New Site Media Group

How To Use a WordPress Blog To Enhance Traffic To Your Website

Steinar — Thu, 17 May 2012 04:30:01 +0000

A WordPress blog can be installed easily in any website and can be used to drive traffic by writing useful posts that contain relevant information and relevant business key phrases. As a Charlottesville Website Developer we use a blog in our websites to update our prospective and existing customers about our products and services, we can also use it strategically to enhance traffic to our websites.

WordPress blog is very easy to install in your website. You or your web designer can customize it as per your specific needs. The WordPress admin interface is so handy to use that it hardly takes few minutes to write and publish a new post. But it is important to know how to use your blog for search engine optimization and to drive traffic to your website.

Four important things you need to show on your blog are recent posts, archives, categories and comments. Every new post you generate through the WordPress admin must be done strategically as search engines consider it as a new page on your website with a distinct link. Hence, it is vital to understand the importance of the title you select for your blog post.

You can easily customize the titles of the posts in WordPress blog in a way that only title comes in the new post link and not the date or category of posts. You can even include business key phrases in the title of the post. For this, you must write a post that contains useful information on the services or products you want to promote. Title must be selected accordingly.

As it is not easy to update content on your website regularly, writing new posts serve that purpose. You can target new keywords through the blog posts. What you need to do is to write relevant content including these keywords and link them with the appropriate page of the website. It serves dual purpose.

First, you help your customers to know more about the services you provide and second, you make search engines to see the appropriate interlinking with targeted keywords on your website. You can also target long tail keywords through blog posts as it is not easy to target these keywords through main pages of your website. This way you can drive traffic to your website through WordPress blog.

Try a WordPress blog to drive traffic to your website through strategic writing in your posts and to keep your targeted customers updated through relevant information about your products and services.

What Makes a Good Charlottesville Web Development Company

Steinar — Tue, 15 May 2012 04:25:07 +0000

The world of web development is still very much misunderstood. We’ve even heard people call it a “dark art”. So when you need help turning your ideas and designs into a high quality website or web application, how do you know who you can trust to get this done?

The purpose of this post is to provide some key points on what makes a good Charlottesville web development company, and will help you understand the kind of questions you should be asking development companies.

This is going to be a very opinionated post and we make no apologies for it. If you disagree with anything we are certainly open to discussing it further.

Now to get on with the post. Below are the key areas we are going to be looking at, and what you should be looking for in a Charlottesville web development company.

Able to do both front-end and back-end development
Don’t specialise in one back-end technology
Should follow best practices
Understanding of marketing strategies surrounding the projects
Invests time in research and development
Has a rigorous testing process, including automated tests
Flexible to change
Use source control

Able to do both front-end and back-end development

We don’t subscribe to idea of developers that do front-end development and developers that do back-end development. That’s the equivalent of having a plumber who only fits pipes and leaves the fitting of the baths, showers, sinks and toilets to someone else.

We agree there is a separation between web developers and web designers, there’s a completely different thought process going on there, but the separation between front-end and back-end is just wrong. To be a good web developer you need to understand the full development cycle and to be able to get involved in the project from start to finish. There is also much to be learnt from the working with the varying technologies, but we’ll come on to that.

Don’t specialize in one back-end technology
There are a number of good back-end technologies that are appropriate for web development including Ruby on Rails, ASP.Net and PHP (and others). They all have their strengths and weaknesses and not one is perfect. A good web development company should be flexible in which technologies they use, so that they use the most appropriate one for their clients’ needs.

The key reason we have spent time learning a number of technologies is to able to pick and choose the bits we like. Over the years the developers involved in The League have been able to take the good parts of each technology and formulate a number of best practices and use them across all platforms.

Should follow best practices
The key to being a good web developer in Charlottesville is not the technologies that you use, but the best practices that you follow. As technologies come and go in our very fast moving industry those best practices will remain, or at least evolve. As a developer if you have a good grounding then you can move with the times and technologies fairly easily.

So what are these best practices that we are talking about. Below are some of the key ones we follow.

Writing semantic HTML
Follow web standards for all front end coding
Automated testing of both front-end and back-end code
Use of a MVC framework

Understanding of marketing strategies surrounding the projects
We’ve heard this complaint many times that web developers don’t think about the marketing strategy of a project. This is generally because developers don’t care. Well they should. How can they advise clients and think about helping clients produce the right solution, if they aren’t thinking about the “bigger picture” (sorry, we know it’s a horrid phrase, we’ll go wash our mouths out now). If a developer blindly does the work, they are not offering the client a service, they are just being a meat puppet.

The most important question a developer can ask is “Why?”. Take time to understand the client’s requirements fully, and advise them, after all the client doesn’t understand the ins and outs of web development, you do. Make the development cycle a two way conversation.

Invests time in research and development
As everyone knows the web industry is a very fast moving industry. Things come and go in the blink of an eye. A good web development company gives it’s developers allocated time each week to look at new trends and technologies. Admittedly some of these trends and technologies are dead ends, but you won’t know unless you look into them.

If you want to know if a web development company knows there stuff, simply ask them what their developers have been looking into recently. You don’t have to understand everything you are told, note them down though and look them up on the internet to understand if the company are looking at new trends or not.

R&D is probably the most important time each week for a developer. If developers don’t evolve, the solutions they build will become stagnate and dated very quickly. As a client do you want an out of date solution before you even start?

Has a rigorous testing process, including automated tests
Too often we have seen the client is the tester for a project. If this is happening, then, to put it bluntly, the development company don’t understand your project well enough, they are just “banging out” code.

A good web development company should be writing automated tests (integration tests, unit-tests etc) for all their code, both front-end and back-end. On a simple level, tests help developers to concentrate on the code they are writing at that given time, they also help developers to write more concise code. More concise code means the code base is easier to understand and cheaper to maintain.

The major benefit of a test suite to a client is that when changes are made to the code in the project there can be a lot more confidence in the fact that the change, or new code, hasn’t broken anything else.

We are not saying automated testing is the silver bullet of web development, and tests are only effective if they are written well, but they certainly should be part of any web developers toolset.

Automated tests aren’t the only important aspect of testing. The web development company should also have a level of human testing as well, and this is certainly something clients should be involved in. User stories are key to this process. As part of the development process, clients should work with the web development company to put together User stories, so that all parties involved understand how users will interact with the site or application and the results of those interactions.

Flexible to change
We’ve all heard developers complaining how their clients’ change the requirements of a project midway thought a project. Developers need to stop complaining about this, it happens to us all and it’s never going to change. A good web development company should have processes in place to cope with change. If you are a client, ask how change requests will be handled.

Web developers should work to short release cycles, preferably 1 – 2 weeks. The worst thing that can happen to a project is that the developers get the brief, start the work and then 2 months later they announce it’s finished, only for the client to say “This isn’t what I asked for!”. By working to short release cycles, clients can be involved at all stages. At the end of each release the client should review the project so far and submit any change requests.

Use source control
Our final recommendation is a pretty obvious and simple one, to most people, but we still speak to developers who don’t use any form of source control. This seems more prevalent with freelancers as they don’t see the need as they are the only ones working on the code. If that’s how they see it, then they are missing the point.

There are lots of reasons why all code should be source controlled. We’re are only going to mention a couple of key points here. Firstly it’s a great way of keeping a log of changes made to code. (As long as developers put a comment into the commit). Secondly and most importantly is allows developers to change code without the fear of losing already work already done. This is especially useful when trying out other possible coding solutions to a problem.

2012 ALCEA Mid-Year Presentation on Paid Traffic

Steinar — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:28:57 +0000

Thanks to everyone who attended my session on paid traffic.

Here’s the link to download my presentation: http://bit.ly/wEFDsH

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Keeping Momentum in Social Media

Steinar — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:58:09 +0000

Here’s a good article from Corporate Executive Board on the realities and best practices of executing a social media platform in your company …

While many companies are enticed by social media, most struggle to sustain successful initiatives, particularly when it comes to utilizing new mediums to mobilize their workforce. Companies recognize social media’s potential as a powerful tool for internal communications and thus move forward yet fail to get the anticipated employee-participation levels.

via Keeping Momentum in Social Media – BusinessWeek.

In my experience it comes down to strategy & engagement. The tools and channels will change – that’s a given. It’s your strategy and the level with which you can generate buy-in that impact success.

How Search Engines Rank Web Pages

Steinar — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:13:38 +0000

Search for anything using your favorite crawler-based search engine. Nearly instantly, the search engine will sort through the millions of pages it knows about and present you with ones that match your topic. The matches will even be ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Of course, the search engines don’t always get it right. Non-relevant pages make it through, and sometimes it may take a little more digging to find what you are looking for. But, by and large, search engines do an amazing job.

As WebCrawler founder Brian Pinkerton puts it, “Imagine walking up to a librarian and saying, ‘travel.’ They’re going to look at you with a blank face.”

OK — a librarian’s not really going to stare at you with a vacant expression. Instead, they’re going to ask you questions to better understand what you are looking for.

Unfortunately, search engines don’t have the ability to ask a few questions to focus your search, as a librarian can. They also can’t rely on judgment and past experience to rank web pages, in the way humans can.

So, how do crawler-based search engines go about determining relevancy, when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through? They follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm. Exactly how a particular search engine’s algorithm works is a closely-kept trade secret. However, all major search engines follow the general rules below.

Location, Location, Location…and Frequency

One of the the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Call it the location/frequency method, for short.

Remember the librarian mentioned above? They need to find books to match your request of “travel,” so it makes sense that they first look at books with travel in the title. Search engines operate the same way. Pages with the search terms appearing in the HTML title tag are often assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic.

Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.

Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.

Spice In The Recipe

Now it’s time to qualify the location/frequency method described above. All the major search engines follow it to some degree, in the same way cooks may follow a standard chili recipe. But cooks like to add their own secret ingredients. In the same way, search engines add spice to the location/frequency method. Nobody does it exactly the same, which is one reason why the same search on different search engines produces different results.

To begin with, some search engines index more web pages than others. Some search engines also index web pages more often than others. The result is that no search engine has the exact same collection of web pages to search through. That naturally produces differences, when comparing their results.

Search engines may also penalize pages or exclude them from the index, if they detect search engine “spamming.” An example is when a word is repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase the frequency and propel the page higher in the listings. Search engines watch for common spamming methods in a variety of ways, including following up on complaints from their users.

Off The Page Factors

Crawler-based search engines have plenty of experience now with webmasters who constantly rewrite their web pages in an attempt to gain better rankings. Some sophisticated webmasters may even go to great lengths to “reverse engineer” the location/frequency systems used by a particular search engine. Because of this, all major search engines now also make use of “off the page” ranking criteria.

Off the page factors are those that a webmasters cannot easily influence. Chief among these is link analysis. By analyzing how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be “important” and thus deserving of a ranking boost. In addition, sophisticated techniques are used to screen out attempts by webmasters to build “artificial” links designed to boost their rankings.

Another off the page factor is clickthrough measurement. In short, this means that a search engine may watch what results someone selects for a particular search, then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren’t attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors. As with link analysis, systems are used to compensate for artificial links generated by eager webmasters.

Emedding Youtube Video Options for Your Website

Steinar — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:52:28 +0000

YouTube Videos

The cleanest option is to create a video pop-up from within your text (click here)

However, you may wish to create a pop-up from an image, such as this (click on the image)

Creating a pop-up version of your YouTube video is a great option if you want a more streamlined look and feel to your site, rather than intruding on the flow of the text with large blocks of video. It’s also great if you want to reference a video to make a point but readers don’t necessarily have to see the video to understand a specific concept.

Pop-ups with shadowbox format such as this is also considered more cutting edge and elegant to some due to it’s departure from the standard embedded video options provided by YouTube and other video hosting services.

YouTube Embedded Video (click on video below)

Embedding your video is the standard approach to including a YouTube video on your site. There are many options, including size, color, and framing to create an attractive appearance that meets your taste and website style.

Standard (Medium) Size

Smaller Size

Joomla 1.6 – a great CMS for building online communities

Steinar — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 04:30:12 +0000

It’s no secret that we’re huge fans of Wordress, primarily due to its ease of use for those looking to blog, sell some stuff online, or build a loyal following of fans.

Joomla on the other hand is considerably more complexm not only in it’s capabilities but ease of use as well. Once thing that impresses me is the ability to deploy a robust online community portal wherein users may register & participate in the site experience in a much more integrated and meaningful manner vs. WordPress.

The community behind the open source content management system Joomla released version 1.6 earlier this week.

Along with WordPress and Drupal, Joomla helps make up the group of “big three” open source CMS applications. According to statistics from W3Techs, Joomla powers 2% of the web and holds 11% of the CMS market.

Joomla is used for front facing and internal sites for companies like eBay, Citibank, General Electric, IHOP and more. With Joomla 1.6, the goal was to make the package more user-friendly and powerful.

via Joomla 1.6 Offers New Features for Designers & Admins.

Let us know if your company is considering a new site design. Joomla might be the right solution for you.

Apple Mac App Store Screencast Walk Through and Review

Steinar — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:23:33 +0000

The new Mac App Store is finally here …

http://www.apple.com/mac/app-store/ With the Mac App Store, getting the apps you want on your Mac has never been easier. No more boxes, no more disks, no more time-consuming installation. Click once to download and install any app on your Mac. The Mac App Store is now available as a software update for any Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Google Search Considerations When Optimizing Your Content for SEO

Steinar — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:00:49 +0000

When people search on Google there are a variety of results shown, including Local, News, Images, Video, Blogs, and Real-Time social media content.

To maximize your website’s exposure it’s important to understand the implications of optimizing your content for SEO to appear in several of these categories simultaneously. For example, instead of just showing up in the standard website index, you might also drive significant traffic from Images, Blogs, or News.

Depending on your subject and niche, I recommend you start by picking two or three of these categories to start. The simplest is blogs. Setup a free blog at wordpress.com or blogger.com and start writing. Link to your website and pages within your website. Include your keywords in your content. Include at least one picture in every post and populate the title, description and alt tags with your keywords. This tactic alone should increase your search engine traffic.

If you have a physical location go to google.com/merchants and register your company with Google Local. This will enter your address and company information into the Google Business directory and possibly land your listing in the Google Local results set when someone searches for your business. This is important since most users click on the Google Local listings before scrolling down to high ranking organic results.

Advanced users should consider optimizing for video as well. Upload a few videos to Youtube, which is owned by Google. Include your keywords in the title, description, and tags within the video post. If your video is well ranked by Google, you might actually secure the #4 position in Google search results, which they reserve for videos.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. What do you think? Are these good strategies to consider for DIY SEO?

How search engine traffic stacks up and what this means for your internet marketing strategy

Steinar — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Much has been speculated about the future of search engine marketing, especially with the increased reliance on social media networks to find more relevant information from trusted sources.

A review of the search engine landscape illustrates that the market for search is still tremendous on a global basis. Google search leads in total number of searches and maintains a market share leadership position.

If you are looking to revamp your search engine marketing strategy consider focussing on Google. Most of the optimization techniques you apply will have a positive impact on your ability to rank well in less popular search engines, such as Yahoo and Bing.