Fox Web Company. Smarter.

Increase your site's traffic.

1. Keywords

Keywords are what people browsing the Web use to find what they want.

For example, whenever you go to Google or Yahoo! and search for a good Thai restaurant in the Jackson, MS area, chances are, you'd type in "Thai food Jackson Mississippi" or "Thai restaurant Jackson MS". Each of those words you'd type is a keyword.

In order for crawler-based search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, to display your website among the first ten results, the content on your site needs to be rich in keywords that potential customers would use to search for your website.  It can also be helpful to make keywords within your content bold, used as headings, linked to more relevant content, italicized, etc.

2. Links to your site

Search engines not only look at what's on YOUR website when someone searches for it! They also look for  other sites that have links to your site, and analyze whether or not the link descriptions are relevant to the content on your site. The more links there are to your site, and the more relevant your site's content are to those links, the better your search engine rankings will be!

So... how do you get people to link to your site? Here are a few suggestions...

Networking on the Web:
Surely by now you've become aware of how the advent of social networking has affected the ways and reasons we use the Internet. Sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn connect not only teenagers and college students, but professionals as well.  These social networking sites are all free to join & use, and provide a great platform for marketing your site to a practically limitless audience of potential customers.

Advertise:
If your website features an e-commerce system, or another system by which you are intending to make your website make YOU money directly, then advertising could be a fruitful investment. Lots of websites with big audiences (news, weather, etc.) offer ad affiliate programs. Some websites offer banner or other graphical ads, or text-only ads, or both, priced depending on how much space they'd take up - very similar to how newspaper ads work!

There are free options out there for advertising as well: Google AdSense is a good affiliate program. The way it works is, you'd display some small, non-invasive text ads on your website, and, in return, other websites will display text ads that link to you.

Blogging:
What's a blog, you say? You're reading one right now!

A blog is kind of like an online diary or journal, that's great for personal use, but can also be a great marketing tool. You don't have to be a great writer to have a blog, either! (Hey, I'm writing this, and I'm just a graphic designer.) Just write about what your business is doing, exciting new products or services you may be launching, post pictures, etc. Most blog platforms have spell check if you're not a great speller. And, of course, to increase your site's linkage, post links to your site, and use those keywords we talked about! Example: Fox Web Company  - Smarter web design and web hosting.

Also, having a blog makes it easier to network with other bloggers. For example, the FoxWebCo blog you're reading now uses Typepad (I also recommend Blogger and Wordpress), and the Typepad interface allows us to customize our blog to link to blogs we like, and other folks who like our blog can link to it, etc. All these links out there will add up & have a positive effect to your website's traffic!

3. Frequent updates

Search engines also work by looking for websites which have been updated recently. That's why it's a good idea to keep up-to-date information posted on your site.  Here's some ways FoxWebCo can help you with this:

We'll update your site for you.
For a reasonable hourly rate, we can post any updated text, photos, etc. you send us to your website. For more information about our rates, contact Andy (andy@foxwebco.com or 228-493-6555), and he will work with you to come up with a solution that's best for your website (and your wallet!)

We'll set up your site so it's easy to update yourself.
There are couple of ways we can do this: We can outfit your website with a Content Management System (or CMS), or, if you purchase the program Adobe Contribute and install it on your computer, we'd be happy to train you on how to use it to update your site.

If you choose to try out a CMS, there are practically limitless options out there, and MANY of them are open-source (that means they're free, but donations are encouraged)! Here's some of our favorites, but feel free to dig deeper & find one that works for your site, and we'll help install it.
- Mambo
- Joomla (these first two are very similar, you may notice)
- Drupal
- CMS Made Simple
- Wordpress (technically, Wordpress is a blogging system, but its format is so flexible, that it can be modified as a CMS)

4. Good, clean XHTML/CSS

Good, clean what?

XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is what's called a markup language - a set of codes used to tell a web browser what to display on a website.  It's what FoxWebCo web designers & developers such as myself use to make your website display what your business needs it to.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used to make your website have the look it does - it's used to define fonts used, font sizes, background colors, borders, widths, heights, etc.

To make a long story short, XHTML & CSS, when properly written & implemented, work together to tell the web browser to display a website that has all its content in the right place, looks good, etc.

If your site was designed by FoxWebCo, you can probably guarantee its XHTML and CSS are compliant. However, if we designed a a site for you several years or so ago, you may want to check with us to make sure it's compliant with Web standards - no, we were never bad web designers! It's just that the standards and the most efficient ways of making websites IS constantly changing, and to make sure your website is keeping up, its design and layout should be updated once every year or two, in my opinion.

XHTML & CSS are constantly evolving to use less and less code. A website designed in 2000 probably has a lot more code in it than one designed in 2007. The more code a search engine has to dig through, the less desirable your rankings will be. Also, this ties in with keeping a site's content up-to-date, as well.

So, in conclusion, if your website isn't showing up where you'd like it in the Google or Yahoo! search results, please use this article as a checklist to see what may need to be done. Also, feel free to contact us for more information on how we can help get your website up there in the Top Ten. :)

 

More Savvy Web Browsing - Are You Up-To-Date?

Are you using the most up-to-date version of your favorite web browser? If not, you could be missing out on some cool new features, or seeing some funny stuff on some of the websites you visit.

A while back, I introduced you to some popular browsers out there that, for many, are a refreshing alternative to the big blue "e" for Windows users. Perhaps you don't have the 5 or 10 minutes to spare to try a new browser out, or you're just not that interested, or you fear change, and hey, that's OK. But you should definitely at least be on the lookout for Internet Explorer updates as they become available.

Why? Because the Web is always changing, improving, and evolving. And most reputable web design firms, like FoxWebCo, will continue to change, improve, and evolve with it.

I'm going to share a dirty secret with you about Internet Explorer, the most popular web browser: it has kind of a bad reputation with Web Design people such as myself, due to some problems adhering to World Wide Web Consortium standards. But they're getting better at it. (Microsoft even promises that Internet Explorer version 8.0 will pass the Acid 2 Test for standards compatibility.)

What is the World Wide Web Consortium (or, W3C for short) and what does it mean to you? To make a long story short, the W3C is organization that seeks, among other things, to make the entire Web accessible, no matter what kind of computer, browser, or whatever you're using. The W3C defines how the codes designers like me use to make Web pages should work, and how browsers should interpret those codes. But Internet Explorer is notorious for not playing by the rules.

Since the release of Internet Explorer version 7.0 in October 2006, things have been a little better. IE 7 even has tabbed browsing, a nifty feature that was previously only found on Firefox and other browsers that many may not have known about. But the problem is, many of you are still using Internet Explorer version 6.0.

Some website designs that look AWESOME in IE 7 and other browsers, in IE 6, will appear distorted. Things that should float beside another element may get pushed up under that element, text and content may "bleed over" into the background, etc. It's kind of a tough job sometimes to make a website look good in the latest browsers, and IE 6, too.

So - in conclusion, I urge you strongly to upgrade! Not just for the sanity of myself and other Web designers, but so YOU can be a savvy Web surfer and use a browser that does a much better job of what it's supposed to do by being smarter about standards, has cool new features, and is also more secure.

If you don't know if you NEED to upgrade or not, in your browser, go to Help and click About Internet Explorer. If the logo doesn't say "Windows Internet Explorer 7", you should upgrade!

Click here to get started upgrading to IE 7!

And after you've finished upgrading to 7, be on the lookout for version 8.0 to be released!  Whenever Internet Explorer asks you to install any browsing or security updates, do it!