The most valuable search engine optimization technique (SEO) is content quality. Great quality content does a lot of the heavy lifting for SEO. The search engines look for many elements when determining the authority of your site for specific search terms and phrases. How does a computer determine if a website has good quality information on it about the target search terms? If you begin to use your noodle and think about it, it makes sense. If I have good content on a page about something, then you will likely read the content all the way through. This means you will be on the page for some time. That helps your chances for getting ranked better. The search engines measure how much time is spent on web pages. Of course, search engines can read your website content, so they know what keywords are on your pages. They also can see what internal links are pointing to your page, so they understand how important you feel it is. When a page is important to your site it likely has several other pages on the same site that link to it. The most important link to an internal page is from the home page. Read More »
Articles Written by Pat Norton
February 6th, 2012
What should a good SEO report provide?
Your SEO report should contain enough information to help you understand how your SEO campaign is progressing. There are several elements that go into getting good SEO results and these elements need to be measured or expressed in your report. There are also several benchmarks that you, as an owner, or marketing director should be using to quantify the SEO results and measure the ROI you are receiving from your SEO agency. Here are four basic elements that you want to measure in your SEO report. Read More »
December 20th, 2011
Do I Need a Mobile Website?
The answer to that question is buried in your analytics. Very few businesses by percentage currently have a mobile website. Those that do are ahead of the curve for their effort. Those that don’t will be behind the curve very shortly. We have been watching our client’s analytics very carefully, and the past eighteen months have shown dramatic increases in mobile website use for many of them. There is a fairly clear pattern that B2C sites are well ahead of B2B sites. We have seen some clients go from 4% in total visits just 18 months ago to 20% currently and rising. There are several good reasons this is happening, but it is important to look at your data and figure out if you should make plans to go mobile. If more than 10% of your visitors are mobile, you need to get going. If you have a mobile website, is it working? Read More »
December 14th, 2011
Is Google Killing Chickens?
This is an interesting question based on the recent changes in the data Google provides in its analytics program. Google Analytics (GA) is website tracking software, and is the most widely used system by website owners and service providers such as us. Google recently made a change to GA and they are now not providing some of the search term information that drives traffic for a small percentage of terms. Read More »
November 22nd, 2011
New Customer Acquisition
New customer acquisition is the driver of business growth. In order to expand your business you can do a few things. You can sell more to your existing customer base. You can raise your prices, or you can go find new customers. The 64 million dollar questions are where and how? The answer is simple, online search. You are the best person that understands your customers. You know what they do, and what they need. Now you need to figure out what they search for so you can get in front of them at the right time. You need to give your business a fighting chance to win that new customer. Read More »
September 29th, 2011
SEO Link Building
Search engine optimization (SEO) Link building is a fundamental strategy to obtain top search engine rankings. Back links, as they are called, are links on other websites that point to your website. A link pointing to your website is like a vote. The major search engines tally these links or votes to see what the rest of the world thinks about you. If you have a lot of good quality links pointing to various pages on your website, you have a very good chance of getting good search engine rankings. Link building for SEO is a simple concept, yet it continues to evolve and change. Active Web Group has become proficient in all the legal methods of getting links for our clients. Each link building campaign is designed and executed with the main purpose of gaining sustainable rankings through search engine approved link building techniques. Read More »
August 5th, 2011
Why Doesn’t Google Like You?
Why doesn’t Google like you? Who does? Sounds funny, but it is more truthful than you think. Google has to index billions of pages with computers and try to determine what pages should be well ranked for particular search words and phrases. Sounds like a big task, but a simple concept. The pages with the best content on them for the particular search term in question should be ranked the highest, right? Read More »
July 27th, 2011
Easy SEO Tips
Here are some easy SEO tips that you or your web developer can likely accomplish. If any of them are beyond your ability, call us and we will guide you. Often changing a few simple items on your site will result in rankings movement. While this is far from an overall program, if you perform a few of these items, you will see we SEO agencies know what we are doing, and rankings bring sales and leads! Read More »
