Website Blog
Why Have a Website
Stuff About Website Creation and Internet Marketing Blog
November 21st, 2013
Why does every business need a website?
Did you know that in a recent survey by Inc. Magazine that over 75% of consumers search online for a local company to service their needs? And that other surveys put the percentage even higher than that! When was the last time you used the phone book to locate a local company? Even the phone book companies are building an online directory because they know that the days of the phone book are numbered.
Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY (maybe not grandma but everybody else), searches online these days. Either through their home computer, smart phone or tablet. If you are not online (your competitors are trust me) than you are missing out on all of that business that is looking for your type of company.
People I talk to tell me that even if a friend or relative refers a company to them they still go online and check them out. If there is no website then that company loses credibility. For some business's, credibility means everything.
Your website is your storefront. If you don't have a traditional brick and mortar store then your website becomes your only storefront. If you do have a traditional brick and mortar store then your website becomes your virtual storefront. When I used to run a retail store for a large floor covering chain we learned soon enough that the outside of the store was the "first impression" that the customers got when they approached the front doors. This "first impression" would carry over into their buying decisions when they entered the store. The same goes for your online storefront. If it looks great. If it is simple to navigate. If it shows well to the consumer then you have a great chance of getting that customer to actually call you or come to your store.
Have a website! Have a great looking website! Generate more business! Easy, huh??
Why Have a Site Map
Stuff About Website Creation and Internet Marketing Blog
December 1st, 2014
Why Have a Site Map.....
Having a site map for your website is a great idea.
There are two main reasons to have a site map. First, a site map helps visitors navigate around your website. They can pull up a static site map that is on your website and find where they want to go very easily. A static site map should be comprised of every area that is on your website so visitors can see the structure of your whole site on one page, right in front of them. Of course, the site map should be linked so the visitors can just click on the area that interests them and go right to the page.
Secondly, a site map that is a great way for Google and the other search engines to be able to index your site. Submitting a site map to Google will get you indexed faster. You won't have to wait for Google to stumble upon your site because you are letting Google know that you are there.
Site maps are a great idea and should be used for just about every site.
What's Next?
Stuff About Website Creation and Internet Marketing Blog
August 8th, 2015
What's Next?
Okay, so you have a website for your new company. Now what?
This is the second article in my new series on a new company's online presence and continued interaction with consumers and potential clients on Internet related services.
Having a website is a great start but where do you go from there? You need to get yourself found on the Internet. Google wants all of it's search results to be relevant to the searcher. People search for all kinds of things on the Internet and Google wants to be your preferred search engine. So it is important to Google to present relevant results when people search for things.
So Google has provided certain information to webmasters to insure that rules are followed thus insuring quality search results for their customers. Having a website is not enough. You need to be aware of what Google wants so that you can optimize your site to conform to those wants.
One important thing to remember is Google wants high quality fresh content on websites. If you are providing fresh content on your website, Google's search bots will find this when they crawl your site and rank you accordingly. This is one of the myriads of ranking factors involved when ranking your site albeit an important one. Probably the most important ranking factor!
So having unique, new and quality content is very important to where you will show up in search results (of course this also takes the most work).
Also, when writing your unique and high quality content it would be wise to know which keywords are important (and words you would like to rank for) and populate your content with these words. Google will add importance and relevancy to any content that provides a higher keyword density score (You can overdo this so be careful. Too high of a keyword density score and Google will assume you are trying to game the system and will penalize your site and thus your rankings!).
To sum up: New high quality content, keyword rich content and ever changing content is an important factor in whether you will show up in search results! This cannot be understated.
More to come......
Why CMS?
Stuff About Website Creation and Internet Marketing Blog
August 20th, 2014
Why CMS?.....
CMS stands for content management system. It is a software based system for creating a website.You can either code a website from scratch or you can use a CMS.
Coding a website from scratch can be a very arduous and expensive way of creating a website. Everything must be coded from scratch. Whereas, a CMS created website you can leverage the structure of existing templates and the software core to have a jump start on the coding. You start from a base and customize from there.
CMS has allowed the website creation companies to be able to create affordable websites for smaller companies! No longer do websites cost 10's of thousands of dollars. You can have a very creatively designed website now for just hundreds of dollars.
Remember though, having a website and having a website that is "found on the Internet" are two different things. Anybody can make a website but not everybody makes websites with on-page SEO created right into structure of the website......
The Growing Importance of Site Speed
Stuff About Website Creation and Internet Marketing Blog
February 10th, 2014
The Growing Importance of Site Speed.....
Site speed. Or loading speed. In other words, how fast your website loads.
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How fast does your website load? |
Google is putting more emphasis on how fast a website loads. They feel that a faster loading web site enhances the user experience. And Google is all about the end user experience. Google has come to realize that people don't/ won't wait for a slow loading website to appear. If a site takes too long to load, most people will just exit out and go to another site in the search results.
You don't want this to be your site. A website that loads too slowly and hence provides a low quality user experience. If your site is slow, Google will lower your rankings. Lowering your rankings will cost you in the search results. Of course site speed is not the only factor in site ranking but it is becoming increasingly important to Google and plays a big part in where you will be found in search results.
Knowing this, we must do the things required to speed up your website. This is an integral part of
current SEO strategies. Also, increasing your site speed will be an ongoing task. You won't just optimize your site once and figure all is good now. We need to constantly monitor our sites to make sure they are still loading at a fast pace.
Some things that can be done to speed up your site are:
- optimize your images for file size
- minify your javascript, css and html code
- leverage browser caching
- avoid landing page redirects
- enable compression
- reduce the size of above the fold content
- use CSS sprites
- and lots more really....
There are a couple of online tools that can be used to look at your site speed. Google developers will use page speed insights. There is also Yahoo's YSlow and GTMetrix which will test both for you.
Page speed is getting more and more important all the time so it is worth it to spend some money on having your site speed looked at and op