Triune Designs Blog: Web Design, Development, & Marketing

Oh, the search engines. I think they are my best friend and my worst enemy at the same time. Writing posts that might ring true for people engaging in this blogging community and with people cruising along on the search engine highway comes with a slight risk. The wrong people will also find this blog.

I have two examples come to mind.

The Iconic Symbol
The first is with a blog post I did on Twitter a few months ago. I had a good conversation with some readers and got a few links coming to the website. Awesome… and then the junk came. Apparently, the icon was picked up on Google images… and a few bloggers liked the it enough to steal bandwidth hotlink the image. I assume a few of them did it by accident, but either way it was pretty annoying and required a bit of angling so they would not use my resources.

Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt Me
The second example brings us to today: our blog kind of got hacked yesterday. I believe it has to do with some of the recent blog post about web security. So far, I cannot tell that anything actually happened, but two “people” registered on the blog as subscribers. They/he/she did this despite my not having user registration access on the main part of the website. After a quick Google search I found that one of the email addresses is associated with a person who uses that newly acquired access to break into the website and do (presumably) bad things.

I guess I might have to try and increase the security on the blog. Between that and prayer, hopefully nothing bad will go down on the back-end of the website. Stay tuned!

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.

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.