Marie Dinsmore, Real Estate Partner, The Dinsmore Team

I love the feature, but it will tend to kill your battery after a few hours

I couldn’t reproduce that on the Iphone with the Pandora app, but this is a fun little Easter Egg for Blackberry users.

We are seeing some really great things in SEO and social media this year. Google has been continuing to clean up their index and integrate social aspects into ranking factors, Google+ opened to the public, and Facebook is unveiling a new layout. Internet marketing and social media are becoming more and more the things that get business moving and growing again, even in spite of a slow economy.

One of our clients was just rated as a top 75 software company in INC 5000 after consecutive years of 40% growth. Several other clients have been able to expand and add new staff to accommodate growth. Others are just getting started and are getting new calls and customers from their websites. It is exciting to be able to help business attract new customers and increase their revenues.

As for our team, we are manufacturing better than one website per month right now, plus adding new marketing clients along the way. We have some awesome sites to add to the portfolio in the coming weeks, and some new businesses getting launched in the coming weeks.

With so many businesses searching for ways to stay afloat and attract new business (and some even struggling to retain customers), it is refreshing to know that the norm doesn’t have to be the rule. There are lots of business still growing, still hiring, and helping move the economy forward. We would love to hear your stories too!

Your Website Developer Matters – Part 3

In our two previous posts, we have been looking at whether your webs designer and your hosting company actually matter. Today, we will be looking at search engine optimization firms and why it is important to know their process, their techniques, and their long-term results with other clients.

I was actually in the process of drafting this post when Jim Amick (our sales representative in Columbia, CS) sent our team an article from the New York Times. The article talks about JC Penny’s rise to search engine dominance and their quick demise.

For starters, JC Penny hired an outside SEO firm to help them increase their search engine rankings.  Eventually they started appearing in top positions for thousands of keywords with online revenues continuing to grow. At first glance, you would think their SEO firm was doing spectacular work, right? This couldn’t be further from the truth.

When Google looked at their back-link profile (all the websites that were linking to JC Penny) they found that there were thousands of paid links placed on non-relevant websites with anchor text (the actual text of the link) matching a lot of their top performing keywords. These links violated Google’s webmaster guidelines and were deemed to be an “effort to manipulate search results” according to Matt Cutts of Google’s web spam team.

You can read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=google%20search&st=cse

So some pose the question: isn’t the job of an SEO firm to “manipulate search results” and increase the rankings of their clients? Well, the answer totally depends on the SEO firm’s process.

There are strategies in SEO that Google sees as being reputable – called white hat SEO. These strategies are tactics that follow Google’s webmaster guidelines.  There are guidelines for on-site content and code, meta info, titles, structure, and off-site metrics such as inbound links, link exchange partners, buying links, and so much more. These guidelines are in place to give SEO companies and website developers a sense of what is acceptable activities to increase the relevance of your website.

So, it becomes very clear that the SEO process used by your SEO firm in vitally important to the long term sustainability of your website’s Google rankings.  Look at their results and how long those results have been maintained. Also look at how quickly they achieve results. In most cases, very fast results point to using tactics that could result in penalties and even removal from Google’s index.

When looking into hiring an SEO firm, they need to understand the balance of on-site SEO (content/code/meta info/titles/internal link structure/etc) and the off-site SEO (incoming link profiles/social media/mentions/linking root domains/anchor text/linking domain authority/etc).  The content must be written for users first, utilizing the appropriate keywords, page code and structure. This needs to be combined with a natural incoming link profile (not paid links or link farms) and social media strategy. Taking shortcuts or purchasing thousands of low quality links to get faster results may work in the short term (as in the case of JC Penny) but will not have long term sustainability.

Your Website Developer Matters – Part 2

In Part 1 of Does Your Website Developer Matter, we talked about the process of building a website, some costs, and what really goes into making a successful website. An often overlooked part of websites is the hosting account. A hosting account acts as a host for the website files and databases.  A website requires a specific environment to render pages over the internet.  The packages include some amount and mixture of disk space, RAM (memory), bandwidth, databases, PHP, MYSQL (or other database type), security features, and more depending on the server it is on.

A lot of websites don’t require a lot of disk space or resources, so a popular form of hosting is a “shared” hosting account. Hosting companies figured out that they can cram a lot of websites into a small space, limit the resources and the bandwidth they give each one, and increase overall profitability by giving out very small slices of servers and resources. This gave rise to a small price war of mainstream hosting companies – offering very cheap hosting plans and very limited resources.

These plans are OK for sites with minimal traffic, small databases, and a small amount of files, but when you start increasing traffic and bandwidth use, these websites will see dramatic losses in performance because they don’t have the resources to handle the increased load.  Also, if you have a large database of products or pages, limited amounts of RAM can really hinder page load times because less information can be stored in RAM memory.

When having a website built, your website developers need to understand the technology being used for the website, and the server requirements for its software, database, and file system under load. If you plan on increasing traffic to the site, it has to be able to maintain performance with increasing amounts of people browsing the website. If the website drags under the load of additional users, you may end up loosing them all together. One of the most frustrating things about browsing the internet (according to end users) is slow websites. A slow loading site will cause a quick click of the back button and a swift exit from your business’s “online presence.”

2010 also brought some interesting news from Google – website performance is now considered as a ranking factor in the search results. All things being equal, the faster loading site will outrank a slower loading site. Small investments in the proper hosting account can provide additional SEO benefits in addition to keeping customers browsing.

In addition to just “hosting” a website (or just providing a space for your website files and databases), there are also hosting accounts set up for managing and maintaining the software, security, and updates for the technology used to run your website. This is considered “managed hosting” – where a systems administrator oversees the website and monitors up-time, performance, security, backups, testing prior to production upgrades, and updates. This is especially important with e-commerce sites or any websites that store sensitive information. If your company has a breach of data, you will be held responsible for it in most cases unless you have taken proactive steps to prevent it (as in the case of using a managed hosting solution). When you read the fine print of a cheap hosting account, you are responsible for your own software updates, security patches, database maintenance and security, and the overall security of the information you store and transmit online. Most business owners don’t know how to manage and maintain this – and don’t know they are responsible for it.

In the end, your website hosting account matters – more than most people realize. Once your website becomes a source of leads and business, loosing it or having unplanned downtime can affect your entire business. Just because there is a cheap option doesn’t mean it is the right option. Ask your developers about how they plan to host and what systems they have in place to protect you and your business’s intellectual property from hardware or software failures, malicious intent, or bandwidth and load spikes. It is always better to ask the “how” questions now instead of the “why” questions later after issues arise.

Your Website Developer Matters – Part 1

You need a website, but aren’t sure what direction to go. You see commercials about $199 websites, getting a website for $9.99 a month, and then see companies charging thousands of dollars for websites.  Is there a difference in these services, and which one is right for you?

The truth is, there is a website solution for just about every price range from free to tens of thousands of dollars. There are some very specific and drastic differences in the solutions available with varying features for each. Understanding the difference in the details will hopefully shed some light on what each type of solution is able to do for your business.

Before we begin, lets look at the elephant in the room. If you want to, you can go online and find a free website template, find a hosting company, and get a website up for little more than a few dollars a year and some time invested.  If you don’t have a budget but want to get something going, you can. You can find tons of designs online, put it on a website, and have it up in a few days to a few weeks. There is a learning curve to overcome on how to do it, but most individuals can understand the basics well enough to get a website published online.  You can get a hosting account for $6-$10 a month, get your domain for $9-15 a year, and have a very low cost website up and running.

First, let’s look at the website, and we will come back to the hosting account in Part 2 of this series. A website can serve a lot of different functions for your business. It can be a digital business card, sell items, engage customers, capture leads, provide information, and interact with people in a lot of different ways. Before you get a website, it is important to understand why you need it.

• Do you need an “online presence”?
• Do you need a logo?
• Do you need to interact with people?
• Do you need to capture leads and new business?
• Do you need a blog?
• Do you need regularly updated content?
• Do you need it to appear in search results?
• Do you need website metrics and analytics?
• Do you need to sell anything?
• Do you need reports on sales?
• … and on and on.

Understanding your needs will help you fill out your requirements for the new website.  This is an important step to making sure that you get the website you need for your business.

We could address each one of these items individually, but there are a few that deserve a little extra attention.  The idea of having an “online presence” has become kind of a catch phrase for website developers. It is one of the most important parts of your website – to give you a way to be found and interacted with online. If you build your website and no one sees it, it really doesn’t accomplish the goal of being an online presence. You need to know a little something about search engine optimization (or SEO).

SEO is the process of building relevance for your website so it can be found by searching for keywords related to your business.  It involves having the right website (content/code/meta info/titles/page structure/etc) and having enough authority (links from other reputable websites/social media engagement/off-site factors) for search engines like Google to recognize your website as a valuable resource.

There are over 200 individual ranking factors or signals (and they are increasing and changing in weight regularly). If you plan to build your website, do you know and understand how SEO works, what the ranking factors are and how to optimize them, and how to engage in the right strategies to build trust and authority with the search engines? If not, then you can invest the time to research and uncover how to do it, or have someone build your website that understands how these things work together. If your goal is to have a website to get leads or increase your business, it is vitally important to understand that just having a website won’t do it. It has to be engineered specifically for a purpose, have the right design, the right content, and the right SEO strategy to become successful.

The “process” of building a website can be done by just about anyone, but having someone that understands how everything works together for success is a different level of expertise.  To create a winning website strategy, you need proper keyword and industry research, planning, content creation, professional design, strong calls to action, visitor funneling (lead visitors to appropriate actions), and website metrics and analytics to continue the optimization process based on actual visitor data and search engine data.

As you can start to see, who builds your website is becoming increasingly important.  There is a lot more to a successful website than just getting online. There are tons of inexpensive resource to help you get online – the real difference shows up when your website starts producing leads and helping you retain and interact with customers. The “cost” of a properly developed website is more up front, but the real cost of having an ineffective website will be much higher in the end.