What’s wrong with this?

Well, the most common problem that emerges from this is that these businesses tend to blow thousands of dollars on websites that are visually stunning, but don’t convert into sales. Too many businesses then put this down to the “internet being a fickle thing” or “our industry is not set up to support web sales.”

The actual reason why these websites fail is because they have not been strategically designed.

Web designers are not web strategists or strategic business consultants, and while they are great with the flashy components of your site, they are not business strategists.

Issues such as usability, navigation, search engine performance, and most importantly, conversion to sales, are not a web designers forte. This is where a web strategist steps in.

A web strategist, such as Reload Media, takes you through all of these elements and more BEFORE you see a web designer, ensuring that by the time you walk into a web designers office, you know exactly what needs to be done and the entire process is both time and cost efficient.

So what exactly does a web strategy company like Reload Consulting do?

To begin with, they determine from you what “Aims” you have for your business in terms of online sales. From there, they work with your business to develop a “Strategic Web Plan” which can be taken directly to a web designer, ensuring you don’t waste your dough on a website that doesn’t earn a crust of sales. These web strategy companies use industry knowledge gained from years of experience to assist you with all elements of planning your website.

You might be thinking that this all seems like a lot of work, after all, it is just a website. But think back to how much time you spent developing your business plan, and how much time you spent searching for retail or office space, the sign out the front, and the marketing campaign.

Your website is essentially just like another retail space, only it operates in its own medium that requires new strategies and marketing ideas. And just like your physical store, if customers cannot find their way to or around the shop, get help when needed or be able to make the purchase decision, then the investment to open that new space is wasted.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process undertaken by SEO companies and individuals to optimise a website for appearance in keyword-based search results in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and more.

The aim of any SEO initiative is to increase a website’s ranking for a given search term. A website’s ranking refers to its place on the list of search results when a user searches a term.

For an example, let’s use the ficticious business “Reload Pies.” Say Reload Pies sells homemade gourmet pies from a store in Brisbane. A search in Google for “Brisbane gourmet pies” may see Reload Pies appear fourth on the list. We would therefore say that Reload Pies’ ranking is number four on the first page in Google for the search term “Brisbane gourmet pies.” A website’s ranking is different for each search term and in each search engine.

The aim of SEO, therefore, is to increase Reload Pies’ ranking so that it appears first. For the search term “Brisbane gourmet pies”, Reload Pies’ website would need to be optimised, using a variety of SEO techniques to improve it’s overall ranking.

The reason SEO is such a time-consuming process is because this whole process has to be repeated for each keyword that Reload Pies wants to target. Each keyword also has to continually be re-optimised because the way in which search engines rank results continues to change and because competitors can also perform SEO.

For that reason, many business choose to use professional SEO consultant companies.

SEO Tip #01

One of the most important factors when it comes to your website’s performance in search engine results is the keywords meta tag.

The keyword meta tag is embedded in the HTML code of your web page and is read by search engines during their indexing process. The keyword tag allows you to specify what search keywords you would like to appear for in search results.

But don’t think that you can just add whatever keywords you like and appear in every search results page from then on. Google (and other search engines) have systems in place to deal with excessive keyword meta tags.

The practice of filling your meta tags with large numbers of keywords is called keyword spamming and is a very quick way of being booted out of a search engine for spamming. The jury is still out on exactly how many keywords is too many. Some “experts” argue for no more than 50 while others are as conservative as five.

There are also some pundits out there who claim that 13 is the magic number. Recent results from our SEO campaigns suggest that keeping to 25 keywords and below is optimal. However, keyword relevance is also important. If you have 32 keywords for instance, but all of them appear in your web page copy numerous times (in context and not just stuffed in there for the sake of it), then that will most likely be perfectly acceptable. However the reverse is also true. You might only have 12 keyword meta tags but if none of those keywords are relevant to your content then you may be blacklisted for spamming.

But still you can write good content, fill your keyword meta tags properly and submit your site to search engines and still not get any traffic. In this case the reason is most probably your choice of keywords. Keyword meta tags should not be too specific to the point where no-one would ever search that term or too broad to the point where there is way too much competition to appear. Getting the right keywords into your site is critical to search engine performance. An SEO company can help you determine what keywords are being used to search your industry and provide advice on how to change your content to match.

But don’t expect to just go ahead and optimise your keyword meta tags and suddenly appear #1 in Google. SEO is made up of more than just keyword tags, and for this reason SEO is an on-going process that is very time consuming. For the average business, it is not cost-efficient to employ someone to look solely after your company’s SEO and at the same time not time-efficient to get someone already in your business to take up the responsibility.

Fortunately, web strategists, such as Reload Media specialise in SEO programs, which manage your keyword meta tags in the context of your overall SEO program. These programs are cost effective, last for at least 12 months, and ensure that your site is getting top-of-the-line optimisation from specialists who are paid to know everything there is to know about search engines.

So while keyword meta tags are important to a website’s search engine performance, they are just one slice of the overall SEO pie.