We are proud to announce the re-launch of MarkHillman.com. The site is the online presence of Mark Hillman, a former Colorado State Treasurer, State Senator, and life-long wheat farmer. Through this easy-to-update website, Mark can share his unique insights on Colorado politics. He also maintains a priceless list of local coffee shops around Colorado.

Mark is hardly new to us at Flat Creek. In addition to re-designing his website, Flat Creek has long hosted Mark’s email newsletter, Capitol Review. In fact, we’ve integrated a archive of past issues into the new site. Take a minute to check out markhillman.com to see what’s going on. If you like what you see let us know so we can help you take your interests online, just like we helped Mark.

No, I’m not going to tell you that we’ve uncovered new magical secrets to make your website zoom up the Google search rankings. People who do tell you that, especially when they charge a hefty hourly fee to do it, are lying to you.

I’m just pointing to a terrific article by New York Times business writer Saul Hansell (”Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine“) where he was actually allowed inside Google’s Building 43, the closely-guarded facility where Google engineers tweak the mathmatical algorithm that drives Google’s search results. As the article points out,

“‘Expectations are higher now,’ said Udi Manber, who oversees Google’s entire search-quality group. ‘When search first started, if you searched for something and you found it, it was a miracle. Now, if you don’t get exactly what you want in the first three results, something is wrong.’”

Hard-core search enthusiasts are always looking for any gleaned insights into the latest tweaks to Google’s code. Those who claim to have more are, again, playing loose with reality. According to the article, here’s a synopsis of how a website becomes listed on Google:

“As Google compiles its index, it calculates a number it calls PageRank for each page it finds… PageRank tallies how many times other sites link to a given page. Sites that are more popular, especially with sites that have high PageRanks themselves, are considered likely to be of higher quality.

“Mr. Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages, which involves more than 200 types of information, or what Google calls ’signals.’ PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages – like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years.

“Increasingly, Google is using signals that come from its history of what individual users have searched for in the past, in order to offer results that reflect each person’s interests.

“Once Google corrals its myriad signals, it feeds them into formulas it calls classifiers that try to infer useful information about the type of search, in order to send the user to the most helpful pages. Classifiers can tell, for example, whether someone is searching for a product to buy, or for information about a place, a company or a person.

“These signals and classifiers calculate several key measures of a page’s relevance, including one it calls ‘topicality’ – a measure of how the topic of a page relates to the broad category of the user’s query.

“The sites with the 10 highest scores win the coveted spots on the first search page, unless a final check shows that there is not enough ‘diversity’ in the results. ‘If you have a lot of different perspectives on one page, often that is more helpful than if the page is dominated by one perspective,’ Mr. Cutts says. ‘If someone types a product, for example, maybe you want a blog review of it, a manufacturer’s page, a place to buy it or a comparison shopping site.’”

We’ve learned a lot over the years on how to write, develop, and build websites so they are friendly to search engines. But looking at SEO is secondary to designing with the user in mind first. For professional firms, especially local and regional ones, a lot more traffic is going to come from your site directly via old fashioned referrals. Ease of navigation, compelling content, and client interaction are key points for your site design. If you let us do that — and we are very good at it — the search engine traffic will follow.

We’ve talked before about Web 2.0 and its impact on everything from web design to March Madness brackets. Today, I present your life’s goals – 2.0 style.

One of the fundamental tenants of Web 2.0 is allowing website visitors to create their own content on the site and share it with other users, who can then comment, review, ignore, or whatever. The concept is called social networking.

The website 43Things.com does just that, allowing users to upload not their photos or video but their goals. As the site creator says:

We all have stories about what we care about. Writing down your progress on a goal can help someone else learn about something you both want to do. When you see a goal you’ve achieved, click on the “I’ve done this” button and share a story about how you did it.

Putting your goals online is intensely personal, and that’s just what this site is hoping for. Because if someone trusts a site enough to put their own personal goals online and share how they reached their goals with others, they will probably be extremely loyal site users. And a loyal audience drives ad revenue, which makes a site like this profitable.

Not only will they be loyal, but they will encourage other users to participate. They will create communities within the site, driven by shared goals. They will encourage each other and have very personal conversations, developing relationships they may not have anywhere else.

This is quintessential Web 2.0 — relying on the users to create content instead of just reading it.

So what are your goals? Get started on 43Things.com now.

The design should be compelling and match closely with your organization’s website, unless of course your organization has a terrible website. It should have some sort of graphical header, but not much larger than 80 pixels high. Especially if you have an “at work” target audience, you will want to focus on what viewers will be able to see in the Outlook Preview Pane. Only allow space for a paragraph or two of text per article, and post the rest on your website. Ultimately, you want to use the newsletter as a tool to drive traffic to your website, so include five to seven links throughout the design.

Content, clearly, is also important because without something to say, your recipients won’t waste their time reading your e-mail. This is worth repeating – if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all. Keep it to a couple of good articles that relate to your clients. Give them a little bit of consulting for free. If they start to look forward to your e-mail because you give them insights they need and value, you have won.

Finally, you need the addresses for your distribution list. This is one of those places that gives small business owners headaches, especially after the federal anti-spam law CAN-SPAM was passed. The law now basically says that you must have permission from everyone on your list to send them a bulk commercial e-mail. That is, you must have some request from the individual to receive your messages, or a relationship with the recipient.

One question that always comes up: how often should I send? Most small business owners want to send something every week. Why not? If you have the list, use it right? Wrong.

While each client base is unique, and you should test different send times and days of the week, generally, a monthly newsletter is plenty for your customers. We’ve had great success with monthly newsletters for our clients, even sending every other month.