The Bella Buzz: Successful Web Design, Internet and Social Media Marketing Strategies from Desiree Scales, CEO--Bella Web Design, Inc.

A Conversation about Good Search Engine Optimization Practices

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On this week's Bella Buzz podcast, hosts Joe Magennis and Desiree Scales discuss Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for business owners. Desiree walks us through her typical analysis of a client's current efforts and points out the critical steps that should be taken in order to improve a web site's organic rankings on search engine results pages or SERPs.

Bella Web Design focuses on the organic listings for clients since they are the most commonly clicked on link and are much more cost effective than the paid listings that are at the top and side of the SERP.

Desiree begins the process by working with clients to determine the most appropriate Keywords that they expect to generate search traffic from. Keyword analysis is an important early step in the development of a web site.  Content needs to be crafted, navigational layout and site architecture built, and finally meta tags coded and optimized for the correct keywords.

Once the site is developed and launched, her team will then submit the site to various directories such as Kudzu, City Search, or other paid listings that might be appropriate for that particular client.  

This is a process rather than a project.  SEO is an ongoing service that requires maintenance to keep a listing at the top of the results.  Changes to the Google algorithm or new competitors in the marketplace can have an negative impact on a site if it is left to wither on the vine.  Being responsive and monitoring the rankings will ensure that the site continues to remain relevant.

We pursue a discussion regarding link building and the strategies that should be implemented in an attempt to get inbound "link juice" passed to your web site by high ranking sites.  Desiree points out a particular web site called MRelevance.com that focuses on Atlanta Real Estate marketing services and notes that real estate agents have had success getting quality traffic and assistance in gaining high rankings with a link from this site.

Continuing in the real estate market, agents and brokers who have web sites hosted and templated from a franchising company will find it challenging to rank well simply because the content is database driven on the backend and gets credited to the main domain ie remax.com.  Realtors should develop stand alone sites that are hard coded HTML, and optimize for keywords in their local area including counties, cities and towns so that they can rank well for these keywords.

Don't forget to post your business in the Google Local Business Directory, which has recently been updated to include content ranging from logos, images and even video.  A listing here also signals to Google that this is a legitimate business and can improve the overall ranking of the site.

As a final point, SEO firms can make claims that they can have you ranked at the top of Google within a short time period and we just throw a word of caution out there.  Rankings take anywhere from 2 to 6 months to see results, and if they are guaranteeing them sooner, they may be using "blackhat" techniques that might work in the short term, but will potentially harm your web site forever while they have moved on to another client. Check out the reputation and results of the agency that you are engaging with.

Theme music for The Bella Buzz is Fallen by Digital Chemistry, available for download at the Podsafe Music Network.

You can subscribe to The Bella Buzz directly from ITunes by following this link, and we would be happy to receive listener feedback and ratings at The ITunes Store.

New Customer Testimonial about Search Engine Submission--Squeeky Kleen Window Cleaning

Our good client Nate Neal from Squeeky Kleen Window Cleaning came by today to clean our windows. Little did he know I had a Flip video camera in my purse! Here's what he said about his business thriving because of our search engine submission:

Find Incoming Links for Better Search Engine Ranking

So, how important are incoming links to your website's search engine ranking? In a word, very! Without any links pointing back to your site from other sites, your site will not rank well in Google, Yahoo or MSN. Search engines gauge a site's value on how many websites link back to it (a virtual popularity contest). If there are no other sites linking back to yours, the engines assume the site has no value to anyone.

One way to see how many incoming links you have is to go to Google and type in the search box:

link:www.yourdomainname.com

For example, let's look at my site www.bellawebdesign.com (<<shameless new incoming link! See how easy it is?). Type in link:www.bellawebdesign.com and you'll see I have over 200 sites linking to my site. If you type in "atlanta web design" into Google, you'll see we're number three on the page. Pretty good, eh?

The trick to finding incoming links is to hire someone to do the research for you. We offer a service (<<shameless plug) to everyone who hires us to do search engine submission which includes finding as many reputable and solid incoming links as we can in your industry to boost your incoming link popularity. Here is an example: type in link:www.rokandlola.com and you'll see this client has 48 links. We've gotten permission from blogs and boutique directories to link back to their site. See this link http://www.grechenscloset.com/directory_newboutiques.php They are listed third under the February 15th category.

A word of caution: Some search engine "specialists" will send your link out to non-reputable sites (adult!) and link farms. Be very wary of SEO firms who promise thousands of links back to your site. This could hurt your rankings beyond repair. Google actually deletes sites with too many links!

This actually happened about 6 years ago to my own site www.bellawebdesign.com. A competitor with an evil mean streak submitted the site to a link farm and it was pulled from Google for 30 days. After much protests and lots of paperwork we were able to prove to Google that this was a dirty stunt and they popped us back in. So be warned! Do your homework before hiring an SEO firm or web designer and make sure they have a stellar reputation. (Click here to read more about "How to Avoid Bad Web Designers" or listen to Desiree's radio interview on the subject on Radio Sandy Springs by clicking here.)

Does Your "Long Tail" Wag Your Business?

I'm having so much fun with my guest bloggers, I thought I'd invite Barbara Moss to join us this week!

Barbara Moss, Senior Account Manager at What a Concept!

For the past few decades, Barbara Moss has been a technical evangelist connecting people with the tools that enhance collaboration efforts and streamline processes (starting with dual floppy PCs in the early 1980s!). Her roles have spanned across the spectrum from developer, trainer and recruiter to manager/director, project manager, and sales. Her industry experience includes insurance, banking, software, retail and health care/bio tech.  As a Sr. Account Manager with What a Concept!, she currently helps organizations understand how to implement Web 2.0 interactive technologies into their business practices.

“The Long Tail” and Small Business

I have been reading The Long Tail, Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine.  The basic premise of the book is that businesses with strong distribution power (i.e., online stores) can sell a greater total volume of otherwise hard-to-find items in small amounts than they can sell of popular items in large amounts (see graph below).  This situation has evolved because traditional brick and mortar stores don’t have the physical space to carry the depth of inventory that online retailers can carry, especially when the inventory is electronic or can be produced on-demand, such as publishing on-demand.  Unfortunately, the book restricts long tail theory to large businesses.

The yellow area under this graph represents the Long Tail

So, does the long tail theory apply to small, niche online stores?   If so, how can online retailers apply the theory? 

The answer to the first question is YES.  Thanks to the Long Tail economics made possible by major online retailers, a large number of online consumers now expects and searches for an ever increasing array of “obscure,” niche products.  Smaller online retailers who are also smart can reap the benefits of the path their larger counterparts have laid.

Here are several simple things small online retailers can do to expand their reach to online consumers:

1. Search Engine Optimization: a lot has been said about this subject because it can’t be stressed enough.  Ensure that your website is designed with SEO in mind and revise it as necessary to keep current.  Did you know that the more you talk and are talked about on the web, the higher your SEO rating?  The recommendations below are other ways to increase SEO ratings.
2. Blog: get out there and talk about your passion as it relates to your product.  Have your own blog and comment on other people’s blogs.  Be willing to share ideas and help others.   Don’t make your blog an advertisement - people want to hear about you and your expertise, not be sold to.
3. Post videos on YouTube and pictures on Flickr:  Again, share information, don’t sell.
4. Participate in online communities: Almost all niche markets have at least one community.  Get involved!  Communities like FaceBook and MySpace have all kinds of niche groups – join these as well.
5. Meta Tags: Tagging is a way to categorize web pages and blog posts.  Since any entry can have multiple tags, use as many tags as needed to reach your relevant audience.  Tagging is another way to increase SEO.

Don’t forget, your customers are your best advertising.  Solicit and use satisfied customer comments wherever possible.  Find out if they’re hanging out on the web in places that relate to your business and join them there. 

It’s time to let your long tail WAG THE DOG!

Getting your Blog in Google

On a whim last weekend, I put the words "Successful Web Designers" into Google and found my blog on page one! That made me pretty happy and warm inside. Its almost as if I had the Google stamp of approval. Then I thought, "Does this really mean I'm successful or was did I know what I was doing subconsciously when I titled my blog 'Successful Web Design and Internet Marketing Strategies from Desiree Scales, CEO--Bella Web Design, Inc'?" (Whew!) I think it might be a little of both.

When naming your blog and giving it a title, make sure that you use keywords for the particular phrase you would like to be found for. This also goes for the titles in your blog posts. Another example from my blog is when you put in "web design plagiarism" into Google, my recent post about plagiarism comes up because the words in the title tag match that query or search.

These are just a few things to keep in mind when you design your blog and title your posts in the future to give you an edge in the search engines.

Yes, we are one of the most successful web design companies in Atlanta. (Maybe the Google-bots are smarter than we think after all? Heh heh!) We just celebrated our 9th birthday October 3rd (Google's 9th birthday was last week!) and our company has grown every year since we put up our virtual sign on the web.  With that experience comes a lot of knowledge which allows me to know how to optimize my blog and posts. This is experience which I'm proud and excited to share with you, my readers. Please continue to post comments and ask questions in order to help us make this blog even more "successful" in the future!

Why Updating your Website Monthly is Crucial to Staying on Top of Search Engines

Keeping your site updated every single month is the one of the keys to staying at the top of Google, Yahoo and MSN. I can't tell you how many of our clients haven't updated their website in YEARS! When I get a call that someone isn't on the first page of Google anymore, the first question I ask is, "When did you last send us something to post to your site?" The answer is always the same--more than 6 months ago.

Web crawlers from the search engines are coming to your site once a month. If, after a few months, they do not find any new content, they will stop coming to your site. The reason for this is that Google's mission is to keep the most relevant and timely sites at the top for people to find when they do a search. If Google presented material that was out-of-date, it wouldn't be used as frequently as it is on a daily basis. People would be frustrated.

Keeping your site updated in some manner each month is also important to keep your audience coming back and finding new information. I suggest putting up a news page, a calendar, portfolio or a document page with white papers or articles that change every single month. This is enough to do the job and keep your site at the top of Google, Yahoo and MSN for a long time to come.

Another good idea is to work with a web design company that offers an easy to use Content Management System such as Edit.com. Edit.com is only $150 to set up on your site and $180 a year to license. It makes it very easy to update your site regularly through a browser on any computer connected to the Internet.

If you take time to feed and care for your website, it will bring you a lot more results in the long-term. Update your site regularly and stay at the top of the search engines and on top of your competition!

Our Worst SEO Clients

Well, I've talked about bad web designers and given my piece of mind over that unpleasant topic, but now I think its only fair to turn the discussion around to our more difficult clients and why we sometimes have to turn away SEO business.

Recently, I had a client who had an IT person in-house who completely sabotaged our SEO efforts. Being a web designer myself, I know I don't like it sometimes when people criticize our sites and tell us what we're doing wrong. I can completely understand the animosity that builds when we walk into a business and take over SEO for a developer that hasn't done a good job in this area. This webmaster changed our meta tags and "forgot" to post some code at the top of the site after we asked him to do this repeatedly. Unfortunately, the client trusted the relationship he already had established with his webmaster instead of good common sense. It wasn't worth arguing and trying to save the relationship and, quite frankly, it was a losing battle.We ended up walking away and giving the client a full refund.

Sometimes problems start after we have to go in and take a look around the site to see how its built. If the site was built on a Customer Management platform (allowing the client to edit their own pages) and all the pages are dynamic, this becomes a real nightmare for a search engine submission specialist. Google states on their site, "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." in its Webmaster Guidelines (This is straight from the "horses mouth" folks!)

This means dynamic sites are very hard to get listed and often work against the website and its creators. We can't do submission for sites that are dynamic because they don't get crawled properly and we're wasting the client's time and money so we won't even attempt SEO with these types of sites.

Another difficult client is one who wants results yesterday which is usually the decision maker. They don't understand that we don't have a magic wand that will put them on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN immediately after we start our work. It takes 2 to 6 months sometimes for the engines to list a site on the top page with Google being notoriously the longest. (Great article about this here.) Think about it this way, the engines get more than 10,000 submissions per month. You have to stand in line behind a lot of other sites and wait your turn just like everyone else. Trust me, not matter how hard we try to reeducate decision makers about the fundamental concepts of SEO, they don't care. They want the instantaneous, magic cure. It won't happen immediately, but if you trust your SEO company and they have a track record of proven work, it will happen within 6 months or less.

The bottom line here is our best SEO clients are clients for whom we have actually built the site. We can completely control how content is put into the pages and in what order. We can optimize the images and the code behind the scenes and we always design our sites in HTML. We do use database and dynamic pages, but those are built in between pure HTML pages. The index page must ALWAYS be an index.html page. Our best SEO clients are also very patient and trust that the job we've been given will get done on a timeline that makes sense. We deliver what we say we will deliver and when we can't, we know its time to walk away in an honest and fair manner. That's all you can really ask for of any company you're doing business with.

 

Choosing the Right Domain Name for Proper Search Engine Optimization

I just found a great domain name last week for a new client. www.northatlantacustomhomes.com

What makes it so great? Its RELEVANT!

The domain reflects an actual keyword phrase that a potential customer of this client would probably put into Google, Yahoo or MSN. "north atlanta custom homes" The better your domain name matches potential searches, the better your chances of getting to the top of the engine for that particular keyword phrase. Remember, the search engine crawlers like RELEVANCY.

Another reason why its a great domain is because its easy to remember. It also tells the user exactly what the client does immediately.

I still can't believe it was floating out there. Its amazing how many great domain names still exist. My client is happy and that's all that matters. (Stay tuned...site coming soon!)

Pointing Multiple Domains to Your Site is a Search Engine Submission Killer

Do you have more than 1 domain name pointed to your website? If you so, STOP NOW! Pointing more than one domain name to your website is confusing to the search engine spiders or web crawlers.

A good (bad!) example of this. Go to www.sylene.com. Now, look at the address bar once you get to the actual site. What does it say? HOLY MOSES! It changes to http://www.sylenedc.com/ doesn't it? There is a perfect example of what NOT to do. (I'm trying to get my client to fix this as we speak as it has greatly affected her search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN.)

Here are a few reasons why its not a good idea to point more than one domain name to your site:

• Web crawlers will think you are trying to create doorway pages or cloaking pages that are built simply to SPAM the search engines.  These are built simply to "fake out" the crawlers by SPAMDEXING.


• The crawlers will think you are an adult website--no joke. Adult sites are well-known for pointing thousands of domains to one home page. Don't get caught up in that confusion folks or the crawlers will never come back (unless they want to have a really good time, heh heh heh)


• The crawlers will not crawl your site correctly. They will leave because they aren't given the correct information about your domain. They can actually get "confused" and won't know which domain to index.
  

Bottom line, you can buy all the domain names you want, just park the ones you don't use and choose the best domain for your site and stick to it. Choosing a domain name is an entirely different post. I'll probably talk about that next now that I'm thinking about it. Stay tuned...

Feb. 22 UPDATE:  I had my client www.sylenedc.com create a page at www.sylene.com with a hyperlink which allows visitors to click to get to the site instead of an automatic redirect. This will work better for the engines and the crawlers will now crawl the site correctly as they also put a "no index, no follow" in the meta tags at www.sylene.com.

Optimizing your Website Pages to Get Search Engine Traffic

First off, if your website only contains one page, stop reading this post and go add some pages to your site--IMMEDIATELY. Do not pass GO and do not collect $200!

Now, for those of you who have multiple pages, hopefully more than, oh, 5, please ask your Search Engine Submission Specialist if you are concentrating on optimizing all of those pages to hit different areas of the search engines. If they aren't, you might want to send them to this article. Your meta tags and title tags should be different on the pages that are targeted for different products/services.

In other words, if you provide a main service of, oh, say, web design, but also provide web hosting, ecommerce design, search engine submission and optimization, etc...the titles and tags of your pages should all be different to rank in those very different categories. This is because of a thing called "relevancy" Definition:
rel·e·van·cy  (rl-vn-s)

 1. One that is relevant.

2. Relevance; pertinence.

If you throw too many categories at your home page, the spiders will be confused and won't know where to rank you. You probably won't get ranked correctly at all. Concentrate on your main category only on your home page and optimize your other pages for their own categories. These categories should reflect what you are actually talking about on the page to get you more relevancy.

If you want to go after web design and web hosting, your home page should reflect and talk about web design and your web hosting page should only talk about web hosting, not web design and hosting.

A good example is www.lillieglass.com Their home page ranks for "atlanta custom glass" in Google--they are number 2. But if you put "corporate engraved glass awards", their http://www.lillieglass.com/customaward.html page comes up number 6 in Google because it is relevant to "corporate engraved glass awards."

Now this doesn't mean the site had to be submitted 5 or 6 times separately for each phrase. It was only submitted once and will be submitted on a monthly basis during the length of service they agreed to with our company.

So this is something to think about as you build your site. Make sure you get a list of your top 5 keywords you want to be found for and optimize your 5 page site accordingly. Keep in mind--the more pages you have, the better your changes are at nabbing more keyword phrases on the top pages of Google, Yahoo and MSN.