Intellisites, the smart choice for web design

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – search engines love links.  If you want your website to have a good ranking on the major search engines, then you want other websites out there to link back to your site.

But one thing we haven’t talked about too much is the quality of the links.  The search engines take into consideration not only the number of links to your page that exist out there, but they also care which sites are doing the linking and how popular those sites are.

So the goal is not only to get a lot of other sites to link to yours, but to get popular sites to link to yours.

And thanks to sites like LinkedIn, this is easier than you might think.

Linking from LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals.  When you join, you get to set up a little profile page about yourself.  The difference between LinkedIn and some of the other social networking sites is that LinkedIn profiles are usually very business-oriented, listing people’s educational background and work history rather than their favorite movies and photos of their pet chimpanzees.  Once you have your profile page set up, you can get in touch with other users (e.g. your colleagues and business associates), which results in a list of “connections.”

LinkedIn is a cool site for you as an individual, but you can also use your membership in LinkedIn to boost your rankings for your business website.  If you have a LinkedIn profile, you can include a link to your company’s website on that profile and encourage your “connections” to do the same.  Because LinkedIn is such a popular website, the links on profiles there are going to impress Google and Yahoo a lot more than many other links would, therefore helping out those search engine rankings.

Meet Alexa

Alexa.com is a website that makes a list of all the websites in the whole wide world in order of popularity.  A website’s Alexa ranking tells you a lot about how popular it is and, therefore, how strong a link from that site would be.

If you check out the Alexa ranking for LinkedIn, you’ll see that it’s a really high quality site in terms of popularity.  As I’m writing this, it’s ranked #29 in the world, and although the exact number changes often, LinkedIn is always on the short list of very popular sites.

Why Not Do Your Website a Favor?

So by signing up for LinkedIn and adding a link from your profile to your website, you are going to make your website look more favorable in the eyes of the search engines — in a quick, painless, and FREE way.

It seems that a lot of people aren’t aiming high enough when it comes to their SEO goals.

Often, we find that our clients are primarily concerned about ranking highly when people Google their company names.  While that’s clearly important, we want more from SEO.  We want our clients’ websites to top the results not only when web searchers already know our clients, but also when people who don’t know their company names are just seeking their particular services.

After all, people use Google today like they used to use the yellow pages.  Whether they’re looking for podiatrists, plumbers, or pet groomers, they usually have a better handle on what service they are looking for than which particular companies they will use.  We want you to have the advantage that businesses whose names started with the letter “A” used to have — a top slot on the list of businesses in your category.

So, the goal of search engine optimization should be to get your website to rank as high as possible when a web surfer is searching for the service you provide.  How can you make that happen?  By zeroing in on keywords that random web searchers might type in if they were looking for businesses like yours.

There are two ways to do this.

1. Become psychic and read the minds of web surfers everywhere.

2. Consult the friendly crew at Intellisites.  We know keywords like podiatrists know feet, plumbers know pipes, and pet groomers know PediPaws.

Is anybody actually visiting my website?

That’s a question that a lot of people ask themselves.  After slaving away to keep their sites polished and updated, business owners want to be able to see whether their site is actually working for them.

So what’s the best way to do this?  Look at your analytics.

Through Google analytics, you can find out not only whether your site is getting visited, but a boatload of details about who is visiting it and what they’re doing there.  It’s kind of like 24:7 video surveillance on a store – except it’s on a website.

In some ways, Google analytics are even better than constant video footage would be.  For example, you get to find out how visitors ended up at your site.  In other words, what did people type into Google that made your site pop up?  That’s really important information from a search engine optimization standpoint, so that’s an awesome feature of Google analytics.

You can also use Google analytics to determine your site’s bounce rate.  A bounce rate basically shows whether people who visited the site peaced out right away or spent some time clicking around to different pages.  Your goal is to have a site with a low bounce rate, which would indicate that your home page is enticing people to delve deeper into your site.

And that info is just the beginning.  Do you want to know the average time your visitors spend on your site?  Do you want a map of what areas of the world your visitors live in?  Are you interested in how many new visitors vs. how many returning visitors?  Do you want to compare your traffic from one day to the next?  Google can hook you up with all of this information, and more.

Of course, the benefit of a store’s video surveillance system is that it can be used to see people’s faces (well, at least a grainy version of them).  So while you can actually see who visits a brick and mortar store through its video security system, you cannot see a picture of exactly who visited your website through Google analytics…

…yet.

Here’s a little secret about this blog.

We write it partially because we love sharing our thoughts and knowledge about web design with you.  We love giving out free advice and information because, truthfully, we like you a whole lot.

But, to be honest, we also get something out of it.  (Besides, of course, the joy and warm fuzzy feeling that only generosity can bring.)

By blogging it up on this page, we’re kissing up to the search engines.  The articles we write deal with lots of issues that are relevant to web design – and the more we write, the more the search engines like us.  As we touch on different website-related issues, we’re incorporating more and more valuable content into our site.  The search engines are definitely going to take that into consideration when they figure out how to rank us.

Why are we telling you this secret?  So you can go out and do the same.  Blogging is a great way to let your clients get to know you better and to provide them with interesting information.  It helps you to show off your expertise while giving your clients a good reason to keep checking back in on your website.

And, like the cherry that tops off a perfect sundae, it helps to make your website more attractive to search engines.

Now, in order to maximize the appeal that your blog has to search engines, just make sure that you do put together posts that are really informative and relevant to whatever business you’re in.  To some, blogging implies writing casually about day to day happenings, and although blogging about the Jay Leno shaped cloud that you saw on the way to work might make your readers smile, just make sure to incorporate that anecdote into an article that has something to do with something important.

If you can pull that off, you’ll have a blog that your website visitors – and the search engines – will dig.

How’s your search engine optimization going?  Good?  That’s super!  If you’ve been cleaning up the pages of your website to make them more attractive to the search engines of the world, you have taken a really important first step to getting noticed on the web.  Give yourself a cookie!

But while you’re chomping away on your Chips Ahoy, take a minute to read about a couple of other things you might want to be doing as well.  (And if you’re doing them already, feel free to reward yourself with more nummies!)

Pay Your Way to the Top…Or at Least, to the Side

If only you could bribe Google the way you sometimes can bribe the maitre d’ of a restaurant!  It would be great to slip Google a $20 spot and get a place at the top of the page in return.  Since that’s not possible, Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are the next best thing.  You write ads, identify the relevant keywords, and wait patiently for people to type the keywords into Google.  When someone does, your ad will pop up on the side of his screen – and you pay nothing unless he clicks on it.

Setting up a PPC campaign is a great supplement to SEO because it can address issues that SEO can’t.  You can set up temporary PPC ads for special sales or promotions.  You can also identify many more keywords through PPC than you ever could with SEO.  PPC + SEO = Lots of visitors to your site.

Analyze Those Analytics

Google Analytics are, in a word, amazing.  When you have analytics installed on your site, Google will track a ridiculous amount of information for you.  Want to know how many people visited your site?  How they got there?  How long they stayed?  What town they’re from?  It’s a little scary, but you can find out all that information, and more.

And once you have that information, you can use it to improve your site and make it more enticing for the 289 people from New York, 28 people from Connecticut, 12 people from Maine, and 2 people from Japan who you now know have visited your site!

Help Them Land

In addition to using SEO strategies for your whole site, you might want to set up landing pages for special purposes and make sure those are search engine friendly.  For instance, if you were a cookie baker who wanted to advertise his holiday cookie line, you could set up a special page for that and make sure everyone Googling “holiday cookies new york” finds your site.  This will help pull visitors through a “back door” of your site, and directly to the page that’s most relevant for them.

If you’re on target with all of those, you deserve a real treat.

If you have an awesome website, you may think that you have taken care of a huge piece of your company’s marketing picture.  And you are correct.  Except for one thing.  Once you have an awesome website, you need to get people to visit your awesome website.

Let’s think back to years ago before you were a successful business owner.  At one time, you were probably a nine-year-old kid with a lemonade stand.  And, if you were a really motivated young entrepreneur, you may have decided to market your lemonade stand by printing up fliers on your dad’s Apple IIe.  After you had taken the time to design these fliers, would the nine-year-old you most likely A) leave the fliers on your back porch hoping that the wind would blow them around the neighborhood or B) take a spin around the neighborhood on your bike, passing fliers out to everyone you meet?  Chances are, if you really wanted to save up for that Atari, you got those fliers into people’s hot little hands. And on telephone poles, and on windshields, and in mailboxes…

You need to bring some of that youthful energy into promoting your website. You’ve worked hard to design a great website for your business, and you need people to see it so it can do its job and get you some work.  Luckily, bike riding around the neighborhood with fliers is not one of the recommended methods of advertising your site.

But here are a few things that might work.

Send out an e-mail blast. Remind your loyal customers that you have a website and that it’s worth checking out by e-mailing them a link.  That’s especially recommended if you’ve recently made changes to your page, or even better, added new features such as a blog or a link to a social networking page you’ve set up for your company.

Do some search engine optimization. The main way new customers will find your website is through their favorite search engine, and if you’re not one of the first ones that pops up, you’re in trouble.

Set up a pay-per-click campaign. This will get your site noticed on search engines, pronto.  For more info on how to do this, click here.

Send out a mailer. Here’s a throwback to your lemonade fliers – you can also remind your customers that you have a website by sending a message on actual paper through snail mail!  And for those of you who are still nine years old at heart — we didn’t mean to discourage you before – if your trusty Huffy is still kicking and you’re up for the challenge, no one’s going to stop you from hopping on and distributing them yourself.

You may be hearing the term SEO a lot lately. With the economic downturn in full effect, businesses are shifting marketing dollars away from costly strategies like TV ads, and toward more cost-effective approaches like SEO.

So what is it?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. In short, search engine optimization is a process (or series of processes) applied to a website that helps it to place highly on search results pages for specific keywords.

Here’s a little exercise to help you understand what I mean:

Go to www.google.com and search for the word ‘chocolate’. The top results include an article from Wikipedia, the Hershey’s web site, the Godiva web site, Ghirardelli, and the website www.chocolate.com. All of these pages are clearly about chocolate, three of them are from world-renowned chocolate makers, and all five of them are extremely relevant to the term you searched for. These pages have been built in such a way as to convince the Google search engine that they are, in fact, the most relevant results for someone searching the keyword ‘chocolate’.

These sites are optimized. And as a result of their high placement, they are going to get more traffic than any of the other 116,000,000 (seriously, look in the top-left of the results page) websites that Google found about chocolate.

Why SEO Is So Important

It’s widely accepted that the power positions on a Google search results page are the top three spots. Once you drop to #4, the chances that someone will click through to your site are quite a bit smaller. The numbers drop even more drastically once you go past position #10 (that is, onto results page #2).  Optimizing your web site is one of the only ways to get into those top few positions.

The other reason that SEO is such a strong marketing strategy is that it creates qualified connections.  Someone using a search engine to find a product or service has already identified their own need and is actively searching for a solution. If you’re one of the first options they come across, you’ve got a much better chance of getting the sale.

Learn more about our search engine optimization and other search marketing services.

According to a recent figure, 81.57% of all searches conducted over the internet go through Google. Next in line is Yahoo!, holding a meager 10.07% of the remaining search traffic.

That staggering number means that in the SEO game, Google gets to make the rules. And if you want to get a high page ranking on the worlds most popular search engine, you better play by them.

What are these rules?

It’s impossible to come up with an exhaustive list of what Google likes to see. Their preferences are deployed through search algorithms; mathematical formulas that give different weight to various characteristics of a web site, and then sort the results based on how well they match the terms entered by the searcher. The mathematical nature of these preferences makes them hard to fully describe with words.

But there are some things we know for sure.

1. Google has a heavy bias towards informational resources. Search for just about any broad topic (like “money” or “France“) and you’ll get a Wikipedia reference near the top of the page. That’s because Wikipedia is absolutely loaded with well-researched, well-written information. Google can tell, and rewards Wikipedia handsomely.

2. Google likes to see high-quality incoming and outgoing links. This means that if something on your page links to, say, a related article on CNN.com, Google gives you a thumbs up. If you have a link that goes to a web page that has no relevant content and no sensible reason to be attached to your page, you get the Google thumbs down.

3. Google is smart. It’s able to look at the content on a web page and determine if you’re actually writing an informational piece of text, or if it’s simply a long list of the same keywords over and over again. Tactics like this worked for a while, but Google caught on, and has a tendency of punishing pages that employ them.

So how do you make Google happy? It’s  relatively simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

To get a good ranking with Google, you should focus on two things: adding valuable content, and getting involved with good people.

On the Internet, you add valuable content by writing informational articles and putting them on your web site. Often. The more you update your site with good content, the better you look to Google. Over time, they begin to see your site as an information repository, not just an online sales floor.

The way you get involved with good people is through high quality links. If you’re a realtor, you want to make sure you’ve got links on your page to resources that help homebuyers. If your company makes cookies, have links to things like the FDA’s web page, or a well-respected nutrition web site.

With Google, the emphasis is on quality over quantity, so with every update you make to your site, make sure you’re giving your visitors something valuable.

If you need a bit more guidance, don’t be afraid to drop us a line.

-Dave Borland