Working with CMS Systems

CMS is the future If your here, you are likely already familiar with the concept of Content Management Systems (CMS) and what they do. The attraction is simple, the ability to give your marketing folks (yourself in some cases) the ability to directly edit content of your website without any HTML expertise or a concern that they might break the site. I bought into this idea working with the folks at one of the local design firms. A BIG attraction for me is the ability to tweak key SEO elements...
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Starting your SEO Efforts

When optimizing your site for traffic, you will need some means to see where you are, track your progress (or your lack there of), and help identify mistakes. Here are the core elements I recommend: Sign-up for a Google Analytics (GA) account, it's free and it some if the best information you can get about visitor activity and how they got to your pages. If you do PPC marketing on AdWords and don't have Google Analytics installed you can add it under the Analytics tab in AdWords. If you a...
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Bot Herding (aka Page Sculpting)

Bot herding, sometime referred to as "sculpting," is the act of shaping what search engines sees, and therefore what content you are ranked on. The idea behind bot herding is to keep the search engines off the content you didn't want to be known for. One of my clients has a consumer reports aspect to their business and actively blacklists companies who don't provide good customer service. As a service to their customers they listed other services (more…)
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Web Marketing Parallels to Bricks and Mortar

I recently went through a pre-launch design study with a client. The client is launching a new division of an existing company and after hearing me speak at a local business group, wanted to be sure he was starting with the right stuff. First let me say this is a great approach. Its much easier to fix problems on the front end than to try and undo mistakes that have your site identified for the wrong things. However, when you work on an existing design you do have some history of what is work...
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