Archive for the ‘Website improvement’ Category

CityCenter Co. works hard to make sure your website is visible to the search engines. It is vital that your site be found by the search engines so that it can be found by the searchers. We do however caution not to over do it, not to over optimize the site.

What do we mean by over optimizing? This is when the use of keywords supersedes the message of the website. The key is purpose. The purpose of a website, like any other marketing media, is to invite the reader to communicate. It is very important that the site present the message you want to your prospects to hear and to solicit some action from them in the form of an e-mail, a phone call or some reach for your services.

Over optimization can take several forms:

1. Keywords are used so many times that the text reads like it was written for a ten year old. The site becomes stultified, it no longer delivers your message or guides the reader to action.
2. The headline for the site does not attract the reader’s attention. Readers scan your webpage to see if this is the information they are looking for. They read the headline or the first paragraph and on that basis they decide whether to keep on reading. If the headline is more focused on impressing the search engines than on securing the reader’s attention then you’ve wasted the visit.
3. A keyword can be overused to such an extent that the search engines adjudicate the site is spamming that word and ignore it.

Write for the person reading the website, not the search engines. You sell to people not search engines. Make sure your message stays intact and on target.

Optimization is necessary, you have to be able to be found, but we urge caution when doing it. Keep your message in mind and be sure not to lose it. Use keywords but use them to deliver your message not obliterate it.

How do you motivate your employees? How do you keep them up to date with new technology?

Say you have an employee who is “just doing their job,” making you some money, doesn’t embarrass you but isn’t putting forth that extra effort to create new business or learn anything new to better service to your clients. What would you do?

You could fire them, but that means all the time and energy you’ve already put into them goes with them.

You could try to motivate them. Get them to see how much more their fellow employees are doing and try and get them to “get on board”.

Or you could just let them be.

Now what if that “employee” was your website? It looks good, brings in some business and presents your company in a good light. But is it doing all that it could? How do you find out? It’s not a flesh and blood person you can sit down and give a pep talk to. You can’t ask it to look at what the other employees are doing, or to “try a little harder”. Or can you?

True, the website can’t look at what other websites are doing, but you can. When was the last time you checked out your competitors’ websites? Are they doing something on their sites that you should be doing on yours? Does their homepage explain their services better than yours does? Are their product pictures clearer, or presented in a more attractive or eye-catching way? Is it easier to find their contact information?

We suggest you occasionally search for competitors. Go to Google and search your keywords and see what comes up. Now look at their websites. Take a good look. Not just at their design, but at their functionality. Take good notes. Any time you find a feature you think would make your site “a better employee,” write it down with the URL of the page you found it on. Then keep going. Find something else on the site you like, or go on to the next site and see what’s special about it. This doesn’t have to take long, but even if it takes an hour or two it will be time well spent.

Now take your list and email it to your web designer. (You can use sales@citycent.com if you can’t remember their email.) We’ll look at the sites and the various features to determine how best to incorporate them into your site. Then we’ll put together our recommendations and a proposal for implementation.

Get the most out of every employee you have, flesh and blood or cyber. Look them all over and start those pep talks.

We sometimes run across online tools that can show you how to make improvements to your website. Here are two really good ones:

Website Grader: http://websitegrader.com/ Just fill in the URL of your website (and if you wish some of your competitors) and it will give an overall score reflecting things like website traffic, SEO, and social popularity. It will also give you some ideas on how to improve your website.

Browser Size: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ From Google, this one helps you visualize how much of your web page others can see. This is useful when originally designing a page, but also later on when you add  a new element and want to make sure that the majority of your users can see it without scrolling.

Both of these are simple but effective tools – enjoy!

And Happy New Year from CityCenter!

In the last few months we have talked a lot about what you can do internally to improve your sites ranking on the search engines. We looked at finding and using your keywords in the Page Titles, Page Content, Image Tags and using Proper Coding to up your sites rank.

There is another very important aspect of getting your site ranked high on the search engines: link building. This is the practice of obtaining or creating links on other web sites back to your site. There are a number of ways to go about this. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Blogging – Set up a blog for your website and create keyword rich content which will be of interest to your clients and prospects. Then let the world know it’s there with ads, links from your site, links from your newsletter and RSS feeds. You can also connect your blog to your Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media accounts and also set it up to automatically send out as a newsletter. All these would create links back to your website. You can learn more about blogging from these articles.
2. Social media sites – Set up business accounts for your company on Facebook and LinkedIn. and keep them current by updating them with keyword rich information. Be sure to link your posts back relevant pages on your website.
3. Write articles – Write and submit keyword rich articles to article directories like Ezine, www.goarticles.com or www.articlecity.com or use an article submission service such as SendArticles.
4. Write press releases – Write and submit keyword rich press releases to sites like PRweb or PRlog.
5. Buy links – Pay per click search results and services like Google Ads.
6. Ask for links – Requesting links from other related sites is always suggested. Find sites which relate but don’t compete with your site and request a link. Some good sites include trade associations, clubs, directories, Chambers of Commerce, and sites about your product or service which do not themselves sell. The higher the ranking of such sites the better the affect a link will have on your site. Avoid sites which have no relation to yours, such as link farms, link exchanges which indiscriminately put you on any site no matter the content (you could end up being connected to porn.)

Summary:

Links into your site are vital. Some SEO gurus estimate they account for up to 80% of your Google ranking. How many links do you have now? You can easily check it on Google by searching “link:www.yourdomain.com”. Now that you have a number, get to work increasing it.

Here are some articles on link building which we hope you find useful:

• http://www.realwebmarketingblog.com/2009/11/why-you-need-to-do-link-building-1.html
• http://www.seomoz.org/article/advanced-link-building
• http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/More-Link-Building-Tips-from-Ivan/

It’s not just what you say that matter’s, it’s how you say it.

Sometimes it’s how you code it.

If you’ve got something important to say, you want people to see it. So what do you do? You can make that sentence bold, italicize it, increase the type size, or put a bullet point in front of it. That way the reader knows that sentence is more important than others.

But how would a search engine know what was important on the page? Simple, by properly coding the webpage you can let both the reader and the search engines know at the same time. Here’s how…

• Header Tags
  Header Tags tell the search engine “This is important” By default the text is black, the type size is increased and bolded, however they can now be custom programmed to look however you wish. There are eight levels of Header Tag, <h1>through <h6>. <h1> showing more importance than <h2> which is more important than <h3>. You should utilize their hierarchical structure logically. If you use <h1> for the main headings of your content, the next level of subheadings should be <h2>, and so forth. Include keywords and phrases within header tags for the best bang for your buck.


Properly coding the webpage you can let both the reader and the search engines know what is important.

• Emphasis Tags
  Emphasis tags include bold <strong>, italics <em>, and underline. There is no difference in value, so you can utilize them all to spread emphasis around “organically” within your content. But don’t overuse them. Bolding or italicizing too much text takes away the emphasis for the search engine as everything seems to be important.
• Bullet Points and Number Lists
  Using the ordered (number) and unordered (bullet) lists offers an excellent way to put emphasis on content in short, quick bursts. Using keywords and phrases within lists is a way to boost the emphasis you’re placing on pieces of your content. As with any of these emphasizing features, only use lists when it makes sense and when they flow naturally with the page’s content.
• META Descriptions
  The description tag is one or two sentences (about 25 words) describing the site. This tag often appears on the search engine results page as the description of the site. Proper use of keywords in this tag can help the search engines find you.
• META Keywords
  The keyword tag is simply a list of the keywords a person might put into a search engine when trying to find a site that deals with what your company does.

Summary

Good text is essential. Proper coding of that text is just as important. It not only lets the reader know what is significant, but tells the search engines as well. Take a look at your website. Does it emphasize your key points? Are those points coded so that the search engines can see the emphasis? If you need help checking these points, please let us know.

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” according to a Chinese proverb.

“A picture of a thousand words isn’t worth squat,” according to Google.
(Okay, we made this up.)

While images are important to your website’s message, they do not communicate to the search engines unless you take the extra effort to make them visible. There are several ways your web designer can code your images for better search engine visibility.

Example of HTML code for the image below.

1. Name your images correctly. The image name should be descriptive and contain key words. If the site is about clouds naming your pictures cloud.jpg is good, but a name like “cirrus-clouds.jpg” is better. Don’t over do it, “clouds-clouds-clouds.jpg” or “clouds-cirrus-clouds.jpg”, may be looked on as spam.

If the site is about clouds then naming your image "cloud.jpg" is good, but a name like "cirrus-clouds.jpg" is better *

Separate the words in the name with dashes. “Cirrus-clouds.jpg” will rank higher than “cirrusclouds.jpg” as cirrusclouds is not a word that is likely to be searched on.

2. The ALT attribute. The original intention of this attribute was to describe images for the vision impaired and to provide an alternate (ALT) description of an image which did not load properly. Thus, the ALT attribute should be a brief description of the content of the image as if you were explaining it to a blind person or a computer program which cannot see it, like a search engine.

Provide an alternate (ALT) description for an image which did not load properly.

The ALT attribute should utilize your keyword but not to the detriment of the description. A good ALT attribute for the picture above would be cumulus and cirrus clouds at sunset, it describes the picture while containing keywords relevant to the site. A bad ALT might be clouds, cumulus clouds, cirrus clouds as it is nothing but keywords. There is a good possibility it will be tagged as spam.

3. Image TITLE attribute. The image TITLE attribute can be valuable in making your images work for you. It gives you another opportunity to display keywords to the search engines. On some browsers, the TITLE attribute text displays when you place your cursor over the image, it also tells the search engine more about the image. It can be the same as the ALT or can go into more depth using your keywords.

4. Captions. Place a keyword rich caption next to the image. If the image is placed in the body of the site, surrounded by text content, having the keyword physically close to the image will also have benefits.

Summary:

Images are important. They make your site more aesthetic and quite often are the only way to make your point with visitors to your site. However, to make them valuable to your sites search engine ranking remember the following:

• use keywords in the image file names
• separate the keywords in a file name with dashes, not underscores
• include keywords in the image ALT attribute
• include keywords in the image TITLE attribute
• place the image in the immediate vicinity of keyword-related content and use a caption

As mentioned in the last post, if your image contains words, such as a quote, a testimonial, or a beautifully calligraphed message, those words will not appear to the search engine unless completely duplicated in the various attributes. They will not help your search engine ranking the way properly done text does. Therefore you have to weigh the importance of how it will look versus what it can do for you.

In the next post we will discuss other HTML coding that make your website more easily found.

* Important Note: We are website designers and really know nothing about clouds. If these are not cirrus clouds we apologize.

Search engines read words. This simple sentence is so important we’re going to repeat it. Search engines read words. Another way to say this is page content is very important in getting a high search engine ranking.

No matter how it is said, it means that if you want to come up high on the search results you need to have words on your pages.

According to search engine gurus, for best rankings there should be between 200 and 600 words per page for the search engine to index. This text needs to contain your keywords/phrases. That’s just common sense. But that doesn’t mean just putting your keywords down at the bottom a hundred times. That will get your site flagged as a spammer. You need to work your keywords naturally into the content so they are visible for the search engines and easily read and understood by the reader.

It is important to note here that search engines only read the text content of a website. Words displayed in graphics or as part of a flash presentation cannot be seen by the search engines. While these do display your message to a person visiting your site they are invisible to search engines. Using graphics to display words not only prevents search engines from reading your site, it also effectively blocks your content from being read by “reading” programs used by the visually impaired and from people who have images turned off.

Only the text content of a website can be seen and indexed by the search engines.

This sounds easy. You just use your keywords a lot when writing your content. But remember that when you’re making your content keyword rich, it still needs to read correctly for a real person.

Here are some ways to make your pages a quick, easy and interesting read, while also making them search engine friendly:

• Your keywords/phrases should be used in the first sentence of the page, as the first words if possible.
• Use at least 200 words per page.
• Don’t try and use all your keywords on one page. It is smarter to optimize each page of the site for one or two words and spread the keywords over different pages.
• Use your keywords/phrases as a natural part of your content. Just be sure you use them.
• Use keywords in your bullet items when you’re making your point. This is not only good for the search engines, readers often scan the bullet points first before reading the rest of the content.
• Highlight (bold) keywords in sentences where applicable
• Use keywords in your hypertext links
• Keywords should also be used in the page title (Read our post on Page Titles)

Summary:

Search engines read words. Keywords are what bring those visitors to the website. Good writing and useful information are what makes a site “sticky” (holds the visitor’s attention). Good writing using keywords will not only bring visitors to your site but keep them there as well.

In the next post we will discuss how to use keywords to make your images work for you in increasing your search engine visibility.

A “site map” is a file on a website that helps you find things on that site. There are two kinds of site maps both of which make your website more usable.

The first is a simple page on your website that lists – usually in outline format – the most important pages on your site. Sometimes a user will have difficulty finding what they are looking for with the normal navigation menus on a page so a site map provides an easy way to scan the titles of all the pages on your site. Also, the links on a site map are easily seen by a search engine so it is another way to ensure they check all of the pages on your website.

Here is what CityCenter’s site map page looks like:

A site map provides an easy way to quickly see the pages on a website

The second type of site map is specifically designed for search engines. It is a simple text file, but it is structured in a particular way, named “sitemap.xml” and contains specific information:

• URL (web address) of the web page
• the date and time that page was last modified
• how often it is usually changed, and
• what you think its relative importance is (compared to other pages on your site)

Here is what one line of a sitemap.xml file looks like:

<url><loc>http://www.citycent.com/about.htm</loc>
<lastmod>2009-06-12T05:37:02+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq><priority>0.50</priority></url>

It’s somewhat readable, but not something you’d really want to type out yourself. Luckily there are lots of online services (many free) and programs that will create a sitemap.xml file for you:

• http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/4
• http://sitemapdoc.com/
• http://www.addme.com/ror-sitemap-generator.htm
• http://gsitecrawler.com/

Some of those services also provide an editor so you can make modifications to the site map. Most often you’ll want to edit the “priority” field. The system works on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 with 1.0 having the highest priority. Setting a page to 1.0 won’t get it a higher ranking with Google, but it will tell the search engine viewing your site that that page is more important than others. But if you set everything to 1.0 then there is no difference and the search engine won’t be able to tell what you think has a higher priority. Usually you would put your home page at 1.0, your primary product or service page as 0.9 and pages that few people will need as a 0.1 or 0.2.

Once your site map is created you need to name it sitemap.xml and upload it to the main directory of your website – the same place your home page is. You’ll want to be sure that the file is structured properly or the search engines won’t be able to read it. Again, there are many free online services that will validate the file for you:

• http://www.validome.org/google/
• http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html
• http://www.webmasterwebtools.com/sitemap-validation/index.php

Google and other search engines will look for your site map and factor that information into their review of your site and the index they create for it.

So both types of site maps – one for humans and one for search engines – will help your website be more useful and visible. If you need help in creating either of these for your website please let us know.

The page title defines the title of the document. It is coded into the page by the web designer. The title tag:

• defines a title in the browser topbar
• provides a title for the page when it is added to favorites
• displays a title for the page in search-engine results

It is extremely important to your site’s search engine ranking, but it is often written incorrectly.

Page titles appear across the top bar of the browser. They tell the visitor and the search engines what the page is about. They allow you to tell the search engines which keywords define your website.

The page title appears across the top of the browser.

The page title appears across the top of the browser.

A title should be able to stand on its own and clearly communicate the contents of the page to the reader.

Titles should always contain your keywords and phrases as they are broadly used by search engines to index what the page contains. Each page of your site can, and should, have its own title. It allows you to steer the search engines to specific pages of the site by keyword. This also allows your website to be found with a larger number of keywords.

Here are some good page titles:

• Cardiology, heart and vascular disease, Pasadena, Southern California Heart Specialists
• Dry Cleaning, Laundry, Free Pickup and Delivery – BRYAN’S Cleaners and Laundry
• Rose Bowl Stadium – Sports, Special Events, Film Location

These titles use keywords and let the searcher know what the site will be about.

Bad page titles which we found on the web:

• BitTorrent
• Ubunto Home Page
• Services

These titles are useless unless the searcher already knows and is searching for a particular company. They do not assist in either page ranking or search visibility.

Search engines, such as Google use the page titles to index the page. They display the page title, or a portion of the title, at the beginning of their results.

Search engines display the page title, or a portion of the title, at the beginning of their results.

The page title is often the first impression a person gets of your website, even before they click to it.

It is very important that you use your keywords in your page title. They should appear before your company name and should appear in order of importance. Put the keyword or phrase you’ve chosen as most important first and then the next most important and so on, ending the title with your company name (see examples above).

Google displays the first 64 characters, including spaces, of the title while Internet Explorer and Firefox displays up to 95 characters. Therefore you should ensure that your keywords are prominent in the first 64 characters.

CityCenter Co. uses the page title “Website Design Los Angeles, CA, web design, redesign, programming – CityCenter Co.” It uses 82 characters with spaces. It is displayed completely in the web browsers. Google displays the title as “Website Design Los Angeles, CA, web design, redesign, programming…” The keywords are all displayed for the searcher to see.

The title is also saved when you bookmark a page. It will remind the user of what the page is about each time he checks his favorites.

Summary:
Page titles using well chosen keywords and phrases assist the search engines to properly index and display your site information. They help the people searching for your company to make an informed decision even before they get to your site. They keep your information in front of users who have bookmarked them.

In the next post we will discuss how to use keywords in creating your website’s content.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most asked about topics in web design. While we do not claim to be experts, we do study what the experts say and understand the basics.

In the next few weeks we will pass some of those basics on to you.

First, let’s define SEO. According to Wikipedia, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural search results.”

Search engines determine which sites appear on their results pages by the words used on the page. While beautiful graphics, audio and video can help the visitor understand your message, a search engine can only read the words. This makes the words you choose when writing and coding a website of prime importance. Choosing the proper words and using them correctly are what SEO is all about.

Now that we know what it is, we need to know how it is done.

The first thing you need to know is:

         What keywords do you want to be found on?

This might elicit a slew of answers. It also often brings an “I don’t know” response. So how do you decide? Here are some questions that might start you thinking in the right direction.

1. If you were looking to check out your competition, what word or phrase would you search on?
2. What are the most common words used describe what you do?
3. Is there a generic term for your product or service? 

Google Analytics reports are a very good tool for finding the keywords your website can currently be found with.

You can also check to see how people have found you in the past. Check your website’s usage statistics. Most hosts offer a free, or low cost, statistics program. Google offers Google Analytics which is a free service. These programs will tell you what keywords were searched on by people who came to your site.

Once you’ve determined which words describe what your business does there are several things that must be done with them in order to make your site as search engine visible as possible.  

In the next post we will discuss how to use the keywords you’ve found to create powerful web page titles that attract search engines.