignored completely.

Those well-positioned sites didn’t get there overnight.  SEO takes consistent action and reaction.  What works today for SEO may not work as well in the future.  Competition for high positioning intensifies over time for any keyword phrase as more businesses find out about SEO.

By committing to an SEO strategy over time, a small business has a great opportunity to drive significant amounts of traffic to its site and lands great positioning.  What do you need to know to do to make this commitment?

1. Assess your current site and positioning.  Where have you been, where are you at, and where are you going?  By knowing your current positioning, you have a reference point for understanding the results of your present and future efforts.  You may be surprised at how well some parts of your site are performing!
2. Know what to change.  There are over 200 factors that Google considers to determine ranking of pages in its results.  Many can be controlled your site design and profile, and there are a handful that provide the greatest return on your investment.  You might consider hiring an SEO consultant to help you identify what will work best for your site.
3. Make meaningful changes in increments.  Unless a site has poor content, navigation, and suffers from serious neglect, there are probably areas that are doing reasonably well to attract traffic.  Making too many across-the-board changes too quickly may negatively impact those well-performing areas.  Plus, it may be difficult to identify what changes made the biggest difference.
4. Measure your effectiveness.  It’s important to periodically check your ranking among the major search engines to gauge the impact of your changes.  Do this for the first week or two after your changes.
5. Measure your traffic.  Typical analytics tools can tell you statistics such as number of visitors, traffic sources, which search terms yielded visits and page popularity.  The metrics derived from these tools are important for guiding you ongoing SEO enhancement efforts.
6. It takes time.  Don’t expect the results to happen overnight.  If your site has not ranked well in the past or is not established, it may be several months before your site’s ranking rises substantially.  Search engines need time to crawl your pages and your competitor’s pages to pick up changes and analyze them.  Ranking for high value phrases may prove to be a significant challenge.

The proverb “good things come to those who wait” is particularly important in SEO.  If you need help developing a comprehensive search engine optimization plan, contact us to get started.

I was recently asked to review a site that was ranking poorly and not indexed well in search engines, especially Google.  The site looked well designed, had nice internal linking, and a fair amount of SEO performed on it.  A quick search on Google and Yahoo uncovered the problem - duplicate content!

Duplicate content plays tricks in search engines, and that's nothing but bad for you SEO efforts.  For example:

• The popularity of any one page that's duplicated is diluted, reducing the likelihood that it comes up in search results
• Some of all of the URLs may not appear friendly to a visitor, thereby reducing the likelihood of that visitor clicking on it

Upon finding duplicate content, Google will remove content it finds duplicated and only show one link that appers to be the "best".  Larger sites will often have dynamically generated pages with little change in content, URL, title, or keywords.  This is an immediate RED FLAG and will cause Google to remove the offending pages.  Any SEO done for the tossed pages has also beed tossed out the window.

If you think your site may have duplicated content, our SEO services can help you.  Contact us for more information.

I noticed over the weekend that Google PageRank was updated again.  After the last update in July, many of the sites I maintain ranked higher.  This time, it was a mixed bag.  The Demtron home page rose from 2 to 3, but another site went from 2 to 1. The rest of my sites stayed the same. I checked out a few of my competitors and every one of them stayed the same as well. From what I'm reading, it seems likely that toolbar PR updates will move to every two months now. Ah... that little green bar. What a time waster!

I recently deployed BlogEngine.Net 1.4.5 and found a few typos in the widget titles such as RecentPosts and Tag cloud.  After searching all over and trying all sorts method to change this, I came across a post at the CodePlex forums that solves this problem.

How do you change the BlogRoll title?

Worked like a charm. Just have to remember that any future updates may wipe out this change.