What does your business do? How does it do it? How is it different from other companies? Your Company was formed with a Vision and if you are unable to share that vision with anyone else, you have a serious problem.  Let’s think for a minute why a company vision statement is so important to the fundamental success of a company. First, your employees, vendors, design team, will all need to share your vision to duplicate it, create it and broadcast it to your clients.  Then secondly, your clients will need to take stock in your vision because, there is nothing better than a satisfied customer that shares their good experience with their friends and family. That’s how you make yourself a reputation over time. Can you explain your Company Vision in 2 sentences right now? If you can’t, maybe it’s time to start working on it. If it’s any longer or more sophisticated than 2 sentences, then who will ever understand you?  How about an example?  Here is an example of a poor and great vision statement for a towing company:

Poor example: We tow and impound vehicles.

Great example: Friendly Las Vegas towing  specialists with safe and secure indoor climate controlled storage. Clean and professional facilities, family owned and operated.

Ok, do you see a difference? Which company would you call first if you read these two options? Look at the words you choose to represent your company and make it ring true. Hang this up in your location or make a small sign and put them next to all your phones to remind you and your employees every minute what you do and how you do it. These words will be used for the life of your business, repeated by employees, clients and customers and if you take the time to make it right, this is where your reputation will manifest itself from.  Remember you set the standard and everyone else follows what you create, or whatever you fail to create.  So if you set the standard and want to be an amazing company, then this is the very first step to being in that top 20% of successful companies.

Let’s wow your clients and get referrals. Remember don’t be afraid to revisit it daily and make adjustments until you find exactly the best way to say it. Make it memorable and be able to deliver it on command, in an elevator, in a meeting, at lunch when meeting someone for the first time. Everyone is curious to know what everyone else does with their life and in business and if yours sounds simple enough and interesting enough, others will take interest and that is the name of the game. You will become what you invent.

Company Vision creates quality digital media. That combination broadcasts your message which forms your destiny.

Once your vision is understood, allow your network to help you. People are smart and some will surprise you. So long as you have taken the time to broadcast the right message, you will receive back what you are looking for in referrals, clients and opportunities. Without it, you are a sitting duck but with it, you armed and dangerous; ready to meet the world and carve out your companies niche! Best of luck for you. Please feel free to contact us here at the Web Squad. We can help you carve out that perfect Vision Statement.  For us, your vision statement is the starting point to building your logo and a logo then turns into a business card. A business card then starts a website design, and a website broadcasts a message.  That is what we are here to help you do; broadcast your message to the world… So start today, revisit your company vision and ask yourself, does it ring true? If not, make it so!!!

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.

Probably one of the biggest SEO mistakes that people are making today is not deep linking. There are hundreds of websites that have a good design and have a respectable PR on their homepage, but start to click around and you will find out that the rest of the site has as PR 0 or worse. This is a prime example of poor or lazy SEO, and so many people are making this mistake. It is understandable to have your homepage to have a high ranking, but don’t forget that your site is more than just one page. You homepage usually does not have the majority of the content that you want people to see anyway. Optimizing these interior or deep pages will benefit your overall rank in the SERPs and increase your PageRank across your site as well.

The objective of deep linking is to optimize specific pages on your website for the one or two keywords that they focus on. For example, imagine that you were a vet and had a page on your website for each type of animal that you treated i.e. cats, dogs, horses, etc. Now instead of optimizing your homepage for each type of animal you treat and optimizing for you being a vet, with deep linking you would only optimize your homepage for you being a vet (i.e. vet in “your-city”). Then you would optimize your page about cats, your page about dogs, and your page about horses separately. If your on-site link structure is setup correctly, this type of optimization will benefit your entire site because as your deep pages gain in PageRank, they will share that with the pages above them. Now instead of having a site where your homepage has a PR of 3 and the rest of your site is PR0, you will have your homepage PR3 and your deep pages will have PR1 or 2.

Deep linking will also make your site more user friendly. Say a person is searching for a horse vet and they come to your site. Now if you optimized your homepage for “horse vet” they will click your Google listing and end up on your homepage, only having to look around for your page about horses. Instead, if your optimized your page about horses for “horse vet” they will click your Google listing and immediately be on your page about horses. This provided instant satisfaction, which is what internet users want. This will increase your chances of converting potential customers into real customers.

There are some instances where deep linking is not necessary. These would be for pages you don’t necessarily want people to see like a “terms & conditions” page, or pages that are not that important for users to see right away like a “contact us” page. Also, if you have a small site with just a few pages, deep linking may not be too important because your PageRank will naturally trickle down to your interior pages if you have the right setup.

If it is optimized wrong it could be. The basis of search engine optimization (SEO) is to make your website visible to potential customers, but if your site is not properly optimized you could be missing out on untold amount of customers. Some big companies have trouble with this, companies that you wouldn’t think that they need the extra bump in customers.

Some of the worst offenders of bad SEO are Las Vegas casinos. Many of them are missing out on thousands of customers every month due to poorly optimized sites. Google says the average monthly search volume for the word “casino” is 20,400,000*, and when you search the word “casino” the first listing is the movie “Casino”. The first actual casino that shows up is a tribal casino is Connecticut. The first Vegas casino that is listed is Harrah’s and they are #4, which is good considering they are the only Las Vegas casino until Hooters Casino on page 4. Now, realistically speaking, people would see these results and try a different search term like “Las Vegas casino” (1,000,000/mo.)*or “Las Vegas hotel” (5,000,000/mo.)*, but just imagine if you owned one of those giant casinos. Wouldn’t you want to be on the first page, if not in the top 5 listings?

Going back to our original search term “casino”, imagine that you own a casino in Las Vegas. Say 1% of those 20 million people visit your site, that’s 200 thousand visitors a month. Now out of those 200 thousand visitors, only 2000 or so actually visit your casino, whether by booking a room or just stopping by, and spent on average of $1,000 each. That’s and extra $2 million as month. This is just a basic example of how proper SEO can help your business; it’s all about presence on the web.

SEO is not an easy task, it takes time. The amount of time depends on the individual keywords that you choose. The best types of keywords to pick are those that have a high search volume, and a relatively low competition. It is the same concept as starting a business in the real world. For example, you probably wouldn’t open an electronics store across the street from Best Buy and Wal-Mart, but a gas station or electronic repair shop might do well in that location.
A big part of SEO is how your site is built and written. There are two ways to make a website, Flash, and HTML. These two can be mixed, but it needs to be done the right way. Google does not like Flash websites simple because it cannot read and index the Flash content. It sees Flash as a file and a script running the file. On the other hand, Google loves HTML because it can read the content. However, there is a bit of a tradeoff between the two. Flash makes your site look really good and there are a lot of things that can be done with Flash. HTML is versatile, but doesn’t give the same kind of flare that Flash does. The key is finding a good balance between the two so Google can index your site.

Over using Flash is another problem Las Vegas casinos have when building their websites. Wynn Las Vegas’ website (www.wynnlasvegas.com) is built entirely out of Flash; there is not one bit of Google friendly content in their site which makes its hard for it to be ranked and indexed well. Over using HTML can also be a problem when building your site. Too much can make your site hard to be indexed and ranked, too little and your site looks bland. The trick is to find the perfect balance between HTML tags and actual content. Correctly balanced HTML content spiced up with some Flash can make for a really good looking site that can be read easily by Google. That is the first step to making a good presence on the web.

The Web Squad has studied and discovered the formulas for making good, indexable websites for your business. Whether you are thinking about getting a website or already have one, The Web Squad is here to help your online presence.

-The Web Squad
*Using Google Adwords keyword tool 9/23/09

Is Your Site Costing You Money by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at thewebsquad.wordpress.com.