Replies

1. 
   seeyou | Sep 13, 2007 01:22pm | #1

   Bump- I'll be interested in the answer to this as well.

   http://grantlogan.net/

    

   "he ot the placed closed down whyyy thhhattt nnooo gooodddd" - sancho

1. 
   FatRoman | Sep 13, 2007 02:02pm | #3

   Seeyou, seemy answer above.Let me know if you have questions...

2. 
   BillHartmann | Sep 18, 2007 06:12am | #13

   IIRC Lawarance had several message about this 2-3 years ago.Do a search on his name..
   .
   A-holes. Hey every group has to have one. And I have been elected to be the one. I should make that my tagline.

2. 
   FatRoman | Sep 13, 2007 02:00pm | #2

   Try this http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931

   IIRC, you just set up a site for your business, right? I'll tell you the same thing I tell my web clients, that it matters less what kind of meta tags or description that you put into your HTML code, than what text you actually write that appears on your pages. In this case you've done a pretty good job, as you've got lots of text throughout your pages, using terms that people looking for a contractor might type into a search engine.

   Couple of improvements I'd toss out for your consideration --

   Flesh out the home page with some more text. Both from a search engine and a design perspective. This one looks a little lonely compared to the others.

   Also on the home page, the tag is set for 'Page 1'. Use something like 'Welcome to Bakersfield Remodeling -- a residential and commercial construction company', and then use something similar on the tags of the subsequent pages. Here's where thinking like a visitor to your site pays off. Nobody types in 'About Us' to a search engine and expects results, unless you are a group of narcissists. LOL These tags get indexed on a search engine crawl as well, so make them work for you.

   Images - You want to tag your images with an alternate description. This is what comes up if the image can't be displayed for some reason, or if the person is blind and using a text reader, etc. It also gets indexed on the search crawls. So if they are blank, or not filled with good info, you are losing an opportunity to promote yourself. Take the home page. There's a background image of your truck and the sliding drawers (very clever, by the way). The alt tag for that reads "The image “http://www.bakersfieldremodel.com/images/bg_akwq.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors." The next two images have blank alt tags.

   In short, like the site I linked to above tells you, there's no magic bullet to any of the search engine stuff. You've got to have a good system in place.

   If you read all the way through this and can stand one more item :), you need to adjust the width of your 'Your Project' contact box. The right half is hidden from view for me. You could probably pop that photo on top of the table that's holding the contact form and take care of it quickly.

   Questions? Let me know.

   Best,
   Steve

   
   

   ---

   Edited 9/13/2007 7:01 am ET by FatRoman

1. 
   shelternerd | Sep 13, 2007 03:26pm | #4

   Great, thought provoking answer. Any chance I can get you to take a look at my site and let me know if I'm missing anything crucial? http://www.chandlerdesignbuild.comThanks------------------

   "You cannot work hard enough to make up for a sloppy estimate."

1. 
   FatRoman | Sep 13, 2007 03:50pm | #5

   Sure thing. I'm stuck trying to get a software project out the door by tomorrow, so I'll take a detailed look over the weekend.But, very quickly, you are missing the alt tag info on your photos. At least the ones on the home page and the green building initiative page. Make sure you include a tag not just on your photos, but even for the images like your logo.Are you using a content management system to control your site? I see it's in PHP and the reason I ask is that you probably want to incorporate some kind of search engine friendly link module. Fortunately you don't have links like ?id=342d5v, which doesn't translate very well to search engines. But you could likely clean up your links like http://www.chandlerdesignbuild.com/index.php?id=work&t=How%20We%20Work
   to get rid of the spaces in the name (they are being translated to "%20"

1. 
   shelternerd | Sep 14, 2007 06:49am | #10

   Thanks, I'll go over this with my web guy. I just photograph the stuff oan write the text and assemble it in MS word and he does all the cool artistic stuff and the layout (and sometimes re-arranges my writing to break it into captions and side bars and the like. Thanks for your feedback.Michael------------------

   "You cannot work hard enough to make up for a sloppy estimate."

1. 
   FatRoman | Sep 17, 2007 02:31pm | #11

   Michael,No problem. Another thing is that none of the pages I've looked through have any meta tags or meta description at all. That might not be a terrible thing, because you've done a great job with all the descriptive text throughout the site, and there's a fair chance that those terms get picked up by the search engine robots anyway. But it won't hurt you to put them in, just to be on the safe side.Most search engine optimization stuff is not far off of alchemy. My best suggestions are that you pepper your site with as much descriptive text as you can (the search engines read this as well as the meta info), use key terms in your headline tags (where you'd have an <h2> tag showing off 'Green Building in North Carolina' perhaps -- the engines give more weight to the headlines than regular text), fill in your meta tags and descriptions on each page, and most importantly use terms and phrases in your text and meta info that your clients will be using when searching the web. In other words, 'Flitch Plate' isn't something that Archie and Edith B. would likely be typing into Google to find you; but 'green home builder north carolina' might very well be used. You just have to think like the person on the other end of the connection as to what terminology they'd be most likely to use to find you.Last thing. If you haven't already, sign up for something like Google's Analytics (http://tinyurl.com/2so7kd) -- it's a free tracking service that can help show you, not only the page views of your site as a whole, but what pages are attracting the most attention, what search engines are most used, and what search terms are being employed to find you. You just have to sign up for a Google account (if you have a gmail account already, that counts), enter your URL, Google will spit out some code, and you put that code at the bottom of each page you want to track. If you have a dynamically generated footer, put it there and it will get punched out for every page. There are other services like this, but Google's seems to work pretty well. You could probably put this in yourself, but your web guy certainly can.Let me know if you have questions. And by the way, how did you go from sculpture at Dartmouth to plumbing and tile setting?Best,
   Steve

2. 
   shelternerd | Sep 18, 2007 03:53am | #12

   SteveThis is very helpful info. I'll see about getting it implemented (at least the web tracking stuff) as soon as possible. I got from sculpture to building because I always wanted to do design-build but had philosophical differences with the Bauhaus bound leadership at Dartmouth so I majored in sculpture and took drafting at the engineering school. Wanting to be able to direct my jobs from a more educated perspective I learned most of the trades. The two trades that were the hardest for me to manage were the plumbers and tile setters so I just took those trades on myself and then trained my employees to do it the way I wanted it done. I am fortunate that I have really good relations with my other trades. But we still do a lot of the low voltage wiring in-house because it's constantly evolving. Thanks again for your insight. Michael

2. 
   Huck | Sep 13, 2007 06:47pm | #8

   Nice website, and nice projects!  BTW, did you write the Fine Homebuilding articles shown in the margin?  How did you go about getting them onto your website?  I wrote an article they published some time back, and would love to put it on my website, like you did.

   “Good work costs much more than poor imitation or factory product” – Charles Greene

   http://www.bakersfieldremodel.com

1. 
   shelternerd | Sep 14, 2007 06:46am | #9

   They sent me a very specific legal document giving instructions for what would be considered acceptable re-use of the articles I wrote. I'll look around and see if I still have it or if my web guy has it. Remind me if I haven't gotten back to you in a week or just call FHB and ask them to send you the guidelines.------------------

   "You cannot work hard enough to make up for a sloppy estimate."

2. 
   Huck | Sep 13, 2007 05:13pm | #6

   Thanks! 

   “Good work costs much more than poor imitation or factory product” – Charles Greene

   http://www.bakersfieldremodel.com

1. 
   FatRoman | Sep 13, 2007 05:52pm | #7

   No problem. By the way, I meant to say how much I enjoyed the Greene & Greene page!