highimpactsitedesign.com

Google Places Tags–Are They Worth It?

chris190 — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 21:45:57 +0000

There has long been speculation that Google will introduce a way to generate revenue from their Places pages. As pay-per-click (PPC) becomes less effective (fewer than 10% of searchers now click on sponsored ads) it must be tempting to look elsewhere to replace the lost income. Google Places is an obvious choice.

A new feature has appeared on the Places editing pages (June 2010)–the option to have a yellow tag added to your business entry to highlight specific information such as a coupon offer or your website address. That sounds great, until you see that it comes with a $25 a month price tag. Is it really worth that? I could see $5 a month being a no-brainer, but for small businesses, even an extra $25 a month outlay needs to be justified.

Obviously, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”…if tags bring more qualified traffic to your website then $25 is no big deal. But as the tag feature only rolled out nationwide at the end of June 2010, it is too early to tell, but early results seem to indicate that the yellow highlight is attracting more clickthroughs.

No doubt this is partly due to the novelty effect–as so few people are aware of the option at the moment, there are not many tags appearing on the listings so they will help to draw attention to the ones that are marked. But as more businesses adopt them it may come to the point where most, if not all, of the listigns have them in which case it is unlikely to have any beneficial effect. At that point, the only question is whether not having a tag will have a negative impact on traffic.

Local Business Listings

chris190 — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:18:42 +0000

The purpose of a business website is, or should be, to generate leads and sales for the business. That assumes that the business owner realizes that a brochure site is not going to be of any value, and that he has got past the stage of showcasing “our office”, “our factory” and “our services” and is offering real value to a visitor.

Given that our business owner is more savvy, he understands that his website must provide a return on investment (ROI) and it can only do that if it produces new business–either from new clients or by encouraging existing clients to buy more frequently or at higher values.

As the majority of sales are still conducted offline, the real objective of the website is to enable local buyers to find the business and stimulate enough interest for them to go into the shop and buy. One of the best ways of doing this is through Google Places.

Google Places produces the 7-pack map results that are often seen at the top of their organic search results. These are compiled from information that Google finds on the Internet, such as reviews of businesses, listings in directories and recommendations on authority sites.

Even if the business doesn’t have a website, it can still be featured in the map results. Of course, if the company does have a website, it can add additional information such as opening hours, brands carried, and photographs and videos. All of these help to ensure a high position in Google Places and, as these have a great location on the page, above the organic results, this will result in more click-throughs and more business.

And although Google has dominated the search engine wars for some time now, it is important not to overlook the other major engines, such as Yahoo! and Bing. They have similar map results and can be useful in driving extra traffic to your site. In fact, these engines are gaining ground on Google as they strive to differentiate themselves by offering different capabilities rather than trying to emulate Google.

Every business should update its search engine map results and make sure that the information provided is as complete as possible. With fewer people clicking on the sponsored results (pay-per-click) more emphasis is being put on the organic results and the 7-pack positions.

Finding the Best Keywords For Your Website

chris190 — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:21:03 +0000

Choosing the right keywords to optimize on your website is one of the most critical factors in determining your success.
Keywords are the words that potential buyers will use in search engines to find websites that are relevant to their quest. If you get the wrong ones you might get a lot of traffic, but if it is not targeted to your product or service, you will not get many sales.

What Makes a Good Keyword?

When people are searching on the Internet they are in one of three modes:

Browsing
Comparing
Buying

When someone starts looking into a potential purchase the first stage is to gather general information through using generic keywords to find sites relevant to their search. they are looking to learn about the product or service to see if it is what they need.
The next stage is to compare the offerings of different companies to see which one represents the best fit to their requirements. At this point they hope narrow their search to a specific product.
The final step is to find the best value for that product.
The best keywords to use are those that will be used in the comparison phase. The first stage is too vague and might result in a lot of visitors to the site, but they are not buyers.

How Many Keywords Should You Choose?

The first reaction of most people when they start to list keywords is to use the general description of their business, for example: “plumbing”. But the chances of ranking well for a generic one-word keyword are slim to none: the large national corporation spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to rank for those terms, and you just cannot compete. Even if you could, the term is too generic–you don’t want everyone interested in plumbing to go to your site, you want people who want a plumbing service in your neighborhood. So a better keyword phrase would be “drain clearing in Austin, TX” or “faucet replacement in Arlington, VA”. That way you know that when a search results in a visit to your site, the person is looking to buy.

So before you jump right in and start optimizing for keywords, spend some time thinking about the two to four-word phrases that potential buyers would use. If you get those right, you’re well on the way to success.

301 Redirects

chris190 — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:05:59 +0000

I am often asked; “What happens to the old web pages if the site is redesigned?” If the page no longer exists the person trying to visit it will get an “404 error message” saying the page does cannot be found. This is obviously a problem as any traffic to that page is potentially lost.
The 404 error page can be written to provide a search box for the visitor to search the site for the page he wanted, but it is still likely that he won’t bother but will just leave the site. Not an ideal situation.
Fortunately, there better ways to handle this.One way that can be used is to put a refresh instruction in the meta tags on the page that has been replaced. While this device is often used, it is not a good idea, for two reasons: first, the visitor will usually notice that he went to one page and then it quickly changed to another–this leaves him wondering what happened, and people are very suspicious these days about websites that don’t behave as they expect. the second, and more important reason, is that the search engines see that they have been redirected and that is a red flag. They are then concerned that the original page may have been cloaked, and used just to attract traffic that was then sent elsewhere. At best this could get the website penalized: at worst it could get it banned.
The best solution is to use what is called a 301 redirect.
This is a piece of code that is included in the .htaccess file instructing anyone looking for the old page to go to a new address. This is acceptable to the search engines as it does not switch pages but just informs them that the page has moved permanently. And it is transparent to the human visitor because he doesn’t go to one page and get sent to another, he just lands on one with a different URL, and he almost certainly won’t notice that.
So if you need to remove one or more pages from your website, make sure that you use a 301 redirect to prevent your visitors from getting an error message.

Breadcrumbs–A New Focus

chris190 — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:45:57 +0000

Breadcrumbs on a website can illustrate one of three things:

1. Attributes
2. Path used to reach the current page
3. Current page’s position in the site structure.

Breadcrumbs usually use the “>” delimiter and appear like this: Home > Directory > Page

If they are being used to show attributes, they show information relevant just to the current page. For the path used, they represent the users navigation through the website. But the most used form is the third option, and shows where the page figures in the site hierarchy.

Breadcrumbs are useful to remind the user where they are, and can also be clicked on to go back to one of the links in the structure. They have always been useful and are incorporated in most professionally designed websites, but they are taking on a new importance with the Google search engine starting to show some of them in the results pages.

While it is early days, Google’s Matt Cutts says that you should “make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs.”

At the moment Google is only picking up on the location breadcrumbs and I believe it will stay that way…but who knows! The best advice for anyone setting up their website is the same as with any other feature that is used by the search engines: build it so that it is useful to the human visitor and let the search engines work with that. The whole purpose is to give the reader a good experience and deliver informative content–as long as your site does that, it will rank well for your chosen keywords and phrases.

Keywords: Are They Still Valid?

chris190 — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:57:12 +0000

In the early days of search engine optimization the keywords meta tag was used by the engines to determine the likely content of a website and its relevance to search terms. Unfortunately, unscrupulous website developers quickly cottoned on to this and started stuffing all kinds of keywords into the tag, regardless of whether they were relevant. They just used words that were highly popular in searches, in the hope of performing well in the search engine result pages (SERP), and driving traffic to their site. The site was often some spammy effort to earn money through selling dubious products.

This abuse of the system led to search engines paying less attention to the phrases in the keywords tag and, ultimately to them being ignored completely by most of the engines.So the big question now is if they aren’t valued by search engines, are they worth using at all?The answer is yes, for a number of reasons.
First, there are still some engines that do use them to help to determine the relevancy of the page content, including Bing, one of the three major engines.
Secondly, even if they aren’t used much now, that doesn’t mean the engines won’t start giving them more prominence again in the future.
Thirdly, having the keywords in the tag won’t do any harm. It is sometimes said that putting the keywords in alerts competitors to the phrases for which the site is optimized, but in reality, anyone who is that interested can soon work out what the keywords and phrases are, without needing to look in the meta tags.
So, on balance, the keywords are still valid and should be included in a well-designed, optimized website.

Link Building: The Right Way

chris190 — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:27:43 +0000

At one time, search engines ranked websites by the number of incoming links–and the more the better. Unfortunately, this led to Webmasters acquiring hundreds of low-quality links from sites that had little or nothing to do with their main topic. It was purely a numbers game.
Of course, the search engines soon caught on, and started to put more emphasis on the quality of the sites that had initiated the links. One of the measures they used is Google PageRank, but more importantly was the search engine’s opinion of standing of the site, particularly if it is an “authority” site.
So, the first thing you want to do is convince the search engines that your site deserves a high rating.
The two main ways to do this are:
1. Get links from high PageRank sites.
2. Get links from authority sites relevant to your site’s subject matter.
But don’t think that this is a one-off exercise: to be successful it is a continual process. But as you gather more links, it becomes easier to attract other sites who want to link to you. Ideally you want high ranking sites with a high degree of relevance, but even sites that have little to do with your topic can be of value, as long as they do not represent too great a proportion of the total incoming links.
One popular way to gain links is through reciprocal link exchange–you put a link on your site in return for a link from someone else’s. This is alright, with the proviso above–don’t have too many of them. One-way, or inbound, links are the best type to have, especially if they come from authority sites.
Getting a good spread of links from quality sites and is the fastest way to get your website highly ranked, and a planned link building campaign is essential to the search engine promotion of your website.

Website: DIY or Hire a Professional?

chris190 — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:54:34 +0000

Your first choice is whether to build a site yourself, or to hire a professional to do it for you. If you choose the professional route, do you need a website designer or an Internet marketer? And, no; they are not the same! If you listen to all the hosting companies offering site building software, you might think that building your own site is a good idea. And while you can undoubtedly make some pages and put them up on the Internet, the chances of them being any real use to you are next to zero. The physical design of the structure is the easy part – you can use the free software offered by the hosting service, or use a program such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. If you couple that with a graphics application such as Photoshop or Gimp, you have the basic tools needed to put a site together. Of course, this assumes that you have the design skills to provide your own graphics, and enough knowledge of HTML coding to be able to change and update the site if necessary. Nevertheless, setting up your own site can be a good option if you have the skills and the time, and want to save money. So perhaps you should employ a website designer? The problem here is that they are often wrapped up in producing a pretty, elegant site, that looks great, but doesn’t attract traffic. In designing a site, you need to have a balance between being visually appealing (for the human visitor) and having great content for both the human visitor and the search engines. Because of this, the preferred route is to hire a professional Internet marketer. You don’t want someone who just has the design skills and can do basic page optimization: you need someone who understands how to market effectively on the Internet and how to get your site pulling in traffic and converting it to buyers. On-page optimization is about 20% of the answer: the other 80% needs off-page activities such as researching keywords, analyzing competitors’ strategies, writing articles, contributing to blogs, building backlinks to your site and using Web 2.0 social networking site to spread the word. Submissions to search engines and directories also have their part to play, but they are less important than the proactive marketing of the site. In summary, if you want a site that looks good, and also brings more sales and profits to your business, you need to find an Internet marketer who understands your business and can provide original ideas for promoting it on the Web.

Can You Afford to Optimize Your Website?

chris190 — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:43:43 +0000

Or more realistically: Can you afford not to?

Over 80% of the websites on the Internet are ineffective in attracting new business. Most of them are ‘brochure’ sites – pretty pictures with limited text; all about ‘who we are’ and hardly a mention of ‘what we can do for you’. It’s not surprising that they are not profitable.

When someone visits a website they want to know “What can you do to solve my problem?” They are not the slightest bit interested in who you are, how long you have been in business or what your office looks like! That will all come later, if they consider working with you.