Small Business Consultants

 in Houston Texas USA

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Completed sessions.

(A collection of notes from the classes can be found elsewhere on this site.)

Back to the Clinic Schedule.     Useful Reference Sites   Linksfile Spreadsheet

Clinics in 2005

{LinksFile}

• Web advertisers don't optimize effectively.
• Flash sites do not perform.
• Search importance to retail continues to grow.
• Relevance of one & two word searches.

Review of presentation "What makes a web site work?". discussing the elements of a web site that make it an effective marketing tool for small businesses.

{Presentation}

During the class, a question was raised about how to evaluate rankings on keywords over some period of time. One of the class members contributed a site reference that he uses to track his rankings in Google over time. That service is available from http://www.googlealert.com/. This is a little different from the question that was asked, which pertained to varying results from Wordtracker over time. I still am not aware of any way to get that information other than downloading the search results to another database application as I described in class.

{Presentation in Excel}

{Presentation in PDF}

• Researching keywords to focus the site.
• Selecting appropriate keywords.
• Choosing your domain name.
• Selecting a hosting company.
• Organizing the site structure.
• Setting up the site layout (page format).
• Creating the site in Frontpage.
• Elements to include in the site:
  • Site map
  • Newsletter
  • Forum
  • Links pages
  • Site search
  • Contact us

{Step by Step Startup}

• Updates on what is happening with major search engines.
• Continue his review of changes made to RLLDesign website to enhance rankings.
• Using discussion forums to your web site's benefit.
• Tips on getting placed in DMOZ and Yahoo directories.
• How to get free traffic to your web site.

{Notes on Class}  

{Keyword Density analysis}

{Presentation}  

{Class Notes}  

(Presentation}

A question was raised in the class about keyword research tools other than Wordtracker. I didn't really know of any good ones to suggest, but have compiled a list of other tools that you might want to look at. They can be found on my page of useful reference sites.

{Presentation}

In addition to covering several topics in the class, Jay provided a list of reference sites useful to participants (see the notes for more information).

{Jay's notes in Word}

{Jay's notes in RTF}

{Presentation}

{Presentation}

• Review of changes made  based on findings from site statistics.
• New research tools.
• "Dirty tricks" by link partners.
• Guidelines on internal link structure.
• Benefits of linking.

{Class Notes}

{Presentation}

• Presentation

• Using Wordtracker to identify keywords for your site.
• Analyzing your page with Netmechanic.
• What site statistics packages are available and how do you pick one?
• How can you use a newsletter to boost your site and research your market?
• Where is the most important place to have your keywords on your site?

Overview of how to create a search engine friendly web site, touching on several related issues:

• Importance of content.
• Wordtracker, researching keywords.
• Importance of load time, measuring with Netmechanic utility.
• Anchor text, "miserable failure" example.

• Evaluating your site performance using WebPositionGold reports.
• Using copywriting to improve your rankings.
• An e-mail list manager from Omnistar.
• An open source database from osCommerce that will be used in the upcoming database web site development class.
• Links to your site from Alexa pages.
• Using Frontpage to publish your site, and, creating a forum on your site.
• How "Google bombing" of miserable failure illustrates the value of keyword links.
• The latest "Hot phenom" on the Internet: www.jibjab.com.

{Presentation}  

Comprehensive and easy to read and understand statistics on your site are essential to being able to make improvements over time. Generally, statistics packages are provided by your web hosting company. If they are not, or if the package provided is not sufficient for your needs, you can choose to have statistics provided for your site by an outside service. An excellent choice is Hitslink.com. Visit the link below for more information and to subscribe.

We also took a look at the updated search engine "Ask Jeeves", which has added some interesting functionality attempting to make the search experience more useful and friendly.

Two surveys of search users attitudes about searching were recently described in SearchEngineWatch, and were "blogged" onto my site. The findings were of interest, and confirmed much of the material that has been discussed in these classes for years.  There was some interesting detail, for example, 80% of searchers consider "organic" listings more important than sponsored listings.

We discussed other handy tools that have been recently presented in the class, such as the Thumbshots tool that illustrates the lack of overlap between results from different search engines.

Jay presented several tools for site developers to help with optimizing your site for different terms.

Jerry Hobby presented a class on "Blogging" and what it means for webmasters and developers. Jerry's Powerpoint presentation is available in pdf, and he has also provided a tutorial on his website for setting up a blog on eBlogger..

(Jay's notes) 

• Alternative sources of statistics for your site,
• Google's AdSense for your site,
• Discussion of other free web tools, &
• Impact that internal linking can have on page rank.

• New perspective on AdSense from Google,
• Miscellaneous tools for web masters,
• Using Excel to retain and review statistics over multiple time periods

{Presentation}   

{Links file (Excel)}  

(Jerry's comments)   

(LinksFile)   

• What is eBay?
• Why do I need eBay when  I have web pages that work for me?
• Who are the eBay Buyers and Sellers?
• How will ad on eBay help get customers to my web site?
• So maybe I do need eBay. What do I do?

(Brian's notes)   

(Jay's notes) 

• Creating your pages from scratch
• Directory structure vs. Navigation structure

(Presentation)

• add a form and send it to the right place
• capture an email address and send it to the right place
• autorespond to messages
• set-up multiple email accounts incorporating the domain name
• set-up a forum
• set-up an internal search feature, including Google
• select a statistics package
• bulk mail to your customers

(Presentation)              

Monday, February 16, 2004

(President's Day!)

Class:  "Using your statistics to make adjustments to your site."

Note: The adjustments that Jay made to the outdoor lighting site in class have,within 4 days,resulted in number one listings in Google for the pages that were adjusted!

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Dick Myers

No Clinic Tonight!

Small Business Consultants

5602 Dumfries Drive, Houston, Texas  77096-3920

713.721.2109  Fax: 832.553.2902

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