Meet the author: Jill Olkoski
Jill has a MA in Clinical Psychology, a BS in Computer Science, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering.
She currently owns Aldebaran Web Design in Edmonds (near Seattle WA) and enjoys educating her clients on topics related to small business website design.
In Jill's previous life, she spent 17 years in the engineering and quality organizations of a Fortune 100 tech company.
When starting a web design, clients often need to select a domain name, and one of the debates that happens is whether to go for branding, or for a keyword-rich domain. Here’s Matt Cutts from Google weighing in on this topic, albeit from 2011.
A potential client who is a golf teacher asked me to review her existing website. It got me to wondering about whether adding an “s” to lesson would bring in more traffic – do people search for “golf lesson” or “golf lessons”? Here’s the answer.
You’re a small business owner and you are developing a new website. How do you know what the best keywords are to select? There are many tools web designers can use to calculate the number of searches and assess the competition for particular keywords. Here’s a very fast, free Google tool you can use to check out the potential search traffic for different sets of keywords by region.
I often recommend adding a blog to my small business clients’ websites – and I do this to improve their website traffic and search engine rankings. How can adding a blog accomplish these goals?
I recently had a client who had her website that was under development reviewed by another web design firm, and one of their suggestions was to change all the text navigation links from text to images. Is this a good idea?
I’ve had several clients ask me this, because either they’ve noticed it on other people’s websites or had some SEO person tell them this – that they need a keyword meta tag.
Google has not (for many years) used this meta tag, and therefore, it’s simply a waste of time to put them in a website. If you don’t believe me, listen to this video from Matt Cutts from Google: Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been updating my business address on local search, and was having trouble getting it done on CitySearch. This article covers the different things I did to have it updated.
So you’ve read my last past on how I’m addicted to page speed testing. I had a consultation yesterday and was given another tool, Google’s tool for page speed testing. My home page got 84/100, and my blog got 72/100. Gotta work a little bit harder on that but not too shabby. Give a whirl, what’s your score?
Maybe you’ve heard it’s impossible to know what Google’s search engine algorithm is and how it is constantly evolving. This is true. However Google published it’s Webmaster Guidelines for small business owners and their website designers to follow. I think it’s important for small business owners to know about these guidelines, and talk to their web designers to make sure they are being followed.
