Tips for Finding the Right Web Development Company for You

Posted by Josh on February 18, 2012 - 4:50 pm

Here at SeeVolution, we specialize in making sure your site is operating at peak performance, but in order to do that, you need two things; a website and traffic. There are plenty of companies willing to give you a turnkey package that includes building your site and then offering SEO/SEM services to advertise it. Here are a few tips in navigating through the process of choosing the right company for you.

Anyone who has spent anytime browsing the web today knows that first impressions, now more than ever, mean everything. Even for the sites that have the coveted top rankings in either organic or paid search results, it’s all too easy to find the next virtual storefront when you come across a site that doesn’t instantly engage you. For business owners this makes finding the right web development company more important than ever. Especially when engaging the consumer can mean taking in consideration everything from browsers, search engines, search engine placement optimization, web accessibility, web standards and other nuances of creating a successful web site.

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Will Facebook Change After the IPO?

Posted by Josh on February 16, 2012 - 10:50 am
How Will Mark Zuckerberg Handle the IPO?

It's a Game Changer

It’s going to be interesting to see how an internet start-up known for its stubborn and almost arrogant attitude towards what they think is right for its users will handle going public and having to answer to shareholders who aren’t always as patient or open minded as its loyal followers. There are already signs that Facebook may be making decisions that don’t jive with its past philosophies on user experience because of its $5 billion IPO last week.

It’s reported that more than half of Facebook’s current users use mobile devices to log on to the social network. This is an interesting fact by itself, but the plot thickens when you consider that there are no ads displayed on the Facebook’s mobile app. To a potential shareholder this mean the company could potentially increase revenues by 50% by simply publishing its ads on mobile versions of the site.

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Straight from the Horse’s Mouth – Q&A’s With Successful Online Entrepreneurs

Posted by Josh on February 10, 2012 - 7:12 pm

Eight Q&A sessions with people who have cracked the code of online success. Discover the philosophies and tools that current owners of thriving online businesses believe in.

Q&A Sessions with Successful Online Businesses

Learn from the Best

Q&A with Jeff Hayzlett - Jeff Hayzlett discusses how his success at Kodak can translate to any business. Jeff is a top expert in new Social Media techniques and the former CMO at Kodak.

Q&A with Tim Ferris - In this interview Tim Ferris, Author of The 4-Hour Work Week, discusses his philosophy and how he balances life and business.

Q&A with Cynthia Typaldos - As a person who has been responsible for two successful online ventures, RealCommunities and GolfWeb, Cynthia Typaldos has been featured in multiple publications including the Wall Street Journal.

Q&A with Gurbaksh Chahal - At 27 years old, Gurbaksh Chanal is already an internet legend. He has already started and sold two online advertising companies for a total of $340 million. With stats like that, we should all listen to what he has to say on the subject of online success.

Q&A with Lauren Friese - As the founder of TalentEgg.ca, a portal for young grads based in Canada, Lauren is a classic online success story.

Q&A with Chris Brogan - As co-authored Trust Agents, Chris Brogan has figured out what countless others have been trying to do since the blogosphere became a word – become one of the top bloggers in the world.

Q&A with Jason Alba - As CEO of JibberJobber, Jason Alba built a tool to help job hunters better manage their job search online. He’s a strong advocate for Social Media and personal branding.

Q&A with Christopher Knight - Knight owns the web’s largest content distribution solution for authors and generates millions of visits monthly. He also founded EmailUniverse, another resource for E-mail newsletter publishers.

(photo by opensourceway)

Why Siri is Telling You to Optimize Your Site for Mobile Browsing

Posted by Josh on February 04, 2012 - 1:42 pm
Siri and Mobile Optimizing

Siri and Local Search

Some industries evolve quicker than others. I recently watched a documentary on how Jack Daniel’s makes their famous whiskey and it seems today the process is identical to what it was when they first began bottling it. An industry that won’t be able to say the same in 100 years is SEO – or even five years for that matter. With constant innovation in the products used by SEO companies, to the constant revisions of requirements by the Search Engines, it’s not something you can put on autopilot.

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5 Business Biographies You Need to Read

Posted by Josh on January 24, 2012 - 3:40 pm

Anyone who is interested in becoming an entrepreneur or understanding what makes one tick, should read biographies of the people who epitomize business leadership and innovation. Nothing will give you as much insight in to the thought process and philosophy of a business icon as much as their story told in their own words, or by somebody that is close to them (which can sometimes give you even more).

Here is a list of our top 5 favorite Business Biographies:

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Books for Entrepreneurs - Steve Jobs

The Visionary

For obvious reasons, we are sure you’ve heard of this one already. It’s on top of the best sellers list and will likely remain there for a long while. But if you are one of the few that haven’t picked it up and been amazed by the juggernaut known as Steve Jobs, then you need to do so. The author, Walter Isaacson, wrote the book at the request of Steve Jobs towards the end of his life and interviewed him more than forty times over two years. He also interviewed over a hundred of his close friends, family and colleagues. A true study in business solutions without compromise, it’s a must read for those looking to make their place in the business world.

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Backlinking 101

Posted by Josh on January 16, 2012 - 1:30 pm
Backlinking

The More Inbound Links, the Better.

There are a lot of ingredients that go in to a good SEO recipe. In this post we’ll focus on one of the most important; Backlinks.

Backlinking is the process of publishing links on websites that link back to you. They are important because they play a crucial role in increasing your Google PageRank as well as increasing your search engine visibility which will in turn give you what you really want; more traffic for your site.

Building these links can be quite labor intensive and tedious, and not all backlinks are created equally, so make sure you are doing it right.  A link published on a site that is relevant to your content and has a high page ranking will do infinitely more for you that one that doesn’t.

There are a number of ways to get your links on other sites. Here are a few to get you started:

Directory Submissions – These won’t necessarily increase your traffic, but it will increase your Google PageRank. Here is a list of SEO Directories to get you going. Some of these directories require reciprocal links, but keep these to a minimum as you don’t want too many outbound links on your site.

Google Directory

You may have already heard of this Directory.

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Inographic: Why SeeVolution is the Tumblr of Analytics

Posted by Chris on January 11, 2012 - 3:39 pm

SeeVolution Simplifies Web Analytics

Know Where Your Customers Are Coming From

Posted by Josh on January 05, 2012 - 10:46 am
The Basics of Traffic Sources
Traffic Sources in Google Analytics

Knowing how people get to your website is a fundamental factor in fine-tuning your online presence.  It can do wonders when it comes to squeezing more out of your advertising budget or becoming more educated about the tendencies of your users. Fortunately for you, any web analytics tool worth its salt will have a breakdown of all the sources of traffic that lands on your site. So now that you that you know, let’s cover the basics:

Under “Traffic Sources” in your analytics you’ll find the following:

Direct Traffic – These are people who didn’t search to find you. They either typed in your URL directly or have your site bookmarked. Either way, they already knew who you were, either through an offline marketing campaign or through word of mouth.

Referring Sites – When an individual arrives at your site from clicking a link located on another site, they fall under this category. This could include banner ads or directory listings as well as blogs or partner sites. These are important to know since it can tell you a lot about what else your visitors are interested in or what they are searching for online.

Search Engines – This tells you which search engine an individual saw your search result in. This includes paid listings along with organic ones.

There are some subtleties to analytics that are worth knowing, but that is the meat and potatoes. One important thing to look for is the percentage of visitors coming from direct traffic as opposed to search engine traffic. Since 80% of web traffic comes from search engines, you know that you need to focus on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) if you see the majority coming from direct traffic. That will tell you people aren’t finding you by your keywords and you’re missing out on a lot of very valuable (and cheap) organic traffic.

(photo by DavidErickson)

What Do Web Analytics and Horse Racing Have in Common?

Posted by Chris on December 29, 2011 - 10:04 am

Who will finish first in conversion rates?

Horse Racing and Web Analytics

 

We have all heard the term winning by a nose used when calling a horse race.  The winning horse would win by mere milliseconds, which is why jockeys are legendary for their rigorous training methods. They know that the difference between having your name remembered and being left in the dust is attention to detail and putting in just a little more effort than the next guy. The same could be said for your own website.

If you want be in the winner’s circle, you are going to have to use every tool and trick in the book to stay competitive. This includes every type of website analytical strategy you can get your hands on. It’s not enough these days to throw a website up and hope for the best. As of December 2010 there were 266,848,493 websites online according to news of dehli.

It will never cease to amaze us when companies spend so much time and effort (not to mention MONEY) on advertisements that are designed to drive traffic to a site when they have spent little or no time making sure that traffic actually sticks once it gets there. As an example, we had a client that needed a drastic increase in conversion rates so we took a look at their scroll maps and found that by moving their call-to-action up on their homepage that we could increase their conversion rates by 25 percent.

Unless the client had gone the extra mile and made sure they were getting all they could out of their traffic, they would have never known they could have dramatically increased conversion with something as simple as placing their buy button higher on the page.

The worst thing you can do is assume your website is performing to the best of it’s ability; there is always room for improvement. Use the tools available to you and make sure you are the one coming out ahead at the finish line.

(Photo by tpower1978)

8 Celebrities Who Caught The Start-up Bug

Posted by Chris on December 19, 2011 - 12:41 pm
Ashton Kutcher

Ashton Kutcher loves investing in start-ups

This article is in response to Christina DesMarais’s Inc magazine article about why L.A. is the “New, Hot Place to Launch.”

Los Angeles is a big playground. It is bursting with beaches, movie stars, theme parks, and enough restaurants, bars, and cafés to satisfy two megacities. The latest trend among Hollywood’s elite is not a hip new restaurant or sheik clothing line, but indorsing and investing in tech start-ups. What was looked at as geeky or un-popular 20 years ago has finally become what all the cool kids are talking about.

The realm of Twitter is particularly fascinating. If you are on Twitter and following celebrities we could consider you innovative.  Innovative in the sense that your parents might not be on Twitter, but they still know who Ashton Kutcher is.  The amount of influence that these people carry is astonishing. They can drive more traffic to a website with one tweet than a blogger or SEO strategist can do with months of hard work. Real power. Real influence.

If you’re in the celebrity’s shoes, it is a lot more fun tweeting about a new startup that you are involved in at the ground floor than say a Nike or Reebok. It is about more than just money. It is about building something really cool that you can say you were involved in at the beginning. People often generate their best work when they feel they are part of something special as opposed to a mere financial incentive.

IdeaLab, Launchpad.la, MuckerLab, StartEngine, UpStart.LA, Science, and Amplify are start-up incubators that have launched in L.A. Further proof that the entertainment industry is no longer the only kid on block in L.A.

8 Celebrities Investing In Technology

(Photo by USA Today)

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