Leadership Viewpoint

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become an issue that any online business agonizes over. I’ve heard that it’s all about keywords that are listed and used on your site. Others have told me that keywords no longer matter and that the addition of a Google sitemap is the driver behind SEO. I’ve also been told that getting lots of links to your site is what will drive SEO. So what’s the truth?

For a small business site, this one has good ranking and readership. Much of it came years ago, when we first posted articles online and scores of other sites linked to them. Maybe we are just lucky. Or maybe, just maybe, the main point of the web is to provide real value to your consumers. Consider the possibility that putting substantial content online will help your site more than all the strategies one can imagine. Develop original, meaningful content, and they will come…

We often encounter a similar, ‘manipulative’ approach to business too. I recently heard a young professional say, “Can’t you just make money off this?” to me as I was suggesting some ways to improve a program for a client. Sure, it’s easy to just make money off your clients, at least in the short term. Real, lasting business relationships, and your own self-esteem, come from doing the right thing for your clientèle, stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone in their best interests. Anybody can do the easy thing for their customers. Long-term partnerships come to those who do the extra something and ensure that their customer’s needs are fully met. Substance is truly the ante to play the game.

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If you are reading this, you have a pretty good sense of what a blog is. Strategically, it’s a great way to establish your expertise in the topics you select. Depending on how you administer it, it can also serve as a feedback and discussion opportunity with your readers.

The owner of the blog can select a number of topics and write about them whenever it is convenient. It is possible to write a number of entries at one time and pace out the timing of their publication, and it’s a nice way to keep fresh content on your website. If you selected Hostmonster as your website host, installing a blog is very simple. Go to the Cpanel Main Menu and click on Fantastico. You’ll find four blogs listed. I have tried three of them, and have finally settled on Wordpress as the best one I have used. To install it, first click on Wordpress in the left column. This will give you new content in the right column. Click on New Installation. It is a complex application and is going to add a lot of files. To keep things orderly, I installed it in a directory I named blog. You don’t have to, but I wanted to keep it as a subset of my main website. Complete the rest of the installation sections with your information, and then press Finish. Fantastico will then provide you with the full URL to your blog’s administration area. Be certain to bookmark it so you can find it again!

Go to your administration area and login. There are lots of choices and options to play with. Customize it any way you see fit. If you would like to change the appearance of the blog, you’ll love the choices that Wordpress offers. Google FREE Wordpress templates and you’ll find hundreds of choices. Have fun with it and follow the directions to upload your favorite.

Wordpress also offers a myriad of neat plugins. There are tools for eliminating spam, adding Google Adsense, calendars, offering podcasts and much more. It allows you to customize your blog and make it your own. Now get blogging!

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It’s not always easy to write multiple articles for your website. It takes time, talent and patience to build extensive original content. There are ways, however, to work around this. There are tons of free articles available for use on websites. I put an example of one online for your reference. In this example, I duplicated one of my basic pages and then dragged an HTML box onto the page and stretched it to the width I wanted. I then double-clicked on it and pasted the content into it. In this case, I haven’t linked the article to the remainder of my website. The link in this blog is the only way to get to it. It’s simply an example for this website building series.

I got the article from ARA Content. You can simply sign-up for their service, and use whatever you want. They even supply the photo! If you want to see the full scope of options, simply Google free articles and examine your choices. Be certain that the articles are licensed to be reprinted, and follow the rules laid out by your source. They will generally want to ensure that they are credited for the article.

Remember that one of your goals is to constantly update your content so that the search engines keep noticing you. This is an easy way to put up quality content and have regular updates simultaneously.

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News feeds simply funnel the latest news from major sources into your website. The constantly changing content, when done using php technology, garners the attention of search engine spiders as new content and may boost your site ranking.

I have placed 2 examples of RSS Feeds onto my website and will leave them in place for class members to view them.

The first one is on my Consulting page. Here’s how I did it.

1. Go to RSS Feeder and signup.

2. Login and select/format the feeds that you want for your site.

3. Copy the resulting code and paste it into a blank Notepad file on your computer. (START, PROGRAMS, ACCESSORIES, NOTEPAD)

4. Save the Notepad file as rssfeeds.php and upload it into the public_html file on your host.

5. Now go to the Main Cpanel Menu, and click on Apache Handlers.

6. There will be 2 data entry boxes. In the first one, type “.htm” without the quotes. In the second, type “server-parsed”, again without the quotes. Then click on ADD.

7. Repeat number 6 except change the entry of the first box to “html”.

8. Finally, go into your Webstudio page and click on the Cool Stuff tab on the bottom. Drag the HTML box onto your page where you want the news articles to appear. Stretch the box if you want it to be wider. Double click on the box and type the following into it:

!- -#include virtual=”/rssfeeds.php” - -
(Put a ‘less than’ sign before it and a ‘greater than’ sign after it.)

Upload the page to your public_html file and you’re all set!

The second example is on my Further Reading page. This one comes from Bravenet, which offers a number of neat, free extras for your website. Go to their news page and sign-up. Customize what you want, and they will generate a javascript code for you. Go into your Webstudio page and click on the Cool Stuff tab on the bottom. Drag the HTML box onto your page where you want the news articles to appear. Double click on the box and paste the code into it. Upload the page to your public_html file and you’re all set! While this one is much easier than the first example, the search engines will not see this feed, and it has no hope of boosting your site rankings.

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Once you’ve gone to the trouble of adding a variety of neat graphics and photos to your website, pages may not print neatly. For content-heavy pages like articles, this may be annoying to your visitors. To address this, professional websites often offer Printer Friendly versions of key pages, usually via pdf files. While Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is free, the full Acrobat Professional product retails for $449. There are, however, other ways to make pdf files. A simple FREE software solution is available for download with PrimoPDF.

A pdf is a better Printer Friendly version than a Microsoft Word document because you have complete control of the final output that the user will print, and because everybody with access to the Internet can have a free copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader; hence they can view it. No digital alterations can be made to a pdf by typical visitors. (I’m hedging that comment because I’m sure there are probably some geeks that can do something to it.) Hence, it is very important to create your Printer Friendly versions thoughtfully. Be certain to include the URL and your company identification on the document before converting it into a pdf file. Each of the articles on my website include a Printer Friendly version. It may be helpful to view one of them as an example.

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As your website grows, a long list of links for individual pages can become cumbersome. By the time my website had about 20 pages, I was no longer happy with the way all those buttons looked on each page. One way to address this is via a dropdown navigation menu, like the one I used. To see what I mean by this, go to my home page and run your mouse over the navigation buttons, you’ll see them open up to additional buttons. If you hold the mouse over Programs and then over any of the topics that dropdown, you’ll see additional sub-options dropdown. To create this device, I used a simple DHTML Menu Builder provided for free via the folks at CoffeeCup. Simply enter your URL’s and page names into their little software interface and in no time you’ll have a nice little dropdown menu. There are lots of color choices, as well as an option to make it horizontal rather than vertical too, if that fits your design better.

When I first made this menu, I asked a few questions of the expert moderators of the Webstudio Online Forum. I originally found them by clicking on the ‘Help’ link inside Webstudio. These folks have a ton of experience, and continually offer help and support to users of the software. In fact, one of them didn’t like the way the boxes overlapped in my original dropdown menu, so he went in and edited the code to improve it. He was also kind enough to explain what he had done, and since then I have been able to make minor modifications myself! Use the various ‘Help’ options to add to your website and accomplish your goals.

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Another nice (and smart) thing to do for your new website is to start an account with Google. Google is the largest of the search engines, and much more. Its offerings will be the topic of more than one entry. Both of these services are free.

SITEMAP

Most non-developers think a sitemap is the page that illustrates the layout of a website. I put a people sitemap on my website so that visitors can quickly look to see if their topic is covered. Among webmasters, however, there is another, more technical sitemap that is important to the spiders/robots that search the web. We want to help the robots find every page on our site, since that makes it easier for the search engines to list our pages. To make a sitemap, go to XML-sitemaps and follow their directions. Your initial URL should be your home page. Then upload the sitemap into the Public HTML file on your host server. Register with Google and follow their directions to add your sitemap.

ANALYTICS

If you are using Hostmonster for your site, you are already receiving a good bit of information on your website visitors. Google also offers very rich analysis of your website’s activity, with some different aspects and analysis. To get yourself set-up, go to Google Analytics and sign up for your free account. They will provide you with some code. Copy it and paste it into your page HTML via Webstudio Between the Header and Body. As a reminder of how to get there, double-click on the background of each page to open the ‘Object Properties’ dialog box. Go to the ‘Page HTML’ tab, and click on the ‘Between Header and Body’ option. Copy and paste the code from Google into this section on each page and save it. Then upload it to your host. Return to Google in about a week, and you’ll be amazed by the richness of the data that they are providing to you.

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There are SO many nice little items that you can add to your website, and most of them are free and easy. Over the next few days, I’ll walk you through a few of my favorites.

FAVICON

This is the little icon that appears before the http:// in the URL. It’s the icon that shows up in your Favorites list as well, hence the name favicon. It’s a subtle touch that big companies use. Now you can too! The first thing you need to do is decide on a simple graphic to represent your website. In my case, I took the lion from my logo. Pick an item with simple lines that will be an appropriate identity for your site. Using editing software, crop it into a square shape and save it as a small gif file. There are a few free favicon makers online. I use the one at Dynamic Drive. Their directions are very simple. Once you make it, simply drag it into your public http file at your host.

To ensure that it shows up with both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, it’s smart to place this:

link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico”

into the html code of your website. You’ll need to place a ‘less than’ bracket before it and a ‘greater than’ bracket after it. (When I type them into this page, the blog software assumes it’s a code and everything disappears.) To insert this code into a Webstudio, website, simply double-click on the background of each page to open the ‘Object Properties’ dialog box. Go to the ‘Page HTML’ tab, and click on the ‘Inside Page Header’ option. Copy and paste the code from above (with the brackets at the beginning and end) into this section on each page and save it. Then upload it to your host.

When I first did this, the favicon did not immediately show up on my computer. It was, however, appearing on computers that hadn’t been to my site before. Over time, the problem resolved itself and it shows up on my computer now.

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If you’ve been following along with these postings and building your site, you should now have a nice little website posted on the Internet. Now what will it take to get it listed and for people to find it? Luckily, the folks at Webstudio have a very simple method built into their program to make this easy. Simply double-click on the background of a web page, and a dialog box entitled ‘Object Properties’ will open. Click on the ‘Page Meta Tags’ tab and enter the Page Title, Description and Keywords. These should be whatever you want the page to be found under. Once that’s done for each page, it’s smart to also do it for the website as a whole. Go to Website, Website Properties, Web Search Information and complete that too. Then load the whole thing into your Public HTML file online, and you’re good to go!

There are lots of articles online regarding the ins and outs of loading these keywords. A comprehensive reference piece by Bruce Grossan provides an excellent understanding. A lot of websites employ various tricks to increase their rankings, so much so that search engines keep altering their processes to make it difficult to manipulate. In my experience, the real key to good rankings in the long term has been good content. Put worthwhile information on your website, label it with appropriate keywords, and submit it to the search engines. If you do your job, they will do theirs.

The other matter that you should keep in mind is that search engines seem to have a bias toward sites that are updated regularly. If you continually alter and improve your website, they will be more inclined to rank you higher, assuming more current content is more relevant to the searcher. Blogs work well toward this end, since the search engines are ‘pinged’ when new content is added. Whenever you do any major site updates, resubmit your information to the search engines. It doesn’t hurt anything, and it may just help.

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One thing about the Web that’s different from software on your computer is the incredible lack of standardization. The screen resolution issue is easily handled upfront with a decision. The challenge that multiple browsers create is not so simple. First, let’s be clear about browsers. Most people use Microsoft Internet Explorer. It is far and away the industry standard. An up-and-comer is Firefox, from the Mozilla Foundation. It’s growing in popularity and is often bundled with free Google products. It claims:

* Pop-up blocker
* Tabbed browsing
* Easy feed subscriptions
* Alerts about unsafe web pages

The past month of my own website’s analytics indicated that the proportion of usage was:

* Internet Explorer 83.49%
* Firefox 12.14%

This is important information because the two primary browsers often make your page look different to the user. Items are spaced out a bit differently, and occasionally graphic elements will overlap in one browser and look fine in the other! It’s all part of a master plan to drive website designers insane, and it’s working! It is very important that you download a copy of Firefox and look at your website in it. Webstudio’s preview feature uses Internet Explorer, so nothing extra is needed to check your website with it. Be certain to adjust your site as needed and then re-check it in both browsers before you upload to your host.

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