It certainly is counter-intuitive if you’ve ever written any HTML before, since you pretty much have to code large sections of the site before you put any content in (or at least it feels that when when you begin). Even for those who haven’t written a word of code in their lives, they’ve surely visited hundreds of websites, and their thought is, “I want my site to look like this!” And that’s a great way to think when you’re envisioning a website, but it’s not the right order of operations when it comes to actually implementing the new site.

Start with content: “Content is King”

As Bill Gates said back in the mid 90s, content is in fact king – particularly in this context. How can you build a design without any content? The content is the centrepiece of the design – it’s the entire reason why you need a design to begin with. Imagine building a museum with hundreds of show cases and beautiful areas for paintings, but not having any paintings or artwork to showcase. How do you know what size rooms you need for a collection if you don’t have the collection? How do you build security casings for artwork that you don’t have? It works the same for websites – you need the content before you can build an intuitive and classy design around it.

Templates to the rescue

With templates, and more specifically the high quality premium templates available for WordPress, why spend thousands of dollars on a custom design (or less than that on a sub-par custom design) when you can get incredibly well build templates for less than $100? “Okay, but I want my article on jobs over here and my picture over there, your templates can’t do that! So there.” Who cares? It really doesn’t matter to just about anyone exactly where your content is on the page as long as it’s readable and easy to find. Don’t get hung up on where every single detail is located, because the large majority of your visitors will not notice.

I’m not saying to forget about design and the importance of site layouts, but rather, trust that the designer who put together the template you’ve chosen for your site has a great amount of experience building websites. They’ve been doing this for years (particularly in the case of premium templates) and they know what is best for the layout and design of your site. You will most certainly have better ideas than the designer on certain elements here and there, but that’s not something you should ever be thinking about before you even have content on the site.

Your site may look stunningly beautiful after hours or days working on the design, but if you have no content, it’s completely useless.

Content defines the purpose and character of a website, so the next time you’re putting together a site, don’t get hung up on the details of the design before you’ve even defined a purpose. Go find a nice template and get writing!

I recently did a guide on how local businesses can choose the best keywords for their website. This guide sparked the idea of taking a new business website through a 30 day SEO case study. Keeping on track with the topic of my keyword research – daycares in halifax – I will be building a business website in this industry and documenting what I do to bring it to the top of the first page on Google.

The site: Daycare Halifax. (Hang in there while I complete it as much as possible over the next couple days.)

I will be documenting and demonstrating what I did for the following (check back to this post for links to each demo):

Keyword Research
Onsite Optimization
Onsite Content Strategy
Link Building
Other Website Promotion
Social Media Integration

Some of the key measurements that I am interested to see at the end of the case study are as follows:

Total Time Worked – I’m confident I can keep this in under 15 hours for the month, and under $100 total.
Beginning Ranking vs Ending Ranking (and fluctuations in between.)
Total Traffic Beginning vs Total Traffic Ending – and all Analytics Data

What’s the point / what’s the goal?

Good question. I want to provide a comprehensive outline on how local business owners can create or recreate their websites with a marketing focus in order to increase their search engine rankings, traffic, conversions, and sales.

My ultimate goal for the case study is a top 4 ranking within 30 days of work and 60 days total. Search engines can take a little while to crawl and record the efforts put into an SEO initiative so it’s always good to give it a bit of time to see what happens. I hope to work less than 30 minutes per day for the first month in order to achieve these results.

No matter what industry you are in and regardless of whether you operate a brick and mortar business or an online business, these tactics will work for you. Bookmark this post and check back for the links to the updates on this case study.

Why is keyword research important?

The major reason to do proper keyword research while you are building or optimizing a website is so you learn how your customers are searching for your products and services online. You can stop the guess work and learn the exact keywords they are using to find you – they may be different than you thought. Having this information allows you to better tailor your content to attract these searchers without having to pay for them.

Using the Google Keyword Tool

There are a lot of paid keyword research tools out there that do an excellent job at finding you excellent keywords. For the sake of this lesson, I wanted to assume that most local businesses wanted to operate on an extremely tight budget when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (read: no budget).

The best place to start your keyword research is with the Google Keyword Tool. This tool gives you a variety of information on keywords such as global and local search volumes and the cost to advertisers.

Using the GKT isn’t that difficult, but I have made a quick 4-5 minute video to help you better understand what to look for and how we use it to determine the best keywords for our clients. This video is the same process we use to start any keyword research.

Note: click the expand button on the bottom right to get the video in a larger screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpqLT8tZskY

How many keywords should I target?

This really depends on how much content your website has, how many pages and articles you may be creating, and much more. To keep things simple, we recommend 2 core keywords for your main home page. Most of the time, these are city keyword and keyword city (eg. Halifax web design and web design halifax).

For your product and service pages, you may want to target a service-specific or product-specific keyword such as buy keyword in city or just buy keyword (eg. buy fishing rod in Halifax).

Every blog post you write on your website, should also be somewhat targeted toward a keyword. Even if that keyword only has a dozen or so searches per month, it is beneficial to capture those visitors with your blog post and have the opportunity to convert them with your website. Without proper keyword research, they wouldn’t have found your site in the first place.

Need some help?

Our Web design package includes basic on-going SEO optimization and promotion. If you currently have our service, simply send us an email and we’ll be happy to give you a hand. If you’re not currently a subscriber, we will still offer a free keyword and competitive analysis on your website free of charge. Just contact us through the contact form above.

The writers behind this site have worked in the wine industry for years, tasting thousands of wines and pairing them with a huge variety of meals. We wanted to put together a site that matches the quality of their experience with the quality in design of their website. With the site you see here, we blew away both our own as well as the customer’s expectations!

The question to ask as a business owner then, is how do you stand out in the sea of competition in Halifax and Nova Scotia? You can examine strategic competitive advantages and value added services until you are blue in the face but the best way to stand out is to make it easy for your potential customers to find you.

How do you make it easy for customers to find you?

Two sources come to mind right away. The Yellow Pages, and Search Engines. If you do not yet have a Yellow Pages ad, I recommend spending the couple hundred dollars per year to put one in – believe it or not, individuals and business still check the Yellow Pages.

When it comes to search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing you will need search engine optimization in order to better your website’s rank in the search engines. The Halifax Internet marketing and Halifax SEO industry is just as competitive as any other.

Some examples of the more popular Halifax SEO companies include Grape Kiwi, Norex, Alpha Search, and Robert Snell. There are also many Halifax web design companies that offer SEO services alongside their design services and countless freelancers who are trying to make a buck.

How much does Halifax SEO cost, and what is involved?

The cost involved with your search engine optimization initiative will depend largely on the type of business you operate, how competitive the industry is, and your target market details.

Most of the time companies will ask for payment in advanced based on a contract of agreed upon details of the SEO service. Other companies operate on a monthly payment structure where you will pay a monthly fee based on the specifications in the contract. Whatever method you choose to go with remember to always get the deal on paper.

Buyer beware. There are a lot of great Halifax SEO and Internet marketing companies that provide excellent service and results. Unfortunately, there are an equal number of people who are just trying make a quick buck and disappear. Be sure to meet in person, ask for a reference, and participate in conversation before diving into an SEO plan.

Interested in getting more information on Halifax SEO? Contact us for a free consultation.

Wherever possible, we leverage the best free and open-source tools and technology. One of the great open-source solutions we use is the WordPress Content Management Framework.

There are times when a free solution won’t fit the needs of your website or business. However, from our experience more times than not it will. There are two major reasons we try our best to leverage as much open-source and free software as possible.

Keeping your costs low

We are changing the way web development is done and a big part of that is keeping your costs to a minimum. Using free software whenever possible allows us to continue bringing you excellent online business solutions at our low monthly rates.

Community, open development, and great support

Most open-source and free software, including the WordPress Project have a huge following and community backing. This means quicker updates to fix bugs and enhance the software with new features, the ability to highly customize each project if required, and access to individuals with a high level of knowledge and experience working with these tools.

It’s not for everyone

As we mentioned, there are times when what we offer and what you need won’t align. If you’re looking at spending tens of thousands of dollars on your new web-based project, we aren’t the company for you. If you want a completely customized system (in terms of design and administration) with everything exactly to your specification, we’re not for you. If you want to build the entire system yourself, then we’re not for you. If any of those cases fit your project, still [intlink id="contact"]send us an email[/intlink] as we know many custom development companies and tools for completely self-made websites that would be just right for you.

But it’s more than likely for you

On the other hand, if you have a more reasonable budget but still want powerful integration tools (like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, eCommerce, Google Analytics and more) then we are perfect for you. Similarly, if you want to be able to easily update your site yourself with pictures, news, articles, hours, and other little content updates, but not get into the nitty-gritty of coding, designing or building everything yourself, then we are definitely for you! We love surprising our customers with the simplicity of the tools they need to update their sites, while still keeping costs low.

There are a few areas of business that we recommend businesses use social media for. Below are a few of those.

Social Media for Customer Service

Customer service can often be increased with the use of social media. Participating in the communities that your customers are in will let you have great conversations, and offer support where necessary.

By giving product and service updates via twitter and facebook will let your followers know what’s going on with your company. It is also important monitor any @ replies, or direct messages both on twitter and facebook for questions, complaints, or comments. Being quick to answer your customers’ questions online through social media is a great way to increase brand recognition and loyalty.

Social Media for Sales and Promotions

Social media is also a great medium for offering discounts and promotions for your products and services. Allowing your followers, fans, and friends, to enter draws or receiving discounts for helping you promote your business can be an excellent way to increase sales while reaching more people.

Using Social Media to leverage web content

Another great reason to use social media is to leverage the content on your website. By promoting your new content via social media it will give access to many that wouldn’t usually know about it. This may also increase the amount of links you generate and amount of time visitors stay on your website. If you are able to track these visitors you may also get a better idea of what percentage of clicks or sales to expect if you were to run a promotion or sales campaign.

No Accounts are Better Than Stagnant Accounts

If you plan on opening a business Twitter, Facebook, or other social media account it is important to use them. If you do not plan on using your accounts, you are better off without them. If potential customers find you through an outdated social media profile, it may cause more harm than good if they try to contact you without response.

Be sure to check your profiles every couple of days to stay on top of any activity, alternatively, consider not opening certain accounts if you feel they are too time consuming.

Social media is not going anywhere. Some initially thought it was a fad that would blow over and never stick, especially when it came to business. This is definitely not the case, and if you are still one of those people who think this you might want to check out our internet marketing training programs for a good introduction on how you can benefit from these technologies online.

Although I completely agree with the hype surrounding social media as a great way to brand a business, person, idea, or whatever really. It is an extremely low-cost method to leverage in order to make a name for yourself online. That said, it is important to note that these are not marketing assets. You do not own your social media profiles, as much as you would like to think you do.

If you are someone who uses social media extensively for their business, just imagine what would happen to your business or brand if twitter and facebook were to delete your accounts tomorrow. I bet you would wish you did more asset marketing.

When it comes down to marketing your business, product, or idea online, be sure you stuck to the fundamentals. Build your marketing assets.

What are Marketing Assets?

This is a common question, and is extremely important to consider. Marketing assets are essentially things that you own that help with your marketing initiatives.

Consider the difference between an opt-in mailing list of 2000 people – all who have agreed whole-heartedly to receive news, information, and promotions on your products and services – versus 2000 people following you on Twitter, or 2000 fans your business has on Facebook.

The latter is something you do not own, and unfortunately, do not control. Your 2000 Twitter followers or 2000 Facebook fans could disappear tomorrow, or worse still your social media accounts could be shut down and there would be nothing you can do about it.

The opt-in list on the other hand, is a marketing asset. It is a valuable list of potential and current customers that adds value to your marketing. You are able to use this list for marketing purposes, and you own it. The data you have on these people are yours, and no other company can restrict you from it.

So what should I do?

If you ask any professional marketer, whether in the traditional sense or an online marketer, what the most valuable marketing assets they have are I suspect all their answers will be the exact same: data.

If you are not currently storing information and data on your customers, potential customers, competitors, website visitors, and their behavior, than you are missing out on a huge wealth of information. Storing data is hugely important. Other than a trusted brand, and customer loyalty, in my opinion, data is the most valuable marketing asset a business can have.

Make sure you have some sort of website analytics software installed, such as Google Analytics to understand how people are using your website, where they are coming from, and what they are doing. Another great idea is to build your customer relationship management database and make sure you know who your customers are and keep in contact with them.

Other marketing assets might include value-added products on your website, such as an informational eBook, and as mentioned, your opt-in email list.

Social media is great to leverage your content and drive traffic to your site. It is important to understand how to use twitter for business and the best practices for using social media.