Facebook has launched their new layout with expanded cover photo, home page tabs, and a Timeline among other features that enhance the user’s social media experience on Facebook. That is great for business Fan Pages to display their product, service or brand more effectively and the App Tabs are easier to see which creates more frequent use of them and more fan participation.

The real engagement with fans comes within the apps themselves and the implementation of Open Graph for developers. After a user adds your app to their Timeline, app specific actions are shared on Facebook via the Open Graph. As your app becomes an important part of how users express themselves, these actions are more prominently displayed throughout the Facebook Timeline, News Feed, and Ticker. This enables your app to become a key part of the user’s and their friend’s experience on Facebook. This also promotes your company virally in a variety of useful ways. With the Open Graph, you’ll be able to create a deep, persistent connection between you and your users, and drive new users to your social media Facebook app.

Another new and welcome change is the increase in size of your IFrames Wrapper. Our Social Media Marketing company’s IFrames wrapper is one example.

The size has almost doubled which provides more of a full size web page horizontally than an in-column layout. This is a great opportunity to further display your products and services with a more appealing and visible design. Users can use your Fan Page as a regular website to shop and purchase products, view video, complete contact forms or applications, and so much more.

The revolution of even the most basic the Social Plugins has taken a leap forward as well. A dozen revamped buttons such as the New Like Button lets users share pages from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click and also add comments to the “Like”. The Send button allows your users to easily send your content to their friends! The Comments plugin lets users comment on any piece of content on your site.

We will be watching a new trend in Social Media that is taking off called Social Discovery. In essence it involves the ability of Social Media Users to find other users or groups to communicate and share with. These apps will help users discover the people around them who share friends or interests. Some apps alert users to connections after they check-in to a location, others more passively ping users when their phones spot a contact nearby. More on that as it evolves.

Author - David Nagle

A guideline to hiring an SEO company – Be aware of deceptive practices.
Throughout the decades we have been in business, we have seen many factors that have evolved with regard to the effectiveness of Search Engine Optimization, web design, marketing and how that determines your page rank on the major search engines. We spend on average anywhere from 30 to 100 hours per month on each client’s online marketing and the marketing of the top key words and key phrases for their business and industry. Most of this is done manually by our hands-on experts in the field. When we talk with prospective clients to discuss their marketing interests we hear some shocking things on a consistent basis that need to be discussed.

There is rampant deception in this industry that needs to be addressed and that you as a business owner need to be aware of when you are hiring a marketing company that provides SEO, Link Building and Social Media Marketing. Let’s take a look at the SEO aspect of an online marketing campaign. A Must Read SEO Article for CEOs!

There are questions you need to ask when hiring an SEO, marketing and web design company, and the answers are crucial in making your decision of which company you are going to hire.

1) On average, how many hours a month does your SEO company actually work to optimize and market your company?
2) Does your SEO company do their optimization and marketing manually or by automation?
3) Will your SEO company not only work on internal website optimization, but also work on marketing your website externally?
4) Will the company provide you with a list of what they have done, quantify that and provide ongoing MEANINGFUL analysis of their progress?
5) What do they provide with regard to their external marketing efforts and will they provide a detailed list of what they accomplished?
6) Will they research the top competitive key words and phrases and use those in their SEO?
7) Are they marketing your business in the correct geographic regions?
8) Will they keep you involved with their marketing efforts and ask for your insight into their company and it’s goals?
9) What added benefits will they provide at no cost to you in order to boost your results because they care about your success and a long-term relationship?
10) Will they honestly and completely assess your website and current marketing efforts and provide a comprehensive list of objectives and plans to achieve them that will address all phases of a successful marketing campaign?

And always get a custom website design and not pre-designed templates.

We have conversations with several companies a day that are getting quotes from SEO companies and we have found a common list of disconcerting revelations from their experiences with other SEO companies. The first subject that comes up is cost and the conversation starts out like this; “How much do you charge? I got a few quotes for $150 – $250 a month and they guarantee great results!” Well, first off, no one can guarantee any specific result (provided that the objective is to compete using the top key phrases) because that is determined by the search engines themselves, not the company doing the marketing. I touch upon the subjects in the list of questions above and the business owner on the other end of the conversation usually is speechless. “You are the first company who has delved into these subjects and educated me this thoroughly!”

One common deception is what we call “The Phantom Key phrase”. We hear this one the most. A client hired a company to do their SEO. They tell me “Well, our current company has us #1 on Google and they got us there in just a few days!” My first question is, and I already know what the answer is going to be… “No kidding!, tell me what key phrase you rank #1 with?” Here is an example to illustrate a commonly practiced deception. One company’s CEO replied, “Broward County Plumber is the key phrase we rank #1 with.” Well, little did this CEO know, that “Broward County Plumber” is so rarely searched that there is practically no competition for that key phrase, thus an instant high ranking is achieved once their pages are indexed into Google. It looks and sounds great to the CEO of this company… HEY! I am on top! Then I explain to the company’s owner that a teenager with some coding knowledge could have accomplished this for free in about an hour. I ask, “Did you know that the key phrase “Fort Lauderdale Plumber” is the phrase that is actually used by people who need a plumber in your area? Did you know that key phrase gets TWENTY TIMES the number of searches that your current key phrase gets? And did you know that you are practically nowhere to be found on the search engines for that top competitive key phrase? We are talking thousands of searches a month that you are missing out on. This deceptive practice can be accomplished in several ways too. You can use keywords that sound like they are used widely but actually are not, change a letter, add an extra letter, pluralize a word, or shift the structure of the phrase and presto! you are #1 and the company’s owner isn’t aware that they are not using competitive and accurate key phrases. But hey, you got a great deal right?

To rank high with competitive key phrases takes a great deal of work and marketing and no legitimate, experienced company will put forth that kind of effort for $200 a month. They would be out of business fast. But for a couple hundred dollars more, hiring the expertise you need, you will get the results you want and your revenue will expand exponentially! A dramatic increase in business and ROI is what you are looking for, and your investment more than pays for itself. Too many times we have taken over the work of SEO and marketing from another company only to find that they have not touched anything in months. The xml sitemap was last updated five months ago! The pages have not been adjusted and the website has not expanded in months. But, Hey.. Ya got a great price!

Another way SEO companies can take on clients for bargain basement prices (which is very appealing to budget conscience business owners who make decisions on SEO without this knowledge) is to use automation. Websites or software which post your pages to the search engines and broadcasts data with a click of the button. You may have seen these options available within your hosting company’s website or advertised on television from ineffective budget website building companies who always use templates. Automation can only get you so far. It is inept and ineffective and provides a false sense of security that you have done what it takes to compete and market your website to the search engines. Software cannot do the expansive and integral manual work that is crucial to successful SEO and marketing of a company’s website and online presence. Sure, you can get limited results from little effort or automation, but boy are you missing out on a big piece of the pie and a great deal of business!

We have a client that hired us for SEO, Link Building, Press releases, web design Blog creation, entires and syndication and Social Media Marketing and signed a long term contract to do so. The problem was they didn’t want to pay to build out and improve their website which was sorely lacking in content among other things. I honestly told them that it is imperative they build out their website design and improve it’s structure for us to be successful in our efforts. They said, don’t worry about that right now, it’s not in our budget. Well, we DO worry about the success of our clients. So we went ahead and restructured their website, built it out, re-designed the website and expanded it with relative industry content, links and coding… absolutely free. They are quite happy with the amazing results and it would not have been possible if we didn’t go the extra mile for them and provide these added benefits. This and the services outlined above are the type of commitment you need from the SEO company you hire. SEO, Marketing and web design go hand in hand and it’s complex work, effort, expertise and commitment on a daily basis is what it takes to succeed in a competitive environment. Just like anything in life, the more you know, the harder you work, the more successful you will be.

In today’s economy and challenging business environment with tight budgets, cost seems to be a major factor in determining vendor hires. But, on the other hand it is a total waste of money to pay for something you are not getting or a service that doesn’t deliver what you need.

Author – David Nagle

Social Media Marketing and it’s powerful reach
Few companies are using social media marketing to it’s full extent. Many think they have done their job by creating a Facebook Fan Page and posting news on it everyday, gathering a modest following, posting a video, putting “Like” links on their website etc. That is nice but you are not promoting and networking your business.

Facebook is approaching 1 BILLION users. What happens when you promote to 1,000 people that “Like” your fan page… Answer – each user has approximately 100 friends – your promotion reaches 100,000 people, of which many can help network your brand, purchase your product or service, and virally spread the word or pass on an important source for information. That is where we come in. We specialize in Social Media marketing, SEO marketing and diligently work the social media accounts of our clients for as little as $295 or a Full Marketing Plan with SEO, Viral, PPC, Geo, BL, and authorative communications from $895 per month. We give you expert daily SEO and a complex marketing plan each day to promote your website and web presence on Social Media and search. The returns are absolutely remarkable. What most CEOs do not realize is that Facebook is becoming a Search Engine / Social site / Community and advertising power house! We predict that within the next decade Facebook will challenge Google in searches and as a one stop communication and information source. Now is the time to start your marketing efforts on the world’s largest marketing platform. Let’s take a closer look… What you Need To know!

Do you have a custom Blog that is syndicated and fed to publications, social media, web resources, and a subscriber base? Is your product or service updated frequently on the social networks with promotions, interactive pages that feed traffic and revenue to your website and company? That is just the tip of the iceberg, as the purpose of Social Networking in the business world is “Networking” and “Marketing” your company to current and prospective clients and applicants. You must optimize your social network accounts and all activity, create interactivity, give incentives, promotions, and feed valuable information to your base in a timely manner. That basic marketing plan is a successful way to market your business online and virally compound revenue. To be truly effective, you must cross network and market your Social Media accounts with your web presence. Each Social Network venue has it’s own set of special tools, functions, and advantages that work hand in hand with each other as well as external online marketing opportunities and your company website. When used and employed correctly, they are a tremendously powerful marketing medium that brands your company and attracts new business more than any media source you may use. We have some clients that actually rely mostly on Social Media Marketing and referrals for new business because it is truly that effective!

Social Media Marketing is also supported by internal marketing techniques, the engine that drives the Social Networking vehicle forward. Digital communications via video and interactive calls to action, digital newsletters, emails and live feeds with interactivity to communicate with your company on a regular basis are just some of the underlying support mechanisms used to market your brand and offerings and keep your market interested and in touch.

A good marketing company will work and build your marketing plan each and every day and generate new income for their clients and keep updating the functionality and employing the broad spectrum of applications that become available within each venue. For instance, The FBML application will soon be phased out in favor of new applications supported by Facebook such as IFrames. In each case, the results will be a steady increase in quality clients, renewed interest from current and past clients and build your brand and base. Your company’s website will also realize increasing visits from month to month and all this translates into consistent revenue increases and larger market share over time with increasing revenue that far exceeds Investment – ROI is the fundamental objective of successful marketing… and Social Media | SEO marketed correctly and with dedication is what so many Companies are lacking in today’s competitive environment.

Author – David Nagle

What is happening online with Staffing Companies?

I have spent several weeks reviewing several hundred staffing company websites, the coding of their pages, which is easily accessible, their SEO (or lack thereof) as well as misuse and misunderstanding of social networking. The big question I ask myself is how can so many of these companies fall so far behind with regard to the latest marketing strategies?

The Beginning
I remember when I was marketing the first Travel Nurse Staffing company back in the late 80s, ah yes, times were good and the revenue was flowing! Then came the big recession of the early 90′s and unless you got competitive with your rates you lost clients. Leadership can get complacent and lazy… and before you know it, you have lost market share and have been left in the dust. Today I can see this happening with web based marketing. These executives may not realize it but their online presence represents who they are and tells a greater story of their corporate culture. I can identify several hundred staffing company websites that need a MAJOR facelift not to mention script and coding that is compatible with the latest browsers and operating systems. In the office their site may look “ok”, but in fact, to the outside world there are many different browsers that display their site in horrible ways with major functionality issues. This is especially true with mobile devices which display things quite differently that the home PC.

SEO and Staffing Websites
Now let’s talk a little about Search Engine Optimization. Looking at the coding in many of even the most popular company websites, I can see the same mistakes made over and over. Key phrases being used are not structured correctly nor are they supported by the content. And even the basic rules of SEO have been ignored, not thoroughly implemented, or have errors that will damage their search results. I can even see meta tags promoting the web designer who developed their website instead of the company’s website! Most executives have no idea this is even going on. And some are insulted when it is suggested they need to take a look at their deficiencies.

Social Media Marketing
This is an area where just a handful of companies are using social media to it’s full extent. And I mean very few! Many think they have done their job by creating a Facebook Fan Page and posting news on it everyday, gathering a modest following, posting a video, putting “Like” links on their website etc. Not even the largest Travel Nurse company who is popular across the country has an interactive IFW!

Facebook is approaching 1 BILLION users. What happens when you promote to 1,000 people that “Like” your fan page… Answer – each user has approximately 100 friends – your promotion reaches 100,000 people, many of whom are medical and healthcare personell. The problem is about 95% of staffing companies haven’t a clue how to use Social Media effectively and are utilizing only 25% of it’s full potential. That is where we come in. We specialize in Social Media marketing and SEO and diligently work the social media accounts of our clients for as little as $500 per month. The returns are absolutely remarkable. What most CEOs do not realize is that Facebook is becoming a Search Engine / Social site / Community and advertising power house! We predict that within the next decade Facebook will overtake Google in searches. Now is the time to start your marketing efforts on the world’s largest marketing platform. Let’s take a closer look…

Do you have a custom Blog that is syndicated across all platforms? Are your job postings updated daily on the social networks with online applications on Facebook? That is just the tip of the iceberg my friends. The purpose of Social Networking in the business world is “Networking” and “Marketing” your company to current and prospective clients and applicants. You must optimize your social network accounts, create interactivity, incentives, and market that in various ways. To be truly effective, you must cross network and market your accounts. Each Social Network venue has it’s own set of special tools, functions, and advantages that work hand in hand with each other as well as external online marketing opportunities and your company website. When used and employed correctly, they are a tremendously powerful marketing medium that brands your company and attracts new business like no other. We have some clients that actually rely mostly on Social Networking and referrals for new business because it is truly that effective!

Social networking is also supported by internal marketing techniques, the engine that drives the Social Networking vehicle forward. Digital communications via video and interactive calls to action, digital newsletters, emails and live feeds with interactivity to communicate with your company on a regular basis are just some of the underlying support mechanisms used to market your brand and offerings and keep your market interested and in touch.

A good marketing company will work at it each and every day for their clients and keep updating the functionality and employing the broad spectrum of applications that become available within each venue. For instance, The FBML application will soon be phased out in favor of new applications supported by FB. In each case, the results will be a steady increase in quality candidates, applications and renewed interest from current and past clients and staff. Your staffing company’s website will also realize increasing visits from month to month and all this translates into consistent revenue increases and larger market share over time. Increasing revenue and ROI is the fundamental objective of successful marketing and that is what so many Staffing Companies are lacking in today’s competitive environment.

If you do, your website may as well be a broken down vehicle off the information super highway. Manual search engine submission is the best, most effective and preferred method when it comes to optimizing, marketing and submitting your website to the search engines.

Search engines expect every details of the site to be filled in manually through their website mechanism. Automated submission through back door is considered as a SPAM in most of the popular search engines and directories.

The Search Engines!
There are hundreds of general and niche search engines which are eager to accept your website if you submit the required information in the right category according to the submission guidelines. The question is how you are going to do the search engine submissions and which search engines are you going to submit in? Certainly you don’t want to submit your mortgage site in a “health directory” or place it in the sports category of a general web directory.

Don’t automate me!
You may have come across “Completely automated search engine submission service that submits your site to 90,000 search engines on a click of mouse … IN SECONDS!” and lot of other software’s which claim to automatically submit your website to thousands of search engines and directories. The rates of these submissions are very cheap and so is the result of these submissions. Chances are your website will be blacklisted by some of the popular search engines and directories. Consider the facts before you utilize a software or service to do automatic search engine submission.
Every search engine and directory is unique and the have various features which differ in Different categories and sections. (Some may have as less as 12 main categories while others have more than 3000 categories classified into sub categories and inner categories. The category names are not consistent across the directories)
Different types of form input. Some search engines will ask for a very few details of your website whereas a dedicated account is needed in others for submitting your website. You need to do a detailed registration by providing phone numbers, address etc.
Registration and confirmation methods. Most of the search engines and directories need a confirmation from your email to avoid automatic submission CAPTCHA (IMAGE Confirmation) – A picture with numbers which have to be manually entered. This is also to avoid automated submission.
Approval of your website.
Maximum number of submissions per user (some of them restrict to a single submission per user)
Frequency of submission..
The popular search engines and directories are opposed to automated submissions and it is considered as a SPAM. No automated software or service can take into account the above different features of search engines and directories while submitting the web sites. The fact is most of the directories do a manual review on the submissions and will find out the automated submissions sooner or later and block them.
What is manual search engine submission and how is it better than automated search engine submission?
Manual search engine submission is the process of analyzing where and what to submit in the search engines and directories by experts and doing each and every submission by hand ensuring a good acceptance rate for your website.
Manual search engine submission involves Analyzing your website, doing the submission text with title, description, key words and creating a unique account.
Collecting the appropriate search engine and directories for submission and submit the website in the right category.
Modify the submission text as per the need of various search engines and directories.
Confirming the submissions (Image confirmation, email confirmations) wherever needed and co coordinating with the editors of search engines and directories whenever required.

The advantage over automated search engine submission is –
First and foremost, manual search engine submission is the only acceptable method of submission to a search engine or directory. Automated article submission is considered as SPAM which is obvious from the various confirmations implemented by them.
A directory is organized into categories and subcategories. Editors review each submission manually and evaluate the submission. In manual search engine submission the websites are submitted in the related directory, search engine under the right category which is not possible in the case of automated submission. Automated software can’t adequately submit to any article directory because it cannot study the directory’s structure and decide which category is best suited.
Websites are submitted according to the different input systems of various directories by manual submission. Whereas automated submission just posts a set of predefined data irrespective of the input fields which results in an incomplete submission followed by rejection.
No search engine or directory is skipped in manual submission. Any Image confirmation (CAPCHA code) and email confirmation is done immediately which is not possible with automated software. Incase for any reason the search engine, directory is down or the website submission is not through, then it will be done another time.
More emphasis on niche search engines, directory related to your website theme.
Very high acceptance compared to an automated search engine submission.

 
Author – David Nagle

When it comes to the planning and executing the design of a website or Online Business, there are really two ways of going about it. On one side, you have custom built and designed websites with massive flexibility and on the other, you have pre-built website template designs.

How do I know if a company is telling the truth that they provide custom designed websites?
Many companies provide website designs that were put together in mass production, then they provide the templates of these basic designs to plug in text and photos and sell to their customers at a very low cost. They sell them as “Custom Designed Websites”. This is false and misleading. If you look at their portfolios, you can see a simple “cookie cutter” style design that sorely lacks in top notch creativity and branding that we at A Work Of Art, Inc. provide. If they provide SEO services, find out how much time a month is manually put into it, and get examples of their work. SEO needs the hands on thoroughness, effort and expertise to succeed as it should. As you can see from our portfolio, every professional business website is custom tailored and built from scratch for each and every client.

1. Custom website designs
When we say “custom” website designs, we’re referring to designs that are conceptualized, designed, and built from the ground up, specifically for a particular website or Online Business. These “one off” designs are only used for that single company, product, or service and you won’t see the same design being used by any other website. These website designs have not be pre-built by a design company for use by several clients or resold by any template retailers. A Work Of Art, Inc. is proud to offer custom website designs, specially crafted by our website design artisans specifically for your unique brand and are far more appealing, marketable and your brand is applied far more effectively.

2. Pre-built website designs
In contrast to custom website designs, pre-built website designs have been built either:
A.For no single product/service/company – The pre-built design has been built to be used by several websites or Online Businesses.
B.For a single website non-exclusively – Although the website designer created the website design for a particular client, the design was created to be reused for appropriate future clients as well.

Website designers and website design companies will typically fail to effectively customize the pre-built design for the client’s unique brand and purposes. They include things like inserting the client’s logo and perhaps modifying the design’s color scheme to match. These are sometimes referred to as “customized” designs, so it’s important to be aware of the difference between “custom” and “customized”.

At A Work Of Art, We take pride in branding, marketing and Optimizing your website in the most professional manner so that you get what you want and need “The first time” and you have something you can build on and grow with into the future. Most web design companies offering cheap prices can not offer this despite what they may tell you. Their top priority is their bottom line and mass production. don’t fall into the “123 and done” companies.

The many meanings of website design “template”Pre-built website designs are often referred to as “templates”, although that term is also used in elsewhere in the website design & development industry to refer to the design of a website that is built using a Content Management System or other website platform. For such websites, the design is separated from the actual page contents, and the empty website design is referred to as a “template”. This becomes confusing because some websites which are platform-based may have a unique template that is a completely custom design. Thus, “template” in a general sense, may or may not refer to a pre-built website design.

Which is best, custom or pre-built website design?

Let’s stick to the facts and let you form your own opinion on the subject. Each process has it’s own pros and cons and at A Work Of Art, Inc., we believe these need to be carefully weighed for each client to determine the best solution. To determine if a website design should be custom or pre-built, we consider the following dimensions of quality:

Branding
As website design is a part of Internet marketing and marketing in general, branding is an important facet of your efforts. Your brand includes a visual vocabulary: symbols, colors, and fonts which can all be utilized in the shaping of your custom website design. For branding purposes, a custom website design allows a greater opportunity to present and reinforce your brand.

Cost
The process of conceptualizing, planning, and creating a custom website design is generally far more complex than using a pre-built template, even if the pre-built template is customized for your purposes. The complexity of custom website design demands a higher cost. If you say, “I just want to have a small web site and not spend a lot of money”.

Every day I get calls from companies saying they went that route and now their website is obsolete, they can’t find the company that designed it, isn’t correctly optimized and they need to have it done all over again. In the long run, it is more cost effective to have it done correctly the first time and have it custom designed to fit what you need in the latest state of the art design applications.

Flexibility
Using a pre-built template is a bit like buying and moving into a house. You’re confined to the dimensions and layout of that design and you may find that you’re very limited in that space, rather than building a space around your content and features. If you have to make some radical customizations to that pre-built website design in order to make it work for your website or Online Business, the costs of those customizations might become an issue or not be possible at all.

In general, if flexibility of the layout and design are what you’re focused on, you’re probably better off with a custom design.

Author – David Nagle

Choosing a web designer or web development company is a crucial decision, and you must be careful when choosing a company to handle the responsibilities involved with building and developing your professional business website.

Each and every day I hear horror stories about how someone hired a designer, they could not handle what they needed them to do and so they disappeared or kept their money. Now that person or company needs to spend the money all over again… they THOUGHT they got a good deal and had no idea what was involved with developing a stable, reliable, custom designed website that would have everything they wanted from branding to integrated marketing and complex functionality for professional business sites. Below are some important things to consider when selecting a website designer or company for your project.

What Types Of Web Professionals Are There?

Website Designer - helps you to determine the page layout, graphics, text location and colors of your site, as well as the navigation and how pages will cross-link to one another. He may also do the actual computer programming and graphic art work for the site, or may hire out that work to a programming specialist. A Website Designer is the project manager for your site design.

Website Programmer - takes the design from the Designer and creates the code to make the site run. She is also responsible for all the technical stuff that happens behind-the-scenes to make sure the site works properly for your visitors.

Graphic Designer - creates the graphics for the site, including page layout, colors, etc. Think of this person as the “visual artist” for your site. They must be experienced with branding techniques and work to create a custom theme and design to market your web presence.

Internet Marketing Consultant – helps you to determine how your website fits into your overall marketing strategy, and how to get more traffic and sales from your website with SEM, SEO, Social Media Marketing and Back linking just to name a few. The marketing of a website is very complex with thousands of unique ways of applying strategies.

Web Marketing Specialist – Performs Search Engine optimization, posting, tracking and analysis, social media marketing, creating Blogs and link building campaigns just for starters. A Work Of Art, Inc. has the experience and expertise to provide all of these services plus much more. A Note on Copy writing: You may find a designer who can also help you with the text for your website but don’t count on it. Be prepared to write the text yourself, or hire a professional copy writer. Copy writers charge per page, sometimes up to $500 a page ($5,000 for a 10-page website.) A Work Of art, Inc. in Fort Lauderdale, assists client with copy writing. Consider a hybrid solution: get advice about simple website copy writing principles from an internet marketing consultant, then you write the text. Have the consultant edit the text to make sure that it works on the web. A Work Of Art does all of this for you!

Who Is A Good Designer And How Much Do They Charge?Much of your choice of designers depends on whether you want to work locally with someone, or whether you are willing to work remotely with them. Here are some things to think and ask about when hiring a website designer:

Pay attention to how much they ask you about YOUR BUSINESS. They should want to get to know you and your business intimately. How else can they design a site that reflects you and your business, unless they spend time to get to know your company, your industry and your goals?

Look at sites they’ve designed to see if you like their style. Is there a certain feel to ALL their sites, are they using cookie cutter templates or do they design custom websites from scratch and are they flexible in their designs?Ask them if they did the actual graphic and layout design of the site, or if they just did the programming.

Do they have a structured planning process that leads you through the design phase, and will they document all the discussions and decisions? If they have a Website Planning Guide that you’ll work through together, that’s really helpful.

Ask them what they know about internet marketing and search engine optimization. Are they experienced with Social Media Marketing? How much time a month do they spend marketing your website? Is it done manually or do they take the least effective route by using automated software. Be sure that they’re creating a site for you that meets your larger marketing and business goals. (A pretty site is no good to you unless it generates revenue and prospects. Ask the designer for their fees and what is the estimated cost for the site you want. They may not be able to give you a good estimate until you discuss content and features of the site. Expect to pay between $60 – $125 an hour, depending on their skill and their location. A quality website with good graphic design and layout that is optimized and includes branding will cost around $2,500 – $3,500 for a 10-page site. 95% of companies do not have the knowledge to employ all of these and use templates and automation and only charge $50 – $100 a page. This is not what a successful company needs. Go cheap and you WILL regret it. If you add a blog, newsletter, shopping cart, autoresponders, email address setup, SEO, membership site, or logo design (or if you have more than 10 pages), expect the price to be higher. Ask them how they bill you. Will they invoice you monthly, or when certain milestones are reached? Do you have to make deposits? Do they stick to their initial quote? Do they charge for every little task and change? We provide ONE quote, provide unlimited proofs and do what it takes to make sure our clients are happy… and we Stick to the quoted price! Usually if they charge for changes and more proofs they are not confident in their abilities.

Pay attention to whether they’ll try to stick within your budget, or whether they keep suggesting new add-ons that increase to the cost of your site. Remember, designers aren’t responsible for your budget! Talk to some of their current and recent clients, to see how smooth the process was. You want someone who has good project management skills AND good communication skills. They have to listen to you, not just give advice. Ask them whether they will maintain your site after the initial design, and how much they’ll charge for that. Some designers want to create new sites but don’t want to maintain them. If they have been in business only a couple years they may not even be around to maintain it… we get that comment a lot from prospective clients who complain about their previous web designer. Someone like a virtual assistant (VA) may be able to maintain your site for a lower hourly fee, as long as the VA is skilled in website programming, but know you have to hire TWO companies and that is not what you want. The more bells and whistles and complicated programming in your site, the less likely that an average VA will be able to maintain it for you. Make sure you own your domain name, even if the website designer registered it for you. Get your hosting username and password and make sure you have admin privileges.

You have got to enjoy talking and working with them. Do you LIKE the designer? Do you believe they’ll act ethically? Do you enjoy speaking with them? Do they stay focused to the task at hand, or do they ramble and waste your time? Do you feel you “click” with their personality and values? Do they offer you invaluable insight and advice about your site design? Tell each prospective website designer what your deadline is and ask if they can meet it. If you don’t have a specific deadline, brainstorm with the designer to create a good working deadline that you can both meet, especially if you will be doing the job of writing the website text.

Your website is crucial to the success of your business. By doing extensive interviewing of potential website designers, you’re more likely to pick one that can do the work you want, is willing to really listen to you, can create a site that reflects you and your business, and keeps within your budget and timeframe.

Author – David Nagle

The 11 Deadly Sins of Search Engine Optimization

(Common mistakes and misconceptions about search optimization and marketing)

There is so much misinformation floating through the internet regarding search engine marketing and optimization that it’s important to shed some light on a few common errors and misconceptions. The following list highlights some of the most critical issues involved in determining the success or failure of a web site’s search engine optimization and marketing strategies.

1. Lack of “Search Friendly” Content.

Every week I review web sites with no real search engine indexable content. Web pages composed mostly of graphics, flash and other bells and whistle are commonly over-looked by the search engines. Search engines determine what content is of value per web page based on the text used on that page. A truly optimized site should contain at least 200 words of keyword-dense text. There is some debate among experts on exactly how many words should be used, but generally 200 words will suffice. As a point of reference this paragraph contains about 200 words. It is equally important for text content to contain keywords that match the page titles. For example, a site selling peanut butter owned by a company called “ACME Foods” might have a title of “Acme Foods, Inc. Wholesale Food Products”. We have to consider how many people are likely to search for the term “Acme Foods, Inc. Wholesale Food Products” it is much more likely that people will search for the term “peanut butter”. Knowing this, we can say with confidence that it would be a wiser choice to title a page, “Peanut Butter, ACME Foods” and the page content should reflect this same keyword strategy.

2. Insufficient Link Popularity.

Search engines make every attempt to qualify the results which are displayed in search results. One of the ways that they do this is by tracking the number and quality of the incoming links to a web site. A site with a large number of incoming links from quality sites is given a higher ranking in search results. This is an important consideration that is sometimes over-looked by those attempting to market web sites. Services that promise to link your site to thousands of other sites are far from productive; in fact they can sometimes do more harm than good. Most search engines these days consider services like this to be spam, so called “link farming” and often give sites with these types of links a low ranking or drop them all-together from the search results. Incoming links to a site that compliment it and are relevant to the site contents are golden and can greatly boost a site’s ranking. Google’s page ranking system is a good example. A site with a page rank of 1 if given a link from a site with a page rank of 8 can see its page rank boost to 4! Link popularity is one of the most time consuming and difficult aspects of search engine optimization. It’s no wonder that many of the search engines give so much importance to this web site measurement.

3. Lack of Keyword Research And Updates

So, you have a web site. Do you know what pages in your web site are generating the most interest? Do you know what terms people are searching for that result in them finding your site? Probably not. Let’s use the peanut butter analogy again. You own a web site that sells peanut butter. You spend some money on paid search advertising, logically; you assume that the key phrase “peanut butter” is a prime candidate to target. What happens? usually one of two things, one, the term peanut butter is such a popular search term that thirty million other web sites are competing for the same key phrase. Two, the term peanut butter is so unpopular that it’s unlikely that it’s searched for more than once in this lifetime. Proper keyword research can solve these problems. Let’s say for the sake of argument that keyword research is performed and that it is determined that a significant number of people are searching for “organic peanut butter”. It just so happens that our peanut butter company manufactures a whole line of organic, all natural peanut butter. We have discovered a niche. The right amount of people searching for the specific product that we want to sell. It’s the perfect match. So, what must be done to capitalize on our findings? First we optimize our web pages for our target keyword, we change the title, and the content so that they include the term “organic peanut butter”, then we scrap all of the paid search advertising that wasn’t working and focus on targeting our “organic peanut butter” market. The point is, successful search engine marketing relies on constant research and updates the internet is fluid and evolving. What works today might not work tomorrow, we have to be able to identify strengths and weaknesses in our internet marketing campaigns and must be prepared to research, update and adapt.

4. Designing First, Optimizing Later

I have seen this mistake repeated hundreds of times. Even experienced web designers fail to consider the results of design decisions on search optimization until it’s too late. What is the point of spending thousands of dollars for a well “designed” web site if nobody ever sees it? Consult a search engine specialist early in the design process. Even if your web site marketing strategy relies heavily on paid search advertising a consultation with a professional optimization expert may expose flaws in your site’s layout. Points in the flow of information that tend to cause users to lose interest or become confused may become apparent, better to address these issues early on.

5. Relying Too Heavily On Paid Search Advertising

This is a mistake made by Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike. The fact is that most businesses, small and large aren’t getting it right.

The rationale is that since search advertising can be purchased it isn’t necessary to focus on search optimization techniques. On the surface this might make some sense, you can buy certain keyword phrases that people are searching for, so why bother optimizing your site for the search engines? For a company with a huge internet advertising budget this means spending huge amounts of money to drive traffic to their sites, when, if their site had been properly optimized from the beginning, these costs might be half as much for the same amount of viewers. For many smaller businesses trying to compete in the internet marketplace simply becomes overwhelming. While paid search advertising is a highly effective means of targeting an audience, organic search optimization greatly increases the chances of success for any web site. Make sure that the site you are advertising is one that people can find easily without the assistance of a paid search campaign.

6. Not Supporting the Conversion Process

A few weeks ago my wife decided that she wanted to buy some Australian made baby clothes that we can’t find here in the states. So being the internet savvy father to be, I decided to have a look on the internet for the particular brand she was interested in. I surf to a search engine and type in the brand name. A few seconds later I’m greeted with a list of web sites that supposedly have what I’m looking for. I click on the first site in the list. I find myself at the site of a clothing importer based out of California. There are links to several categories of clothing, none of which seem to have anything to do with babies, eventually after a lot of searching I find a link on the children’s clothing page for infant garments. The infant garments page has a few images of clothing but not the brand I’m looking for. I look to see if there is way to search for clothing by brand name. There isn’t. I look to see if there is a list somewhere on the site of brand names carried by this distributor. There isn’t. I look to see if there is a toll free number to call. There isn’t. The internet optimization part of my brain is boiling by this point, so to add insult to injury I go back to the children’s garments section of the site. I click on a link to purchase a bright green jacket. I’m confronted with a page that is requiring me to fill in a bunch of personal details. Ok, so I fill in the details and click submit. Now I find myself back at the bright green jacket page. Apparently now I’m qualified to purchase something. I click the “check out” button. The web page goes blank. I know that this is the result of bad programming. I know what’s going to happen next. “Error 404 page not found”. Has this type of thing happened to you? If you have ever tried to purchase something on the internet, I’m sure it has. This is an illustration of a web site that is well ranked in the search engines but has not taken the time to create a site that is designed for its users. I was forced to hunt through the web site to try and find what I was looking for. The flow of information was counter-intuitive. There was no online support. All-in-all the whole site was a joke. I would be surprised to learn that the site in question made any sales at all, ever. There were several points in this online experience that I felt like giving up. In the industry this is known as ”abandonment”, This is a critical point in what is known as the “conversion process”, the act of turning web site viewers into online purchasers. This is an issue that should never be underestimated. In fact it is the number one factor that determines a web site’s success or failure. A web site with a million dollar marketing budget and millions of visitors will not succeed unless it serves to understand its user’s needs and anticipate its viewer’s questions.

7. Graphics Used For Text Links.

Web designers often use graphics to represent a link in a web site. There are many reasons for this choice. Unfortunately for web designers, the major internet browsers display web pages in different ways. Since fonts display differently on individual computers and in different browsers, it is a much simpler proposition for designers to create graphic links than it is to attempt to create cross-browser text links. The downside to this work-around is that search engines have no idea if a graphic link relates to a specific web page or a link to download the latest Britney Spears MP3. For search engines to understand what a link is truly representing, they need to find words in plain, good old fashioned text. If a web site must use graphics for navigation it is important to include a set of plain text links somewhere on the web page, usually at the bottom of the page.

8. Use of Frames.

Search engines have a hard time indexing sites that are created in frames. Framed sites use several html files to display one page. Search engines are often confused by the frames method of creating web sites, usually only indexing the first html file within the Pages that aren’t indexed will never show up in search engine results. Also, many people that use the internet regularly for research and purchases, so called “power users”, tend to avoid sites built with frames, especially those sites which require the user to scroll content in separate frames. Simply put, frames are bad.

9. Splash Pages.

Entry pages that instruct the user to “Enter”, usually decorated with a large graphic or a flash animation. The index page of a web site is the one that search engines read first. More often than not the only readable content on this type of page is a link that says, “skip intro” Splash pages lack indexable content, usually contain no links and often contain a “redirect” to the real home page. Search engines do not like redirects, they want the real thing. Avoid splash pages unless you aren’t serious about being found by search engines.

10. Submitting To 10,000 Search Engines

I sometimes have a difficult time believing that these services are still making money, more importantly that people still think that they work. The fact is that a handful of search engines account for about 90% of all the web traffic generated and the rest comes from people typing in a web site’s URL indirectly into their browser’s address bar. The amount of viewers generated from these Mega-Search Submittal services is so negligible that it’s hardly worth consideration. Don’t waste your time or your money.

11. Not Clearly Defining Action Points

Another mistake that is repeated quite is often is the failure to clearly define what the objectives of a web site are. What are the main goals of a site? Who will the primary audience be? What actions are desired of the site’s visitors? If these questions aren’t answered prior to designing a site they will reflect a poor user experience in the final result. Action points or calls to action are a terminology handed down from the traditional marketing world. They serve to define a desired action and are often supported by persuasive sales copy. Though the basic concepts are the same as traditional marketing, calls to action can take many different forms on the internet. Often they appear as links or as part of a shopping cart. The nature of a web site determines its type of action point. The most important thing to consider is that without them, viewers have little or no idea what the purpose of your site is. Imagine an infomercial running a half hour long advertisement on television, yet the commentator says nothing during the whole ad, just stands there holding a cardboard box, you are left trying to guess what’s inside, the advertisement offers no explanations or means of contacting the company involved. Pointless isn’t it? This is exactly what a web site without clearly defined points of action accomplishes; nothing. It’s an exercise in futility.

Source – Jeff Palmer / seoarticles.net

Author – David Nagle

CONTENT AND SEO by A Work Of Art SEO Team

Creating text for the pages on your website is important for communicating to your page viewers and your market. A more important task is recreating all that text as optimized for the search engines.

In doing so, the SEO team’s Creative Writer will take all the SEO research and data and infuse it into the website’s original text so that it marries well and blends right into the language. There are many steps beyond that which must be taken to refine the SEO Ready text. An example would be shifting the emphasis of a sentence or changing the usage of a key word to reflect another meaning. Many of us call it story telling while guiding the robots through the story. A page with many keywords and phrases dumped into lots of text is not SEO ready.

A well expressed and creative SEO CW is so valuable to the process of getting a web page or web site ranked high, and the Text SEO Ready. You must have well constructed text that relates well to the subject on the various web pages with an underlying understanding of the SEO goal and how to maintain it’s importance. Now that you have SEO Ready Text throughout your website, you need to integrate the links, tags and other elements that support the text and do it consistently throughout the website. It can be tempting to implement Alt tags without regard to usage in their relationship with the text. So consistency is important throughout the optimization. An over emphasis on the wrong formula and you can hurt your results. The mind best suited for the task is a logical, creative and thorough one. Common sense comes to mind as well. I have seen many professionals have such a chaotic recipe for correctly optimizing text and that failure can severely delay the trend of improved search results. Thanks for you interest! A Work Of Art, Inc. a Fort Lauderdale Web Design company is here to provide our 20+ years expertise whaen you are ready!

Author – David Nagle

Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords or key phrases and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines to your website’s information. The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients.Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign or web service. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

There may be different levels of SEO depending on the your objectives, budget or geographic saturation. Warning – Be careful of companies who discuss variations of what is known in the trade as Black hat SEO or Spamdexing. These methods depend on link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices. Many web design companies and SEO companies out-think themselves and get away from the basics with the idea they can manipulate the search engines into ranking their web pages higher than they warrant. Many times this backfires costing the client’s website permanent damage with regard to future rankings in the major search engines. There are several levels of SEO and marketing which include link building, Social Network Marketing, a syndicated Blog, Marketing to external websites etc.

A Work Of Art, Inc., (awoa.com) based in Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs, Florida along with many other webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.

The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the web page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engine. Meta tags provide a guide to each page’s content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable because the webmaster’s choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site’s actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches.

Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.By relying so much on factors exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters.

Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

Google headquarters Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.

In recent years major search engines have begun to rely more heavily on off-web factors such as the age, sex, location, and search history of people conducting searches in order to further refine results.By 2007, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals. The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages.

Getting indexed – The leading search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically. Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Yahoo’s paid inclusion program has drawn criticism from advertisers and competitors.

Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren’t discoverable by automatically following links.Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled.

White hat versus black hat – SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Some industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note.

White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether.

Marketing strategies considered - Eye tracking studies have shown that searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and left to right (for left to right languages), looking for a relevant result. Placement at or near the top of the rankings therefore increases the number of searchers who will visit a site. However, more search engine referrals does not guarantee more sales. SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator’s goals.

A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site’s conversion rate. In addition, paid search results or “Pay Per Click” campaigns are certainly not the way to go for many business types for various reasons such as low profit margins, and low sales volume combined with popular key word associations.

SEO may generate a substantial return on investment.
However -search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of positioning, continued placement, referrals or revenue growth based on search results alone. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors. It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic.A top-ranked SEO blog Seomoz.org has reported, “Some search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a small share of their traffic from search engines.” Instead, some of their main sources of traffic are links from popular websites within a company’s industry type. These can include free listings, articles, banners and other sources within a website that generate incoming traffic.- David Nagle – Creative Director, A Work Of Art, Inc. – AWOA.COM

Author – David Nagle