No doubt, it’s a lot easier to create an online business than it is to build a bricks-and-mortar storefront. No building inspections, remodels, fixtures, signage or utility bills with your web biz. No months of planning and waiting and budgeting. You can hatch an idea one Friday night and be in business by Monday morning on the web!

Let’s look a little closer at this. What do these steps in real-life business building do for your operation?

Building Inspections
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your architecture is sound, safe and reliable, and meets the highest standards.
Web:  Your web site is coded correctly to ensure reliability, up-to-date techniques, and online security standards are met for payment gateways.

Remodels
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your storefront is lively, interesting and current to attract customers who want to shop somewhere that understands their “vibe.”
Web: Your online business is attractive, well-written, always fresh, and cleanly designed; clients and visitors feel confident that you know your stuff.

Fixtures
Bricks-and-Mortar: Your business space is uncluttered and organization makes it easy to find the product they need.
Web: You minimize gizmos and distractions; your website is easy to navigate.

Signage
Bricks-and-Mortar: Signage is quickly spotted, easy to read, and portrays a powerful message.
Web: Your site is coded and written—optimized—for search engines so potential customers find you with ease.

Utility Bills
Bricks-and-Mortar: You can’t avoid these, but you can make your building efficient and take advantage of the bonuses of being a “green” business.
Web: Reliability and service are critical to keeping your business running 24-7. Ensure you have the best hosting service available.

Careful planning, attention to details, and keeping your customers needs in mind are key to success!

Today’s major search engines such as Google and Yahoo continually refine their search algorithms to deliver more accurate results for their users. With this in mind, today’s SEO campaigns should spend no small amount of their time making sure that the website they are working on deserve top rankings. It can be extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to achieve top rankings for a website with lackluster content.

Here are a couple of seemingly obvious tips, that get over looked all the time, that can affect how search engines perceive the authority of the content on your website and thus your rankings. These two simple things can help ensure your SEO campaign has as strong a starting point as possible.

• Spelling – You won’t believe how many sites we have worked on that have spelling errors. You would think that with all the spell checking tools available this would not be as prevalent a problem as it is. The negative impact of poor spelling can be fairly severe. It may cause a search engine to misunderstand your intent or damage the credibility of the content. Remember even spell checker isn’t always right. Double check your work carefully and make sure you don’t have mistake that a spell checker will miss such as “there” spelled “their” or other words that sound the same but are spelled differently.

• Grammar – yes we all may have hated our junior high school English classes but see if you can remember back to when your teacher was discussing sentence fragments or incomplete sentences. Sometimes when we speak we will use these, but when you are writing content that is supposed to be recognized as an authority then they are a big no-no. Sentence fragments can be easy to spot if you take the time to proof read your work. When in doubt, see if your sentence has a subject and a verb. Ask yourself if the statement makes sense on it’s own. If not, then it needs to be rewritten properly.

There are many grammar rules to writing a proper paper and they should be followed as best as possible. Try to avoid mistakes of this nature within your websites content before they go up on your page. However, if you happen to notice an error later on, you should address it as soon as you are able.

There are many platforms for which a website can be built apon such as Flash, Dreamweaver, Drupal, Straight HTML/CSS, WordPress, Zen Cart etc.. The list goes on and on with new platforms becoming available all the time. With the exception of Dreamweaver, any of these platforms could be used for a great website that can have a successfull SEO campaign. OK, yes you can even make it work with Dreamweaver, as lame a design crutch as it is.

A good search engine optimization company will know the strengths and weaknesses of the platform of a website and make sure to adjust the campaign to the specific site. Let’s take Drupal for an example. This is a platform that we happen to really like. We have worked on several successful SEO campaigns utilizing this platform. However, the “out of the box” Drupal package is not a very search engine friendly platform. This does not mean that Drupal is a poor choice for building a successful website. It just means that specific methods will have to be utilized to make sure that search engines can properly interpret the sites content.

The point is this, if you are launching a new site, it may be worth researching the cost, coding timeline, search engine friendliness and over all usability of your web design platform before moving forward. But, if you have an existing website, you can still greatly benefit from a properly planned and executed search engine optimization effort no matter what platform your site was built on. (Let’s just hope it is better than Dreamweaver.)

I am often asked by clients who engage our SEO services, “What can I do to help?”.
There are, of course, many things that can be done by clients, but for this blog post I would like to address the crucial SEO tools of link building.

We have done and continue to do SEO work for a huge range of business types. These businesses need to remember that they are the experts in their respective fields. We are the SEO experts.

So unless you are an SEO firm looking for our services (don’t laugh – it happens more than you think) you should know your business better than we do.  What I mean by this is you should have long standing relationships that have been built throughout your career within your business genre.  There are almost always link building opportunities to leverage from within this group of professional relationships. Vendors, distributors, and even customers to name a few, almost always have websites that might make for an ideal link.

One reminder though, once you have thought of a possible candidate website to go for a link from, check with your SEO team first. Just because you can get a link to your website from another doesn’t mean you should. Let your search engine optimization experts at Tempo Creative decide if the link is of value and how best to leverage it for the SEO campaign.

I recently spoke with a prospective client who wanted their website to rank on the first page for a fairly competitive keyword. They had it in their heads that they could help boost their rankings by adding a blog to their site. Not a bad idea, or is it?

OK, of course a blog can be a huge benefit to the search engine optimization efforts of any website. There is, after all,  a reason I am taking the time to write the content you are currently reading. But, can a blog hurt your rankings? You bet it can. There is an old saying: “Anything worth doing is worth doing right”. This applies perfectly to websites that are considering adding a blog to their offerings. Here is a quick list of 5 things to think about, in no particular order, if you are considering adding a blog to increase your search engine rankings:

• Frequency of Blog Posts: How often will you take the time to post content to you blog. I have come across a number of blogs that seem to get a post up on the website about twice a year. That is not exactly a way to build up any sort of readership and isn’t likely to add much benefit to your SEO efforts either.

• Commitment: Bloggers often come out swinging, but then can’t go the distance. They tend to post a good bit of content in the beginning and then stop. Maybe it’s because they run out of ideas to blog about or maybe they get bored. Either way these blogs quickly lose their interest from readers and search engines alike.

• Poor Code: A blog is still a web page. If you don’t know how to use meta descriptions, keywords, title tags etc.. then you aren’t going to get your pages crawled effectively by the search engines. Another coding issue with blogs can be the way your URLs are written. Let’s use WordPress for an example. WordPress is a very common blogging platform, and a good one at that. However, the default permalink structure doesn’t allow for any keywords to be used in the URL. There are simple fixes to remedy this, but you have to be aware of these problems before you can address them. Poorly coded websites do not often achieve impressive search engine rankings.

• Security Issues: There seems to be an endless number of blogs on the internet that either don’t have any security or really lazy adminstrators. Take a look at some of the comments that get approved on these blogs. Is it any surprise that you won’t get strong search engine rankings for your page when the comments are full of spam links? It is important to take the time to read the comments and make sure that they are appropriate for the content of the page. If you do choose to publish links from user comments, they had better be to legitimate pages of relevant content.

• Quality Content: Write blog posts that are relevant to the purpose of your website and will be of some value to your sites visitors. If this means waiting until you have something worthwhile or entertaining to say then wait. Poor content will lower the online reputation of your blog to both visitors and search engines.

Just because someone said you should have a blog on your site doesn’t mean you should run blindly forward with this effort. Having a poorly coded, infrequently updated, blog that is full of useless content and spam will make for a perfect anchor, pulling your site right to the bottom of the search engine rankings.