Custom WordPress Sites

The other day, I was at church and was listening to the message when the speaker mentioned that sometimes when her husband is in a hurry he only irons the front of his dress shirt. She said he does this because since he is wearing a coat, nobody will ever see the back half, so what does it matter? The only people who know it isn’t fully ironed is he and his wife. Unfortunately, I have seen on too many occasions that this is the same concept people place into their website for their business.

We all want the flashy designed and pretty looking site, but are not willing to put the time & effort into making the site useful. You can have the most beautiful site in the world, but if it is missing key elements like calls to action, SEO optimization & Social integration, you in essence have spent a bunch of money for something pretty but unproductive. In this post I am going to cover two of these three. I will save the calls to action & sidebars for another post in the very near future.

How Social Is Your Site?

I recently wrote about making your WordPress site more social for consumers. In that post I shared about some great plugins that are designed for WordPress Sites that allow consumers to share your content easily and quickly on social media platforms. As you can see, currently Facebook is sending more traffic to our site than Google. Also, you can see that Twitter has made the top five. The reason that Tech Savvy Agent is in our top five is that I write there on a regular basis with links back to our site. When you look at the analytics on their site, it too shows Facebook at the top of the list. Chris Smith shared with me recently that they see over 45% of their traffic from their powerful Facebook page of over 12,000 fans alone.

We are currently seeing almost 36% of our traffic on 210 just from the various social platforms we participate on. This traffic comes not because we just broadcast our content onto Facebook & Twitter. The traffic comes because Jason & myself engage our friends/followers on the social networks in conversations and build relationships with them. After this trust has been established we can then share links to blog posts and sections of our site and people will click on them and visit. Not only will they read our content, but they are also more willing to share it with their friends/followers after reading as well. Being the complete statistics junkie I am, I did an analysis on the past 30 posts that have been written on our blog to see how much social sharing is taking place. For the past 30 posts, on average, they have been re-tweeted 23.74 times and shared on Facebook 34.19 times.

They say the average person on Facebook as 130 friends. That means on average my posts have a reach of nearly 4,420 people just on Facebook each time we write a blog post. The same holds true on Twitter. This reach is in addition to the thousands of friends/followers that we have. By using an analytic type plugin I can watch when I send out a tweet or post on Facebook the traffic coming to my site immediately. Usually there is a big rush all at once and a few hundred show up within 10 minutes. If you don’t have a site that allows for the installation of these type of social plugins, it might be time to consider a site like WordPress.

How Does Your Site Rank in Search Engines?

Search Engine Optimization still plays a major role in how consumers find your site. The social platforms do a great job of directing those you are already connected with to your site, but the search engines is what can bring in those that aren’t connected to your sphere. Before the recent explosion of social media, sites would see close to 76% of their traffic come directly from search engines. I believe that sites that are optimized properly can still see a major chunk of traffic from Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. The problem however lies in what is set up on back end of your site that is never even seen by a consumer. Each page in your site has three basic SEO components that without the proper setup you are throwing away valuable Google Juice. One of my recent clients contacted me an asked why her static website was not showing up for anything in the search engines. She would search and sometimes find it showing up on page 7 for a very specific term, but it was not generating any business for her. I asked for her web address and immediately looked at the page source for the site. Here is what search engines saw for her site:

Page Source Code — click to view full size

The three main components that need to be filled out on every single page of your site and every blog post you post is the Title, Description, & Keywords. In that order of importance too. As you can see from the source code of her site, the first two segments were greatly overlooked. I cannot stress how extremely important these are to determining how your site ranks in the search engines. It is imperative that you fill in these sections with keyword rich content. This client had done a pretty decent job with keywords but their description and title was basically their name, where they are licensed and the name of the company they worked for. Unfortunately, not many consumers search for you by your name unless you are a celebrity and those searching for a company will land at the company page 9 times out of 10.

To help solve this problem, I always install on WordPress sites I build for clients a powerful plugin called All-In-One-SEO Pack. It works great and can really help take a page up the search engine results by giving you an easy way to add a separate Title, Description & Keywords for each individual page & post of content on your site. Make sure that when you add content to your page to take the extra few moments to fill it out. These simple steps can be the difference between your site ranking on page 9 for your terms or page one. A recent SEO overhaul we did for a client took her for her main keyword which she wasn’t found in the first 12 pages of Google to #4 on Page 1 in under 2 months. Since then she has reaped the benefits of increased traffic and increased income all because we went back and fixed the title, description, and keywords on the static pages of her site.

Time to Iron The Back Half of Your Shirt

So if you have been only ironing the front side of your shirt and focusing only on the visual appeal of your site, it’s time to flip the shirt over and start ironing the back half as well. 2011 is almost here and what a better time to get everything in order. Go set up the SEO & social side of your site now and start gaining the benefits as the new year comes in. If your current site does not permit you to add these components, it might be time for a change to a custom WordPress site that offers these types of things. As always, if you feel this is overwhelming and need assistance, feel free to contact us, we are here to help.

photo credit: banalities

One of the things that we at 210 Consulting love doing is helping new businesses get their online marketing started in the right direction. Unfortunately unless you are always working in the web development, SEO, and online marketing industry, it can be overwhelming to a new company. Also, since you are just starting your new business, money is usually very tight. So, when you go to purchase business cards, accounting software, or a domain name and they offer to get your site up in running in less than 10 minutes for under $100, you are ecstatic to do so because you can now say you are on the internet.

Usually within 10 minutes of a conversation with a new prospective client I can tell if they have one of these types of sites. Why because they have only 5 pages of content, on a standard layout with zero ability of customization, and the adding of plugins or a blog is impossible! When I ask them why they chose this as their website company, the response every time has been this: “Well, I didn’t have a bunch of money to go buy a fancy site and didn’t want to put that much money into something. Once this site makes me some money I will upgrade. Besides my new site looks pretty and will be fine for my online marketing strategy.”

This is when I finally ask the client, Would you order a steak if you were eating at a superior seafood restaurant? No! Because they aren’t known for their great steaks. They are known for serving some of the best fish on the planet. This same principle holds true when you purchase a website from an online postcard company or an accounting software company.

These types of websites are designed to be simple, easy to set up, quick to activate and are inexpensive. But the limitations they possess are huge. My sister-in-law set up a website the other day for her new business and was very excited when she emailed me a link to look at the site. I pulled it up and called her within 2 minutes to tell her to stop wasting her time and that we needed to do something different. We then made a call to one of my connections that was able to create a WordPress Blogsite for her in just under a weeks time, she hired me to do some graphic design work and for under $1,000 we had her an awesome and amazing new site up and running.

So what made her new site that much better & worth the expense? Here are just some of the big differences:

Unlimited Pages of Content versus only 5- The original page had a total of 5 pages of content available. She had maximized that in her first 10 minutes of setup. She could add more, but there was a fee each time she went to add more pages. On her new WordPress.org blogsite, she can now add unlimited number of pages with pictures, videos, links and more. The reason the number of pages is so important is that it is a big factor in how search engines rank your content. More pages make you look more like an authority on a subject and thus the page goes up in the searches.
Power of Plugins- Plugins and widgets are awesome additions to any site. Unfortunately her template 5 page site did not offer any of this. She could not add simple things like a Facebook share button, or a ReTweet button. With a blogsite like WordPress she has the ability to do all these things and much more that not only make it easier for people to share her site with others, but some that also help her with her Search Engine Optimization.
Online Ordering- The template 5 page site also prohibited the addition of any types of online shopping carts or purchase online buttons. Which as her business continues to grow she wants to start offering these features to her clients so that they can purchase her items online and ship them around the world.
True Ownership of Her Content Forever- Unlike the other company, the information is now on her own site. She owns it and nobody else. She does not need to worry about if they decide to raise the price up. Or if they go out of business, or if they move servers and crash things for weeks at a time. The other nice thing is that she has a home base to direct customers to that only her content & products. The customers will not be finding her competition there. While online forums are great sources of online business, you do run the risk of your customer that found you there clicking a link to your competitor that is on the same platform and losing the business to someone else. The same holds true for those those that “have their website on their company site” which is nothing more than just a profile there that drives traffic to your organization and not you. All it takes is one accidental click on a company site and once again your co-worker is getting the sale instead of you.

These are just four of the many reasons why I said she needed to change her site before even really starting. Luckily, she listened to me & took my advice. We worked together with a web developer and built her an awesome looking & highly search engine optimized blogsite. She then did a few training sessions with me to develop her targeted audience and keywords to write about. Since then she has written a few blog posts, added some great content to her site & seen an explosion of traffic. Without this, she would not have known the first thing about what to write about or what types of things people are searching for. Remember, she wants to bake cakes, not become a online marketing expert.

So what are the results?

Well, take a look for yourself. This was an email conversation I had with her today:

Hey Jeremy,

Just got 3 cake orders today for a word of mouth referral! So far since the website has been up I have actually collected about 450.00! Its quite a bit for cakes and chocolate covered yummies….

My response:

Awesome! So how many cakes have you sold in the first 2 weeks now? 5? 6?

Her Response:

8 actually

a gift basket

and 50 chocolate covered pretzels!

As you can see, she is well on her way to regaining the money she spent on building her website and the beauty is that she will continue to profit from the site for a long time thereafter too! So before you sign up for a website through one of these other companies, stop and ask yourself, Would you order steak at a seafood restaurant? Then why am I buying a website through a postcard company?

If your small business needs assistance getting started with your online marketing plan and would like to see this type of results, feel free to contact me to develop your online marketing gameplan. Also, if the picture above has you interested in some delicious chocolate covered pretzels, make sure you visit Vie Bakery. Lastly, if you are wondering what we suggest for a website, we believe you should go with a custom WordPress Site.