Statistics say that 78.3% of the U.S. population are internet users* and that 92% Of Internet Users go to search engines** when they’re looking for just about anything they need: from plumbers to physicians, remodeling contractors to web designers – you name it, it’s searched for on the internet first and foremost. Should a growing business care about it’s search engine rankings??? YES!!!

What’s a business to do?!

There are several factors that help determine website rankings on Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo! From site content and structure to the underlying code on the page to inbound links off the page; the factors are many. Search engine companies had made their fortunes first on the ability the direct internet searchers to the content that most accurately describes what they are searching for. The algorithms that search engines are built on are more complex than most of us can imagine and yet the results they display are intended to be so simple and straight forward that even a child can find exactly what they are looking for.

A few main tips on getting and keeping your site at the top of the rankings are:

1. Content is king.

Back in the early days of search engines you could scroll down to the bottom of many web pages and find keywords and search terms packed together by the hundreds. Every word or phrase that was even remotely close to that website’s product or theme was packed in for miles own the page. Many of the words were repeated over and over again making no sense whatsoever. Website designers started even trying to get creative by coloring the text that same as the background so that users wouldn’t even know that text was there unless they highlighted it with their mouse or viewed the source code.

Well, a lot has changed since then – and search engines will certainly not fall that little trick any longer. Gone are the days of simply packing in as many keywords as possibly over and over again to get the search engines to notice you.

When writing content for your website, good, accurate content and descriptions of your product and services are paramount. It doesn’t have to Pulitzer worthy – just thorough and accurate. I find that most of the time if you write your content just like you would describe it in your 30 second elevator speech, that is sufficient. YES, use your keywords, just don’t overdo it.

2. Use your own, original content.

OK, so you’re not a writer. Your busy, you have don’t have time to try and write a website full of content describing your business and products. it’s not that your lay, you just really don’t feel like delving back into a writing mindset that you haven’t had to use since high school or college. So you decide to just copy and paste someone else site… STOP!!! This is a huge search engine “no-no”. Definitely don’t use content that someone else had used. If you think you can copy and paste someone else’s writing, you are not only infringing on copyright laws, you are also shooting yourself in the foot with search engines.

Modern SE’s (search engines) are now, and have been, keeping an eye out for duplicate content across the internet. Your site can and will be penalized if you have simply taken someone else’s text and put it on your own site. You can even go to “www.copyscape.com” to check and see if someone else out there is using your text! IT’s NOT THAT HARD to take a small amount of time to wordsmith your own ideas on and put them on your site- it WILL be worth it.

Start with a brief outline of each of the pages on your site (i.e. home page, about us page, services, areas served, contact etc).

Then put together a rough outline of what you’ll want on each page. Whiteboards or giant post-its are great for this.

Next: simply go to each point in your outline and write an “elevator-speech” version of what you want to say. For instance, on the about Us pages, you want to talk about the company history for a few sentences, a little about yourself or the owners, and what your driving passion is for your industry. Talking about each point like you would at a networking event is usually a great place to start. For certain items like services and even some products, going into more detail can be very effective not only for your viewers but also for search engine rankings.

3. Patience, Patience, Patience.

While we could easily spend hours and hours discussing SEO (Search engine optimization) tricks and techniques, one of the things we have learned over the years is this: IT TAKES TIME! There is rarely any one magic bullet that will shoot your site to the top of the SE’s; if there was everyone would be doing it. In fact, there are many techniques and tricks that can be done to improve your results if they are implemented regularly and consistently over time. Time is the key in most cases. Many companies are promising these unbelievable results for your website: “Be at the top in Google”, Reach Number 1 in the search engines Guaranteed” etc, etc.

BE CAREFUL FOR SEARCH ENGINE SCAMS! Any company that promises particular results in organic search engine rankings is almost always selling you a lie. Rankings in the main search results (organic rankings) simply CANNOT be guaranteed. As I mentioned before, if it could be guaranteed than everyone would be doing it!

However, a good, well designed and implemented search engine optimization (SEO) plan can, in time, bring and keep your site at the top of the rankings… and believe me, top rankings mean increased traffic, sales and – bottom line – more money for your business.

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WE CAN HELP! While this article is by no means meant to be an exhaustive dissertation on SEO and internet marketing, we wanted to help our reader understand just a few of the important concepts on the topic. If you need someone to help you with website design, SEO, internet marketing or other forms of marketing Barta Media Group would be more than happy to help. We offer competitive and reasonable rates for our services and great results. Please drop us a line or give us a call today at 678-464-5785.

* from internetworldstats.com

** from The Inquistr – Search Engines Used By 92% Of Internet Users

I was sitting outside on the back deck watching the storms blow in last night. As I watched the magnificent display of  lightning off in the clouds and the winds were getting stronger and stronger I was reminded how nice it is to have the peace of mind that my computers and other electrical equipment are protected by a professionally installed surge protector.  I recently hired The Socket Doctors to come out and install an inline surge protection device that stops major surges from even making it past my main electrical panel.  Even though I already had my computers plugged in to store bought surge protectors and battery backup units I was still uncomfortable when major storms came in.  PLUS, I knew that my other devices and appliances were still subject to getting fried.  In any case, for under $200 I consider it to be more than worth the peace of mind.   If you live in the Atlanta / Gwinnett area and would be interested in this feel free to contact me and I’ll put you in touch with the guys who hooked me up.  OR just contact them directly via their website at www.socketdoctors.com .

Barta Media Group specializes in Business Visibility Solutions, web design and SEO  in the Gwinnett, Atlanta and Gainesville GA areas.

Why are people visiting your website?

This may seem like a silly question at first but I’ve found very few webmasters truthfully sit down and ask themselves this. What purpose does your website serve your visitors? Along with that, how does your design reflect these ideas?

If you never asked yourself these questions when you started to design your website the best time to do it would be during a redesign period. You can figure out what your visitors are really interested in. Maybe it’s just the page content, or maybe they spend more time interacting with their profile, or leaving comments on posts. Whatever the actions of your visitors may be it’s key to define them upfront before starting to redesign your site.

This information can help you figure out what elements on your current site are hindering the accessibility and what you could do to improve the others. You may also find that your users are asking for some type of interactivity or widget that would be perfect for your site, but it’s strangely missing. The perfect time to add new features to a design would be during a refresh period. Make sure you collect as much data as possible before sitting down at the work bench.

Keep your Brand Consistent Throughout

A website refresh is a very different concept from a website re-branding. Many designers can’t tell you the difference but they hold completely different outcomes in the end.

To rebrand your entire site would take quite a while. You’d need to come up with an entirely new set of everything – new logo, new page elements, new color scheme, new graphics… basically hitting the drawing board from scratch again.

Refreshing your site’s current design is much different. The context here is going into your site to find out what parts of it are working and what aren’t. The goal is to then remove elements which are performing poorly and move around/fix up the one’s that can help.

You may also consider adding new elements or running trials for 2 or 3 different interfaces to see which of them perform the best.

Plot for your Target Audience

The “target audience” you’re hitting will change from site to site. Each website has a different goal in mind and provides a completely different service than the next competitor, thus it’s very important to define your target audience early.

This isn’t a difficult step. You just need to consider your current niche and where you’re trying to appear in the market. If you run a blog about video game news you may look into a similar market as IGN or Joystiq. Consider their designs and who visits their site – what do they do right? Do you hold any of these traits on your website?

A gaming website is just one of thousands of niches to be found around the web. Google is your best tool for the job here since you can search by keywords and popular content you showcase on your website. Figure out what type of audience you want to draw in – younger, older, tech-savvy, TV enthusiasts. Once you know who to target it will me much easier to figure out what you need to do better to reel more in.

Identify Your Website’s Stress Points

Stress points are areas in your site where visitors seem to get confused, lost, or just give up and leave your page entirely. Not every design will have these but it’s never bad practice to go through your current design and see if you can pinpoint any obvious ones.

From a user experience perspective these could be anything. Links in your navigation too small or difficult to read, maybe paragraphs are spaced too closely or images take up too much space. I encourage holding a poll for your readers to help out during the refresh process. They are the ones experiencing the site after all, their opinions should be the most important as the designer.

If you can’t find any major stress points in your site design you may consider seeing what areas look “out of place” or just plain odd. These aren’t stresses for your visitors but chances are good if you think they look weird, others probably will too. Try messing around with page elements to see if you can fit blocks into your site easier. Sketching a new design layout on a piece of paper can sometimes help out when you’re really stuck in with a creative design block.

Whatever you may decide to change don’t bother trying to re-invent the wheel. Much of what you would need to do has already been done countless times over and it would be silly to do it all yourself. Save some time and Google around for whatever it is you’re looking for. Chances are good you’ll find a few articles or code snippits containing exactly what you want.

As web designers we can have a hard time letting go. This is especially true when it comes to our past design works. However your visitors and clients do not live in this same sense of nostalgia and you must adapt as your site grows and develops a community.

These are just a few simple tips to get you started on a brand new refreshed design for your website. It’s a fun process every few months to sit back and contemplate potential new features, releasing these updates 2 or 3 times a year. It keeps your visitors on their toes and helps your site adapt to an ever-changing Internet.

I grabbed this excellent article from WDL by Jake Rocheleau.  If you like it give them a visit and “like” the article.

If you’re looking for someone local to help implement these ideas or for new, custom web design CLICK HERE to contact us.

Barta Media Group.  Gwinnett Web design We are web designers specializing in websites that are attractive, informative,  easy to navigate and search engine friendly.  Get a great site AND great rankings!

It’s no secret that the internet has become the driving force behind business.  Internet marketing and communication has become essential for every serious business and organization. In fact, it is safe to say that many new business owners wouldn’t even consider opening their doors without an effective web presence; a presence that effectively reaches out to customers and potential customers with an informative, compelling reason to use their services.

Aim small -miss small - target your audience.

If you are a business owner it is imperative to at least consider to options for launching yourself into the internet market and, for that matter, the 21^st Century.  While the internet is not the only avenue to market your business, it will, without a doubt, connect you to the largest possible audience.  With that connection alive you can position your marketing campaign as an influence to the widest possible market ever known to man (it is the “World Wide Web” after all).

Targeting a larger, wider audience than traditional marketing is a huge advantage for many businesses.  However, some business owners aren’t concerned with the worldwide connection. They are looking for strategically target a more narrow audience.  With the internet, this is possible as well.

There are several marketing strategies that can help business owners narrow down their targeted marketing through the internet.  First, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a very reasonable approach to accomplishing this.  SEO is the process of making a website “search engine friendly”.  To take this explanation a step further:  Major search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, crawl the internet basically “taking notes” (very descriptive notes) on every website it finds.  These “spiders” are looking for information to determine each website is about.  It then stores, or “indexes” the notes it gathers into a ginormous database.  Whenever a search is performed it literally checks the search term against the websites in its database and returns results that are the most helpful and accurate.  That being said, a successfully optimized website can return results that are very specific to a particular region or specialized product and truly arrive toward the top of a search engines results.  These results are known as “organic results”.  These are not paid or sponsored links, they have truly arrived at their ranking by being the most accurately indexed according to site content.  Sites that appear at the top of the results will always bring more traffic to that website; more traffic almost always means more business.

A second way to narrow your internet marketing is via pay-per-click advertising.  If you’ve done a search in Google recently you may have noticed results at the very top and also on the right side of the page inside a lightly shade yellow box.  The businesses listed there have purchased the rights to show up on that particular search as “paid sponsors”.  The nice thing about pay-per-click advertising (Google Adwords or Yahoo Sponsored Search) is that you only pay for the advertising when the searcher actually clicks on your link and arrives at your site.  You can also be very specific about what terms you want to be included in and to what region.  The down side to pay-per-click marketing is that paid results still only receive 25% of the search engine traffic while organic search results account for the other 75%.

Don't overdo it - and it'll work!

Email marketing has been another effective method of internet advertising.  While being controversial and often times just plain annoying, a successful email marketing campaign, when run properly (and respectfully) can most certainly be an effective way to improve your bottom line.  Sending out monthly newsletters, occasional sale notices or other information that your contact base will find beneficial is a great way to keep you business and service on the minds of your existing and future client base.  Be Careful though, for many people, such as this author, getting too many emails from one source can be extremely annoying.  It is imperative that email campaigns are run with respect to your contacts.  Don’t send too many too often and make sure that you are actually offering something of financial or practical value (preferably financial).  Otherwise your email become as loathed as the typical spam scam and will find itself relocated to Junk Mail or worse- the “Unsubscribe” list.

In closing, here are a few final reasons to start your business with an effective website.

1.  Be open 24 hours a day.  Day or night customers and potential customers can peruse your services and submit questions regarding your services.  Never worry about being your web store closed.
2. Add professionalism and credibility to your business.  Many people will not even consider working with a business that doesn’t have a web presence for the perceived lack of credibility and information.  Imagine if there are two businesses a similar distance but in opposite directions from your home.  You have heard that both carry a product that you are interested in.  One business, “Store A” has posted an attractive website with all the valuable information regarding their services.  There are pictures and descriptions and a contact page with a map and phone number.  You can find out pretty everything there is to know about their products and they’re even running a SALE this week!
   The second business, “Store B”, has no website.  You’re not sure what the store hours are, the prices or if they carry the brand you need.  The choice is simple.  In this scenario, “Store A” will win your business every time.
3. Reach a Huge New Market.  There are countless people that would never have even known about your business without your website.  Developing an attractive, informative, easy to navigate and searchable website can help you reach people anywhere-anytime!

Jason Barta is the owner of BARTA MEDIA GROUP, formerly  Jason Barta Web and Graphic Design based in Gwinnett County GA.  BMG specializes in websites that are attractive, informative, easy to navigate and search engine friendly.  Many clients have greatly benefited being at the number 1 spot in their respective fields in the major search engines.

1) Social Media Integration is a must if you want to have a great ecommerce blog. There are multiple ways in which you can accomplish this goal, but the bottom line is that you need to let people connect with you via social networks, and share what they like about your ecommerce blog in social networks. On the side bar of your blog you should consider placing Twitter or Facebook widgets, which showcase your social presence. Within each blog post you should try using a retweet button like TweetMeme and a Facebook Like button, in addition you can also place an AddThis button on each blog post so that readers can share it in multiple places.

2) Product Reviews are critical components of any great ecommerce blog, as they allow potential customers to read more about the product and move forward with the purchase if they are interested. They are also a great way to showcase some of your best sellers, and see if you can drive even more people to those product pages to increase sales further. You do not want to review products too often, so start by adding a few every month and see how your readers react.

3) Great Blog Topics are key if you want to keep readers engaged and coming back to see what your next ecommerce blog post will be about. Taking a little time to think out useful and relevant topics will go a long way with your readers. Posting everyday just to post something is not going to build your ecommerce blog a loyal following, as the readers want to see quality posts.

4) Regular Updates are essential to let readers know that you are still active on your blog and committed to continually update it with new quality content. Having some sort of consistency is necessary so that a reader knows when to come back and check for a new post. If you update daily, then it is more likely that someone will come back multiple times per week to see what is new. Whereas if you only update weekly, a reader will check back much less often.

5) Guest Bloggers posting to your ecommerce blog provides a smart way to gain additional exposure, while improving authority and credibility. Adding guest bloggers is a great way to network, and in turn will allow you opportunities to guest blog at other sites. In both situations you will have a great chance to gain back links to your ecommerce site which will help your SEO efforts.

6) Video is one of the best ways to set your ecommerce blog apart from others in your niche, and if you host your own videos, you can often get additional benefit for your SEO efforts. The other option is to host at a third party site like YouTube, which can help improve your social media presence. These videos can showcase products, the team behind the site, or be used as a promotional tool for new items in your store.

7) Online Shopping Tips might sound a bit scary at first, as they could potentially drive readers away from your ecommerce blog to try and purchase an item somewhere else. However if the online shopping tips are provided in the right manner, they will give the reader added confidence when buying from your ecommerce site.

8 ) Promoting Sales is a must on your ecommerce blog if you want your online store to be a success. The promotion of a sale needs to be executed properly so that you do not scare off any readers. Therefore you should limit the number of times you promote sales each month on your blog, and ensure that you do not make it too “salesy.” If a reader is excited about the product and the sale price, then it is likely they will click through and convert.

9) Answering Customer Questions is typically done in email, but if your customers continually ask similar questions, then it is a good idea to answer them via an ecommerce blog post. This will allow you to give multiple existing customers a thorough answer, and provide future customers with insight that may help them become more comfortable shopping in your online store.

10) Fun is a must, as no one wants to visit a boring ecommerce blog that is nothing but a big sales pitch with a bunch of text. You want to make the experience engaging, interactive, informational, and fun for every reader that visits your ecommerce blog.

Utilizing these tips will help set your ecommerce blog apart from the rest, while also improving your customer relationships and SEO.

Author: Nick Gant, ZippyCart

If you are interested in having an online store built contact us here.

Web Design Gwinnett  |  Web Design Atlanta  |  Web Design Gainesville, GA

Just copy/paste into a graphics editor or right click and Choose “Save As”.  Enjoy.

However, that time has finally come to a close.  We have finally launched our new website.  It’s BartaMediaGroup.com.

Have a look and feel free to post any comments!

Thanks.