Updates to Will England - the Homepage

After five more years of neglect, I updated my personal web page for Will England by adding a 'viewport' for a 'responsive design' mobile friendlyness.  Why?  Well, I've dropped nearly below the fold on Google and I'm not on the home page of Bing for a name search.

And, I had a nice meeting today with Chris from iCrossing and the Kent, the SEO expert at Sprint today who mentioned again, that they use my home page as an example of SEO done right.  But I failed them.  :-)  Thanks again for the tips (and the BBQ, Chris!)

So, sometime in 2020, I should plan my next web page update!

A personal note on SEO

A personal note on search engine optimization of your web pages. I've spent quite a few hours making sure that our Cub Scout Pack is well represented in the major search engines. If you search for Overland Park Cub Scout , our pack comes up number one in the search results in all the major engines. Tonight, it paid off. We had a new scout and parents come to our meeting who found us by searching for Cub Scouts on Google. We are able to help them join a Cub Scout Pack and build our Cub Scout Pack membership simply because I took the time follow the basic rules of search engine optimization with our Cub Scout web page. As you can tell, I'm a bit proud of this accomplishment and I'm very pleased that this band will have a chance to have their son in a great Cub Scout Pack in the future.

Planning SEO for the Holiday - with humanity

Search Engine Watch online offers a set of solid tips that may be of value to those new to the Internet and marketing.

 First off, people search for holiday bargains, deals and gifts. And secondly, if you want to get in front of those holiday shoppers, you should have specific pages for them to find in the search engine.

 You're going to need a plan around the holiday calendar - early October for Haloween promotions, early November for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, the last day you can offer free shipping for holiday delivery, post holiday cleanup sales and more.


Now, you know when you're going to offer what - but how to get it in front of the shopper? Use the right keywords. Drill into Google Keywords - Google Trends and Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool are invaluable sourcing for brainstorming keyword lists and uncovering potential new target terms for holiday 2013 optimization. Find terms that will help educate shoppers about your offers and promotions. Be darn sure that the keywords you're including on your page are reflected in the page content. If you're offering 'secret santa' gifts in your keywords, you should have relevant, targeted content about secret santa gifts you offer. The big search engines will penalize you if you're spammy in your keywords, using words unrelated to your page content. Your customers will also punish you, dropping you from their consideration and mindshare if they click through and find no related content.


Beyond your keywords, you should make sure your page titles, Open Graph titles and body text all reflect the search terms you're keying in on for the holiday season. Don't be a dweeb though; this is overkill and reflects poorly on the site. Keyword loading may get search hits, but between the typos (foe?) and the spammy title, you're not going to be generating any long term or quality customers.


Search engines take some time to crawl and index your pages; pre-publishing landing pages with some good textual descriptions and hints about what's coming is handy to give the crawlers something to latch onto. Use social sharing too, so your visitors can share the sweet upcoming deal with their networks.

Most importantly though; remember not to burn your goodwill and customer sentiment on oneshot marketing efforts. Seth Godin phrases it best: "In the connection economy, though, the thoughtful, patient, mature and modern approach wins out. Because connection is built on trust and generosity, not on snark and short-term wins." It takes years to build a reputation and high search engine rank. And a couple thoughtless decisions to ruin it.