Web Design & Internet Marketing: a Practical Business Approach

(Watch the 5 min video below) The problem with many websites is that navigation buttons, images and animation are invisible to Google from a linking standpoint. In other words, if you don’t have real text links in your navigation buttons, Google will have trouble finding your subpages. The image links won’t work for Google. This means your potential customers can’t find your website. Watch the following video to learn how to check to see if your website is blocking Google.

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 Is your website blocking Google? [4:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (142)

Audio transcript:
Is your website blocking Google? Or, to be more specific, if your website has so many images or animations on it, that they are getting in the way of Google’s ability to crawl through the text on your website? Now, here is the problem. Google needs real text, real text links to crawl through to the next page.

So, for instance, on this website, in this paragraph, it’s all plain text, but there are no links in here. The typical blue underlined links that you would see that would link down to a sub-page. And that’s a problem for Google, especially on this website. Google does need the link text.

Now, buttons that are linked, images and photos that are linked, animation that is linked to sub-pages, they do not work. Google cannot crawl through those images to get to the rest of your site. Thereby, making the rest of your site, technically invisible to Google. So, when someone searches for a product or a service that might exist on a sub-page of your website, Google doesn’t even have that page in its database.

So, it will never show up in a search and you just won’t get found. And that’s the problem. Now, how does this work? Let’s just give you an example of button text. Here is a button that says kiosks. And here is a button and a link that says compact power. Now, one of the ways you can figure out whether your website is blocking Google is to actually try to highlight the text.

Click down and hold, and then drag your mouse cursor across the text and see if you can highlight it. And if you can’t, it is probably a button, as this is right here. Now if you right click, trick number two, and you get a little pop-up. If you see something that says flash, that means it is a movie. It’s actually a piece of animation. And Google can’t read animation. It doesn’t know what to do with it.

And it doesn’t crawl through it. Now, another way to do it is, let’s take a look at another image that’s linked here, contact image. If we right click again, that is using the right button on your mouse, you get another pop-up. And if you see something that says, “Save image as,” that tells you that that’s an image.

And even though it is linked, Google can’t crawl through it. Now, in this particular site, this text here, if you really went fancy and you did a source view, you could go to view source up in your browser, and search for the words that are in this text right here, and you won’t find them, because this text was actually animation generated by flash. And it is invisible to Google.

So, to sum it up, if you are not getting found in Google, it could be that you have a heavy dose of imagery or animation on your website. And it’s literally blocking Google’s ability to get through your text and also to get through to the sub pages on your website, which makes them invisible.

It makes the text invisible; it makes the pages invisible to Google. And today, with the technology available, you can accomplish beautiful, graphic-rich sites, that are transparent to Google, that are loaded with link text so Google can easily crawl through and get all of your pages into it’s database.

And that is the first and one of the most important steps to getting your website found in Google. And today, Google is the primary search mechanism in the world to find a business like yours.

And if your website is important to you, you might want to consider biting the bullet, and rebuilding it, so that it’s friendly to Google. Use these open source platforms like Droople, Junela or WordPress.

They are free, they are infinitely customizable, and they come with templates, and they are great. Now, I would like to sign off with a little thought provoking question. Is your website building your business? And that is it for today.

(see 5 min video below) We finally put together our 1st company video promoting a unique Pay per Lead website solution. It is targeted towards commercial and residential cleaning companies that don’t have a website or have one that is ineffective. The way the program works is our company builds a website at no charge, promotes the website online, and then charges clients only when their phone rings from the website (or when they receive an email lead from the website).

Now why did we build a video to tell this story? Because video is compelling. Text and photos that describe a product or service pale in comparison to watching a movie with animation and sound. Also it is a difficult concept to explain to people (ie sell).

I previewed the video below to my Tuesday morning business group today to help educate them about what my business does. I wasn’t sure how they would react but at the end everyone asked me to forward the video to them and 2 members wanted to talk to me about new business. Not bad for a group of 20.

Your business: Think about what you sell and what story you can tell… and the secret to a good story is simply 3 things:

1. Problem: hook your audience with a typical customer problem that you can solve for them
2. Agitate: give examples of these problems to make them squirm
3. Solution: solve their problem and be the hero

Can you find the above three chapters in the video below?

Now at the end of the video I would love your opinion and if you know any cleaning companies in your area that have websites that suck (no pun) let me know :)

Your business is being talked about online, and often the information is flat out wrong. Find out how to be alerted when your business, name, or industry subject is mentioned anywhere on the web with Google Alerts.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment!

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 From Video: Find out what people are saying about your business [4:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (122)

Transcript:

How do you find out what others are saying about you online? How do you know when your business is being mentioned on websites and blogs? And more importantly, what if people are saying things that are flat-out wrong about your business?

How do you keep tabs on that? I just got out of a meeting with our local residential community association. The marketing manager mentioned that she gets an alert in her email box everyday regarding what people are saying about the association.

She tracks websites that post inaccurate address information, phone information, and today, she mentioned that a website had published some landmarks near the community that were just flat-out wrong. They were actually in other towns. So, she was able to go to that website, email back the webmaster and give them some suggestions of landmarks that were more appropriate. Now, how do you do this?

Well, the secret here is to go to “Google alerts.” Google alerts is a place that will notify you of any mention that you have in your business or your person, or perhaps a topic of interest for your business.

It’s really easy. The first thing you do is you go to google.com/alerts. And then, you will be presented with the search box. You have your search terms, the type of search that you want, how often you want to be notified, and what email address to send it to.

So, all you do is type in your search term and in our case, I’ll search for web-knowledge.com. I want a comprehensive search that means I want Google to scan news, blogs, the web, video, and discussion groups. And I want a daily digest and you can choose to have it sent immediately as Google finds a mention of your business or if you have a lot of mentions you might want to put it on a digest that is emailed to you once a week.

Fill out your email address and create the alert. Now if you don’t have a Google account, my recommendation would be to create one. And the sign up page would look a little bit different when you go to it. And there will be a link down here that would allow you to go and create a Google account.

So, let’s create this alert here. This alert has been added to my list of alerts and this is where you can go and manage your alerts. Now, let me make a little mention here. If you noticed, here’s my name, Peter Ericson, I track social media, I track my business, and I track the blog. Here are my businesses, a website address, and here again is the blog address.

Notice that some of these addresses have quotes around them and some don’t. If you put quotes around your search, what you are telling Google is you want those words presented right next to each other. So, in other words, “the complete website” those three words need to be in order, “the complete website” for Google to actually post an alert.

Otherwise, it will look for a document that has a word “the” the word “complete, ” and the word “website” randomly streamed throughout it. And that’s not helpful to me.

So, just remember that little quotes trick. And you can add, edit and delete an alert as you like. Also note that I follow social media, it’s interesting for me to read what’s going on in “Facebook” and “My Space”, and “You Tube” and the social media sites out there. And Google presents quite a lot of returns on this.

But if you are in a different business and you want to say follow things in a real estate business, well, you might want to search for local real estate mentions. By town, by property type, commercial, residential, etc, to start the information flow and you can always go back and edit the alerts anytime.

Google Alerts lets you stay on top of what people are saying about your business online.

 

 Get found in Google... hire the right seo provider [8:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (79)

…that will get your business found in Google. In this podcast I will tell you about the 3 major areas that your search engine optimization provider must cover… and how much to expect to pay for it. Click play above to listen.

Audio transcript:
Today we’re going to talk about how to get found in Google, or how to hire a search engine optimization expert. This is something you probably don’t want to do yourself and you’ll want to hire out, and it’s not that expensive if you do it right. Now what is search engine optimization? It’s best to explain through an example.

Let’s say you’re a fence installer in New Hampshire and you have a website that you want to get found in Google. Well, your hope would be that a prospective customer would go to Google and type in the keywords “fence installation New Hampshire” and your website would show up, they would see it, click on it and go to your website.

If you specialize in wrought iron fences, you’d want similar results. Someone types in “wrought iron fences New Hampshire,” boom, there’s your website. Or by town, that’s very powerful too–if somebody lives in Lebanon, New Hampshire, they type in “wrought iron fences Lebanon New Hampshire,” and you want your website to show up. That’s what search engine optimization is.

Now in order to hire somebody to do this work for you, it’s helpful to know what the basic procedures are for proper search engine optimization. I’m just going to share with you what we do and get great results with. The procedure we use falls into three basic steps: keyword research, keyword installation on your website, and then proving the effectiveness of the research, the data analysis.

So the first thing that has to be done is your search engine optimization expert has to research the scope of key phrases that people might use to type into Google to find your website. You should know how competitive the key phrases are, and almost more importantly, how popular the key phrases are, because you want to go after the popular keyword searches. When that research is done, you should have a pool of 100 to 300 different key phrases that people might search to find your type of business, and people search very specifically and that’s why this pool is so large.

Second thing is keyword installation. Let’s say you’ve picked 10 key phrases that are real important to your business and you’ve decided these are the ones I want to show up in. The search engine person you’ve hired needs to install those keywords on your site, and they install them in two general segments. One is visible text. The text that you read on your website needs to have those key phrases baked into them: the header text, the link text, the actual plain-copy text that’s on your website–you need to bake that in.

And a little tip here: If your search engine person is a copywriter, that’s a real plus, because you want to weave in these key phrases, but you want to make sure that the copy is still readable–that if a human comes to your site and reads the copy, it makes sense. The second thing for installation is there are hidden areas that most webmasters know about where they install these key phrases. They’re called “title tags,” “meta tags,” and those are the two biggies. There are “image tags” and there are other areas, but that’s the installation process.

The third and last thing you want to make sure your search engine optimization person does is that you want to make sure that they prove the effectiveness of the work that they’ve done. You want to see, after you’ve paid for the work and they’ve done it, that you’re ranking better on the key phrases that you chose, and there are a couple of ways to look at this. One is they should be looking at your analytics, which show you the actual visitor traffic to your website. And two, they should produce a “before and after” scenario for you.

So let’s say you have 200 key phrases that are in your pool. They should be able to give you a report that shows you all 200 key phrases and where in Google each phrase is landing. Are they on page one, are they on page two, page five, page ten? And you should look at that before the work is done and that same report should be run after the work is done, and the “after” report should show an increase in position on a lot of those key phrases. The analytics should show more traffic coming to your site, and it should show you the actual key phrases that people are typing in to get to you. So with a combination of those two reports, you should have a good sense of whether the work actually worked or not, and ultimately, your phone should be ringing.

Here are three questions to ask your would-be search engine optimization provider. One, what kind of research do you do? Listen carefully. Two, how is the installation handled? How do they actually install the key phrases? What’s their philosophy? Three, how do they prove to you that the keyword installation helped? Those are three really solid questions.

Here’s a side note. There are a few directories you might want to submit to as well, or get your search engine person to submit to. One is called Dmoz, one is Google Local Search, especially if you’re a local business, one is Yahoo Directory, and there are several others. But note that today, you’re not submitting to Google, you’re not submitting to Yahoo, you’re not paying somebody to do that for you; Google will find your site. They usually come back–every 30 days, 14 days, or two days, depending on how frequently you update your site–and Google looks for changes. And once the work is done with the optimization, Google will pick it up. Google can pick that up in a day. So just be careful of recurring fees.

Now here’s the big question: How much money do you spend on optimization? Well, optimization really falls into two categories. One is for local search, less competitive. Two is for national search, much more competitive, and you can expect to spend more. For local search, you’ll be spending well into the hundreds of dollars. You’ll probably spend between $500 and $1,000 for somebody who’s going to take you through the whole process.

And think about the payoff. How many new clients do you need to get that money back? One? If you’re a fence installer, you probably need one client. Even if you spend $1,000 on the search engine optimization, you get one new client out of that who found you online through Google, boom, and your money’s back.

Now, national search is a little trickier because it can be very competitive, usually it’s quite competitive. You’ll want to look at– and this is where your search engine provider will help you–how many other websites are competing for you. If you sell PCs and you’re going against Dell and Hewlett Packard, you have a very long fight and you’ll spend tens of thousands of dollars, and still might not come up where you want to be. You’ll talk about things like back links and getting into social media, writing up blogs, article marketing, Facebook, social bookmarking–there’s lots of things to do, lots of money to spend.

However, if you’re a national business and your website has never been optimized or has had very little optimization, even though you don’t end up on the first page of Google with an optimization, you will most likely still generate quite a lot more visitor traffic, and that’s where your analytics really pays off. You can see, “Gee, we have 500 visitors a month, 1,000 visitors a month coming,” and after the installation that bumps to 700, 1,400, 2,000 visitors, and you know that your money has paid off.

As always, please feel free to comment and subscribe :)

Let’s take a look at a real search in Google: Look up a local florist say in Framingham, MA. If you typed in “Framingham florist” you would find a list of Google generated business links at the top of the first results page. If you ran a florist there you would want to make sure your business was on this list. You would also make sure that your business’s website address was included so visitors can link directly to your site. Watch the video below to find out how to get your business in Google’s Local Search in less than 10 minutes.