Investing Time and Experience Before We’ve Even Started

Working with Trinity Applied Internet Part B: Investing Time and Experience Before We’ve Even Started

You know the staff. Now, what is the process? How do we approach your project?

The term “applied” in the name of the company is no accident. A cumulative thirty years experience in software and web development speaks volumes on behalf of the partners, and is directly applied to every project we produce, problem we approach, and product we deliver. The process behind your website or web application development is not piecemeal or made up as we go along.

Consult, research, facilitate, plan (and plan and plan some more), design, develop, test, adjust. Rinse and repeat. Every time, for every project. It doesn’t matter the size or the complexity of the project at hand, we spend the time at the beginning on analysis of your company, research, and planning. In fact, if you have already been through an estimating and proposal process with us, you know we spend a considerable amount of time getting to know you before we’ve ever even won you as a client.

Think every shop that advertises their easy and cheap WordPress package, or their hosted solution you dial right into, does that on your behalf? They don’t. Believe us, because we hear time and again from clients who tried out the competition first because of a really attractive price point, and since have realized they didn’t need a cookie-cutter approach. Or they went with a big media and advertising agency and were shoehorned into marketing decisions based on what the agency was “really good at,” and how it wanted to promote themselves as a full interactive shop.

Well, that strayed from the topic a bit, but the point is, at Trinity Applied Internet you get specialized, considerate, and tailored service that addresses your needs specifically. If you are a marketing department working with some IT constraints, we plan for that. If you are a small organization with one paid staff member and no time for teaching yourself website administration, we plan for that when we design your project, rather than discovering it at the end (or not at all.)

The adage about “prior planning prevents…” at best catastrophe and at worse any number of irritating little hassles. We take it to heart, to the extent that we are researching, discussing, and planning your project before you have even officially engaged us.

Social Media Profiles and SEO Ranking Revealed

SEO experts everywhere, including SearchEngineWatch.com and Technorati are recommending the use of social media profiles as ways to increase traffic, dominate SERPs with mad Google juice and expand your brand reach. But is a ‘go forth and multiply’ approach alone successful with these myriad of social profiles, or is a strategy also important? While most businesses are jumping on board the “Big 3″ social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin), there are many smaller platforms (Ning, FriendFeed, Flavors.me) that are growing in popularity and therefore, importance. Which ones should you be on? Which can you skip?

In any business venture it is ALWAYS best to have a plan. We all know that things don’t always go according to plan, but no plan is a sure bet for disaster. When approaching social media, it should be a part of your overall marketing strategy and while it has its own way of contributing, it should still move the business forward in the direction of achieving your vision. So, what does that mean? It means – don’t do anything without a purpose and without being tied to a tangible, clearly defined goal.

What is your goal with each social media platform? (Yes, goals can and should be slightly different for each.)

Facebook is a great place to get connected to your target audiences, to engage them on a daily basis and build trust and respect, as well as periodically informing and educating them about your product or service. So maybe you would link to a product page on your website for the product you are promoting that month (in your profile) – or set up a promotional page on Facebook (maybe using my favorite custom tab creator, ShortStack) that links back to your featured product page on your website, rather than just the home page.

Twitter is a succinct message (I think of it as a message in a bottle flying through the rapids with a bunch of other bottles) so it needs to be eye-catching. People generally see your profile when they click on the button from your website or search for you on Twitter. Your profile here will be more useful if you keep it interesting and shareable – according to Technorati.

Linkedin is about professionals. Make your profile reflect your professionalism – but don’t strip it of personality all together. It is always important to be authentically you, even SeoMoz (Whiteboard Fridays) agrees. People search for your company on Linkedin in order to establish your legitimacy, but give them something to comment on or inspire them in your profile and you will make many more connections than a boring resume that is just like everyone else’s.

YouTube is different than the other platforms for several reasons:  its potential to go viral is much higher, it is a more preferred medium, gets shared more often, and personality is REQUIRED. One big way to make an SEO impact on YouTube is to think about the keywords you are targeting in your SEO for your website and use them in the file names of your videos – a fantastic idea (meant for Facebook, but it still applies to any video content) from GetBusy Media - since videos are not text, only the titles and file names are crawled by search engines! Also, make sure you have your accounts set to Public – or Google won’t even see the great stuff you have to share.

Overall, social media profiles that are created correctly CAN increase your search results, direct links, spread brand awareness and funnel potential customers to your website, but they are NOT a cure-all. As awebguy.com explains in their blog post on the subject – setting up your social media profile is a beginning – not an ending. You must be active in the community that you are creating by setting up your profile, to truly reap the benefits they have to offer.

This isn’t as difficult as it seems – you can post responses in the Q&A section of Linkedin, as Technorati suggests, you can solely share your opinions on topics that are trending in Twitter (by using the “Top Tweets” sidebar on Twitter), you can share to your own site when you see a company or individual video on YouTube that inspires you, and you can interact with the things your fans are saying on facebook about your brand – or your competitors.

Content is and will always be King – so pay your dues in the Social Media kingdom, but don’t forget to make yourself stand out with targeted, specifically awesome, profiles about how wonderful and unique you and your company are. Make something worth sharing!

How To Improve Your Local Search Results

Once you have a basic understanding of what local search is and why it is important, there are a lot of ways to improve your business’ local search results. Lets start with the basics:

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.)

What is Local Search?

Local Search is the idea of associating your businesses online content with a particular geographical location or area. A quick example would be to search for food carts in a major city. When I search for “Portland Food Carts” links to food cart/truck websites come up in the search results. Google and Bing both place local (geo-based) results at the top of the first search results page. Those search results look something like this:

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.

Classes offered by the Nevada Small Business Development Center

I’ve been asked by the Nevada Small Business Development Center to teach a couple evening seminars focusing on online solutions for small businesses.

It is an honor to be asked and I’m excited to have a chance to talk about websites, search engine optimization, and email marketing with small business owners. The classes are inexpensive and I promise to answer as many questions as possible in the time allotted as well as getting through my entire curriculum.

You can register for the class on the NSBDC’s website. Register now. Space is limited.

Class Information (I’ll post detailed descriptions later this week):

Utilizing the Internet for Small Business
Date: October 30, 2007
Time: 5:30pm – 8:30pm
Location: REDFIELD Campus, 18600 Wedge Parkway, Nell J Redfield Bldg A, Room 213
City: Reno
Fee: $25
Registration: Online or (775) 784-1717

Search Engine Optimization
Date: November 6, 2007
Time: 5:30pm – 8:30pm
Location: REDFIELD Campus, 18600 Wedge Parkway, Nell J Redfield Bldg A, Room 213
City: Reno
Fee: $25
Registration: Online or (775) 784-1717

Email Marketing
Date: November 13, 2007 – November 13, 2007
Time: 5:30pm – 8:30pm
Location: REDFIELD Campus, 18600 Wedge Parkway, Nell J Redfield Bldg A, Room 213
City: Reno
Fee: $25
Registration: Online or (775) 784-1717

What do web metrics mean to your website?

Last week Nielsen//Netratings accounced that they were changing the metrics they use in their NetView (website analytics/metrics) service (View Press Release – PDF). They are going to look at the time users spend on a website, versus the number of pages viewed to measure a website’s audience/traffic. They cite AJAX interfaces (which don’t create a traditional request to deliver new content) and streaming applications like Flash based video players (think YouTube) as the reasons for the switch.

This change in metrics highlights a great point about website metrics in general – a metric that is helpful in trending user experience on one website may be useless for tracking user experience on another. There is a great article on this in eWeek (The More We’re Told, the Less We Know ).

This point that Evan Schuman makes in his article is that before you can sort out what metrics have meaning for your website, you need to understand your audience. Once you know what your audience is looking for in your website, then you can start tracking the corresponding metrics to that kind of user experience.

I also think that an intimate knowledge of how your website works is also essential for understanding what website metrics are telling you.

The most important thing to remember about website metrics is that they aren’t hard and clear truths about what is happening on your website. It is best to think in terms of trends and fluidity – otherwise your view of what you are doing on the web can easily become myopic. It is always best to talk to a group of live customers and clients (if you can) instead of relying solely on website statistics.

Any good strategic plan for your website must have a way to measure changes. You will get the best results from your website strategy and marketing efforts if you get as specific with your metrics as you do with your goals and objectives.

Google Analytics is upgrading

Today Google announced that it will be rolling out a new version of its analytics package to all current analytics accounts over the next couple weeks. I couldn’t be more excited. Google Analytics is an awesome (free) package that allows you to easily gather serious data about your website traffic. If you haven’t tried it – you should – and what do you have to lose? It’s free.

Two new features have been included that I have been wanting since I started using Google analytics.

1) Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format. Exporting data from Google Analytics in a presentable format has always been an issue. Being able to schedule emails of PDF format reports? Now that is extra exciting.

and

2) Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others. Finally. Now you can tailor the report view to the items that you, your company, or you clients need the most. Awesome.

Check out the full post – they even have a tour.

Thank you Google. Can I have my upgrade tomorrow?

Live in the real world

I was reading an article posted on an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) website called The Value of Offline Publicity (Warning: that site is so busy with information, buttons, ads, and banners you might become disoriented). I enjoyed the article for one main reason – it was not your usual SEO topic. The author talks about your website being an extension of you or your company and thus what you do can have profound impact on your site.

He has a point.

I felt his methods concentrated on making your business into a ‘cult of personality’ where the business is an extension of the person (his article makes the assumption that most sites are one person operations – and in the world of knowledge blogging that is the truth). I’ll admit that I think his ideas are very effective – I have promotional strategies very similar to several of his bullet points – but I think that his six tips are just the tip of the iceberg. What he is talking about with a couple examples is a whole paradigm of thinking. It’s the idea that your PR and marketing is all tied together. Each piece of your marketing feeds each other piece.

Too often businesses cut their website and online strategy off from the real world. In SEO circles this is especially true, SEO tends to gets really geeky – it likes to live completely in the head. Marketing needs to be a whole body – what you do online effects the real world and vice versa – and with a little planning you can nudge things in the right direction and sometimes get the perfect storm – buzz synergy that feeds on itself.

I always tell clients – what you talk about to your clients in person, you need to talk about online. What you do in your business you need to talk about online. What you are doing online you need to talk up to your clients. If you don’t want to do this – chances are something isn’t going well in the business or you are trying to be something you are not either in reality or virtual reality.

What good is a brochure without a web address on it? or a website that never talks about print publications? The idea is to have one voice – just because you cross into a different medium doesn’t mean your voice changes. How you say things will change – what you are saying won’t. If it does you have a dangerous disconnect that will disorient your customers.

Now by all means follow his advice – become famous – just remember that all your agents (print, pr, tv, radio, web) need to talk about what you are famous for – and they need to talk up each other as well.