This is a basic overview of websites in the age of Google. Hopefully it will help the small company have a presence when people do Google searches. This is a ‘throw it at you’ article, so please add questions and comments so I can add additional information that I might have missed.
If you haven’t created a website before, or don’t know what a ‘website host server’ is and how to connect to one to upload your website information using FileZilla or some other program, this all might be over your head. The goal here is to help those who have basic knowledge and then to help them ‘get on top of the hill’ so they (their website) can be seen by more people, thus helping their business.
Google wants to list important and useful companies first when someone does a search. This is logical, but in a crowded business world it means that small company can be drown out express by finding oneself on the 50th page of search results. Unfortunately this means a lot of very talented people get overlooked if they don’t have a robust web presence, resulting in what was once a thriving business now floundering because no one can find them. So, here I address how to be seen and recognized by Google
To make your business found on the internet, it takes a series of efforts including the most important thing: the number of clicks to your website, that is, if 100,000 people are visiting your website every day you will be acknowledged as being very important and thus deserve the top listing, when say someone searches ‘architectural illustrator nyc.’ Of course no one gets that many clicks, but the number of clicks, along with popularity on social media and a few other things you can do all add up to making your website and presence more friendly, inviting and visible.
It also takes time, perhaps a couple of weeks to build a website that actually works. What used to take a few days, a couple thousand if you hired someone, now takes a lot longer and would be represented by 30 or 40k. Lets get started by listing the different items you need to address when building your existence yourself…
First, you need to acknowledge where your company shows up in a Google search using generic terms: Just a few years ago I came to the realization that my primary website, SimpleTwig.com was appearing on page 56 of Google search results when searching for ‘brooklyn architect.’ I was able to change this by modifying my website to eventually show up on page 1 or 2 of search results. Gone are html or flash websites, so if you use that your website is obsolete. You can start by making sure you increase the number of clicks you get every month by simply having an email signature that has a link to your website. This is a basic thing all businesses should have, and your email computer signature should match your iPhone email signature for professionalism (on the iPhone, set up signatures in the settings>email>signature settings).
Second, to understand that your website must be able to appear on all platforms, from a desktop computer, tablet or mobile phone. This means you must use a responsive website. In this respect I recommend choosing a ‘Responsive Theme Template’ from ThemeForest.com. You also need to pick a html5 type of site. Stay away from flash websites. I am not an expert in this area but it seems that all websites are becoming html5 friendly to make them a faster web browsing experience. The template will give you the basics to build your new website. By selecting a style that you like it will save you a lot of time, plus, it will usually work. They are cheap, between $15 and $45 or so.
Third, to acknowledge that you have to add information into the ‘source code’ of your website so that google can see, and crawl, your website. Crawling with a ‘spider’ essentially means that Google, Yahoo and other search engines will examine the content of your website including the tags you put into the code.
How do to you see and edit your website’s source code? Well if you purchased a template, it is the text in the ‘index.html’ file and other files. You can view it by opening it up in a text editor. The index.html is your first page and where your host will look for the first page using this title. So, when one goes to http://simpletwig.com in the URL address you only see http://simpletwig.com and not http://simpletwig.com/index.html. This is because it is understood and therefore not necessary to show the actual address.
Note that you no longer need Adobe Dreamweaver of some other program to create a website, that if you purchase a website template, and, have a text editing program, you will be able to assemble your new website. Always make copies of the original untouched website template, and versions as you progress. I often overwrite old index.html files by first changing the name of the old index by adding v-1, v-2, etc. for version-1… i.e. index_v-1.html. This way if I have to go back because something broke due to editing the code, it is easy to do.
Always test your code changes with a browser (you have to upload to your host and then refresh your browser on the page you are making the changes to). Use right-click to capture source text (if needed) and copy/past into your text edit program, renaming the text file to index.html (or whatever page it represents) and save it to the correct folder (directory). And, try to organize your images into the image folder but note that google doesn’t like you to list your images as 1.png, 2.png, etc. and instead want more natural names to describe what is in the image. This I ignore because for me I have a preference to the order I want to show images and therefore it is easier for me to list them numerically.
Tags: So what are good tags to put into your index.html code? A good way to find out is to see what other websites use. How do you see the source code for other websites? Go to their page, then right-click the browser over the website you’re looking at and select ‘View Page Source.’ It’s that simple and you can simply copy/paste their source code to get good tags.
Index Source Code: Here’s what the first portion of the index source code should look like:
| <!DOCTYPE HTML> | |
| <html lang=”en”> | |
| <head> | |
| <!–=============== basic ===============–> | |
| <meta charset=”UTF-8″></meta> | |
| <title>SimpleTwig Architect Residential-Mixed-Landmark</title> | |
| <meta content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, minimum-scale=1.0″ name=”viewport”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”index, follow” name=”robots”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”SimpleTwig” property=”og:site_name”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”SimpleTwig Architect Residential-MixedUse-Landmark” property=”og:title”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”http://www.simpletwig.com/” property=”og:url”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”website” property=”og:type”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”Care of our clients: it’s fundamental to our architectural service.” property=”og:description”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”image/jpeg” property=”og:image:type”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”1200″ property=”og:image:width”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”630″ property=”og:image:height”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”http://simpletwig.com/title-image-2.jpg” property=”og:image”></meta> | |
| <meta name=”keywords” content=”simpletwig,new york residential architect,nyc residential architect,brooklyn residential architect,nyc architect,new york city architect,brooklyn architect…”/> | |
| <meta content=”Care of our clients: it’s fundamental to our architectural service, with focus on design and financial goals.” name=”description”></meta> | |
| <meta content=”52893175c37992db26f2ab13910ed130″ name=”p:domain_verify”></meta> | |
| <!–=============== css ===============–> | |
| <link href=”css/reset.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”></link> | |
| <link href=”css/plugins.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”></link> | |
| <link href=”css/style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”></link> | |
| <link href=”css/dark-style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”></link> | |
| <link href=”css/yourstyle.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”></link> | |
| <!–=============== favicons ===============–> | |
| <link href=”images/favicon.ico” rel=”shortcut icon”></link> | |
| <!– Global site tag (gtag.js) – Google Analytics –> | |
| <script async src=”https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-60741190-1“></script> | |
| <script> window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag(‘js’, new Date()); gtag(‘config’, ‘UA-60741190-1’); </script> |
As you can see, there are a lot of categories to add to have a complete basic source code that will help google help people find your business. Some will be included in the template you purchase, some will not.
GTMetrix: A very good way to know if you’re building your new website correctly is to use GTMetrix.com. This will give you a lot of guidance on what you should be doing and also, how to do it. It lists a lot of categories by analysing your website and grades them with red (poor), yellow and green (good) and well as giving each category a score.
Social Media: I hear it already, ‘I don’t have time to do social media.’ Well you have to. Google will look at how many followers you have on your different social media sites to help determine how important of a source you are. I recommend Instagram which makes it easy to upload images and automatically share them to Twitter and your FaceBook page which you have to have as well. This means it really doesn’t take any time at all. To get followers is very hard, but if you stay on topic and don’t post pictures of your dog (yes I’m guilty) then people will be more likely to follow. Be sure to add links from your website to your social media links and back.
Link backs: while they are sort of important as it shows google that other sites have your link so you must be important, it really only works if the site that posts your link is also important. You can list in multiple directories but this probably won’t do much except confirm your name and contact details (always write your company name, your name, your contact details the same on all sites). It is critical though to get on yelp, google maps, and google business, and, to post images, information, etc. on those sites to make it seem active. People use these tools. Once on there, try to get recommendations to stand out.
SiteMap: It is important to create a sitemap of your website, so google spider knows where to crawl to see all the pages of your website. There are online tools that will help you accomplish this. You will upload the sitemap to your website host server.
Google Analytics Number: You’ll need to add this to your source code as well which you can see in the example above near the bottom. Get your own from Google as it is like registering your website with them.
Images: After sizing your images and saving them as PNG’s, it’s time to compress them so that they are mobile user friendly. I use ImageOptim.app to compress each image (via batching) which GTMetrix and Google loves. I even received an email from Google saying my website is mobile friendly after about a month, so I guess everything I did worked.
Copyright: There was an issue on my older website where at the bottom of my splash page I had a copyright notice. Google assumed this was the end of my website and therefore didn’t crawl any other pages. Of course I had other pages, so I added a line in the source code (which is missing above) to tell it to continue onto the other pages. You can search for this if you think it might be an issue so you know exactly what to write into the source code.
Email and other things to do to limit spamming: Email should be an image and not written out on your web page, so prevent bots from scanning your website and harvesting your address, then spamming your email or selling it to others to spam you. You should also register your website domain as private for the same reason.
Blog: Add a blog. Use WordPress. A blog provides a means for people to find and visit your website. This means more clicks to your domain and google likes that. It will help you rank higher. Make sure the blog is part of your website, and that you link to your blog from your website and back. For instance, the link to my blog is http://www.simpletwig.com/blog/. It is a wordpress blog. I had to get help moving my free wordpress blog to my website by the person who hosts my domain, but it works great and both generates some clicks and even a few clients after they read an article or two. So now you know, you are helping my business just by reading this article, which is why I took the time to write it. It’s a trade and hopefully the article helped you.
Contact: I’ve mentioned creating signatures with a link to your website, and this should also contain contact information including your company name, phone and address, but so too should your website and blog have the same information. I mean what’s the point of doing any of this if a person can’t find a way to connect with you?
Stay on topic: This is essential for both a successful business and for your identity. If you have an architectural rendering company then all of your images and discussion should be centered on that. This includes posting to instagram or other related sites. You can always start other instagram accounts to explore other interest you might have and even link back to your business instagram page from them. This post is clearly off-topic to my architectural website, but I have two motivations to keep it here: 1) it helps colleagues by sharing my experience and 2) it may generate clicks to my domain. It also shows Google that I have new content.
Instagram: It’s easy and free to create, so do it. What’s more, it’s very easy to switch from multiple instagram accounts by first clicking on your profile icon, then at the top is your instagram account name with a drop-down menu where you can switch to another account in an instant. I just created a new instagram account called SimpleTwigTech. Look it up and follow! It will take a while for me to upload the variety of architectural related things I’ve worked on because it is a low priority, but it is something I want to do, develop technology and be a leader in the industry.
New Content: Those websites that are always on top of the search results tend to have daily relevant new material. The quality of material can vary and one way to help your website is to have quality content versus very small articles of a paragraph or two. Quality content Google views as an important source of information, but especially if that content is discovered by people doing searches, so try to get your tags on blog posts, image posts, etc. correct. The other way is just to upload periodic new content no matter the size. This shows Google that you have an active website that is always being updated with new material for people to explore. This is where a blog can be useful, as you can write up several articles and then schedule their release over a year. Once a month is better than posting nothing the entire year. In fact if your website isn’t changed for a year or two Google might think you are no longer in business… again why having a blog linked to your website using its domain is a critical component as we all know changing images and writing captions, uploading, etc. can be time consuming.
Secure Server: This is yet another requirement which is triggered if your website has any place where someone might log in. A secure website is noted by a https versus the normal http at the beginning of a URL address. If you have a blog you probably have a log in. The actual reason is for websites that sell products and take credit card information. The fact that Google can’t distinguish between the two creates a financial burden on the small business because companies that host your website will charge you to have a ‘certificate’ (SSL) and will require you to renew it yearly. While a website that doesn’t have a certificate can operate normally, the problem is that the URL is labeled with a note as ‘not secure’ right before the http. This has a disincentive effect on visitors who might think your website is corrupt, could hack their computer or steal private information. The financial burden and time it takes for you to implement a SSL is unfortunate and totally unnecessary. In my opinion, if you pay to have your website hosted on a server, the company that provides the servers should be able to acknowledge that their server is secure without burdening the client they’re supposedly serving.
Conclusion: Hopefully this article has given you an overview of what to do, why you should do it and in some cases, how to do it. Certainly doing google searches for more information on the varying topics will help you along the way. Please leave your comments and questions so I can update the article or add new relevant articles, especially if something isn’t clear.
For additional articles on building a good website that can be seen by Google, click on the ‘Categories > Website’ link in the right column. I will be adding more detailed information in future articles, so subscribe as well.