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A quick history:
I design LOTS of really small sites for really small businesses for really small amounts of money. I host the sites with the intent of keeping them as hosting customers for years to come. The design is essentially free but of nice quality. Even database driven where applicable.
In my agreement with my customers, I agree to submit their site twice a year and I make NO guarantees about rankings. I explain that top rankings cost top dollars. (about 5 times what I charge to design the site from what I can tell) They still want to get "found on the search engines" when I design their sites. And there are plenty of people out there "guaranteeing it" as I'm sure you know.
So, lay it on me here.
Is there an EFFICIENT way for me to get them ranked reasonably well? I'm willing to put in some hours for them and still keep my low fees. I do the keyword research already at Wordtracker and craft the keywords and content. I'm aware of the "techniques" for doorway pages though I don't want to get into that level of sophistication. (There's just no time in the budget for it.) It's apparent to me that Keywords are king and they have to be in the content as well. I understand that.(I've read a lot on this so I can follow you. You don't have to be beginner basic when responding.)
I need the nitty gritty EFFICIENT techniques that will keep a 20 room motel owner in Hayesville , NC happy with his web site response. He's not expecting 5000 page views a day. He'd be happy with 20 most likely. He'd just like to see them 10 of them come from SE referrals.
Do I really need to get into all the doorway crud and cloaking stuff?
I'm searching for the bare bones minimum that has to be done to a site to get it in the top 10 in markets that are not all that competitive. A good example market would be "rental cabins in Western North Carolina".
All comments welcome! Don't be gentle. I'm 43 and trying to make a solid career change into this arena of web development. I need to know all aspects of it and what I can resonably expect to provide my customers. I admit naivety in the SE world. That's why I'm asking for solid, efficient, direction. At this point, having purchased WPG, I'm really not sure how far I need to go to get basic results.
Thanks!
DW
I intend on sticking around here and reading. This looks like a good board. The problem I have at the moment is getting this one customer taken care of.
I've made the mistake of designing the site without taking seo into account along the way. There were several things I was not aware of.
Such as background color and text color being the same even if the text is in a table with dark background cells. Now I have to change the text color and they won't like that.
Anyway, so goes it.
Any other comments are truly welcomed!
DW
My second concern, having seen your asp file about hiking, and also noting your post answering SSI questions, is how you manage these client sites. Are they generally flat html files or dynamic?
And some additional questions... Do your clients tend to be in a niche by industry, like B&B's, cabins, outdoor activities? OR are they a hodge-podge of local businesses, everything from florists to undertakers? Do you set up individual domains for none/some/most of them?
Welcome to WebmasterWorld.
I'll eleaborate for a brief moment to help you understand who (or what) I am.
My business plan is to design sites for practically any type of small (mom and pop)business.
I concentrate on the Northeast Georgia mountain region since I intend to move there in a few years. (I already have a part time residence there.)
I am an engineer/designer by trade here in Atlanta. I am well versed in AutoCAD and computers (PC's) in general an have worked in many different industries doing design work on a daily basis. I'm 43. I've been around. I've learned what matters in design and what is fluff. In some cases fluff is needed. In most cases not.
I simply like designing sites and I feel like I could earn a living at it up in the mountains. Hence, a career change process is in the works over the next few years while still holding down my other "real" job.
With that said, I am designing these sites utilizing ASP where it is applicable. And I also make portions of the sites, areas where content changes on a monthly or weekly basis, editable by the site owner. This is done with an online WYSIWYG editor that I password protect. The owner logs on, pulls up a menu of the editable pages on the site, selects one, makes the changes, and saves it. This is so they can get their updates done as quickly as they want without having to contact me and wait on me to find the time to do it for them. This also allows me to work on future sites of course and not be married to each site with maintenance requirements.
Those editable pages are SSI's. The body of the page essentially. That's all the customer sees in the editor is the text content and perhaps a graphic or two. Not the entire page. What they change is SSI'd into the template page which they can't touch. This limits how much damage thay can do to a page. ;-) They just have to know how to spell ;-0
All my sites are on a Win2K platform. Hence, all my SSI stuff is processed on an ASP platform. So, I'm creating ASP pages and SSI'ing ASP pages into them. Any form processing and information capture to a database is ASP.
I resell the server space from a trusted ISP at whatever price I can garner. I basically design these sites for "free" and make up my earnings from hosting the sites on yearly contracts. Each year is paid in full. I come up with a higher monthly fee for the first year (to cover design somewhat) and lower it for the rest of the years by enough to make the customer smile and continue his business. Example: for a 20 room motel site (the one I'm working on submitting now) I charged $480 this first year ($40/mo). If all goes well, and the customer is happy, and I don't have any further involvement in the site, I'll charge him $360/year from then on. Pretty cheap! I charge more if I can sense that there will be more development time involved but what I charge is based on intuition more than a set formula. I can tell if a potential customer has gotten quotes out of his budget for site design and I know what is generally being quoted in the region I serve. So I price to get the business.
So, with all that said, do you see what I seek? I need EFFICIENT search engine optimization techniques that work reasonably well. That is what I am trying to develop in my own mind is an efficient, time effective, methodology to optimizing these little sites so I can provide a value to the customer and still earn a living. "Time is money" and the money end of these little sites is fixed. The only flex is in the time I spend designing them. I try to minimize the time spent but still provide an excellent site for the customer. One that can be found in the search engines.;-)
I've got eight sites going now. I am just now getting into optimizing them all for SE. I realize now, I should have been optimizing them as I designed them. I won't make that mistake again! So,.. I'm new to SE techniques and I'm desparate for time effective techniques. I also want to do it responsibly for my customers. And I want to develop a process I can use for each site I design from here on out, as I design it, that is time efficient.
I have determined that I need to have approx. 75 of these little sites going at a time to be able to break free of my current job and move to the new career full time. As long as I can put the content management on the owner and get them reasonable search engine visibility, I think it is possible.
Now to address your comments:
I do understand the types of phrases that are searched upon for each customer. I spend a few hours at Word Tracker developing keyword phrases for each site. Sometimes, as you point out, the things we might think are being searched on are not searched on at all. Example: Hayesville, North Carolina = 25 searches in 60 days. Yuccch! However, North Carolina = 6,621 searches in 60 days with a fair competition factor! Good keyword phrase I'd say. I've come up with a handful of phrases that are useable on this little motel site that have good competition factors associated with them. I only hope I am on the right track! North carolina vacations = 112 searches in 60 days. North carolina golf courses = 84. North carolina mountain lodging = 14 yuccch! So, I'll incorporate the best into the content as long as it's relevant.
Here is where I am getting confused and somewhat frustrated. I have read A LOT on SEO recently. I purchased WPG, I signed up for Planet Ocean's "Winning the search engine wars" monthly newsletter. All are good information and WPG is good but I have two problems. I don't have the time to read and assemilate whole tomes on search engine optimization. Not to mention that these books etc. seem to make a rather unclear plan of how to address SEO efficiently. They just cover all the possible bases of what MIGHT work and what MIGHT not work but no info on what USUALLY works. In other words, it's like everything in life. You can immerse yourself in the endless details and idiosyncrasies of any subject but at some point you are just frittering away time and not accomplishing much. Every process has a "tried and true" track that will get results. Beyond that there it is tweaking and fine tuning and "frittering away time" that gets you incremental and sometimes valueless improvement.
A good example is ASP programming. I use Macromedia Ultradev 4 to do all my sites and it provides tons of TIME SAVING features related to ASP development that I simply could not do without. These features allow me to develop data driven sites on a small budget. If I had to hand code everything, forget it. My customers could not afford the cost. And they'd do without a site. It's that simple.
Ultradev however does produce some bloated ASP code. Many ASP programmers criticize it's use because of this. They can write "cleaner" code by hand. Bravo! spend as much time as you like tweaking code to be "faster". I've got sites to build! And I promise you, my site, with it's "bloated" ASP code will be unnoticeably slower to the end user than the site the programmer developed. That's because my end users aren't sophisticated enough to notice the minor difference. So, in my opinion, the ASP programmer is "frittering away time" creating valueless improvement. My customers certainly would not pay the difference in cost for the minor performance increase.
Similarly, that's what I'm trying to sift out of all I have read on SEO. What techniques are tried and true. Which one's are absolutely necessary. And which one's are really just the frittering away of time to see if one can improve a rank from 10 to 8 or not.
Am I making any sense? :-) Have I bored you silly? :-)
I hope to get some help here and in turn provide some. Right now, I am not confident enough to feel good about my SEO thinking and about the results I will get on this little motel site.
I am open and appreciative of all thoughts on this.
I am truly glad I found this board. Didn't find it via search engines by the way. Found it from a link on another site ;-)
Don West
In addressing your questions, I want to mention that I do obtain domain names for each client ( sometimes two)and each site has it's own IP address.
I usually purchase a keyword rich domain name and plan to submit the sites under that domain. I then purchase an "easy to remember" domain and have the ISP point it to the keyword rich, submitted domain.
Example: I have a client called www.KGknifegrinding.com That's what he wanted for his "easy to remember" domain name. He puts that domain on all his advertizing, business cards etc. However, the domain I will submit will be www.crown-moulding-wood-mouldings.com
Those are keyword phrases relevant to his business that had lots of searches and good competition factors.
I'd like to hear some thoughts on this approach too.
Thanks!
DW
Couple problems I've dealt with: when clients add and maintain their own content (unsupervised)- it's going to take its toll on keyword density (though their misspellings may actually help here and there) You could have the page humming along until Billy Bob posts his drivel for the week and blows it all to hell.
Billy Bob must be aware of the tradeoffs of his maintaining his own content - and putting his top-ranked pages you so carefully optimized into the toilet.
I did a couple of test sites (sites that I maintain from A-Z) to see how fast I could get them (they were brand new) top 10's in particular keywords - and evaluate the results of some of my 'test approaches' when left to experiment at will. I found the sites I did without 'interruption' did much better than sites with content generated and maintained by the client.
(Duh.)
But it's a hard sell: convenience vs. rankings. Can you put a value on your expertise that the client will pay for? Or will Billy Bob keep churning out his masterpieces counting all the dollars he saves in site maintenance? Additionally, do you have time to dedicate to Billy Bob's weekly demands times 100 clients?
Unless you want to hold weekly seminars to educate your clients, including handouts of supporting studies you do on your own time - it may very well be something that is difficult to overcome.
You are obviously NOT an idiot girl. :-)
I'm wondering if I might be able to optimize only a few pages of a site, say the home page, and a couple of pages that might legitimatly utilize search phrases in their content, and let ole Billy Bob wield his magic on the rest.
Would that be an approach I could take? It would serve two purposes if it's feasible. One, it would cut down on the time I spent optimizing a site. Two, it would insure that I control the "important" pages.
Is it feasible to only "pay attention" to a few pages of a small site with SEO in mind?
Your thoughts?
Thanks!
DW
P.S.I'm interested to know how you make your pages owner editable if you're willing to share your knowledge. I'm looking for a better way so perhaps they can edit a text file which is an SSI that CSS formats in the master page.
Thanks!
DW
I maintain all meta tags, page titles, and descriptions; and change these, for whatever they're worth - myself - depending on pertinent content. I also preserve key areas of content, as well as the site templates themselves.
Left to their own devices, the Billy Bobs of the world would most likely all-caps their way into search engine oblivion.
Meanwhile, clients can update their catalogs, their content, their pictures of their dogs... whatever - and only do so much harm. Some even get pretty savvy.
If you, as a small business owner running herself most-likely ragged doing sites for (essentially) hosting money and trying to keep costs down, set forth to educate each user - you'd find there wasn't enough money in Bill Gates' bank account to pay for your time and frustration. Therefore - you adopt the Q&D (quick-n-dirty) approach and protect what's most important on the site, optimize wherever you can, try to hold the site together, and still try to find time to see enough daylight you don't come down with a bad case of desk-job scurvy while Billy Bob puts on his thinking cap for his next version of War & Peace.
Been there. Done that. Have the medal hanging on the wall. And survived a bad case of scurvy.
And I did it. I finally did it.
Because I'm really not much of a code writer ala Star Trek's "Dam**t, Jim - I'm a graphic designer - not a Perl God", you'd probably learn more (and learn it right!) by taking a look at scripts posted places like hotscripts and cgi-resources. They have several that will do what I think you're trying to do. If not exactly - you can tweak here and there and get the job done with what's available.
Hack away long enough, use some imagination, and you can do a lot.
Thanks for the info!
DW
always keep them guessing
I am code challenged too! That's why I chose the Dreamweaver Ultradev route to development. But,I'm learning to code anyway gradually. You pretty much have to at least understand what you're looking at. I'm not sure it's necessary to be able to concieve it from scratch though. Good that it's not. I'd probably nerver be that good.
Thanks!
DW
I know (what you did last summer). While we don't do site reviews here, your asp content feed interested me. From the two sites I found (Peaks real estate, country music star wanna-be. We don't list urls, either.), it appears you've touched on the main problem in your above posts; code bloat. You're also a little light in the keyword department. Lumping aesthetic appeal and code/script engineering under the general term design, there are sometimes massive conflicts between design and SEO.
Spiders read from top down, so you can't put 20k of image-rotating code at the top of the page. Spiders don't like deeply nested tables, yet programs like Net Objects Fusion seem to rely on deeeeeep nesting to micro-position everything. If anything, I'd recommend hand coding the root index page and maybe one or two secondary pages and adding a few keywords. Take a look at Brett's post on keywords in this thread [webmasterworld.com...] then maybe give a quick run-through on two old threads: thou shalt not [webmasterworld.com] and one-size-fits-all [webmasterworld.com]
The realtor's site was the first one I did and it was done in Fusion and Drumbeat for the listings section. I've long sense given up on Fusion because of what you mentioned.
The country music wanna be was just overhauled and I will submit it and a couple of others I've just finished soon. Today I will move forward with the motel I mentioned above and get it submitted. The threads I've found here have helped a great deal in clarifying some things for me.
Thanks for all the help!
DW
P.S. How'd you find the two sites I did?? :-)
You leave crumbs. And, I practice [webmasterworld.com].
Please advise on how to avoid puting the 20k of navigation code at the top.
Are you saying don't use it, just have text links, or is there some way of moving the code without moving the visual appearance of the navbar?
Practically every site I've seen has the navigation at the top, left, or right. How do you keep that from being a problem?
Thanks!
DW
