This video by Design850 owner Mike Bunton will give you the 3 basic items every video that you use on the web should have.  If you are uploading to YouTube, Facebook or some other video sharing platform, having these 3 parts on every video will ensure an effective marketing piece for your Tallahassee area business.

Every business should be using video to promote their business without exception.  What will set your video apart from all the other videos that are out there on the web?  Follow these three quick tips and apply them to all the videos you use and you should see a difference.    Making sure your videos are branded by having an opening/welcome screen, a lower third showing your name, business name and contact information (like a phone number or website URL) and closing with an extended screen having a specific call to action will help maximize each of the videos that you are using to market your business online.

If you are a Tallahassee area business and need assistance in marketing your business on the web – from web site design to email marketing to lead capture to video marketing to search engine optimization – Design850 invites you to drop us a quick email or give us a call and we can chat about how we can help your business market more effectively online.

As you work on the search engine optimization of your website, remember that it doesn’t happen overnight – it takes time.   Yes, there are techniques that you can use (like video marketing) to speed the process up some, but having new and original content added to your site on a regular basis is the best method for long term success.

Video marketing is powerful and accelerates an audience getting to know, like, favor and trust you!

This post is a second in a series answering the question, “How Can My Business Rank Higher in the Search Engines“.

Today’s post is “5 Tips to Have a Great Website Foundation”.

As a quick review, there are three different aspects to help any business website rank better in the search engines:

1) Have a Good Foundation
2) Have a Site that is Updated Regularly with Original Content
3) Use Video to Help in SEO

Today, we are going to look at the first of these three items, the foundation of your website.

The foundation of your website is the actual code, the images, the stylesheets – each of the items that make up the physical website that when put together, make the website that you see when you type in your business website URL in a browser.

Before you decide that your website looks fine so everything must be good, you can take a look at these five different tips that will help you determine how well of a foundation you have on your business website.

#1 – You Have Done Keyword Research

There are a number of free tools out on the web – Google having one of the most prominent ones – where you can determine what phrases and keywords are being used in search queries in your local area.   This can help a business owner make sure that you have your content written toward those keywords.

#2 – Make Sure You Have Valid Code

What ‘having valid code’ means is that you have a developer who developed your website and that they have done all the proper techniques in coding your website in the best possible way.

You can check the code on your website by using this free tool – http://validator.w3c.org – type in your business URL and click on ‘Validate’ and it will tell you if there are any errors or not.   If you have a large number of errors, that is something that you will want to discuss with a web developer.

#3 – Use a Sitemap

You can view the Design850 site map – click here for the sitemap – this is the sitemap that I use and submit to Google on a regular basis.

From a business website, you want to make sure your website has a sitemap and that you submitted that sitemap to Google, especially as you add new content to your website.

#4 – Take Care of the Technical Stuff

This is a wide ranging set of items to consider and one of the best tools I have found on the web that can tell you how you are doing on taking care of technical stuff is Website Grader and you can view the free tool here – click here for Website Grader – and once here you can type in your business URL and it will tell around 20-30 different factors about your website and then assign your website a grade.

Design850.com Website Grader Score

The best part about this tool is not only is it free, but it will also give you some direction on how to improve your score.

#5 – Keep Your Website Updated Regularly

We will discuss this idea further in our next blog and video post.

We hope that you have enjoyed today’s video and blog post and encourage you to ask any questions by using the Quick Question form located on the sidebar area of this website.

Social Media + Local SEO + Mobile = Success!

A great little formula that I saw today – those local Tallahassee businesses that use this formula are the ones destined for success!

Best quote I’ve read about SEO for Tallahassee businesses in a while: “Ranking high on search engines is no longer optional, it’s critical!”

Today, I wanted to talk to you about one of the most common questions that I get asked and that question simply is, Mike, “How Can I Get My Business Website Found in the Search Engines?” or “How Can I Make the Placement of Website Better in the Search Engines?”.

So, I wanted to take a few moments to answer that question today as one of the common questions that I get and here is the answer!

First, you must have a good foundation with your website.

What that means is the actual coding, the structure, the images – all the different parts that make up the actual website itself, need to all be done correctly. If you don’t have good page titles, page names, if you’re images aren’t named correctly, or your content isn’t tagged correctly, the foundation of that website isn’t going to lend itself to make it easy for Google to find your website and index the content on the website.

Second, you need to have good content posted to the website on a regular basis.

What site owners should be looking for is that when Google sends it little computers to come visit your website and finds 10 pages of content on your website, the next time it comes back and visits your website, we want there to be new pages of content that it can index.

The reason is that Google will always give presidence to those websites that have and are continuing to post new and unique content to their website over the long term.

Having good content posted to your website on a regular basis is an important factor in search engine optimization.

Third, use video to help market your business and market your website.

One of the great things about video is that it can greatly enhance the search engine placement of your main business website. Using video properly can greatly effect how search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, can go in an index the content and bring up the power of your website in the search engines.

Today, we talked about a commonly asked question with a straighforward and simple answer.

How Can I Improve the Ranking of My Website in the Search Engines?
1) Have a Good Foundation
2) Have Good Content Posted to Your Website on a Regular Basis
3) Have Video Help the Placement of Your Website in the Search Engines

Stay tuned for our next three blog posts where we will share more in depth information about each of these three key parts to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The common mistakes

• Strange domain name – Increasing number of business websites use strange domain names that do not reflect their businesses in any way. I’ve see some that use hyphens, just because they want to include their target keywords in their domain names. Others choose very long domain names that include their most important keywords. All these cause confusion to customers and visitors. A business domain name has to be short, contains no hyphen and reflects the brand of the company. A short name that reflects a brand helps everyone to easily remember the website’s address. So, always go for memorable names!
• Bad color combination - I strain my eyes on some websites to read text, because of the bad color combinations used. Some use very faint colors for text, while others blur the text with background colors or images. It is important that a business site choose a good color combination that blends effortlessly with the entire theme.  Probably the best tip I have learned about color combinations – have your text appear on a white or very like background – there is a reason books aren’t printed with white text on black pages – think about it!
• Auto-playing music – Nothing annoys me more than visiting a business site and being surprised by an auto-playing music. Some of these businesses use it as a marketing technique, but its actual effect on visitors is negative. I believe a business website should not set any marketing audio to automatically play on page load. Use proper business ethics and give visitors a choice to turn the audio on if they like to hear it.
• Contact Information - Prospective customers and existing ones deserve the right to know where the business they’re dealing with is located. But unfortunately, many business websites don’t include physical addresses on their sites. Some even lack telephone numbers where customers can reach them in real-time. These issues cause lack of trust and confidence.
• Web page loading issues – Some business websites take forever to load. This is most commonly caused by server overload, badly-coded scripts that make dumb SQL queries and those that make heavy use of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), such as Flash and SilverLight. Studies have shown that Internet users have very short attention span, and want to do whatever they come for as quickly as possible. If a site doesn’t load within a few seconds, they will go off to a competitor’s site. To help keep visitors on your business site and reduce the bounce rate, get a server or hosting that guarantees faster loading of web pages. Also make sure your web-based software is developed very well with good database architecture. Moreover, avoid heavy use of RIAs, as they tend to largely slow down loading time. Flash and SilverLight are sparingly used to spice up web pages, but it is wrong for web pages to heavily depend on them.
• A Long Story about the business - I’ve noticed on so many Chinese and some other business websites that they spend too much unnecessary time and space talking about how many acres of land their factories cover and how many employees they have. A visitor is not interested in knowing these facts. Go straight to the point and let visitors know about your products and/or services and their benefits of buying them.

As a business owner, I know you will take the above-mentioned precautions seriously and not want to make the same common mistakes that drive visitors away from sites.

This video is a follow up video that was circulating on the web about a year ago. It includes many new statistics and thoughts for those who still consider social media a ‘fad’.

As a recognized leader in social media marketing in Tallahassee, Design850 is poised to help take your business to the next level online.  Using social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others, Design850 can show you how being social is not just a fad, but a necessity in today’s business world.

Give us a call to let us show you the ins and outs of the major social media platforms and how each not only helps your brand, but helps you position your site more effectively in the search engines using proper SEO techniques.

If you are on Facebook or Twitter, please join Design850 on those platforms:

Facebook:   http://www.facebook.com/design850

Twitter:   http://www.twitter.com/dadofgage

Let’s look at some of the top reasons why Tallahassee businesses would want to use a ‘FAN’ page on Facebook:

• unlimited membership – profiles or groups are capped at 5000
• administrators appear as the business when posting – so you can have multiple admins and they can all be posting as the business
• indexed by external search engines (Google, etc.) – one of my favorites!
• can host applications – once you get the basics of Facebook, having a more interactive fan page is a must and the ability to host applications is important
• enables analytics and tracking – you get detailed statistics on who ‘LIKE’s your business, the age and sex demographics, etc.
• resembles a regular profile page – and function like profile pages too!

Now let’s look at some of the reasons why businesses might choose a ‘GROUP’ page on Facebook:

Have more control over who joins by setting for member approval.
Can be ‘private’ thus creating a more ‘secure’ environment for sharing.

Now obviously, the choice for Tallahassee businesses is Facebook fan pages.

The BIGGEST reason to choose a fan page is that the updates you make to your business fan page appear in the news stream of your fans so they can instantly react and INTERACT with you and your business!

While both Fan and Group pages can be beneficial in certain instances, overall the Fan Page is far superior to the Group Page when it comes to maximizing a brand’s Facebook presence.