• Logo – Make sure your logo is professionally designed and utilized throughout your marketing materials. Typically on a website, the logo is located in the upper left hand corner of EVERY page. Additionally, make sure to link your logo back to the home page of your website. This is standard practice.

• Font – Make sure your font is consistent throughout the website. Utilizing a bold tag or an italic tag is acceptable, but spattering the website with different fonts or vastly different sizes is not recommended. Your page design actually begins with the font you choose. Choose a professional font that is simple, readable and browser safe. Serif fonts (ie: Times New Roman Book Antiqua) are the best for large quantities of text as they are the easiest to read. Sans Serif fonts (ie: Arial, Helvetica and Verdana) are good for headlines and commonly used for entire websites. A very common code to ensure that a searcher will see your text with the font you intend is: <font face=Georgia, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica>. This says that if you have Georgia, you will see Georgia. If you don’t, you will see Verdana. If you don’t have either, you will see Arial, etc.In regards to font size, we recommend not going any smaller than 10 points for your body text and using 12 point or bigger for your headlines.

• Design – Consistent site design goes a long way toward making your site pleasing and usable. Be sure to keep your design consistent throughout the pages of the site. If you vary your design throughout sections of the site, make sure to keep it logical. For example, I work with a Nanny Agency that services several states. The design of the site is completely the same except for the color. We designated different colors for different states. Other than that, the logo is the same, the style is the same, which makes it very clear that this is the same company.

• Bottom Text Navigation – Bottom text navigation is essential for every website. Make sure that your main pages are listed clearly, in text at the bottom of every page. Navigation is the tool that enables searchers and search engines to find the different pages within your site. Try to make the “path” that you want your searchers to follow as easy and clear as possible. We don’t want anybody getting frustrated because they can’t find what they are looking for.

• Contact Info – Contact information is expected at the bottom of each page, underneath your footer. Included should be your Company Name, Address, Phone Number, Fax, and Email. An optional addition could be Hours of Operation.

If these elements are not in place when you begin a SEO Campaign, it will be the first thing your Specialist will address. Once the website basics are in place, we can move onto basic SEO elements. First things first!

There’s a split-second buffer before the alarm goes off separating sleep from a warbling mob that stands ready to attack my eardrums with clubs and parade cymbals. In this brief moment, a subtle noise emits like clock radio speakers inhaling. But before the alarm can ever finish filling its lungs to capacity, and quite possibly before I’m ever awake, an arm (connected to my body) penetrates the darkness and depresses the snooze bar with the precision of a laser guided boney missile. After that daily phenomena, my mind wakes up to thoughts of websites dancing with search engine spiders as I roll out and get ready for another day.

A cup of brewed coffee accompanies the 20 second commute back upstairs to the office. Mental engines are now firing on all cylinders fed from the internal combustion of caffeine and core keyword phrases. SEO work commences with checking emails, Twitter updates, and SEO news. It’s in these morning hours that the bulk of SEO monthly work is performed for clients. Tasks like fixing website errors, finding links, analyzing stats and writing copy flows from blurred finger tips to various stacks of open windows on the monitor. ALT Tab is my friend.

Lunch sneaks up quickly with a tap on my shoulder, and has the duration of a bad Haiku:

Tupperware from fridge;
Salivating, Microwave;
Dumptruck hits my lips

Want to know more about the everyday adventures of an optimizer… follow me.

Any day now, your prospects are going to rise by double – no triple digits! Any day now. Any day. A-n-y day… okay, just one day…

Still waiting?

Don’t feel alone. Hundreds of thousands of website owners are waiting right along with you. You’ve developed your brand name, tag line, price point, loss leaders, website design, staffing, business plan, line of credit… and an Internet Marketing plan focused primarily on hosting, design and development. Overlooking one major consideration: How will people find your site once it’s launched?

A few weeks ago, I bumped into an acquaintance of mine from long ago who was vacationing in the area. As we chatted, she proudly announced she had just launched a new online business, and how it had taken her much longer than she had expected to get the right design for the site. In fact, she had hired and fired three design companies, trying to get just the right ‘look’. When I mentioned I worked in the Search Engine Marketing industry, we immediately had a conversation that went something like this:

“How much do you charge for submissions?”

“Submissions? Where?”

“I thought you worked with the search engines!?”

“I do – I’m asking where you want to be submitted to? Google is free. MSN is free. Yahoo is – well – free if…”

“Oh –but how often do you submit?”

“Once, but if you get some good incoming links, even that’s not really necessary. I could..”

“Well, my company submits to thousands of search engines every month!”

Alarm bells are ringing in my head as I’m smiling politely and nodding along to how important it is to put the keywords in your tags and how great the program she has is, because it automatically enters them on every page for her.

“How are sales?” I jump in on an intake of breath.

”Well, a little slow– but we are looking to upgrade our package to their premium service which guarantees we will be #1 in Google – so..”

“Do you know how they plan on…”

There’s that alarm again! Oh! A quick hug and an air kiss and off she went, pecking away at her Blackberry with perfectly manicured nails, the light from her ear piece fading away into the night. Hopefully, her site will not follow the same path.

To ensure yours gets the traffic it deserves, here are some SEO items to think about when planning your website launch:

1. Is your site search engine friendly? Flash and splash are essential to many industries. Numerous Mannix Marketing designed sites incorporate flash – but challenge yourself and your designer to figure out a way to have both flash and simple text-based content. And, make sure that database generated pages are built with SEO in mind. (Or, just hire us!) Search engine robots are built to spider a site quickly and move on to the next. They like text and easy to follow hyperlinks. They like short urls instead of long complicated dynamic ones. Bottom line, you’ll need to follow some of these rules to place well in the search engines on competitive phrases.

2. Submission services that submit to 15,000 search engines for $139.99 are typically a waste of time and money. Do you even know where they are submitting you to? Does it matter if you are in the search engine Aboombabawbaw.com? Probably not. You can submit to Google, MSN and Yahoo for free. Just follow the hyperlinks. Enter your URL. It’s that easy, and you are now one of just 83 million sites selling the exact same product!

3. Keyword tags are not really that important. Developing the correct keywords for your site is important, and then using those keywords throughout the content of your site, in your title tags, in your anchor text, etc. Stuffing keywords in the meta keyword tag hasn’t worked since 2001. Don’t let anyone tell you it has.

4. Spend as much time as you can afford reading up on the basics of an SEO campaign. A good place to start is: http://searchenginewatch.com/ Or hire a consultant for an hour to talk to you about Internet Marketing and give you the basics. Preferably before you build your site. Then build the site with Optimization in mind.

5. If your site is already built, come to terms with the fact that you may have to modify your site in order to gain placements. If you approach a company that says they will build a site for you that simply ‘refers’ people to your site – carefully read their terms. Typically, they keep the site should you stop paying them, not you. And, they can and will sell it to your competitor – after you’ve spent thousands of dollars to have it built and placed, putting you back at square one – a site that can’t be found in the search engines. It’s easier just to get through a little pain now and realize that some things may have to change on your newly built site.

You can have increased placements, increased traffic and increased leads. But it will take work, money, time and commitment to get there. And, in the end, it will provide you with the perfect shade of green… The color of money, of course!