ebasedEVOLUTION, a full-service online marketing and website design firm, is proud to announce it has been named Charlotte’s leading website design company for 2007 – 2008 by The Charlotte Business Journal.

ebasedEVOLUTION has grown each year since it was founded in 1996 and continues to add new services for clients as the Internet evolves. The company began as a website design firm and has expanded into Internet marketing as the ever-increasing use of search engines has made website optimization a priority among businesses of all sizes. As the industry has changed, ebasedEVOLUTION has added Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click campaigns, web hosting, consulting, and email marketing to its list of services while maintaining a high-quality website design and development reputation.

Link

New Delhi, India, January 04, 2009

Cranberry Communications Pvt. Ltd. (http://www.cranberryindia.com) has come up with specialized web design services for web design companies based in USA, Canada and European Union countries.

Cranberry is presently providing web design and web development services to big web design agencies in USA and UK. Presently cranberry is providing Graphic design, Web Design, PSD to XHTML, PSD to CSS, search engine optimization and content management system development based on PHP and asp.net

Cranberry has launched fixed project based pricing, per man-hour based pricing and staffing augmentation services for long term projects.

Cranberry is now expanding its market for non English speaking market specially Norway, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland for various web services.

Link

I empathize with business owners who get frustrated when faced with the task of creating or upgrading a company Web site. Let’s face it, the Web is in its relative infancy, and infants are notoriously temperamental. Worse yet, they tend to outgrow their clothes a bit too quickly.

On the Web, even great firms dedicated to delivering quality can be challenged to keep up. So where should the average business owner begin? As with any other marketing decision, one should have a plan that considers company objectives and return on investment. Here are three recommendations for ensuring your company’s success:

Define objectives

The primary reason Web sites fail is a lack of established goals. A successful project relies on clear, legitimate objectives. Typical goals might include generating Web or phone leads, decreasing support calls or facilitating your customers’ ordering process.

Specifying objectives increases the likelihood of success. Of course, fulfilling company objectives brings associated costs. A good firm will walk you through the process of understanding the costs and anticipated benefits related to various features, giving you information needed to help establish priorities and a reasonable budget.

Consider required skills

Content and marketing: Good content is the heart of a successful Web site. Consider whether you will need help with copy writing, photography, illustration or audio/video production. Furthermore, remember that your site’s content should reflect company objectives and be kept fresh through constant updates. A vendor’s expertise in search engine optimization (SEO) also should have a prominent place in your selection criteria. SEO is not a one-time effort, but rather an ongoing activity involving time and significant skill. Finally, ask potential vendors about e-mail marketing and how they approach this tool in relation to overall marketing objectives. While distinct from your Web site, properly constructed e-mail campaigns are effective tools that enhance your Web marketing efforts.

Link

We will plan your search engine strategy with our main goal being to make your site as useful and visible as possible. We will begin by choosing the best possible keywords in your web pages to allow for search engines to read and index your content in the most effective way. Throughout the process we will avoid techniques that search engines frown upon. We will get the search engines and directories to include your site in thier indexes and lists. We will use Google Adwordspay-per-click advertising. Google Adwords are essential in your websites growth. We can customize your Google Ad Campaign to reach your targeted audience locally, nationally and worldwide. Your website will be under constant surveillance using Google Analytics.

Chicago SEO

Have you ever heard a search engine optimization (SEO) professional use the term user experience during a presentation, in an article or as part of a sales pitch? On the web, user experience (commonly abbreviated as UX or UE) is a term used to describe the overall perception, experience, and satisfaction that users have as a result of their interactions with a website.

Search engine optimization is all about the user experience, because the idea behind SEO is to get users to their desired information and destination(s) as quickly and easily as possible by using the users’ language (keywords). Searchers type in keywords at a commercial web search engine. Searchers’ expectations are validated in search results pages and, hopefully, after they click on links within those search results…a perfect, seamless user experience.

On the surface, an SEO professional’s presumed knowledge of user experience might sound impressive. However, if you do a little digging, you might discover that search professionals have their own preconceived notions as to what constitutes a positive user experience, notions that have little or nothing to do with users at all.

Link 

Want to get your Web site to appear high up in the results when someone is looking for the kind of stuff you sell? There are two ways to appear when someone types in “keywords” into a search engine:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO) — designing and writing your Web site to naturally rank high in search engine results.

2. Search engine marketing (SEM) — paying for a listing adjacent to keywords that you choose.

SEO and SEM are increasingly important, as they drive highly motivated prospects directly to your Web site. Moreover, with SEM, you pay only for those who actually “click through” to your Web site, so it makes search engine advertising particularly attractive to small companies.

With both SEO and SEM, the most important step is to clearly identify which “keywords” searchers are likely to use when looking for the types of products, services, or content you offer. Then you must make sure you’ve “optimized” your site for those keywords by using them over and over throughout your site in your content, headlines, page names, additional Web pages and more.

If you want your site to appear high in results without paying for ads, choosing which keywords to use throughout your site is critical! Choose the most narrowly defined terms appropriate to your products, services or content.

Link

(more…)

Rob Buti is a professional web designer & developer servicing  the Chicagoland area and its surrounding suburbs including:

Chicago, Buffalo Grove, Elmhurst, Hinsdale, Lincolnwood, Niles, Orland park, Rolling Meadows, Westchester, Aurora, Burr Ridge, Elmwood Park, Hoffman Estates, Lisle, Norridge Palos Hills, Roselle, West Chicago, Barrington, Carol Stream, Forest Park, Indian Head Park, Lombard, Northbrook, Palos Park, Rosemont, Western Springs, Bartlett, Cicero, Franklin Park, Inverness, Melrose Park,Northlake, Park Ridge, Schaumburg, Westmont, Bensenville, Clarendon Hills, Glencoe, Joliet, Merrionette Park, North Riverside, Palatine, St. Charles, Wheaton, Bloomingdale, Darien, Glendale Heights, Kenilworth, Midlothian, Oak Brook, Palos Heights, Summit, Wheeling, Bolingbrook, Downers Grove, Glen Ellyn, La Grange, Morton Grove, Oak Lawn, Plainfield, Tinley Park, Willowbrook, Broadview, DuPage County, Glenview, La Grange Park, Mount Prospect, Oak Park, River Forest, Villa Park, Willow Springs, Brookfield, Elk Grove Village, Hanover Park, Lemont, Naperville, Orland Hills, Riverside, Warrenville, Winfield, Winnetka, Wood Dale, Woodridge, New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas, Tampa, Pittsburgh, and Charleston.

Link

Interactive agency’s search experts tapped for five panels at this year’s event in Chicago.  Rosetta, one of the country’s leading interactive marketing agencies, is sending two nationally-recognized search marketing experts to speak at this year’s Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in Chicago.
Paul Elliott, partner and head of Rosetta’s Acquisition Marketing Practice, and Chris Boggs, manager of Search Engine Optimization, will serve on five panels throughout the four-day event. Now in its 10th year, the global SES Conference and Exposition Series educates marketers on search marketing tactics. SES Chicago is the only major search marketing conference in the Midwest, holding over 60 sessions December 8-12 at the Chicago Hilton.
Rosetta will participate in the following panels:

• Measuring Success in a 2.0 World (Monday, Dec. 8 at 11:45 a.m.)
• Why Does Search Get All the Credit? (Monday, Dec. 8 at 4:30 p.m.)
• Advanced Link Building (Tuesday, Dec. 9 at 4:15 p.m.)
• eCommerce 101: Optimizing Your Shopping Cart for Search and Conversion
  (Wednesday, Dec. 10 at 4 p.m.)
• How to Speak Geek: Working Collaboratively With Your IT Department to
  Get Stuff Done (Thursday, Dec. 11 at 9 a.m.)

Link

By Jeffrey Smith

I know many businesses are a hesitant when they think about SEO Services, due to bad press or SEO companies who have given the industry a black eye. Just as in any industry, there are going to be a few bad eggs, but with the costs of SEO rising due to supply and demand and the competitive nature of online business.

SEO is more than just a passing fad, it’s a necessity for most companies today.

Internet marketing and web sales represent one of the most cost-effective forms of advertising in existence. Just keep in mind that It’s not the size of the organization, it’s the thoroughness of the specialist optimizing your site that is in question.

SEO is never a one and done scenario.

Once the process starts it may take months to achieve the desired effect (this is why the pricing is typically so high). The upside of course is that one your keywords are anchored in your industry, a steady influx of traffic is nearly guaranteed.

Link

by Rebecca Allen

Part one of our Success Guide “Online Marketing for Small Businesses”

How to get started: First, make sure your site has lots of relevant content, and add fresh content on a regular basis. Next, avoid using Flash for navigation elements, and skip the Flash “intro” page; search engines can’t “see” the text or links within Flash so it creates a barrier to getting the rest of your site noticed. For those who know some HTML, review your code to be sure that the title tags (invisible pieces of code that help search engines categorize your content) of every page are unique and accurately reflect its main theme. Check to see that the most important headline on your page (which should be enclosed within what coders call h1 tags) and the page content contain the keywords you believe users will be searching for. Finally, if your site doesn’t have a site map, now’s the time to add one, and if you do have a site map, consider optimizing it for Google. ( See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/ for more.)

Don’t try “tricks” such as keyword stuffing (filling your page full of keywords, to the point that the text no longer makes sense), using hidden content, multiple h1 tags, or link farms (pages that are merely long lists of links to other sites). Any of these can get your site sandboxed (excluded from search results altogether), leading to a costly loss of traffic. And don’t risk a temporary drop in rankings by doing a major redesign that changes the site structure, page names, and content of your whole site at once. Instead, change your site gradually over the course of several months, and inform important sites linking to you if any of the links they’re using have changed.

Because of the way search engines work (using programs called spiders to keep track of what content is where), it can take time to show up on Google and other search indexes. Don’t expect to see significant results from your NSO efforts for anywhere from three to six months. It isn’t unusual for companies to contract for one-year NSO engagements—avoid any companies that claim they can get you results immediately.

Your Investment: If you have an intermediate knowledge of HTML, you can probably do some of the most basic NSO work on a small site yourself, but larger sites or sites in a highly competitive category will need the help of an expert to win. Depending on the size of your site and your industry, costs can vary from $500 to $15,000 a month during the terms of your engagement. NSO isn’t a one-shot deal, either; plan on re-evaluating your position and strategy once a quarter after that if you want to stay ahead of the pack. And if you’re doing it right, NSO also makes your site as friendly to human visitors as it is to search engines.

Link

by Jeff Muendel

As much as most high-quality SEOers (those who practice search engine optimization “honorably”) like to think of their pursuit as pure and intellectual, the fact of the matter is that search engine optimization is a form of marketing, no matter how you approach it.

Perhaps short of nonprofit organizations and the occasional Internet artist, people interested in getting their Web pages in top search results are interested in making money from the traffic that will come from those search engine links.

A recent Hitwise article revealed some interesting demographic numbers that the company has measured through its sources. In comparing American Google and Yahoo search users, Hitwise found that Google has a higher percentage of users in older age brackets than Yahoo.

This negates some of existing beliefs in the market about the composition of those two user groups; a commonly held belief has been that Yahoo was for the aged, Google for the youth. Maybe not:

• In the category of users 55 and older, Google has 1.5 percent more of the market share.
• In the category of 45- to 54-year-old users, Google has 2 percent more of the market share.
• In the category of 35- to 44-year-old users, the market share was more or less equal.
• In the category of 25- to 34-year-old users, Yahoo has almost 3 percent more of the market share.
• In the category of 18-to 24-year-old users, Yahoo has 1.5 percent more of the market share.

Link

(more…)

by digital alex 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a necessary part of any website strategy. The potential traffic is simply too big to ignore.The question isn’t “Should I do SEO?”

it’s “When should I do SEO?”

As a site owner, you have to make hard decisions about how to spend your always-not-enough budget and when. In this post, I’m going to talk about some of things your should consider when trying to determine…
When Should I Invest in SEO?
SEO is not direct marketing. Just because you put a dollar in today does not mean you’re going to get a $1.50 out tomorrow.

Fundamentally, natural search optimization is a long-term investment. With the right strategy and the right implementation, I do believe you will get the return on that investment and, possibly, a sustained competitive advantage.

Of course, this presents a problem: you have to spend the money now, but you might not see it for a while.

to Make the Most of SEO

Search engines don’t buy from you, people do. There a few things you need to have in place in any site to make the most of SEO:

1. Functioning Site – There’s no point in bringing people to your site if it doesn’t work. People don’t like it and neither do the search engines. Getting your site to work properly is as important as getting people there.
2. Great Product – You can optimize your site till you’re blue in the face, but if you’re product stinks, you’re fighting an uphill battle. They say the quickest way to kill a bad product is to advertise it…

Link

(more…)

by ziggyff

Inner optimization means a set of actions directed to content changing. There are some rules to reach better indexation by Search Engines.

• Content. It means text and pictures Text. First of all content should be unique. Second: text should contain keywords. Recommended keywords consistence is 5%. Third: It was noticed that search engines rate high update of content. Pictures: There is only one recommendation in this sphere: you should keywords in alt=”” parameter.
• Meta-tags. This is special tags which influence on search engine’s attitude to your content.
• Text formatting. One note: you should use <strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i>.
• External links optimization. This requirement is satisfied by using of parameter “nofollow”
• Correct linking. First: you should use keywords in the text of the link. Second: you should create list of the most interesting pages of your website. Third: you should place link to your frontpage on each page. Fourth: if your website has tree structure you should place link to every branch which direct to this page.
• Clear code. Try to use java-scripts as rarely as possible, don’t use code reiterations.
• CSS. Use it to make code clear.

Link