Find Buffalo Blog

Great websites come in “ones”, not hundreds or thousands. So why do so many small businesses buy a packaged web solution with their content all ready created, some design choices (nasty ones), and “Search Engine Tools”? I would rank their most common reasons as:

1. Price point
2. Turn-key with content & design
3. They don’t know any better

The first reason is easy to understand to a point. Every business and organization should be financially responsible and how great does a $100 set-up fee and $20 a month look compared to thousands of dollars for a custom solution? They think it’s priceless, but really it’s costly. These businesses range from Real Estate/Mortgage to Lawyers to Car Dealerships. They launch their shiny new pre-packaged site and join 50 or 100 or 1,000 other sites, saying the same thing and looking the same way. Instead of saying, “Here is what we do different to earn your business” they scream “At least we have a website that tells you nothing different that a bunch of others.” Search Engines could care else about these sites, they already have indexed thousands of pages with this content. Other sites? Not many see value in linking to you and your stale content. All these pieces result in few leads developed, converting only those that were seeking you out in the first place.

So what should these businesses do?
The first step is realizing the value in doing things correctly, even at small level. Here is what I recommend to those weighing out a fabulous 100 page pre-packaged website vs. a 5 page custom site.

1. A basic, clean and professional design is better than anything. Create, shoot or buy one good image (pro photographer) to build your image around. A simple layout makes it easier for users to both understand your site and use your site.

2. If you have very little creativity, hire a free lancer that does! Using a web savvy copywriter is the best bang for your buck. A good copywriter will interview your staff, find the key components to telling your story, give it some energy and also have some understanding of search engines and keywords. The bonus: Good copy can also be used or tweaked for print materials.

3. Answer the top ten. If your website does not answer the top ten questions you get from a prospective client on the phone or in person, your going to loose out when a potential client is comparing you or trying to get a feel for you. Sounds simple, but most websites fail this test.

So small business owners and decision makers, keep these points in mind and consider my parting point. What equation sounds better to you, little money for no leads or some money for more leads?

FindBuffalo.com has been available to the world for 45 days now so I thought it would be a good time to offer up a review on some of the keywords I’m starting to pull traffic for and also layout the sites I have managed to pull links from. As a quick review I will say that I have found it easier going to gain rank with search results on Yahoo than Google (still no major traction there), some progress from MSN and no love from Ask.com. Is there a trick to getting Ask to notice you? Let me know. So here are some specifics to what I can offer. If I don’t list an engine, I simply do not appear in their top 100 results. Damn you Google.

Search Term: buffalo mn - #5 MSN - #27 Yahoo

Search Term: golds gym buffalo mn - #1 Yahoo

Search Term: community center buffalo mn - #10 Yahoo - #12 MSN

Search Terms: buffalo mn news - #1 MSN - #3 Yahoo

Here are the links I’m aware of for FindBuffalo:
City of Buffalo (on drop down nav under community - org’s)
Buffalo School District - District #877
WrightSpot (Wright County Community Site)
DelanoMN (Delano MN Community Site)
Zion Lutheran Church - Buffalo, MN
Marci Weiche, Buffalo, MN Realtor
Wikipedia - Buffalo MN

Since day one I’ve had every intention to add some uniqueness to my blog template, just not time. I know there are about 10 other layouts I like better but I would want to customize them even more. I decided to concentrate on content, learning this blogging game. Finally I knew it was something I had to take the time to slap together after reading Lee Oden’s Blog Tips of the Week:

This week’s tips to bloggers!

1. Include a descriptive tag line near your blog’s logo or title. Give readers something to quickly understand the purpose of your blog
2. Give your blog some identity. Use your name, a catchy blog name, logo, unique design. So many great blogs are using the same blog template as everyone else. When you use a common blog template, it makes your blog look like a spam blog - splog.

So, mix in the logo colors of FindBuffalo, add some grid action and plop down the standard MN city sign for some local spin and visual depth and PRESTO! I did have to get a little help from a few peeps to get it to appear.

Here are 5 blogs that I visually enjoy when visiting:

• Gigaom - Love Business 2.0, love the Om, love the layout
• Search Engine Land - New & fresh from the vets of SEO
• MarlerBlog - Legal schemgal … it’ so clean - it’s dirty.
• Volksbloggin - Fun, fun & fun color scheme, hero shot, so unique
• N. Design Studio - Amazing. Free WP themes too!

Please comment on my new header (good, bad, ugly), much appreciation in advance.

I’m not taking $7.50 for this post as I want to write about this on my dime. I came across RockStartUp.com a few months back through one of the CSS gallery sites, maybe Remix. I was in awe. I love web, I love video, I love entrepreneurs and I love watching a business start up and go somewhere. Combine those and give some transparency to an idea taking flight, a web business making it’s way and I’ll watch daily (or check every day for a new episode). So far there are 6 episodes to date, keep ‘em coming. The first one highlighted founder/CEO Ted Murphy getting his VC money and getting things going. Some of the videos are great … the ones that cover more of the business side. The others offer some entertainment but I could skip those, but I can see how others tune in for that alone.

As far as PayPerPost, I don’t know where I stand. PPP should know that after watching RockStar, I went to the site, signed up but was denied as I had just started blogging at the time. I have yet to go back to resubmit now that I qualify. The plusses are a little coin for your efforts and having them put me onto new products or services. The fact that I can choose to post a little or a lot with these paid posts is enough control for me. The cons I guess are letting the money fog or direct your agenda or opinion. I know PPP doesn’t mandate a glowing post, but still … it does for many. You can also get more inner workings on PPP at their blog.

So I would recommend the RockStartUp vids to any web entrepreneur, it’s fun to watch someone making moves. As far as PPP, we all are in search of some currency, whether it’s cash, popularity, compliments, comments or just an avenue to rant. I’ll let you decide what your posts are worth.

Star Tribs online venture to reach the young and vibrant is Vita.mn, a companion to the weekly print version. They push and pull (online tools for saving, tagging, rating, reviewing, list building) info for the music, arts, movie, bar, club, food and “all that jazz scene” in the Twin Cities. I came across it early last fall but haven’t been drawn back to it until I saw thew print version (free) in the entry way of where I ate lunch Friday. I decided to peruse the online version again and see if there were things that might be worth learning from for FindBuffalo.

I enjoyed some of the collections, especially the Overrated Restaurants (I agree on Chino - overrated). Users also get Karma points for their participation. Some people love that type of validation. For some strange reason the site doesn’t click with me. The design and layout is fine, the content generated by users is good … but I’m still disconnected from loving the site for some reason I can’t totally define yet. In searching some blogs I found both some lovers and haters of the site. MNSpeak.com had some interesting comments/banter, mostly down on VitaMN on the post Star Tribune Launches Vita.mn whereas some other users/visitors liked what they saw including AllFourSeasons and Yelvingtons (Steve Yelvington actually put the Strib online back in 1994 as editor | article).

I’ve been tagged twice now so I figure I should take part. Thanks to LocalMN and RugJeff for the love. Here are 5 things you can now file away for me … assuming you’ve started one on me.

1. I never intended to get into this internet thing, but 12 years ago, I was the only employee under 30 at a small company so they bought me a book on creating web pages and that was the beginning of the end.

2. I’m a die-hard Nebraska Husker Football fan and make a few trips to Lincoln every year for the Big Red experience.

3. I’m a very blessed husband to a great wife and a proud father of 2 little girls. It doesn’t get any better.

4. I stayed at Sheryl Crow’s house in the mid to late 90’s for a week. She was leasing it from John Malkovich at the time, in LA. It was a “friend of a friend” deal, who moved to LA, so we trucked her stuff out from Minneapolis, spent the week in Cali and Sheryl put us up and spent a few nights out with us. She is a great person in addition to her talents. Cool experience.

5. If I had enough talent, I’d love to write a book on my life’s experience and just get at least 10 people to read it. (I know ..that’s a stretch!)

There’s my five. I know the people I would tag have already been through this so I’ll leave you with a few links of what I read the most in my quest for SEO, webmaster and marketing knowledge.

Lee Oden’s Top Rank Blog
Paul Jahn’s Local MN blog
Mike the Internet Guy’s Blog
10e20 Search - Social -Design Blog
iBegin Blog on their local search website - it’s a cool project in my eyes (user power!).

Thats a wrap!

I posted about the Google Webmaster tools and now I here is my experience with Yahoo’s Site Explorer tools. I had read some earlier posts on other blogs that stated they were unimpressed with Yahoo’s efforts. It seems that Yahoo listened a bit and rolled out some improvements … and I have been happy with the service. I submitted a few weeks back, signing up was very easy (must have a Yahoo account). Site Explorer also allows you to submit RSS feeds. That alone has prompted me to work on creating a news feed from my News & Info page on FindBuffalo, which should be done soon. They seem to crawl the feeds often and proof is easy to find as the tool will actually list out the last time they crawled the pages they have indexed. That’s a great feature. I’ve also noticed that it seems they have paid more attention to blog posts that contain Yahoo in them. My post on Yahoo Local has been crawled as recently as yesterday where other blog posts have been left alone. Has anyone else experienced this?

They are also crawling my pages with redirect URL’s more often, such as FindBuffalo.com/foxefyre . I’ll continue to report my findings but so far I’ve actually been more impressed with Site Explorer than Google Webmaster and I’ve seen better indexing from it. As noted in the Google post, you can use www.xml-sitemaps.com to create a text site map for Yahoo with their free service, more reason to use them.

I use the following line in many of my ‘day job’ meetings with clients on their website content.

“Nobody will ever comment that they found too much information, too easily on your site.”
(this also gets a laugh every time out of the client, from it’s simple truth)

On the other end of this quote, a few users will share with you that information was vague and really hard to find on your site. Then factor in the hundreds or thousands of users that felt this way and left your site never to come back. That’s the last thing I want for FindBuffalo, so I’m working through avenues of gathering valuable information and making it a breeze to find out about it. At the same time, I also must balance the small amount of time I can dedicate to managing the site. Here are some items I am providing and working on providing on the site:

• City of Buffalo Newsletter: Valuable to all city residents. We all get a copy in the mail, but I would guess many have a few hours of shelf life and then get tossed. On FindBuffalo, they can stay here forever.
• Buffalo School District Newsletter: I have put in a request with the schools to post the newsletter on FindBuffalo and I foresee them agreeing to do so (say yes! to spreading the word). I also see it as a more likely way to connect with the students, not just the parents, after all … this is their medium of choice.
• City News: The city posts a ton of info on their site, send flyers with my utilities and other various methods. While the City is definitely behind with their site layout and usability, I’ll look to convey their info here in a more streamlined and searchable manner.
• Local News: The local radio station, KRWC posts news items daily or every other day. I grab one based on what I think it’s relevance is an post it on FB. I would LOVE if they ever added some RSS feeds so I could just pull that sucker in, but again … I’m just satisfied they have a website.

As you can see from this small snippet I’m aiming to offer information from 30 or 40 sites overall in one place, making that information more accessible. To keep usability a priority I will push to keep navigation clean and understandable. Nobody likes to guess how they arrived where they are at, or not even have a clue where to go. Using simple and direct terms, crumb nav, content links, a site map and more can keep me on top of this. In the works right now are various RSS feeds from FindBuffalo to let my faithful know of site updates. This all will be more challenging as the site grows with information, but remembering to “Keep it simple stupid” will make my users feel smart and then fel like coming back again … and again … and again.

So, with that as the closing, I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

Upon reviewing my traffic from yesterday I noticed that City Pages, a news and arts weekly in the Twin Cities, had featured my Find Bufffalo blog. City Pages has a great collection of Minnesota based blogs to which FindBuffalo is listed on. I was the “Minnesota Blog of The Day“, you’ll see it as the third header down the page in their 1/2 Morning Communiqué.

There is nothing like an incoming link and a little validation that you’re worth reading to put a smile on your face, especially to start the day. Hopefully this isn’t the last!

Since FindBuffalo launched I’ve been visiting DMOZ.org daily to submit my site to be added to Buffalo, MN. I also had the intentions to become an editor for the Buffalo, Minnesota section. I can’t do either. Both “URL submission” and “become an editor” have been out of commission since October upon my research of other blogs and news posts. For the longest time this was the first stop on the internet to submit a site and let the world know “I’m here”. It has long been a trusted, human made directory. Some suggest that part of the issue lies in the number of sites being submitted daily in ratio to the number of editors (speculated at millions of sites to be reviewed by thousands of editors). Others sugest that DMOZ is permanently dead for one reason or another.

I don’t know what to believe, but each day I hit up the site hoping they are back, hoping to submit my site.