The New Look Google

Now that the masses have access to Google's newly redesigned results pages, it's time to consider this in an SEO light if you have not already been considering it.

How do Google's New SERPs Affect SEO?
Google has had its search options available for about a year, but they have not been in the face of the user like the newly redesigned SERP is. With this new design, users don't have any choice but to notice the options that are available. It's not too different from Bing or Yahoo in that respect (Danny Sullivan notes that Ask pioneered this design). The difference is that way more people search with Google on a regular basis (in fact, last month Google reportedly dominated the search market by even more than usual).

SEO Strategies and Increased Engagement from Searchers
The new SERPs may shake up SEO efforts, simply because users will start going to the different options Google provides them, taking them to different sets of results. Now that the options are in the limelight, users are more likely to use them.

Yahoo tells us when they added features to their left-hand navigation bar, engagement increased. "We've been steadily adding more filtering options and relevant search suggestions to our left-hand navigation bar...and have seen engagement and click-throughs for those features double over the past seven months." I can't imagine why Google wouldn't also see an engagement increase for certain features that are now more visible.

It's going to come down to evaluating the different options for any given query that you wish to rank for, and focusing efforts upon those. Make sure your site is SEO compatible contact Scream Media today for a free no obligation SEO health check for your website.

Starting an Online Business

If you are thinking about starting an online business the first step you should take is to find a niche product or service. A niche is a product or service that serves a highly targeted audience with specific needs. Why is this important? Because with all of the different businesses establishing a presence online it is important to choose something that caters to an underserved audience with a demand for a specific product or service.

Many people who are new to online business make the mistake of choosing a product or service that is currently considered “hot” without thinking about the high rate of competition and the fact that the market may already be saturated. In addition to that, you can end up paying a fortune in advertising with nothing to show for it in the end.

If you choose a niche that serves a highly targeted audience with specific needs you will stand a much better chance of succeeding with your online business. Here are a few tips on choosing a niche that will help to improve your chances of success.

What Are You Passionate About?

Sit down and make a list of things you are passionate and knowledgeable about. The list should include interests, hobbies, professional skills, and any other topics that you would be happy working with on a daily basis. At first, you may find this a challenge if you have been caught up in the 9 to 5 grind and forgotten what you are passionate about. Be patient and enlist the help of some friends if you wish.

It is important that you are passionate about what you do because this will show through when you build a client base. If you are enthusiastic about what you do this will reflect on others and they will return to do business with you time and again. Additionally, if you enjoy what you do it will never feel like work.

Research Your Market

Once you have decided on a topic the next step is to start researching the topic on the Internet. You can begin to find your audience and where your position will be in your market by participating in forums related to your topic, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and any other sites where you can find people discussing your topic.

As you visit these sites listen carefully and take some notes on what people are discussing. This will help you to discover exactly what they are looking for when it comes to your product or service. Listening to the needs of your audience will help you to determine a niche for your online business.

For example, if your topic of interest is landscaping it is important to find out what people are looking for with regard to landscaping. Landscaping is very broad topic with a lot of competition. What about landscaping? What are people specifically looking for? Are they looking for landscaping professionals? Are they looking for landscaping tools? Perhaps they are looking for tips on how to do landscaping.

The key here is to drill down into the term “landscaping” and find a specific niche related to this topic the serves a highly targeted audience with specific needs. Landscaping plans for small backyards would be an example of a niche that serves a specific audience.

Keywords

Once you find your audience and what they are looking for the keywords you choose will help your targeted audience to find you online. Once you get to know your audience you can brainstorm keywords they might use to search for your product or service. You can use one of the many keyword tools that are available online for accomplishing this task. Google has a fantastic free keyword suggestion tool

Just like you had to drill down to find a niche you must find keywords that relate to the niche. Let’s go back to the landscaping example. If you simply choose the keyword “landscaping” you may get a lot of visitors to your website but they will be untargeted. If you are selling landscaping plans and they are looking for tools they will leave your site. If you choose the keywords “landscaping plans for small backyards” you know exactly what the people are searching for and it makes it easy to deliver the solution when they arrive at your website.

Take the time in the beginning to choose your niche and get to know your market and what they are looking for. The time you invest will help you to build a solid foundation for building a business that will last over the long term.

Our marketing team has over 25 years experience in both on and off line marketing. For a professional analysis of your online business plan, contact us today to set up a no obligation meeting.

Website Design

Design is not a magic pill

If you don’t have a basic marketing plan in place, design can’t cover that up.

The first question we ask our clients  when we talk about a new project is, “Who are you trying to reach?” It’s shocking how many businesses have put hours of thought into their design without ever considering the most basic of all marketing questions: “Who am I selling to?”

If you’re not clear on who you want to appeal to, the most gorgeous website design in the world won’t help you make sales.

Figure out who you want to reach first, and focus on design after you’ve made that decision. You’ll find your design works a lot better when every color choice and pretty picture is especially made to appeal to the people you want to draw to your business.

Design is NOT your message

Before you add design into your marketing mix, you have to know what you want to say.

 That’s why it’s strange that there are people out there who think they can rely on their design alone to communicate their message.

Think about it this way: you have a beautiful website. It may stop people in their tracks long enough to want to learn more. That’s great, but if they read on only to discover that you have unfocused or boring content, you will lose them.

Good design may get customers in your door, but great content keeps them from walking right back out again.

When you implement both good design and solid, valuable content, you’ll double the power of either of these elements alone. Don’t rely on design alone to communicate your message.

Design is not about you

Don’t make design decisions based on personal likes or dislikes. Make them based on what appeals to your target market, and the colors and forms that will best communicate your message.

If your target market thinks yellow is an appealing, fresh, happy color that endears them to your services, then it doesn’t matter that yellow is your least favorite color.

When you let your site or materials reflect only your personal tastes, you’re risking your design not resonating at all with the people you want to bring to your business.

Check your ego at the door and think about who you want to sell to. For great prices on website design contact Scream Media today!

Website Mareketing Challenges for 2010

Following is the list of pointers to get your website on top, reach out to potential customers and ensure brand visibility in 2010. Need help with implementing any of these actions, contact Scream Media Today

1. Decrease Webpage Load Time. Google’s Matt Cutts recently hinted that the load time of a website may affect its ranking in the search engines. That is, the faster a website loads, the better its chances to rank well for its niche keywords. Website load time is touted as the next big step towards improved rankings. The pre-requisites to a good webpage load time are; reputable web host and fast internet connection.
2. Get Listed in Google Local Search. Getting listed in Google Local Search ensures brand visibility in front of visitors from the nearby places. It has been proven that the number of visitors to a website increase exponentially when listed in local search results. The reason being, a customer will always prefer to purchase a quality product which is easily available in his or her vicinity rather than order it from another unfamiliar city or state.
3. Get Involved in Social Media. Social Media is the flavor of the season and in 2010 organizations are going to actively engage in conversation and social networking and reach out to their potential customers. Social Media Marketing is a must for every organization as it helps create brand awareness and build relationships with consumers in the highly competitive market. Micro targeting and Personalization will be the keywords in 2010.
4. Optimize Your Website Mobile Users. With and ever increasing number of people tweeting and using Facebook from their mobile devices, a lot of organizations are now finally paying attention to how their websites appear on mobile phones. You can have your website appear on the mobile under the same URL or have a special domain for the same. The most common way is to have the domain name as mobile.websitename.com.
5. Apply Web Analytics to its full potential. There are hundreds of web analytics tools in the market which provide a mountain of data pertaining to the visitor’s usage. Some of the most well known web analytics tools are Omniture, Google Analytics and Yahoo! Web Analytics etc. Web Analytics tools can answer the “how” but not the “why”. That is, you can find out how many visitors checked the product catalogue webpage, but not the answer to, why the visitors didn’t place an order for the product. Organizations need to dissect the data from web analytics tools and successfully apply its learning’s to enhance their visitors experience and in turn increase sales revenues.

In 2010 companies must go beyond organic search engine optimization by integrating social media marketing and optimizing their websites for mobile users.

What does Google say about content? Matt Cutts comments

Two important points I get from this video: A. Google's really trying to drive the point home that they work on their algorithm every day and most likely mostly in regards to spam catching (and speed) and B. Get your good content out there...social media.

This informative article  by Barry Schwartz entitled Google Makes One Change Per Day To Search Algorithm, posts a video by Matt Cutts where he is asked the question "how many changes did Google make to their primary search algorithm in 2009"?

Matt clearly states that Google tends to roll out 350 to 400 [changes] per year or "about one thing per day"...

He says the changes could be in how they segment a language, relate better synonyms or web spam improvements.

Take notice of the web spam improvement. - "significant but not always noticed outside of Google"...

He's also asked about content and whether content is still king and he answers "I think content is necessary, it's not always sufficient because people have to find out about your content. You have to find some way of marketing to people...or find some hook or some appealing way to get people to want to find out what information you have......but if you don't have good content it's a lot harder to do good search engine optimization for your site. I would start with that and once you have good content think about how to find out where the rest of the world is so you can tell them, hey this is the great content that I have".

OK so content isn't king anymore unless it has links to it which is basically what good content should give you in the end if people link to you.

Either way, over 300 algorithm changes a year and get your good content out there. I guess he's talking about social media. Agree?

Dont get left behind, Check out what Scream Media can offer you regarding Social Media Marketing and SEO today!

Call us now on 021 559 0800 to speak with  one of our marketing team. 


Click here to see the video

What makes a successful Website?

A successful website meets clearly identified goals and provides compelling content that draws your audience to your site again and again. In addition it is easy to navigate and last to is attractively designed to complement the content.

When a visitor comes to your website they are making a lot of decisions very quickly. First they are trying to decide whether this website looks legitimate. Secondly, they are looking to see whether you actually do provide the product/ service that they were looking for. How long do they take to decide? Seconds. The appearance of the website is probably going to be the main key to decide whether your target audience hit the back arrow or proceed along the website. Just think of how many times you didn't go into a shop, because of its appearance from the outside.
Basically, users’ habits on the Web aren’t that different from customers’ habits in a store. Visitors glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. In fact, there are large parts of the page they don’t even look at.
Most users search for something interesting (or useful) and clickable; as soon as some promising candidates are found, users click. If the new page doesn’t meet users’ expectations, the Back button is clicked and the search process is continued. 
Users appreciate quality and credibility. If a page provides users with high-quality content, they are willing to compromise the content with advertisements and the design of the site. This is the reason why not-that-well-designed web-sites with high-quality content gain a lot of traffic over years. Content is more important than the design which supports it. 
Users don’t read, they scan. Analyzing a web-page, users search for some fixed points or anchors which would guide them through the content of the page.
Have you ever been to a beautiful looking website from a large corporation or organization only to leave in frustration because you could not find what you are looking for ?

Your website should be easy to navigate. You should assume that your audience may not enter the site from the home page. This means that there should be no dead ends. Every page should have consistent easy to understand links back to other pages.

The easiest way to create an easy to navigate site is to take the time to plan the structure of your site before you start building it. This simply means you decide roughly what pages your site will have and how they will link together. Once you do this you can easily create a set of links between your various pages which makes everything easy to find. This is also called a sitemap.

 

Is your Business Losing Out?

With Internet growth in South Africa at a all time high and the introduction of Paypal, the best thing you can do for your business nowadays is get online. So many consumers and so much of the market is based on the internet nowadays, that it is almost financial suicide not to get involved in the online sensation. Scream Media offers highly competitive prices, as well as a very professional, proven product.

Scream Media not only offers a team of skilled designers and programmers to help design and build your site, we also offer services including webhosting, SEO, PPC, social network marketing and internet strategy.
Creating a website is like nurturing a plant, where the process begins with choosing the right sapling or seed and ends with sowing the proverbial fruit of your labor. Likewise, website designing also requires your utmost attention and step-by-step execution of strategies in order to thrive in the long run. Without a doubt, website designs do play the role in creating that preferred reaction to your business. It is about the overall outlook of a website, where packaging does play the role. After all, first impression can yield better results by convincing the visitors to stick to a page for sometime. Usually, visitors do jump from one page to another, as nobody has much free time these days. In the event that your design does attracts the visitors, there is a high probability that they would like to check out more of your pages. A rule of thumb is 3 clicks to find what you want.

On the other hand, a webpage design says a lot about your business. In case you do not have the budget or skills to create a background based upon coding, you can streamline things by designing the perfect theme. These days, themes have become one of the most useful tools in retaining the visitors, as people remember these websites and like to return to them. Themes work well, when you need to convey your message without too much effort. For example, Scream is in the process of redesigning our own website, following on from the modern art theme we currently have on H2L

It is not difficult to get the right theme for your website. You can consult experienced corporate website design professionals, who can help you out in getting the right theme. A well designed theme should communicate your message effectively.