After the launch of their new website, Check Write is finally getting the business they deserve! Check Write’s original site was not producing any new sales; no phone calls, no inquiries through email, no contacts. In essence it was just not working. Offering payroll and bookkeeping solutions to small and midsize companies as well as offering similar services to individuals and households, Check-Write’s business needed the ability to be seen and found easily in Google. Choosing to optimize their website for search engines and installing an easy to use contact form opened a window of opportunity leading to inquiries and, better yet, new clients.
Helping businesses to build their business through a website that works is what we most like to do. Getting her 1st lead through the site’s quote form ending with the close of the sale, owner Cindy Hollis is thrilled, “TCWebsite was able to optimize the search engine so that when clients were actually looking for my service, my name came to the top of the list!” Check Write’s new website, new contacts and new clients are what it’s all about. Here at TCWebsite, we couldn’t be happier!
We recently released an online magazine, let’s call it a blog-zine that allows Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering to put their glossy mag online. Real magazine, real blog, and social integration. The magazine is currently featured at Dartmouth.edu
So you’re an Outlook, MacMail, or Entourage user and you are struggling with how to deal with email at home or when you are out of the office traveling. Yes you might have webmail tied to your hosting platform but does it have spam and virus filtering built in?
What if your hosting providers server blows up? They all do at some point due to a spam attack or other act of god. What do you do for back up? Can you get mail elsewhere? Send mail?
The answer is state of the art, reliable, professional and free. It’s called Gmail (Google’s email). Set yourself up in 3 easy steps:
If you don’t have an account do your self a favor and head on over to gmail.com and sign up.
Then tell your webmaster to mirror all your email to your Gmail account. This means every piece of mail you receive will still end up in your Outlook AND a copy will be sent to your Gmail account.
When you go home or hit the road and don’t want to lug your laptop you can access your mail from your Gmail.com account
Professional ninja technique: set up your default ’send as’ as your main email address. So when you send an email from Gmail the recipient will see that it came from you@yourbusiness.com, NOT Gmail. You can do this under ‘Settings’ and ask your webmaster for help if needed.
So to wrap it up you can have your desktop Outlook to get all your email and have a webmail backup with spam an virus protection when you need it. In fact you might like Gmail so much you might just dump Outlook like I did
(Watch the 5 min video below) The problem with many websites is that navigation buttons, images and animation are invisible to Google from a linking standpoint. In other words, if you don’t have real text links in your navigation buttons, Google will ahave trouble finding your subpages. The image links won’t work for Google. This means your potential customers can’t find your website. Watch the following video to learn how to check to see if your website is blocking Google.
Audio transcript:
Is your website blocking Google? Or, to be more specific, if your website has so many images or animations on it, that they are getting in the way of Google’s ability to crawl through the text on your website? Now, here is the problem. Google needs real text, real text links to crawl through to the next page.
So, for instance, on this website, in this paragraph, it’s all plain text, but there are no links in here. The typical blue underlined links that you would see that would link down to a sub-page. And that’s a problem for Google, especially on this website. Google does need the link text.
Now, buttons that are linked, images and photos that are linked, animation that is linked to sub-pages, they do not work. Google cannot crawl through those images to get to the rest of your site. Thereby, making the rest of your site, technically invisible to Google. So, when someone searches for a product or a service that might exist on a sub-page of your website, Google doesn’t even have that page in its database.
So, it will never show up in a search and you just won’t get found. And that’s the problem. Now, how does this work? Let’s just give you an example of button text. Here is a button that says kiosks. And here is a button and a link that says compact power. Now, one of the ways you can figure out whether your website is blocking Google is to actually try to highlight the text.
Click down and hold, and then drag your mouse cursor across the text and see if you can highlight it. And if you can’t, it is probably a button, as this is right here. Now if you right click, trick number two, and you get a little pop-up. If you see something that says flash, that means it is a movie. It’s actually a piece of animation. And Google can’t read animation. It doesn’t know what to do with it.
And it doesn’t crawl through it. Now, another way to do it is, let’s take a look at another image that’s linked here, contact image. If we right click again, that is using the right button on your mouse, you get another pop-up. And if you see something that says, “Save image as,” that tells you that that’s an image.
And even though it is linked, Google can’t crawl through it. Now, in this particular site, this text here, if you really went fancy and you did a source view, you could go to view source up in your browser, and search for the words that are in this text right here, and you won’t find them, because this text was actually animation generated by flash. And it is invisible to Google.
So, to sum it up, if you are not getting found in Google, it could be that you have a heavy dose of imagery or animation on your website. And it’s literally blocking Google’s ability to get through your text and also to get through to the sub pages on your website, which makes them invisible.
It makes the text invisible; it makes the pages invisible to Google. And today, with the technology available, you can accomplish beautiful, graphic-rich sites, that are transparent to Google, that are loaded with link text so Google can easily crawl through and get all of your pages into it’s database.
And that is the first and one of the most important steps to getting your website found in Google. And today, Google is the primary search mechanism in the world to find a business like yours.
And if your website is important to you, you might want to consider biting the bullet, and rebuilding it, so that it’s friendly to Google. Use these open source platforms like Droople, Junela or WordPress.
They are free, they are infinitely customizable, and they come with templates, and they are great. Now, I would like to sign off with a little thought provoking question. Is your website building your business? And that is it for today.
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After the launch of their new website, Check Write is finally getting the business they deserve! Check Write’s original site was not producing any new sales; no phone calls, no inquiries through email, no contacts. In essence it was just not working. Offering payroll and bookkeeping solutions to small and midsize companies as well as offering similar services to individuals and households, Check-Write’s business needed the ability to be seen and found easily in Google. Choosing to optimize their website for search engines and installing an easy to use contact form opened a window of opportunity leading to inquiries and, better yet, new clients.
