Sorry, but there are no magical solutions that will increase the size of anybody’s traffic. But there are a few things you can do that can definitely improve your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Here are a few you can easily do yourself:
Setup Google Analytics for your website
Google Analytics gives you comprehensive information on how people found your website, how they explored it, how long they stayed on it and a myriad of useful reports. With this information, you can improve your website return on investment, increase conversions and make more money on the web.
A Google XML Sitemap can be a very useful tool in your overall SEO strategy. It's a file listing all the pages in your website that you can submit to Google, helping it index your website faster and more efficiently, and ultimately bring in more traffic.
Once Google Analytics starts tracking your website, you’ll be able to know which terms people are using to find you. Make sure you update your copy to include them. That doesn’t mean you should stuff your text with useless babble; your primary concern should still be to have copy that makes sense and helps convey your message. The good thing is that it’s really easy to update text in the YWD platform.
Search engines look for headings in order to make sense of your content. Your pages should have a descriptive heading within the page content, formatted in the Heading 1 (H1) style and similar to the page title.
Use titles for your links. When you link content to another page of your website, it can be beneficial for you if the search engine that's crawling your content has some descriptive information about the link itself. Every link that you create can have a "Title" attribute, and you can use it to your advantage.
Use YWD’s Page Properties option to enter a Title and Description for your pages.
The page Title -- also known as the <title> tag -- is considered the second most important element of a page for SEO purposes (the first being the content itself). It should describe the page in 70 characters or less.
The Description is a plain language description of the document, usually consisting of 20-25 words or less. Search engines that support the Meta Description tag will use the information to publish on their search results page, normally displaying below the Title of your site listing.
If you have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. pages setup for your business, make sure you include buttons linked to them on your website design. You can use YWD’s Global content blocks feature to add them to all your pages at once.
But if you don’t have those pages for your business (or even a personal Facebook account, for example) you can still make your website more inviting for people to share it on their own social networks. The Social Networking section of YWD Designer lets you add interactive widgets for all popular networks without programming.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
So you just went live with a new website for your business. Congratulations! Now you go to Google, search for it and... nothing. Oh, you must have typed something wrong, of course. You search for something more unique within the content and... nada. OK, this is starting to get on your nerves. You then search for the name of the website itself and... nothing again. What’s going on?
Your website needs to be indexed first
How does Google know about all those gazillions of websites out there? It relies on a piece of software called a Web crawler (also known as a Web spider). Google and all other search engines like Bing have their own crawlers that are constantly browsing the Web, identifying websites and automatically going through all their links and then indexing them. Google’s is called Googlebot.
Until your website has been indexed i.e. added to their giant database (which it uses to search and return the results) your website will not “exist” for Google. Unfortunately, there is no set time for Google to initially index your website. It can take even a few weeks for that to occur. But there are a few things you can do that can help with that.
Have actual content
Sounds obvious, but sometimes people forget that. In order to index your website, Google needs to find content -- words, sentences, text! Make sure your pages have relevant copy, especially your Home page. Describe what you do and what you offer, and name your pages properly. That makes sense not only for Google of course. For instance, having a Home page with just a giant image and no text will not help you, because Google will not know what it’s about. And since we’re talking about images, add a descriptive text (also known as the “Alt” attribute) to them.
Submit your website
If your website is completely new, you can manually submit it to Google. It will eventually be reviewed by a human (or an alien, who knows) and may be added to their index before Googlebots crawls it.
Site verification is a process that enables you to use certain site management tools provided by the search engine. This will enable you to use other tools such as Google Analytics, and will also serve as one more reminder for Google that your website exists. A website management system like Your Web Department makes it very easy to verify your website with Google, Yahoo, Bing and even Pinterest.
Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.
Whether you just got a website for your business or you’re converting an existing one, it’s highly recommended that you set up Google Analytics so it can start tracking its traffic for you. But in addition, it certainly may give Google a heads up that a new website is now live.
If you can, get other websites to link to yours. These links should come from real websites, not phony ones (in which case Google would actually penalize you). Clients, suppliers, partners and others may be interested in exchanging links with you.
Use social media
If you have profiles on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. add a link to your website from them. After all, Google gets to your website by crawling other websites, and social media websites count too. And make sure you share your website on social media as well.
Have other suggestions? Please let us know. And good luck with the new website!
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
OK, you already got a website for your business. It’s a start, and in fact you’re ahead of lots of people, as my partner Paul Chato reveals in this recent post of his. But is your website really working for you? Does it need a tune up, or even a major overhaul?
There are a few symptoms that could indicate that your website needs a redesign, and we’ll go through them here.
1. Your business has changed but your website hasn’t
If the business itself has changed significantly, the website should as well. Otherwise, it will not be supporting your organization’s goals, and in fact it could be even hurting it and sending people away.
» Make sure your content is up to date
2. The website isn’t bringing in business
If it isn’t, you’re losing a great opportunity. At the very least, the website should be generating leads, as well as other intangible factors such as brand recognition. Both the copy and the design should be engaging and support your core message.
» Ensure content is tailored for your audience
3. Traffic has stalled or decreased
By using tools such as Google Analytics, you can easily track the evolution of the website traffic over time. You can also compare the bouncing rate and get other insights. For instance, what are the exit pages?
» Improve your Search Engine Optimization
4. The design looks “dated”
If your website was designed years ago, it’s inevitable that its look will reflect that. Browsers have changed, new features are available, others became deprecated. The “Skip intro” Flash that was all the rage 5 years ago (well, not even then) just won’t do it anymore. Not to mention more subliminal design elements like navigation, fonts, colour schemes, page widths, etc. have changed.
» A good designer can help!
5. You don’t have a mobile version
You’ll probably be surprised by the number or people that are already accessing your website from their phone. That percentage will only grow over the months.
» Time to get a mobile version of your website
A few recent examples from our clients
Here are a few of our client websites built either by or with Your Web Department that went through a redesign just over the past few weeks:
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
I'm sure you have heard of "Content Marketing" it is the new trend and terminology for online marketing. What it is? According to Wikipedia:
"Content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. Content Marketing’s basic premise is to “provide some valuable information or entertainment – “content” – that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but which seeks to positively influence a customer in some way.”[1] This information can be presented in a variety of media, including news, video, white papers, ebooks, infographics, case studies, how-to's, Q&A’s, photos, etc."
Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling.
If you business has a website and/or a blog you are already doing content marketing, maybe not as well as you could be but you are there already. The good thing is that getting better at it takes only: discipline, strategy and lots of tracking.
Discipline - Create consistent content
In order to create consistent and good quality content you need planning and discipline. Having an editorial calendar will help you achieve consistency, and it doesn't have to be just one person doing all this; your entire business staff can contribute to content creation. Although most of your content will end up as blog posts this is not the only channel you have for content marketing, as the Wikipedia entry describes there are many different avenues to distribute your helpful and valuable insights, shuch as: product descriptions, comparison tables, how to guides, etc. You also need discipline to stay focus on message and avoid the sale pitch, which could be very hard for a lot of marketeers.
Keep in mind that content marketing is a process that takes time, you need to build your audience before you start to see results. The results will come as long you constantly keep providing good quality content for your audience.
Strategy - Define what you will say, how you will say it and when you will say it
The content you create should be focused on what your audience wants and how you and your organization can add value and solve problems for that audience. Defining what you will talk about (content categories) how you will say it (tone and voice) and how often you will create it (you need to be consistent, if daily isn't realistic, but twice a week is, keep it to the same days each week) is very important. And as stated above, you need to stay focused on the strategy and related messages that you have defined. Get you team involved in the production of content. Tips, best practices and guides on the industry that your business operates in are always good topics for people that want to learn more about what you do. The more valuable your content is for your audience the more of an authority you become in your field and this could prove very beneficial in generating good leads.
Tracking - Review data and modify accordingly
There are many tools to help you track the impact your content has on your audience. Google analytics can track the referral traffic that shared content can produce. When sharing your own content in Social Media networks be sure to use a url shortener such as bitly.com or HootSuite's ow.ly, which then tracks the click throughs to your post. All email newsletter systems such as: MailChimp or ConstantContact have tracking for how many people open the emails and how many click on the links from the email body. As you can see there are many ways to measure who's reading, viewing, sharing and referring back to your website. This is great feedback to see what works and what doesn't and make changes accordingly.
Content Marketing is great for brand exposure through all the sharing you and your visitors can do. There is also an educational factor with all the good quality content you provide to your audience, which can positively influence them to share or become the next lead. Every new and original piece content you create provides great benefits for SEO (search engine optimization), Google and other search engines like fresh and up to date content to add to their index. Add cross links (explain) and make sure the content is original and your website search result page position will improve.
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are the actions you can take that will help your potential customers find you when they use things like Google to search for a product or service. Now more than ever having proper website SEO is vital for any business, any business that wants to be found on the internet that is.
Google (Google is so dominant in the search space that it should be your primary focus) like all other search engines, works on indexing the content of websites, more specifically the text. Therefore when a person does a search, the string of words entered in the search field is compared with the content of all indexed websites on the world wide web. The most relevant and closest to having content matching what was searched shows on the top of the list of the search results page.
SEO Guidelines
It sounds simple but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. Google tries hard to bring the most relevant results to the user, their primary objective is to serve the Google search customer - not the business or web site owner. Having said that, Google is well aware that without websites their search tool is nonexistent, therefore they provide guidelines and best practices for optimizing your website to ensure you are found.
Content is King for SEO
Google puts a lot of emphasis on quality content. Original well written content will rise to the top, add keywords (the terms people will use to search for you) in the proper headings and/or body content and your website is further improving its chances of being easily found.
Links are endorsements for your site
Google's search algorithm is a tight kept secret, and it is modified on a regular basis. Just to keep at bay all the people trying to reverse engineer it so they can gain an advantage. The algorithm takes into account the content of a website (as I mentioned above) but also the links from other websites to the pages of your website. Google actually considers these links back to your sites as "votes" for the quality of you content. Social sharing of your content through tweets or Facebook also reinforce the credibility of your site in Googles "eyes".
Blogging - Your SEO partner
Blogging can be one of the most powerful ways to improve your SEO and increase your page rank (how high up the search results page your site will land). Stats show that sites with blogs often have 55% more traffic than sites without blogs. Google loves blogs because it means new content to crawl. And if you create blog content that uses your keywords (naturally, don't over do it or you will get punished by Google) and is well written and engaging, people will link to and share your content all contributing to making your site what Google considers relevant.
Google + and Google Place for localized search
Eager to be found by local customers? Then take the time to set up a Google + account and register your site with Google Places, it will help contribute to the relevancy of your site. Local search works great when people search for a service within a city or region. It takes only a few minutes to add your business address to Google Places. Google confirms addresses by mailing you a postcard to that address with a PIN number to confirm the right location of your business.
Mobile sites help with mobile searches
More and more people are using smart phones to do web searches (often for local businesses). And as mentioned above, Google is all about giving their users what they want and on a mobile devise that is content that is optimized for the small screen. Having a mobile friendly web site will improve your sites mobile search ranking.
Don't forget to submit your XML site map
One of the most basic things that can be done to ensure your site is indexed by Google is to submit your XML site map to Google. And be sure to do a separate version for your mobile site too. We have written about how to do this in past posts and Google's Web Master's Tools also include great info.
This post only scratches the surface of SEO - there is so much more you could learn online and there are also some great partners you could hire to help you with SEO. A word of caution, there are also a lot of SEO scams out there and you need to be wary of anyone who makes guarantees of number one rankings.
Here at Your Web Department we are constantly working to improve our SEO ranking, we use Google analytics (Read this post for more information on Google Analytics: Your business website just went live? Time to set up Google Analytics and start tracking its traffic) to see what terms are working for us and help us focus our efforts and we are constantly working to create good relevant content to meet our customer's needs. Our system is built for SEO and we even have a basic SEO package to help you get started.
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
Hey, how good are your website’s headlines? One of the main ways search engines can tell what a page is about is by reading the heading tags on your webpage, so lets use them effectively.
Your website pages can have an inbuilt hierarchy through the use of headings and sub-headings. Websites can have up to 6 levels of headings, with Heading 1 being the most important.
While they’re not a silver bullet in terms of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the use of headings can have a positive impact on your rankings. They define the hierarchy of each page, and when the search engines “crawl” your page they use it to figure out their structure, and which parts of your content are important,
A few simple things you can do
You should always use a Heading 1 text on each page, so the search engines know what the page is about.
Make the Heading 1 the first heading on each page.
Include your relevant keyword(s) in your headings, and optimize for the keywords i.e. specific. For instance, if your website is about law, include the types of law that you practice and not just the generic term “law”.
Don’t forget humans. There’s no point in having headings that are so long that look bad and affect readability. So avoid headings that spread over multiple lines, or copy that makes no sense.
Setting headings in Your Web Department
The YWD Content Management System (CMS) makes it easy for you edit any block of text in your website. To set up any paragraph to the Heading 1 (or 2, 3..6) simply select it from the editor’s “Format” pulldown menu. That’s it!
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Sorry, but there are no magical solutions that will increase the size of anybody’s traffic. But there are a few things you can do that can definitely improve your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Here are a few you can easily do yourself:
OK, you already got a website for your business. It’s a start, and in fact you’re ahead of lots of people, as my partner Paul Chato reveals in 
"Content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. Content Marketing’s basic premise is to “provide some valuable information or entertainment – “content” – that stops short of a direct sales pitch or call to action, but which seeks to positively influence a customer in some way.”[1] This information can be presented in a variety of media, including news, video, white papers, ebooks, infographics, case studies, how-to's, Q&A’s, photos, etc."
Google (Google is so dominant in the search space that it should be your primary focus) like all other search engines, works on indexing the content of websites, more specifically the text. Therefore when a person does a search, the string of words entered in the search field is compared with the content of all indexed websites on the world wide web. The most relevant and closest to having content matching what was searched shows on the top of the list of the search results page.
