What should my MN Web Site do?

Before you go out and hire a web design company take a close look at what your website should do. Defining your exact needs will help you avoid costly mistakes in the construction of your new site. Here are some examples of topics that business sites should convey in order to land more customers.

[ ] Establish a presence on the Web
[ ] Increase product and service sales
[ ] Generate new business leads
[ ] Increase the international presence of the organization
[ ] Generate requests for more information
[ ] Support other marketing, advertising and promotional campaigns
[ ] Provide customer service
[ ] Increase store or business traffic
[ ] Provide the latest information about new products/services, sales, special promotions, events
[ ] Build a database for email campaigns
[ ] Provide product usage direction
[ ] Survey new and existing customers
[ ] Recruit new employees

For more information on sound MN web design practices contact Steven Ayres at Rocket 55. www.rocket55.com Rocket 55 is a full service Minnesota web design firm.

Defining a new website

When embarking on the creation of a new website, we at Rocket 55 suggest that you define your site through the following questions.

Have you registered a domain name registered?: (e.g. www.yourcompany.com)
If you already have a URL, what is it?:
Which company hosts your existing Web site?:
Do you know how much they charge you for hosting each per year?:
How many pages are there in your current site?:
What are the objectives of your current site?:
How many visitors does your current site get?: (daily, weekly, monthly)
How long do they visit the site for?
Are there any features or functions of the current site that you would you like to keep?:
Which ones do you want to get rid of?:
Which products and site pages are most popular?:
Have you had any feedback about your current site ?
Who was your current site designed and developed by?:

If you have any questions regarding web design or are one of our many Minnesota web design customers please contact Steven Ayres at steven@rocket55.com

Tracking SEO Links

If you are going to create a linking campaign, you will need to track this activity. My suggestion is to start an excel file with the following fields. Site name, Appearance URL, Submission URL, Date of submission, URL of page you asked others to link to, Whether reciprocal link or payment is required and date the link was checked.

For more information please feel free to contact a member of Rocket 55 MN web designers.

SEO Vs. SEM

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of sculpting your web page content and code to be as highly presentable and technically available on your niche keyword as possible. SEO specialists call upon a variety of tasks to modify linking structure, meta tags, and page content in order to help your website to help itself.

Think of SEO as a practice of altering your website in such a way that your most lucrative keywords stand out from the other content in your pages.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) calls upon a considerably wider-scope to drive traffic to your optimized website. While SEO helps your website to reach out to the search engines on its own merit, SEM calls on a variety of marketing methods to persuade the search engines to favor your domain. SEM methods include keyword research, competitor analysis, link building, content development, Pay Per Click advertising, affiliation, and more.

This blog is written by Steven Ayres from Rocket 55 Marketing + Design. We are a full service MN web design firm. We also specialize in MN SEO + MN SEM

MN Web Design

Search Engine Optimization is absolutely scalable to local or regional needs. Much of our work fits under the category of MN web design, with a strong emphasis on search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Equiping a website with the needed elements for an effective localized SEM campaign takes skill and know how. For more information on conducting a Minnesota Search Engine Optimization campaign, contact Steven Ayres at Rocket 55. Rocket 55 does SEO and SEO for Minnesota based businesses.

SEO and Minnesota Businesses

Most Search Engine Optimization efforts are targeted at the wrong spectrum of potential customer. For instance, most of our SEO work targets Minnesota businesses, but that doesn't always mean that their keyword implementation should be limited to Minnesota consumers. Rocket 55 first identifies the geographical area that the company wants to target. Then we start our keyword list based on that area. An effective SEO campaign will not waste time and valuable marketing dollars bringing in traffic that is unnecessary. For instance, a local salon, is concerned with individuals within a ten mile radius and that is it. Conversely, some businesses may have products or services that they have traditionally sold to local markets that can now be offered nationally wide via the web. Just be aware that as the geographical range increases so does the price of SEO. This is due to the fact that as the area grows, so does the competition. The more the competition, the more effort it takes to get a site ranked.

I hope that this posting was helpful. Rocket 55 is a full service marketing and design firm. Specializing in Minnesota web design and Minnesota SEO.

Importance of SEO: MN Web Design done right

Incorrect MN web design: The vast majority of web sites are built by individuals who have zero formal education or experience with sales or marketing. Therefore it is no big surprise that most websites do not come up on search engines when you Google on their exact business type and location. This is largely caused by three things: lack of relevant content on the home page, misuse of tags and/or overuse of Flash or Javascript.

Correct MN web Design: Rocket 55 is a Minnesota website company that understands the importance of search engine ranking and search engine optimization. It is everything. If people aren't landing on your home page you basically have a digital postcards floating aimlessly in cyberspace. This is why Rocket 55 goes to such great efforts to get to know our customers products or services and then understand what keywords their customers are using to find them.

That is the basic minimum starting point for launching a successful Minnesota SEO project.
Defining the key words that need to be used to make the site successful. This can take research at times. At Rocket 55 we never know who our next client will be or what industry they will be from.

So one piece of advice we would give to companies that are starting to think about a new site is to do some research on their own. We urge companies to understand the basics of SEO and not hire a company doesn't have the ability to implement these types of efforts. For any information you can contact Rocket 55 for any of you MN web design or MN SEO needs. Steven@rocket55.com