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Demystifying the Geek Speak on Your Website By Margaret Gill Does the Geek Speak around websites just do your head in? It did mine in for a very long time until I realised websites are a lot like house work: • They have spiders running amok making decisions on what parts of your house they are going to showcase on their web Sound familiar? In business you either need to have a lot of money to throw at your website or you need to get a handle on some of the geek speak so you can get the most out of your website and attract high numbers of visitors to your site. Last month we looked at the basics you need to get right when you start to think about the design of your website. This month we are going to take a look at some of the things most people “don’t know, they don’t know” about getting visitors to their site. Confusion reigns in most people’s brains when the geeks start to speak. Computer geeks talk in some extra terrestrial language that seems more apt in a Star Wars movie than on your website. Once you break down the terminology it all starts to become less threatening and more like a now age game of hide and seek. Unlike traditional hide and seek where you spend the whole game trying not to be found. Now your purpose is to be so visible you can’t help but be found. Let’s have look at some of the important terminology before we go too much further: Internet Searchers – People sitting at their computer wanting to find relevant information on a particular topic. These are the people you want to visit so they can buy your products and services. Search Engine (SE’s) – Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista are all search engines. They have machines (called spiders) that get dispatched on regular occasions to crawl electronically through your website. Within a nanosecond these spiders can make or break your business as they search at warp speed determining whether your site meets the needs of their clients or not. Their sole purpose is to index relevant web pages to help their clients (internet searchers) find the information they seek. Search Strings – the words and phrases people type into a search engine to find the particular information they need. Keywords – words you list on each page of your site to help search engines find your site. The more relevant the key words are to the content of your page – the more chance you have of being found. Search Engine Ranking – this is where you sit on the page when the search engine proudly displays the results of a search string. Your aim is to be number one, in the top three or at least on the first page of results. Trouble is everyone else in your industry is competing for the same spot. Natural Ranking – This is where your efforts have paid off and search engines list your site in their ranking for free. Hallelujah if you are at #1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO’s) – This is your ability to improve your natural ranking by including appropriate keywords and constantly changing relevant text. Pay Per Click (PPC) – This is when you pay search engines to rank your site on the right hand side of the screen. PPC is a word auction. PPC is one of the ways search engines make money and you can bet the rules run in their favour. You bid on certain words that you guess your clients might use if they were looking for your particular product or service. If your bid is the highest then you rank the best. You only pay the amount you have bid if someone actually clicks on your ad. If you are in a popular target market, PPC is sometimes the only way you will get visitors to a new site. Beware because it can become pricey and you can loose your shirt if you don’t understand the rules. You might ask what this has to do with your website. The answer is EVERYTHING!!! There are now billions of websites out in cyberspace and you are competing for ranking with every one of those sites who have keywords similar to yours. Unless you are very good at getting potential clients to your site via other sources such as advertising or brochure drops, ranking is the traditional way people find your website. The only way to stand out is to understand how ranking occurs and make yourself stand out. Make It About the Client Most people make their websites about them and not about the client. To get the best rankings you need to understand what your client wants and what they might be typing into a search string to find you. The more focused and specific your keywords are, and the more focused and specific you are in telling people what you can do for them, the more chance you have of getting website visitors. Search engines, like all businesses are about providing the best results they can for their customers. To keep people using their search engine they have to be very selective about what they rank. All through this article you will see the word RELEVANT. If you can get information on your site that is relevant to the benefits your customers are searching for, then you up your chances of being found. The trick to getting any sort of ranking is to fill your website with relevant information about your products and services. “Hey wait a minute” you say, “what about the pretty colours and pictures and groovy graphics that are going to look good on my site”? The short answer is that search engines can’t see these items and don’t really give a dam how your site looks. They are about returning relevant information to their clients. Design is secondary to good text when it comes to being ranked. Oh dear and you just spent $3,000 making your site look really pretty. Now let’s get to the really bad news. If you have employed a designer who has used: • Graphics with little or no text (text is any words you can cut and paste off a site) • Flash (those are the sites that count down the percentage as it takes forever to load, often making it mandatory to download fancy software to even be able to see the site) yeah right – we all sit patiently while that happens = NOT! • A Splash Page – those are the really pretty pages with a gorgeous graphic and a couple words on the page – those words are usually “enter here”. Did Jackie O have a little black dress? You bet she had several because she knew they got her attention. Website design is a lot like fashion design. Catwalk designer outfits look good on a select few but most of us look best in basic traditional styles that bring out our best features. It’s the same with websites. Don’t be talked into the latest design fade when a basic site will be what brings the compliments and the visitors. Most websites with the above scenarios, will result in the search engines going straight over the top without even pausing for a look - quite simply because the site is invisible to them. Remember search engines love relevant text not pictures! Secondly – anyone that does happen to stumble on your site will invariably click away before the site loads. The majority of people who visit websites only stay 10 seconds. If you make it hard for people to see your site, or haven’t given them a compelling reason to stay you can rest assured they will be hitting the back button and will be gone in under 5 seconds. They will NEVER come back. You only have to look at the way you visit websites yourself to know this to be the truth. Isn’t that depressing! The bad news only gets worse. Most search engines find you via four methods and many websites have these areas blank. • Titles – these are the words that appear in the tabs of your browser and is the heading that appears in a search engine ranking • Meta Tags – the description you see when a site comes up in a natural ranking • Keywords – are coded into your site and help search engines match your site to a search string • Text - the actual words you see on your website The more these four items match and compliment each other, the higher up the search engine ranking you go. Sadly the text for most websites is generally the last thing that gets considered. Text is usually a task completed in haste and sent over for your designer to cut and paste into your beautiful new site just before it goes live. Most never touch their text again and each day it remains untouched it falls further from favour with the search engines because they love new and relevant text. People seek up to the minute information and for that reason blogs frequently out rank websites these days. Finally, don’t be like me, I forget to include the bleeding obvious in my text. When I first started out I had no idea about this stuff (it’s been a big learning curve). For ages my www.margaretgill.com site wouldn’t rank when I typed “Margaret Gill” into Google. DUH!! I had forgotten to put Margaret Gill in the text of the site and it wasn’t until I added a testimonial with Margaret Gill in the text of the testimonial did the site achieve a #1 natural ranking. There was a big celebration the day it hit #1! Last time I checked it was still beating all the other Margaret Gill’s in the world but I do own the domain name and that is why I’m at #1 because all my ducks are in a row and Google can see them and you have to love that! This nifty tool will let you see what a search engine sees when they pass through each page of your site http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php - it’s sobering! Hopefully between this article and last months article you are beginning to see websites need a lot of thought up front. They are not something a novice should embark on. I would urge you to get help with your site before you start building. You can save yourself a lot of heartache and money. -oOo- Margaret Gill of Abundant Private Practices is a business coach and mentor to health and wellbeing practitioners. Her Full Practice Building System has helped many passionate natural therapists get more clients, help more people and grow the natural therapy practice they deserve and desire. www.Abundant-Private-Practices.com This article orginally appeared on Samantha Richardson's fabulous Empowering Women Website
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