Internet Building Codes Blog

I’ve developed a lot of sites over the years and one of the first sites was a fishing site that sells advertising.  This site was originally designed as a learning experience.  Let me tell you the story…

My first site was for a large land developer in Colorado.  Quite the client for a first project. I poured my heart and soul into the project, determined to create an amazing product for them.  You see, I didn’t want my client to know that they were my first guinea pig.  Every designer has had their first client.  You know what I’m talking about.  I put more work into that site than just about any other, except for the fishing site I mentioned earlier.  The land developers loved the site when they saw it for the first time.  They told everyone they knew and the site was flooded with visitors for a few days, and then…nothing.  The heartbeat of this once lively site was dead.  As soon as the initial flood of self-generated traffic died off, the site sat there silent, crickets chirping.

I was nervous.  I hoped my clients wouldn’t notice.  But eventually they did.  Sure it took about 3 months before they said anything but then I had to deal with it head-on.  They were disappointed and so was I.  I had held up my end of the bargain.  All they asked for was a website, nothing more.  I hadn’t promised a website that actually got visitors, but I should have and I felt guilty.

I felt like, although I delivered what I was asked to do, I hadn’t delivered everything I had hoped. I guess I was ignorant.  I didn’t know what I didn’t know.  It never even occured to me, in those infantile days, that I should consider how to build a site that actually got traffic.  I didn’t even know, at that point, that I had any control over the traffic itself.  I was pretty green.  Let’s face it, I didn’t know much at all.  About the only think I knew for sure was that I needed to know more.  I couldn’t move forward as a designer and collect more money from new clients knowing that I was experimenting on them.  I just couldn’t live with myself.  So I took a year off and built ActiveAngler.com.  The site proved to be the best education I could have ever gotten.

I knew I wanted to learn how to build a site that got traffic and how to build a site that kept visitors longer than the best fishing sites and one that got the visitors to come back again and again.  Some pretty tall orders.  After negotiating with hundreds of professional fishermen, I narrowed my authors down to 75 guys from around the world.  I allowed these top-notch fishing guides to submit their articles to me to post on the site, free of charge.  I never expected to get more than 750 articles right off the bat.  Suffice it to say, I had a ton of great content and I didn’t pay a penny for any of it.

Organizing the content became a full-time job in itself.  My site map took up an entire wall in my tiny office.  I compiled images and stream flow reports, fish recipes, tips, advice and more.  Looking back, the greatest feat was that I developed the entire site using a 56k modem.  I can’t imagine working at that speed today.  I remember that there were times that I’d wait for an hour to upload and test a batch of files.  In fact, I kept another computer on my desk just to trade stocks and options while I was waiting for my mac to process the files.

In the end, I was able to accomplish a lot with that mac.  With no money ever spent on advertising, I built a prototype for a successful website that still to this day serves as the model for how to build a successful website.  I accomplished my goals of getting people to the site, getting them to stay at the site and getting them to come back to the site.  In fact, the site still gets between 5000 and 10,000 visitors a day and it’s pretty much been ignored for the past 10 years.

It’s amazing to me that the web has evolved so much since its inception but those 3 basic elements are still central to the success of any site.  Eliminate or ignore even one of those pieces and your site will fail.  Think about it.  If you fail to get people to the site, your site will be lost in cyberspace.  Fail to get people to stay on the site and it makes no difference how many people you attracted to the site.  Fail to get them to come back and you’ll likely lose the chance for any sale because people rarely buy on their first visit.  Sure, you might be thinking that I’m just talking about ecommerce websites but I’m talking about every type of site from B2B to B2C to B2G sites.  People rarely buy on their first visit.  Even if you’re not selling anything online, you still need to get people to come back to your site to build rapport and get them to contact you.   The key to repeat traffic is conversion.  You have to think about how you’re going to convert them into a customer at some point.  From the moment they hit your site, you should have conversion at the forfront of your mind.  We’ll cover conversion techniques in detail in the future.  For now, focus on the 3 goals and build yourself a prototype that you can use again and again.

Hope that helps.

It’s no secret, the Key to SEO is all about domain trust.  If Google trusts your domain name, your site will tend to rank better.  So how can you increase your chances of ranking better?

1. Get other sites to link to your site.
2. Verify the content of your site by creating logical internal links.
3. Utilize web 2.0 sites to link to your site.
4. Link your web 2.0 pages together to increase trust between the pages.

The use of web 2.0 sites is a great way to not only drive high-quality traffic to your site, it also passes link trust from authority sites.  This results in higher page rank but more importantly, can help you to dominate many of the top listings on Google.  Rather than just having 1 or 2 spots on the first page of Google, now you can have your site and each of your pages that you create on the various web 2.0 sites rank on the first page of Google, effectively eliminating your competitors from the first page.

Hope that helps.  Until later.

Chadd Bryant

The key to SEO has been a hotly contested topic in certain circles for years now.  Some people have speculated that the key is linking.  Others claim that it’s keyword research.  Others will fight to the death for meta tags.  The truth is, there isn’t a single magical key to SEO.

There are many ingredients in a successful SEO campaign and without combining them, most SEO efforts will not succeed.  Think of SEO like a cookie recipe.  Many people know how to make a batch of cookies.  And in order to make a great batch of chocolate chip cookies, you have to mix flour, salt, eggs, chocolate chips, butter etc.  Have you ever made a batch of cookies and when they came out of the oven, something just didn’t taste right?  Something was missing.  Maybe it was the sugar?  Or maybe the eggs?  You could do everything right.  Measure all of the ingredients precisely, preheat the oven to the perfect temperature, bake them for 14 minutes but something still tasted funny.  Cookies just don’t taste right if you get 95% of the recipe correct.  You have to get it 100% correct in order for them to taste great.

The same is true of SEO and unfortunately, the majority of all websites taste a little funny because all of the ingredients aren’t included.  SEO just doesn’t taste right when you leave out one of the vital ingredients.  You can research your keywords, build optimized pages that have the perfect keyword density, link your pages together to make the most of each page’s PageRank but if you forget to include the external links, the end result may not work.  Or do everything else but neglect to reinforce your SEO with internal links, the end result may not work.

There are literally dozens of ingredients in a delicious SEO recipe.  Sure some are more important than others but the point is, don’t expect to get great results from your SEO campaign if you’re just combining one or two ingredients.  Just writing a great headline, a keyword-loaded title and uploading it doesn’t
mean that you’ll see top search engine position.

Until tomorrow.

Chadd Bryant.

In this digital age, it seems that more and more, people are becoming more and more prone to use the undo command.  Back a few years ago, when something was designed, it was done with pencils, markers, rubylith and waxing machines.   But these days, everything is digital and undoing things is easier than ever.  Plus, with the advent of the Intenet, nothing is set in stone.  Since Internet files are never sent to print, we’re not stuck with 50,000 copies of an old out-dated brochure.   But, since everything is fluid, things are constantly changing and clients are more apt to ask for changes with little regard to the intentionality that was put in place in the original design.

I call it “Monkey Boy” when a client sits over your shoulder telling you exactly what to do, as if they were the expert.  This scenario almost always results in lack-luster results.  So how can you avoid this scenario?

Here are a couple tips to avoid becoming Monkey Boy:

1. Always maintain a professionalism in every aspect of your business.
2. Increase your rates.

Let me address each of those points separately.  First professionalism.  Clients are looking for professional advice.  As long as you maintain that professionalism they are more likely to respect you and your expertise.  But when you display anything that’s unprofessional, you immediately close the gap between your expertise and their naivete.  It may be something as slight as a hesitation.  They may ask a question and you may hesitate.  They take that as a clue that you may not really understand your craft.   Or maybe it’s that you answered your cell phone after hours with kids in the background.  That can immediately lower you in their mind from a professional to a common dad.  Sure being a dad is great and establising relationships are wonderful, but nonetheless, that can diminish your credibility and ope the door for them to begin treating you like Monkey Boy.

Now let’s talk about your price.  You know it–you get what you pay for.  If you’re charging too little, then your clients are likely assuming that you may not be as good as the next guy who charges more.  Are you clients more likely to butt in and offer their opinion if you’re perceived as the chump that is punching the keys of if you’re the high-dollar professional from out of state?  Charge more and you’ll likely get a very different reaction and will immediately command more respect.  But you’d better know what you’re doing.  People can see right through a hack and if you don’t offer value, they’ll ditch you.

Does this ever happen to you?  You design a new site.  You love it.  It’s the hottest thing you’ve ever made.   Then you close the Photoshop file for a couple days.  When you open it you hate it.  What happened?

You were too close to it.  You couldn’t see straight.  Closing the project and revisiting it a couple days later gives you a fresh perspective.  It allows you to be more objective.

Unfortunately, the same thing can happen at any point in the design and development process.  It can happen with the writing, the layout, the programming or the marketing.  The good news is that the Internet is fluid and nothing is locked in stone.  If something needs to change, you can change it, because it’s digital.  One of the best ways to get this distance is to just remove yourself from the equation.  Even after a couple days you can still be so close to a project that you can not see it objectively, like someone who’s never seen the site before.  That’s why assembling a group of people to test the site can prove invaluable.  Preferably, use people who are in your target market.  If you’re selling video games, don’t bother asking your grandma what she thinks.  Find people who would likely use the site.  But don’t just get their feedback.  Actually watch them as they surf the site.  See where they click first.   What paths do they follow through the site?  Are those the paths that lead to your desired action, like a sale through a shopping cart?

It doesn’t have to be a formal thing either.  Many marketing companies spend millions on testing with control groups, and that’s not a bad thing, but if your budget won’t support that, then just do what you can.   Asking five other people is better than not asking anyone at all.  These informal straw polls can reveal glaring issues that otherwise may have gone unnoticed.

Try not to get offended.  You’re obviously going to hear some negative feedback.  Your initial reaction will almost always be defensive.  Don’t try to explain why things are the way they are.   Just take the criticism and evaluate whether or not it’s worthy of further discussion.  Sometimes taking a couple days to digest the information can also be helpful, so you let your defenses down.  If you’re even a little bothered by the results of the critique, just put it on hold and usually a few days will allow you to accept the feedback as a positive thing rather than a negative thing.

Hope that helps.

Imagine the horror when you learn that your site has been removed from Google’s listings and your company begins to bleed.  That frightening scenario happens everyday for companies around the globe.  Google has become such a monster that many businesses are completely reliant upon them for their revenue stream.  How can you avoid becoming the next victim?

Diversify.  If your company is like many others, your livelihood may revolve around Google and the traffic that they are sending you.  But when Google shifts their algorythm, and they do it all the time, your site could fall off and your traffic and sales will follow.  If you diversify your traffic streams and get a little from affiliates, a little from smaller search engines, a little from other sites that link to you and some from Google, you’ll be in a much better position to defend yourself when the moster decides to attack.

Wishing you a happy Halloween…

Chadd Bryant

I see it all the time.  People come up with a long list of keywords and they use that keyword string in the title and meta keywords.  And then they copy that page again and again as they open it and change the content to create another page.  Sounds like it would work fine, but when you have a long list of 100 phrases on the page, your keyword density becomes so dulted that the site has little relevance for any of the terms.

You’re actually going to find that your results are much better if you take those phrases and focus on one phrase per page.  Just choose on of the phrases and use it in the title, the headline, the content on the page, the meta keywords, ALT tags, comments etc.  Then choose another phrase and focus on that one on another page.  Then when someone is searching for your phrase, Google is more likely to see your page that’s dedicated to that phrase as more relevant that the other guy who just mentioned the phrase once.

Here’s the other benefit.  If you use a long list of words that are not actually mentioned in the page itself, then Google may think you’re trying to cheat or manipulate their search results.  You know what that means?  You could be delisted.  So be sure that the words that you list in your meta tags, are also found in the content of that page.

Until tomorrow…

Chadd Bryant

When the IBCC first gathered to consider the question of the fundamental elements that have to be included in a website in order for it to be a successful site, we started the discussion with things like “a seamless shopping cart.”  But a lot of sites are very successful even without a shopping cart.  There are no hard and fast rules that say that you have to sell something through your site in order for it to be successful.  So perhaps the better question to ask is, “How do you define a successful site?”

That’s a question that leads to many answers.  For some, the site just conveys a message.  Take a political website.  Their main goal is to get people to vote for their issue.  Other sites may sell advertising so their goal is to get as much traffic through their site as possible.  Other sites may sell products and need to have a sales process that leads the customer through a shopping cart, ultimately ending in a transaction.  Other sites may be interested in generating leads.  B2B operations are often more concerned with generating leads, educating them and building a relationship, rather than selling them a product right now.

So back to the question of what makes a successful site…

Once you realize that success can be determined in many ways, the answer you’re looking for must be one that’s broad and covers all types of goals.  So the IBCC determined that in order to meet the needs of most any type of site, the three keys to online success are as follows:

1. Get people to the site
2. Get them to stay at the site
3. Get them to come back again and again

Accomplish these three simple tasks and virtually any site will be successful, no matter what the ultimate goal is.  The 3-step formula works for e-commerce, education, B2B and more.  You name it.

I know, there are people out there that love to play the Devil’s advocate and they’re saying, “But if you sell someone your product on the first visit, then they don’t need to come back.”  Or maybe some of you are thinking, “If they click on an ad on the site right away, then they don’t need to stay at the site.”  True, but think of the difference in the level of success if you accomplish all three goals as opposed to just one or two.

If you sell someone your product on the first visit and they never come back, didn’t you lose out on future money?  Studies have shown that the life time value of a customer is far greater than the first transaction.  Get them to come back again and sell them more and more and more.  That’s the key to online success when operating an e-commerce site.  Or get them to come back again and again to click on your ads, if you’re just selling advertising.

Until next time.

Chadd Bryant