SoFla Web Studio Blog

These South Florida SEO Strategies Will Keep You Competitive

Randy Hine — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:10:42 +0000

Because competition is the name of the game for the search engines, you need to do everything possible to engage and entice your website visitors. You need to pay attention to what your competition is doing right, as well as what they are doing wrong. You can learn from your competition's success and put some of their ideas to work in your internet marketing campaign.

You only have a small window of opportunity to grab your visitor's attention, make them feel positive about your company and create a customer. That's a pretty tall order for the first 5 seconds of your initial meeting. This is what we need to accomplish if you not only want to gain a new customer, but also give them a reason to tell their friends about what they have found on your website.

If you can implement these three key strategies in your search of that coveted page one search engine ranking, you will remain competitive, even if their SEO budget is much larger than yours.

Never Boring

Not only do we want to avoid boring our visitors but we also need to figure out ways to really engage them in a positive way. If your SEO strategy is just like everyone else's then you can expect that you won't stand out in a crowd. Before you worry too much about the nuts and bolts of meta titles or content marketing, try to establish a "theme" or design that will stand-out from every other site out there.

Suggestions:

Try to interject a bit of your personality into your website.
Be funny, controversial or eccentric, just be memorable.
Dazzle the eye with color, character and substance.
Write about industry innovation (or secrets) that will interest your readers.

These ideas are designed to make your customer remember you and also want to tell their friends and colleagues about what a great experience they had on your website.

Give Them Something

Try to help your website visitor remember you by taking something of value away with them. Offering an incentive to return and do business with you will greatly increase your chances of a second visit. If your product or service is one of value, you can expect that for every freebie you hand out, you will sell two in the future.

Suggestions:

Buy one-get one free coupon.
10% (or more) off of a future purchase.
Social Media engagement, such as, "write a caption, win a prize" giveaways.
Offer to give a portion of the purchase to a charity.

If your giving away something really great, you can expect the news to spread rapidly and this promotion can give your search engine ranking a huge boost because of all the internet "chatter" created about you.

Learn From The Competition

Visit their social media sites as well as their main website in search of what is working for them, and what is not. If you see a strategy at play that is garnering a ton of "likes and shares", try to implement it in your own campaign.

Suggestions:

Make note of which keywords are being utilized.
Explore their website in search of strategic partnerships they may have which could work for you.
Try some of the same marketing channels and platforms that are working for them.
Find those sites that are not successful (try page 10 of the search results) and avoid those things that stand out.

You can learn a lot from your competition and rest assured, they are also watching you.

Your South Florida Web Studio SEO strategy is important to your business and your internet marketing success. Don't make the mistake of leaving this important job to anyone less than an expert. With the search engines becoming our first source of information, the job of SEO is too important.

Contact us today and we will make the job of your SEO, our job #1!

What SEO changes can you expect from Google over the Summer of 2013?

Steven Alig — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:31:39 +0000

Keeping with our theme of the Future of SEO, Google's Matt Cutts has provided us another informative update of what we can expect to see from Google's WebSpam team over the next few months. Much of this will have a direct impact on webmasters and the search engine optimization community. In a seven-minute "Webmaster Help" video, Cutts explains what their team has planned for the coming months, and what it all means for webmasters. It involves the Penguin update, the Panda update, advertorials, hacked sites, link spam, and a lot more.

My favorite line in the whole video is at about 4:20 when he states, "If you've been hanging out on a lot black hat forums and trading different types of spamming package tips and that sort of stuff then it might be a more eventful summer for you." :) It looks like the summer is going to be a bumpy ride regardless as I do not recall Google releasing information like this prior to an update. Maybe I am wrong but it seems like there are some BIG changes coming and we will be hearing much more about it in the near future. Of course Google still stands by their consistent recommendations for ranking well:

Make a great looking site that users love
Make it so that they will want to tell their friends about it
Make it so they will want to bookmark it
Make it so they will want to come back and visit it again and again

The SoFla Web Studio interpretation: Create your website with Good Design and Great Content.

Contact South Florida Web Studio today to help you get started.

2 Easy Steps to Make your Miami Website your Perfect Employee

Randy Hine — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:19:45 +0000

If your Miami based website was a member of your team what would it look like? Would it be someone who would get fired for sleeping on the job and always missing deadlines? Or is it your number one sales rep who is fast, effective and always has a smile on its face? Just like any other member of your staff, reviewing and refocusing your website is crucial. Here are two easy ways to review your website so that it can perform at its best.

1. Watch your Links and Toolbars

First, make sure all of the links and webpages are working properly. Go through each link, menu bar and anything else clickable and check that it goes to the right place. Nothing makes audiences grumpier than finding a link to something they want to learn about only to discover that it doesn’t go anywhere.

While this may seem like a simple problem, studies show that the average internet user has a minuscule attention span. Even a second delay can reduce your number of viewers by 11%, and faulty links and broken pages only add to the problem.

We here at South Florida Web Studio use SEOmoz and thier great campaign tools to automatically crawl our websites on a weekly basis and report back any "Page not found" (404 errors) warnings. We can then easily see if there are any broken links on our site and fix them. We either change the link or apply a 301 redirect to the proper page.

2. Create Content Worth Reading

Remember your website is more than a brochure or a welcome mat; it is your company’s first point of contact with many of your current and potential clients. Don’t make them feel unwelcome and frustrated with bad copy. Scan through each page for spelling errors, and out of date information, then change it to something more relevant.

Once the nitty gritty part is done, help your viewers get the most out of your website by including, pictures videos and easy digestible content. Make sure it capture’s your businesses voice and style, but avoids too much fluff or rambling nonsense. When all else fails remember keeping it simple and to the point is your best course of action. If you follow these simple steps you will be on your way to having that perfect website that will work hard for you.

Need help with your next website? Contact us and we can help get you started.

The Future of SEO

Steven Alig — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:05:19 +0000

Human beings are innately social creatures. We feel better when we eat together, laugh together, and converse together. When we have a problem, need advice, or want a recommendation, historically, we’ve always turned to people in our social circle— friends, coworkers, family— for the solution. The internet has, of course, changed the way our social species socializes. Now, when faced with a question whose answer is not immediately known, it’s not uncommon to hear someone respond with, “Google it,” or, “Ask the internet,” as if the web is our human pal in the next room. But that’s not so far off from the truth. When we want to find a good restaurant nearby, figure out how to install a low-flow showerhead, or find the most tactful method of breaking a heart, we turn to our new best friend: the int ernet. Or, more specifically, a search engine. But our friend the search engine is changing, and it’s mostly because we, as a species, are pretty much staying the same.

What this means is that we’re continuing to be our old social selves. Even if Google’s link to Urban Spoon or Yelp has recommended a popular Thai restaurant on Main Street, we’re still more likely to check out the hole-in-the-wall Cajun place that a friend recommended to us. That’s because ultimately, even if we treat the web as our indispensible companion or an all-knowing demigod, we still ultimately trust other human beings, or websites upon which we can mount a human face, a personal connection, more than we trust a faceless internet search engine. The future of SEO is essentially a capitalization on this fact, and it is as social as we are.

A recent article from the Search Engine Journal has given the future a name, and they’re calling it “Social SEO.” Engines like Google and Bing have been using “social signals” in their algorithms since 2010. Basically, the more a link gets tweeted, shared, or +1’ed, the more social relevance it has, particularly if it’s shared across social mediums, or by a person with social authority, and this bears weight in its search status.

This social future is based not only on what you share with your own network, but the likes and interests you have in common with others, be they friends or complete strangers. For example, if you enjoy a particular YouTube channel and decide to subscribe, you can be grouped as a demographic alongside the others in that group. That is to say, if users A and B like TheCuteCatChannel, and Google knows that user B also enjoys a blog about DIY pet projects, then the next time User A is searching for DIY projects, they might get a recommendation for a DIY pet project, based both on their interest in TheCuteCatChannel, as well as User B’s. The same theory works with becoming a fan of certain Facebook pages or deciding to follow certain people or companies on Twitter. This is how social media is going to revolutionize your search results, which is pretty cool, because it’s even more personalized than ever.

As another article on the topic concludes, backlinks are still extremely important in search engine optimization, ranking just below Facebook shares, and should not be ignored. We’re also still in the nascent stages of the new “social SEO,” so you don’t want to trash any of your current methods in favor of the new. But remember the weight of the personal connection. When your birthday’s coming up, would you rather your friends base your gift on your likes and interests, or the most popular gift shop within 10 miles of your zip code?

If you’re having trouble figuring out how to optimize your search engine results, remember that there’s an SEO company that can take all of your beautiful content and spin it into SEO gold. Contact us to learn more!

Media Temple Raises Rates On IP Addresses

Steven Alig — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 02:50:56 +0000

Don't get me wrong, I think MediaTemple, as a hosting company, is great and I understand having to make critical business decisions is not always easy.

However a recent change to thier policy for Additional IP Addresses took me by surprise. Via email earlier this year I was notified that I would be receiveing a 500% price increase for the cost of any additional IP addresses that we have associated with our servers.

Here is the email:

Hello,
We have some important information to share with you regarding a price change to your subscription to our "Additional IP Address" service. Historically, we've been able to offer this service at an industry-low price point of $1. On February 15th, however, we will be increasing the price to $5 and here's why:
Why Now?
You are using what is known as an original IPV4 address which is being replaced with the newer, nearly infinite, IPV6 address space. Since IPV4 addresses are almost all gone, the demand has increased dramatically and we must adjust our business for current market conditions. You can learn more about IPV4 address scarcity here.

We use MediaTemple DV servers for many of our clients and they run very well whenever an issue arises, the support at MT has been very accommodating and helpful. We also do our best to keep our costs down for our clients.

So while we have never passed this cost on to our clients, we do not have a choice at this point and will have to do so in our next annual billing cycle. Fortunately, we can limit this to particular e-commerce clients that require a unique IP for SSL certificates and will be able to cycle in the costs along with SSL renewal. And of course this will be a direct pass through to our customers without any markup and we hope you will all understand.