lucidCircus has worked with Prague based Ilincev Design for many years now.  Over the last couple of years we’ve been educating ourselves to offer SEO (search engine optimization) , PPC (pay-per-click) and now SMM (social media marketing).  Here is a mindmap of our SEO service offerings:

http://www.seobook.com/

Or just one?

Let’s take look at a web strategy that has a number of SEO and benefits: the hub and spoke strategy. A hub and spoke strategy is when you create one authoritative domain (the hub), and then hang various related websites off that domain (the spokes).

If you don’t yet have an authority site, it’s probably best to focus on that one site. However, once you’ve built an authority hub, it can be a good idea to specialize in a number of niches using multiple, smaller sites.

Let’s look at a few reasons why, in the context of dominating a niche.

Economics

Economic theory holds that division of labor increases profitability.

During the early days of the web, it was easy to make money by being a generalist. However, as the web got deeper and richer, it became difficult to maintain a generalist position unless you had significant resources.

Specialization, by way of niches, allows for greater targeting, and this targeting can increase value. Leads and advertising become more valuable, because the target audience can be reached more efficiently.

The hub and spoke approach is this theory in microcosm. The hub is the generalist authority, whilst the spokes allow for niche specialization.

We’ll see how this dove-tails with SEO shortly.

Full article: http://www.seobook.com/should-you-have-multiple-websites

article suggested by Ondrej Ilincev

3rd redesign in 8 years http://somalab.net – cms, xhtml, css, seo, and ecommerce.  Authorize.net and PayPal integration for fulfillment.  The original ropes inducer!  Stronger orgasms for men.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-disconnect-in-ppc-vs-seo-spending

There’s a big disconnect in the way marketing dollars are allocated to search engine focused campaigns. Let me highlight:

Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013.
- Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008

OK.  So companies in the US spent $10 billion last year on paid search ads, and even more this year. How about SEO?

SEO: $1.3 billion (11%)
- Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008

SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.

That looks to me like most of the eyeballs are on the organic listings – the ones you can only influence with organic SEO… Huh? Maybe we should get more data on this subject. Let’s turn to Enquiro:

Organic Ranking Visibility

(shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%

Side sponsored ad visibility

(shown in percentage of participants looking at an ad in this location)

from the desk of
Ondrej Ilincev

http://ilincev.com

1 – 50%
2 – 40%
3 – 30%
4 – 20%
5 – 10%
6 – 10%
7 – 10%
8 – 10%
Continue reading…

Ondrej Ilincev

http://ilincev.com

Ondrej, who has been a design partner with lucidCircus for the last 8 years has of late become a guru when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Last year a half dozen of our clients started asking for SEO and PPC (Pay Per Click) work to be done so I’ve been working with Ondrej and his team closely and learning a lot in the process. It helps that whenever I have a question or a client has a question that I don’t know the answer to, Ondrej is usually ready with an article from one of the SEO focused blogs that explains in full. Since it’s all good intel that I want to be able to refer back to easily I’ll add them to this blog as I get them or find them in my chat logs.

Todays article is What Aspect Of SEO Should You Be Spending Most Of Your Time On? from seobook.com.

From the article:

3. The Five Most Important Areas Of SEO On Which To Spend Your Time

These are highly debatable, but here’s my ranking:

1. Produce Remarkable, Attention Grabbing Content

“What aspect of SEO should you be spending most of your time on? Optimizing the title tag, getting links, creating quality content? “

Everything starts with remarkable content i.e. content worth remarking on and linking to. Do you have unique, timely content? Does you content solve a problem? Does you content provide a new insight? Does you content spark controversy? Does you content start – or contribute to – a conversation?

2. Crawlability

If your content can’t be crawled, you won’t rank. Ensure your site is easily accessible to both humans and search engine spiders.

3. Build Links

Google’s algorithm is heavily weighted towards links. Beg, buy, or earn links, and rankings follow. Get your keywords into the link text. Building links also means building relationships with people. Spend a lot of time doing this, especially in the early stages.

4. Title Tag

It is debatable how much ranking value the title tag has, both it definitely has click-thru value. Your listing fights for attention with all the other links on page. What will make people click your link?
Learn the lessons of Adwords. Match your title tag to the keyword query. Solve a users problem. Arouse curiosity.

5. On-Page Content

Forget endless on-page tweaking. Largely a waste of time. Instead, keep a few keyword phrases in mind when writing. Use semantic variations of your terms in order to help catch long tail terms. Link your page to related pages, using keyword terms in the link.

Bonus: Watch Your Competition. Do What They Do

Download the toolbar. And keep a very close eye on your competition. Whatever they do, you need to do more of it

Summary

SEO used to be a technical exercise involving the isolation of specific factors that, when tweaked, lead to higher rank. It still is, to a certain extent, but much less so than it used to be. Therefore, there is little point looking at each factor in isolation.

SEO has become a lot more holistic and strategic, so by far the most important aspect is clearly outlining your goals, and defining a strategy to achieve those goals.

Continue reading…

New site launch : http://regionalbest.com

New site launch : http://delcorp.com

About Delaware Corporate Agents, Inc.

lucidCircus designed and developed this new site for DelCorp.  The site features Flash based forms integrated into their legacy eCommerce provider.

Since 1973, Delaware Corporate Agents, Inc. (DelCorp®) has incorporated thousands of businesses worldwide.  With over 35 years experience assisting companies in the formation of their businesses, we pride ourselves in providing a high level of customer support through our experienced, knowledgeable and dedicated staff.

Currently we are providing SEO support as well as maintenance to their databases and forms.  Next up for them is a CMS.  Delcorp isn’t only a client of mine, I became their client as well.