Marketing, Advertising and Web Design Tips by Jeff Swanson

For those of you looking for marketing and advertising tips, please check out my new blog. I’ll still be posting to this blog, but it’ll be a wider range of topics, not just marketing.

Adding rel="nofollow"’s to appropriate links on your site is a helpful way to optimize your site for the search engines and maximizes the link juice that you have. Got it? If not, here’s a brief definition of what I’m speaking to:

rel="nofollow" is an attribute that you can add to links on a web page. It goes inside of an "a tag." Example - <a href="http://www.yoursite.com" rel="nofollow">Name of link</a>. What the rel="nofollow" does is tell crawlers, like google, not to follow this link. When that happens, you aren’t passing any of the popularity of your page to that link. This is very helpful for links to contact pages or other pages that you are not trying to rank in the search engines. In other words, you might as well pass the value of your page to other pages that you feel are important - and want to optimize for search engines.

Link juice or popularity is basically how powerful your page is according to the search engines. If Google thinks your page is very important, then it has quite a bit of link juice. You can pass that link juice to other pages on your site, or out to other sites. You want to point that link juice to places where it can help you, therefore, adding a rel="nofollow" to pages like About Us and Contact Us makes sense. Why waste any juice on those pages when you can increase the juice that goes to more valuable interior pages. 

An education is not enough to get you by in the fast-paced marketing world. You need to know the history of the industry and keep up on trends that are forming. Because I love you all, I’ve constructed a list of the five best books I own that teach essential skills and strategies.

5. Hey Whipple, Squeeze This

3. The Brand Gap

4. Made to Stick 

2. Copywriters Handbook

1. Ogilvy on Advertising

Happy reading. Please leave comments with other useful books. I’d love to hear some suggestions. 

If you’d like to track what users are doing on your site, Google Analytics is a groovy tool that will do just that. The reason it’s so groovy is because it’s detailed, very simple to use and (best of all) free.

The first thing you need to do is set up an account. Go to www.google.com/analytics/ to get things started. Once you’ve created an account, you simply add a snippet of code to the html pages of your site. The code should be placed just above the closing body tag (</body>) and must be added to all pages that you would like to be tracked.

Now your finished! You can login to your account whenever you get an itch to see how well your site is doing. You’ll see loads of information as in how many people are visiting your site, what pages they are viewing, how they are getting to your site, and much more.

Now that you have a Google account, you can use it for other great tools they offer. Two others that I often use and suggest you do the same are AdSense and the Google Toolbar. AdSense allows you to make money off of banners on your site. The Google Toolbar has great stuff on it, like the PR checker, which I will discuss in an upcoming post. Until then… 

Businesses looking for a web-based software development company should check out Bright Mix, an up-and-coming leader in the industry. Bright Mix has just opened an office located in Omaha, Nebraska and they are rapidly flourishing.

The company was started by Dusty Davidson and Kevin Zink, two young and intelligent programmers that had enough with corporate life. If you’re in need of web 2.0 software development, these are your guys. They bring a fresh and accurate point of view on what users expect to find on the web.