I’m not a huge fan of directories. In my opinion, they are a waste of time and if you are relying solely upon directories for your link-building campaign, you’re probably in big trouble.

The fact of the matter is that directories have very little effect on where your website will end-up ranking in the search engines. If you think about it, most directories have thousands of outbound links, each of them pointing to different websites around the world. And most directories don’t have much page rank to pass any real “link-juice” to all of those links, just like the majority of forums these days. The SEO effect is highly diluted and the potential for seeing any true gains in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) is practically non-existent.

However, there are still 3 instances I can think of in which a directory listing might actually be able to help drive some traffic to your website and bring in potential clients:

1) Niche-specific directories.

By niche-specific, I’m talking about those directories that only list websites related to your market or industry. For example, being a web designer, it might be worth my time to get listed in a few web design directories.

To give you a real-world scenario of how this could be beneficial, do a Google search for the keywords: Missouri web design (click here to see the results). Google shows me that the #1 and #2 websites ranking for this keyword are both niche-specific directories. Therefore, by adding my website to each of these directories, I have a decent chance of getting the lead if and when a user actually searches for that keyword.

Those directories could be very beneficial to get listed in, especially if you don’t have the time, skills, or budget to hire a professional SEO provider to get your website up there for that exact keyword.

2) Anchor text variation.

Directory listings are also good for giving you an easy solution for anchor text variation. Most directories will allow you to enter just about any anchor text you desire for your listing.

Anchor text variation is an extremely important factor for your SEO campaign. I went into detail about it in my post on the Importance of Anchor Text Variation.

3) The DMOZ.

Even though it’s not a niche-specific directory, the DMOZ is probably the one and only directory in existence today that Google really pays attention to. Even then, there’s a lot of buzz going on in the SEO community that suggests a DMOZ listing isn’t worth all it used to be. Honestly, I’m not sure about that. So just to be safe, I always submit sites to the DMOZ. It only takes about 5 minutes for a submission. So why not?

The only draw-back to the DMOZ is the amount of time you are going to have to wait before you know if your site is accepted or not. I’ve seen it happen as quick as 4 months. In contrast, I can recall one instance in which it took over 1 year before one of our sites was finally approved.

Back to the main topic of this post, niche-specific directories can obviously have some perks. I wouldn’t become obsessed with them or spend too much time trying to get listed in 100’s of them, though. Your time and effort will be more efficiently spent if you focus it towards other Internet marketing and SEO avenues.

For those rare occasions that a directory website is in a high position for one of your  keywords in the search engines, then I’d definitely recommend you go ahead and add your listing to it. But don’t spend too much time trying to hunt them down. You know what your main keywords are. If you are like me, you’re probably checking the SERPs every day and you’ll definitely notice if a directory site is outranking your own.

Search engine friendly URLs. What are they? Basically, they create a URL that has a meaningful, readable name for the web document, instead of a bunch of gobbledygook numbers, symbols, and non-alphanumeric characters. By configuring your permalink settings in WordPress, you can easily implement search engine friendly URLs with just a few clicks and an alteration to your server’s .htaccess file.

This will help to add relevancy to each URL in your site, from a search engine’s perspective, by allowing you to place keywords inside of a URL. It will also help your human visitors to be able to read and remember each URL in plain English.

To implement search engine friendly URLs in WordPress, follow these steps:

1)Log-in to the WordPress admin panel with an account that has administrative-level access.

2)Click on the “Settings” menu, then scroll down and select “Permalinks”. From here, you will see several different options for configuring your permalink settings.

We want to move away from the Default and choose one of the other options. The best choices to select are either Day and Name or Month and Name. I would steer away from using the Numeric option because it’s really not going to help you accomplish the goal of creating search engine friendly URLs.

As an alternative, you can click the Custom Structure radio button and enter: /%postname%/ into the text field. This is the method I prefer to use, as it makes for a shorter URL by removing the day and month elements.

3) Click on the “Save Changes” button.

Now here is where it can get a little tricky if you don’t have much experience in editing files on a web server. By default, WordPress will automatically try to update your .htaccess file for you, if in fact it has the appropriate permissions set to be writable. If it is, then you’re all set and ready to go (you can ignore the next step in this blog post). However, if it is not writable, then you are going to have to edit the file yourself.

4)Locate and update the .htaccess file.  Depending upon your web server’s configuration, your .htaccess file is most likely going to be located in the web root of your domain. This is usually a directory like “httpdocs”, “public_html”, or “www”.

Once you have located your .htaccess, open it in any plain-text editor (do NOT use a rich text editor, such as WordPad or Microsoft Word). Notepad is just fine and comes built-in to all version of Windows.

Luckily, WordPress will automatically generate the text that you’ll need to place inside of the .htaccess file. So all you really need to do is locate it and copy / paste the exact text that WordPress displays in the gray box directly underneath the “Save Changes” button.

Once you have the text inserted inside of the .htaccess file, save the changes to the file and upload it back to the server.

5) Test it. To make sure that it worked correctly, visit your website and click on a few of it’s pages. Look at your web browser’s address bar to make sure you are seeing the URL path in readable English.

By using search engine friendly URLs, your site will be more effectively optimized and configured for search engines and human readers alike.  It’s not hard to do and it only takes a few minutes to implement.

I’m a traffic junkie. Nothing gets my blood flowing more than when I run through my morning ritual of traffic analysis for our websites and I see the number of unique visitors climbing each day. I love it.

Lately, I’ve been noticing a trend for some of our sites. The amount of traffic coming from Yahoo and Bing is slowly but surely starting to increase and we’ve received some excellent leads that have converted into sales, as a result of it.

Moral of the story? Just because Google is still the Big Daddy of the search engines does not mean that Yahoo and Bing are totally worthless. You should still pay attention to them and if at possible, try to get a first-page placement in their SERPs.

According to StatCounter, Google held about 79% of all search engine traffic during the last 30 days in the United States, with Yahoo and Bing fluctuating around 9.x% each: check it out here.

Now please don’t misconstrue what I’m saying. By no means am I suggesting that you sacrifice your Google SEO campaign efforts and throw them away for obviously secondary-level search engines. However, if you can optimize for all 3 of them, then why not?

Based on my experience, I’ve found that the quickest way to get on the first page of both Yahoo and Bing is with your on-page SEO factors, whereas Google tends to focus more on the off-page (links).

Yahoo and Bing seem to allow you to get a little more “spammy” and have a higher keyword density than Google likes to see. They also focus less on “link-juice” as one of their main ranking factors.

The following tips apply to all 3 search engines for on-page optimization practices. When applied correctly, your chances of hitting the first page for all 3 of them will be greatly increased (in-bound link factors set aside):

• -Keywords in your website’s URL.
• -Keywords in the Title tag.
• -Placing your keywords and phrases at the very top of the page’s content.
• -Inserting images in the page that are named something like your-keywords.jpg.
• -Including keywords in your image ALT tags.
• -Writing at least 500 words of text content for each page.
• -Placement of heading tags throughout the body of the page with keywords in them.
• -Higher keyword density.
• -Making your keyword appear as the last text on the page.
• -Naming the actual web document with your keywords included, i.e. my-keyword.html, instead of contactus.html.
• -301 permanent re-direct for the entire site, pointing all non-www traffic to the www “version” of the site.

I’ve always lived by the principle that a lead is a lead, a conversion is a conversion, and a sale is a sale, regardless of what search engine it originated from. Your website can be ranked #1 for a keyword and sit in that position for years. But if it doesn’t do you any good, what good is it?

In summary, consider this analogy: Google is still the big paycheck I get every week from my job. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore the $50 bill (Yahoo & Bing) that is laying on the sidewalk in front of me. I’m going to reach down and pick it up!

Craig’s List can be a a powerful online marketing and promotional advertising medium, if you utilize it in an effective manner. The fact that it is 100% free is certainly a benefit of using it, also.

So how do you harness the power of Craig’s List and what exactly do I mean when I say “utilize it in an effective manner?”

One of the best ways to effectively create a Craig’s List advertisement is to use an image inside of your post. You can create virtually any type of graphic or “flier” to enhance and give your ad a more visually-appealing appearance. Also, an image can help your ad stand out from the others in the main category list because it will have an orange “img” displayed next to it.

Adding an image to a Craig’s List ad is also the only method for tracking page views that I am aware of. However, for it to work, you’ll have to have your own web hosting account or web server.

Please take note - I am NOT talking about using the built-in Craig’s List functions for selecting and uploading an image to your post. Instead, I’m referring to the insertion of an HTML tag into the post body itself.

To do this, you’ll need to know the exact location and name of the image file on your hosting account. Simply write the post as you normally would. But in the very bottom (or top or wherever you fancy) of the post body, insert the image tag:

<img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com/your-image-file.jpg”>

Just make sure you replace the “yourdomain” and “your-image-file” to reflect your specific domain and image file names. You can even make the image a link by adding:

<a href=http://www.yourdomain.com><img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com/your-image-file.jpg”></a>

Note the HTML tag for the hyper-link: <a href=”…”>. You simply insert the HTML tag to call the image (<img src=”…”>) and wrap the hyper-link tag around it. Make sure you don’t forget to close the end of the link tag with a “</a>” or else it won’t work.

Once you activate the post and it goes live, you’ll be able to track the number of hits the post gets via your hosting or server account’s web statistic logs. Just about every single web hosting provider in existence today has Webalizer or AWStats  already installed and ready for you to use.

Let the post run for 24 hours and then check your web stats for the domain in which you called your image file from. Look at the “Referrers” section of the stats and you’ll be able to tell exactly how many page views your post got.

The traffic stats from one of our travel websites looks something like this:

Notice that we ran 3 ads: one in Minneapolis, one in St. Cloud, and the last one in Orlando. Obviously, the Minneapolis post got the most page views (17), St. Cloud came in second (10), and the Orlando ad came in third (9), as you can see in the web stats. *make sure you look at the second column to see the exact number.

The reason it works like this is due to the fact that any time someone views your specific post, it will call the image file you inserted and display it within the post body. Each time the image file is called, it counts as a referral from that page to your hosting account.

This method is perfect for tracking which cities give your ads the most attention and it can be an excellent measure of where you need to focus the most in your Craig’s List advertising campaign.

As always, we implemented WordPress  into the website, in order to give a more robust, fully-featured content management system that gives the ability for our clients to easily update the website any time they want to.

The New Branson Landing website will be used to provide information to the general public about the Branson Landing and news that relates to it, such as, upcoming events and new stores that are making the Landing their primary place of business.

The new website also has the functions for both regular and featured business categories, in an attempt to provide a means by which the new website can be monetized.

WordPress is an awesome content management system (CMS) that has increased in popularity over the years, almost gaining a cult-like following.

There are several reasons why people (myself included) love the WordPress platform and choose to integrate the WordPress API into their websites.

1) WordPress is open-source.

Anyone who is familiar with the open-source community already understands the benefits of using open-source software and development environments. Developers from all over the world are able to help keep WordPress safe, secure, and up-to-date. And by being an open-source technology, WordPress is free for both private and commercial usage.

2) WordPress can be installed on virtually any domain.

Just because it’s WordPress doesn’t mean that you have to use a WordPress sub-domain to use it, i.e. whatever.wordpress.org. Instead, you can easily download the source files and install them to your own web server and have the website on any domain name you choose. The only requirements are that you have a server or hosting account with PHP and MySQL installed.

3) Thousands of plug-ins.

You can find a WordPress plug-in for just about anything you can imagine. And most of them can be downloaded and used for free from WordPress Extend. Once again, by being open-source, literally thousands of developers world-wide are devoted to providing enhancements for WordPress, free of charge.

4) It’s easy to use.

We’ve been integrating WordPress into most of the new websites we are designing currently. One of the main reasons for this is because it gives our clients and end-users a very simple, user-friendly way to be able to add pages, write blog posts, and update the entire website’s content from the WordPress admin panel.

It’s a major benefit and very empowering to our clients for the simple fact that they have full-control over their website and they don’t need any technical skill or HTML knowledge to be able to make changes any time they want to.

5) Quick Installation.

The WordPress website claims it’s a famous “5-minute” installation. And while it’s true that I’ve never installed it in less than 10 minutes, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who can hit the 5-minute mark. I just don’t type that fast

All you need is a clean MySQL database and then upload the source files to your hosting account. From there, you just need to edit the wp-config-sample.php file to reflect your database server, database name, username, and password. Once you’ve got that complete, you re-name the file to wp-config.php (remove the “sample” from the file name) and visit the default web root (or directory you uploaded the source files) to begin the installation process.

6) User interaction.

The very nature of WordPress allows for an in-depth interaction with all of your website’s visitors. By allowing comments on each blog post you create, your users are able to give feedback, ask or answer questions, and join in any discussions that you might have going on.

7) Multiple user roles and capabilities.

WordPress has several different roles that you can assign to your users. You can have administrators, editors, authors, contributors, and subscribers. Each role has a different level of access and privileges that are assigned by default.

8 ) Free support.

The WordPress community has an outstanding level of support via forums, blogs, and other users who are willing to help you out if you run into any issues. In most cases, you can post your problem up on the forums or a WordPress support blog and someone will be there to give advice or answer your questions.

9) Less spam.

By spam, I mean comment or blog spam (not the crap that comes into your email account’s inbox). Blog spammers try to leave junk comments on your blog posts that contain links to everything from porn, to online pharmacy sites.

Why would they want to do this? Because they know that a comment with a link in it is still a link. And the more links you have pointing to your website, the higher you will rank in the search engines.

Spammers have been utilizing this method of obtaining back-links for years. Luckily, WordPress comes installed with the “Akismet” plug-in by default. However, you still need to activate it before you are fully-protected against comment spammers.

10) Huge selection of themes.

There is a huge selection of themes or skins that you can find for WordPress. Many of them are 100% free while others have to be paid for. Of course, there’s no law that says you even have to use one of the ready-made themes for WordPress. Instead, you can design a fully-customized web layout and integrate WordPress into it.

That’s what we do for our clients. That way, they get a web design that is made specifically for them and them alone. And they still get to reap all of the benefits of using WordPress.

However, if you do not have the budget to hire a professional web designer or if you don’t have the necessary skills needed to do your own design and integration, you’ll probably be able to find a basic theme that you can live with.

Over the years, we have used just about every CMS on the market. And we also developed our own fully-customized CMS with an FCKeditor integration for the back-end. And I have to admit - WordPress is definitely my favorite of all time.

As a web developer, thereare always going to be those  times when the WordPress platform isn’t going to cut it, usually when the project requires very heavy custom programming. In that case, we do have to strap our boots on and start crunching code. But for the most part, a WordPress system will be more than sufficient for your needs.

]]> http://www.thebransonpro.com/10-reasons-to-use-wordpress/feed/ http://www.thebransonpro.com/just-one-outreach/ http://www.thebransonpro.com/just-one-outreach/#comments Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:00:11 +0000 admin http://www.thebransonpro.com/?p=462 Just One.

We finalized the design for Just One’s new website www.justoneoutreach.com today. Once again, we integrated the WordPress CMS into it, after the custom design was complete. The site has a great administrative back-end and full-blogging features. We also integrated a Flash / XML-based .mp3 player into the site.

We created a 2-column layout with the sidebar on the left and the Javascript navigation menu on the top (roll-over effects included in the menu) and a fixed-position background image.

Just One is a ministry based right here in Branson, Missouri. The owners of the website, Lance and Jasmine Wilkerson, also have a band called “Witness 7″ and they use their gift of music in their ministry. They are an extremely talented couple and really have an amazing band.

Just One is dedicated to helping people in the local area to find Jesus and break the chains of addiction. Through music, worship, and testimony, they are helping people with their powerful message.

Will last year’s SEO strategy still be effective in 2010?

The short answer to that question is “definitely not”. We have seen some major changes in Google and it’s ranking algorithm this year. Code-named “Google Caffeine”, the search engine giant has been working on their new ranking system since August of 2009. Caffeine promised faster search indexing, more accurate results, and more focus towards user experience.

Despite a delayed launch, Caffeine finally went active across all of Google’s data centers a few days ago.While it’s true that most users who search in Google will not notice any major differences during their search activity, every webmaster, advanced power searcher, and SEO professional will need to make drastic changes to their SEO strategy, if they want to continue to climb in the SERPs.

Here are some of the key elements to focus on during your 2010 SEO campaign:

Focus on niche-specific keywords and search terms.

The new Google is focusing more on highly-relevant and niche keywords. Try to focus more on the long-tail search terms and make sure your keyword density is appropriate for each of your landing pages.

Use Google’s own keyword-tool to get a better feel of the keywords and phrases that are going to generate the most traffic for your market and then optimize for them.

Pay attention to social media and networking.

Your website will need to have a solid presence across all of the major networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. Make sure you have a Twitter account for your business and a Facebook fan page, at the very least.

Keeping them updated with fresh content, posts, and status updates will help you gain more fans and followers. But remember that you should NOT over-do it. Many social networking users get turned off by too many promotional status updates (if you’ve ever signed in to your Facebook account and have been bombarded by 25 promotional-style status updates in your News Feed, you know exactly what I’m talking about).

Social bookmarking.

Try to acquire as many social bookmarks for your web pages as possible. Bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Reddit can really give your site a boost in the SERPs - if you implement social bookmarking into your SEO campaign.

The beauty of social bookmarking sites rests in the fact that your pages will get backlinks and gain credibility each time someone ads or shares one of them.

Make sure you give your website’s visitors an easy way to bookmark and share your pages. To do this, I’d recommend installing the “Share” button across every page in your website (just like you see it on this blog). Users will be more inclined to share your page if you give them a quick and easy way to do it.

Site speed and load time.

It came straight from the Google horse’s mouth - site speed will definitely play a role in where a website ends up in the SERPs.

The unfortunate thing about this is that it’s quite possible you could have a better website with more relevant content, more trust, and more authority that could end up being outranked by another website, just because their website loads faster than yours.

Try to keep the use of Flash elements to a bare minimum, use an external stylesheet, and make sure all of your images are reduced in file size so they load faster. Not only will site speed help you in Google, it will also give your website visitors a better user experience and keep them coming back to your site. Nobody likes visiting a site that takes 60 seconds to load and your visitors will more than likely hit the “Back” button and go elsewhere if your site isn’t fast enough.

Images.

You will need to properly optimize all of your images for each page in your site. It’s best to name your actual image files with keywords in them before uploading to your website. And make sure each page has an image that is relevant to that specific page’s content.

Video.

Video should be used on your site also. But I’m not just talking about searching in Youtube, finding a video related to your market, and then embedding it into your site. I’m talking about a unique video, customized just for your website that is NOT going to be used anywhere else on the web.

The new Google will more than likely see a unique video as more important than one that has been grabbed and embedded from Youtube. Just like any other content on your website, your video needs to be unique.

A video on your home page will also help to reduce your bounce rate and boost the over-all amount of time your visitors spend on your site. Not everybody has the time to go out and shoot a professional video for their home page (myself included). But at the very least, we can make an .FLV slideshow or something similar to use.

Keep it fresh.

Google wants to see fresh content, just like it always has. Make sure you set aside a little time each day (or week) to update your website, write a new blog post, or change a few paragraphs of text on your pages. Doing so could potentially help your site be recognized as an up-to-date source of information.

The new Google and 2010 doesn’t have to be scary. And you certainly shouldn’t lose any sleep over it. By sticking to these simple principals and keeping pace with the changing times, your search engine marketing campaign can really pay off this year.

We are now in the new era of Google. So let the new SEO games begin

We just completed the new version of Take 1 Hair Studio’s website: www.take1hairstudio.com and launched it for our friend Lindsay (owner of Take 1).

We implemented a Hollywood-style design for her to coincide with the salon’s theme and atmosphere. We also integrated the WordPress content management system  into the new site to add blogging functions and the ability to be able to easily update the website’s content via the WordPress admin panel.

WordPress is a great solution for an open-source CMS. I’m a huge fan of it for several reasons. It’s secure, highly robust, and has a ton of plug-ins that can easily be added at any time. And it also gives our clients full-control of their website’s content so they can update all of their web pages without the need for any technical skill or HTML coding.

We recently completed the new website design for the Branson Commerce Park. The website now features a 3-column layout with a  Javascript navigation menu. We also integrated our own customized CMS (content management system) for the project, developed with PHP and MySQL technologies.

The Branson Commerce Park is a 200-acre commercial business park located on the northside of Branson, Missouri. It features a high-tech infrastructure that will allow for maximized business expansion and growth throughout the future. It is undoubtedly going to bring in fresh businesses and help to boost the economy of Taney County, as a whole.

During a recent ceremony, managing member of BCP, Phil Lopez, and Branson Mayor Raeanne Presley participated in a ribbon-cutting to mark the dedication of the Commerce Park’s streets to the City Of Branson (as seen in the photo below) *photograph courtesy of Jeramie Worley.