Las Vegas Web Design Blog | The Web Squad

In order to communicate effectively to all of one’s social networking friends, one would need to have a profile on each social site and then post to each one of those separately.  One would also have to check each profile separately to get any answers, questions, or comments at each site.  This process is very time-consuming and keeping track of every site is a nightmare.

Ideas have come up about decentralizing social networks.  Technology has already surfaced to do this; it is called Salmon.  What Salmon does is rather simple.  Suppose Facebook and Twitter implemented Salmon.  If person A posts a tweet on Twitter, person B could respond to it from Facebook, without even having a Twitter account.  Person A could then respond to that post from Twitter and person B would see it in their Facebook.  The same decentralization process happened to email.  Everyone has email accounts on different sites like Gmail or Hotmail.  Person A can send an email from a Gmail account to person B with a Hotmail account without person A having to worry about having a Hotmail account.

What could this mean for the future of businesses in social networking?  First, it would increase the ease of communication between itself and clients/customers.  However, a business would still have to have an account in order to have a tangible presence on each social networking site.  Salmon just makes it easier to contact people on all of them, without having to worry about signing into a different account every time.  This increase in communication could lead to a better following and even better conversion rates as people would see the company has a strong presence in the social media world.

A lot of people in business go by the old saying “First impressions are everything”, however, with Google and the other search engines this is completely opposite. With the search engines they base their results on the last time they crawled the web in order to provide the most up to date results to searchers. However, the search engines do not crawl equally, in fact they are very biased on who they crawl and when. In order to get crawled and indexed often you have to earn Google’s trust.

Today, search engines are looking for the latest and greatest to display in its SERPs. This means that classic link building techniques are going to be less effective than they have been in the past. Google is going to start looking for the best, most up to date content to display to its users so site age will come into effect but so will site trust. This keeps brand new start ups from dominating the first page, but also keeps stagnate, out of date sites from clogging up the works as well. This is where the Google cache comes in. The cache is a carbon copy of how your site looked the last time Google visited it, and it will tell you when that was exactly. Google, like any other company, does not like to waste time and resources so it crawls sites only when they need to.

If you have a static website the last crawl date is not that big of deal because you site is not any different now than it was then. If you have a blog or a blog on your main website, then this cache date should be very important to you because it tells you two things. First, it tells you what content Google has indexed for your site, and, second, it tells you how much Google trusts your site. You can figure out your trust rank with Google and other search engines based on how quickly they index and cache your site after publishing new content; the quicker they crawl your site, they better your trust ranking with that search engine. To improve this ranking all you have to do is publish quality, unique content. When you do this Google sees that every time they visit your site it has changed, and will, in a sense, bookmark it for quick indexing every time you publish something. Like everything with search engines (except maybe PPC), this will not happen overnight.

Tech Tags:
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Google

How to ‘Cache’ Google’s Eye by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Today, the web is a much a part of our lives as cars or television. Almost every business has some kind of presence on the web whether it is as simple as a local business listing on Google to a complete website. This allows users to quickly search for and compare different businesses when they are looking for a certain product or service which means first impressions are imperative.

A website is quickly become a necessity to compete in today’s business market no matter what industry you are in and without one you might be passing up on hundreds of sales a month. Some business owners think that having a listing in the local phone book is enough, but according to Nielson Ratings 54 percent of Americans have given up on their phone books. Another interesting fact from Nielson is that 61 percent of all online searches turn into offline sales. This means that people are throwing out phonebooks and favoring the web where they can get customer reviews, directions to the business, and compare them to other businesses in the same industry. Think of the website as a virtual salesman; they will be informing people about your product/service while trying to turn them into a customer and the best part of a virtual salesman is that you don’t have to pay them a commission or hourly wage. The key to competing against other companies is to have a quality website.

When creating a website there are several things that you must keep in mind. First of all, you should not try to build one unless you know what you are doing. Trying to build your own website with no experience will make the website, and by association, your business look subpar. You can take a class in web design, but most of the time you will not have the time necessary to learn everything you need to. Hiring a web designer is usually your best option, but many business owners are hesitant to hire one because they think it is going to be expensive. Web designers understand that business owners have tight budgets and many are offering custom website design with monthly rates much like a phone bill. When done right your website will pay for itself more than once proving to be an invaluable investment.

Before meeting with the web designer, should you choose to hire one, have an idea of what you want to do on the web, how you want to do it, and who will be using your website. These three things will go a long way in the design process of your website as it needs to curtail to your target audience. This includes color schemes, basic layouts, content, and interaction between the user and the site. Having a plan of what you want to accomplish with your website will help the web designer create a better website faster.

Having a blog on your website is also another tool that you can use to give yourself the competitive edge on the web. Blogs allow you to update your customers about happenings within your company, new products or services you are offering, ongoing sales, and more. There is really no limit to what you can and can’t do with a blog. It also gives your website a little bit more of a professional look because it tells the customer that you are really involved in the industry (providing that you post relevant content). It will also help you in the search engines because they love websites that continually have fresh content. Ranking well in the search engines means more exposure and more sales.

When you hire an SEO firm they all pretty much promise you the same thing, first page rankings in the SERPs for certain keywords. How do they do this; by creating lots of backlinks to your website, tweaking your website a little bit, and writing quality content. This is great for most people and as long as they see results they don’t question the firm’s methods. However, like with a lot of things, there is a good way to get on the first page and a quick way (A good SEO can do both, but for the sake of simplicity I will talk about the two separately). Search engine optimization is like a marathon, it takes time and a good strategy to get to the front.

The quick method of reaching the first page involves creating lots of backlinks and content very quickly, kind of like a sprint. With this method a lot of SEO’s will just focus on building links from wherever they can and to the homepage only. Like sprinting in a marathon, this may get you to the front quickly, but you will soon run out of steam and start to drop back. It may take awhile for other websites to catch up to you so you could remain on the first page for a few months or even a few years depending on how many of your competitors have hired SEO firms. SEO companies are able to get away with this because the average person does not know a single thing about search engine optimization, and for those that know a little bit they do not know how to check where the links are pointing to. When people get a summary report from the SEO firm it may look something like this:

Oct. 2009*
	New links: 200
	Total links: 2,000
	SE Ranking “Keyword A”: #3
	SE Ranking “Keyword B”: #5
	PageRank: 3
	Amount Due: $4,000
*Not Real Stats

What they do not tell you is that out of those 2,000 or so links, 1,990 are pointing to your homepage and about 1,000 (maybe less) of those links are actually relevant. They figure that you will never check this or have the knowledge to check it. However, it is fairly easy to check how many links are pointing to your website and where they are pointing to using Yahoo Site Explorer. All you have to do is enter the URL of your website (Note: http://www.site.com and http://site.com will return different results so use the URL that is ranking) and Yahoo does the rest. If over 70 percent of the links are pointing to your homepage that is a bad sign, unless of course you just signed the SEO contract in the past two or three months then 70-80 percent is normal. If the SEO is doing a good job then you should see this percentage start to drop below 70 within the next few months.

If you are thinking about hiring an SEO firm you might want to do some research on their website using Yahoo Site Explorer. If 90 percent or more of their links are pointing to their homepage, chances are that they will do the same to your site. They may tell you that their method is the best way to getting to the top quickly, but remember search engine optimization is a marathon, not a sprint.

The good way search engine optimization strategy is to link to all or most of the pages on your website. A good percentage that will return strong rankings would be 50 percent of the backlinks point to the homepage and 50 percent point to other pages. This method still has most of the links pointing to you homepage which is the most important page of your website, but also have links pointing to the content of your website, this is also known as deep linking. Deep linking is a very underutilized strategy in search engine optimization because it takes longer to reach the first page of the search engines, but in the end the strength of your rankings will be much better and you will even rank above others who used the sprint method.

Another part to the slow and steady method is getting quality, relevant links. Many times SEO’s who use the sprint method will get links from where ever they can whether the site is relevant or not. Some of the best (or worst) examples of this are commenting on hundreds of unrelated videos (i.e. man breaks world record for corn eating and linking back to a law website), commenting on unrelated blog posts (commenting on a law blog and linking back to a health website), and creating a fake program and having the download URL point to the clients website (I have actually seen all of this done more than once). This might yield a lot of links, but since they are unrelated they do not have much weight to them.

A good way to think about links is to compare them to change; the lower the quality the lower the value. For example, using the sprint method will yield lots of low value coins like pennies and nickels, and maybe a few high value coins like quarters and half-dollars. The slow and steady method will yield a lower number of coins but they will be of higher value such as quarters, half-dollar, and dollar coins. So in the end which would you rather have 1,000 pennies, 500 nickels, and 250 quarter(1,750 coins, $97.50); or 500 quarters, 250 half-dollars, and 50 dollar coins (800 coins $300)?

Are You Getting The Most From Your SEO? by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

A website is the online version of yourself and your business. So it would make sense that many of the things that you need to run a successful business you would need to run a successful website. The designer does not know your business, all they know is how to make good websites and take your ideas and make them into reality. There are a few things that you should have already planned out before calling a web designer.

1. What are you trying to do online?

You should have an idea of what you are trying to do online. Are going to sell things over the internet, or just use it to create leads for your physical business? Do you want people to be able to contact you through email or phone, or both? Knowing the objective of your website will help the designer because it will give them a place to start. They will be able to tell you the kind of things that you should have on the website and how users will be able to interact with it.

2. What is your business identity?

In other words, who are you? This includes having a logo (or at least a basic idea of a business logo), a business name, and a business plan. If you do not know who you are as a business, neither will the designer. This goes along with “what are you trying to do online?” Creating a website is almost like painting picture, you cannot paint what you cannot see.

3. What are you selling

You might not be selling anything online, but your business does whether it is a physical product or just a service. Know exactly what you are selling, what it does, and why people should buy it. When you meet with the web designer, pretend they are a potential customer and try to sell your product/service to them.

4. Who are you selling to

What demographic is your product geared toward; is it made for a large group of people or a select few? Knowing this is vital to the design of your website because it has to appease to your target audience. For example, you would not have dark, aggressive colors on a site that is geared toward women, nor would a site selling children’s toys be super-professional looking.

5. Do you have any content

Content is the nuts and bolts of a website. Without it your site would just be a bunch of flashy pictures and users would have no idea what you are selling. Your content should be a fine mix of copy and information telling the customer what you sell, who you are, and why they should use your products/services. Another reason to have content is that search engines love it and will rank you higher if you have it. Another good form of content to have is an on-site blog where you can tell people about new products in your store or new neighborhoods added to your service area. You can also inform people about news within your industry. A blog is gold to the search engines and you should defiantly consider hosting one on your website.

6. How big do you want your site to be?

Do you want it to be five pages or twenty? Figuring this out before consulting with the designer will help because it will give the designer an idea of the type of on-site navigation you need. The size of the site should be based on the amount of content you have and the number of products or services you are providing. If you ask the designer, “how big should my site be?” they will return with, “how big do you want it to be?” or “how much content do you have?”

7. What are your keywords?

If you are planning to either hire someone to do search engine optimization on your site, or do it yourself, you need to have at least five keywords in mind that you want to optimize for. These keywords will go into the coding of your website as well as in the content on the site. Using similar keywords is very helpful because it makes it easier to optimize for similar keywords like “motorcycles and dirt bikes” versus “motorcycles and rims”. Imagine your business was listed in a thesaurus, what would be under your business name?

7 Questions to Ask Yourself before Meeting with a Web Designer by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.