The Website Revelation – What Owning a Website Actually Means

As a Web Developer and SEO consultant I deal with many existing website owners who are looking to modify or improve their website. I also deal with many people who are looking to start their web presence with a new website. Through both of these interactions there is often a common theme; a misunderstanding or an attitude. I call this a misconception of reality, as often the reality of what the Internet can actually do for the person’s business and what they think it can do differ massively.

The 7%-38%-55% Communication Rule

Dr. Albert Mehrabian, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, UCLA is best known for his 7%-38%-55% Rule that states 55% of communication is attributable to non-verbal behaviors like body language and facial expressions; that 38% of communication is attributable to voice including volume, tone, pitch, cadence, and quality; and only 7% of communication is attributable to the words used.

Despite this persuasive evidence, companies continue to pile on the Web-text in the vain hope that search engines will index it and that someone might actually read it, even though the reality is 70% of website visitors merely scan for headlines, bulleted points and captions.

Do I need a web site? That is the question often asked by business owners.

The answer will usually depend upon the type of product or service offered and what the business is trying to achieve. Some products/services are more suited to the web than others. Plus, a well designed web site can be a superb tool for communicating with customers, prospective customers, suppliers and the wider community.

For most service businesses, I’d say “Yes, you do need a web site.”

My top 10 ways to improve search engine rankings are based on 7 years of banging my head against the world wide web’s search engines and reading numerous books on top 10 SEO tactics.

Let me say first of all that there are a lot of books, sources and tutorials that make promises of getting your website into the top 10 spots on the major search engines. Most of these are self promoting and the end result is that you have to hire these people to accomplish the things they say you can do on your own.

Firstly it should be noted that Search Engine Optimization is not something performed with a blanket approach it is an individual set of actions performed page by page to suit that page’s particular goals. Here at Kanga Internet we break up a clients website into specific and important pages based on the keyword terms we have identified through research and then write the first few pages to suit those terms. We associate page titles, page file names (buy-blue-widgets.html), H1 tags, description and keyword Meta tags and in page content to tell the story that match those identified keywords. It is also important to ensure your pages are W3 compliant and have no errors.
The following are the top ten mistakes that I have seen made over and over again by people trying to self-optimize their websites.

SEO is a trade that exists solely on the internet, and even then it is comprised almost entirely of the hot air of so-called “expert opinion.” Plenty of it blowing around these days as search maintains position as one of the most important marketplaces in the modern business world. Many DIY webmasters will end up searching for blog entries, articles, informational web sites, etc to help get them up to speed. The problem is that in most cases certain key terms are flung around like household names while the people doing the flinging are way out of touch with the average web browser. What some of us don’t realize is that not everyone knows even the basics of SEO.