I have written many times before that the best practice when writing new articles for your site it to write for your human visitors.
So many website owners these days are putting articles on their site that are stuffed with “keywords” looking to be found on the search engines. They don’t realize that if the page doesn’t make much sense to the people who are reading it they won’t stay.
The results are, if they are lucky enough to gt their page ranked well in the search engines, the real target of their effort (people) just stop by and leave right away. However, the odds are they won’t get very high in the search rankings either because no one is going to link to them and inbound links are the main factor in doing well in search.
So what will do well? I tell my customers to write what they know and target at the human visitors. You should pick out your search key words and place them in the title, then write your page. After you’re done look back and see if you can put your keywords into the text another time or two and still have it sound natural. I advise that you read it out loud. If it sounds spammy it probably is.
Google is on a quest this year and will have about 500 improvements to their search algorithm to eliminate or devalue spammy pages, not just their much talked about Panda update. They had a great post recently that I recommend called:
One of the things I try to constantly pay attention is security. Especially website security.
it’s very important that you keep the programs running on your site up to date. Ones like WordPress and their plugins are constantly updating and they make it really easy to install the upgrades. usually with one click.
What about some of the other forms and scripts you have on your site. Have an email contact form? Perhaps a script that lets your visitors print your page or recommend your site to someone else?
It’s not unusual for a website owner have these forms installed, maybe by a website designer and then forget about them. Let me assure you that while your site may have stayed the same, hackers never rest and they are always looking for their next target.
There’s plenty of help for webmasters out there and some of the best if direct from Google and it’s free. if you are not subscribed to their Webmaster Central Blog yet you should be. They had a really good post on security yesterday and i recommend it.
If you are thinking of building a new website or redesigning your old site this great post on speckyboy.com is definitely worth reading.
When starting a new site I try to ask my prospective client not just, how do you want your site to look, but what do you want your site to do? That’s important because most visitors don’t just want to see your brochure any more and maybe more importantly the search engines don’t either.
Every once in a while you run into such a great collection of tools online that you just have to stop and play with them for a while.
That’s what happened to me today when I discovered this post on a site called Splashnology. There are links to so many good tools here like background image makers, CSS makers and more than I can mention here.
If you are interested in some great free tools to help your website look better I highly recommend that you check out
There have been many times when I have recommended that my clients use PayPal for credit card processing. They are simple to set up with no upfront fees.
Unfortunately they also have a long history of freezing peoples accounts for minor infractions or even unfounded accusations. Usually the problems can be resolved, but in the meantime your money is frozen. Not good if you are a small business on a tight budget. For that reason I always advise removing the money from PayPal as soon as possible and as often as possible.
Today PayPal froze the defense fund for Bradley Manning, the accused leaker behind the Wikileaks circus even though the person with the PayPal account has never had any problems with them before. No matter how you feel about Mr Manning’s guilt or innocence this is not acceptable.
What? PayPal doesn’t believe in a fair trial?
Pressured by the government?
I, for one, will do my best from now on to find, use and recommend alternatives to PayPal and I’m sure new ones will be sprouting up all over the place due to this fiasco.
Update: as of 6:30 PayPal has unfrozen the account. They claim that the tremendous amount of bad publicity this has generated had nothing to do with their decision. (Yeah, I believe them)
There’s a new free ebook from Google called Improving Online Conversions for Dummies.
They lean toward adwords, but that’s how they make their money.
If you’re interested in buying or selling ads from your site, it’s explained well.
There is another benefit, too. You can learn how visitors are probably going to behave on your site.
You can use that information to convert them to the action you want. Buy something, sign-up, etc.
Who would know what people are looking for better than Google?
Sometimes I do my best thinking while out for my daily walks, sometimes it’s just silly stuff. Today there’s an old expression running through my head. I used to hear it quite a bit in my past lives, but I don’t much anymore, “People buy from people”.
It’s probably because so much shopping is automated these days that people don’t expect a personal relationship when they’re buying things, I know I don’t. It always surprises me when I feel a personal experience from a business I interact with online.
I think one of the best things you can offer your website visitors is a clear idea of who you are and what you can do for them. I’m a one man shop so it’s easy to be the face of me. The face of a company can also be many people, provided they’re all consistently delivering the same message. More important is listening to their customers and sharing what they are hearing with the rest of the group. Everyone needs to be on the same page so it’s important to meet regularly to discuss what they are hearing and what would be the best way to help the customer.
In my business everyone’s thirteen year old niece or nephew can build them a website. I would like to think that I’m better than most of them, but I will admit there are probably some that are better than me. So it’s my job to let my customers get to know me and give them confidence that I will offer them a better value.
A cup of coffee together is my preferred method, but it could be a phone conversation, email or text. Not every business can take their customers out for coffee and danish. Your visitors really just want to know they have been heard, that you are concerned about what they want. Any solution you offer them, as long as it tries to address their needs lets them know you’ve listened and is almost always better than offering them nothing at all.
Make sure you give your visitors an easy way to talk to you and really listen to what they say. That’s the best way to let your customers know that you’re a good value for them.
