The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog 
- Free Website Review
Looking forward, Mark’s latest article on SEW discusses seven questions you need to ask yourself prior to initiating a site redesign or SEO campaign. The article will post on Tuesday, July 3rd. We’ll add a link to it here once it has been posted.
The exciting part of this article is that Mark is offering to conduct free website reviews for site owners looking to improve their web presence. Once the article posts, just click on the email link below Mark’s picture and fill out the contact form (example - submit your site URL at this link).
Hopefully, he’ll get a chance to help out some site owners and webmasters who are seriously missing out on potential traffic and success. Feel free to submit your site today! He’ll be choosing 3-5 sites to review. Each review will be posted as an article on the SEW site by the end of summer.
Written by Stefan Weise on Jun, 29th 2007 in The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
- Keyword Research Fundamentals
Mark’s latest article on Search Engine Watch covers some fundamental questions each person should ask themselves prior to keyword research. Their top level questions, but ones you should have the answer to before you begin. Strategy 85% of SEO. Implementation does take time and energy on some level, but it’s what you do and how you go about it that really makes the difference.
Some professional SEO firms obviously don’t consider some of these questions prior to research and implementation. Just read each company’s taglines and top level statements about SEO. If they promise #1 rankings, but fail to specify whether this applies to your most important keywords, you’re getting played. If all they ever mention is rankings, and fail to discuss traffic or conversions, you will know what to expect and what not to expect right off the bat.
The goal with every aspect of search engine optimization and any other arm of interactive marketing is to grow your business. If that is not the objective of your current agency of record, it’s time to shop around.
Written by Stefan Weise on Jun, 26th 2007 in The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog, Interactive Marketing | No Comments »
- ICLS.NET Offers Retro SEO
In case you’re wondering, that is not a compliment. While retro may be hip and cool in the fashion and music industries, it’s sad and more than a little annoying in the SEO industry. Because I personally own several domains, I was just solicited via snailmail by icls.net (no link love for this one!). While they’re not asking for much ($35/yr, $60/2yrs, or $140/5yrs), they’re not offering much either.
SEO is my job. So when someone clutters my mailbox with an offer to “enhance their website exposure”, I find it worth responding to.
So what magical services will ICLS (Internet Corporation Listing Service) provide for my hard earned $35?
1) domain name submission to 14 established search engines
2) quarterly se position and ranking reports for 8 keyword phrases in 14 “major” search engines
Silly me! And here I thought there were only 4 major search engines (only 2 of which drive traffic worth mentioning)! With Ask.com providing less than 5% of search traffic to most websites, why would I worry about the 10 search engines providing less traffic than that?Not to mention that search engine submission died out as a relevant practice years ago! These days, a couple links to your site will get you indexed faster than any supposed search engine submission service. So let’s just go ahead and agree that part one of the service offering is totally worthless.
So in essence, they want to charge me $35 to send me a ranking report for a whopping 8 terms!!!! Wow. That would take me at most an hour of casual search inquiry. So in essence, they’re fee is $8/hr for something I’ll want to know a heck of a lot more often than 4 times a year!
Nice try! I’ll pass.
Written by Stefan Weise on Jun, 16th 2007 in The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
- Marketing Agencies Still Use FLASH Navigation?
As we draw towards the end of our website redesign, I found myself looking at several websites in comparison. It occurred to me that several of these well-known Dallas area agencies were still using FLASH navigation. Seriously? How have they managed to stay out of the loop for this long?
If I was a business owner or director of marketing looking for a web design and website promotion company in the Dallas / Fort Worth area, I would automatically eliminate any agency whose website or clients’ websites have FLASH navigations. It is an automatic sign that they don’t know the foundational principles of search engine optimization and website promotion.
Sure, FLASH can look fancy. That’s its only function. It allows you to easily put graphics and text in motion without resorting to video. The problem is that search engines like Google and Yahoo! and MSN cannot read FLASH. And if they cannot read your navigation, they cannot index your website. Sure, some companies claim that a Sitemap page containing links to all of your pages on the bottom of the page will settle that issue. Even when the search engine indexes all of your pages through the Sitemap, your rankings will suffer from the lack of proper semantic markup.
Granted, I’m the SEO Copywriter around here, so I can’t explain all the details of design theory and W3C compliance like Stefan, our Creative Director, could. But I know enough to have seen that a skilled designer can create navigation that looks really good without using FLASH or anything else that would hinder SEO.
Remember, style is important. It is in many cases the essence of your branding campaign. But you NEVER sacrifice accessibility or search engine optimization for bells and whistles. You will always sell more widgets when more people visit your site. Just think of it this way: would you rather have 100 visitors who love your moving FLASH navigation or 1,000 visitors who are interested in buying/converting? Content is #1. Exposure is #2. Style is #3.
Keep those priorities and your e-business will go far.
Written by Stefan Weise on May, 19th 2007 in The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog, Interactive Marketing | No Comments »
- Yahoo Makes On-Page Optimization a Little More Interesting
Yahoo just made on-page optimization a little more interesting - or at least they gave us a new attribute to tinker with and test out for a while.
Search Engine Land broke the story earlier today that Yahoo will start to recognize a new attribute that allows you to tell Yahoo to ignore certain sections of a page. In other words, “Hello, ignorant search engine - THIS is the MAIN content of the page.” That has the ability to be really useful.
In the past, if you wanted to clear out the noise on a page liberal uses of javascript was the way to go. This new method introduced by Yahoo could potentially get rid of the limitations of this method while achieving the same results for your pages.
Sure it could be a maintenance nightmare, but at least yahoo stepped out and led the pack on this one.
Written by Stefan Weise on May, 2nd 2007 in The Vizion Search Engine Optimization Blog, Search Engine Marketing / PPC, Interactive Marketing | No Comments »