SEO Table of Elements

The overarching goal of SEO (search engine optimization) is to improve a website’s position within search engines so that potential website visitors can reach a website through relevant searches (known as queries). While SEO conversations often seem to focus on the concept of ‘ranking number one’ for a particular term, SEO has multiple facets that require unique technological and creative skill-sets. With patience, realistic expectations, discipline, and correctly implemented/managed strategies, SEO can be one of the most beneficial forms of web marketing.

The image below shows the difference between paid search results (advertisements) and organic search results for Google.com:

Goals of SEO

At its most basic level, SEO seeks to improve two core areas:

• Website Content Relevancy - The degree to which a website’s content matches a users need and/or intent, which usually are represented through queries (commonly known as keywords).
• Website Content Popularity - The order by which search engines display search results depend on a range of factors, one of the most important of these being the quantity of external websites that link to a particular website.

These two concepts, 1) relevancy and 2) authority pervade into every aspect of SEO, which we can sum up with the following idea:

“Successful SEO modifies website content and code, and builds links from external websites so that a particular website appears in priority positions of organic search results for a relevant query.”

Why Does SEO Matter?

More and more, people rely on the internet and, more specifically, search engines to find information, make transactions, and accomplish an array of goals. As a marketing medium, search engines offer an incredibly powerful way to target a very specific audience based on intent. To illustrate this concept we’ll provide a simple example:

• Bob searches for ‘short haired puppies’ in Google.com – Bob sees a lot of images, peruses some of them, but does not satisfy his need, which is to purchase a puppy
• Bob types-in and searches for the term, ‘best small-breed puppies,’ in Google.com – Bob sees some pet stores, and takes a look at them, but he decides that he wants to find a location close to home
• Bob finally types in ‘breeders that sell beagle puppies in Chicago’ – Now Bob notices that the results that appear are much more relevant as he begins to see results of local pet stores

What’s at play in the above example about Bob and his quest to buy a puppy?

• Bob represents the average search engine user, where he refines his search to become more detailed as he discovers more information.
• Bob represents a typical user with different buying cycle stages. His search also moves from being ‘informational’ in nature to ‘more transactional’ in nature as he narrows his search query.
• The websites that appear in organic search results have a ‘ranking,’ which search engines determine through complex algorithms. The websites that appear first have higher content relevancy for Bob’s search terms and are more popular than other websites (these sites have links from external websites).

SEO is a Method

To be more specific, organic (non-paid/advertised search results) search results constitute a marketing channel. In the USA, alone, more people use Internet search to find information than the yellow page, and has over 220,000,000 estimated Internet users.

As such, the potential gains for ranking a website (in terms of both website visitors and potential online leads/sales) within search results for particular queries is quite high.

SEO is a Process

SEO requires a unique marketing activity that involves both technologically-driven and creatively-driven skill sets. Generally, SEO can be broken into three phases:

• Planning & Strategy - This phase generally entails analyzing a business/website from both a marketing and technical perspective (usually through an ‘audit’) in order to determine a direction for SEO activities. This stage is vital for an effective SEO processes as implementation activities must be founded upon stable considerations in order to be effective. This stage also sets benchmarks, against which progress can be monitored.
• Implementation & Analytics – SEO generally divides itself into two camps 1) onsite optimization and 2) offsite optimization. Onsite optimizaiton addresses technical and content issues found on a respective website itself, whereas offsite optimization dedicates itself to acquiring relevant links from external websites.  Ongoing reporting ensures that SEO methods work effectively.
• Maintenance & Training – While SEO experts can (and often times do) complete ongoing SEO activities, many businesses find it in their interest to train and manage staff in order to help manage SEO themselves.  Indeed, mastering SEO can take years to learn, but certain less technologically-intensive and/or content-oriented activities can be completed by just about anyone who has the right know-how. With occasional oversight and guidance by an SEO expert, such tasks can be managed by a business/organization to ensure that it maintains effective SEO.

SEO is Long-Term

A good way to think of SEO is to think of it as a long-term investment. SEO is unlike other web marketing methods in that returns can take significantly longer. This is largely due to the fact that successful SEO must be ‘organic,’ and as such needs time to grow.  Interestingly, SEO requires higher initial costs, but these costs reduce relative to benefits over time. This is such because SEO activities can take months to see an impact in search engines.

SEO Has High Long-Term ROI Potential

While SEO does have higher initial costs with lower benefits compared to online advertising (e.g. AdWords), the fact that SEO is a long-term solution makes it more profitable. One reason is because online advertising only works when it has a budget exists to pay for the advertisements; as soon as advertisements are paused, the benefits cease (for the most part). Conversely, SEO can take some time to build in order to see benefits, but with appropriate maintenance, SEO benefits will persist over time.

Furthermore, studies show that Internet search users tend to click on organic (non-advertisement) listings more than paid advertisements and that these users tend to have higher levels of education. Because SEO provides a long-term solution and drives higher-quality traffic, its chances of driving online goals (known as conversions) is more likely and, as such, has higher potential (long-term) for a positive ROI (return over investment).

Want to learn more about how GrayBox’s internet marketing services can help your business use search engines to drive traffic to your website and help you accomplish your online goals? Drop us a line and we’ll work with you to create an internet marketing strategy that can help you make the most of SEO.

In this post we’ll go over your main options, their benefits and the respective costs.  Trying out these methods will help you reach new customers, promote your brand and expand your business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to tweaking your website’s contents, organization & inbound links in order to better place for strategically chosen keywords in a Search Engine’s index. Specifically, you’re looking for keywords that support your business goals, have a low amount of search competition and have a high number of monthly searches. Search Engines seek to provide relevant results to searchers, so it’s important that you match your site to relevant keywords to drive good traffic to your site.

Each SEO campaign has three essential steps:

1. Keyword Research & Competitor Analysis
2. Onsite Optimization
3. Offsite Optimization (Link Building)

In terms of audience reach, if you pick your keywords carefully, you can reach a fairly targeted group of potential customers. Google Search accounts for about 80% of USA search traffic so you’ll want to target your efforts with them, Bing & others watch Google search results so you’ll also experience some trickle down to other sites.

SEO is a large, long-term investment, both in time and money. When you start your SEO campaign, it can take a month or two to start seeing results. However, unlike performance-based marketing (ads) it’s mostly a one-time cost. SEO represents the best long-term investment of your money and we deem it essential for every business website.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM/PPC) & Paid Text Ads

If your looking to drive traffic to your site immediately there is no better way that Paid Text Ads — plus you can do it in very targeted way, bringing in well qualified customers.

You have two major options, Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising. Both systems use similar auction-based methods of purchase. Essentially there is a limited number of advertising slots, each company picks a advertisement criteria and an amount your are willing to pay to have your ad display. The top amounts paid (10 for Google, 5 for Facebook) show for a given pageview. The ads shown & amounts paid shift dynamically through the day as links are clicked & daily payment maximums are reached.

In Adwords you bid for specific keywords while on Facebook you bid on user profiles & criteria such as geographic location, education level, career, age, etc. You get much more targeted impressions with Facebook over Google, but you’ll reach more new customers & conversion centric buyers on Google.

The key to a successful SEM campaign is constant monitoring of your performance & tweaking to get a better return on your investment.

Display Ads

Display ads are fairly simple — there a great way to drive traffic as well as increase your brand recognition — the only trouble is their expense. You pay on an Impression Basis (CPM), you pax XX amount per thousand times the ad is loaded (in contrast to PPC).  It’s not much per thousand, but it quickly adds up on high-traffic sites.

You typically buy ads through Display Ad Networks, the king of which is DoubleClick (recently bought by Google). Their are also many smaller display networks, or in some cases you can buy them individually from the website publisher.

Display Networks match your business to sites that represent your industry, hoping that the audience will be interested in your product — creating a very broad audience match.

Some networks also act as brokers, allowing you to pick sites you’ld like your ad to be seen on. One of note is BuySellAds.com, we suggest you use them if you’re just trying our display ads for the first time.

Social Media

Facebook & Twitter are the two dominant social media platforms in the United States, yet to a business they serve two very different functions. The only cost is time, to be effective we recommend posting multiple times a day on each service. Be personable, share your knowledge and make some friends.

Facebook

Facebook is centered around friendships & relationships with people and with businesses. Facebook users skew more female, younger and less educated than Twitter users. They tend to follow brands with more loyalty, but are less commerce centric in their actions. Your posts and updates will largely build up your audience & customer loyalty, not necessarily reach new customers.

Twitter

Twitter is a better way to reach new customers than Facebook as it’s more search-centric than Facebook. Users are more exploratory and tend to follow people along their interests. It’s a great place to expand your market, speak to your niche and prove your expertise in your industry.

[Shameless plug, follow @GrayboxComm on Twitter]

E-Mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is a great way to retain your existing customers and keep them engaged in your brand — the trouble is building and maintaining your customer file in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act. Don’t purchase a list (they typically perform very badly), but slowly gather names from customers and collect them on your site.

There are a lot of great tools out there, MailChimp or Campaign Monitor for small-businesses; iContact for medium-sized businesses, and Bronto or ExactTarget for enterprise level needs.

You’ll typically pay a cent or two for each e-mail sent. This doesn’t sound like much, but can really add up when you have a large customer list & send often.

Affilate Marketing

Affilate Marketing is essentially paying a small commission on your sales to get others to link to products on your site. It works best for eCommerce companies that offer a variety of products.

It’s hard to get affiliates on your own, so we highly recommend using an Affilate Network — the king of the hill is Commission Junction, but there are plenty of industry specific options as well.

Conclusion

As you can see, their are plenty of options to promote your business online — our best advice is to experiment with multiple options, consistently review your ROI, and tweak your campaigns and trying new marketing ideas.  If you need help, GrayBox has multiple marketing, eCommerce and internet business consultants to help you develop your online marketing strategy. Get in touch.

These allow us to select adjacent elements, element’s parents and many others.

My favorite resources to learn more about this are:

CSS 2.1 : http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200509/css_21_selectors_part_1/
CSS 3 : http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200601/css_3_selectors_explained/

Take a look, if you’re not using these you’re missing out.

As creative professionals we take in the business problems you want us to solve, we think about it and come up with the best possible solution for your given problem. The trouble is, how do you hire someone who is smart and experienced enough to tackle your problem and get it solved on time and on budget.

You have a couple options, We’ll break them down below. Each has their own benefits and hassles.

Outsource to India/Mexico/Wherever

This is going to be your overall cheapest route. You honestly can find some good talent, who know how to code well and get a task done. However, you’re going to have to manage it closely, and you’ll have a good amount of communication trouble. For a while, cheap overseas talent seems like the answer/revolution in the industry, but now even big companies are realizing that if quality matters it needs to happen with qualified, local professionals who speak you native language. MicroSoft and other large companies have suffered from enough production delays that they’ve mostly pulled out from outsourcing completely.

Outsourcing comes in all shapes and sizes, you can outsource to an independent freelancer or hire an outsourced agency. The trouble is most discount agencies here in the states sell you on a service locally, then outsource the production to lower their bottom line and pocket the difference. Make sure to check with your agency exactly who, how and where the production is completed.

Outsourcing is best handled with small, isolated tasks with a high-level of management oversight from you or your company. We’ve seen web application start-ups go bankrupt waiting for an outsourced project to be delivered correctly.

Pros

1. Cheapest option
2. Good for small, production-based tasks

Cons

1. Unreliable service
2. Often leads to production/deployment delays
3. Hard to communicate with
4. Deliverables are often subpar and of low quality

Hire an Employee for Creative Work

Long term, it’s pretty safe that with a good hire you will get the most bang for your buck by hiring directly. Of course hiring makes things real complicated real quick for a small business, you’ll need to worry about benefits, days off, a place for them to work, payroll, taxes, etc. Plus once you hire, you are locked into that one person’s creative process and skills.

On the other side, for a relatively low rate per hour, you get about 2000 hours a year of work from your hire. In a large urban area, a print design is 45-80K/year, a web designer is 55-90K/year, and a web developer is 65-110K/year. It’s significantly less is smaller cities. Aquent has a survey of salaries each year http://www.designsalaries.org/, or run some searches at http://www.payscale.com to see the actual average cost.

Pros

1. Highest # of productive hours for your money
2. You have direct management oversight
3. 100% dedicated to your project

Cons

1. They are your employee, so you have to deal with the office space, payroll, benefits, etc
2. They require consistent direction and a management of tasks
3. Limited expertise/skill set
4. Limited creative process/problem solving

Hire a Creative Professional Freelancer

Hiring a freelancer is a good way to get a specialized expert onto your team. You can find a good freelancer who is professional, knowledgeable, and local to your business. Most have a wide range of experience both in enterprise and agency backgrounds and they typically come in one of two types, an expert is a specific niche in the creative/tech industry or a jack of all trades. For a role with analysis, strategy and planning, you’re better off hiring an expert. For a start-up a jack of all trades is a good option option as long as you can handle the strategizing.

Since freelancers are often specialized, you often need more than one to complete your project. A well-planned web project needs at least 4-5 different skill sets, and each freelancer will bring their own billing, contracts and other hassles. At the end of the day, you need to create the vision, develop a production plan and assign tasks to the specific freelancers on your team. Typical freelancing rates scale with experience — expect about $30 to $100 an hour.

Essentially, you can get top-level talent, on-demand if you’re willing to handle the management hassles of leading an independent, distributed team.

Pros

1. Expert Level Talent on demand
2. Lower cost than hiring an Agency
3. Less commitment than hiring an employee
4. Specialists are good for consulting/analysis and planning

Cons

1. Limited Skill Set to their one area of expertise
2. Big Jobs require Client (You) to manage multiple people
3. Beware Jack-of-all-trades freelancers for a complex project. Hire multiple specialists instead.

Hire a Creative Communications Agency

If you can afford it, hiring an agency is a great option. Like working with freelancers, you’ll get expert-level talent who can consult you on your project and build the best solution for your business. A good agency shouldn’t focus on just the production, they should also help guide you to the best creative solution for your business. Working with an agency should also be easy — you should at least have two key contacts within the company, an Account Manager who handles the relationship between the two companies and a project manager who guides your project and delivers it on time and on budget. Your project manager is the keystone of your project and should be communicative, intelligent, interested in your business and feel like a partner in your business.

The downside is the cost. For top-shelf agencies expect to pay $250-$400/hour, but most agencies are around $150-250/hour depending on the skill level & experience of their team. Also, a lot of agencies handle the project management and just outsource the work to experienced 1099 freelancers. It’s such a common practice that a lot of freelancers get 100% of this business by subcontracting behind the scenes for multiple agencies. Make sure to check with your agency regarding who specifically is working on your project.

Pros

1. Dedicated project manager
2. One-stop shopping. Can typically handle all your needs.
3. Feels like partners in your business

Cons

1. Most expensive option
2. Often outsources your project to freelancers anyway

Work with GrayBox

GrayBox takes the best aspects from the freelancer and agency options and mixes them together. You have a dedicated project manager, a team full of experts and a lower cost than a traditional communications agency. We truly think it’s the best of both worlds, and out clients tend to like the savings and level of customer service we can offer as a result of our mixed business model. Contact us and get started.

One important thing to recognize is how much visual clutter/noise in included in these logos. Long gone are the simple logos we see everyday, McDonald’s, FedEx, CitiBank, etc etc. These logos don’t tell a story or sell the brand, they are decorations.

http://www.logolounge.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=782

style=”background-color:#1c0abc;”

or

style=”background-color: rgb(28,10,188);”

with RGBA, you can add a fourth value, the “alpha” transparency of the color. 0.0 is 100% transparent. 1 is fully visible.

Above is five stops, with the A value .2-1.0 in .2 increments.
rgba(28,10,188, 0.2),
rgba(28,10,188, 0.4),
rgba(28,10,188, 0.6),
rgba(28,10,188, 0.8),
rgba(28,10,188, 1.0).

RGBA is better than the CSS opacity element, because individual colors can be transparent without effecting the opacity of the entire element. You can isolate the transparency of the border, background color and text color without effecting the transparency of the other elements.

RGBA is part of the CSS3 standard. Current support in all major browsers but Internet Explorer. A good technique for a IE fallback is to stack color properties, ending in RBGA. Newer browsers will use the last color and IE will ignore the CSS properties it can’t understand.

This technique requires a slight shift in your color coding, but you gain additional flexibility in your designs.

We’re going to look at some common terms so you can understand what is what and start making some meaningful decisions.

Visits
A single session on your site. One visit often contains multiple pageviews. If one visitor (user) comes to your site three times during the day, you’ll have three visits.

Absolute Unique Visitors
One unique, separate visitor to your site. Doesn’t matter how many Visits that visitor has, it’s counted as one unique visitor.

New Visits
A single session on the site by a unique user who has NEVER been to your site before.

Pageviews
Loading of each independent webpage. If a visitor went from your homepage to “About Us” to “Contact Information” that would be three pageviews.

Landing Page
The first page of a visit (session).

Exit Page
The last page of a visit (session).

Bounce Rates
The percentage of single-pageview visits in which the visitor leaves your site after seeing only one page.

Time on Site (or Avg. Time on Site)
The time on site for a specific visit (session).

Direct Traffic
Visitors who arrive on your site by typing in the URL directly “http://www.gograybox.com” in their web browser.

Search Traffic
Visitors who arrive on your site via a search engine. This is both organic (non-paid) and paid search listings (PPC/SEM).

Referring Sites
These visitors arrive on your site by a link from another, non-search engine site. This could be a blog post, news article, directory listing, etc etc.

Conversion Rate
Your percentage of visits who complete a certain, configurable goal. These are often newsletter signups, purchases or comments.

These are the high-level definitions, their is a lot more depth in analytics but these are basics so you can understand what is happening on your site and how your users are getting there.

Get in touch with us to go over your website’s marketing plan. We have many experienced professionals to help your drive your conversion rates and help you achieve your business goals.

Studies consistently show that about 50% of primarily use navigation systems on a site, while the other 50% predominately use site search to get around. If either of these two systems are lacking, you are losing/alienating some of our users.

We’ll look into the usability concerns of site search in a future post — below we’ll explore some common navigation systems.

Sectional Navigation

This type of navigation is becoming really popular. In fact it’s what we’re using for this site. The basic concept is to organize your site into major sections and just link to the home page for each section in the global navigation. Essentially, instead of just the one home page, each section has it’s own internal structure — a collection of individual micro-sites if you will, unified by the global navigation.

This approach is effective when you either want to A. Highlight individual brands, each with their own unique identity (see Gap.com), or B. Keep users focused on dedicated tasks, such as shopping or support (see Apple.com).

We wouldn’t recommend this for sites with a lot of hierarchical complexity, such as an e-commerce site. This style is also typically paired with liberal uses of Left Navigation for navigation within a specific section.

Dropdown Navigation

Declining in popularity in recent years, dropdown navigation allows a user to link to both the section landing pages and the top-level pages within each section. Some sites also have flyouts, allowing for the display of more levels in a less overwhelming way.

Their are some drawbacks. For one, the relatively small dropdown and flyout click areas have proven difficult to hit precisely, increasing user frustration. Likewise, they become illegible when you have a lot of options below each section head — The best approach is four to seven links below each section head.

Used well and in moderation, dropdowns can be effective way to expose multiple levels of site content to a user.

Sitemap Navigation

Sitemap navigation is a great way to expose all or most levels of your site’s structure to your users at all times, increasing time on site and the visibility of the content you’ve worked hard to create.

For eCommerce sites especially, they are a great way of exposing a deep and complex hierarchy of categories and pages (see REI.com). This allows multiple paths for users to find your items. Also, usability is increased as the hit area of each dropdown is quite large, with many individual text links contained within it.

Likewise, Sitemap navigation allows users to link from every page of your site to every other page — reducing number of clicks and promoting exploration.

Left Navigation

Left navigation is very common. It solves some basic problems with traditional (top & wide) navigation and creates some new ones.

Left navigation is a great way to display tier-two & tier-three level pages within a specific section by providing focus and acting like a filter as you drill down through the site (see Amazon.com). Plus, you can easily add/remove items from a left nav as users are more used to vertical scrolling than horizontal.

Left navigation does have it’s problems. For one, it simply lacks the prominence of a top navigation systems. In eye-track studies, users typically scan the top, left-to-right before working down the page. It’s also hard to organize a longer list of links without the use of flyouts so that it remains legible. Left navigation becomes less usable as more links are placed within it.

At GrayBox, we wouldn’t recommend only using left navigation exclusively as your navigation structure for your site. Instead, it works well when paired with some of the other systems described above.

Conclusion

As you build your site, spend some time planning out the content hierarchy are organization systems you will employ. Your site’s navigation is a key component of creating a user-friendly, easy to navigation and clear site to best reach your users.

You would never break ground on a house without a well thought out architectural plan — so too with your site. Invest the time to build a solid foundation, you’ll pay yourself back with more conversions, easy navigation and happier customers.

GrayBox can assist you with Information Architecture and Usability planning — Discuss your site’s navigation with us today.

We at GrayBox are very excited to welcome you to our new site. Here you will find information about GrayBox and see examples of our work. If you are a freelance creative professional, you can also apply to work with GrayBox as a freelance consultant.

We think our new site will help potential clients learn more about our company and get to know us better.

If you have any feedback or comments on the site, please don’t hesitate to contact us or e-mail us.