Girl Geek Speaks

All A-twitter About Twitter

2009-07-04T23:06:00.004-05:00

So, what is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where you have 140 characters to send a message to the Twittersphere answering the questions, "What Are You Doing?" You can invite friends, family and business partners to "follow" your posts. In return you can follow posts of others who are of interest to you. In some ways it's a quick way to take a pulse of your market.

Your tweet can be directed to all your followers or you can respond directly to someone who has sent you a tweet. You can tweet from you cellphone.

Business has taken Twitter to heart. There are many articles online about how to use Twitter for SEO and promoting your business.

The main guideline is to "tweet" (meaning to post) something on Twitter that's useful and relevant to your niche market. That way you begin to gather a following. In addition, you can load Twitter onto your Facebook, MySpace, and Blogger pages, as well as put a widget on your website. These will keep all your friends and followers on those websites up to date with your tweets.

To post links to websites with long URL's, you can use www.tinyurl.com to short them to post in your tweets.

What you do with Twitter is only limited by your imagination...oh, and the 140 characters.

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Websites and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a FREE Initial Design Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Search Engine Optimization Software

2009-05-03T15:11:00.001-05:00

Do-It-Yourself SEO Software - Affordable Search Engine Optimization

For those of you who know how to update your website and want to optimize your pages yourself, I highly recommend purchasing the Internet Business Promoter software. This is an indispensable tool for search engine optimization (SEO).

The software will do

keyword research

ranking reports

suggest link partners

or semi-automatic submission to search engines and directories

More importantly, it will show you exactly what you need to do to and for your website to get it top rankings on search engines.
The company provides a money back guarantee. "Top 10 rankings or your money back."

Click here to learn more or purchase >> Internet Business Promoter

Annette Vaillancourt, Ph.D.

Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Websites and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget

1-877-866-4335 for a FREE intial web design or SEO consultation

Yahoo Local Search and Google Local Business Center

2009-04-18T18:57:00.003-05:00

Hi All,

If you haven't already, list your websites on http://local.yahoo.com and on Google Local Business Center (www.google.com/local/add). Search engines are displaying local searches more prominently in the search engine results pages (SERP's).

The listings are free and you can post a wide variety of information about your products and services on the listings.

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget

List Your Site on Local Search Directories

2009-04-09T10:06:00.003-05:00

Hi All,

Local search in figuring more prominently in SERP's (search engine results pages), so, you need to list your website on Yahoo Local and Google Local Business Center. You will need a emails on each to create an account, so create a yahoo.com email and a gmail.com email first.

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

SEO Tips for Beginners

2008-08-27T07:54:00.005-05:00

Diana,
After talking with Annette last night I ran across an article on search engine optimization for beginners and I thought it might be of interest to you as you venture into web design for clients.

Paul

Diana,
I agree with Paul ...that if you are designing websites for small businesses you should know something about search engine optimization. How the site is designed will have an effect on whether it will rank well in search engines. This may be more than you want to know, or more than you need if you're designing sites for small, regional companies that will not need to rank highly on search engines, though they would do well to get on the local search results.

For example, besides placement of the keywords in the meta tags and alt tags, the location of the keywords in the text on the actual page does play a small role. It's best to have the main keywords near the top of the page. The article is right about keyword frequency...not to overstuff the pages, but what happens out there in the real world is keyword frequency does matter, but only relative to the other websites that rank in the top 10 spots for that keyword. You have to do what they're doing. I have a piece of software that will tell me this. Oh, and each page needs a minimum amount of text on it so when the search engines spiders read it they can tell what the page is about. The minimum is between 250 and 500 words.

Also, all sites now need an xml site map, which is like a table of contents. That site map needs to be submitted to the search engines and updated if you change the title tags. You can get one made for free at www.xml-sitemaps.com then submit it to Google Webmaster Central. The site also needs to have plain text navigation, usually at the bottom of each page, because search engine spiders cannot read navigation buttons (which are images or Flash).

All images need to have "alt tag" for 2 reasons. They are required for browser compatibility and they are required for people who are blind (their computer reads the pages aloud to them and so they need to know there's a button there). Oh, and as far as images on a webpage, images are usually large and slow loading files, so always compress images before putting them on the page or keep the use of images to a few. If your page takes longer than 8 seconds to load on the slowest dial up modem, you lose about 80 percent of visitors....they won't wait.

I have made search engine optimization my area of expertise in the last few years and would disagree with the article Paul sent you on one point...that of inbound links. For high rankiings, depending on the keyword, getting quality, relevant inbound links is essential for high search engine rankings.

The other things that affect search engine rankings are the amount of traffic to the site, the age of the site, and the competitiveness of the keywords. I tell my clients not to expect their site to get high rankings until it's at least 3 months old. If they need to generate traffic right away, I recommend a Pay Per Click advertising program like Google AdWords.

Finally, what the article overlooks is that not all the client's desired keywords are something that people are searching, so when writing for the web, I help my clients select keywords that are being searched at a high frequency, so that the site will get traffic. There are alot of keyword selection tools available for free, like WordPot, WordTracker.

This is probably more than you need to know, but if you continue designing websites, clients will be asking you the next day after their site has gone live why they can't find it on Google (answer: it takes a few weeks for Google to find your site, then index it).

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

SEO Client Signs $50,000 in Businesss in 2 Weeks

2008-02-09T22:48:00.001-06:00

Okay, I have to brag on one of my clients, Florida Federal Criminal Defense Attorney, David J. Joffe. Due to his aggressive search engine optimization contract with Girl Geek Web Designs, he was signed on a ton of business in the last 2 weeks of January 2008. By my calculation is was about $50,000 in new cases.

Go, David!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Add Tags to Your Blog Posts, Images and Videos

2008-01-06T12:56:00.001-06:00

As you might know by now search engine optimization is a dynamic environment, as thing change periodically and new avenues of boosting rankings come into existence. Recently Google started including and ranking Blogs, Images and Videos in their search engine result pages (SERP's).

So make sure your web designer is adding alt-tags to all your images, and that you are tagging your blogs and videos with your most important keywords.

Thanks for reading!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Getting High Rankings in Google

2007-06-28T07:55:00.001-05:00

Dear Girl Geek,

I want you to optimize my website, so I will get high rankings in Google. How would you go about doing that?

Larry

Hi Larry,
My understanding is that you want your site to come up on the first page of organic search engine results on your desired keywords. The goal would be to have that happen on Google primarily, but also track rankings on Yahoo and MSN - the other main search engines. In addition, to get immediate traffic to your site you want to set up a PPC program through Google, which you may or may not want to continue once your site is ranking well in the organic results.

Note: Well established, relevant, busy sites with lots of links pointing to them get highly ranked in Google. So the strategy would be to draw alot of targetted traffic to your site via quality inbound links and referrals from search engines, social networking sites, blog postings, classified ads, and referral sites (such as Psychology Today, professional organizations, and educational sites). The site would be optimized for your desired keywords. The final strategy is to add fresh content to the site at least once a month to give search engines something new to rank and keep people interested in coming back to your site.

Here's what I'd need from you
1. Login information for your site, so we can upload changes and add a contact form

2. the age of your site - new sites take longer to get well ranked

3. a list of DESIRED keywords that you want your site to rank well on. You mentioned using WordTracker, so I'd like that list and any additional keywords you think someone looking for your services might use.

4. A list of any of the social networking sites your listed on, i.e. LinkedIn, Ryze, Zoom, Squidoo, Zandz, Digg, Merchant Circle, etc.

5. A list of all the domain names you have pointing to your site

6, a description of your niche...as detailed as you can, i.e., age, location, income, educational status, race, marital status, etc.

7. a list of links from any educational institutions you have been or are affiliated with, so we can ask them to link to your site

8. a list of professional organizations you are affiliated with for the same purpose.

In preparation for SEO and PPC set up, what I'd do is

1. Do a brief review of the site to make sure it's search engine ready and all browser compliant, i.e. check to make sure there's no funky code, no slow loading times and that the internal navigation is set up properly and the outbound links are relevant

2. run an inbound links report on your site and those of your 2 top competitors on each of your desired keywords, to generate a list of websites from which we can request links to your site.

3. create an xml site map for your site, so that all your internal pages can get indexed by the search engines

4. Set up Google Analytics and conversion tracking on your site, so we can monitor the progress and outcome of the SEO and PPC efforts

5. run a baseline ranking report for your desired keywords to see where you already rank in Google, Yahoo, MSN. I'd make a list of the top ranking sites on those keywords for later use in setting up the PPC program.

Setting up a PPC program

I usually have people start with Google AdWords because that's the search engine most 70% of people use.

For PPC, I'd
1. create a campaign structure by logical groupings, such as by topic or service specialty

2. create a list of phrase match, geo-targeted keywords with a traffic report and minimum bid recommedations. You can establish a monthlybudget that you want to spend. I can generate a recommended budget based on getting the most views possible.

3. Write a minimum of 2 ads per ad group with alternative wording, using your most important keyword in the ad title and body.

4. create a local business ad for each ad group, such that your ad appears with GoogleMaps attached, so people can see where you are located

5. add conversion tracking to see how well each keyword performs

6. set up regular reports to see how ad groups are performing

Ongoing SEO strategies

1. continue to slowly add relevant inboung links with high PageRank. If you add links too fast, Google gets suspicious.

2. add fresh content to your site regularly, probably via a blog. Google owns Blogger.com and so considers it a prime link into your site, especially if you continue to let them host it remotely.

3. post your site on local online classifieds, like Craigslist.

4. post your site on social networking sites

5. suggest you start posting comments to relevant blogs of possible referral sources. I can do some research and suggest some of those.

6. submit your site to specialty search engines or vortals, where applicable

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Organic Rankings vs. Pay Per Click

2007-05-02T10:26:00.001-05:00

Dear Girl Geek,
Optimization sounds like the answer to what we are seeking: a flow of people, but not an excessive number. I am curious about how that process gets conceptualized quantitatively--if it can be. How does one relate needs to some level (?) of optimization? There are questions for discussion especially if I am on the right track. How do we make optimization work for us? Key words? What else?
E

Dear E,
For optimization to work for you, I need to understand your goals and objectives, which I think I outlined in a previous email. How we make it work for you is a 3 step process 1) reworking/redesigning the site to make it more search engine "friendly), as well as incorporating new information you've discussed below (will you need help writing the new content?). 2) integrating selected keywords into your site (which I will work with you to develop) and 3) providing inbound links to your site that will both increase your rankings in search engines, but also drive targeted traffic to your site. These links will need to be relevant and ones that have a high ranking on search engines.

Keyword research is dependant upon the number of keywords you want the site to rank well for. I create a matrix showing the results of my research on desired keywords. I look at what you think your ideal clients would be searching to find you, then look to see if those phrases are actually being search and how much competition there is for those keywords. I look for obvious keywords and what I call "long tail" keywords...that are relevant, but not searched frequently. These types of keywords are used most often when someone is actually ready to make a purchase vs. just researching. For example, someone researching therapy services in the Miami area might type in "Therapists in Miami" just to see who's available. Someone who knows exactly what kind of therapist they seek might enter "Eating disorder treatment in Miami."

Getting quality inbound links is something that needs to proceed slowly over time, as Google gets suspicious when your site shows up with lots of new links all at once.

The best combination for generating more traffic is high rankings in the organic/natural search engine results combined with a PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising program. Here's how that works. PPC gets you immediately on the first page of results, but listed to the right in the "Sponsored Links" area, but you're paying to be there. It takes anywhere from 3-12 months to get high rankings in the regular/organic/natural search results, but once you're there, you're not paying for clicks into your website. If someone sees your site ranked highly in both, they are more likely to click on your site.I can discuss PPC's more with you if you like.

How I do the pricing on that depends on how aggressive you want the optimization to be. I would recommend at least a 3 month starter package because it will take that long to get results.

Yes, we can objectively measure the results of the optimization through Google Analytics. What we do is define a desired action site visitors will take and drop some code into the site to track if they are actually doing that. So if you're wanting to use the site to convert visitors to leads and the action is they email you via an online contact form, we track how many do that. Or if you want to track how many people request a white pager you post on your site, we can do that.

Hope this helps.

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

FAKE "bills" for website domains

2007-03-25T13:38:00.001-05:00

Help Girl Geek!

We just got a bill for $89 for our domain name registration. I says it expires tomorrow. We don't want to lose our website. We've tried unsuccessfully to reach this company, List-Corp by phone and email. Should we pay this?
P

Hi P,

Absolutely NOT! IT IS A FAKE -- an advertisement/solicitation that fools many naive site owners, who don't read the fine print. They format their ADVERTISEMENT to look like a statement and then add urgency to it by saying your domain name is about to expire in a day or so.

I've gotten them from Domain Registry of America and others.

Again, I urge you to keep good records and to pay for your domain at least 5 years in advance so you don't lose it.

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Choosing a File Extension for a Domain Name

2007-02-04T10:31:00.001-06:00

Dear Girl Geek,

What are the advantages over the different file extensions (.com, .net, .org, etc.) and how does one know which to use when choosing a domain name?

Thank you.
Pam

Hi Pam,

The file extensions are actually designated for certain types of websites. Obviously .com is the most popular one because it is familiar to everyone. Here's my understanding of the uses for each:

.com = commercial sites
.net = internet sites
.org = non-profit sites
.edu = educational institutions
.gov = government only sites
.ws = website
.tv = television related sites

So choosing a file extension kinda depends on what kind of site it will be referring to.

Hope this helps.
Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Moving My Site to a New Hosting Company

2007-01-05T18:44:00.001-06:00

Hi Girl Geek,
What's the best way to move my site from my current webhosting company to another without disrupting my website or interrupting my email? - S

Hi S,

Here's my understanding of the correct order of the process of SEAMLESSLY moving a site, pointing a domain at the new server, and transferring domains to a new registrar. At least this is how I've done it time and time again.

1. Your web designer should download and save your site from the old hosting service, then immediately upload it to your new hosting account as soon as that is establish and BEFORE the domain name servers (DNS) have been changed.

2. Your Web designer should then set up your email accounts on the new server.

I didn't know this, but you can have a site hosted on one server and the email hosted on another, if you want.

3. Only then the should the DNS (domain name server) change be initiated because when that process is complete it will simply point your domain at the new server, which has your site sitting there ready and waiting. The standard time it takes for this to occur is between 24-48 hours. I have had it happen even sooner. This way you can still get your email from the old server, then switch to the new server email options the day the tDNS propogate on the new server.

4. Finally, when everything is working and your site is tested at the new hosting company (making sure all your links work, pages load correctly and your email is working), then and only then would I request for your domain name to be transferred to the new registrar. Note: Moving a site to a new server/hosting company does NOT require transferring a domain name to a new registrar. That's the prerogative of the site owner. The only reason I do this for clients is so they get one bill and one customer service person to deal with if anything comes up about their website.

NOTE: , when your web designer sets up your email account on the new server, to reduce SPAM, which can never to totally eliminated, see if they offer a spam filter or spam assassin on your hosting package.

Sigh...one of the sad facts about having a live link to your email on a website is that you will get alot of SPAM and there's very little you can do about it. Recently I found that I have 5000+ spam emails sitting on the server clogging up my hosting account. Such is life on the web!

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Webpage Standards

2007-01-01T22:35:00.001-06:00

Hi - thank you for taking my question. I am a photographer but am just now learning how to use adobe photoshop to make a web page of my pics. It is asking me for a web page size - could you please tell me what the "standard," web page size and number of pixels per square inch should be.
Thankyou very much.
Pete

Hi Pete,The default webpage size is 800 pixels by 600 pixels with 72 dpi (dots per inch) resolution.
Hope this helps!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Blogging Directories

2006-11-18T21:38:00.001-06:00

If you have a blog and want people to know about it, you might want to list it in the following blog directories:

Blogs are great ways to get traffic back to your website.

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Get Google to crawl meta tags

2006-11-02T19:46:00.001-06:00

Hi Annette,

I can't get Google to correctly crawl my meta tags.At least a month ago, I updated my meta tags on the following website: www.humorandwisdom.com as follows:

META name="title" content="Jokes and Riddles, Humor and Wisdom by Kuder.

META name="description" content="An organized and screened collection of jokes, riddles, puzzles, and lifestyle enhancing wisdom."

META name="keywords" content="Jokes and riddles, Joke, jokes, riddle, riddles, puns, Kuder, humor, wisdom, wealth, happiness, affirmation, affirmations, aphorism, aphorisms, rebus, rebuses, words of wisdom, positive affirmations, blonde jokes, blond jokes, Halloween jokes, Halloween riddles, Halloween humor, Christmas jokes, Christmas riddles, Christmas humor, jokes riddles, difficult riddles, hard riddles, answers to riddles, funny riddles, math riddles, logical riddles, funny puns, office humor."

When I put "humor and wisdom" into a Google search, it comes back with:
return to kuder's home page Jokes and Riddles, Humor and Wisdom by Kuder Click flag. Jokes The best of the best. Riddles The cream of the crop. Words of Wisdom Ditto! ...

The above are random words from my home page, but isn't what I submitted and isn't what I want my listing to say. Clicking on what Google cached, it reads:

This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.humorandwisdom.com/ as retrieved on Oct 17, 2006 11:59:35 GMT.G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web. I have re-submitted my website a couple of times. How can I get Google to get my meta tags right? Also, Google isn't picking up the other key words I submitted.

Roger

Hi Roger,

That's because Google doesn't use the description metatag as what they display in the results. If you had "humor and wisdom" in your description tag, which you don't, it might display that, but not necessarily.

When you enter a keyword phrase in Google's search it crawls all the content of your homepage or entire site (depending on your robots follow tag). What is displays in the results is text around that phrase that appears in the content of your page. You don't have "humor and wisdom" in your text of the page either.

Also, you don't have the phrase "humor and wisdom" in your keyword tag. In fact, your doing that tag all wrong. You should NEVER use single words as keywords. You should always use 2-4 word phrases. Second, those phrases need to be in the text/content of the page too. Third, you should only have 2-4 keywords in that metatag, with the most important one first.

When you say Google isn't picking up the other keywords you "submitted" are you meaning the ones in your keyword tag? Not sure what you mean here. Google hardly pays attention to metatags other than the title tag. Other search engines might, but you have to do your tags correctly, as I've described above.

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Reputable Website Hosting

2006-11-02T09:16:00.001-06:00

Hi,

I am currently hosting my site with IX webhosting and am not too fond of the system - email sluggish and many functions not available as well as dragging teeth to make changes. Wanted to get a few suggestions about reliable hosting sites that some of you may use. Any info appreciate. Thanks - Have a good day!

Susan

Hi Susan,

I host 90% of my websites with www.TheDesignShoppe.com because they are high-tech/high touch. The fees are low, they throw in alot of "bells and whistles" for free, and the customer service is great. They own and maintain their own servers and have 99% up time. In the 7 years I've worked with them, they only had a server crash once and they had all their sites back up and running within 24 hours.

I want to throw in my two cents about GoDaddy and Network Solutions. Both have been reputed to have done disreputable things, some of which I've experienced directly. I've had great problems with both. For example, if you register a domain with GoDaddy, such as yourcompany.com, they will buy up all other versions of it, like yourcompany.net or .biz, and then try to sell it back to you at a higher rate. I've also had them "lock" accounts after I've made a purchase and give no reason other than "security" and not allow access to them again. Network Solutions is not a U.S. based company, so they are not subject to some of the laws affecting the internet. I've had a client get stung by one of their $99 promotions, then get billed $499 for it. I've tried to transfer domains from Network Solutions to another provider and they've been slow to release them.

I've also been told that if a hosting company hosts "adult" sites, that this can affect your websites' ability to get onto search engines, because the search engines may ban all sites coming from those servers. So, buyer beware!

More on this and other issues you need to know when building a website will be in my upcoming ebook. Watch for it.

Thank you for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Promoting my Website

2006-10-29T20:24:00.001-06:00

Hi Annette,
do you know how I can promote my web site to attract more visits besides what I put in the Meta tags and just sit and wait? I don't have much money so I can't spend hundreds of dollars on ads. Any help is appreciated,

Thanks. Loren

Hi Loren,
I assume you're talking about how to get traffic from search engines, since you mentioned metatags. Metatags are not that important anymore, except the title tag, that looks like this . That's the first and one of the most important places search engines look for keywords. What's most important is keyword-rich original content on your site.

There are 3 aspects to getting traffic from search engines, all of which require a book in themselves. First your site needs to be in the first 2 pages of the results for desirable and relevant keywords or few will ever find it. You have to carefully select your keywords and optimize your website pages for those. This is a time consuming process. Then you have to get other sites of link to your site. There are 3 ways to do this. One is to have compelling and interesting original content, so other site owners will naturally want to link to your site. Second is to request links from other sites. This has to be done carefully, so that you are getting relevant, quality links from busy sites. The third way is to pay for links.

I do search engine optimization and have been successful in getting sites within the top 20 results on relevant keywords.

For those with a small budget, I recommend PPC (Pay Per Click ads, as those get you seen immediately).

Hope this helps.
Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Website Feedback Form

2006-09-30T15:54:00.001-05:00

Hello Annette,
Is there any type of free web feed back form that I can use on my web site. The web site I have does have a from available but I doent' seem to want to repond to sending me and email that feedback has been received.

What I want is a form that visitors can submit and the form will come to me first before it is actually posted on my site. I have a guest book but I am trying to get a web form also.
Thank you, Martha

Hi Martha,
I'll bet what's happening is you haven't set your form up correctly. Sometimes because of your website hosting package, you have to make sure to route your form to an email that included your domain name, i.e. info@yourdomain.com.

Hope this helps.
Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Free Guestbook

2006-09-10T09:16:00.001-05:00

Hi Girl Geek,
Is there any type of free guest book that I can add to my web site that has the option of reviewing the guest book entires before they are posted to the web site? Thank you
Martha

Hi Martha,
You might try Bravenet.net for free guestbook. Beware, as guestbooks get spammed alot.

Otherwise, I'd suggest a blog. You can get a free one at http://www.blogger.com/ and set it up to moderate comments.

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Helpful Programs to have for Web Design

2006-09-04T13:15:00.001-05:00

Hi Annette,
I've just got started building my own website from scratch. Tried Dreamweaver, but it just took too long to learn. So I've decided to use CoolPage. It's a pretty basic, but quite easily understood web design program. My question is, what are the most popular or most crucial pieces of design software to have while building a very basic website. I'd like to have a shopping cart and newsletter on it. I've got Photoshop and a good little free button making program. What else would I need in terms of software. Nothing too fancy like flash or others. Just the essentials for a beginner website builder like myself.
Thanks
Rob

Hi Rob,
The other thing you will need is a way to compress images, as filesize usually is large and slows down page loading time. Photoshop does that when you tell it to. Click "save optimized for web."

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Friends Building Sites for Friends

2006-08-18T12:24:00.001-05:00

Hi:

My friend is running a restaurant. I would like to create a web page for them. But i have no experience. Can you tell me how can i begin and is it possible for customer order the food through the internet and them fax it to fax machine.

Thanks
Tat

Hi Tat,

Designing a website for a business takes each of the following skills and knowledge:

1. HTML coding or use of a WYSIWYG editor, like Dreamweaver or FrontPage
2. Knowledge of search engine marketing
3. Visual design and graphic skills
4. Adding features, like fax in orders
5. Excellent writing skills and knowing how people read websites, which is different than print
6. Designing navigation

Unless you have all of those skills, I would recommend you have your friend hire a professional web designer. Putting a "beginners" website online may create a bad impression of your friend's business and do more harm than good. About 50% of my business over the last 4 years has been fixing sites built by well intentioned friends.

I'm sorry, but I had to laugh at your message because your grammar made it sounds like you want to fax the food to a fax machine.

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Preventing Spam to Website Email Addresses

2006-08-04T16:47:00.001-05:00

I Got 5000 + Emails in a Single Day!

I was thrilled when I saw my Outlook downloading emails one afternoon. Had I run some killer newsletter that was bring such a response? Had my search engine optimization hit the gold mine? But when it got to over 5000 emails, I began to get suspicious.

Sure enough, I was getting spam emails that had backed up and clogged up my hosting server since 2005. So, if you've every gotten feedback that people cannot reach you through your email on your website, you too might have this problem.

The solution, log in to your control panel of your web hosting company and clear your email box of spam at least once a month. Often your hosting company supplies some sort of Spamblocker that you can add to prevent this from happening, or a way to route spam into a :blackhole or bounce them back to the sender.

Another way to prevent getting a lot of spam from your website email address is to not list is as a text link. For example, instead of me putting Annette@GirlGeekWebDesigns.com, I'd put Annette AT GirlGeekWebDesigns DOT com. Or, you could create the @ symbol as an image file and use that. That would confound the spammers out phishing for emails.

If you post an email on your website, some spam is inevitable, but you can prevent alot of it.

Thanks for Asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ask Girl Geek: Getting High Rankings in Search Engines

2006-08-04T16:26:00.001-05:00

Hi Girl Geek,

We have several big competitors in our primary market, and we are looking to make our website hit higher on google searches and generate more business. Can you help? How do we get started?

Name withheld

Hi,
Getting your website ranked well in search engines is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. When people ask me how to get a #1 ranking in search engines I have a list of questions I ask them.

1. What search engines do you want to be ranked well in?
2. What keywords are you wanting high rankings on?
3. Who's linking to your site already?
4. Are you using a Pay Per Click advertising program?
5. What sites do you consider your main competitors?

The first step I would take is a thorough review of your site to see:
1. Is is search engine compatible and browser friendly?
2. What keywords are already on your site?
3. What incoming links are driving traffic to your site?
4. Where does your rank in the desired search engines already?

Then depending on your goals and budget I would make recommendations that could be implemented in stages.

Whole books and conferences are held on this topic, so I'm just going to give the briefest of overviews. My goal is to give you enough information for you to know what's involved and so that you can ask intelligent questions when discussing this with an SEO company or even with your web designer who will need to know whether or not you plan to promote your site via search engines.

So here goes...

SEO is a complicated and ongoing art/science and needs to be reviewed at a bare minimum of every 3-6 months because the ranking formulas/algorithms used by the major search engines are changed frequently. Do not be mistaken: this is NOT an easy project, but it is do-able. To really do the job right you need an ongoing effort. It's almost a full time job, if you're serious about doing it right. And, there's no magic bullet, at least, not one I've heard of or tried.

SEO is also different depending on which search engine you're wanting to get ranked well in. If you're covered by the top 3, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, you've reached at least 90% of internet users. Each of these search engines attract different demographics and have different requirements for the site construction and keyword placement, so that's something to consider when trying to figure out where to put most of your effort.

Similarly, when you ask for better rankings it all depends on what search terms you're wanting good rankings on. SEO strategies also change over time, so your site needs to be reviewed for those periodically. Also, since the internet reindexes itself once a month, changes made today in your site might not result in changes in ranking for up to 30 days.

The two main strategies in SEO are keyword selection and placement and link strategies. Of course, the site has to be designed in such a way that it is not only compatible with the search engines, but that it loads quickly and displays correctly in all browsers. If your site takes longer than 8 seconds to load, it is estimated that you lose up to 80% of potential visitors.

Selection of appropriate keywords is essential. I use a 4 step process to determine appropriate keywords. 1) brainstorming all the keyword phrases that potential site visitor in your niche might us in a natural search 2) checking to see if those terms are being searched monthly at a high rate 3) checking the number of websites competing for that search term and 4) determining the relative cost for that keyword in the 3 major Pay Per Click programs. (You have to go through the same steps for PPC programs, so why not do them all at the same time?) Then you need to follow the guidelines of the search engines as to where to place the keywords within your site and at what frequency. These rules change over time, as people try to "fool" the search engines.

Link strategies are important for 2 reasons. Having outside sites link into your site drives targeted traffic to your site. Having multiple incoming links into your site also alerts the search engines that your site must be "important," so it is awarded a higher ranking if it is busy. So think, strategic alliance.

The best incoming links are natural links, which are unsolicited. You obtain these by having really useful content on your site, so that people will naturally want to link to your site.

The other strategy is to request links to your site from "relevant" websites. Determining "relevant" links is time consuming. The quality of the incoming link is more important that the quantity of links. You have to request links to your site, follow up and often give reciprocal links from your site as a "courtesy" to the linking site.

It seems now that a lot of sites are requesting payment for providing links to your site. That can run into some money. So I generally start out with the free links, then scrutinize the quality and traffic on the paid sites. Some of the ones I've looked at for my other client appear just to be people whose site exists for the sole purpose of bilking money out of naive site owners, who don't know a quality link from a hole in the ground.

About 6 years ago, I got a bid for SEO on my Geek website, and with the designers discount it was $1200 for 3 months. I didn't get specifics because that was outside of my budget at the time, but I've learned what questions to ask since then, because too many people have gotten ripped off because of fantastic claims by SEO companies. So beware of SEO companies that "guarantee a #1 ranking in search engines." What they might mean is they can get you a #1 ranking on an obscure search engine on 1 keyword for about a month. When you get a bid, get a detailed explanation of what you're getting for the money.

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Don't Lose Your Domain Name

2006-07-02T03:18:00.001-05:00

Hi All,
I can't believe it. One of my website clients forgot to renew his domain name, LakesideCounseling.com, and it was immediately snatched up by for resale, a company in D.C. called BuyDomains.com.

When I tried to get them to release it back to my client for the original $12 he probably paid for it, they told me they'd sell it back to him for the "current market value." They estimated the value at $1,888!!! They told me most expired domains go from between $2000 - $4000. Sheesh!

I've also seen some domain registrars buy every version of your domain name that you don't buy, to resell to you at a higher price later. (The registrars I've seen do this are GoDaddy.com andRegisterFly.com.) The registrar I've had no trouble with are Register.com or Enom.com.

So, here's my suggestions:

1. buy all versions of your domain name, i.e. .com, .net, .biz, .org if you have a unique business name and want to stop anyone else from using it or having to buy it later at a higher price. It's not that expensive.

2. Buy your domain names in 5-10 year blocks. It's often cheaper that way anyhow, since most domains register for $9 - $12 a year, and you may get a discount for buying over time.

3. Buy plurals of your domain names too for similar reasons. For example, I own both http://www.girlgeekwebdesigns.com/ and http://www.girlgeekwebdesign.com/ and have them both pointing to my site.

Again, it's not that expensive on the front end, and may save you $$$$ and heartache down the road when you're business name is well known.

Ask me anything!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335

Ebook Coming Soon!

2006-06-25T11:11:00.003-05:00

To learn more about my soon-to-be-published ebook, Girl Geek Speak: Everything you Need to DECIDE and DO BEFORE Hiring a Web Designer, listen to the audio clip above.

I love technology!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
Call for a Free Initial Consultation
1-877-866-4335