Web Marketing Magic Bullet

According to Google's rankings, the best web sites are the best written - that's right, I am again talking about QUALITY CONTENT as a means of promoting your web site.

Consistent high-ranking web sites do well because of the content-and I mean text here, not images. Not only are the sites well written, but updated at least every few weeks if not more often.

Many web site owners are under the mistaken impression that you can have a web site built, tell the search engines you've got a site and you'll start making money. Nothing is further from the truth. It takes constant attention to grow.

Here are some tips on writing content for your web site:

• Updating - once your site has been seen by a visitor, it is no longer interesting if nothing changes. Plan ahead for this and schedule regular updates.
• Spelling and Grammar - Seems obvious, but not always carried out. Write out your content in a word processing program, check spelling and content before sending it to your webmaster. Then be sure they look closely at it for these errors as well. Two sets of eyes are better than one.
• Paragraphs: Keep these short-no long blocks of text! Don't ramble on as web visitors will get bored and go somewhere else. Try to keep paragraphs to 1-4 sentences.
• Lists - Use both bulleted (like this list) and numbered. Lists form a large part of the text on the highest ranking sites. It denotes your points quickly and is easy to read.
• Sentence length - Again, keep them brief-actually 10 words or fewer. This is very hard for some people to do, including me, but makes that all-important content easier for visitors to process. You may sprinkle lengthier sentences in but don't clump them together in a paragraph.
• Contextual relevance - Make sure your text contains numerous terms related to the keywords, as well as variations of the keyword. The process I like to use is to have my clients write their version of content, then pass to me to edit in keyphrases and related terms. Then I pass it back to them for additional editing. Back and forth until we get it right.

Then every few weeks, return to the first item in this list!

Your content will provide information about your product and service to the web visitor in a way that's easy to read and understand.

The Look of Things to Come

Drumroll......Here it is!

This is the look of things to come for the CD WebMaker site redesign.

I'd love to hear what you think so leave your comments, good, bad and ugly if you like.

New Website Launch

Today I've finished up the Doorways to the West site. Well, except for some slight changes the client will request first of the week.

This has been one of the smoothest projects I've had in a long time. Client was ready with content and info, and knew what they wanted to accomplish. It's been just great working with them.

This site has some serious PHP and MySQL programming involved. They needed a 'photo gallery' for the doors and other work by Tom, and needed to be able to update it for themselves.

That led me to write my own gallery script which was hugely successful. Then the client asked for some upgrades to the galleries, which went smoothly enough.

All that accomplished with XHTML and CSS, along with the PHP and MySQL.

I'm quite proud of this project and the client has passed along some early feedback:

"Am getting a REALLY positive response: Warm, Inviting, Professional, Dramatic, and Rich...are some of the responses".

Go check out the site and if you're in the market for new doors, give them a shout, these things are fantastic!

Hey, hey, my, my

Wow, I can't believe it's been that long since my last post. I've been working on a new format for thisin WordPress and have finally called it quits.

I know some of my colleagues would scoff that I'm returning to and sticking with Blogger, but who cares? WP has some good features, but not worth the extra time, trouble and plugins you gotta put into it.

I will be doing a redesign for layout purposes, but every time I start to work on my own website I get extremely busy with clients. Guess that's a good thing, huh?

I got a RIO Carbon MP3 player and voice recorder on eBay this week. This little thing is fantastic. Don't know if I could justify the $300 MSRP, but for $125 I know I can't go wrong. I've got all my music loaded into it, and it only takes up about 1/3 of the total space. I can plug it in to my 'puter and listen to the tunes, too.

The 'real' reason for getting it though was so I can start podcasting. Boy, another thing on my list.

WORKS IN PROGRESS: Doorways to the West - a woodworker from Westcliffe that's selling hand-carved doors (beautiful!) and Eagle Steel Homes (our neighbor). I'll be posting the URL's and some photos later.