Before you build, decide what will happen once it's up. 

Static, informational 'brochure' sites are a thing of the past. Today, competitive web sites are dynamic marketing engines that are a keystone of your business's identity.

To adjust quickly to market conditions, you need to be confident that you can set a strategy and execute it. Your web designer can help ensure you have that flexibility if they know how your company will use the site.

Some questions to answer:

• Who has the technical skills to maintain your site?
• Who in your company is responsible for content decisions?
• How will it dovetail with your larger social media strategy?

Knowing this information at the start of the design process will help you realize a better return on your investment. 

Let's take the questions one by one:

Who has the technical skills to maintain your web site?

Your Web Designer

Your web designer probably maintains a wide variety of sites, and, depending on your employees' skill set and the number of changes per year, that may be a cost-effective option. Of course, they must be able to make changes quickly.

Divert, Hire or Train

If that's not right for your company, you will need to find someone in your org who already has the skills to maintain content, or you will need to train or hire someone. 

Many of Quoin's sites are built on WordPress, and training is always a component of our new site design packages. Most people who can readily operate Microsoft Word can maintain a WordPress site through it's well-tested user interface. However, a basic knowledge of HTML can save time if a tag gets broken.

If you have an in-house IT department, this might be the answer to the question. But suddenly you're asking your IT department to support marketing. This is a relationship you (or they) may not be accustomed to. 

Who in your company is responsible for content decisions?

What we're really asking here is: Who is responsible for strategy decisions? What blog posts will support your new product release? You have a benefit coming up. What do you say about it, and how often? Does the content manager have the images she needs?

How will your new site dovetail with your social media strategy?

Your web site and blog posts are the foundation of your organic search results. These are fundamental to your site's success, whether or not you're also buying online ads.

Traffic between your web site and your social media network is a two-way street. People can find your site first, and then engage with you socially, or vice-versa. But your web site designer will need to provide the right tools for them to do that. 

Some common social media tools are:

• Facebook 'like' buttons for your company's page: When a user clicks this, your site's news begins to populate their feed, keeping you connected to them.
• Facebook 'like' buttons for your individual blog posts: When someone clicks this, they post that particular blog post to their wall, so their friends can see it.
• Twitter 'follow' button: When they click it, your user starts seeing all of your posts in their Twitter feed.
• Retweet button: posts that blog post to the user's feed.
• Many other social networks can be integrated with your web site, and it's a flexible process wherein networks can probably be added or deleted as your strategy changes. But it's best to know up front if, for instance, you're going to be making inroads into GooglePlus.

Set your strategy and stick with it

But not forever. The best thing about online marketing is it's flexibility. Sometimes that flexibility can lead owners and marketing managers to change tack before they know if a strategy has been effective. 

Decide how long you can wait to see results. A month is very short in search engine terms. Make sure you take baseline measurements before you put up your new site. Then stick to your time line. 

Having the right people and strategy in place to support your site will give you your best chance of success.

If you're considering a new web site, please check out our recent work.

Google’s Central Conflict

Here’s the problem Google has: you’ve got a website about sauerkraut, and someone just typed ‘how to make sauerkraut’ into the Google search field and pressed the return button. There are 770,000 articles in their index that match this string. How do they decide which article to serve first in the list? Where does your site rank?

In very simple terms, there are a couple of criteria Google uses to determine PageRank:

1. How many other sites think your site is a trustworthy authority on the keywords entered?
2. How many people have already searched for ‘how to make sauerkraut’ and then clicked on your link?

There are hundreds or perhaps thousands of criteria Google uses or we think Google uses. Here’s a more comprehensive list of Google ranking factors.

Google is Mysterious

Google has to play its cards close to its chest. If it didn’t, far more sites would game the system than currently do. All you’d see when you searched for ‘sauerkraut’ is the ‘Shamwow Sauerkraut Spinner’ (this product doesn’t exist, I just wish it did).

Google won’t tell us directly how to get high rankings. Many times we have to guess from the way sites are ranked, and simple trial and error. It’s a constantly changing game. Web developers can and do gang up on Google to figure out why they do what they do, trading secrets and tips on blogs everywhere. On the other hand, Google can always change its algorithms.

A Few Clues

Google’s Matt Cutts says, “We prefer to focus on things like ‘trust’, ‘authority’, ‘reputation’, PageRank, high quality… The Google philosophy has always been the same: If somebody comes to Google and types ‘x’, we want to return high-quality information about ‘x’.” They repeat this a lot, and many people say, “But that doesn’t tell me how to get to the top of the rankings!”. It doesn’t, but it shows us how we can help Google’s business while they help ours: create trustworthy content that people find useful.

Corollary

Because Google has an enormous team of well-paid engineers focused on outwitting web masters everywhere, beware of anyone who says they know how to get your page to the top of Google’s rankings. As a business owner or marketing director, you can do much of the work yourself by finding partners to link to your site and by writing content that everyone wants to have.

Google wants to know if your site’s content is trustworthy and valuable to their users. It uses the PageRank scoring system to describe your site’s popularity. One large factor of your site’s score is the quality and trustworthiness of the sites that link to yours. Such a link is called a “backlink” in search engine optimization (SEO) terms.

When a site with better popularity than yours links to you, it bumps up your ranking. Government (.gov) and educational (.edu) sites are more trusted by Google, and they are very valuable backlinks to have.

Beware of Toxic Backlinks

A site that is less popular can hurt you, if Google has taken disciplinary action against the site. A toxic site is one that has a history of spreading viruses, spamming people, or using ‘black hat’ SEO techniques to try to boost their popularity artificially on Google. Such a backlink could lower your PageRank.

For this reason, Quoin Design advises its clients to avoid signing up for “link farms” where people trade links in the hope that more links will equal better page rank. It just doesn’t. Your time is better spent writing rich content which is what Google wants more than anything else.

Before you trade links, make sure that the other site’s PageRank is higher than yours. If it isn’t, you might still want to do the deal for other business reasons, but make sure they’re a good internet citizen first. It’s the quality of the backlinks that counts, not the quantity.