Archive for August, 2009

Web Cautions

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

by Lorraine Hart
President Ideal Consulting Services, Inc.
516 826-6725, www.IdealConsulting.net

With the advent and growth of the World Wide Web many companies and services have been jumping on the band wagon. There is undoubtedly opportunity on the web, but there are also significant land mines out there. Before you jump in or if you are already in, before you commit to some of the promises being made, please use just a little caution.

Recently I have come across a number of situations where promises have turned into problems. Following are some cautions.

If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t good. Beware of the free website offers. In the cases I have seen, the web developer either links you to your competitors or ends up charging you a huge monthly fee to maintain the free website. I have seen fees as high as $281 per month for a free website.

Regarding linking to other websites, I just want to say be careful. Links are or can be good, especially links to you, but beware of linking to a site where your prospects can find your competitors.

If you are new to the web or if you are expanding your presence on the web, make sure you own your own domain name (that is your address on the web). Just because you pay for it doesn’t mean you own it – so just check it out. Sometimes a third party will offer do get you more visibility on the web. Some of these companies will purchase a different domain name, duplicate your website and then send prospects to that website. If you decide to cancel your services with that company, they own the new domain name that has been getting all that traffic and has built up a presence on the web.

A similar situation occurs when your web developer has your website directed to their website. It is common for web developers to use this while they are developing your site, but once your website is completed, it should be found directly on the internet, not as a “sub-domain” of another website. To find out if this is the case with you simply type in your website and then look in the bar at the top when your website comes up. If it starts with anything other than your website name you are part of another’s site.

I am seeing more and more promises from companies to get you top listing on the web. I am also seeing promises of key-word clicks. Some of the services are excellent, but unfortunately many of the services are not what you think they are. The one many of my clients have been telling me about is the offer to get high placement or promise that you they will be listed “first or second, etc.” Often this is not quite what you think it is. Instead what they are promising is that you will be first or second in their directory. This, of course means that your prospects have to first find their directory and then they can find you.

Earlier I mentioned duplicate websites. There are a number of ways that this is being done and an explanation of the advantages and disadvantages is beyond the scope of this article. With the internet becoming the place to go for information and because of constantly changing rules it is difficult for anyone to stay fully informed. However there are certain cautions that you must know about.

For more information, please email or call Ideal Consulting.

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The Missing Sales Ingredient

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

by Arthur Hart
Websites by Ideal
516-382-0861

There is a key ingredient in the sales process that is deadly if it is missing at either the very beginning or at the very end. That ingredient is confidence in you and your company.

It can be deadly at the very beginning if the potential customer has never heard of you and it can be deadly at the very end if the potential customer isn’t quite sure of your ability to build their dream.

In either case, a good website can do a lot to overcome the potential customer’s lack of confidence.

Even if they haven’t heard of you directly, having a website for them to visit shows them that you have a real business that has been around for awhile and that you intend to be there for them. The reason we recommend that you register your domain name and purchase hosting for at least five years is that even the search engines use this as an indication that you intend to be there for the long haul.

At the end of the sales process, when you are trying to close the deal, things will go a lot more smoothly if they’ve built up their confidence in you via your website. For example, a webpage filled with testimonials from satisfied customers goes a long way toward building their confidence in you. And similarly, a good photo gallery showing some completed projects will also boost their confidence. It is their confidence in you that will get them to sign on the dotted line.

To see a sample of some of the website designs created by Websites by Ideal, visit our website: www.websitesbyideal.com and go to our samples page. You can contact us for help with your website by either filling out and submitting the contact form on our website or by calling 516-382-0861.

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To Web or Not to Web

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

by Lorraine Hart
President
Ideal Consulting Services, Inc.

I am often asked about websites. These questions range from “should I?”, “must I?”, “should it be fancy?”, “should it be simple?”, “is it cheap?”, “is it expensive?”, “can I live without it?” The answer to all those questions is yes, and it depends. If you haven’t stopped reading by now, you deserve some real answers to those often asked questions.

In answer to the question “should I?” I am tempted to ask you if you should have a phone or more to the point a cell phone. Why do you need to have a website? Quite simply, because as a business it’s the thing to do and people expect it. That does not mean that you are going to get an influx of new clients simply because you have a website. However if and when you do take the plunge or when you decide it is time to redesign your website you will want to take some steps to make it possible to find you on the World Wide
Web. One of the simple steps is to include your website in all your other promotional materials. Another step has to do with what the technicians refer to as making your website search engine friendly. This is also known as search engine optimization or SEO.

Practically speaking what can your website do for you? It can serve as a good communi-cation tool; it can give you the opportunity to brag a little or a lot. It is an opportunity to show off your work, to show how you are different and of course to show that you are up with modern technology. Even if doesn’t really matter, people like it. Often, even if people never visit you online, it makes them feel good to know you have a real “address”.

The next question is how fancy should it be? That depends on you and your potential guests. Some people like very fancy, with lots of bells and whistles, others like very simple. Tastes vary greatly, just as they do in styles of houses, furniture and even clothing. I like simple, but that’s me. What do you like? More importantly, what will your visitors like, or should I say those who you want as potential clients. Keep in mind that although the animation and music can add life to your website, these features can also become very
annoying. Costs vary greatly and no, quality is not directly proportional to cost. I have seen some very nice, inexpensive websites, but unfortunately, I have also seen some very expensive, really bad websites. Beware of the very high cost and very low cost solutions. Make sure you know what you are getting so you can compare your options. If you plan to have a gallery of photos, you will need more space and more pages.

One of the first steps in planning for your website is deciding what to call it. Even if you are not quite ready for building your website now, you should still decide what name you want and buy that domain name now. Then you will have your name when you are ready for it.

Part of your planning process must include website maintenance. Although you may not want to be bothered with major updating, you absolutely do want to have the ability to make simple changes and updates. And it has to be simple. Unfortunately we have probably all heard of people waiting weeks and months for a simple change.

Once you take the plunge you will be glad you did. In addition to a storefront on the web, you will have another way to communicate to your clients.

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Search Engine Optimization

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

by Arthur Hart
Websites by Ideal
516-382-0861

It doesn’t pay to try to fool search engines into giving your web pages a higher page ranking than they deserve. The purpose of the search engines is to provide their users with relevant and useful information. Therefore, your focus in getting better results from your website should be cooperating with the search engines. In other words, you should focus most of your attention on putting relevant and useful information on your website – the kind of information that the search engines would love to direct people to when they’re looking for it.

This being said, there are some ways of helping the search engines find out what information you have available so that they can properly index it and present it when they think it is relevant to what someone has asked them to find on the internet. It helps to visualize the activity of a search engine system as colony of little ants busily scurrying all over the internet looking for food to bring back to the main databases. The food they are looking for, as we indicated before, is information that might be relevant and useful to someone making a request for such information from the search engine.

So how do we help these busy little ants find the food we have for them on our website? One of the best ways is to use good descriptive page titles. A page title is a string of up to about 60 characters or so that the web browser will display at the top of the page. It’s easily missed by most people because it’s almost hidden out of sight at the very top of the screen – way above all those useful toolbars you’ve got installed. However, our little search engine ants pay particular attention to these titles as a good indication of what is to be found on the page. Knowing this, one should pay attention to using meaningful page titles. For example, if your website is about the care and feeding of gerbils, then the title of your photo gallery page should be “Gerbil Pictures” or “Pictures of Gerbils” rather than simply “Pictures” or “Photo Gallery.”

Our little ants aren’t intelligent enough to know that since your whole website is about gerbils, your photo gallery page is naturally going to contain pictures of gerbils! Each page is indexed individually and needs to offer as much help as possible as to its own content. A good way of indicating to our little ants what is on a page, even before they arrive to examine its content, is to have a meaningful name for the page. The same principle applies to naming pages as we saw in giving them meaningful page titles. For example, the page address “http://www.my-gerbil-website.com/gerbil-pictures.html” gives the search engines a lot more meaningful information than “http://www.mygerbilwebsite.com/gerbilpictures.html.” People have gotten into the habit of leaving the hyphens out of domain names and will usually opt for “mygerbilwebsite.com” instead of “my-gerbil-website.com” even though the later gives the search engines more information. The search engines treat the hyphens as blanks. Therefore, the individual words stand out for them in the first domain name. However, they aren’t quite up to figuring out where the blanks or hyphens should go in the second domain name.

If you know or can guess what word or phrase someone is likely to use when searching the web for information that you have on your website, then by all means use those words or phrases in the page content. Again, however, don’t overdo it by packing your pages with keyword phrases just to try to get the search engines to give your page an artificially high ranking. The search engines have caught on to this trick and if they think you’re trying to put one over on them, they can and will reduce your page ranking instead of increasing it. By the same token, keyword meta-tags in the internal page header, that were originally meant to be used to help search engines index the page properly, are virtually ignored these days. This came about because too many people abused the intent of these tags and just stuffed them full of the same keywords repeated over and over in an effort to fool the search engines.

In summary, the best practice is to work in concert with the purpose of the search engines, which is to provide relevant and useful information to the person using the internet. Steer clear of so-called “black hat” techniques such as “cloaking” which intentionally shows the search engines different content than will actually be displayed to the human users of your website. It all starts with creating or providing useful content and then helping the search engines find it easily so that it can be indexed and easily retrieved when it is relevant to a search engine user. The latest tricks and techniques for getting your pages to show up first will eventually be recognized and penalized by the search engines as they are counter to their purpose.

How to Get Better Search Results:
• Relevant Content, i.e.: remodeler, Bohemia
• Descriptive Page Titles
• Meaningful Names on a page
• Use hyphens – each word searchable
• Use keyword phrases in page content

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