Did you know there are different types of websites?

Depending on your business model and the purpose of your website, it’s important to choose the right format. For example, if your business provides services to your local market your needs are completely different from a business that provides products or services to a national or global market. If the purpose of your web site is to help generate leads for your business, you need a very different site than someone selling products online.

Here are some guidelines to help you choose the right type of site for your business.

Brochure Web Site

A brochure site is the simplest type of business site. It is often a single page site. It may have a few supporting pages including a contact page and an “about us” page. Generally a brochure website is used to promote a service provider.

It can also be used to simply provide information about a business. Many brick and mortar retailers have brochure sites. Their page lists a little bit about their business, their location and their hours.

If they’re really doing it right, a brochure web site will have a squeeze page that offers free tips or a special report to prospects who sign up for their newsletter. The newsletter is then used to provide additional information about the business and notify subscribers of the arrival of new products, special sales or other special events in the business.

Information Website

Many websites you find online are information websites, sometimes called “authority sites”. They’re packed with valuable content in the form of articles, blog posts, videos, audio recordings and even free resources. Generally content is organized by topic or keyword. Examples of authority sites you may be familiar with are Ask.com, Wikipedia.org and eHow.com but there are literally thousands of smaller “niche” sites that provide in-depth information on a vast array of topics.

An information website is right for you if your business model is:

* Information marketer
* Affiliate marketer
* Content marketer (making money from advertising revenue)

You might use this type of website format if you’re a service provider too. For example, you might have a landing page that promotes your services. You’d use an abundance of content to establish credibility and authority as a service provider.

Again, you would want to employ a squeeze page and mailing list to provide updated information on your topic and promote products, either your own, an affiliate product, or someone who pays you for advertising.

Ecommerce

An ecommerce site is used to sell products or services. Amazon.com is a great example of an ecommerce site. If you are a retailer or sell a certain services you will likely use an ecommerce format. On your website people will be able to make purchases.

On this type of site a squeeze page and mailing list is critical as it allows you to notify readers when new products are available or you have special pricing on some items. You can also use your newsletter to educate your subscribers on products or services similar to those they’ve purchased previously.

Of course, these are just three of the most common types of websites. There are also:

* Membership sites
* Social networking sites
* Review sites
* Game sites

Take a look at your business model and the reason you’re creating a website. What website type or format best fits your needs?

Planning your website before you create it is the first key to success. To learn more about creating a website that supports your success contact Techkat to request a Free Consultation. We can help you determine the best type of web site for your business and help you put all the pieces together.

The way that search engines rate and rank sites is by sending out robots, also called “spiders” because they crawl the web. These spiders follow links from page to page and site to site indexing content. Through this process they can determine the quality of a site (PageRank) and the importance of a site (position in search results). The following five SEO tips can help you give the spiders more of what they like.

1. When writing an SEO article for your website make sure that your chosen keyword appears in the opening and closing paragraphs, but do not fill the article with the keyword. A search engine will see an article with a ridiculously high keyword density as spam and the article will be useless for improving your website’s search engine rank.

2. Always include a sitemap page in your website. A site map page ensures that your site can be crawled by search engine spiders. These spiders then index the pages of your website. Site maps also tell the spider about your site’s hierarchy and which pages are the most important.

3. Learn about search engine optimization or hire a company that specializes in it. The work you put into your site will be wasted if the site can’t be found during a web search. A good SEO plan will have you ranking higher in the results of the major search engines for keyword searches that relate to your company.

4. Visit your site and check to make sure that the title tag at the top of your window describes the content that you are looking at. Be sure that it contains the keywords that you want readers to associate with your website. If you are a small local business be sure that the key local search words are included in the title tag.

5. Get to the point with keywords. Most searches are only two or three words, and if your keywords are longer than that, you may be more difficult to spot. Shorter is better. So, if you can eliminate unnecessary words, do it! Your goal is to be seen by as many people as you can, not describe everything you do in the keywords.

By implementing these five SEO tips, webmasters can greatly boost their websites’ position on search engine results pages. It is important that they earn these favored positions, though. This is done by always providing original, relevant content. A site that is tweaked into high standing on the results pages will get a lot of traffic – but it will not keep any of it if the content is sub-par. Content is king.

How often do you set aside time to review your marketing strategy and update it if necessary? Have you updated your marketing plan within the last year, or when you released your most recent product? You do have a marketing strategy, don’t you?

Some businesses start off with a marketing strategy and over time they just continue doing what they’re doing. When was the last time you took some time to seriously examine your marketing results to see whether your strategy is still being successful? You really should do this at least yearly – or whenever you release a new product to market. Evaluate what’s working and what’s not. Research what your competitors are doing. How can you do it better? Brainstorm some ways to freshen up your message.

How can you tell if your marketing strategy needs tweaking? Ask yourself:

• Have you lost your focus? – Is your marketing message still clear? Do you know where you want your company to be in two years or five years? Is your marketing on point to get you there?
• Have you lost touch with your market? – Check your marketing statistics. Are you still acquiring new prospects for your products and services? Are your prospects converting to customers at the expected rate? If not, there is most likely something amiss. Could it be your products? Do they still meet your customer’s needs? Possibly. More than likely, though, the problem is that your message is no longer meeting the needs of your target market.
• Are you employing a variety of methods to communicate your message? – If you are only using one or two methods to reach your target market, consider the expanding array of ways they are now getting information. Many of the old methods of marketing are losing their effectiveness in favor of newer, more immediate ways of communicating. How can you expand your “playing field” to meet your customers and prospects where they are?
• Are your sales stagnant? – If your sales numbers are not growing quarter by quarter, or year by year, you may soon find yourself overshadowed by your competitors.
• Is your business network consistently growing? – You need to maintain an ever-widening circle of influence to grow your base of sources for referrals and joint ventures. It also gives you a better finger of the pulse of your market and can provide many opportunities for growth. Take every opportunity to expand your business network.
• Are you just bored with your marketing? – If you are, it’s certain that your customers are too. Putting a fresh marketing plan in place can re-energize you, your customers and your profits.

If your marketing strategy could use a tweak, contact Techkat Online Marketing for a marketing review and guidance in developing and implementing an improved campaign.

It used to be that the only reliable way to find information online was to use a search engine.

However, with the advent of what we call Web 2.0 (interactive, dynamic websites that promote or operate as social networks), people can now easily find information and websites that other human beings recommend.

The most recent instance of this is social bookmarking. Websites like Del.icio.us, Digg, and Furl allow users to share their personal favorites (bookmarks) with others. Users tag each bookmarked website with the keywords they feel are most applicable.

Now, instead of using a search engine to find information, people can search tags that will display all websites bookmarked with that specific tag. This amounts to a human referral or vote for the site and its relevance to the subject being searched.

Other versions of social networking include blogging social networks – primarily Technorati.com. Technorati indexes blogs based on the amount of incoming links those blogs have, as well as the tags associated with their posts.

But the most popular social network is of course Facebook. This social giant now enjoys more unique visitors every month than Google and savvy businesses and website owners are learning how to penetrate this incredible resource.

Lastly, two powerful new social media networks have emerged that are revolutionizing audio and video: YouTube and BlogTalkRadio. These mega networks allow citizen filmmakers and broadcasters to share their visions with the world and spread the word about what matters to them.

Few businesses realize it yet, but these media networks are potential goldmines stock full of future Speilbergs, Bloombergs, and Oprahs – all potential broadcasters of your marketing message.

How Will Social Networking Help My Site Traffic Grow?

Two out of three people online in June 2006 visited a social networking site. In fact, 1 out of every 20 website visits is to a social networking website. Experts say that social networks are starting to eclipse traffic from the major search engines Yahoo! and Google.

So if your company is not present on any of the major social networks, you’re missing out on the easiest, fastest way to access 67% of internet users.

How Do I Get Involved in Social Networking?

Working with social sites is similar to working with the media. Give them a good enough story, secret, tip, or resource that they can sink their teeth into and you’ll have an army of talkers spreading the word about you and your business.

And this translates into referrals, which convert into sales on an average of 667% better than cold leads (search engine results). So even if you reach less people through social networking, your conversions will be far higher.

We target various social networks through a variety of methods:

Article or Blog Promotion

We manage several blogs for our various clients (as well as article pages) that contain posts written purely to capture the imagination and interest of our client’s target market.

For instance, if you sell pet beds, gifts, and items, we will develop a series of blog posts or articles that discuss a controversial or “hot off the press” topic that pet lovers either find highly valuable as an information resource, or highly intriguing or emotionally stimulating. We will then promote it to various social bookmarking and blogging networks, as well as popular bloggers – who will then circulate the story and generate traffic back to your website.

Social Promotion

Particularly effective for clients who target teens, young adults, musicians, or other highly active social groups, we implement social promotion campaigns on networks like FaceBook, LinkedIn, MySpace and CraigsList to spread the word about your business. Even if your business does not target the “myspace crowd,” we can almost always devise a creative campaign to get the net buzzing.

How Does Social Networking Work With SEO?

As more and more internet users begin to use tags to find information (a tag is a keyword that a human associated with a website, vs. a keyword that a search engine attributes to a website), Search Marketing professionals cannot ignore the growing dominance of the social networks.

However, we view the partnership between social networks and search engines as an excellent and balanced marriage. Sure, social networking gets you in front of people who no longer use search engines in lieu of finding their information through referrals or bookmarks/tags.

But the added, and perhaps more exciting bonus, is that while you grow in popularity with social networks like Digg and Facebook, your search rankings will continue to increase as a result!

Your popularity signals Google that you are an authority in your market according to your human audience.

Because your goals, experience, and needs will always vary from our other clients, our first step will be to take you through our Marketing Intelligence Assessment.

This questionnaire will give us a holistic and detailed view of not just your traffic or website needs, but more importantly your overall marketing mix and how SEO can enhance it.

Your Marketing Intelligence Assessment will analyze the following areas:

• Benchmarks
• Overall Online Marketing Approach
• Additional Needs
• On-Page Optimization
• Sales & Lead Conversions
• Depth of Engagement
• Future Objectives

Once we receive your assessment, we will schedule a free consultation with you to discuss possible approaches to your campaign. However, almost all of our client campaigns include varying combinations of the following strategies.

Common Client Campaign Strategies

1. Keyword Term Analysis
Once you give us a list of keyword terms you’d like to target, we will do additional market research to determine the hundreds-to-thousands of keyword terms your target audience searches to find companies like yours. We will analyze these terms to find those with the best ranking potential (they have a good ratio between amount of searches and amount of competing websites).

However, unlike keyword analysis tools that only analyze the number of websites indexed in a search engine for a particular keyword, we are able to determine the exact number of websites optimized for the keyword. These are the only real competition you will have as you will quickly outrank, even with minimal optimization, any website that isn’t optimized for your keyword.

So you’ll often find a keyword term that appears highly competitive, with millions of websites listed in a search engine’s results, is actually quite easy to rank for! Vice versa, you’ll know not to waste your time on a term that may not show many results, but for which all those websites are well optimized – making the term hard to rank for.

Once we’ve compiled our master list of recommended keyword terms to target, we will provide you the list so you can provide any feedback necessary.

2. Content Creation
As we’ve mentioned before, content is key to any search marketing campaign. Therefore, there are three content areas that we will target:

1. On-Site Optimization. This includes visible content and source code. We will analyze your site code for errors that may prevent search engines from properly spidering your site. We will also analyze your site’s code-to-text ratio and other coding elements. Lastly, we will review and edit your visible content for optimal keyword density while maintaining sales effectiveness.

1. Article Creation. We will produce one article for every keyword term we, together, choose to promote. Traditionally, this is between 200-400 articles. Each article is well written, informative, and engaging to ensure that they add value to your visitors’ experience in addition to winning great rankings.Most importantly, we add these pages slowly over several months to ensure your site grows organically. This is a key element Google and other search engines look for when ranking a website – that it is constantly updating and adding new information.

1. Publicity. But we’re not talking about traditional PR here. We develop additional articles that pay particularly close attention to your target audience’s pressure points: the secrets they want to know, the tips they need to hear, the problems and solutions your company addresses.These articles will not be placed on your website, but will instead be promoted to hundreds of other websites in search of compelling articles on your particular subject. This achieves two objectives: 1) each article links back to your website, earning you one-way links from authoritative sites, and 2) the more independent websites that discuss your company or publish an article written by your company, the better your reputation will be. Your potential customers will find your company discussed on other websites, or see that other websites have endorsed you by publishing your article.

3. Linking Strategy
In addition to the links earned through article promotion, we will negotiate links on your behalf. We will concentrate on sites with high Page Rank and traffic rankings as links from these are considered powerful “votes.”

4. Social Networking
We discuss this in depth on our What is Social Networking page.

5. RSS Feeds
We will implement RSS feeds on your blog and/or article pages to keep visitors apprised of new content. Search engines will also be notified through your RSS feed every time a page is added to your site, resulting in faster indexing.

6. Tracking and Analysis
You will receive detailed reports on your rankings across the major search engines, as well as site traffic and visitor behavior (we can only provide site and visitor data if you place StatCounter code on your website or provide us access to your own statistics program).

7. Traffic Conversion Optimization
Where many SEO campaigns fall short, we excel. Rather than just win you traffic, we ensure that traffic converts into sales and leads. To do this, we employ proprietary software that statistically analyzes your website. We help you develop numerous versions of key elements to your sales process (headlines, offers, colors, layout, intro paragraphs, calls to action, etc.). Each version is systematically tested against the others to not only determine the best version of each element, but more importantly the best combination of elements.

Because this particular service is based on scientific analysis and, in our experience, positively guaranteed to increase any company’s sales by at least 30% (more often 50% to 85%!), we provide it for free. You only pay us once we achieve your results. However, your revenue must meet our minimum requirements.

To learn more about Traffic Conversion Optimization, please refer to our special report.

Pricing Models and Our Guarantee

We price each campaign on a per-client basis. Pricing is based on amount of hours you wish us to dedicate to your project each week, as well as which strategies you’d like us to implement. However, we are more than happy to work with your budget and can accommodate a variety of pricing models, including: hourly, per-project, weekly salary with a cap on hours, etc.

Our Guarantee: We cannot guarantee a certain number of rankings or that particular keywords will get ranked with particular search engines. There are simply too many variables to consider and anyone guaranteeing such should be avoided at all costs. However, we do guarantee the quality of our work.

When we tell you that we will reach a milestone within a certain amount of hours, if we fail to reach that milestone, we will complete additional work for free or at a pre-determined reduced fee until said milestone is reached. In addition, if after six months of site optimization, traffic is far below satisfactory, we will re-negotiate a severely reduced fee to continue promotion until a reasonable increase in traffic is reached.

There are some SEO tactics that can actually backfire on you. They are called “Black Hat”. Not only do they NOT help your search rankings long term, they can actually get you banned from the search engines. And recovering from being banned is a long and arduous process that can set you back for years.

Here are some of the black hat SEO techniques that you should never use:

1. Link Farms
Also known as Spamexing or Spamdexing.

A link farm is a series of websites created solely for housing gratuitous links that point to a collection of websites. It can also be a network of websites interlinking with each other.

Such websites are considered illegal in the eyes of Google and major search engines because they aim to achieve high rankings for websites that haven’t earned those rankings through good content and overall quality.

As a strategy, utilizing link farms, or spamdexing a search engine is highly dangerous. Even if your website has great content, if you or your SEO consultant use this technique, your website will still get penalized or banned because the engines figure that if you did have good content you wouldn’t resort to such sneaky tactics designed to trick them.

How to Guard Against It: When an SEO professional tells you that he or she will secure incoming links for you, ask them to tell you specifically how they will do so. The correct answer is that they will target specific, pre-existing and established websites to gain an incoming link from them to you (in most cases without having to link back to them).

If a professional tells you that they will build you hundreds or thousands of pages across different domains that will link to your website, do NOT work with them as this will severely cripple your website.

Also periodically search your domain name in the major search engines to see what sites are pointing to you. If you see anything out of the ordinary, such as websites whose domains are extremely long or jibberish (lots of numbers and random or inappropriate words) or pages that are simply long lists of links, approach your SEO professional about getting your site removed from these pages and how they appeared there in the first place.

2. Doorway Pages
Also known as Advertising Pages, Jump Pages, Gateway Pages, etc.

Doorway Pages are a form of landing page that is designed solely for the search engine and oftentimes isn’t even viewable to the human visitor. These pages often use a redirect script that automatically points the visitor to another page on the website without the human visitor ever seeing the doorway page. This is also known as cloaking and is clearly defined as an illegal practice by Google and other search engines.

The only time a landing page is acceptable by search engines is if it is in the form of an informative, well written article that human visitors read and enjoy, where they are not tricked into clicking or being redirected to the website’s main pages.

How to Guard Against It: Make sure you understand exactly what kind of pages are being added to your website and be sure to look at most of them. Ask your SEO professional point-blank whether any of these pages will automatically redirect to your website’s main page. If they say yes, then they are breaking the rules and are well aware of it, and we recommend you do NOT work with such an individual or company.

It doesn’t matter if they say they use a special javascript or other redirect that is “legal” or acceptable to Google. This is never the case and though Google may not know about that particular trick yet, it will find out fast enough and your site will get penalized as a result.

3. Keyword Stuffing
Also known as Keyword Spamming.

One of the original illegal SEO techniques, keyword stuffing occurs when you load a webpage full of particular keywords, either in the meta tags, other script tags, or in the content itself. This is different from optimizing the page for particular keywords because the same words are being repeated dozens or hundreds of times in no credible or informative way.

Keywords are hidden several ways, for instance some people will make the text the same color as the background so search engines see it, but no human visitors can. Others will hide keywords in script tags. Still others yet will use CSS to position keywords outside of your visible screen area, again so that no human visitors can see it – but search engines can.

On the surface, using such techniques might sound like an attractive idea. However, search engines can detect whether a keyword is being used properly and will penalize or ban your site for using any of the above techniques to stuff keywords into your site.

How to Guard Against It: Oftentimes, the only way you can know if your site has been stuffed with keywords is to view the source code of your website (visit your site in your favorite browser, click “View” and then “Source Code.”) A page of HTML will display. If you see the same keywords repeated hundreds of times anywhere, then your page has been stuffed and will be considered in violation of every search engine’s rules.

4. Scraper Pages

Scraper pages are those comprised of search results or content automatically pulled from dozens or hundreds of websites or search engine results. This is a form of plagiarism as no part of the scraper page is original content. Most often, such sites are used to display Google Adsense Ads or other ads that pay the site owner every time a visitor clicks on it. However search engines have gotten very good at banning such sites from their results and human visitors can detect them easily as well.

Scraper sites are easy to spot as they are largely illogical. They are snippets of other webpage content, or search results, and therefore have no sensible point and do not make sense when read.

How to Guard Against It: As with other illegal techniques, it’s important to first ask your SEO professional directly whether they will employ such unethical techniques. Then you must monitor their work. Make sure you have access to your website’s hosting service so that you can view all pages that are hosted on your site’s domain. Periodically view pages at random to be sure they do not contain this or other illegal content. Also get reports of your site’s rankings and search the keywords you rank for. Click through from the search results and check the landing page’s source code and content for anything fishy or inappropriate.

Download This Information in PDF Form

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or Search Marketing(SEM) is a complex, ever changing process.

Search engines constantly change their algorithms, shuffle their indexes, merge results and share content. The only consistent thing about marketing your website to them is that what works really well today probably won’t work so well tomorrow.

That’s why you need an experienced search marketing professional who keeps two fingers on the pulse of the major search engines. If Google hiccups, we know about it. If Yahoo! gets stubborn, we’ll coax those rankings back to the first page.

Working with search engines is a long-term, high maintenance relationship and we’re dedicated to managing that relationship so you don’t have to, and at an investment you can feel good about.

So How Exactly Does SEO Work?

This is the million dollar question. And we can almost guarantee you that for every person you ask, you’ll get a different answer. That’s because marketing to the search engines is like any creative endeavor: cooking, painting, carpentry, etc.

If you ask five people to bake a cake, you’ll get five unique cakes each with different ingredients. Ask ten people to craft you a chair and you’ll get ten distinct pieces each with its own style.

Because the search engines change their ranking algorithms (the equations they use to analyze a website’s reputation and rankability) so often, and they each use such widely varying criteria, there are literally hundreds of ways to promote your site to the first page of search results.

However, there are certain universal guidelines regarding what central principles and elements are vital to your search marketing strategy. There are also very clear rules against certain practices that attempt to cheat or trick the search engines.

Fundamental Principles for Successful SEO

1. Content
Content will always be your key ticket to top rankings. Without it, any rankings achieved will be short-lived. For content to help your ranking, however, you need a lot of it and it has to be updated regularly. Most importantly, each page of content must target a specific keyword term.

However, if your site possesses content that is auto-generated or is poorly written, i.e. a human visitor would not find it useful and informative, the search engines will figure it out and demote your site, possibly even blacklisting you and preventing you from showing up in their results at all.

We develop well-written, keyword targeted content for your site that is updated consistently and monitored for rankability. Your business will enjoy the added benefit of an ever-growing resource library of information that your site visitors will enjoy and which will also help with your sales conversions.

2. Links
More specifically, one-way links from authoritative sites in your niche market. You can find out how authoritative a site is by looking at its Page Rank.

Page Rank, or PR, is a ranking system Google devised to show how much weight or authority a particular site has. No one can say the exact methodology Google uses to assign Page Rank, however all SEO experts agree that it largely has to do with the amount of incoming links a site has, how long it’s been around, and visitor activity on the site (yes Google even knows how long someone remains on your site after they click through from the search results!).

What this means for you is that you want as many high PR sites linking into your site as possible (without you linking back to them). This is because Google gives these sites a lot of respect and values their “recommendations” signaled by who they choose to link to.

If all this sounds a bit complicated, think of it this way:

Google and the major search engines analyze your website the way scholars judge academic papers. The more journals and other reputable papers cite your research and quote you, the more authoritative and “expert” you become.

We negotiate inbound links on your behalf, concentrating on links from sites related to your market whose reputation thematically relates to the reputation you’re trying to build. We also make sure these links deep-link into your website, meaning that they link to various pages in your website, rather than just to your homepage (also a sign that you’re highly authoritative).

3. Visitor Behavior
Google knows everything. Other Search Engines like Yahoo! and MSN aren’t so far behind. If a visitor clicks from their search engine into your site, and leaves immediately, Google knows that they didn’t find what they were looking for. If too many people do this, Google will drop you from their rankings because they assume you’re not relevant for that particular term. This is why site design, compelling content, and conversion analysis are important.

We offer Website Conversion Optimization in addition to SEO to help you address this particular issue.

4. Human Idiosyncracies.
Google wants to know that a human is running the show. Automated SEO software, or any techniques that add hundreds of pages to your site within a week, or which create content automatically, are a dead giveaway that you’re doing something Google doesn’t like.

This won’t just get you knocked off the top 10 rankings – Google and other search engines will ban your site from ever showing up in their results – even when someone searches your exact domain name. This is why any illegal or unethical techniques will kill your business.

We hand craft every single page of information on your website and upload those pages consistently over several months.

Universally Illegal SEO Practices: Avoid at ALL Costs

Search engines may be vague about what you can do to get top rankings. However, they are not vague about those practices that will get you banned from their rankings. For instance, Google provides Webmaster Guidelines that detail what you are NOT to do when promoting your website.

When you are looking for an SEO professional, be aware of these illegal techniques and the different “pet names” given them by dubious fly-by-night companies. We’ve provided several of them here for your easy reference. You can also download these tips in an easy-to-read PDF format.