Read-Write Web

Who among us, working in a tech-related field, has not had an acquaintance who waved away our computer-jargon with the retort “I don’t understand computers!” Or gotten a phone call from a relative late at night, who needed help with their home computer?

At the same time, software engineers, web designers, and graphics artists seem to be at a loss when it comes to dealing with the physical world. A great programmer is stumped when their car stalls, a brilliant web designer will have their website in perfect order while their desk is buried under three feet of junk, and many IT professionals tend to let their health go, developing the expanding waistline and fluorescent-lighting complexion that goes with spending all your time in a cubicle or a server room.

We have to remember that the first microprocessors emerged in the early 1970s, which makes them about 40 years old. That’s an extremely short time, when you consider how used we are to the digital age. In all of human history, we’ve only had the span of two generations to adapt to a world with computers in them, and yet they are everywhere in our world. No wonder some of us have a hard time dealing with them!

Compare things like cars and phones. We’ve had those around for nearly a century, and as a result we’ve gotten more of a handle on them. The average person may not have mechanic knowledge, but they at least understand that a car needs gas, oil, a battery, and coolant. They understand how to do simple maintenance tasks like changing a flat tire or replacing an air filter.

And telephones make sense to people on a level where computers do not. The average citizen – excluding the tech-savvy reader we expect you are – is still fuzzy on the concept of the Internet; how can that web page be across the country and yet right in front of them at the same time? Yet they have no problem understanding that the voice on their telephone is coming from a person very far away.

Peter Brittain

While any name-brand web hosting service offers Internet marketing and SEO services, there are some simple common-sense tips which anyone can follow to at least get on the radar as far as the World Wide Web is concerned. In addition, once you’re set up with the initial traffic optimization, there are things you can do to ensure that your website keeps growing. These tips will both ensure that your website appeals to both visitors and search engines alike.

Have Plenty of Content

It is very difficult to optimize a site for a search engine when there’s almost nothing on that site. And by content we usually mean *writing*. Written text is still the main thing that search engines see – after all it’s what web searchers type into Google to find your site in the first place. So remember, just images or just having Flash won’t do the job. You should at least be able to have a couple of paragraphs on a page explaining what your site is for.

Follow Internet Standards

Search engines prefer to crawl sites which adhere to standards. While it is difficult to have a site be 100% in compliance, the better you follow good mark-up standards, the better. Check your HTML, XHTML, CSS, and RSS with the relevant W3C services, and check back periodically to make sure that your site is still easy for search engines to navigate.

Important Elements

· Title – put the title of each web page between the title tags in the head section of your HTML.

· Meta tags – At least a couple of these can make a difference. Using “description” and “keywords” helps some search engines and directories index your content and categorize it better.

· Link internally – We cannot stress enough, all of your website’s individual pages must be accessible from a hypertext link on at least one other page. Text links are better than image buttons, and descriptive linking text is better than “click here”.

· Headers matter – Use the header tags (h1 through h6) to display the name of your page and the relevant sub-sections within the page. For instance, if you are running a car-buyer’s directory, the listing of cars should have something like “Cars for Sale” in the h1 tag at the top, followed by “Ford”, “Chevy”, “Saturn”, etc. in h3 tags.

Blogs

Blogs have a huge advantage in getting search engine traffic. They provide lots of text for a search engine to scan. They are updated regularly, so fresh content keeps bringing in a new audience. Their layout makes it easy to sort subjects by category. And all blog software generates an RSS feed, which visitors can collect into a feed reader and track new changes to your site from there. Get a blog and keep it fresh, and you almost can’t go wrong.

Be Selective in Your Friends

By this we mean that you are risking your good standing with Google and other search engines if you participate in shady marketing schemes. If you link to a lot of sites which are blacklisted by search engines, pretty soon your name will be on that list, too. Follow search engine’s webmaster’s guidelines for good conduct – it’s not hard to follow some common sense rules.

Market Yourself

Every day that you have a website, you should be thinking of what you can do to promote your website. Do all of your business partners and family know about it? Are you joining social media like Facebook, Twitter, Meebo, or MySpace, and if so is your website in your profile? And while you shouldn’t link-spam your site to social news websites, it is perfectly acceptable to post a link to a section of your site if it’s particularly relevant to a forum topic. You can also submit your site to any directories you find online that would have something to do with your website’s focus.

Following the above guidelines should put you at what we call “natural traffic”, the ambient level of traffic that any average site should have. SEO optimization and marketing services are then better prepared to help boost you far above average.

Peter Brittain

The thing that makes the boundary between web design and marketing so distinct is the kind of people each profession attracts. Marketers – the people who work in “sales” – are a different breed. They’re social, talkative, interactive, open, friendly, and persuasive. Web designers, on the other hand, spend all of their time working with machines and designing abstract things like software and graphics on them. So they’re likely to be introverted, intellectual, solitary, analytical, and strong on communications but weak on personality skills.

It terms of the Myer-Briggs personality types, engineers and artists are often (I)ntroverted, i(N)tuitive, (T)hinking, and (J)udgmental, while sales-staff and human-resource types tend to be (E)xtraverted, (S)ensing, (F)eeling, and (P)erceiving. The two personality types tend to clash. The manager’s job is to try to make everybody get along and work towards a common company goal.

Perhaps companies could do something to help these two tribes see eye-to-eye. Maybe they could have “take somebody from the other department to lunch” day! Perhaps, along with the new “eXtreme Programming” meme going around, we could assign web design teams composed of half-engineer and half-marketer. They each sit down and see what the other one does, and do the designing together.

Wouldn’t that be a nice world? But at the same time, we should cherish each type. If everyone was equally good at design and marketing, then nobody would be highly skilled in either one. There just doesn’t seem to be enough room in one human brain to cram in all of the learning needed to deal expertly with both people and computers. So we have to keep the two fields separate, while seeking to find a common ground between them.

Peter Brittain

The micro-manager. – It’s that feeling of constant dis-satisfaction you can sense. They’re somehow convinced that if they just analyze your site long enough, they’ll find something to pick apart. The icons are too small, the gradients could stand to be fuzzier – or why not move the submit button over to the left side of the form? It would be less grating if it were in the specification at the start.

The persecution-complex paranoiac. – 90% of the site owners out there are not conscious enough about the security risks of the Internet, and then you have the 1% who are convinced they are getting hacked all the time. “My website’s been hacked!” No, actually, congratulations! You made the front page of Digg! Unfortunately, the traffic brought your server down.

“I have a nephew who could build the site…” – No, really, that’s OK! Yeah, anybody can web design, in fact, it’s not even a real job. It’s just like shoveling snow, even though some people make a living going door to door offering to do that. Yeah, just a few minutes diddling around with a copy of Frontpage Express and some flashy animated GIFs, we’re good.

The would-be 1337 hacker. – At the other end of the technology scale from the Luddite is the one who knows too much for their own good. Sometimes it’s a real thrill to work with these people – they know what you’re doing and have good sense about it. But then there’s the ones who prove the old saying, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” And just like that, they’ve introduced bugs into the PHP, converted all the English pages into the Kanji character set, and have somehow made a PNG image which cannot be displayed by any browser. Can you fix it? At 3AM?

The black-hat trafficker. – You try to avoid these, but some slip through the radar. Of course, they’re dishonest by nature, so they lied about their intentions on the way into the deal. But now you’re crest-fallen to discover that that logo you made went onto a dreaded sales-letter page. And the mail server you set up is being mis-used for spam. And the site you so lovingly designed is now a link farm. The worst part is, when Google drops their PageRank to 0, when social bookmark sites blacklist their URL, and when their own web host gives them the boot, guess who gets the blame? That’s right, the web designer.

Peter Brittain

#2 – Make a Google gadget. Google has opened their gadget platform to the public, and even has a simple kit to get started. You can always compose a feed for your blog, a photo stream for your images, or a simple service like a calendar or a horoscope. Then your gadget can get published and be hosted on blogs, desktops, and user’s iGoogle pages.

#3 – Build your own search engine. While we’re on Google, Google also offers a service to let you create your own Google-based search engine. This could be posted on your site, and offer visitors a search experience tailored to your niche market. This is a great way to hook many affiliated web businesses under one canopy.

#4 – Start your own YouTube channel. By joining YouTube, you get the opportunity to become one of their channel producers. Many websites are jumping on this bandwagon; it pulls in viewers who otherwise wouldn’t take the time to read an article, and there’s always the possibility that one of your videos could go viral.

#5 – Sell branded merchandise. This, again, is easier than you’d think! Sites like CafePress allow you to upload your own content and have it printed onto shirts, hats, mugs, calendars, and more. Then sell them from the sidebar on your blog. You never know until you try it – your site might be more popular than you thought it was! And for that matter, why not give out your own custom calendar to your friends next Christmas, or send your kid to school in a shirt with your website’s logo one day?

#6 – Publish an ebook. Like CafePress, the site Lulu lets you upload an ebook in digital format, which it can then sell in either ebook or print form. If you’ve had a blog for a few years, you might be in a position to publish a “best-of”. Or you can draw on your expertise in your field to produce an ebook on your chosen niche topic. Books and blogs go well together, as one promotes the other.

Peter Brittain