Custom vs. Free Website Design – Which is Best?
Your website is the most important part of your online marketing efforts. Without it potential customers will find it quite difficult to know what products/services you business has to offer.
While having a website for your business is the first step, you need to ensure it is a good website also. Here’s why:
- It is the first impression potential customers get of your business and its brand
- It will impact your SEO efforts – both on and off site
So the question is, “Do I have to pay through the roof in order to get a well designed website?”
Not necessarily, there are thousands of free website templates available for you to choose when building your site. However, if you have the money to spend on a custom template, this might be worth your while.
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each:
Just like any aspect of you business, you need to weigh up the pros and cons of each website design option. Budget will be your main factor, but make sure you don’t sacrifice your companies brand in the process.
What Role Do DMOZ Listings Play in Determining Google Ranking?
The DMOZ Directory is the equivalent to the Holy Grail (almost) when it comes to link juice for Google SEO. For years, DMOZ has been considered the first “port of call” when starting your link building journey in any SEO campaign.
Due to its overwhelming popularity, it is almost impossible to get into DMOZ these days. So with this in mind, what role does DMOZ play in determining a websites ranking in Google?
This was a question recently asked to the Google Webmaster Team and Mr Google himself, Matt Cutts, answered in a short video below.
Matt mentions that the DMOZ directory is showing its age, however it should still be considered a valuable SEO source.
In regards to ranking, a website gets no special reward/ranking boost from being in DMOZ. A link from DMOZ is worth the same as a link from anywhere else; it’s just that the DMOZ directory tends to have a higher page rank. So a link from DMOZ could carry a little more page rank for your site, just like a link from any other highly reputable sources.
Apart from ranking, Google actually uses the DMOZ directory for computing snippets. If you block a page on your website with robots.txt then Google can’t crawl that page. So instead they will look at the listing in DMOZ. If the listing mentions what the particular page is about, then Google will use this information.
Finally, Matt says that due to its age, Google are always testing assumptions when using DMOZ.
There are other ranking factors that carry a lot more weight, so you should concentrate your efforts on these.
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Determining Your Audience for SEO Work
Determining Your Audience for SEO Work
RM2 Project Blog:
written by Tammy Kollinger
When optimizing your website for Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine, it’s extremely important to determine your target audience. Knowing your target audience helps you make educated choices when first brainstorming the keywords for your website and then later narrowing down your list.
So how do you do determine your target market? First of all, you must know where your best customers for your product or service are located. In other words, are you looking for local, national, or worldwide business? To give you an example, RM2 Project is located and serves Miami Beach. Some of our keywords are “Miami Beach web designer”. Essentially, we’ve looked for ways to regionalize our products and services for our target audience.
Another way to determine your target market is to look at whether your target audience is male or female, their age and/or income bracket. Your SEO keyword phrases should reflect some of this information. Additionally, listen to how other people in your industry talk about the type of product or service you offer. What you’re ultimately looking for are the phrases one commonly might search for on Google or any other search engine.
RM2 Project Blog:
A Solid foundation of SEO for your website is more important than anything else in order to keep organic traffic flowing in. Think of it as building a house. You would never build a house without a foundation. It might look pretty from the outside but sooner or later it’s going to crumble without a foundation and that’s what will happen to your website with out proper SEO. We have proven techniques and knowledge of how to help improve your website rankings in Google Bing and other search engines. Feel free to call us at 1.800.301.5420 to setup an appointment for a free quote on SEO work for your website or email us
To see some of our SEO clients and their websites please visit our Portfolio
RM2 Project Blog
Findings About Social Networking Sites
RM2 Project Blog:
written by Tammy Kollinger
I’ve been doing some research on social networking services and came across some very interesting information. A June 2009 article from Anderson Analytics mentioned the results of their May 2009 study. So if you haven’t heard about these findings in the news by now, here it is in a nutshell:
• An estimated 110 million people in the US using social network services sites (SNSs) regularly.
• Facebook and MySpace have the highest numbers of regular users. Twitter and LinkedIn are in third and fourth place.
• Women (55)% are more likely than men (45%) to use SNS.
• The majority of SNS users are less than 35 years old.
• LinkedIn has the oldest and MySpace the youngest average regular user.
• Users on average login to the sites 5 days a week, 4 times a day and spend about 1 hour on SNS each day.
• Non-users think they do fine keeping in touch with people without using SNS. Tech-savviness is not a critical factor.
• The most common reasons for using an SNS site? To stay in touch with people you know.
• GenXers and Boomers are most likely to use SNS for business/job related reasons.
• Users tend to have a primary site, like Facebook or MySpace, and use other SNSs for special purposes, such as LinkedIn for job/business related activities or Twitter for promoting blogs.
• Overall, male and female SNS users engage in similar activities online.
• Male SNS users tend to share information about their hobbies, interesting articles or work related topics; female users tend to share photos, broadcasts about what they are currently doing or post about their pets.
• Male users tend to have a greater number of connections and are more adventurous in connecting to strangers online; in addition, they are more likely to use SNS for business.
• 50% of the SNS users have followed a commercial service, product, or brand on an SNS site.
So there it is, folks. Business owners, pay close attention! This is the direction the world is heading. For more information about the findings of the study, click here.
RM2 Project Blog:
You should really keep up with the trends if you want to stay ahead of the game and sell your products to the masses.
to see some of our SEO clients and their websites please visit our Portfolio
RM2 Project Blog
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