Crown Point Design Blog » seo strategies

SEO is only 1 Component of Internet Marketing Success

CPDScott — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:41:54 +0000

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the big buzz words in internet marketing, but the truth is that SEO is only one component of creating a successful web presence. Yes, search engines like Google are the most common tool that people use to try to find a business and showing up on the front page of organic searches is very important. Does this mean that you should spend your entire marketing budget, time, and energy toward SEO? NOOOOO! Here is why…

There are multiple resources available on the internet to drive users to your website. Social networking sites are now becoming very mature and offer even more capabilities than their early years. Sites like Yelp, Kudzu, StumbleUpon, and Delicious encourage user interaction which makes for a great user experience. Being involved in a community based site has more value than a paid advertisement, because you can let your clients advertise for you and often times these services are free.

When you search for your company on a search engine how many results do you show up in? A successful internet marketing plan will have your company listed in multiple resources making you look like an established and professional business.

Other components of a successful internet marketing strategy include email marketing, blogging, and search engine marketing (also referred to as SEM, PPC, or CCP advertising). Utilizing multiple resources is the best strategy for gaining users from across the web. Simultaneously, while taking advantage of these tools you will in turn be helping your search engine rankings by increasing you inbound link activity and establishing a better web presence.

When designing your website, it is vital to take advantage of white-hat search engine optmization – SEO – best practices, but don’t overlook these other areas or think your job is done once the on-page SEO components are taken care of. SEO is only the beginning of how you can achieve internet marketing success.

5 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques Tutorial

CPDScott — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:39:14 +0000

This tutorial outlines 5 simple On-Page SEO strategies. Anyone that has experience surfing the web should have an understanging of the topics covered.

sitemap.html Vs. Sitemap.xml

CPDScott — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:56:30 +0000

There are two types of sitemaps that you can create to help search engines crawl your website. The first is an HTML file labeled sitemap.html. This file provides the links to all the pages within your website in a simple list fashion and usually categorized. They HTML file helps search engines figure out how all the pages on your site are linked together so that it does not miss anything as it crawls your site. This is also helpful to users who may be looking for a page in a paticular category or section of your website. The sitemap.html file should be linked from the most important areas of your website (usually the home page).

The second type of sitemap is the XML file refered to as the Sitemap (capital S) and labeled Sitemap.xml in the root of your website. A Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website, but has some other benefits to search engines like Google. You can provide Google with additional informaion about your pages including:

How often pages on your site are updated. (ex. your Products page or News page may be updated daily, while your Contact and About pages are only updated periodically)
Last modified info on each page
The relative importance of each page on your site. (ex. your Home page may have an importance of 1.0, category sections have an importance of 0.8, and blog entry pages have an importance of 0.5) *Note this does not impact the rankings of your pages within search results

Sitemaps allow Google and other search engines to crawl your website faster and more effectively. As you know, we want to keep Google happy:) It is also important to know that sites are never penalized for submitting a Sitemap.

There are also other types of sitemaps for Video, Mobile, News, Code Search, and Geo.

More information can be found on the sitemaps.org website.