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Do you want your website to rank well in Google? Then think of your website like a restaurant.

How Do You Know It's Good Dining?
Think about how you determine if you want to try a restaurant.

First, you would probably think about what type of restaurant it is. Is it Italian, Lebanese, American, a deli, pizza, Chinese, or a steak house? Is it upscale or down home? Is it near your home or further away? Is it fine dining or fast food? These are all questions of relevancy. If you are interested in pizza then pizza places are relevant, and steak houses are not.

So, you are interested in pizza, but which pizza place to try? Now we are talking about quality.

Imagine you are visiting New York City, and you inquire about nearby inexpensive pizza places only to learn there are dozens of them near your hotel. How do you pick one? You might ask the hotel clerk for her opinion. You might notice that one restaurant is busy, while another is empty. You might overhear diners leaving one restaurant saying good things and overhear bad reviews of another.

All of these factors would influence your perception of the quality and value of your choices, and you would quickly weed out those that you perceive poorly. These factors are your best indicators of quality.

Relevancy and Quality
Now think of Google as a local dining guide – these days it frequently is – and you are searching the web for a place to eat.

Google's goal is to tell you only about the types of restaurants you are interested in (relevancy) and which pizza places are likely to offer the best quality and experience (quality).

Relevancy is fairly easy for Google to figure out as long as a web page is properly optimized with the right keywords and content.

Quality, however, is trickier for Google to determine because it is more subjective.

So, how does Google gauge quality? The answer is also the same as our example: opinions and popularity.

Google looks to see how many other websites have made reference to a web page by linking to it. After all, if another site links to your web page, it typically means they have found your web page to be a good page with valuable, quality content – it's a recommendation in the form of an "inbound link". Other factors also apply. For example, if an auto repair website links to a restaurant web page, that is less valuable than if a food critic blog links to the same restaurant web page.

Next, Google looks to see how many users have "liked" a web page or "shared" it with their friends via social media. If I like or share a restaurant website with my friends via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, I am offering a legitimate recommendation, and Google takes that seriously. After all, I wouldn't want to mislead my friends, right? A recent study showed that social media shares can sometimes account for as much as 25% of the search engine ranking factors now. This is important.

How Do I Get Inbound Links and Social Media Shares?
First, offer the best product or service you can. People are not going to recommend a pizza place where the pizza tastes like cardboard and the service sucks. Make the best pizza and offer the best service. This is a no-brainer.

Second, similarly make sure that the content on each web page on your website is as good as the pizza you serve.

People are simply more likely to link to or share web pages that offer significant value, whether it is interesting information that is otherwise hard to find or special offers or something very entertaining like an irresistibly-funny video. Quality is still king.

And make sure it looks good. Do you instinctively trust a restaurant with a dirty floor, a run down facade or ill-groomed waitstaff?

Third, encourage people to link to the pages on your website and/or to share them via social media. Of course, offering truly unique and valuable content is the first and most important step in doing that, but you can give people that extra push by making it easy and also by asking nicely.

Make it easy by adding "share" buttons on every page of your website and by posting links on your own social media that are then easy for others to share from there.

Ask for it by, well, asking for it. It's that simple. If you ask nicely, you will find that most are willing to post a favorable comment on your social media business page or to link to your website from their own website – happily if they like your company and the website. Ask other websites in your industry to link to your site. Trade links if you have to. Improve your listings in the many online business directories, many of which are free.

Finally, enlist the help of professionals. Maintaining a quality website and competing for online success requires a lot of effort. As a small business owner or manager, you must be involved and active in the process, but you don't have much time, do you?

For more information about our website success services, email us at design@coppercupimages.com or give us a call at (918) 337-2781.

Are you asking this question? If so, good. Many of our clients are increasingly aware of the importance of accessibility of their web presence on mobile devices. Mobile web users are expected to outnumber desktop web users within the next three years.

So, what's the answer?

We'll, let's look at the differences first. If you have a website, there are two possible approaches to cater to mobile visitors of your web content:

1. an app
2. a mobile version of your website

1) Mobile Version of Website

A mobile version of a website is essentially a stripped-down and redressed version of all or part of the existing website content. Users still visit the site in a browser on their mobile device. When they do, however, they are shown a simplified version that focuses on key content and navigation options. They usually have an option to switch to the full version of the site if desired, especially when some site content may not be available in the mobile version.

Mobile versions of websites usually focus on the most accessed content (calendars, latest news, etc.) or content that is more likely to be accessed "on the go", like a contact or directions page. Visitor statistics can be helpful in determining what your mobile visitors are looking for.

A mobile version of a website does not necessarily require building an independent copy of the site – rather, a streamlined version of the existing website content can be automatically delivered to the mobile browser along with a modified CSS style sheet that changes the appearance of the content.

2) Apps

Mobile "apps" are not websites at all. The are stand-alone mobile applications that are designed to deliver content and/or special interactivity that can't be achieved via a web browser. As such, the mobile device's web browser is not used at all. Everything runs straight through the "app".

There are three advantages to apps vs. mobile websites:

1. The term "app" is all the rage right now, so it sounds cool.
2. Apps offer an opportunity to build some truly unique interactivity that you might not be able to achieve with a mobile website (think device motion detection or geo-location).
3. Mobile apps are easy to access via the mobile interface.

Pros, Cons and Advice

Offering a mobile version of a website is far more cost-effective than app development, which is considerably more time-consuming and expensive. Additionally, apps are also platform specific, meaning that you must develop apps for each platform (iOS, Droid, Windows Mobile) if you want to have an ubiquitous mobile presence. You must also be prepared to support and upgrade your apps when new versions of a mobile platforms cause compatibility issues (think software on your computer).

Mobile versions of websites, on the other hand, are relatively simple to deploy and maintain, ubiquitous to all mobile platforms (all that is required is a standards-compliant web browser on the mobile device), and doesn't require a download.

If you are a website owner wondering whether you need an app, the answer is probably no. Unless you're rolling in money you don't know what to do with, or you need to deploy features that work in conjunction with other components of the mobile device, the cool factor alone does not justify the significantly greater expense and trouble of app development.

But wait! There is a combination solution.

Also, there is a simple answer to the third app advantage I mentioned above. For a minimum cost, you can have an "app" that merely launches the mobile browser and loads the mobile site. This provides some of the cool factor and makes accessing your mobile site easy.

For publishers, there is also a new world of digital publishing of content for devices like iPads and other readers, where your print content comes to life with interactivity and multimedia. This is a whole other subject.

If you have any questions or you want to talk about making your website content more mobile friendly, drop us a line at Copper Cup Images.

It has become clear that the social media – i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Merchant Circle, Google Buzz, etc. – represent an extremely powerful marketing toolset for our website clients. Why then do we have so much trouble convincing them?

Short answer: They are too busy to care what their friends are eating for breakfast.

Unfortunately, many of our clients are simply too busy to take the time to see social media in a different light – to recognize the power of all those connections being made out there on the web, and how that power can be, if not harnessed, at least utilized to help their own marketing efforts. But there is a serious risk in ignoring social media.

Consider this analogy: "If I tell you, face to face, about a product I just bought and love," I ask clients, "how many people have I told in that moment? One. But, if I post the same endorsement on my Facebook page or Tweet about it, how many people did I just tell? Well, I personally have more than 500 Facebook friends. Big difference." This is the power of personal recommendation on steroids. I don't know about you, but our business grows almost entirely on the word-of-mouth recommendations of our clients.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Do you want your website to do well? Then you should be encouraging users to share and like your site content via social media.

Why? Because Google and Bing are also paying a lot of attention to what users are sharing and liking, and recent studies – including one by SEOMoz.org – indicate that Facebook shares and likes are significantly influencing search engine results. That means that web pages that have been "shared" or "liked" by Facebook users more frequently are more likely to be ranked higher in search engine results. Google is taking social media so seriously, in fact, that the company has also introduced the +1 button, yet another way for users to share their likes and interests directly within search results.

Additionally, social media offers the opportunity to engage your customers and clients in new, more casual ways. When using social media for marketing purposes, keep in mind that the medium represents a two-way conversation. The most effective social media marketing offers fun and interesting reasons for customers to interact with you and your organization. Try to do that on a billboard.

You can also use the opportunity to regularly share your valuable expertise to help your friends/followers achieve their goals more easily or quickly, and they will certainly appreciate it and share their experience with their friends and family.

Remember, social media for businesses and organizations is not about what you had for breakfast. It's about engaging your audience through powerful new channels. It's already proven to be very effective, and the search engines are reacting to the trend. But you have to make the effort – don't worry, we're happy to help you. Just remember this: if you continue to ignore social media as a marketing tool, you may find that your clients will soon "like" somebody else more.