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Do not underestimate the power of frequent updates!

October 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is the fifth post in a series of articles which expands on Six things you absolutely have to have on your website.

The Six Pack Series

Outdated tools

Don

Frequent updates are indispensable for running a successful website.  In the previous decades, a company could have a nice looking, static website and be on the edge of innovation, but that is not the case anymore.  According to Netcraft.com, there are over 485 Million websites as of September of 2011.  It is important to realize that this may not be completely accurate, but as you look at the huge number, you get the idea.   There are lots of websites on the World Wide Web these days.

As a result, it is easy to get lost in the shuffle.  The search engines continuously search for websites that are being updated, especially frequently, and send them to the top of their rankings.  As a result, this is one of the best reasons to have a frequently updated website.

There are multiple ways to keep a website updated.  Some ways include adding articles to your website, updating product information, updating your calendar, adding news about your industry or your own company and finally, running a successful blog.

With this need to update your website more frequently, I think it is imperative to have a good Content Management System (CMS) installed on your server.  This is especially true for small businesses and non-profit organizations.  A CMS will allow your organization to update your website easily without billing your designer saving you money.  Some CMS’s you should consider are Joomla, Drupal, Pixelsilk or, my choice, WordPress.  All of these will allow you to more easily and more effectively, update your website more frequently.

Of the options for updating your website above, running a blog on your website is probably the easiest option to implement and further, it will allow you to update using some of the other options.  For example, you can easily add news and articles to your website using your blog and also you can update or do product launches if you have just a few products or services.

Here are five key reasons for having a blog on your website.

1.News and Articles

News and articles on your products, your company or your industry can establish you and your business as an expert in the field.  Your customers want to know what you think, and writing these articles will allow you to communicate that with all of them at once.  Further, it can keep your customers informed on your business’ successes.

2. SEO

As mentioned before, a frequently updated website gets noticed by search engines.  Those websites that update often are friends to those search engine spiders.  A blog can enable this like no other feature on your website.

3. Sticky Content

Do you read a sports blog?  How about a technology or some other blog?  Think about it, a blog creates sticky content that hooks a reader or visitor bringing them back again.

4. Small scale product launches

Do you have a new service?  How about a new product?  Do you think the loyal customers you already have would want to know about it first?  If you have more than a few dozen products and services then you will need a e-commerce solution, but if not, you can launch your product or offer updates to the customers you already have.  Your blog is also an excellent way to build the hype for a new product or service launch.

5.Shareability

A blog is inherently built to be shareable.  Great posts are retweeted, shared on Facbook and a whole host of other social media websites.  Further, if you have an RSS feed, your blog is instantly syndicated further pushing its shareability.  This shareability allows your company and/or business to be shared as well introducing new readers to you and your products and services.

Following it up

These are very compelling reasons to frequently update your website.  The best websites on the world wide web are convinced of the need, and now you are too.

How can you make a plan to implement a strategy to update your website more frequently?

Filed Under: Blog, The Six Pack, websites Tagged With: , , , ,

Four crucial reasons you must build your website on html

September 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is the fourth post in a series of articles which expands on Six things you absolutely have to have on your website.

The Six Pack Series

html image

In the beginning, the internet was basic, very basic.  HTML documents were not very pretty.  It consisted of what seemed like a limited amount of font and colors.  As the internet progressed, developers started using pictures and other sources of media files to enhance their web pages for the visitor.

Since the beginning, web pages have always been designed in HTML.  As a result, we developers and website designers have looked for ways to enhance the experience.  Nevertheless, search engines have had more and more web pages to identify and, ultimately, index in their database for search results.  There are billions of websites and webpages on the internet.

Search engines built robots, or spiders, automated programs which search the internet looking for pages to index in their vast databases.  What these robots look for is data. They are searching for HTML elements such as hyperlinks, tags, alt tags for images, text, meta tags, etc.  Search engine robots aren’t looking for images, graphics, flash animations or any other kind of user enhanced media experience. It’s not that those things aren’t good, that’s just not what search engines are looking for.

The result is that a new discipline called search engine optimization has been born to help websites make sure they are optimized for these robots.  Building your website on a basic foundation of HTML is a very necessary journey.  Can you use media in your webpages?  Absolutely!  But keep in mind these four reasons for building your web page on HTML.

1.  Accessibility

Internet surfers who are vision impaired do not see the cool images and graphics.  In fact, they use a screenreader which reads the text from the underlying source code of the web page.  The screen reader browsers read the important elements of the page based on the HTML tags that are used.

For example, if you have the title of your page inside the <h1> tag, the screen reader browser will read that first as it is the most important element.  It reads the links to the internet surfers too.  What vision impaired surfers see is very much like what search engine robots see.  The snazzy media files will not help them much.

2.  Keywords, header tags and alt tags for Search Engine Optimization

These are basic HTML elements and, simply put, they are very attractive to the search engine robots.  Header tags will tell the robots what words are important on the website which is why it is a good practice to put your website’s keywords in a header tag.

Alt tags are for images.  You and I will see the images, but the robot does not.  Adding an alt tag helps the robots, and vision impaired internet users, know what the image is for.

Meta tags are in the header section of the website and identify to the robots what the website is about (description) and what the keywords are on the page.  Adding the keywords in the header tags later in the page reinforces what you are telling the robots and usually get you some attention in the search engines.

3.  For creating sitemaps

HTML by its very nature is hierarchical as is most markup languages.  Hierarchy really just refers to organization such as how an outline will organize any kind of document.  This structure makes it easy to create sitemaps for both the user and the search engines.

HTML sitemaps is excellent for your visitor letting them know where things are on the website.  A website is made up of web pages, and they are arranged in an ordered way.  There is evidence that having an HTML sitemap is very helpful in getting better indexed in the search engines.

XML sitemaps search have long been used for indexing in search engines as well, although there is debate on its effectiveness.

Nevertheless, there is benefit for using one or both of these type of sitemaps for SEO purposes, and they are created by using the HTML structure used for building your website.  Without the HTML structure, it will be difficult to build a sitemap.

4.  Mobile based platforms

There is a need to use HTML when designing for a mobile based version of your website.  There are a lot of things you need to know when designing a mobile version of your website, however, you need to start with basic HTML elements which easily read by mobile browsers today.  Mobile surfing technology has migrated to HTML, but it does not include flash programing as of yet.

There is a temptation in website design to go heavy on flash and other media related applications.  While that can enhance the user experience and create a more interactive environment, a website that is built exclusively on a different platform will ultimately leader to lower visibility in the search engines, a poor user experience for the vision impaired, hard to initiate a basic structure for a sitemap and difficult to be used on mobile platforms.  Keep this in mind when having your next website built.

Filed Under: Blog, The Six Pack, websites Tagged With: , , , , ,

SEO Tips: Social media helps your visibility

September 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

SEO Tips

Search Engine Optimization. SEObook.com, one of the foremost authorities on SEO defines it like this

Search engine optimization is the art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries.

Wikipedia has its own definition.

I define SEO as the task of increasing your visibility in the search engines.  Your company, your brand, or even yourself has a visibility in the search engines.  This includes, primarily, your website, but other things effect visibility too.  For instance, social media profiles will increase that visibility.

Take a look at this image.

Search Engine Results

This is the front page of the results for “todd e jones” in Google.

You will see that my website, toddejones.net, is at the top of the rankings which I am thankful for since the sites listed just below mine have been around a lot longer.  However, if you look at the whole page you will see three social media profiles giving me a visibility of four different results on the front page.

I have circled the results.  There is my Facebook page, my twitter profile and finally, my Linkedin profile.

As a result, you will see, that a simple thing like having social media profiles will increase your visibility online and ultimately your SEO for your website.

Filed Under: Blog, SEO Tips Tagged With: , , ,

Three solid reasons for having Pretty Permalinks

September 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is the third post in a series of articles which expands on Six things you absolutely have to have on your website.

The Six Pack Series

a bad URL

Flickr: FrankFram

Permalinks are the text which becomes the link to a page or article on your website.  Another word for a permalink is a URL or uniform resource locator.  Permalinks usually are or contain the title of the page for which they point to.

Most of your pages, especially your static pages such as About Us, will have links that identify the page as it is.  For example: www.yourdomain.com/about-us.html.

The problem comes when you publish an article or a blog post.  Usually your title is more than a couple of words long, and, depending on how your database-driven website platform settings are configured, may contain a long string of numbers, letters and special characters which is known as a query string.

So, what’s the big deal?

Well, there are three very good reasons you should have what is called pretty permalinks.  Pretty permalinks are links to your article or blog post which do not contain the query string but look more like your static page links.

1. Short, pretty permalinks are ideal for sharing

Long permalinks can create multiple problems including readers sharing them with their friends via email and other social media networks.  A long link becomes trouble when you are trying to copy and paste or simply trying to tweet or post the article on Facebook.  Cut off any of the link and it is broken.

Some designers have started using shorteners to making social media sharing easy.  Other designers have gone so far as to strategically create short links (or domains) that are very easy to remember.  Such an example is goo.gl. Another purpose of using a shortening strategy is to help track click-through rates.  Social media marketers are using these types of links to track how a marketing strategy performs using the shortened link in an ad, on a landing page or in an email campaign.

Some will debate the use of shortening your URL for SEO, but I advocate using it for social media sharing but leaving your regular URL, your permalink, with its structure of keywords.  The bottom line is keeping your permalinks from being extra long and containing letters, numbers and characters.

Regardless, if you keep your permalinks pretty, and shorter, it will be much, much easier for your loyal readers to share the latest article from your website.

2. Pretty Permalinks are best for SEO

Long permalinks notwithstanding, it seems that is best to have pretty permalinks with keywords included to have a good search engine optimization experience for your articles.  It makes sense though, doesn’t it?  Sure, Google and other search engines use robots to find sites, but humans write the algorithms to power the robots, and, it seems, pretty permalinks help articles be indexed well.

Further, there is evidence that people actually tend to click on links in the search results that use pretty permalinks.

3. Pretty permalinks are short and use less bandwidth

Experts are starting to believe that long URL’s can cause a greater use of bandwidth.  Bandwidth is the amount of data that is delivered from one point to another, generally taking place when a user surfs the web and pages are being loaded from the internet to his or her computer.   Configuring your permalinks to be pretty will cause the URL to be shorter.

Now what?

When designing your website, choose a platform which will generate permalinks that use keywords and less characters.  If you already have a website, you might look for ways to go back and optimize those permalinks.

Are you using permalinks on your website?  How do you make it easier for your readers to share your articles with their friends?

Filed Under: Blog, Series, The Six Pack, websites Tagged With: , , ,

Use keywords to optimize your website

September 14, 2011 By 2 Comments

This is the second post in a series of articles which expands on Six things you absolutely have to have on your website.

The Six Pack Series

Words

A website that is void of keywords is one that will be invisible online.  Keywords are one of the most significant developments in that past 10 years.

What are your keywords?  What words do you think your customers are using to search for your services?  Are you a photographer?  What kind?  How would you use Google to search for you?

These are some of the answers that need to be answered.  In fact, you should link keywords to your geography as well.  For example: “photography, Conway, AR.”

Here are three tips:

Brainstorm

Be both specific and general.  Do a little brainstorming with a key member of your staff.  Try to think like a consumer.  Good search engine optimization (SEO) takes more than keywords, so don’t put pressure on yourself to get it exactly right.  You are trying to put obvious keywords in your meta-tag headers that will be present in your website.

Look for tools

There are some tools you can invest in to help you.  You will need a little help and some advanced research will never hurt! You can take advantage of the keyword tool from Google,  the Wordstream toolbox, SEO Book, Copyblogger and SEO Moz.

Don’t forget key phrases

People search by phrases mostly rather than keywords.  The more you can use key phrases the more narrow the competition is and the better chance you have to rank higher in the search engines.  Simply trying to dominate a single keyword is going to be next to impossible, especially for a small business.  Think geographically for your key phrases.  Try to dominate keywords, and especially, key phrases for your geographical location.

Once you have your keywords in a list, have your website designer put them in the header section.  It’s simple and will help your visibility in search engines.

Are you making keywords a part of your website strategy?  What kind of keywords do you need to look at for your website?

photo credit Flickr: Feuillu

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What is SEO and why is it important?

July 18, 2010 By 1 Comment

If you have a business and/or a website, at some point you will be solicited via email or phone by a company doing SEO.  I have received emails and so has one of my clients looking to help us rank better in the search engines.

Black Magic SEO, SEO Comic

http://www.flickr.com/photos/byronshell/

So, what is SEO?  SEO stands for “search engine optimization.”  Search engine, of course, refers to search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Optimization, is the act of optimizing or “to make as effective as possible” the object which needs the optimizing.  In this case, SEO is the act of optimizing your website to rank as high as possible in the websites.

Over the years SEO has changed.  SEO has evolved along with website design over the years, and now there are a number of ways to do SEO effectively.  Hiring a good consulting firm to manage your SEO can be very expensive.  These folks are really good at what they do and the businesses they help usually have huge benefits from their work.

So, what is a small business like your to do?  After all, you don’t really have the budget to hire a full time consulting firm to begin to handle your SEO.  There are a few options.

Learn more about SEO

As any consumer of a product, you really should learn more about SEO yourself.  That might start with a book which can sometimes go over our head or some other kind of resource.  I would start with Google’s own article on SEO and then move to something a little more specific such as SEOBook.com.   A good book to get would be Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

Talk to your Website Designer

Some of the best SEO folks are actually website designers.  If they aren’t sure how to at least navigate SEO for the purpose of building your website, then you might need a new designer.  They should have set the ground work for a well optimized website, and many offer additional SEO services for a fee.

They will be able to walk you through the process of choosing keywords and inserting them in to the appropriate areas of your website.  Further, if they haven’t already, they should be able to get your website indexed in the “big three” search engines; Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Social Media Saturation

One of the best things you can do is join the social media channels.  Social media sites are some of the best places to get additional “fuel” for your search engine rankings.  A friend of mine refers to this as “social media saturation.”  Make sure the URL to your site is linked to your Facebook, your twitter, your Linkedin and your Youtube accounts or whatever else you use for social media.

Blogging

Blogging is technically part of social media saturation, but it can also be an example for having an active website.  Blogs show activity at your website, making it dynamic, not static.  The search engines are attracted to activity.  When you blog, you create a regular update to your website that is noticed by search engines.

When you blog, you should create good content, and by that I mean content that is in line with the purpose and keywords of your website.  For example, if you have a website for your pet sitting business, then you would blog about pet sitting tips for pet owners.  Create a reservoir of good content that will be searched for and found by a frustrated owner looking for help.

One more thing, I highly recommend getting either your blog or your entire website built on WordPress.  WordPress is built to be SEO friendly out of the box.  Many of the things I mentioned are a lot easier with WordPress.

There is much more to SEO than this such as Pay Per Click and online advertising.  Further, there is also “black hat” and “white hat” methods.  There is also link building which can take time and there is being included in directories.  Nevertheless, you can learn enough to know how to approach SEO with your website.

I am only trying to get you thinking about the subject.  Don’t react impulsively to an unsolicited email or phone call from someone offering to put you on the front page of Google.  Often they aren’t better than the one who designed your website.

Filed Under: Uncategorized, websites Tagged With: , , ,

Do-it-yourself Tasks for SEO

September 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Some Do-it-yourself tasks to help with the SEO of your website

1. Write a press release–If you have some good or big news, write a press release. You can have someone to do it for you, or you can use a press release service who often offer editing of press releases. You will need to choose someone to release, and my suggestion is PR Newswire. Often other services boast that they submit to PR Newswire. However, PR Newswire offers the service too, and you can use them directly rather than using someone else. Often, a press release is a fraction of some kind of advertising campaign, and many times, it produces massive results.

Another company to consider is eReleases.com. They are very upfront about their cost and why you pay what you do.  Further, the results that they have provided for their customers have been well documented.

2. Social Media–If you already have a Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter or Myspace account, kick them in overdrive. Really, just updating regularly and making of note of your business can be a big help. These social media networks result in organic marketing. Having the right person at the right time to recommend you can give you more exposure than you ever imagined.

3. Online Advertising–If you are advertising in print with limited results, then you might consider switching some or all of your advertising budget to online advertising. The easiest way is to sign up for Google Ads, but you can also find a site that you think would be relevant to your potential customers and inquire about placing an ad on their site.

There are a couple of sites that are considered hyper-local in the DFW area, meaning that they target the local neighborhood for their readers. While this is a DIY task, you can also have someone to manage the campaign for you. Often these charges are based on a percentage of how much you are spending.

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