Posts Tagged ‘SEO’

Getting good rankings on Google

Friday, December 18th, 2009

This article is a brief overview on some of the many effective strategies to help your potential customers find your website.  I’d like to answer one of the most common questions we get here at Gorges Web Sites: how do I get good rankings in Google?

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!

Chris Grant has been building Internet web sites and commerce applications since 1994, pioneering early database-driven Web application and e-commerce projects. He has been instrumental in the construction of hundreds of Internet projects, large and small.

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What is the best way to manage the content of a website?

Monday, April 20th, 2009

So you have or are considering a website for your business, and know that you need to manage the content, but what is the best way to do so?screenshot_1

In the old days of the web, content management was done using the same people who programmed the site.  They would open up the right file, edit the content, and ftp the new file up to the web server.

These days, that process is slow and error-prone, and the management of your content should be done by the business owners, product managers, editors, or marketing personnel.

Use of a content management system (CMS) is imperative if your site is going to function as a quality business growth tool for you.  You need a CMS that is easy to use and always accessible.  Search engines and human visitors both are looking for fresh, relevant and updated content.

Big budget publishing companies have sophisticated work flow software to manage the development of their content, allow editors to review this content, and publishing editors to approve for release.

But what is the small website owner to do? At Gorges Web Sites, we have been delivering special-purpose content management systems for years now.  At first, we used our own CMS, affectionately named ‘GoGorges’, which is a linux- and php-based development framework and content management system that we steadily improved over many projects.

More recently, though, the open-source content management systems have really come of age.

On recent projects, we have used:

Each of these systems have pros and cons, and through experience we have learned which one is most suited for a particular set of business and publishing needs.

The great news is that the use of these content management systems has lowered the cost for delivery of a sophisticated website.  You can get more functionality for less $ than ever before!

If you’d like to learn more about how one of these content management systems can help your business and improve your search engine optimization rankings, then fill out our quick form for your free consultation and we’ll jump on a call to discuss.

Chris Grant has been building Internet web sites and commerce applications since 1994, pioneering early database-driven Web application and e-commerce projects. He has been instrumental in the construction of hundreds of Internet projects, large and small.

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Marketing your web site – do you need SEO?

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

Here at Gorges Web Sites, we receive many requests for information about web site promotion.  For most people, this seems to boil down to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), or more directly ‘how do I get good ranking on Google’?  If you are really and truly interesting in growing your online business, this blog article is for you.  And as you will see, it is about much more than just SEO.

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.

Chris Grant has been building Internet web sites and commerce applications since 1994, pioneering early database-driven Web application and e-commerce projects. He has been instrumental in the construction of hundreds of Internet projects, large and small.

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