Impulse scores a 70 on WebsiteGrader.com

Check out our fancy new badge; 70 out of a 100 aint' bad heh?

Link: WebsiteGrader.com

10 RULES FOR WRITING HOME PAGE COPY AND TEXT

Here is a great article from Susan Greene on writing home page copy.

Because the home page is the first page most of your visitors will see, it’s also the most important page. Its purpose is to grab the readers’ attention and help them find information quickly and easily. If your home page lacks facts or is confusing, your visitors will click off before they ever gets a chance to know you. Here are some tips for ensuring your home page is effective:

Read the entire article here: http://www.susangreenecopywriter.com/articles/10_rules.asp

Impulse launches new SEO blog

check our new seo blog with tons of tips and tricks to help your site rank higher on search engines like google, yahoo and msn.

link: http://optimize-my-web-site.blogspot.com/

Impulse asked to do SEO for local station WWAYTV3

Impulse is now teaming up with WWAYTV3's Internet Sales Director to better optimize their website and improve their Google ranking. They will be looking to optimize their site for certain keywords such as:

Wilmington NC local news

Wilmington NC local weather

Wilmington NC local sports

Link: WWAYTV3's website

Google Fight

Check out this website; you can enter any 2 keyphrases or keywords and see which one ranks the highest on Google. 

http://www.googlefight.com

I'm not sure how reliable it is but it looks pretty cool.

Schnitzer-Slate Insurance of Wilmington NC offers bid

Impulse was recently offered to bid on the new Schnitzer-Slate website. The new design has been completed but now they are looking to optimize the site with a dynamic e-marketing and SEO strategy to help increase sales.

Impulse Web Solutions provides a variety of web services such as web design, seo, e-marketing and web programming.

website design wilmington

Impulse ranked number one on Google on 9.20.07, right above:

www.bironetworks.com
www.icoastalnet.com
www.wilmingtonweb.com
www.bluelaserdesign.com
www.akiramedia.com
www.venuecom.com
www.spencehackney.com
www.dijittech.com

Link: Google Rank

Google rewrite screws my ranking

So did Google do re-write lately or what? My ranking for 'wilmington nc web design' has dropped liked crazy. Instead of being on the first or second page I am nowhere to be found - instead, the top sites listed for that search phrase are:

sageisland.com
securenet-it.com
venuecom.com
akiramedia.com
bluetonemedia.com
modularmedia.com

Man, what happened? I use to be right there with the big boys..now I'm nowhere.

Blogging Success Tips

We can help setup a forum or a blog on your website to help build community, share ideas and also provide a good SEO resource.

Forums and blogs can provide you with an opportunity to see what people think about your website, services, products, etc.

The topics that you create on your blog should be related to the service you are providing or the product you are selling.

If your blog is seperate from your website, you should always link back to your main site from your blog.

Well-managed blogs can also rank very high on Google and bring traffic to your site.


5 Reasons to Build a Blog according to Yahoo:

1. Expose a new or unfamiliar product or idea


2. Improve your search engine rankings.


3. Position yourself as an expert in an industry or field.


4. Influence public opinion.


5. Engage in a forum openly with your customers.

We can setup most blogs (Google Blogger, Wordpress, etc.) and modify their given templates so that the look like your current web design.

wilmington nc seo

As of 6/7/07, we ranked #1 on Goolge for 'wilmington nc seo', right above

www.securenet-it.com
h2-seo.com/Wilmington-SEO.htm
www.topdesignfirms.com
wilmington.craigslist.org
www.ncfusion.com
www.capri-marketing.com
www.bironetworks.com

web hosting wilmington nc

As of 6/1/07 number one on Google, right above

www.marketingtool.com
www.akiramedia.com
www.securenet-it.com

Link: Web Hosting Wilmington NC

wilmington nc website hosting and design

Checked my Google ranking today for 'wilmington nc website hosting and design'

Today, the 25th of May, a year and 3 months after I started Impulse Web Solutions, I am number one on Google, right above Sage Island.

In fact, I just did a Google search for 'sage island wilmington nc' and Sage came up one, my blog came up second.

Not bad for a local boy heh?

Is it smart to list my competitors on my website?

Looking through my Google Webmaster Tools stats today and saw that my average top position for 'sage island wilmington nc' was 3!

In an earlier post, I had mentioned how I was ranked #2 on Google for 'web hosting in wilmington nc', Sage Island was number 1.

So, I went to Google and typed in 'sage island wilmington nc' and sure enough, there I was, number 3.

Also, yesterday I was talking to someone about how it is good SEO to place your competitors together in your web marketing campaign. "How's that I asked?" The answer is simple - let's take my situation as an example.

Someone looking for sage island using Google has obviously heard of them somehow right? Either through some other form of advertising that Sage may or may not have paid for. But, that same person may have never heard of me, Impulse Web Solutions, an alternative web company here in Wilmington. So, while they were looking for Sage Island, they may possibly see my link, wondering who I am and click on my link instead. I have to admit, Sage Island is the biggest web company in town right now and is my biggest competition. However, they also have a lot of overhead and expenses, therefore their prices are higher. I have also run into some of their past clients who stated that Sage had gotten so big that they were forgetting the little guys. Small site changes were taking weeks and the quality of work was suffering.

So, with that information, I think I might start mentioning my competitors more often in my blog posts. With that in mind, here are some of the people I consider worthy adversaries in Wilmington NC:

Sage Island
Venue Communications
Akira Media
SecureNet Information Technologies
Modular Media
Blue Tone Media
NC Fusion
Breakforth

Wordtracker Keywords

Just got a new e-newsletter from Wordtracker today. They have launched a free tool tha will allow you to see what the most popular searches have been in the last 90 days.

For example, I typed in Wilmington NC Web Design and here was the result:

316,456,828 searches ( last 90 days )

5 searches for wilmington nc web site hosting and design

So basically out of 316 million searches done on the web in the last 90 days, only 5 people were searching using this term. Now, there are about a gazillion web design firms in Wilmington right now, which means I have my work cut out for me. I currently offer a Basic SEO package - you can read all about it here: Impulse Web Solutions Basic SEO package

Link: Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Validate your css

Here is a link to a site where you can validate your website's css.

http://validator.w3.org/

You simply type in the url of the page you want to check and click 'Check'. This will validate your site's markup and return a page that will either congratulate you on your excellent coding skills or tell you all the bad things about your css.

Having valid css and html is important for good SEO because.....well, I'm not really sure why but I would think the cleaner your site and the less errors and bugs you have the better.

The cleaner your code is, the easier it is for spiders to search your site. There...I think that's probably the reason why - I guess. :)

Keyword density

As I peruse the online plethora of "how-to's" on the web about how to rank your website higher on search engines, I keep running into the 'keyword density' enigma.

No one seems to know what the magic percentage or number is as far as how many times to use a certain keyword/keyphrase on a webpage.

You don't want to repeat them too much or you might be considered spamming the search engines; but then you want to make sure you use them enough or you don't get your point across. It's a mystery. Google certainly won't give any hints about it, so how do we know what's acceptable and what's not? Should I repeat the same keyword 5 times? 10 times?

Anybody got any clues?

Pinging the popular blogs

I set up a blog for my company the other day (http://www.avalive.biz/blog/blog.html) and was showing it to a friend. He asked me if I was pinging Technorati when I made updates. I was like, 'Techno -who?'.

He said you can set it up so that whenever you made changes to your blog, you notify other popular blogs of your changes. Fortunately, Google's Blogger does that automatically for you.

Technorati is very popular right now so you want to make sure you ping them.

I did some research and found this site the other day:

http://www.pingoat.com/

This service lets you ping multiple blogs at once. It's free, easy and they also have some other great tools like a webpage keyword analysis tool, a spider simulator tool and email anti-spam generators.