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5 Reasons Your Business Needs a Blog |
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Why a good blog matters
1. Build relationships
You know they're buying your products and services, and you might have some demographics/firmographics, but who are they really? Your blog readers are likely to be your best customers, and knowing them better will help you to find more like them. A company blog offers opportunities to dialogue with your customers unique way through the comment area in each post. While marketing programs can generally only send one-way messages, a blog keeps the lines of communication open both ways.
2. Build your reputation
People like to do business with people and companies they feel they know. You have your "Mission, Vision and Values" up on your wall in your offices, but do your customers know what you stand for and what you're trying to accomplish? Do they know what's important to you as a company? You can post about charities you're involved with, share customer success stories, demonstrate solutions you offer and problems you've solved, all with the end in mind of building your reputation and brand image.
3. Build customer loyalty
The more customers know you, the more loyal they become. As you feature different solutions you offer, they are encouraged to do even more business with you. Featuring some of your best customers will solidify their relationship with you and make your top tier even more loyal. Most blogs will offer a subscription option through RSS and email, which means you will have opportunities to interact with subscribers every time a post is published.
4. Build authority
Before I had a blog to go along with my design business site, all visitors saw when they visited were marketing messages and a portfolio. I got almost no business through my website. By starting a blog to go along with the content I already had on the site, I was able to build authority through blog posts and responses to comments, and began to get the bulk of my business through my site. The difference was not in the quality of my work, but rather the opportunity for potential customers to get to know me, and learn about my skill set, the solutions I had provided for customers, problems solved, etc.
5. Build traffic
Blogs are perfect for search engine optimization. Search engine spiders like fresh content to feed on, and while a company website might be rather static with little need for content changes, a regularly updated blog provides fresh, keyword-rich content that search engines love. This will cause your site to rank higher when potential customers search for your products and services and drive more traffic to your entire site.
In the coming weeks we'll take a look at some business blogs that are well-designed and implemented, as well as some that need some improvement, in order to more clearly define what makes a business blog successful. |
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Why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Matters |
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Why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Matters
 If you aren't yet aware of its meaning, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Simple enough, but just what is SEO and what is it for? This is a more complex matter.
Search engine optimization refers to a number of different techniques used for building websites and the content on these sites to improve their placident in the search engine results pages.
The idea of SEO is to make your website more visible to web users who search for content with search engines (which is essentially everyone who uses the World Wide Web at all).
If your website is a personal page meant primarily for yourself and perhaps a small number of family members and friends, it may not be all that important to you to have a site which is optimized.
However, if your website is business oriented, it matters a great deal.
Think of it this way: if your business decided to stop being listed in the phone book, took the signs and awnings down and stopped advertising, how successful would you be at attracting new business?
Search engines have for many largely replaced the function once performed by local phone directories.
In order to attract (and even retain) business, you need to have a high profile where your customers are likely to see you - and these days, this place is online.
It once was that if people couldn't find you in the phone book, your business was in serious trouble. Now, of course the question is how easy it is for people to find your website.
You may have a great looking website and even use the URL in your printed marketing materials and advertising campaigns; but not everyone is going to see your advertisident in the paper.
People tend to look at web sites when they're actually in need of something and even if a potential customer has seen your ads, it's not at all certain they'll remember to go to your site immediately when they're looking for what you offer.
Instead, your potential customers are using search engines - which is why your business may need some help from a professional SEO consultant to ensure that consumers will find you when they really are looking for you.
One of the things we should look at first here is what the search engines actually see when their crawlers come to your site.
The search engines don't know (or care) about your site's design in terms of graphics (though they will read the alternate text for these images - if you don't know about this important elident of web design, an SEO consultant can help you with this).
All the search engines see when they look at your site is text and nothing but text. For this reason, sites which are entirely Flash-based are not generally recommended from an SEO perspective (many visitors don't like this either).
What the search engine crawlers are looking at on your site is the actual text contained on your website as well as the information contained in what is known as the headers of your site's HTML, most notably your title tags.
These tell the search engine crawlers what your site is about - if you don't include these (or use an entirely graphics or animation based site), the search engines really can't tell what your site is supposed to be about.
This can be fatal to your site, as it basically assures that no one will be able to find you with a search engine query.
As for how the search engines determine page ranking, this is a much more complex question. The short answer is relevance: but the relevance of any given website is calculated in a number of ways.
The exact nature of the algorithms used by each search engine is different and each is closely guarded proprietary information - to further complicate matters, these algorithms are constantly evolving.
However, there are certain things which the SEO experts have managed to figure out through analysis and reverse engineering of search results and websites which are universally applicable.
This is what enables an SEO consultant to look over a website and suggest changes to the site to increase its visibility in terms of the search engines.
The alterations which can improve a site's search engine rankings include fine tuning the copy on the site to make it tune with the site's content, its meta tags or especially popular search terms which are relevant to the content.
There are other changes which will improve a site's search engine ranking which are not visible to visitors to the site.
These are changes which affect what the search engine crawlers see when they visit the site and help this to more accurately determine what the site is about. There are yet other SEO techniques which your site should avoid using.
What should you avoid?
Let's take a look at a hypothetical scenario. Suppose your kitchen wares business has a website which is doing well in the results for tea kettles, frying pans and the like.
However, you'd like to further increase traffic - how about trying to rank high in the search engine results for some other non-kitchen related search terms?
This may help to increase traffic to your site, but there are reasons why everyone doesn't do this. If SEO really worked like that, every site on the web would optimize their content for whatever the most popular searches happened to be.
There are many websites which do this simply to get you to their site by any means. This is one of the several different SEO techniques which are considered "search engine spamming" and should be avoided.
If you're considering working with a professional search engine optimization firm, you should avoid any company who uses this technique or any of the others which follow:
* Keyword stuffing. * Misleading redirects and link/URL cloaking. * Duplicating content between pages of a website. * Misspelling words and names commonly used as search terms. * The use of unrelated links (also known as link farming). * Or for that matter, any other technique aimed at fooling the search engines.
These "black hat" SEO methods can work as a means of generating traffic, but they only work for so long before the search engines (and the public) catch on.
Once search engines figure out what you're up to, they often respond by un-indexing your site, making it impossible for anyone to find you with that search engine.
Don't think you won't get caught either; the major search engines encourage users to report these deceptive tactics. You can get better and more lasting results with ethical SEO methods; and without having to worry about having your site blacklisted.
Is Your Site Doing Well Enough In Search Results?
Unless you're already in the top couple of results in the major engines, chances are you'd like to do better regardless of where your site stands at present.
As any expert search engine optimization consultant will tell you, SEO is a process, not a single task. It's something that you'll likely have to continue working on as your site slowly but steadily makes its way up the rankings.
This organic SEO approach is the most effective and will get you to where you want to be sooner or later; the most important thing is to ensure that your business' website is optimized for search engines.
Failing to implident good SEO practices is one nearly certain way to set yourself up for a fall. It is much like the unadvertised, unlisted and unmarked business we discussed earlier.
People who are ready and willing to do business with you will pass you by, unaware that your site even exists. Whether or not to use SEO as an integral part of your marketing strategy isn't even a question anymore - the question is how you'll go about it.
About the Author: John S. Britsios is a Web Architect & Senior SEO Consultant, specializing in Web Content Accessibility, Usability Testing, Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing. |
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Benefits of having a website during recession times |
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So what are the benefits of having a web presence over traditional marketing means?
- The web has a much greater reach, anyone with a PC and internet connection, anywhere in the world can find your site and potentially do business with you.
- The web never sleeps. Your website will not keep normal business hours but will continue to sell your services 24/7.
- It’s easier and quicker to find a product or service on the web thanks to excellent search engines such as Google therefore people will use this method to find companies much more.
- You can say more and sell yourself better on a web site than any other media. Consider the cost of an ad in something like the yellow pages and what you get for that price as opposed to a web site on which you can have text, photos, audio, video, news and as many pages as you like!
- The ongoing cost of a web site is quite small compared to other media. If you are managing the site yourself then the only repetitive costs will be your domain name and hosting and these should be reasonable.
- Spending money on something like Google Adwords to get people to your site is a much more efficient way of spending your marketing budget and you can monitor the effects of a campaign much more closely.
- You can use Google Analytics on your web site for free and gain very useful information about the type of people visiting your site and what they looked at most while there. This information can allow you to optimize your site to maximize the amount of people who actually contact you and give you a valuable sales lead.
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Welcome to V Creative Agency (VCA) |
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Welcome to V Creative Agency (VCA), a eclectic and full web design and internet marketing company. VCA utilize a professional team of designers to offer you affordable and effective websites with creative design. We rely on customer service just as well as design because a functional website is more effective than a pretty website. |
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