Businesses often spend lots of money on complex web systems, but are hesitant to invest in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and other web strategies.

For example, starting with a fresh URL often takes quite a bit of time to gain search engine footing.  Another option is to purchase a developed URL that has established traffic in a niche category.  This is akin to buying a client list, through earned goodwill with search engines earned by the prior domain owner.  The results are guaranteed natural traffic, and a head start on any other newly established domains.  For some reason, most business owners resist this strategy, and often opt for "cool sounding" domains with .net or .biz extensions. 

Where does this leave these domains?  With very little traffic, and a domain that has no momentum.  You have to play by the set rules with SEO, and take every opportunity to gain an advantage on your competitor.

Businesses also often resist paying for traffic, or spend $30 on an un-optimised Google Adwords campaign and lose faith.  Would you spend $30 on a print campaign and expect much in return?  Sometimes you have to "pay to play"  which if done thoughtfully, can put you into the game quite rapidly.

Client Highlight - SEO Satisfaction:

When first engaging T3RG motorcycle schools, they had ok traffic at 1,800 unique visitors per month, but they had a bounce rate of 65%, meaning 65% of the 1,800 visitors left within 3 seconds, not satisfied with the first impression.  The old home page had lots of statistics and certifications, but had a cumbersome pathway for users to simply register for a class.

With the help of Digital WorkHorse, the traffic has edged up to 3,000 hits a month and the bounce rate down to 34% within 3 months.  Now, 76% of the traffic is sticking around to see what T3RG.com has to offer.

Search Engine Results:

If you type in "Denver Motorcycle Training", the results are displayed in the diagram on the upper right of this page.  T3RG is the top natural search listing, the top Google Ad placement and the top Google Places placement, with a sponsored map link directly to T3RG.com.  Would you like to be in the same position?

Contact Digital WorkHorse to start your SEO campaign today!

More on SEO:

With your SEO strategies, you need to stay nimble, and spend your time on whatever openings are currently available.

For instance, Google currently ranks videos quite high in its algorithm. You-Tube and Revver videos now show up in Google searches, grouped in blocks, and often in the 2nd or 3rd position. You need fewer back links to compete for the same position that a web link would. The competition for video space is less than the web space, and is easier to penetrate. Google may change this, and it is almost certainly temporary, but it is best to get when the getting is good.  For now, video is king!

Basic Rules of the Road

1. Never "scrape" or copy content, and paste it into your site.  Google will simply go out and see where it comes from, and ding you for your plagiarism.  Study up on your subject, then just write from your heart.  Google loves unique content.
2. It is important to optimize your site, but never do anything to jeopardize ground already gained.  If most of your traffic goes to a particular page, and you change the page link address, a Google cataloged link becomes a broken link, which could haunt you for months to come.  Move your pieces carefully.
3. Back links are always king.  Try to get links to your site from other larger sites with complementary content. 
4. Facebook pages with paid Facebook ads are currently the most direct way to drive traffic

Contact Digital WorkHorse to start your SEO campaign today!

No Follow Links - To Use or not to Use - More SEO tips and tricks:

The rel="nofollow" link attribute is designed to give webmaster granular control over the flow of link equity (PageRank). Links that have the "nofollow" attribute end up passing zero equity, are not followed (crawled) and are dropped off the link graph of the major search engines. Nofollow can be a great way to optimize your webpages to appear more relevant to the engines, and as a result, people.

If you think of each link on a web page as a valve that sends link equity down a pipe then you could shut off some of those valves and send additional equity down the pipes that matter the most. Nofollowing is usually a good method of preventing link equity from propagating to pages that you don't want or need ranking in the serps.
How do I use it?

Simply place the rel="nofollow" attribute into the <a> tag

Without nofollow: <a href="http://www.example.com">my link here</a>

With nofollow: <a href="http://www.example.com" rel="nofollow">my link here</a>
When should I use Nofollow? Examples

* Unimportant pages - One idea would be to nofollow the privacy policy and terms & conditions pages on all pages of your site except the sitemap, then nofollow the sitemap on all pages except the home page - so you'd be saving equity all over the site but still letting the crawlers find your sitemap, from the home page, and all pages it links to.

* Duplicate links - You could make sure you don't pass link equity to the same page twice by placing using nofollow on duplicate links. Note you may not want to always follow this rule if the cost of implementing nofollow attributes on duplicate links is higher than the perceived benefit (for example, I would probably avoid trying to write rules in your CMS that place a nofollow attribute on a link pointing to page "A" within your navigation if a contextual link on that same page is linking to page "A" as well... just too messy) - and be careful because it's easy to shoot yourself in the footer since feedback on nofollow difficult to measure other than ranking changes.

A really conservative and safe approach would be to nofollow duplicated links within the copy of your page, so if you sold legal related services and you linked to your services page more than once within your page copy you might try nofollowing the link that says "services" and keep the "San Diego Family Lawyer" link followed.

* Paid links and ads - Nofollowing paid advertisements is probably a good idea, however I'm sure many will argue against it. Search engines want you to nofollow paid links because they argue paid links unfairly re-route equity and do not represent natural linking, which reduces an engine's ability to serve up relevant organic results. Google for example even have a way for you to report paid links.

* Comment links - it's no secret that nofollow is used to reduce the effect of link equity, PageRank etc. from leaking away to sites that you don't necessarily want your page recommending, especially if you let people post comments freely without moderation.