5 steps to gaining site traffic through search engines

The secret to coming up first in Google's search engine results pages is not as elusive as one may think. Not quite as simple as flipping "The Google Switch," but if you work hard, have dedication, and use creativity your site can climb the rankings. Because of what it takes to be perfectly positioned, the process is very much like a competition. Beating the competition (being no. 1 in search results) is an ego booster. It feels good to see your company riding high above your competitors, but when done correctly, your SEO efforts will drive potential customers to your site who are looking for what you have to offer.

Step 1:
Know your Google goals
The process of search engine optimization, or SEO, begins with examining your goals for the project. Map out in a document your benchmarks for success. You should have short term goals and long term goals. These goals determine how to proceed with your keyword research.

• Sell more high-heels through your online store and increase your revenue by 30%.
• Add 200 subscribers to your blog.
• Increase the length of visit by 2 minutes from visits coming from a local keyword.

You must have site analytics to truly measure whether or not you've been successful.

Google Analytics will give you concrete numbers that measure your site's visits, keyword referrals, search engine traffic, and much more. You must look at the before and after data to determine the success of your site's SEO changes.

Step 2:
Successful keywords perform a balancing act
Once you have articulated your goals, you can then examine the best keywords for your campaign's success. We use software to determine a keyword phrase's competition (how many pages Google has indexed for that phrase), how often the phrase is searched, and how relevant it is to a company's goals. Balancing these factors is key.

You can use Google's Traffc Estimator for free, but it doesn't provide all the information to make keyword phrase decisions.

Step 3:
Know your competition
Competitive intelligence is not only stealthy, but a great indicator as to what you need to improve. Examine the other sites standing in your way to high rankings. Look into their site structure, links, keyword phrases, domain age, and more to help determine which factors need improvement on your site.

Step 4:
Examine site structure and content
When a search engine produces search results it has not only examined the content on the page, but it also examines the site's code. It's important to know how to look under a site's hood and determine if the proper tags have been utilized.

Step 5:
Report, examine, and repeat.
After the necessary changes have been made, be sure to report on what has improved or changed in the search engine results (relative to your goals). Examine data from your site (or have us help with site analytics) to determine what changes need to be made in order to complete a successful Internet marketing campaign.

***Plexus does not guarantee to make your site number one in Google. We are just outlining the steps to success. Significant progress with significant ROI can be made with persistence, patience, and proficiency. Anyone that guarantees you the top spot for a Google search probably isn’t an ethical consultant. Be sure to do your research and ask questions in order to find the best SEO partner for you.

Last Thursday, August 21st, Plexus hosted a drop in Open House from 5pm-7pm for our clients and neighbors. Guests were invited to celebrate our new office space in The Leathers Building here in Athens Georgia.

If you've read Charlie's blog post from June, you know The Leather's Building originated as a manufacturing facility until it was vacated in the early 1990's. It has since been renovated & revamped into a hip place to work, eat & shop.

Plexus has many people to thank for making our office space possible; from Chris Blackmon of Atlas Real Estate Advisers, contractor Elrod Sims, Brian Brooks of Wachovia Bank, Connected Technologies, Partner Technologies, The Lindsay Group & Go Mini's

At the Open House, we served sandwiches & fruit salad from Trax Cafe & white wine from Shiraz Fine Wine and Gourmet, both our neighbors in The Leather's building. We also had beverages from two of our great clients, beer from Terrapin & red wine from 5 Points Bottle Shop.

Thank you to everyone who came by! We are very proud of our office space & neighborhood. If you didn't make it to the Open House, drop by sometime to say hello & check our great office.

We needed to add CSS to HTML links based on certain conditions (for instance, if you're already there). That's pretty easy to do by using link_to_unless, but the easy way isn't very DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself):

	<%= link_to_unless(@current_controller=='faq', "Frequently Asked Questions", faq_path){ 
			link_to("Frequently Asked Questions", faq_path, :class => 'active') 
	} %>

Hear how the text "Frequently Asked Questions" is screaming at you to stop typing it over & over? Well, this pattern (adding an "active" class to say YOU ARE HERE) happens often enough that it had to be broken out into a helper:

def link_to_active_if( condition, link_title, link_path = {}, opts = {} )
  if condition
    classes = opts.delete(:class) || ""
    classes.rstrip!    

    # checking to see if "active" is already one of the classes assigned, and if NOT, append it to the classes string
	
    unless classes =~ /^(\w*\s+)*active(?!\w)/ 
      if classes.blank? 
        classes = 'active'
      else
        classes << " active"
      end         
    end    
  end

  old_opts = opts.dup

  link_to_if( condition, link_title, link_path, opts.merge( {:class => classes} ) ) {
    link_to( link_title, link_path, old_opts )
  }
end

As you may see, there's kind of a hack at the regex beginning ("unless classes =~ " etc.) Ruby 1.9 users can get around that with the new hotness Regex engine Oniguruma (which allows negative lookbehind assertions), but we're a bit more restricted. At any rate, the craziness checking for "active" means you can send the class "active" in through the opts hash and only get 1 "active" back in the class string.

The new helper call is quite a bit cleaner, even if it doesn't make the questions REAL FAQ's:

<%= link_to_active_if( @current_controller=='faq', "Frequently Asked Questions", faq_path ) %>

That's great in cases where we want the link active for multiple actions in a controller (for instance), but since the current page/action being the exact link location is another common pattern, we can easily add another helper that uses the new link_to_active_if:

def link_to_active_if_current( link_title, link_path = {}, opts = {} )  	  
 	  link_to_active_if current_page?(link_path), link_title, link_path, opts
end

Giving us:

<%= link_to_active_if_current("Frequently Asked Questions", faq_path) %>

Many who know me know that I am very active in supporting Economic Development in Athens, GA. It has been my pleasure to serve on the Athens Economic Development Board during the last year with many well seasoned and highly educated business and community leaders. NBAF is only one of dozens of projects that we evaluate and support in order to bring more business and jobs to Athens. However, NBAF has drawn the most attention, positive and negative. I have been involved in all of the public meetings during the last year, and during the most recent public meeting, I actually had the opportunity to speak on behalf of AED and DHS. Below is a copy of my public comment on record.

"My name is Stephanie Sharp. I live in Athens, I work in Athens, and my children go to school about 5 miles from the site of the proposed project at Athens Montessori. I own a small local web development firm, Plexus, that employs 10 people in Athens. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am also a board member on the Athens Economic Development Foundation.

I come here tonight to speak about the special interests that are being served by our support of this project. We do not support this project because we are pro-government or pro-military or anti-environment. We are simply pro-business and want to see Athens take full benefit of the knowledge that is being developed through our educational institutions. This opportunity came to us because of our scientific community and our economic development leaders, and because of the "special interests" this community has.

Special interest in more jobs for the Athens Area
Many of the opponents have argued that the highest paying jobs will be given to transplants while Athenians will be left with the lower paying jobs. The truth of the matter is that those people will live in and among us, and will spend their money at local businesses, buy real estate in our area, and contribute to the tax base in our area. Overtime, these positions will inevitably transition to more locally grown professionals. Even if only 50 jobs go to Athenians at an average salary of 40-50k a year with federal benefits, that is a great benefit to 50 people who now might work in underpaid positions or be unemployed.

Special interest in expanding our scientific knowledge and our ability to attract businesses that will enable us to keep more of the graduates from all of the post-secondary institutions we are fortunate to have in Athens.

Whether NBAF is built here or not, our primary Special interest should be in making sure that Athens isn’t overlooked as a possible location for other business and industry because we need the jobs and the income. When a potential business contacts the Department of Economic Development looking for a suitable location we don’t want Athens to be at the bottom of the list because "economic development" is a dirty word in these parts.

During my tenure on the Economic Development Board, these are the only special interests I have been introduced to, and I support each and every one of them."

I've been given a large hint from Buck in his latest blog post to write an in-depth post on the new Plexus Web site. Since I designed and fathered the new site, I'll discuss the changes that we have made.

The main idea that both I and the Plexus team wanted to focus on was to make our new site be more visually appealing to viewers. While text is extremely important for Search Engine Optimization, I wanted to balance it out with more images that show what Plexus' capabilities are. As the saying goes, "A picture is worth a thousand words".

The first thing you'll notice when arriving at the Plexus home page, is the revamped navigation and logo placement. As you begin to scroll through the page, you'll also notice that the navigation stays fixed to the top of the page. There's really no good explanation for why the navigation stays at the top of the page, we just thought it looked cool. Just kidding, having the navigation scroll along with the page allows for quick navigation access. Below the navigation, you'll find a sneak preview of our portfolio. The preview is a slider script that allows for more interaction with the viewer. It also provides a nice animation giving the site more depth and motion.

Below the sliding portfolio preview is a short introduction. Another new addition is a series of boxes describing other services we provide. Remember, "We build Web sites and MORE..." Hovering over each box changes the color of the box and lights up the information, also adding more interactivity.

Underneath our other services you'll find featured news releases and blog posts from Plexus employees. We've also rearranged our staff profiles to fit into a single row. This proves that we're not just robots working on your site, but actual people, with dreams and emotions.

Moving onto our portfolio page. Once again, with "more visual" in mind, we now have a featured image for each category. This is a function that we control through a site manager (also found in many of our clients' sites) that we created to be able to swap out photos with ease.

Our profile page has also undergone major reconstruction. Our profile landing page serves as your introduction to the Plexus crew, along with a brief overview of it's history. For our group photo, we were going for a grungy, semi-pretentious, rock-n-roll look. Clicking on an employee in the photo serves as a link to their individual profile page.

For the profile page, again, "more visual, MORE VISUAL". You will find updated photos of the Plexus team, each employee photographed against the "Plexus Red" background. Each profile photo has been enlarged so you can get a more up close and personal experience with every employee. Under each profile photo, you can learn more about each employee and read latest thoughts on their blog. The first view of the blog is a shortened preview created to eliminate the amount of scrolling when perusing blog posts.

Each profile contains several staff extras that can be updated and changed through the site manager. These include a site highlight box, flickr photo feed, and favorite links. This provides extra information about each employee, and offers some helpful advice and tools to the viewer.

Our Products and Services pages have been updated with newer photos of our pxComponents. We have taken some outdated services and products off the list and added a few that we now offer to clients.

Our contact page might not look different at first, but it has also been modified to further help potential clients get in touch with us. Upon selecting a subject, a different set of questions pertaining to that topic will appear. This helps the client voice their questions more clearly, and helps us focus on what the clients' needs are.

Congratulations! You're now an official Plexus site expert. Now take all this knowledge you've learned and experience our brand new site for yourself. And although the site might be close to perfect, it is a new site, and therefore might still have a few bugs. If you happen to come across anything that might look odd, please don't hesitate to contact us and let us know.