Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

Traditional advertising has some huge benefits the internet has found difficult to replicate. There isn’t a goodwill equivalent of sponsoring a little league team, or a targeted audience quite as captive as putting a notice in the Sunday bulletin, but there are still advantages that can’t be overlooked.

Let’s take a handful of blog entries compared with a 5,000 copy newsletter mailed out to your customers.

1 – Your web content will reach customers you didn’t even know existed, as well as the ones you knew about.

2 – Your best customers can share your web content with friends, family and coworkers with ease.

3 – You can fix your mistakes. If you’ve ever sent out a newsletter with a typo, you know how embarrassing that can be. With web content you can always go back and fix it easily.

4 – The cost of printing and mailing 5,000 newsletters, no matter how many corners you cut, is going to cost around $2,000. Web content, even with excellent design, top notch hosting and paid editorial content, will still cost a fraction as much.

5 – Instead of 5,000, you may have 5,000,000 readers, and the cost to you will remain the same.

6 – The long term effect of web content is tremendous. Unlike traditional marketing media that fades the minute it’s mailed, web content remains online for as long as you’d like it to. That means years from now you’ll still find that people are reading your content from today and even taking action based on it.

The cost, convenience, customer experience and long term benefits make it clear why almost 5% of small businesses have started publishing a business blog and why the number is growing every day.

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Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

Once you’ve run a blog for a while you may find the ideas harder and harder to come up with. You know you need to update regularly and make the stories as relevant and interesting as possible, but that may seem like too much work. An easy way out of the problem is to buy articles from a content farm, but it’s not a very good solution.

A content farm is a site with articles you can purchase, or in some cases use for free, to quickly get tons of content to put on your site.

Free content is almost universally designed to promote someone else’s business. You may search for articles about cars but end up with stories promoting a specific dealership or the interests of a particular manufacturer. Worse still is that, in trade for the use of these articles, you will be required to insert links pointing back to the place you got them from.

Unless you’re in the business of promoting other web sites for free, this is not something you should be doing.

Paid articles from content farms is even worse. Not only will you usually be required to place the links pointing to other sites, but the articles you buy may appear on dozens, if not hundreds, of other sites already. Search engines can spot identical content, so unless what you purchase is completely original and has only been sold to you for your exclusive use, the benefit to search engines will be effectively eliminated.

If you can’t create your own content, or just don’t feel like it, the best solution is to hire a professional writer with pro-blogging experience. In all my years of working in this industry I’ve never heard anyone brag about the benefits of content farms except for the people who own them, and their goal is not your success, but their own success.

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Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

In the early days of the internet the mantra was “content is king.” Once the spammers and scammers got smart enough, that fell away, but the good guys at Google have better programmers and smarter systems, so lucky for readers, those days are back. Content is once again king, even if it’s a throne he’s forced to share with some other important elements.

It’s unfortunate for webmasters who want a cheap and easy way to bring eyeballs to their sites, though, since content is far more work than installing a system to trick the search engines. That’s okay for you, though, because those eyeballs would resent you anyhow for stuffing the ballot box in your favor, as it were.

If content is the king, relevance is his crown and scepter

When the shift to content came back the first thing the tricksters did was create endless pages full of random words. That’s content all right, but it sure as heck isn’t very useful. Tricks like that didn’t work for very long, and they almost never work now. When they do sneak through the system, you get angry readers and risk being blacklisted by the search engines.

How can you be relevant? It all depends on what you do. If you make widgets, talk about how you make them and what purpose they serve. If you offer landscaping, talk about shrubs and bulbs. Whatever your area of expertise is, that’s what you need to talk about.

Stepping up the content

If you want more content but don’t have the time, ability or inclination to do it yourself, consider hiring a professional to take over the responsibilities for you, or at least supplement your own writing.

Many web design firms have writers on staff for just this purpose. People like this are most commonly used to complete content pages for site’s “About Us” and “Products & Services” pages, but many are capable and experienced writers who can write news articles, blog entries or detailed product descriptions for your site.

There’s a fair chance your existing web site is already equipped to handle such regular additions of fresh content, or that your site can easily be reconfigured for it. When in doubt, just ask.

The only thing better than lots of relevant content

A large volume of relevant content is great, so the only thing better is regularly updated text content. If you commit to adding even one or two new articles or pages per week, search engines will be more likely to come back often, and so will your organic readers.

Once a search engine recognizes that you regularly update your content, they’ll realize that the site is an actual living entity on the web, for lack of a better way to describe it, and your rankings within your key search terms will improve.

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Thursday, March 20th, 2008

A Favorites Icon is the little logo for your site that appears in the address bar up top just before the URL. It used to be a sign of elite status on the web since it proved you had good designers who had great skill and rare software on hand. Today it doesn’t mean much of that, and almost everyone has one, and that means your site should too.

Now it means that sites absent of a Favorites Icon (the file named ‘favicon.ico’) may stand out as less professional.

If you already have one and need to upload it, simply place it in the root directory of your site. Some hosts may require you to login to your control panel to upload it through there, but that’s less common.

If you’ve already uploaded it but can’t see it when you go to your site, you may need to clear your cache (under the dropdown tab ‘options’) or restart your browser.

There are a number of sites out there that allow you to upload an image to their site to automatically generate a pretty good Favicon, but make sure you give it a sharp, crisp, high-contrast, high-saturation image of at least 160×160, and it being perfectly square will help too. If you or your graphic designer are familiar with PhotoShop, this is all very simple. If not, don’t sweat it too much; you’ll still do okay.

If the option is present, select to merge the icon with larger sizes like 48×48.

When you get a site built, ask your designer to create a Favicon, and make sure it will be created, uploaded and tested for you. Ideally, you won’t pay extra for this. It should be a fairly standard item in any site construction or redesign.

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Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Business owners have already recognized the value of a strong web presence, but taking that from a simple brochure to a powerful marketing device can change everything you thought you knew about marketing in a period of just a few months, but you can’t do it alone. You need help from some of the biggest companies in the world, and those are the search engine likes of Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL, not to mention all their lesser cousins.

Getting a site to the top of the search engines can be tricky, but the benefits of building your site with those companies in mind will pay off in ways far better than any traditional advertisements, and you can do it while helping people get the information they want, even if they aren’t ready to become your customer just yet.

Convincing a search engine that your site is important and relevant is hard, but if your pages are not built in compliance with their published standards, it can be impossible. A big key to making the search engines work with you is making your site easy for them to “index,” or read and catalog.

SEO Friendly Pages

Whenever you use Flash or images instead of text, specify alternative text so the search engines can still understand what it is.

Start off with a descriptive, relevant headline. This needs to say what the page is going to be about and it should appear separate and in a larger font.

Make sure your ROBOTS file is set to permit access to search engine crawlers. If they aren’t permitted to look at your site, they won’t have any idea what content is there.

Avoid the use of Frames and iFrames, as these are still very confusing to search engines. You may have relevant content that the search engines like, but when readers click through, they’ll find themselves in a small portion of your page, rather than on a real, full-content page.

Making the Most of Meta Headers & Keywords

You may not have noticed this before, but up in the top of every web document is an area of “meta” text. This may include the page’s title, description, language used, keywords, program used to create the page, how soon it will be updated or deleted, and more.

If you didn’t know that exists, odds are it isn’t being utilized fully. The title and description are rarely overlooked, but the keywords often are. Having relevant keywords in here that actually pertain to the page can boost search engine rankings tremendously.

The Keys to the Keywords

Don’t use the same keywords for every single page of your site. Not all pages are about the same things, and recycling the same ones over and over doesn’t help one page over another.

List as many as 20-30 keywords if you can, but make sure they actually apply to the page. Littering it with irrelevant words (commonly used in the past have been celebrity names) can hurt your site more than help it.

Make them specific and descriptive.

If possible, you should tell your webmaster or web designer to make a box in the admin section of your site, so that when you create new pages you can enter the keywords right there. If you have to manually crack in to the code every time you make a new page, it’s going to be far more work than it’s worth.

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Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

A lot of web design firms like to quote prices based on how many pages they build, some even going as far as to quote prices for “up to” a certain number of pages (often ten to 15), with an additional rate for more pages. A better question than how many pages you should have might be “what are you hoping to do with your site” or “what’s it actually worth?”

If you’ve got a solid idea about what you want and have no problem providing the relevant content, a site with 50 pages is little more work than a site with a dozen. If a designer wants to charge you $50 per page, bear in mind that it likely only takes them a few minutes to do it, and realize that you’re probably paying way too much.

If you had eleven fingers, your manicure would still cost the same.

The actual cost has very little to do with the number of pages you have. Once the skeleton is in place you should be able to have a virtually unlimited number, assuming the site was properly built with a content management system in place.

So the question comes back to how many pages you should have. Enough to get the point across but not so many that readers get lost. If your site is a contractor information page, you can get by very well with under a dozen. If you have a catalog of products for sale and number of other categories, it could run easily into the thousands without being any problem.

Don’t focus on what pages cost or an actual number that you should have, but think of all the things you need your site to be and make sure you’re working with a designer who understands these needs and will do whatever it takes to get you there.

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Sunday, February 24th, 2008

For the first time in business history, entrepreneurs have been afforded the luxury of hanging a shingle without so much as the first red cent to their names. It’s an unbelievable opportunity for small businesses to get a foot hold in previously cash-dominated markets, but there is a difference between “free” and “affordable,” and your customers can tell.

Disadvantages to free web services may not be readily apparent or may not seem like a big deal, but they can make all the difference in closing a sale.

Free Hosting –
First of all, it never is. Free Host sites may put ads on your site, but will always restrict the server space you get to place your site as well as the monthly bandwidth you get to let readers access your site. If you go over the limit on either one, you’re going to end up paying inflated prices to get your site back on line.With free hosting, you may not even have the ability to upload a custom site, meaning you’ll be stuck with one of a limited number of design templates.Free Templates –
There are a number of really interesting free templates available on the web, but they are not a substitute for a unique, professionally designed site. Many have browser compatibility issues (so they’ll look good on one computer, but terrible on another), and none have any form of support included.Guys can’t understand how girls feel when they show up to the prom and another girl is wearing the same dress. We think the fact that we’re all dressed alike is a sure sign we did something right. Imagine your customer comes to your web site and recognizes the template from somewhere else. They’ll know you got it for free, and they may judge your professionalism by it.Free Domains –
Unless these are included as a promotional add-on to a paid account, which is fairly common, a free domain will always come back to haunt you. Beware that you may end up paying hundreds of dollars in the future to keep it, once you’ve built the reputation of your site and business at that URL.

Free Blogging –
The big drawbacks to free blogging are that you don’t get to use your own web address, you may end up showing ads on your blog (for other companies, maybe even your direct competitor) and you’ll never get to make it look like it’s truly your own.Getting a custom blog interface professionally installed and integrated in to your site is affordable, and some companies even offer it as its own separate package.This isn’t to say that everything free is automatically bad, because that’s just not the case. There are many great programs and services available for free, and many things you pay for ain’t all that great.

The caution is to get sound advice from someone with experience before jumping in, and always be wary of anything that’s free. The money has to come from somewhere, and if you can’t see where it is, that may be all the red flag you need to run the other direction.

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Thursday, February 21st, 2008

There are basically two ways you can build any web site. You can build it as static pages, meaning manually constructed pages that rarely change, or through a content management system (CMS), meaning a backend database system that can easily be modified or enhanced at any time by an authorized user. There is also a hybrid between the two, so let’s compare the differences and benefits.

Static pages are mostly used for small sites with limited information that rarely changes. If you build a web site about sun decks, odds are you’ll only need a dozen pages that only need to be changed every few years or so. The advantage is that static pages are often cheaper to build and they are often more secure than dynamic, CMS created pages, depending on which CMS is used.

The disadvantage of static pages is that it doesn’t work well for larger sites, and it’s much more difficult to add and change pages. If you build sun decks but want to have monthly specials, you’re going to have to call your designer back in to make the changes. If you notice a phone number missing or want to remove an employee from the bio page who is no longer with the company, it’s a hassle and will require you to call the designer back to do it for you.

Once you have to call the designer, you’re paying for the site again, and the potential savings you enjoyed up front may quickly evaporate.

Static pages also do not allow for reader comments, blogging, or any other dynamic content that may increase customer interaction and loyalty.

There are a number of advantages to using a CMS:

• You can add or edit as many pages as you want at any time without calling in the help of the designers.
• You can allow for comments, ratings, discussion forums or blogs.
• Your site can be very big, while small changes to all of the pages will remain very easy.

The cost concern can be resolved by thinking of the cost on a longer term. It may be more expensive for the first month, but cheaper over the first year when you don’t have to call in work orders to make fixes big and little. Many reputable companies don’t even charge extra for CMS construction over static, so it may not even be a real issue.

The companies that automatically build a CMS system, even when a static site would work just fine, are the best. That’s the hybrid option. It looks and acts like a static page but still gives you all the options you might need.

Best advice is to ask as many questions as you can in advance before you sign the contract and get answers to all your important concerns.

There are several options for a Content managment system.  There are many good open source CMS systems that can be setup and running in a matter of minutes.  There is also the option of customizing your CMS either with a out of the box solution or with a custom desinged CMS system.

With the custom designed CMS you will have the flexibility to have the site look and act like you want it to.  You will then be able to manage your content images and functionality from the CMS control panel. 

There is no one size fits all for managing content and you should talk with a few competent design specialists that know the different Content Management Systems and what the pros and cons are to each. 

 

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