Higher Source Web Sites

What is a “Small Business” Thinking?

HigherSourceSites — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:08:07 +0000

What is a “Small Business” Thinking?

Is this something that will help or hinder you as you ponder your business plans?

It seems to me that if you use the web and think of the “face” of your business entirely on the web, that there really is no “small thinking”, that the leverage given to you via marketing on the web is the same as a large or very large company.

How important is it to to think about your business marketing and web presence in the early stages of your business? Let’s think of an example where it might become apparent.

In other words let’s say you are a plumber, a one man company that is a busy plumber and you like your situation. Perhaps you don’t want or need more success. Eventually however you might outgrow that situation and want to hire and clone yourself so that you need not go out on calls, but will administrate instead. So to grow your company you need more presence, more visibility, more calls to be able to hire.

Even though you had not thought of it before, now the web becomes something you can leverage. What was missing before becomes now a necessity. But you had not yet even picked a domain name or hired a developer, it becomes apparent now that if you HAD done that earlier, you would have had more presence once your domain name had been registered, because the domain age now becomes a factor.

11 Reasons why your web site isn’t getting traffic

HigherSourceSites — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:18:16 +0000

Overachieving graphics – By this I mean you want the pretty pictures but are not willing to write text to go along with it. Yes they will look at the picture, but unless you are cousin to a google engineer, the graphic alone won’t bring in visitors. Unless of course you are images.google.com
Poor copy writing – Hire a copy writer to work with your seo guy. Usually one can’t do the other, because the odler copy writer doesn’t know seo, and the seo guy is too young to know how to write well…
Targeting the wrong market – It’s hard to determine unless you have a marketing department who is your likely target in your industry. And unless you are skilled at SEO you won’t know what a micro niche market is either.
Not targeting any market – Using a shotgun approach won’t work. You need to pick your battles.
Poor design – not all web construction people are also art directors. Normally a well done site, one with a budget preferably, will have both.
Takes too long to load a page – THis is graphics killing your site another way. If it takes too long to load then your visitors will leave. It’s even less than seven or eight seconds, when that used to be the standard. And even less for an e-commerce site.
Too flashy and cutesy – Unless you are marketing to an eight year old, too flashy will turn off most visitors. If the web development team doesn’t use html5 for your screens, then perhaps you are losing a market that lives on mobile or devices that won’t play swf files (flash).
Using poor contrast in color mixing – For an older market its crucial to pick colors that won’t get you blindsided by delivering content without contrast. As you get older your eyes get worse, and contrast is not just a nicety, its a necessity…
Poor credibility – Not having testimonials, or privacy policy page where it can be noticed both from the home page and from our contact page. Even any of the above items will kill credibility.
Poor font choice – There are certain fonts that are web safe, use those. Having uniform font selection throughout the site is the mark of a professional web construction, or art director.
Navigation is non-uniform – Having a sidebar with navigation is nice, as long as secondary and tertiary pages use the same style. Having breadcrumbs is necessary for larger sites. Have a good way to back out of a page without clicking the back button. Having a huge menu is a turn off, but sometimes is the easiest way to allow visitors to see what you offer.

It’s important to take the time to develop a good web site but many times you need to consider your target market audience. You can’t fish where the lake is dry or the fish aren’t in school! Search Engine (SEO) has many facets, one of which is finding your target audience. Two things have to exist for you to succeed; You will need traffic and you will need motivated traffic. You cannot expect to come home with dinner on the table if the fish aren’t buying what you think you are selling.

Depersonalize Search – a quicker way

HigherSourceSites — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:37:53 +0000

My last post about how to depersonalize search might have been too hard for the weary computer user, so here is a much quicker ( and efficient ) method. If you are using Firefox there is a plugin that you can install that does a great job – just point your browser to http://yoast.com/tools/seo/disable-personalized-search-plugin/ and choose which version you want.

Once it is installed you have in your browser ( after restarting ) the ability to do your search without qualms about how accurate the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) will be based on your own personal searches you have been making on that computer.

All you need to do now is use the search form shown in the graphic…

Finding the right developer

HigherSourceSites — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:15:04 +0000

If you ever want to hire a web developer please make sure you put your hosting service and your domain in your own name. This is the best advice I can give you for the long haul ahead in your internet presence. I recently spoke to someone who has a difficult problem because the web guy she had hired became a difficult person and refuses to relinquish his hold on the domain name. Lawyers and bad feelings and frustration ahead if you do not heed me now.

And this is not the first time I have heard of these types of problems.

It is my preference that I have my clients purchase their hosting service and their domain first, before work begins. In the case where the client has no clue of what to do then we get on the phone and talk them through the process. Or they are in the office when we consult and get that stuff out of the way.Obviously this is the ideal situation because then we sometimes meet for the first time and can establish rapport and credentials and mutual respect and understanding.

Never give your credit card number to someone if you don’t have to. Its the last resort when all else fails with your developer.
But they should have a way for you to pay without giving it to them directly, so I don’t know why you would do that.

I make it a practice not to take credit cards for direct payment, unless its a recurring invoice situation where it becomes a necessity, or a convenience to the client. For example I used to take a credit card for authorize.net or first data to put that in motion.
PayPal makes it easy to make a payment and have your numbers kept to yourself. And that is but one way of probably many other ways to make a payment.

In the case where you are purchasing your hosting and domain through the services of a hosting company then most likely you are safe to give those numbers for your purchase. I say most likely because how else can you conduct any business these days without using your Credit Card number?

If you currently are having a problem with a developer such as I described above, you should try to give them as much aggravation as you can, just so they do not inflict themselves upon any others. Perhaps you can ruin their reputation by giving negative feedback on yelp.com or some other sites, or even create a blog to bring them down. However I have known personally individuals who are really good at what they do but one individual did not get the proper attention and do not deserve to have their reputation ruined this way.

I did notice a new industry popping up in my radar, and its called “reputation management”, but I am not sure what they do to correct nuisance and negative campaigns against companies and individuals on the web.

One thing that can be done to counter the negative is to produce lots of positives. Ten to one would be a good ratio, because if any of these positive articles that get to page 1 on SERPs would counter the one negative one that is there also.

Low Hanging Fruit (SEO)

HigherSourceSites — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:13:47 +0000

I was thinking recently about how to find ways to get some traffic to your web site, something that would be easy to describe and easy to implement. I think the best way to describe it is the idea of “low hanging fruit”.

Let’s say you have a site – let’s use Cary on Fitness as an example. Cary Hiner is an excellent example because he is local and has a lot of competition in the physical fitness industry. He is up against some big companies like fusion fitness and 24 hour fitness etc. So what would I do if i were Cary?

First go to my site to the resource page and go to the google adwords link and click on that. Then plugin your site domain and use the following search criteria. You might have to use your gmail email account to get all the columns in your search, if you wanted to dig deeper. So your search might look like this ie;

So using the adwords data here can show some interesting stuff, although it is not an advanced research tool it has several advantages. One is that it is free, and that is a big plus. Another one is that it is a fast idea generating tool. You can see at a glance whether or not you want to use some of these terms in a new post or a new page. So for example you have “speed exercises” is one of the “low hanging fruit” limbs from the SEO tree, so to speak. You can write an optimized post with that term and see whether or not it drives more traffic to your site. If you already had a post with those terms, then you have a control laboratory built into the site, for those terms. Just watch for traffic for both posts to see if there is better traffic to an optimized page then the other one. You can download the entire data set up to a hundred rows and sift through the data at your desktop convenience.

Why fight the high competition unless you have to?

Server Logs confusion

HigherSourceSites — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 18:28:46 +0000

Recently a client was talking to me about his hosting company’s stats on his website. Here was our correspondence.

ed- hi,

fat cow sent me my visitor stats for february- so far this month, 1,805 visits, 25,590 hits..thats the most for any month since august 2011.

my response -

Frankly I don’t believe those numbers, and do not use fat cow for quant stuff.
According to Google Analytics ( you can go to them via logging into google.com/analytics
and view the dashboard) and see better and truer numbers. You will see the dashboard report when it is emailed…
You can get over 200 different reports this way.In the case of hosting companies numbers – i think they are using server logs
and can confuse people easily that way because they don’t track individuals who come to the site, they track the number of requests
that go to a browser.For example every time a browser goes to a fat cow domain the server logs are written, even if they are search engines themselves
so there is a huge number of erroneous “visits” or “hits” made this way. Server logs do not distinguish between real visits and search engines
crawling the domains…

In the case of a web page that has several graphics it also can make a lot of requests to the browser to go out and get those images
for example, so even though one page loads, it will show several “hits” which really is not what you want.
Lots of times i will see a hit counter on a site and know for certain those people do not know what they are doing, because unless they are
acquiring data real time for real people and not the erroneous numbers described above, it is a falsehood.

You want real numbers as shown below…(graphic omitted here for privacy- ed)
If you want to see better numbers than get cracking and write more posts in those forums, or create new pages and write more stuff there, or
invite others to write new posts and pages or invite moderators or something that acquires writers. Also backlinks are important, that is links from
other sites that will drive traffic to your site, but until they have something to read there probably not yet…
The search engines will index the pages using the titles of the pages and the headings of the posts, along with the content you write, and will drive traffic
to your site…
Like i said before though, you won’t be getting traffic until that really happens, and not to concern yourself with traffic until there is substance for
people to read.
Content is King.

Maintenance Agreements & SEO

HigherSourceSites — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:11:56 +0000

After you create your design and implement your web site construction either with or without designers and art directors, what then?
Do you expect people will come because you build it? Remember that movie (Field of Dreams) was categorized as a fantasy?
Lately I have been thinking of a good way to continually work for the benefit of the client in small ways that don’t cost a lot of money for them, yet will bring that web site construction to purpose.
One way is to incorporate some SEO into a maintenance agreement.
To my mind web site maintenance has several functions ie;

Backup and Restore – I believe this is the heart of all maintenance agreements and therefore requires careful consideration for the owner and the maintainer
Security – How can the owner ensure a site does not get hacked, or if not that then what are the best alternatives?
Be the Help Desk for the Client so that they understand what they have
Implement the Changes the Client wants – remembering your time is also valuable and not all requests are reasonable
Reporting Requirements both required and not required
Researching the data on the site, and what it represents
Making productive suggestions for improving the SEO of their content

To do all the above what do you think the time commitment would be for a developer? How many hours a month do you think it would take? Certainly the honeymoon time of the agreement would be the busiest because that is where the greatest questions would arise from the client – so the help desk would be the busiest then. But also laying the foundation for the backups and strategizing over it would be the greatest.

In some cases it is a straightforward thing – in Word Press sites there are dozens of backup plugins, but also there is the problem of how often to backup the files and which ones. Here generally we take different approaches;

We sync the data daily to a local database so that we always have the latest copy that way. However there are some remote servers where even the use of tunneling makes this difficult. That’s another reason why a developer should be brought in to give server recommendations so that backups become easier rather than more difficult.
We schedule a daily backup using a plugin such that it is either tucked away on the remote server or downloaded via email and tucked away inside a local host folder or email folder
We take the wp-content folder, the .htaccess file, the index.php file and download that to local host and tuck that away for safekeeping. That way all the plugins and images are available.
We export the pages and posts and images into an importable xml file, and build a localhost copy using the resulting file. This way we have pretty much everything and can verify we have a good copy.

In cases where it is a direct static site where you have local copies and are ftp’ing them to the server then you have to take a good look at your desktop and how safe those files are, as well as how hackable is the remote server. In some cases you can be sure you have at least one good copy of everything that way, as long as you sync in one direction you are generally safe. However its nice to have a portable method of safekeeping, or cloud based system such as Amazon S3 to automate the backups. The price of a terabyte of storage is getting cheaper daily.

As for the rest of the agreement – doing something for the benefit of SEO is becoming more imperative because of the competition for visibility on the internet is becoming so intense.

For that you have to research the terms on the page, the construction of the page (more intense if you had no part in the process in the first place), and building up a modicum of analytic structure (Google Analytics) to show improvement or regression.

Recently I was talking to someone about their site and their desire to be indexed and visible for a particular search term – however when I looked at their site they had no such term on their home page, or for that matter not much of it elsewhere either. Yes I would have to say if you want to be found for a particular search term you pretty much have to have that content on your site!

However not every term you think is important is the one you want to emphasize in your content. After reviewing what I thought were competitive terms, synonyms, other sites – I found alternative search terms that would be more productive to aim for.

Each month should deliver similar small analytic and research steps to improve the SEO of the site.

Word Press Videos

HigherSourceSites — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:05:45 +0000

The videos below are all short and sweet, and will teach you
how to use Word Press in a short amount of time.
I’ve added links to the videos and a link to come back and review what else you need. If there is something other than what is listed here, please let me know, and I will endeavor to find or create one. Thanks for visiting.

Topics include

add heading

add image

add image from URL

add links

add media

add new page

add new post

add-paragraph

admin bar

Using Word Press Menus

HigherSourceSites — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:25:10 +0000

Follow along with this video to see how Word Press Menu System can work for you. Remember that sometimes your own theme has its own navigation system, which you can opt-in and opt-out on a click of a button.
Click on this Posts Title to view the video.

Offers to publish reciprocal links

HigherSourceSites — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:39:52 +0000

Almost weekly I get offers to put up a link to some other site, in return for their putting a link to my site. Almost always I decline for a variety of reasons. Some of these cases i could have done a bit of effort and made it whole, but if they haven’t done their homework or approached me properly, i say why bother? Here are some of my favorite reasons. Do you have some others?

I have no control of the anchor text on their end of the reciprocity.
Their page rank is less than mine
Their information is out of date
There are too many outbound links on that page
There are ads on the page
The Title Tag on the page does not contain keywords I consider important to my domain
I don’t have control over the description meta tag
The image of my site has no alt text, and is out of date
They don’t use the title attribute in their outbound links
Their email to me seemed generated and impersonal

Notice I don’t have any design issues with their page. Text is still gold for seo.

Please let me know if you have other reasons for declining someone’s seeming good intentions…