When companies from Fortune 500 list are making use of WordPress, then what keeps you waiting…

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Our WordPress team has hands-on experience with delivering WordPress CMS solutions ranging from a rather simple blog to heavily customized WordPress implementations serving complex business requirements.

WordPress - Smackwagon Design

With well over 450 successful WordPress implementations in the past 4 years, you can rest assured with Smackwagon Design™.

Using Keyword strategy is vital to your beginning SEO strategy. The types of words you use and where you place them will have a large effect in where your link will reside when someone makes a search.

Head terms – are general terms such as “cheese” they tend to have massive traffic volume but are much harder to rank on.
Tail terms – are more specific terms such as “white goat cheese.” These terms may have less volume but are capable of ranking for.

• Each page should have a mix of some head and tail terms.
• Ranking on some tail terms is much better than not ranking at all for head terms.
• Every web page should only be focused on 1 or 2 keywords. Not doing so will optimize your pages in too many directions, decreasing your overall effectiveness and ranking potential.

Just because one search has more than an other does not mean it is better. A search query with small traffic but low competition is much better than a large query and maximum competition. anything with less than 75% competition is a good opportunity to target.

For example The keyword, “build a web site” has 110,000 sq/m. sq/m=seach query per month.
This Search query is extremely competitive. Trying to organically rank your web site within that search query would be almost impossible, until your website starts to have some serious internet presence.

Another issue to consider is some of the Head terms that have a massive amount of search querys are broad terms. Such as “Directory” Someone may be looking for a different type of directory than what your website is based around. So being more specific in this case is better, so that people will find the correct type of directory they are looking for.

Another thing to consider is that Google ranks web sites on how old they are and how much of a presence they currently have in the market. Since we are new, we can only compete in sub markets for keywords that get a smaller amount of searches. As we grow we can try to build rankings in some of the more difficult key-words. It is better to have a decent percentage of something small than a very small percentage of something big.

It is more important to get your web site ranked in a smaller more specific search query with around 10,000 or less searches per month. This way the competitiveness is not overwhelming and we can at least take a small portion of those searches.

Googles algorithm has been changing since its birth in 1995. In the beginning Keywords had a massive importance for what words your web-page would rank for. Meaning the algorithm was 90% based around what keywords you used in your web pages. As people caught on people began “spamming” certain words so that there page would specifically show up for that word. As the Algorithm began to advance through the earl 2000′s Googles algorithm has since become far more complex and can actually recognize content purposely trying to spam keywords to get in for a specific search.

PPC is the act of paying a search engine to temporarily put your listing in the top 3 positions for a particular search query. You pay can set a spending limit, and pay the Search engine on a per click basis.

Pay Per Clicks (PPC) - Is this the right thing to do?.... does it pay off? - Smackwagon Design

Every-time you search for “Books” and click on one of the top three links a business just paid Google to be in that top position. Some search queries are more valuable than others such as someone searching for “buy Books” may be willing to pay as much as $10 per click to Google for a potential sale. Another search query such as “create an art web site” is more specific and less lucrative, thus would be less valuable and may bid for 20 cents per click.

All of the prices are determined by an open market of bidding leaving the prices constantly changing. After creating an adwords account with Google on www.google.com/adwords you can research keywords that you think people would use to find your product or service. They also have a tool that allows you to see how many people searched for a particular keyword or phrase last month. Since other people are also bidding for particular searches, the ones that are more competitive will naturally cost more money to win. You can also set a spending limit for yourself, for example tell Google you would only like to spend $100 at 50 cents a click, once you get 200 clicks your link is removed, and your campaign ended.

You may have noticed after making a Google search that the top 3 links are highlighted these are the PPC links, and all other links below it are naturally ranked. This is why many people will always start clicking on the 4th link which is actuality the highest natually ranked website for that search. Google has recently done away with the difference in appearance between PPC and natural, but the same underlying concept and bid system is still there.

Creating a PPC campaign is simple to start but very hard to master. This subject is a little bit too indepth for this web site. If you are actaully interested in going on a campaign I would suggest picking up a book on this particular subject. Creating a campaign without having any knowledge in this area would be a foolish mistake, and could become very costly.

We have seen a pattern forming over the few years where we will be contacted by a potential client with a story such as, “I paid over $5000 four months ago to have my e-commerce site built and it’s still not up and the designers won’t fix it!”. I’m not a big fan of stories like this. For one, this means that this potential client has already spent their budget having something created that didn’t actually meet their needs – meaning that they do not have the budget to pay the going rate for having the site done properly. But the more disturbing aspect is when I have a look at what has already been built and find out that the ecommerce website is really nothing more than OsCommerce.

Os-Commerce - Open Source Code - Smackwagon Design

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with OsCommerce, it is a FREE shopping cart solution built by many different programmers to be offered as “open-source“. It’s fine if a client really has a bare-bones budget because hey, it’s free. When we use a free solution such as OsCommerce, what we charge the client for is simply installing, customizing the template design, and setting up initial categories, shipping, etc. Unless you are programming or installing many additional complex modules to interact with the base cart, I really can not fathom why a job using OsCommerce would cost $5000 or more. To me, this screams of shady business practices.

I’ve said this in a number of other articles, that I believe honesty is always the best policy. If you are using any sort of pre-developed software (whether it’s free or if you are paying for it), do not fool your client into believing that they are receiving 100% custom work. (Developers Try Not to Reinvent the Wheel!) I find that even when using software, there are aspects that are custom (usually the design), but we make clear in our estimates and contracts which is which and what the client is actually paying for.

Designers and programmers are always on the look out for things that can help them while doing a job, everything from free scripts to stock photos to the latest software. As a designer or programmer, you have to judge for yourself what works best for you and what would benefit your client the most. I find the clients are much more comfortable working with you when they know exactly what you are doing for them and what they paying for and it’s simply more ethical to let a client know when you are using a free or pre-built solution or something custom.

Remember its a relationship you are building!

Google LinkBacks - SmackTalk - The thinking behind link exchanging is that Google will record links as a vote of confidence for sites.

A Linkback is when someone links to your web site. This one of the best ways to increase your rankings within a search engine, and here is why…

Generally speaking people linkback to a web site, because they are trying to help others by directing them to useful information, a tool, or product. Web sites that have useful information, and people enjoy tend to have a lot of linkbacks. Google knows this, and places a lot of emphasis and priority on how many other web sites are linking back to yours. It is an accurate method of gauging how popular YOUR web site is, of what quality your content is, and what type of people are viewing your pages allowing them to better index your site. Remember Google bots find your page by crawling through links from someone elses page. Once the bot finds a link on your page, it will than follow that link to the external page (called spidering) as well ans so on and so on.

So linkbacks are great important!

How do I get people to link to my site? There are some things we can do to make this happen. There are also some things we can do to make it happen naturally on its own. The ideal situation is for people to be linking back to your page because they want to show someone else something. If you can accomplish this feat than your web site is experiencing exponential growth. Easier said than done, lets first look at some of the beginning strategies.

Strategy 1: Link exchange. Contact people that own and operate web sites of similar traffic base to yours. Than ask them to do a link exchange. Link exchange is when you place their link on your page, and they place your link on their page. Typically, you will not be able to get a link exchange from a web site that is getting more traffic than you. This is because they are helping you more than you are helping them. This is why it is wise when attempting to contact web site owners, to go for web sites that are getting similar amounts of traffic, or less. This way you have a higher chance of them saying yes to your link exchange request, and your not wasting your time. What if your not getting any traffic? Start linking with other sites that are just starting out as well .
CNN article on link exchange

Strategy 2: Create content that people will want to link to. Easier said than done, this is one of the best ways to getting people to link to your web site as well as getting your links high within Google searches, since Google puts a lot of emphasis on high quality original content, such as these paragraphs.

Strategy 3: Create something different other than writing to draw people in. For example if you can come up with a tool that helps people come up with synonyms for key words that people can use for their websites a lot of people will link to your website to help their friends. By creating a tool that people like to use, they are getting a lot of link backs naturally. You could also create a cool game, or new video, anything new.

Strategy 4: Give something away for free. Again, easier said than done, because you have to construct some type of product or service that people will want. Give it away for free at first, people will link to you faster than normal, making your growth temporarily exponential.

Strategy 5: Affiliate marketing program. This is better for larger more established websites but none the less, might as well get you acclimated with it here. One of the benefits to a AMP is that people place your add and link on their page, in the hopes of getting a sale through the link. Even if someone doesnt buy something you still got additional traffic and linkbacks.

Strategy 6: Create a forum. A forum will be necessary to create valuable fresh, and rich content. Lots of users will also create link backs when they want to show their friends an article.
Forums also create good user input and interaction.

Strategy 7: Index images with Google images. When users find your images, they also fallow the link, increased traffic.

All of these are a lot of work, but will eventually lead to more linkbacks, which will increase your “Natural Google” rankings, and traffic. – For Help call us Today! 916.412.1484.