| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Your own websites? Thread poster: Eric Stone
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My philosophy about a website is that it reflects you and that it gives your clients an honest impression of who you are.
In my case, I could fill my site with pictures of young and eager career men and women (all laughing and being happy of course), or all kind of modern business buildings etc., but the fact is, that I am a one-man organisation (also called 'freelancer'). In short, I am a simple, but hard working translator trying to deliver quality, even working during the evening... See more My philosophy about a website is that it reflects you and that it gives your clients an honest impression of who you are.
In my case, I could fill my site with pictures of young and eager career men and women (all laughing and being happy of course), or all kind of modern business buildings etc., but the fact is, that I am a one-man organisation (also called 'freelancer'). In short, I am a simple, but hard working translator trying to deliver quality, even working during the evenings (please see the time of this thread) and even during weekends to make all of my clients happy (and of course to earn a penny or two).
Therefore I decided to have a 'simple' webside, on which the only thing that is moving are the language flags. I hope it reflects what I am: 'An 'old fashioned translator' who is working in the 'old fashioned hard way' to deliver 'old fashioned quality'.
The way you decorate your website, is up to you, but remember, it also reflects who you are, and if it is a lie....., well, fill in the dots yourself. Till sofar, I am happy with my site.
PS) For all who wants to visit my site right now, it is (a kind of) under construction.
[Edited at 2016-12-12 23:25 GMT]
[Edited at 2016-12-12 23:26 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Paulinho Fonseca 
Brazil
Local time: 07:44
Member (2011)
English to Portuguese
+ ...
| Absolutely right: '...a website is that it reflects you and that it gives your client...' | Dec 14, 2016 |
Robert Rietvelt wrote:
My philosophy about a website is that it reflects you and that it gives your clients an honest impression of who you are.
In my case, I could fill my site with pictures of young and eager career men and women (all laughing and being happy of course), or all kind of modern business buildings etc., but the fact is, that I am a one-man organisation (also called 'freelancer'). In short, I am a simple, but hard working translator trying to deliver quality, even working during the evenings (please see the time of this thread) and even during weekends to make all of my clients happy (and of course to earn a penny or two).
Therefore I decided to have a 'simple' webside, on which the only thing that is moving are the language flags. I hope it reflects what I am: 'An 'old fashioned translator' who is working in the 'old fashioned hard way' to deliver 'old fashioned quality'.
The way you decorate your website, is up to you, but remember, it also reflects who you are, and if it is a lie....., well, fill in the dots yourself. Till sofar, I am happy with my site.
PS) For all who wants to visit my site right now, it is (a kind of) under construction.
[Edited at 2016-12-12 23:25 GMT]
[Edited at 2016-12-12 23:26 GMT]
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I would just add: '...reflects you and that it gives your client...' the idea of the kind of professional and specialized fields they are dealing with or looking for.
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Paulinho Fonseca wrote:
I get many emails from 'companies' saying that my website SEO is not good. It might not be, but I have also checked on some of these 'companies' and found out they are scammers.
You might have to work hard to improve the SEO of your website to achieve the same results you can achieve with a ProZ profile.
Most of my new clients find me via my web site.
The truth is that I'm involved in more peripheral things (e.g. video, regulated sworn translations, DTP, etc.) than the average text translator, so prospects often need lots of information/guidance on things they don't know.
The need for a web site came up when I noticed that I was spending too much time answering queries on the same issues, namely the Brazilian law and regulations on sworn translations, on which there was little information in PT, and none in EN at that time. That was the kernel, later it grew into other areas where information was scanty, scattered, or too technical (hence not customer-oriented), such as video localization.
I have a pretty good SEO ranking, thanks to the useful CONTENT I provide, and without having spent one red cent specifically in Search Engine Optimization.
The 'companies' Paulinho mentions also approach me now and then. Some have interesting (free!) tests to check which of my site's keywords are most effective in drawing traffic. However I improved them myself, didn't hire their services.
I think that a translator has no interest in drawing millions of visitors to his/her web site. Our work relies on a specific need, and we are limited to a specific set of language pairs.
My Proz profile basically states all the various things I do, and each ends with the URL of the corresponding page on my web site. A couple of months ago I downgraded from Proz member to free user, to check how much of my site's traffic came from the Proz profile. Now I can say that it was about 5%.
However... my SEO ranking was pretty good already. If it were not, the Proz profile might have given it a boost; I wouldn't know. Food for thought.
| | | | | Another word about SEO | Dec 15, 2016 |
I agree with José that the most important part of a website is its content, which should accurately reflect whatever is compelling or different about the services one offers. I also think it is more valuable to have a smaller number of visits and contacts from people who are actually interested in these services than to have a lot of page views.
The Google SEO guidelines I mentioned earlier have nothing to do with optimizing a web page's text for certain keywords. Instead, they con... See more I agree with José that the most important part of a website is its content, which should accurately reflect whatever is compelling or different about the services one offers. I also think it is more valuable to have a smaller number of visits and contacts from people who are actually interested in these services than to have a lot of page views.
The Google SEO guidelines I mentioned earlier have nothing to do with optimizing a web page's text for certain keywords. Instead, they concern things like having valid HTML, page load speed, whether the site provides a secure connection (with https), website accessibility, mobile or responsive design, and other elements that Google considers to be best practices. That's what the varvy.com site I mentioned evaluates in its SEO test.
As far as content is concerned, it seems more important to use semantic HTML than to worry about keywords. By that I mean, for example, correctly using headings (h1, h2, h3 tags) to highlight the structure of the text, only using the blockquote tag for actual citations of text, and so on. The W3C, which is responsible for the HTML standard, has a site where you can see this semantic structure at :
https://www.w3.org/2002/08/extract-semantic
You put in the URL of a page and it will show you any semantic elements it finds, such as the content outline and page metadata. My understanding is that search engines do pay some attention to this kind of thing when indexing to find out what a page is about. As the Wikipedia page on semantic HTML puts it:
An important type of web agent that does crawl and read web pages automatically, without prior knowledge of what it might find, is the Web crawler or search-engine spider. These software agents are dependent on the semantic clarity of web pages they find as they use various techniques and algorithms to read and index millions of web pages a day and provide web users with search facilities.
In order for search-engine spiders to be able to rate the significance of pieces of text they find in HTML documents, and also for those creating mashups and other hybrids, as well as for more automated agents as they are developed, the semantic structures that exist in HTML need to be widely and uniformly applied to bring out the meaning of published text.
More info on semantic HTML:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML
http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmltags/a/why-semantic-html.html
[Edited at 2016-12-16 11:51 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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