In the past, your web designer might have been the only one working on your website. But with today's technologies and expectations, you as business owner, content contributor, or marketer can have an expanded, active role in posting information on your website. 

The garden is an appropriate metaphor for websites. Websites can be seen as living and breathing things based on the interactivity they can foster. They are virtual gardens that you stake out and refer to by domain. And you, the owner of your site, can be the gardener.

Website gardens benefit from attracting beneficial organisms, i.e. customers, and giving them a spade to dig with, tools to see what's going on, tools for interacting with you and your site and your business. Customers and readers expect to be able to comment on blog entries, to follow up on issues, to really have the ability to gain useful information and engage with you online and not just via email.

Ergo, interactivity and being able to post information yourself is an important component in making your website an engine that can help you promote your products and services.

Benefits of website gardening:

1. The more information you post (as long as it is well organized), the larger the footprint of your garden on the web, which improves your chances for more website traffic driven by search engine indexing.

2. The more items you've planted (i.e. blog posts) the higher your credibility in social media avenues such as LinkedIn and Facebook (as long as posts are relevant and professional).

3. Regularly generating information for your website has indirect benefits in other ways; that of self-discipline, of policy development, etc.

Gardening tools and techniques:

- Blogging and other Social Media use
- Use of tools for engagement such as QR codes
- eNewsletters (like Constant Contact) and the ability to sign up on your site
- RSS subscriptions, Google Feedburner
- Commenting capability

To be continued…

Blogging

The traditional model used to involve you in that you could specify a creative direction for your website developer, offer some initial content, and the developer would code it.

But today you can become even more a part of the team. Not only can you specify the creative direction of your website; you can become more involved in creating and improving your website. 

The footprint of your website, i.e., the amount of information on the website, lends credibility to the site. If your site has a lot of information, it follows that you've invested a lot in it and that it is a good resource for people.

Blogging is an inexpensive and easy way to increase the amount of information on your website. We recommend that most of our customers blog if they can spare the time and if they can write compelling, professional content. WordPress is a great, free tool traditionally associated with blogging. But it can manage not only your blog, but your entire site, and your website designer can code it to look any way you'd like to best suit your needs. As a matter of fact, we've started to code most of our sites with WordPress. 

Incoming Links, You and Your Community

Incoming links have always been a key area that boosts search engine placement. It follows that the more links there are to your website, the more credible your website. We recommend that our customers try to develop their incoming links as much as possible. Ideally this could happen in conjunction with a social media effort and by creating content and periodic articles that people find compelling; articles that they'd like to share.

In addition, you can develop your incoming links by becoming involved in other organizations. Volunteer to write blog entries on their blogs! It is usually appropriate to have a link to your website in your article on their blog, or even an additional couple of links to blog entries you've created for your own website. This is a great way to develop not only incoming links, but to become more engaged in a positive way with a community with which you'd like to network.

Ratings: Encourage Your Customers to Play

Your customers can become more of a part of your team, too. Google seems to need to know that other people care about your business or organization; this makes sense. I believe that business rating tools are becoming more important. I notice that placement in Google Places results seems to correspond with businesses that have been rated well by services such as Citysearch  and the rating mechanism for each place page that Google provides. The more ratings, the better the placement, although this could just be dependent on the general popularity of the site. I have not really started pushing this strategy yet and don't know the result in terms of incoming traffic, but it seems to make sense.

A good approach to this would be to ask customers if they would place a review on your business or organization's Google Place page. That said, we'd appreciate a shout out on our Google Place page if you find these articles stimulating and/or if you are a client!

Be a Good Team Mate

Many variables are critical to the success of your web presence. We recommend being very thoughtful in the coding, presentation, and text content on your site. Ultimately, the key thing is to think like your potential audience and to try to anticipate its needs. 

Consider conversion optimization when creating the core content for your site. Blog entries can be a bit more spontaneous, but the core service pages and home page of your site need to orient your potential client and give them a reason to want to participate, and make to it easy for them as well! 

In my last post, I described how WordPress is a great tool that empowers small businesses and organizations to efficiently create a lot of content (information) that can be syndicated and shared. This is important. The volume of content on a website is one of the key factors in being able to find the site on the Internet because volume is an indicator of credibility to search engines. And the easier it is to share a site's content, the more likely it is that the content will be shared and help drive incoming traffic.

For a professional presence, WordPress works best in a collaborative relationship between business owner and professional web design firm with the design firm laying out the initial website infrastructure and assisting as needed throughout the lifespan of the site. WordPress gives the layman businessperson the ability to edit page content and add simple new pages, and it's an economical way to implement a robust website with a web design firm.

If you are a budget-oriented business person who has some technical skill, you be might be considering a DIY site. Assess your skills. Here are some factors to consider if you’d like to develop your own site without the aid of a professional web firm.

• Do you have graphic design skills, or can you use Photoshop or a similar program to edit your logo and process your photos to look good on your site?
• Do you know and understand the advantages of using one predeveloped WordPress theme over another?
• Do you know at least a little bit of html?
• Can you figure out how to navigate most websites and do what you need to do on them (like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)? Do you know how to upload photos or is it a frustrating process for you?
• Are you willing to spend a lot of time to learn about basic search engine optimization practices in WordPress? And are you at ease using Google to perform searches?
• Do you understand how to back up your website completely and can you figure out how to minimize comment spam and hackers in WordPress?
• Can you write well? Is your writing rife with spelling and grammatical errors?

If you are weak in any one of these areas, it is probably best to consult with a professional firm to fill in the gaps.

Part I: "The Perfect Website"
Part II: "A Great Budget Situation–WordPress"

Stay tuned for the next followup post in this series. You can subscribe to this blog via email.

Practically speaking, there are a lot of great low budget website promotion tools available to the layman. One of the best tools around is WordPress. It's not just a blogging platform. WordPress can be programmed to run your entire website.

WordPress is well suited to the needs of small businesses on the web:

• It's free
• Well-supported and popular (so it will be around for a while)
• Can be maintained by the layman
• Many great options (plugins and widgets)
• Great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Great for Web 2.0

We've had success with a number of websites implemented in WordPress. We design the initial site, the home page "look and feel" and features that are supported and integrated into the site, and our customers can take it from there by fleshing out each page's text content, adding new pages and creating blog posts. This saves our customers some money because they do not have to rely on us to create new pages, and can do many website maintenance tasks themselves as well.

It is possible, of course, to use a canned "theme" for your WordPress site. But to integrate your company's graphics into a canned theme requires some know-how of graphic design and web programming if the site is to look professional.

I'd like to talk a little bit search engine optimization (SEO). Consider the websites of just five years ago. Five years ago, it was a lot easier to attain high rankings in search engines. Why? Because there were fewer sites competing for the same key search phrases, and because today's web programmers have become more sophisticated, and because big corporations tend to crowd out smaller businesses for the most popular terms.

Some key factors for high search engine rankings include:

• The volume of content on site
• That it is a well structured site (optimized and coded for search engines)
• The number of sites linking to the site

WordPress empowers the small business person in all these categories. 

Content
Your website needs to stay relevant and have a lot of content. If you don't have applicable content for a particular search phrase on your website, it cannot come up in a search engine. The phrase must be on your site, and the more often the phrase is on your site, the more search engine authority your site has for that particular phrase. By enabling you to add pages and blog entries (which are seen as pages), you don't have to rely on the added expense of having a web programmer create every single page and post, and you can create many pages rich with key phrase terms for your business.

Coding
The web programmer can create a means for the business person to optimize each new page on the site. As long as the programmer is well-versed with current coding methodologies that are best for search engines, a framework will be in place so that the code of new pages is also suitable for search engines.

Incoming Links
Use of a good share plugin for WordPress facilitates the syndication of your content on the web. If the content of your page or post is compelling and your reader is prompted by some type of visual cue to share it, it is more likely to be tweeted or shared on Facebook or Linkedin or other social media outlets. Incoming links not only advertise your site's content, but in terms of search engines, links lend credibility to your content and are a consideration in the placement and listing algorithms used by search engines.

Part I: "The Perfect Website"

Stay tuned for the next followup post in this series. You can subscribe to this blog via email.

OK, so you’ve got a new web site. How are you going to get people to come to the site?

Search engine optimization (SEO) used to be the main method of web site promotion. But Web 2.0 has arrived, and now you’ve got a number of tools to use from the driver’s seat of your web site.

Here are some ideas for consideration:

1. Have a blog? Claim your blog on Technorati and get feedback on the popularity of your blog.

“Getting Started with Technorati”

2. Generate compelling blog content that relates to your web site business. Find an educational mission and write about it.

3. Use Facebook. Create a business fan page and post engaging, relevant content on your page. We post information that corresponds to our educational mission (helping people promote their web sites) on our fan page.

Keep your audience in mind–don’t post spam; post information that can really be of use, and interact sincerely with people who are in your networking group.

Social media resources

4. Post your blog entries on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Related articles

• Six Reasons SEOs Love Blogs (searchengineguide.com)
• Three Blogging Tips (best-tutorial.net)
• Build Your Brand Through Social Media (lazerpromotions.com)

Sometimes it is hard to figure out how to reach someone in a company, according to marketing manager Laura Freeman. Make sure your contact information is clearly visible. Put contact information on every page, traditionally in the footer (bottom of the page). Or, have a “Contact Us” page. Preferably do both.

Resize your photographs before you put them on the Internet rather than relying on your browser to resize them, says developer Corey Green. Large photos dramatically increase the time it takes for a site to load. Also, the photos look jagged.

Organization is important, especially for larger sites, according to developer Kathy Smith. “I’ve gotten totally lost on sites that don’t have links presented in logical ways. A site should be easy to navigate, and easily expandable without compromising the navigation.”

She added that making a Web site as informative as possible is the best thing one can do. “Put resources online. Give your customers a reason to visit, bookmark, and come back.“

It’s important to not overwhelm your visitors with needlessly long pages or over-elaborate navigation systems, says developer Alex Roys. The more concise you can be, the more effective in getting your point across–rather than burying the visitor under a mountain of information that they can’t use.

Keep these suggestions in mind, and half the battle is won in giving your company or organization an attractive and useful presence on the Internet.

But there’s one element that never changes: Writing words that sell.

“Words That Sell: A Thesaurus to Help Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas” is a classic marketing book available on Amazon.com, published in 1984 and reprinted in 2006. Words That Sell has come to our rescue many times in creating vibrant copy that persuades and informs powerfully.

If you get stuck for just the right word, most regular dictionaries and thesauri can leave you cold. You need words that grab ya.

Does your company “pride itself on its reliability?” How dull. Add some zing with words like:

• High-performance
• Durable
• Built to last; ruggedly built.

Why not say that you have high standards, stringent standards, rigorous standards, or that it’s laboratory tested or precision engineered? Heck, why not say it will “last a lifetime” or “last for generations”?

Is your product powerful? Or is it dynamite, high-voltage, Herculean, titanic, Promethean, muscular or masterful?

Author Richard Bayan wrote that he rummaged through huge stacks of magazines, newspaper, brochures and catalogs, listened for compelling phrases on television and radio, and combed dictionaries to create “your personal magic kit.”

Words That Sell is a super tool for creating great copy. Hmmm . . . maybe we should reword that:

“At last! Now there’s an even better way to write mesmerizing copy! Words That Sell stirs the imagination and adds professional writing skills to your toolbox. You’ll wonder how you ever got along without it!”

Consider this when sprucing up your Web site for the season:

Make sure the style and design fits your company’s personality. Visitors should be able to recognize your Web site immediately by use of the same branding you use offline.

Organization and ease of navigation are key. If customers can’t find what they are looking for where they expect to find it, they’ll look elsewhere.

Be sure your site works well on all Web browsers. You should test this every time you change design and content.

Other things to check while spring cleaning your site include security/privacy, ease of online checkout, and contact info. Be sure to include all methods of communication such as e-mail, phone and an FAQ section. Make it easy to find out who is your company spokesperson along with their contact info.

Periodically check your search engine position report to see which keywords are working and which aren’t. Finally, monitor social media to see how your company and site are being talked about in blogs and forums.