That's not how this question is usually phrased. Usually, clients want to know if they're through. And typically, the answer to that question is the same as the answer to any question about when to stop marketing efforts: you should stop marketing as soon as you have as much business as you'll ever want.

I've done linkbuilding for clients with no links at all, and I got one client his two millionth link. (I should say that he had about 1,999,847 when I began, but still, it sounds good, doesn't it?)Links are votes for your website as a useful source for people searching for your keywords, and you can never have too many good votes, or good links.

But that's not to say that linkbuilding should be the main focus of your marketing efforts forever. Time and budget constraints mean than most of us have to pick and choose. So how can you tell when it's time to end a linkbuilding campaign?

• Look at your initial goals. If you're lucky enough to have the budget for it, you can plan a couple of hours every day for linkbuilding. Not only can you do this, but you should. This is just good maintenance for your website. If that sounds like a luxury, then it makes more sense to plan your linkbuilding in terms of campaigns. You may want some basic foundational linking: directories, social media, links from your vendors or partners or clients. These build that initial base of links that can give your new or underappreciated site a boost in PageRank and visibility to search engines. When you've run through all the quick and easy placements, you've finished that campaign. Or you may want some highly-placed blogs or personal sites to mention your goods and services with a solid link. For this type of campaign, it makes sense to develop a target list and work till you get acceptance or rejection from most of them. Planning your campaigns so that you can tell when you've succeeded is sensible.
• Watch your results. It makes sense, when you've done a linkbuilding campaign, to use your Analytics or site meter to see what kinds of results you're getting. One of my clients gets regular traffic from professional directories, but not so much from blogs. Now that we know that, it makes sense to put her into more professional directories and not to focus on blogs. Watching your results is particularly important if you're doing the work yourself and don't have a track record to rely on. By now, I can usually predict what kinds of links are going to be most beneficial in terms of traffic, but if you are your own link-builder, you may get some big surprises. And I still rely on Analytics to fine-tune all my linkbuilding efforts.
• Give it some time. Some kinds of links will increase naturally once you get the ball rolling. Others need intense work every time. You can't always tell which category your efforts will fall into until you've watched for a while. So it often makes sense to do a linkbuilding campaign, and then to back off for a while before beginning the next one.
  

Labels: linkbuilding

I talked about navigation earlier in the week. At that time, I was discussing how you can find out what visitors to your site do. Once you see where they go, then you can develop a strategy based on that information.

The question arose: what if those visitors are not doing what you want them to? Then, assuming that what you want them to do is connected with their wants and needs as it should be, they aren't getting what they want and neither are you.

I'm working with Dr. Jane Bluestein, whose website has just this kind of problem. People come to visit, look at one page, and leave. Jane would like them to stay, to read articles and visit her bookstore, and to buy her books.

How can she accomplish this?

Well, we're approaching the problem on a number of fronts, but one of the biggest issues for Jane's website is navigation.



Here's her old website. When you visit, you get a nice welcome and a set of pictures of children. Now what? The collection of handprints gives links for various kinds of people who might visit. You can choose "Elementary" if you're an elementary teacher, or "Media" if you're in the media -- well no, it doesn't work quite that way, but something along those lines.

Just below it is another group of links. In case you can't read them, here they are:
About Our Company • About this Site • Contact Us • Site Map • About Jane Jane’s Schedule • Where Jane has Been • Press Kit • Testimonials • Jane’s Blogs Bookstore • Articles • Handouts • Workshops • Fun Pages • LinksWhat’s New • Other Resources on this Site • Special Ed • Beginning Teachers

Then there's a bit of text, followed by another set of links:

Contact Us Site Map by Topic Site Map Alphabetical About Jane Bluestein, Ph.D. What Jane’s been up toSchedule Workshops Articles Handouts Bookstore High School’s Not Forever Web site Links

So on the homepage there are three sets of navigational options, all a bit different, and all frankly offering way too many choices. As I mentioned when I wrote about breadcrumbs earlier this month, more than seven choices is the same as no choices: it doesn't sort out the options. Visitors may feel overwhelmed.

The other pages are similar, so a visitor coming by search to one of her articles usually just reads that page and leaves.

Here's Jane's new homepage:





She's compressed the navigation down to seven options (the maximum you should use) and put all the choices on handy buttons in one of the places where people expect to find them. The choices she's offering are also better: people are directed to the places Jane wants them to go (like the bookstore and the page with information about hiring her as a speaker), to clear and appealing options like her blog and her impressive collection of free stuff, and to readily understandable places like "home." Instead of getting lost on the page and leaving, visitors will be able to grasp the information they need quickly and move on to the next place they want to visit.

If an analysis of your visitors' behavior shows that they're not traveling through your website the way you'd like them to, try making it easier on them. A good signpost or two, a helpful trail of breadcrumbs to guide them -- it'll make all the difference.

Stumble It!

Labels: online marketing, usability, web design

This blog can give you plenty of good insights and information into things like content and keywords and how to use your Analytics -- but what if you're really just getting started with your web presence? Expressions like "keywords" may not be meaningful to you if you're wondering how to get your business onto the internet.

The short answer is this: call me up and I'll help you. If that's too short, read on.

First, you need to have a website.

It's easy to get a website. There are places online that will put a site up for you, and places where you can do it yourself for free. The only problem is, you can end up spending as much time and money on a bad website that doesn't serve your purposes as you do on a good one that brings in customers and sales. Add the opportunity cost in lost sales and your "low-cost" or "easy" website can end up costing you way too much.

Speaking as someone who works with people who are unhappy with their websites, I can tell you that I very rarely have someone tell me how they carefully chose their designer, hosting firm, and copywriter. People who've done that are usually happy with their websites. The people who come to me wanting to change their websites have had them put together by a kind hobbyist they know, or have taken a stock website sold by the hundreds at a generic service.

Many capable businesspeople feel helpless when it comes to putting together a website, though. I spoke recently with a local businesswoman who has a website that doesn't do much for her. I asked her how she'd chosen her designer and copywriter. "I just did what the phone company said," she shrugged. Sure enough, the phone company put up a website for her, but it has been a disappointment.

The production manager of a printing firm had looked into companies that specialize in making generic websites for printing companies. "There's no creativity there," he said, "and that's not good in a creative business." But once he'd rejected that option, he didn't know where else to look.

Spend some time looking at websites in your industry and talking with your local web design firms. If the designers you speak to can't explain what they could do for you and what your website could accomplish, then just thank them and move on to someone who can. Building a website isn't actually a magical process that only members of the mystical brotherhood can understand.

On the other hand, get someone who can read HTML to check out the designer's code for you, and someone who understands SEO to look at their portfolio. It's the same as buying a car: if you're not a mechanic, you can choose the vehicle and the color you love, but you get your mechanic to look under the hood before you make up your mind.

We're talking about designers first, but you may be thinking that you need space on the web before you can think about design. However, since your designer may also be able to host your website, that's a better starting point.

You also need a domain name. This is your web address, the thing your customers type into the top of the browser to visit you. It needs to be memorable, readable, and available. There are tools that can help you determine what would be a good domain name for you, and it isn't expensive to register one (about $10 a year). If you think you may want a website for your business in the future, you can register "yourbusiness.com" and park it (to continue the car metaphor) until you need it. That way, you won't lose out on having the best possible web address for your business.

The process of designing and setting up your website can be quick, if you choose a ready-made option, but a custom site can take a month to get from initial inteview to live website. Whichever approach you choose, plan the time involved so that you can do the physical-world marketing you need to do to get your website well-known to your current customers.

Once your website is online, you need to get the search engines to notice you. The first step is to tell the major search engines that it exists. I've seen ads online offering to submit your website to the major search engines at high prices, but actually you can just click on these links and submit your website. Follow the directions closely and do it just once.

Yahoo!
Google
MSN
DMOZ

Then use your marketing skills to get the word out about your website. Put the address on your business cards, your signs, your print ads. Your current customers will visit your website to browse, and visit your physical location more often as a result. New customers will see your website and decide to visit you.

For many people today, the internet has taken the place of the phone book, newspaper ads, and asking friends where they'd go. There's no need for you to be missing when they look for you online.

Labels: online marketing

The content that greets visitors to your website is enormously important. The stuff "under the hood" -- the meta language that human visitors don't see -- is also important. We've discussed keywords here before. Once you've gotten your description and keywords set up, you should also think about your alt tags.

Alt tags are descriptions of images. People with limited vision can hear them and know what pictures are on your website. At some pages (like the example below) you can see them when you put your mouse over a picture.

They also tell the search engines, which cannot see pictures, what images are on your page. When people do image searches, alt tags tell the search engines what to offer the searchers.

Many of you have never heard of or thought of alt tags, and many more don't bother using them. This explains the weird stuff you get offered when you do image searches.

Taking the time to create good alt tags can do good things for you:

• They help clarify what your page is about. When you use your keywords in your alt tags, search engines get another opportunity to identify your page with those keywords.
• They let you add keywords that don't fit into your visible on-page text. A jeweler client of mine makes lots of different kinds of jewelry. A list like "pendants, bracelets, earrings" wouldn't fit with the style of her website, but descriptive alt tags on her photographs let her include all those words. The painters I work with could list all the suburbs they serve, but again such a list wouldn't fit the upscale design of their site. By using the locations of the houses in the alt tags on their images, they can include the place names.
• They can draw a different group of customers. While SEOs may complain that most searchers who come to see images just bounce right away again without shopping, I think that isn't always true now, and is changing. As more of us use alt tags well, image searches will become more useful and popular. One of the most popular searches at my educational blog this summer was for "monkey bulletin board." I was top at Google image search, and visitors not only clicked through to look at the bulletin board more closely, but went on to visit the client whose products had been used to create it. Since my blog is about lesson plans, the people who visited through image search were different from the ones who came to the same post through regular search.

So what's a good alt tag? We're talking about keywords here, and the same things I've said about keywords before still apply:

• They have to match the content. Often, web designers will just use the basic keywords of the site. I've even seen the page descriptions being used. This looks shady. If you have a picture of a pendant, the alt tag should call it a pendant, not "first class handmade jewelry." A stock photo of a laughing child should not have your company name. Think how you feel when you do an image search and turn up pictures that seem completely irrelevant to your search. Don't do that to your potential customers.
• They ought to be related to your overall purpose. You can use a picture of a cute puppy and label it "cute puppy." This could bring people to your website. However, unless your goal is to have lots of random visitors with no interest in your goods and services, this isn't going to get you the return on your investment that you want.
• They should be things people are actually searching for. As with all your keywords, the words in your alt tags should be terms that your customers and potential clients might type in at the search engines. If people looking for your services won't be searching for "Five years in the same location" (and they won't), then that shouldn't be your alt tag. Use a word or phrase that someone will actually search for, and you increase your chances of being found enormously.

How do you create alt tags? It's easy. Go to the HTML of your page and find the image. It will begin with "a href..." Then there'll be a string starting with "src" and then you'll see "alt=" That's the place to put your alt tag. You can just type in "cute puppy" or whatever you've decided on in place of whatever follows the term "alt=" even if it's an empty space. This may be the kind of task you let your webmaster do for you. In that case, you should be able simply to ask to have your alt tags changed.

Then just watch your site statistics and see how many more people are visiting you through image search.

Stumble It!

Labels: alt text, keywords, web design

A man came to see me not long ago. He was trying to decide whether to work with me, or with this Amazing New Online Marketing Tool he'd discovered. I admired the heavy, brightly colored pages the representative of this Amazing Tool had given to him, and I went to their website and saw this Amazing Chart:




Yep, for $1000 a month -- with a lengthy contract -- you too can have 325 clicks per month to your website.

It is possible that I laughed. In fact, I think I probably did. After all, faced with something like this, you have a choice between a merry laugh and saying, "Dude! What's wrong with you?"

I'm sure I would never say a thing like that to a client. Or even a prospective client who's thinking of going with an Amazing New Online Marketing Tool instead.

A careful reading of the materials suggests to me that this is an Adwords campaign, and there's nothing wrong with that. But look at that chart! This company is asking people to pay large sums of money for a number of visitors in a month that you can easily get on your own every day for free. You can get an Adwords campaign on your own, too -- not for free, but for much less than that.

This isn't really funny, though.

SEO is a new enough field, and online marketing is a new enough experience, that there are lots of people out there preying on the inexperience of innocent businesspeople. It's like the time in the long-ago past when anyone at all could claim to be a dentist and practice on people just by hanging out a sign.

I know people who call themselves SEOs who believe that you have to resubmit your website to the major search engines every month, that the best way to increase PageRank is to submit fake testimonials to spammy sites, and that it's impossible to get good rankings without paying for it.

And that's the honest ones.

The people with The Amazing New Tool aren't exactly deceiving anyone. They are essentially saying, "Look! Pay us lots of money and you can have a small amount of traffic at a website!" They're just saying it in an excited tone of voice and trusting that people who don't know much about websites or online traffic will get excited enough to sign a contract. By the time the poor creatures realize that they've been tricked, it will be too late.

How can you avoid this?

• Learn a little bit about online marketing. You can learn the basics by reading this blog, and there are plenty of others out there, too. Ask questions so you can tell whether the Amazing New Tools are in sync with reality or giving you a completely different story. For example, all respectable sources of information on SEO will tell you that excellent content and design are the basics. An Amazing New Tool that guarantees magical results regardless of the quality of your product or website is not reliable.
• Work with people you trust. Can they answer your questions? Do the things they say make sense to you, based on your knowledge of business and marketing? The internet is a specialized environment, but it's not another planet. If the things your Amazing New Tool is suggesting sound as though they'd be dishonest or shady in the physical world, then they probably will be on the internet, as well.
• Be alert for the scent of snake oil. Sure, scammers can look respectable. But often they don't. If it feels like someone is about to pull out a fake Rolex and offer it to you at an Amazing Price, then you should probably trust your instincts and bow out.

You can get good amounts of traffic to your website by having a useful website, letting people know it's there, and giving it some time. It is entirely possible that you can accomplish the same results by paying an Amazing Company large sums of money, but it isn't sensible. Hire the people you need for the purpose of creating a useful website and letting people know it's there, and pass on the Amazing New Tools.

Labels: ethics, online marketing, SEO

Every morning between morning tea and hitting the gym, I check all my clients's Analytics, and of course mine, too.

When you first installed your Analytics or other site meter, you might have gone every day. "Look!" you thought happily, or perhaps even said to coworkers, "I got 17 visitors yesterday!" Or, "Oooh! I've had visits from 93 countries this month!"

After a while, the entertainment value lessened. You were still seeing about the same things, after all. Maybe the lines on the graphs were going steadily up, which was nice, but even that loses its power to thrill after you've been looking at it for some weeks. You cut back to a weekly glance at the dashboard... then maybe you just checked in occasionally... And now perhaps it's been a long time since you looked at all.

If you don't have Analytics or don't know whether you do or not, check out the article "Understanding the Google Analytics Dashboard". It will explain the main things on the dashboard: how many people came to see you, where they came from, how they got there, and what they did once they arrived.

Having a daily look at your dashboard is like checking your site's weight or blood pressure or whether its nose is cold. You get a rough general idea of its health. In less than a minute you can see how many visits you're getting on average, and you can use the "Compare" function in the top right-hand corner to see whether your traffic is up or down. You can see which pages are most popular and whether most people find you through search or by typing in your address.

Once you've gotten an idea of the overall health of your site, though, you may want to look at other things when you make routine checks.

Let me suggest a couple of deeper examinations that can be truly useful. I've added screenshots to these descriptions to help you see how to find the information. However, since Analytics is confidential, I'm using screens from one of my own blogs, not from the websites being discussed. The data won't match, but you can find the right buttons on your own dashboard, and I won't be sharing too much information.



Navigation Summary lets you look at a particular page and see how people respond to it. Under "Content" on the dashboard, click on a page you want to learn more about. To the right of the screen you'll find "Navigation Summary." Click on it and you'll see a page like this one, which shows where people came from to the page in question and where they went next.





At my SEO website, for example, the most popular page is my homepage. Most people go look at another page, and the largest number of them go to my second most popular page: my list of clients. It's a partial list of the people I've worked with. The Navigation Summary page tells me that no one starts out at that page. Everyone goes somewhere else first. Nearly half go right to this page from my homepage, and the same percentage go on to "Services" from the clients page.
Why? Well, if you go to my Clients page, you see this header with navigation buttons along the top.



Here are the buttons, from left to right:

Welcome
Blog
Clients
Services
Contact

So it appears that lots of people visiting my website use the buttons from left to right to visit all the pages. Sure enough, if I check the Navigation Summary for the "Services" page, I find that about 60% came from "Clients" and about 40% head on over to "Contact." 96% of the people who go to my "Contact" page went from the "Services" page.

There are differences in the numbers, but this is still the largest number in each case; the majority travel through all the pages from left to right. There are iconoclasts. There are people who go straight from the homepage to "Contact." But the majority just follow the navigation buttons.

I've gone into a lot of detail to make this clear and you may be thinking it's obvious that people would naturally do that. You read English, you tend to go left to right.

Checking other websites, though, I see one where visitors mostly go to the homepage and then leave, one where they travel evenly to one of the other nine pages linked at the homepage, and one where just about everyone goes to the catalog.

When you make design decisions about your website, this information can help you. Are you putting your strongest sales pitch on your "About" page when only 8% of your visitors ever go there? Are you adding excellent content that shows up well in the search engines -- and then no one makes it from that page to your homepage? You need to know these things.

The Navigation Summary shows you people's routes in terms of the pages they visit, but the Map Overlay tells you where people are coming from in terms of human geography. There is a map on the dashboard which shows by the depth of color of the countries which nations are sending traffic to you. This can simply be interesting to know. One of my clients is a speaker and writer who travels internationally. Seeing visitors from Finland might make her perk up a little, thinking about a visit to Finland in her future. I like to see international visitors, too, since I have an international clientele.

But my clients who are housepainters and decorators in Australia have as many different countries visiting them as I do, and it isn't good news. Not that they mind having people from Germany visit them, but they just aren't going to be dropping by to paint their houses. They've been doing some linkbuilding lately. They need to find out which links are sending international guests, and which are sending actual customers.

Here's how: click on "View Report" under the map on the dashboard. Click on the place you want to learn more about. In this case, I'm going to click on Sydney, the town where the painters are. Now I choose "Dimension," a drop-down menu from which I select "Source." It's right beneath the word "territories" in the picture below.




I can now see just how the people in the town of Sydney found my client's website. These are the useful, traffic-sending links. Seeing that an ezine article sent several people from the United States just tells me not to bother writing ezine articles.

Any time you're focusing on the regional long tail, use Map Overlay>Dimension to narrow down your view so you don't get misled.

There is so much information in Analytics that you can see something different every time you check it, so you might as well add it to your daily routine. That doesn't mean that you want to spend time idly wandering around your results. Are you trying to answer some particular questions about your website? You can ask me, and I'll tell you how to find the information.

Stumble It!

Labels: Google Analytics, linkbuilding, web design

For the past several days, I've been working in a client's office, helping her get her online catalog set up. She has a fresh new website, nicely optimized for SEO, and all we need to do is put in her products.

Notice that "all we need to do.." We had actually imagined that we'd be able to hire a data entry person to do this. "You don't want to pay me to do that," I said. "You can hire a college kid at minimum wage and get all that done as soon as I have it set up."

It wasn't like that. Setting it up wasn't as simple as we had imagined. The client had some changes she wanted made to the website. There were some bugs in the system. The machine wouldn't go any faster than one SKU per six minutes and insisted on being refreshed in between all entries.

I mean, I might like to be refreshed between entries, too, but you don't see me refusing to work and handing out error messages right and left, do you?

And the tech guys were saying things like "Name servers" and "back end" and "transfer lock."

The client was feeling a bit stressed. Like maybe she needed to be refreshed, too.

I did the only thing possible. "Shut down and have lunch," I said. "It'll probably be fine when we start up again."

This is, as we all know, a useful trick for communicating with tech devices. Does it work with tech guys? Will a sandwich make it possible to get things done when it seems impossible?

I have one particular tech guy whom I've been asking to correct an address on an inside page of a client's website for three months. I don't think any amount of sandwiches, even with bacon, will help with that. But some communication issues aren't about lack of cooperation or a need for refreshment. They're about language. Sometimes tech guys don't realize that they're saying things in special ways that other people don't understand.

How can you best communicate with your tech guys?

• Recognise that jargon is often the issue. All businesses have their own jargon. "Name servers" isn't actually more difficult than terms like "trade books," "vermiculite," or "SKUs." It's just that we get used to our own jargon. When your tech guys use terms you don't know, speak up boldly and ask what the word means. Not knowing what a name server is doesn't make you stupid any more than not knowing what sforzando is, so don't be shy about that.
• Realize that some concepts are hard to understand. Sometimes you don't even need to understand them. Ask for a metaphor: "Is this something like a delicate mechanism so I have to follow the steps exactly?" Say, "Are we talking about a physical object here?" Or even, "Do I need to understand this?"
• Be clear on your preferences. I have to make a guess when I start working with a client on how much they want things quantified. I may start with, "Your traffic is steadily increasing; do you want the numbers?" or I may offer to send a spreadsheet. When a client informs me that I'm making her feel like her head is about to explode or that he really doesn't care what I do so long as the orders come in, then I can back off. Feedback makes that possible.

A little persistence can work wonders in communicating with your tech guys.

Stumble It!

I teach Freshman Comp in my spare time at a local college. Today, we were talking about how to find sources for a research paper.

One of the students thought she'd write about Bono, the singer from U2.

"How would she find resources?" I asked the class.

Easy. There was widespread agreement that she would go to Google and type "Bono" into the box.

"I know what she'll get," said one confident young woman. "The very first thing will be his personal homepage, with his life story and discography and ..."

"Maybe not," I had to say. "It depends how many people have hired someone like me to get them higher on Google."

I had to tell the kids the SEO facts of life. Someone like Bono is commercial enough that there are going to be people working to make money from his name. "There'll be fan sites," I said, "and commercial sites."

And indeed, Bono's personal homepage (or his band's; he doesn't seem to have one himself) is not #1 for a search at Google on "Bono." First is Wikipedia. Then a fan site. Then the band's official website. Then Bono's BBQ of Jacksonville, Florida, and good for them, I guess, though mostly only if they ship BBQ out to all the people searching for "Bono."

Everyone can't be #1. If lots of people want to be #1 for the term you want to rank for, then you might not get to be #1.

I had a client who wanted to be #1 for "ecards," a popular term which gets batted back and forth among a large handful of companies, several of which are owned by the same people. I got them from #39 to #4 this summer. They're currently #9 -- still on the front page, but invisible to those who won't scroll. If I had been working for them all this time, they might be #1 now, but there's no guarantee. The other companies might have hired SEO experts, too. And while the cut and thrust of movement up the charts at Google is fun for us, it isn't the most important thing for your business.

When that student types in "Bono," she's going to see Wikipedia right off. I have of course pointed out to my students that Wikipedia, while useful, is not a strong academic source. She knows that's not going to get her an A on her annotated bibliography. Does she give up?

Nope. She'll read several -- certainly down to the last one she can see without scrolling. Probably to the bottom of the first page. Maybe as far as page three. Statistically speaking, few people go further than page five. Most people look at page one and then change their search.

That is, they go up and type in "Bono discography" or "Bono U2" or some other variant that comes to their minds.

What are your customers doing? If they see you as a commodity, then when they don't find you right away as they search, they'll go to your competitor.

If I don't care where I buy batteries, I'll type in "batteries" and go to the first place I see. If I don't care what Bono I find, I'll go with Bono's BBQ -- that doesn't even make sense, does it? Bono isn't a commodity. No one is looking for Bono thinking that any old Bono will do -- Edward de Bono, Sonny Bono, whoever...

So one of the most important things you can do for your business is to make sure you're not just a commodity to your customers. Make sure that you're valuable enough to be worth scrolling for. Make sure that they'll go to the trouble of changing their search if they don't find you immediately.

You should also make sure that your regular customers know your URL. Put it on the things you hand out or send out, including your invoices and receipts. Direct them there in your email marketing and ask them to bookmark you. Make sure you have enough useful links to direct people over to your website often.

My personal website, Rebecca Haden Quality Copywriting and SEO, is still not #1 for a search for my name. When I wrote this, my educational blog was. I was of course happy to see that I had knocked down Amazon.com, which had been #1 for my name (I review for them) for some time. However, today they've returned to #1. Then my educational blog. Then there's a whole raft of things I've done for clients... press releases I've sent out, social bookmarking I've done... really, I could get quite nostalgic looking at that first page. I'm #8. I am of course also all the other numbers on the page, competing with myself for that coveted #1 spot. I'm also most of the next six pages, and after that I just couldn't stand to look at myself any more so I didn't keep looking, but I'm probably still there. It's an occupational hazard. It also keeps me from imagining that the #1 spot is the be-all and end-all of SEO.

I didn't like to disillusion my students about the perfection of the search engines. I don't want them to think that's enough research, though, typing their paper topic into Google and clicking on the first thing that presents itself. And I don't want you to become so fixated on being #1 at Google that it overshadows the many benefits of responsible SEO.

Labels: SEO

Blogging can be great for your website. It can send you traffic, bring the search engines over to visit you more frequently, increase your visibility in your community, and encourage your regular customers to hang out at your website more.

Done well, blogging can have enormous benefits. Done badly, it's a waste of time and money.

What's the difference? Just follow these rules and you'll see benefits:

• Have good content. I'm really not talking about topics or writing style here. There are blogs I read for their excellent writing, others I read for their useful information, and still others that I read because I like the writers and want to know what they're up to. You and your customers also have varied reasons for choosing which blogs to visit, and tastes differ. But neither humans nor search engines will be fooled by ads disguised as blog posts. They won't send traffic, they won't garner you any links, and they won't do any good things for your business. Google's diagram below makes it pretty clear how they look at those low-quality links. If you're paying someone to do this for you, or taking time out of your workday to do it, just quit right now.

• Post regularly. Irregular, infrequent posting causes you to miss out on a lot of the SEO benefits of blogging, which have to do with frequently updated content. What's more, human visitors won't keep coming to visit you if there is usually nothing new going on when they visit. Most good blog directories won't even let you list your blog until it's had three months of regular posting. If you're going to go to the trouble of setting up and blog and linking it to your website, you have to blog regularly or hire someone to do it for you.
  
• Watch your traffic and make sure your blog is doing what it should. As always, there is some time involved here. You can't put your blog up on Monday and decide on Friday that it isn't worth doing. It can take longer than that for people to notice you, not to mention the search engines. However, blogging is ephemeral, and should give some indication fairly quickly of what kind of results it will provide. With Google Analytics, you can see who comes to your website from your blog, where they're located, and what they do once they arrive. If you want local traffic and your blog sends you international traffic, if you want people to shop your catalog and your blog is popular but sends no one to that catalog, or if your blog just hasn't caught anyone's fancy in the months or years that it's been up and is still only getting visits from your friends, then you are getting signals that tell you to change your strategy.
  
  Let's look at some examples.
  
  
• One of my clients has a brick and mortar educational store. I write a blog for her that announces events and new products in her store. I have a fairly popular educational blog and I link to her there when it's natural and appropriate for me to do so. I also blog for her at her professional organization, with a link to her on every post. The educational blog is her main source of referral traffic for her catalog, and the items featured there are routinely among her best sellers. Both the other blogs give her links and traffic. This is a good investment for her.
  
• Another client has me blog for him some of the time and edit staff-written posts at other times. He used to post only about once a month, but is working his way up to weekly posts. His traffic has increased 101.47% (I like numbers) over the past month as frequency has increased, and his blog is sending people to his website about a dozen times a month now. He also has traffic from other blogs (including this one) that mention him for free. The traffic from his blog is international, and they visit only a page or two. His blog is not doing as much for him as it could. However, within the confines of his budget, he has a good start. It would be wise for him to earmark the first profit from his blog to invest in increasing the frequency of his posts.
• For my third example, I don't want to call out anyone in particular. I have several clients with blogs that don't do their jobs. I don't write those blogs. I mention this not because I plan to claim that's the problem, but because I want it clear that I am not the one making the decisions in these cases. These blogs have only occasional new posts. Some are poorly written. One is well written, but not strongly linked to the website. Another is well-written and well-linked, but so personal that the people who read it are highly unlikely to be customers. I've just checked these clients' analytics, and they show no visits from these blogs at all this month or last month. For these businesses, every minute and every dollar they're putting into those blogs is wasted. They should either fish or cut bait: that is, make the investment of doing a good job on the their blogs or close down the blogs and put the effort they're spending on that elsewhere.

Blogging can be a very good business move. Just make sure you're doing it the right way for your business.

Stumble It!

Labels: blogging, Google Analytics, linkbuilding, online marketing, SEO

I've got a guest post up at SEOmoz.org. It's intended for SEO professionals, not businesspeople, so it may be more than you want with your morning coffee, but if you'd like an inside look...

Labels: SEO

We all have things we enjoy about our work that are, let's say, less public and obvious than the ones that are, well, public and obvious. For example, I enjoy SEO because I'm an analytical, problem-solving kind of person, I like words, I like to help deserving people reach their goals, I have a minor geeky streak ... things like that.

If I'm honest, though, I have to admit that I also like it because I get to be a fairy godmother. I love it when a client's website has a 408% increase in traffic. It delights me when their uninspiring website becomes beautiful. I feel happy when their sales double or triple or increase tenfold. I get to wave my wand and say, "My work here is done!" and leave with a cheery smile.

You know what? It doesn't always happen.

Oh, it usually does. Most of the people I've worked with find that their business is much better because of it. Sometimes very fast.

But not always. In fact, I have two websites right now that aren't giving me that fairy godmother thrill. One is my own website, Rebecca Haden Quality Copywriting and SEO.
Oh, sure, it's beautiful. It has 851 links after only being up for two weeks. It has reasonable amounts of traffic, particularly since I've only spent about an hour working on it since it went up.

What am I complaining about? A complete lack of magic. It's just increasing normally, with normal links and normal traffic, and nothing magic going on at all.

The other one -- well, I shouldn't say where it is. It's an ecommerce website. I worked on it for eight hours right before my own site was launched -- so it's been a couple of weeks. I did a site analysis, rewrite, some navigation suggestions, improved the meta language, did some link requests. Traffic is up about 50% and it has sixteen links now instead of two.

Listen, there's nothing wrong with that. But... it's not magic, is it?
The internet has encouraged us to expect magic. We think that two days is too long to wait for physical items to be shipped to us across actual physical space. We imagine that we can fall in love and get married with none of the inconvenience of meeting people and getting to know them. We believe that all the information in the world is now available to us when we type a vaguely worded question into a little box.

This is an illusion.

So how do you get the fairy godmother effect in SEO?

• It takes work. True, it seems to some of my clients that their business got better because they met me. But actually it takes quite a bit of work. That's why my own website's progress hasn't looked like magic. I'm spending my time on paying customers.


• It takes time. We may behave as though the internet has made the passage of time obsolete, but it hasn't. Traditional marketing had as its rule of thumb the simple truth: if you won't commit to a marketing plan for five months, don't start it. The internet can speed up some of the indicators of success, but we're still dealing with human beings. However fast the spiders and robots travel, they do very little shopping or hiring.


• It takes thought. Not just thinking on my part or on the client's part, but thinking on the part of the client's customers or clients. We're told that it takes the average person anywhere from five to twelve contacts with an idea before they'll take action. Your website can make a profound connection with a visitor and it can still take them longer than two weeks to decide to buy your product. They need those contacts.

So, if it isn't magic, why am I feeling a lack with those two websites? Well, with the one, I only spent eight hours on it over the course of a day or two. Usually I spend months working on a website, even if it's only a couple of hours a week. If I come back and look again at the results after a couple of months, I'll see results.

My own website? The one I'm expecting to perform SEO miracles with little to no assistance from me? Well, I'll let this be a compassion-building experience. Next time a client wants instant results, I'll be able to remember how I felt.

In the meantime, I'd better get looking for my wand.

Labels: SEO

Recently, I needed to rent a tuxedo for my teenaged son, who is a music student. I'll end the suspense right now by saying that I succeeded. Not only were we able to rent the suit, along with the needed shoes (for some reason they're not allowed to perform in sneaks) and tie and so forth, but we were able to sign him up for a special musicians' plan. Musicians can just call and give the date of their gigs, and have everything packed up and waiting for them on the day.

This was such an excellent service that I would have gone to that shop on purpose in the first place had they mentioned it on their website.

As it was, only complete chance that took us to that particular shop.

Here's what happened. On Saturday morning, my son and I set off to find the needed tuxedo. We began, as modern people usually do, by typing in "tuxedo rental Fayetteville Ar" at Google. That's where we live, and that's what we wanted, so that's what we did.

There were some directories there, with descriptions that suggested that they would be those fake directories which exist for grayhat SEO purposes, so we ignored those. There were a couple of places, though. We clicked on the first. It gave an address, and a nice picture of a bride which was in fact an ad for another business. No directions. No prices. No other information of any kind.

I noted the street they were on and returned to the search results. I saw a name I recognized. I clicked and was taken to their corporate page, which had no local information. In fact, it listed locations only in Washington, Idaho, and Montana, all of which are too far away for me to drive to for a tuxedo rental.

Disgusted, I tried local search and saw that there appeared to be a couple of options on the same road as the mysterious one with the picture of the bride. No hours, no directions, nothing helpful like that, but I had addresses.

We sallied forth and drove from one end of that road to the other. There were no tuxedo rental places visible.

A little cell phone work allowed us at last to find a place, hidden in a strip mall. They told us about the musicians' plan, money changed hands, and we were out of there within minutes.

You might think that I would give those nice people a link here, or at least tell you who they are and where they are, just in case you find yourself in Fayetteville some day needing a tuxedo for a concert.

Nope. They don't deserve it. Plus, their website only mentions locations in Washington, Idaho, and Montana, anyway. And I don't know whether they have musicians' plans in those states or not.

Here's how to make certain that your website irritates local customers, keeps them from visiting you, and causes them not to link to you just for spite:

• Don't give your hours. Keep your location as vague as possible. Don't include a phone number if you can help it. If they can't find you, they won't be able to visit.


• Don't mention any of the advantages of visiting your place of business. Don't have photos of your products, mentions of your special offers, or any hint that you provide service of any kind.


• Give no information that will allow a visitor to your website to compare your business with any other. Don't put information about prices, selection, or policies. That way, if anyone does visit you, just out of desperation, they have an excellent chance of needing something completely different from what you offer.

Don't follow the advice above. Turn it on its head and do just the opposite. You'll be amazed by how much difference it makes in your business.

Labels: SEO, usability, web design

You may not think of fairy tales and business together very often, but we do have a business fairy tale in our culture. You can see it in movies.

Our heroine is perhaps a baker. She makes wonderful breads and cakes and pies, and several people encourage her to sell them, so she does. Gradually, everyone in town hears about her, helped along perhaps by the magical evening when one of the most important people in town chooses her special Buche de Noel for a dinner party. She has an evil competitor who uses underhanded tactics and tries to sabatoge her puff pastry, but she wins out through goodness, hard work, and possibly the assistance of John Cusack.

We imagine that it will be like that with our websites, as well. You have excellent content and you're selling something good, so you should sort of magically show up at the top of the search engines and have lots of traffic, while your evil competitor who tries to buy links should be foiled.

Well, those who buy links may well be foiled. However, you may not just automatically get links, any more than the mayor will automatically hear about that Buche de Noel in the absence of actual marketing.

I have a client who is quite well known as an author and has had her webiste up for some years. She has some very good links, just because people link to her. Her publisher, Scholastic, some universities -- these are good links, and hard to get if they don't just come naturally. But she has only a couple hundred of them. She needs more, if she expects to achieve the PageRank and traffic (and therefore the sales) that she deserves.

Another client has had her site up just as long, and it's an excellent resource. She had three links when I started working for her. Not because she didn't deserve any links, but just because she didn't happen to get them. It's as though the baker in the business fairy tale made all those scrumptious breads and pastries, but no one noticed.

What if the baker decided to put a sign out saying "Bakery"? Perhaps she might give out samples at a fair, or put an ad in the newspaper. The eventual success of her bakery would be less of a fairy tale, but no less positive an outcome.

Linkbuilding is like putting a sign in front of your business. It's respectable and sensible. The difference is, a linkbuilding campaign is more effective if it looks as though you didn't have to put out a sign. Ideally, it will look as though people just decided to give you links because your strudel is so delectable.

So to speak.

You certainly don't want it to look as though you are the evil competitor. My basic philosophy of marketing is that you should be very good at what you do, and let people know that. How can you accomplish this? Here are some things to keep in mind when you're linkbuilding:

• Choose relevant websites. It is easier to drop links into link farms and "free article" sites, but it doesn't fool the search engines and it makes you look sneaky.
• Make sure the content you use to build links is actually useful. Don't leave comments with your URL unless you actually have something to add to the discussion. If you're really good at what you do and you choose relevant sites, then you should have something to add to the discussion, and you deserve to have your URL there.
• Build relationships. People will give you links out of respect and friendship, as well as linking to your worthwhile content just because they want to share it. Chances are, they won't give you links just because you asked them to, along with hundreds of other webmasters you haven't bothered to build relationships with.

If you follow these suggestions, the links you've worked for should be indistinguishable from the ones that have come about naturally without your asking for them. This is a time-consuming process. If you're not good at it, or you don't have time for it, it makes sense to hire someone to do it. There's nothing wrong with that, either. Just make sure your linkbuilding minions understand the importance of getting That Natural Look.

Labels: linkbuilding

One of my clients asked me an excellent question this morning: "What would you recommend as a low cost/highly effective approach for our ongoing SEO?"

My answer to her had to do with her particular circumstances, including balancing me with a less expensive worker, but the general question is a good one for most of us. In the modern world, all businesses need SEO. That doesn't mean that all businesses can find room in the budget for the cost of full-time SEO. How can you get the most bang for your online marketing buck?

After pondering the question for a while, I have the answer. The most economical SEO is SEO that works.

I currently have a skydiving business contemplating hiring me to write their website content. I can do what they need done for just a little bit less than the profit from one new client. They have been contemplating for a couple of weeks now, and have not had any new clients coming in from their website. How many clients did they lose by failing to have their website up and visible? If they are able to find someone to do it for them for free next week, they will still have lost money by delaying. And that's assuming they find someone free and just as good, and you know good SEO writers don't grow on trees.

Consider another case. This one is hypothetical, but only out of politeness. You can see real examples of this all over the web. But let's say hypothetically that you're a jazz guitarist, willing to play private parties in the town where I live. You invest in a series of clever and popular YouTube entries showing that you are a "ninja guitarpicker" and comment all over the social sites as "ninja guitarpicker," gaining a bunch of links in the process. Perhaps you congratulate yourself on having done all this SEO yourself, at the cost only of a hundred hours of your own time and sandwiches for your cameraman. When I go to my favorite search engine and type in something like, "jazz guitarist for private parties in Fayetteville," your #1 ranking at Yahoo for "ninja guitarpicker" won't mean a thing. You will be invisible to me.

One of my clients hasn't seen the degree of improvement she wants yet. We realized that increasing her links and traffic wouldn't improve her sales because her website has too many problems, especially with the shopping experience. She really needed a new web design. This is not an inexpensive choice,but we can see that it will be a very worthwhile investment. She could have spent the same amount of money on online ads, but her results wouldn't have been as good.

So your least expensive option is probably to hire an expert like me to come up with a strategy for you. Then set one of your less expensive employees to do the basic things that don't take expertise: submitting to directories, for example, inviting your current customers to visit your website, signing your company up at professional networking sites, and stamping your URL on everything you ever give out that will take ink.

Once you begin to see the return on your investment, you can determine what part of your marketing budget ought to go toward online marketing rather than print or TV. But you can't make that determination without having done some effective SEO first. And without keeping good track of your results, you won't know which efforts paid off best and should be ongoing. So at the very least you should begin with some expert analysis and some foundational SEO using current best practices.

SEO, after all, is marketing. If you wouldn't advertise your auto repair business in Catfancy magazine, don't rely on random blog comment spam and think you've tried SEO. If you wouldn't stand on the corner saying, "Pssst! Wanna buy a Rolex cheap?" then don't use blackhat techniques and think you've done online marketing. And don't try a one-shot approach and hope for longterm results.

Instead, do what you do with any marketing plan. Use available data to determine an effective strategy, commit to a long-term effort, test, and adjust for new data. This is the way to make sure you get the best return on your investment -- and that's what marketing is all about.

Labels: SEO