Website Design and SEO that Actually Gets Results

Are you hoping to increase your website’s traffic?  Or maybe your site already gets plenty of traffic but no one ever converts into a lead.  Either way, we can help.

We’re constantly researching and testing so that we can bring positive results to our clients by simultaneously increasing their traffic and their conversion rates.  Through the hundreds of experiments conducted in our in-house marketing test laboratory over the past decade and a half, we’ve discovered exactly what makes website visitors tick.  Plus, we’ve been able to successfully reverse-engineer Google’s ranking methodologies to help our clients’ sites appear at the top of the search engine’s front page.

But what makes Red Rocket different from the others?  For us, the difference is in the details. In an industry where details make the difference between success and failure, Red Rocket leaves nothing to chance.  For instance, the company’s exclusive 106-Point SEO Checklist ensures that every site that we develop adheres to the strict unwritten rules of the major search engines. Plus, Red Rocket’s proven process for creating effective websites has demonstrated again and again that online success is within reach for business owners both small and large.

Don’t you think it’s time your business begins taking advantage of the power of the Web? Give us a call today at (970) 674-0079, and we’ll show you how we’ll turn your website into a money-making, marketing platform that’ll give your competitors a run for their money!

From the Lab

What Not to Do for SEO: Part 7

What most people don’t understand is that search engine optimization has to do with much more than just using keywords in your content. People forget that you’re optimizing your website for a search engine’s “experience.” Much like you would for a human reader, you need to make the content accessible to search engines.

This is where things like valid code come into play. If you don’t properly code your website, Google might have a tough time finding whatever it is you’re trying to get them to look at. Just keep one thing in mind: use proper code, and Google won’t get lost in it!

What Not to Do for SEO: Part 6

Today’s lesson is quite funny, actually. I often hear, “why am I not ranking for my keyword?”

One of the most embarrassing things to hear is, “oh, well, it might have something to do with the fact you didn’t say that phrase even once in your content.”

Yep, it’s happened. That would be like us trying to rank for “SEO in Fort Collins” and actually using the phrase “you know, that thing that makes you show up on Google.” Sure, we might be talking about the same thing, but we didn’t actually say the phrase.

This one’s an easy one, folks: use your keyword in your content. And don’t over do it.

An Embarassing SEO Mistake

For several years, there was a website in Fort Collins that was making a horrendous mistake. This company is an icon in Fort Collins; one of most well known names in town – and no, I’m not going to tell you who.

There’s a very important file at work when it comes to SEO. It’s called your robots file. It tells Google where it can and cannot go in your website. If you say, don’t visit this page, it won’t. This is done by using one line of code. You have to be extra careful though because one simple typo can deindex your entire site. Oops…

Here are the contents of a basic robots file:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

This is saying, “Attention all search engines and other web crawlers: You can view everything on my site.”

Here is how you should properly tell Google not to go somewhere in your site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/

This is saying, “Attention search engines and other web crawlers: Don’t go in my private directory!”

Here is where some people (like the website I mentioned above) make a serious mistake:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This is saying, “Attention everyone: stay out of my website altogether.”

This one simple slash told Google not to pay attention to anything in the site at all. This website did not appear in Google for years. Kind of a big deal wouldn’t you say?

In short, if you don’t know what you’re doing with a robots.txt file, don’t mess with it. If you’d like help with setting one up, give us a call!

SEO Question: Do Links from Social Media Sites Help My Rankings?

This is a fairly interesting question, and it’s kind of an important one.

There is a ton of speculation that Social Media somehow helps SEO if you get links from Facebook and Twitter.  This question can be answered with four simple words: THESE LINKS ARE WORTHLESS.

As we’ve talked about before, links count as votes for your website. Do you really thing Twitter and Facebook want to vote for your underwater basket weaving website that also has content about other nonsense? Doubtful. Here’s why:

Google counts the number of links you have, as well as how good the links are. When you “vote” for a website (or link to them), you’re telling Google, “I’m vouching for everything they have on this page.” Twitter and Facebook vouching for anyone but themselves? Yeah, right…

That’s why I tell everyone to post blog posts about their topics, not put all their content on their social accounts. It does nothing for your website, and you’re really just helping those sites appear like authorities, if anything. So the next time you hear someone say that links from social sites are good for SEO, run!

What Not to Do for SEO: Part 5

Last time, we talked about Google’s “Penguin” update. Today, I’ll talking about another one that happened roughly one year earlier: Panda.

This one is pretty straightforward. Google started lowering the rankings of websites that would churn out the worst content imaginable. Imagine if you found someone that didn’t know your language, and paid  them to write content, and lots of it. You would end up with countless pages of obviously paid-for content that provides no value to readers. 1) it’s lame, and you will get punished for trying to scam the search results, and 2) you’re ripping off your readers!  The idea is to provide content that holds actual value for people – imagine if all of our posts had nothing to do with anything, and it just sounded like a bunch of poorly written essays about nonsense with the occasional mention of something like “Fort Collins SEO.” That’s what Panda was intended to combat.

The take away: Don’t write a bunch of baloney and expect it to help you. Write great content; it attracts links from trustworthy sources, and more importantly, it keeps your doors open and your lights on. In other words, if your content is good enough, it will help you make sales!

Stay tuned for more; we’re only getting started.

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