Methodic Pages – Got Skill. Get Site. Get Found.

Your website is a great way to market your skills or products, but how do you turn visitors into potential customers? Hint: your best leads are people who contact you. By increasing the number of contacts you receive, you earn leads who you can potentially convert into customers.

Khoa Bui wrote a great article for Entrepreneur titled Making the Most of ‘Contact Us’ to Gather Leads that explains why businesses need to do more than just list their contact information if they want to truly generate leads. Bui offers invaluable information on where to include your contact information on your website and how you can use a call to action or incentive to get more people to supply you with their contact information. The article also has good advice for how to keep people on your website as long as possible and why it is important to thank them after they contact you.

Making the Most of ‘Contact Us’ to Gather Leads provides readers with advice that’s easy to implement. Bui’s advice is simple and direct. If you are not getting enough leads from your website, read this article to learn techniques that will produce results.

Chris Darling and Methodic Pages works with owners of service based businesses who struggle with getting search engine optimized websites to represent their business online and want to benefit from standing out from their local competition. I bring you a rare talent that integrates overall site layout, presentation, and on-page SEO with every project. In working with me, my clients receive an interactive, highly optimized website that lays the perfect foundation for any online marketing strategy you decide to put into action. If any of this speaks to you or your online business goals contact Chris Darling to get a free project based quote.

Google added the Panda (or Farmer) update to their algorithm reduce the SERPs (search engine results page) position of content farms, which they consider to be websites with a high amount of content that has little value to users. Google’s changes don’t just affect large sites like those owned by Demand Media. If you are trying to get found, but you have designed your site in a way that Google deems as having thin content, your website could drop on SERPs as well.

Dr. Peter J. Meyers, of SEOmoz, wrote an excellent article titled Fat Pandas and Thin Content that gives readers seven scenarios that could cause Google to lowers your ranking. Meyers also provides solutions for these problems as well. Many of the problems that Meyers writes about, such as having too many ads on one page, are issues that have never been a problem before.

Unless you are extremely familiar with all the changes made by Google’s Panda update, Fat Pandas and Thin Content is necessary reading. This is one of Google’s biggest algorithm changes within the past year and you may not even be aware your website has problems. Protect your SEO investment by not letting your website get Panda-slapped.

Chris Darling and Methodic Pages works with owners of service based businesses who struggle with getting search engine optimized websites to represent their business online and want to benefit from standing out from their local competition. I bring you a rare talent that integrates overall site layout, presentation, and on-page SEO with every project. In working with me, my clients receive an interactive, highly optimized website that lays the perfect foundation for any online marketing strategy you decide to put into action. If any of this speaks to you or your online business goals contact Chris Darling to get a free project based quote.

Before you build a WordPress website, or if you already have a WordPress powered website, you need to consider how you’re going to keep it safe from hackers. According to Dave Clements’ article, How To Change Your WordPress Database Prefix, “…WordPress powers about an eighth of the world’s websites…” That makes WordPress sites a very popular target for hackers.

As Clements points out, one of the easiest ways hackers can get into your WordPress site is by attacking your database. By default, all WordPress databases start with “wp_” as the prefix. If you don’t change the default prefix, hackers can easily determine where your database information is stored. Unless you make regular backups, which you really should do anyway, it can be very difficult to restore your site after it has been hacked.

How To Change Your WordPress Database Prefix provides step-by-step instructions for changing your database’s prefix, including infographics. The article also shows exactly what you have to do to reconfigure WordPress to read from the renamed database file. Clements’ advice is easy to follow and it could make the key difference between your site getting hacked or not getting hacked.

Chris Darling and Methodic Pages works with owners of service based businesses who struggle with getting search engine optimized websites to represent their business online and want to benefit from standing out from their local competition. I bring you a rare talent that integrates overall site layout, presentation, and on-page SEO with every project. In working with me, my clients receive an interactive, highly optimized website that lays the perfect foundation for any online marketing strategy you decide to put into action. If any of this speaks to you or your online business goals contact Chris Darling to get a free project based quote.