I just returned from a three day conference on our favorite web programming framework, Ruby on Rails. It\u2019s nice to take some time to do a little learning \u2013 I felt like I was in a semester-long class, crammed into three days! But I have come back full of ideas and inspiration, and hope to share a bit with you, fair reader.<\/p>\n
One of the phrases I kept hearing over the last three days was Google Juice<\/a>. Wikipedia defines this as \u201cthe ability or power of a website to turn up in Google searches. A website that commonly turns up as the first or second entry in a variety of searches \u2014 especially for keywords that are not part of the site\u2019s name \u2014 can be said to have a lot of Google juice.\u201d This is something every site wants, so how do we get more of it?<\/p>\n One of the talks I particularly enjoyed was by Dan Benjamin<\/a>, author of Cork\u2019d<\/a>, among other things. This was a talk on \u201cBuilding Community-Focused Apps,\u201d and was largely an account of what he learned from his experiences with Cork\u2019d. And a big part of building a site like that is getting users, because without users, a community website is pretty worthless. Having build Gone Raw<\/a> ourselves, we\u2019re very interested in these kinds of websites.<\/p>\n One of his tips was that you need to care a lot about your Google ranking for every page of your site. It\u2019s very common for someone to build a site and worry about how it shows up in Google when you search for the \u201cgist\u201d of the site. For example, if you search for \u201craw food recipes,\u201d Gone Raw does come up on the first page<\/a>, and that\u2019s great. But not if you search for raw foods<\/a>. Is this important? Yes, but not as important as you might think.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more important, for sites like this, is how the many individual pages come up in searches. If you search for \u201craw bread,\u201d we also come up on the first page<\/a>. Search for \u201craw onion bread,\u201d and we\u2019re first<\/a> on the list. This is critical, because more and more frequently, we get new users on the site because they were searching for a particular phrase or set of words that appears in our many recipes or forum topics. And this, more than any other factor, drives new traffic to Gone Raw these days.<\/p>\n So remember, every word of every page is valuable on your site. Not just the home page, or the name of your site, or a few keywords. The text of every single page has the potential to bring you new visitors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just returned from Ruby on Rails conference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13940,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[479],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/espresso_cups.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1754"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/needmoredesigns.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}