Top-Ranking Success: Gillmore Home Renovations

Our latest client has squeaked into the top-10 rankings on Google after about one month live, a little sooner than anticipated! In fact the site was ranking #3 on Bing after just two weeks, so we could tell it was off to a good start. It should settle closer to #5 on Google eventually.

Gillmore Home Renovations does interior and exterior renovations, construction, and carpentry in Peterborough, Ontario. The owner, James Gill, has been doing home improvements for about 10 years, and has some great testimonials from happy clients.

Most of his business is kitchen and bathroom renovations, but he also builds custom decks, fences, and much more.

This client came to us after building his own free site, which he quickly learned had limitations in terms of both looks and being found in searches. We've traded that in for a top-ranking website that reflects a very professional craftsman.

The website is focused on photos of his work, along with simple yet descriptive copywriting about aspects of home improvement that visitors would be interested in. Future plans include adding a Frequently Asked Questions or Interior Design Tips page, to provide further educational value to visitors.

Recent Noteworthy Privacy News

Here's a replay of five online privacy articles we tweeted about in February 2012.

You don't own your content, Facebook does - Your photos on Facebook and MySpace still exist years after you have "deleted" them. Want proof?

Twitter implements default HTTPS for all users - Most users will have no idea what this means, but basically Twitter is doing a great thing for user safety @twitter

Adobe fails again. It's almost not news. Sigh. - Oh look, another massive serious security hole in Adobe Flash. I await the day Flash is a distant memory.

Those cute smartphone apps are hacker heaven - "Twitter uploads your smartphone's address book... names, email addresses, phone numbers... and stores the data..."

Most users still won't understand the risks - Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Microsoft, and RIM agree to disclose up front how your private data will be used by apps

Top-Ranking Success: Maxama Protection

This is yet another client who came to us with an existing website that was of little use. In fact, it ranked... wait for it... #57!

As of writing this post, it now ranks #6 for "Ontario security company", a major leap from obscurity to top-10, and the owner is thrilled. Actually, the goal was to get it ranking in the top-10 for "Peterborough" security guard terms, so we ended up doing far better than planned.

Maxama Protection provides security guards in Peterborough, as well as vehicle patrols and alarm response throughout central Ontario. The basis of the redesign was focusing the site on these three fundamental services they offer.

The site was good looking, it had a simple and consistent layout in the company's colors of black and teal. Looks weren't the problem, even if most of the photos were too small and there were some stock images that seemed out of place.

But just about everything to do with SEO was awry.

There was a 1990s-style "splash" page, pointless and bearing no content except the company logo. Every page had the same uninspiring title, "Maxama Protection Inc" and same description. Not a single link was formatted properly. Body text was scarce, and what existed wasn't optimized for either marketing or SEO advantage.

The single biggest improvement for this site was the addition of a huge amount of meaningful copywriting. All pages were expanded to include lots of body text and bigger, better pictures. The content was lacking basic sales elements, such as stressing the 30-year history of the company, and listing the key benefits of what they do for clients. The company address and phone numbers were added to every page, instead of being hidden away on a separate "Contact" page.

As well, a map was added to the home page showing where the company operates, something visitors/clients immediately need to know. Links, photos, and headlines were given proper tags. The css was cleaned. All the code was simplified and clarified. Server files were added to strip the site of the "www", designate an error page, and other back-end basics.

Another successful website redesign, and one very happy client!

Five Business Uses For Social Media

Are you using social networking sites to full potential for your business? How many of these 5 different applications do you currently take advantage of?

1) To get breaking industry news. Since social media is real-time, you can often get advance notice or inside information about events, announcements, regulations, innovations, and more. Staying in touch with a community of customers, competitors, suppliers, distributors, consultants, regulators, and others can help keep you on the leading edge in your industry. Note: the quality of what you can learn will depend on the quality of people you follow and interact with.

2) To research your competitors. To observe what competitors are doing, what they are saying, what they are offering, how they may be expanding, and what consumers think of them.

3) To research your prospects. To observe what consumers are saying to each other, what they are wishing for, where there might be opportunities for new products or services, where needs aren't being met in the marketplace. (Killer bonus: learn exact words and phrases to use in keyword targeting for your advertising and website!)

4) To connect with prospects. Be careful how you approach this. Most people on social media networks are there to be social, and may lash out at people who are obviously trying to sell them something. Answer? Leave the sales pitch at the door. If you offer good advice consistently, people will learn to trust you and will come to you when they need to buy what you sell. Just link to your website and carry on.

5) To connect with other businesses. You can promote your products or services by interacting with your retailers and resellers. Or you can put yourself in front of thousands of new consumers by connecting with complimentary businesses. Or you can help promote your industry by working with your competitors. (For example, if you have a local business (landscaping, painting, computer installation, hair salon, clothing store, etc.), you can chat and share tips with identical businesses and consumers in other cities without risk. This makes you both look great.)

Give some thought to this list, as it may help add depth or scope to your social media activities, or it may help you focus on the primary reason that you're on there. Remember, the benefits of using social media will be different for a dentist, car dealer, musician, manufacturer, retailer, etc. And remember to be social before anything else!

Six Blog Credibility Tips

1) Use proper grammar and spelling. Sure, there's a lot of bad grammar on the web, and that's to be expected of the average uneducated schmuck. But if you are passing yourself off as a writer you have no excuse for bad writing. At least check your spelling.

2) Publish original content. Prove you are an authority on your subject. A good way to kill your own credibility is to offer nothing but regurgitated material, like summaries and links to other blogs, articles, and news. If you don't have, at the very minimum, an extremely unique point of view about something, why are you blogging anyway?

3) Provide evidence and supporting material for what you are saying. You can gain credibility by backing up your thoughts with stories, studies, examples, references, quotes, and other evidence. Just remember point #2, and don't create posts with nothing but stolen material.

4) Blog only when you have something worth saying, not simply because "it's time to", or someone said you should. I blog about once or twice a month. Others blog several times a day. Don't be influenced by what others say or do. Unless you blog for an audience that's illiterate, quality rather than quantity will sustain your blog over the long term.

5) Don’t ramble. Edit large posts into smaller ones if possible. Remember, there are blogs and then there are full-blown news, opinion, and editorial pieces. People are busy. Blogs should be concise, on-topic, and easy to read.

6) In terms of the physical layout of a blog, don't make advertisements the focus. First, that's a violation of most terms of service, and second, it will be obvious you are just making stuff up to blog about in hopes of making money from the ads. Having ads on a blog is fine, but if your content is nonsense, no one will ever come there to click the ads anyway.

Six Basic Keyword Reminders

Between doing market research, drafting mock-ups, and repeatedly asking clients to send you information, web designers can have much to do when designing a website. Which means sometimes even the most basic SEO elements get lost in the shuffle.

Remember, a site that can't be found in a search is useless, regardless of how nice it looks. It's always good to go back and double-check your keyword implementation towards the end of a site design.

1) Don't always take your client's advice on the best keywords for their industry or market. Take their suggestions, but do your own keyword research, because consumers often use different words than people within the business realize or expect.

2) Don't assume your client's competitor's sites are designed well. Their keywords/phrases may or may not be well chosen, so don't just start copying them in an effort to compete. Be careful looking at competitor info.

3) Don't simply choose keywords/phrases for your client's site that are hot in their industry, choose accurate ones that describe what they really do. The whole point of keyword selection (for legitimate business websites) is to get the correct visitors to the site. Traffic that isn't looking for what your client really sells is useless traffic, and will be a waste of their time to deal with.

4) Page titles such as "Home Page" or "Welcome To Joe's Lumber" are useless to both visitors and search engines.

5) Page descriptions such as "Home Page" or "Welcome To Joe's Lumber", or even "Joe's Lumber is your #1 source of lumber" are a waste of an important search engine tagline.

6) Use only one or two H1 headlines containing keywords, not dozens of them. In theory you could put the entire contents of a page inside one big H1 tag, but then search engines would see the whole thing as equally (un)important. Focus search engines toward several specific, logical, important elements that contain targeted keywords.

Six Persistent Web Design Myths

Over the last few days I've been browsing some other web design sites and chatting with people. Here's a sample of some of the untrue, yet surprisingly persistent, beliefs still shared by many web designers:

1) An older website will rank higher in searches than a newer one
2) A site with many pages will rank higher than a site with few
3) Search engines have difficulty reading inside tables
4) You can tell a search engine how often to visit a site
5) It is important to submit sites to search engines
6) Code that is "compliant" with "standards" makes some kind of difference

There are other myths still circulating in the web design industry as well, some based on things that used to be true a long time ago, and some with no foundation in reality. This short list seemed like the most common.

It's hard to know if colleges are teaching this stuff by mistake, or if some bad apples in the industry are (still) intentionally trying to mislead new designers. Or perhaps people who are teaching themselves are being misinformed by what they see on poor quality sites and forums.

In the back of my mind, I'm inching closer to creating some kind of training course... although having confused competitors is fantastic. What to do?

Twitter Unveils User Photo Galleries

Twitter is now rolling out a photo hosting feature, with a preview of a user's images on their profile page and a link to a gallery of all their pictures.
You can access anyone's photo gallery either by clicking the link, or by adding "/media/grid" after their profile page address.

The profile shows 4 previews... https://twitter.com/#!/cnn

from the gallery page... https://twitter.com/#!/cnn/media/grid


This is similar to what Facebook did long ago, showing a row of pictures at the top of user profiles. While Twitter says there's no way to control it, it seems the preview contains the 4 most recent pictures.

Now we'll see if people get as creative with the Twitter photo previews as they did with the Facebook photo previews.

One Great Security Advantage
Since Twitter allows you to upload a photo as part of any standard tweet, it eliminates the need to give third-party applications (twitpic, yfrog, img.ly, etc.) any access to your account. This is really fantastic because it eliminates any possibility of password theft or spamming your timeline.