Heatherstone

Building Site Traffic That Matters

Overton — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:58:15 +0000

A customer using the Heatherstone Foundation Package had a question about driving traffic to their site by purchasing an “advanced membership” from a company that aggregates website links en masse. Answering his question meant creating a thumbnail write-up of how SEO works. I’ve removed the names of the parties involved, but otherwise, here’s the advice I gave our client:

{“Advanced Membership”} is something I would recommend staying away from. Early SEO efforts revealed that lots of links could improve search engine page rankings. This led to the creation of “link farms”, or sites that had no content other than line after line of links and you could pay to include your site, thus driving up your relevancy calculation.

Of course, the search engine algorithms change over time. The development teams at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the like realized that people were using link farms to skew relevancy, so they accounted for it. Link farms became at best useless and at worst a way to get your site black-listed or devalued.

This kind of gaming the system is called “black hat” SEO because it tries to find gimmicks to increase search engine placement. The search engine companies frown on such things and do their best to block each new gimmick.

The best kind of SEO is to use “white hat” techniques. Relevant articles are the best of these, although that means investing time and effort. Quality content added frequently leads to quality visitors and enhanced reputation for your site and your business.

When thinking about SEO, the golden rule is that search engines attempt to model as closely as possible what the person using the search engine will actually want to see. Figure out what your visitors want to see, what will get them to pick up the phone and call (or whatever your goal might be) and that’s what should be on your site.

Will random visitors be drawn to become customers of yours because of a page filled with automatically generated links to pages you’ve never looked at? It seems highly unlikely. I would save my time and money for more worthwhile alternatives. It’s important to remember that your website has a goal beyond attracting visitors, namely visitor conversion.

Why WordPress stops post writing with Javascript “Access Denied” error

Overton — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 01:47:22 +0000

It’s a horrible problem if you have a WordPress-based website. You go to your administration pages and try to write a post, but it won’t let you click in the editing panel. There’s a nasty little Javascript error, so you get “Done, with errors”. Clicking on it gets you an error something like this:

Line: 176
Char: 290
Error: Access is Denied
Code: 0
URL: http://www.example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Hunting around for a solution to this problem feels like an exercise in futility because lots of people have had this problem, posted it to message boards, but never received an error. Fortunately, “davidbibo” actually came up with an answer. The problem may be the “www.” at the beginning of your URL.
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The Blogification of Heatherstone

Overton — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 16:33:28 +0000

At Microsoft, they have a term for using your own products. It’s called “dogfooding,” short for “eating your own dogfood.” The idea is that you can only understand how your customers will use your product if you use it, too. This site is now our dogfood site.

We’re doing a lot of websites for clients lately that use WordPress as a content management tool. Their sites become blogs with varying levels of emphasis put on the blog aspect. We encourage them to put the blog element right up front as the home page. It builds the company’s credibility to be regularly writing about their industry. Not everyone is quite ready for that commitment, despite the significant evidence that it works. Writing a blog is one more piece of work, after all.

Our own site wasn’t set up that way, though, which undermines our own credibility. If we think that’s the right way to go, then why aren’t we doing it?

So now we are. Ah, dogfood. Yummy!

How to Handle Unwanted Email Forwards

Overton — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:36:07 +0000

There are plenty of people that enjoy receiving email with jokes, striking pictures, outrage on political or economic topics, or ways to ensure good luck. More enjoyment comes from forwarding them on to others.
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From Treo to iPhone, Exchange to Google

Overton — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 06:54:14 +0000

The Treo has been the mainstay of our consultants for a few years now, hooked up to Exchange servers. We generally have preferred the Palm version and the Good mobile messaging hook-up to get email and calendar items to push to the phone. As a company of nomads, that kind of mobility and connectivity has been critical to our success.

No more. Hark, the iPhone and it’s software companion Google!

We’ve switched to iPhones from Treos already. The size, the extra features like iPod and Google Maps, and absolutely amazing web presentation of the iPhone was compelling. Lowering data plans by $20 per month, abandoning Good for another $20 per month, and the prospect of getting rid of Exchange at $12 monthly, each per phone, sure doesn’t hurt.

We haven’t moved away from Exchange entirely yet, as our use of Gmail and Google Calendar as a replacement for Exchange and Outlook is still in testing, but it looks quite promising. The only limitation so far is that the iPhone calendar and email icons don’t seem to be configurable to go to web pages instead of the built-in apps. Perhaps we haven’t found out how yet or Apple has yet to make that happen.

For our highly mobile lives, it’s great to see another advance forward with a price tag that rolls back. Total Cost of Ownership - that’s the key.