Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Free Marketing Report - 50 Marketing Charts & Graphs

Monday, May 10th, 2010

HubSpot.com has recently published an incredible report of over 50 charts and graphs of original market research.   The report clearly shows a significant shift for many businesses from outbound marketing (print, radio, telemarketing, direct mails) to inbound marketing (SEO, Blogs, Social Media).

The report itself is an interesting read for any marketer or business owner and you can download it free at Hubspot website.

Here are a few key statistics about the state of Inbound Marketing and why it works:

Larger websites perform better.

Businesses who’s website has more than 300 indexed pages in Google generate over 200% more leads than businesses with fewer than 300 indexed pages.

Bottom line: larger websites tend to perform better in search results.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report - http://bit.ly/cVMpkn

Bloging more often drives results

Bottom line:  The more often you blog, the more customers you’re likely to get via your blog.

A weekly updated blog generates 20% more leads than monthly updated blog.  Daily updated blog performs 30% better than weekly updated blog.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr

Blogging adds huge SEO value to websites

Companies that blog have 434% more indexed pages.

Bottom line: Adding a blog (and blogging often) is the easiest way to generate relevant pages and boost your rankings in search engines.

Source: Data from over 1,500 small businesses - http://bit.ly/XDkQV

Inbound marketing works!

According to HubSpot study there are two big reasons for businesses to focus more on inbound marketing.

A - Economy.   92% of businesses cited economy to be the biggest reason for them to increase their inbound marketing budget.  Inbound marketing cost less.

B - Past success with Inbound Marketing.  58% of businesses cited they had a success with inbound marketing in the past (as opposed to 4% of respondents who said they had success with outbound marketing).

51% of surveyed businesses said they increased their inbound marketing budget in 2010 compared to 2009.

Bottom line:    Inbound marketing works!

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr


Inbound marketing is more effective

According to HubSpot, inbound marketing has an incredible 60% lower cost per lead!

Bottom line:  Inbound Marketing is more cost effective.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr

Inbound Marketing is important for lead generation.

Virtually every aspect of inbound marketing has grown this year compared to the last one.

SEO and organic search has grown in importance by 4%, up to an incredible 59%.

Blogs have gain 2% in importance compared to last year. 48% of businesses view blog as important tool for lead generation.

Social Media has grown the most: up by 14%.  60% of businesses view social media as an important lead generation tool.

Bottom line:   Inbound Marketing is becoming more important to many businesses.

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr

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Website statistics - what to look for?

Friday, April 30th, 2010
Almost every business with a website does something to market and promote it.  When we ask business owners how well does their website perform, many don’t have the key data to answer this question.
Measuring the performance of your website, where do your visitors come from, what is your conversion rate and what keywords people use to find your website is very important for your inbound marketing strategy. Yet many small business owners still either don’t have access to their website statistics or can’t find the time to make sense from the analytics data.

So what is the easiest, quickest and most user friendly way to track your website’s performance?

Consider adding Google Analytics to your website.  It is free to use and if you ask your web developer to add the tracking code to your website it won’t take him long to install it.

In a recent post at the Online Marketing Blog, Thomas McMahon offers these tips on what to analyze first:

  • Unique Visitors. “If your unique visitor number is low, it could mean that your site is either having issues [with] search engines, or needs more content,” McMahon explains.
  • Traffic Sources. Are you getting traffic from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, or other sites? This information can help decide where and how to promote your future content.
  • Referring Keywords. If these keywords don’t refer to your company, then “maybe you’re not optimized, or optimized for the wrong phrases,” McMahon notes.
  • Top Content. Use the same format as your top content, or build out on those topics, to help drive more traffic, he advises.
  • Location. If your business seeks to have a strong local search presence, the location area in analytics can tell you the country, state, and city of your visitors.
  • Campaign Tracking. This feature helps you track visitors from your ads, wherever they appear, to a particular goal, page or conversion at your website.
The conclusion? With minimal effort you can use analytics to help you improve your website’s performance and increase sales.
Need help adding Google Analytics to your website? Contact us and we’ll set it all up for you in no time.

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Speed Matters: Google Adds Load Time to Algorithm

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Google recently added site load speed into it’s ranking algorhytm.  According to Google, the site speed will only play only a small part in the rankings and the biggest emphasis is still on the content and inbound links.

Although this change may only affect 1% of the search results, having a faster loading website could make the difference between the first and second place in the search results.

There is another, more obvious reason to optimize the load speed of your website. There is a direct correlation between website’s speed and the amount of time visitors spend on it (Source: Internal study by Google, Additional resources at O’Reilly Radar). Faster loading website means more more visitors, more hits and more enquiries.

Please see our post with tips how to make website load faster for more in-depth information.

Although site speed has become integrated into the algorithm, Google still puts tremendous emphasis on relevant content and incoming links. The addition of site speed will only affect a small percentage of search queries performed. Is is therefore still important to create valuable content and build inbound links that will return the best user experience for the visitor.

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How to Speed Up your Website

Monday, April 19th, 2010

Speed is an important aspect when building a website.  The faster your website loads, the more visitors it will attract which ultimately leads to more enquires and more sales.

There are a number of things that can be done to improve your website load speed. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Get a fast web server

Having a fast, responsive web server is a must. Whatever you did to optimize the speed of your website you did in vain if the server is overloaded.

If you’ve a simple website with few visitors then shared hosting is fine. For a website getting popular, it might be a good idea to switch to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with guaranteed RAM & CPU usage. If the website is already popular, a dedicated server will be the best performing one.

2. Optimize images

Know when to use GIF, JPG and PNG files.  Optimizing your images will dramatically reduce their size and they will still look good on the web.

GIF is suitable for images with few colors like logos, text & line art. When saving a GIF file, make sure you use a small color palette.

JPG is good for images with lots of colors & details like photographs. Decrease the quality of a JPG image before saving. It will still look good on a screen.

PNG, a format specially for websites, has great quality – both transparent & non-transparent – is specially functional when you’re in need of quality transparent images.

Always use the “Save for Web” tool in Photoshop, to compress your images in order to lower their size.

You can also use the Smush.It tools to take the compression even further without sacrificing quality.

3. Use XHTML/CSS for layout rather than tables

Tables are rendered slower than CSS by browsers. When using CSS, you can do more with less code. CSS-only website is more compatible with web browsers (including mobile browsers), has better SEO and loads faster.

4. Compress your CSS and Javascript files

Optimizing your CSS stylesheets and merging your Javascript files to reduce HTTP requests is another thing you can to to decrease your site’s load time.

You can also Compress your CSS files (you may try this, this or this) and Compress JavaScript files. It lowers the size seriously & doesn’t have any bad effects on your side. This & this are some of the popular compressors.

5. Use HTTP compression

HTTP compression is one of the most effective step with a little effort.

Today, almost every browser & web server supports HTTP compression. Using it, your files are sent to the visitor compressed & un-compressed on their side & you can have up to 90% success for the text based files (like HTML).

You have 2 popular choices with this:

  • HTTP compression: a feature of the web server (can be enabled on the server side)
  • Gzip: can be enabled at the site level. Here are more details.

6. Cache web pages

Caching is a superb way of decreasing the stress on the server by running more static files & less queries. It simply saves a static, HTML version of the page to be displayed & displays that file rather than the dynamic one.

For CMS applications like Wordpress, there are already ready-to-use caching plugins (like WP-Cache). For PHP, here is a great article from SitePoint.

A small note, caching can also be done at the web server level.  Unfortunately majority of shared web hosting plans do not offer server-side caching at this time.

Free tools

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

  • Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
  • YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
  • WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
  • In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below.We also recommend reading Google’s post about site performance.

What do you suggest?

Do you have any other tips to make websites load faster?  Please do share them with our readers.

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Google launched real-time search

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

It was bound to happen someday but now it’s really here: Google just launched a real-time search integrated into search results. It updates as things happen around the web in real-time. Live Twitter updates, news articles, blog posts, Yahoo answers, new web pages, all these now stream in the actual search results on your query.

Here is a demo video from Google:

So what does real-time search mean for your business and your online marketing?

Now it’s more important than ever to be active on the web, making the most of your website and including social media in your online marketing strategy.  You need to consistently produce high quality content that is not only optimized to get found in the top search results, but you also need to produce content that will appear in the real-time stream.

While it may take many months for your website to rank in the top 10 for certain keywords, you now have a chance to grab the attention of your prospects via Google real-time stream results.

If you’re on Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace you really should consistently post new updates.  The benefit is two-fold. Your subscribers and followers on these social networks have the potential to become more deeply engaged with your brand, but now you’ll also have the added benefit of leveraging Google’s massive search audience.

With the arrival of Google’s real-time search, inbound marketing truly is the way to go.  The best you can do with your website is to transform it from a static pages into a small publishing house that produces fresh, interesting content that your prospects are searching for right now, at this very moment, somewhere on the internet.

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Behind the SEO scenes: busting the Google myths

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

Many of our clients come to us with some idea how the search engines work and we of course welcome your knowledge and enthusiasm. Over the years some myths emerged about the mysteries of Search Engine Optimization. Because Google constantly changes it’s search algorithms, many things that did work in the early days do not apply anymore and are replaced with newer practices.

We think it’s important to keep you informed about the latest developments on the internet scene and we will keep our best to offer you the relevant information.

This article is going to be quite technical and if you want to pass and let us worry about the ins and outs of search engine optimization, we completely understand. After all, our job is to make your life easier.

Let’s look at some of the aspects of SEO and see what the experts at Google have to say about them.

Google does use Keywords Meta tag in web rankings

That’s right. Keywords meta tags are definitely a thing of a past. As Matt Cutts, Google Software Engineer explains in the video below, while some of the other search engines might still see some value in keyword tag, Google does not use it in the search rankings anymore.

Which is more important: content or links?

We always say you should have a good content on the website to get the most of it. If you have a good, interesting web site with lots of useful information, people are more likely to visit it more often and link to it.

As Matt Cutts explains, if you do have a good quality content, you have much better chance of getting the high quality inbound links.

Duplicate content & Multiple site issues.

Another gray area people generally worry about is so called “duplicate content penalty”. Some people worry that if you have two websites and publish the same content on both of them, one of the web sites gets “penalized” and will not show in the search results.

While this in most cases doesn’t need to raise concern, there are some disadvantages in having a duplicate content. Greg Grothaus, Google Search Quality Engineer explains:

If you are interested in knowing more, you can view more at the Google Webmaster Central Channel

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