Jesse Smith’s Blog

It was a lot of work getting EverybodyInn out the door. It’s here now, but with a brand-new website it feels disturbingly like a tree falling in a deserted forest. If nobody knows your website exists, they certainly won’t be beating a path to your door.

So you gotta figure out how to spread the word. A lot of software companies, like mine, are uncomfortably dependent on the search engines (and in particular, on Google) for their livelihoods. Don’t get me wrong, the Internet is a revolution for small companies that can’t yet afford to attend trade shows or run advertisements in trade magazines, but it does make me uneasy being so dependent on a few companies. Search engines can bring a lot of visitors to your website, if you design your website correctly. And if you don’t… well, then we’re back to that silent forest of falling trees.

I’m somewhat new to this whole Internet marketing thing, so in the course of building the EverybodyInn site, I did a good amount of research on search engine optimization (SEO). That’s the art (definitely not a science!) of writing websites so that the search engines will rank them high for your desired keywords and search phrases.

Here are some of the best articles I’ve found on the topic:

• Website Marketing Advice - This site is actually aimed at bed-and-breakfast owners who are having a website designed for their B&B, but even as a software developer and part-time web designer, I learned some new tricks.
• Search Engine Optimization - Written by the founder of another startup software company (he makes help desk software), this page has lots of good practical tips and also a good discussion on figuring out what keywords you should be focusing on optimizing your pages for (they may not always be what you initially think!).
• On-page SEO for Small Companies - Some overlap with the previous article, but a good summary, and a great discussion on avoiding Google’s penalty for duplicate content (two pages shouldn’t have the same text, but sometimes you do want to say the same thing in several different ways).
• SEO You Should Always Do - I think I’ve done most of these, after reading this article. Another good list of actionable advice. The author of this article (Stephane) also wrote an ebook about increasing traffic to your website. I found it helpful, although perhaps he chose a bit too much breadth of coverage at the expense of depth on any particular topic. But it only cost me $15, and at that price I figured if I learn anything that gets me even one extra sale, it will have paid for itself many times over.

There are also a lot of ethically-dubious “black hat” SEO techniques that I won’t mention here or use on my site. Not only do most of them involve deceiving your visitors/customers, they can also get you banned from the search engines’ listings entirely. (This actually happened to BMW for a while!) And in any case, you don’t really need those techniques. Just write useful content using the sort of language your customers speak, take advantage of some easy and common-sense web design techniques, and avoid other web design techniques that will actively hurt your SEO efforts.

Oh yeah, and be patient. It takes time for Google and other search engines to crawl your website and adjust their rankings.

That part’s no fun.