2014 Trends for Business Websites and Online Marketing – Part One

Confused about how to effectively promote your business on the Web?
Confused about how to effectively promote your business on the Web?

As a online business marketing provider and small advertising agency since 2001, this post is about my identification of trends that will impact online visibility and business for 2014.

Google AdWords

Everyday I am getting more calls from old clients who state – “Our business has lost placement. We’ve been doing some things ourselves over the past years and now we know we need professional help. We seem to have simply fallen out of the Google index and need to get fast exposure and leads. Can you help us?” In fact in the last 10 days alone I have had five calls just like this.

What Google did in 2013 is now bleeding over into 2014; with businesses being pushed right into AdWords to get exposure and sales leads. Many prospects ask “Isn’t there a better way to get sales other than paying for them in pay per click? Won’t blogging get me sales?” Hands down the best way to increase revenue is to get into pay per click. Although for some clients Bing may be the right place to start, typically it is best to start off in AdWords.

Organic Placement and Blogging

The new SEO model is not about anchor text, volumes of links, or even article marketing – rather the new SEO is about relevant, unique, quality content for your website and blog. I am seeing very few clients invest in blog postings with a three day a week frequency, rather the preferred trend is to buy longer more authoritative blog posts with a one post per week frequency.

Although I am still getting clients that want keyword density, keyword anchor text links, and think they want article marketing, using these tactics now for placement on Google may actually push your site into one of Google’s filters that looks like a penalty.

Tune in Thursday for our trends on Google+ Local and You Tube.

Matt Cutts on Squeeze Pages – One Page Websites

Here’s our video tip of the week using Matt Cutts from Google’s Web Spam team.

What Matt says in the video is if a one page website or squeeze page works for your customers Google does not consider one page websites or for that matter squeeze pages a problem.

However there are a few personal comments that I would like to add to this.

  1. Google does preferentially show in the search results websites that are more authoritative on a topic and typically websites of this  nature will be those with way more than one page.
  2. Google has now factored PageSpeed into their algorithm. If you have to scroll and scroll and scroll on a single page website to see content you may be negatively impacting your PageSpeed and may benefit from switching to a multi page format. This is a fairly new algorithm update and so you may have not had this be an impact before but may now or in the very near future.
  3. Consider user experience. A one page website does not allow for a privacy policy page, contact page, or for that matter more information about who you the business are. I would forgo a single page site to move to a more robust presence that allows for greater transparency and identification of your business.

Web Design Trend – Responsive Design

One of the hottest new trends in web design is responsive design. Responsive design is where a website has been created, at the source code level, to render differently based on the device and viewing platform.

My own firm is in the process of moving back into web design this quarter with a responsive, SEO optimized web design program. In fact we’re completing our site testing right now and getting ready to start content roll-out in the next several weeks. If you want to preview what we’re doing you can check out our page links below. Just remember for now no links to any pages are working yet.

Make sure to look at the pages with a smartphone, tablet, laptop, and desktop to understand what responsive means. Seeing is understanding. The site is built on pure CSS code and uses PHP includes.

 Home Page

http://www.mccordweb.com/clients/MWS2014/index.php

 Right Column Inside Page

http://www.mccordweb.com/clients/MWS2014/inside-1.php

 No Side Column Inside Page

http://www.mccordweb.com/clients/MWS2014/inside-2.php

 Three Split Column Inside Page

http://www.mccordweb.com/clients/MWS2014/inside-3.php

All pages are being tested for HTML5 compliance and Google PageSpeed. So far the results are very good and the pages for desktops and tablets rank with an over 80 number for speed.

Our niche when it comes to web design has always been highly specialized unique content authority sites with our new approach we will hit a more moderate price point by offering some degree of customization using our pre-designed page layouts. I’ll look forward to keeping you advised as we get closer to launching our own corporate site and web design program. Pricing will be in the range of $3,000 to $6,000 based on content and number of pages.

My Tips for Securing WordPress

My firm blogs for many clients and in the process we’re on blog sites more frequently than the blog owner. In some cases my team was the first to notify the client of a hack. Typically when a site is hacked, we cannot login to write or see the WordPress site when we go to gather links for a blog post.

To keep your WordPress blog or WordPress website from being hacked these are my tips for security.

1. Make sure you are using a secure password. Many times the client’s webmaster will send us our logins and the password is something like 123456. For security, I like passwords like this A&Ji3nGba*3!. Impossible to remember but really hard for a hacker to guess.

2. Secure your site from brute force login attempts. I like the WordPress plugin Login Lockdown. This plugin allows you to lock out intruders who are repeatedly trying to get in by blocking their IP address.

3. Monitor your core WordPress files. I really like this plugin. It monitors your core WordPress files and emails you when there have been changes and advises you what files have been changed. I cannot begin to tell you how easy this  makes fixing a hack attack by having an idea where to start.

4. Use an exploit monitor. I use the WordPress plugin called Exploit Scanner. We’ve found several deep hacks with roots in a parent website feeding into an on-domain blog this way. By scanning the WordPress files for explode and hidden elements we have been able to quickly identify a hack and work fast to remove it.

There is nothing worse for a website owner than to do a search for themselves on Google.com and find a note next to their site for users not to visit it due to malware or Google to turn off the links to their site.

These simple preventatives are what we suggest for every blog owner they are easy to install and require just  minimum of vigilance.