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Keywords, Keyword Phrases, Long Tail, Short Tail, Search Result Rankings, Results…….aaargh!  WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE SO RIDICULOUSLY COMPLICATED?

Ok, now that that is out of my system, the title of today’s post is a subject that is important to most organizations that have a website.  The question to be answered is “How does my site rank in search engine search results for keywords or keyword phrases that are relevant to my business? 

You have likely heard of encryption or been cautioned to look for “https” in your browser bar when going to a website, particularly if you are going to make an online purchase.  What does this mean and how does it help secure my transaction?

Have you ever been to a website, whether looking up weather, news, or searching for a particular answer to a question and experienced a slow response? Of course you have.  What was your response? Perhaps, if the information was important you hung around, waiting for the site to load so that you could get your answer. But if you needed a quick answer to something which was important to you, you likely went to another site that could give you what you were looking for.

You have a Real Estate company and you want to put your listings into the MLS and have it display on your website. You don’t want to enter it into the MLS and then have to enter in the same information (images, fields, address, everything) in again on your site.

Your MLS is using a piece of Real Estate software developed to make it easy for you to add in your listings and then have those listings display within the MLS, on any site that displays that MLS, until they are removed or sold.

What is Responsive Design?

Responsive web design means that a website has been developed to provide an optimal viewing experience across a broad range of devices including desktop computer monitors, popular tablets or pads, and popular mobile devices.  With a responsive website design you don’t have to worry about having different websites for different devices. Responsive sites provide a consistent user experience across devices.

Most business people are quite comfortable calculating the return on investment on a new product, a new real estate development, or perhaps a new piece of equipment in their plant.  Are you measuring the return on investment in your website? 

A necessary first step toward getting a hand on how valuable your website is to your organization is to check your site traffic.

Having the correct keywords on your site is the biggest driver of your having acceptable search engine results.  A keyword is a word or phrase that someone might enter into a search engine when looking for a product or service.  Think of the keywords that relate to your business or organization and write down a list of 5 or 10.  Then go to a keyword analysis tool such as the one offered by Google and enter in your keywords.

We are going to begin a series of blog posts regarding SEO basics.  Some recommendations we make are easy to implement while others will be more difficult and may require the help of a consultant. For this post we concentrate on three high level areas where you should concentrate your efforts.  These areas are: Optimize, Convert, and Promote.

Today we saw an online article where a well known financial institution unintentionally allowed its domain name to expire. (Reference – “Regions.com update: domain renewed, but access remains limited”).  This can not only be embarrassing, but can result in loss of connection with your customers or clients.  A lapsed name can typically be renewed for a limited or no penalty for 30 or 45 days, but why take that chance?

You only have about 10 seconds to satisfy a site visitors curiosity before he runs out of patience. If a user visits your site from a Search engine search (Google, Bing, etc) there is always a little anxiety that user experiences when selecting a site from a list.