In today’s online world, using cascading style sheets, or CSS, for your website’s navigation is key to getting all of your pages indexed in the search engines.

Why is it important to have all of your pages indexed? Only indexed pages can be returned in the search results. If the search engine spiders can’t find a page, then a searcher can never find it through the search engines, either.

One important factor in ensuring that your pages get indexed is how you set up the navigation on your site. In order for the spiders to crawl and index your site efficiently and completely, your navigational links must be plain HTML text.

Using cascading style sheets to style plain text navigation

Creating a navigation bar using the CSS property allows you to use plain HTML text without it looking like plain text. CSS web page navigation can achieve the same stylized effects as fancier JavaScript and Flash navigation, for example rollovers and dropdown menus, by using standard HTML tags such as <ul> and <a> that the spiders can easily follow.

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Importance of PPC management – and how it relates to gardening!

If you’ve ever planted a garden, you know that choosing and planting the seeds you want is not enough to yield the barrels of fresh produce you are expecting. Careful and regular tending to your garden is needed to check proper growth and ensure no outside factors are hurting your garden.

Pay per click is a lot like a garden. There is plenty of thought and careful planning that goes into the set-up of a paid search account and in selecting proper keywords and ad copy, but what happens after that? Does PPC become an afterthought or is it carefully tended to?

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Online conversion audit: after (or even before!) you’ve successfully increased targeted traffic, discover how to get prospects to say “yes.”

Perhaps your company has been focusing so much on boosting targeted traffic that you haven’t given much thought about what your prospects will experience once they arrive at your site. If so, don’t beat yourself up about it; it’s not uncommon.

But . . . you will want to remedy that, as soon as possible, to ensure that prospects that do arrive at your site quickly and easily find the information they need to make a buying decision so that they order from you – and NOT from your competitors.

Here are steps that you should take when conducting your online conversion audit:

Online conversions, tip # 1: Make sure that your site is quick to load.

According to Akamai Technologies:

• On average, people are only willing to wait two seconds before they start to become impatient with load time.
• Even more alarming, 40% of shoppers are willing to allot only 3 seconds for load time before they click off your site (and then probably choose one of your competitors).
• Quick load time is needed to build customer loyalty, according to the same study, especially for high spending customers.
• Seventy-nine percent of online shoppers who suffer from a dissatisfying shopping experience are less likely to return to that same site to make a future purchase.
• Twenty-seven percent of shoppers won’t even go into a physical store if they had a bad shopping experience with that store’s site.

So, if your site doesn’t load quickly enough, then it doesn’t matter how wonderful your products and/or services are, or how well you’ve explained the benefits of them. Your prospects are already gone – possibly for good!

If you need a second reason to speed up your load time, here it is. Google has recently announced that site load time is now part of their algorithm. This means that sites that take longer to load will potentially rank lower in the search results than faster sites. If you’re lower in search rankings, your company will be harder to find – and, if prospects can’t find your site, you’ve lost out on a whole lot of conversions and sales.

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Wondering if using manufacturer-provided copy will cause duplicate content issues for your site?

Manufacturers often provide copy about their products so that retailers can use it to describe those products to potential buyers. Although this copy may be useful to people who arrive at a retail website, manufacturer-created copy causes multiple duplicate content issues from a search engine optimization standpoint.

You may be asking: why should I care if duplicate content issues cause problems for the search engine spiders?

Take a look at search engines from a search engine company’s perspective (Google, Yahoo, Bing and so forth). Each of the search engines want online searchers to choose to use their services, right? To get this to happen, a search engine focuses on providing the best results for each search query; to quote the most successful of the search engine companies about one of the ways that they accomplish this: “Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information.”

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Search engine optimization jobs and pay per click jobs available: Senior SEO Technician, PPC Manager and Social Media Services Specialist

The Search Guru team is growing. We’re a full service SEM / SEO firm serving mid to large to enterprise level firms in North America, looking for candidates for the following positions to grow our firm. The positions below may be filled individually, or one person may cover more than one. This is a great opportunity for the right people. Please share with your network if you believe you know someone who would be a good fit. All part time unless the right candidate needs full time and can cover other areas of SEM. Note the right candidates need not be local – all positions are virtual / work remote – not limited to Cleveland or Ohio.

1. SEO Technical Consulting

Looking for a heavy tech here – someone who has experience in building, testing, optimizing and reverse engineering. The right person can figure out what the site owners have done to get themselves in trouble as well as reverse engineer competitors’ strategies. They are typically developing income generating sites on the side and may do some programming. http://cleveland.craigslist.org/eng/1666671695.html

2. PPC Manager

Need a 20 hour / week person who can contribute strategically and support / develop junior PPC staffers. http://cleveland.craigslist.org/mar/1667212695.html

3. Social Media Services Strategist

This person will perform audits of clients’ Facebook pages, YouTube channels, etc. and support the link building team in generating linkbait ideas / programs for clients.

Qualified candidates may send their resumes, cover letters and salary
requirements to: Jobs@TheSearchGuru.com.