Of course we had to take time and mention the overwhelming response we received between July 9th and August 8th in conjunction with our “I Need a New Design” Contest here on lifeBLUE. Just to let you in on some of the raw numbers involved:

• There were 209 websites submitted that graced our “Wall of Shame”.
• 10,827 votes were cast over the 1 month span.
• Contest winner ReviewBack.com brought in 4,391 votes (and yes, we verified them).
• Blogs are powerful. Through our 2nd chance offer, ThirdFloorCards.com won out after offering up a blog post reviewing our website and ended up in 4th place overall before winning the random drawing of ‘2nd chancers’.

A full write-up of the contest is currently running in our Company News section. Most importantly, we want to thank everyone that took the time to make a run at being dubbed the worst looking website out there. We enjoyed having you here at lifeBLUE.

More often that not, a website can benefit from using a text-based navigation instead of an image-based navigation.  It’s commonly understood that words that are placed near the top of your code (page) are given slightly more consideration and weight by the search bots in determining what your site is about.  Because the majority of websites have their navigation across the top of the page or down the left hand side, placing important keywords in your navi and ensuring they are 100% crawlable can help boost your optimization efforts.

Don’t know if you’re navigation is text-based or images?  Take your mouse and try to click and drag over the text within your navi.  Can you highlight the words?  That’s text-based.  If not, you’re dealing with images.  Of course, you can add Alt-tags to your images to help the cause (especially if you can’t replicate the look and feel of the navi with plain text), but there’s still no substitute for using plain old text links.

Generally, if you are hoping to improve your SEM for a given set of keywords, those keywords can and should be used in your main navigation.  You have a home page that is a  catch-all area that then directs visitors to the categories and main themes of your site.  Those categories/themes should be highly visible pages within your domain, and the best way to make them stand out, pass on optimal benefit through internal linking, and make your site climb the SERPs is to drop them as text in the main navigation.

Go on, give it a try.  While there’s still a good 50 little odds and ends every website can run through to ensure their on-page factors are optimized for the engines, this is a good start and a practice that most of your competitors will be overlooking.

This is an extremely common question that we get asked here at lifeBLUE Media, as well as one that just about every webmaster or blogger or company with a web-based business has to consider early on in their online campaigns.   Of course every situation is different - different competition, different costs associated with PPC and SEO, different barriers to entry, etc.  So what does it really come down to?  Here are the 3 biggest factors in determining what marketing online would mean for your site/company with regards to cost:

1. Your Goals - Do you want to dominate the Google Sponsored results and rank top 3 organically for highly searched keywords?  Or are you more looking to test the waters and attack a few niche spots?  In short, it’s important to realize that you can spend just about as much money as you want to spend to go after online success.

2. Your URL and Current Link Profile - Do you have an authoritative domain?  Are you already getting some good search engine traffic from a decent (top 100) organic ranking?  It’s a lot easier (with respect to time and $) to take an older website, with a keyword-rich domain and some established incoming links to the top than it is a brand new site or a site that has no current ‘rapport’ with Google.

3.  The Competitive Landscape - In conjunction with #2, how crowded is the SERP for what you’re chasing?  If you’re going to go after selling shoes online a quick Google search will show that there’s a lot of big name brands littering the sponsored results and the organic results.  That’s not going to be easy.  That means time and money.  Looking to target dermatology in the Atlanta area?  Not as tough, and therefore not as much time or money.

Those 3 questions are the most important to consider hands down.  I know that doesn’t help place a monetary figure on any particular campaign, but those are the initial questions that you should consider when starting your plan to market online.   Performing well with respect to conversions and marching your website up the SERPs takes patience, execution, and money, but rest assured that no matter what type of website or business you’re running, there is untapped potential waiting for you on the internet.