Websites Under Your Control Blog

Google has recently started testing a way for their users to vote for search results they like, either from the search results page or from the page itself. 

They call it the "+1" -- see www.google.com/+1 for more information from Google.

When someone with a Google account is logged in (and most people with such accounts just stay logged in all the time), they will see a faint icon next to some* of the results, and a slightly more obvious icon when they hover over the result with their mouse.

If the Google user clicks on the icon, they will be endorsing that web page.

* - Why only some of the results? Owners of websites who want to participate will have to add a snippet of code to their websites. They also have the option to add the clickable icon to their website.

Want this for your website? Google tells you what needs to be done -- see the short version or the detailed description. If you are comfortable editing the HTML of your website, you can do it yourself.  (If you are one of our Online Business Partner users, just go to the "tracking code" content holder, click "HTML", and add the snippet before or after anything that is already there.)  Otherwise, check with your webmaster.

Interested in being at the top of Google when your local customers search for what you offer?

Here, we typed "home cleaning frisco" into Google, and were presented with listings with a map, labeled "Local business results," showing nearby services.

Google's local search results -- which happen automatically when Google detects that people are searching for something in a specific geographical area -- will display the closest matches on a map on the first page, before even the top-ranked "organic" search results.

Where do they get these matches?  Google gathers all sorts of information to populate this portion of their search results, and they may already have your business listed. Business owners can also list their businesses.

Whether you are listed or not, go to Google's local business update page and add or update your information. There, you will be able to add your contact and business details, links to your website, a description, images, videos, key words, categories in which you want to be listed, and much more.

You will have to do this yourself, because Google will "robo-call" your listed phone number to verify it is really you making the updates, but it is easy.

The best part?  It's free! No need to pay anyone, since all you do is fill out a form, and you are done.

There was a time when filling your website’s pages with relevant keywords and incorporating a variety of search engine optimization (SEO) tricks would all but ensure you would rank high in search engine results. There were plenty of SEO tricks back then, and many proved to be highly effective. But, as they say, all good (or maybe not so good) things eventually come to an end.

Search engines make their money by selling ads, and need lots of users in order to sell those ads.  It is only natural, then, that search engines continuously improve the methods they use to deliver the best, most relevant search results possible. As it turns out, they are very good at it – and getting even better.

It is no secret that Google adjusts its search algorithms more often than most people take a shower. One of the primary purposes of these tweaks is to seek out and destroy the tactics being used to surreptitiously increase a site’s ranking in search engine results. Consequently, websites filled with pages populated with content created solely with search engines – rather than visitors – in mind are only going to continue their steady fall into oblivion.

This leads to the obvious question: What do we do now? Well, we do what we should have been doing all along. We fill our web pages with high quality content that is well-written, informative, and of interest to our target markets. Search engines will only continue to hone their ability to recognize high quality content, while putting the kibosh on SEO tricksters.

If you populate your website with informative, quality content, it will naturally include words and phrases that are relevant to your topic or to the searches your target audience will perform to find products or services like yours. As long as the site is built properly (see our posts on titles and headlines), this is what it takes to for search engines to prominently display your pages.

(Need help with your content? We offer a ghostwriting service for our clients. If you're not our client, see if your webmaster or marketing advisor can help.)

The days of keyword stuffing have passed, and poor quality content written just to appeal to the search engines will no longer be so easily forgiven. SEO strategies that worked wonders before will now do little to increase your ranking, and their effectiveness will continue to dwindle in the coming months and years.

Providing useful, high quality content that educates your visitors and holds their interest is your best option. Rather than fanatically calculating your keyword density and obsessing over whether “web site” or “website” has more local search juice, simply deliver good, useful content that meets the needs of your target market.

We get asked repeatedly about adding "meta tags" to websites, usually the "keywords" meta tag.

Let's deal with the myth first. Meta tags don't help your search results in Google.  Period, stop, done, over and out.

All the major search engines stopped looking at the keyword tag in 1997, when the "adult" website industry started stuffing innocuous but popular search phrases into their website meta tag keywords, to hijack searches.

The only meta tag that Google looks at that we care about today is the description tag.

How is the description tag used? Google will randomly select snippets of text from your web page and display that as the text in their search results.

If you add a description tag, then Google will throw that description into the mix, along with whatever random snippets it finds on your page.

That's all. It won't boost your ranking at all.

According to Google's Matt Cutts, "Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking."

So, meta tag keywords? Don't waste your time. 

Meta tag description? As a low-priority task, put some creative and compelling text there, and it will show up once in a while in Google's results.

To add text to the description meta tag (or the keywords tag, if you really want to cover all bases), just click on "Add meta data to Web Page" link in your Online Business Partner page editor.

Then, type the text you want to be occasionally used by Google when it displays your page in search results, and click "Publish".  You are done.

(If you're not using our Online Business Partner, check with your webmaster, who will be able to revise your site to add a description tag.)

This won't get you higher up on Google, but it will give you a chance to provide one more bit of compelling text, so when people see it, they won't be able to resist clicking on your link in Google!

(Of course, don't fib. Google can get pretty cranky when you try to trick them!)

We get asked occasionally about optimizing for Yahoo, Bing, and others, rather than Google.

As with any expenditure of time and money, you have to decide where to do your spending.

As of today, Google owns the search world, without question. As you can see from the following graph, Google has 85%, Yahoo and Bing split 10%, Baidu (Chinese language search engine) has 3%, and the remaining 2% is divided among thousands of search engines competing for the crumbs... so why even think about anything other than Google? Go where the searchers go!

Source: NetMarketShare

 

The purpose of search engine optimization is to get traffic to your pages, but your site must be written and formatted for those who visit.

Your headlines serve both purposes. The visual formatting makes the headlines stand out to your visitors. The designation of some text as a headline (using "heading tags") makes it stand out to Google and other search engines. For both, the headlines make it immediately obvious what topics are covered on your page.

How to make a headline

Headline levels, defined using "heading tags," can be numbered from 1 to 6, with 1 being the most important in terms of indexing.

For best results, place the main topic of your page in "heading 1" tags, and the subtopics in "heading 2" tags. If you care about Google showing the page, use words in the headlines that your visitors are likely to search for.  For example, a headline such as About Our Company informs your human visitors what is to follow, but a headline that says you are a company "serving the needs of North Texans needing ambulatory and wheelchair transport" is more informative, and certainly helped Preston Trail Transport to reach the first page of Google. Notice how it tells what they do, and where they do it.

If you use our Online Business Partner^® service, just log in and open your page, click in the relevant text, and click to set the heading in the tool bar. Otherwise, contact your webmaster with your instructions.

The bottom line: Optimize your pages with well-written content that uses important keyword phrasing in the headlines. It is one of the easiest ways to improve your search engine results.

Someone defined "insanity" as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

If you try that in Google, you might actually get those different results - but don't worry, it's not you!

A few days ago we blogged about the need for titles on web pages, and while doing so, we searched for a handful of different phrases to find the most illustrative example for our screen shots.

First we searched for "health insurance frisco tx" and then "physical therapy frisco tx" before finding what we wanted when searching for "pizza frisco tx."

On the third search, we saw Google results that included items from the previous searches, totally unrelated to "pizza." See the screen shot at the right.

(The screen shot was fortunate, because trying to replicate this several times resulted in a different set of links each time.)

So no, you are not losing touch with reality -- Google really does vary its results on one search based on what you searched for previously.

This means that your results will vary from one search to another even on the same topic, and if you are on the phone with someone telling them to Google something, their results might very well vary from yours, even at the same time.

 

In website terminology, the "title" is the text that appears at the very top of your browser window when you visit a web page, such as the white text in the blue Internet Explorer window shown here. In tabbed browsers, the page title also appears in the tab.

It's not merely cosmetic!

Search engines use the title as the most significant indicator of what that web page is about, and also as the headline for your entry in their search results.

Note the entry for Palio's on the first page in Google for a search I did for "pizza frisco tx"...



Don't leave your web page with a nondescript title like "home page" -- make it meaningful, and include the 3-5 words that your ideal customers are most like to search for, and you will dramatically improve your search engine visibility!

How you set the title on your website will depend on what tools you have at your disposal to make changes.

If, like Palio's, you are using our Online Business Partner®, just login, go to the web page details screen, and type in the title -- that's all there is to it! (Not using our service? Check with your webmaster for an estimate for changing the title on each page.)

(By the way, Palio's makes awesome pizza, voted best in Frisco! Go visit, and tell 'em we sent you!)

Snowball Express is dedicated to helping the children of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces since 9/11.

On December 16th through December 20th of this year, Snowball Express will host 2000 children and surviving spouses in Southern California, from all across America, for an all-expense paid holiday gathering none of them will ever forget.

The Snowball Express website not only needs to tell their story and communicate with those involved. It also provides the mechanism for families to register, for donors to donate, and for the non-profit organization to thank its sponsors. 

We were glad to donate our efforts for this project.

The Frisco Chamber of Commerce decided to kick off the national Chamber of Commerce week with the unveiling of its new website, which uses our Online Business Partner™ technology.

Chamber President John Land had us develop a custom design for the new website and build the initial menus and pages. Then his staff took over, and added additional pages and created their own material right in the website, thus letting them manage their costs as well as their site content.

Some of the information displayed on the Chamber of Commerce website resides in a different system, and the Chamber did not want to convert all of that information at this time. To allow for a fast and smooth transition, the data in the other system is displayed on the Chamber's new site through "iframes" or windows within a web page that display the content of a different web page.

While this reduces the level of control available for managing the presentation of the data from the other system, it allowed the Chamber to launch their new website without any time or attention whatever paid at this time to the format and management of the date stored on the other system.

Even though the Chamber did not make any announcement to its members, several hundred people per day discovered it on their own, starting with the publication of the site late on October 20th.

(The graphs here are taken from the standard graphs provided to every owner of a site using our Online Business Partner™ technology.)

By the way... the visitors in the first week were not just from Frisco, not just from Texas, and not just from this side of the globe!

It looks like there were visitors from nearly every state in the US, from Mexico and Canada, and quite a few from all over Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia as well.

In fact, with this much global traffic in the first few days, we would not be surprised to see visits from pretty much the rest of the world when we look back after a month or two!

(We know Frisco is a great place. But how do all these other folks know it? And why haven't they already moved here, now that they do?)