Fresh Content

In considering SEO for your web site, look at it from the perspective of potential visitors and their favorite search engine.

When people search the internet, they are looking for information and don’t want obsolete information.  If you’re desparate to get a cup of coffee and want to know the closest place, you don’t want to find the place that went out of business last year.

Google wants to be people’s favorite search engine, so they want to deliver what people want.  Therefore they consider how freshness (or staleness) of the website.  If a site hasn’t been updated in a long time, then there’s a good chance the information is obsolete.  That means, it’s probably not the first site to return to people searching for that great cup of coffee.

Now let’s get back to your website.  If search engines want it fresh, then it needs a steady supply of new content.  That presents two big challenges:

Challenge #1:  How to get that new content into the web site.  This is one of those that’s best solved up front.  If you have a static web site or a flash-based website, then getting new content can be more difficult and/or expensive.  Small companies usually go this route and then are chained to the person developing the website for any updates (which means money and time). New content could also mean new menu items (which means more money and time).

On the other hand, there is software out there that makes adding content very easy, like a blog (eg wordpress) or a content management system (CMS) such as joomla.  With this type of software, adding a new article is point-and-click without needing to know how to program.  The new article appears in the right spot.

What is even nicer with a blog or CMS is that your single new article can be leveraged on multiple pages.  Maybe the title is shown on the front page of your site as the latest news.  A brief of the article can be shown on another page listing articles in that category and finally the full article on a brand new page.  With 1 new article, you have 3 fresh pages.  Fantastic.

Challenge #2:  Most people in business have plenty of information and comments about their company and industry.  Ideas are rarely a problem.  The problem is time.  Getting time to write a new article can be very difficult, especially with so much to do already.

Scheduling time to write an article can work, but I find that usually the time is spent doing something else: sales, accounting tasks, taking care of something that is taking twice as long as it should, etc.

Another option is to pay someone to do it for you.  For $100/page, you can have as much new content as you’d like.

What’s going to work best for you?  Impossible to say, but if you’ve found a way to get those other pesky tasks done on-time, then the same approach can work for new content.

Final Comment:  OK, so fresh content on your site is important.  But how “fresh” does it need to be?  How often do you have to add new content?

That depends on your industry.  If your competitor web sites are rarely updated with anything new, then adding new content quarterly or twice a year would put you way ahead of them.  On the other hand, if they constantly update their site, then you’ll need to do updates at least as often as them.

…keep plugging away at getting those new customers….

What do I need? Web Site, Blog, Content Management System, Forum?

You want to get your information out on the internet, but there are so many options what’s the best one?

Like everything else, there is no general “best” one (and this on a wordpress blog? Horrors).  It all depends on what you need.  Here are some tips to get you started from a business perspective.

You need a site with a handful of pages that probably won’t change much.  This is pretty typical.  If you’re not expecting the site to get you any new customers, then the cheapest way to do it is with a template tool.  Most hosting companies offer an inexpensive template tool, but regardless of what the sales pitch is, figure it’s going to be a few days of your time to get it to look exactly like you want.

You can do search engine optimization (SEO) on it to attract new customers.  That can certainly work.  However I’ve found if you go the cheap template tool route, you’re probably not going to invest in search engine optimization either.

Another solution is to have a custom site built for you.   The cost of these can range from inexpensive to millions of dollars – it just depends on the complexity of your site.  For a site with a handful of pages, you’re probably going to top off at $2,000 – $3,000 (with less expensive options available)

One final note on this option is maintenance.  What happens when all is said & done and you notice that your address isn’t exactly right.  How would you get that changed and how much would it cost?  Or you are selling something new and want to add that as a new page to the site?  On a custom site, you’ll need to go back to the original developer to make the change for a certain amount of money.   This leads us to another important consideration, going with a really cheap developer (or someone doing it on the weekend) to get the site created adds a risk that they won’t be around when you need something changed.

You are a consultant that needs to tell the world about yourself. For this situation, you probably want to have two solutions.  The first is a “destination site” – your comany web site.  This site would present your wonderful accomplishments, how to contact you, your process to get started, etc.  Typical company site type stuff.

As a consultant, you’ll also need to establish yourself as an expert in your field.  The historical approach was to write a book.  A friend of mine who has his own successful company got that same advice and invested the first 6 months of his business toward writing his own book.  Too much time for me to not get a paycheck, but it worked out great for him.

Now with the internet so common and people used to using it for almost every aspect of their daily lives, blogs are a great solution.  A blog serves some very useful purposes:

1. Establish yourself as an expert in your field (of course it only presents the opportunity, you’ll need to show your own expertise)
2. Help drive people to your company web site (seo).  With references to your web site (eg www.industrywebhost.com – shameless plug), people reading your blog may venture there.  Perhaps even more importantly, search engines (eg google) will also see your blog “voting” for your web site which helps in where it gets ranked.
3. Answer those questions people are always asking you.  This way you can direct them to your blog for all the answers.  I won’t give another shameless plug, but I do know a couple of doctors & lawyers that answer the casual (aka unbillable) questions by referring people to their blog.  That way they help those people out without taking up any of their own time.
4. If your blog is part of your website, then it presents an easy opportunity to add fresh content to your site.  Which can be used to educate visitors and help out your search engine ranking.

The great news with blogs is that there are sites like wordpress.com, gooble’s blogger.com and many more that allow you to blog away for free.  What a deal! (although check their privacy statements, some use it to get and sell information on you).  There are also open source solutions (again, like wordpress) that you can use for your own site.  So out-of-pocket cash isn’t very much.

Now expectations is a biggie that’s often overlooked. People expect the blog to be updated on a regular basis.  It doesn’t have to be hourly or daily, but it needs constant feeding.  While not taking cash out of your pocket, it certainly requires your time.  Estimate how much time it’d take you and multiply that number by three.  Maybe it won’t take quite that much time, but I’ve found if you don’t budget that much to start, all your other interruptions will gobble up a smaller amount of time.

The other false expectation is that people will flock to your blog for your words of wisdom.  Maybe you are the single best source for a great deal of valuable information, but there are millions of other blogs out there.  So don’t be too disheartened if you aren’t seeing a lot of visitors.

Want to drive people to your blog?  Of course you do, but that’s the topic of another thread.

Much more to talk about, but I’ve ignorned my ringing phone enough this morning and need to get back to work.

jim

I want to know

Blogs are usually the author primarily putting out their thoughts to the world and people possibly commenting on it.  I certainly have my share of thoughts that I’d like to share, but find I get a lot more excited about helping someone with what they want to know or do.

There are millions of forums and places to get great information, but sometimes you just can’t seem to find them.  Or you’re not sure what to search for.  For example, “Do I want to have a blog or setup a content management system?”  You can get a ton of information on either topic or one of the great open source tools, but sometimes you just need a little help to get started in the right direction without searching around the www for a day or two.

I encourage you to post those questions here and I’ll to post an answer.

What was that line from Jerry McGuire?  “Help me, help you.  Help ME, Help YOU.”

jim

The Big Bang

Welcome to my new blog!

OK, “The Big Bang” is a bit of a joke since this is just the start.  I have a software engineering background with an MS in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, but find myself now in Denver, Colorado.

If you’ve never been to Denver, let me tell you what surprised me.  Denver is flat.  But to the west is the beautiful Rocky Mountains.  The other thing is that the weather is beautiful, sunny over 300 days a year.  We do get some snow, but it’s gone very quickly.  In fact, my house faces southeast and gets the morning sun, which takes care of any snow on the driveway.  The downside of Denver is it’s hard to grow things out here – when it’s sunny most of the time, that means we aren’t getting rain.

Prattling on about myself and impressions of different cities isn’t why I started this blog.  I was one of the expert speakers at a local expo and everyone was interested in blogging, content management systems and search engine optimization.  That was a strong reminder that those questions keep coming up over and over again.  So this blog is my humble attempt at capturing some of those questions and answers and maybe capture a gem from time to time.

I hope you enjoy what I have to say and I am always eager to your thoughts, comments and questions.