Web Site Design and Search Engine Optimization

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June Table of Contents

• Keep it Simple - the First Rule of Web Design - See what Edward Tuft says is the summary statement of his work's goal.
• The Google Patent - What You can Learn from the Google Patent Application - What we've learned from the Google patent application.
• Build a Free Web Site for Your Business - We've added a free web design tool for those that host with us.
• Keeping Phone Costs Low? - An Internet phone may drop your phone bill, but will that bill stay low?
• Starting a Blog - What Do I need to know to start a blog?

Keep it Simple - The First Rule of Web Design

Edward R. Tufte, when asked to summarize the goal of his work, said “Simple design, intense content“. That’s a great summary statement for web design. If you want to see your web site rank and visitor traffic soar, avoid the splash screens and stick to rich, dynamic content with plenty of incoming links. Content rules.

Tufte should know. The New York Times calls him the “da Vinci of data” because of Tufte’s ability to see through complex information to rich and meaningful conclusions. For more information, see the April 2005 issue of Scientific American, p. 38.

The Google Patent - What You can Learn from the Google Patent Application

There is a lot of hot discussion on the forums, blogs, etc. about the Google Patent. Although Google filed it over a year ago, it is just now made public. You can read the patent at:

Patent Application

If you want to read it, skip down to the “Description” part and start there.

While it is a little overwhelming, we can summarize a few things here:

1. Just because a strategy is listed in the patent doesn’t mean Google is doing it. Google is trying to protect ideas they may use in the future.
   
   
2. Reading over the list does give you the ideas of the goals of Google - where they want to go.
   
   
3. An overall summary shows Google is targeting incoming links as very important and that Google wants these as natural links, not forced. For example, a lot of links to your site from multiple pages of another site is not natural. A lot of links to your site with the same anchor text is not natural.
   
   
4. Your pages should be built for human traffic, not the search engines.
   
   
5. If you have the Google toolbar installed to read PageRanks, the toolbar can feed a lot of information to Google about the sites that you visit that they can use for ranking your site. This includes the web sites you visit, how often you visit them, how long you visit them, the links you click, the searches you perform, when you perform them.

Build a Free Web Site for your Business

For those who host with us, we are offering free web site design. Our hosting service includes at no extra charge the SiteXpress tool, which can be used to easily create web sites for a small business. Featuring about 150 templates, you can create a professionally looking web site and have it online and working for you in a few hours. The manual for this design tool will be online and free in a few weeks. This gives our customers several choices:

1. Create your web site and get it online at no extra charge, then purchase our $30 SEO book and optimize the site on the search engines.
   
   
2. Let us create the site for you - either "el cheapo" with the templates for you or a custom site. Then let us optimize it in the search engines.
   
   
3. Or - mix and match. You do what you can to save money with the site designer and SEO work using our book. Then pay us to fine-tune the site design with our experience. Then use our SEO book with reports from our SEO tools to optimize your site in the search engines.

Keeping Phone Costs Low?

Update: We've found the Vonage support is the worst of any company we have ever used. We don't recommend Vonage to anyone any more.

Our phone costs use to be $63 a month for a business phone, with a major part of this as taxes and surcharges. The surcharges are a strategic method the phone companies use to get around the controlled rates regulated by the states. Most of the phone and utility taxes don't get to the governments and stay in the pockets of the corporation.

We just switched to an Internet phone. Our business phone is now only $39.95 a month. Our startup costs were zero, there was no contract to sign, and the taxes are about $2 a month. We still have caller ID, forwarding, and the rest of the extras we use to have to pay for. Long distance calls in the States and Canada are free and international calls are cheap, cheap, cheep. We are also a reseller. Want to try it?

Of course, the cities and states are trying to load on extra charges to both the Internet and cell phones. Write to those that represent you, and blog those that don't care what you think out of office.

Starting a Blog

Starting a blog is one of the easiest methods of getting good search engine positioning. A blog is really simply just an online journal, with each entry arranged chronologically with the latest at the head of the list. Because blogs are updated frequently (often daily) and have lots of content, the search engines love them. As a result, if you have a blog on your web site expect your site to be updated quickly and frequently. On the other hand, updating a blog daily with good content takes work.

The best way to start is to study a few blogs out there on your topic of interest, such as the topic of your web site if you have a site. To find a few blogs to study, go to Google and search on the topic adding the word blog, as cars blog. When I tried this, I found an interesting blog on hybrid cars. There are over 4 million blogs out there now. Keeping up with even a single topic can keep you busy.

When you are ready to start, you can either use an existing web site that provides a blogging tool or add a blogging tool to you own web site. If you want to use a tool on an existing site for blogging, one of the easiest to set up and use is Google's own tool at http://www.blogger.com/start. It's free. If you want to add a blogging tool to you own web site, The best commercial version is probably Movable Type at http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/. Another blogging tool, Wordpress, is free and available at http://wordpress.org/. That's the tool we use. Both of these have extensive support web sites on the Internet. There are also plenty of other free and commercial blogging programs on the Internet. All of them allow you to focus on entering content quickly to the blog and leaves the formatting and indexing to the blogging software.