Triune Designs Blog: Web Design, Development, & Marketing

Last week I showed you some of Google’s recommendations on how not to optimize your website for being found on search engines. Now it is time to have some fun and learn what Google says about setting up your website the right way.

Google Says: “Get More Links”

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.

Google’s Ranking Webmasters/Site Owners Help

How? Participate In Community
For many, a website is just an online business card. They just put some information on the site and then tell people to check it out for contact information and a quick egocentric bio. Unfortunately for those businesses they are missing out on the true power of the web: the community.

Here are a few suggestions on how to increase the number of incoming links. What you should notice is that most of the suggestions center around participating in the online community and building an online presence through active interaction.

• Create good content – Make the information on your website helpful, useful, and informative; entertaining; newsworthy; or funny. In other words, make the content on your website worth talking about.
• Read and comment – Read other people’s blogs and participate in their discussions. The web communities are not one-way streets and it is vital for you to be an active participant. The more you get involved, the more you will find people linking to your site/blog.
• Link to others – Again, the web is a two-way street. Link to other people’s or business’ web pages when you find something worth noting. Does someone have a particularly good blog post? Do they excel at a particular service or have a great product? Link to them. You will find that giving other people links becomes reciprocal over the long term.
• Give something away – People like free stuff… and people like to talk about getting cool, free stuff. Therefore, give something away. Whether it is an e-book or one of your products or services, give a little something away for free and people will want to talk about you and link to your website.
• Use Twitter – Have a good blog post on a particular day? Let the Twitter world know and throw it up on your Twitter feed.
• Add your post’s link on Facebook – This should be done a little more sparingly than Twitter. However, if you have a special article that is worth noting, post it on Facebook for all of your friends to see. Perhaps your friends will also find the post special and add a link themselves.

Remember, for small businesses like us, building links to your site is not about quick-fixes or schemes. It is about participating with those around you.

As a final thought before closing, here is Google’s own recommendation on how to build incoming links:

The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

Google webmaster recommendations, emphasis added

Now, what are you waiting for? Go out there and get involved…

The Lucerne, Switzerland bridge photo is courtesy of Olivier Bruchez on Flickr.

I recently read an interesting question quoted from Seth Godin: “where does your product end and marketing hype begin?” What a great question. My answer is that a lot of products get lost amongst all of the hype surrounding them. If you really look closely at most television commercials, websites, print ads, etc. you see that numerous marketing campaigns constantly cross the line from valid product information to just pure marketing hype.

Where does your product end and the marketing hype begin?

Blogs, in contrast, are different from the aforementioned traditional advertising methods. Business blogs (that are written right) are built around providing information to end users, not about simply hyping a product or a company. Blogs show that you (as a company) are knowledgeable; blogs provide an invaluable human touch to your company as a whole. Blogs provide information to potential clients that end up driving them to purchase your company’s services. Blogs drive traffic to your website through search engines. Blogs keep (potential and current) clients coming back to your website and company for more. Most importantly, blogs create trust. Readers who continue to read your blog articles develop a sense of trust in your company and also see you as a thought leader in your given industry.

Blogs are real, not hype. This difference is why blogs are better suited for modern marketing efforts. Today’s audience is desensitized to hype. People are well-equipped to ignore hype; people crave authenticity. Chew on that for a minute…people crave authenticity.

When you write your business blog, write from the perspective of providing authentic, useful/interesting information to your target audience. Avoid the temptation to go out and simply sell yourself through your blog. Rather, ask yourself what does your audience want to know about? What would they find interesting? What would they find helpful? When you discover what it is, then go out and write your blog articles around those topics. Most importantly, though, be real. If you do so, you will be a better web marketer.

Photo courtesy of Martin Brandt

My little guy hanging out in the shower.

I was giving my two year old a bath, and as sometimes occurs, he urinated in the water. It was at the end of his bath anyway so I figured it was time for him to get out. As I was getting the towel I warned my little guy not to drink the water (as he frequently tries to do) because of the fact that he had just peed in it. Despite this warning he tried to drink the water forcing me to abruptly stop him.

So what does this have to do with web marketing? Well, I began to think of our clients and the advice we give them when incorporating a web marketing campaign (or known to us as Web 2.M). I have noticed that on occasion, our recommendations are not followed and our clients’ efforts are thus hindered.

So in an effort to bring about action, here are a few important reminders of marketing pitfalls to avoid (not listed in order of importance):

1. Avoid the gobbledygook – Think of gobbledygook as the cliche terms, jargon and other words that basically do nothing for your product but “make you sound very, very important.” And we all know how much we like those people who try to make themselves seem more (smarter, powerful, religious, popular, etc.)…just plain annoying. (And a big thank you to David Meerman Scott for searing the term gobbledygook into my brain.)

2. Avoid having a small, stagnant website – Essentially a small, stagnant website is just a like a billboard along the internet highway that you saw 50 miles ago, but even less effective. Having a constantly updated, fresh and growing website is what you need for a strong marketing campaign. Your fresh website is like having continuous good, juicy news about your company that the town crier and gossips cannot wait to talk about to everyone else.

3. Do Not Ignore Inbound Links – Inbound links are so vital to a good marketing strategy that you cannot ignore needing them. Google (yes, that Google) places such a high importance on inbound links that they actually incorporate them into their search engine ranking system. If you completely ignore inbound links you might as well save yourself some time and abandon any type of web marketing effort at all. For more information on that, check out Hubspot’s article on Google’s PageRank.

Avoid these web marketing pitfalls and you stand to help your marketing efforts exponentially over the course of time. Conversely, falling into these pitfalls is more like drinking the pee-filled bathwater after having been warned.

We are in our second installment of providing helpful hints on how you can write a successful blog. Last time I wrote about selling yourself through not selling yourself. If you are curious about that statement or just plain confused then read the last article; you will be glad you did. Let’s continue in this article by talking about how you can write a blog and help your web marketing efforts by being the impassioned expert.

I would say that everyone at one point or another is looking for some type of expert. If I need a dentist then I am going to be looking for a dentist who has an expert level of knowledge and care. If I need a new roof, I am going to look for someone who knows what he is doing. Likewise, Triune Designs’ clients want an expert graphic designer, web programmer, and/or web-marketing consultant when they hire us. So the question ends up being how do you convey to potential customers that you are an expert in your given field? Writing a blog is one of your answers. Blogs are a great avenue for allowing you to convey your knowledge to potential clients.

How Does This Help
As I said before, people are looking for experts to solve their problems. Since you are writing as an expert in your field, your blog will draw people into your website. Your blog articles do two things for you at one time. First, they draw new potential clients in. Your articles will have keyword-rich information related to your business and your website. Additionally, writing often will keep your website content fresh. Search engines love fresh content so over the long-term, you increase your chances of being found higher when people search for your type of business. Another benefit is that if a reader finds an article particularly interesting they will pass it along to their friends or coworkers, thus spreading the word about services you offer.

You also benefit by writing as an expert in your field by having your current customer base coming back to see what else you have written. Writing as an expert who is providing articles to help your customers will continue to draw back in your customers. People will return to see what advice, information or updates you provide them in your latest installment. The more your potential and existing customers come back the better chance you have for increasing sales, donations, membership, etc.

Putting the Fingers to the Keyboard
So you are the expert and we need your potential clients to know that you are an expert. Start first by deciding what general subject matter you are going to talk about. This will give your blog and your writing focus. For the Triune Designs blog, we decided that it was most appropriate to write about subjects related to web marketing, web design and web programming. Furthermore, we made it our goal to focus in on helping our clients better utilize their own websites in the marketing process. The subject matter you choose will depend on your area of expertise and it should also depend upon what you are passionate about in your job.

Now that you have your subject matter begin writing. You do not need to get into extreme length for your blog articles. In fact, at first I would suggest keeping them a bit shorter as you get comfortable writing on a consistent basis. While you are writing, remember that you are an authority in the field you are writing on: make sure your writing conveys the same.

So, be the expert and show that you are passionate about what you do. Your potential and existing clients will be happy that you did.

A blog is a vital piece of your web marketing strategy. If you want to harness the power of the Web 2.0 movement then your first plan of action should be to use a blog. And, if you are going to write a blog then obviously you want someone to read it. But, how do you get people (or potential clients) to come and read what you write? This article offers some thoughts towards that question.

Side note for those new to blogs:
If this is your first introduction into the world of blogging then I suggest that you do not consider writing any blogs for a while. First, begin by reading a couple of different blogs that interest you. For example, about six months before I ever decided to even write a blog for Triune Designs I read three or four other blogs that were related to my field. Reading them helped me get a grasp of how blogs work and assisted me in getting a bearing on what topics I should write about. So, my advice to you is to first get out there and see what people are talking about and then later you can add to the conversation.

Your most important priority when preparing to write your blog is to ensure that you write articles that people will want to read. This means that you will have to avoid a major pitfall that is very tempting and very common: writing a blog just to sell your items. It is very easy to just post articles that tell people to check out this service or a specific product of yours, but if that is the only subject matter you write about then you are not going to pull readers in. As a result, your blog is not going to be as effective as it could be.

Instead, what you need to focus on is making your articles desirable to your audience. Make them entertaining, make them informative, or just tell a good story. Regardless of what you write about, make sure your content is about something interesting in one form or another. For the Triune Designs blog, we try to provide useful articles to our clients that help them improve their web marketing techniques or sometimes we provide important industry-related news that our clients might need to know. We believe this is what is important to our clients, and as a result, that will entice them to want to read more consistently.

So, ask yourself: what is important to your clients? Once you find that out then go out and write! Happy blogging!

Even though I am not proud to admit it, for a while, we were beaten at our own game…and by a non-web marketing company at that! The experience served as an important reminder of how important inbound links are in the world of search engine marketing. Before I go any further, let me set the stage.

One cannot ask for a better environment for testing one aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) than what we encountered. The search engine phrase we will be using in this case study, “triune designs” is pretty obscure, which means that very few competitors will be vying for the top spot. Our competitor (truly in name only) for this case study is Triune Designs. They are a boutique-clothing designer based out of France (Fr.; triune-designs.com). We are Triune Designs, a web-marketing firm based out of North Carolina (triunedesigns.com). Our names are exactly alike, which helps in using the aforementioned specific search engine phrase. Finally, we both purchased our domain name within the span of about six months. This is helpful in our analysis because it removes any advantage for either one of us based on age of the domain name. So far, everything is about as even as you can get in the real world, which allows us to truly study some of the more controllable aspects of SEO.

Triune Designs (USA)
Being knowledgeable of how websites and search engines work, we implemented the basic recommendations on how to optimize a site for the likes of Google and Yahoo. We added our keywords and company description to the meta tags and used “triune” and “designs” as many times as possible within good content. We also used textual-based navigation buttons to allow the search engines to see every page of our website. Finally, we utilized lightweight code to make it easier on the search engines to discern all of our content/keywords. Whether or not you understand what I just said, suffice it to say that we did the things that need to be done to better optimize a site for search engines.

Triune Designs (Fr.)

Meanwhile, our namesake’s mirror image across the ocean did not take advantage of the “hidden” meta tag keywords and they only had “triune” written a couple of times throughout their website. To make matters worse for them, out competitor used image-based navigation, which meant that search engines would only see the first page and nothing else (computers and search engine spiders cannot read images, so they get stuck on whatever page they first land on, which is usually the home page). I would not say all of this was wrong, but Triune’s (Fr.) programming did not help their cause with search engine optimization.

Shocking Results
What all of this means is that we should have had the major advantage and should have been listed first on most of the search engines. So, imagine my surprise when Triune Designs (Fr.) started being listed first! What was happening to cause such a coup? It turns out, they did something very simple, but effective: they utilized inbound links. Inbound links are links on other people’s websites that link to your website. Triune Designs (Fr.), in a major grassroots effort, basically got out there and spread the word in other people’s blogs, websites, and on social networking websites. In doing so, Triune got people talking about them and got others to add links to their website. In the span of about two or three months, they had over 100 links coming into their website. We were way behind them; we only had approximately two inbound links. The resulting effect was that our French clothing counterparts were listed first in just about all of the search engines when using the term “triune designs.”

I constantly tell each our clients about the importance of inbound links. Unfortunately, most of the time, our clients shrug this recommendation off. Going out and adding inbound links is not flashy and is seen by most as too much work for very little gain. However, this case study serves as a valuable and scary reminder of just how important inbound links can be in search engine optimization. If a clothing designer whose website was not set up for SEO can beat a web marketing firm whose site was, just by using inbound links, imagine what can happen if someone takes full advantage of almost all of the recommended techniques!! That would be a very powerful marketing tool, which would be hard to contend with.

Until next time…

Want to drive more traffic to your website? It is easy…just add another link in the chain.

At one point or another, most clients ask how they can drive more traffic to their website. As a good web marketing professional should, I provide a sizeable list of various ways to help increase traffic and to optimize their website for search engines. While all of the methods in that list are valuable and effective, I want to focus in on just one item for today’s discussion: in-links.

Search Engines
Links that point to your website (a.k.a. inbound links or in-links) are a very powerful way of increasing your chances of being listed higher on search engines. The Google’s and the Yahoo’s of the world see in-links as personal references from one website to another. This is similar to a person referring a friend or colleague to their “great dentist” or “a quaint little restaurant” that they have found.

The reason search engines place emphasis on in-links is because it is more difficult for a company to add links onto other’s websites. Different from other methods of advertising which are self-driven, a referral (or in-link) is almost solely dependent upon someone else giving their approval and permission.

Exposure
Another positive aspect of having a large number of in-links is increased exposure. Having your website address, company name and other company information on other’s websites increases your visibility. This is a great way of advertising for little cost. Think of in-links as little billboards along the internet highway…a great way to be seen.

Sounds great, but how do I do it
The first way of building in-links is to swap links with friends, partner/sister businesses, and other businesses you may interact with. According to Netcraft, as of April, 2008, there are over 165 million websites on the web. With that many websites around, there has to be someone you know who has a website and would be willing to add an in-link for your company. One thing to note, though, is the increased value of building in-links with websites of a similar nature. Even though having a link on other reputable websites is a good thing, having in-links on websites that are similar is best. A dentist swapping links with an orthodontist is better than a dentist swapping links with a florist because of the similarity of the first two websites. Both in-links are good to have, but one is better.

Another way of building in-links is to get yourself out there. Utilize networking (professional and social) websites. Facebook, MySpace, Xing, and LinkedIn are a few examples of networking sites that you can join to help build more in-links for your company’s/organization’s website. Adding your professional and company information to these networking sites not only assists with adding more inbound links, but they help provide potential exposure as well.

Participating in blogs and online discussions is yet another way of getting yourself out there. Find an industry-related blog or discussion and join in. Some blogs/discussions will allow you to enter your website address; but even if you are not able to do so, you are still getting your name out there. (In doing this, though, make sure you are really participating and not just spamming other’s websites. There is a difference and make sure you do it right.)

A third way of helping your website build inbound links is to have good content on your website. Writing useful, interesting, resourceful, and fresh content keeps people coming back again and again. Good content also makes your site interesting enough to entice others to reference it (in say a blog, for instance). A good example is Hubspot, an internet marketing company. They provide good information and resources related to search engine optimization and marketing. I might refer to them in another blog post or on one of my web pages because the information they provide is useful and interesting enough to me that I think it is worth linking to them. (Oh, by the way, in case you missed it I just gave Hubspot a quick in-link…good for them.)

The Big Finale
If you really desire to increase traffic to your website and you want to utilize some simple solutions, consider building your inbound links. They are a valuable commodity in today’s search engine web world.

A final thought, as important as links are in today’s search engine optimization, perhaps we should consider a new nickname for the Internet: the World Wide Chain-Link Fence. Ten years from now you will be able to say you heard it here first.

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you again at our next article.

–GIIHELSO–