Nowadays, more and more small businesses are catching onto implementing some form of SEO through gaining traction with blogs and social media. However, many small businesses fail at using these outlets correctly.

After determining the core purpose of your business, the next thing to consider is your niche, or target audience. Many businesses tend to start broad and to target wide ranges of audiences on an abstract level. However, starting small and beginning to build relationships with readers and social media users means defining your niche. Once you have a strong grasp on a solid audience, it will more than likely help you build better traffic in the long-run. After that foundation is established, can expanding your niche be a good move to consider.  

Depending on your business, you may also want to focus on using a modest handful of social media sites to effectively reach out to your niche. Contemplate a blog to connect your social networking accounts and take into account of what kind of valuable content or interesting information you can bring to that niche. Remember, to be able to engage those readers is to break your business of a narcissistic approach where it’s all about the sole intentions of the business, and no use of feedback mechanisms. Comments and trackbacks are an excellent way to communicate and create ongoing conversations that include the business itself. Most people fear negative comments that can potentially arise by enabling comments, but feedback should really be seen as a goal, not a liability case. In addition, a little bit of social interaction by participating in discussions with others can be even more effective. Reply to your comments, ask for feedback, welcome controversy, and create community based ideas.

Takeaway: Start focused and find your niche. Relationships will never last if conversations are made to be one-sided.

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ABOUT BAYTECH WEB DESIGN

Baytech Web Design is a global, full-service web development and internet marketing firm. Rated the number one web development firm of 2008 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Baytech Web Design offers a full range of web services to entrepreneurs to enterprise level clients. As a winner of the Horizon Interactive Award, this dedicated team of professionals creates customer-focused web-based solutions that deliver tangible and measurable success.

http://www.baytechwebdesign.com

It has been engrained into our minds that content is key. So how does Google recognize or interpret a new page or fresh content? To Google, anything new means first content. Therefore, your new website should be indexed on Google first before you continue to add new content to it.

Google will detect fresh content through pings, sitemaps, other links pointing to the site, and most important of all, repeatedly crawl through the site. So to encourage Google’s spiders to visit your site as frequently as possible, implement a slow and steady cycle of new content addition.

On another note, never add duplicate content. Google may remove duplicate pages from search results for a certain query, and will penalize your pages by also omitting them from the index. To achieve high rankings, it is in your best interest to do so with unique content but with as much original content as possible. Should it use the same content as other websites, ensure your pages have better inbound links than any other website that has the same content.

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ABOUT BAYTECH WEB DESIGN

Baytech Web Design is a global, full-service web development and internet marketing firm. Rated the number one web development firm of 2008 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Baytech Web Design  offers a full range of web services to entrepreneurs to enterprise level clients. As a winner of the Horizon Interactive Award, this dedicated team of professionals creates customer-focused web-based solutions that deliver tangible and measurable success.

http://www.baytechwebdesign.com

KEI, or Keyword Effectiveness Index, helps one determine or measure how effective a keyword is for their website. Without it, it is very difficult to target your customer or client. The KEI along with a search engine friendly website will help you increase your overall conversion rate. Two variables help make up the formula for KEI:

1.       Popularity: KEI values increase as the popularity of the keyword increases. Popularity is determined by how many times a keyword is searched per month.

2.       Competition: The more competitive a keyword, the more likely the KEI value will decrease. Competitiveness means the number of sites a search engine pulls up when you search for that particular keyword using an “exact match search,” which means quotations around the keyword(s).

Suppose that the number of searches for “Bordeaux Hostel” is 636 per month, and Google shows 322,333 results for that keyword. The ratio between popularity and competitiveness would be divided: 322,333/486 will give a KEI value of 0.002.

Once targeted terms and phrases are determined from the KEI values, deciding which web page to optimize becomes less of a chore, thereby increasing the targeted flow of traffic to your site and improving your rankings.

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ABOUT BAYTECH WEB DESIGN

Baytech Web Design is a global, full-service web development and internet marketing firm. Rated the number one web development firm of 2008 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Baytech Web Design offers a full range of web services to entrepreneurs to enterprise level clients. As a winner of the Horizon Interactive Award, this dedicated team of professionals creates customer-focused web-based solutions that deliver tangible and measurable success.

http://www.baytechwebdesign.com

Absolutely! Sitemaps help web crawler discover pages from links within your site and from links in other sites. The crawler picks up all the URLs in the sitemap and associates them with metadata. Basically, it gives web crawlers pointers on how to crawl your site better.

In order for all the pages in your website to be indexed, the sitemap should be located in the root of your websites and include the following:

1.       The <urlset> tag should be the opening and close with </urlset> tag

2.       Each URL should have a <url> entry as a parent XML tag

3.       Each child entry for each <url> parent tag should be tagged with <loc>

Sitemaps dictates a Sitemap Protocol 0.9 that Google adheres to. Therefore, the sitemaps created for Google will be compatible with other search engines that assume the same standards. It will look something like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<url>
<loc>http://www.baytechwebs.com/</loc>
<priority>1.00</priority>
<lastmod>2009-07-01T20:18:39+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>

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ABOUT BAYTECH WEB DESIGN

Baytech Web Design is a global, full-service web development and internet marketing firm. Rated the number one web development firm of 2008 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Baytech Web Design offers a full range of web services to entrepreneurs to enterprise level clients. As a winner of the Horizon Interactive Award, this dedicated team of professionals creates customer-focused web-based solutions that deliver tangible and measurable success.

http://www.baytechwebdesign.com