More and more consumers are moving online to make purchases. From flat panel televisions to high-heeled shoes, e-commerce continues to flourish on the web. Modern consumers are visiting local retailers to try on and test out products, then they’re heading home to compare prices and purchase online.

Many stores have recognized this pattern and have built e-commerce storefronts to try and make up for lower sales at brick-and-mortar locations. But consumers are extremely wary of data theft and online fraud, so e-commerce sites must be easily found and convey credibility. This takes not only solid web design, security and functionality, but also a web marketing strategy that employs search engine optimization (SEO).

Getting found online takes more than a photo and product link. E-commerce sites should look to add a new page of content to their site daily. This shows the search engines that they’re “fresh” and growing. Storefronts should also create unique product descriptions, rather than just copying from Amazon.com or other major e-commerce sites – because it’s unlikely that you’ll win a battle of search dominance against the large, well established players. Instead, focus on creating product descriptions that target slightly different search phrases and work to convert those leads.

Content is huge when it comes to SEO, but your e-commerce site should also have built-in SEO functionality. At a minimum, be sure your web development firm is using the latest web standards and offers a dynamic method for setting and adjusting page titles and meta tags. Quality firms also offer filtered navigation, search engine friendly URLs, dynamic XML sitemaps and social networking integration.

E-Commerce is highly competitive, no matter the industry, service or product. So take the time and make the investment in a web development company that employs SEO strategies to help your business rise to the top of the search engine results pages. Call or email Baytech Web Design today for a free consultation about your e-commerce website and SEO needs.

Most people turn to Google when searching for something on the web. While other search engines may slowly be reclaiming some of the search market share, no one commands authority in the online search space like Google. More than 60 percent of internet users in North America turn to Google for their searches. In August 2009, that amounted to nearly 7 billion queries – in just one month, and in N. America alone! Globally, Google receives over 80 percent of internet searches.

While it’s important to not forget about other search engines like Yahoo! and Bing, most companies are interested in optimizing their website to perform well in Google. At Baytech Web Design, we’ve found that many companies haven’t even used one of the simplest techniques available to improve their organic SEO – claiming their business listing on Google’s Local Business Center (LBC).

The LBC lets you enter key information about your business or service, including address, hours of operation and product/service category. You then verify the information manually – this prevents Spam listings and adds even more credibility to the information’s accuracy.

Once you’ve claimed your listing at Google’s LBC, you just might find that you’ll start climbing the search engine results pages for your targeted keywords. It’s really a win-win situation. The LBC provides Google with more accurate and verified search results, and your company gets to piggyback on Google’s search dominance.

Baytech Web Design can help your company get listed on the LBC and can also help you put together a full web marketing program that includes SEO, linking and PPC strategies to help your company in its quest for top search ranking.     

Like the telephone switchboards of the 50’s, website links ensure that people get where they intended to go. But website links do much more than just hand off information, they contribute to your company’s search engine optimization and can also influence your page rank. Search engine spiders are constantly crawling the web, following and indexing links to provide more relevant content to their users. So how do you leverage links to start moving up the search engine results page (SERP)?

On the quest for top search ranking, different SEO strategies exist when it comes to links. One key SEO tactic is “link popularity.” Link popularity is used by major search engines to rank the quantity and quality of the links pointing to your website. They also examine the link text and relevance of those links. All of these factors contribute to your page rank.

Link popularity is just one facet of linking for SEO – external links. Your website should also review its use of back links and internal links to further optimize search results. Every link on your site today has an impact on your search ranking and SEO.

At Baytech Web Design, we know that it takes a coordinated use of back links, internal links and external links to start moving up the SERP of key search engines. The links you put on your website (and have coming into your site) serve as a quality indicator for your overall site. And internal and external links that relate to your industry keywords and meta tags can contribute to the quality ranking you receive.

It pays to include linking in your SEO strategy, but many companies just don’t know where to begin. Let the online marketing and SEO specialists at Baytech Web Design help you implement a link strategy that will show results. Call or email today for a free consultation about your use of links.

The amount of information on the web today is staggering, and getting your website noticed is only getting more difficult. Over a year ago, Google indexed its one trillionth unique URL – that’s 1,000,000,000,000 pages of content. And there’s even more. Google admits that it’s impossible for them to index every single page of web content.

“So how do I drive more traffic to my website?” This is a common question we get at Baytech. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Each search engine uses different algorithms to determine content relevancy, and each industry’s top-targeted keywords have become very competitive—and expensive, if you’re bidding for them through PPC ad placements.

There are, however, a number of best practice SEO strategies and tactics that Baytech employs when we build client websites. These tactics include metadata tagging, search engine friendly URLs and creating optimized, relevant content. These are well known strategies and, of course, we integrate other SEO best practices into our web development projects—just give a call to discuss.

No matter your business though, from a large e-commerce site to a small niche player, most company’s can improve their organic SEO rankings by retaining a website development company that’s up-to-date on the latest SEO best practices.

Baytech is constantly reviewing the latest trends on SEO and refining our processes to improve our results. We won’t guarantee top site ranking like some self-proclaimed SEO experts might, but our track record speaks for itself, and our SEO strategies and best practices deliver results.

The next time your company is considering web development or custom web application work, be sure that SEO strategy is part of the scoped project. Feel free to call or email Baytech today to discuss your project and to learn how we can help generate SEO results.

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

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

Organic or Natural? No, it’s not about getting elbows deep in dirt; however, organic SEO is about a planting and growing process in order to get your site listed in search engines.   Expect that if you plan to invest time today in sowing your seeds of effort, it may take weeks, even up to months for that seed to sprout. As patience is a virtue, begin by weekly maintaining whatever you can handle. Some SEO techniques that can help your site get noticed are through search engine submissions, web/blog/article directories and social book marking sites. If you submit to one of each of the aforementioned suggestions, then your divided efforts will be even stronger than a bulk of work on one day of the week.

Submitting your sites on various article directories or social booking marking sites is not a one-time deal. It is important to set aside some time following up and focusing on what is working best with your site. If you ensure that your working links are linked with higher page ranked sites, your site will also rank higher and therefore you will be moving ever closer to the front page of a search engine.

It will also be a good idea to check if all of your back links are working properly. As back-linking is strongly upheld by good SEO practices, liberally submit your links to other sites of higher ranking and lower ranking on the alexia scale.

In all, don’t be afraid to roll up your sleeves and get organic!

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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 Designoffers 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

Baytech Webs is beaming with pride as we are announcing recent launches of eight of our rapidly growing base of high-profile clients. Working closely with great minds and leading our clients from the conception of ideas to the completion of a project, we take every mission under our wing as it were our own.

Today, we are featuring the following clients who are utilizing our cutting-edge technology in CSS, HTML, and PHP:

1.       O’Codger:  This is the ultimate internet guide for the avid consumer. Find reviews and ratings fast through a bounty of trusted quality resources and information services. Doubling as a platform for social networking and the infinite possibilities of mind-share between people, O’Codger is dedicated to accumulating quality websites for consumers worldwide.

With O’Codger, Baytech Webs has managed their banner ads, content, online purchasing and ordering systems, social networking functions, and third party integrations.

2.       LCR Dixon: LCR Dixon is another one of our impressive clients, unrivaled in the industry for tax automation. This formidable team of transaction tax experts has hundreds of years of experience in tax and/or EROP implementations combined. Their primary focus it to deliver the most advanced SAP solutions for their clients.

Along with content management, LCR Dixon’s features Baytech Webs’s expertise in web development through CSS, Flash, HTML and PHP.

3.       Strategia: It is always a pleasure for Baytech Webs to serve firms dedicated to nourishing growth and providing consultation services. Strategia specializes in helping small to large companies expand in new markets with new technologies and acquisitions. By helping them build their site, we help make it easy to keep information up to date with Content Management Systems. In a fast world for fast industries, we make it possible for Strategia to have a web presence so they can continue excellence in consultation services.

4.       Talty Court Reporters: In the court reporting field, Talty Court Reporters brings the highest standards in the industry, comprised of a force of professionals averaging over ten years of experience. Based in Santa Clara County, the Talty ensures that clients will receive the highest level of competence and professionalism for all their litigation needs.  Collaborating efforts with Baytech Webs, their newly launched site features a content and newsletter management system as well as third party integration applications.

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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

Search engines spiders are programs that search engines will utilize to find,  visit or re-visit content in webpages, files, images, or even videos. If your website is “crawlable,” then the search engine spider is able to discover, identify, and obtain information about the links and content within your site. This is why linking is an essential part that makes your page SEO and search engine friendly because if a spider is not able to follow a link, then your landing page may not even exist in the search engine’s database. Therefore, if your destination page is not included in its database, it maybe not even be present in  any search results.

Figuring out whether your website is spider-friendly is really about the accessibility of the link. Flash files are frequently used for navigation; As a result, links are not recognized since spiders do not typically crawl through flash files. To solve this and still have the dynamic functionality found in Flash, navigation can be done with SEO friendly CSS code. And again, with Javascript or Ajax menus, a bot may have the same difficulty reading those links.

More pointers to keep in mind, is to ensure a copious amount of authoritative links on your website. They should all connect to relevant and important information, making it easy for spiders to crawl and therefore influence rankings. Other ways to counter common issues that deter crawlability is to create alternative navigations that utilize text links in the footer. Include HTML site maps of a considerable amount of text links. And speaking of site maps, you can also provide an XML site map list to search engines of all the URLs you’d like spiders to read on your site.  

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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