Mergers, Acquisitions and Websites
Recently we have seen several of our clients purchase additional businesses or be purchased by another company. My first question to my clients is "What is going to happen to the web site?" This is often followed by a "Huh?" and a statement like "We buying a business and not a web site." and that is where I reply you are buying both.
In many cases people know how to value a business but not how to value a web site or even understand how a successful web site plays into the success of a...
How Google Sees Your Site
In order for Google to even begin seeing your website, it needs to be able to send it’s Google bots to crawl your website. The way that these bots crawl your website is determined by a file called robots.txt. On most websites, there are pages that utilize CSS and/or Javascript, which are often external files that are linked to from your HMTL. In order for Google to access these, and fully understand your webpages, these files need to remain unblocked by the robots.txt file. Google...
The Importance of a Good Hosting Company During Website Launch
When you're ready to launch a new website, it is easy to forget the little things, like search engine rankings. Enamored by the glitz of a fresh looking website and new images, often redirects are overlooked and the old site is just forgotten. However, Google does not forget so easily; unless properly told so. Why Use Redirects Your old website and Digital marketing efforts worked hard to climb up the rankings, slipping past competitors and nestling on the first page. Often the old...
Website Asset Rather Than Expense
Updated: Feb. 2015 There seems to be a misconception by many businesses that a website is an expense. Of course this is true to the extent that a properly built and marketed website costs a decent amount of money, but so does a new building to facilitate your employees and day-to-day business. As a CEO or business owner, it is easy to see why a building, the equipment used, and your brand name and logo are assets to your business, but a properly optimized business website is now just as...
Importance of a Good Internal Linking Structure
A website’s internal linking structure is simply how each page links to other pages on the site. Seems simple enough, but surprisingly, many business owners or Internet marketers overlook how important it is to search engine optimization efforts to properly display and name internal links. How to Use Internal Links Each page on a website should link to many other pages on the site. The most common place to accomplish this is in the footer. It is out of the way, yet if users get lost on a...
Online Marketing: Before or After Website Development?
It’s not altogether uncommon; a prospective client calls in and says, We just finished our website and now we are looking for a marketing firm to drive in new business via search engine traffic and media buys. The first thing we do is take a look at their newly designed website after asking for their domain name. Sometimes, no matter how hard it might be for the client to swallow, we have to say, "You have a beautiful website that showcases your product/service as a high-end prestigious...
What exactly is a PING and how do I do it?
A Ping is a basic internet program that allows one to verify that a certain IP address exists and can accept requests. Pinging acts as a notifier to search engines that you have updated your RSS feed on your site. Once a search engine receives the ping they will typically schedule an immediate refresh of your feed so they have the latest content. This is the easiest way to get your blog or RSS feed indexed by the search engines. There are two easy methods to ping a search engine. You can use...
What’s a Title Tag? Why Does It Matter?
A title tag is coded into each page of a site and is meant to define what a page’s content is about. It appears in the title area of a browser window and will be the default name when you go to bookmark a page. It’s defined in the underlying HTML coding of each page. Title tags are a critical part of search engine optimization, or SEO. While not as important as the content of a page in gaining rankings in the search engines, it does get heavily factored by the search engines...
Benefits of RSS
What is RSS?
RSS, also known as Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary, is an XML-based format for distributing links to content on your web site that you would like others to use. Each area of your site that features a changing list of information should have a corresponding RSS feed.
Current State of RSS
RSS users can be lumped into two types of buckets, "Aware" and "Unaware". Aware RSS users are knowingly using RSS. Unaware RSS users enjoy the benefits of...
Tracking Offline Media Buys
Updated: Feb. 2015 Your website analytics can be used for far more than just tracking the performance of your search engine optimization efforts. Media buys these days almost always have a website address as one, if not the only, path for conversion. Think about how many television spots, radio reads, magazine ads, direct mail pieces, or billboards feature prominently a website address as the next step for an interested party to take. When the people making these media buys are not working...