Your website is representative of your business, its reputation and even credibility. When getting ready to build a website, consider the following factors:

• Your website needs to have a modern look and feel, appropriate for your type of business (e.g. social networking website versus financial planning firm; alternative energy provider versus HR software developer)
• Your website needs to offer a good amount of free and interesting information to its visitors (links to quality websites in your industry, free PDFs, demos, etc.)
• Your website's content needs to be written in a simple language and presented in an easy-to-read format (suitable for visual scanning)
• Your website needs to have clear and visible calls to action (buy, order, download, register - links, banners, and buttons)
• You webiste needs to collect emails of your visitors or other contact information (newsletter signup, registration form, free download, free demo)
• You need to conduct a thorough keyword research as well as competitive analysis
• You need to SEO your site's design, content, and formatting by incorporating your main keywords in all structural elements
• You need to build as many incoming (back) links as you can from sites and blogs in your industry
• Your need to learn about online PR and Social Media Marketing (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Pinterest)
• Your need to participate in your industry's reputable forums and blogs and offer your professional advice

You need to enrol in Google AdWords; you need to create custom landing pages for each ad group (one per each ad group, keep them orphan)

You need to collect your website statistics and analyze it on a regular basis (Google Analytics is a must; remember to set goals)

In summary, you need to be constantly creating content: on your website's blog and on the leading social sites, as well as posting comments on forums and blogs with links back to your site where possible. The key is to create meanignful and useful content for your visitors and for the general public; re-writing your press releases and posting them on all social sites will be counter productive.

Above all, you need to entice your users to clicking on Social Media buttons: "like" and "plus" and "share" your pages as well as posting comments on your site. Those comments should ideally contain your most important keywords. Comments are key. Simply clicking the buttons is not enough, or you need hundreds of those clicks. But comments, if you can get 40 social media "likes" with keyword-relevant comments, you site will move up in ranking on Google very significantly. Being on the first page on Google will drive traffic to your site. Your next objective is to retain this traffic by earning its interest.

If you'd like to talk about your website marketing objectives call Joomla Bliss at 613.231.6308

Every two years, one of the leading web marketing firms and tool developer Moz produces results of their survey on search ranking factors. Below are their findings. Note that it is not clear how exactly they estimate the values and the total points, but in general, their guidelines are valuable.

Every web marketer uses their own tools, but there is a list of tools that all marketers use or at least are familiar with. Moz published the results of their 2012 survey on the status of SEO and web marketing industry. These results are very useful, especially if you are just starting with SEO and website marketing and looking for some benchmarks.

Below is the Moz list of the most important website marketing tools by category and by percentage of respondents (out of 1600 respondents in total, if we are not mistaken). Joomla Bliss in Ottawa adds one category to this list at the very end.

Halloween Special Edition

Google and other search engines include Twitter profiles and messages in their search results. Search engines use "signals", such as the number of social media shares of a link, to determine how that link ranks for a given keyword. This is now called a "social search". 

It is official. Social media matters now more than ever. it matters for SEO and it matters for Marketing in general. You've got to get on top it.

This post concisely describes how to use Twitter for website marketing and SEO.  We explain how to use your Twitter smartly to get higher ranking for your website on Google and other search engines. 

If we could tell you one thing and one thing only about how to use Twitter and social media in general to get higher ranking of your corporate website on Google and other search engines, this will be the following: "Create and tweet/retweet only highly useful and valuable content". If you don't have time to learn or do anything else, applying this rule alone will eventually generate a social following for you and will establish you as a thought leader in your field.  If you'd like to do more, here are 13 quick and easy tips you can employ:

Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaigns can have different goals, i.e. increase awareness, drive traffic, drive user registration, prompt sales, etc. But ultimately, all businesses need to generate revenue, and Social Media Marketing is just one form of Marketing, with the same ultimate goal of helping to increase Sales. The first step is to determine what specific goals you need to reach by embarking on a social media campaign.

A website has a little value if your clients or customers can't find it. Before embarking on a website design project, it is good to familiarize yourself with the basic web marketing principles.

Website Marketing in a Nutshell

Overall, website marketing can be summed up as three things:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Social Media Marketing (including Affiliate Marketing)
3. Paid advertising on search engines (Google AdWords) and social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc)

Whether you are focusing on all of them or only one, the bulk of your activities will be creating content on your website. Quality content is key for any kind of website marketing activity.

Why Keywords are So Important for Web Design and SEO?

There are hundreds of articles and blog posts written on the topic of keywords for the purposes of website design and SEO. So JoomlaBliss would like to contribute our knowledge to this very important issue as well.

Optimising Web Design for SEO

Here is what Google has to say about the file extensions: "At Google, we are able to index most types of pages and files with very few exceptions. File types we are able to index include: pdf, asp, jsp, html, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf.“

Details on file types:

• Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Atom and RSS feeds (.atom, .rss)
• Autodesk Design Web Format (.dwf)
• Google Earth (.kml, .kmz)
• Lotus 1-2-3 (.wk1, .wk2, .wk3, .wk4, .wk5, .wki, .wks, .wku)
• Lotus WordPro (.lwp)
• MacWrite (.mw)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt)
• Microsoft Word (.doc)
• Microsoft Works (.wks, .wps, .wdb)
• Microsoft Write (.wri)
• Open Document Format (.odt)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)
• Shockwave Flash (.swf)
• Text (.ans, .txt)
• Wireless Markup Language (.wml, .wap)