Philadelphia Pet Adventures: Business Blog Brings Buzz

McBuzz Communications recently helped Philadelphia Pet Adventures of Philadelphia, PA, launch a new website and blog.

It's a local business looking for visibility in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.com. Both the owners happen to be great writers, and this certainly helps when it comes to creating web marketing buzz using a blog. But it's possible to use a blog to gain search engine visibility even if writing is not your favorite thing to do.



There are many other possible sources of content for a blog. If you know someone who has expertise in a particular area relevant to your business, they may already have written a short article or presentation for some other purpose. Ask if you can use all or part of their work on your blog -- with attribution. There you have it. If you can find just one of these already-existing sources each month, you have half of what you need to keep your blog going.

Another excellent way to generate content for your blog is to do a short survey or review of existing resources. People are always looking for a good tip. There are lots of good resources out there, but who has time to look for them?! If you have experience with a particular kind of resource that's helpful in your line of work, sit down for a few minutes and compile a list, with a brief note saying what's good about each one. You don't have to love writing to be able to do this. Just imagine you are telling a good friend about it.

Here's one example from a fantastic blogger at Intuit named Avinash Kaushik. See his "Recommendation #6: Best WordPress Plugins" in that post. It's a list of additional features for blogging software called WordPress. The subject matter is not important. Just check out how Avinash gives a run-down of available resources.

This example is loaded with keywords (terms) pertaining to publishing a blog, which is great for search engine visibility with respect to those keywords, AND it positions Avinash's blog as a resource for people working in this field, which makes others want to link to his blog / website. In short, it's what good "search engine optimization" is all about.

Google's Success Can Mean Web Marketing Success for Your Website and Your Business

Google is a wildly successful company. The New York Times and many others reported yesterday that Google's fourth quarter revenue rose 67% over last year. In the two and a half years since the company went public, its stock has risen from $85 a share to just over $500. (Not only are they profitable, but they recently ranked #1 on Fortune magazine's list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For.)

Most of Google's revenue comes from its brilliantly simple business model of serving up advertisements along side free search results. This model would not work if the search results were no good. The supercharged minds at Google are constantly improving their search engine's ability to crawl and index the Web. The search engine is so good, Google can actually show fewer ads with their search results than they did when they first began doing so, "but those ads are more relevant to users, are clicked on more frequently, and hence, generate a better return for both Google and for advertisers." (New York Times, Feb 1, 2007)

Here's why Google's success is good news for anyone who wants to do marketing and PR for their business using their website.

Google can offer more relevant ads to its users because it "knows the meaning of a web page." The better you and I are at putting detailed content on our websites - and at getting other sites to link to ours with instructive links, in a format that search engines like Google can read - the better Google is at bringing the right traffic to our websites.

For the same reason Google excels at placing relevant ads next to search results, it excels at giving search users results that are highly relevant to the terms or "keywords" they plug into the Google search box.

The thing to keep in mind is that bringing the right traffic to your website may not be as difficult or expensive as you think. The "right traffic" is site visitors that want what your business or organization offers, as opposed to what your competitors or peers may have to offer.

You can differentiate your product or service from your competitor's by doing three things:
1. Figure out exactly what sets your product or service apart. This is a critical part of any business plan. There are many resources available to help you with it, including the U.S. Small Business Administration.
2. Write it down using clear, descriptive language. (If you are not a writer, you can have someone give you a hand with this.)
3. Put this language into your PR and marketing materials, including your website.

Some of your competitors are not actively improving their website on a regular basis. If you are actively improving your website, then you automatically win that race hands down.

As for competitors that are actively improving their websites, you can gain an edge by using plenty of descriptive language - and putting it where Google can find it. The goal is to attract searchers using 3 or 4 words in their search: for a pet sitting website, "pet sitting Wyndmoor PA" rather than just "pet sitting" or even "pet sitting Wyndmoor".

The best way to do this is to use a blog or other form of content management system (CMS) on your website so that you can get new content up on your site quickly and frequently, without having to know HTML or other code. There are plenty of blog software and CMS packages available for this purpose - many of them free.

The other part of this equation is to foster links to your website from other websites - preferably links that say something about your product or service. For example, a link that says, "Learn more about Philadelphia Pet Adventures pet sitting services" is far more instructive to the Google search engine than a generic "click here".

It's also important to use the same language your customers use whenever you talk about your products or services, because that is the language they use when they do a search. This point is fitting material for a follow-up post.

As Google continues to improve its search capabilities, you can benefit by giving Google plenty of rich text on your website to work with. The beauty of this approach to web marketing and website success is that you are already creating the kind of content you need for your website every time you create a brochure or newsletter, or write a press release, or even when you write an e-mail to a client or prospective client talking about your products or services.

Leverage the power of readily available, easy-to-use blog or CMS software to get that content up on your website the very same day.

The Google "crawler" - Google's automatic text reading and indexing machine - will come by soon enough to see what it is that sets you apart from your competition, and the next time anyone does a search, Google will let them know about you.

"www" in a website address: Why it matters to website success - continued

Here is a follow-up to my post about why "www" in front of your domain matters to the rank of your website in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN ("www" in a website address: Why it matters to website success).

If you want the code to use on your website host server to change all incoming requests for URLs without the "www" into URLs with the "www", simply put the following into your .htaccess file. The first 2 lines are a comment to remind you what the code is for.

# If an address without the "www." prefix is entered,
# this will redirect to the page with the "www." prefix.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

# That's it!

Here is a good resource on .htaccess files:
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/htaccess

Also, remember to change other settings and code on your website that involve the domain and whether it has "www" in it or not.

For example, WordPress blog software users should be sure to make the following changes.

Before adding the above code to the .htaccess file, WordPress users must be sure to login to their blog admin panel and go to Options > General.

Under *WordPress address (URI)* enter the address with "www." in front if it is not already there.

Likewise for the *Blog address (URI)*.

If these addresses don't have "www." in them, the .htaccess rewrite will cause an error. Other blog software, such as Typepad, is likely to require a similar change.

("URL" stands for Universal Resource Locator and "URI" stands for Universal Resource Indicator". For most purposes, the two terms are interchangeable: both mean "web address".)

If you use Google Site Search, you will need to make sure that the domain used in the Site Search code has "www" in it.

After adding the rewrite code to my .htaccess file, Google Site Search I use on McBuzz.com at http://www.mcbuzz.com/search.shtml did not work. The results page was blank. To make it work again, I went into the HTML and changed
input type="hidden" name="domains" value="mcbuzz.com"
to
input type="hidden" name="domains" value="www.mcbuzz.com"

The fact that Google Site Search requires the "www" is further evidence, it seems to me, of the importance of standardizing your URL to include "www". (You could try to standardize it to not include "www", but that seems -- well, not as standard, and thus harder to implement.)

If you have questions or comments about using the .htaccess file, or about the importance of standardizing your domain as either "www.example.com" or "example.com", please post your comment below or contact me through the McBuzz Communications website.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

"www" in a website address: Why it matters to website success

"www.mcbuzz.com" and "mcbuzz.com" -- what's the difference? None, right? Put either one in your browser's address window and you go to the same website.

No. Not exactly.

Business owners and others who want to be found on the Web should be aware that although http://www.mcbuzz.com and http://mcbuzz.com take you to the same website, www.mcbuzz.com and mcbuzz.com are, strictly speaking, different domains.

Strange as this may sound, here is why it matters to web marketing & website success. The two domains can have different rankings in a search engine like Google. Not only that, one can actually detract from the rank of the other.

How? Because when another website links to yours, it will either use www.example.com or example.com in the link URL (the web address).

Incoming links are a critical part, some would say the most critical part, of a web page's ranking in Google.

So, if half of the sites that link to yours use "www." and half do not, the positive effect on your site's ranking will be divided between the two domains.

Put another way, if all of the sites that link to your website use "www." in the link URL (http://www.mcbuzz.com instead of http://mcbuzz.com, say), then all of the positive effect on your site's ranking will be assigned to www.mcbuzz.com and its subpages.

There are several ways to make sure that visitors to your site all go to the same domain. You can start by making sure that you, or whoever works on your website, is consistent in creating URLs for the site. That way you ensure, at least to a significant degree, that incoming links to your site will all have the same form.

There are also some technical solutions you can use to change non-www. addresses into www. addresses on your website's host server. These are slightly complicated, "don't-try-this-at-home" kinds of things that I will write more about in the future. In the meantime, contact me through the McBuzz Communications Web site and I will help you with those. No purchase necessary.