Your Organization’s Online Brand relies on providing a positive, interactive experience for your customers on your website.  Your website needs to be timely, relevant, engaging and easy to find and navigate to meet the needs of your customers and members.  This year, make a resolution to give your website a little more love and your website and your customers will thank you.

Here are our top New Year’s Web Resolutions for you to create a great online customer experience and grow your brand in 2012.

1. Optimize for Mobile

Mobile search and web browsing is going to be critical to being found on the web.  It is estimated that nearly 36% of the U.S. now owns a mobile device and more than 80% of of small business owners are smartphone owners as well.

What this means to you is that there is a very good chance your site visitors are using a mobile device to search for and browse your website.  Pull out your smartphone or iPad and go to your website.  Spend some time trying to access different articles and content from your mobile and think about how this experience compares to the traditional experience from a typical desktop PC.  If you are frustrated from the experience – imagine how your site visitors feel.

Now, search Google using one of your keyword phrases from a mobile device and see where you rank.  Over the next few months, even high-ranking websites may see a rank decrease from mobile searches if they haven’t enabled user agent-detection for specific devices.  Google just introduced Googlebot-Mobile, a new search engine crawler that specifically looks for mobile type CSS that triggers a mobile stylesheet custom for individual users’ devices.  Someone browsing the web from their iPad is going to have a different experience than someone from their Android smartphone.  Google ranks mobile websites based on factors such as usability, speed, features, and overall performance.

Get started with this web-resolution and register and attend our Free 2012 Search Engine Marketing New Year’s Checklist webinar this Thursday to learn how to optimize your website for mobile search in the New Year.

2. Don’t Forget About the Technical Stuff

As the internet has become more widely adopted by the general public, websites have become easier to set-up and maintain with less technical know-how required.  There are some technical truths that still hold true and taking the time to understand these facts of the web this year will help you improve your customers’ online experience.

There’s no such thing as an “Out-of-the-Box” website.  All websites require customization like naming menu buttons, adding a logo and graphics, changing the color scheme to match your organization’s branding, and adding content that tells visitors who you are and what you do.  All of this takes time and is an ongoing process even after your website is launched live.  Your website will look very different day-to-day from the initial set-up to “Go-Live” day.

Where you host your website does matter.  Your website requires a host that stores your content, CMS software, and other data on enterprise-level computer hardware (servers and hard disk arrays) connected to the internet with high capacity bandwidth making your website accessible online to anyone who visits your website url.  Nowadays, this typically means a cloud environment like Amazon Web Services which offers security, expandable storage and bandwidth when your site experiences unexpected spikes in traffic, and a dedicated IT staff available 24/7 to maintain, update, and repair the infrastructure hosting your website.

Learn more about the Cloud in this great video from SchipulCon 2011 and learn more about website CMS platforms in our free upcoming webinar “How to Select the Best Website CMS for Your Organization’s Website.”

3. Improve What’s Inside Your Website – Content!

You have a beautifully designed website that takes visitors’ breath away when they stop by – but have you focused on developing and implementing a content strategy that communicates to your visitors who you are and what you do once their breath returns?

Great content is relevant to your visitors and is also what attracts search engine crawlers to boost your website’s search rankings.  Content isn’t limited to just text anymore either.  Add photos from recent events, upload digital training and product videos, and integrate your social media accounts with your website to give your website visitors a full view into your organization’s online brand.

January is the perfect time to go through your website and review existing articles, news releases, and other content and make sure your latest press releases isn’t from 1996.  Look at your website through the eyes of your visitors and think about what is not being communicated about your organization that should be and make a list of these items.  Tip: Create a weekly schedule to write new content on these topics in 2012 and you’ll see an increase in your site traffic as well as your search engine rankings.

Learn more great ways to improve your website’s 2012 Content Strategy on the SEM blog and register and attend our Free upcoming webinar “Writing for the Web” to improve your website’s content this year.

Tools for Successfully Keeping Your Web-Resolutions

Here are a few more tools and resources we’ve put together to help you succeed:

• Check Out our 2011 Pages, Videos, and Help Files You Used the Most.
• Find out what’s making waves in web marketing and technology each week in 2012.
• Learn great do-it-yourself web marketing tips.

Send us your questions and come hang out with us at our Houston Headquarters or Silicon Valley, California office!

The countdown to Christmas has started and the Holiday shopping season is in high-gear! We’ve put together some handy tips to make sure that your e-commerce website is ready to handle the increased traffic and provide a great experience for your customers so they’ll keep buying in 2012.

Deck Your Website Walls with Holly

Share your holiday spirit with your customers by adding holiday graphics to your homepage and make it easy for shoppers to find holiday-specific information on your website. Add a Gift Guide with a link from your homepage, offer a special sale item each day, and provide a link with holiday shipping rates and delivery times to your website. Come see the holiday homepage we designed for the Children’s Museum of Houston.

Email Your Customers a Cup of Cheer

During the holiday season, people expect to receive more frequent email newsletters from their favorite stores. Design and send holiday-themed email newsletters at least weekly with your seasonal products and sales.  Find more great tips for your holiday email marketing in our DIY email marketing guide.

Remember Your Social Media Stocking Stuffers

Add a Santa hat to your organization’s Facebook and Twitter profile photos and share your holiday specials across your company’s social media channels. Promoting your products across LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and on your blog will attract new shoppers as well as share your seasonal goodies with your existing customers. Find even more great advice on your holiday social media marketing on our website.

Santa’s Got a Brand New iPhone

Today’s savvy shopper is on the go and that means there is a good chance they are visiting your website on a mobile smartphone or iPad. Make sure your website is optimized so customers can search and shop from a mobile device. A great mobile style sheet can drive traffic to your retail store as well and should include an address and telephone. Pull out your mobile phone and check out Schipul’s mobile style sheet.

Give the Gift of Security

Online shoppers want to know you won’t take their credit cards for a sleigh ride when they purchase online. Check to make sure your SSL certificate is installed correctly and up to date and protect your customers’ personal and financial data. We recommend heading over to GoDaddy’s FAQ for SSL certificate help: http://www.godaddy.com/ssl.

Keep Purchases from Getting Lost in a Snow Storm

You want to make sure the rush of shoppers to your website doesn’t take your site down. Now is the time to make sure your hosting environment can handle big increases in traffic. Schipul hosts our clients’ websites in a cloud-environment that expands and supports site usage spikes affordably. Give us a call if you are looking to update your website hosting environment and have questions.

Show Online Shoppers that Christmas Sweater is Haute

Enhance your customers online shopping experience with product videos and images and increase your holiday sales. You’ll want to make sure your website has the functionality to support digital media first, and then use professional equipment and lighting so your clients can “touch and feel” your products from your website.   For those new to using online video to sell products, check out the VideoCommerce.org’s Holiday Shopping Video Tips Article.

Start Planning for the New Year

Keep increasing your sales year round by reviewing and updating your search engine marketing strategy. Here is a great Holiday SEM slideshare by our very own Jonti Bolles and you can find a ton of free training and tools to boost your website ranking in search engines online at the Schipul SEM Blog.

We recommend updating your shopping cart to the latest version to ensure a smooth holiday shopping experience for both your customers and your staff. If you are looking to add a shopping cart to your website, check out these great shopping carts and then contact us to find out more about adding e-commerce to your website!

Drupal CMS – Ubercart
WordPress CMS – Shopp plugin
Tendenci CMS – Shopify

Me, at the so called "Center of the Univserse" in Seattle

You’ve heard it before: Location, Location, Location. Just as in the brick and mortar world, Location matters in Search Engine Optimization as well. And this trend is not one to be ignored.

Think of it this way: Google is in the business of providing the best answer for people’s questions (questions otherwise known as search queries). Your business may not be the best answer for “coffee” or even “coffee shop,” but “houston coffee shop” or “the woodlands coffee shop”? Now the field is narrowing to just your customers, and your business is rising above the pack.

Microsoft says 53% of Searches have Local Intent. Google says one in three searches happen from a Mobile Device. Location Based Services like Foursquare and Gowalla are growing. Location has been important for years, but with the increase in the importance of the mobile web, it’s more important now than ever.

What does it mean to your business?

Be sure your site is optimized for the geography of your customers.

How?

Top 5 Tips: How to optimize your site for Location

1. Claim your Google Places Listing

You may have noticed that when you do a search, you often see more than just the traditional 10 organic Search Results. Sometimes you see images, sometimes video, and often Red Pins and a map with a list of businesses based on their relevance to your search and proximity to you.

These pins represent Google Places Pages. If Google is aware of your business, they have already made a Place Page for you. Now it’s your opportunity to claim the listing and add as much relevant information about your business as possible. To get started, look for the link at the top right labeled “Business Owner?” and click.

If your business is not listed, go to google.com/places to get started.

More tips on Optimizing Google Places Listings from The SEM Blog

After you’ve conquered Google, check out Bing’s version of Google Places – Bing Business Portal

2. If possible, include your address in the sidebar or footer on every page

This is dual purpose – for visitors and for Google. You don’t want site visitors (potential customers) to have to search all over for your phone number and address. This is also helpful for Google because it reinforces your address and city name on every page Google indexes.

In the SEO world these references are known as “Citations” – anytime your business name and phone number or address appear together on the web, even if there is no link to your site. This adds validity to the address on your Google Places listing and tell Google you are relevant (similar to link backs).

For some sites, you just can’t add every location to the footer because there are too many. Consider text like “serving XYZ geography” with a link to you locations page.

3. If you have multiple locations, create separate pages on your site for each

If you have multiple locations, consider creating separate pages for each. Each page can stand on its own for the keywords related to that city or neighborhood. Be sure that every page has unique content, or you may get dinged by Google for having duplicate content.

Ideas for content: an embedded Google map showing the locations, text directions from at least two points of interest in the city, a paragraph of text on what that location specializes in, photos of the locations, information about the Staff, etc. etc.

Don't Stop at the homepage, optimize interior pages as well

4. Make sure city information is in title tag, meta description on interior pages

Don’t stop at the homepage, make sure geography terms are sprinkled in throughout the entire site. Add your city or state (or neighborhood) where it makes sense in your page’s content, title tag, and meta data. Consider every page of your site, as each page will stand alone in its specific keywords.

5. Submit to applicable directories

Tackled all of the above and looking for more? Consider submitting your site to directories. To find applicable Directories, follow SEOMoz’s advice on finding linkbacks for your business advice and do a search for Cityname + Business Type + Listings/Businesses/Results. You will get a list of links to various directories that catalog your type of business.

Want More SEO Tips from the Schipul Team?

Check out blog posts from the Schipul Search Engine Marketing Team over at TheSEMBlog.com and follow us on twitter @SEMBlog.

I’ve been working here at Schipul for almost a year now. I came here after 4+ years of working for the Society for the Performing Arts in Houston, TX. During this time, my mind has not strayed far from trying to find better ways for performing arts organizations to harness the power of the Internet to enhance audience development and, more importantly, sell more tickets.

This post is a first step in helping performing arts institutions to better understand and use the Internet for their organizations and their artists. I welcome your feeback, and hope you forward this on to anyone you know that works for a performing arts organization if you find it useful.

A Reality: Performing Arts needs SEO

You probably think an organization like Lincoln Center wouldn’t need Search Engine Optimization. You’re wrong.

Despite being quite familiar with their site, I had to Google them first to find their site. Today’s web user is very reluctant to start slapping .com on anything you want on the web.  For instance, try typing whitehouse.com into your browser. You will not find our President.

Need more proof? Take a look at this report from Google Insights about searches including the words lincoln and center. NOTE: These results are from New York state.

I don’t know about you, but I know Lincoln Center is in New York City. Yet above you can see that many people actually search for “lincoln center nyc” or “lincoln center ny”. Again, these are searched from the state of New York. The point here is that regardless of how strong your brand or position is in a patron’s mind, they will more likely be Googling you or the performer first.

Wait! Don’t go optimizing your performances just  yet. You need to develop your strategy first. You’re probably thinking you’ll succeed if you start optimizing around the same time you start marketing the performances through your other outlets. That’s not going to work. You need at least three months of continuous optimization to start getting attention of the great and powerful Google. This means your online marketing should not, in any way, be tied to your other marketing plans. Why?

Newspapers are dying because they thought reprinting their paper on the web was all they needed to do. They were wrong. You must market to an online audience (i.e. Google) if you want people to find your web site. This means you need to start treating Google like your oldest subscriber and donor.

A Challenge: Performing Arts needs Video

Do you remember when we all thought how crazy it was to have a camera on a cell phone? Now we have phones offering HD video! But there’s a HUGE drawback as it’s not so easy to transmit video via today’s web. However, as the Internet continues to become more mobile, and the transmission lines get faster and more widespread, sharing video is going to become as ubiquitous as photo sharing is today.

Today, many performing artists rely on photos to tell their story. Take this image from Diavolo’s Trajectoire.

But doesn’t this video do a better job of telling their story?

Of course, it’s not just about presenting it, it’s HOW you share the video. Take this video I’ve embedded from Alvin Ailey Dance Company. NOTE: Alvin Ailey has restricted our ability to share their videos to this format.

Revelations from AlvinAileyAmericanDanceTheater on Vimeo.

Not very impressive, is it? If you do decide to click on it, you will bear witness to one of the greatest displays of American choreography the world has ever seen. But if you’re like most web users, you are more likely to trust the Diavolo video link (32K+ hits) over the link from Alvin Ailey (26K+ hits).

Proving a picture is worth 6,000 clicks.

Artists and presenting organizations have to work together to provide better opportunities for patron video consumption. It’s not about showing entire pieces or performances, it’s about whetting the appetite of an audience that is starved for good content. And like we’ve seen above, how you allow your patrons and fans to present is important as well.

An Adventure: Check in, Experience the Performing Arts

Do you remember your reaction when you first heard someone talk about Twitter? It was probably the same reaction you have had listening to someone talk about Foursquare, Gowalla or SCVNGR. I must admit, I long fought against the location-based check in services. However, the more I learn about them, the more I begin to see the dawning of a new level of personal interaction.

The purpose behind these services isn’t to alert people of your location, it’s to tell a story about a location. Every time you walk into a special place, like a performing arts venue, a memory is made. You are not the person you were after you’ve walked into one of your special locations.

For a performing arts organization’s patrons, this is a regular experience every time they walk into your performance hall. The hall is your sandbox, and you now have some pretty amazing toys to play with in it. Whether you create photo contests with Instagram or Hipstamatic, or offer discounts to patrons who check in via Gowalla or SCVNGR, you now have the ability, generally for FREE, to create memories and expand your patrons’ experiences beyond the stage and performance.

Performing Arts Online

I want to explore these and other ways the Internet can be used to tell the story of performing arts over the course of this year. I can tell you now, the performing arts groups are not fully utilizing the power of the web to further their mission and vision. My goal, my New Year’s resolution, is to help change that.

I hope this is a first step in the right direction.

We love seeing well though out updates to tools we use regularly.  Google’s latest search page re-design makes finding the content online you want even even easier.  While many of these features are not exactly new, it’s nice to see them placed a bit more in the forefront so many might be new to you!

Here are a few Google search options to know about – you can click on the image above to blow up our labeled screenshot or watch this handy video to learn from the mouths of Google all-stars themselves:

1. Universal Search options – the Web is an enormous place and narrowing down what you’d like to search through can make it easier for you to find relevant content.  Search through the entire Web, news items, blogs, images and more.  Your time is valuable and Google is helping you reclaim some of that
2. Set your preferred timeframe – if you only want content added recently or want to take a step back in time and look up Web site results from 2009, Google helps you make it happen.
3. Location location location – given how important location-based marketing is these days, Google lets you  select where your information is coming from and that doesn’t just mean geographically speaking either.  You can also select to search your ‘social circle’ on Google for content, which will pull in links from you Google chat pals and contacts, direct connections linked from your Google profile and even content from your Google Reader feeds.  Learn more about Google Social Search here.
4. New or re-visited sites, you decide – sometimes you’re hungry for something new and refreshing.  If you don’t want to go back and visit sites Google knows you’ve already visited, you don’t have to.  Here’s to new adventures!
5. Pick your view, any view – Google even lets you customize your own search results page view:
   1. The Google Wonder Wheel breaks down your search term into different categories or clusters, giving you some more search ideas
      
   2. Google timeline gives you a different view of search results, for the more linear-minded
      
   3. Related search gives you extra search ideas that may help you find the information that you need (hey, we could all use a little help now and then)
6. Something different – Google is pretty darn smart and these ‘something different’ search options might help give you an extra boost into other search possibilities in a similar category of your original search.
   

Example of Webmaster Tools Page Speed Graph

Page Speed

Google has recently released an entire sub-site to improve on website speed. The site includes a tools page which highlights among others Page Speed which is Firefox plugin for developers. The also showcase a new report in Webmaster Tools to show how quickly your site loads. Many of these tools give you stats about your site speed as well as suggestions on how to improve it. These suggestions include:

1. Combining external files such as CSS style sheets
2. Minifying or zipping javascript files.
3. Using image sprites or images optimized for the web
4. Minimizing DNS lookups (content from other sites)

Google Page Speed in Chrome showing data load times

*This website embeds our Twitter feed, which requires an extra DNS lookup and can increase the load time. You will have to decide the importance of similar widgets for your site. We like our Twitter feed and Flickr pics, so we’ll take the small performance hit to keep those. But, we don’t include other widgets from most of our other social media profiles so we can speed up our blog. Finding the right balance for your site may take some testing and tough decisions, but speed is definitely something to keep in mind.

Social Search and Authority

Speed is very important to Google themselves. As the real-time web continues to change minute by minute, Google is beginning to bring some of that data into its results. You may have noticed that Google now displays twitter results at the top of some searches.

The first part of the ranking system is the time of the tweet. Google generally displays the most recent tweets first so searchers will have up-to-the minute results to their queries. This speed combined with link authority shapes how searchers can get the latest Glee news (or other important things of course).

Google Search with Twitter Results displayed above the regular results

As you can see, this search result shows twitter responses. While the exact science behind choosing tweets is not know, we do know that Google follows a similar model to their search results. Incoming links to a website can raise its ranking, and similarly more followers and incoming links to a Twitter profile can give that Twitterer more authority. There are similar theories out there, but we know that Google is ranking authority somehow.

The Facebook Factor

Google also has agreements with Facebook to bring your status updates and Facebook info to the Search Results as well. Before you freak out, yes, you can keep these things from the search engines using the Privacy features in Facebook. They have a dedicated page for Search Privacy Settings. I have mine set to Everyone, but I understand that may not work for you. Other options include Friends and Networks, Friends of Friends, and Friends Only. From the Search Privacy Settings you can preview your public profile, which will give you an idea of what information Google will see about you (see below).

Facebook Seach Privacy Setting Options

Google can also use this public Facebook profile to show authority. If you do not have your own website, doing a vanity search may show your Facebook profile as the top result for your name. I have my personal website (JMO), but my Twitter feed and Facebook profile both rank above it because of the authority those sites carry. I urge you to search for your name to see where your social profiles rank.

Tips for you

What steps can you take to insure people find you fast?

1. Setup your website in Webmaster Tools and use Google Chrome or the Page Speed plugin for Firefox to check your site speed.
2. Follow the suggestions from those tools.
3. Link to your Social Media profiles from your own website.

Google is still king of search engines and of how people can discover you. It’s up to you to make sure they can do that quickly.

Here are some highlights so far from Santa Clara

1. Danny Sullivan Keynote at SMX West
2. Keyword Research is the Bedrock of your SEO Foundation
3. Search and Reputation Management presented at SMX West 2009
4. Google’s SearchWiki, Customized & Personalized Results at SMX West 2009
5. SEO Status Report Metrics – SMX West 2009
6. 301 Redirect, How Do I Love You? Let Me Count The Ways at SMX West 2009
7. WordPress SEO Plug-ins from Tools Sessions at SMX West 2009

Great work so far Jonti! Now travel safe and get back here as soon as possible, we miss you.

Jason McElweenie

For more information on SEM, Social Media or Web Design visit Schipul.com