Pittsburgh SEO – SEM – SEA | Internet Marketing and Website Design | Blackball Online

What do Libraries, the Internet, Search Engines and your Website have in Common?

Think of your Website like a book in the library

Well, just about everything. Search Engines index and organize information with the goal of fulfilling a particular search request. A library provides a structure for the organization of books, publications and other hard copy materials which makes it easier and more efficient for us to search and find what interests us. We enter the library, locate (search) the general subject matter we’re interested in by looking at the category title headings on top of the book cases, asking the librarian, or digging through the card catalog. We then filter our way through to our category of interest to the specific subject we want.

A book grabs our interest based on the title and cover, we then do a browse of the flaps or covers to learn a bit more from the description, then a peek at the author,  and if we like what we’ve read so far we flip through some pages and move on from there.

Here’s how it goes in a nutshell; we locate a structure, either digital or brick and mortar, which organizes and stores what we feel is the information or content we’re looking for, we then conduct our search, then we act on those search results.

Ok, so what? If you’ve been around a bit nobody really needs a primer on how we interact with a brick and mortar library, it’s automatic. So tell me something I might not know. Well here it is; Your Website, the Internet and Search Engines work just like a library, and your Website is a “book” in a global digital library.

Let’s say you happen to have a really great book in the library, but you don’t have a title, a brief description about your book, etc., etc., how’s anybody going to spot it much less get an idea on what your book is about? Right of the bat the library can't catalog or put your book anywhere because you didn't give the library anything to catalog your book with. It’s like a 6 year old walked into the library, hid your book, making your great book meaningless because nobody can find it even if they’re specifically looking for it.

We’re broaching this subject because of the vast number of Websites that we see daily which don’t contain the bare-bones basics necessary to be part of the party when somebody is using a Search Engine to locate a particular good or service which you may supply. Just like that book in the library with no title, flap, cover or back cover description and all those other things that initially define a book to a person with the intent of capturing interest. Think of the Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.. like a giant digital card catalog.

On the Web, content is king as they say, but the content has to be defined and organized in the background as well as on page. This provides the support which gives content its best shot at being seen as king. And history has proven that kings like to be seen.

Fundamentally, the point is to treat your Website just like a book in a library. This will give yourself the best chance at being found and included in the decision making by consumers when they look for your specialty.

Here are some basics to start with:

-          Title your Home page with what you’re about, not your company’s name, that’s not a title, that’s authorship, you can squeeze your name in at the title’s end.

-          Describe your primary offerings briefly in the Home page description.

-          Define each interior page like a chapter in a book with its own title and brief description.

-          Treat your menu / navigation items as a table of contents.

-          Treat keywords as your index.

In the overall scheme of things, think of what will resonate with the people you want to reach and talk to. Speak your customers’ language and they should respond.

Oh, as a side note, most of the nerds that devised these Search Engines we use today were very involved students of library sciences.

Think of Internet Marketing Companies in Pittsburgh like Blackball Online Marketing as your research librarian that help the search engines, and ultimately your customers, find you online.

SEO, Speed, and the ridiculous Internet Exploder

Google now puts a heavier premium on speed. I suspect it cared before but now with Instant, speed is a major factor. As a Pittsburgh SEO company and web design firm, we are always looking for ways to boost rankings for our clients. To increase speed, we’ve already covered the need for a strong web host in a previous post so now it’s time for the browsers to step up to the plate. When the browsers support innovative and less cumbersome markup, the speed rises and resource usage falls.

CSS3 (cascading style sheets v.3) offer an even more diverse set of styling selectors to speed the crawl and load times of your site. CSS3 also allows for graphic manipulation and generation without the images. http://www.css3.info/ is an awesome site for testing css3 selector compatibilities for your browser and we thought we’d share our findings with you.

Microsoft has been ignorant to the user for long enough now. (Never mind the developers.) The weak link has always been IE. IE9 is now a Beta release and has been for some time. A complete rewrite and standards compliance are the only things that will sell me.

Because the everyday user gets this prepackaged and spoon fed to them and because of the enormous war chest M$ have acquired peddling this crap (Vista, IE…)  we will have to live with IE inadequacies for some time I fear. Microsoft doesn’t force users to update their browsers and it should. This would eliminate the need to provide backward compatibility to all the old non compliant browser versions of IE out there.

On to the statistics:

Results from FireFox 3.6.10

From the 41 selectors 41 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 574 out of 574 tests)

Results from Google Chrome 6.0.472.63

From the 41 selectors 41 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 574 out of 574 tests)

Results from IE8

From the 41 selectors 20 have passed, 1 are buggy and 20 are unsupported (Passed 345 out of 574 tests)

Results from IE9 beta

From the 41 selectors 41 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 574 out of 574 tests)

Results from IE9

From the 41 selectors 41 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 574 out of 574 tests)

I haven’t even bothered to test IE7 and I think you can see why from the results of IE8.

This is very promising from an SEO and web developers standpoint. IE9 seems to pass all of the CSS3 selector tests. If it finally gets on board with the W3C standards for rendering you’ll hear a collective sigh from all the developers who toil to produce workarounds and patches for IE. Rendering has always been an issue with IE.

****UPDATE****

As seen above IE9 passes all tests with its official release. Microsoft must have finally felt the pinch of losing so much of it's browser users to Firefox, Opera, and the others. better late than never. No data on the rendering issues that previously existed and drove developers batty for years and I think this is good news. I did a Google search on "IE9 rendering issues and got old posts so I think this issue is fixed.

I'll leave you with a quote from a friend. "Microsoft is an ad agency that just happens to push software." I wonder how many billable hours have been spent fixing something that should have been right all along?

Blackball Online Marketing is a Pittsburgh Web Design and SEO Company.

Search Engines are Brand Blind

By marketing your services or goods via the Web, Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo do not care if you’re GE or Joe’s Electrical Service on the corner of Main Street, USA. What matters to the Search Engines is whose site has the best content tailored to their particular target market. The Search Engines see the content and text you’ve provided for your particular offerings, not the brand name, or how big you are.

Let me pass on to you a story: Mr. Patrick Cray has a small electrical contracting and HVAC business, South Hills Electric Heating and Cooling. He built his business on being trustworthy and quality workmanship. He wants to keep the ball rolling but doesn’t have the ad budget to spend on billboards, TV spots, etc like his bigger competitors.

This dilemma was solved by successfully delving into something unknown to him at the time which was Search Engine Optimization or SEO. For Mr. Cray, this was something he was a bit skeptical of in the beginning, but the cost for marketing his business using SEO to compete was well within his comfort range and worth a shot. SEO is now and continues to be the main driver of his business. He’s found a successful recipe for promoting his business that’s very cost-effective, flexible, and puts him in complete control.

Mr. Cray has also integrated Social Media into his SEO strategy to build on his current SEO success.

So, if you’re looking for an electrician or a heating and cooling specialist  Online in the Pittsburgh area or in your particular part of the city and surrounding area there’s a real good chance Mr. Cray’s South Hills Electric Heating and Cooling company will be consistently on the first page, if not on top – and it’s been that way for the past year or so for him.

When they say the Internet has leveled the playing field for the small to very small businesses they were not kidding.  Mr. Cray is now a believer; he’s got the calls for service to prove it – courtesy of a well executed SEO strategy made just for him.

If you have some questions you’d like to bounce off us about how SEO can help your business just drop us a line. We’re Blackball Online Marketing and SEO and we’re on the Internet.