Kyle Ritter

I don’t have time to elaborate on this, but this article brings up some solid points that I always try to make apparent to my clients in regards to optimizing your website for search engine spiders.

One point made in the article that I like to particularly drive home is this one: Be certain that geographic specific information is mentioned on each page of the site. Always have a contact page that also lists geographic specific information.

Many surfers search geographically, yet so many business websites completely disregard this fact.

For instance, on my Portland Bar website, I wanted to list the websites of all the bars in the database. Finding these websites was a nightmare, most of them only had the bar name listed in their content, with absolutely no indication of where they are located. A search for “Nocturnal Portland Oregon“, Nocturnal being a bar in Southeast Portland yielded impossible results. I was able to locate the site, but only after much effort was in visiting all of the pages that appeared for this term and search for a link.

Hopefully, my listing for Noctural – Portland Bar will help them be found in the future.

I have just finished up my most recent traffic generation campaign for Flying Rhinoceros.
Play on the Farm is a series of educational books and DVDs with a faith-based message. This website includes some great flash animation from some of the finest illustrators and animators, as well as voices by Vince Gill and Amy Grant.

Our plan for traffic generation was two fold:

Viral Marketing
This includes a Play on the Farm “send to a friend” script that allows parents and educators to inform up to 10 friends about Farmer Bob’s world

User Content Generation
All mail messages and subject lines sent through the send to a friend script are archived in a database. All messages are displayed live on the website. This creates an instant testimonial system, as well as creation of a brand new page of content every time a sender sends a message.

In order to protect the senders and recipients identities, their contact information is not stored, only the messages.

When you take on a client, especially when you are newer to the web design industry, you may feel compelled to “impress” both yourself and your client with the coolest, fanciest design. Maybe you want to add all kinds of features that you feel are fun tasks that enhance the website.

You are designing as a power user, as a web professional, you spend countless hours surfing websites, and have seen every design under the sun. You want your newest project to be fun, not boring.

After a few months of solid traffic and usage monitoring, you will begin to see otherwise.

Reality check time – Most web surfers aren’t power users. They are just looking to get to the information they need, and they want to get it as quickly as possible. Even users such as myself are prone to hit the back button if we can’t immediately find what we are looking for. Do I have to spend time hunting down a link for an article? Do I have to suffer through a tedious flash intro and gratuitious animation just to look at a product image? If so, I go elsewhere. I’ve got better things to do, namely, design “boring” web sites.

Even such things that might be obvious to power users, such as *breadcrumb trail navigation, are often overlooked by Joe Surfer. Breadcrumb trail navigation makes perfect sense to us, because it seems like such an efficient way to find your way “back”.

An interesting bit of irony: seeing as Joe Surfer generally just wants his information as quickly as possible, and with breadcrumbs being the fastest way from a specific page to other relevant pages, it would make sense that Joe Surfer would appreciate and use the breadcrumbs. Yet user tests show that Joe Surfer is more than happy to just go back to the home page and start over, rather than use unfamiliar navigation.

To use the catch-phrase lingo of our long dead DotBomb brethren, you’ll need to undergo a paradigm shift from fun to boring in your methods of design. That’s right. You are not an artist. You help facilitate information delivery.

Spend some time conducting user tests. Gather up friends and family of all experience levels to surf the website. Make notes on what they look at, how they get their, and where they are lagging. This will pay off for both you and your client: Your client will be happier with website performance, and happy clients generally help you gain new clients.

* Breadcrumb trails are a path of links generally found just above the content page that show the path and all the stop one could make on the way to a home page.

And example of breadcrumb navigation:

Home>>Website Tips>>2004 Articles

For those living in the dark, MSN’s indexing robot has been heavily crawling websites for the past few monthes. Some folks with larger sites have gone so far as to ban MSN bot due to aggressive crawling. Most of my sites have no more than a couple of hundred pages, so it hasn’t affected me much.

Then, about 2 monthes ago, they gave users and opportunity to test their ranking algorithms using their tech preview.

I was rather impressed myself, many of my sites (all of which contain useful, relevant information) enjoyed top rankings, while other webmasters were throwing a fit: They felt that the results reflected low value, irrelevant websites that had been unethically manipulated for high rankings.

When MSN goes live, I believe we will see fiercer closer to evenly split competition between Google, Yahoo, and MSN for web surfers. Kind of like the internet worlds version of the “Big 3″ automakers. As of now, Google retains the high market share of internet searches. Many companies, such as AOL and until recently, Yahoo, were using it’s search results for their own engines.

As it stands, many peoples browser default to MSN’s home page, which gives them a natural advantage. For webmasters, we will be seeing a whole new set of results in our server’s referrer logs. One thing I’m looking forward to: Watching the Big 3 constantly adjusting there algorithms to deliver better results than the other. This will be beneficial to both surfers, and webmasters who optimize their websites in an ethical, relevant fashion. Both parties stand to win more, while it will leave Black Hat optimizers continually scrambling to learn the newest way to manipulate the algorithms.

Jack Humphrey wrote a great article for SiteProNews called Active Vs. Passive Website Traffic Generation.

It really got me thinking about my own traffic generation tactics. I do actively seek to generate traffic from search engines and link directories, but also, I don’t spend too much time generating reciprocals and joining link exchanges. I don’t frequently trade links with other webmasters, nor network with them.

Yet I hungrily read the latest news and regularly post information to both my blog and my other informational based sites, while seeking out like minded sites that I could trade with. Then I looked at my Portland Web Design Company website: I have little traffic to it, and have spent no time linking it, except throughout client sites and sites within my own network. While I make sure to optimize, am I passively seeking traffic when I should be actively seeking?

I use this weblog as both a professional promotional tool and as a venting utensil. While it might seem like neither should go hand in hand, I am most satisfied with the results. I’ve had a few referrals come in due to my posts. While some of my posts are decidely un-professional, it puts a human touch to what otherwise could simply be a cold hard information.

Well back to work. I need to actively promote my website.

It’s not a good idea. They have access to your site, and if they have done their job properly and it is well promoted, should be earning you revenue through sales or referals, and at least be placed in front of your customers eyevalls. If you try to screw your web designer, bad things like this can happen.

Designers: ALWAYS take a minimum 33% upfront, long before you ever fire up Photoshop or write a single line of HTML. If you are a professional, then you are worth it. That is how the business works. Collect the remainder of the fees upon delivery.