The point of SEO since “day one” is to increase sales by obtaining qualified business leads from Internet search engines. Achieving this goal is possible with almost any business of any size. And, while SEO is a complex, evolving issue and requires tons and tons of work, every business Owner, President, CEO or CMO must recognize that without an organized SEO campaign in place, you will fade off the map, lose sales to competitors and bleed the value of your brand over time. You will spend tons of money on traditional media buys and find it ever so difficult to track and tie sales to those sources. To ignore SEO in its traditional and new evolving forms is to deny your company and its employees the opportunity to succeed online in the long-term.

So what are some of the basic reasons for which business owners and senior managers should take a closer look at SEO?

Obtain Increased and Higher Quality Sales just as you begin to optimize your website, long tail search volumes will improve. Over the long term, with a lot of hard work, you can achieve significant positions on the major search engines leading to positive, bottom line results:
• Your website will perform better and receive more traffic shortly after you begin to implement standard optimization tactics. This is not to say that if you sell mortgages (a competitive area), you can optimize for “mortgages” and on day #2 of your work going live on your site, you’ll have more traffic. BUT, if you begin to work on your niche and provide more and more relevant information to your users and to the search engines in a clear, concise manner, you’ll grow your traffic from the outset of your program.

• A lot of businesses are locally based and rely on foot traffic for customers to be within a short drive of their office or retail location. Search engines offer a plethora of local search features, and strategies for local search abound. If you leverage these local search tools and local search strategies properly, you are sure to increase your sales.

Increased Search Engine Visibility  Spread your wings!

• With a solid SEO program in place, you will cater to all major crawler-based search engines. So, not only will you receive exposure on Google (at some point) but also on Yahoo and MSN and several other outlets. Once you optimize your site for organic search, the 3 major engines will pick up your site and run with it over time.
• As opposed to Push marketing SEO is “PULL Marketing” The quality of a lead that find you through search is very high.

When someone searches your keywords and finds you, there is a darn good chance that they are going to be a solid new business lead. When a searcher finds you, they have INTENT. They pulled themselves right to you for a reason; they are looking for what you have. This is just the opposite of PUSH marketing “ direct mail, outdoor advertising, TV, radio and other media mediums.
Brand Recognition “ small businesses may not have large budgets for major branding. However, strong niche oriented organic search results can lead to your brand being associated with that niche over time. Your brand awareness and brand recall strength will increase as time goes on.

• Your company’s name becomes associated with specific keywords that are embedded in a customer’s mind.
• Control the terms that you associate with your products, services and brands.
• Impression on customers over your competitors control your messaging with your landing pages.
• The impression that you make on search results in crucial. To correlate this to a more human level let me ask this: If you went to a business networking event (Search Engine) where you might see a prospective client (Searcher), would you arrive at the event in tattered clothing, hide under a table or hang out in the bathroom for the entire event? Probably not. I’d suggest you’d opt for the former and likely network, move around the room, show your face and be found. This is the same as a search engine.

Why hide?

Why show up to a business event in dirty tattered clothing?

If you poked your head out for the one good lead at the event, would you shake that person’s hand take their business card and hand them a Post it Note with your company’s name and your contact information scribbled on it? Probably not. This is the same thing as ignoring what is returned in search queries about your products and services. That is, poor page descriptions and poor landing pages make a really bad first impression “ don’t let this happen to you! Many companies have neglected page links that are in search results which do not make for a strong impression on their prospects.

Have you ever searched and get results and click through and you suddenly waiting for a .pdf to download?

As a business owner, you must begin to recognize that this is no longer good enough. You get one chance to make a first impression, so don’t hand someone a Post-It with your name scribbled on it. Make a clear, positive impression. Proper optimization can help you with this.
Enhanced Credibility and Legitimacy “ Has anyone ever said to you: “I searched your company’s name, but I could not find you.”

Have you ever searched for a company by their name (no matter how unique) and you cannot find them?

Is that frustrating?

Does that make you think less of that company?

For me, it does. Some points to remember are:

• Search Engine’s organic / natural results are viewed as authority referrals.
• Google Trust Factor: Some studies suggest that a referral from a friend exponentially increases the probability of closing a sale. Think of leads that come through search as referrals from trusted a friend. Think: “Google is my friend; Google is my brother referring his friends to me!” People trust search engines, especially Google’s authority. Take advantage of the trust factor to build your sales and qualified business leads. Google is viewed as everyone’s trusted friend who makes a referral “ what Google says goes. Please don’t deny this fact.
• Each day, journalists go online and search for experts in subjects that they are covering.

Can’t afford a high end PR agency?

Optimize your site for your niche and be found for interviews in your subject, product and / or service area. Show the world you’re an expert and they’ll come to you for commentary.
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IE 9, released in March, has actually been doing well, thanks to strong demand for Windows 7. In one month, its usage share among Windows 7 users has doubled, from 3.6% in March to 7.5% in April, or 9.95% on the last day of April, as opposed to averaged across the month.

Learn the security essentials of mobility

Business-Ready Mobile Infrastructure About a week ago, Microsoft said it had sold 350 million Windows 7 licenses in 18 months.

Yet the popularity of Windows 7 hasn’t proven to be enough to keep users of older versions of Internet Explorer from defecting to the competition. Internet Explorer 8, 7, and 6 all saw usage declines from March to April.

Overall usage of Firefox declined too, from 21.8% in March to 21.63% in April, despite the March launch of Firefox 4.

Who has been gaining at the expense of Microsoft and Mozilla? Google and Apple, NetApplications said. Google’s Chrome browser, the heart of its forthcoming Chrome operating system, saw its global usage share rise from 11.57% in March to 11.94% in April.

Apple’s Safari browser jumped from 6.61% in March to 7.15% in April. Apple saw usage gains for Safari in both its Mac OS and iOS product lines, but iOS usage of mobile Safari grew more than twice as fast as Mac OS usage of the desktop version of Safari. iOS usage increased by 0.37 percentage points while Mac OS increased by 0.15 percentage points.

Microsoft isn’t giving up, however. Two weeks ago, the company posted a preview of Internet Explorer 10.

The name of the game is to make users less frustrated. They’re lost and they need some help. First thing you should offer them is a link to your sitemap and your homepage. These will offer a quick way to get back in the game. Alternatively you can put a search bar in your 404 page. This gives a familiar way for your users to find what they are looking for. There are mixed feelings about putting a contact form on your 404 page. The idea is that users can tell you that your page is missing. Ideally though, you should be actively checking that you aren’t missing any pages. Google webmaster tools can help you with this. Here is an example of a 404 page. Granted there are much better 404 pages out there, this is just a sample of the basic tools that you should have.

Create Your 404 Page

You’ll need to create a HTML page. Try to keep it very simple for the user. They’re lost so you have to create a clear path for them to follow. You’ll find a lot of humourous 404 pages to help keep the users entertained. Although this is nice, make sure you have a way for users to get back to your site. Also remember to keep your page above 512 bytes. Earlier IE browsers don’t handle small 404 pages well. Throw in an image and it should solve this problem.

Also, it is probably a good idea to put a robots meta tag telling search engines not to crawl your 404 page.

Example:

1

Put the 404 Page on Your Site
After you have your HTML page created, dump it onto your server and take note of where it is. You’ll have to reference it later when setting up the server.

Setting Up the Server for Your 404 page

A lot of web hosts and CMSs allow you to setup your custom 404 page right from within the control panel. This should be the first thing you check as it gives you a nice interface to work with. The alternative isn’t complicated, but why trouble yourself if you don’t have to.

You’ll need to know what kind of server you are on if you don’t plan on using the control panel. If you are on an Apache server you can create a file by the name of .htaccess .

Within this file you just have to put the line:

1 ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

Replace 404.html with the path to your 404 page. This will tell the server where to look if it encounters the error 404 (page not found).

If you have an iis server (windows) than it’s a little more complicated. You’ll have to open your internet service manager, select the properties of your web server, then head to the custom errors tab. You’ll find all of the error codes there, just select 404 and replace the page with the one that you created. For a more in depth look at this you can visit this tutorial on how to create a custom 404 page in iis.

1) Create a video
2) Host the video on YouTube
3) Add link to description of the video
4) Build links to the video for ranking
5) Traffic goes to the video, and HOPE the traffic will arrive at your site

What is the problem here? When your video got ranked on Google and people click on it, it brings them to YouTube, not your site. You are actually building traffic for YouTube instead of building traffic directly to their site!

You can actually get a VIDEO ranked on First Page that goes directly to your site, and NOT YouTube.
The video that you create, should direct traffic to YOUR site and boost its rankings.

Here’s a BETTER way:

1) Create a video
2) Host it on YouTube
3) EMBED the video on your site
4) Create a video sitemap for your site and submit it to Google Webmasters Tools
5) Build links to your video page (your site) instead of to YouTube

Like the following image:(disclaimer: for example purpose only. This is not my site. It has a good video sitemap)
Bingo, now whenever a visitor click on the video on Google, it will go straight to your site.

The trick here is to use Google Video Sitemap (if you have not already!)

● Pages filled with images, videos and rich AJAX benefit a ton from sitemaps as it makes the job of Googlebots easier to crawl!
● Sites with dynamic content also benefit from the structure of a sitemap.
● If your site has a HUGE archive of content pages with videos and you couldn’t be bothered to link them all or to link them well, then the solution for you is a sitemap! Fast and simple!
● Your site is brand new and therefore, does not have a lot of links to it. A sitemap makes your site easier to crawl for the Googlebots.
● In short, Google loves sitemaps and will reward you handsomely for it!

“Google doesn’t guarantee that we’ll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site’s structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.”

Straight from Google!

As with all things, if you want maximum optimization and exposure for your videos, you will have to plan out a sitemap so that Google’s job of crawling and indexing your videos becomes a lot easier and hence, your videos will get ranked better as a result.

I’m going to list the important guidelines for creating sitemaps for your videos, so that your video site-mapping becomes an easy and enjoyable experience:

● First and foremost, the types of video formats that work:
○ .mpg
○ .mpeg
○ .mp4
○ .m4v
○ .mov
○ .wmv
○ .asf
○ .avi
○ .ra
○ .ram
○ .rm
○ .flv
○ .swf

● Make sure that each of your URLs contain the following:
○ Title
○ Description
○ Play page URL
○ Thumbnail URL
○ Raw video file location and/or the player URL (SWF)

● What does Google consider as a video content page? Remember that your site must have either an embedded video, a video player (which Google assumes that if you have a player, then it’s only natural that there are videos for playing), or the addresses of raw video content that is hosted on your site. Note that if Google can’t find any videos on any of the addresses that you provide, then these URLs will be ignored.
● The limit to the number of entries per sitemap is 50,000 videos. Any more than that and you will have to make more than one sitemap or create a sitemap index file.
● The uncompressed limit for each sitemap is 10MB. Sounds very little but it is sufficient!
● The robots.txt file should not be blocking any of the items that are in in each sitemap entry, especially all of the URLs there.

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Chicago Seo

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit ‘enter’ you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query. SEO thus helps you get traffic from search engines.

This SEO tutorial covers all the necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization – what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines.

1. How Search Engines Work

The first basic truth you need to know to learn SEO is that search engines are not humans. While this might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines view web pages aren’t. Unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. Although technology advances rapidly, search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in movies. Instead, search engines crawl the Web, looking at particular site items (mainly text) to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

What you can do is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these on your site, you’d better run the Spider Simulator below to see if these goodies are viewable by the spider. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. – in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you’d like to be at the top.

The last step in search engines’ activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

2. Differences Between the Major Search Engines

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. For different search engines different factors are important. There were times, when SEO experts joked that the algorithms of Bing are intentionally made just the opposite of those of Google. While this might have a grain of truth, it is a matter a fact that the major search engines like different stuff and if you plan to conquer more than one of them, you need to optimize carefully.

There are many examples of the differences between search engines. For instance, for Yahoo! and Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are very, very important. Also, for Google sites are like wine – the older, the better, while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.

Our unique online graphic design service has been created to offer exceptional design and printing services without the need for time consuming meetings. The design brief and drafting process can be completed quickly and effectively without you having to leave your desk.

On receipt of your order, we will send you a brief questionnaire that helps us to understand your business and current promotional aims. This can be sent back via email or discussed in more detail over the phone.

Next your brief is developed by our graphic design team, who research your business area and apply their knowledge and experience to create a professionally designed draft. This is sent through by email for your review and feedback.

The design development process is then carried out with your designated account manager. Following discussion, any changes you request will be incorporated into a revised draft, which is emailed across for approval. The number of revisions included in the price varies between products, so please check individual product sheets for full information. Additional drafts to this, if required, can be produced for a small additional cost.

The result is a fast, straightforward and affordable solution for all of your business graphic design needs.

Logo Design

Chicago Web Programmers offer a fixed price logo-design service, with three great packages. Whether you want to freshen up an existing logo or are starting from scratch, our professional logo designers create strong and distinctive logos that will get your business noticed and ensure it stands out from the competition.

Business Stationery Design

Our business stationery is custom designed to create just the right impression with your clients and contacts and portray a professional company image. We offer packages for standard business cards, shaped business cards, folded business cards, compliment slips and letterheads.

Flyer & Leaflet Design

Our talented graphic designers will turn your marketing messages and promotions into cost effective flyers and leaflets. We can also, if required, provide expert copywriting services to persuade, inform and inspire.

Brochure Design

Our range of business brochures includes letter & A4 portrait and landscape, square and custom size brochures. We will combine the right format, with bespoke graphic design to both attract attention and stimulate enquirers.

I was very impressed with the service received when creating my new business logo and stationery. The initial ideas presented by Chicago Web Programmers were all very varied and perfect for the caring nature of my therapy work. They really seemed to understand where I was coming from and it only took minor tweaks to my chosen logo to complete the design process. I was also pleased to receive my business cards and printed paper within about a week of placing the order.

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We utilize bug tracking systems to guarantee your system works without fault. We also offer post project support and website maintenance services. Our custom programming services cover the full life cycle of an application – we analyze your requirements and deliver practical recommendations coupled with efficient project implementation.

With over 10 years of experience building large scale PHP, Java, Perl, JavaScript applications, the Chicago Web Programmers team can produce any application required.

Our goal is to provide software solutions to help your business grow and strengthen. Using PHP, Java, Perl, JavaScript as a platform to deliver these software solutions, we can ensure rapid application development of custom applications, and project completion within strict deadlines and tight budgets.

The open source nature of PHP and its close integration with other open source software such as Apache, Mysql and various Linux distributions makes it the perfect language for building custom applications.

Chicago Web Programmers specialists in developing complex, high-traffic websites – using PHP and Ruby. Our team of PHP experts know perfectly well that when a project is delivered, it has merely reached the first stage of its long life. Ongoing maintenance of a complex application costs a business much more than its initial development – which is why at Chicago Web Programmers we take pride in delivering applications which adhere to industry best practices and strict coding standards. Our vision of forming long-lasting relationships with our clients, means we focus on providing the absolute best PHP development services.

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Whilst Google is the main search engine player, it is worth remembering that Yahoo and Bing are also major search engines and can assist in driving more traffic to your website. At Chicago Web Programmers we endeavor to rank your website pages highly in all three major search engine providers.

Our business is to improve your search engine position, dramatically increase your traffic & maximize your sales.

Our methods are direct and accountable, two vital ingredients for successful search engine marketing. Happy customers is the reason we are the fastest growing London SEO/Chicago SEM company and have clients ranging from small businesses to blue chip corporations in and around the Chicago area.

Because of our approach to SEO, we know that a top page ranking for your business is just around the corner.

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At Chicago Web Programmers, we believe that strategic web design is a key component of any internet marketing strategy. 90% of people will visit a Chicago company’s website before calling it. If they don’t find what they are looking for, 80% leave and go somewhere else for the information. We can build you an internet site that takes into account the goal of your Chicago internet marketing, your page elements, your target audience, colors and graphics as well as the content on your site.

After we build a site plan that you’ve agreed on, we will then create a concept draft of the site for you to review. We take into account any guidelines and information you have supplied and build the draft the way the actual site will look. We don’t build the final site until you are happy with the draft.

Once your site is built, it is time for Chicago Web Programmers to promote it. Studies show that search engines are the first place people go when they are looking for London products or services online. Through search engine marketing and optimization, we can attract the highest volume of visitors to your site. Avoid missing out on potential sales; contact us now to learn more.

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