SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

GRASPING FOR THE GOLD RING 

Way back in beginning history of the internet a couple years ago, and before SMO (Social Media Optimization) became all the rage, the most asked question about web sites was, “How can I get on the first page of Google?” While it may be difficult to be at the top of the list on page-one of a Google search you can, with a little due diligence, get on the first page. 

Do a web search for “SEO” and you will find a plethora of differing third-party solutions all claiming they are the “ultimate solution to SEO”. All give good advice and for the most part all are over-kill for small to medium sized websites. However, if you have hundreds of pages of content and dynamically deliver data you should look to third party solutions.

For the rest of us there are four simple steps that go a long way to providing a sound foundation for your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
1.) Title Tag, Metatag Descriptions and Metatag Keywords,
2.) Keyword Density,
3.) H1 Tags,
4.) Inbound Links.

STEP 1. Title Tags, Metatag Descriptions and Metatag Keywords

Title Tags, Metatag Descriptions and Metatag Keywords reside in your website's HTML between the head tags. They are the descriptions that search engines use to find and rank you. Well, kind of. Supposedly Google doesn’t read Metatag Descriptions and Metatag Keywords anymore but Bing does. Who knows? Regardless of the “he said, she said” rhetoric I say err on the side of caution. Put ‘em in.

Title Tag Descriptions

Title Tags incorporate a brief description of who you are and what you do. This is the first basic step to defining your site and is often overlooked. Title Tags are unique to each page of your site by nature. If a page title in your site now says, "Welcome to Acme Widgets," I would suggest adding meaningful content, "Acme Widgets - for improved capability," following the basic who, what principal. Remember, this phrase has to fit within the width of the little tab at the top of a browser page--aproximately 20 to 25 characters.

Metatag Descriptions

A Metatag Description is one general statement of who and what you are. Here you apply the full who, what, where principal; "Acme Widgets, Inc, Anywhere, USA. Widgets for improved capability, etc., etc." Almost all search engines recommend a Metatag Description be shorter than 155 characters. That’s characters, not words.

Metatag Keywords

Metatag Keywords are specific descriptions of the products and services you offer. Once the darling of SEO, Keywords have fallen on hard times. Keywords became the target of spammers and ultimately unreliable and misleading as a major determining factor in SEO algorithms. The caveat here being the relationship Keywords have to page content, hence Keyword Density.
Note: The article "Google does not use keywords meta tags" states they have not used keywords for quite some time. However, I prefer to include them just for that reason. Knowing how often Google changes policy makes me want to error to the cautious side.

STEP 2. Keyword Density

A good rule of thumb is that every page should reflect at least one keyword from the Metatag Description or Metatag Keywords in your page content. More than one is good but do not try to overdo this rule by stuffing keywords.

If you are using “Acme Tour Boats” in, say, the Metatag Description (and you should) an example of how to place a keyword in the page content would be changing, “Our boat tour is  more than an awesome journey,” to “An Acme Tour Boat is more than an awesome journey.” All this SEO stuff is not exactly rocket science, just common sense. That is why you need a web developer to do it right, right?

STEP 3. H1 Tags

The Google ranking algorithm dictates that if you’re using a (h1) tag (or an h2, h3, h4) the text between these tags, (h1) Sample text goes here (/h1),  must be more important than the content between other tags like span class, (span class="definition") Sample text goes here (/span). Rules rule.

Developing a site using CSS3 (cascading style sheets) will automatically insure the use of h1, h2, h3, and h4 tags.

STEP 4. Inbound Links

Inbound Links are the links coming to you from other sites. If another site provides a link to you anywhere in their site, search engines consider that an inbound link and gives you a higher page rank. Search engines recognize your website to be valuable if another site hyperlinks back to you. At that point the link becomes reciprocal, i.e. a two way street.

Google says, "PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content."
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769

Want to check your inbound links? Feeling lucky? Warning - this is a real ego check. Here is what you do. Type this address into a Google Chrome browser address bar or a Google search page in any other browser: 
link:www.http://yoursitename.com/  
My site, link:www.http://thilldesign.com got apx. 407 results, 
link:www.http://ibcrf.org got 1,470 results, 
link:www.http://cnn.com got 1,160,000,000.  
Results may vary. 

Contact me for more information!

HTML EMAIL

HTML EMAIL REAPS REWARDS FOR YOUR VENTURE

A strategy employing e-mail marketing can reap rewards for your venture. E-mail marketing works, even with the proliferation of spam.

There are a plethora of email programs that design, publish, share, track, manage, integrate, etc. rich-text HTML email campaigns. I recommend taking a good look at Mail Chimp. Rates today are $10/mo up to 500 addresses. Mail as often as you like and it is way cheaper than direct mail through the USPS (even though the independently contracted USPS sorely needs our print communication business).

Most web developers offer proprietary email and email-tracking programs but in today’s wild-west-web environment there are two reasons it is best to use a commercial email program: spam and CSS.

Spam

Ever hear of opt-in and double opt-in lists? You will when you delve into the new world of list generation, i.e. the laborious process of collecting names to build an email list. Basically, you have to ask a potential recipient to “opt-in” or give permission to email to them. And even beyond that commercial email programs highly recommend to ask twice or “double opt-in.” Stop whimpering.

The whole rationale behind this exercise is to prevent someone from flagging your email as spam. If more than 1% (yes, that’s one out of a hundred) reports spam your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may block your email server. Penal? Yes, but that is how it rolls now. Read the CAN-SPAM Act, http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business . You may want to risk sending to non-compliant lists for your own endeavor but you have to seriously ask yourself if you would put a client in that potentially risky position.

CSS

Browser based email services like Google Gmail, Yahoo!Mail, and Hotmail strip out Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and render that beautifully designed HTML email into garbage. The frustrated web designer, reduced to a quivering mass by this time, has to go through each line of code and hand insert inline code. Here is a more techy explanation:

Wonder why the HTML based email sent out by your PHP script will NOT display properly? Browser based email services will strip all the CSS that is included in between the (style)content goes here(/style) tag pair or the external style sheet such as (link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”http://mycss.com/my.css” /).

In order to make your HTML or web-based email to properly display, you must use inline CSS, inside the HTML element , such as

(div style=”font-size:8pt;padding:2px;margin:2px;”)content goes here(/div)

or

(span style="LINE-HEIGHT: 25px; COLOR: rgb(255,255,255); FONT-SIZE: 12px")content goes here(/span)

Looking forward to hours of hand coding? You don't have to. Don’t wimp out now, you can do it. Just go to Mail Chimp or Constant Contact or Cooler Email and let them do the heavy lifting.

Making email work for you―who really does come to your site

Web site owners bemoan the fact they do not know who specifically looks at their site. Now you can at least find out exactly who is opening your email campaign. Email programs track who opens your email, where they click through to and then what links they respond to. So data includes not only who but how many they opened, etc. With the list of respondents you can develop a list of addresses to email back to.

Why is collecting all this data so cool? You know who is specifically interested and you can respond to these people. Now you are way beyond a cold call. Make that new email offer more narrowly tailored to exactly what they are interested in and go for it. You can even add attachments to an email―like an iron-clad contract. 

Contact me for more information!

MOBILE WEB

BEEM MY WEBSITE UP TO MY SMARTPHONE

HOW DO I MAKE YOUR WEBSITE MOBILE READY?

Thill Design can design and develop your site to be view-able on mobile devices - and desktops and tablets too. JavaScript's new offshoot, jQuery, makes it easier to create content on multiple platforms. This new fluid or liquid layout automatically re-sizes pages as devices change in size from desktop to tablets to mobile devices. 

Go to http://www.thilldesign.com/onePage/index.php and you can see jQuery at work. This is a version of my HTML site converted to jQuery. To see how it fits different screen sizes just grab the lower right corner of the browser page and make the page smaller, It will automatically resize text and graphics to fit an infinite number of screen sizes including mobile.

Smart Phone
320 x 480 px

Desktop 1024 x 768 px

The distinction between Mobile Web applications and native applications is anticipated to become increasingly blurred, as mobile browsers gain direct access to the hardware of mobile devices (including accelerometers and GPS chips), and the speed and abilities of browser-based applications improve.  

OUR WORLD IS GETTING SMALLER

And our lust for miniature devices that aspire to the technical sophistication of a Star Trek Communicator accelerates. We want our cumbersome desktop internet connection to become a Mobile Web that fits neatly on our cell phones and tablets, satisfying our need for more, better, faster, and smaller.

Look no further, Bunky! Your smart phone can already sport a GPS locator, video teleconferencing hardware and software, an HD video camera, a regular camera, a stereo system, a vast library of books, films, games and music. It's just mind boggling to think you can get all this on one little smart phone let alone what the cost would be to buy individually. Twenty years ago I paid $20,000 for one Mac FX workstation.  Today, you can buy an iPhone for $80.00. I try not to think about that too much.

But everything does come with another kind of price and the Mobile Web trade-off is less content but more fulfilling. So you can’t view three columns of text interspersed with huge graphics and that’s ok. You’re in a hurry anyway. Mobile Web on your cell phone lets you do lots of stuff, like get a website’s location via Google Maps. Mobile Web enables you to make purchases with your cell phone. Starbucks has an Android app that will display a barcode you can use to buy that next latte. Smartphones can scan a Tag Reader like the one here and have a VCard downloaded to your contact list (try this one, it actually works if you don’t mind getting a little shameless advertising).

Contact me for more information!

DYNAMIC RESPONSE FORMS

WEB FORMS DIALOGUE WITH YOUR VIEWERS AND THAT LEADS TO SALES!

Web Forms are the primary way for you to capture leads. When you dialogue with a prospective client not only are you providing them valuable information, they provide you the contact information necessary to close your offer. 

That information gets stored in a data base for you to market to again and again. Incorporate that data into an HTML email marketing plan and get ready to welcome a whole new bunch of e-friends to your door!

Web response forms contain input elements like text fields, checkboxes, radio-buttons, submit buttons, drop-down menus and more. They can also add security and spam protection through form validation and Captcha security fields.

Common applications include:

• Job Application
• Online Order Form
• Bill Payment Form
• Online Banking
• Event Registration
• Mailing List
• Contact Form
• Satisfaction Survey
• Lead Generation

Go to my Contact page to see a web form in action:

Contact me for more information!

GOOGLE MAPS

GET FOUND DYNAMICALLY

Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free, that powers many map-based services. Google Maps can be set up using the same account you use to set up Google Analytics. Go to http://maps.google.com/ , log in and click on, “Put your business on Google Maps.”

The beauty of having your business listed in Google Maps is that if you make Acme Widgets and anyone does a Google Map search for “Acme Widgets, Any Town, USA” a Map Marker listing your business will appear along with all the other Widget makers in your area. Click on your own map marker and a pop-up window with Acme Widget Company’s title, address, photo, short review, hours, ratings, etc. appears. 

This is so basic and so easy to do it must be hard for a business owner to sleep at night thinking their business is not listed on Google Maps. And did I mention this is FREE?

Contact me for more information!

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

GOOGLE ANALYTICS SLICES AND DICES DATA MORE WAYS THAN A RONCO VEG-O-MATIC

The second most asked question about web sites after, “How can I get on the first page of Google?” is “Who is coming to my site?” Enter Google Analytics. GA slices and dices statistics about a site’s visitors more ways than most mortal men can digest. “GA tracks visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.”*

Google Analytics is free and as with all Google products you get a lot of bang for your buck. And did I mention Google Analytics is free?

So how do you do this? Go to www.google.com/analytics and set up an account. There you will get the full Monty about site data analysis. If you have a Google Gmail account you’re already signed up. Just use the same username and password to log into Analytics. The how-it-happens is that Google generates a snippet of code that gets pasted into each web page you want tracked and within 24 to 48 hours you will see report data. Of course the basic thing to track is day-to-day traffic to judge the effectiveness of your site’s performance.

Furthermore, “GA's approach is to show high level dashboard-type data for the casual user and more in-depth data further into the report set. Through the use of GA analysis, poor performing pages can be identified using techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from (referrers), how long they stayed and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation.”*

The big caveat to using any data tracking system in an attempt to find out “who” is coming to your site is that you cannot ascertain a visitor’s specific personal data like name, physical address, phone or email address. The closest you can get is the IP address they are viewing your pages from.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_analytics 

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