A WordPress website that features the amazing Interior Design in Denver work by Katherine Schroder. www.atelierid.com

Step 1: Understand your content and goals
A good example is: “I would like to drive traffic to my website so users can signup for one of our classes.” Does your website have content about the classes you are offering? Do you update your content frequently and link to other relevant websites? Do you blog about topics of interest to your industry?

Now that you have thought hard about the content you’ve added to your website and how that relates to your business goals, it’s time to talk about specific things you can do to optimize your site.

Step 2: Measure first
Make sure you have Google Analytics installed and understand how to use the data. You should know how many monthly visitors your site receives and what the top referring websites are. Are people getting to your site from Google searches or links to your site that your friends have posted to Facebook and Twitter?

Now you are ready to optimize your website and have a good understanding what you are optimizing it for.

Step 3: Optimize your Website
Google and other search engines visit your website using “crawlers”. These are programs that automatically read all of your web pages, index the content and understand links between pages and other websites. This is very key to remember, a computer is indexing your website not a person. You need to write content for your website that is readable and sounds good to humans but is also very intelligent for “crawlers”.

Example:
Say you have a page titled “My Classes”. What does that tell the Google “crawler”? Answer, nothing. “My Classes” has no real meaning to that automated crawler. How, how about you change the page title to “Writing Classes in Denver, CO”. Now you are providing value to Google. When a potential visitor to your website goes to Google and searches they will probably type something like “writing classes in denver” not “my classes”.

Now that you understand why a good page title is important, here are a few general rules to follow:

1. Pick 5 keywords that describe the content on a page
2. At least one of those 5 keywords should be part of your Page Title
3. At least three of those 5 keywords should be in the first 100 words of your page
4. Link to other content within your website
5. Don’t have a ton of links on a page, 5 or so links per page (not including your navigation) is a good balance

Now that you understand how to write efficient content for your website, we also recommend having a Blog, a Flickr photo gallery, YouTube videos, a link to your Facebook Group, and a link to follow your business on Twitter.  Encourage your friends and customers to write a review about your business on Yelp.  Use tools like Google Alerts to track mentions of your business and blog about or link back to those articles.

That’s just a sample of optimization efforts you can do to increase your rank in Google and your website traffic in general.

Step 4: Advertise using Google AdWords or Facebook
If you have the budget and want to try advertising it’s a good way to drive traffic to your website.  Before you go down this road you should have Steps1-3 perfect and you should have a clear reason for placing an ad.  Once a user sees and clicks on your ad, you will want a strategy to measure “conversions” of this ad.  For example, a user types in “writing classes in Denver” into Google and sees an ad for your site.  They click the ad and see a form to fill out and receive more information about writing classes and writing clinics in the Denver area.  When the user fills out the form it’s called a “conversion”.  This is how you measure the success of your ad.  Our clients typically spend between $50 and $1000/month on Google Ads.  It’s an ongoing effort that requires attention, so be ready!

Summary
I hope these 4 steps provided you with good answer to “How can I rank better in Google”.  As always, Contact Us for more information on strategy.

Define your Voice
Blogging enables you to write in a style that is less corporate and more reflective. Your Blog is an opportunity to further define your brand, who you are as a company and connect with your Customers in a new way. Some examples include: Announcing a new product or service; Writing a How-To article about a topic specific to your industry; Promoting an upcoming Event or Sale; Responding to a complaint, news story or industry development.

Inform your Customers and Educate yourself
Writing an interesting blog post may require research and a few revisions. Going through this process will help you frame your own thoughts on a particular topic and learn something along the way. Writing posts that educate your Customers is also important as it positions your company as a thought leader in your industry.

Search Engine Results
Blogging is one of the best ways to add fresh, relevant content to your website. Search Engine Bots crawl your website on a regular basis looking for new content. The combination of posting regularly, providing a RSS feed of your posts and having other individuals link to a blog post you wrote is important to ranking well for searches about your company or industry.

The latest version of the popular WordPress content management system has been released.  This is a major upgrade that includes a cool new interface for editing your website.  If you would like your website upgraded to the latest major version of WordPress please drop us a note.

Gary Vay*ner*chuk is an owner of a successful Wine store in New York that has experienced explosive growth and leveraged the Internet to increase sales. Gary has also become an Internet phenomenon through his new media efforts like the successful Wine Library TV podcast and inviting users to discuss “anything” with him via IM, Twitter and other Social Networks. This use of Web 2.0 technologies has created a demand for Gary at Web Conferences.

In this video Gary discussed his philosophy of building on the small successes. This is extremely applicable to a Small Business’s website strategy and is worth a listen. Enjoy.

Every summer my wife volunteers at American Diabetes Association Camp Colorado as a medical counselor. This camp is a great opportunity for kids with Diabetes to have a fun week outdoors.

Divinia volunteered a website, hosting and graphic design efforts. Like many Small Businesses or Non-Profits, getting control of content is the number one request. We used WordPress, a Blog, YouTube video cllps and PDF/MS Word downloads to deliver information to parents and campers. We also used Google Analytics to monitor web traffic. The week of camp traffic spiked to several hundred unique visits!

As the blog post discusses, this is great news because you can use YouTube Insight’s analytics about your videos for many of the same reasons as you use Google Analytics to measure your website traffic. Understanding your traffic and interest in what you are putting out there on the web helps you shape your message and strategy.

A great example of this is the blog post “We’re Hiring” on the Union Square Ventures website. Union Square is a Venture Capital firm that invests in many tech companies….this blog post is how they posted their latest job opening for a new Analyst. The cool thing about this approach is that no resumes were accepted, applicants were asked to comment on the blog post and list their social networking profile (facebook, myspace, linkedin, etc).

It will be interesting to see if more and more companies begin using this type of approach as a mechanism for filtering their applicants.