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Tips, tutorials and advice from Digi Donkey Internet experts on website development.

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Website Writing

Posted: 2012-01-30

So  you've decided to get a website and you have no idea what to send the web  designer as far as content goes. Well, read on for some basic tips for writing  content for the web.

Your Home page introduces your business and your Web site.

Write a summary, including a brief description of your products or  services, the cities, counties or states you service and your value and  commitment to customers. This page sets the tone for your site and tells people  what they can expect to find on other pages. Give the basics here and provide  greater detail on other pages.

Let your customers know why they should explore your site

A business home page is similar to the front window of a retail  business. Highlight your best products or services and any special offers here.  Present your products or services value to browsers to get them "through  the door" or deeper into your site.

Convince customers of your site's value to them

Consider what you might say to people to keep them coming back.  You might mention how long you've been in business and how you show your commitment to customers. Be sure to tell visitors about your approach to  business, your values, and your abilities. 

It's a good idea to also post your contact information on the Home  page for people who come to the site to quickly find your phone number or  address.

A Good Way  to Format the Information on Your Home Page

If you are totally lost as what to do here is a good format to follow when writing  the text for your home page. Break the information up into 3 parts.

Part 1 – Acknowledge your customer’s need.

Why would someone come to your website in the first place? What are they looking for? Why do people come to you? What service or product are they looking for?  You need to address this on your home page.

Part 2 – Mention the main products or services you offer to address the  needs stated in part 1.

In part 1 you addressed some need or needs of potential customers. In this part  you need to mention the main products or services you offer that address those  needs. It doesn’t need to be a detailed explanation of each service, just 3 or  4 sentences. You can give detailed explanations of what you offer on separate  pages.

Part 3 – Explain why your products or services are a better match for the  customer as opposed to someone else’s.

This  is your value proposition. Why is your company better? Is it materials used,  price, experience, customer service? State why the customer should choose you.

Google Reorganizes Backlinks

Posted: 2011-09-30

Google changed the way they categorize links and instead of writing a whole new article on this I'll just post what they they wrote here. It is pretty self explanitory. This article was originally posted on Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 2:57 PM. 

If you need any help breaking this down into non-nerd-speak contact one of our Internet experts today and they will explain how this effects you and your Internet presence.

From Google . . .

Check out the original article here...

Today we’re making a change to the way we categorize link data in Webmaster Tools. As you know, Webmaster Tools lists links pointing to your site in two separate categories: links coming from other sites, and links from within your site. Today’s update won’t change your total number of links, but will hopefully present your backlinks in a way that more closely aligns with your idea of which links are actually from your site vs. from other sites.

You can manage many different types of sites in Webmaster Tools: a plain domain name (example.com), a subdomain (www.example.com or cats.example.com), or a domain with a subfolder path (www.example.com/cats/ or www.example.com/users/catlover/). Previously, only links that started with your site’s exact URL would be categorized as internal links: so if you entered www.example.com/users/catlover/ as your site, links fromwww.example.com/users/catlover/profile.html would be categorized as internal, but links from www.example.com/users/ or www.example.com would be categorized as external links. This also meant that if you entered www.example.com as your site, links from example.com would be considered external because they don’t start with the same URL as your site (they don’t containwww).

Most people think of example.com and www.example.com as the same site these days, so we’re changing it such that now, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links. We’ve also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com.

If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links. We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.

Note that, if you own a root domain like example.com or www.example.com, your number of external links may appear to go down with this change; this is because, as described above, some of the URLs we were previously classifying as external links will have moved into the internal links report. Your total number of links (internal + external) should not be affected by this change.

As always, drop us a comment or join our Webmaster Help Forum if you have questions!

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Search Engines Explained

Posted: 2012-01-30

Business owners consistently hear about how they need to optimize their website. Well, what does actually mean? Here is an attempt at explaining the process in the least technical way I can. This will be a little over-simplified but you should have a pretty good idea of what this is all about by the time you are done reading.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of creating a website that will actually show up when someone uses a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to find your products or services. The work required to do this is generally split into two parts. The first part consists of work that needs to be done on the actual pages of your website. Some of the things that need to be worked on are the text, page titles, page descriptions and file names of your pages. The second part is work that needs to be done off of your website. This primarily includes getting websites with similar content to link back to you.

How Do Search Engines Work?

There are a variety of factors that play into how web pages are ranked when someone types something into a search engine. Here is a simplified explanation of the process.

Someone types the service they are looking for into a search engine.

In this example we are looking for a plumber in Boston.

The search engine will analyze the words that were typed in.

In this case the words are "plumber", "in" and "Boston".

The search engine will match what was typed in with all of the web pages it has indexed that contain the words “plumber”, “in” and “Boston” as well as the complete phrase “plumber in Boston”.

The search engine will give priority to the phrase "plumber in Boston" and then look for individual instances of the words "plumber" and "Boston" appearing on the same page throughout all of the web pages it is aware of. Not only does it scan the text that appears on the website but it will also scan the text in the Meta Tags. The Meta Tags include information such as the title of the web page and a description. There could be millions of different web pages that match depending on the search term used.

The search engine will also take into consideration how many other different web pages are linking to those pages.

Links coming from pages with similar content, phrases and words are given more weight than pages that have nothing in common with the page they are linking to.

The names of the files the web designer used to build those pages will also be taken into consideration.

Including the names of your services and location in names of the files used to build your website can help to improve your search engine ranking.

The search engine displays a list of results.

The search results are generally based on a combination of the search phrase used, text matches to that search phrase on websites, links to those websites from websites with similar content and the names of the files used to build those websites.

There are obviously other factors taken into consideration such as how long the website has been online, how often it is updated, if it includes a site map, how quickly it loads and so on. But for the most part, this should give you a pretty good starting point as to understanding how search engines work and why optimizing your website may be a good idea. If you have spent a good deal of money on your website and no one can find then what was the point of spending the money in the first place?