Tony’s Website Design Blog

Here's an email I just sent to a client and I thought it would be good content to post here:

Well, there's a bit more to it than just changing some words on your website to make your site rank higher. On some websites with less competition, you can do that and have some success. With the industry you are in, it's more competitive and you'll need to do more. This includes, but is not limited to the following:

1. Adding content to the site - you need to look like an authority on what you do. Google wants to give people the best results. You can't trick Google. You need to have the content to back up what you're saying.

2. More keyword research and cross linking - Further keyword research should be done and certain pages should be targets for certain keywords. Again, this comes down to having enough content since you can't do that with very little content.

3. Inbound links - the more sites that link to you, the better. Each link is like a vote for your website. The website with the most votes in its category wins. We can do this for you as well and it's beyond our initial, on-site SEO work.

Regarding a budget for this, if you made $1000 on a job and put that into your website (copywriting, marketing, SEO) and got 10 jobs from it - is that worth it for you?

Honestly, I'll often send this type of email to a client after they ask what you're asking and then never hear from them again. The few that do get our help get better results and return on their investment. There's simply more competition on the Web now than a year ago, than five years ago. It's going to get even tougher. The fact is, your competition is investing time and resources into coming up first in searches and you can't get by unless you do it as well.

And that's the truth. It IS getting tougher to rank high. Gone are the days when you can just change some text in your title tags and see an instant boost. That's part of it but there is so much more. How much more completely depends on what your competition is doing.

People ask us how much SEO costs. It's completely variable. It will depend on your industry, keyword volume and your competition. Luckily, today it's still fine to throw about $1000 toward SEO and see some results - for most companies. If you want us to do that for digital cameras, then multiply that by about 100 and you're in the neighborhood.

And $1000 is very cheap. Businesses spend more than that on print ads - easily! I've got close connections to some big players in the SEO world and they are doing multi-million dollar contracts, just for SEO. If you can't at least spend $1000 for SEO, then forget it - you don't understand the industry that well and don't understand how you'll get return on your investment. I know SEO is this mystical thing but it's really not. I've got plenty of posts here on my blog that explain that, so I won't repeat it here. It takes money to make money, right?

-Tony

As people are finding out, it's important to have your website up to date. It's now, more than ever, the first place where people will go to find out about your business. And that makes sense, too. The Web is everywhere - in about every home, at the office, at coffee shops and on phones. People are now used to having the Web wherever they go. Sites like Facebook and Twitter thrive on having the very latest information possible available. If you're website is 2 months old, it has cobwebs on it. Researching anything is only a few seconds away.

Make sure you're not giving people old information and make sure you're not holding back information that they should have.

"Who Updates the Website?"

I'm sure that's a question that company presidents say a lot. They understand the importance of the website but are wondering who is responsible for it. Maybe it's someone who is tasked with 10 other jobs that take priority over updating the company website. That just doesn't work in today's market. Someone should be updating it at least weekly, if not more.

We just started working with a local insurance company here and they have someone they just hired whose job it is to keep the website updated along with all their social media sites. Yeah, she gets paid to tweet and update Facebook but the company sees the value in having updated information and reaching a younger demographic who are using sites like Twitter and Facebook. This just shows you how important up to date information really is.

"Who Can Update the Website?"

If your company isn't blessed to have someone on staff to update your website, then it makes a lot of sense to outsource it. It's much cheaper than hiring someone to do it and you still get the website updated frequently. Because you hire a website design firm to do the work, it's being done by experts who test their work in multiple browsers and know how to fix things that have programming behind them. It's very difficult to find one person that can do great design, work on SEO and do programming work. I think there are 3 of them out there and they're all doing very well. :-) That's why it makes tons of sense to hire a website firm that has a team of these kinds of experts.

Website Maintenance Plans

There are many kinds of web maintenance plans out there. Some require that you pay a monthly fee, like a retainer, for have that web design firm available. Other plans have you only pay for the work that you need done. Some plans may work better for different companies but most small to medium sized businesses will find that the pay-as-you-go type of website maintenance plan works the best for them.

Here at Webstix, we have a system called "Maintenance Blocks" that works very well. It's a pay-as-you-go type of system.

Maintenance Blocks

Here is how our Maintenance Blocks work:

• Each block is a half hour of time.
• You can use that time for anything you want: design, updates, programming or SEO (we don't clean windows, sorry)
• You get an account set up where you first deposit blocks and then tell us how to use those blocks.
• We quote the website maintenance work before we do it (unless you give us the go ahead right away).
• We stick to that quote unless the scope of work changes - in that case, we'll re-quote the work.
• We deduct the blocks and the rest stay in your account for future use.

The pricing of a block will vary. They are pre-paid, so the more you buy in advance, the better rate you get.

Find out more about Maintenance Blocks now or get right into it and submit a website maintenance request.

Get that website up to date!
-Tony

Webstix is 9 years old today and starts year 10 - happy birthday!

-Tony

As a follow up to my last post, Playing Monopoly - The Top Spot in Google, I found this article today:

Link Building is Still a Numbers Game (www.seosmarty.com)

When it comes to ranking being first is the only thing that matters. Last month I had a site that has been ranked #2 for it’s main keyword move up to #1, want to see what the traffic was like?

The article shows that being #1 is 7 times more traffic than being #2. Seven times!

Ok, that's just this one site in particular, but it still makes that same point as my last post. You really can't stop at #2 if you've worked hard to get there. How much more traffic you get is going to depend on your keyword and how much traffic (queries) that keyword gets. That's really what you can say.

How Does SEO Work?

I've found one way to easily explain the magic of SEO to people and it can be done in less than a minute. There's really no magic at all. SEO is pretty simple. Here goes:

1. Google "click here".
2. What website do you get?
3. Why?

Think about it. Why would that website be relevant for that search. They have nothing to do with each other - nothing at all but yet it's the top result and isn't going anywhere. It's simply because there are links to that page on probably every 3rd website out there. The text that is linked are the words "click here" so that's why that site (that page) ranks #1 for that keyword.

So how do you get your website ranked high for a keyword? Get lots of links to it from lots of different websites. There you go... simple.

Oh, and as I always say... don't link the words "click here" on your site. Don't write sentences like this:

To view our beautiful website portfolio, click here.

Instead, write this:

View our beautiful website portfolio.

And then Google will see the link to that page (portfolio.html) and think that page you're linking to must have to do with "website portfolio." Even doing this within your own website - especially from your home page - creates a "link net" which fine tunes your SEO linking and sends the right traffic (juice) to the right page.

So, as you can see, SEO is simple but yet complex. There are things like going about getting all those links from other websites and choosing the right keywords that takes skill and using the righttools - just like you'd hire a construction company to build you a house, not a mechanic.

Happy Memorial Day - Thank You, Vets!
-Tony