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The effectiveness of blog marketing

Blog marketing has become an effective tool to bring your website viewers. It is an important area to grow your business. Why? It is because blogs improve the online experience by adding information in a comfortable way on a website. Blogs have made its way into the realm of marketing and if done correctly, it is a great tool towards the success of your company. A Blog success correlates to content, distribution, and frequency. The most popular blogs have a voice bring personality and keeps the viewers coming back for information.

Some blogs specialize in the whole industry that they are in, reporting on various things occurring in that industry. It stars with everything from competitor news, to industry events, and hot topics that might occur. This approach gives you probably the greatest amount of material to work with thus running out of things to write about doesn’t really happen often. Whether you’re starting out creating a blog on a specific interest you have or adding it to your business, here are a series of questions to ask yourself before implementing a successful blog marketing strategy:

• What are your goals?
• What is your social media strategy?
• What must happen for your customers before you meet your business objectives?
• What are the key performance indicators that will help you measure the buyer persona’s path towards conversion?
• Do you have the measurement tools in place to properly monitor and measure for research and to determine the effectiveness of your blog marketing?

Taking a look at Company Logo Changes

When looking back through time as companies grow, it looks like changes within a company go beyond structure. Within the long company life cycle, logo redesign seems to take a huge part of reshaping an image to fit a bigger audience. A logo redesign can be worth its weight if you get it right. There is a thin line between freshening up your design, and taking a step backwards with a redesign. A redesign can be small and simple, but other times it can be a huge re-vamp of a company and its goals. From Wal-Mart, IBM, Starbucks, and Apple, each company has taken the time to reshape their image. Could you imagine Apple selling an IPad or IPhone with their old logo?

A logo redesign can invigorate a company’s image or squander its brand equity. It takes careful time and thinking, proper exposure to their target group and testing. Here are a few well known companies that have changed their logo over their company life cycle.

The Search Engine Optimization Campaign

Getting your SEO campaign right is the hardest things to do. But get it right, as many as 55 percent of all the people who search for that specific term to click on your link. SEO works, plain and simple. It is more cost effective and delivers more of a long term benefit than paid advertisements in today’s marketing world.

But SEO is becoming more and more sophisticated. The search engines try to limit all that spam and useless content that no one wants to see.

So how do you start? It’s all about working smart. Start with a plan. Make short term objectives in order to reach those goals. Make small steps and track all your results.

Hiring an SEO firm or consultant or for this can help with all these steps. But in the meantime, a couple ideas to dwell on are:

• get your website indexed with all search engines
• use video to grab attention
• optimize your images
• make use of the location for your business
• get your content into the web news using RSS feeds
• submit an XML sitemap
• Be relevant and build authority
• Join the conversation with social media marketing

How much does a website cost?

The most commonly asked question:

How much does a website cost?

Searching for how much to a website costs can be daunting, but here are some websites that give a general idea of market rates today.

• Here is an external website blogging about website cost
• Information for planning your design budget

Websites vary in cost, from a couple hundred dollars to thousands of dollars. And there is a big difference in quality. Website Design is more than just visual and graphics. It’s an analyzed and thought our process used to identify functions and layouts needed to display your company in the right image. At Orange Aura, we would like to ask you what your budget is for a website. A Budget dictates how much time we can devote to your website. What are you looking to spend to achieve your vision, compete against your competition, and be the dominant player in the market?

It’s always great to take time to do the research and see what you can budget to develop your business and idea.

How to create a robot.txt file

What is a robot.txt file?

A robot.txt is a file that tells various search engines not to crawl on certain website pages. Basically, it blocks search engines from seeing what certain web pages on your site. It’s placed on your website server and can be created in your Notepad on your computer.

Why do I need it?

Very simply, search engines look at your robot.txt file when they look at your site. So if you don’t have one or if you don’t need to hide pages, it is best to have one for Search Engine Optimization to boost ranks. Having a robot.txt file located in your website is better than not having one at all.

But you may need a robot.txt file because:

-you building parts of your site and do not want your unfinished work to appear in search engines

-you have information on parts of your page that is of no interest to the public

-you want parts of your website server directories hidden, like cgi-bin, files that don’t need to be looked at.

-you can select which search engines you want to block or appear in. You should do this because certain small search engines purpose is to only collect email addresses for spamming.

But overall, you need a robot.txt file because larger search engines look for this file first like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

How can you create an effective robots.txt file for your site?

Simply create a text document and save the new document as robots.txt.  Do not use an html editor to create the file unless is has the ability to create a plain text document (ASCII). Most computers will allow you to create a text document using notepad.

• Right click on your desktop
• Choose new
• Choose text document
• Open the document you just created
• Insert instructions to robots
• Click on save as
• Save document as robots.txt

Once you have uploaded the file to the root directory of your domain it’s good idea to use a robots.txt validator to confirm that everything is correct. You can search Google for free robots.txt validator or try the one listed below.

http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml

If you would like more information, visit the Official The Robots Exclusion Protocol Website about Robot.txt: http://www.robotstxt.org

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Robot.txt file – Codes to use

There is nothing difficult about creating a basic robots.txt file. It can be created using notepad or whatever is your favorite text editor. Each entry has just two lines:

User-Agent: [Spider or Bot name] Disallow: [Directory or File Name]

This line can be repeated for each directory or file you want to exclude, or for each spider or bot you want to exclude.

Here are a few examples that will make it clearer.

1. Exclude a file from an individual Search Engine

You have a file, privatefile.htm, in a directory called ‘private’ that you do not wish to be indexed by Google. You know that the spider that Google sends out is called ‘Googlebot’. You would add these lines to your robots.txt file:

User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /private/privatefile.htm

2. Exclude a section of your site from all spiders and bots

You are building a new section to your site in a directory called ‘newsection’ and do not wish it to be indexed before you are finished. In this case you do not need to specify each robot that you wish to exclude, you can simply use a wildcard character, ‘*’, to exclude them all.

User-Agent: * Disallow: /newsection/

Note that there is a forward slash at the beginning and end of the directory name, indicating that you do not want any files in that directory indexed.

3. Allow all spiders to index everything

Once again you can use the wildcard, ‘*’, to let all spiders know they are welcome. The second, disallow, line you just leave empty, that is your disallow from nowhere.

User-agent: * Disallow:

4. Allow no spiders to index any part of your site

This requires just a tiny change from the command above – be careful!

User-agent: * Disallow: /

If you use this command while building your site, don’t forget to remove it once your site is live!

Proper Search Engine Indexing

For billions of users, Google’s search engine is nothing but a very simplistic search box, but behind the scenes, it’s a complicated algorithm and getting increasingly difficult as time goes on. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are getting more precise at sorting websites in order to help people find the information they are looking for. In short, search engines are becoming faster with better and more intelligent crawling and indexing systems. Ever wonder whats the best way to maximize on how search engines index? And how you can make sure users find your website?

Visibility of Your Site

Getting website exposure is probably the main concern in all website development and the hardest. You could have the most visually appealing website, but if your website isn’t  indexed properly, you’ll struggle with getting optimal amount of viewers. Some reasons that could be keeping your website from appealing in search results are:

• Googlebot could not find your site if it was temporarily down when they tried to crawl it, posted after googlebot crawled it
• If there are not many inbound links from other sites
• the structure or content of a particular page prevents it from being in the search engine results (dynamic content like flash, JavaScript, or some type of frames have a hard time being indexed in search engines)
• URLs include frequent redirects

Control your content by using a “robot.txt” file

Every kind of website has different goals. Some websites want certain pages to be visible and some sites needs pages to be hidden. By using the Robots Exclusion Protocol, it allows websites to establish access restrictions. There are some pages that you don’t want to be referenced by search engines like internal logs, or subscription-only content, or pages that won’t be read well by search engine crawlers.

Creating a robot.txt file and placing it in your website will do the trick. All top search engines will follow all the instructions from the robot.txt file.

Working with Meta tags

The second part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol is the robot Meta tags that follow each page on your website. Using Meta tags gives a fine-detailed control of how an individual document is indexed.  Meta Tags can be placed inside the HTML of a page to specify the search engine behavior for that page.

Building a sitemap and its advantages

The next part to a successful search engine indexing for your website would be building a Site map. In order for Google and other search engines to include pages from your website to their index, they need to know the URLs of all those pages. A majority of the time, search bots will find your pages by crawling your website and reading links from one page to locate others, but many times there are sites that have pages that are not linked from anywhere. To overcome this issue, creating a detailed Site map on your site will ensure that the search engine knows it all.

Doing all these tasks for your website will not only improve its efficiency and functionality, but you may start to notice more users finding the right parts of your website. Increasing your traffic!

How to choose a cost effective SEO firm



Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the method of attaining top rankings in a search engines’ result page. For any business that seeks high quality visitors and customers, SEO is an important practice. Information on achieving high Google rankings is readily available as well as tutorials on specific SEO practices. One can certainly attempt it on their own and achieve noticeable results down the road. However, most business owners do not have the time to execute a proper SEO strategy much less the time learn the SEO business in the first place. Building an online presence is a time consuming and tedious process that calls for expertise and experience.

The SEO method demands comprehensive evaluation from the Web site and what it provides; optimal keyword research; writing keyword rich content, link developing, directory submission, article submission to several article directories; press release distribution; and much more. Additionally, one has to continuously monitor and evaluate the ranking, and make adjustments and modifications as needed. It is a complete time employment, and outsourcing the SEO procedure to SEO experts is the best way to concentrate on your core skills.

You can find a lot of corporations these days that are offering SEO similar services as our own. Many of these firms provide inexpensive services. When choosing an SEO service one should not just ask about the pricing, but how these individuals plan to achieve these rankings and build back links. You should ask them what specific strategies they intend to implement in achieving your desired SERP rankings. You should take some time and read the Google Webmasters Best Practices. Many SEO services employ “black hat” methods; that is, methods that are frowned upon and forbidden by Google and other search engines. Search Engine Optimization is not an overnight process. It can takes months, or even years (if you are in a competitive niche) to build quality, organic back links.  Those who employ ethical SEO practices will reap the rewards of high Google rankings, but those who execute black hat techniques will ultimately lead to your website getting banned or de-indexed.

How to create a sitemap xml file

A sitemap.xml file is a file which allows you to tell search engines about URLs are available for crawling. It basically tells the search engine bots where to look for content on your web site.

The Sitemap.xml file helps search engine bots sort through your organization of your website. By submitting a sitemap.xml file, you are basically helping a search engine’s crawler to do a better job of crawling and indexing your web site. Having one is better than not having one!

A Sitemap Index File

You can create multiple sitemap.xml files, however each sitemap.xml file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes).

Here is a typical set-up of a sitemap.xml index file:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <sitemapindex xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″> <sitemap> <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap_1.xml</loc> <lastmod>2008-05-01</lastmod> </sitemap> <sitemap> <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap_2s.xml</loc> <lastmod>2008-05-01</lastmod> </sitemap> </sitemapindex>

What the tags in the Sitemap.xml File do!

The URLSET Tag

Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.

The URL Tag

Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag.

The Loc Tag (Location)

This is the URL of the web page. It must be fully qualified URL.

The Change Frequency Tag

This setting indicates how frequently the content at a particular URL is likely to change. It can be set to always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never.

The Last Modified Tag

The time the URL was last modified. This information allows crawlers to avoid re-crawling documents that haven’t changed. This date should be in W3C Date/Time format.

The Priority Tag

The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on the same site. The value for this tag is a number between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your site. The default priority of a page is 0.5.

The priority assigned to a web page has no influence on the position of your URLs in a search engine’s result pages. Nor, does assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your web site will help you.

These are just the basic set-up tips for creating a sitemap.xml index file or a regular sitemap.xml file. For a complete listing of all of the sitemap.xml variables and options, go to http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

It’s a great source of information on the actual creation and working samples of sitemap.xml files.

How to Share Website Content with just a Simple Button

A great way to boost traffic is to give your viewers the option to share your website content with their friends. If you read a lot of blog websites, you’ll start to notice that some of them have a sharing button.

Two very popular sharing buttons are Addtoany.com and Addthis.com

Share anything, anywhere, and boost traffic back to your site. It only takes seconds to get AddThis/AddtoAny, and it’s free! It makes it easy for all types of blogs, websites, and flash related content. Some of these buttons strong features are automatically translations to over 50 languages, so anyone can share, you can choose to receive statistics on sharing trends/top content shared, and these buttons are customizable. It’s obviously worth trying and its as simple as copying and pasting a simple code.