“A winning effort begins with preparation.” Joe Gibbs
So you’re considering having a website built for your business? I highly recommend picking up the book; ‘Website Owners Manual’ by Paul Boag. It will arm you with helpful information that could improve your understanding of the process, organizing your content, choosing your designer and much more. It contains just about everything you should know before diving into a website development project. Remember, the more thoroughly you grasp the process the better your interactions with your website designer will be enabling him/her to produce a more successful product which is more likely to give you an advantage over your competition.
We’re proud to announce the launch of a beautiful new website for the Tap Room at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena. The client needed to be able to change their drink and appetizer menus and other information on a daily basis, so we created it with a Content Management System (CMS) for easy updating by the client.
Other websites we have created for the Langham Hotel are Langham Huntington Weddings and Huntington Spa.
King Creative Design is looking forward to making a BIG splash in 2012 (and the coming years), starting proudly with the introduction of our new website. Our designers have been working with clients for over 15 years. We do print design, logos, identity programs and custom websites for companies throughout the Los Angeles, Pasadena, other Southern California areas and nationwide. We welcome you to check out our site and invite your friends to do the same.
Happy New Year!
This post is for beginners, so if you’ve been around for awhile this stuff isn’t going to be new. You’ve probably heard the term Web Analytics used and you likely validated one to track data on your website. I’m going with the assumption that you used Google Analytics, because it’s free and robust. It can be difficult running a small business and having the time to set up and pull out the data that really impacts your online business. Below I’ll cover a few cursory topics of what you should look for when getting familiar with Google Analytics.
Make Sure you Set up a Master Account
You’re going to want to set up and test a decent amount of items with Google Analytics. The thing is that you’re not always going to do them correctly, trust me. By setting up a master account you can rest assured that your data will never be skewed while you use other accounts to test out filters, funnels, goals, etc.
Make sure you set up filters
Filters allow you to direct traffic in a way that gives you a more realistic scope of the traffic and conversions happening on your site. I wrote a nice little post entitled Four Google Analytics Filters You Should Be Using. By setting up filters you’ll have a nice start and may be surprised by what you thought your traffic was compared to what it really is after filtering out useless or repetitive data.
Use Google Analytics to Monitor Organic Keyword
You may have already provided on-site optimization to your site. The real benefit from this area is realized when you can’t always keep up with keyword research. Google Analytics will allow you to see the terms visitors used before selecting your site. Looking for anomalies of terms not often associated, or never thought about, with your site can be a way to focus a new page or product towards these individuals. Further research should be taken before committing to making changes, though. Still, you can grab a list generated by GA and it takes some guess work out of the equation.
Check Your Stats in a Regimented Time Frame
I suggest looking at your data weekly and compiling that information into a spreadsheet to help you see rising or declining trends in a number of areas. If you haphazardly look at the data GA provides it becomes meaningless again. By generating several months worth of data it will allow you to make decisive actions and to combat any specific problems that may occur.
The key is to not rush it. Take your time and learn at your own pace. You’ll have a master account set up to combat any mishaps that you might cause while changing settings, filters to provide you more reliable data, a greater grasp on your organic key phrase traffic, and a growing complied list of data to help you make decision in the future.
So it isn’t surprising news that the Google overlords will be looking at social media signals. What a lot of people took away from that is that Google has been looking at social media for quite some time and all those links really do mean something in terms of SEO. So as an SMB you may have a static Facebook page and a Twitter with one tweet that is two years old. It’s now time to rethink how you use your social media.
Retweet That Link Up
This one should be pretty self-explanatory. You need to start focusing on when the best time to send out a tweet with a relevant link is for your demographic. I’m following the understanding that you’ve already created a decent amount of relevant followers. Now you need to know when they are most active on Twitter. This may take some time to figure out but then make sure your content is Tweeted out during those times. Asking for a retweet usually nets more retweets than not asking for one as well. Also concise wording allowing for ease of retweeting is another factor you have to think about.
Don’t Write Fluff
You can probably name some big name in your field. I’ll bet you they have created some great content. It is one thing to hash out some fluff, but an entirely different proposition to take the time and research to make excellent informative pieces. Additionally, if the person is able to keep a solid rhythm of up-to-date content you’ll be a step ahead. If you’ve already got that part down the next step is really integrating the same kind of content from your blog onto social media sites. Take the time to respond to followers on Twitter, release informative links and content on Facebook, take the time to post and answer questions on Quora. These should be natural extensions of your site and should reflect the same kind of standard you have on your site.
Flesh Out Your Profiles
The more you actively create a fleshed out profile the more human you’ll seem out on Social Media networks. That personalization is the thing that separates you from all the other individuals out there. You, usually, have very little space to tell people about yourself, or your company, so pick your wording carefully. I also see a decent number of people that forget to put links in their profiles. Before hand I mentioned that these Social Networks are an extension of you and your site, why wouldn’t you want that SM traffic the ability to go to your site where you have more freedom and space to truly tell people about yourself and your services? Lastly, I recommend sticking with the same photo across all SM platforms. As your reputation rises in your field that photo will become synonymous with who you are and what you represent.
Don’t Worry What The Cool Kids Think (Reputation across SM outlets)
Not too long ago people would judge certain people across SM outlets by the number of followers, or likes, a person had. Trust me it might be great to have 100,000 people following you, but if the majority of those people are spam bots or irrelevant to your business that number is pretty worthless. Focusing on providing great insight, being conversational with individuals that are leaders in your industry, and following/interacting with a core group of people is the key to success. Instead of worrying about your Klout score when starting out, worry about putting hard work into providing information to your demographic and distributing properly. The more work you put into that aspect the easier it will be to generate a great reputation on SM networks.
