Blog

It’s Impossible to Optimize a Website

Here’s the deal. SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is a nice fancy word that tends to freak people out. After all, when you use letters instead of words, it’s got to be important. Right?

One of the misconceptions a lot people make about SEO is that it’s about optimizing a site.

It’s Impossible to Optimize a Site

When you go to Google and search for ‘hermit crab food,’ you don’t expect Google to send you to a site, you expect to be sent to a page about hermit crab food.

Google serves up ten pages that it deems relevant to your search. You click on the first link and the PAGE is in fact about hermit crab food and how wonderfully nutritious it is and how your hermit crab will love it. You have landed on a well optimized page even if the site is poorly optimized.

The Four Must Haves

There are four key elements to making sure your page is optimized for a specific keyword or keyword phrase. If you hope to rank on the first page, you must have these four elements. These are the MINIMUM!

1. Keyword in the Title

You must have your keyword in the title. This is arguably the single most important on-page element for optimization. It helps search engines understand what this page is supposed to be about. The closer to the first word the better, but it needs to be natural! Don’t force it.

2. Header Tags

The second element is H1 and H2 tags. The heading tags serve as triggers for search engines. When the spiders are crawling your site and come across an H1 or H2 tag, they notices the terms identify them as important.

It’s like highlighting text with a bright yellow pen. It triggers a response from search engines and lets them know what keyword is relevante for the page.

3. Document Title

The document title is what is displayed in search results. You know the ten listings from Google, the title is the headline of your search result. That title is important in identifying the relevant keyword for the page. Make sure to get the keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible.

You do not have to make the Document Title and the Title of the page the same. These can be different. Just make sure they are keyword specific and relevant to the copy of the page.

4. Links

In SEO, a link is like a vote. Inbound links from other pages on your site or from other websites count as votes for quality. The more links you have to a page the better.

When you are optimizing a page, you must be sure to include some links OUT of the page to other content on your site and to other pages on the web. Make sure the links are using anchor tags and are using relavant keywords for the link.

It’s all in the Page

You cannot optimize a website, you can only optimize a page. It’s the accumulation of optimized pages that lead to optimized sites. Pay attention to these four elements and you will see your pages begin to show up higher and higher in search results. And the higher you rank, the more traffic you will get.

What other factors do you use on your pages? Share with us in the comments below.

How to Install Genesis Framework and Child Theme

By Alan Smith

The Genesis Framework is the most stable, secure, and extendable theme for WordPress I’ve used. It can also be a little intimidating to modify.

Creating Navigation Menu with StudioPress

By Alan Smith

Adding navigation to a StudioPress child theme is a simple process when you know the steps. In version 1.8, you will need to use the WordPress Menu creator to generate your Primary and Secondary navigation menus. But first, you have to make sure Genesis is setup.

Setting Up Genesis

In the Dashboard, go to Genesis>Settings>Theme Settings. This will take you to the Genesis setup window for you to set all the defaults.

Scroll down to the Navigation Settings meta box. Here you will see two check boxes, one for Primary Navigation and the other for Secondary Navigation. Check the box for the navigation menu you want to use.

By checking one or both of these boxes, Genesis will add the necessary code to the site to render the navigation menus.

Setting up the Menu

Now that Genesis is ready for the menu, WordPress can create the menu and populate the navigation. In the dashboard, go to Appearance>Menus.

Click the plus sign, [+], at the top of the page. In the Menu Name field, type ‘Primary Navigation’ and click ‘Create Menu.’

You will now have access to three new metaboxes, the Theme Locations, Custom Links, Pages and Categories. If you have other plugins or software installed, you may have additional options.

The Theme Locations is your Primary and Secondary navigation that is activated by Genesis Settings.

The Custom Links allows you to create links to external pages or sites by adding the URL and a Menu Label (name).

The Pages box lists all the pages you’ve created. They will be sorted by ‘Most Recent’, but you can ‘View All’ or ‘Search’ for specific pages.

The Category box list all the categories that you’ve created for your posts.

In the Theme Locations metabox, select the Primary Navigation from the drop down. Now go to the Pages metabox and select all of the pages that you want included in your Primary Navigation. Place a check in the check boxes and then click ‘Add to Menu.’

All the pages will populate the menu field to the right of the metaboxes.

You can then drag the boxes around to get the navigation in the order you want it to appear on your site. Move them up and down to arrange the order, move them under and indented to make them a submenu. You can move them around to fit your desired navigation structure.

Onc you have the menu the way you want it, click ‘Save Menu’ and you menu will be live on the site. Go to a page on the site and you will see the Primary Navigation displayed the way you set it up in the dashboard.

You can add pages or remove pages as often as you need. When you create a new page, if you want it to be included in the navigation, you will have to manually add it in the Menu.

If you have any questions, leave them in comments below.

Four Ways Pinterest Can Work for Your Business

By Alan Smith

Pinterest is a very fast growing social network that has a lot of people talking. It is a bit unique in how you share content. If your not using Pinterest and do not have an idea what all the fuss is about, go check it out. If you need an invite, let me know and I’ll send you one.

Source: mashable.com via Alan on Pinterest

4 Ways to Make Pinterest Work for You

1. Add a Pin It Button

You can add a Pin It button to your website. If your on WordPress, use a plugin that adds the social media icons to your Posts or Pages. Check the plugins that are available and make sure that Pinterest is included.

Having the simple “Pin It” button can get more people connecting with your site.

2. Become Visual

Pinterst pins images and videos to users walls. Not text or excerpts from your page or post. The way to encourage Pinterest sharing is to have plenty of graphics or video on your site that users can share. They can be simple images that are interesting or captivating to expanded Infographics. Become more visual if you want Pinterest traffic.

3. Promote MORE than Products

It will be tempting to just load your Pinterest boards with your own products and images. But if your going to be on Pinterst, you need to participate. And participation is about sharing information, news, tips, and products from other companies. You need to promote the social community by engaging the community. Definately post your content, but don’t be an island. Share!

4. Learn from the Heavyweights

There are several larger companies that are doing an excellent job using Pinterest, follow them. Get an idea of how they are using the network? Look at the kind of content they are sharing. Observe the kind of content that is getting a lot of re-pinning. Find the trends and then begin to develop strategies that work for you.

To Join or Not to Join, that is the Question

Whether you take the time to become part of the Pinterest world is up to you. I have just recently joined the community. I will keep you posted on what I think and how effective it is for me. I really think that it can become a great traffic source. But I want to spend where I get a return and that return is translated into revenue. I’m going to give a few months and see how it goes.

How are you using Pinterest for your business? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

How much does a website cost?

By Alan Smith

As a web design and developer, one of the first questions I’m frequently asked is “How much does a website cost?” I understand the reason for asking, but it is a very difficult question to answer. It’s kind of like asking, “How much is a car?”

There are several factors that go into the cost of a website and I want to break them down so you can have a better understanding of what to expect.

Site Design

Depending on where you are with your business or blog, you may need to invest in a site design. A website design needs to reflect your business, matching your logo and company image. Your company needs to project the same look in print and online and having a quality design will help make that happen.

Design Cost

I tend to break design into three categories: template, semi-custom, custom

A template is a prebuilt design that you can use for your site. It is often professionally designed and offered for sale on template or theme sites. These templates can be very professional in look and meet your needs. This is the lowest cost option. Themes can range from $10 and up.

A semi-custom site begins with a template or theme and is modified to match your business colors. There is very minor changes to the theme, a color palette is altered, a logo or graphic may be added, and some very simple and basic layout changes may be available.

This is an intermediate option and can cost between $200 and $500.

A custom site is designed completely for your business. A designer will take the time to develop a completely new and unique look for your site. There will be custom images and graphics developed to match your company look. This is the most expensive option available.

Cost will begin at about $1,000.00 and will go up depending on the designer, complexity, and time frame.

Site Development

Once you have a site design, whether from a template or custom work, you will need to turn that into a working website. Web development is the process turning your design into a website for the Internet or an intranet. Web development cost will vary depending on the platform you choose to use.

There are two classes of web platforms, open-source and proprietary. Open-sourced platforms are free from patent and copyright liability and are free to use and modify. Open-sourced platforms reduce the cost of entry and provide access to any and all users. Some open-source development platforms are WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and MySQL.

Proprietary platforms are “closed” systems. Software companies design and develop software and then protect that software from users by keeping the source code hidden. To use the software requires the user to purchase a license from the manufacture.

Converting a design into a working website is going to be connected to the platform your developer uses, their level of experience and expertise, and the complexity of your site.

A simple site consisting of static content, a blog and some simple content management will begin at $1,000.00 and go up. As you add features like shopping cart, membership services, forums, social network, etc, the price will grow proportionate to the complexity.

Hosting and Registration

Once you have a site designed and developed you will need a place to store and serve the site. This is done from a computer called a server attached to the Internet. A hosting company will provide you with storage for your site and the appropriate bandwidth.

Hosting

There are three flavors of web hosting: Shared, VPS, and Dedicated

A shared hosting environment occurs when several websites are sharing the same resources from a single server. Many web hosting companies will host 100’s of sites on a single server. Each site has access to the servers processors and memory and will share those resources. Shared hosting will cost between $3.95 and $9.95 per month. Most will allow you unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. Read the fine print and be aware of what your host is providing before you sign any agreements.

Shared hosting is satisfactory for small sites with less than 1000 unique visitors per day. This is going to vary with hosting providers.

The Virtual Private Server is a server where you have dedicated services of processor and memory. You are still sharing a server with other sites, but you have a dedicated amount of the server resources available only to you. This increases your sites performance and limits residual impact from a shared environment. The VPS is a good option for sites that are growing and need more resources for their site.

The VPS hosting begins around $14.95 per month.

The Dedicated Server is for larger sites with large amounts of traffic. A site on a Dedicated server has all the resources of the server dedicated to their website. All the processor and RAM is dedicated to your site. Dedicated hosting is ideal for sites that are growing and have several thousand unique visitors per day.

The Dedicated hosting plans begin around $150 per month and will go up from there. There is not a ceiling on hosting cost. As you need more storage or bandwidth, you can add more servers to your network.

Domain Registration

Before you site can be found online, you need a domain. The domain is the name of your website. A registrar is a company that registers your domain with ICANN. This will cost about $10 per year. It is an annual cost and many hosting companies will register your domain for free as long as you maintain hosting.

The Cost

How much does a website cost? It depends on what you want. It can cost as little as a few hundred dollars or as much as several thousand dollars. The only way to know for sure is to discuss your needs and get a quote for your project.

I always recommend bringing your budget when you meet to discuss your website. Most of the time, a professional designer or developer will be able to help prioritize your needs so you can get all you can and stay in budget. The budget is critical.

Now it’s your turn

What are you questions about the cost associated with a website? Ask them in the comments below and I’ll be sure to answer them.

5 Easy Steps to SEO with WordPress

By Jordan Godbey

For a site to be effective in the search engines, you want to make sure you’ve got all the basics covered, starting with the on-site changes and then moving to the off-page parts of SEO. I’m going to show you 5 steps to creating a rock-solid SEO platform for your WordPress site to grow on.

Permalinks & Title Tags

3 of the most important elements for your site structure are:

– Title tag
– URL
– Meta description

Title
The <title> attribute is your best chance to tell Google what your site is about. You will find some title’s like “Home” on a website. That is horrible because it says nothing about who you are or what you do.

Think about ‘Home’ or ‘Welcome’ versus this title in Google: ‘Cincinnati SEO Company ABC | SEO, PPC, Email Marketing Services’

Sure, it’s a little bit longer, and might get cut off at the end, but in general you are helping your visitors AND the search engines understand more about you and your content so they can best serve it to people who are searching.

URLs
By default wordpress uses IDs to create the URLs of your site, and they aren’t very people friendly.

Example

Bad : yoursite.com/?p=24
Good : yoursite.com/locations/chicago

Meta description
Meta description is the snippet of text you see under the listing. Sometimes it’s very short or very obscure.

The meta description area is your last chance to entice the visitor to click on your website and select it over all the rest on the page. You can put in reputation words like ‘voted best X’ or offer a deal ‘Offering 50% off on all X’.

You only have a few sentences before it gets chopped off, so be as succinct and clear as possible.

You can see a real word examples of good vs bad Title, URL and Meta Description below for the keyword ‘hiking trail’

Bad example Title tag for SERP:

Bad example URL for SERP:

Good URL, Title and Meta Description for SERP:

The WordPress SEO plugin can help you easily change each of these 3 issues in no time. More on the plugin in step 2.

Crawlability

Once you are set up with good titles and descriptions, you need Google to find and index all your content so it can show it to visitors in the search engine results page (SERP).

We’re going to make sure you have a good robot.txt file and an XML sitemap.

Some of your pages might not have links to them or might be very deep inside your site and the crawlers might not read their content very often.

Joost de Valk, who goes by Yoast, has a great SEO plugin for wordpress called, ironically, ‘WordPress SEO’.

This plugin will help you manage the elements discussed in Step 1 as well as your XML sitemap and robots.txt file.

Robots.txt defines what the search engine spiders can crawl on your website and what they can’t. If they can’t crawl it and read it, technically it shouldn’t show up in the SERPs. Sometimes you don’t want certain things showing up — but you also want to make sure that the stuff you do want to show up, does.

Inside the Indexation area of Joost’s plugin you can select if you want things like your categories and tags archives to be allowed or disallowed. You want to avoid having duplicate content on your website and confusing Google as to which page should rank and which shouldn’t.

WordPress has ways of creating multiple links to the same content and you want to avoid indexing those pages where ever you can.

XML sitemaps is a list of every page on your website in one file that the spiders can read to discover your content more easily. Again, the WordPress SEO plugin will create this for you and automatically add new pages that you create to the file.

It’s great.

Basic Link Opportunities

Once you’re done your on-page optimizations, you need to work on off-page optimization, AKA links.

Links are the basic element of SEO. It can get very complicated once you grow and want to rank for difficult keywords, because not all links are equal.

For example, if your competitor has 50 links and you have 51, that doesn’t mean you will rank higher. However, I’ve never seen someone rank well with 0 links, so they absolutely are vital to success.

Here are some places to start with that you can get links from :

– Good directories, like DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory and business/niche directories.
There are thousands out there and most are garbage. Make sure that by adding your site it would help a real person out by having you in there, not just to try and get some SEO value from it. You want to stay away from spam/crap sites that could hurt your profile.

– Business partners (suppliers, distributors, etc) – ask that they put a link to your site showing that they work with you

– Social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more will let you create a profile with a link. Sometimes they are nofollow (so you won’t get much SEO benefit) but they get crawled a lot and it will help to discover your content.

– Submit a piece of content to high quality article directories, How-to websites and do a press release. You will be able to define the anchor text linking back to your site which will help you target your keywords.

– Add valuable comments on blogs in your industry/nich that you can contribute to.
Most likely you’ll drive traffic as well, as many people like to read the comments and will click on people they find useful or interesting. Many blogs make their links nofollow, but not all. So you will get some SEO benefit from this. However, do not hire an outsourced firm to write thousands of low-quality comments on blogs like great post! to try and get higher search results.. it doesn’t work.

Local Listings

If you have a local business you can get your company listed in local directories for your city and in sites like Angieslist, YellowPages. Do a search for businesses like yours in your area and find the sites that they already have profiles in.

Monitoring Tools

So say you do all of this work.. how do you know if it did anything? By the traffic and (hopefully) sales of course!

Here are 2 tools we’ll use to monitor traffic and other analytics for the site.

Google Analytics
Google Webmaster Tools

Both are free and work really well. They can get complicated, but the basic functionality is easy to understand.

To set up Google Analytics first you’ll need to create an account on the site – google.com/analytics then you can install another plugin by Yoast called Google Analytics for WordPress which makes configuring your site very easy. You’ll just select the profile you created on google.com/analytics from a dropdown inside your wordpress dashboard, and you’re done!

Then you’ll be able to see how much traffic you’re getting, which keywords are sending you traffic and where those people are coming from.

After you’ve set up GA, you’ll want to set up WMT (Google Webmaster Tools).

Google Webmaster Tools is a site that allows you to manage other aspects of your site.

Here is where you can tell Google where your XML sitemaps file is that you created earlier so it can better find your content.

Also you be able to tell it if your site is tarted to a specific language or region and things like if you prefer the www version of your site to be shown or the non-www (example.com or www.example.com) by the way, those are NOT the same thing!

You can spend a lot of time learning these tools to get more value out of them, and I recommend you do.

Using these 5 tactics you will be off to a great start. SEO is a very long term process — the harder the niche & keywords, the longer and harder it will be to rank, but you will get there eventually. Don’t give up!

Focus on putting out great content and be in it for the long haul.

Target photo credit Magnifying glass credit

Social Media Not Good for Local Business

By Alan Smith

If you’re running a small business and your market is primarily your local area, then social media may be of little value to business success.

The Pew Internet Study

A recent Pew Internet study looked at where people are getting information about local businesses. They found that most people are turning to the interent (51%), over newspaper (31%), word of mouth (23%), and TV (8%).

A small business website is critical for the success of your business. Since the turn of the century, the most important component of your small business has been a website. With the advent of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, there has been a growing push to have your business on these networks.

Social media may not be good for local business marketing . . . yet.

According the study, only 3% of the responders used social media to get information about a local business. Only 3%. This seems counter intuitive with so many people using the social network.

Social Network Fails

Social networks are great for connecting with people. They seem to work well for larger businesses that are marketing to build brand awareness and community. These companies spend a larger amount of time, energy, and money using social networks to grow their market share and build affinity to a brand.

Most local businesses use the web to gain more business and/or generate more leads. They are not trying to build brand awareness or develop community. There just isn’t enough time or money for most small business owners to divide their resources to develop a quality social media strategy that would generate a great return.

Social media is great for business, but it doesn’t seem to be ideal for most local business. There has to be strategic design to get a return.

Get Connected

It’s Impossible to Optimize a Website

It’s Impossible to Optimize a Site

The Four Must Haves

1. Keyword in the Title

2. Header Tags

3. Document Title

4. Links

It’s all in the Page

How to Install Genesis Framework and Child Theme

Creating Navigation Menu with StudioPress

Setting Up Genesis

Setting up the Menu

How much does a website cost?