Tag Archives: SEO
Let’s face it – everyone loves cookies. From double chocolate chunk to plain old oatmeal, cookies just make you feel good. It’s kind of similar to how good SEO can breathe life back into a boring website. This weekend I spent hours slaving away baking some Christmas cookies, and between the mixing and eating I came across a weird discovery. Baking cookies is an awful lot like optimizing a website for better rankings in search engines (albeit not nearly as tasty). The following are five fun similarities:
1) You Need to Prep Properly
Have you ever tried to cream a rock solid block of butter together with sugar? Trust me, you don’t want. All you get is a mound of butter that looks like it’s been dropped into a snowbank. Recipes include detailed preparation instructions in order to help you avoid these sorts of lumpy situations, and so too should your SEO strategy. Preparation is key in the early stages of an SEO campaign, so don’t go jumping the gun. Make sure you take your time and perform plenty of research on your industry. Do you know which keywords to target? Should you be focusing on building more directory backlinks or will citation site submission be of more use? Taking the time to prep your optimization ingredients will help save you time and disappointment down the road.
2) You Need to Have the Right Ingredients
You can’t make a great cookie with just one cup of flour. You need to combine a number of different ingredients in order to create a batter that’s worth bragging about. The same goes for SEO. You can’t just insert keywords into your content and assume that search engines will immediately love your website. A strong SEO campaign requires equal helpings of content development, link building, and code-level optimization. One ingredient isn’t more important than the other – they all work together to create a finished product that’s capable of attracting plenty of attention.
3) You Have to Keep the Oven at a Steady Temperature
Cranking your oven up to 500 degrees won’t help bake your cookies faster, it will just cause them to burn. Trying to cut corners by speeding up the process doesn’t work – you need to bake your cookies slowly, and consistently in order to ensure they’re properly prepared. Similar instructions are necessary for an SEO campaign. Trying to speed through the optimization process will only cause you more harm than good. SEO is all about constant and continuous optimization. Cranking up your keyword optimized content production for one month may help boost your rankings today, but the effects will quickly wear off once you stop. Constant optimization is what will benefit your website in the long run.
4) You May Burn the First Batch When You’re Starting From Scratch
Testing out a new recipe requires patience and practice. The same can be said for working on a new SEO strategy. Somethings might work, others might crash and burn. But you’ll never know until you try. Mix up your optimization strategy and try something different – you could come out with a winning recipe!
5) You Can Never Have Enough!
Whether it’s cookies or content, one thing is for certain – there’s always room for more! Your small business website can never be over optimized. Just remember: there’s always another company out there looking to take your spot in search engine results. Keep them at bay with a clearly defined optimization strategy.
Want to make your next SEO strategy a delicious success? Then don’t forget to add CIK Marketing as one of your main ingredients! Contact us today to learn more about our SEO services.
You don’t have to be a website guru in order to perform an audit on your website. All you really need to know is what to look for. A website audit can be used to sniff out a few problems, but typically focuses on the overall content, security, and performance of your site. Auditing your small business website can determine whether or not your site is functioning to the best of its ability, and if not, how it can be improved. If you haven’t taken a good long look at your website in the past few months (or years), now’s the time.
Five Things to Look For During a Website Audit
When performing your audit, keep an eye out for the following five things:
1) Internal Link Structure
The internal link structure of your website is important for a variety of reasons. First, it helps enhance the usability of your site by providing visitors with intuitive paths between pages on your site. Second, internal links help increase your search engine ranking abilities, especially if the anchor text of your link includes keywords. For example, if you click on a link titled “Website Design in Chatham-Kent“, the page that you’re directed to should be optimized for the keyword phrase “Chatham website design”. There are probably dozens of great linking opportunities on your site already – all you need to do is take the time to find them and implement the link. Remember to check for any inactive or broken links as well. Dead links frustrate your website visitors as well as search engine bots.
2) Updating Your Sitemap
First, stop and make sure your website has a functioning sitemap. While some websites include stylized sitemaps, a simply HTML file will suffice in most cases. You don’t even have to make the sitemap visible to your website visitors. The main function of a sitemap is to help search engine robots find and understand the content that is on your site. A sitemap will also help enhance some of those internal links we were talking about earlier, which will help with your SEO rankings again.
3) Analyze Your Copy
A website audit isn’t complete until you’ve spent some time reviewing your website content. At this time, you’ll want to look for things like duplicate, out-dated, or irrelevant copy. Keep an eye out for spelling and grammar errors too – you’d be surprised how many periods and apostrophes slip past an initial content review.
4) Redirect Review
It isn’t uncommon for a website auditor to suggest or implement changes to a website’s structure. If this is something that you plan to do during your review, remember to create proper, search engine friendly redirects to ensure that your webpages retain their optimized rankings after the move. Say, for example, that you move a page from www.mywebsite.com/about/ to www.mywebsite.com/aboutus/. In order to capture any visitors that mistakenly land on the first, no longer active page, you must create what is called a 301 redirect. If you’re not familiar with coding redirects, ask an expert for help.
5) Design Features
That cool animated GIF that you added 10 years ago could be making your website look old and dated. When auditing your site, make note of design features that you’d like to scrap or update. A few quick tweaks could make a world of difference to your website’s appearance, and thus, to your brand image.
What features do you look for when auditing your website? Let us know!
You’ve heard me complain about Flash on the CIK blog before. Sure it looks pretty, but what does it actually do for your website’s design? The answer is nothing, unless you consider sucking up your bandwidth as a major bonus. If your Chatham-Kent business is looking into website redesigns, remember – Flash is not your friend. Sure, Flash can be useful in some situations, but it should only be used when absolutely necessary (creating animated text = not one of those situations). So, without further ado, here are five of the most frustrating reasons why Flash sucks (believe me, there are plenty more).
5) It’s a Bandwidth Hog
Sure, this isn’t as big a deal now as it was ten years ago, but still. Why create a site that sucks twice as much bandwidth as a standard HTML site? Believe it or not, some of your customers are still surfing using dial-up, which means they’re still waiting…for…your…website…to…load…
4) You Can’t Bookmark a Page
This drives me looney! Websites that are designed entirely using Flash do not have standard HTML URLs. So, the deeper you dig into a site, the more confused your browser becomes about your location; in fact, the next time you find yourself stuck on a Flash site, check your browser address bar as you flip between pages – chances are good it will show the homepage address for every single page within the site! This wonderful design flaw means there’s no way to bookmark a page that you’ve found useful, or easily share a link to an internal page of the site. Website design is suppose to be all about making things easy for visitors, so please don’t make things impossible by using a Flash-based site.
3) There’s a Loading Screen for Pete’s Sake!
Let’s get one thing straight – I don’t want to wait for anything, whether it’s my coffee or an organ transplant. Waiting sucks. So when I have to site and watch that little green loading bar on your website, it makes me very, very angry. If you’re website is so complicated that I must wait for it to load, do everyone a favour and redesign it. Chances are your customers will be confused by your fancy-pants features and end up bouncing anyway.
2) You Can’t Optimize Flash
Search engines hate Flash almost as much as I do. But, unlike me, who has the pleasure of turning one up every now and then, search engines simply ignore them. A search engine can’t read the garble of code that is Flash, so it simply chooses to ignore it. So, remember all that money you paid to your website designer to “optimize” your Flash site… ya, that was not one of your smartest ideas.
1) There is Absolutely No User Benefit to Flash Sites!
In case you forgot, your company website is suppose to be a tool that customers use to learn more about your business. Your site should therefore be built to provide the visitor with as much value and usefulness as possible. Don’t built your website because you think it looks cool. Build it so that your user can navigate it easily and discover exactly what it is they’re looking for.
These are just a few of the reasons why I hate Flash – feel free to add more in the comments!
