Search engine optimization is critical for any business because SEO, acronym for search engine optimization, is how your business shows up when a potential customer enters a query on Google, Yahoo, or now Bing. As you’ve heard me say in other articles, search engines are the yellow pages of today; just the order that your business is found is based on importance and not how much money you’ve spent with that advertiser. In terms of search engine optimization on Bing, I found our www.nvhost.com websites in similar positions as our sites are found on the other search engines so it wasn’t any different for us – I advise you to do the same testing for your key words to see how you come up in their search results.

What is the consumer reason for Bing and how has it been reviewed so far? If you visit Bing.com, you will find a link to an explanation of why this new search engine is important for consumers. It offers the usual rationale that its search results are more reliable or more relevant to consumers but could they really say anything different? Like MSN, they also have some discussion about how the search engine will provide financial incentives or better deals to visitors. Unfortunately, those potential incentives have not brought me to use MSN for searches and they will not bring me to Bing either. In terms of reviews, most “geeks” would rather compliment mass murders than behemoth Microsoft so I don’t put a lot of stock into most reviews because of this lack of objectivity. In my opinion, Google is still offering a superior search engine product by having search results focused on keywords that can have a local tie in if you are searching for local services – like dry cleaners. While they aren’t a primary source for the information for me, I also prefer the news sections and how simply they are organized on Google.

The big so what on Bing is that we now have another search engine to check as we make sure to search engine optimize our websites. Microsoft has very deep pockets and is very willing to launch products while losing money, learn about the consumer product experience, and then make adjustments to gain market share. This search engine does offer pay per click marketing opportunities but I haven’t had a chance to test their PPC system to offer an opinion on it yet. Using the 80/20 rule, I typically stick with Google because of their very high market share which means I will reach the most potential customers on one site. Microsoft has been very focused on Google as their primary competitor in recent years and the attractive PPC revenues will be the reason that Bing will be around and revamped for several years unless Microsoft makes an acquisition in this category. As a full search web development company that offers website design and search engine optimization services, we will continue to monitor the development of Bing as a search engine to make sure our search engine optimization services and our website design will be friendly to the search engine. If you have any questions, please visit us at www.nvhost.com and use our live chat feature or contact us form.

I need to insert a warning message here – this article will include the “boring” nuts and bolt that some consultants charge hundreds of dollars for in seminars and e-books. You might find the nuts and bolts information boring but it will potentially save that money since we will provide the information for free while increasing revenues from new customers visiting your website. You’ve been warned about boring information but hopefully boring will be profitable for you to turn your professional website design into new customers and revenues.

Recently, our business www.nvhost.com has been experimenting with Twitter to help build a customer’s exposure to new customers and building their customer or potential customer email list. While it seems like 90% of communication on Twitter is useless drivel about going to the movies, life being boring, or whatever nonsense that is going on, we still find value in targeting Twitter users. However, Twitter users follow others which provide opportunities to serve interesting content to them and begin to build a relationship with your business.

Twitter is an open source social site that allows people to see the followers of various topics and businesses. For instance, if your business interest is sports, you can follow ESPN and target the followers of ESPN by following them since they are available to everyone on the site. In our experience, we’ve found following the followers (I know it sounds Dilbert like), that about 20% of them will follow you back. Getting people to follow you normally means that they click through to your website to find our more information on who has decided to follow them (Twitter accounts receive an email when someone follows them) which means this process is search engine optimization on steroids since the goal of SEO is to get visitors to your website that are interested in your business focus. This means that you will begin to develop Twitter followers who have an interest in your business topic so that you can begin to develop them as customers with your professional web site design. In about a month’s time, we’ve been able to build nearly 1,000 followers for this customer that she can now communicate with whenever she likes.

The process to “follow followers” can be time consuming and tedious if done manually. The best solution is to purchase software that will automate this process for you. There are several product offerings in this area that seem useful but we don’t make any specific recommendations since the purpose of this article isn’t advertising. Be aware, your Twitter account will be frozen if you have too much activity which usually means following about 500 people per day. You will also need to “unfollow” Twitter accounts that haven’t followed you back and that is where software is especially helpful – Twitter will only let you follow 2,000 people without having 2,000 followers so this software tool is very important. Another suggestion is to create a new email account for Twitter activity as you will be overwhelmed with messages if you don’t.

Next month, we will discuss how to communicate with Twitter users and how to maximize the 140 characters that you have to work with. If you’ve found this information useful or want to find out more about Twitter, please continue to visit this website as we consistently post our knowledge here. If you have any questions or have a need for web design, search engine optimization, web hosting, or custom programming, please visit us at www.nvhost.com or call us at 866-469-4678.

If you haven’t heard about Twitter recently, you’ve probably been hiding under a rock or you don’t have teenage kids. The Twitter concept is to share short bursts of thoughts in an online format much like text messages on cell phones. However, these thoughts go out to the group of people that have signed up to receive your messages. The site is currently the hottest social website going and celebrities are leading the way. In fact, the women on The View crashed the site recently by mentioning they are active with the site and thousands of viewers immediately went to sign up. They are not alone as most news and talk show performers are also advertise fans can receive inside information by signing up and receive twitter messages from them.

Most articles about Twitter call this the most powerful way to generate hundreds of visitor to your site in a short period of time. When you spend significant money on web design, hosting, and search engine optimization, visitors are normally a good thing. However, my gut reaction to this method of generating traffic to websites is a big waste of time as the people will be “visitors” and not paying customers so why bother wasting time creating message if you can’t make money. Which one is correct and what is the reality – it depends as usual. If you have customers that are in high school, college, or are in the club partying crowd, stop reading this article and immediately create a twitter account. Likewise, if you have impulse products driven by celebrity activity, it is likewise a very good idea to create an account and begin to “Tweet” your customers. However, there are also useful business reasons that you might not have thought about. Computer programmers have created Twitter groups to discuss and troubleshoot bugs, computer virus, and other useful suggestions when you could use some help from others that have been in the same situation. It might be worth a few minutes of searching to see if your industry or competitors have Twitter accounts as this would be useful intelligence to have to avoid missing the opportunity to create value for your business using Twitter – call us and we will be happy to discuss ways to improve your internet marketing methods.

Many online website sensations have a very short lifespan so is Twitter the next one to fade into the history books? Recent articles have indicated that 60% of Twitter users become inactive or quit after using the site for only one month. While I can’t verify these statistics, I can understand how some might find it boring to hear about the mundane things your friends or favorite celebrities are doing on a daily, hourly, or shorter basis. However, the amount of traffic that can be generated during that month period of time when people are active can be extremely profitable so don’t lose another day – sign up and create your Twitter account today if you can think of a useful way that it can grow your business. Likewise, there are still the remaining 40% that continue on with the service, just waiting to find your custom web design offerings for them to purchase.

If you’ve found this information useful, please continue to visit this website as we consistently post our knowledge here. If you have any questions or have a need for web design, search engine optimization, web hosting, or custom programming, please visit us at www.nvhost.com or call us at 866-469-4678.

We see a couple of primary reasons why people need to “spring clean” their website design. The most common issue we see is your website design has looked exactly the same since the internet was invented, or at least since the day your company realized the internet was a place to do business. I have an MBA in marketing and over 10 years of brand management experience for both large and small companies so I have seen how numerous companies manage their brands. As a rule of thumb, if the brand hasn’t been refreshed in the past 2 years, it probably needs it. In this short term timeline, brands make “tweak” improvements to their packaging and key brand equity images to better connect with their target consumers. If brands haven’t been updated in the past 3-5 years, it normally means it is time for a major branding project to evaluate how the brand has been changed and how consumer perceptions of the brand have changed. The outcome of this evaluation is typically a major makeover with key brand elements having design updates to meet the revised brand positioning and to keep the images/brand relevant to consumers. Website design should be no different, unless you consider that the attention span of consumers on the internet can be even shorter than in the brick and mortar world – making it even more critical to regularly update your website design. At www.nvhost.com, we recently updated our website design and we would love to hear your comments and feedback.

The other main reason to “spring clean” your website design is because we see many sites that try to do way too much and are so busy that it is impossible for a consumer to actually find what they want on your website. Ironically, some of the worst web designs can be found on web designer websites themselves because they want to have all of the coolest flash design elements that take forever to load. Wild background designs and having too many images on your website will also slow down the loading speed of your site. If your site takes longer than a few seconds to come up, it will annoy your customers and your website design will probably cause your company to lose customers. We believe in the tried and true method, K.I.S.S, and we aren’t talking the long tongued guy. We believe in keeping your website professional and simple to navigate to help your company/brand drive sales; we will prevent your company from looking bad to customers and killing brand equity as we work through the web design process.

If your website design isn’t making your customers say “WOW” about your business, it is time for spring cleaning. Every day lost is additional revenue that your company cannot make up – don’t put this decision off any further. While our company, www.nvhost.com which was launched in 2000, would love to be the one to help. However, the important thing to do is to interview potential web developers to make sure they have the experience to be able to deliver your project on time, on budget, and exceed your expectations. Additionally, the web developer must understand your needs and goals because all the experience in the world is useless if the web designer isn’t on the same page with your vision. Hopefully this information has been useful but please use the contact us or free quote buttons on our website if any there are any unanswered questions – the only dumb question is the one not asked.

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If you haven’t heard of social sites, then you have been hiding in a cave. These are the sites were people have user names, with simple pages that tell their friends, and the world, what they are thinking, feeling, doing, or about to do. I would create a quick list of the sites but unfortunately that list in this communication would probably get this article banned from some of the article sites where we share information because they might find inclusion too commercial. A query on your favorite search engine using “social bookmarking” will provide further insight on the sites we are writing about. These sites are some of the busiest websites in the world and frequently make the news headlines that only increase traffic even more. One social site created controversy, and “old news” headlines recently by changing their policy that any information posted on their site can be used by the social site anyway they see fit forever into the future. Another social site crashed when a daytime woman’s program mentioned it. The site most likely crashed because the demographic that watches this women’s program are stay at home moms that have the time to visit the site – something they clearly did in exponential numbers that the site could not handle.

By now, some of you might be thinking blah blah blah social sites, they are nothing more than useless internet information. YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY BE MORE WRONG! Besides the unbelievable traffic they generate every day, these social sites are the place where millions of people get tips for anything and everything consumer. If you, or your company, doesn’t have a presence on these sites, it should be the first thing on your to do list because search engines love capturing the information. Likewise, these networks are viewed as a collection of friends that have high credibility so a recommendation on them is more than worth its weight in gold.

Beyond setting up a user name & page for your small business, how do you best harness the power of these sites? The best way to do so is to share information, knowledge, and tips about your business category. Consistently creating new content on your social site landing page is a great way to generate return traffic. Most of the sites have some “sharing” function that allows people to sign up to receive communication about recent changes or upcoming events. Please note, posting blatant commercial messages on these sites might feel good, but they won’t have much of an impact because the messages will be removed by site staff and you will end up banned from posting on the sites which defeats the opportunity to reach out these potential new customers.

We can help identify the social sites that best match up with your company and product offerings. We can also help find forums to follow discussions about topics of interest – ones that should be frequently visited and posted on. The idea is to share useful information to the audience involved in the forum or on the social site, like putting money in the bank, and good things will happen for your company. While it might take a little time, eventually your valuable comments will develop a following and customers will come to your site and buy your products. Please visit our website at www.nvhost.com and we will be happy to answer any questions that you might have.

What is search engine optimization (SEO)? In an attempt to keep the article easy to understand, I’m going to keep the information at a high level, which will leave out some details – information we will be happy to provide if you contact us. SEO is a series of techniques that make your website easy for search engines to understand and position properly in search results when potential customers type in key words important to your online business. It is a no brainer to understand why it is important to have search engines properly understand your website because being on the first page of search results means thousands of dollars of business, if not more. Search engines are the primary way that customers look for help when customers don’t know someone or haven’t watched an ad on TV. Each search engine, Google for instance, considers key words used on your site, percentage of keywords used (too many is just as bad as not enough) on the site, key words provided within the programming that is behind the scenes in the programming, links from other sites to your website, consistently having fresh content on your site, traffic to your site, and many other factors. To keep this article focused, we will now concentrate on “links” that many companies offer services for.

Not a day goes by without at least 5 unsolicited spam messages coming into my nvhost.com email box that guarantees first page search engine rankings in only a few days – most doing so for only $99. The technique most of these companies use is called “linking” and is an SEO technique with a goal to “prove” to search engines that your website is so important that hundreds of other websites want to have links to your business. Unethical SEO companies will sell that your website will be linked to 1,000’s of sites in minutes. If you see this in their sales copy – RUN AWAY!! Search engines are very smart software packages that are not only the goose that laid the golden egg; they can also be the Grinch that stole your internet business! If you hire someone that creates thousands of links in minutes, called automated submission, many search engines will BAN YOUR WEBSITE so that you NEVER SHOW UP in their search results, let alone show up on a page that isn’t the first one. While search engines view links as a measure of importance, they would like to see the links show up naturally, over time. Search engine companies view thousands of links created in a 5 minute period of time as cheating and that is why they ban those websites from their search results. Hand submission is the key to ethical search engine optimization success and customers should expect improvement in search engine ranking to take place over a 6-12 month period of time. In the, “you get what you pay for’ – $99 isn’t a realistic price for hand submission. Staying on top of search engine results requires constant effort that all online companies must proactively pursue.

So how do you know that a company is using ethical hand submission techniques? We find the best proof that companies use ethical tactics is the amount of time the company has been in business. Any company can put up a new website tomorrow after ripping off customers under a previous website name. Our recommendation is to work with companies that have been in business for at least 5 years, if not more, because longevity is the best proof that a company is doing business the right way. While they might tell you something different, Alexa.com is a great site to see the time history of website and the website design for the company. Another great source is whois.sc that will also detail website ownership history. While less reliable, daily reports for the sites submitted to can be another method to show hand submission.

Search Engine Optimization is a complicated topic that we make easy at nvhost.com. Feel free to contact us at our website or by phone so that we can provide additional information and answers to any questions that you might have. Likewise, please be on the lookout for the next article in our series of SEO articles to gain further insight into the topic.

We are pleased to announce that NVHOST.com will donate 10% of any new projects, $999 or over, when customers enter “football heroes” on our website contact form or if potential customers tell us on the phone that they called to support retired football players and would like a portion of their project proceeds donated to retired professional football players. This donation program will last through the end of February, 2009. We will also have links on our site to professional football charities if you would like to directly make a donation to these organizations to support their causes without starting a project.

NVHOST.com, a Phoenix, Arizona based company, is a full service web development company focused on building custom internet solutions for our clients at very affordable prices. Our company offers custom website design, web hosting, search engine optimization, and many other services detailed at www.nvhost.com with a focus to exceed our customer’s expectations. NVHOST.com was founded in 2000 and recent growth has created the opportunity for us to expand our team to include additional marketing and customer resources. The new team now boasts a marketing director with an MBA in Marketing from the University of Minnesota and he has over 10 years of running multi-million dollar brands for major US companies that has worked with our country’s largest retailers during that time. In terms of customer support, the recent addition to the company also has a decade of experience working for a major internet retailer and she will make sure your project is completed on time and as it was agreed to.

We have two main goals for this charity project. The first is to raise awareness of the plight many retired professional football players suffer from because many of our proud football heroes suffer in silence. Secondly, we hope to raise money to be part of the solution to this challenge. How can we help increase profits for your business while we give back to the NFL greats that gave so much to all of us? Please visit our site contact us today at www.nvhost.com or call us at 866-469-4678. While the big game will be played on the field on February 1, 2009, the biggest game for retired professional football players is being played in homes around the country every day! Please keep these retired players in your thoughts and prayers and as we try to raise money to make a small impact in their lives. Retired professional football players have entertained and inspired us for years on Sunday and it is now time to return the favor!

We hope you will find the information useful and please let us know if you have any ideas or suggestions so that we can exceed your expectations.

Beyond additional staff, NVHOST.com will be re-launching our website with a new website design and new features to make it even easier to navigate our site. Hopefully you will enjoy our new site and find it inspirational as you consider making website design changes for your own business. We are also planning to add a monthly newsletter that will contain business and marketing ideas to help drive sales for our customers. Likewise, we encourage you to share your company’s vision and business concerns with our team so you can utilize our cross functional expertise to develop solutions for you, which is something we can all use in a challenging economy.

In closing, I would like to take a moment to thank everyone for their business. This expansion of our company would not have been possible without our customers. Our initial focus was mainly national with a strong emphasis on local with Nevada website design & Nevada business web hosting being our primary focus. Likewise, our customer base developed regionally to include many states that included Arizona website design customers as well. Today, we service customers around the country as well as international website design clients. Our focus will continue to be an affordable resource to drive client business, be it with website design, search engine optimization, e-commerce, custom programming, and web hosting services. Please let us know if you have any questions or if you have any comments on how we could add new marketing tools to the business to be valuable to your company. Please visit our site at www.nvhost.com and let us know what you think.

Thank you for your business over the years. I am looking forward to the continuing business we shall share in the years to come.

Greg Danaher
NVHOST.com