Schrock Hosts Phil Walker and Platte Visions Website

I would like to welcome Phil Walker and his website, www.plattevisions.com to the family of websites hosted and optimized by Schrock Innovations. Those of you who know who Phil Walker is may also know that his award-winning Visions Along the Platte River Valley CD series has sold more than 10,000 copies and is now featured in classrooms across the state as an interactive tool to teach Nebraska’s rich history.

Phil called me about a month ago and asked me to take a look at his website to see what could be done to improve its ranking in Google and other search engines. Before we started, I though it would be interesting to see exactly where Phil’s website on Nebraska History actually ranked in Google, so I did a quick check. I was shocked to find that despite his site being up for over a year and being publicised all over the place, that it was not ranked in the top 10,000 Google results for the search terms Phil Walker or Nebraska History.

We evaluated Phil’s website and proposed some small, but significant changes. We added a sitemap, some meta tags, and converted words that was contained within some images into standard text. Once the changes were complete, Phil’s website moved into the top 50 results for both sets of search terms in less than 4 weeks.

While our efforts to elevate Phil’s website will continue, his case illustrates an important point for anyone out there who owns or operates a website. Organizations put websites up on the Internet to serve content to visitors. If your website is not attracting visitors, your content – and your money – is wasted.

With that in mind, more than 80% of all website traffic originates in a search engine. That means someone goes to a website like Google and searched for a term – in Phil’s case we chose Nebraska history. The object of the game is to engineer your website and its supporting components to be as close as possible to the #1 search engine result. This is how you can get traffic and this is how you can deliver your content to the maximum number of interested visitors.

I think it is ironic that business people understand that it makes no sense to advertise on a radio station that has no listeners, but they will dump thousands of dollars into a website that has no visitors. An audience is an audience, and anyone running a website needs to ask themselves what have I done lately to attract and please my audience?

Schrock Innovations does free website evaluations over the phone for any website owner who is looking for an extra edge over their competition. My advice to business owners is pick up a copy of this weeks Midlands Business Journal, read the feature article about Search Engine Optimization and then call Schrock (866-496-8772 or 423-9595 locally in Lincoln) and ask one of their web guys to look over your website. It could be the best 5 minutes you have spent on your website in some time!