Web Solutions of America invites you to join us for a Lunch ‘n Learn with our Online Marketing department on Friday, June 1st at 12:00 PM.

What: SEO Lunch & Learn: Add Google to Your Sales Team

Where: Insurance Office of America main conference room, 1855 West State Road 434, Longwood, FL 32750

When: Friday, June 1st, 12:00 PM

Who: Web Solutions of America and anyone that could use help getting their website to the top of the search engines

What’s Covered:

• What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• How does it help my company increase sales?
• Is Social Media important, and how does it tie in to SEO and my marketing campaign

WSOA will provide lunch and help you navigate through online marketing and how your website can be used to communicate with clients and increase sales.

RSVP below or call (407) 998-5593

We hope to see you there!

46% of all mobile phone users now have a smart phone that can access your website. Almost 500 million smart phones were sold last year and JPMorgan predicts that 657 million smart phones will be sold this year. That’s a lot of internet-using phones! Now consider that 1 in 5 Americans access at least one website on their mobile phone every day.

In a world where information is so easily accessed by such a great percentage of our population, it is a good idea to present your website in as many ways as possible. By having a mobile-friendly site, you are making sure your site can be accessed anywhere.

Nobody knows more about your business and your customers than you do. Reach out to your potential clients en masse by regularly adding articles that give them information that is important to your industry.

When creating content for your website consider these 4 points:

1) It must be 100% unique. Google’s biggest push in the last few years has been to devalue web sites that use content borrowed from other sites. They have gotten very good at detecting copied text, even when it has been changed slightly.
2) If you think the information contained in the article you are writing is too valuable to give away, you’re on the right track! Of course trade secrets should be kept to yourself, but information that has value to you has value to the reader.
3) Create content for your visitors, not the search engines. Don’t overuse your keywords, just write naturally.
4) Make the articles you create relevant to your industry.
Once the article is finished, send it to your SEO team for their input. They will place the title and header elements as needed and get it published and ranking on the search engines. In almost all cases, Web Solutions will not charge existing clients to add a new page to the site, so once it’s written, it’s painless!

If a search is made for [football scores] you would probably want the most recent scores of the football games that just happened, not from games that are a few years old. This new algorithm change is designed to give you the most up to date results, without having to specify 2011 or the actual date the event took place.

To better clarify what content will be affected in the update, Google gives us these varying degrees of freshness.

• Recent events or hot topics
• Regularly recurring events
• Frequent updates

How will Google’s freshness update affect your website’s previous rankings?

If your industry or website content fits the list of the 3 varying degrees of freshness you might see a change in your rankings. For website’s that do not have trending topics or frequent product updates, don’t expect to see too much of a change.

Seeing decreased ranks or loss of traffic?

Our SEO team at WSOA loves new algorithm updates but sometimes for others it can lead to a disaster in your online strategy. If you have noticed a drop in your rankings or a decline in traffic to your website please contact us to see how we can help.

By: +Adam Lang

• Make sure the font size is easy to read and has the appropriate size for each H1, H2, H3, and P tag.
• Stick with a dark font on a light background. White text on a black background can be much harder to read.
• It’s usually best to left align all of your text, especially for large paragraphs.
• Use typefaces such as serif (Times) and standard sans-serif (Arial or Helvetica).
• Only change your font style when you want to make something important or standout. Stay away from always using italic or condensed font styles.
• If you have ads on your site separate it from your content.

• Your navigation structure should include the most important pages that you want your visitors to navigate through.
• Think how the flow of PR works when creating link structure. Create a chart beforehand with all of your pages.
• Visitors should be able to find what they are looking for within 3 clicks.
• Again, separate your content and your ads.
• For ecommerce or blogging sites, a search box is a must along with tagging.

• A consistent design helps with branding.
• Stick with the same layout when it comes to rounded corners, boxes, drop shadows, bullets, colors, or navigation.

• Make sure it is easy to read, find, and click.
• Create a call to action that gets people’s attention and want to click it.
• Look at your analytics and see where people are clicking.

• Today’s websites are created with social interaction in mind and not just information.
• Include icons for all of your social media profile .
• Add Facebook like, tweet, Linkedin share, and Google +1 buttons through your site.

• Stay away from Flash as much as you can! Anything in flash will not count as content for your page and will not help you rank.
• Stay away from too much external linking as this will only give your flow of PR to other sites
• Keep everything on the same domain.

If you have questions regarding designing or creating a website please feel free to contact us, use the live help, or include a comment underneath. Our designers and developers will be happy to take your questions.

Example:

Dash: http://www.wsoaonline.com/web-development

Underscore: http://www.wsoaonline.com/web_development

Answer: Dashes

Why:

As explained by Matt Cutts in the Google Webmaster Help YouTube video, dashes in the URLs are used to separate two words whereas underscores combine both words into one. In SEO terms this means that when using a dash to separate words in your URL, Google will index all of these terms individually. When using an underscore Google will only index your combination of words as one.

What Google Index’s:

Dash: “web development”

Underscore: “webdevelopment”

Question: Should you change your existing pages URL layout to dashes?

Answer: No, if you make changes to your pages current URL layout you will lose your search rankings. If you are just starting out your website or are adding new pages to your site it is recommended that you then use dashes in your URL.

If you have questions about your website’s current URL layout please comment below or use our live chat feature.

Answer: No

Why:

Back in the day the flow of PageRank was spread “evenly” across the links on a web page. No matter where a link was placed on a page, such as in the paragraph or in the footer, each link received the same amount of link juice. However, this does not apply anymore today.

Today’s algorithm change from Google adds emphasis to where the link is actually placed upon the web page. Thanks to what is called the “Reasonable Surfer Model,” each link on a page is calculated with a different weight depending upon how noticeable it is to the web surfer. A good example of this would be to open up any webpage and scroll down the page only looking at the links displayed. Which links are more noticeable first? They would most likely be the larger, more dominant links on the page that get your attention. Google gives a higher flow of PR to these more dominant links because of their importance of getting the surfer to where they want. They also believe that links within the paragraph, also called editorial links, are more likely to be more relevant and withhold a greater reputation.

Footer links will always receive less of a flow of PR to them than editorial paragraph links because they are positioned lower down the page.

After the release it affected many sites, either boosting or decreasing their ranks. Google’s explanation to this was simply that it was not a temporary algorithmic change and that it was implemented to give more credit to the websites who had greater domain authority and offered better original content on its individual pages. The result to the change was pages on websites with lower authority decreased in ranks. They declared it as a quality win as most long tail searches were now querying better matches.

Listening closely to what Google had to say on their Mayday algorithm change gives an assumption that websites who have original and quality content along with authority will rank higher. Taking this and putting it into SEO terms means that link building strategies, on and off page, need to be geared towards long tail keywords.

The chart below shows an example of the list of key phrases a website ranks for. The key phrases to the left are the highly competitive, but highly searched for key words, while the key phrases to the right are the less competitive, less searched for long tail key phrases. A look at the chart shows that even if a site is getting 5-10 referrals for that long tail search, when you add up all of the small searches, they exceed the big boys.

In addition, these long tail keywords are also easier to rank for and as well convert at a better rate because they are more specific. If a site is ranked for “football uniforms” it will get a lot of traffic, but if it is ranked for “Nike men’s football uniforms” it will get much more qualified traffic looking to actually buy a football uniform.

If you need help deciding which long tail keywords to go after comment below and we will help you do a free keyword analysis for the homepage of your website.

On Page:

• Create a custom URL for your page that fans can remember
• Post regularly with exciting information
• Ask questions in the newsfeed
• Tag other pages or people in the newsfeed
• Offer deals and discounts
• Create contests with prizes to build interaction
• Bring in a guest speaker  to post about your product or answer questions
• Create either online or offline public events that your fans can attend
• Send out updates
• Create custom tabs within Facebook to build interaction along with a call to action to like the page
• Create a Facebook applicaton
• It’s okay to ask your fans to like the page every now and then
• Ask for fans to post reviews, pictures, or videos
• Ask fans to subscribe via SMS or RSS
• Combine your Facebook Places page with your Fan Page

Off Page:

• Do a search in Facebook and make sure there are no other pages or place pages with your brand or company name in it. If so report it to Facebook.
• Contact other related Facebook Pages to see about helping each other out mutually. This includes sponsored posts, tagging each other, events, etc.
• A bit spammy, but as the Facebook Page make posts on other pages
• Promote you Facebook Page in store, on your business card, in your email signature, and anywhere else you can get the name out.
• Create a Facebook Ads Campaign to build traffic to the fan page
• Add Facebook widgets to your website
• Add Facebook social plugins likes, send, and share button to your website and blog
• Connect your page to Twitter
• Turn your customers into fans
• Send out an email to notify them your brand is on Facebook
• Word of Mouth Marketing

If you have any more ideas or questions on ways to build fans on Facebook please list them at the bottom.

• Each website must have a “radically different layout
• Each website must have a different selling approach
• Each website must have a different structure

Overall each website must be completely different in all ways to not be considered spammy. Google’s spam team believes that if a person is creating a lot of duplicate sites they feel as if that person will try to cut ways to get their sites up quicker, such as using auto generated content, syndicated feeds, and cookie cutter themes. This does nothing but add clutter to the search results, which Google does not want.

Will you get more traffic though from creating multiple clone websites?

The answer is no. It would be much smarter to focus your time in creating one site and building authority to it. Spending time creating original dynamic content and getting links to it will build your PR and boost traffic to your site. Having duplicated content and cloned sites will only get you penalized and not even seen in the search results.

If you have multiple websites that all sell the same products try this quick test to see if your products are being indexed in Google:

Copy a line or two of your product description and paste it into a Google Search. If your page comes up then you are being indexed, but look for other duplicate sites that have the same text in the search result. If there are other sites that do then your page could be getting penalized.

For more information about this please leave a message below, click on the live help, or fill out the contact form.