Does Your Website Work Weekends?

Monday, August 31, 2009

One of the great things about your website is that it will go ahead and work for you while you're out doing other things. It will, assuming you've done a good job with it, show the best side of your business to visitors 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

That is, if you have visitors 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

You can tell by looking at your analytics. Here's your dashboard. You can see the traffic to your site in the blue line.

If you put the cursor over the little blue dots, you can see exactly which day, and day of the week each is.

Look at a couple of examples and see the difference:

This site has minor peaks and valleys. Some of the peaks are on Thursdays, some on Tuesdays or Fridays. The traffic never goes way down. This site has traffic all week.

This site has valleys on the weekends. There is an enormous difference between weekday and weekend traffic every single week. Essentially, this site doesn't work on weekends.

What difference does it make? In general, if your site doesn't work on weekends, your customers probably don't either, and they're only visiting when they work.

In that case, your website can be an all-business kind of place. You can use the jargon of your industry. You should be serious enough that your customers' bosses can walk by and see they're working.

You might also be able to increase your traffic, and perhaps your sales, by posting something interesting on weekends, or even offering special offers only on the weekend.

If you have traffic all week, then people come to you whether they're working or not -- or they work weekends, too. You may want more of a Web2.0 feeling, a community aspect, a fun area. You should make sure that your site accommodates amateurs as well as pros at whatever you do. Or, if you're in an industry where people work on the weekends, you might want to take advantage of it by offering those weekend specials if your competitors don't.

It's just another useful piece of information about your clients.

Labels: Google Analytics, online marketing

How to Link Out Effectively

Friday, August 28, 2009

Why is the internet called a Web?

It's because it's a collection of links, a bunch of pages that are hooked up with one another, as the strands of the web are in this picture. A fly over at the edge of the web will move and its movements will travel through all the interconnections, alerting the spider in the middle.

At this point the story become unsavory, so we'll drop the metaphor.

The point is that your website is not supposed to be there all by itself like this not-a-web-page. The pages of your site should be linked to one another in ways that let visitors travel easily from one to another, and they should also be linked up to other sites and pages on the internet.

It's important to do this in ways that are valuable to your visitors, and it's also good to do it in ways that are valuable to your business.

One obvious way to do this is to have a links or partners page at your website. Pages of this kind can be great, as long as a couple of basic characteristics hold true.

The links should have a purpose. Sydney Painters Courtney & Wise have a links page that serves to increase visitors' confidence in them. Showing their certifications for fair trade and ecological responsibility, their membership in prestigious groups like the Master painters, and so on helps people feel comfortable inviting them into their homes -- very important for painters. Many of the companies linked on this page have also given links to Courtney & Wise. Nothing wrong with that. A page of random links that have no other purpose than to get reciprocal links is pointless, and will look that way, too.

The links should have value to visitors. The Retreat at Sky Ridge has a page of links to information about Eureka Springs, their nearest town. People planning a trip to this popular tourist destination can go to that info page and find links to lots of useful stuff, so it's an extra service to customers, and adds value to the site. It's also likely to bring people back repeatedly, a benefit to the website. FileReplicationPro, a remote backup software company, has a page of links to articles that go into more detail on things like real time file replication for Mac Os with mixed servers, which you might care about if you were one of their customers. Helping visitors find information they need is a valuable service.

You don't have to have your outgoing links on their own separate page. I include links to pages I'm describing so you can go look and see them if you want more details. EnviroSolutions describes its product, the Ozonator NG-1000, at its website, and links in that description to scientific papers on the use of ozone as a microbiocide and other things that people who need an Ozonator NG-1000 will want to know about. Again, this is valuable to visitors. It also increases the likelihood that people will understand and want the Ozonator, since they'll be able to find the information they need. In such cases, it makes sense to have the link right there where the question comes to your visitor's mind.

When you create links at your website, it's important that they should give enough information that your readers can decide whether to visit that link. The anchor text (that is, the words people click on to visit the link) should tell your readers where they'll end up if they click. Words like "click here" don't do that. Neither should you have deceptive links that take people to ads when that wasn't what they had planned on seeing.

Following these principles will give you and your visitors a positive linking experience. And yet people often hesitate to link out to other pages, for fear of losing their visitors. Don't worry about that. Just make sure your website is interesting and valuable enough that your visitors will want to return, and you'll never have to hesitate to link to other sites.

Labels: linkbuilding, web content

Are SEO Pros Lonely?

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Josepha told me yesterday that search engine optimization professionals (or, as Tom puts it, search engine optimists) are lonely, according to the news. People in her office were discussing a Fox news story which is actually about black hat tactics and spam. Doing these jobs, the story claims, will leave you friendless and indeed shunned by decent people.

The story lists a variety of job titles and then offers inaccurate descriptions of the work holders of the titles do. Bloggers for hire, for example, "provide phony support for a product." That's not actually what professional bloggers do. I know, because I'm a blogger for hire myself. I blog for various companies, providing useful information for their visitors. Saying that professional bloggers "provide phony support for a product" is like explaining what professional dancers do by saying that they take their clothes off. There's a difference between a ballet company and a strip club, and there's a difference between SEO professionals and spammers.

I'm not saying that fake reviews don't exist. I've been asked to write them, actually, though of course I refuse. I review lots of products for various companies, but never without using them, always honestly, and always under my own name. The fact that there are people who will write multiple fake reviews for pay (very small pay, by the way -- as I say, I've been offered these jobs, and all I can say is that the people who do this stuff must be desperate) is irrelevant to the work of professional bloggers.

Professional bloggers write blogs for companies, just as professional cleaners clean buildings for companies, or professional photographers take pictures for companies. If Fox thinks that the average company blog is written by the CEO, then they are mistaken.

Fox also claims that search engine optimizers "dupe" people. Actually, we help honest business people make their websites communicate well with their customers. Fox is confusing us with con artists.

In fact, Fox includes professional bloggers and SEO professionals with telemarketers, email spammers, and people who sell ringtones with misleading phrasing. Perhaps they have confused themselves with journalists.

Making a Website for a Nonprofit Organization

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Last night Jon Schleuss and I presented the new website we built for the local chapter of the American Association of University Women. This excellent organization has been supporting equity for women for more than a century, and we were glad to have the opportunity to create their new site.

We showed them which pages they could change themselves, which ones had to have changes made by the webmaster, how to use the blog and the calendar.

The experience brought out some of the differences between working with businesses and working with other kinds of organizations. Here are some things to keep in mind when you build a website for your organization:

There may be a lot of different responses. While workers in a business generally are invested in the success of the website, members of an organization may not be. Some of the members of the AAUW didn't see the point of having a website at all. Others worried that the new functionality would interfere with the current methods of communication within the group. There were concerns that changes might offend the webmaster. It may be necessary to spend some time with the membership paving the way for changes.
There might be too many cooks. During most of the creation of the website, there were only one or two people from the organization involved in decision-making. Once the site was up, there were suddenly dozens of decision makers. With other organizations, we've seen all decisions have to go through multiple committees, or be passed around informally for weeks waiting for consensus. The AAUW currently has a couple of empty pages. Jon expressed it by saying, "Rebecca and I have personal websites, but this is a website for your whole group, so it should reflect the whole group. We're waiting for your input as a group, and as soon as you've decided what information you want there, we'll add that." My past experience is that members usually want changes after launch -- no matter how much discussion there is ahead of time or how long the conversation is left open -- so your organization may need to budget for the cost of making changes after completion.
There may be rules. The AAUW has lots of rules, ranging from the way logos should be displayed to the punctuation of the content. Corporations sometimes have this sort of rule as well, but national organizations nearly always do. Whether to use "e-mail" or "email," whether abbreviations and acronyms are allowed, and whether to use honorifics like "Ms" or "Dr." are among the usage issues that often come up. The central site for the organization usually has these rules posted, though local members may be unaware of them. It's worth checking for such rules and passing them on to your web designer and copywriter.

I've done web content for religious institutions, professional associations, community organizations, and nonprofit groups. Invariably, the benefits of the website are similar to those for businesses, in terms of improved communication, new members, and increased funds. The process may be a bit different, but it's worth doing. In this case, the members of the local chapter are proud to say that their new website is the best branch website in their state. They're right about that. Their new design expresses the lively, diverse, dedicated nature of their organization, and should help to bring the next generation of educated women into the group.

Labels: communication, nonprofit organizations, web content

Is an Old-Fashioned Website Harming Your Business?

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

When people ask for an analysis of their websites (I do that for free, by the way -- don't hesitate to ask me), one of the most common things I see is an old-fashioned website.

Here's one. This website is a good example of how websites used to look, long ago. Words and pictures and things were just stuck on the page one after another. Pictures were small. Nothing gave the visitor any indication about how to move through the site. People in those days expected to have to spend time figuring out what was going on with a website, and to have to read everything in order to find the information they sought.

In some ways, websites were like things on paper, in those days, but they wouldn't really have made nice brochures or anything. They were more like classroom handouts. It was kind of cool if there were pictures at all.

This site was also built in an old-fashioned way. Web designers in those days used the techniques developed for making tables of information, to sort of put things approximately where they wanted them to be, and it sort of works on some people's browsers.

Again, it was kind of cool, in those days, to be able to do anything besides just making a black and white page of text.

We are way beyond that now.

Here's the new website Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue and I worked with owners Eric and Cindy Studer to build for The Retreat at Sky Ridge.

Obviously, the new site looks more attractive than the old one. But notice the ways in which it works better:

The name of the place is in the top left hand corner, where people who read English naturally look to begin getting information from a page, and it's large and different enough to work as a title. The old site had the name (the former name) in that place as well, but it wasn't visually distinct from the rest of the page.
The navigation is obvious. It's in the place where people expect to see it, it looks like navigation, and the colors change on mouseover (the mouse, in the screenshot, is over "Contact") to help visitors find their way.
There are clear calls to action. If the visitors are ready to book their stay at The Retreat, they can do that. If they want to get on the mailing list for special offers, they can do that too. Getting the contact info to make a call is easy.
The site is built to modern standards. You can't see this in a screen shot, but it makes a big difference. As time goes on, old-fashioned kinds of website construction work less and less well, and before long they simply won't work at all. Trying to maintain a web site built with outdated methods is sort of like clinging to cassette tapes. It's only a matter of time.

If your business has an old-fashioned website, that may mean that you've been online for a long time. Good for you. You have domain age and probably also faithful visitors on your side.

But you may not realize that you have an old-fashioned page. The first time I heard my son talk about what astronauts did "in the olden days," I experienced some cognitive dissonance. To me, the terms "olden days" and "astronauts" didn't go together. I'm old enough to think of astronauts as kind of new by definition, and "olden days" as something that goes with maybe cowboys or knights in armor.

If you have an old-fashioned web page, then you might be used to it. You might not realize that modern users of the internet are going to look at a page like the "before" picture here and feel confused. Is that the homepage? Where are they supposed to go? What company is this, and what do they offer?

Highly-motivated visitors may search around to find the information which is after all, there somewhere. Most visitors, though, will spend a few seconds at this page and then return to the search engine results page whence they came, and go somewhere easier to understand.

I should add that I sometimes see quite new websites which have been built in old-fashioned ways, with old-fashioned designs. This is really sad. If you have one of those, then you've got the negatives of an old website without any of the positives. It's a bit heartbreaking to say "I realize you just had this built a month ago, but you know all that money you think you saved by having your cousin do it for you? It's an illusion."

If your website looks like the "before" picture here, you really have to have a redesign.

Labels: budget, online marketing, web design

Vocabulary and Your Website

Monday, August 24, 2009

I was talking earlier today with the client I mentioned in the post called "The Call to Action" and in "Your Website is Not a Piece of Paper." We've fixed his website up since I wrote those posts. It's far better than it was before, and in fact he's ready for another round of optimization, for a new and narrower group of keywords.

This is a great idea. But as I was talking with him, I had to think about vocabulary. This guy's website specializes in animal tissue and blood for research. We're working on terms like "mouse albumin," "tyrosine hydroxylase," and "tissue homogenates."

I have another client who specializes in transporting chemicals. We've been working on terms like "Ammonium potassium thiosulphate" and "acetone" (and you might be surprised how much there is on YouTube for that term).

And yet just yesterday I was trying to work with a client to get rid of phrases like "empowers operational continuity." And just this morning I was working with a client to change things like "public facilities hygiene management" to "We clean restrooms."

These are all questions of vocabulary. And all questions of vocabulary come down to what your audience is really used to and using. The picture above, for example, is for me a picture of Icarus.

I'm aware that there are huge swathes of humanity to whom that word means nothing.

So, if I'm going to write web content to go with that picture, how do I decide whether to use the name "Icarus" or to write something like "There is a Greek story about a boy who made himself a pair of wings..."?

You just have to know your audience. If I'm the kind of person who needs to buy some rabbit complement, then I probably use that term. "Hey, guys!" I shout down the hall to my colleagues in the next lab, "I'm gonna order some rabbit complement. Do you need any glutamate receptor antibodies while I'm at it? How are you for anti-sera?"

But if I need someone to clean the toilets at my restaurant, I probably don't say, "You know, we really need a public facilities hygiene management expert." I probably say, "We need someone to clean the restrooms." And when I go to Google in search of some temporary tech guys to help me through a staffing change, I'm sure not going to type in "empowers operational continuity."

There are fields in which the experts who supply the stuff use different terminology from the people who actually buy the stuff. If your field is one of these, clean the jargon out of your website. You'll be glad you did.

Labels: usability, web content, writing

How Original Should Your Website Be?

Friday, August 21, 2009

Naturally, you want your website to be different and exciting. You don't want it to look as though it were made with a template. You want it to be special and unique.

But before you get too carried away, or allow your designer to, think of elevators.

We can be pretty flexible about elevators. The color, the surface decoration, whether there's a single elevator or a pair or a bank of them.

We'll accept elevators on opposite sides of a foyer, or both on one side.

We can handle different materials.

But there are limits. We want doors, walls, floors. We want the elevator buttons to be very obvious and easily reachable. We have a mental idea of where the front of the elevator is supposed to be, and we expect certain things to be there.

It's the same with websites.

They can have all kinds of graphics and colors and stuff going on, but they should still meet the user's expectations. Navigation should be clear and obvious. The most important things should be above the fold, especially on the homepage. Contact information should be in the places where people look for contact information. The name and logo of the company should be readily visible.

Sometimes designers feel that this is limiting. Sometimes I feel like I'm working with designers who think it would be really cool and edgy to put the wheels of the car on the top, in a pentagon. "No, no," I say, "you have to have the wheels under the car, roughly in the four corners." I can tell I'm spoiling their fun.

But once the initial coolness of a truly original website wears off, people will find it irritating. They won't want to go there for practical purposes (like buying things from you or hiring you). So the best plan is to build a usable, search optimized website, and challenge your designer to work within those limitations to create a thing of beauty.

There's a lot of satisfaction in that.

Labels: usability, web design

Very Fast Websites

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Dr. Tom Hapgood is bucking for the title of Fastest Web Designer in the West, having beaten our previous record by having a site completed in less than two weeks.

Here's the old site design:

The image of Barbara Steeps, "The Hog Lady," is a favorite poster of hers, and she likes the happy excitement it shows. Unfortunately, this design doesn't show visitors what this site is about or how to shop here.

It's an ecommerce site, but visitors have to scroll waaay down in order to see a link or indeed any hint at all of the existence of a catalog. The content listed towns in which the client had previously had stores but now doesn't, with just a quick mention of the online store and its contents -- below the fold, for humans, and search engines would have to conclude that the list of towns was the important part.

Developer Carla Romere had pristine coding, and a well-built catalog, but the usability and search issues made this site unprofitable.

Here's the new site:

Tom kept the poster, but added a subtle Razorback (subtlety's important for licensing reasons, but it also gives a sophisticated air that I love) and a crowd scene that works perfectly with Barbara's poster. The poster is set at a jaunty angle that highlights the navigation.

The same design works for the About Us page, which sports a picture of Barbara and her husband Bob with their vehicle -- a common sight around town on game day.

I've given her some keyword-rich content, too, so people will be better able to find her online. With a bulleted list of the most popular searches in the category of Razorback merchandise, this new design will give clear signals to the search engines and also let visitors see at a glance that they've come to the right place to get those Razorback shower curtains and hog noses.

Don't worry if you can't figure out the point of this. If you're not a Razorback fan, you just wouldn't understand.

The point, for the purpose of this discussion, is that we've gotten an exciting new look, a clear purpose and call to action, and a site that should do great things for The Hoglady's business. We're going to have Josepha do a linkbuilding campaign, and Barbara is using a blog to showcase new product and Twitter to keep in touch with fellow Razorback fans. Both her blog and her Twitter link are readily visible on her main pages.

What made this project go so quickly?

It's not a complete redesign of the entire site -- we didn't touch the catalog -- but just of the pages that make the most difference for search and conversions.
The clients had a clear goal, and we developed a clear strategy for them from the beginning.
Rosamond, Project Manager on this job, insisted that we have all the images and information before we began. That let the clients sit back and relax while Tom and I did the work.

Depending how fast the webmaster is, you might click on the pictures here and see the old site. Old or new, you'll still get to hear the calling of the hogs, which might be an entertaining way to spend 15 seconds of your day.

Labels: ecommerce, keywords, web content, web design

Web Content: Math or Literature?

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Back in the early days of SEO there was a lot of talk about something called "keyword density": the percentage of the text on your website that was composed of the keywords your customers would use to look for you.

The idea was that if you met the mystical correct percentage -- 2%, some said, or 3% or 6% or even 10% -- then search engines would serve you up to searchers. If you went under or over, then no dice.

If you had a typical 480 words on your homepage, then, you'd want (depending which figure you believed in) somewhere between nine and 48 repetitions of your keyword. Since you can work with about 10 keywords at once, you could in theory construct your entire 480 words from those keywords, just sort of rotating them randomly.

Thus, the realtor whose site I rewrote recently could have paragraphs with nothing but sentences like "Call for commercial real estate, commercial lots and acreage, income producing property, warehouses, retail and office space, warehouse space, and investment properties," and that sure makes you want to call, doesn't it?

On the other hand, sentences like, "Our highly trained and compassionate staff desire nothing more than to assist you in your quest for property-based wealth" reveal nothing to search engine robots, which are pretty smart for robots, but not smart enough to guess what that sort of thing means.

Steve, the realtor in question, was pointing out other sites to me. "They have stories," he said, and they certainly did. I have nothing against stories, and they can certainly be good for marketing, but they don't do much for search engines.

What's more, people aren't likely to read them as they surf the web. They're going to spend a few seconds deciding whether or not they want to spend more time at your website. If they decide in your favor, then they'll stay and perhaps read your story.

But first they have to find you -- and the search engines have to find you first, largely based on keyword-rich content, or the humans never will. And then they have to decide, looking at the page of search engine suggestions, to click through to you, largely based on your meta description. And then they have to decide to stay at your page long enough to read your story -- a decision based largely on what they grasp in the first few seconds from what you have in the top left hand corner of your web page.

The realty sites with stories hadn't come up when my client searched for his keywords. In one case, the site wouldn't even show up for the company's name -- my client had to put me on hold while he went and found a business card with the URL on it.

Here's the solution: have natural yet keyword-rich text on your home page. Do your research so that you know the best keywords to use for your business, and include them as much as you can while still communicating well with your human visitors. Even allow some bulleted lists, if you can bring yourself to. Your human visitors will be glad to be able to scan the list quickly to confirm that you offer what they're looking for. The search engines will be able to tell what your website is for.

Then put your stories on an inner page, where you have more space and your visitors are already relaxing and spending some time with you. Your blog is a great place for stories.

Labels: keywords, SEO, web content

Finding Your Customers

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

In general, the object of a web site is to allow your customers to find you. You make your site eminently findable with good SEO and SEM, make sure it says what you need your customers to know about you, and get on with your work.

But it occasionally happens that your customers don't actually look online for what you offer.

One of my clients creates custom software for people in the financial sector in New York City. We were talking recently about how he has lots of traffic now, but still would like to see more conversions.

"We need," I said again, risking getting really boring, "to figure out where the people who need you are hanging out online. Then we have to make sure that you're visible from there."

This is another thing that's generally true about online marketing. It involves research. I track down the people who need my client's product. I say to them, "Now, supposing you needed some goat gamma globulin, what would you do?" or whatever the product in question might be.

Sometimes it takes further probing, but at some point you will find out what terms people are going to use and where they'd be likely to begin. You'll then have enough info to begin some in depth research. Or you'll confirm what you, as a business owner and expert in your field, already thought. Or you'll be amazed,and that can really turn around your business.

But in this particular case, we're talking about a small and specialized group. So it's different.

I understand this because I'm a musician. If you're not a musician, and you need one, you might go to your favorite search engine and type in "wedding singer" or "guitar teacher" or something.

If you are a musician, then you are never more than one contact away from the right person. You say to yourself, "I need a tenor -- who might be available?" If you can't come up with anyone yourself, you ask another musician. Conceivably, you tweet it: "Short on tenors for the Requiem. Who's available on the 19th?"

I've literally never Googled for a musician of any kind.

So what if your customers are like this -- such a specialized group that they practically all know one another? Does that mean that you really don't need a website, and can just rely on word of mouth?

Nope. Even in groups where "everyone" knows "everyone," it isn't literally everyone. There's a new person in town. There's a start-up company you haven't heard of yet, but with your help they'll be in the inner circle next year. There's someone in a slightly overlapping circle who could use your services, even though you didn't go to school together.

And there are also people you know -- even current clients -- who need something else from you, and they've been meaning to call you, but haven't yet. Or your competitors' current clients, who aren't completely happy right now and are considering a move.

So the fact that you may need to go out and find your clients doesn't mean that your website is irrelevant. Here's what it means:

Your website probably won't be the first place people encounter you. Don't assume that your visitors know all about you, but do assume that they'll be prepared to read more, and will want more information. They're deciding, after all, between you and some small number of specific other people. The idea that people will decide to stay or leave within a few seconds may be less true for your website than it is for most. You may need more content than another site
Your website needs to come up first on search for your name. When people hear about your business from someone else, they'll still look you up online before they call you. They're just very likely to look for your name rather than your business name. Having your business website at the top of search for your name allows you more control over how people see you. Sure, they can still check out your Facebook page or Amazon profile, but a good website can make them feel that they don't need to.
Don't neglect social media. It's the new word of mouth. An online follow-up after some face time at a conference, tweeting the link to an article you discussed, or adding someone to your network can remind them of you and help establish a mutually satisfying business relationship.

Even when you need to find your customers, your website still speaks for you.

Labels: online marketing, social media, web content

Your Website is Horrible

Monday, August 17, 2009

"This is the point," I told the client, "where I tell you that your website is horrible."

I was joking. of course, but only slightly. I have had to do this in person several times recently, because for some reason I have a bunch of local clients right now.

Usually I send these things off by email, couched diplomatically in words like, "Your website doesn't seem to do your wonderful gallery justice" or "You might not have realized that your meta description says, 'Add a description here.'" If people are shocked and horrified, I don't have to see it.

Often they email back after a bit saying, "We had noticed these things, too. What can we do about it?"

In person, it's different. I met with a nice realtor Shan and I are working with, and he kept calling out to people in nearby offices, "Our website is awful! I can't believe this!"

"That's okay," I say soothingly. "We're going to fix it."

At another client's home office, we were gathered around the screen looking at the problems. "See," I pointed out, "the search engines can only see what's on this screen. They can't see your pictures, or hear your audio clips, or read the words in your Flash introduction. This is all they're seeing. They have no idea what you do."

These clients were silent, their brows furrowed in distress.

So when I brought out my printout (really, it's worse when we do it on the screen) and pointed out all the problems to the third client in a row, I felt a bit apologetic.

On the other hand, I also got to visit a client whose beautiful new website just went live. She's going to be taking care of her own blog, so she needed a little bit of training. She was very excited. She gave me a hug.

It's a before and after experience.

If you suspect that maybe your website is horrible, you can email me and I'll tell you the truth.

Labels: online marketing, web content

Cleaning Up Your Internet Presence

Friday, August 14, 2009

I've had several clients recently who want to get rid of something online. There are plenty of reasons for respectable companies to find themselves wanting to to clean up their online presence.

One of my clients has a listing of his company as an LLC, when it's not. Another had a disgruntled employee who took his side of the story to Rip Off Report. Another has moved several times and hates to have customers coming into the brick and mortar shop saying, "I'm so glad I found you! I looked you up online and went to the address and you were gone!" It reminds her of all the people who go to that old address and then don't find her again.

In the past, I've had clients troubled by online blogs kept by people who used to work for the company, old public online arguments, and people with very similar names.

My name is Rebecca Haden, and when I first got my website online I was sharing the front page of Google with an actress also named Rebecca Haden. Now, I don't mind sharing, but it looked odd to have "Join the Rebecca Haden Fan Club!" there on the SERP with me, so I wanted to get rid of that.

How can you get rid of these things?

Remove it. Surprisingly, companies often have outdated information online at sites which they control. Your Google and Yahoo local business listings, Merchant Circle page, etc. are things you can fix. Often, they've been set up back in the mists of time by someone who no longer works for you, so there's some detective work involved in getting into the interface to update the information, but you will be able to correct or remove these references, with persistence.
Correct it. Sites like Manta or Rip Off Report aren't under your control just because they have content about you, but they do have places where you can submit corrections or additions to the information they list. Do so. Your calm and well-reasoned response to a negative review or just plain inaccurate information can help to undo any damage.
Bury it. Often, the item you want to get rid of is outdated, or simply not the best source of information about your company. You can use honest SEO and SEM to move that item off the front page, and people simply won't see it any more. That actress still has a fan club, and I wish her well, but she doesn't need her fan club on page 1.

Sometimes, clients are unaware of the need for a cleanup until I tell them about it. You can use Google Alerts to keep track of your online reputation, or just search for your company occasionally to see what your customers are seeing. Then respond to any problems swiftly.

And, of course, if you don't have the time or the skills to keep track of or correct these things yourself, you can hire someone like me to do it for you.

Labels: online marketing, web content

The User Experience at Your Website

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Tom and I are working on a very fun e-commerce website right now. The owners are fun, their products are fun, the customers are fun, it's just a fun project all around.

At the moment, the owners probably aren't having any fun at all.

The reason is that as I tried out their website in the course of my basic research, I found that the user experience wasn't what the owners expected.

There's no link to the catalog -- or even any hint of the existence of a catalog --until way at the bottom of the page, where people would have to scroll to find it. And most don't.
Before you can shop, you have to fill out quite a long form. You can't even check on shipping before you do this.
When you click the button to put something in your shopping cart, you get a big notice warning you that the security certificate has expired.
If you persevere in spite of that, you find that the payment information form has some odd features -- the name of the company that does the processing is right above the place for shoppers to give their info, and the form is built differently from most credit card forms. Enough people are antsy about online security that the payment info section is just not the place to be creative. It should look and behave like all the other credit card forms the customers see every day.
If you got to wondering about the company and wanted to contact them to find out what was going on, you would quickly discover that there was no contact information anywhere -- not so much as a phone number.

We're talking about a very unusable site, here.

The owners of the site were surprised by this. They had never tried it out.

Try out your site. See what happens when you try to find it, or try to shop there, or try to -- well, whatever you want people to do at your site. How hard is it? How fun is it?

Are you surprised?

Labels: ecommerce, usability, web design

How Many Pages Does Your Website Need?

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The short answer to this question is: more.

As long as you have good content to fill them with, more pages are always good. Search engines love fresh content, human beings like to find new things when they explore -- there's really no downside.

But it's not always that simple. Sometimes the number of pages is dictated by budgetary constraints, or time constraints. So let's recast the question as this: How Many Pages Does Your Website Have to Have?

In order to answer this, you have to consider the purposes of the various pages in a typical website.

The homepage

The point of your homepage is to bring people to your business's spot on the web, to introduce yourself well enough that they want to stay, and to help them navigate to the other pages you have on your website. Apart from naked blogs with no homepages, websites normally need to have a homepage. It should be strong for search and have terrific navigation. It should make the USP of your business abundantly clear, and let people know what you're selling and how they can get it. That's about it.

The products or services page

You need a page or pages that convey the details about what your business offers. that can be a full-on catalog, if you're an e-commerce site, or it can be a single page that details your single product or service if you're something like a cleaning service. If you have anything more complicated to offer than "monthly cleaning, $50," then you should have subpages that divide the products and services section up in a logical way. People would rather click a couple of times -- with confidence that they're heading where they want to go -- than scan an enormous page of complex information.

Credibility pages

Credibility pages contain the evidence that you are a good choice for your visitors, when it comes to your products and services. You can do without these if you have to. However, visitors who are thinking about using your services or buying your products like to see this kind of evidence. These are the FAQ pages, the pages of recipes for the ingredient you're selling, the details about your process. This can also be your blog, your portfolio, your gallery, your awards, even your links page. This is where you put useful or fun stuff to bring customers back repeatedly. This is where you show the good qualities you show in the physical world if your business lives there, too.

The About Us page

People go to your About us page when they're inclined to buy, but need a bit of reassurance. This is where you show that you're a bona fide, trustworthy business, by sharing your address, years in business, names of the workers, photo of the staff or building, qualifications, or whatever else you have to build confidence.

The Contact page

Your customers need to have a way to contact you. Visitors may come in for no other reason than to get your phone number or your physical address (who uses phone books anymore?), and a contact page lets them get the info fast and get on over to see you. If you want to avoid a Contact page, you can combine it with your About Us page, but Contact pages are generally a good idea.

There are, as you can see, five basic kinds of pages your site ought to include. Think about the purposes these pages serve, and you'll see that you're best off having all five. This is where I get the term "basic five-page website" which you see around here sometimes. Try not to leave any of these items out when you put your website together.

Labels: web content, web design

What's a Linking Campaign?

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Links are good, from the point of view of search, and you want your business website to have them. Specifically, you want inlinks -- other websites having a link to your website.

Ideally, you get these by having great content. I like it when I discover that someone has linked to my content. It's a nice beginning to the day to see a new referral source at Google Analytics.

But the truth is that most sites need a little help in the linking department. There's so much stuff on the internet that other sites may not notice your wonderful site unless you point it out to them.

When I was an inhouse SEO, I spent Tuesdays working on linkbuilding. Tuesdays were my day to be in the shop, so I was going to be interrupted a lot, which made it a less perfect day for creating wonderful content, but a great day for linkbuilding.

Now, I do routine linkbuilding for a number of sites, once a week. I wish I could say that I did the same for my own site. The cobbler's children, as you know, go barefoot. I have to pick between working on my own site and those of my clients, and you know who wins.

So I need a linkbuilding campaign: five hours of linkbuilding.

Two questions spring to mind, I'm sure. First, "Why five hours?" The answer is simple; I've discovered, over the past year, that it takes five hours to get results. A couple of weeks after a linkbuilding campaign we expect to see an increase in rankings and a rise in traffic. We're fast, but we really don't see that rise after two or three hours. Ten hours is even better, but five hours gets results pretty consistently, so we've defined that as the size of a linkbuilding campaign.

The second question has to be, "What's a linking campaign?" This is an intensive effort at linkbuilding, with a specific goal. Here are some examples of linkbuilding campaigns:

A foundational linkbuilding campaign when you first launch your site, or re-launch a redesigned site, draws the search engines' attention to your new website.
A campaign to update listings fixes online errors when you change your phone number or move your blog, both of which I've done this summer. Any new information, including a shift in your business model or changes in key staff, calls for a linkbuilding campaign.
A directory campaign is in order when you notice, as a colleague mentioned to me last night that she had, that you're not included in the directories your customers use.
A campaign directed at the influential bloggers in your field gives a new product a boost.
A new linkbuilding campaign is required when you enter a new field, perhaps with a new product or service, but possibly just as a gradual shift in your business or in the business environment. Some of my clients, for example, have offered green business services for a long time, but hadn't positioned themselves in that way. Now that there are new green business directories and sites celebrating sustainability, they have new pastures for linkbuilding.
A catch-up linkbuilding campaign is wise when, like me, you haven't gotten around to routine linkbuilding in a long time.

Before you start your linkbuilding campaign, get your house in order. Make sure your content is appealing enough that other webmasters and web owners will accept your link requests. Make sure, while you're at it, that's it's all up to date and reflects the current reality of your business. Then get yourself linked up.

Labels: linkbuilding

Does Your Website Need a Team?

Monday, August 10, 2009

Yesterday I was talking with some friends about working teams. The people involved in the conversation were as follows: the director of an airport, a high school music teacher, the director of a nonprofit, and me.

We'd been reading articles by Stephen Graves and Marcus Buckingham, and we were considering the value of being well-rounded and ready to jump in and do whatever needed doing, versus the value of choosing the right team members for a project.

Naturally, I began thinking about the websites I'm writing right now:

Over the weekend, I wrote content for a company with a tech team of their own. I wrote the thing and shot it over and now -- though I'm still getting cc'd on the error logs -- I'm through until they get back to me.
I'm working on two with a designer/ developer/ web host for which I'm content writer/ SEO/ linkbuilder.
I'm working on two for which I'm the content writer and there's also a designer, a project manager, a linkbuilder, and a webmaster.
There's one with a content writer (that's me), a graphic designer, a web designer/ webmaster, and a linkbuilder, all working sequentially rather than together.
I've also got one with me as content writer, a designer, and a webmaster.

So I'm working with teams ranging from two people to -- well, I don't really know how large that first example's team is. Projects like that tend to involve some faceless group of people known as "the boys," "the guys," or "the lads," depending what country you're in. There could be two of them, or thirty-five, for all I know.

I have clients who built their websites all by themselves or have their site build by an individual, and then just call me in for marketing. I also have some clients who assemble their websites by going to a variety of different companies or individuals for different things. They don't have a team, since the various groups or individuals aren't working together, but just get each item -- content, logo, design, hosting, etc. -- from a different source.

Which is the better approach?

There are advantages to teamwork:

You can choose each member of the team, or spread out the assignments to the members, according to the needs of a given project.
You have people doing the things they do best.
Work can be dovetailed for maximum efficiency.
Team members support and inspire one another.
You can choose to communicate with one team member, and still keep up with everything.
You don't need to know the best people for all the tasks -- you just need one person who can assemble the team.
That saying, "Jack of all trades, master of none" has merit. The best developer isn't also going to be the best writer.
You can develop an ongoing relationship and expect to have your future needs covered.
You can sometimes get the best price this way, since the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

There are advantages to piecework:

You can manage the entire project yourself, according to your own ideas.
You can choose an individual or company for each element of the job without concern about the synergy among them, or matching up their calendars.
You can sometimes get the best price this way, choosing providers from different circumstances at different rates.

There are advantages to the one man band, too:

You can control the entire project by doing it yourself, or choosing one person to do everything.
There's a single point of contact, rather than multiple workers with whom you might need to communicate.
There's a single vision, rather than multiple inputs.
One person has responsibility for everything.
You can develop an ongoing relationship with an individual for future needs, though that individual may not be able to meet all your future needs.
You can sometimes get the best price this way, paying only one person a fixed price.

Consider how you like to work, who you know, and what your goals are. Do you want to be able to order your website and then attend to your business until launch date? Then you don't want a piecemeal arrangement where you have to oversee everyone. Do you want to be able to drop in and check on the work every day? A team is harder to check in with than one individual, unless they're all in one physical location. Do you like brainstorming sessions? More heads can be better than one.

In yesterday's conversation, the other people I was talking with didn't have the luxury, as I do, of bringing together a carefully-chosen new team for each new project. Neither did they have the experience I have, of being brought into different teams all the time. I like that, but not everyone would. For your website, you can make your choice.

Labels: communication, web design

How Fun Should Your Website Be?

Friday, August 7, 2009

Marshall Farrier wrote that it's important to have the correct levels of fun at your website. "Weaknesses in the fun department can result either from over-emphasizing its importance or from neglecting it entirely," he cautions.

My first reaction to this was consternation. How could you have too much fun? But Marshall is defining "too much fun" as so much flash and splash that you can't find your way around the website.

Good point. With this in mind, I looked again at the new website designer Jeff Wain and I made for Little Kids Preschool, Inc. , searching diligently for signs of excessive fun.

The site certainly is fun. The header replaced an earlier, more playful one, combining an academic air with a reasonable level of playfulness and fun. The letter blocks in the logo and the drop cap on the sidebar paragraph (it's repeated in the class blogs, too) add a special touch. A happy picture of children, fun bullets on the list, and bright colors add to the sense of fun.

And yet the navigation is sensible, the content is professional -- even the children in the photo appear to be comparing a couple of sets of data in support of some philosophical argument.

No, this website is not excessively fun.

The other site Jeff and I made, for A Plus Educational, is also very fun.

That's an animated worm, there, peaking out of the apple over and over. Those are, I can't deny it, dogs in costumes. The navigation is unusual, and you're always taking a bit of a chance with that.

However, it's a simple homepage for an enormous catalog, and the point of it is to convey the fun feeling people get when they visit the A Plus store. This site would be erring on the side of excessive fun if it were for a law office, but for the company in question I think it's just right.

Let's consider one more example: the Liquid Dispatch, Inc. website Tom Hapgood and I made.

This is a chemical transport broker, a company that arranges backhauls of petroleum and liquid fertilizer and feedstocks. It is not, like a preschool or a toy and school supply store, an obvious candidate for a super-fun site.

Yet Tom's design seems to me to have quite a bit of fun going on. We've got shiny textures and movement and bright colors and a zooming tank truck. We've also got clear navigation and terms like "bonded, licensed ICC broker," which does not suggest madcap frolics to me.

Do you agree with me that all three of these designs hit the right fun level? How about your own?

Labels: web content, web design

Browser Capabilities at Google Analytics

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Does this look familiar at all?

Maybe not. Even if you use Google Analytics to keep track of traffic to your business website, the Browser Capabilities section may be a part that you ignore.

You'll find this under "visitors" at your dashboard.

The colorful pictures above show the Screen Resolution, one of the choices under "Browser Capabilities." It's chock full of numbers, so if you aren't a numbers kind of person, you'll have skipped the whole thing.

Look back at it now. You'll notice that the largest number of visitors to the example site use a screen resolution of 1440x900. That's what I use, too.

If you're not sure what this means, then go to the control panel or system preferences panel of your computer and you can not only find out what screen resolution you use, but also change it around and see what that means. If you use Windows or Vista, you find the control panel by clicking on your Start icon, which is oddly enough the thing you use to shut down the computer. If you use Mac, your Apple button will take you to System Preferences.

So what? Well, if we look up at the charts again, we see that more than a quarter of the visitors are using a screen resolution of only 1024x768. There are even a few people who are using 800x600, which is like an antique computer of some kind -- or people with limited vision making their screens easier to read. There are also a few people -- those 320x396 people -- using mobile devices.

The most obvious application of this information is to design. On this example site, the designer and I were thinking about the header. There were some issues when I looked at it on my screen -- but when he showed me how it looked at the lower resolution, I saw that perfecting it for me -- and the 31.43% of the site's viewers who match me, plus the other 6% or so who use higher resolutions -- would cause issues for the 60% or so who use lower resolutions.

But this can also tell you something about your visitors. How many of them visit you on mobile devices may say something about the age or affluence level of your visitors. It may also say something about how visitors use your site -- do they look you up while they're out and about to find directions to your shop or to check out the conversations? Are they checking facts while in meetings? Or are your customers only coming to see you from their office computers?

The operating system your visitors use is another piece of information you can get. Here's our example site's breakdown:

The blue part is Windows: just over 64% of the visitors use Windows. A third of the visitors use Mac, and the little orange sliver is iPod.

This looks like an ordinary slice of well-off professional people using their home computers.

Here, for comparison, is an IT company I work with:

The blue section is still Windows -- a huge majority. Macs are the 10.37%, but the orange slice is Linux. There are also some skinny slivers of other things that are hard to see, but they add up to an amazing 80 different operating systems, including not just Chrome and Flock but Android and all kinds of other stuff, too.

The people visiting this website are probably mostly at work. And chances are they're IT guys. So the content of the second site can be much more techy than the content of the first site.

Have a look at your visitors' Browser Capabilities next time you're in Analytics. You may be able to get some insights into your visiting population that will help you not just with design, but with the kinds of blog posts and special offers you need to be creating, and the places you ought to advertise, too.

Labels: Google Analytics, SEO

Should You Buy a Domain Name?

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Your domain name is the main web address for your website. Mine is www.rebeccahaden.com. Choosing a domain name is important -- a poor choice can make online success more difficult.

But what if your chosen domain name is already taken? Sometimes you aren't the first Acme Wind Chimes to register for the domain, and someone else has already got www.acmewindchimes.com and that's all there is to it. Sometimes, though, you get a message announcing that the domain you want is for sale.

I'm going to try to be fair about this. There are people who feel that a domain name is like a piece of real estate. You see an undeveloped piece of land on a street corner, you foresee that there will be a future value in the land, you buy it and hold onto it until it becomes valuable, and then you sell it, earning a profit for your far-sightedness.

Equally, the domain brokers feel, they saw that someone in the future might want www.acmewindchimes.com, so they put up their couple of dollars to park the domain and wait for someone to need that domain, at which point they sell it for hundreds or thousands, gaining their reward for their prescience.

I think I've expressed the viewpoint fairly.

The question is, do you pay that price? Here are some things to consider:

What's the real competition? If www.acmewindchimes.com is parked with a bunch of irrelevant ads on it, then your www.acme-windchimes.com has a head start. Do an excellent job, and you won't have to worry about other Acme Wind Chimes websites.
What are your alternatives? Don't get your heart set on a particular domain name if there are others that might serve your purpose equally well. If you're a new start-up, then availability of your most logical domain name should be a factor in the naming of the company. If you're an established company with a new web presence, consider all the possible alternatives before deciding that you have no choice.
What's the ROI? Considering the alternatives open to you, will you be losing customers by using an alternative name? if so, can you estimate what the loss will be? I was recently quoted $1778 for a domain name. I normally pay $10 for registration. If I believed that doing without the first choice domain name would cut my income by $1768 dollars in the first year, it could be worth my while to pay the fee.

A suggestion, though. You might want to go ahead and register YourName.com if it's still available. Just in case.

Launching Your Website On Time

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

I have a confession to make: I'm launching a website late. It was supposed to launch on August 1st, and it still isn't live.

I want it known that I don't miss deadlines. I didn't miss the deadline on this website, either. Rather, there was a concatenation of circumstances:

The client was waiting for a translation...
So the text was waiting on the client...
So the designer was waiting on the text...

The translation didn't happen.

And didn't happen. And the day before the launch date, it still hadn't happened.

No problem. The client accepted an alternative suggestion, approved the design as it was, and paid for the site, around 5:00 p.m. on July 31st. I alerted the hosting company. The hosting company got everything ready that evening, and sent over the access information. We were all poised to launch --

But the designer moved house on the night of July 31st. There were unforeseen problems with the move, one of which led to a lack of internet access for several days. The files needed for the launch are in the designer's computer, which is incommunicado.

The site isn't live yet. Probably tomorrow.

So no one was asleep on the job (except, I suppose the translator, though I haven't heard the story on that). And yet the launch date passed with no launch.

There are several possible morals for this story. Rosamond, our Project Management expert, says we should never begin a project until the client furnishes everything they're supposed to furnish. The hosting company says a few days' delay is worth it to make sure everything is done right.

For me, the message isn't really a moral. It's more a realization. Most websites have obstacles to overcome. A freelance designer suddenly takes a full time job in the middle of the project. A decision gets stuck in committee. A domain dispute arises.

These things happen. The really remarkable thing is that nearly all websites get launched on time.

Followers and Following at Twitter

Monday, August 3, 2009

Here's a quick quiz, for those of you who are beginning to use Twitter for business. What is the twitterer above doing wrong?

If you answered, "He's pretending to send people useful suggestions in a friendly and helpful way, but really he's sending out identical tweets to everyone who has used one of the words in his alerts," you're correct. This is not being a useful member of the Twitter community. This is spam.

I was taken in by this guy, actually, because last week I linked to a chart like the one he's spamming for in a blog post. I thought he had read the blog post and was offering an alternative chart. This probably happens often enough, since he has sent 1500 and some of these tweets out to people.

I went over prepared to follow him.

Obviously, I did no such thing.

But it brought to mind the question of whom to follow at Twitter.

I Twitter for half a dozen companies. It makes sense to have someone whose job this is, and often there's no one in the company who really feels drawn to the task. Still, most of the people for whom I Twitter manage their own followers and following. Some do better than others.

Who should you be following?

People you know. Follow your friends, colleagues, and clients, especially if they follow you. It's basic courtesy.
People who say things that interest you, especially if they follow you. I follow one person who tweets interesting stuff about teaching, and several who tweet interesting stuff about design. This allows me to keep up pretty well.
People who might find you useful. This doesn't relate to me much because, let's face it, everyone needs my services. But I Twitter for companies with a more specific focus, who follow people who might need their services. I always prefer to hire people I know, whether in the physical world or via Twitter, and I don't think I'm alone in this.
People you like and want to talk to. People you admire. People who do what you want to do.

Notice that I didn't say, "People who follow you." I have several new followers at Twitter every day and I always go visit them, but I don't automatically follow, and I don't think you should either.

Let's do a little math. Twitter shows you twenty messages. If you follow 20 people and each one tweets once a day, you can go to Twitter once a day and see what everyone has said. If you follow 1,788 people and each one tweets automatically every ten minutes.... You can do these calculations, but even without the calculations, we can see that there's a limit to the number of people you can actually follow and interact with. The number shrinks if even a few of the people you follow are very prolific tweeters -- even one can fill up your screen and prevent you from seeing what other people have to say.

The value of Twitter for business is about networking and developing relationships, learning from others and sharing resources and insights. Promiscuous following isn't going to accomplish that for you.

As a rule, if you're doing a good job at Twitter, you probably won't be following way more people than you have followers. That is, if you have 17 people following you and you're following 1700, then you're probably doing it wrong.

Welcoming Another Worker

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Rosamond Haden is joining Josepha and Rebecca at Rebecca Haden Quality Copywriting and SEO.

Rosie is Area Market Director for a Texas-based franchise, and brings that corporate knowledge to us in the form of superior project management and customer relations management skills. She's studying for her PMP certification, and we're glad to have her.

Rosamond will be working out of Shreveport, Louisiana. Josepha works out of Kansas City, Missouri. Rebecca works out of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Since our clients are all over the world, it probably doesn't matter where we are, but if you prefer to meet with us personally, you now have more places where you can do that.

Previous Posts

Archives

Does Your Website Work Weekends?

Monday, August 31, 2009

How to Link Out Effectively

Friday, August 28, 2009

Are SEO Pros Lonely?

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Making a Website for a Nonprofit Organization

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Is an Old-Fashioned Website Harming Your Business?

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Vocabulary and Your Website

Monday, August 24, 2009

How Original Should Your Website Be?

Friday, August 21, 2009

Very Fast Websites

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Web Content: Math or Literature?

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Finding Your Customers

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Your Website is Horrible

Monday, August 17, 2009

Cleaning Up Your Internet Presence

Friday, August 14, 2009

The User Experience at Your Website

Thursday, August 13, 2009

How Many Pages Does Your Website Need?

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

What's a Linking Campaign?

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Does Your Website Need a Team?

Monday, August 10, 2009

How Fun Should Your Website Be?

Friday, August 7, 2009

Browser Capabilities at Google Analytics

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Should You Buy a Domain Name?

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Launching Your Website On Time

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Followers and Following at Twitter

Monday, August 3, 2009

Welcoming Another Worker

Sunday, August 2, 2009