How building your website correctly from the outset will continue to benefit you now

With all the changes that have been happening lately in the world of SEO - Google buying YouTube, the Google Caffeine algorithm upgrade and the Bing and Yahoo merger - it is becoming increasingly more difficult to keep up and stay ahead when it comes to optimizing your website.

In this day and age having a website no longer means just having a site designed, built and uploaded and leaving it at that. Internet Marketing has grown exponentially in recent times and in order to take full advantage of this trend and reap the associated benefits, you need to have a fully functional well-built website before you can even think of embarking of any form of optimizing in order to gain rankings and attract the right kind of traffic.

The basics of building websites still counts for something

That said if you have a well-indexed website and it was built correctly from the word go or has been kept up to date in terms of the latest building recommendations, you are in good stead for moving forward with your intended optimization and capturing your market share.

Sites build in frames or framesets, flash and/or tables etc are considered by the web authorities (W3Schools and others) to be outdated and in some instances deprecated indicating that it is no longer supported in XHTML 1.0. These sites are then also not crawled by the Search Engine bots and will be left behind in the race for rankings.

Domain Age is a factor in Search Engine Optimization

Although it may not be a defining factor, domain age is still a factor and for two reasons:

1. The age of a domain gives the appearance of longevity which Google gives higher relevancy to. Search engines generally tens to put more trust into those sites that have been around longer.


2. Also the older the site, the more time it has had to build links from other sites etc.

Where to from here

There are many things that could be suggested for example you could consider rebuilding your site if its not been built correctly. It might also be a good idea to consider taking over old domains in order to benefit from aging if your current domain is not too well like or if you are just starting out. This is especially true if the domain is relevant and the site is built with high quality content.

What else needs to be considered

Before Google Caffeine kicks into effect take the time to test search keywords and phrases from your site (that you wish to be found under) and see where you are listed on both www.google.co.za and www2.sandbox.google.com. Then look at the results and and make a decision from there.

Web 2.0 sites and those with user generated content is now also considered the way to go and something to keep in mind if you plan on taking full advantage of the upcoming changes and want your website to perform at it optimal best.

Visit the following sites for more information:

Domain Age http://www.a1articles.com/article_1036559_81.html

Google Caffeine http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine

SEO Basics

http://www.deondesigns.ca/blog/learn-the-basics-of-seo-before-you-try-anything-fancy/

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18752155/Basics-of-SEO

So a search engine likes my site - Now what?

This pattern is fast becoming a trend in the realm of Search Engine Optimisation. Website owners are finding that they have plenty of visitors coming to their sites all being pushed their by SEO techniques, Google AdWords and other Pay Per Click traffic generation methods.

The sad part is that all these extra visitors are not necessarily translating into extra enquiries and sales at the same exponential rate that the traffic to the site has increased.

The answer to this particularly perplexing conundrum is actually fairly simple : Search Engines Are Not People.

Search Engines may love your site and it may rank incredibly well in Google and other prominent search engines and get excellent keyword reach and relevancy from all the articles and content that you are posting to your site, but at the end of the day a search engine is not going to enquire about your latest and greatest product. So how do we get around the problem?

There are some very simple guidelines to design your landing pages to which will increase the chances of real people liking what they see and actually engaging further with you :

1. Keep the page simple. People have come through to that page for a specific reason and are looking for a specific thing, don’t complicate the page with tons of other “stuff”, just keep the info and required actions on the page relevant to what they were searching for.
2. Ensure that the visitor to the page is 100% sure about what it is that you need them to do on that page. If they need to send you a mail – tell them! And tell them a few times for the sake of clarity and ease of use. The worst thing you can have a user do is get to your landing page and say to himself, “now what do I do?”!
3. Test multiple landing page designs. Don’t assume that the first design you do is the correct one. Try a few designs and see which one gets you the best conversion results and then stick to this one. Be careful of trying to make too many changes at the same time because then you will not be able to judge which changes are the ones which worked.
4. Tell your visitor where they are. They have just come through to you through a search engine which told them that you were the right people to speak to; now reinforce that with some compelling copy that highlights what it is that they were searching for.
5. Once your visitor has completed the required action for that page, your site should direct them to a thank you page which will let them know that their enquiry has been successfully submitted. Now the cardinal sin of most websites is that they leave the page at that and they don’t try and cross sell or up sell a visitor who very clearly is interested in your product offering. Use this page to give them more info or to offer them something else that they would be interested in.

Using these guidelines will ensure that your landing pages do not suffer from having a multitude visitors but rather a throng of active participants who are willing to engage with you and take the next step in the buying cycle.