SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of increasing a websites rank in different search engines via natural techniques. It helps a website attract more visitors by increasing  its visibility throughout the web.

Internet users tend to click on links according to what they see first, from left to right and from top to bottom, on any web page. The website that emerges on top of the search results page, usually gets the most number of incoming traffic. Those that don’t appear on the first ten pages, however, become virtually non-existent.

Google Search

Some companies here in St. Louis use SEO as a powerful marketing tool for their business– considering the number of users searching the internet for products and services everyday.  It goes without saying that the website with a higher search engine ranking can attract more potential clients.

Website optimization massively relies on the proper use of keywords or keyphrases. A keyword/keyphrase, as mentioned in the previous blog entry, is a word or group of words that users type in search engines to find certain articles, products or services. It is therefore every websites aim to rank highest in keywords related to their industry.

One of the best SEO tools I’ve seen so far is a Firefox plug-in called SEO Quake. It’s free, it’s complete and it only takes seconds to install. The SEO toolbar that appears on top of the webpage after installation, will display you everything you need to know about any website you go to.. pagerank, backlinks, keyword density– the whole nine yards.

There are a lot of techniques related to SEO, one which primarily involves editing a websites html code to make it relevant to specific keywords. It removes roadblocks that prevent search engines from indexing the website. Other techniques involve, link building, creating sitemaps, finding the best keywords, installing web analytics, writing unique content and the list goes on and on. Most of these techniques are taxing and time consuming– not to mention, complicated.

SEO Techniques

Straightline Technology Group offers you the option to optimize your website without neglecting the other areas of your business. We are going to start by creating a search engine friendly website to carry your products and services in the online market.  Our expert team will also take care of search engine optimization, web development and web maintenance.

Our main goal is to make you an important player in your line of business here in St. Louis. Contact us now to make your website count.

Pay-per-click or PPC is a form of online advertising where an advertiser pays a certain amount each time a user clicks an ad. This advertising model is found in search engines, blogs and other content websites. Ads relevant to the user are placed on a page where they search for specific articles, products and services.

Google Adsense Ads

Flat-rate PPC and Bid-based PPC are two of the most popular arrangements to determine the cost per click. Flat-rate PPC allows you to negotiate a fixed rate for each click a user makes. The Bid-based PPC however lets you bid on keywords that you think are relevant to your target market.

If you have a company selling antique furniture for example, you can bid on keywords like “antique” or “furniture” and keyphrases like “antique furniture” or “old furniture”. These are words that users type to search for antique furniture on the net. The auction is typically hosted by a publisher or by advertising networks such as Google Adsense, Bidvertiser and Adbrite.

Keywords or Search Terms

Pay-per-click advertising is a very effective way of driving customers to your website without paying a monthly fee for ad spaces. When using PPC, there is an estimated 1%-10% chance for users to click on your ads and eventually go to your website because they will be presented with ads that are related to their searches.

Geographic limitations are not a problem with PPC ads. If your business is based here in St. Louis, you actually have the option to choose locations that are near or within the St. Louis area only. This feature enables you to control the amount of money you want to spend on your advertising campaign without sacrificing the results.

The pay-per-click scheme, given its advantages, also has its weakness. Scammers can impair its integrity by committing an internet crime popularly known as click fraud. They are able to do this by clicking ads over and over again without being detected.

Due to this rampant abuse, Google and other advertising networks commit themselves to developing advanced tracking systems that would prevent click fraud from happening. This solution has garnered its own share of controversy but its ultimate goal is to assure advertisers that they are not paying for void clicks. On top of all these, advertising networks address transparency by providing advertisers with detailed PPC reports. This allows advertisers to see where the clicks are coming from.

Straightline Technology Group Website Services

The possibility of converting user clicks into sales is endless if you have a good product to back it up. Your product also needs an attractive and easy-to-navigate website to appeal to its buyers. Straightline Technology Group offers you a wide variety of services on web development and planning. We can assist you from conceptualizing the website, creating it and all the way to marketing it online. Contact us now!

So you were reading random internet articles one day and a couple of interesting pieces about “networking your office computers” caught your attention. You wanted to read the articles for later and share it with your friends but the bookmarking toolbar on your browser is just not good enough.

In this day and age, internet users go to social bookmarking websites like Digg, Y!Buzz, Technorati, Furl, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us to solve this problem. Social bookmarking allows users to bookmark, classify, search, organize or share files and web pages they find on the internet.

Social Bookmarking Websites

The internet is a great big world of information. One can only keep up with thousands of websites and millions of different articles that are created everyday. If finding a reliable piece of article is not hard enough, try reading through 100,000 pages of Google search results. A person who wants to read about “search engine optimization” can open twenty websites at a time and see SEO definitions written in twenty different ways. If he closes a web page, it will be difficult for him to backtrack it later.

A social bookmarking system enables users to categorize articles by using one-word descriptors called tags so that other users can find it.  It allows users to share articles via e-mail or embed them into their blogs. The comment feature and rate system also encourages a healthy exchange of ideas among them.

Digg Homepage

Information overload and link spamming aside, social bookmarking websites can become a treasure trove of interesting stories and an archive of our favorite articles. They are also great platforms to promote and advertise websites for free. Digg alone has an estimated 33.5 million site visitors every month. One can only imagine the exposure a single website can get by just submitting relevant articles.

A blog is a shortened version of the term “weblog”. It is a website which acts as an online journal for individuals or organizations that own and maintain it. Blogging is the act of maintaining, organizing or adding content to a weblog. The one who does all of these things is called a blogger.

A blog is made up of individual articles consisting of texts, videos, images and links to other websites. The latest entry is usually seen first on the page.

Contrary to popular belief, a blog is not only an online diary for personal experiences. It can be— but not necessarily. A blog can also focus on diverse topics like food, making money online, news headlines, household tips & tricks, cars, stock market, technology and gadgets. It can also feature controversial themes such as politics and religion. Some blogs allow comments after each entry to encourage a healthy discussion among its readers.

Popular Online Blogs

A blog can be used in an unlimited number of ways. A world traveler, for example, can set up a photoblog to update his friends and family about all his travel experiences. A food enthusiast can create a blog to document his trips to restaurants around the city and even feature his favorite recipes.

A laptop company, on the other hand, can create a corporate blog to reach out to its employees and inform its clients about its newest products and services. A corporate blog takes on a more serious approach to blogging. It is used by a number of businesses to develop brand awareness and a good reputation in the market. It also improves their websites visibility in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Corporate blogs educate customers about certain products and create an avenue for manufacturers and consumers to communicate.

Blogging is indeed a great equalizer. It is a venue where people from different walks of life can give their opinion about a certain topic without being judged or persecuted. A blog is for anyone who has something to say regardless of race, social status, economic standing or educational background. Popular bloggers like Darren Rowse, John Chow or even St. Louis’ own Steve Patterson already have a certain level of influence to their readers.

Steve Patterson

Steve Patterson has been blogging about St. Louis New Urbanism and local politics for several years now and has a dedicated following not only in St. Louis but nationally as well.   Wether you agree with his politics or not you cannot argue with the effectiveness of his blog.   

If you want to create a customized blog for your company, contact us.

A previous blog post already gave you an overview of what Google Pagerank is. Now that you already know the basics, the next step is to determine you website’s Google Pagerank. There are a lot of sites that you can choose from to do this.

One of the sites I like is http://www.prchecker.info/. It’s very easy to use and it doesn’t have any ads that pop up in front of your face. The website is very straightforward and best of all, it’s free.

One of the many things that I like about it is that you can choose from three different icons that you can place in your own site for everyone to see. They are already in HTML format so all you have to do is copy and paste. I like simple and uncomplicated badges so they work fine with me.

These icons will be a symbol of your status in the internet food chain and a reminder of how far you have gone. After all, going a notch higher is not that easy. It takes a lot of hard work, patience and consistency to reach a perfect 10/10, an industry standard. Some people call it a “badge”. I call it achievement.

The good news is, Straightline Technology Group offers a wide variety of services that include Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing.

We understand how a high google pagerank is to every website. We can help you increase it in no time. Our advice to our clients is to sit back, relax, while we do the hard work. Contact us.

This is a list of other websites you might want to check out.

Blog Flux
Google Rankings
Li’l Engine Pagerank Checker

If you read our blog entry yesterday, we talked about using dashes over underscores when you name a web page.  So what do you do if you already named your pages incorrectly and you want to fix them?  You 301 redirect them.  You want to do this for many reasons.  First of all, doing this will automatically send all traffic to your new page.  Second and most important, this tells search engines that the web page has moved.  Doing this will transfer all of your PageRank to the new page and eventually the search engines will remove the old pages from their index.  It does take some time so you have to be patient.

Now there are many ways to do a 301 redirect.  It depends on what type of server you’re on and what type of files you’re dealing with.

PHP Redirect

This is how it is done with PHP pages.  You would basically take the content off your old, underscore pages and then put it on your new dashed pages.  Once you do that, add this code to the old page and you are good to go:

<?php
header(”HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(”Location: /new-web-page.php”);
?>

ASP Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”/new-web-page.php”
%>

.htaccess

A .htaccess file is a special file that you can use on a Linux server. You can add this code to the .htaccess file.  If your site is just html pages, this is the best way to go.

Redirect 301 /old_web_page.html http://www.yourdomain.com/new-web-page.html

There are many other ways to do this with other languages, but these are the most common.  If you believe that your web pages are incorrect and you want to fix them, contact us and we can work with you to get them fixed.

For SEO you should use dashes instead of underscores in web site URLs.  There has been a lot of debate over this and Google has said it will start seeing underscores as spaces, but it’s just better and safer to go with dashes.  The results for underscores and dashes are always different and we know for sure they see dashes as spaces.

The best time dashes would be used is in file names.  Take our Chief Technology Officer services page, the page name is chief-technology-officer.  This is to let Google know that it is 3 words, not 1.  If our page name was chief_technology_officer then Google would consider that 1 word, potentially.

But what about your domain name?  The domain name can also benefit from this, but there is a time and a place for it.  I would not use dashes in your domain name unless you had to.  If your domain name is only used to be found in search results, then I would say it would be alright.  However if this is your main domain of your business I would not use dashes unless nothing else was available.

One of the services we offer for our web design or web development customers is Google Analytics statistics.  Google has a great web statistics program that you can view to get all the information you could ever want about your website and even more.

Here is some of the information you can get using Google Analytics

• Visits during any time period
• Web browser information
• Search engine information
• User operating systems
• User screen resolution size

If you sell products online you can track your sales, conversions and leads.  If you would like more information on getting Google Analytics statistics on your website please contact us.

Screen Resolutions

Search Engine Source

Operating Systems

Screen Resolutions

Users browsers

SEOmoz has a video up discussing PageRank, what it is and how it works.  PageRank is the number that Google assigns the pages on your web site.  Since Google doesn’t release definite information about PageRank and how it works, there are a lot of theories.  We know a majority of your PageRank scores comes from backlinks (links to your web pages).  There are tons of other factors that calculate your pagerank and hopefully this video will clear at least some things up.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-What’s PageRank Got to do With It? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Bschool.com has released an article titled “50 web tools to keep tabs on your competitors.”  There is actually a lot of good information in there.  One of them is Google Alerts.  We previously discussed Google Alerts for monitoring your own company.  Well you can use Google Alerts to monitor any keywords, including ones that might include your competitors name or the type of business you are in.

Check out the whole list here