Archive for the “SEO” Category

This weeks RTC meeting is a little different and should be lots of fun. The featured speaker will be Jessica Gillette of Fortuna based C. Crane Co. Gillette will spotlight some of C. Crane’s newest gadgets, including a wi-fi radio that picks up web stations (11,000+ stations at current) and plays them at a nice fidelity, and their LED lighting system, which produces the equivalent of 60 watts at 7-9 watts and doesn’t contain any
mercury.

Other gadgets include LED Flashlights, CCrane Radio and possibly more. C. Crane has been around for 25 years as has a catalog chock full of cool gadgets many of which they have designed or had a hand in designing.

The meeting is Thursday, 5:30 PM at the Humboldt Area Foundation Community Center. 373
Indianola Rd. (Google Map). Meetings are free and open to the public.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading and studying the esoteric arts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the voodoo that seems to make some web sites come up at the top of the lists at Google or Yahoo when people search on certain combinations of words. I long ago came to the conclusion that the real secret is actually rather simple: have good content and get a lot of incoming links to your site. But some folks like to make it a mysterious and complicated process. Mainly, I think, so they can charge a ton of money for not doing much. I’ve written before trying to make the process simple and fairly straightforward. But  this cartoon sums it up really well.

Not long ago a client whose site we had built called and asked if we could get them to come up on the first page in Google for a certain phrase. Seems they’d attended a workshop and the workshop leader had typed in the phrase, which, on the surface sounded like an obvious term for someone looking for this kind of a company. It included the word Eureka so they were localizing the search. None of the local companies in this industry came up on the first page. I looked at this client’s site and sure enough, the word Eureka was not mentioned. In ten minutes I added the word Eureka to the title tag and built a header on the home page that included the phrase. The change didn’t appreciably alter the content of the page and wouldn’t confuse or distract a human user. Within a week, the company’s web site came up number one on Google for that phrase. It’s still there. Oooh! Magic!

Now, of course, no work was done to see if this was a phrase that people actually use to find insurance brokers in Eureka. Nor was any follow up done to see if incorporating this phrase actually increased traffic to their site, and if so, did they sell more insurance as a result. These things, too, are not that hard to discover. Perhaps another day…

Technorati Tags: search engine marketing, search engine optimication, seo

We work with a lot of small businesses. But small or large the one question that everyone always asks is: How do I get people to find my web site? Not to be flip about it, but there are two ways:

1) Do a good job providing search engines what they need to have your site show up in organic search results. That is, if someone types in a phrase at Google or Yahoo or MSN , you want to come up at minimum in the first 3 pages of the search results, but best would be on the first page. This is not easy. It takes research, it takes structuring your site properly, it takes writing lots of good content and it takes building incoming links. Read Feedthebot.com for some straightforward tips on how to implement Google’s webmaster guidelines for getting good organic search results.

2) Spend money to market your site. This includes using pay-per-click services like Google’s Adwords, Yahoo’s Search Marketing and other services. It also may include off line marketing such as buying ads in newspapers, magazines and yellow pages that include your web site address. It could also mean radio and television advertising.

That’s it! I’ve boiled it down to 2 big categories. There is some overlap such as paying sites to link to you which would fall in to both categories, but in general, that’s all there is to it. It’s the specifics that get hard. Getting these things done can cost you a lot of time, or money. Sometimes both. So, whenever we talk to clients about a new, or redesigned web site, we always talk about the marketing. What are the expectations for the site? How will those expectations be met? Do you have staff and a budget to help meet those expectations?

But say you have some time and not very much money. Say, you only have $100 or $250 to spend. The blog SEOish offers the views of 7 top web marketers on what they would do with a limited budget. I don’t necessarily agree with all of them. They don’t agree with each other! But it makes for an interesting quick read.

One of the tips that I do agree with use some of that money to buy some good books in order to learn all you can about this field whether you hire someone to help you or not. Among the books mentioned several times is one of my favorites, Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. (Disclosure: That’s my affiliate link, so if you click this and buy the book, I get a little reward). Get it. Read it. Read his blog.