When we make websites, we have the keen eyes of our designers make the website design and styles. They use Latin text as a placeholder on the pages. Our awesome staff of writers write the content and search engine optimization keywords for all of the pages to be. Once the design is approved and we are ready to move forward, the design and content have to be put together. We call this building out the pages and it can be a long and tedious process, depending on the size of the site, but it can be done no other way.

At DDA we have a large number of people who are capable of taking on this task, so it is an easy type of workload to manage. It is actually a useful thing to have around when workloads need to be managed because is a versatile job to be assigned that can assure that everyone is able to stay busy and productive at all times. Plus, it is essential to creating websites, so it has to be done.

I will be out of the office next week, which means I am spending this week getting everything in order to make sure that all goes smoothly in my absence.

Print Production. We have projects that are in the proofing stage. I need to make sure that any proofs that come in next week are forwarded to the client promptly. Also, if approval is received on any proofs, I need to ensure that production is notified promptly to proceed.

SureThing Ranking Reports. I am checking and double checking on what optimization reviews may be coming up. I need to make sure that their ranking reports are completed and sent to our SEO team to be posted for the review. I also have web updates to complete for clients that need to be live before the week’s end.

Production Coordination. I am reorganizing my notes to assure that everything is up to date and clear so that I can pass the responsibilities over while I am away. Everything is fairly straight forward and any questions can be addressed to the project coordinator.

I feel as though I have a good handle on everything at the current moment and that nothing catastrophic can happen. No one will even know that I am not here next week!

Over the weekend my fiancee was filling out an online form and needed to fill out my personal information as well. When it came to my employer’s information, question after question was asked — What’s the address? Phone number? How long have you been there? What’s your title?

When it came to tell him my title of SEO specialist (and the repeating it…S E O Specialist) he looked clueless.

Sure he knows that I work on websites all day but he is an electrician and not very computer savvy. Watching him hunt and peck my information into the computer was funny, especially since typing on a keyboard without looking is second nature to me.

Although we each have our own titles here at DDA, the name sometimes isn’t long enough. If you would try to list everything that each one of us does as our titles, the list would be endless.

Being a Search Engine Optimization specialist at DDA, a search engine marketing company in Southampton, PA, means that I am constantly fighting the uphill battle of improving website rankings in major search engines. Working in a world of meta tags and Dreamweaver can be a battle in itself, but I push onward and upward. The results are seen when my client’s rankings on Google climb closer and closer to the coveted #1 position.

You can see DDA’s success in Google with our numerous website rankings.

I am by nature long winded. What takes others four words to say, probably takes me 25, and I will repeat myself. As a writer though, redundancy and wordiness need to be left behind.

At DDA, writing copy, specifically for websites, oftentimes means writing search engine optimized content. As I know my fellow writers have already covered, SEO content requires a lot more than just punching in keywords here and there. We need to create upwards of 30 to 40 professional and knowledgeable pages — and on a few occasions a lot more — of content targeting specific keywords, written specifically to the intended audience, with accompanying paragraphs and additional optimized content.

As with anything else, you need to be as concise as possible. People have short attention spans and regardless if they’re reading a brochure, watching a video, or looking at a tradeshow banner, the message has to be clear and to the point.

This holds true for content development for highly optimized websites that we are designing and developing.  While we target literally hundreds of keywords, the writers go to great pains to guarantee that every single one of those keywords is integrated correctly and concisely just as we would for any other content we are writing.

By keeping it concise and to the point, we are engaging visitors and keeping them interested, while at the same time achieving optimal search engine rankings.

Everyday when I sit down to write my blog I always think about what it is that I do, so that I can create a relevant post. And everyday I think about how much easier it would be to write about what everyone else does.

I have the same reaction when I am asked by someone about my job. Somedays I feel as though all I do is shuffle papers even though I know this not to be true. My days brings about such a variety that I don’t get to spend long periods of time focused on the same thing, this is probably the reason for the lack of things to write about.

Truthfully I know I am responsible for a great deal; production coordination, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Pay Per Click (PPC), invoices, print estimates, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reports. It is just difficult for me to put what I do into words.

Designers bless their little cotton socks, love to make web pages look cool, fashionable, and stylish and use their huge array of fonts and skills to create beautiful graphical headlines and titles for Websites.

Then the SEO team gets involved and sparks fly. The problem is that search engine spiders cannot see text in pictures. To define a picture, I mean a graphic on a web page that is a gif, jpg or png.

Therefore if you need a spider to see it, you have to use HTML fonts and this then limits designers to only six fonts that are classified as web-safe fonts. These are Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, Verdana, and Trebuchet MS. What that means is that it is safe to assume that these fonts are installed on the website viewer’s computer.

When you are reading a webpage and that page is displaying text in Arial font, what it is in fact doing, is telling the user’s computer to display the text using Arial. The user’s computer then looks into its fonts directory, finds Arail and display the text correctly. If you were to tell it to use a font the user’s computer did not have, it would substitute it and the text would not display as the designer intended.

So is there some middle ground that will stop the war between the Website Designers wants and Search Engine Optimizers wishes?

Well…Yes this “Treaty of Ghent” style, both sides winning compromise does exist but just like the battle of New Orleans, they go on squabbling unbeknownst.
..and this holy grail hybrid of Design and Optimization is called……..

This post concludes tomorrow.

When we moved into our house just before Christmas there was not much that we wanted to change with the landscaping.

As the weather gets nicer, we keep finding things that we want to change. We have removed a garden area and yard space in order to widen the driveway, took down a large Holly tree on the side of the house, and just completed pulling the English Ivy from a large portion of the front yard.

We are slowly making the space ours, rather than someone else’s. Next on our list is to have the large, over-grown, diseased Spruce tree that stands 15 feet outside our front door taken down and hauled away. As we search for the best price, I am amazed at the lack of customer service that these tree service companies offer.

On Friday, an estimator from one of these companies came to my house. As he was inspecting the tree and doing what it is they do to price taking a tree down, he kept asking me questions about the other estimates that we had received. I was not going to lie to him so I told him what the ballpark price was of the estimates. As I said the price he stopped everything he was doing, looked at me and said that he could not beat that price so he was not going to give me an estimate. With that, he got back in his truck and pulled away.

Customer service is usually someone’s first impression of a company. At DDA, we put our prospective and existing clients at the top of the list. We take pride in our quick turn-around time for estimates as well as our attention to detail. DDA offers an array of services to meet your marketing and advertising needs. Whether you are looking for website design, video, illustration, print design and production, or SEO services we can answer your questions and meet you deadlines.

I have been reading up on one of my newest roles at DDA! I have been spending some of my free time at home reading about the different approaches of search engine marketing, so that I can gain a better understanding.

This is where I came across the two different definitions of search engine marketing. When I read that SEM was search engine optimization and Pay Per Click placement I was boggled. Here at DDA we practice the second definition of what SEM is, the practice of buying pay per click positions.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a form of marketing via the Internet to build a website presence in search results. Some feel that SEM includes methods such as search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click placement. Others believe that search engine marketing is only the practice of buying Pay Per Click positions.

Dyanmic Digital Advertising has a team that focuses strictly on the search engine optimization and achieving organic search results. We also have a team that focuses on the paid results for the clients who are interested in pursuing that avenue. I am a part of DDA’s SEM team. On a daily basis I monitor our clients PPC campaigns.

How Search Engine Marketing Works…

An advertisier will bid on the keywords that they are interested in within their target market. Should a searcher use any of their key terms, their ad may be displayed in the sponsored ad section of the site. The advertiser only pays when a searcher clicks on their paid ad to visit their site.

That doesn’t seem to complicated, right?

There is much more to managing a paid search campaign, but for today this will have to do!!

Over the weekend the weather snapped and it is now quite chilly outside. The clouds and rain are here too. It makes for a rainy Monday, a day where I would much rather have stayed in bed wrapped in my warm blanket. But it is still Monday which means I must return to work at DDA.

My day begins by checking my email, which seems to be never-ending, from the weekend. After that I must remind myself to write my blog - hopefully I will come up with something interesting. After that the day is vaguely sketched out. I know I must run SEO reports and check on the status of our Pay Per Click campaigns to see how they did over the weekend.

I have various website update requests from one of our clients, and inbetween all of this I will no doubtedly receive phone calls from others here at DDA with questions or answers about projects.

A day without that though would be very uncomfortable, I expected it!

DDA subscribes to several business practices and principles that directs everything we do. They are transparency, ethical conduct, and doing the right thing. The practice of these are both just good, sane, logical and practical approaches to client and vendor relations and emotional, cerebral and feel-good-about-yourself practices and beliefs that allows one to look himself or herself in the mirror each morning and sleep well at night.

Some definitions through the eyes of DDA:

Transparency. I like to think I am a good communicator. I know I am a lousy listener. My other career path might well have been as a history teacher and I sometimes wonder if the excitement of the advertising and business world overwhelmed my common sense.

Despite my best efforts, I recognize that four people in a meeting or discussion will leave with four slightly or largely different understandings of what just happened, what information was shared, what conclusions were drawn, and what the next steps are. Since we believe strongly that good process is at the core of all efficiency, somehow each successful advertising, branding, or marketing meeting must result in common understanding, shared goals, and a focused unified vision of the end game.

Transparency tools are woven into and heaped upon every advertising, branding, or marketing project we undertake. DDA TRAC (Time Resource and Accounting) is an in-house developed, Internet-based time tracking database tool. The result is that every hourly billed project including programming, logo design, graphic design, copywriting, photography, video, 2D and 3D animation, illustration, trade show displays, large format graphics, print design and print production for sell sheets, catalogs, brochures, flyers, direct mail, business cards, training portals and tools, CME design and development and even search engine optimization (SEO) is invoiced accurately. No time, not one minute is rounded up or added on, and every invoice is accompanied by a detailed minute-by-minute description of how the time was spent. On time, On budget, On TRAC every time.

Additional tracking and reporting tools abound. DDA’s search engine optimization (SEO) work has a series of metrics that perpetually report website visitation, usage, pathways, experience-based mapping, rankings, and much more. Website analysis means corporate websites can be better understood, improved, and managed.

Online proofing development websites are assigned to each client and each project. Our clients see every project unfold, improve, and take shape and their input is welcomed, requested, and insisted upon every step of the way.

Transparency is as much an attitude as it is a report or tool. At DDA, we believe that direct communication is the hallmark of a truly professional service-oriented vendor. We answer the phone, have project coordinators for each client, welcome questions and love client interaction. Every project is a blend of skills, expertise, information, and point-of-view provided by both the client and DDA.

Call us anytime. At DDA, the Transparency is clearly better.

Ethical Conduct to follow Monday.

Doing the Right Thing to follow Tuesday.