Website Optimization

We want to use our website as a marketing tool. We need it to reach the right people. We need it to be found by more people and ultimately we want to be read by more of the right people!

So I've done a bit of research on how search engines determine which are the most relevant results to display for a search term. By its very nature this a is black art - search engines will not tell you exactly how this is done, but here is the basic idea.

Search engines crawl through the web on a regular schedule and read all of the text. They then index all of the words. They have a cached (saved) copy of the entire web in memory and can find the words in websites that match what you are searching for. To make the results meaningful, the search engine will try to display the 'best' results first - at the top of the list. So the big question is - how does it decide?

Keywords - one way to prioritize results that the search engine uses is to see how often in the page text the keyword is used. The more often a keyword appears, the more relevant the page is considered to the topic. Apparently the engines can detect 'keyword stuffing' - it will know if you are intentionally overusing a word either visibly or invisibly on a site!

Our keyword strategy should be:

• Don't use flash! Because search engines cannot read any of your flash content.
  
• Find out what keywords people are using to find your site - we use Google Analytics for this
  
• Use words and terms that are specific to the industry.
  

File names, urls and ALT tags - besides the text content of the site, search engines take into consideration the names of the files and folders of the site. You will find that you often get results based on the address of the page. ALT tags are textual descriptions of the images in a page. This text displays for the user if there are image links in the page.

Our naming convention should be:

• Use relevant and meaningful words for file and folder names.
  
• Include meaningful alt tags on images that are links
  
• Use the TITLE tag to display a succinct description of the page
  

META tags - are not important! At least they are much less important than they used to be. The reason for this is that they have historically been abused to fool search engines. And they have been a primary means for 'keyword stuffing'. Search engines now prioritize the value of text that users can actually see.

Our META tag strategy?

• Keep META tags short and simple and don't get caught 'stuffing'!
  

Links - to your site. One of the ways that search engines determine which site is the 'authority' on a particular topic is by analyzing the links to site. If a site is referenced by other sites, it is considered to be more important - their 'ranking' will increase. If the sites from which the links originate are high ranking sites, then the links will confer even more value.

Our linking strategy should be t0

• get links on relevant directories and related sites.
  
• Avoid links from the dark side of the web and artificial gimmicks that will lower our rank.

Change - the more a site is updated, the more relevant it is considered. If a search engine finds that the site changes frequently, it will consider it more relevant and improve the ranking.

Our content strategy should be to:

• Update the front page at least once a month
  
• Add new content as our development continues
  
• Make the site interesting for our clients!

As we implement changes to our website we hope to see our results improve. We have installed widgets that tell us the Alexa scores for our site and our competitors as well as a tool that gives us our Google rank every day. Currently we are ranked as site 3,851,993 by Alexa and we have four sites linking to us. We are considered a page rank 3 out of 10 by Google.

We've got some work to do - Let's spread the word!

Web traffic

In our recent marketing website upgrade we have taken a serious look at our web traffic. Historically our marketing efforts have focused on networking and selling to individuals can companies that we have specifically targeted. We have not focused on the web as a primary marketing tool but rather as a support where people can find additional information about us.

Now I would like to put this site to use and help it generate business for us. It's time for the website to get to work! But how do I make our site easier to find and more useful to potential clients?

The first thing that I needed to do is study our current traffic. How were people navigating our site? How did they find us? How popular were we?

It used to be that you had to use special software to analyze your log files to determine the behaviour of visitors. This is no longer necessary. There is a free tool from Google - 'Google Analytics' that allows you to automatically track user behaviour by just adding a small piece of code on your pages.

With these reports I could also see what visitors searched for to find our site and how they navigated the site. It is interesting to see what people click on - it was not what I expected! This information was very informative for the site redesign!

The next thing I wanted to know was how we compared to our competitors. Was our site more of less popular than theirs? Again, there is a useful web tool to help us figure this out. Alexa at www.alexa.com tracks and maintains statistics on web traffic for several years back. The site allows comparisons of different sites so we can see how we fare against our competitors.

First of all, the results tell us that we are in a very small niche. In terms of popularity rank on the internet here are some of our clients:

• Traffic Rank for cadillacfairview.com 756,450 - (756,450th most popular site on the web)
• Traffic Rank for oxfordproperties.com: 2,347,908 -
• Traffic Rank for redcliffrealty.com: 4,276,079
• Traffic Rank for dundeerealty.com - insufficient data!
  

And here are the results for service providers - including us:

• Traffic Rank for realnet.ca: 2,587,071


• Traffic Rank for spacedatabase.com: 3,851,993


• Traffic Rank for xmeasures.com: 6,076,412


• Traffic Rank for lasertechfloorplans.com: 8,924,117


• Traffic rank for stevensonsystems.com - insufficient data

As you can see, we are doing quite will without any web marketing or search engine optimization! There are, I believe two reasons for these good results. First, many clients log in to our online system to manager their files. Second, we are embedded in many client sites and serve up reports and drawings that would count to our web traffic.

If we look at the web traffic analysis, we find that less than 25% of our visitors reach us through a search engine. Without our web applications, our popularity would be much lower. We clearly have some work to do if we are to raise our web profile.

The Way Back Machine

The Internet seems so commonplace and familiar it is easy to forget that is still very new. On November 13th the first web site was launched at CERN in Switzerland. Here is a link to the oldest web page in existence: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/Link.html , last changed Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT (though the URI changed.)
 

The world wide web had a slow start. Here is a link to the world wide web project page from Nov 3, 1992 (two years later). It lists the 30 odd servers that constituted the web http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
 

In November, the world wide web will be eighteen years old! If only there were a way to go back in time and visit old pages and sites and see this history. But of course, someone already thought if this and it exists: "The Way Back Machine"! Go to http://www.archive.org type in a web address and hit the 'Take Me Back' button. This site has a saved version of the entire Internet going back to 1998.  
 

I tried it with http://www.spacedatabase.com and found all the old website designs that I was so proud of. Here is an old version from 1997:

For our photos we took pictures with a film camera and had them scanned onto a 'CD' This was before digital cameras were widely available. We made desktop software at the time - one of the features was that "Drawings can be faxed or modemed directly from your system." -- 'modemed'?

In 2000, I came up with a snazzy new design for the website. It had an embossed effect and the buttons lit up with a scroll-over effect which was advanced at the time:

On this site we also had our 'Online' application. Users could log in and use our application online! Wow-wee!:

In 2003, we decided that it was time to update our corporate image and develop a new brand identity. We worked with Jump Communications and came up with this elegant new look:

We kept this framework for several years - slightly updating with some more graphics.

We have continued to use these basic design elements in the latest iteration. You can see the connections in our current site (as of August 2007)

I am sure this page will look quaint a year from now!