One Internet, One Internet Company

Building a brand is hard work. So is maintaining one. That’s why it’s important to hire the right people to help curate your image and message.  Several times a week, we get emails from India-based SEO and web design companies; telling us how they can put us on the first page of Google’s searches or design a website for a few hundred dollars a month. 

Our initial reaction is almost always, “Do they even do research?” We do the exact things they are offering to do for us. Then, one day, it occurred to us, they probably get a lot of business by offering their services to other “web design” companies. Everything Clever Ogre does is done in-house. We don’t farm out any work, but there are agencies out there that do. To some, there may seem to be advantages to shopping work around for the best deal. They like the idea of getting web design here, SEO there, and email and hosting somewhere else…we tend to disagree, and here’s why:

Continuity: An important part of branding is continuity. Your image needs to remain constant across all platforms. Using a single agency to complete your all of your web-based work will ensure all of the elements are the same. Fonts, colors, shapes…they all help tell the story of your brand.

Convenience: Having one agency build your website and another agency produce your ads or do SEO research is cumbersome. It can also be more costly in the long run, going back and forth between multiple agencies to make changes or requests takes much more time than making one phone call or sending one email. 

Cost-effectiveness: Having a single agency work on your website and search optimization will eliminate the “Hey, web guy, the SEO guy said we need to do X.” “OK, but I've already moved forward with W, implementing X will cost extra.” When the design and content optimization are coming from the same place, there will be no overlap in work, no extras for you to be responsible for.

You shouldn't have to sift through your contact list to figure out whom you should contact. Clever Ogre wants to help make the Internet a better place. Find out what we can do for you.

7 Tips

There was a time, and you might remember it, when experts stuffed keywords into website content and filled the meta keyword section with pretty much any word that could remotely be connected with the topic or product on the website. Doing this, and other ‘black hat’ things could make a website come up high in Google’s search results. Now…not so much. Here are some things to remember when considering your website’s content as it relates to search engine ranking.

1. The most important thing to have is good content. Writing content for your website and integrating keywords, naturally, into each page will do wonders for letting the spider bots know what’s on your site.

2. There is no optimum keyword density. The right occurrence of keywords on your site is dictated by how many times the keyword can be used naturally. Use the keyword (or some variation) in the headline, page title, in the content…wherever it fits best.

3. Proper use of “H-tags” and bold font go even farther to improve search engine ranking. Think of your website like a term paper. Each section needs to have a heading and subheads to let the reader know what is there. They may only be looking for one specific thing, but if you have it, they’ll find it on your site.

4. Page titles and descriptions are more important than we give them credit for. When you perform a search, the big links you see, either in blue or purple (depending on whether you’ve been to the site) are the page titles. The limited bit of information below that is the page’s description. This is your opportunity to pull people in and get them to your site.

5. Links – it’s quality, not quantity. Search engines like that you have your site linked on other people’s sites. This is good. It lends credibility to your brand, to an extent. You should focus on having your site linked on relevant and diverse sites. Oh, and you can go ahead and cancel your subscription to that blog-spinning service.

6. Use social media. Not every network is right for every need, but find the one or ones that best suit your needs and match your audience’s habits. People search social media for answers these days. Be there.

7. Make sure you include your location in your content. Someone may search for t-shirt design, and you may do t-shirt design in Poughkeepsie, NY, but if you don’t tell the search engines where you do your designs, it won’t know to serve up your website when someone searches for t-shirt design in Poughkeepsie.

All right, that’s all we have for you this month. If there’s something you’d like us to talk about, let us know.