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Gutenblog: SEO
February 2019
February 2019
You invested in a beautiful and powerful website, which you were really excited about. But after a few months you realized it's not generating many leads.
This is the unicorn that everyone is chasing. In a saturated market, how do you get people to notice your business? Once they notice you (visit your website), how do you convince them that you are better than everyone else? And then, once they trust you, how do you motivate them to contact you right now. That is the challenge. And it isn't worth paying for ads/marketing to drive traffic to your website until you have a high enough conversion rate to justify the Cost of Acquisition (CA) for each conversion versus the Lifetime Value of a Customer (LVC).
If you are convinced you need help, but this article already looks too long, you probably need to hire a professional. Contact us to see how we can help.
WEBSITE CHECKUP
The first thing you need to do is a basic website checkup.
1. Is your website Professional? Is it beautiful ...
April 2018
April 2018
We are extremely excited to be nearing the end of a major Gutensite platform rebuild which will offer a completely new design, workflow and modern framework. This ambitious work on the 2.0 platform has taken all of our attention for the last 2 years. We will be sharing more information about 2.0 really soon, but in the meantime, one benefit of this development is going to be available for all our clients on the current 1.0 platform as well.
So the good news is that we have just finished our new system for automatically providing free SSL certificates to every domain and website on our platform!
In the past, the only way to get an SSL certificate was to have us purchase one privately and then manually install it (for a cost of $100). Now SSL Certificates are automatic and free, because we developed a sophisticated system that interfaces with an open certificate authority called Let's Encrypt and automatically creates, installs and renews these certificates every 3 months (which is ...
November 2017
November 2017
Whether or not SEO is a major part of your marketing strategy (and it should at least be one factor), you need to comply with the basic best practices to ensure that your site is found by people searching for your product/service. This is free traffic, free advertising. Each organic search visitor is like picking up a dollar bill off the ground (or ten). The basics of SEO include:
- Write fresh, keyword-rich content that appeals to customers in every stage of their buyer's journey.
- Tag your content with the appropriate meta data (e.g. Headers, Meta Descriptions, Friendly URLS, etc.
- Promote your content and build back links.
- And now, make sure your site is secure.
(BTW, If you need help getting up to speed with SEO and other Digital Marketing best practices, schedule a free call with our consulting team to discuss your options.)
Google has been pushing website owners to convert their sites to use SSL certificates for a while (they don't want criminals or governments snooping ...
April 2014
April 2014
Inc. recently ran an article and infographic about the biggest challenges small businesses have with their websites. We've been saying this stuff for years, so we thought we would share.
The main problems small businesses have with their website include:
- No Clear Call to Action
- Poor Design that Doesn't Impress and Engage
- Difficulty Updating Content
- No Way to Measure Success
- Poor SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Not Optimized for Mobile
- No Designated IT person
Our CMS makes it easy to update your website, our support team helps every step of the way, our sites are Mobile/Responsive on every sized device, and we function as the webmaster and technical team for our small business clients. Furthermore, when we build websites for our clients, we make sure clients figure out what their conversion goals are, so we can help them design a website that funnels traffic to those conversion goals and measure the results. This means every page includes a call to action, e.g. you view ...
November 2012
November 2012
We're committed to making sure Gutensite is compatible with the latest recommendations for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that your website has every advantage possible to achieve the best rankings that your content can earn.
Below are a few of the most recent updates to our SEO features:
- Redirect to Remove Trailing Slashes. Search engines see the urls http://www.domain.com/blog/ and http://www.domain.com/blog as two different pages. This can trigger a warning for having duplicate content which dilutes your rankings. So we do a permanent 301 redirect to remove the trailing slash, in case someone ever accidentally links to a page in that way.
- Redirect to Correct Capitalization. For the same reason mentioned above, we also will redirect http://www.domain.com/blog to http://www.domain.com/Blog with the correct capitalization so that you don't get penalized for "duplicate content".
- Add Unique Page Titles to Calendars. We added month and year to the page title on calendar list ...
November 2012
November 2012
If your customers are looking for information about "how to build a widget", and you rarely, if ever, mention the words "how to build a widget" on your website, your webpages will never be found for that search. If you want to know how to rank high on Google, you need to understand the strategic use of keywords. Figure out the keywords you want, and then make sure you have a lot of helpful, keyword-rich content.
Here are the top five places you should add keywords to improve your website rankings today!
1. Organically throughout the page. Don't stuff keywords into your articles awkwardly, but when you write genuinely interesting and helpful articles make sure you chose the phrases that match your keyword list. And be sure to write articles about your keywords.
2. Title of page. Search engines place a lot of emphasis on the keywords in the titles of each page (The title should be in an H1 tag as part of the page and also in the header title which appears at the top of the ...
October 2012
October 2012
We're working on improving the native SEO performance of all websites that run on our platform. Search Engine Optimization recommendations change all the time as search engines improve their secret algorithms and we have to adapt to the new rules. But we are committed to making sure that we make SEO optimized websites.
Search engines do not like duplicate content. Unfortunately they aren't smart enough to know that it's just one page with different capitalization or with extra variables in the URL. Essentially if the URLs are different, it treats the webpage like two different pages. If search engines see two pages with nearly identical content they are going to think you are spamming, or if they see two pages with exactly the same content it will dilute the rank of that page.
So today we setup redirects to ensure that if a page is accessed with the same friendly url that has different capitalization, it will redirect to the correct friendly url (both still work, but it 301 ...
December 2010
December 2010
We've added a new setting (accessible on the Admin > Site Info) page, to allow you to disable the Search Engine Sitemap. By default all our sites are SEO optimized, but in some cases, a client may not want the search engines to index the site (until they are ready). So this option will turn off the sitemap.xml data, which search engines use to provide a map of what pages to index. It will also add a meta tag that tells the search engine to go away for now and not index the site.
November 2010
November 2010
We just redid the structure of our website and wanted to make sure that all the friendly URLs matched the new structure. But when you change your friendly URL, any hard coded links to that page (on your site or from another site or in a search engine) will stop working and your visitors won't find that page that used to be located there.
So we've implemented a great automatic system that archives the old friendly URL, so that people are automatically redirected to the new URL. Whenever you change a friendly URL on a page, Gutensite creates a record in your Shortcuts list for that old URL and points it to the same page. That way, visitors won't get "Page Not Found" errors.
This new feature makes managing your site much easier, and makes it possibly to update your site structure with little hassle.
Eventually you will want to go through and change any broken links on your site and point them to the proper URL, and search engines will automatically update their links. And then you ...
July 2009
July 2009
Over the years we have developed a very capable product and have consistently offered high end personal service and support for our clients. We have a very loyal client base because we make it a point to go above and beyond all the time. We are in this for the long run and our goal in business is not to make money but to provide an excellent product to our clients, knowing that this approach will be profitable. But despite these things, we have learned the hard way that you can have the best product or service in the world, at the best price, but if people don't know about it, it's worthless.
Small businesses and non-profit organizations often overlook the importance of branding and marketing. Usually this is due to a few factors:
- Small Budget: revenue is too small to pay for quality Branding/Marketing.
- Small Staff: no one is qualified to lead the marketing effort.
- No Time: staff is too busy with development, management and customer service to have time to spend on ...
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