I’ve added a new project to my portfolio, a website for a startup Financial/Tax advising company in the Milwaukee area. The site was designed and developed for Wordpress using my new design and markup framework. The project gave me an opportunity to spend some more time in Illustrator, explore some new Wordpress plugins, and work out the kinks in my framework (more on this to come).
Please take some time to visit Safe CPA.com.
Much of the focus of articles about Search Engine Optimization deal with what the designer/developer needs to do and tends to overlook the other half of the battle - how to continually produce optimized content after the initial design. Maintaining, updating, and promoting the site is crucial for the long-term success in search engine rankings. Thankfully producing quality content through your CMS/Blog Platform is easy to do and yields enormous benefits!
Small, meaningful, and frequent updates are loved by both your users and search engines. A search engine, just like someone browsing the web, will begin to think that a site which has not been updated in years is no longer relevant. Therefore, the longer your site sits with old content on it, the further back in search engine rankings you will find yourself. Keep content fresh by announcing news and updates, posting to a blog, and changing general information pages as your business grows.
Page titles and headings on the page are the quickest way for a search engine to determine a page’s content. Try to sneak keywords into page titles and headings as much as you can rather than making them generic. For example, try using “Gardening and Landscaping Services” instead of “Our Services” or “Mowing and Clipping Rates” instead of “Prices.” Also make sure to use the heading tags to style page headings rather than just formatting text to be large and bold. Heading tags will create the same look and feel and also provide the benefit of indicating to a search engine that this is important information.
Search engines, like your readers (assuming they’re English readers), read a page from the top down and always consider information near the top more important than info towards the bottom. Therefore, keep your most important, keyword laden, frequently updated paragraph towards the top of your page and move images and static text below this.
In addition to using heading tags for major headings on the page, bold and italic formatting can be used on key words to attract the search engine’s attention. Try “We are proud to be Milwaukee’s #1 Landscaping Company” rather than “Milwaukee’s #1 Landscaping Company”. Do not overuse bold and italic text and it’s both unappealing to readers and can actually reduce your search engine rank.
Remember that not everybody is going to use the same search keywords to try to find the same site. Some may type “landscaping,” others “yard services”, while others may search for something specific like “hedge trimming.” Talk to family, friends, and coworkers about words they would use to search for your business and do your best to use them all across your site. This ensures that someone will find you even if they are searching with a keyword you personally might not have associated with your site.
Repeating the same keyword or phrase over and over raises big red flags to search engines. Search engines are smart enough to know that repeating one phrase in large, bold letters over and over is not a natural presentation and will assume that the site is a spam site attempting to attract attention. As a general rule, try to use a keyword or phrase no more than 3 times per page.
Images are worth 1000 words to readers, but they’re only worth a few words to search engines. Try not to rely on images too much and when you do use images, make sure to use the title attribute. Give each image a meaningful title that both reflects what is depicted in the image and involves a keyword or two. If you upload an image of your latest landscaping project to your homepage try to give it a title like “Landscaping Project - Decorative Fence and Flowers by Your Company Name.”
Search engines use links on your website as a major clue to the site’s purpose. Try to use keywords in links when linking to both outside sites and other pages on your site. For example, instead of “To find out more about our services, click here” write “More landscaping and gardening services.”
Incoming links are incredibly valuable to your site’s search engine rankings. In fact, they are nearly as important as everything else in this article combined. Try to get links to your site from any other sites you might maintain, from friend’s or family’s sites, from other companies you do business with, and more. Try to find a directory that lists similar businesses such as http://www.thecityofmilwaukee.com/landscaping/index.html. One of the best ways to place some links back to your site is to read forums, online news stories, and other online articles and leave a comment that links back to your site. Do your best to get your site listed on as many other websites as possible!
On great way to get external links to your site is to submit content to other sites. Try writing an article for eHow, eZine, TellMeHowTo, Digg, Reddit, or any similar site. Make sure to create an author page with a link back to your site and potentially attract hundreds of new customers each time you publish an article.
Actually, that’s not all, but it’s a great start. Search Engine Optimization is an infinitely nuanced art that requires constant study and practice, but if you follow the steps outlined in this article, you should enjoy positive results with minimum effort.
First of all, what is the plural form of CMS? Anyone? Anyone?
As part of the never-ending learning process I have decided to dedicate the next few weeks to a lot of projects I should have started years ago. To begin, I finally installed a working WAMP environment on my machine so that I can test server -side code, including CMS installations, locally. This should save me hours upon hours in development time in the future.
I also finally finished developing my own front-end web framework. It’s a hybrid of the 960 Grid System, my own default style preferences which I use in the vast majority of my projects, and 6 jQuery plugins which I always reuse. I realized after a while that I just kept running into and spending hours solving the same problems with each project I started, so I instead decided to work out all of the nitty-gritty details and create one clean web page with all the bells and whistles that works in all the major browsers. Now I should be able to just copy that source folder and apply project-specific colors and images and be done with most of the markup.
I’m also finally taking the time to learn all that there is in Photoshop and to learn Illustrator. I’ve never done vector illustrations before but as I’m doing more and more design work it’s becoming a dire necessity. I’ve only been at it a week and it’s been a bit more difficult than I would have hoped, but within a few weeks I should have the basics conquered.
Getting more familiar with the various CMS systems available is also a major item on my to-do list over the next few weeks. I’ve been using CMS Made Simple and Wordpress, and I’ve decided that I just plain don’t like Joomla. I think I’ll take a look at the latest offerings from Wordpress and CMS Made Simple as well as checking out Cushy CMS and maybe Drupal. Does anybody have any CMS recommendations?
