ImpliWeb – Official Company Blog

Once you’ve completed your website and have it as SEO friendly as you think you can make it, it’s time to sit back and watch the visitors come pouring in.  Or at least, that’s the goal.  However, after about six months, it will be time to evaluate your SEO practices and make certain they’re actually working.  How can you do that?  Here are a few things to take into consideration when deciding if you need to adjust your keywords.

Where are you ranked on search engines?  Do a general search on several of your keywords and see where your site ends up.  If you can’t find it within the first two or three pages, don’t bother—people searching on that topic almost never bother to look at results three or four pages in.

Look at your site statistics (you should have some form of statistics tracker for your website).  See how many hits you’ve received over the past six months and take note of any increase or decrease.  Some statistics programs will even show you what website your visitor came from and what keywords they used in a search.  This is very useful information, especially if your number of hits has decreased or not increased significantly.  You may want to take those keywords and use them in your SEO.

Also take a look at your actual sales.  If you’ve noticed your profit margin has increased significantly, that means you’ve done something right.  Remember that increased hits do not always equal increased profit.  It doesn’t matter if you have millions of people visiting your website if none of them are buying.  However, despite that, you really are more likely to get more sales if you get more customers to see what you’re offering.

After you’ve looked at all of these numbers, you’ll have to make a decision: are you happy with the increase in sales, or do you need to revamp your SEO to bring even more visitors (and customers) to your site?

In the past, we’ve discussed ways of incorporating search engine optimisation keywords into your website.  However, just like anything, SEO can get out of hand, and if that happens, you may actually lose traffic.  Here are some things to watch out for when doing SEO for your site.

First, make sure you don’t over-do your keywords.  If you use too many keywords or repeat them too many times, the text on your website will start to sound very repetitive.  If you find your keywords are used in every other sentence, you may have used them too much.  Make sure your text reads naturally and doesn’t sound like it was written for a search engine robot.

Second, make sure your keywords are used in the correct places.  Having a keyword in your page title, in your Meta data, and in the first paragraph of your text is helpful.  Having a keyword used as part of a graphic is not since search engine robots can’t see images.

Third, avoid JavaScript’s, flash animation, and other similar things.  Most of these are not readable by search engines.  Also, some web browsers have issues loading them, and if your visitors can’t load your site, they can’t purchase items from it or learn about your services.

Fourth, don’t use SEO practices that try to fool search engines.  This includes using hidden text (text that is the same colour as the background, thus making it invisible to readers), stuffing keywords into the title or image ALT tags, and using duplicate content.

Avoiding these bad SEO practices while using ones that have been proven to work is a sure way of bringing more traffic to your site and getting higher page ranking.

Coming up with your domain name can be one of the most challenging aspects of creating your website.  The problem is that your company name may already be taken.  Another issue is that your company name may not be the perfect name for a website.  Here are a few things to consider when working on your domain name.

Does it describe your business?  For example, if you’ve incorporated under the name J. Smith, Inc, a domain name of www.jsmith.com doesn’t really describe much.  The company could be a small real estate business, or it could make homemade jewellery.  In this case, you may want to modify your domain name.  Something like www.jsmithpetgrooming.com is much more informative and acts almost like a keyword for your business.

Another thing to consider is how unique your domain name is.  A unique name like www.theonestopshopforukflags.com is very unique, and web surfers probably won’t end up on your site by accident.  However, if you purchase a domain name like www.goggle.com, chances are you’ll get some visitors who mistyped Google.  This can be helpful in getting more visitors to your site, but it may not actually result in more sales.  Most people will probably immediately correct their typo and never really look at your site.

In addition to your domain name, you need to think about what suffix you want.  While .com is popular with commercial sites, you can also purchase .net, .org, or .co.uk, among others.  If you’re working on a budget, you may only want one domain.  However, for a little more money, you can purchase two or three and have them all point to the same site.  Having the .com, .net, and .biz domains for the same site can help you get more traffic.  Likewise, you can always buy several different domains and have those all go to the same website.  www.joesflowers.com, www.joesfloralshop.com, and www.joesflorist.com could all point to the same website.  You would want to use one of them on all of your marketing materials and such while the other two would help catch different combinations of keywords.