Is Your Business Web Site Marketing Targeting Canadian Customers?

Did you forget about Canada?

Are you a U.S. eCommerce business that’s made a New Year’s resolution to expand your business web site marketing to boost online business? Then please, remember our friendly neighbors to the north.

According to Statistics Canada, four in ten Canadian dollars spent on e-commerce go abroad. So are you doing all you can with business web site marketing target the Canadian market? Some American companies, like online retail giant NewEgg, are setting up separate Canadian Websites while using their already-established U.S. shipping facilities and customer service centers to handle Canadian orders.

Other retailers, like Saks Direct, are making it easier for Canadian customers to order from their U.S.-based Website. They’re using business web site marketing methods that makes it easier for Canadian shoppers to view local featured merchandise, as well.

Thanks to the currently weak U.S. dollar, savvy international customers are flocking to American online businesses. And it’s up to those American businesses to find those customers with innovative business web site marketing. That also means things like using organic search to find keywords that target Canadian shoppers.

Priming your Web Design & Marketing Tactics for a Great 2009

Are your ready for a great 2009? Ok, we know that this upcoming year looks tough for most businesses. But we also know you’re probably not planning on just coasting through the year and simply hoping for the best. So here are a few basic web design & marketing maintenance tests you can quickly do to make sure that it’s primed for the new year.

1. Check your business’ information

How does your “about” page look? Successful businesses often change focus and direction. And when that happens, a change in web design & marketing is necessary. If you wrote your “about” page a couple of years ago, take another look at it. Does it still represent what you do? If not, update it.

2. Check your contact information

There’s a ton of stuff that a business has to deal with when it moves. Updating things like the phone number and address on a Webpage isn’t one of them. But it’s crucial to successful web design & marketing. Have you moved recently? Then make sure everything’s up do date. Test all your email addresses to make sure that they’re getting into the right inboxes.

Also, have you started Twittering? Have you joined any new social networking services? Now would be a good time to add all that new web design & marketing information to your Webpage.

3. Check your business’ email auto responders

If you’ve set up an email auto-response message a while back, it’s easy to forget what you wrote. Check it again and make sure that the web design & marketing message is still up to date.

4. Check the links on your Website

If your Website is a couple of years old, it may need some housecleaning. The easiest thing to check for prime to maintain excellent web design & marketing are the links. Do they all work? Are all the external sites you’ve linked to still there?

5. Make sure you’re on Google

Are your keywords still relevant? How are you ranking on Google for your targeted keywords? Is your Webpage optimized for Google searchers? If you’re not ranking on the first page for targeted keywords, there’s probably more web design & marketing search engine optimization you could be doing.

Google’s New Position on Dynamic URLs may Change Web-Building Strategy for Professional SEO Services

The latest news from Google is sure to spark up a lot of discussion among Webmasters and professional SEO services. It’s about dynamic URLs. According to Google, it is not necessary to rewrite dynamic URLs in order to achieve optimized search results.

OK. The first thing you may be thinking is what the heck are dynamic URLs anyway and why should I care?

Let’s tackle the first question. Many Web sites these days have databases. Whether they’re commercial, academic, or personal, databases can be very useful for Web sites. They can also be very, very big and hard to update. Imagine how difficult it would be if a database with a couple thousand pages needed to be updated – weekly. That sounds like a lot of work, but with scripting languages like PHP, updating databases becomes a whole lot easier. PHP does all the hard work. But in certain situations, using PHP means creating a dynamic URL, which is a URL that’s created when a user makes a certain query. Those Web pages can be a hassle for professional SEO services looking to make every page as search optimized as possible.

Here’s how dynamic pages work: a user enters a query into a Web page. The script, PHP or a similar language does some quick binary wizardry and creates a unique (or dynamic) Web page modeled on whatever the user wanted. This is a page that will only exist as long as the user stays on the page. When the user closes the page, the URL is gone. Vanished. At least until someone else makes the exact same query.

So it’s easy to see why search engines and professional SEO services may have trouble with these dynamic URLs. Sometimes they exist for mere seconds, unlike their counterparts—static URLs—which stick around as long as the Web master wants to keep her Web page online.

Dynamic URLs are easy to spot. They often have long, nonsensical (at least to us) strings of letters and numbers. Most look like this:

http://thelittlestwebsite.com/products/itemid=2947&sort=date

Any professional SEO services specialist can tell you that if a page is difficult for you to figure out what’s going on, then a search engine will probably have just as much trouble. Here’s an example of an easy-to-understand static URL that makes life easier for Web users, professional SEO services, and search engines:

http://thelittlestwebsite.com/products/lunchpails.html

At least that was the conventional wisdom. Professional SEO services were able to make dynamic URLs look like static URLs. But changing them would often mean hours (and hours and hours) of work; not exactly the most enjoyable task for Webmasters or professional SEO services.

But there’s good news for Webmasters and professional SEO services. Google now claims that their Web crawler has grown sophisticated enough that it can read dynamic URLs almost as well it can read static URLs. Or in their own words: “While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of click-through rates because users can easily read the URLs, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking.”

But professional SEO services are a methodical bunch, and many won’t be convinced until they can test those dynamic URLs against static ones and carefully examine the results. But if those tests prove that Google is correct, that could mean less tedious work for Webmasters and professional SEO services, and more time for them to focus on more important, and more fun, Web site stuff.