December 19, 2011 – 9:53 pm
1. I resolve to lose weight.
Over the years it’s easy to pack on extra weight. A few extra paragraphs here, some photos there, and before you know it you have created a website the size of a small universe. Does this nineteen-sentence paragraph make my home page look content heavy? It’s okay, I know I need to shed a few extra pages.
2. I resolve to update my look.
About 5 years ago I was literally stopping traffic! Now, I hardly get a second glance. Well I have really let myself go for a few years but not this year. For my new look I’m thinking less stale & frumpy template and more sleek & sophisticated custom design. Hey, I’m worth it!
3. I resolve to be more social.
Hi everyone! (see I am already starting.) I am ready to be more than a brochure website. I want to be engaging and have more interaction with my visitors and fans.
4. I resolve to be friendlier.
First, I want to be more user-friendly. I need to include better organization, navigation and messaging in my next redesign.
Secondly, I want to be more Search Engine friendly. This year I want to really optimize myself to dramatically improve my rankings.
Lastly, I want to be friendlier to mobile devices. More and more of them are trying to access me on their little screens. I need someone to make a smaller, less-flashy mobile version of myself just for those mobile devices.
5. I resolve to study more.
I want to study up on how to be the best website I can be in 2012! I am willing to adjust as needed based on what I learn about myself from studying the results from analytic reports. Who is looking for me and how can I make it easier for them to find me? Who says a website can’t be beautiful and smart at the same time.
September 26, 2011 – 1:50 pm
The answer is: It’s time to get help when ‘getting help’ saves you time and money.
Are you a do-it-yourself-type of person? I am. I hate spending money!
For instance I would never pay someone to do my laundry. At least that is what I used to think. Allow me to explain. After graduating college, my husband and I packed all our belongings to go teach school on a far-away tropical island. It was a beautiful island. Except inside the local Laundromat.
Ah… the Laundromat. It was crowded, smelly, rusty, and I had to go there to do laundry every week. I would take $20 worth of coins and fight (as politely as possible) for machines that were close to each other. I would spend 3 hours, starting washers, monitoring washers, transferring to dryers, switching to dryers that actually dried, discreetly folding unmentionable articles in public, then hauling it all back home.
In the end I felt tired but I was proud of my laundress labors. I came home with clean clothes for the family so we could soak them all with tropical sweat the next week. Besides, it is only 3 hours and $20/week.
This went on for one entire year. That is, it went on until I had my Eureka moment.
It was a moonlit night and I saw my friend packing her clean folded laundry into her car. She was not sweaty, ragged or worn. She was not bitter over losing precious quarters down the coin slot of a broken dryer. She told me that the owner of the Laundromat would take a week’s worth of our laundry and wash, dry, and fold our laundry for us. I had always known that they offered this service but I just figured it would cost $50 or $60. So I went in and spoke with the owner and she said she would indeed wash, dry, and fold my laundry. She said it would cost $15. Yes, $15!
Now I may be a DIY person. But I decided that some things are better left to the pros. I went from spending $1040/year down to $780/year. I went from spending 156 hours/year on my laundry chore to 1 ½ hours/year.
Living on the Island taught me a lot– cultural understanding, WWII history, how big the Pacific Ocean is—and most important: some things are better left to the pros.
I talk to people about web design and web marketing a lot for my job as account manager at a terrific web development firm. And I meet a lot of people like me– DIYers . If you are like me and hate spending money, remember that doing a year’s worth of Search Engine Optimization is about as much fun as I had at the Laundromat. You may feel proud of yourself but is it worth the tediousness?
Don’t waste a year of your life like I did. When it comes to growing your business, and marketing leave it to the pros. You will be glad you did.
Search-Engine Management: A Cat-and-Mouse Game
So you hired a professional web design development firm. You got organic SEO and you are moving in the right direction. You are on the top ten in most of your keywords and new clients are finding you and contacting you. So four to six months go by and suddenly your rankings are slipping and your competition’s website is passing you up. Your design still looks great. The site is easy to navigate. What happened?
The problem with SEO is that, like any industry, it is constantly evolving. Marketers find ways to trick the search-engines and the search-engines find ways to punish the tricky marketers. Then the marketers find new strategies, and the search-engines change their ranking algorithms, so on and so forth. Think of it like the old cartoon “Tom and Jerry”.
So if you are a business owner or the person responsible for your company’s site you could spend a lot of time keeping up with the latest news regarding this cat and mouse game. Or hopefully your web design firm also specializes in marketing. If that is the case you can make arrangements with them to set up a SEM plan. That way you have someone who is constantly keeping a finger on the pulse of the SEO industry and who can keep abreast of effective new marketing strategies to make sure your site doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.
Have you ever wondered how Google or other search-engines decide the order of sites listed after someone searches for a particular key word? Well, I asked Rick Sibay and he gave me a twenty-page thesis written by some guys from Stanford.
“Read this. It will explain Search Engine Optimization.” he said.
Whoa! It had a lot of those long equations– you know the ones that have more letters than numbers. I am not a mathematical engineer but I can give you my personal interpretation.
You know how wolf spiders carry the baby spiders on their back? Well search engines have virtual wolf spiders that I like to think of as info spiders. These virtual info spiders crawl over a site picking up on heading words, key words, dates of updating, etc. They crawl through portals (aka other links) that connect to the site. They pick up all these little facts and data and carry them on their virtual backs back to the spider web headquarters. Then they input the data and facts into a big mathematical equation or algorithm that looks kind of like this:
[bold words + (keywords ÷ last update) - ¾most recent update] x amt of clicks – (spamminess X outdated stuff)= how high on search engine results page
Actually the algorithm is much longer and more complicated but I hope you get the idea.
But there were two main problems. The first was simple ignorance. The do-it-yourself website people and many professional website designers alike didn’t understand how it exactly worked and sometimes having text in graphic boxes or too many graphics or flash lowered the sites rankings. Why? Because these things were unreadable to the little spiders. But the things that were unreadable were so popular like a cheesy theme song audio playing on the home page or bouncing yellow smiley-faces. These innocent mistakes were actually making good sites rank worse than they were. The second problem was not as innocent. In the earlier days cunning web marketers figured out ways to try to trick the spiders by stuffing extra heading words, keywords or questionable back links. This worked for a while. However Google wised up to their tricks and changed their algorithm accordingly a few times. Basically they want the top site of a particular search to really be the TOP site–not just the site with the most cunning web marketer.
Fortunately, if you hire a great web design and development firm, they will create the site by making sure from the start that the site will have all the good things the little spiders are looking for in all the right places. Not only that, but they will also keep current with search engine standards and changes to algorithms such as the ones recently released in January 2011. When the site is ready to go public it will be off to a good start!
Search Engine Optimization is just making appropriate changes to improve performance in the realm of being able to be found by the people you want to find you. It is trying to get higher to the top of the search results page. Consider keeping this in mind when you are starting your new site or enhancing an old one. Because the spiders aren’t going away—but they are getting smarter.
Next week: Continuing optimization through Search Engine Management.
Most experts will tell you that having a website is a critical part of establishing, maintaining and growing your business. We of course would agree with that. But did you know that your website could actually be hurting your business? Here are three reasons why:
Outdated content
Last summer I stopped by a rural gas station on a family vacation. I was hungry and thirsty so I went inside the convenience store. The first thing I noticed was the labels on the snack food were faded in color. I picked up a pack of snack crackers but they slipped through my fingers due to a thick layer of dust. Needless to say I came in hungry and thirsty but quickly backed out of the store without buying a thing. The same thing can happen with your website. A potential customer comes in to visit, hungry and thirsty, so to speak. You must have fresh content. Do you have photos on your site? How current are they? How about ‘upcoming’ events–have they since past but still appear on your site? Most importantly if you are not advertising a product or service that has been out of stock or no longer available for 6 months, your potential customer might be backing out quickly, drawing a conclusion that an out-dated site means you don’t follow attention to detail. Or worse, they might assume you’re out of business.
Lack of Optimization
They used to say of Las Vegas “build it and they will come”, that’s not true on the web. You can have one of the most amazing, informative and relevant sites on the web, but if your site is not submitted and, more importantly, constantly optimized for major search engines, potential new customers will have a very hard time finding you. SEO starts from the design of the site through the development and well beyond.
Generic Template Design
Basically a web template operates similarly to a form letter for use in setting up a web site. I recently received a nice form letter from a time share company. Maybe you have got something like this that says basically “(Your Name), you have won a free vacation. Call us right away (Your name)” Skeptically, we throw the form letter in the trash because the over-exagerated personalization actually makes it more ridiculous.
Low-cost templates abound on the web. Companies and association directors, many fearing the cost or complexity of a custom designed site, turn to templates as a quick and affordable way to get on the web. They may not realize that the template is designed to be sold to them not their clients. A website is arguably one of the most visible forms of marketing – working for you 24/hrs-a-day 7 days-a-week. Doesn’t it deserve to stand out? A custom website is designed with your logo, theme, motto and your target audience in mind. You just can’t get that with a template.
Conclusion
Just like you must maintain your physical location with routine cleaning, landscaping, changing light bulbs, ect., you should consider maintaining the website in a similar manner. The best way to do this is using a custom-design, keeping current and fresh content, and optimizing the site routinely.
Next week’s blog: More about Optimization…
As the month of July approaches, it will mark our tenth year in business. Wow, what a wonderful ride it has been. Just like all businesses, this past decade has had its challenges, opportunities and rewards.
We would like to thank all our existing clients for their business through the years and can tell you that we have a lot more in store for our next decade… Stay tuned!
How ‘clean’ is your website? Have you accumulated extra files, images, pages? Is your product or service offering up-to-date?
Now might be a good time to devote to ‘cleaning’ up those extra items that can be often neglected. Below, we provide a few tips you can use to help with your Fall Clean-up.
Review Your Website — for Errors
Look at each page and read the content carefully. Is your content free of spelling and grammar mistakes? Do the images match the message? Do you have pages with ‘broken’ links? These are common issues that can be easily fixed.
Review Your Website — for Accuracy
Do you sell products or services on the web? When was the last time you checked to make sure the information is accurate? We suggest you carefully check every product/service offered on your website to ensure it is accurate and still being offered. Check your images, product descriptions, whitepapers and any other details about your product/service. If it’s out-of-date, it shouldn’t be on your website.
Review Your Website — for Consistency
How do your pages ‘flow’? When you go from one page to another, do you get the same “look-and-feel” or is their a lack of consistency between pages? “Look-and-feel” elements include the layout, graphics, image styles and even ensuring the same font is used consistently throughout.
Review Your Website — for META Tags
How does your site rank? When is the last time you reviewed your keywords and compared them to your competition? Has your content been ‘optimized’? These are critical areas to review that, if done correctly, can dramatically help to increase your search rankings. These are also areas you should review often.
Review Your Website — for Rogue Files
Do you have FTP access to your website? If so, you should check to make sure only files that relate to your website are on your web server. A common mistake is forgetting to delete old pages off the web server that are no longer relevant. Just because you delete a link to the page, doesn’t actually delete the page itself. If you’re using a standard site (and not a web console or Content Management System, for example), you’ll need to FTP into your site and remove those files – but BE CAREFUL – you don’t want to mistakenly delete a file that is a necessary part of your live website. Considering the risk of deleting the wrong file, this is one of those, “if you don’t know, better hire someone who does” scenarios.
Following these tips can help keep your website ‘ready for business’. And, considering that your website might make the first impression your potential customer realizes, isn’t regular focus worth it?
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