Getting Your Website Seen, Part 1

December 8th, 2009

So now you have a website, your own domain name (like www.dauntlessdev.com) and you’re ready for visitors! But wait, how do we get people to visit? Well, there are a number of ways people will come to your site: word of mouth, advertising, and search engines.

Before we get into the last one, I want to talk a bit about Word of Mouth and Advertising. If you have a website, it’s a good idea to put it on all of your signage for your business. Why? Because lots of people today would rather go to your website to research you then to call and ask.

But other than telling people about your site, and displaying the website around town, there’s only one major way of getting people to visit your website: Search Engines (aka Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc).

You may have heard the terms SEO or SEM before. SEO is Search Engine Optimization, whereas SEM is Search Engine Marketing. Both are very important, but are different beasts.

This is a two part series of articles, the first on SEO, and the second, on SEM. (click the title for the full article)

Search Engine Optimization

A lot of SEO is done on my end, meaning I’ll take care of it for you. The pieces that I do are things like keeping the structure of your site clean and readable for search engines that are looking at your site. So to do that, I’ll use a specific type of code called CSS to program your site, which makes it easier to read for the blind (yes, they do use the internet) and for search engines. I’ll also make sure that you have search-engine-readable URL’s (e.g. http://www.yoururl.com/your-article.html) to each of your pages. There are several other aspects, though, that you can do.

Link Building

You may have heard of a thing called link building. Link building means that you go out and get other sites to post links to your site on theirs. As search engines are crawling over the web looking at other people’s websites, they notice all the links they have to various pages. If the website does a really good job of talking about a particular topic, and it links to another website, that gives that other website a good reputation. The more links from reputable sources that are aimed at your site, the higher your site will list on search engines!

But be careful! If there’s a website out there that is just posting whatever link they feel like, and it doesn’t seem to pertain to anything important, than that could even give you a bad reputation and lower your ranking!

Link building itself is actually an art all of its own. So if you’d like to know more about link building I’d suggest you pick up a book on it. Some good ones are “The Truth About Search Engine Optimization”, and “The Findability Formula”.

Keywords and Phrases

Now, a lot of SEO comes down to keywords. You need to pick a set of keywords and phrases that people would use in search engines if they were looking for a business like yours. For example, if you worked for a web design company, you might use words like: website, web design, site, or internet. Don’t forget, if you’re location based (meaning you operate in a specific region) then use your location in those keywords: Anchorage website company, Alaska, Alaska web design. For starters, think of around 20 keywords/phrases, and out of those, pick 3 to 5 words that are the most important.

Now those words are what you’ll be using in numerous circumstances. First of all, we’ll work together to put them in your titles. Titles are what the top bar of your browser (IE, Firefox, etc) says when you’re at a page. For this page, it should say something like: Getting Your Website Seen | dauntlessdev.com. Search engines look for keywords there when deciding where to put your page on their list.

BEWARE: If you only think of what a search engine is looking for, you’ll hurt the experience of your visitors! And that not only would make your webpage worthless, but will also mean visitors leave faster, which search engines notice, and they’ll rank your page lower!

You’ll also want to use these keywords and phrases a lot in the content of your pages. In fact, boldening those keywords helps too, as search engines notice that they are highlighted.

Meta-Tags and Meta-Description

Another thing that I will do for you, is taking those keywords and putting them into each website in a special repository for them that only search engines read. this is called the “meta-tags” and “meta-description”. The meta-description is sometimes even used as the summary field below a link on a search engine. So you may want to customize those yourself, since that’s the first thing users will see when your link comes up. Remember, it’s important to use your keywords in a user-friendly manner.

But how do you know what keywords or phrases are being used by the general public? And how do you know which ones will drive the most traffic to your companies website? Well, we’ll be talking about analyzing keyword, in part 2 of this article, which is all about Search Engine Marketing.

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Posted in Maintaining Your Site | 4 Comments »

What does it take to get my own site?

December 3rd, 2009

My goal in all of this is to make this whole process easy for you. So we start the process with good communication:

Step 1: The Consultation

The first thing we need to do is sit down together and talk about what you are looking for in a website. What is your end goal? What would you like it to do for you? When we’ve established the basic goals of your site, the rest will all revolve around achieving that goal. We may talk about what you want your website to look like, too. In that regard, it’s helpful if you have looked at other websites already and picked out a few that you like. That way we can see what elements of the designs you liked and I can implement those into your business’ website design.

After I get a good idea of what is is you want and need, and we’ve talked about our options, I’ll provide you with a proposal that will outline the work I’ll be doing and the product you’ll be getting, along with the costs. If you like it, we can sign the contract. By the signing of the contract, most websites will be done within 30 days. Of course, if it’ll take longer, we’ll have already talked about that, and it will be in all the paperwork.

Step 2: Construction!

Now that we have our plans laid out, I’ll start building the site. I’ll need two things from you at this point: 1) Any photos we’ll be including in the site design, and 2) the content for your website (the text for what it should say). We will have talked about those things during the consultation as well. Writing content can sometimes be difficult, so if you need help with that, I can certainly offer some good suggestions, or base content, and we can work from there.

As I flesh out the design of the site, I’ll be sending you a few site designs and you can tell me what you like or don’t like about them. This process may take a few iterations and back and forth communications so that we can get it refined to be exactly what you want. But it usually won’t take too long.

3) The Finished Product

When we’ve finished designing the site and you like what you see, I’ll put it all together and show you how to use any features that we’ve implemented. From there, we’re done!

A note about what hardware you need:

You don’t need ANY hardware for this process. I will take care of all of that behind the scenes, and you don’t need to worry about anything technical. Really all that you have to think about is what you want, and communicate that with me!

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Why should I buy a website?

September 21st, 2009

I’ve talked to several people in my time that have asked, “why do I need a webpage?” Well the first answer is pretty well-known. A website can be a great marketing tool to get new customers. In fact, current statistics show that 75 percent of the American population uses the internet. Anymore, you would be hard pressed to find a company who doesn’t use the internet on a regular basis for something. Even harder would be to find a company that doesn’t have access to the internet in some fashion or another. The bottom-line, is that your market base is on the internet, whether old or young. Your competitors are likely there, are you?

But maybe you get all of your customers from word-of-mouth. Maybe you don’t sell anything online. Perhaps you feel you don’t even need to market your product. Can a website be useful for you? Of course! In fact, most of my clients operate by word-of-mouth, and don’t use their website as their primary marketing tool.

Instead, they may use it as a reference. Take Snowflake Cakes for example. By utilizing a full gallery of images of their work, they’re able to share it with other people so their customers can see instantly the quality of their product. From there, word of mouth spreads even better.

Think about it, you need to get a fancy cake to celebrate something. A friend tells you they used a company called Snowflake Cakes, and that they were great. What do you do from here? Do you call them and talk to them to find out more information? Perhaps. But what if that friend of yours also gives you their website, “SnowflakeCakes.com” and says there are pictures of their work on there? Most likely you go look it up, and just like that, you have pictures of their work.

Would you like to be able to put photos of your work in the hands of people who hear your name? They instantly associate good, quality products with your name.

Now that’s powerful. That’s a website.

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