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.

Here’s Sam, a Homestead Product Designer, with a few words describing a new enhancement to a couple of our elements in SiteBuilder. - Rochelle

SiteBuilder fonts number just twenty nine
For some customers, that is quite fine
From Arial to Wingdings we have a good set
But what about Mangal, Batang, or Sevnet?

“Where are my fonts?”
People often will write
“I use them in Word…
I’d like them on my site!”

Well now they’re all there
Every font Word can show
Is in two of our elements:
Anti-aliased text and logo

We’ve made it so you can use any font
Custom logos and headers will look like you want
They render as images as you will see
So your site will appear as you meant it to be

Since visitors don’t have the fonts that you might
SiteBuilder makes images so your pages look right
But search engines cannot read them at all
And big images slow your page to a crawl

For large content sections, we would suggest
The text element will serve you the best
It uses the fonts, that all browsers display
“Your website is great!” people will say

Now you can use any font on your computer in the the anti-aliased text and logo elements in SiteBuilder!

Hi folks, most of you have probably already heard the exciting news: Homestead is going to become an Intuit company!

This is especially great for us because the people at Intuit believe in our product vision and are eager to help us achieve it. Their small business expertise is a perfect complement to our goal of giving you, our customers, the very best in website and online sales tools for small businesses.

There are a lot of reasons why Intuit wants to aquire Homestead, and they mostly boil down to this: they want us to keep doing what we’re doing, only more so. I can tell you that everyone here on the Product Team at Homestead is absolutely thrilled with the news. Being taken under the wing of a larger, innovative company will give us access to more resources and additional expertise, which will help us accelerate our plans for new and improved products. At Homestead we’ve always had more product ideas than we’ve had resources to develop them. Now, although I’m sure there will always be more ideas than time in the day to build them, we’ll be able to deliver more to our customers at an even faster pace.

Personally I’m very excited about joining up with Intuit, and I hope we can give you some idea of just how exciting this will be for you, too. We’ll still be the Homestead you know and love: same people, same mission and, once we’re part of Intuit, all the commitment to our customers and focus on quality products that both those names represent.

You can read more about the upcoming deal on the official press release. Stay tuned for more news, and as we roll things out we’ll be sure to let you know about them right here in our Product Blog.

“Homestead and Intuit”; we like the sound of that, hope you do too!

- Rochelle

Homestead has a lot of good resources for you to use when building your website that you may not know about. Here’s Bryan from Quality Assurance to tell you about one of his favorites. - Rochelle

Did you know that Homestead has a library containing tens of thousands of free, public-use images that you can add to your site? Need some pictures of food for your restaurant’s website? Search for the word ‘food’ in the Homestead image library, and you’ll find approximately 12,618 food-related images to choose from! Think that your babysitting website could use a few pictures of kids playing? Search for the word ‘playground’ and find 109 playground-related images that are free for you to use. For pretty much any type of website that you may be creating, the Homestead image library has a number of high-quality images that might meet your needs. To access the Homestead image library, simply add an image element in SiteBuilder or SiteBuilder Lite, then follow the instructions and click the Our Image Library button. You can search for whatever type of image you’re looking for; it’s fun to browse and easy to use! Try it on your own: a few high-quality, relevant images can greatly improve the look of your site. Enjoy!

Many of you have already heard of the Homestead Connection, a site started by a Homestead member as a helpful resource for people using SiteBuilder and other Homestead tools to build their websites. To quote the site, it’s a place where “you’ll find tips, FAQs and other useful information to assist you in presenting your site in the best possible light.” We thought we’d invite the head of that site to introduce it to readers of the blog. Hope you find it helpful! - Rochelle

The Homestead Connection Forum is a community of individuals who use Homestead’s website design software. It is member-owned, and was started to offer “Homesteaders” a place to seek answers to questions, share knowledge and learn new ways of enhancing Homestead-designed sites. The driving force of the Forum is the willingness of members to provide answers to posts based on their knowledge and experience.

Members have access to information on everything from search engine optimization and site design to tools and tips. There are currently over 4800 posts on the Forum. This collection of knowledge and information, together with the ability to ask questions in “real time”, provides Homestead users with an extensive resource for obtaining solutions to common issues associated with producing a quality website.

HC members have the option of adding their site to the Member Directory as well as being able to add an active link to the site in their signature. These options help to increase search engine awareness of member sites.

The Forum is not intended as a replacement for Homestead’s Help Sections or Technical Support. HC is offered as an additional resource for Homestead users so they can get timely answers to questions, and to help new users become familiar with the programs.

There is also a Homestead Connection site designed to be a ‘partner’ to the Forum that offers helpful guides and tutorials. The HC Forum and website, together with Homestead’s tech support, give users access to a comprehensive foundation of information and assistance to help with building their Homestead designed site.

If you aren’t a member I encourage you to visit the Forum and join the active community of Homestead users who are succeeding on the WWW. This is an opportunity to learn new ideas and to share the knowledge you have gained with others. The door is always open.

Links:

http://www.readybb.com/homesteadconnection

http://www.homesteadconnection.com

In response to your questions regarding our two website editing tools, Sam, a Homestead Product Designer, talks about the differences and benefits of SiteBuilder vs. SiteBuilder Lite. - Rochelle

Some of you already know this, but our newer members may not: Homestead offers two different ways of creating and editing your websites - SiteBuilder and SiteBuilder Lite.

SiteBuilder is our flagship, full-featured website editing tool. You download it from the Homestead website and install it on your own computer to use. SiteBuilder offers an expanded list of useful elements you can add to your website that you will not find in SiteBuilder Lite, including shapes, forms and web polls. With SiteBuilder, you can edit your website’s background, as well as add various advanced text effects. Also, with SiteBuilder you can work on your website without an Internet connection, and save your work on your computer until you are ready to publish the edits you’ve made to your site online.

SiteBuilder Lite, on the other hand, does not require a download at all: it runs in your web browser. After logging in, you just click to open SiteBuilder Lite from Homestead’s website. While online you can make easy changes to your site like editing text, images, the navigation menu and even your logo. You can’t save your changes without publishing them directly to your website, but many people find SiteBuilder Lite easier to use, particularly if they don’t need all the features in the full-featured SiteBuilder.

The cool part is that no matter which tool you use, and no matter how many times you switch between the two, your website will always be up to date. Any changes you make with SiteBuilder Lite will sync up when you open your website in SiteBuilder, and vice-versa.

Hope you’ve found this useful. If you have any suggestions, please let us know!

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The simplest and most familiar method for many of you will be to receive blog updates via email subscription. Simply click on the “Receive email updates” link in the upper-right of this blog above “About Us”, and enter your email address. Once you verify your subscription you’ll automatically receive new posts direct to your email as soon as they’re posted.

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Either method you choose, you’ll get the latest post delivered directly to you. We think you’ll like the convenience, so why not give it a try!

Some of our members have written in to this blog asking questions about their services. We take customer service very seriously here at Homestead, so I thought we’d have Jon, a long-time manager of our support department, share some news with you about recent changes and enhancements to customer service. - Rochelle

Everyone needs help occasionally. I’ve been a member of Homestead for as long as I’ve been working here, and even I have questions sometimes! So I know what it means to be confused or need help with a problem. Some of you have written in to this product blog about questions or problems you have. When I’m in the same boat I have the luxury of walking down the hall and talking to someone at their desk. But I rarely do that anymore, now that we have launched our new Help Center!

It’s true: now when I have a question, I use our own Help system to get my answers. Partly to test its effectiveness, of course, but I’m finding that the new system is efficient enough that I can find out the answer faster than if I walked down the hall!

Homestead’s old Help system worked, but to be honest it was a bit unwieldy at times. The searches weren’t perfect, and often returned so many results that sometimes it took just as long to sort through the answers as it did to figure out the answer for myself! Another problem I would have was when I did send in an email for support, I was never sure of where they were with my case until I received a reply. Maybe not the end of the world, but it could definitely be a bit frustrating.

Fortunately - for you and me both - we’ve recently launched our new Help Center. It’s designed to provide a better way of helping and teaching our members. The first major improvement is a better search algorithm. Now when you search for answers in the Help Center, it returns the most appropriate results, based on a combination of the terms searched for and the amount of time the Help Topic has been viewed. So today, not only do the words used matter, but the popularity of the Help Topic is considered as well. Maybe the most satisfying function of the new Help Center is being able to view the status of any Help request made. The way it was before, I had to send an email in to Support, wait for a response, then sort through the message thread to find out how that new response fit in with the question I originally asked. I always found that to be a pain, especially because I had to keep flipping back and forth between the Help and my email. Now the Help Center lets me create a “Help Ticket” that contains my question or problem. By logging in and checking the Help Center, I can now check on the status of my ticket (and the answer to my questions). The Help Center not only shows me the current status of that Ticket, but it also gives me a list of all the Help Tickets that I’ve created before. This is especially helpful when I’m trying to find an answer that I know I was told before, but couldn’t remember. Now the Help Tickets remember for me! And these are not machine answers; the customer service specialists you get when you call in are the same ones answering the Help Tickets that you submit through the Help Center.

So feel free to try the new Help Center out. It’s a lot more fun to use when doing your own research, and the Help Ticket system makes it easy to track progress on your problem or question. Plus, it looks a lot cooler than it did before. Give it a try!

I’m really pleased with the response to our product blog! You’re keeping our blog group busy, which is great. Just thought you’d like to know that yes, we DO read every comment to the blog; here’s what we do with them!

First, here’s who reads them. Homestead’s product bloggers are a group of people from practically every department in the company, including managers and directors from technology, product development, creative services, customer service and marketing.

We all review each comment before it gets posted to the blog, mainly to check all the links provided to make sure they’re accurate and appropriate, and then we meet to discuss trends and the priority of new development. Thanks to your comments we’ve already moved some new product features to a higher priority! We’ll post information on what those are here shortly. But here’s a hint: do php support, enhanced help center support and new elements ring a bell?

That’s why your comments are so important: they really do influence how we prioritize new product development. We made the decision to make this a blog about the products and not a forum, so you won’t be seeing replies to individual comments, but believe me, we read them all and they all make a difference. So thanks for writing in! Stay tuned this week for a post from Jon about our enhanced help center.

Your response to the blog has been great!  We started it to give you a window into what we’re doing at Homestead to make our products serve you better.  Equally important to us is that the blog gives you the chance to comment on the changes and let us know what you think of them. 

We read every one of your comments, and get a lot of great ideas from them.  I’m happy to say that many of those product ideas are already in the pipeline, and that you’ll be reading about them very soon!  Since a lot of you are making suggestions that are similar to what others are saying, we’ll try to address them in posts that will be informative for everyone. 

Thanks again for visiting, and please let us know what we can do to make your Homestead experience even better!