GORGES CEO Chris Grant meets with Congressman Hinchey

When the Congressman asked me about GORGES, I let him know about our rapid business growth over the last 5 years, primarily due to our innovation in Internet technologies, and our ability to help our customers businesses grow.

I also mentioned that we are actively keeping software development work from heading to offshore development companies, as our expert developers, low cost of living, and proven processes compete very well on the global market.  While our hourly rates may be higher than India, for example, our total cost to complete a project is often lower.

There are many reasons for this, foremost among them dedicated project management, a willingness to understand our clients’ business needs to create the right-fitting solution, as well as in-house experienced web developers and designers.

After hearing this, the Congressman remarked ‘Now this is the kind of company that America needs to create jobs and move this economy along’.

Just what we were thinking….

Social Media is changing the way marketing is done. Customers, potential customers and competitors share information every day through different Social Media channels to create new business and cultivate relationships. Many businesses—from start-ups and entrepreneurs to well-established companies—are creating increased returns and finding new customer leads from social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

What do these businesses share in common? They use social media tools to generate the kind of exposure that converts relationships to prospects and prospects to sales.

This can be your success story, too.

Give us a call to find out how we can help!

You may be doing many of these already, others you’ve heard of but haven’t done, and there may be a few that are new to you.  There are thousands of articles on this very topic on the Internet.  I can’t claim to have read all of them, and the items in this article aren’t really earth-shattering, but perhaps will represent a kind of a summary for you to help you focus and get more traffic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategies

The most important, and inexpensive strategy is to develop high rankings for your preferred keywords in the ‘organic’ searches, for instance on Google.  So let’s start with ways to deliver to search engines concise information about what your website is all about.

1) Write a keyword-rich title for each page

Use keywords in your titles.  The title of a page is very important to Google.  So take great care here.  Don’t use common words such as ‘and’ or ‘the’ if you can avoid them.

2) Write a description META tag

While META tags aren’t as important as they once were for search engine rankings, they still matter.  A description is  a sentence or two describing the content of the web page, using the keywords that page is focusing on.  The first 60 characters or so will appear in Google when that page is being returned in a search result.  Every page in your site should have distinct title and META description.

3) Include your keywords in the headings and sub-headings of your content

Search engines look at the headings and sub-headings (H1, H2, H3 etc) tags, to learn more about the content of your page.  So craft keyword-dense headings as part of your content development efforts.

4) Position your keywords in the first paragraph of the body text

Search engines read content the way humans do, top down, so put the most important keywords and phrases early on in the content.  More is not better, be judicious, but make sure you use them.

5) Include descriptive keywords in the ALT attribute of image tags

Taking this step will help your site be more useful to visitors with sight-impairments, and also helps your images find their way into the Google image library, which can bring you more traffic.

6) Use keywords in hyperlinks

Help the search engines understand what is important by using your keywords in all links.  Go a bit further by using your keywords in the actual page names.

7) Make your navigation system search engine friendly

You want search engine robots to find all the pages in your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don’t read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, supplement JavaScript and Flash menus with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site.

8 ) Create a site map

A site map page with links to all your pages can help search engines (and visitors) find all your pages, particularly if you have a larger site. You can use a free tools to create XML sitemaps that are used by the major search engines to index your webpages accurately. Upload your sitemap to your website.

9) Develop web pages focused on each of your keywords

Google ‘sees’ each page in your site as separate from the rest, so tune up each page to focus on a few specific keywords.

There is much more to SEO than this, but this should give you a good start.

Good luck in your quest for ever-higher rankings!

Paragraph upon paragraph of dense text, large picture files, heavy-handed Flash animations, generic stock-photo images and static content. These are some of the common mistakes businesses make when establishing an online presence or website.

The web is known for rapid change, so it is crucial that your business website meets a customer’s expectations.

Most small businesses want to be found on Google. However, a home page full of text doesn’t help it rank higher in a Google search and may turn potential customers away.

If users have to read a lot to do anything on the site, they may simply choose to click away to your competitors site.

We suggest you keep your home page simple and have short, sharp text that will engage the visitor. Avoid too much color because it can be difficult to read.  Make sure your text is a good font size and keep your paragraphs short.

Another area where websites commonly get it wrong is in the use of images. Large picture files or flashy content takes time to load. People will move on to some other site if your website doesn’t load quickly.

Pictures should also be unique and reflect your brand. Avoid using stock photos. Being online is about being found and when you’re found, you should have something different and inviting about your site.

You can use interactive elements on the site to really focus on your brand and how you want it to be perceived.  These can include Google Maps, video, commenting and other user interactions.

Once the website is built, it should also be updated regularly.

The biggest mistake a lot of business owners make is that once they’ve got their website up, they don’t pay any attention to it. If people can see something happening on the site every day, they know it’s a functioning website and business.

Businesses also need to analyze how visitors spend their time on the website. Business owners should use Google Analytics to help gather this data to see what is needed to improve their site, where customers go on the site and how long they spend there.

And if your business uses social media such as Twitter and Facebook to promote customer interest, be sure to link to these accounts from your website to make it easy for customers to join.

Before you put any design or copy on a page, you need to understand your users.  So, research your customer base and find out what information they are interested in, and what they need to do or learn to make their purchasing decision.

As the nature of the web keeps changing, so has the nature of website design. Websites are moving from a magazine-style format of pictures and text to being more interactive and dynamic.

Your website is the cornerstone of your marketing and communication activities. Today’s generation doesn’t look at the Yellow Pages, they look online and you need to be found online.

The do’s and don’ts of designing a business website.

Do

Keep text to a minimum on your home page and write it to engage your audience to explore your site.

Ensure images are unique and load quickly.

Analyze your website regularly to see where visitors are spending time and what you can improve.

Research your customers thoroughly before building a new website or redesign.

Promote social media accounts on your home page.

Don’t

Fill the home page full of text in the hope of improving your search optimisation.

Use large pictures or flashy content that is slow loading.

Neglect to update your content frequently.

Use colors on colors for text, making it difficult to read.

Use generic stock images.

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Wikipedia’s definition is a good one. Here’s 10 things that you should be looking at when optimizing a landing page:

• Relevant Content
  A landing page’s content should be related to organic search results, ad campaign, anchor text in inbound links and any other advertising, online or offline. If people don’t get what they expect, they will not stick around long.
• Multiple Landing Pages
  A landing page shouldn’t necessarily be your homepage. In many instances a homepage is a good landing page. However, for more targeted traffic and better results, you want a landing page to be focused on specific offer and specific call for action. To accomplish this, a given website could have multiple landing pages. Create some deep link landing pages (links that go to pages deep in your website) that will focus on specific offer and your conversion rate will be higher.
• Focus on Functionality
  More and more visitors seem to judge the professionalism and credibility of a site by its design. To satisfy this, many website owners concentrate on the design aspect instead of focusing on its functionality. A well-designed landing page is essentially worthless if the prospect can’t accomplish anything. While I wouldn’t suggest skimping on the design, it shouldn’t be your priority. Focus on the exact steps you want your visitor to take and design a page with that in mind.
• Call To Action
  You got visitors to your landing page, now direct them to take action. Make it clear a highly noticeable without overwhelming your audience. Whether it’s a sign-up form or a “buy now” button, make it the focus of your page.
• Send a Clear Message
  Keep your landing page clean and clutter free so your visitors stay focused on your message. Emphasize the biggest reasons that they should carry out the applicable call to action with larger text, contrasting colors, images. Make it easier for them to scan the content by using lists and getting right to the point.
• Offer Incentive
  Bribing your visitors with freebies and samples is a proven method of enticing them to sign up. Offer more then your competition but don’t sell yourself short either. Provide a list of reasons why your offer is better and what exactly the visitor can expect. Provide references and testimonials.
• Make Visitors Stay
  Avoid sending your visitors to another page unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any internal navigation as well as external banners. If you remove all distractions and limit navigation options, you stand a better chance of keeping your visitors around.
• Simple is Better
  Make it easy for your visitors to complete the action you want them to. Less confusion and decision making for your visitor means better conversions rate for your landing page. Don’t offer multiple choices and throw in optional extras. Focus on the offer the page was created for.
• Power of Freebies
  Everyone likes free offers. They are hard to resist and can be a powerful conversion tool. Whether a call to action is free or something free is received as a result of carrying out a call to action, it certainly doesn’t hurt. If your competition charges for something and you offer it for free, you’ll win the customer. Remember, just because you make a free offer doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be quality.
• Testing
  Testing various text, call to action forms, layouts will give you true idea what produces the best results as far as conversion. Using a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer you can easily monitor the conversion rate, bounce rate, and tons of other useful metrics found in most modern day web analytics tools. Using these metrics you can easily figure out which version will be your optimal page, one that maximizes the results.

Creating a successful and effective landing page takes a lot of work but should be the focus for anyone involved with a website. Whether you are a website owner, web designer, web developer or a web marketing specialist you must be aware of the components that comprise a solid landing page. After all this can mean website’s success or failure.

Most of our customers approach us with great ideas for the graphic design and features they would like to see on their websites.  When meeting with customers for our kickoff meeting and planning process, we avoid these topics.

Why? Isn’t the graphic design and features of a site important?  Yes, however, our process starts with the main objective your site visitors have when landing on your site.  If your website is selling or marketing products or services, your visitors are there for INFORMATION.  They don’t really care about colors, web 2.0 whiz-bang features which cost a ton, or how cool your blog software is. They have a question in their heads, and our job as website designers is to answer that question.

So the first most important step in website design is called ‘Information Architecture’.  We spend a fair amount of time talking about menus, pages, sidebars, page layouts, headings, and CONTENT.

Our goal in working with you to design your website is to deliver the key information that your customers need in a way that is easy for them to find.  We don’t want to keep them guessing which obscure menu name they have to click to find the information they are looking for.

If we can answer your prospective customers’ questions in one or two clicks and get them moving towards making a decision, then we consider our job well done.

After this process, we get into colors, styles, features, and other tactics to get your site looking top-notch.

If you’d like to hear more, we always offer no-obligation consultations to hear from you and make suggestions as to how we can help make your website work for you.

One of keys to success on the web is developing strategies to convert casual visitors to lifetime customers.  There are many simple tools that can help transform your static online presence into a dynamic and living entity that visitors return to again and again.

CORPORATE BLOG
Your business is always growing – changing as you adapt to new clients, customers, and opportunities.  Those changes are something worth talking about!  A corporate blog is an easy way to show your visitors that your business is alive and thriving.  Furthermore, using email notification and RSS, you can easily broadcast your news to a community of readers who care.

EMAIL NEWSLETTERS
Once you make a sale or finish a client’s project, your business moves on and without some effort, your customer/client may soon forget the details of their experiences with you.  Regular email newsletters are an invaluable way to keep in touch with your customers, clients, and colleagues and inform them of the most recent projects, products, and/or people in your organization.  You can even build the subscription process right into your website with a simple subscribe form.

These tools offer a powerful way to keep people aware of your business.  Even if there are no known future sales opportunities, they can help generate a buzz and build your brand through word of mouth.  At Gorges Web Sites, we’re passionate about finding ways to use the web to help grow your business!  There is a wealth of options and opportunities available and we’re excited to help develop and execute the right strategies for you.

If you would like to experience the most cost-effective growth possible for your site and your business, there are 5 areas to focus on, and SEO is NOT the first:

1. Analytics: We can’t judge the effectiveness of any marketing effort, or evaluate growth without metrics.  We highly, highly recommend Google Analytics.  It is free, and easy to install on your site.  Get it on your site before taking any more steps.  You will be amazed at the wealth of data the Google sends your way.  This simple tool will tell you what pages on your site have the highest attention, where your viewers come from, which keywords are delivering traffic, the effectiveness of your paid advertising, and much more.  Get your analytics going BEFORE you undertake any additional steps.  Do it today.
2. Social Marketing: Building your online business requires much more than optimizing content.  It is crucial that you engage and learn from your early customers.  Foster community, push your site, generate referrals, blog about your ideas everywhere, write content, post fliers at the coffee shop.  Use facebook, twitter, put a blog on your website, encourage your visitors to add content to your site via topical discussions.  Draw your audience into ongoing discussions on your web site.  Think outside the box, drive traffic.  Start now and keep it simple and low-cost.  You are the driving passion behind your idea and your web site, let the world hear your voice.
3. Public Relations: This step is about your relationship with your broader community.  You need to lean on traditional PR to strengthen your brand and expertise.  Build a positive opinion about your company to your neighbors, partners, employees, the public, and potential investors.  Generate press releases, develop positive relationships with the media, and build your brand in the public’s mind.
4. SEO: What you are reading this article to find out about is likely Search Engine Optimization.  A properly constructed web site takes SEO into consideration during the design and information architecture steps.  SEO should not be an ‘afterthought’ that you outsource to some agency.  SEO is the lifeblood of your site and needs to be planned in.  If your site is not architected well, you can ‘optimize’ keywords all day long without effect.  Traditional SEO has 2 components: 1) Your site content, structure, links, keywords, menus, etc, and 2) In-links from 3rd party sites.  If you have done #2 and #3 above, you are already building in-links (continue!).  If you have proper data analysis and analytics running on your site (from #1 above), you will have up-to-date metrics on how well your site is doing.  OK, so you’ve done all of the above, built the site correctly, have analytics installed, and are generating traffic through your own efforts, it is time to analyze and optimize your site.  In an SEO analysis, we look at menu structure, content structure, keywords, title tags, meta tags, your site map (you do have a site map don’t you?), and more.  Taking as input your desired list of keywords and key-phrases, we will tune one or more content pages to maximize exposure to the words that make most sense for your business.  When done, we will watch your analytics and encourage steps 2 and 3 above as ongoing traffic-building efforts.
5. Paid Search: Now, with all of this in place, a paid search or adwords campaign can be constructed and tuned.  Start small, have a short list of keywords and reasonable budget.  This is not about branding, this is about driving traffic.  Determine your target cost per acquisition of new customers, and evaluate if your paid search is delivering.  Drop key phrase campaigns that aren’t delivering; turn the budget up on campaigns that are delivering.

Summary: The order above is crucially important.  Don’t spend a penny on paid search or paid advertising until you can track performance, have developed brand awareness, and are engaging your community about your business and areas of expertise.  Get this together and watch your business grow exponentially.