There are four main sources for website visitors: organic search, paid search, direct, and referral. 

Organic search and paid search is simply traffic that comes from search engines like Google. I’ve discussed them previously in my off-site SEO and digital advertising posts.

Referral traffic sources are links on other sites back to your site.

These can be harder to obtain, but here are some common methods:

• Include social sharing buttons on your site
  
• Guest posts on other websites with a link back to your site
• Website fields on social site profiles like Twitter
  
• Forum posts
• Comments on blogs and other website

Direct traffic is from visitors that find your site directly as follows:

• Directly typing your website into the browser
• Clicking on a link in an email
• Using a site in the browsers bookmark
• Clicking a link embedded in a document, PDF, excel, or other file

To get more direct traffic try these actions:

• Put your website address on your stationery, business cards, etc.
• Include links to your site in the body and signature of your email
  
• Link to your site in email newsletters
• Add buttons to your site so visitors can easily bookmark your content for return views to your site
  

Once you know where the traffic is coming from you can prioritize where you need to put your work in to get the most out of the traffic.

If you want help getting more traffic, contact us or Get Started today! 

The post Where Do My Website Visitors Come From? appeared first on Blue Zoo Creative.

Most of us are busy with other things in our business and personal life. I know it’s been a challenge for me to balance my writing for Blue Zoo, myself and clients!

But remember that blogging is a great way to increase your visibility to people looking for your products and services. Adding valuable, relevant and actionable content to your website consistently will help not only attract an audience, but also those hungry spiders that affect your search ranking. For more on search and SEO, read our blog called Where Does My Traffic Come From?

Here are 8 Tips for Increasing Traffic on New Blogs:

• Write relevant, helpful and actionable content. To make the most impact, this needs to be done regularly, ideally every week. It’s very important to make the content useful and relevant to your target audience.
• Learn to be a better writer. This takes time and practice. You want to tell stories that are personal, helpful and engaging.
• Use great pictures, infographics and illustrations. Most people are very visual. Good images attract a person to read more and/ or engage with the post.
• Learn to use your blogging platform. Most platforms, like WordPress, offer tutorials and support. Even a well written post is enhanced with good formatting, headlines, tags, etc.
• Put your best content on social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Delicious.com, Reditt.com, or Stumbleupon.com.
• Share your blog posts on various social media networks. You want to encourage people to share your content and links.
• Write articles related to your industry and submit them to sites such as GoArticles.com.
• Submit your site to online directories relevant to your industry and niche.
  

OK, now that I’ve overwhelmed you, just go write something. Take one small step at a time. Build on your progress. You’ll get better with time and practice. Find out how Blue Zoo can help you plan, create or edit your content.

Quit Monkeying Around, Join the Zoo and Get Connected!

The post 8 Tips for Increasing Traffic on New Blogs appeared first on Blue Zoo Creative.

The other key factor for SEO is what you can do off your website to get noticed by search engines. 

Currently, the main currency in off-site search  engine optimization is links from other sites to your site. These are known as backlinks. A site with a lot of backlinks will typically rank higher than a site that has fewer links. Convenient places to create backlinks to your site include social media profiles, social bookmarking sites (StumbleUpon, Delicious, Diigo), forum posts, and website comments (where allowed).

However, not all links are the same. The search engines weight the quality of the link as well. A link’s quality is based on whether the site is “respectable” or not. For example,  a link from CNN, an a well known and highly linked site that’s been around years, is seen as a lot more important than a link from a site that was just set up a few months ago.

Anchor text or what text you use within the link is also important. You should put the keywords that you’re trying to optimize for in the underlined text that make up the link. Here is an example of how to use anchor text.

Use “Find out more about my keyword“, not ”click here to learn more about my keyword.”

The first example includes the keyword within the underlined link while the second example hyperlinks unrelated words.

One of the new factors affecting search rankings are social media shares. If a search engine sees links on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, they think that these links are more important than normal and gives them a bump in the rankings.

Make sure that you have social sharing buttons like the ones below on your site to make it easy for visitors to share your content.

If you have questions about SEO or want to increase your search engine traffic, please contact us today.

The post Off-Site Search Engine Optimization-basics appeared first on Blue Zoo Creative.

The way search engines rank your site has changed dramatically over the past few years. If you set your site up more than a couple of years ago with SEO in mind, you might be working with old information and be missing out on valuable opportunities.

There are two things that you have to work on when performing SEO on your site, on-site and off-site optimization. Both of them are very important, but on-site optimization is where you have the most control since you own your site. Here are a few things you need to keep in mind when performing on-site optimization.

If you’re trying to optimize for a specific keyword (ex. baseball hats, exercise equipment, etc.), make sure that you mention that keyword on your site. There are some recommendations about the minimum number of times you have to have the keyword on the site, but for the most part, that’s more trouble than it’s worth. Just make sure that you have the keyword in the body of the text somewhere

Next, make sure that your keyword is in the title (in the browser bar at the top of the page) and header (typically the bolded title above the main text). You also want to make sure that your keywords are in the meta description which is hidden in the HTML code and is sometimes difficult to change. We use WordPress at Blue Zoo Creative which has some great tools for the layman to easily manage these values.

The meta keywords tag used to be a very important tag, but it is no longer used by major search engines. Don’t waste your time by populating this tag.

If you have any questions about SEO, contact us to see how we can help.

The post Search Engine Optimization for Your Website appeared first on Blue Zoo Creative.

The first approach is you use a name that has one of the keywords that you’re targeting. For example, if you sold widgets, you might try to register buywidgets.com, qualitywidgets.com or nwawidgets.com as your domain. Having an exact match of the keyword that you’re trying to rank is one of the factors search engines look for when ranking your site.

Make sure that the content that you have on your site is quality content that relates to your keyword and not simply a particular keyword repeated randomly. Remember that Google is doing its very best to ensure that you are writing for people, not automated search engine bots. Repeating keywords for search only is called keyword stuffing and you will be penalized.

The other approach is to pick something that supports your overall branding. BlueZooCreative.com is an example of this approach. Our domain doesn’t contain any of the keywords that describe our business (web design, SEO, social media, etc.). Instead, we targeted a name that is memorable and relates to our company branding (creativity, zoos and fun). For more on how we picked our domain name and branding, read this.

While doing your domain name research, be careful where you do it. Some services reserve domains that you search for in order to sell later at inflated prices. Our domain tool will make suggestions from a list of keywords and we don’t reserve the domains to later sell you.

Now get started on picking your domain name.

The post How to Pick A Domain Name appeared first on Blue Zoo Creative.

Many people have an aversion to spiders, myself included. Maybe it’s memories, in our ancient lizard brain, of being bitten by poisonous spiders. Interestingly, many native american traditions consider the spider to be a positive sign for creativity and the web of life.

Which brings us to the internet, web, and the amazing amount of information that can be found online. Spiders are software programs that crawl the internet “looking” for content from sites and adding it to index databases.

These spiders are friendly and the key to your web success.

You want to make friends with these spiders, which means learning how to get your content found by the spiders crawling around the internet. Before search engines can tell your customer where to find what they want (your website if you have done well with your SEO), the content must be found and indexed by the spiders.

Spiders crawl from one site to another by links from one page to another. Inbound links from other sites back to your website are very important. They are considered good “food” for the spiders to find and feed. The more times these spiders find inbound links, the more they will visit your site. This is part of what creates a top ranked site that makes it to page one of Google search. Google has an army of friendly spiders looking for “good” content to index on their vast listings.

What constitutes “good” is changing and evolving, but it relates to content that is popular and being searched for by many people.

You can also submit your website URL to search sites like Google, Yahoo, Bing and directories. It’s a good idea to submit  your site to human edited directories like Yahoo. This also helps make your site more visible to the search engines.

The practice of search engine optimization, SEO, is critical to your business success. There are many great resources on the web to learn about SEO. Good website design includes design features, structure, programming and links to optimize your site for the search engines. Blue Zoo does this automatically with every website that we design. We can also provide your business with advanced research, SEO and link building for your website.

SEO is a complex and constantly evolving field, like the recent Panda and Penguin updates from Google.

Thankfully, we have an in-house expert, Collin Condray, who keeps us current. SEO is critical to your website and business success. If you don’t have the time, then it is important to hire a person or company who is keeping up with the changes in search. Google search is evolving to include more weight from social media and quality content on websites, like on a company blog.

Your website and blog need to include content and keywords relevant to your business niche. You can research the top keywords for your product or services. Then these words need to be included in your website and blog content. This is the reason more businesses are turning to blogs as a way to provide quality content to both their prospective customers and the search engines. They target their customers with content that address the top problems, solutions and words that people are searching for in their niche.

Like any skill, it takes time and effort to develop your SEO. If you would like to learn more about creating sexy content, read this blog.

Or contact team Blue Zoo, to talk about how we can help your business with SEO.

The post Friendly Spiders? appeared first on Blue Zoo Creative.

Here is my list of 10 website problems and how to fix them.

1. No website. Surprisingly, nearly 50% of small businesses still don’t have a website. In today’s fast paced digital world, most businesses need a website to be competitive and to be taken seriously in the marketplace. This is your chance to tell the story of your business in an engaging and visual way. Quit Monkeying Around! Get Online Today.™ Enough said. Now go get started, and please consider Blue Zoo Creative.
2. Hard to find contact info. This is critical. You want to make it easy for your prospective clients to find you and interact with you. And don’t use forms that require people to fill them out just to contact you. Give them your email, phone, or preferred contact.
3. Hard to navigate. Again, you want to make your website very easy to use. You want a nice flow to the various pages and content on your site. Give people a good overview of what your business is about and have simple, easy to follow links between various content.
4. Poor design. Your website might be too plain, too cluttered, or just plain too much.  Web designers may want to create a gorgeous, high graphic, and high sizzle type site, but the  truth is this approach can be as bad as a design that is too basic or cluttered. Good design conveys your message in an visually stimulating and easy to understand way, using enough design elements to capture attention and encourage action.
5. No call to action. You want to encourage visitors to your site to take some kind of action. Sign up for your newsletter. “Like” you on Facebook. Join your fan club. Leave comments. You get the idea. Ideally, you will collect an email to start building a list to communicate with prospective clients.
6. Slow to load website. This can really turn off a first time visitor to your site. Everyone is busy these days and we want things quick. While in life, I recommend slowing down, in web design, I recommend speeding up! Make sure you aren’t trying to put too much on your landing page.
7. Not connected to social media. Really? Your site needs to be connected to social media. Social media is becoming the preferred way of communicating for many people, not to mention being a key part in Search Engine Ranking. If you want to attract and communicate with new customers, you need to outreach on at least some social media channels. Choosing the appropriate channel for you and your target audience is key. Different channels work better for different content, products, services, and personalities. This is where a social media specialist can help. Yes, we offer social media services tailored to your needs.
8. Not optimized for SEO. This is a complicated topic that takes time and effort to do right. You can have the best website in the world, but if it’s not optimized for search, it can be hard for people to find you. Here is a link to some basic SEO tips. A good web designer will use SEO techniques in your web design.
9. No examples of your work. This is your chance to show off your product and services. Make it visual. People love pictures and videos. Visual images are the perfect way to capture our attention and inspire us to action. Use top quality images that convey your product, service or story.
10. Death of a salesman. Did I get your attention? Your website can act like a salesperson for you and your business, 24 hours everyday with no coffee breaks! Story is one of the best ways to capture attention and engage your audience. Here are some tips from Social Media Today on how TED uses story.

Hopefully you found at least one idea to help  improve your website. If so, please consider implementing it today or as soon as you can get help. Your dreams often start with a single step.

What is your biggest website problem? Let us know. Maybe we can help.

Brad- chief marketing guy.

The post 10 Website Problems and How to Fix Them appeared first on Blue Zoo Creative.

I’ve also got some video to go with this presentation so stay tuned for that.

Thanks to the Arkansas Small Business Technology and Development Center at the U of A and thanks to the attendees, you were great!

The post SEO Basics Seminar Deck appeared first on Blue Zoo Creative.

The talks will be held at the Iceberg in Fayetteville from 8 AM to 10 AM on June 22 at the Iceberg in Fayetteville. To sign up, please visit the ASBTDC website.

The post Blue Zoo Creative Presents Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Seminar appeared first on Blue Zoo Creative.

Here is the video of the event:

And here is the PowerPoint presentation that’s in the background:

The post A Brief Overview of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) appeared first on Blue Zoo Creative.