After listening to feedback from our clients regarding our old image gallery, we went ahead and answered their concerns late last week with some major improvements!

Our galleries now have a “lightbox” display feature, which allows visitors to click on a thumbnail and have the image elegantly overlay the screen, while dimming the rest of the site’s content out. This puts all the focus on the picture itself, and images can now be viewed at full size. As always, the entire gallery can be scrolled through at the visitor’s pace.

Websites.ca clients are gonna love the way their photos look in this display, and can rest easy knowing that their pictures are practically impossible to save and store by the average website viewer.

Wanna see what I mean? Check it out!

If you’re a new or old client of ours and want to take advantage of our nice new Gallery, just get a hold of us with a call or an email. Let us know you want to upgrade to the new Gallery, and we’ll get on it right away, at no cost to you!

But how does one get to page #1? Can you buy your way to the top? The answer is yes and no.

The NO Answer
On Google, there are 2 sides of any search result page. There is the left side and the right side. The RIGHT side contains links that are ADVERTISEMENTS. And the LEFT side contains the “natural search results”. The natural search results get sorted by a complicated and secret formula that Google uses. But there are some details that are not secret on how to use the formula to your advantage.

It is important to note that way more people click on the left side than the right side.

The YES Answer
You can purchase paid links that will show up on the right-hand-side on the Google search results page – or on other websites in Google’s advertising network. But it certainly doesn’t beat showing up in the natural search results.

So How Do You Do It?
The answer is to get people to link to your website. This does NOT mean putting a link on your website and pointing it to another website. This means getting someone else – that has control over another website – to put a link on their website pointing to your website. And their website should contain “similar” content to your website’s content.

Paid Links
You may see offers about getting high up on Google. These people use large lists of links and websites that they control to get you the links you need. This is a practice that is not allow by Google and you will be shut down eventually. In the short-term you may see results, but eventually, Google finds out. Check out why this experienced person says don’t waste your time buying links.

Here is a nice video:

When more people LIKE you or your website, you can communicate with all them is an instant by making a STATUS UPDATE on Facebook. Pretty powerful stuff for generating leads!

So let’s all give a warm internet welcome to Clearwater Pond Services, Rookies Sports Bar, Cement Works Inc. and the Village of Galahad!

These four new clients really show the wide range of industries and businesses that choose us to look after their site; from tropical fish to village councils, we’re building quite a portfolio here!

Let’s meet them one by one, shall we?

Clearwater Pond And Aquatic Supplies

A full-service pond and aquarium store, these guys have everything you need for ponds and aquariums, all under one roof. To give you an idea, they’ve got 2800 sq. ft. dedicated to their green houses alone! They also offer custom woodworking right on-site.
Check out their brand new site!
clearwaterpondandaquatics.ca

Rookies Sports Bar

Located in The Central Hotel in Winnipeg, Rookies is a staple venue for good times in Manitoba, and has been for some time now. Great people, great music, great food and drink, and now an awesome new website to do it all justice!
Check it out:
rookiesinsidethecentral.ca

Cement Works Inc.

Here’s a business based on reliability, quality and consistency, so it’s no mystery why they chose our services for their website.
Their cement fleets travel to remote locations in Western Canada and mix cement right on-site, using carefully engineered mix designs in state-of-the-art volumetric mixers. They take pride in the fact that they’re blowing up the industry with their certified and proven batching methods.
See for yourself on their solid new site:
cementworksinc.ca

Village of Galahad

A quiet, family oriented municipality heavily rooted in tradition and community has just added to their lengthy list of resources with a beautiful new website!
The Village of Galahad thrives on a diverse economic base, supported by vibrant oil, coal mining and electrical power production, as well as a trading area with traditional roots in agriculture and oil and gas development.
Located north of the Battle River valley in Alberta, this community is also rich in beauty and history.
Take a look at their new website; and don’t miss the historical photo gallery; very cool!
villageofgalahad.ca

…Stay tuned for more website launches!

An inlink is a link to YOUR website. It is NOT a link that is on your website going to someone else’s website. It is only a link from someone else’s website, going to your website.

A link is basically just something you can click on (usually they are blue words, underlined). Like, this is a link going to Google. And the words that are in the link, that is the words that you can click on are important – the more descriptive, the more keywords that it has – the better. Relevancy is important between the 2 pages being linked. You used to be able to just pay someone to put a bunch of links on a page all pointing to your website. Well Google doesn’t allow this anymore. They now track the “relevancy” between the pages (that is, if the subject matter is similar). Also, the number of relevant inlinks to the page that links to yours is important. So say is page A is linking to you – and A has 2 inlinks. Compare that to B, which has 50 relevant inlinks. If A links to you, well that is OK. But is B links to you, that is really good, because they have a lot of votes/inlinks – so when they vote for you, that means something.

The websites with the top inlinks are getting all the traffic – and probably generating a lot of leads and a lot of revenue.

Getting inlinks is really easy. You can simply ask your suppliers or customers to add a link on their website to your website. But there are other techniques too. One technique is called forums. What you do is start by doing a search for what you want to showup for. For example, if you want to showup on Google for ‘plumbers kelowna’ then start by doing that search. Now go through the list of results. If you come to a website that is a Forum (a place where lots of people exchange information) then become a member and take part in the conversation. Answer peoples’ questions and make comments. For each of your posts, simple put a little footer message under your comment/question:

Best,
John Smith
http://www.johnsmithplumbing.ca/

See how easy that is? For each post, you’ll get a nice, very relevant inlink. Very powerful stuff!

Want to see your current inlinks? Simple, just head over to the Yahoo Site Explorer and enter your website address at the top. Then click the ‘Inlinks’ button.

We also track the number of inlinks to your website in a graph – this way you can see your progress on getting more inlinks. This can be accessed by clicking the ‘Stats’ button when logged into your website.

Post a comment here if you have questions or head over to our new forum to discuss in more detail! Our new forum is at: http://forum.websites.ca/

For those of you who become active members – well – we want to reward you! We will
be giving free hosting amongst other things to those forum members who actively help
others in the community.

You have to become a member to post stuff – this means once you navigate to
http://forum.websites.ca/ you just click the
Apply for Membership button on the right.
Alternatively, you can
Become a Websites.ca Forum Member here.

Some things to look forward to:

• Dedicated service teams – each customer will have their own team of specialists.  You’ll get to know your Websites.ca team, and your team will get to know you, your business, and your goals for your website.
• Simplified billing – customers can now pre-pay for the year with one simple bill, or pay month to month  – easy!  We added Paypal to our payment methods to make the process even more convenient.
• New software – in mid-2010 we’ll be releasing our new software.  The focus of the new software is to make it even easier for customers to update their website themselves, and to identify and track how well their website is meeting their goals.
• New head office – We’ve moved our head office back to where it all started in the historic Exchange District in downtown Winnipeg.

Not a customer yet? Give us a call: 1-877-517-7867

• We do the work for you, but you can make updates yourself, if you want
• Custom design, not a cookie-cutter template
• Search engine marketing
• Website traffic and search reporting
• Personalized domain name registration and email included
• Google Apps email and documents support
• A dedicated service team to help you figure out what a website can do for your business, then design, build, and maintain it for you!

http://www.websites.ca

There are lots of important things you can do to capture more traffic from Google searches.  We’ve given lots of <a href="http://websitesca.wordpress.com/2009/05/24/tips-for-search-engines/"Tips for Search Engines in the past, but in this article we’re going to talk about Google Local.

What is Google Local?

Google Local is basically maps.google.com.  When you go to maps.google.com you’ll see a map of the world and a search box.  So you can search for things like "plumber winnipeg".  Next, when you click Search, you’ll see a map of Winnipeg with lots of pins showing you plumbers in Winnipeg so you can find one by proximity.  Also, sometimes a little thumbnail of a map will show up on the regular Google search when visitors query something with a geographic keyword – like a city name.

A lot of small businesses get new clients via maps.google.com.  The important thing to note is that you can get on maps.google.com and it doesn’t cost you a thing!

Getting on Google Local

To get listed on Google Local, simply go to http://www.google.com/local/add and follow the steps to sign-up.  It is really worth it!