Smashwebs, Inc Official Blog

Smashwebs, Inc is proud to announce that we will be expanding their geographic realm a little bit further.  In an effort to also be able to start serving the Chicago Metro Area, we will now also be operating in Evanston, Illinois.  Web design in Evanston is a fairly competitive area, but thanks to the ability to package the best Search Engine Optimization services in town…we hope to quickly become a difficult competitor to beat.  Our pricing will be budget friendly, and as always, we will strive to provide the same designer sites that are so easy to use.

Congratulations!  Redemption code is #6785A.  You must wait until Sunday to post the code, along with “I’m a winner!” on the Smashwebs, Inc Fan Site in order to seal your prize.  If you do not make that post before Wednesday, January 20th we will have to select somebody else!  We will be in contact with you to get a mailing address, or you may contact us directly at winners@smashwebs.com

Smashwebs, Inc would like to give a warm welcome to our new customers in the last month!

Riewer Group
Located at http://www.RealtorOmaha.com

Malaika Foundation
Located at http://www.MalaikaFoundation.org

New Image Dentistry
Located at http://www.Dentists-Omaha.com

The Thought Bubble
Located at http://www.theThoughtBubble.com

Engineering Specialists Inc was, thanks to Smashwebs, one of the very first to jump on top of the search engines for the keyword “Physical Needs Assessment”.

For those of you that do not know, a physical needs assessment is basically a investigation and subsequent report designed to discover current maintenance issues, as well as other short-term capital items that may need replacement.  The investigation determines, based on everything from interviews and inspection, what costs will probably be associated with a particular property in the next few years, and further designs a long-term maintenance and replacement schedule.

For example, should your rooftop HVAC units be replaced with a much more efficient model now or would it be cheaper to wait until the unit actually stops functioning?  Etc…

ESI is now starting to have difficulty targeting the keyword as it no longer holds a monopoly on the online sector.  As more businesses shift into this line of work…how can they make sure that every time somebody Googles “physical needs assessment” their website shows up?

The simple answer is a company blog! A company blog offers one of the best post-SEO campaign tools you can find, and guess what.  It’s free.  The catch with this is, however, you still have to be creating these posts with SEO in mind.  The search engines do an excellent job of figuring out what to index, but the most important thing is learning how to research what you should even be writing blog posts about.  I could go write an excellent blog post right now about my favorite store in America, but do you think I would even have the slightest of chances that enough people would find it to make it viral?  Absolutely not!!  For that reason you do need to know how to write for a blog – if you want people to actually see it.

Engineering Specialists Inc, a customer of ours came to us with a simple problem: Getting on Google.  They acquire a customer or two per month thanks to their current online site, http://www.esiomaha.com, but were having difficulty competing with larger forensic engineer companies such as Donan.  Instead of wasting countless hours attempting to do SEO on their current site (which has way too much information on it to be effective for a keyword such as “Forensic Engineer”), Smashwebs offered a different kind of solution.

The solution: Create another website!

Who says your business can only have one anyways? Having multiple websites is an excellent idea for a few reasons:

• You can target specific keywords.
• Easily have access to which sites (Namely, facets of your business) do well and which don’t.
• Use each site to provide strong links to the weaker ones.
• Really span the web for breadth AND depth.

By having multiple sites you may optimize for many keywords at once, and have all of them strong!  For example, when trying to expand the forensic engineer side of Engineering Specialists Inc’s business – we didn’t do SEO on a weak “Forensic Engineer” domain name.  We created an entirely new company website that just focused on that.  Now instead of offering leads a huge plate full of stuff they don’t want, they search, they find, they buy.

In Smashwebs, Inc’s software plug of the week we are featuring Solidworks 3D CAD Software.  Solidworks is a program that allows its users to model in full 3D at a fraction of the cost of its competitors, such as Autocad.  Solidworks is an excellent program that is essentially a parasolid-based modeler that utilizes a parametric based approach to create models and assemblies.

In lamen’s terms, its good.

Example of Solidworks 3D Model

As far as how to buy this software – you’re in luck.  If  you are looking for the Solidworks software in Missouri, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, or South Dakota – check out a company called Tridaq, Inc.  Tridaq Inc has offered Solidworks in Illinois for nearly 12 years, and has recently expanded to offer Solidworks in Colorado, and Solidworks in Wyoming.

Making your blog actually searchable on Google is in all honesty a pretty difficult task to undertake.  It’s difficult because it’s not a one step process.  There is no magic formula on a specific thing to change to make it start happening, no advice any one person can give…but there are a few steps you can take to help your blog show up in Google.

Step 1: Focus on a specific topic in each post.
Focusing on a specific topic is a good first start.  The point is to saturate your blog with keywords that are all relevant to the title.  Whether you write your post around your title or the other way around is up to you but keep in mind, whatever your keywords are is going to be how people find that post.

Step 2: Keep it concise.
The last thing you want is a drawn out and wordy post that isn’t 100% relevant to the title!  Keep it short, but long enough to describe what you are wanting to talk about.  Make sure you use the keywords as much as possible but it MUST BE COHERENT!  Clarity is key because primarily you want people to find it – but you don’t want them to leave immediately.

More to come.

Smashwebs, Inc is a specialist in not only setting up official company/corporate blogs, but we can train your marketers on how they should write posts as well.  A blog is not something that should just churn out useless information.  It should captivate your potential client’s interest when they search for a question, and answer it in a way that sheds good light on your business before they even call you.  The strength of a website and blog go hand-in-hand.  Your website’s rankings can get some momentum from blog posts, and likewise, your blog can get momentum from your website’s links.

We get a lot of questions from clients wondering how to write blog posts, and what they should be about.  Our answer is always simple – write a post about something you think people will search for that isn’t already flooded with answers!  This can be a very powerful tool that can help your company gain traction in a crucial area it may have lost in the recent year or two.

Recap:
Write posts specifically for the purpose of people finding it.  Think about what somebody that is interested in what your business does may have a question about.  Then answer that question in a way that makes them excited that they found your company.  Plug yourself.

If your business has just started hearing about the benefits of blogging, Twitter, and Facebook…let Smashwebs clear a little bit up.  I’m finding that businesses are putting efforts into the areas of marketing that don’t necessarily benefit them at all.  There’s plenty of examples of situations where a business’ marketing methods not only didn’t reach their right target, but did nothing more than annoy potential clients.

Lets examine Twitter for today:

Of course, the place where online marketing and annoying converge is often located at Twitter.com.  Our beef with Twitter is simple enough, it really doesn’t serve a purpose for most people other than an excellent means of spreading gossip and rumors to people that don’t really care.  The company itself is seemingly worthless from a financial perspective and despite having over $50 million dollars in venture capital raised in its third round (and millions of users) it is still a non-profit, in the sense that they aren’t making any money.  In my opinion Twitter is absolutely a fad, and unless they find a way to attract people that are willing to actually buy things from the people they are subscribing it is going to remain a red mark on any of those investors tax returns.  Facebook prides itself on being a free tool for social connection and updates, that’s why people use it.  It’s free because people want to advertise where millions of people can see their ads – it couldn’t exist without the business side!  Twitter is no different.  The main thing that strikes me as odd about Twitter is this: The only people I see using it are businesses or celebrities for the SOLE purpose of gaining followers.  It’s a free-to-lease-mall full of stores that has no shoppers.  We call that Behind the Wall Advertising.

As original as this may sound, link building is about quality, not quantity.  Ultimately, your website needs to focus its link building efforts on RELEVANT links that come from relevant sites.  If you’re a lawyer in the Omaha area, you shouldn’t be targeting random business lists and other irrelevant link exchanges.  This is one of the first mistakes that people trying to do search engine optimization on their own.  And the worst part: they keep doing it!

If I can give  you a good tip on how to do SEO correctly, just focus on relevant links coming from sites that have good information.  Figuring out how to do that, well that’s the secret to good SEO.