Myths

Myth: Anyone with a Computer Can Design a Website

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Myth: Anyone with a computer can design a website.

Well, anyone with a computer can get a website online. But just having the right tools does not make you an expert–and there’s a lot more to web design than getting some information online.

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and today I want to talk about another myth that is very common related to the internet and websites, and that is that anyone with a computer can design a website.

When I started building websites, there was no such thing as web design software. We built everything by typing code into a text editor. Now, there are all kinds of sophisticated software programs to make the web designer’s job easier. And even tools for the non-designer to use to get a website online.

On the one hand, this is a great development and has brought the cost of web design down dramatically. On the other hand, it has given birth to a myth that anyone with a computer can design a website. The truth is, there’s a lot more to web design than getting some information online.

It’s probably true that anyone with a computer now can produce a website. But that is not quite the same as designing a website. And even though anyone with a design program–with the graphic design software–might have the tools to design a website with, it does require some experience to design an effective website.

I would say this: that just having the right tools doesn’t make you an expert. For example, I might have the most sophisticated spreadsheet program in the world, but that doesn’t make me a chief financial officer. The CFO of a corporation needs to have the experience to understand corporate finance, and they need certain training to be able to do a good job of managing the corporation’s money.

In the same way, you can have the right design programs, the software, and the apps. But even though you might be able to turn out a website with it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that website is designed. I happen to have a pipe wrench and a blowtorch, and I can sweat pipe, but you probably wouldn’t want me installing your sink. You want somebody with the right training and the right experience, so you know that that system is going to work right and not leak for you.

To design a website, I need to know more than how to use my graphic design software. I need to understand the business purposes of the website. I need to understand how the graphic design communicates the message that the corporation wants to communicate. I need to understand user interface design. I need to have some technical expertise so the site can get found by search engines. And I really have to be able to put myself in the mindset of the ideal customer and how they’re going to interact with that website, so I can make the site inviting and easy to use.

You know, it’s interesting, they did a survey of people who held the job title of web designer and they asked them, “What was your previous job title before you were a web designer?” The number one previous job title for web designers across the United States was “graphic designer.” That’s not a big surprise; that’s a natural transition. The number two previous job title for web designers was “waiter.” That’s an indication of how easy it is with the right apps, the right computer software, to turn out a website.

You can buy templates and pre-designed websites and fill in the blanks, and you can have a website in ten minutes, as one corporation famously advertises on TV. That’s a great way to get a placeholder up if someone is just starting out in business and they don’t have a lot of marketing budget. But that’s not the same as web design.

Web design is the major reason why people either stay on a website when they visit it, or they leave the website. The user experience design is something that the application, the graphic design tool, cannot turn out. That’s something that requires experience to create. Not only so, but design is the main reason why people trust a brand or trust a company when they’re visiting a website; or, why they would choose not to trust that company or brand.

It’s all in the design, and those are very subtle things that a piece of software cannot do for you.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: Anyone with a Computer…

Myth: Posting on Facebook helps you rank at the top of search results

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Myth: Posting on Facebook will help you rank at the top of search results.

Not true. Although Facebook can be part of a valuable marketing strategy, you can post on Facebook a million times and still not have any impact on your website–or your business–getting found by new customers.

Here’s a question I got this week from one of the readers of my book:

“Dear Steve:

“I’ve been considering to hire a company for our website management and SEO that is basically relying on regular postings to our Facebook to improve SEO. They charge $300 initial set up and $99 every month for help with our postings. When I read your book it doesn’t seem like you post to social media. Can you please explain how you improve SEO? It seems like that there is more than one way to increase traffic to our site?.Also, how do I measure traffic to my site, and how do we measure whether we are successful or not? Please feel free to educate and enlighten me. Thank you.”

So, thank you to my reader for sending that. Those are all great questions.

First of all, a brief word of caution. If anyone tells you they’re going to improve SEO by helping you post to Facebook, I recommend you consider looking for a different vendor. Although Facebook can be a valuable part of an overall marketing strategy, Facebook posts will not do anything directly to improve your ranking on the search engines. And, while it’s possible to make an impact on SEO for $99/month, many of the packages I’ve seen at that price are smoke and mirrors, and I’d ask a lot of questions before buying. Where social media can have a small impact on SEO is when a lot of people are actually talking about you on social media. And that doesn’t happen just by posting on Facebook (or Twitter, or anywhere else).

The good news is that you do have options. And in a minute I’ll talk about what does work for SEO.

But first I want to clarify something the reader said. Actually, I do post on social media. I have some clients for whom that’s an integral part of their content marketing strategy that we helped them develop. We also do a very good job with Facebook marketing for certain types of clients.

I also have a number of SEO clients for whom I regularly post on Facebook (like the service my reader asked about), and I do not even charge them for the service. I think a lot of them may not even know that I’m posting for them, because I often fail to “toot my own horn,” so to speak, to tell people what I’m doing for them. For these SEO clients, I don’t post on Facebook because of any value it has for SEO. Rather, it’s so that their Facebook business page stays current with regular activity, and so that Facebook won’t deactivate the page due to inactivity.

Why does someone offer this Facebook posting service and call it SEO? Well, it’s easy to do and extremely inexpensive, so they’re making a very high margin on the service. And even though it has no value for SEO and probably has no value to the business, it’s highly visible. So the business who subscribes to the service can see the activity and feel like they’re getting something for their money–even though they’re not. The real SEO work that I do is mostly invisible. The client can’t see my code changes, or server optimizations, or all the work that I do out in the “ether” in creating citations and backlinks. The clients who measure their revenue growth, and ask new customers “How did you hear about us?” know the tremendous value of what we deliver. But they can’t see any of the SEO work.

That begs the question: What does work for SEO? And what is SEO anyway?

SEO is the science and art of getting your business found by people who are searching online for your business. The strategies we use will vary depending on the type of business we’re working for. My reader who asked the question is working for an eye doctor. So their potential customers are searching online using terms like “optometrist,” “ophthalmologist,” or “eye doctor.” Here are the key factors that will make a difference for them?and this will also be true if you’re any type of service professional in a local market (dentist, chiropractor, veterinarian, eye doctor, lawyer, or any type of home improvement contractor?remodeler, home builder, electrician, plumber, landscaper, door & window company, tree surgeon, etc.):

Picking the right terms to target. This can make the difference between getting found by 5 people or 5,000. Often the best terms are not the most obvious ones.
Optimizing your website so the search engines understand what you’re all about. This includes website code, title tags, description tags, local search schema, alt tags, and quality hosting.
Building accurate and well-thought-out directory listings for your business (citations).
Building quality inbound links (backlinks). These are very hard to do right, and can hurt you if done wrong, so typically you will want to steer clear of a cheap backlink service.
Managing and improving your online reputation (reviews).

There are lots of other ways besides SEO to get people to your website and to get new customers for your business, like social media, PR, content marketing, email marketing, online advertising, direct mail, media advertising (in TV, radio, magazines, etc.), mail inserts, billboards, and more. But SEO is often the most cost effective.

The best way to measure traffic is to install some type of analytics software, like Google Analytics (but there are others) and track the website visitors. Measuring traffic is not always the best way to measure success. It is possible with a good local SEO campaign to get lots of new customers with a proportionately smaller increase in site traffic. And it’s possible to increase site traffic a lot without significantly increasing your business. Ultimately the best measure of success is business growth?more customers and more revenue?and it is very helpful to ask each new customer how they heard about you.

It’s also very important to look at how well your website converts visitors (traffic) into leads (potential new customers who are contacting you). If 1,000 potential customers come to your website but only 10 of them contact you, that’s a pretty low conversion rate. For that matter, your website itself can increase or decrease your referral business (without reference to any SEO), because people who are referred to you often check out your website first, and your website may determine whether or not they actually call.

Marketing strategies are not a one-size-fits-all solution. There are quite a wide range of options for you, not only for SEO (ranging from a light SEO campaign all the way up to a very intensive campaign), but also for your website, social media, and other ways to improve your marketing. Typically I make recommendations for my clients based on what they’re wanting to accomplish, how much they want to grow their revenue, and what the overall marketing budget is. So I ended up inviting my reader into a conversation where we can decide on a strategy together based on a reasonable budget for their specific goals.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: Posting on Facebook helps with SEO

Steve Johnsen is a marketing strategist, a business coach, and the Founder of Cloud Mountain Marketing. He is also the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller, 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee.

Myth: Good Design Isn’t Needed with Good SEO

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Myth: Good design isn’t needed if you’re already at the top of search engine results.

Well, I would say that, actually, both are needed!

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk about this idea that you don’t need good web design if you’re already showing up at the top of search engine results. The reality is that these are two separate things, and actually both are needed.

Using your website to get you business, to get you new customers, is actually a two-step process.

The first step is, you have to get found. When people go online to search for a service provider, you want them to find you. You want them to find your website. But once they click on that link and come to your website, then your website needs to connect with them emotionally and convince them to either pick up the phone and call you, or come into your store location, or fill out the contact form, or however it is that they get in touch with you to start doing business with you.

And that is a function of design.

Good web design makes an emotional connection with people. It causes them to trust you and to trust your brand. It makes them want to do business with you. So actually, you need both. You need to be at the top of the search engine results so that people can find you, and you need good web design to make that emotional connection with people so that once they come to your site, they’re wanting to do business with you.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: Good Design Isn’t Needed with SEO

Myth: If You Build It, They Will Come

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Myth: If you build it, they will come.

Absolutely not true. When you launch a website, there are a lot of things that need to happen in order to get your website found by the people that need to connect with you.

Hi, I’m Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk to you today about a common myth related to websites, and that is this idea that if you build it and launch it, they’re going to come to you. Well, many, many business owners have discovered that this just isn’t the case.

Now, we all know that this is not true in the offline world, but somehow we imagine that it’s going to be true in the online world, that all I need to do is get my website built and launched and then automatically I’m going to have people finding it and get customers from that website.

Your website is just a collection of files that sits on a computer somewhere in the world. Once that website is launched, nobody knows that it exists, and it really takes a lot of work to get people to find your website. Expecting that you’re going to launch a website and automatically have people finding it is sort of like opening a new business, printing up a whole bunch of business cards, and sitting at your new desk with your business cards waiting for people to show up. It’s just not going to happen. At a minimum, you need a sign out on the street that says what kind of business you’re in so that people can walk in.

But more than that, when you launch a new business, most people understand that you need some advertising. You need to send out some flyers and maybe need to make some phone calls. You want to do something to get people to learn about your new business and come and seek you out.

Well, this is also true with your website. Your website is a great way to get people to find you, but once the site is launched, it does take a fair amount of effort to get it found by the people who are likely to become your best customers. In fact, the effort involved in getting your website found by the right people is usually a lot greater than the effort in getting your website built and launched in the first place.

When we’re sitting down with new clients working on their web design, one of the things that we do differently from many other designers is figure out the long-term strategy for how their website is going to grow their business so that this strategy can actually be incorporated into the design process. But even when your site is already built and launched, you can always go back and develop a plan for getting your site found and for making the site effective as your number 1 employee.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: If You Build It, They Will Come

Myth: SEO Is Simply Pay-As-You-Go

by Steve Johnsen Leave a Comment

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Myth: SEO is simply pay-as-you-go.

Not true! There’s actually a huge difference between pay-per-click and SEO, or search engine optimization.

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and I’m going to talk about pay-per-click advertising and search engine marketing, as well as search engine optimization (or SEO), and how these can be done more effectively and how they can help you grow your business.

One of the things that I hear sometimes is that SEO or search engine optimization is pay-as-you-go, which means that it’s simply a matter of more dollars in resulting in more visitors to my website. The more dollars I put in, the more visitors I instantly get to my website.

Well, that’s just simply not true. And a lot of times people confuse what is called pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization or SEO. Both are ways to get people to your website who are online searching for a service provider. But the two models work very, very differently.

Pay-per-click is exactly what it sounds like; it means I am paying the search engine to have somebody click on the link that leads to my website. In that kind of model, it is true in a sense that the more dollars I pay for clicks, the more people I’m going to get to my website. With a pay-per-click model like Google AdWords?that’s a very common example of a pay-per-click type of advertising?the more money I pay, the more people I’m going to get as a kind of a general rule. And as soon as I stop paying, I’m going to stop getting people to my website.

Search engine optimization works very, very differently. Search engine optimization means doing a whole lot of technical things (which I’m not going to get into) to make the search engines think that your website is the best result for people who are online searching for a service provider. Therefore, when somebody goes in and searches for the kind of business that you provide, the search engine is going to display you as the best link. You’re not paying to be put in that position?at least not directly. You’re not paying the search engine to be put in that position, but rather you’ve done a whole lot of work to make the search engine consider you as the best result for certain people.

Now with SEO, you’re not going to see an immediate result. It usually takes time to do the work to get your website to the place where it is seen as one of the best options by the search engine. But once you get there, it’s very easy to maintain that position if you keep doing the work. You can stay ahead of the competition at a much lower overall cost than with the pay-per-click campaign.

Now the funny thing is, even with a pay-per-click campaign?although it is a model where if I pay more, I get more traffic?most of the pay-per-click advertisers give quality scores to the campaigns and the ads and the web pages, which means that there can be as much as an 800% difference on Google AdWords with the amount of traffic you’re getting for your campaign with the exact same budget, depending on how well it’s done.

So, one person may be running a Google AdWords campaign spending $3,000 a month and getting half of the visitors that somebody else is getting on a budget of $1,000 a month, because the one who’s investing $1,000 a month is doing it right, and doing it really, really well, with high quality scores, whereas the person who’s spending $3,000 a month is just throwing money at the wall and it’s not getting nearly as much result.

Every day, there are hundreds of people online searching for you and the service you provide, and I want them to find you. So this is not a simple pay-as-you-go model, but rather it’s a matter of figuring out what is the best strategy, short-term and long-term, for your business?whether to use a pay-per-click search-engine-marketing campaign, or to use search engine optimization campaign, or both?and to do them in such a way that you get the maximum result for your investment, to make your website effective as your number 1 employee.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: SEO Is Simply Pay-As-You-Go

Myth: All Web Hosting Is the Same

by Steve Johnsen Leave a Comment

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Myth: All web hosting is the same.

Simply not true. There’s a huge range of types and qualities of web hosting providers and in the impact that that web hosting has on your business.

Hi, I’m Steve Johnsen and I’m going to talk to you today about web hosting. There is a myth out there that is very common, that all web hosting is the same.

The fact is that there are all kinds of web hosting providers, and a wide range in the quality of their equipment, how that equipment is used, the types of data centers the hosting is in, and–what’s most important and the bottom line–in the impact that web hosting can have on growing your business.

Now, web hosting is one of those terms that kind of makes people’s eyes glaze over, so I hope I don’t get too geeky and technical on you here. But it’s really important to understand what web hosting is. Your website is actually a collection of files sitting on a computer somewhere. Typically, it’s a collection of text documents with some HTML and CSS code, as well as some documents containing software code, along with some pictures and maybe some videos. And if there’s software, the computer it’s on needs to have the ability to run that software. But either way, your website lives on a computer somewhere. It’s a collection of files on a computer.

That computer may be a good computer, or it may be a really old, really slow computer. It may be on a computer with ten websites on it, or it may be on a computer with ten thousand websites. Now, you know on your own personal computer, if you get too many windows or documents open, your computer can really slow down.

Well, if you think about it, if you have a computer that has ten thousand websites running?which, by the way, is a very common scenario with cheap web hosts?that computer is going to be very slow. Not only that, it could be an older computer with not so much horsepower and not so much memory. And not only that, that computer could be stuck off in a corner, far away from the Internet backbone, which means that the person who wants to access your website has to go through a whole bunch of connections to get there.

The end result is that you can have a website that’s on a slow computer that’s running even slower because of the ten thousand other websites running on the same machine that’s far away from the Internet backbone. And that experience for your customer visiting your website can be less than ideal.

Your pages may load slowly. Occasionally those computers with ten thousand websites on them can be targets for hackers, and you can get some malware or some sources of spam (or worse) on the computer that’s hosting your website.

This is not only a bad experience for your users; the search engines don’t like those kinds of situations either. So your site is probably not going to rank nearly as well on one of those cheap web hosts. And I’ve seen many occasions where this got someone’s website banned from Google.

It’s also possible to host your website on a really fast, new computer, in a good data center that’s close to the Internet backbone, on a machine that has only a few websites on it (with a lot of resources dedicated to your site). In that situation, your site is going to perform a lot better. The search engines are going to like it a lot better. More people are going to be finding you in online search. More people are going to be liking your website when they do find you. And even though it’s very hard to measure and nobody’s going to tell you they hired you because you have a good web host, this usually results in your getting more business.

The difference in investment between a quality web host and a cheap web host can be significant, but when you compare it to the opportunity cost of how much business you could lose on a cheap web host versus how much more business you could gain on a high quality web host, to me it’s an investment that is well, well worth it. In fact, there is no way I would ever want to put any of my websites on anything but a high quality web host.

Byte to Byte with Steve Johnsen

Myth: All Web Hosting Is the Same