Website Content and Structure

You can do a lot to improve your website’s local search performance just by changing the content on your site. One of the most important and most basic tactics is to add your phyiscal address to the footer of each page. Other tactics can include placing location names in URLs, Geotagging the website pages via page Meta Tags (ICBM method or Geo Tag Microformat), adding your phone number with area code to the site, Geo-tagging photos and videos, or even providing a KML file of your business locations.

Location Based Indexes

The next thing to do is to created listing for your business on location based indexes:

• Google Places
• Bing Business Portal
• Yahoo! Local Listings

Here is a detailed walk-through of setting up your business listing on all three indexes (Google, Bing and Yahoo!)

Location Based Social Media

• Foursquare – A location based social network focused on mobile devices. People are now using Foursquare as a location based search engine and this is a trend likely to grow.
• Gowalla – A location based social network a lot like Foursquare. Here is a brief article contrasting the two services.
• Yelp – User based reviews of local businesses.

If you want to go further in depth and learn how your online media impacts local search, this info-graphic on Web Equity and Online Presence is a great place to start figuring out how it all work’s together. I also love this local search ranking factors guide (warning: it is a lot to take in if you are just getting started.)

Local Search is somewhat related to (and can often be confused with) Localization (translating content to be relevant for a foreign languages/culture), Geo-targeting (providing content based on a user’s browser location settings), and Geo-location (the act of determining where a browser or mobile device is geographically located).

So why should a business care about this listing? Note the locations of the addresses and phone numbers in the above search results – it is an instant mapped based “yellow pages” type listing. On mobile devices being on this listing is even more important – the mobile devices can provide one click to a phone call or to a GPS based directions program.  In the early days of search the idea was to get your business content indexed as the most relevant content on the web. Several years ago, Google and other search engines begin trying to relate most relevant content to a specific real world locations. They figured out that users searching for tires in Seattle, WA did not want to find tire shops in San Francisco, CA.

Most businesses never even realize they can be proactive with targeting their content to a specific location. Businesses must be proactive with the indexing of their content, either take the lead as the authority for information on your business or Google’s Search Engine will try to do it for you.

So where do you start? See my post on improving your local search results.

We love our jobs. As part of our daily course of business, we get the opportunity to work with some wonderful clients, provide solutions to solve some of their tough problems, and generally make things better for them. Some of the work is not very glamorous, but we are here to get the essential important stuff done for our customers – not grab headlines. Last week, we got the chance to work on something that was challenging, fun, and a little crazy in its reach. We built an application (overnight) to display data about the current Old Spice online campaign, and got a huge response. It does not get much more fun and exciting than that.

If you are not familiar with the re-vamped Old Spice brand and their innovative use of social media channels, let me give a brief synopsis. Last year, Old Spice hired the “Old Spice Guy” to promote their new products. Their agency (Weiden + Kennedy) created a series of fanciful commercials with the Old Spice Guy.  The campaign moved online with a series of YouTube videos,  posted as responses to users asking questions (both famous and not famous) on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. For a more in-depth description, head over to Mashable or Digital Buzz.

This year Old Spice‘s online campaign involved a YouTube based battle of words between Fabio (yep, that Fabio) and the Old Spice Guy. Fabio was attempting to usurp the title of New Old Spice Guy, and Old Spice Guy rose to defend it. You can still watch the story unfold on their YouTube channel.

After watching the first day of the campaign, we decided to build an application that tabulated mentions of Fabio and Old Spice Guy (and related terms) across five social media channels (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Digg.) We displayed which character had more mentions (as well as made a worm graph of the trending in real time) ostensibly to figure out who was “winning.” You can view it here.

We blatantly stole some of the design elements off of Old Spice’s YouTube channel (they didn’t mind, apparently) to make our site identify with the campaign, then Pat went to work furiously coding the entire database application working well into the night. (He can do that, he lives in the Land of the Midnight Sun.)

The next day we crossed out fingers, and Tweeted out the application’s URL to Old Spice. Old Spice must have liked it, because they tweeted it out to their followers and posted it on Facebook.

We got 25,000+ unique visitors in one day. As a thank you the Old Spice Guy even made us a video. How awesome is that?

Despite their response making us a little giddy–

(I mean, this campaign made some big waves in our industry last year, and here they are, Tweeting and posting to YouTube about us!)

– we got a lot more out of this than a video. We demonstrated working with large amounts of data coming from different sources, creating data-crunching applications quickly and with creativity, handling irregular and enormous traffic surges, and enhancing an existing social media campaigns.

And, we had a great time. Thank you Old Spice, for a great opportunity.

1. Bundle your Requests.

When you ask for changes to your website, gather all your changes and send them over — all at once.  Sending bundled requests will save you time (1 email instead of 5 emails), decrease the likelihood of a request getting lost, and speed up the time it takes to make changes. In order to bundle requests you usually have to gather them over a couple weeks – this gives you time to think about them, and decide if they are essential and truly in line with your website goals.

2. Prioritize your Requests.

Everything can’t be done at once – no matter how fast the developer.  If you are on a budget, prioritizing your requests will also help you decide what changes are essential to your business.

3. Insist on a System to Track Requests.

If your web developer does not have a system to track requests (spreadsheet, project management software, or bug tracking software) or a consistent process for making changes – things will get lost,  items will be done incorrectly, and communication wil get fuzzy. Bad communication increases costs.

4. Take the Time to Test.

Test what your developer is changing for you – or better yet have someone who isn’t making the request test it.

I am always amazed at the clients who approve the changes but never really go try them out. Even the best developers miss something every once an a while. Having to go back and fix something weeks or months later will cost you valuable time and sometimes money.

5. Take a Screenshot.

I recommend Evernote for screen captures (Evernote will even let your draw on the screenshot). Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words (or dollars). Why would you make a request, and then pay your developer to figure out exactly what you were taking about – or hunt for exactly where that detail is on your website?

Creating thoughtful and specific communications, and having a clear procedure for rquesting, testing and approving changes, will help you get things done faster. You will get you exactly what you want, and improve your bottom line. And your vendor must be eager and able to reciprocate with efficient communications! If they aren’t, well… maybe it’s time for a new vendor.

Recent Launches

www.tmcworkingsolutions.org — A hardworking, non-profit microlender in the Bay Area, TMC Working Solutions needed a more professional look and a much more robust content management system.  Content Gadget and a simple CSS template did the trick.

www.kps3.com — Our long time agency partners, KPS|3 Marketing, have completely revamped their website, incorporating some whimsical Flash (created by 9MM Media), tons of great content, multimedia elements, and our very own Content Gadget.  Their blog is really outstanding, too.

Coming Soon

Trinity Applied Internet — It isn’t just a rumor, we have a new site on the way.  Our problem is, we keep focusing on our clients’ work while our own is relegated to the back burner.   We suppose that’s certainly not a problem from our clients’ perspective (in fact we call that “by design”) — so we don’t apologize.

Reynolds National Center for Courts and Media — On the heels of the UNR Reynolds School of Journalism, its sister organization will be unveiling their new site this month. We loved the name of their last conference, by the way: “FYI, LOL or OMG? – Technology’s Impact on the Courts and Media”

Server Technology — This locally based company is a global leader in manufacturing power distribution management equipment, and their home page redesign is going to reflect their success, stature and service.

Exciting New Starts

We are proud to announce that Trinity Applied Internet has been contracted by Gnomon, Inc. to fulfill the graphic design and custom Joomla/Google Maps components for a new State Historic Preservation Office site.  Watch this space for more information on a really fun project that promotes historical tourism here in our Silver State.

Estipona Group has selected Trinity Applied Internet to build the new Arts 4 Nevada website, incorporating their vibrant and expansive new design with Content Gadget and custom calendar management, e-mail push, and other database-driven applications.

Buzz you later –

Keith and Erin

The graphic design was provided by the Estipona Group, and numerous members of the faculty provided strategy, review, and feedback along the way.  This project also owes a special thank-you to Professor Donica Mensing, who managed the complete refresh of all their content and populated data into all the new applications.

The website features our Content Gadget content management system, and five substantial custom database applications that manage everything from News and Events, to Faculty Pages, Scholarship Applications and the semester Course Schedule.  Prospective Students, Undergraduates, Graduate Students, Alumni and Parents each have sections of content organized and tailored directly to them.  Perhaps most importantly, the School has ample area on the site to publish student work.  The development was crafted to allow for fluid expansion and to be completely supported by staff members.

Projects like these don’t happen without a great committee. Trinity Applied Internet would like to express our sincere appreciation to everyone at the Reynolds School, including Dean Jerry Ceppos, Director of Alumni Relations Kristin Ghiggeri-Burgarello, and Professors Rosemary McCarthy, Bob Felten, Larry Dailey, Donica Mensing and Howard Goldbaum.   The committee was a pleasure to work with, and we wish them the best as they roll into 2009 with a new online presence.

The organization makes very good use of a small number of staff, so manually updating their comprehensive website content in HTML was at best time-prohibitive, and at worst, a real pain.  Board member Edward Estipona had already provided them with a solid visual design, but keeping up with the large volume of information, applications, forms and documents, events, and new video and other media, was becoming very difficult.  Trinity Applied Internet took the existing site design and wrapped it around our Content Gadget content management system, installing tools that would allow their staff to manage documents, publish events, and even load photography into their jQuery banner, all from a secure online administrative interface.

We hope Nevada Humanities is as happy with their new website engine as we were to be working with such an esteemed organization.  Thank you, Nevada Humanities!

TAI is excited to have been given the opportunity to develop this project for Server Technology, a company which also has been honored this week with the first Northern Nevada Technology Company of the Year Award given by NCET.   Congratulations, Server Technology, and cheers — here’s to a great response and a healthy return on investment from PDUsdirect.com!

After hearing feedback from users of content management systems as diverse as Content Gadget, Joomla!, and DotNetNuke, Keith had a ton of ideas brewing around how to make the system as easy as possible to use.   His primary concern was building all the different components (modules, tools) to be utilized intuitively.  All the elements use the same vocabulary of drop down menus and fillable fields in order to make the users’ experience consistent throughout the system.

This is especially important for those clients who also have heavy-duty applications that have been custom-built for their site.  A client could have a lot to deal with, between managing the content, culling and responding to lead gen data, and maintaining special business applications such as password protected white-papers and financial reporting.  We feel you should not have to be a qualified DBA or other IT professional to maintain and utilize your website, so we’re making it as simple and elegant as possible to learn the system.  Clients without all the custom applications should find the changes make their administration even easier.

If you have questions, ideas or comments about your CMS, give us a call.

Well, that’s probably true no matter how big you are.

Suffice to say, we are going to be sporting a new look to the www.trinity-ai.com very soon.  The redesign will shine us up, feature some of our new Content Gadget tools, and better reflect the philosophy and quality of our work.

We’ll keep you posted.