Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web search
Straight from the horses mouth – Matt Cutt’s from Google talks about keywords in the meta tag.
Questions to ask before you rebuild your website
Seth Godin, guru of permission marketing and leading edge thinking on new media, and new marketing has posted this list of questions to ask before you redo your website on his blog.
My additions/comments are shown in bold italics.
- What is the goal of the site?
- In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur? How do we measure these outcomes?
- Who are we trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does she want? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?
- How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level? Who is ultimately responsible for the project?
- Who are we trying to reach? Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?
- What are the sites that this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?
- Are we trying to close sales? Have we thought of the back office logistics to process these sales?
- Are we telling a story?
- Are we earning permission to follow up?
- Are we hoping that people will watch or learn?
- Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
- Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?
- Do people find the site via word of mouth? Are they looking to answer a specific question?
- Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
- Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?
- Is that information high in bandwidth or just little bits of data?
- Do we want people to call us?
- How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?
- Who needs to update this site? How often? What skills/tools do we need to make the updates?
- How often can we afford to overhaul this site?
- Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?
- Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?
- How much money do we have to spend? How much time? Can we stage the roll out of the project?
- Does the organization understand that ‘everything’ is not an option?
Do you have any questions to add to this list?
What is Google Wave?
Google Wave is tipped to be the “next generation” of Internet communication and was first announced by Google in May this year. The name was inspired by the Firefly television series in which a Wave is an electronic communication (often consisting of a video call or video message). Google Wave will be launched to a select group of people at the end of this month and soon after that to the internet population.
In traditional email, you send a message to one or more recipients which consists of a message and possibly attached. The recipient can then reply to the sender or reply to all. Google’s Gmail, built on this with the threading of conversations, so replies to emails are joined together in one thread. This can be confusing at first but is really useful once you get the hang of it.
Google Wave is the next innovation on this. Instead of having of a message (eg email) as a standalone piece of information you have a Wave which is an entire conversation containing many forms of media between 2 or more people.
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. You see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
So that makes it an email, document, forum, wiki, chat, video library, image library, podcast, social network and collabation system all in one.
An example of google wave
Terminology that is currently used is;
Wave is a group of wavelets, consisting of one or more participants. A wave is a living thing, with participants communicating and modifying the wave in real time.
Wavelet is a part of wave, a threaded conversation that is spawned from a wave (including the initial conversation). Wavelets serve as the container for one or more messages, known as blips. The wavelet is the basic unit of access control for data in the wave. All participants on a wavelet have full read/write access to all of the content within the wavelet.
During the lifetime of a wave, you may spawn private conversations, which become separate wavelets, but are bundled together within the same “wave.” Since events occur at the wavelet level or below, the context of an event is restricted to a single wavelet.
Blip is the basic unit of conversation and consists of a single messages which appears on a wavelet. Blips may either be drafts or published (by clicking “Done” within the Wave client).
Below is the 1hr20min video of the announcement of Google Wave in May this year.
What is the best thing you can do for your website
So you've got a website, what next. What can you do now to get it working for you and working for your business?
- Email Marketing – a simple, regular, valuable email message to your database can have incredible increase on your enquiries and sales.
- Google Adwords / Facebook Advertising – Target Google or Facebook ads can get in front of new prospects immediately and provide instant traffic and enquiries. It's under your control, scalable and measurable.
- SEO – Survey your best clients and find out what words they would use if they were looking for your products & services. Optimise your website in search engines for these words.
- Social Networking – Interact with communities such as Twitter, Stumble Upon, Facebook, and LinkedIn to form relationships with your target market and drive them to your site.
- Design – what is the perception that your website is creating. Does it match the brand that you have or that you are trying to convey? How people perceive your business is their reality.
- Outsource – if you don't have the skills or the time to do it yourself, let a professional help you. It will be well worth the investment and you can spend your time doing what you do best.
- People – brand individuals by using blogs, twitter and articles. People like to do business with people more than companies.
- Quality – people seek consistency and quality. Make sure your website is error free, easy to navigate around, generally helpful and everything the user expects. Test, Test then Test again.
Top 8 Tips for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Here are some of the simple things you can do to ensure that your website is optimised to be easily found in search engines such as Google
1. Title Tag
The title tag appears in the top left bar of your browser.The number one factor in ranking a page on search engines is the title tag. Make sure the key words that you want to found for are in your title tag. These can usually be set in your content management system (CMS) or are part of the heading meta tags in the code of your webpage.
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
Anchor text is the text that appears underlined and in usually in blue for a link from one webpage to another. Inbound links are links from other peoples website. You should try and get as many websites that have a similar subject as yours to link to your website, with your key words in the anchor text.
3. Global Link Popularity of Site (PageRank)
How many pages are linking to your page is called link popularity, or in Google, PageRank.
The more sites link to you, the better. Quality content is the most important factor to getting bound links. Try adding a new page of content or update content every couple of days. The only way to perform well in SEO now is to have a rich content site.
4. Age of Site
When was the domain of the site registered? Nothing you can do about this, but there is evidence that suggests that how long you have your domain registered for makes a difference (spam sites are not registered for long). If you are thinking about building a new website register your domain name now. Put a one page website with content rich in keywords on it and have at least one link to it from another site that is already listed in Google. While you are planning and building your site Google will the one page and at least the ball is rolling.
5. Link Popularity within the Site
This is the number of links to the page from inside your own domain.
Because of #2, it's critical that you link to pages from within your site using the right anchor text. Make sure that you:
- Use the linked titles setting
- Make good used of the Most Read, Related Items and Latest News modules.
- Have a sitemap component linked to right from your homepage
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links and Popularity of Linking Site
It's important that you get quality inbound links. This means they have to be from a site that is topically related to your site, and one that has a high PageRank.
It's worth submitting once to directories.
Type “related:www.yoursite.com” into google and contact the top 20 returns for links. If possible, also have have a blog, and network with others in your area of interest. Make sure you frequently link to other blogs in your area of interest.
7. Keyword Use in Body Text
Optimise your page for what you actually write instead of writing for what you want to optimise.
It sounds backwards but makes more sense from a marketing point of view.
Write quality content that is valuable and captivating for your target maker. Then use the tool of your choice to find the keyword density of the page. (eg http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/)
Take the top three key phrases and add them to the meta keywords, title and description. Keywords in H1-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings. Using keywords in bold or strong tags – slight effect, same with img alt tags and filenames.
If you are not happy with the top three key phrases or they are generic terms. Edit and review the content with more of the keywords that reflect what the page is about.
8. Friendly URLs
The word is still out on whether Friendly URLs have a positive effect on Search Engine Optimisation, but they certainly don't hurt and increase the likely hood that you will have keywords in the anchor text for inbound links. A friendly URL is one that has a form like www.mysite.com.au/desiredkeyword.aspx instead of www.mysite.com.au/default.aspx?page=23&prodId=45
Does your website have a call to action?
Are you scratching your head because your website just isn't providing the enquiries or sales that you expected?
If you are driving significant traffic to your website and it's not turning into business then first you need to look at the basics.
If you can tick the following boxes
* professionally designed
* fast loading
* clearly structured
* professional can carefully placed images
* logical, common sense structure and navigation
* good font size
and you are still not getting good conversion rates, then I can almost bet that there is no ”Compelling Call To Action!
Are your visitors clear about what action to take? Or do they look around your website, absorb your information, think “That's Nice” and then continue on to someone else's (maybe your competitions) website.
When confronted with a choice, most of people will take the easiest course of action. If that choice is “no choice,” that's exactly what they will do.
So how do you fix this problem?
Well, that's the easy part. You decide what action you'd like your web visitor to take, and tell them in no uncertain terms. But don't give them too many choices. Have one or at the most two choices for them to make. People get confused when you give them too many options. Keep it simple, and point your prospects to the best option and you'll get a lot more enquiries and sales.
In Summary, have a call to action on every page
Every page on your website should have a call to action. This action may be to get them to contact you, or it may just take them to the next page in the website that you want them to read.
Examples are
* Click here to contact one our qualified consultants
* Call now on xxxx xxxx to get started
* For more information click here
* Leave your email address and we'll send you a weekly marketing tip
How to get started in your online business
If you want to create an online business then you are going to need help building it in the first place. Then you will need ongoing help in supporting and continuing to evolve it. This is why it’s important to find a company that you can build a long-term relationship with.
When looking for a company:
- Use a company that is passionate, but constructively critical, about your idea. If they don’t believe in your idea then they are not going to do a great job. But be careful if they blindly love your idea, because they may be faking enthusiasm to win the work.
- Use someone you feel comfortable with because you will want to build a long-term relationship with them. If you don’t feel at ease with them now, you won’t in the future.
- Ask to see examples of their work in similar fields and for projects of similar size and complexity.
- Speak to their clients and ask questions about how the initial project went. Was it on time and on budget? How was the project managed? What was the quality of the end product like? How was the support and follow up after the site was launched?
- Don’t choose the cheapest solution. We are talking about your online business here. You are better off delaying your plans and raising the extra funds than sacrificing quality and the success of your idea.
- Look for companies that have strong technical and marketing skills.
- Avoid sole traders and micro-businesses. Sole traders tend to be ‘flat out’ working on someone else’s project when you need them.
Your website is your business and you need your development resources to be available when you need them. Over the years we have taken over many websites that were started by a one-man-band but never finished.
How to make an effective home page
Have you ever gone to a website and after a glimpse around it, you have no idea what the website is about or the company does? I can almost guarantee you've have, because I would say that three quarters of the websites I visit do nothing to create a first impression and engage the user.
If you've ever heard me speak, you'll know I'm a big fan of Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing and Purple Cow. I was reading his article, “Blow up your home page” and it really hit a cord.
With the way search engines, Adwords and other sponsored links work, most people that you attract should go directly to the content (or message) in your site that is of interest to them. The home page should only be visited when people go there after getting your business card or generic marketing material.
You should think of your home page as the foyer of your office in a physical encounter or your reception in a phone encounter. It is there to give the user a snap shot of your core solutions and allow them to easily get to the information that they are looking for.
Three things a homepage need to achieve.
1. Create a first impression. It should enforce your brand and your corporate image.
2. Let them know what you do. How can you sum up your business in the least number of words, so that anyone can know what you do?
3. Direct users to the information. The navigation and/or search function of the site should make it easy for anyone to get to the information that they want in logical and simple manner.
7 Reasons why every business needs a website
Websites…”can't live with them, can't live without them.” Well perhaps in a business context it should be websites…”if you want one you need to devote the time and the money to make it work, but you can't afford not to have one.”
What's the first thing you do when you want to find out something about another company, a company that you potentially want to buy stuff off, a company that will become a supplier of goods and services. Usually 2 things
- you look them up on the web
- you ask other people if they've ever heard of them
If your reputation is so good that the phone just rings endlessly with new customers, then maybe you can postpone working on your website, but if not, you bet get moving and make sure your website is working for you.
If you are a micro business and can't justify the budget for a website, have a look at this great article from Seth Godin's Blog.
So here are my top reasons why every small business should have a web site.
Establish Credibility – A Web site establishes you as a professional in your field and helps people to feel more comfortable doing business with you. Perception equals reality and your website helps create the perception of your company.
Enhance Customer Relations – Your website is another office and another shopfront. It is often your customers first port of call, so you can really improve your customer relations by making sure your website helps your customers find what they want and seamlessly makes it easy to physically contact you if they can't find what they want.
Increase Customer Spending – Your office is open from 9 to 5, but your website is open 24×7. Customers like to research, enquire and buy at all times of the day. Particularly if they are in different times zones.
The world is your oyster – The more unique your product or service is, the further a field people will come to buy it. A website opens the door to the entire world.
Gather Customer Data – Collecting information on your customers' tastes and interests is harder to do without a website. Web tracking software lets you see who's been to your site, what they looked at and where they came from. Combine this with a good permission marketing strategy and you can start building a database from which to build an entire eMarketing strategy.
Stand Out from the Competition – A small business can have a website that is as effective as a multinational. The web is a true equalizer when it comes to size.
Drive Traffic to an Offline Location – A website can drive customers to your shop, office, practice or phone number. Just cause your business doesn't operate online it doesn't mean that your customers won't look for you online.
Finally remember that the website is the heart of your eMarketing strategy, but it is still only one part. Don't forget to consider the rest.
Designing websites for the majority of users
Designing a website is often a trade off, because there are so many different variations of browser, screen resolution and operating system. If you had the time and resources, it would be great to create a dynamic website that determines what browser and screen resolution the user has and then delivers a website specifically for them, but for most businesses this is not feasible.
The strategy I would suggest is to optimise your site for the majority. Make sure it still looks ok and functions for other configurations and then don't worry too much about the negligible minority.
So how do you find out who the majority is? There are a number of sites that give statistics on this. One I use is w3schools. It also shows historical data, so you can try and see where the trends are going, so you can also consider the future.
Using this I would recommend the following
Browser
Optimise for MS Internet Explorer (both IE6 and IE7) – 55.6% but make sure it also will look good in Firefox – 31%. Don't worry about Safari unless Mac users make up a significant part of your target market.
Screen Resolution
Optimise for 1024 x 768, ie the design should fill the screen but have no horizontal scroll bar on a PC set with screen resolution 1024 x 768 with the browser website maximised. It should still work for 800 x 600, but a horizontal scroll is ok, and on screens larger than 1024 x 768 the design should be centred in the screen. It is ok for the content area to stretch to an extent, but it stretch to the full length of the screen, then on large resolutions, you end up with more than 25 words per line which limits the ability for the user easily read the copy.
A word on Mac's.
While Mac's are gaining popularity they still make up a very small proportion of internet users (3.5%). This 3.5% is then heavily made up of people in the graphic design, advertising and creative industries. If you want to attract this market then it's important to consider this market when developing your website. If you don't want to attract this market then your probably better off spending your time and resources on improving your website for the majority of users.
