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Getting Your Website Noticed

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Maximizing Your Online Presence

Welcome to the Karelia online marketing tips and techniques page. We would like to offer this page as a resource for those looking to help their personal or small business website stand out in the online community.

Online marketing tips are plentiful and can be located with a simple internet search. However, Karelia created this page to consolidate the best and most useful of the myriad of approaches and techniques.

Thank you for visiting and feel free to leave your comments or questions at the bottom of the page. If you like the page, please provide a positive ranking at the top of the page, allowing users to find the page more easily.

Sandvox from Karelia Software

For Web Design and Editing on the Mac...

Throughout the internet marketing tips found below, you will see references to a program known as Sandvox. Sandvox is a Macintosh application from Karelia Software, allowing users to create websites with Mac OS X.

The write-ups shown below are a continuing series of tips and techniques created as a benefit for Sandvox users and the Macintosh community, but can certainly be applied to the larger online audience.

Introduction

Scratching the surface...

Unless you are building a site to share only with a few family members, you probably want to make sure that it can be found by as many people as possible in your potential audience. This applies whether you have a website for your business, a gallery of your creativity, an informational resource for a church or club, or really any other type of use.

Sure, maybe you just handed somebody a card with your website's URL on it, or they stumbled on to you by clicking a link to your site from elsewhere on the web. But most of your visitors are probably going to use a search engine to find sites, and they probably don't know it is "you" that they are looking for! Therefore, it's very important that you take appropriate steps for your site to be found.

There is an entire industry built up around this concept; it's called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. While there are few practitioners of this who try to fool the search engines into pointing to deceptive sites -- a form of Spam, really -- the term SEO usually refers to legitimate, straightforward techniques to help the search engines, and thus everybody out there, to find your website. In this message, we'll be just dipping our toes in the shallow end of the pool, so to speak.

Getting Registered

Laying the groundwork...

As soon as you have published it for the first time, you should make sure that the search engines (like Google, but also Yahoo! and others) know your website even exists in the first place! There are some easy shortcuts for doing this if you have Sandvox Pro -- see below -- but even if you don't, there are still some important steps you can and should take.

The most basic way to submit your website to Google for indexing is to fill out this form. You only need to do this once, for your home page. It will take a few days for Google to get around to visiting your website. And, it may actually be a while before the site shows up on Google's index because they put new domains on probation for a while to make sure they are not spammy websites.

Speaking of spammy, don't be tempted to use a paid service to submit your website to hundreds of search engines. Most of these are clones of the top search engines.

That said, and although we are mostly discussing Google in this message, it's worth also submitting your site using this form at Yahoo! and this form at MSN Live Search, the #2 and #3 ranking search engines.

In Sandvox Pro, we've made it fairly easy to announce your site to Google -- this proves to Google that you are the owner of your site, so you get access to their suite of handy Webmaster Tools -- and to publish a Site Map, a Google-readable file that perfectly describes your website's structure to Google.

If you have a local business or group, you'll probably also want to submit your website for indexing so that people in your local area can find you. Here are the starting points for Google, Yahoo, and (warning: Firefox/IE only) MSN Live. GetListed.org also covers multiple, local directories.

Relevant Content

Give the people what they're looking for...

This may seem obvious, but it's important that if you want people to find you during a search, your site must contain the text that they are looking for! This absolutely does NOT mean that you should fill up your pages with dozens of potential search keywords; that's counterproductive. But the content should speak the language of the people you want to find your website. Are you using industry jargon to describe the services that your business performs, or are you using layperson terms? Listen to your customers and use the words that they are using. If you do this, your potential visitors will find and understand you, and it will make Google happy too!

What this boils down to is that Google likes the same kind of content that your visitors like. There are only a few things to keep in mind:
  • When you have images, always use the inspector to enter a description for the image. (In technical terms, this is called the "alt tag.") Doing so will not only help people who have trouble seeing the image, but it will also be additional, relevant content for Google. (Although Google doesn't seem to use the image description text for determining the importance of a page, they do collect and index that content just the same.) The description will also help people find the appropriate content when using Google's image search.
  • Be sure that each page on your website has a decent amount of text on it. Google wants to see unique pages, and it can only tell if this is the case by scanning the page's text. If you have only a few unique words on a page (such as a title and a small caption on a photo page), with the rest being "boilerplate" text (such as the page header, site menu, sidebar, and footer) -- which Google doesn't realize is appropriate window dressing the way a person does -- Google may shun your page.
  • Feel free to enter keywords (tags) for a page, but don't overdo it. Apparently Google doesn't really make much use of the keywords, though the other search engines do. 10 keywords is more than enough, and they should be words that appear on that page.
  • Give your page a decent, descriptive title so that when your website is listed at Google, Google will show a useful and compelling title. It's best if your page title (and even your site title) contain the keywords that people are likely to search for.
  • Make sure that the file name of each page is human-readable and contains useful words as well. (Sandvox automatically generates file names, but these are customizable in the page details area in the lower left corner of the Sandvox document window.)
  • We have something coming in Sandvox 1.6 (due out in the next month or so) that will give you even better control over the page title and description that are presented to Google. Stay tuned!

Frequent Content Updates

Keep your page fresh and in the moment...

Google seems to give bonus points to websites that have frequent content updates. The best vehicle for that is for you to start a blog on your website. You might want to write a Tip of the Day, or answer a typical question that one of your customers might have every few days, or post a frequent, topical opinion piece. The more you update your website with new content, the more often Google will visit your site -- and the better it will do in the long run. (If your blog is separate from your home page, you might want to create an index pagelet showing the latest posts from your blog, so Google will notice the home page as changing too.)

(By the way, don't consider pagelets like an RSS feed, which loads in content from other sites automatically, to be changing content. Google doesn't actually see this, since it's loaded dynamically when you visit a page. The content updates need to be actual content which you publish.)

Calls To Action

Pique your visitors' interest...

Once somebody has found your website, what are you hoping they will do? If it's a personal site, maybe it's fine for somebody to just surf around for a while. If you are hoping that somebody will become a customer of your business, or join your organization, then you should make sure that you have a call to action (or more than one) on your home page, and maybe on every page of your website (since people might have "landed" at any of your pages).

One easy thing you can do is to collect somebody's email address so you can stay in touch with them. For smaller operations, you could just have a Contact Pagelet asking for somebody's email (and maybe their name and interest), so that those requests get mailed to you. For larger operations, there are commercial email list providers such as CampaignMonitor.com, AWeber.com, VerticalResponse.com, etc. that generally provide an "opt-in form" that you could add using Sandvox Pro as a Raw HTML pagelet.

Or, it may be appropriate for you to put your phone number, or an invitation to your next meeting, as the call to action. Just make sure that once people find your website, they make good use of the site.

Inbound Links

Get the word out...

Once your website is up and running, it is imperative to get some relevant websites linking to your website. (And not just to your home page, but to any relevant pages on your site.) Google considers a website to be important based on how many other important and topical websites are linking to it. Think of it as how reputation or authority works with people: the more highly-respected people refer you (in the same field as you), the more highly you will be regarded. (Do not be tempted to submit your website to a so-called "link farm"; this is not helpful.)

If there are any directories, groups, or associations that are related to your website's content, you should contact those groups and ask for a link to your website. Participate in online forums and comment on weblogs that are relevant as well. Even though most of these websites will encode links to your website in a way that won't help with your ranking (a necessary evil due to spammers), people who are interested in what your website has to offer will see the link and possibly mention it on their own websites and blogs, where it will help your ranking.

Another way to get nice links to your website is to post a press release -- if you're on a budget, do a search for 'free press release' for some ideas -- that links to your website. Just be sure to use good customer-centric keywords in your links back to your own website.

Make sure that your pages link to each other. If you have a Site Menu, some of this will be automatic, but you can also create hyperlinks in your text by selecting a relevant word or phrase, choosing "Create Link" from the toolbar, and dragging the target icon to the appropriate page.

Try to get the links to your pages to be relevant keywords that people might be searching for, not meaningless terms like "click here."

Sandvox-Only Inbound Link Opportunity

Link-up with Sandvox...

Here is a unique opportunity for inbound links, just by being a Sandvox user. We are in the process of setting up a website "SandvoxSites.com," which will serve as a directory of websites built with Sandvox. We hope that you will submit your site -- or sites -- to this register. But it's not just a list of websites, because such lists are close to useless as far as improving a site's ranking with Google. When you submit your site, we will be "interviewing" you, asking you to describe how you used Sandvox, what your website is about, and what kind of visitors you hope to attract. The goal of this approach is that each page contains relevant content, and thus will be a strong link to your website.

(We only have the submission form in place right now -- soon, we will process the submissions and publish them on the site.)

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We hope you have enjoyed this message. We're really just scratching the surface here.

If you are interested in further reading on this topic, especially for business-related websites, here are some Amazon.com links to some books that you might find useful:
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  • Reply
    IndeXinn Feb 19, 2009 @ 7:37 am | delete
    Nicely done article Dan, but as you say it just scratches the surface of SEO. We created http://www.indexinn.com using Sandvox which was the easy part. Fortunately it is equally easy to edit the thousands of pages in our site as we optimize for the search engines.
    You can find many companies with wild claims about their ability to improve your search engine ranking and most are scams. One notable exception is Jack Humphrey of BlogSuccess. You can download a free copy of his book by clicking http://www.blogsuccess.com/l.htm?p=IndeXinn&w=abb
  • Reply
    jimrb Feb 19, 2009 @ 7:27 am | delete
    Hey folks,
    Thank you so very much from a real novice. I really appreciate the work you've done here to make my life easier. Kudos to you for the impressive site and your product is great. I love the ease of use and so appreciate your continued pursuit of excellence.
    Thanks again
    Jim Bond
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Karelia software is proud to be known as a productive member of the larger Macintosh community. Our utmost concern is the creation of intuitive, simpl... more »

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