Web Programming Answers

Animal Shelter Marketing Letter

More info for animal shelters needing web sites or web marketing……..

… I’ve been building/rebuilding web sites for animal rescue groups. It’s my way of giving as I don’t deal with the shelter that well. I do two basic things: 1) build the site, 2) market the organization on the web.

The web sites I build are usually built on free software called Joomla. Instead of upload stories or changing HTML directly you would login to the administrator and publish your stories from there. If I do help out we don’t have to use that system, but I do recommend it because 1) multiple people can update the site; 2) you can easily grab email addresses from people interested in your org; 3) we can often add new features really fast. For instance I can add an online store in an hour or two; it uses a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor so you don’t need to know any html — really a whole lot more.

Here are all the add ons to the base product:
http://extensions.joomla.org/

The main issue, though, is marketing. I assume that you want your web site to be found when someone types in
nh shelter
dogs for adoption
Or the like.
The business of making that happen is called SEO or search engine optimization. SEO used to be mechanical and very easy to do. Now the mechanical part is just the pre-requisite to the real work of web marketing. It’s very labor intensive (takes a lot of time, though the tasks themselves are not that hard).

Successful SEO is mostly about writing, writing, writing. There are tons of ways to get the word out about your web site, some of them really help you in the search engines, some less so.

I’ll help with either of these, my standing offer is here

A few things you might want to know about me:

I’m a low stress person, I don’t want to be a CARRIER either!

I’m just here to help, if this causes problems in the org don’t ever feel like you owe me anything, it’s your organization

Really good SEO skills are marketable. If you want training to market arnne it’s a great opportunity to learn for the doggies and then use it in your career.

I’m available when you need me, please don’t stress on my account.

Best,
Caroline

VirtueMart Category Page SEO Title Tags

In order to set keyword-rich title tags on a VirtueMart category listing page:

In “administrator components com_virtuemart html shop.index_sdm.php” (your mileage may vary on file name), add and initialize a $title variable in the top:

$title=”";

After setting the category name, append the category to the title:

$catname = shopMakeHtmlSafe($db->f(“category_name”)); $title .=$catname.”,”;
This presumes your shop.index page calls

$mainframe->setPageTitle($title);

Letter to a client about the awful search engine truth

Hey [well respected client name] -

I want to show you something interesting. I have to update my web marketing mantra to say links links links before I say content content content. I know incoming links are important. I know that aged, high quality, authoritative links are better than new, low quality, spammy links. But what I think I’ve been in denial about is that, for right now, links are beating content.

Google assigns page rank to everything it indexes. 0-10 where 0 is banned or not yet trusted and 10 is god status. Now check this out. This page has a page rank of 4

http://www.umdum.com/dir/46297.php

Even before Loren (page owner) added the princeton link the page had a PR of 4. I’ve got scores of highly relevant content on my site but I let my marketing go for 1.5 years and fell off the map, I only have a PR 3 and this page with no content has a 4.

So this was all coming on me like a sneeze yesterday when I wrote you the note with some good back linking tasks.

I KNOW google will fix this, the whole point is to index authoritative content, not well-respected white space. So content will be king, but I have to admit after discussing this with the site owner as well as a very well respected internet marketer that this is today’s realty, links trump content.

 

The newer new SEO – Authority Sites

Google owns 60% of the search market and they’re the most academically inclined of the big 3 (Yahoo, MSN and Google). Google’s job is to provide spam-free content results. They know they’re not doing that now.

A good book on the subject is Authority Site Guide by Content Desk. I am impressed with this book but can’t yet endorse their product as I haven’t looked at it yet. I am loving the book. Google’s been publishing quality guidelines for years and this book describes how to build a quality (Authority) site.

It’s on target.I feel validated.

Some of Content Desk’s Authority Site comments I really like:

Choose a niche and subdomain the sub-niches:

smalldogmall.com: small dog stuff
Poodle.smalldogmall.com
Boston-Terrier.smalldogmall.com
Chihuahua.smalldogmall.com

Promote Interaction
Foster visitor comments
Give ability email and print the story

Incorporate a Reverse Ratio Advertising Policy
The more generic topics have less advertising surrounding them; the specific areas within that topic have more ads on the same pages. Monetize after you’ve filled a need. Don’t advertise on the home page.

More on this later……….