Word of mout advertising has always been one of the best kind of promotion that you can have. People tend to believe referrals and references more than almost anything else. I have found out that these can be from people that they don’t even know. The things that matter are that your customers believe that the references are honest and accurate.
Having recommendations that sound like they are only your friends and relatives won’t help, but kind words from some of your other customers can work wonders. That’s why I always recommend a testimonials page when I make a site that let your potential customers know what your current customers think of your work.
I recently read an article on Search Engine Watch that talks about how this kind of mord-of-mouth promotion can also be very good for link building.
One of the things that I mention to my clients that want to start a blog and allow others to add content to their site is that besides blog spam you probably will get some commenters that don’t like you or what you say. I usually say that instead of just deleting the negative comments the best policy is to let the comments stay and just honestly answer their criticism.
By allowing their comments and then answering them you look like you are not afraid of talking about all aspects of your business. Just about everyone knows that no matter how good you are you can’t please everyone. So a blog that doesn’t allow any negative comments will apprear strict and censored. Open conversation not only makes you look better and fair there’s a good chance that if you keep an open mind you can learn from complaints. I have always believed that listening to a couple of honest complaints can help you improve your business much more than a thousand praises.
Of course on your own site you do have the option of just deleting negative comments, but what can you do if they are not on your site? I recently read a great post on the aimClear Search Marketing Blog by Marty Weintraub that really offers some great ideas about what you can to to help you recover and even benefit from damaging negative comments about you or your business posted on the web.
I have tried several different ways to have my meta title tags. Those are the descriptions that you see at the very top of the browser window that describe the page that your on.
Search engines use these tags in different ways, including the text on the results page for your site and I have never been sure if I should Lillicotch.com in them. Some people say it’s much too valuable of a space to waste on your domain name when everyone already sees that.
I have gone back and forth on this issue. Currently I have my name int the title, then today I read Stoney deGeyter’s post on Search Engine Guide and now I’m torn again. There is no real answer here, but this post is good food for thought. Maybe I’ll sleep on it.
Read Does Your Company Name Really Belong In Your Title Tag?
There are many things about designing web sites that have changed from the beginning of cyber time and many things that haven’t. I try to point out a well done site every week in my Favorite Site Design category.
The truth is that while the look of well done websites has gotten cleaner, easier to read and interact with, the main goal of a website is still to please the visitor. It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to sell, entertain or educate them, you need to offer something that is pleasing to the eye of most human visitors, as well as, offering something that interests them.
Business Week has a nice article on what to do when designing a site today and I noticed it’s almost the same good advice that worked well ten years ago.
I probably will still advise not using Flash for making the navigation for your pages, but Google is starting to look at your Flash pages with new eyes.
They still probably won’t see your site like your human visitors do, but it looks like things are getting better for them being able to know what’s on your page.
I believe that even though I don’t use much Flash anything that helps people find exactly what they are looking for is a good thing.
I know that I could write better titles for these posts. When I scan through my past postings I know it right away.
What I usually do when I write my posts is to write the title first and then start on the post. Sometimes I change the title later, but not very often. Then once I’m done writing my post I read it over and make any changes to the wording spelling, etc., but I rarely go back and change the title.
Search engines consider titles very important when deciding where and how high to rank your page for any particular keyword search so it also is important for your titles to really say something about what your article or post is about.
Recently I found this post on Wordpreneur called “Is Your Title Compelling?” I’m going to try out some of these suggestions and you can decide for yourself if it helps or not. I invite you to let me know what you think and to visit Wordpreneur and
Read Is Your Title Compelling?
I recently read where a TV station in Philadelphia (CBS 3) is launching a revenue sharing partnership with local blogs and social media websites.
This is a great way to promote your content. Paying them is probably even more than they need to do. Just giving them help promoting their content would probably have been enough, unlike Viacom who is suing Google and everyone else that they can think of. My take on this is that Viacom is shooting themselves in the foot and will regret it.
Congrats CBS3 In Philly. Hey Pittsburgh media outlets, I can probably be bought!
Yesterday I got an email from a pool company in Virginia. They wanted to exchange links with me.
“Please consider adding our link to your site on your page: http://lillicotch.com/Blog/2008/02/28/add-additional-income-to-your-site/”
For those of you who don’t have blogs, when you allow visitors to post on your site you will get blog spam. Some of the posts will attract more than others and this page is one of my worst for spammers. So what I’m guessing here is that this pool company hired an “SEO company” to help them with search engine rankings and that company probably first tried to post an ad as acomment on this page and then when my spam filter stopped it they tried this email.
Have a look at my page that they wanted a link from. There was nothing about swimming pools on it, in fact, I can’t think of any page on my site that has anything to say about swimming pools except this one.
I also went to visit the pool site and it looked fine. All about swimming pools. Then at the very bottom of the page there was a link to “Resources”. This was a link to page after page of completely unrelated links (a link farm). While this may have been an effective and acceptable form of promotion in 1996 it won’t help you at all today and may actually hurt your rankings. At the very least it looks your site look cheap and spammy.
Of course they probably never actually visited my site, but how much more simple would it have been for them to find any post of mine that they had some interest in and to write a short relevant comment? If the comment was related to my post I would have allowed it along with a link to their site and I probably wouldn’t have noticed or cared that it was a swimming pool site. Not only that one way links tend to be much more valued than link exchanges anyway.
If you want to know the right way to get traffic to your site there’s a good interview with Google’s Matt Cutts on the USA Today’s site. Anyone want to trade links?
It is a pretty much undisputed truth these days that getting inbound links to your site will move you up the search engine rankings. It’s also true that higher ranking sites pointing to yours will help more than lower ranking ones.
I can’t even guess how many times that I have heard people say that I’m not going to bother trying to get links from “them” because they are too new and won’t be worth anything. That may be true if you are planning to close down your site tomorrow, but do you think that these sites will always be new and low ranking?
You may be able to look into the future and see which of these will grow and which ones won’t, but I’m willing to bet if you could do that you would be retired, living on a tropical island somewhere and probably not reading this blog.
I believe a couple of things. First that unless your link is on a link farm page or some kind of spammer/scraper site that all inbound links will help your rankings right now. Is is also much easier to get new sites to mention you, especially if you offer them something (your help, advice, encouragement or just a friendly word).
High ranking sites are just not in the habit of giving away free mentions. Just try to get Yahoo, Cnet, WSJ, etc. to link to you and you will see what I mean. Newer smaller sites will be much more receptive and some of them won’t always be smaller. They will grow and so will the value of their links to your site.
If you would like to read more there’s a post on the Search Engine Watch site by Justilien Gaspard that I recommend called…
One of the things that I tell my customers when we first start to design their site is to try to think of keywords that they should use in their content to help search engines find them. To put these keyword(s) in the headlines and once or twice in the main text.
I have written before about keyword suggestion tools that help you determine popular keywords that people search for, but what I never really had was a process for deciding which words that my customers should be using. I usually have them tell me what keywords that they want to be found for and many times they weren’t the best ones for people to find them for or were not very popular search terms at all. I’ve said many times before what good are millions of visitors if they just come and then leave right away? You want keywords that bring traffic, but visitors that are interested in what you have to offer.
Recently I read a post on the SEOmoz blog that described a step by step process for helping discover what keywords would work best for a customer’s site. This is some great advice and it always helps to have a standardized process for determining what needs done. I highly recommend reading…
