Advice from the internet savvy please.

Okay. I started a website for my business. My wife did almost all of the work. she followed the templates from a site called tripod. Take a look! I put the link in my sig line, but keep in mind that it is a work in progress.
The advice I need is how do I get the site noticed in the various search engines? Tripod offers links to forms that you can submit but they all seem to say"If we deem you worthy we will deign to include your website in our search"


How do I bring my website to the fore without costing an arm and a leg in bribes?

Thanks in advance

I'd use a smaller font size here:
http://www.jmsequipmentrepair.com/id2.html

Also the logo with your initials in looks a bit weird. I think that has to do with the fact that the 'M' is not centered in the middle.

Perhaps one of our more media savvy members could give some advice on how to make the logo a bit prettier. I know that the text is centered properly, so it is geometrically correct, but visually it doesn't appeal.

I hope that my comments are useful to you. I am not too internet savvy myself, so there is little else I can comment on.

I like to see pictures of the people that I will be dealing with and their names and titles so that I can visualize who I'm talking to. Also, if there is more than one person with different duties, it helps me direct my questions to the right person.

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Originally Posted by JMS

Okay. I started a website for my business. My wife did almost all of the work. she followed the templates from a site called tripod. Take a look! I put the link in my sig line, but keep in mind that it is a work in progress.
The advice I need is how do I get the site noticed in the various search engines? Tripod offers links to forms that you can submit but they all seem to say"If we deem you worthy we will deign to include your website in our search"


How do I bring my website to the fore without costing an arm and a leg in bribes?

Thanks in advance

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Mark, if you're talking about search engines like Google, they will find you. There are submissions, yes, but Google's spiders are very efficient. They've found my blog and I've never done anything like those submissions.

Mark

I read somewhere (wish I could give you the reference, but don't have it) that 60% of people using Google go no further than the first result, 20% go no further than the second, and 10% go as far as the third result. Thereafter, clicks are minimal. I.e. if you ain't in the top three results of a search, then you're very disadvantaged, in terms of internet traffic to your site.

Where I work we have a couple hundred sites. We have a best practice approach to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Some tips include things like url-naming: rather than creating some random url which has meaning only to the organisation (e.g. a product page whose url is based on the product number held in that organisation's own database), try creating a url using a pertinent set of words that describe the content on that page.

An example being, say, a page that sells the Sharp Practice book. Rather than calling it www.marksbooks.com/isbn=9781123456x, call it www.marksbooks.com/sharp-practice-anders-larsen. This and other tips will ensure that Google's bots will rank your site higher than others not using such SEO practices.

I will try to get a copy of our SEO best practices for you and will PM you. In the meantime, it won't hurt for you to Google "Search Engine Optimisation techniques" or something similar. Google don't make public their algorithms for ranking sites, but through a lot of experimentation others have managed to work out many of the techniques that are used.

Cheers
M.

EDIT: I should also warn you that there are certain SEO practices that are against the spirit of the internet and Google will instantly remove any domain found to be using such frowned-upon and dubious practices. If that happens, your site might as well not exist as it gets omitted from the Google Index entirely. An example is setting up spoof sites which have multiple links to your own site -- the more references and linkages to your site that exist on the web, the higher the ranking of your site. Of course, making up a whole bunch of sites to fool the Google bots is kind of cheating as far as Google is concerned, and they'll exclude your site from their index as a result.

Mark do you know if links in post signatures on fora do count for Google?
It seems to me as once they did but now they do not anymore.

Sorry, no idea. We let our web developers do all the magic -- SEO definitely feels like a moving target rather than something you 'get' and then leave static.

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Originally Posted by JMS

How do I bring my website to the fore without costing an arm and a leg in bribes?

Thanks in advance

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not a bad site, a little bland, but i'm biased because i used to be a professional graphic designer. as for getting noticed, the google webcrawlers will pick you up soon enough (usually less than 2 weeks after the site is published) but moving yourself up the pagerank chain is tricky.

as you can see, Google bomb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia the best way to get noticed and ranked on google is to get a lot of other sites to link to yours.

Wow Mark you have alot of competition! Have you been ego surfing? Put "bakery equipment repair san diego" or "bakery equipment repair pomona ca" of the same with "deli equipment repair..." every now and then. Eventually you will see JMS appear on the page. You can drive it up in the order by seeing that a search is completed with your link. The more searches that end with folks clicking your link, the more popular your business will be to the search engine. If you put in the nmae of your business, you will not even be recognized at all for a while. Try it now. Go to Google and plug in "JMS equipment repair" and watch what comes up. It is frustrating. Eventually you'll be there. It's funny too. The first time you do the ego surf and your website come up you feel like Navin R. Johnson did when his name appeared in the phone book.

If you plug Evil Mr. Toes into Google, the top five or ten listings have to do with my silly website. Of course I don't think there's much competition in the Evil Mr. Toes department but I have been doing it for a long time. I also test by putting my name in or other things that have to do with my site.

As chimensch suggested I am thinking of putting a picture of me with my children all holding some sort of hand tool. My children are 4,5, and 7. I think it would be cute, and draw the kind of customers that would be nice to do work for. My wife on the other hand thinks it would look unprofessional. What do you guys think?

I think a touch of whimsy would do the website some good and give a more approachable and trusting touch

You could do a pic like that, but your site needs to look sharper and less like a tripod template. Re-work the logo so it fits in better (notice how it's just plopped in there and doesn't match anything). Check out the "architecture" template on this page: Free Website Templates

You'll notice that with the above template, it's sharper and just feels refined. It has to do with the color choices, font size, and placement of the page within the screen. Not that it's an ideal site, but it's a good place to start and it's easy to get ideas from.

Don't worry though, most of us started in Tripod or GeoCities, graduated to Frontpage templates, then moved on to really working it out (except for Jockeys- he came out of the womb coding html ";"). I like making Flash websites now. I remember languishing in Tripod's horrible editor and know how hard it can be to get what you actually want out of it. I'm not sure I ever actually got what I wanted from it, lol.

As for swiping templates or ideas from other sites, don't worry about it. Remember- good artists borrow, great artists steal:roflmao

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Originally Posted by JMS

As chimensch suggested I am thinking of putting a picture of me with my children all holding some sort of hand tool. My children are 4,5, and 7. I think it would be cute, and draw the kind of customers that would be nice to do work for. My wife on the other hand thinks it would look unprofessional. What do you guys think?

I think a touch of whimsy would do the website some good and give a more approachable and trusting touch

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I like it. As regards your wife's comment, I think a lot depends on what type of customer you were looking for. To give an extreme example, if you were a nationwide service and were looking for a national contract to service all the MacDonalds franchises you would have a different image than if you were a local family-run business and were looking for other local family-run businesses. Does that make sense? People don't buy from web sites, they buy from people and especially people that are like them. I think the more personal you can make it, the better.

Mark- I think a picture with your kids would only be appropriate on maybe a Bio type page or something specifically about you more than the work you do. For the homepage, a picture of you alone with a tool or working on a machine would be more fitting IMO. I personally would just find the kids a little out of place regardless of the type of person I want to do business with. After all, I would be visiting the page in a business mindset to begin with.

I think it looks fine for what it is, though I do think the suggestions of centering the text are good ones.

If you're looking to improve it I'd look just around at various websites offering similar services to yours and copy one I liked, or take elements from ones I liked. As long as you don't copy any IP this is a common practice. I wouldn't copy a direct competitors site, however.

Make sure you register with the various online business listings, this will help pull up your website on google maps.

The "about me" page listed above seems like a good idea, too. You could reiterate your qualifications, give history and so on.

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Originally Posted by JMS

As chimensch suggested I am thinking of putting a picture of me with my children all holding some sort of hand tool. My children are 4,5, and 7. I think it would be cute, and draw the kind of customers that would be nice to do work for. My wife on the other hand thinks it would look unprofessional.

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No she's just polite and doesn't want to make you cry. In fact she is worried that you'll arrange the kids improperly thus spelling MJS, SJM, SMJ, etc. instead the proper JMS. She has been quick to calculate that there's only 18% chance that you'll do it right.
And, of course, sending mixed signals is worse than sending no signals at all.

Plus it's really corny, not to mention that such evidence can and will be used in court against you when the government aka child protection services takes over the care of your children.

Scared yet? Should've thought about it before you voted for the current president's policies. Go have a beer, make sure it's a forty - the tears in it will be harder to notice!

Hey Mark,

I just heard this story on All Things Considered (NPR's afternoon drive program) about Google advertizing. I think you will find it interesting:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103816296

Brad

I have a picture suggestion......................
http://i295.photobucket.com/albums/m...icture0003.jpg

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Originally Posted by gratewhitehuntr

I have a picture suggestion......................
http://i295.photobucket.com/albums/m...icture0003.jpg

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Now that is funny

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Originally Posted by icedog

Hey Mark,

I just heard this story on All Things Considered (NPR's afternoon drive program) about Google advertizing. I think you will find it interesting:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103816296

Brad

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Mark, don't fall for it, it's the beginning of a slippery slope... next thing you'll be listening to Democracy Now and then....

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Originally Posted by gugi

Mark, don't fall for it, it's the beginning of a slippery slope... next thing you'll be listening to Democracy Now and then....

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:rofl2::roflmao:rofl2: