Founder's Blog•
on May 31st, 2009•
I was searching the net for any new SEO techniques that could help expand the blogs we own. As I was searching I started to notice a lot of other useful websites for the budding SEO or for Do It Yourself type of person. Below are a list of well established links that will help take your business or site from a handful of hits a day to a couple hundred hits a day.
- http://www.netmechanic.com/
- http://www.grademyseo.com/
o A basic Grader with nothing to special about it.
- http://www.urltrends.com/
o Graphically displays a website’s visitor traffic information by search engine prevalence. Extracts information from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, AlltheWeb, AltaVista and more
- http://adlab.microsoft.com/default.aspx
o A fantastic set of tools for analyzing and predicting the audience and market of your website.
- http://whois.domaintools.com/
o Learn all about a site from the WHO IS database
- http://www.seo-browser.com/
o Shows you what a search engine sees when they visit your site
- http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html
o Extremely useful tool that analyzes an assortment of page features including meta tags, keyword density and load time.
- http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/
o A stock pile of SEO tools for measuring Google AdSense earning potential, keyword density, meta tag effectiveness and much more.
- http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
o Page Rank
- http://www.popuri.us/
o A tool to check at-a-glance the link popularity of any site based on its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Technorati etc.), social bookmarks (del.icio.us, etc), subscribers (Bloglines, etc) and more!
- http://website.grader.com/desktopmodules/ingeni-websitegrader/WsgPublic.aspx
o Grades your website and you can compare it to your competitors. Very advance tool
- http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
o By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your web server, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.
Founder's Blog•
on May 22nd, 2009•
What is Google and Alexa? Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google essentially is a site you visit and search for data that you are currently interested in. Alexa Internet grew out of a vision of Web navigation that is intelligent and constantly improving with the participation of its users. Alexa is the world’s premier location to find out your sites rank compared to other sites. You simply go to the website http://www.alexa.com type in your websites address at the top in the text box and it will show your ranking. Every sites goal should be to break into Alexa’s top 100,000 websites. Once you break into this exclusive club you are generating a lot of traffic. In order to break into the top 100,000 sites you need to understand search engine optimization otherwise known as SEO. There are plenty of search engines out there Google.com, yahoo.com, ask.com and live.com.
If you want your site to succeed focus all your energy on Google, why? Simply, Google owns the most market share in the business. Google holds ~60% search engine market share in US. Combined with AOL, which is outsourced to Google, that number raises to by ~4% to 64%. Google also the supplies search to Amazon, Myspace, Craiglist and Netscape. Yahoo is at approximately 20% with distribution deals to T-Mobile USA and T-Mobile Europe. Microsoft is at around ~9%, followed by Ask.com 4.0% and AOL at 4.0%. In the UK Google dominates with 74% Google.co.uk usage and 14% Google.com usage, combine to a total of 88%. Yahoo is at modest 3% same as Ask.com at 3% followed by Live at 2%. This is why it is so vital to focus on Google
Google gets all of their information off your site and other sites using a program which is also called a spider. These spiders crawl the net for new and fresh content and cache the sites on Google’s servers. Then Google using their top secret Algorithm creates there top 10 lists. It is important for websites to get on the top 10 because 65% of people won’t go to the second page. If you are on the first page you typically generate a lot of traffic. It is uncertain how to actually get into the top 10 since Google doesn’t inform us but what we do know is incoming links play an important role. But creditable incoming links not just any random link pointing to your site. The higher a site is in ranking (high Page Rank) and they are pointing to a site that has a lower rank, Google will take notice and significantly increase the lower ranking site. Speculation is hot on what Google’s Algorithm could possibly be, it is speculated that there are over 200 variables in this complex Algorithm. Google has employed Ph. D mathematicians to develop this algorithm to rank the websites around the world.
Founder's Blog•
on May 19th, 2009•
When a user visits your site the initial impact for them will be what your site looks like. The overall design is critical to get across what your concerns are. Plenty of blogs lack any creative design and they typically lose readers because of its lack of appearance. Though in stating that there have been sites I have stumbled upon that lack any creative appeal that are highly ranked on Alexa and have high level of subscribers. A blog that looks good can make your content look even better. A good design can make your blog look well cared of and professional. A good design can just be that extra step that helps you gain more subscribers.
For the first time web users I suggest getting a template or a theme to work with in the beginning. In your design you need to know what the sites goals are; if you are trying to create money from it by advertisements it would be highly suggested to create ad space. But putting ad space in can also harm the look and style of your site. The people who go to your site are they expecting an abstract design, a professional style look or are they looking for something dark and disturbing. Tailor the design of your blog to represent what you are trying to convey and also what your target market enjoys.
Here is a list of suggested pages and features you need for your site:
- Contact Us page
- About Us page
- Advertising page
- Archives
- Logo
- Subscription (on homepage and all posts)
- Newsletter Subscription
- A Blog Roll
- Recent/popular/most comment posts
Founder's Blog•
on May 17th, 2009•
Finally I have finished writing the ‘little black book on blogs’. A month’s worth of work finally completed. The little black book on blogs contains a ton of information on how to generate a successful blog. Interested in knowing what colours to design your blog with? Maybe you’re interested in knowing how to market your blog properly. This book has plenty of information that will help you create your successful blog. We have also added a case study done by MIT on web lead management. In a nut shell we have developed a pretty solid guide, below is a sample of what is inside the blog:
- Measureing a blogs success
- Branding
- Marketing
- Design Considerations
- Web leads/ lead generation
- Tools
- And more!
Interested in getting the guide? Contact us below:
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Founder's Blog•
on May 14th, 2009•
Blogs are a unique platform for many people to express themselves. I was just talking to a client who asked me why he should blog. I felt like saying: “It has the potential to generate more business for you”. But i felt that such a comment wouldn’t give justice to blogs and bloggers out there. He continued to stare at me which felt like an eternity, though it was only a mere second.
Shockingly there are plenty of good things about blogging and going into blogging. The obvious one that comes to mind is traffic. Most websites want traffic because traffic=people=leads=sales/awareness. Some people want to become famous and they use blogs as a platform to reach their inevitable celebrity status. Successful blogs will have a following and will have a loyal bunch of readers who could do your every wish. Hand squeezed orange juice anyone? Another reason to become a blogger is because it is good for business. Blogs are a terrific way of generating contacts; blogs that typically generate comments on their site will have a wide variety of individuals to talk to. Plus you can generate trust and creditability. Two important values in creating a successful sale and retaining that client are trust and creditability.
Founder's Blog•
on May 14th, 2009•
Just a tad frustrated… over here at webstarcontent.com we have been developing our brand new lead generation program. We developed the idea last week and we got it live over the weekend. The only problem is we need to populate it now! Once we feel we have successfully created the perfect site to hold our lead generation, all of you will be the first to know. In the meantime I better continue writing away hopefully make some sort of dent by midnight tonight.
Founder's Blog•
on May 6th, 2009•
Finally put up the sites we have worked on that I felt were all unique and different. Each one brought a new challenge and taught us something in the process. Currently, WebStar Content is developing a new website which will be involved in the Real Estate market, predominantly in the Toronto Real Estate Market. The site does not have a name yet, all we know is that this site will be a lead generation system with efficiency and plenty of content as its core goals. We will keep you posted.
My Portfolio•
on May 6th, 2009•
Northern Financial Group is an insurance company that also provides financial planning and investment planning solutions. The president Louie Carnevale describes his company as an insurance boutique and wanted the site to represent that boutique feel. WebStar Content was brought in to make suggestions during the development phase and we shockingly had no issue at all with the developer in communicating the concerns we had. We provided all the content for the site, Northern Financial Group does have a blog but it hasn’t been updated in awhile. The site has all the appropriate call outs to the users (“Get a Free Quote”) which is terrific and will help tunnel leads to the source.
http://www.northernfinancialgroup.ca
Founder's Blog•
on May 5th, 2009•
Well as you can tell we have finally launched our own site. The site is brand new and we are still working on a couple things. We plan on having the site completed by tomorrow, sometime during the afternoon. We also plan on not adding all of our sites to our portfolio, mainly because we have done to much work and we need to focus on our clients 
.