Jenn Mears Web Design

This is an article I found today on Lorelle’s amazing Wordpress blog. It’s the perfect answer to that ever-popular question, “How do I get my site to rank high in Google?” I wish there was a “silver bullet answer” to this question too, but it’s a not so much a magic formula as it is a carefully planned campaign.
Lorelle does a great job of explaining the various factors, but in a nutshell, Google bases it’s page ranking system on a combination of the following factors:

Links: Quality over quantity. Don’t go for those “pay for us to link to you” services. Google prefers a few links to your site on well established web sites rather than a ton of links on spam sites.

Domain Age: Spam sites tend to be fly-by-night operations and the longer your site has been around, the better. However, just letting your site sit there on the server isn’t enough. Google also notices the freshness of your site’s content.

Click Through Rate: Google checks on how people find your site and how they get there, whether via a search engine or from a bookmarking site.

Trends, fads and seasons: Keywords have trends too. So you can probably stop typing in “Paris Hilton Video” into your meta-tags now. ;^}

Posting Frequency: Like Alex the Lion says in Madagascar “You know, keep it fresh!”. The more you reward your loyal visitors with useful new information, the more they will visit and recommend your site via incoming links.

Keywords: There are a few areas where it’s really important to place the words that you think people will use to search for your site. Titles, as in the title that shows up at the top of your browser when you view a page, links, headings and tags.

Traffic: How heavily your site is visited, which pages people go to and how long they spend clicking around.

Code: It’s important to keep your site’s code clean and easy to scan through. Hiding your text in a fancy animation or burying important info under tons of scripting makes the engine work harder. I tend to think of code as being like motor oil, the cleaner it is, the smoother your site runs.

Things are happening around here! Three companies have hired Jenn Mears Web Design LLC to create new websites. They are:

Milestones Unlimited, P. C.: This is a company that was looking to create a brand new site for their care management and consulting business based in Hopkinton, MA. They are licensed social workers who are dedicated to helping seniors and their families find the best care available in times of transition.
Design Objective: To create a site that will present the services offered by Milestones Unlimited in a way that is easily read and understood by the end user. After surveying a number of similar web sites, it was determined that a simple, easy to follow navigation would be most important, followed by easy to read content that could quickly be scanned by the reader.

Loynd Capital Management: There are several internet services that help users choose a Chartered Financial Analyst and these services often direct the user to the CFA’s website via a link. Wishing to capitalize on this service, Geoffrey Loynd, MBA contacted Jenn Mears Web Design about setting up an informational site for both prospective and current clients.
Design Objective: In order to present the company to prospective clients, a home page with a strong sense of the site’s purpose was needed. Loynd Capital Management’s logo is a nautical steering wheel and it flows smoothly into a theme of aiding navigation through today’s financial waters. The aim of the content is to guide the client through the services offered and help them to make informed decisions.

I’ll try to keep posting articles on things like advertising and search engine optimization, but from here on out it’s going to be ABC (always be coding) for a while!

Advertiser: Someone who wants to place their ads on a site.

API: A little bit of code that acts as a go-between for your site and another web site that is providing some sort of service on the page i.e. Google’s Adsense.

Browser Cache: Your browser program, Internet Explorer for example, will keep a record of your internet wanderings for a short while. Sometimes there is so much behind the scenes site traffic, that your browser starts to behave like an overloaded airport control tower and a lot of flights (pages) are left circling, waiting to land. Clearing your cache on a regular basis, keeps your web browser running faster.

Channels: A method Google has for organizing your advertising. It allows you to become your own Marketing Department and track which ads are the most effective for your site.

Click: A term used by advertisers and publishers meaning when an ad is clicked on with the user’s mouse. If you are deciding on a publisher for your ads, it’s important to define how a click is counted. Is it determined by each time the click happens (no matter if it’s from the same user), or does each click have to be from a different user?

Click-Through-Rate: A percentage that is determined by the number of clicks on an ad, divided by the number of impressions. For example, your banner ad for an upcoming sale is delivered 100 times on a web page, and one person clicks it, then the CTR would be 1%. This is a good measure for determining the effectiveness of a particular ad campaign.

Contextual Advertising: When the API that generates ads for your page does it by scanning your content for keywords.

Cost-Per-Action (CPA): The amount an advertiser must pay when a user completes an action once they have clicked onto their ad. For example, a user might click on an ad for a supermarket, but in order for that click to be counted, they have to enter a contest via a form on the page that ad took them to.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC): The amount an advertiser must pay when a user clicks on their ad.

Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions (CPM): The amount an advertiser must pay for every thousand impressions of their ad viewed by a the site’s users. What exactly counts as an impression? That is a term that is definitely up for grabs in the online marketplace. What it boils down to is a question of you and your advertiser service agreeing on what an impression should be. (Geekery: the M stands for Mille or, a thousand in French)

(Wikipedia has a pretty good breakdown of the click/cost thing here)

Destination URL: When your page’s ads contain links, this is the URL of what they are linking to. This is important for blocking competitors’ ads from appearing on your site.

Display URL: This is the URL displayed on an ad to identify the advertiser’s site to the viewer.

Effective CPM: An effective Cost Per Thousand Impressions rate (eCPM for short) is determined by calculating the amount paid per thousand clicks. If your site has received 10,000 views of a page that you host ads on, and Service A pays you $50 then your eCPM rate for Service A is $5. If you are the publisher of the ads,you can use this to compare with other services you host and you can gauge which services can gain you more revenue. If you are the advertiser, you can use this as a measure of which ad campaigns are the most effective.

Link Clicks: A term for when a user clicks on a link unit.

Link Click Through Rate (CTR): The number of link clicks, divided by the number of link impressions.

Link eCPM: Similar to the standard eCPM (see above), the cost of a thousand impressions for a particular link. This helps to a publisher calculate the amount they will earn per every thousand links that are shown to their users.

Link Impressions: The number of times a link unit is viewed.

Link Unit: An advertising term for an ad format where a link is displayed that is relevant to the content of that page. Each link takes the user to a page that contains ads related to that link.

Page Impression: Defined as every time a user views a page displaying ads. This is a separate calculation than the number of times a particular ad is viewed.

Publisher: Someone who is hosting ads on their site.

Didn’t see a term you were looking for? Need a second opinion? Adglossary has a complete list for your enjoyment.