It has been a week and a half since we launched http://www.angelsgeek.org and already our SEO efforts are paying off. I have outlined a general time line below and as new SEO movements are made, we will update this post to include our new results.
We have posted this entry in an effort to allow you to see how we handle SEO as an SEO company by using our website to experiment with new tactics.

• October 20, 2008
• Our new site launches on our new domain.
• October 22, 2008
• Google crawls our site for the first time.
• October 25, 2008
• Internet Archiver crawls our site for the first time, deep crawl.
• October 28, 2008
• Snap Preview profiles our site for image indexation
• October 29, 2008
• Our site obtains an Alexa rating, 7,438,008
• October 30, 2008
• Google performs a deep crawl of our site for the first time
• XML sitemap generation is complete and submitted
• October 31, 2008
• Yanga World Search Bot discovers our new site, performs a deep crawl.
• November 1, 2008
• Yahoo has discovered 2 links pointing back to our site.
• Our Alexa rating has dropped to 4,334,936 which is a good improvement since we first gained a rating.
• November 2, 2008
• Yahoo has crawled our site for the first time.
• November 3, 2008
• Google has included our site in the index results, currently 3 pages indexed.
• November 4, 2008
• Aboutus.org has crawled our site for a directory listing
• November 5, 2008
• Our Alexa rating has dropped again to 3,092,170
• Google has included our site in the index results, currently 12 pages indexed.
• November 10, 2008
• Our Alexa rating has dropped again to 2,394,567
• Google has included our site in the index results, currently 31 pages indexed.
• November 13, 2008
• Our Alexa rating has dropped again to 2,067,563
• Cuil has discovered our website and has started indexing the domain
• November 17, 2008
• Our Alexa rating has dropped again to 1,845,256
• Exabot has discovered our website and has started indexing the domain
• November 19, 2008
• Our Alexa rating has dropped again to 1,669,310
• Our tracking system has been moved to a new platform and we receive up-to-the minute responses
• November 23, 2008
• Our Alexa rating has dropped again to 1,502,347
• Exabot has started indexing our website.
• December 1, 2008
• Our Alexa rating has dropped again to 1,149,607
• Our initial HubSpot Website Grader grade is 70, starting off with a C rank, that’s not to bad!

With the talk of recession in today’s news, many small businesses are looking to cut costs where ever they can to help save in the costs of operation. Marketing is usually one of the first areas people look to cut in order to save money, however have a low budget for marketing can be all the difference in keeping your company a float.
Spending massive amounts of money in a paid advertising campaign can be wasted money during this time, but investing that money with a marketing firm that will represent you in the best way is a good alternative.
Today’s solid marketing campaigns will help you focus on what is really important in marketing, your future customers. Marketing will reach a large audience, but only a portion of this audience will actually be interested in what you are offering. Once these people start to contact you, that is truly where the marketing begins. Anyone can generate a simple marketing campaign and anyone can start to build their growth on the Internet, but the real key to marketing is helping your customers in ways that your competition is not. If you offer the same services as your competition, than what is to stop the customer from going to them? Having small discounts in today’s industry is not going to cut it, as people go with what they trust and many times the larger companies on the Internet will receive more business, then new and upcoming businesses. You have to connect with your customers, and you need to do so on a personal level, but this level of communication is a very thin line. You don’t want to reveal too much about your personal life, as Identity Theft is on the rise, and too much information can scare off customers, but simply being a person will not sell your products or services. You will need to connect with your customers and show them that you truly care about them, and not the money they are preparing to give to you. You must be yourself and you must establish who you are as a person.
A solid marketing company will help you achieve this through the emails you send, the social networks you partake in and the general information you release on the Internet. By working with your customers and not for them you will reach a new level of experience and in turn help increase your business with a more solid foundation.

Welcome to Angelsgeek Today, a small blog dedicated to exploring topics related to website marketing. As a company dedicated to website marketing we see SEO as just one aspect and we treat it as just one part of the bigger picture. While I will post topics that relate to SEO I try to focus on issues that most people tend to ignore or not blog about commonly.

Today’s issue I will discuss the importance of creating solid calls to action.

Lets us say that your site is ranking well, many sites link to your website and in general you are generating quite a bit of traffic. Life seems to be good but one thing is missing! Leads. It is good to have visitors exploring your website, but any company will tell you that while they are glad people discovered their website, they are hoping that some of these people will sign up for a service, buy a product or help the community grow. Turning a visitor in a lead happens when a visitor contacts you in some form or another. Most people think of this as a simple contact form, but it can go into more detail then just a contact form. Lets say you run a service based business and you are trying to attract new clients. It is good to have a general contact form, but think outside the box. Does your company offer a free appraisal or a free on location estimate? If so this can become another call to action as you can add a form to your website for visitors to fill out and request a quote, proposal, on-site visit or whatever. Now you have a general contact form and a request for more info form, which increases the ways your customers can contact you.

Simply having action forms is not the only thing that will increase lead conversions, it also matters where these forms can be located. If you place your call to action form on the bottom of a page then chances are many people are not even aware of this form. Studies show that people upon first visiting a web page will scan the page to determine what content is being offered, and anything that does not appear on screen is not known and has a good chance of never being seen.

So placement is very important and it is also important that your call to action stands out, is simple and gets to the point. If you throw a bunch of information into a simple call to action form, then people will see it as spam and quickly leave your site. A good example of a call to action form can be found on the main page of HubSpot(http://www.hubspot.com/) where if you will notice the request a demo on the right-hand side. It is simple, to the point and does not overwhelm the visitor with a bunch of useless information.

The last important part to building a call to action is the amount of information you collect. In keeping with our example lets say you want to offer visitors the opportunity to contact you for a free proposal. You have a simple layout, placement is one the main screen and you are giving just the basic information, so what do you really need to know to contact someone? Name and contact information is all you need to start the conversation, and studies show that the more elements you add to a form after these two will decrease your chances of a visitor filling out the form. Keep it simple as this is a form to get the conversation going. Once you have been contacted by a visitor you can get more details, but for getting a lead start with just the basics.

If you have any questions on lead generation and calls to action, please feel free to contact me.

As a web development company I get asked the question many times, what is SEO and what can it do for me?
Over the last few years as I practice and help websites increase their own SEO strategy, I have learned a few lessons, common lessons, that many people tend to over look or do not consider.
Search Engine Optimization after all is the art and practice of search engine rankings, but while I worked for a year of doing nothing but increasing clients websites in the rankings, I realized that their is more to increasing traffic then SEO. Many search engines will tell you that content is king and writing natural content is the best way to get rankings and yes writing natural content is the best thing you can do, and optimizing a site for the human user is also the best thing you can do. Just keep in mind that other websites out their do not agree with this and as such employ tactics to tell search engines what their page is about, working to get their rankings up. This is SEO, the art of improving site rankings and while it would be nice to live in a world where we do not have people using unethical methods to obtain better rankings, we currently do live in that world.
When I optimize a site for search engines, I do so keeping within the ethical realm and remembering that while it is good to rank better, it is also good to be ranking for what people are searching for. I can get anyone ranking for Denver CO real estate agent selling 1 bedroom homes, but is that what people are searching for? I can also work to get a website ranking for Denver CO homes for sale, but again does the content on your website live up to this term. There is nothing worse then performing a search, getting results and clicking on a result to find the site is nothing what you are looking for. This creates a negative feeling and impression about your site. So when I start optimization, I optimize a site for what it represents, working to get traffic to your site for what you are looking to get traffic for.
When I work on marketing for your site, I also remember that search engines and SEO are only one aspect. Yes people find your site via search engines and various keywords, but that is only one method. What about social networks, what about directories, what about local community pages. Their are so many websites out their, and so many possibles paths people can take to find your site, and I work to find as many of these connections as possible.
When you market a site, its not about SEO, it is about building an ethical network of related sites that are working to better their industry and community, and this will lead to the best traffic for your site.

Its not about the search engines, its about the humans reaching your site.

As I was reading the latest of many blogs I follow some new techniques are being experimented with in adding a hover element to a CSS based navigation menu. Hovering over the menu items causes an overview to expand and show over the top of page elements, seamlessly. In this menu overview it highlights a sentence or to in regards to what that menu element links to, so hovering over the home option could result in a sentence describing that this is the sites homepage. While home may be self explanatory, a menu element such as services could allow you to list or display dynamically your top sellers, so they know what products you offer before you get to that page. This is a great way to make your navigation more user friendly and add a little bit more of an SEO element to your menu.
Plus the dynamic menu is handled all in JavaScript so its 100% SEO friendly. This is something we will be playing around with in the Angelsgeek Labs and hope to have a working demo very soon.

Angelsgeek Today is our companies blog, and we already know what you are thinking . . . what does this blog have to offer from the millions of others out on the Internet?
Angelsgeek Today is a simple blog that we offer to update you with the inner workings of the minds at Angelsgeek Web Development.
We will post various topics on the development of our site, SEO news, web development news and much more, pretty much anything that comes up in the minds of our staff.

So if you find something useful within our blog, or have any ideas for future blog posts, please comment and let us know.

Thank you,
Angelsgeek