Writing A Good Subject Line

One of the first things I do when I pull up my email is try and delete as many of the “junk” emails I can. I usually find myself looking at who my unread emails are from and what the subject line is to help me do this.  If you get anywhere near the amount of emails I get each day, chances are you do the same.  If there is anything that looks like it is from a company I don’t know or some type of advertisement or spam, it gets deleted before I even open it up.

What is the deciding factor?? Usually people will look at who the email is from first as it is always listed first and then our eyes make their way to the subject line if we don’t recognize the sender.  “The subject line is usally the deciding factor. It is essential that your email subject line not look like ad copy” says Susan Sweeney, the author of 101 Ways to Promote Your Web Site.

It is important to never leave a subject line of an email blank as it will look non important or empty.  It is also important to keep your subject line short with the most important keywords written first.  You do not want your subject line long as people now days view their emails on their phone which allows fewer characters in the preview on the phone email display. 

Just as a newspaper headline is extremely important to reach out to its readers, so is the subject line of a mass email. You skim a newspaper to look for articles that are important or of interest to you just like your full email box.  The content with poor headlines, simply do not get read. It doesn’t matter how much value is offered in the email or how good the content or images are if the email doesn’t get opened.  The first goal of every email blast campaign is to have the largest open rate possible.  This is achieved nearly 100% on the subject line of your email.

Important Factors of A Subject Line:

• Do not look like ad copy
• Attract attention with action words
• Brief, important, keyworded statements
• Build business credibility
• Do not use vague statements
• Positive messages
• AVOID ALL CAPS

The most effective subject lines will grab the reader’s attention, isolate and qualify the reader so they feel like the email is written for them.  Keywords are important to have in your subject line as many people will search through their emails later as they didn’t have time to read them when they first received the email.  If you include keywords in your subject line, chances are they will be able to be searched for later!

Email marketing is a great strategy to attract new visitors to your website.  Our Denver seo company uses this strategy to test out our different landing pages.  We will use Google analytics to track the visitors response to different pages on our site so we know if we need to make adjustments to existing pages to lower the bounce rate, decrease the exit rate or improve our call to action.  If run a mass email marketing campaign that produces 500 visits to a specific page but they leave after 10 seconds, do not visit other pages and we receive no calls or emails… chances are visitors from the search engines won’t either!

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Most small website owners feel like blogging can be a huge waste of time

Is blogging a waste of my time? It doesn’t seem to matter which organization or company that I speak to about blogging, the importance of it seems to be lost in translation. I can tell you that blogging for our Denver SEO company isextremely time-consuming, and a task that we have definitely not invested as much time into our blogging projects is I think we should have.

When it comes to e-mail newsletters, or Facebook our search engine optimization customers do not seem to have any issue reaching out to their customer base this way. Imagine if you could take an e-mail blast, discussion board mixed with a little viral marketing to communicate with your customer base. Unlike a newsletter that often times is deleted, a blog is more permanent nature and can be referred to not only buy organic visitors but by your customers as well. Then take all of that (e-mail blast, discussion board, viral marketing) and wrap it up into a very low costs extremely easy to use dynamic website. That is effective corporate blogging.

Many of the customers that I talk to and prospective customers that I talked to complain about the ability to update their website, yet most have an issue investing the time once per day or per week to blog. Blogging is perhaps one of the best way to build links back into your website and offer your customers and the search engines up-to-date information on your products and services while adding more value to your website. Of course I’m not referring to any type of internal blog for your company, I’m talking only about your corporate public blog.

Will that’s all great and good, but how many courses will you have to take to learn how to blog properly? I guess when it comes down to learning anything new we are all hesitant to invest the time that it takes to learn about it. The fact of the matter is that I have been able to teach most of my clients to blog with and about one hour. Now I’m talking about the actual technical part of blogging. What will they write about? That is a question they must answer on their own. It is perhaps the second most popular question I get asked about. My answer to this is:
What questions do you get asked every single day by your customers?
What prices that you just change in your menu of services?

Is there a sale coming up that you’d like to discuss?
What problems have passed customers have with your services or products?

There are probably at least 10 subjects that you could blog about right now. Directing traffic to your blog not only allows you to answer customers questions and objections from the very beginning, it will allow you to save time in the future as you will not have to explain the same answers to the same questions over and over again. One thing that we try to keep in mind when we are blogging, is this information actually useful? It would be easy for us to get technical and every single blog post, so we must remember that our audience is not interested in learning how to complete search engine optimization for their website (although there are some that are looking for free tips and tricks to search engine optimization). Mainly they are interested in learning about the process, what it takes to differentiate their website from their competitors and basically what search engine optimization is all about.

A blog is a marketing channel. You are not doomed to use one blog, or blog about one topic. You might have one niche blog about one service, and perhaps you might open a separate blog down the road about a completely different service. For example let’s take an insurance agent. An insurance agent in Denver might blog about property and casualty premiums and increase of those premiums since 2005. That same blog may discuss insurance ratings of different insurers in the area. Of course this one blog may be all about property and casualty insurance. The focus of the blog would be around “car insurance”, “homeowners insurance” and perhaps “full coverage car insurance”. After six months of blogging about property and casualty insurance the same aging can turn around and open a completely different property focused on life insurance. Developing niche blogs can help not only with search engine optimization but referring traffic as well. This content must be unique, useful and genuinely helpful for the end user.

With the most recent updates that we have seen from Google in their algorithm changes, it is apparent as always that useful and genuine content always wins in the search engines. So yes, blogging is absolutely about how creative you can get and provide useful information at the same time. Writing about the same dull topics over and over again, utilizing keywords throughout each blog every single time can grow old for not only the search engines but your customers as well. I have visited many blogs that make the same mistake of writing about the same topic in different ways, mentioning the same keywords over and over again and high hopes that they will “dupe” the search engines into believing that their site is popular simply because they blog everyday using the same keywords. Does that make any sense to you?

There are thousands of resources about blogging, take the time to learn a little bit about the different blogging platforms and what you can do to differentiate your company online. For more information about blogging and how Iniquitous, Inc. can help you design a customized SEO plan, polished today at 720-663-1711. Call our Denver Internet Marketing Professionals today!

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This post comes a little late. In our excitement about multi-channel funnels, I now realize that we had never post about setting up Goals in Google Analytics. So although it is a little late, I hope that you will find the information useful.

So in this post we will explain what goals are and how you can set them up in your Google Analytics account. We will get more explicit about setting up goals in future posts, for now we just want to cover the basics so you can get started.

Generically, Goals are a way that you as a website owner, SEO, conversion specialist, whatever your title is, you can track the objectives or desired outcomes for your web property in Analytics. When you look at conversion and tracking conversion of your visitors on your website, there is a measurable action a desired outcome that you are looking for. Goals will correspond to these actions which are to be performed by your site’s visitors. So perhaps you have a web design business and your ultimate goal is to receive inquiries through the contact forms that you have strategically placed throughout your website. So your ultimate goal is to have the contact forms completed successfully by those visitors that would like to know more about your Denver web design services. Your goal will start with actions that are directly associated with the end outcome. So each action a visitor takes to successfully complete the desired outcome will be part of the “Goal Funnel”.

The Goal Funnel

The very first action you will want to take is to go through your website and move through the steps required to complete the desired outcome that you are looking for. As you go through your site, you will want to diagram the different pages for the proper completion of your goal. As you do this notate each URL that the visitor will go to in order to complete the goal that you are looking to track. If you look at Diagram #1 shown here, then you will see an example that applies to our web design example. If visitors do not need to go through different pages to achieve your goal then you will not have to define a funnel.

Diagram #1

The next step will be to configure the goal in your Analytics account. You will start by logging in to your Google Analytics account and then clicking on the “edit” link that is next to your profile. You will have to configure goals for each profile that you want to show up. After you have set the goal in your settings you will go to “Conversion Goals and Funnel” and click the edit link again. Once you have clicked edit, you will want to set the “Active Goal” option to on.

As for “match type”, in this case you would have used the “Exact Match” because there is one URL for our Goal page, the contact page or inquiry page. However, you might have multiple Goal pages, or many pages that lead up to the goal so you might require the use of a different match type. You can find more information about the different match types here in Google’s Help Center.

Defining your Goal Funnel

Here you will want to enter each URL and the name you have set to label each step in your goal funnel. In the example we have used for web design above the desired outcome was to have our visitor complete the contact form, so that is our “Goal URL”. After you have defined your goal funnel you will have to wait a few days to analyze the performance of this conversion process. Once a couple of days have past and you have some data to look at, you will be able to go to the Goals section of your analytics account and open the funnel visualization report. Here you will be able to review the entire funnel or just an individual URL for the funnel.

By setting up Goal funnels you will be able to review the entire process of converting your visitors and see which pages or URLs are losing traffic. Which of those pages have high exit rates or high bounce rates so you will be able to consider which pages need to be worked on. This will help you see how well your website is converting traffic and you will be able to easily identify which pages need work.

If your SEO Company is not currently helping you track conversion, it is something that you should ask them about. Iniquitous, Inc. is a group of Colorado Internet Marketing Specialists that will be able to help you set this up in your Google Analytics account. If you currently are not using Google Analytics call Iniquitous, Inc. today for a complimentary installation of this fantastic tool on your website today! You can contact Iniquitous, Inc. at (720) 663-1711.

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written by: Cade Lee

Denver SEO Professional

A couple of years ago we attended a social networking speaking engagement at The Denver Athletic Club, it was given by a local public relations company here in Denver. Of course I was excited to attend as I had only opened my Twitter account about six months previous to the event and I wanted to get some ideas on how to use this new tool more effectively. At the time I had been reading about social networking and really trying to figure out how to track the results from my efforts, but I had no real idea how to do this except look at the referrals from Twitter or Facebook to my website.

So, anyway, the talk about social networking that we attended… there was an entire panel of experts from this public relations company (no need to mention names here), so needless to say I was impressed. There was a social networking expert, press release expert, public relations expert and a search engine optimization expert all present to address the audience and the questions about social networking (wait… this was supposed to be a post about Analytics, right?). You could imagine how impressive all of this might have seemed, except when one member of the audience asked one question. This one question stopped the whole show. I cannot recall who it was, although I can recall she was self-employed. She simply asked, “With the investment that I would make into social networking, how will I measure ‘return on investment’?” With this the entire panel seemed stumped. They could not answer her question and unfortunately they were only half way into the seminar or talk they had planned. The rest of the speaking engagement went awry from this point forward as they had all lost credibility in the eyes of the audience and it was simply brutal to say the least.

A couple of days ago, Google Analytics released Multi-channel funnels to all analytics accounts. With multi-channel funnels you will no more accurately be able to evaluate each step in process of conversion. So, you will be able to isolate different campaigns, keywords and obtain direct and indirect impact on goals that you have set in your Analyics account. So for example, found site through search engine, signed up for weekly newsletter, came back to site through Twitter and so on. The first step is to sign up for Goals in Google Analytics if you haven’t already started.

One of the biggest questions that I get from website owners is, “How will I know if the visitor coming to my website are actually converting into leads?” The answer is something that we plan on posting more about in future posts; However, to break into some simple tactics to track conversion, setting Goals in Google’s Analytics would be an excellent place to start. Without any kind of tracking on the actions taking place on your website it is easy to dismiss new business that actually might be coming through your website.

With the Goals function you will have the ability to track purchases, track sign ups for your monthly or weekly newsletter and much more. To learn more about setting up goals for your Analytics account, vist Google’s Analytics Help. Also, come back to our Denver SEO blog soon as we will be covering more conversion tactics in future posts.

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If you are trying to get more visitors to your website, there are many different approaches you can take.  You can direct traffic through links, increase your search engine rankings and gain organic traffic or pay for ads through banners or AdSense.  Increasing your website traffic is great but you first need to understand what kind of traffic you want.

Here are some questions you need to ask yourself about the kid of traffic you are looking to get:

• Are you trying to just increase your overall visitors or do you want people who are looking for your products or services?
• Do you want the visitors to be new?
• Are you reaching out to existing customers?
• Do you want to pay for the traffic?

Once you realize the type of traffic you are looking for, you then can start planning your strategy to promote your website.  There are hundreds of techniques to driving more visitors to your website.  Each method has its pros and cons.  Here are 5 quick ways to promote your website and gain more traffic:

1.) Article Directories: You may have heard about people using article directories to build back links to their website to support their search engine optimization campaign.  Article Directories are a great way to build credibility, improve your SEO campaign and drive traffic to your website.2.) Blog Comments: These are great ways to interact with other people in your industry.  You can use blog comments to communicate your thoughts and opinions, prove your knowledge and drive drive people to your site.  All blogs allow you to use a link as the name you post your comment on.  You can chose two methods here, use your name for credibility or use a keyword you are trying to optimize for.  Whatever you chose, make sure you write a good comment that the owner of the blog is not going to think is spam.  Don’t just post a link to your website or say “nice post.”  Actually write something about the article and maybe communicate a similar experience.  Questions are also a great way to communicate with another blogger.  This method wont drive huge amounts of traffic but you will be sure to have a few clicks from curious people.

3.) Forum Posts: A great way to promote your website is on a forum. Go out and find a forum that is industry specific, create a profile and start communicating.  Most forums let you have a signature where you can include a link to your website, blog or something you like.  You can also promote your pages through forum posts.  Ask people questions, promote your work or find a new strategic alliance with someone in your industry.  Forums are great for all of this.

4.) Blogging: Probably the easiest way to promote your website is through writing blog articles about your products and services. Today, most companies have a blog to interact with their customers, communicate their strategies and drive traffic to their website.  Include links to different pages on your website throughout your articles. Remember, they don’t have to be long and they don’t have to be print quality.  Just get in there and write about something in your industry and include a link to your website. You may be surprised who reads it!

5.) Banner Ads: There are thousands of websites that will sell you banner ads that link to your website.  Here you can promote special offers, your products or services. Create an attractive banner on a high traffic website is a great way to drive new visitors to your website.

Each method here for promoting your website will get you a different kind of visitor.  Whether you find someone looking for your products or services, someone who has or hasn’t been on your site before or even someone who will help you learn about your web design.  They are all great! You will be able to go through you analytics and learn from each one of your visitors.  Did they bounce?  Did they visit multiple pages?  Did they visit your contact page?  All of this information is invaluable as you will find out which type of promotion works best.

Like I said prior, there are hundreds of ways to drive more visitors to your website.  Posting links on social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, sending email blasts, posting your website on your building and other marketing pieces, hiring a SEO Company and paying for clicks through AdSense are a few more ideas.  The important thing is to keep trying.  Always promote your website through print, other online properties, social networking, emails and more.  The more you focus on promoting your website the more visitors you will ultimately receive.  Just remember to keep in mind the traffic you are targeting.  Each visitor is a little different and has a different reason for coming to your website.  Make sure you are promoting the right pages with appropriate links and are driving traffic from different mediums to different pages on your website.

Here are a few other articles that can help you with your website traffic:

Are you Getting the Right Visitors? |  Turning Your Visitors into Leads

If you would like more information about promoting your website, please feel free to contact our Denver seo company (720-) 663-1711

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Customer experience could be the most important element to succeeding online.  If your website visitors get bored, confused, or feel like the information they are looking for isn’t there you will lose them.  Confusing or conflicting ideas make good customer experience impossible. With so many websites providing good information out there, it is even more important to capture the attention of your visitors in the first 15-20 seconds than ever before.

What is Customer Experience?

The customer’s experience is a strategic part of all major areas of your business; sales, marketing, customer service, project development and support. If you were to add up all of the experiences, thoughts and opinions a customer has with a company over the duration of their time together you’re left with customer experience. So when we think about online customer experience, we are talking about what the customer thinks and feels about the information on a website.

How to Improve Customer Experience

The key to successful customer experience is to create expectations that your company can provide. Inform your visitors of what to expect and exceed the promise.  Keep in mind that not all customers want or expect the same out of a website.  Some like to read and some like to scan images to get to the information they are looking for.  Some want answers from you right away and some want to find their answer themselves.Many times companies will survey their customers before they launch their website. It is important to figure out what exactly a typical visitor is expecting to find and what the end result should be.  This means that it is essential for your website to set the customer’s expectations at the correct level.

Let’s look at a website for a high priced hotel.  People who always stay at expensive hotels expect nothing but luxury.  A website for a fancy hotel needs to show the luxury features in both text and images throughout their site.  Images are the best way to get a quick response but you also need to take into account those who like to read. Listing all amenities with great pictures will be very important. In the pictures you will want to have people dressed nicely having a good time.

Concentrate on your site’s navigation and make sure your visitors can navigate through your site effortlessly.  Even if your website has the information they are looking for but they have a hard time getting there you will probably lose them.  Make sure you have internal links with anchor text and images as well.  People like to be able to click on what gets their attention; for some it make be a link in a paragraph and for others it may be a picture they want more information on.

The next thing to look at is how your customers expect to contact you.  From our Denver SEO Company’s research, 70% of visitors are more likely to contact you through phone than email.  Make sure you have your phone number on each page of your website in a prominent area.  We like to utilize the header for this. You will also want to appease the people who do not want to talk directly to you right away with contact forms.  Place email forms throughout your website to make sure you have this covered.  Your address and operating hours are also important to have visible throughout your site.

Once your site has been live for awhile, study your analytics.  You may be surprised which are your most frequently viewed pages and where your visitors are coming from.  These will both give you an indication what your visitors are looking for.  If you feel some of your more important pages are not being viewed it could be poor navigation.  Also if you are getting visitors to your site from the search engines for meaningless keywords and nothing else, you may need to look at your search engine optimization campaign.  You may need to focus on more detailed keywords.

It is important to think about what your customers are trying to get out of your site. Make sure “the end result” for the customer is similar to yours.  Most of the time our internet marketing efforts are focused on trying to drive new visitors to our site.  This means we do not have the privilege of prior experiences (past visits) to help shape the actual customer experience of our visitors.  Make sure your landing pages speak to your visitors needs, your navigation is straightforward, you have text and images on each page and your contact information is easy to find.

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Ultimately Mr. Mathewson is really a representative from IBM to the Google Tech Council which is actually a consortium of B2B technology firms which get together every single quarter to share the very best practices and also share practices in an effort to perform better with the search engine advertising campaigns that they’re implementing at their respective firms. Ultimately Mr. Mathewson states that at a most recent meeting, 1 of the members of this group stated that the greatest difficulty in dealing with content farms is buying advertising around search terms that his company finds crucial for their search engine advertising campaign. The issue is that he does not want to appear or have his business appear on pages which are full of links to content farms, in the end these content farms are just “junk sites”. He doesn’t want to have his business connected with these “junk sites”.

Content farms or “junk sites” are internet sites which aggregate links along with other content from all over the internet which are related to the same theme or identical key phrases. The owners of these sites make income by obtaining traffic from Google and then selling Google AdSense advertising on these web sites. What makes these sites content farms or junk websites is primarily to do with the way that they are optimized which typically consists of black hat SEO tactics. Since these internet sites are making use of unscrupulous tactics so that they can obtain high rankings for challenging keywords, often times those firms or websites associated with such “content farms” can be penalized by Google. It is the general census that users or searcers dislike content farms because they’re just a collection of links which are usually extremely loosely relevant to the keyword being searched for. I’m positive that you have searched for one thing on the web at some point in time and come across one of these websites. In the end what did you do? More than likely you hit the back button and moved on. Like several other users, you decided that the page was not relevant to your search, nor did it deliver what you were searching for. This leads to a greater bounce rate which is exactly what Google desires to prevent for their users. If Google delivers outcomes to its users that are not beneficial then ultimately they may possibly lose that visitor to a competing search engine which is precisely what they wish to stay away from.

Most lately this has changed as Google has completed new alterations to its algorithm and the end result was to specifically deal with content farms. Google announced this change with a recent post in their weblog “finding much more high-quality sites in search“. The new algorithm change impacted practically 12% of their queries and was created to minimize the rankings for low-quality websites, websites that are “low value add for users”. These are sites which have copied content from other internet sites or web sites which are merely not helpful. So this all goes back to the exact same old theme, deliver content which is “useful” and you’ll be supplying Google’s users and Google with what they’re looking for. We have covered this in a lot of weblog posts prior to and these days it’s far more crucial than ever that website owners take the time to deliver “useful” content. So what exactly is helpful content? Great question. So what is high-quality to Google? “Sites with original content and information like research and in-depth reports…”

In our market we typically see SEO Companies and SEO Experts that don’t appear to understand the philosophy behind “useful content”. It is not just SEO Firms and SEO Specialists which are attempting to “cheat the algorithms”. A good example of this is JCPenney as pointed out in Mr. Mathewson’s most recent post. The New York Times published an exposé about JCPenney’s Abusive Methods in an Article Titled “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search”. Ultimately JCPenney’s purchased links which had been totally irrelevant and from low rent internet properties that linked back into JCPenney.com. Based on the source, they had bought millions of links and in doing so this helped JCPenney falsely appear quite relevant for keywords that were in question. This shot JCPenney.com to the top of a lot of rankings for hundreds of key phrases.

So the lesson to be taken from this is… your linking efforts ought to be genuine and happen organically. That’s only going to take place should you deliver useful content. The links you acquire really should happen naturally. The following are some techniques that you’ll be able to make sure this:

• Develop high quality Wikipedia pages about original investigation contributions to your industry
• Make absolutely certain that business partners or partner sites use the appropriate anchor text when linking back into your site
• Any articles that you distribute or videos that you distribute need to have links with anchor text if achievable which are proper to your website
• Steer clear of random link requests from site owners that you don’t know or are not relevant to your internet site

In the end, I believe that link brokers will suffer greatly from these algorithm changes. Within the time that we have been in business as a Denver SEO Company, we have by no means been approached by a link broker. Within the last 30 days I’ve been contacted 3 various times from link brokers back east wanting us to have a look at their services, and in one case even flying out to Denver to meet with us. I have yet to meet with the gentleman nonetheless, I am looking forward to our meeting and hearing what he has to say. I don’t know how purchasing links can be beneficial as we have constantly earned links organically. If your website isn’t a temporary property, and it really is the lifeblood of your organization then you need to take heed of this advice or suffer the consequences like many others have. It is our philosophy that providing genuinely useful content and media is always the best rule of thumb in promoting your own website.

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Search engine optimization is currently ruling the world. Everybody who has a website is running to SEO companies that can help them achieve success and reach their online goals. Internet marketers usually look to make their sites popular and they want all the users to throng to their site no matter what they are looking for. But one thing all these marketers should get into their heads is that, search engine optimization is no child’s play and it takes a lot of homework. If at all you are in Denver then getting the services of a Denver SEO will be a cakewalk. Even before you hire the company, you should know the basics of the concept and should know how it helps your site.

If people are unable to get a command over the terminology, then you should surely take the help of a Denver SEO company which is simply unbeatable when it comes to the services it provides. If you think you can divert traffic to your site without anybody’s help it would be sheer folly. Hiring a company is mandatory and their constant support is what makes your site popular. It is important for you to identify the keywords and key phrases required for your site’s content. Usage of such keywords in the content will increase the page rankings. Though this will take time, it is sure to bring results.

Denver SEO services can be found on the internet and there is a plethora of websites that offer their services to you. It might not be all that easy to find the best services and you need to be patient. But once the Denver SEO services are found, you can relax. You can make a list of the websites and choose the best depending upon various factors. Look for the company’s products, their experience, cost of the services, client base, professionalism and their expertise in planning the search engine optimization strategies. If you find all of these to be good, you can ask the Denver SEO for assistance.

Always remember that an online business can run successfully only if you get the right kind of help. That can happen only if you have enough time to spend. You will never find a good Denver SEO company in a jiffy. Homework is necessary for it. Newbies who start their online businesses are usually hasty and they look for success overnight. That can be great trouble and that will never happen. It is important to understand the strategies and beginners should pay close attention and be careful. It might take a couple of months before your site picks up momentum. Choose a Denver SEO company that offers plenty of services, knows your requirements and works hand-in-hand with you.

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A website is more than an electronic business card these days and rightfully so.  If you are a business owner you are probably trying to reach out to the millions online and promote your products or services through search engine optimization, PPC or social media.  In order to do this you not only have to get your website in front of people, you need to have a site that demonstrates good conversion tactics as well.  All of these tips can be implemented by any Colorado web design company or developer without much effort.

The Beginning Steps

As more and more businesses work with SEO companies, you will need to make sure you have a proper seo campaign in place.  Once you have reached the first page of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo & Bing) you will start getting traffic to your website.  The important thing is having a good analytics program so you can analyze your visitors and their actions on your site.  I would recommend Google Analytics as it is easy to follow, comprehensive and FREE!

Now that you have traffic to your site and analytics to see what patterns develop it is time to start trying to turn your visitors into leads.  Here are some helpful conversion tactics used by many internet marketing companies to help produce more leads for their clients:

1.) Visible Phone Number. Have you ever had to search for a phone number on their website?  One of the most common mistakes business owners make is relying on their visitors to go to the “Contact Us” page.  You should have a visible phone number on all pages of your website and not in the footer.  We always use the header to display our client’s phone number and address.

2.) Large Headings. Can you remember the last time you read a full story or article online? Most searchers today skim to locate what they are looking for and will then decide if they want to continue reading.  Make large headings like a newspaper that describe what the paragraphs below are about.  If your visitors cannot easily find what they are looking for they will leave which will certainly not develop into a lead.

3.) Include a lot of Images. Along with the short headings that describe what your content is about, images do the same thing.  As an impatient society we love to get our information (ASAP).  If we can avoiding reading altogether even better!  At our Denver SEO company we try and give our client’s visitors the usual written menu as well as a picture menu on the bottom of the home page.  It is important to appease the picture readers too!

4.) Give Visitors a place to Sign Up. Don’t forget your visitors need a place to volunteer their information!  We use sign up forms for estimates or more information frequently on our web pages.  Remember to keep your form simple, if you create any hesitation for the visitor such as a long form you will lose the lead.  Get the bare minimum information and follow up with other helpful information you will need.  Forms are really only for one purpose and that is to get the contact information of your visitor.  This is your LEAD

5.) List the Benefits. Keeping in mind that visitors like to scan, use bullet points to list the benefits of your products of services.  Sometimes a short list can be the answer your visitors are looking for.  An example being if a visitor is looking for a certain product that includes a certain aspect.  If all they know is they want a widget that weights X then that is what they are going to look for.  Listing specs of an item is also a good conversion tactic!

Often times people want to get all of the information and this is just not necessary.  Online users know that information can be lost or stolen online so take that fear away.  A simple form with “Name” – “Email” – “Location” – “More Details” is all you need to contact them.  Once you get them by phone or email they will tell you all you need to know!

6.) Appease All Search Engines. Can you remember the last site you were on that didn’t load properly?  Probably not because as soon as that happened you clicked “Back” and found a new site that loaded properly.  It is important to work with your web developer and make sure your site pulls up properly on all the different versions of each major SE.

7.) Remove Uncertainty. The process of turning a visitor into a lead is pretty easy, build up your credibility and provide the information or a solution to what they are looking for and you will get the lead.  Uncertainty will stop the whole process on a dime.  Try and use pictures of your staff or sales team, add your credentials or awards as well as any organizations your company belongs to to help build credibility.  BBB logos, top of the town certificates or other awards your company has one will help a visitor feel they can trust you and your company.

8.) Everyone likes A Movie. I’m not recommending putting an hour long film on your website but a 45 second commercial is perfect!  For the non-readers out there it is always a good idea to have a video sales pitch as well.  Not only will this help keep  the visitors on your site to help with bounce rate, it will also build a little credibility as well.

9.) Cross Out Prices. You will be surprised how often a $99 – Now $79 will help you make your sale.  By crossing out a price the visitor instantly knows they are getting a deal.  To be honest it doesn’t even have to be a deal, just cross out a higher price than what yours actually is.  .

10.) Remember the “F” Pattern. I am not talking about the flying V from Mighty Ducks, i’m talking about the pattern people use to read. We start at the top left and go across and make our way down the page.  The top left is the hottest real estate on your page.  Make sure to include your important information down the left side of your page.  There has been a ton of eye tracking experiments done to back this up. Below shows the eye at work on different types of copy on a website.  I found an interesting article here:  Read Pattern

The main reason we have a website is to trap leads for our business.  It is important to decide what the main purpose of each of your pages on your site and then figure out what and how to stress that information.  Understanding your audience and what their needs are will ultimately help you satisfy them.  Use your analytics and see what pages are being hit the most, what pages your visitors are viewed the longest and take advantage of the traffic.  Follow these steps and you’ll be sure to get more leads out of your website, even without increasing the number of visitors.

Bring these tips up with your web design company and you’ll be rockin!

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SEO Tips for your Web Design - image from www.desleepyhead.com

It is funny how many people want a website that looks “cool” or “edgy”.  I have had countless meetings this year with business owners who do not understand who their target market is and just want a website that has a nice flash piece to represent the young atmosphere at the company.  These businesses are missing the point of a website and are willing to spend countless dollars to do so.  At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how much you spend on a website if nobody is visiting it.  If your website is not constantly attracting new visitors/prospects it is really just an electronic business card.  In this post I will talk about some SEO techniques to incorporate into your new web design to help your site rank better in the search engines (SE) and start getting your business in front of prospective customers.

1.) Website Load Times. There has been rumors out there that search engines will start incorporating website load time into how they rank websites.  What this means is you will not only want to make sure your website loads quickly for your visitors but soon for Google as well.  An easy component to check is the size of your images.  You will want to make sure you have images on your website that are no bigger than they need to in size.  A lot of times web developers will use a large picture and scale it down to fit an area on your site.  The problem with this is the file is still large, it just appears small to the viewer resulting in a longer load time.  There are several other ways to help your website load quicker… here are a few resources to check out:  Increase website pagespeed – Speeding up Your Site.

2.) Optimize your H tags. If you do not know what an H tag is, chances are you are working with someone else on your web development which is perfectly fine.  If this is the case you will need to tell them to use H1, H2 & H3 tags on the important pages of your site that you are trying to rank.  I say you need to tell them because most web developers are concerned with the look of a site and not the actual way it will rank in the SERP’s.   “H” tags or Heading tags should be used throughout your site to explain what your content is about to your visitors.  In these H tags you will want to use your keywords for that page.  We have found that using keywords in your H tags has helped improve rankings.  Our Denver SEO company tries to use H tags in all of our websites for the search engines and visitors as people are getting more and more lazy/impatient these days so they like to easily skim instead of reading to find the information they are looking for.

3.) Title each Page Uniquely. For every unique page in your site you should have a unique title with appropriate keywords.  You want to make sure and tell the SE that all of your pages differ and what information is on each page.  Often times you will get a website to rank for long tail keywords you are not even trying to rank for because you have optimized each page correctly.  I can’t stress enough how important title tags are and how the correct use of them will impact your SEO campaign.

4.) Title your Images. Have you ever checked out what your website looks like to Google, Yahoo or Bing?  If not next time you are on your site right click and click on “View Page Source”.  You do not see colors, flash, images here.. you see the code that the SE see.  This is why you need to make sure and title your images with keywords for that page.  If you have a picture of the rocky mountains, make sure to use the “alt” attribute and describe the picture.  Often times I see businesses with images on their site names “www.abc.org/images/11929384.jpg” and without an alt text the SE will only know that image is about “11929384″.

5.) Get rid of “Read More” links. If you know anything about onsite optimization you understand that internal linking is important.  SE like multiple ways to get from page to page throughout your site which is why we do it.  You also probably know that links with anchor text are better than just the standard www.abc.org which is why we need to start using keywords in your internal links instead of the standard “read more” or “learn more” links a lot of people use.  You will want to tell the SE what the page is about with the link anchor text.  This will also help you with your keyword density!

6.) Increase Your Page Total. If at all possible create more pages to create a resource instead of a small five page brochure.   SE like large websites so if you can increase the number of pages you can also increase the number of internal links etc.

7.) Create a dynamic element. It is important to always have your website changing, growing and improving.  Every time the crawlers visit your site they are looking for changes.  It is simple to include a RSS feed on your home page of a valuable source that can update with new content that is useful for your visitors.

Hopefully these seo tips will help you with not only your design but your rankings as well.  Although they are simple to implement many website owners do not.  The most important thing you can do is ask your Colorado web design company questions about latest SEO techniques and what they know about search engines.

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