Believe it or not, a basic website just may not cut it anymore. The days are coming to an end where you can simply pay $9.99 a month for a website builder and $99 a month for an SEO package and expect to get anywhere online. While this may have been possible in the past, Google has been rolling out many updates that are putting an end to this. (more…)
HTML has evolved rapidly, with the idea of HTML5 coming about in the industry sometime around 2009. While it even today isn’t completely released, it is supported by just about every browser thanks to a simple included JavaScript file called html5shiv. This script enables older versions of Internet Explorer to properly display HTML5. It really gives you the best of both worlds, and even all three worlds if you consider devices like the iPad. We use it when designing/developing new websites, or when converting existing websites to HTML5 and even adding in a little content management system called WordPress.
The actual reason why SEO is now being viewed as the best choice in markup is because of its ability to help Google (and other search engines) know which elements are which on a page. For example, just one of the dozens of new tags is called “<nav>”. This tag can be styled with CSS (CSS 3 is our choice). The end result is that google will know what part of your website contains the site navigational structure.
Aside from writing extremely clean HTML5, we also create and submit XML sitemap files that directly tell Google which pages exist on your website, and which have the highest priority.
Get in touch with us today to ask us more about search engine optimization and how we offer a complete package consisting of a modern, user-friendly website and appropriate traffic management techniques. Also take a look at Massachusetts SEO.
Today we’re going to take another look at BeFunGames to discuss the right time to take a website and start making some real money with it. For those of you who haven’t been following the blog, BeFunGames is our own start-up. It’s a fun game site where users can compete in tournaments, win prizes, etc. Over the last month we’ve exploded to over 1000 visitors a day. You can see the article below to learn how we got there, but today’s lesson is in taking the traffic your website has and making money off it the right way, at the right time.
Take for example MySpace. I truly believe that a large part of the reason their visitors are deserting them is because of the ridiculous amount of advertising on the website. While it did (and probably still does) get them some great money, the website’s load time is unreasonable because of all the ads. Facebook – on the other hand – has advertising that seems to make them a really great profit without destroying the user interface and site load time.
As for BeFunGames, I’d say we’re somewhere in the middle. Through our research we’ve learned that we should probably be making triple what we’re making now. Why aren’t we then? Because we’re still in an extremely large growth stage. Yes, there are some ads on the site right now, but none of them break the design or are overly distracting. The goal right now – and how I feel it should be for all start-ups at this stage – is to gain momentum. We don’t just want all of our traffic from SEO to come and go. We’re looking to increase our direct traffic – the users that come back by themselves again and again – because that’s what separates the successful websites from the “spammy” looking websites.
Having minimal advertising on a website might not be something you necessarily want to do, but in my opinion it’s really something that you have to do if you want to make it big. Of course, that’s not all that counts. Having a really great website by the guys here at Web2 will definitely help you out 
In our personal experience, one of the most overlooked factors when choosing a web design firm is on-site search engine optimization. Many clients are often looking for simply the best price possible, thinking that all that really matters is how the end result looks. Believe it or not, we’ve had many clients who have wanted fancy, uncommon fonts – which would have required images for many pieces of text. We’ve also had clients who’ve insisted that the few extra hours we add to our proposals to ensure that a design is 100% visible to Google is unnecessary because he or she has an off-site search engine optimization pro that will “get the website to the top regardless”. While that may be true for keywords that are very specific and have low competition, if you’re aiming for anything better it could prove almost impossible no matter how many back-links you get.
Let’s take a look at one of our own websites for an example. BeFunGames is a fun online game site where users can compete in tournaments, win prizes and chat with the community. We launched the website on January 22nd, 2011 and right from the start we paid complete attention to every aspect of the website in terms of relevancy for our target keyword “fun games online”, “online fun games” and a few others. There are several tools that help analyze your website for relevancy like this, and believe me when I say we made sure to get a perfect rating in every single one we could find. Once we were confident that our website was literally flawless, we looked for an off-site search engine optimization partner; someone who could take the time to submit articles, build back-links and ultimately increase our authority to Google.
During our search, we talked with at least 20 different agencies. During our interviews with them, each company predicted that it would be a good 8 to 10 months at least before we would get to the first page for “fun games online” and “online fun games”. Hearing that made us somewhat disappointed, but we really wanted to give BeFunGames a shot. So, we hired SEOPlans to handle our link-building. Believe it or not, we’re currently only in month three of off-site SEO and we’re already on page one for both of the above keywords! We’ve been able to surpass Amine’s (the owner of SEOPlans) expectations simply because Google really, really likes our website. At this point, we’re still increasing in our rankings and Google visits our site every couple of days which is extremely good.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from this story, it’s that you should really analyze your potential web designers for their on-site SEO capabilities. Have them show you a couple examples of websites they’ve built that are doing great on Google because the last thing you want is a website that doesn’t get picked up and indexed by the world’s largest traffic magnet.
