As we approach the final month of summer, many web site owners are looking forward to the 4th quarter stretch; especially the holidays.  With gas prices out of control, many consumers are expected to shop online more than ever this season.

Now is the time to review your marketing strategy for the upcoming months. Marketing in the online world consists of a variety of factors including search engine rankings, pay per click advertising, email newsletters and the web site’s overall design and layout.

Here are some basic tips to consider for your online business:

•    Good Keywords- Is your web site optimized for the right keywords; those that visitors will search for to buy your products or services?

•    Search Engine Rankings- How does your site currently rank among Google, YAHOO, and MSN?

•    Pay Per Click Advertising- If you’re currently using pay per click marketing (Google AdWords,   YAHOO Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter, ASK, etc) make sure you are tracking your ads properly. Are they converting into sales or leads? Are you paying too much for keywords not related to your business? Should you be advertising locally rather than nationally? Need info on Pay Per Click? Click Here.

•    Web Site Design- How does your current web site look?  Does everything work properly? No broken links, missing images, misaligned text? Make sure the site is presentable to your customers.

•    Does your web site provide helpful information for your visitors? How are your prices compared to others in your industry? What offers can you provide for the holidays- Tax-free shopping? Reduced or free shipping offers? Buy 1 Get 1 offers, Coupons, Etc?

We recently launched a small yet very effective web site that is a classic example of combining good design and marketing.

CapeCoralHomeVultures.com - is a web site based in SouthWest Florida (Cape Coral, Ft. Myers area) that offers information on foreclosed property, buying, and managing foreclosures and pre-foreclosures in the SouthWest area of Florida.

As the site launched in July, the client initiated an agressive Pay Per Click Campaign on YAHOO and Google AdWords and has seen viable traffic and strong leads almost instantly.

Check it out: http://www.capecoralhomevultures.com

Professional SEO Companies have known as a rule of thumb that excessive use of Flash design can inhibit your ability to rank well in the search engines.

Within the last month, Google announced that its search engine has learned how to crawl Flash. As Google states on their official blog: Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets.

What does this all mean?  What Google is stating is they have developed a means of crawling “TEXTUAL” content within Flash files that are designed in buttons, menus, banners, and as they have stated self-contained web sites (those designed in Flash). URLs that are linked within Flash files are also crawled and may be added to their search results. Images that are using Flash are currently not supported by Google.

To Summarize:

• Google is now crawling text in some Flash Files.
• The Flash has to be in SWF format.
• SWF files can be gadgets, buttons, banners, menus, and self-contained web sites
• Basically if your site contains these elements, Google will find them and there’s really no need to do anything but wait and see what the results are.

This is just another step in allowing better search results for the variety of design and programming that’s out there today.

After 10 years of optimizing web sites, we still see many that have ‘bad’ seo techniques that result in poor rankings. Here are some basic tips to avoid:

• Over-stuffing Keywords. Adding a free for all in phrases to meta tags, or even stuffing them within your text.
• Hiding Keywords. Unbelievably, we still see this technique which was considered ’standard’ 10 years ago. Never hide text on a web page. Search engines are actually aware of this technique and can go as far as ‘banning’ your web site for this practice.
• Stuffing ALT Tags- The property tag of your images can be of use in SEO, but stuffing them with keywords (or even entire paragraphs of copy) can get you in trouble.
• Bad linking techniques- Linking to irrelevant web sites, or web sites who also practice bad SEO techniques will only make your chances of ranking well much worse.
• Too little text- too many images.
• Too much Flash animation or Java

Whether you plan on designing a web site yourself or hiring a professional, here are some tips to keep in mind (and make sure your designer follows your suggestions as well):

•  Flash design should be kept a minimum. Search engines will have a difficult time ‘reading’ a page that is entirely made of flash animation. Flash should be an embedded file that does not consume the time of a visitor (in other words, having to wait to navigate or click on other pages because of the flash).
• Avoid introductory home pages- these are blank, ‘click here to enter’ pages that a visitor has to view before even seeing the site. Worse, some designers do flash ’splash’ pages thinking that a cool animation is a great asset to a web site. This is actually a BAD thing for both search engines and visitors who don’t want to wait or click.
• Make sure your text on the site is actual text. There are still designs out there where the text is placed into graphics. Some times designers do this in order to use different font styles for an appealing look. Unfortunately, search engines cannot read the text in this form (and therefore cannot index or ‘rank’ your web pages).
• Missing contact information- nothing is worse than a web site that does not have email, phones or contact forms.
• Consider not using excessive Java, flashing, blinking text, scrolling or trailing ‘mice’ or loud music that distracts visitors.