Dramatic Traffic offers a free consultation session to discuss your ideas and objectives for your website. After our consulting session, Dramatic Traffic will send you a proposal that outlines the website project. We keep the process simple, and clearly communicate what you can expect from us, and what we will need from you during each step of the process. If you are located in the Oklahoma City area, we can arrange a face to face consultation. If you are located outside of the Oklahoma City area, we can set up a video or audio conference call consultation.

Building a website is an important expression of your organization, and it can be a powerful tool to grow your brand, communicate your message, or sell your products. There are many things to consider, but we want to help make the process as simple and painless as possible. We find it helpful to consider these questions as you begin to consider your website project.

• What colors should I choose?
• Should I use a dark color scheme or a light color scheme?
• What layout do I like?
• Should I use a 1, 2 or 3 column layout?
• What are my competing websites?
• What do I like or dislike about their website?
• What makes me or my business unique?
• Your website should highlight the things that differentiate you from your competition.
• What pages or categories should my website have?

You can view our Portfolio here.  You can contact us here.

SEO is an important part of helping the world find the path to your door. We understand that SEO can be overwhelming and that there is a lot of spin and jargon out there. We also know that there are a lot of people who use poor, black hat tactics to try and gain search engine rankings.

At Dramatic Traffic, we use safe, approved SEO methods to build good quality content and gain search engine optimization. We work with our clients to help them understand what SEO is and how it can help their business. We also spend time getting to know our client’s business so that we can ensure we are optimizing their website for the proper search keywords.

Each website built by Dramatic Traffic is built with SEO in mind. We build SEO tools in to every page on our websites so that every page is seen by the search engines, easy for the search engine spiders to read, and ensure that each page is optimized for the specific content on each page. We also understand that getting good SEO rankings can sometimes be quick, but sustaining results over time is more valuable. We equip our clients with tools to allow them to track results and we make it easy to adjust SEO content to get better results. After all, search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, and we all need to be able to adjust our content accordingly.

Even if you’re not an existing Dramatic Traffic client, we can work with your current website to help get your site recognized by search engines and help people find the path to your door. Contact Dramatic Traffic today for a free SEO consultation.

Each of these have their own pros and cons which we’ll get into a bit deeper down the road. I typically choose either option 2 or 3. Most of the time I choose option 3 and I imagine most first time website owners do too. By first time website owners, I mean those who aren’t redesigning their website, but are building the first website ever for a particular domain. If you’re redesigning a website then option 3 is not an option. You do not want to develop a redesign on the same domain as your live website. In that situation you want to build the website offline or on a development site, and then transfer the new site to the domain once it is fully completed and tested. In my opinion, there is no better option for backing up a WordPress site OR transferring a WordPress site, than Backup Buddy from iThemes. It truly is an amazing plugin and well worth the money. (Affiliate Link)

This article will outline WordPress plugins and procedures we recommend if you’re building a first ever website on a domain. You don’t want your website to be crawled by search engines until it has valid content, nor do you want any visitors to see a half-done, junky looking website. In fact, you’d like to get info from any of your website visitors so that you can let them know when your website launches.

1. Stop Search Engines From Crawling Your Site
As I mentioned above, you don’t want search engines crawling your site until the site is ready. The last thing you want is a search engine result that indicates that your website is under construction or coming soon, even after you’ve been launched for two weeks. Fortunately, WordPress makes this very easy. Login to the Admin Dashboard and click on the Settings section, then click on the Privacy link. This page gives you two clear choices: “Allow search engines to index this site” or “Ask search engines not to index this site.” Select the second option and click Save Changes. IMPORTANT: Once your site is ready to launch, go back to this page and select the first option. Otherwise, search engines will not include your site in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS).

2. Install a Coming Soon or Under Construction Theme
The default themes that come preloaded with WordPress are nice, but they don’t do much to make you stand out or give your website a unique look. Consequently, you’ll want to create a custom design. Of course, we can help you with that, but if you’d like to do it yourself, we recommend putting up a nice Coming Soon or Under Construction page while your site is being built. This Anticipation theme (affiliate link) allows you to go ahead and start forming a relationship with your site visitors even before you launch. It allows you to tell about yourself, gather email addresses, share your Twitter and Facebook profile and share your site progress.

3. Work Behind the Scenes to Build Your Site
You may be thinking that by installing the Anticipation theme that we’ve just violated one of the guidelines I mentioned earlier: “You do not want to develop a redesign on the same domain as your live website.” Don’t worry, this warning does not apply here because your site does not contain any content yet. Therefore, there’s nothing to mess up! During this phase of construction, I use a plugin called Theme Test Drive. Theme Test Drive allows you to select a theme to work on behind the scenes. Anyone logged in as an admin will see the site that is active under Theme Test Drive, while the general public still sees the Under Construction theme. So you can tweak and work away on our site, and nobody will ever know it or see your completed site until you change the theme from the Under Construction theme to your new theme.

4. Speaking of Themes, Make Sure You Get a Quality WordPress Theme
When it comes to WordPress Themes, there are plenty of free themes and paid themes out there. A quick Google search will give you pages and pages of themes to consider. We’ve had mixed results with free themes. The vast majority of the time, we spend a lot more time tweaking and modifying free themes than we have paid themes. However, we’ve seen some pretty junky paid themes too. We fully endorse (and actively use) themes from iThemes and Elegant Themes. (affiliate links) We’ve also had really good success using themes from Theme Forest.

5. A Few More WordPress Plugins You Can’t Live Without
We’ll be going into a more in-depth look at our preferred WordPress plugins in a future blog post, but here are 3 other WordPress Plugins that you’ll want to install ASAP.

• Akismet:  Akismet is a POWERFUL tool that will weed out nearly all spam comments from your site.
• All In One SEO Pack: All In One SEO Pack is a great tool to guide you through getting your site optimized for showing up in SERPS.
• Google XML Sitemaps: Google XML Sitemaps is a plugin that will help you ensure that your site is being indexed  by Google and will even tell Google when you add fresh content to your site.

1. Don’t get too fancy with your website name. For example, I find it very frustrating when a website name is missing a vowel. If a website spells a word differently than how the word is naturally spelled, then people can’t simply tell someone else what the website name is. They will have to explain how to spell the website and hope that the other person remembers the odd spelling. If you think that the odd spelling will help people remember it, then you’re very likely wrong. In most cases, people will type out the normal spelling. If you insist on having a website with an odd spelling, you should also purchase the normal spelling and redirect traffic from the normally spelled domain over to your odd spelling domain.

2. If you’re in the United States, stick with a .com address. People will instinctively put .com at the end of any web address. If you think that www.perfectwebsitename.com is the best website name but someone else already owns that name, buying www.perfectwebsitename.net or www.perfectwebsitename.us will not help you. People will likely remember the “PerfectWebsiteName” part of your domain, but they’ll be more likely to put a .com on it than remember the .net or .us. This means that if www.perfectwebsitename.com is your competitor, you’ll be sending a lot of traffic to your competitor.

3. Try to pick out a name that reflects what your business does. For example, if you run a heat and air business that prides itself on speedy service, www.heatandairexpress.com might be good. Another option might be www.quickheatandair.com. Dramatic Traffic does a fair job in this area. While the name doesn’t instantly tell people what we do, the name has a close rhyme, which makes it easier to remember, and once you visit our site and see what we do, the name makes a lot of sense.

4. Avoid domains that are copyrighted. This may seem obvious, but it’s worth stating. All of my websites are built on the open source platform, WordPress. However, WordPress does not allow the use of the word WordPress in other domain names or titles. For example, this means I can’t use the domain, www.WordPressGuru.com. (this domain is in use, but is not associated with this website or any of our partner sites) or even The WordPress Podcast. I could, however, buy the domain and redirect it to my main domain. I just can’t have the publicly visible domain name to contain WordPress. Other companies have similar regulations, so do your homework before you spend a lot of time and money on a website you can’t use.

5. Do not use special characters in your domain name. The good thing is, most special characters are not allowed to be used in a domain name. In fact, only letters, numbers and hyphens can be used. Having said that, avoid numbers and hyphens. If you use numbers, you have to explain if people should use the number or spell out the number. If you have to explain how to type your domain, you’re doing it wrong. (See point 1 above)

6. Choose a fairly short name. This is not hugely important unless you get really carried away. It is VERY important to make sure your domain name is easy to remember. However, you don’t want to go overboard and create a domain that is too long to write out or use as an email address. My rule of thumb is to try and keep the domain name 3 words or less.

7. Avoid fluff or filler words. Remember that part I mentioned about getting natural traffic by choosing the proper domain name? That is achieved by choosing a good keyword and partnering it with a industry term (a great example of this www.halfpricebooks.com). Using words like www.AAAbooks.com or www.numberonebooks.com won’t do you any favors. Many domain registrars also provide good tools to help you discover domain names that have a similar meaning to what they believe you are trying to create. For example, if you type in a name a Network Solutions and it’s not available, they will automatically give you similar suggestions.

Good luck selecting your domain! We’re here to help you with all your website design and SEO needs.

Moving from one house to another house is never easy or fun, but if you properly prepare, the transition can be made smoother. And if you label everything carefully when you’re packing, when you get to the new house everything will be unpacked easily and put in it’s proper place. Moving a website to a new home is very similar.

Here are some tips to help make a smooth transition to the new domain. First, you need to set up 301 redirects for every single page, post and link. You want to set the 301 to link to a specific page on your new domain.  Do not set them all to simply redirect to the new homepage (MyNewExample.com).  Set the 301 to go to a very comparable page on your new domain. If that page does not exist, it’s probably worth creating. I don’t think it’s a big deal if a few of the 301 redirects point to the same place on your new domain, but try to make it as much of a 1:1 transfer as possible. If you’re using WordPress, a great redirection plugin is called Redirection by John Godley.

You’ll probably want to plan on keeping your current domain (www.Example.com) up for 120 days or so. This will give ample time for all the 301 redirects to really take root. Once all of your 301s are set up, sign in to Google Webmaster Tools and fill out a Change of Address Form. It’s under the Site Configuration section of your Dashboard.

One other thing I would suggest is contacting the people that link to your current domain (www.Example.com). You can find a list of links to your site in the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard too. Look through it, and if you see a lot of links from a site, contact them. Thank them for linking to your site and let them know that you want to make sure they’re providing the most up-to-date and accurate info to their visitors, and tell them what the new link should be. They just need to change their URLs to the new one. No 301 is necessary.

One final suggestion. Create new content on your new domain that is rich with the keywords you want to rank for. The fresh content will go a long way to giving you the rank you need. This is similar to what I suggested above, but make this content fresh and unique from the content you copied over from your current site. This step is not necessary if you did a fresh rewrite of the content you bring over from your current site. But if you do a straight copy of the content, make sure you write some fresh stuff too.

Good luck with your move!

The Podcasting 101 class will teach you what a podcast is and help you get started in podcasting. Topics covered include: How to choose a podcast host, choosing the right equipment, setting up an RSS feed, installing the proper podcast plug-ins on your WordPress site, getting your podcast submitted to iTunes & podcast production tips.

The class will be held on October 4th at 6:30 PM at The Div in Edmond, OK. More info about The Div can be found at The Div Website.

How do you choose the best SEO keywords for your site? Choosing the proper keywords for your site my seem overwhelming, or it may seem easy. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t fret. If you think you already know the best keywords for your website, you may be very wrong. This post will show you how to take advantage of one of the best keyword resources on he Internet. The best part: it’s FREE!

The tool I’m talking about is the Google Keyword Tool. The Google Keyword Tool is a feature included in the Google AdWords program. While it does cost money to run Google AdWords, it is free to join the program, and you don’t have to spend money to use the Google Keyword Tool.

Once you’ve signed up for a free Google AdWords account and sign in, you’ll arrive at the Dashboard. Click on the Reporting and Tools tab and select Keyword Tool. Find the box labeled Word or Phrase and type in the keywords you think are best for your site. Find the box labeled Website and put in the URL of your site (optional). Once you’ve completed those steps, click on the Search button.

Now you will see two sections. The first section is labeled Search Terms and gives you information about the specific terms you typed into the Word or Phrase box. The second section is labeled Keyword Ideas and lists Google’s suggested keywords. Next to each keyword you will find a green bar that shows how competitive that keyword is in the AdWords market. This gives us some insight into how many people are bidding on that keyword. However, it does not give us a full picture of how many people are optimizing their websites for that term. In other words, if I own a pet store I may optimize my site for the keyword “Dog Collar,” but that does not mean that I’m also paying for the AdWord “Dog Collar.”

The next column is labeled Global Monthly Searches, and it is very helpful. This tells you how many times that keyword is searched for on Google. You can click on any of the column headers and sort that column in ascending order. Click the column header again to sort it in descending order.

This tool is great because it helps you figure out what people are searching for. Let’s look back at our pet store example. Let’s say that I own a pet store and I don’t call it a collar, but a restraint. Restraint is what it is called by pet industry insiders, my vendor calls it a restraint, and the packaging even calls it a restraint. So when I start making a list of keywords for my site, I might naturally choose the keyword “Dog Restraint.” However, the Google Keyword Tool tells me that there are only 4,400 monthly searches for that term. It turns out, most people actually use the term “Dog Collar,” and the Google Keyword tool tells me there are 673,000 monthly searches for that term. With those facts in mind, which keyword should I optimize my site for? Dog Collar, of course!

You may think that this is over simplifying an obvious search term, but I can tell you from experience that you will not choose the best keywords for your site without the Google Keyword Tool. Recently I was working on a site and input a list of keywords into the tool. It turns out, one of the words at the top of the list was not a very popular term. After going through the list of Keyword Ideas, I found a keyword that was being searched several hundred thousand times more per month, AND it had very little AdWord competition! I never would have found that valuable keyword without the Google Keyword Tool.

Here’s one final reminder. As I mentioned in a previous article, do not try to make every page rank for every keyword. The goal of this exercise is not to overload a page with every search term that receives a lot of monthly searches. You must still choose your keywords carefully.

1. Google Webmaster Tools-This is an invaluable resource.  If you have not yet signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, stop reading and go sign up right now! Once you get your site set up, you’ll be able to track many useful insights such as Google +1 Metrics, Crawl Stats, Link to Your Site, Site Performance and MUCH, MUCH more! In addition to this page, there is a Google Webmaster Tools Help page that is also invaluable. At the very least you should download and read the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

2. Another great SEO Tool from Google is the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. Here you will find hundreds of videos filled with tips, insights and listener-submitted questions. Each video is hosted by Google Search Engineer, Matt Cutts.

3. One last very helpful SEO Tool is the website SEO Book. SEO Book has more SEO resources than any other website I’ve found. The information at SEO Book is very well organized and easy to understand. They do have a paid service, so most of the information at SEO Book is not free. However, there are still some VERY useful videos, blogs, and training resources available at no cost. At the very least, make sure you visit the SEO Book Tools page. It provides several valuable resources such as the SEO Toolbar for Firefox, Rank Tracker Firefox extension and SEO for Firefox extension. These three tools are free and provide much of the insights provided by expensive SEO software.

There are many other great SEO Tools out there, but these three are a great starting point. Go check out these SEO resources and you’ll be learning how to improve your website’s SEO in no time!