This article helps you and your website designer in avoiding situations where 3 days prior to launch, you call upon the SEO expert to check the implementations of the newly redesigned site from an SEO perspective or worst yet, after the launch has been done.

This article throws light on some of the important points to be followed from the start itself so that your website redesign doesn’t equates to loss of traffic with the slick design that your website designer did for you:

Ranking is one of the most highly used, overused and abused SEO metrics. While most of the SEO experts are responsible for over-hyping this SEO performance measurement technique, the role of clients seeking higher results for every possible keyword, cannot be undermined. Clients or SEOs, everyone seems to be obsessed with higher rankings and we are yet to find a performance evaluation where rankings are not the first metrics to be reported.

Some result-oriented type SEO firms combine this with tools that predict SERP CTR rates. A SERP is a search engine results page and CTR refers to Click-Thru rate. While it is true that higher rankings bring more traffic, trying to predict accurate percentage traffic which corresponds to SERP position, usually leads to failure. Due to their relative positions on a SERP, rankings 1 to 5 get much more visibility as compared to the 6-10th ranking. Eye-tracking studies and leaked papers from AOL click-thru reports were used to predict ranking to traffic measurement numbers. Moreover, X or Y% increase was further translated and projected as future expected inquiries and sales for clients.

While everyone was looking happy with this so called perfect trajectory, a lighting of realization struck companies when the traffic figures didn’t match the predicted numbers. The reality to prediction numbers were so wild that there was nothing that businesses and their SEO’s could do apart from scratching their heads and tossing their prediction files into secret bins, so that they never have to see them again.

Business owners find it intriguing when they read Internet consumption statistics telling them that over 60% of the local purchase decisions are made online and that as many as 78% of the customers research about services and products online, before contacting a business, either online or offline. That is an awfully huge number and as most of the business owners would see – there is not much that comes their way, neither in terms of web traffic nor in the form of inquiries. What may be the possible reasons?

We are at an interesting crossroads when it comes to the Internet. It appears that marketing has become mobile, local and social; all at the same time. The local business owner is not faced with the question – “What to do”, but instead it is the plethora of choice, platforms and experts that make their life full of options and hence confusion. Add to that the still existent Yellow pages and trade publications. Small business owners have too many choices and this creates a hurdle in coming up with a decision of which channels to prioritize and which ones to leave.

This popular topic is presented in an insightful series of 6 articles, with this introductory overview being the first in our six-part series. In this part 1 introduction article, our goal is to give you a topical overview on the important aspects of improving your company or organization’s website and its online presence.             

Each series will delve much deeper than we do in today’s article, and provide you with great information and guidance to ensure your online success. Our goal is to equip you with a solid understanding of all aspects of effective web design and web marketing so that you and all our readers’ experiences with their web design firms or web marketing companies are successful and profitable.
 

This 6-part series of articles is provided as follows:

• Part 1: Introduction to Improving your Web Presence (Today’s article)
  

• Part 2: Planning for an Effective Website
  

• Part 3: User-Centered Web Design Principles
  

• Part 4: Importance of Clean, Crisp Design and Effective Content Flow
  

• Part 5: Ensuring your Website is Search Engine Friendly
  

• Part 6: Implementing Results-Oriented SEO and Web Marketing

As you learn new ideas and concepts from this series of articles, we are sure that new questions will come to your mind. We would be happy to answer them for you, so feel free to visit our site at www.ocularconcepts.us to submit your question on our contact form or call us at 866-530-6584. We hope you enjoy this series!

Is my SEO working? This is a question that most businesses ask themselves and find no clear way of tracking just how much SEO is really working for their business. Most of the organizations are trapped in a unilateral way of measuring SEO success – by monitoring their rankings. While rankings are the primary metrics which tell you about the effort that you or your SEO company is putting in, rankings cannot be taken as a true reflection of your online presence. Here is why:

• High ranking for keywords that no one searches for is like opening a shop in a remote location, far from the city where traffic is.

• Google personalizes search results through web history, geographic locations and bookmark history; hence you may see results which others are not seeing.

• High rankings have a bigger goal – a quality traffic stream. If high Google rankings do not send you inquiries, they probably do not matter a lot.

• SEO is like fishing – the wider your net, the better your catch. Too much obsession with limited keywords means your daily, weekly and monthly traffic number may still remain low.

SEO is much more than just high keyword ranking. The success of any SEO campaign is primarily tied with what the high rankings are doing for your business. If you really want to know the effectiveness of your search engine optimization campaign – try web analytics and the simplest tool is Google Analytics –clean, crisp, easy to understand and moreover – FREE. 

Everyone wants to see their website ranking in the top 10 on Google for the keywords that matter the most to their business. You have gotten a great design which complies with W3C HTML standards, have remarkable content in form of presentations, blog posts and articles and you have also have submitted your website to directories. However, that top 10 ranking still remains elusive, doesn’t it? We all have gone through that stage of oblivion and it is true that the shining stars of today were nowhere to be found yesterday.

While ranking in Google in not a rocket science for those who know how to do it, even the best of the search engine optimization specialists tread cautiously when it comes to ranking newer websites. Not many, who know the art and science of SEO, are ready to offer commitment, leave aside a guarantee, for your high ranking endeavor. This hesitation is well grounded in the fact that Google’s ranking algorithm is heavily tilted towards aged and trusted domains. Yes, aged AND trusted – while the two are different, the former helps in building the later and hence they are directly related.