Do You Speak The Web?

Posted on February 20, 2012 by delos

Have you heard about HTML5? You probably don’t follow the news about web languages. That’s okay – you have someone doing web work for you so you don’t have to.

If you will indulge us, there’s this newish-not-yet-completed thing called CSS3 which let’s you use commands to create simple images and movements.

One clever designer has done something truly amazing. Using no pictures, the designer made a walking At-At, complete with shooting laser turrets and walking legs.

Why do we mention this? Sending pictures requires bandwidth, which can be expensive. Sending this same picture using only text is faster and cheaper.

Look for more improvements along these lines as the CSS3 commands are further improved and implemented.

Self promotion. Big production companies.

Posted on February 17, 2012 by delos

These two things seem mutually exclusive. Musicians have to choose between them.

Do you? Does your band need to be discovered?

What if you could use the web to discover fans? Put your original music online for a minimal price. It can work.

What if you don’t have a band but you still want to self promote?

Offer something for free and let people know about it. This will help bring people to your site.

Don’t Get Left Behind

Posted on January 27, 2012 by delos

You may recall a time when Ma Bell was the only game in town. Alternately, you might remember when KMart was bigger than WalMart. And even now, Sears is closing stores and the USPS is closing Post Offices.

But you may be shocked to learn that Microsoft isn’t as healthy as it could be. It could also crumble. And not just for purely business reasons.

Now is a good time to think about having some backup plans for any necessary computer systems you have. You don’t have to switch just yet – just be aware of what some of your options are.

There are free word processors and spreadsheet programs that can replace Microsoft Office.

If you are adventurous, you’ll research Linux and find out that there are free and robust operating systems available. Or maybe you’ll see how Google plans to replace your computer with a stick.

At least go into the Apple store and tinker with the computers there – you’ll see they aren’t so different from Windows computers.

Even if Microsoft doesn’t collapse, at the very least, you will know you have other options besides paying $150 for the next Windows upgrade or the $499 Office Professional.

Content Optimization, Keyword Tweaking and SEO

Posted on January 12, 2012 by delos

In the past, we have talked about key words and how to gather them. If you research online, you will find some web designers recommending having hundreds of keywords including plurals and regions and misspellings and colors and …

And that’s probably fine if you plan to spend a lot of money in Adsense or some other PPC (pay per click) advertising service. What if you haven’t reached that point yet? What if your budget is pocket change?

The good news is that if you do good keyword research, you will be able to narrow down a large list to your 50 biggest hitters. This is a reasonable number to aim for since it is likely that your site only has 10 pages or so anyway. You can’t stuff 500 keywords into 10 pages and not have it look spammy. (If you have more pages in your project then feel free to add more.)

So you take your top 50 manageable keywords and split them into your 10 pages. They will very likely fall into ten or so related topics and these will make good subjects for your 10 pages. Use them in your titles, your image alt tags and your text – preferably near the top of the text, a mention in the middle and then again near the bottom. And if you code your own webpages, you can make sure you are using header tags and meta tags with those keywords. Try to limit your title tags to 60 characters and your meta description tag to 25 words while using as many of your keywords (on the specific page) as possible.

Then have someone read each page and make sure it is easily understandable. They will point out spelling and grammar errors that inevitably creep in. Leaving those things in will distract from the message of that web page and break the reader’s attention span. Even if your readers are not English Majors, bad writing still feels bad. You might not recall what a dangling participle is but you will get annoyed or impatient if you read a webpage with incorrect punctuation. It just doesn’t read well even if you don’t consciously know the rules of grammar.

So if you have made it easy to read each page and not cluttered the page with too many keywords then you are ready to post your site live. You’ll feel good that you have taken your best shot at giving these 10 pages the best structure and keyword optimized content you can. But your content optimization job isn’t over. Nope.

You have to go back and measure the results. How do you do that? You either get access to the website analytics or install them and watch what happens. Say your site is about fruit recipes and over a month you see that your banana smoothie page is not doing well but your apple crumb cake page is gaining more readers every day.

You go back and do a bit more keyword research and find that people are not searching for banana smoothies anymore. They are now looking for banana italian ice recipes. So you rewrite the article with keywords related to banana flavored italian ice and repost it. Likewise, you can look at the apple crumb cake page and write another page (your 11th) about optional toppings for you to have with your apple crumb cake recipe or you write another recipe variation and post that with links between the two pages.

But your job isn’t over. If you stick with it, you will see success with work and regular effort. It is best if you take this article as just one of many data points and research the topic further. You will see that some common keyword techniques and recommendations have been left out or merged together for this article.

Who is your website targeting?

Posted on January 9, 2012 by delos

Let’s assume that your business website exists to make money. Who will you make money from?

Sure, you might target customers within a geographical area. But do you target stay at home parents, business professionals, soccer Moms or hunters and fishermen?

Different sections of your website can be optimized to reach a specific audience. What will attract busy parents to eat at your restaurant? What will help convince local car businesses to use your accounting firm?

So write down all your targets.

Once you know who you are targeting, you will know what OTHER advertising elements you can use to support your website’s reach.

So… What Am I Selling Them?

Now that you know WHO, what is that you have to offer each of them? What your beauty supply business sells to older women is different than what is sold to younger women.

What is it that you offer each of these groups of people? What is it that you do that other businesses don’t do? Do you have better prices? Do you have more options to better fit your customer’s needs? Is your service far superior?

Now write down what you can sell to each of your markets. Use these things on your website but also in all your other advertising.

These are just general suggestions. We at Little Guy Creations will be happy to help develop a content strategy for your business website. Contact us at 518-882-3065.