Homestead Blog

Here’s the second in our series on how to make your site “friendlier” to the search engines your visitors are using to find you. In an article in the Homestead Newsletter, we offered members an opportunity to submit their sites for a chance at having them analyzed to see how search engine friendly they really were. Our winner this week is Milton Ridge Historic Chapel. We had one of our professionals take a look at the Milton Ridge site so he could make some suggestions for changing its design to improve its “search engine optimization” (we call it “SEO” for short). Here’s David to give you his analysis and tips on good SEO practice -Rochelle

We all know now that it’s just not enough to have a pleasant looking website anymore. If you want to attract visitors to your site, you need to make sure the search engines are fully aware of your site and what it represents. When people search the Web for what they need, you need those search engines to guide them to you.

I analyzed the Milton Ridge site with an eye to making its design more search engine friendly. What I found can help Milton Ridge specifically, but can also serve as general lessons that we can all use as we build or maintain our websites.

1) Change your title tags – The titles of your web pages are important sources of information for search engines and customers alike, particularly your home page. It’s best to focus on titles that contain two (possibly three) keyword phrases. One should be your brand (probably your company name), and the other a common search term for your business. Since Milton Ridge is a wedding chapel, I ran a couple of searches on wedding chapels and wedding services. It looks like “chapel wedding maryland” (which yielded 12 daily searches) and “find wedding services” (19 daily searches) might be a good fit. I recommend this title tag: “Find Wedding Services at Milton Ridge Maryland Wedding Chapel”. That’s a manageable 61 characters.

To edit your page title, make sure you’re editing your home page, then click the Page Info button at the top of both SiteBuilder and SiteBuilder Lite. In SiteBuilder, a “Page Properties” editor will appear on the right side of the page; in SiteBuilder Lite, a popup will appear. Just fill in your desired text in the “Page Title” box.

2) Add Text Copy to the Front Page: Milton Ridge has an attractive video on their front page. It’s a good selling tool for visitors to the site, but it doesn’t do anything for the search engines to help people find the site in the first place. I recommend that Milton Ridge add a text description of their business on the front page – this makes really good content for search engine spiders. More than that, this is the page where most visitors will land. Text copy will help your customers understand your business and help close sales.

For Milton Ridge, I would at the very least try adding this copy underneath the navigation bar and above the video: “Find all-inclusive wedding services at the Milton Ridge Wedding Chapel. Located in the rolling hills of Maryland, we provide the perfect setting for your wedding and reception. Call us at 240.372.4442 today”. In addition to this minimum amount of suggested text, I really recommend adding even more information and copy relevant to your visitors.

3) Getting Links: Milton Ridge has some interesting partners listed on their services page. Some of them might have their own websites - like the minister, the florist and the DJ, for example - so I’d recommend asking them to add a link from their site to yours. If possible, it’s best that anyone linking to your site uses your keywords as the anchor text for the link. For example, a good link to Milton Ridge would be something like this: “We are a proud provider of DJ services to Milton Ridge Wedding Chapel.”

Here’s a bonus tip: all links to your site should go to just one URL if possible, and it should be the simplest possible. In Milton Ridge’s case, that would be the simplest available: http://www.miltonridge.com. However, Milton Ridge is using a different URL - http://www.miltonridge.com/index.html - to link to their home page.

That would be OK if everyone used that URL, but most sites linking to them will probably opt for the simpler http://www.miltonridge.com. What’s the problem? If someone’s website links to them using both http://www.miltonridge.com/index.html and http://www.miltonridge.com, search engines will treat these as two different links to two different pages. In effect, they’re creating duplicate content and splitting their links into multiple pages, diluting their impact on search engine results.

I hope this second installment of our tips for making your site more search engine friendly is helpful! Here’s my disclaimer: these free tips should help make your website more attractive to search engines, and are provided to help educate all Homestead members on how to design a more effective website. Please remember, they’re not meant to be comprehensive, and I can’t guarantee that you’ll immediately rank higher in search engine results. But I do think they’ll help. Milton Ridge has a beautifully designed site, and these tips should help them attract even more business with very little effort.

Lindsay, one of our product designers, minored in film in college. See if her parents’ money was well-spent by checking out her short film on managing your domain – Rochelle.

Many of our customers already own a domain name (e.g. www.fische.com) before they create a website with us. There are a couple of options for connecting a domain purchased through a different company with a Homestead website, but these options can be pretty difficult to understand. Because of this, we’ve created a short video to explain - in our own way - a couple of these options to you – domain pointing and domain forwarding - and hopefully make you laugh a little, too.

“Pointing” your domain to your Homestead site is now as easy as transferring it. Whichever option you prefer, both are easy to do through the Domain Manager once you’ve logged into your Homestead account. You can find the Domain Manager - including detailed explanations and pros and cons of each option - by clicking on Domains & Email, then Domains on the left of the page.

Thanks for watching!

There are lots of great new things in the pipeline at Homestead.  Here’s product designer Rina to tell you about our new tools to help you manage your PayPal sales - Rochelle.

If you sell things on your website using PayPal buttons you may have already noticed this, but we’ve just implemented new tools for you to use in managing your PayPal activity. The new tools don’t change the way your PayPal buttons function; they provide a new and improved way for you to add products and manage your transactions.

If you’re a Gold or Platinum member, when you log in to your website account you’ll see a new link in the menu on the left side of your website account. This link is called Selling Online, and you’ll now find all ecommerce tools and products (including PayPal button management) organized within it.

Underneath Selling Online you’ll find a link called Store Manager. Clicking that link opens the new Store Manager page. It contains the same functionality as the old PayPal page - it gives you instructions on how to get started with PayPal, a place to enter your PayPal email address, and links to the PayPal site itself. The new layout of this page makes this information easier to read and understand.

The Store Manager page also has a link that says Launch Product Manager:

Clicking that link will take you to the brand new PayPal Product Manager page:

This new Product Manager is organized into two columns, making it easier for you to look at your products. Using it is simple. To add a new product, click the Add new link in the left column and a form will appear to let you add your new product information. Click the Save button when you’re done.

Your product will now show up in the left column where existing products are listed. As you add more products, each will appear there organized alphabetically.

To edit a product, click on the product name in the left column and you’ll be able to edit its information in the right column. To delete a product, just click the Delete this product link at the bottom of the form.

We think you’ll find the new Store Manager and Product Manager make it much easier to use PayPal buttons on your site. Nothing’s changed about how those buttons work for your customers, or how you can place them on your site using SiteBuilder, but now you have an easy way to manage them!

In this post, Sam, a Homestead Product Designer, introduces the ability to hide your domain contact information. - Rochelle

We’ve introduced a new privacy feature that’s now available to anyone with a domain managed by Homestead. As some of you probably know, whenever you register a domain name your contact information is entered into an international public database, making it available to anyone doing a simple domain search. Unfortunately, some of those doing searches are spammers and telemarketers.

To help keep your personal information out of their hands, Homestead’s new domain privacy feature can mask the contact information associated with any of your domains and replace it with information from our domain registrar, Tucows. The box below shows how enabling privacy would affect a typical domain registry entry:

The cost to enable privacy is $1/month per domain. It is now an option on every domain you register or transfer to Homestead (except for domains ending in .name), and can be enabled for current domains through the Domain Manager as shown below:

We hope you like the new domain privacy feature. It’s a pretty simple way to reduce your exposure to some of the most common internet annoyances, like spam, junk mail and unsolicited telemarketing. It can also help guard against more serious threats like fraud and identity theft, and help you retain full control and ownership of your domain name.

In this post, Sam, a Homestead Product Designer, discusses options for selling products on the internet. - Rochelle

You’ve probably noticed that a lot of people are selling their stuff on the internet these days. What you probably don’t know is how easy it is to join them, no matter what your level of interest is. You can just sell a few things you’d like to get rid of, or have a hobby-type business on the side to sell consumer goods. You can even have a full-blown online store that you depend on for steady income. Whatever you’d like to do, there are some good solutions out there to help you sell goods worldwide over the web.

The quickest and easiest way to display your products and sell online is through existing websites like eBay or Craigslist. Craigslist is basically online classified advertising, and does not have any transaction capabilities built in. eBay offers many tools for sellers and buyers including PayPal integration, and the ability to track all your listings in your eBay dashboard.

Some of these sites have transaction fees, and require both the buyer and seller to have an account with them. You may not find the flexibility that you need to best describe your product or your business if you use one of these online services. And as easy as these sites are to use, one thing they can’t match is a branded shopping experience from your own personal Homestead website.

With Homestead, you have two options for selling stuff via your own website. Our Standard Website Packages come with our SiteBuilder tool, where you can add “Buy This” or “Add to Cart” buttons anywhere on any page in your website. You associate these buttons to your PayPal account, and your customers can buy your goods by paying you via PayPal. Once you receive payment notifications, you ship your goods to the customer on your own. You can manage your item list in SiteBuilder, but your transactions are subject to any fees that PayPal may charge. Once you have a PayPal account, setting this up in SiteBuilder is pretty quick and easy. We recommend this method for our customers who occasionally sell small volumes of items via their site, less than 10 items at a time for example.

For customers who sell more products on a regular or full-time basis we offer Homestead Storefront Packages. Storefront is a completely different product from our Website Packages, and it allows you to accept credit cards directly (with a merchant account) so your customers don’t have to use PayPal. Storefront also offers some very useful inventory management and shipping tools built right in. Storefront packages do not include access to SiteBuilder for building a standard website. Instead, Storefront walks you through a wizard where you choose a website design and layout, and then enter in all the products you are selling. The Storefront templates are customizable, but require a bit more time and technical expertise than SiteBuilder to really get a personalized look. We recommend one of our Storefront packages for people who sell many products at a time and consider their online store to be a regular business.

If you’d like some help deciding on the package you need, give us a call, we’d be glad to help!

What would you say if we said you could add a photo gallery to your website, a forum or maybe a blog? It seems that many of our members would say “when can I have it?”, and I’m happy to answer: sooner than you think! You spoke, we listened, and soon we’ll be rolling out PHP scripting support to a small group of users for a controlled beta test. Here’s Gordon, a manager in our technology development group, to tell you a little bit about it. - Rochelle

There’s been a small but steady buzz from members asking for the ability to add dynamic content to their websites with PHP scripting. PHP allows you to add pages to your site that change whenever the underlying data changes. It’s an excellent way to manage data that changes frequently, like lists and pictures of products, or comments from your customers in a user forum. A PHP application organizes your data and displays it in a crisp, professional way that can really enhance a website.

For the controlled beta test we’re enabling PHP support for four of the most popular applications: WordPress (for blogs), phpBB (for user forums), Image Gallery (guess what that’s for) and MediaWiki (the engine that makes Wikipedia work). Other apps are under review; if you have a specific recommendation, please let us know about it.

We’re excited about the PHP program and would like to get started quickly, so if you’re interested in participating in the beta test please visit us at http://phpsupport.homestead.com Fill out the form you’ll find there and tell us what your interests in PHP are, and how you’d like to use it. For those who aren’t yet ready but would like to know more about PHP and dynamic website content, give us a call, we’ll be happy to help you.

Thanks!