Posts Tagged ‘search engine optimization’

Dec

29

Easy Search Engine Optimization Technique: Blogging

December 29th, 2010

Recently, several clients have reached out to me for guidance on how to increase traffic to their websites. Many of these clients have sites that are rich in media such as video or image collateral but they have not made much use of their text content. In other words, their sites look great, but the lack of text is punishing them when it comes to search engine optimization. One of the ways that we’ve found that will increase the search engine optimization is to incorporate a blog.

Blogs, when continuously updated, create a way for the client to create content that is relevant to their subject area and creates new search engine entry points to their site.  For example, one of my clients is a real estate agent here in the Austin, Texas area.  They have a website that features many images of the properties that they are selling and a few short paragraphs of text that list the amenities of the property.  They aren’t getting great search engine optimization due to the fact that they have very few words in their site that might be relevant to their target audience.

I advised this client to start a blog and to write at least one article per week regarding real estate trends in the Austin area.  They have posted a few articles about specific areas in Central Texas such as the Round Rock, Pflugerville, and Cedar Park areas.  In each of these articles, they’ve discussed how the market is recovering from the housing collapse and listed a few links to some of the houses that the agent has for sale in the area.

After analyzing the visitor data from Google Analytics, we’ve noticed a dramatic rise in traffic to their website as visitors search for keywords like “Cedar Park Real Estate” and land on the agent’s blog post about the homes in that area.

So, with a blog, the client can spend ten to twenty minutes per week putting together a short article on a topic relevant to their visitors and reap the rewards of increased page views.  It’s a win-win.

If you are interested in discussing a blog integration with Halfslide Design, please contact us through our contact page.

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Jun

30

Client Profile – Sherry Ransom

June 30th, 2010

Visit Sherry Ransom

Sherry Ransom

Halfslide Design was recently contracted to redesign the site for Austin-based author and inspirational speaker, Sherry Ransom. Sherry wanted a more modern and user-friendly design applied to her personal site. Her goal was also to make it easy for visitors to get in touch with her and hire her for speaking gigs. Finally, she expressed that she wanted to be able to manage content herself and be able to publish articles on a regular basis without getting a web designer involved.

Halfslide Design built her site on the WordPress CMS platform.  This allows Sherry to manage the content on each page and article completely on her own.  In addition, Halfslide extended the WordPress administration area to give her the ability to manage the events listing on her site so that she could easily alert her fans to the fact that she would be speaking in their area in the near future.

We also built the site to highlight the articles that she has written in an effort to increase her search engine optimization around her topics of expertise.  Visit the site and let us know what you think about the new design.

Visit Sherry Ransom

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Apr

15

Site Redesign – Storage Strategies Now

April 15th, 2010

Visit Storage Strategies Now

Storage Strategies Now

Storage Strategies Now, an Austin, Texas based storage analyst firm, recently requested Halfslide Design perform a renovation of their website www.ssg-now.com. The stated goal behind the redesign was to both provide sample content to those who are new to their service as well as provide a protected area for content that requires a subscription to access. The client also wanted to improve their search engine optimization by providing more content targeted around their service in html format rather than in pdf or doc attachments.

Halfslide Design redesigned the site to run on a customized WordPress platform similar to what the Halfslide Design site currently runs on.  We had to make several changes based on some specific business logic.  First, we had to update the customer registration process.  On SSG-Now, users who register get access to the full site the first time they visit.  Once their visit ends, their account is disabled and can only be reactivated after working out a subscription membership with SSG-Now.  This allows users to get an in-depth look at the content published by SSG-Now before they subscribe.  Halfslide Design modified the customer registration process so that all users were set as inactive after their session ended and also built-in functionality for SSG-Now to update customer accounts once a subscription had been initiated.

In addition, Halfslide Design reorganized the site so that all content published by SSG-Now that was public would be easily indexed by search engines.  Sitemaps of the site are automatically updated daily so that search engines are always aware of new content within 24 hours of it being published.  This has resulted in a dramatic increase in visits to the SSG-Now site since launch.

Finally, one last requirement from the client was that they be able to manage and update the site themselves.  In the past, the client was providing new content to Halfslide Design that we would then post to the site.  The client is now able to manage all site content, pages, links, and pages themselves.

Visit Storage Strategies Now

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Oct

13

What I Tell My Web Design Clients about Search Engine Optimization

October 13th, 2009

Before I get started, I want to point out that much of my thoughts in this post are based on a recent post by Derek Powazek on the evils of SEO. (Major props to him for fitting in the term “Faustian”!) He makes some excellent points in his post and I highly recommend you go read it when you get a chance.

The point of this post is to discuss some of the things that I tell my clients in the course of designing their website.  Inevitably, as any project moves towards a go-live, the client wants to talk about Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  This is natural, as any one who has spent their hard-earned money on a website wants to get it in front of as many people as possible.  My response to them is always the same.  If you are concerned about SEO, you should be concerned about your content. Your job, as the client, is to explain your website through content that is relevant to what you’d like your site to be searched under.  It’s my job, as your designer, to ensure that that content is structured in such a way that the search engines can find and index it correctly.  So below are a few things that I tell my clients to think about when they are concerned with SEO.

Choose Your Keywords

The first step of any optimization is to decide on a small set of keywords that they would like to target.  Most clients I’ve worked with are in the Austin area so they often find that they want to target keywords like “Austin Landscaping” or “Austin Family Doctor”.  The general idea is that, the more specific the keywords, the better as it will be very difficult for any new site to gain traction on Search Engines for broad keywords like “Family Doctor” or “Landscaping”.  You really have no shot at these unless you are able to get 100s of other sites to link to you, thus upping your PageRank.

Make Your Content Keyword Relevant

Once you’ve chosen your keywords, make sure that your content is relevant to it.  If you create a site about landscaping and are targeting landscaping related keywords, but you’re page is just images and never mentions landscaping…you’re completely missing the point.

As an example, I recently authored a post about image slideshows in jQuery.  I knew before going into it that I wanted to target very specific keywords such as “simple jquery image slideshow”, so I made sure that the title of my post included those keywords and wrote my content in a way that it was relevant to those keywords.  I now receive 20-30 visits per day on that post for those exact keywords.  I know I’ll never be on the front-page for “jQuery” or “slideshow”, but I’m okay with that because the post I wrote is really not targeted for those keywords.

Create Fresh Content and Keep Your Site Updated

This is the one recommendation I make to clients that is very rarely accepted.  You need to take the time to keep your site updated and create new content about your topic so that your site will stay relevant.  No one wants to go to a site that hasn’t been updated since 2003.  Stale content gives the impression that your company is either lazy, doesn’t put importance on its web interface, or is out of business.  So start a blog and talk about your industry or subject-matter expertise and keep the posts flowing.

Get Others To Link To You

This is the strategy where most SEO firms act unethically.  They take your money and pay for links to your site that come through bots, pay for click, or blog spam.  You don’t need this.  What you need to do is seek out other sites in your industry and discuss either advertising on their site or link exchanges.  Blogging also helps out here as others in your community will pick up on your posts and link to your site.  Google’s algorithm is based on links, so the more links you get here (and more importantly, the quality of your links) the better off you will be.

The important thing to remember is not to try to trick anyone.  People don’t like to be tricked and won’t stay at your site long if it advertises itself for something that it’s not.  Don’t paste 100 keywords in your meta tags.  Don’t blog spam.  And most importantly, don’t write content for search engines, write it for your users.

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