SEOMarketing Now!

Use Live Chat to Improve Service

Kevin — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:45:21 +0000

Are you looking for a way to improve customer service on your ecommerce website? Are you also looking for another way to decrease shopping cart abandonment and increase sales on your website? How about a way to differentiate your website from the competition? If so, consider using Live Chat. Live Chat allows you to communicate with prospects on your website and can improve both acquisition and retention. Live Chat personalizes the online process by making it closer for the prospect to make a purchase. It is an advantage to the prospect because the prospect gets answers immediately rather than waiting on the phone line. Furthermore, Live Chat offers personalization and high quality customer service is significant for customer retention.

Did you know? 61 percent of respondents say they are more likely to purchase because of Live Chat. A Bold Software study reports that the top factor for a successful live chat is the product/ service knowledge of the agent. Moreover, the time is now to implement Live Chat into your ecommerce website and get ahead of your competition.

Is Your Web Site Cell Phone Ready?

Kevin — Thu, 05 May 2011 18:14:32 +0000

Will your business web site be viewable on mobile phones? It should be if you want to fully participate in the hundreds of billion dollars of business-to-business and retail sales accruing from the Internet.

Although smart cell phones can view most web site content, they remain a minority of outstanding phones. In order to insure your company web site is mobile ready, you need a version that employs a liquid (no fixed dimensions) layout, detects the visitor browser type and directs to the correct display – PC or cell phone. A mobile ready upgrade can be done in three ways, depending upon the importance of this audience to your business.

Single Page Mobile Site

Basic information with logo, phone number, email, etc with a link to the full business web site.

Mini-Mobile Web Site

Multiple page website as pictured. Individual pages such as:

Home

a. Matches web site colors to keep branding
b. Company logo plus slogan at top
c. Phone number front and center with link to full site
d. Buttons linking other pages– For example,
“About Us” “Services” “Products” etc. that give detail

About Us – Several paragraphs about company

Services – Paragraphs describing services

Products – Product listing

Full Mobile Ready Web Site

This involves doing a page-by-page redesign as was done for the site — http://www.ez-dock.com. Note: Try this link with both a regular browser and mobile phone to see how it auto detects the accessing device so the same URL gives a mobile or PC web site version.

If you have read this far, why not contact me directly to discuss getting your web site on the mobile web?

Best regards,

Alan

Alan Davidson
Director of Sales

800-847-3475

Claim Your Google Local Listing or It Might be Hijacked

Kevin — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:23:48 +0000

If you are the owner of the Google Local Listing, claim it. Claiming your listings is an opportunity to be found by more people in more places. People are searching for local businesses.
Google has integrated their local search into the main organic search results becoming the first thing searchers view.

Otherwise, anyone including your competitor can claim your Google Local Listing and hijack the account. The hijacker finds the listing they want and change it. The hijacker can change your business name,address, url, categories, description and telephone number. Your website or phone number is hijacked so customers trying to reach you get someone else. This causes lost sales to the real Google Local Listing owner and frustration.

Web Design Suggestions for Mobile Design

Kevin — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 20:01:06 +0000

Juniper Research estimates that by 2014, there will be 2.4 billion mobile web users. People surf the web using mobile devices such as smart phones with tiny screens, limited bandwidth and navigation. When developing mobile design, keep your mobile design simple. Mobile design is integral for the future and should be implemented now. Do not wait until 2014 to start your mobile web design. Otherwise, you will lose out to your competition.

Here are some mobile design suggestions:

1. Define your mobile design purpose
2. Define your business objective
3. Streamline the menu system
4. Reduce graphics in navigation
5. Eliminate Flash design
6. Design in plain HTML, XHTML by using cascading style sheets.
7. Avoid pop-ups.
8. Avoid tables
9. Avoid Frames
10. Avoid Cookies
11. Mobile phone screen sizes vary from 320×480 down to roughly 128×160 pixels.
12. Design the mobile web design to be able to scroll vertically.
13. Design your mobile website with the appearance and navigation of your main web site.
14. Test your mobile website on many different devices

Check the Reasons why your Google Paid Ads are not Appearing

Kevin — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:08:24 +0000

For those of you who advertise on Google Adwords and cannot see your ads, see below for suggestions:

1. Use the Ads Diagnostic Tool: This tool can help explain why your ads may not be
appearing. You can find detailed explanations of these reasons and
solutions at Ads Diagnostic Tool Information. Access this tool by via the ‘Tools’ tab or view the results directly in the ‘Keywords tab’ under the main ‘Campaigns’ tab.
2. Use the Disapproved Ads Tool: You may still not be able to view your ad if it has been disapproved. This tool can help you find out why your ads were
disapproved. Click the ‘Tools’ tab in your account.
3. Double check your daily budget for your campaign. It could be possible that you reached your daily budget for the day. Also understand that a small percentage of advertisers in the market show up all the time for a particular keyword. Those are the advertisers who get the most clicks and have the best quality score.
4. Check to see if are using ad scheduling. You can find out whether you using ad scheduling by going to campaign settings advanced settings ad scheduling.
5. Use the Ad Preview Tool adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool. If you search for your ad multiple times on Google, it can impact your ad position by showing many ad impressions and lowers your clickthrough rate. The Ad Preview tool is recommended to view for your ads to preview because impressions are not counted and it does not lower your clickthrough rate. Simply enter a keyword and search the state or country.

Web Design Suggestions

Kevin — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 16:34:32 +0000

The suggestions below are targeted to web designers.

1. Avoid splash pages
2. We do not recommend designing an entire site in flash.
3. Make the navigation easy to locate and use.
4. Blinking, flashing, scrolling and animated objects need to be kept at a minimum.
5. Dynamic sites such as sites developed in Drupal and Joomla give flexibility in showcase your new content. For example, have a list of the latest news, product updates on the home page.
6. Do not automatically play video or audio. There can be bandwidth or speed limitations. In addition, you do not know how loud the user’s speakers currently are.
7. Have a search feature on the home page and every page that is designed.
8. Content is the king.

What is a Browser?

Kevin — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:41:15 +0000

A question that we sometimes receive is what is a browser? If you do not know what a browser is do not feel bad because you are not alone. See browser video
If you have used Internet Explorer, then you have used a browser.

Browsers happen to be one of the most-used programs on computers. The most popular web browsers according to Netmarketshare are

1. Internet Explorer with 59.18% of world users
2. Mozilla Firefox, 22.83%
3. Google 8.50%
4. Chrome,Safari 5.36%
5. Opera 2.29 %

What does a browser do?

Web browsers allow for surfing the web. A browser is short for a Web browser, a software application used to locate and display Web pages. Browsers are software programs, which allow the user to search for and view information on the Web, such as web sites, video, audio, et cetera. A web browser or Internet browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web.

I hope after reading this blog entry you now know what a browser is and what they do. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Testing your WebSite in Different Browsers

Kevin — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 13:50:00 +0000

An often overlooked area in web design is website performance on different. Web users are expecting a pleasant web experience. There is a cost to not optimizing to different browsers. According to the Website Magazine, 67 percent of users encounter a slow website a few times a week or more. Also, 46 percent say slow load times cause them to abandon websites. In addition, over a third of respondents say that slowness makes them less likely to return to the site. These statistics show that it is imperative to optimize browser performance to keep users on websites, which has potential for more sales.

When designing a web site, the web designer should realize that different browser platforms perform in different ways. The audience needs to be considered when designing a web site. If you have a website with users that use different browsers, it is recommended to view your website in different browsers. You do this to make sure that the navigation, style and website structure are intact. This not only applies to various browsers but also various versions of browsers. Not all of the users will have the newest browser that a web designer is using. Therefore, it is important to test your website in different browsers.

Factors that Impact Search Results

Kevin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:26:41 +0000

Do you ever wonder the factors that impact your search results?

How does web traffic reflect your web site rank?

Traffic has a direct impact to your web site’s rank among Google search results. The higher the rank, the more traffic you get. There are specific algorithms that Google and other search engines use to rank web sites, which are secretly guarded. Google uses over 200 ranking factors. SEO involves tailoring your website to ranking criteria.

Ranking algorithms is the part of the search engine that decides which pages show up at the top of the results list. Organic ranking is complicated. Ranking algorithm is the mathematical formula a search engine uses to score page against the query to see which pages are the closest matches.

The two main factors are page factors and query factors.

Page factors- Web search ranking algorithms rely heavily on components that have nothing to do with query entered.
1. Strength of links to a page
2. Number of visits to the page and more
These factors boost the rankings for searches on any word that occurs on that page.

Query Factors – The query that the search enters weighs heavily. The number of occurrences of words in the query, where they are found on the page, title, and body. Other elements are weighed in the search engines regarding rankings.

Even Big Business Struggles to be Noticed by SEO

Kevin — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 18:00:48 +0000

Having Trouble Getting Customers to Your Web Site?

You are not alone ….. even big business struggle to be noticed. According to Inc Guidebook, the Web has some 120 million Internet domains and tens of billions of index pages. Each competes for search engine visitors. The good news that even small businesses can attract more customers by a focused search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

SEO is not magic: it takes work and professionals to do the best. Even a professional cannot guarantee landing your site among the top 10 web sites for popular search terms and cannot drive traffic to sites that do not offer value. However, if you have the time or the money to hire a professional, it is worth it.

Some tips for the do-it-yourself:

1) Update your content Frequently.
In today’s survival of the fittest market, web sites containing old
static content reduce rankings. Keeping your content fresh attracts
search engine robots to visit your web site more frequently.
2) Be Persistent.
The age of your site can have a positive effect on search engine
rankings. The longer your web site is online the better your chances.
3) Choose Wisely.
It pays to select the right domain name from the start
and not to change domains.
4) Be Unique:
Do not duplicate content. Duplicate content is damaging to your
rankings. By keeping all pages of your site original you stand a
better chance with the search engines.