Orangejack LLC

Are you new to social media but don’t know where to start?  We can help.

We have just published a free eBook: Getting Started with Social Media. This eBook is written as a guide or checklist to get yourself or your small business started with social media.  This is your starting point.  Also included is a handy chart you can print and use to fill in your various social media profile information to have on file.

Please head over to our eBook page (we hope to have more there in the future!) to download, read, and distribute the eBook Getting Started with Social Media.

There are all types of websites and many different ways to evaluate if a site is “good” or not. It’s a subjective idea that can be measured objectively. But measurements only work if you know what you are aiming for.

A good website balances between visitors finding what visitors are looking for and visitors finding what authors want visitors to find.

The following components give you the path to begin your plan for building a “good” website.

Audience
Identifying your web audience is crucial to almost every decision you make for the site. The more focused and narrow the audience is defined the better. This isn’t to suggest that other audiences can benefit from your site. Instead this is to focus your efforts. Imagine, if you can, your typical user of the site. Keep that person in mind as you work through the planning. Broad but useful audience ranges may include demographics such as age, gender, and geography, comfort level with technology, and occupation.

Goal
What is it you want your audience to do when they come to your site? Is it to find a resource, learn about you, subscribe to a newsletter, or maybe make a purchase? Decide what the main goal of the site should be and focus the design towards that goal.

Marketing
You may end up with the best designed and most technologically sound website in the world, but if no one visits then it has been a waste of your resources. Decide what principle way people will find out about your site. Will you rely on search engines to dive traffic to the site? Will you use traditional offline marketing practices to get people to remember your web address? Will you email a group of people or encourage others to link to your site? These decisions will affect how you design and provide content for the site.

Design
The design should match both what your audience would expect and how you want to be seen. A good website will have a consistent layout and branding on every page. Pick a technology that will enable your goals to be accomplished easily. Who will be responsible for providing content to the site such as the visitors or a team of authors? Do you want them to interact with the author and each other? Navigation of the site should be intuitive and pages should load quickly.

Content
Text: Content read online is consumed quickly by visitors so writing should get to the point quickly. Pages should be easy to visually scan for relevancy and topics. It is recommended to have a section or page that explains who you are, what you are about, and how to contact you. It is also valuable to have a date on each page of content so others know its age relevancy.

Images: Photos and graphics can be useful in enhancing what is written on a page. To keep these images from being a distraction, however, they should be optimized for the web (resolution of 72 dpi, resized to needed dimensions, and uploaded) for fast load time and visual enhancement. Use a graphics program to make the necessary changes to an image instead of using HTML code to manipulate the image.

Media: Embedded audio, video, and flash can be very helpful in communicating a message online. It is best if these do not play automatically and are used sparingly since they can slow down the load time of a web page. Allow the user to initiate the playing of the media. Your challenge is to make it compelling for them to want to “press play”.

Measure
Various sites measure different metrics to see how effective it is. You will need to decide what is important for you to measure. Some of the most common metrics to monitor include the number of unique visitors, number of page views, and time on a page. Websites that offer subscriptions or memberships also use these numbers as a gauge for knowing how “connected” people are with the site.

Google is the most popular search engine on the Internet. But you probably didn’t need me to tell you that. According to April 2008 stats, Google is used by about 60% of US Internet searches (Yahoo is #2 around 20% and MSN around 10%, AOL and Ask are about 5% each). They maintain their huge lead because they return the most relevant results for a search. If they didn’t, we’d use a different search engine. So how does Google do it? How do they know what are the best sites to refer you to for your search?

A Cola Analogy

I grew up going to our neighborhood pool every summer. One of the things we’d always do is carry some change for ice cream and knock-off brand “Check Cola” during “Adult Swim” times. Winn-Dixie sold Check Cola and I loved it as a kid. Today you can get all kinds of generic cola, but when someone mentions “cola”, the two big brands usually come to mind: Coke and Pepsi.

We know what makes a cola drink, but we don’t know the specifics of what makes a cola a “Coke” or a “Pepsi”. Those are trade secrets. It’s the same with search engines — we know what makes a search engine, but we don’t know what makes a “Google” or a “Yahoo”. However, Google has told us how they separate themselves.

Keyword Matching

The most straight-forward variable in the Google formula for their search engine result page (SERP) is matching the word(s) you use for your search compared to the words on the web page. This of course makes sense. If you search for “college football”, you’d expect web pages to be listed that are about college football!

Google PageRank

The next part of the Google formula is something they call PageRank. Google explains PageRank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

This is where the “secret formula” really kicks into complicated understanding. Every link going to a website counts as a vote but not all votes are equal. If site A has a link that says “a college football website” and the link goes to site B, then Google gives site B a slight bonus for searches on “college football”. If site A is already about college football, then site B gets an extra bonus. And if site A has a high PageRank, site B benefits from that also.

Google is trying to determine what websites are trusted and authoritative on particular subjects, keywords, and phrases then return those sites as relevant. But it doesn’t stop there. PageRank is actually just a part of something bigger…

Page Quality

In a recent blog post from the Official Google Blog, they reveal PageRank is part of determining the overall Page Quality:

PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system. Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it’s not just the language, it’s how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing).

Ranking High in Google

So how do you go about getting all of this to work together? Part of it is having a web page that is about what a person is searching for. The other part is becoming an authority on that subject. A large part of any Internet Marketing campaign will include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and there are a lot of things that go into it. Google tells us how to create a Google-friendly site, but the way I’ve described it for years is:

Design your website for people and the search engines will follow

One of the services Orangejack LLC offers is to not only help you with your search engine optimization, but also more broadly with Internet marketing and overall strategy. Please feel free to contact us if we can be of service.