Right now I'm doing some on-site search engine optimization (that is, fixing up the content) for a large and successful logistics company. They're always on those lists of Top 50 Companies and Companies to Watch and stuff like that. They're also on the lists of Best Places to Work and Green Businesses. I like to work with companies like that.

I also had a call yesterday from a small roofing company that's been in business in their town for 30 years. They pride themselves on the quality of their work and the way they treat their workers. They won't take a customer's check until the job is done to that customer's satisfaction. The caller was the son of the founder of the business. He called from his truck on a job site, with his laptop by his side. I also like to work with companies like this.

Not everyone would see what these two companies have in common. To me, though, they both are businesses that ought to be ranking very well on the search engines, and aren't. When you look for logistics, you ought to find that up and coming company. When you look for a roofer in Blue Springs, you ought to find that roofing company. People who find these companies when they search for them will be happy; they'll get exactly what they need.

In both cases, you don't find them.

While there is certainly a fun aspect to getting some bold start up to a top rank against the odds, there's even more satisfaction in getting companies the rankings they truly deserve. It makes me feel like I'm Righting Wrongs. (That's me up there on the white horse.)

So I hope that when you think about getting top rankings for your company, you think about what your company is best at. What you ought to be ranking for, because you really are the best choice for people who search for those terms. What Google would really like to be offering you for, if only they knew.

Usually, getting those rankings is mostly about fixing the problems with your website. The two companies I mentioned have something else in common: their sites have problems, both in the content on the screen, and in the stuff under the hood. Once we get them fixed up, the search engines will probably fall upon them with metaphorical glad cries.

And I can ride off into the sunset, conscious of having restored the balance of the universe, if only in a small way.

Labels: SEO, web content

A local restaurant has finally gotten a website up, and it's one of the worst websites I've ever seen. Its spelling is so creative that -- well, it includes words like "propetisioness" and "prok." The overall quality of the writing is what you would expect of a website using the word "propetisioness." It has no meta tags at all. Its design suggests that a bunch of random images were just stuck together till the space was filled. The basic information, such as hours and phone number, aren't on the home page at all. The code is poor.

The question is: does this matter? The menu's there, the phone number is on the Contact page, I went there and called and ordered food, regardless of how bad the website might be, so who cares what it looks like?

Well, Google seems to care.

This website is below the fold for my personal search for the name of the restaurant, even though both the URL and the title use the name of the restaurant, and even though I a) live just up the road and b) have been to the site before.

Google, we're assured, doesn't penalize for bad code, bad design, or bad writing. But they don't have to make a direct penalty for these things to get in the way of good search results. Here's why:

• Google's goal is to choose quality. While there are fairly bad sites high on search for some things, a good site would quickly take their places if someone made one. In the case of this example, the restaurant's own social media accounts, as well as all the directories they're listed in, are above their own website. Google is, essentially, offering readers everything else it can find before offering this site. 
• Links to your site affect your rankings, and people don't choose to link to bad sites. I recently complained about having to link to bad math sites because I couldn't find good ones. If someone puts up a good math site, will I rush over and change my links? You know it. A bad website just doesn't entice visitors to link to it. If it's bad enough, good directories will refuse it, too.
• People who can't build a good-looking website won't be able to build you a well-optimized website. The opposite isn't always true, since there are web artists who know nothing about SEO. But someone without the skills to write and code your site correctly won't have the more specialized skills it takes to build an optimized site. The site I've been telling you about made a 14 at Hubspot's Website Grader, one of the lowest scores I've ever seen. They have a Moz rank of 0, no inbound links, and they're not indexed. The people who built this site shouldn't be calling themselves web designers.

Beyond that, there are physical-world issues connected with having a poor quality website. If you can fry chicken well enough (and this restaurant can) people who know about your chicken will come get that chicken no matter how bad your website is. People who don't know about your chicken, however, won't chance it. They'll go to the place with a website that makes the chicken look good.

Labels: SEO, web content, web design

I've written before about the dangers of following simple formulae telling you where to put your keywords. It is more important -- and Google's Matt Cutts confimed this in his broadcast from SMX yesterday -- to have good, natural content for your human visitors than to try to game the system with arbitrary guesses about the algorithms.

Still, I always like to put the keywords right up at the beginning, where search engines can catch them quickly before they get a false impression.

Now I have some nice, current data that supports this view. I'm doing a rewrite for a client, a large third-party logistics firm. They have four pages of success stories, a good thing to have. Each story tells how the logistics firm was able to help a particular client company. Each story naturally includes a good proportion of key search terms, such as "third party logistics," "logistics solutions," "warehousing logistics," and so forth.

In looking at their analytics, I was able to see that one of those pages had significant traffic from search, while the rest had none.

All the pages had been created in the same way, with a content management system. All had messy code, some grammatical and spelling errors, and problems with layout. All had interesting points to make (at least if you're into warehousing and trasnport logistics).

What was different? Three started off with a paragraph describing the company. The one with the higher level of search traffic started with a statement about the company's logistics needs. The description came later.

By the time the search engines made it through that paragraph about beauty supplies and shea butter, they had apparently already decided that the page wasn't really about logistics.

Now, you may be wondering why the pages didn't come up for other keywords. The answer is that they probably did. Not high on search, probably, because it takes more than keywords to achieve that, but perhaps for a search on the companies being described. However, searchers then probably didn't choose to click through to a site for a third-party logistics firm -- the description made it clear that this wasn't the place to buy that shea butter preparation.

As I say, I've always favored putting keywords high on the page. I'm not trying to fool people when I write a web page; I want everyone, human and robot alike, to know what I'm talking about right away. But in this case, the analytics gives us a good data-driven answer to our question: yes, it does matter where we put our keywords. So let's get them right in the first sentence, where they'll do the most good.

Labels: keywords, SEO, web content

Deserting your website is not recommended. I often see deserted websites; clients come to me after having left their websites to molder for years sometimes. Once I had a call from a guy who was disappointed with the results of his website, and I had to break the news to him that it hadn't even been online for several months.

But what if you have been good with the upkeep, and you have a good site, and you just decide to neglect it for a little while? What happens, and how quickly?

I have a client who had me write her a good optimized site and was doing basic minimum upkeep on it, and then Things Happened and she left it alone for a few months. I went on vacation, as far as her site was concerned, and she didn't do anything with it herself, either. Now we're back to caring for it, so I thought it would be interesting to share the results.

First, her rankings are fine. I often get frustrated with companies that charge you regular fees to keep your site high on the search engine results pages. If you have a good site and you deserve to rank well for your keywords, then you'll usually stay at a high ranking once you get there, until some other website comes along and does a better job than you.

There are some highly competitive keywords, and certainly if someone else is working to climb over you, you'll have to work to keep your place. But there are hundreds and thousands of keywords that you can maintain just by keeping your website online. Your company name certainly ought to be one of them.

Her traffic fell. It fell significantly, in fact -- it's down 28% compared with the same month in the previous year. Traffic to her blog fell significantly once I quit updating it for her, and it also stopped sending traffic to her website.

This isn't a given -- the educational blog I wrote for a former client continues to send almost a third of her traffic even though I haven't updated it since last summer. The links are still good, the content is still at the top of Google for a lot of keywords, and it should keep doing a good job for her as long as I keep it online.

But a company blog with updates about the company or current news won't keep doing its job for you if it doesn't have regular posting.

Regular blog posting is, in fact, all that I do for my own website (the cobbler's children have no shoes), and my traffic is up 139.50% over the same time last year.

The client in question also got good traffic from articles, and that's still a high proportion of her traffic -- but she's in a fashion-driven business, so last year's news is, well, old news. The continuing traffic from the old articles tends to be outside of her target customer base.

She did keep her ads -- some high-value paid directories and a banner ad -- and those have continued to send traffic.

Now we'll get her blog and her articles back on track, and see how long it takes to get her traffic growing again.

I'll let you know.

Labels: SEO

First, I need to apologize for the jargon in the title. I don't write for SEO experts, after all. I write for people who want to get the most out of their company websites, whether they're up on the latest technology or not. But these are terms that make it easier to think about an important question.

When you get an SEO Strategy Report from me, it includes both suggestions for on-site optimization -- which is to say, stuff you can do at your website, or have your webmaster do, to improve your results -- and off-site optimization, which is the online marketing that can be done elsewhere on the web. The two go together like cereal and milk, and usually, it's wise to do both. The cereal and milk experience isn't the same without both elements, and you can say the same for online marketing.

But there are times when one really is more important than the other.

Take the two sites I'm working on right now.

One is a local business with little competition for search. Their current site isn't doing its job for them, and they aren't ranking as well as they should for a lot of searches. But their competitors' sites also aren't optimized for search. Once the client has a good, well-optimized site up, I'm confident that they'll surge right ahead of their competition. In fact, our proposal for them doesn't even include off-site optimization. We'll be happy to do it for them if they want it, but I think they'll get the results they want without much further effort. Google will look around for something to show their customers, see their great new site, and offer it right up with a sigh of relief at finally having something good to offer.

The other site is in a big city, in a highly competitive field. The search engines, receiving a request for their keywords, have dozens of well-optimized sites to pick from. They have to look further to determine which site to present first.

Here's where off-site optimization is most essential. The search engines will consider the number and quality of links each site has in deciding which one to serve up. Certainly, the site has to be very well optimized, or it has no chance of good rankings. But once that's done, off-site work should be the priority.

So when you're planning where to put your budget for ongoing online marketing, be sure to consider the competitive environment your website lives in online. It makes a difference.

Labels: SEM, SEO

Years ago, I worked for a company that had a website that did nothing. No one shopped there, and as far as we could tell (which wasn't very far, because we didn't know how to keep track) no one went there. The owners went to a round table discussion on websites for people in our industry, and returned with a very clear conclusion: everyone had websites, and none of them did anything.

You have to have a website, we figured, because people asked if you had one, and you couldn't say you didn't have one without looking unprofessional. But it was largely a big hole into which you poured money.

We decided to change that, at least for our company. I was chosen, since I was the marketing person, and I set about learning how to make a website do its job.

I remember how frustrating it was to search for that information. There were no books on the subject at the time, and the online information was written for specialists by specialists. What's more, SEO forums made it clear that a) there were a lot of shady characters in the business, an b) a lot of SEOs didn't have much respect for their clients. The undertone of "Stupid clients don't know anything" was unmistakable at a lot of otherwise excellent sites.

We looked for a local SEO professional, therefore, since we figured we'd be able to meet face to face and ask around. There weren't any. I had to learn to do it myself. That's why I write this blog, actually: competent businesspeople should be able to learn how to help their company websites produce a good ROI, in my opinion, without being mystified or condescended to.

Things have improved. As SEO becomes more mainstream and less mysterious to businesspeople, more information is available, and of course there are more of us SEO professionals around.

So what should you look for when you seek to hire someone to help you in this area?

• People who can and will tell you what they do. There's no reason for SEO to be cloaked in secrecy as though it were a dark art. While I think it takes a certain amount of ability, or at least an analytical turn of mind, SEO isn't mysterious. It just requires specialized skills, experience, and time that most businesspeople don't have.
• People who can distinguish between black hat and white hat strategies, and who will tell you exactly how gray they are willing to get. If they can't or won't answer this question, you may find yourself in murky waters, with potential consequences for your website.
• People who give you realistic expectations and honest information. While you want someone effective, reputable SEOs won't make guarantees. We know that there are too many factors involved for anyone to give you an honest guarantee of performance.
• People who communicate with you honestly and respectfully. There's no reason to tolerate poor communication. You have a choice.
  

Labels: communication, SEO

Usually, when I show you a "before" and "after," there's a big difference. Not in this case. The site above is the old look of Dr. Michael Wiederkehr's website, and the one below is the new one.





Here are the changes:

• The name of the doctor and the clinic, both things patients are likely to search for, are prominent now.
• The header is short enough to be read at a glance.
• The other information from the original headline is in a bulleted list of short phrases -- again, easy to read at a glance.
• The remaining text on the homepage combines keywords people will be likely to use with a clear, simple statement of the doctor's main message about his new clinic. The other details have been moved to an inside page for people who want to know more.
  

I'd have moved the "Online Form" section to a less prominent place, but the designer balked at that. The upper left corner is the first place most people look at a website, so I like to see the unique selling point or call to action there -- the high-rent stuff, if you will. Nonetheless, the eye-catching photo and use of color probably draw the eye to the main message well enough to overcome the drawback of the placement.

We also changed the titles, the meta descriptions, and the content on the inner pages -- again, without design changes.

The new site should be more effective for search and for visitors, without affecting the look of the site at all. As of this writing, the changes are only a few hours old and the doctor's site has moved above the fold on the first page of Google for a search on his name.

Labels: SEO, web content

Web developer Tyler Kasten asked me yesterday how I keep up with current trends in SEO. Things change all the time, he said, so how can we find time to do the homework on that?

It's true that things change. It's also true that it's hard to find the time to keep up. Here's how I do it:

• Stay in touch with the online SEO community. While there are some particularly useful sites -- SEOMoz and Hubspot are favorites of mine -- I'd say that Twitter is the single most useful tool. Follow the right people, and you'll be genned up by reading what people are talking about, without too much surfing.
• Read. You don't get the full story from the tweets of your peeps. I wish there had been books about SEO when I started working in the field. There weren't then, but there are now. I also like .net (Practical Web Design in the U.S.) and WebDesigner. True, these magazines spend as much spacetime on things like building galleries with Spry as they do on SEO, but they're up to date and open-minded. Read print and online, and you'll know more than you would just from your own observations.
  
• Learn from experience. If you keep track of your efforts and use the data, you can see what works and what's changing from your own experience. As I told Tyler, I used to think of social media as optional -- something I recommended to clients who had a knack for it. Now I recommend it to almost everyone, because I can see from the data that it's valuable for almost everyone. Designer Shan Pesaru is cleaning up all the dead ends on an upcoming project of ours with 301 redirects. We haven't always done that before (there are still some loose ends from when we moved this blog, in fact), so I'll be watching with interest to see whether it makes a difference or not. My guess would be not, for this client, but I don't make decisions based on guesses.

How do you keep up with SEO? Like any other fast-changing field, it takes effort. If you're an SEO professional, it's worth it. If you hire SEO professionals, make sure they think so, too.

Labels: SEO

A few months back, I was hired to write content for a website. I do an average of one website a week, so this was not in and of itself particularly significant. The client sent a little data about the company (let's pretend it was a pet shop in Kentucky) and a document from their "SEO expert." The document said things like "Use the keyword for the page as an H1 header, in the meta description and keywords, in the first sentence of each paragraph, and in the last sentence of the page." There was a keyword given for each page. The keywords were things like "Greater Kentucky pet shop." In short, it was the kind of SEO advice being given a decade ago, and which now is only seen in humorous "10 Things Not to Do" articles.

I read these things with amusement and went ahead and did the keyword research and wrote nice, natural, keyword-rich text designed to appeal to human beings as well as to the search engines.

"Didn't you read the directions?" came the response.

My honest answer would have been something like, "Oh, was that real? Where the heck is greater Kentucky? And listen, I'm not that kind of web content writer."

However, I had agreed to do the job, so I wrote the stuff they wanted. Stuff like this:

"Greater Kentucky Pet Shop

Milly's greater Kentucky pet shop specializes in domestic and exotic pets. We also offer pet food, pet toys, and grooming services.

Conveniently located in downtown Louisville for all your greater Kentucky pet shop needs."

Uncomfortable though it made me, I did it. I figured it would be an interesting experiment. I could look back in a few months and see how they had done, compared with all the properly written sites I'd done in the meantime. If indeed they were showing top rankings for all the reasonable keywords, it would be valuable information.

So, having come to the point at which I'd have anticipated that the site's rankings would have settled in, I went to look at it.

It isn't live yet.

Did Milly's pet shop go out of business? Give up on the design firm they initially chose and go elsewhere? Perhaps to a company that would give them natural, keyword-rich content?

We may never know.

Labels: SEO

Yesterday I had a simple project for a web design firm I work with. It was quite an ordinary project: a client wants a higher rank for their chosen keywords, and we need a strategy for accomplishing that. I do this all the time.

This case turned out to be particularly interesting, though, because the company in question so clearly deserved the rankings they wanted.

Let's be honest: if you sell washers, you don't necessarily deserve the top ranking on the search engines any more than any other seller of washers. In this case, though, we're talking about the company that makes the washers, the company whose name is on the washers, the company that has been selling those washers for fifty years. And yet this company isn't even on the first page for most of the keywords they want.

Let's say they're the Acme Washer Company. And let's say that the company that's eating their lunch is the Apex Hardware Group. In fact, there are plenty of companies ahead of Acme on most searches, but Apex is consistently ahead of Acme on searches for Acme washers.

Now, Apex has been a little bit hostile to Acme. Acme has acme.com, but Apex has registered acmewashers.com, acme.net, acmewashers.biz, acmewashercompany.com -- everything they could think of. They've also done nice pages on their site about the high quality of Acme washers, the traditions of the company, and why Apex washers make good substitutes for Acme washers.

But Acme hasn't been minding their virtual store the way they should.

If your company is behind some strong competitors, what steps can you take?

• Strengthen your content. The search engines look at Apex, with its keyword-rich content about Acme washers, and at Acme.com which doesn't even have an "About Us" page, and they draw reasonable conclusions about who is the best choice for people seeking Acme washers. Compare your site honestly with your competitors, and make sure you're communicating well with the search engines.
• Watch your titles and meta descriptions. When a human visitor looks at the search results page for "Acme washers," she sees something like this:

Acme
acme.com/ - Cached - Similar -

Acme washers of all sizes
Acme washers for home and business use. Best prices, free shipping!
www.apexhardware.com Cached - Similar

Acme washers

Acme washers are the preferred washer style for many uses. We offer the best selection of Acme style washers. Use our handy comparison chart to order with confidence. Free shipping!
www.apexhardware.com/acmewashers.html - Cached - Similar -

What will the searcher choose? Not the first one on the list. When this shows up lower down on the page, which is the case for most of the possible searches, Acme.com has no chance. Make sure that your meta language does its job.

• Do your linkbuilding. Acme hasn't done any linkbuilding. As an established company, they have some natural links they've gained over time as people were moved to link to them, but it's suprising to see how many missed opportunities they have -- they're not repesented in the industrial directories, they're not present at the forums discussing washers, and they just generally don't have online visibility. Fixing that -- with some attention to their anchor text --would help the search engines understand what they're all about.

Notice that we're not talking here about gaming the system or duping the search engines. Acme should be the first choice when people search for Acme washers. The search engines want to give people what they're looking for. Acme -- and possibly your company, too -- just needs to cooperate.

Labels: linkbuilding, meta descriptions, SEO, web content

I get a lot of requests for help that involve not being on the front page of Google's search results. There are lots of reasons that can happen, and I can usually help.

Last week, I had such a request that turned out to have a very easy answer: "You're not indexed."

I heard those word myself, years ago when I had been given the assignment by my then employer to make our online catalog profitable. Joel, a hardware guy of our acquaintance, was over for dinner, and I was complaining about the fact that we didn't show up for reasonable searches.

"You're not indexed," Joel said.

I stared at him blankly. I was already writing for the web at that time, but I didn't know anything about SEO yet, or even any of the terminology. I think I said, "Huh?"

I don't want you to feel this way, so let me tell you right off that Google (and this goes for the other search engines too) doesn't actually know about websites until they visit said websites and crawl around their pages and see what they're about, a process known as "indexing."

You can tell if you've been idexed by a search engine going and typing in "site:www.mywebsite.com" at your favorite search engine. Yahoo will redirect you, but all major search engines will tell you, when you do this, how many pages they've indexed at your site.

If your pages have been indexed, you're fine. If not, Yahoo and bing will invite you to submit your site to them. Google is not so inviting, but click on their name back there and you'll be in the right spot.

Do that now. The end may not be nigh, but you have no chance of improving your search rankings or traffic until it's done, so sooner is better.

Labels: SEO

The apples shown here are divided into the #1 rankings ones and the #2 ranking ones. "Not as pretty, " those #2 apples, "but just as tasty."

It's a reminder that we don't all get #1 rankings in the search engine results pages for everything. Sometimes we don't deserve that #1 ranking. I, for example, am not the biggest SEO and copywriting firm in the world. If I type in "SEO" at Google, or "copywriting," I'm not going to be #1. This is fine with me. (I'm #1 for "quality copywriting," though. Just saying.)

But I'm talking right now with a new client who doesn't have the #1 rating his company deserves. He makes a product with which I'm very familiar -- I sold hundreds of his things when I was in retail. He is, in my expert opinion, the big dog in his field. He's been in business for 20 years. His website is 12 years old.

When he asked me to have a look at his website, I typed in the name of his company at Google, and of course his site popped right up. The rest of the page was filled with retailers who sell his product. All good so far.

Next, I typed in the generic name of his flagship product, and there he.... wasn't. I tried a few more variations. Nope. Smaller companies were eating his lunch on the SERPs.

This company deserves those #1 spots. I will of course get them for him. He won't get them by magic. He needs both on-site and off-site optimization. But he'll certainly get them, because he deserves them. When someone is searching for his products, they actually want what he has to offer.

Don't ask yourself what keywords you want to rank for. Ask yourself what keywords you deserve to rank for.

Labels: keywords, SEO

Sometimes people talk about SEO (search engine optimization) as if it were a mystical art of some kind. It isn't. It's good business, good communication, ordinary stuff like that. If you wanted to find a metaphor for SEO, though, I think video games would be a better choice than magic. Like video games, SEO requires speed, strategy, and focus. There's a thrill in vanquishing -- excuse me, I meant in moving ahead of a competitor in the search results. and of course an equal sense of loss when they smite -- or rather, when a canny competitor moves ahead of your company.

So is it a hard game or an easy one?

I can give you a solid "It depends" on that. Optimizing a page for search requires skills which are fairly rare, but those of us who have them don't find it a particularly hard task. When you come to the fight for top ranks on the search pages, it can be quite easy or very difficult, depending on the company and the website.

If you want to predict the level of ease for your own company, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you deserve a top spot? Is your website the most useful and authoritative resource for the keyword in question? Are you a recognized leader in your field? If so, then SEO will be a matter of pointing this out to the search engines. If you don't really deserve the spot, it's going to be hard. Changing keywords or improving your website can both help with this issue.
  
• Are there a lot of orcs out to get you? It is easier to get a top spot for custom musical arrangements for brass quintets than for SEO services. The number of players, their skill levels, and the amount of time they spend on the effort makes an enormous difference. This varies from one keyword to another.
• Do you have any special challenges? A very common company name, especially if there are competitors for the name who have a very strong presence online (I'm still working on that one that's up against a couple of government programs, Microsoft, and an Amazon offshoot), can make your task harder. Not having access to your site or having other limitations that prevent the best on-site optimization can also make things tough.

These factors affect the speed with which you can expect results, and they affect the best strategy for your online marketing. They don't make the process any less fun, though. just examine them with a realistic eye, and then go ahead.

Labels: online marketing, SEO

While I work for private clients, I also work for a couple of agencies, helping to build and optimise websites and looking after some of their clients as I look after my own. At one of those agencies, I have a colleague named Tami. She minds the PPC results and I mind the organic SEO results, and we meet virtually sometimes on Monday mornings in our ritual mining of analytics data.

Tami calls this, "Making sure nothing awful has happened."

I like to think of it as seeking opportunities to maximize results, but it's one of those half full vs. half empty things, right?

In any case, I was there poking around among web sites that I take care of and websites that I ignore. Some people are happy with their initial results and don't care to be more aggressive about their online marketing, so there are sites in my data that get regular care and sites that just trundle along on their own momentum.

Not long ago I wrote about a single SEO case study: a company I'd had on my regular clients list for a year, with excellent results.

That's just one company, though. There are so many factors for each company, ranging from the state of the economy to seasonal changes to level of compliance, that one company can only be an indication of what can happen, not what does happen.

So I ran some anonymous numbers comparing well-built, optimized websites that were being taken care of with equally well-built optimized websites that were being left to their own devices.

I compared only one thing: traffic increase over the past month. Website traffic is not always the most interesting or important metric, but it's easily understood and easily compared. It's a neutral choice. Comparing July and August will certainly give you different results for a lawn care company than for a school supply store, but over a large number of sites, seasonal variations even out. So I simply gathered up all the numbers and took the mean increase (or decrease) in traffic for the entire population.

The good news is that the average good website increased in traffic, whether cared for or not. Some of the untended websites went up in traffic and some went down, but the average result was a 6.49% increase in traffic.

In general, healthy websites do show a gradual and steady increase in traffic, interrupted sometimes by seasonal dips. So it's good to know that a good website can survive a bit of neglect.

The other good news is that sites that were being looked after showed an average increase in traffic of 38.23%.

"Looked after" can include social media, blogging, routine linkbuilding, and keeping an eye on analytics and Google alerts. The sites generally have one to three hours spent on them each week, though some have less and some have more -- sort of like having the cleaners in.

What's the moral of the story? Simply this: spending a little time looking after your website is worth doing. If you have someone with the skills on your staff, give them an hour, or perhaps a morning, a week to do minimum maintenance. If you don't have someone with the skills, consider hiring someone.

The other take-away is that getting your on-site optimization done so you have a healthy website can be enough, even if you do nothing else, to keep you on a path of steady improvement. That's got to make you feel optimistic.

Labels: online marketing, SEO

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

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

When you look at your dashboard at Google Analytics, one of the bits you should always notice is the Traffic Sources. The first view you have is a pie chart showing how your visits are distributed among Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines, and Other.



Here's what those terms mean:

• Direct Traffic is people typing in your address or going straight to it from their bookmarks. Sometimes lots of direct traffic means that you have an easy to remember URL (good for you!) and it's just as simple for people to type it in as to search. Sometimes it means that you haven't filtered out your staff. If you have a high proportion of direct traffic, check to see whether it's new visitors, in which case you've got a good URL and people looking for you by name. Lots of direct traffic from return visitors is good news, too, of course, but filter out people working for you before you make plans based on that.
• Referring Sites is what you get when people follow a link to your website. This lets you see what kind of links send traffic, so you can build more of those. It also lets you know when you've gotten featured at Stumbleupon or Digg. And it helps you find sites that have linked to you without your having requested it.
• Search Engines refers to people who found you by typing something in at a search engines like Google or Yahoo or bing.
• Other is anything else, often email (though that can also show up in Referring Sites).

Click on "view report" under the pie chart and you'll get more detail:


You can see that these two examples show different patterns. The one above shows fairly steady traffic from all three sources. The one below doesn't have much direct traffic, but it's fairly steady through the week, while Referring Sites and Search Engines rose at the end.



As with most patterns, changes are often the most interesting thing. When you have your quick look at your analytics each day, changes should be what you're looking for. When you see a change, find out the reason for it. If it's a good thing, do more in that direction. If it's not so good, then it's time to change your strategy.

Bear in mind that the pie chart is about percentages. An increase in search traffic can show that your SEO efforts are paying off, or it can show that more people are looking for one of your keywords, or it can show that your direct traffic fell because you got around to filtering out the people who work on your site.

At the Traffic Sources report page, you can look at lots more data. For example, you'll see the Top Traffic Sources, which is a list in order of popularity of your traffic sources. You'll see the top five on the main page, and you can click on "view full report" to see all of them.

Google is very likely to be your #1 source. For most of my clients, a major referring source comes next. Direct traffic is usually in the top five. For many, social media such as blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook turn up here.

Again, changes are what you want to notice. When I see a directory in this list, I suggest thinking about a paid ad at that directory. When I see a new source move into the list for the first time, I run right over and check its conversion rate for the site's goals. The information here can help you make well-founded strategic decisions.



The Traffic Sources report page is also the starting point for lots more detailed information. You can narrow down your focus and see where your direct traffic is geographically, or all the referring sites and their conversion rates, or what keywords people are using to reach you (you can use your keyword data strategically, too). You can also check the performance of your adwords campaigns from this menu.



Explore the Traffic Sources page. You'll find it a useful resource.

Labels: Google Analytics, SEO

Since I wrote about how much a web site costs, I've had lots of questions about the subject. One of the most common is, "Why do prices vary so much?"

I really understand this. When prices of an item are as variable as the costs for building a website, it's hard to feel confident about what you're paying. So I'd like to discuss some of the major factors that affect the price of a website.

Domain registration

The domain name of your site is the web address, or URL, of your website, such as YourBusiness.com. I've written before about choosing your domain name. Domain registration is a necessary cost, but it can vary.

Registering a domain is cheap: about $10 a year. Some hosting companies do it for free if you use their services. One young woman who has been asking questions chose to go with a .tk domain, since she could get that for free, but these domains are strongly associated with spam and shady sites, so this isn't a good business move.

Others choose to use a free site without getting a domain name, but this has a danger: when you succeed in your business and want to upgrade your site, you'll have to get a new URL, and will lose all the ground you've gained in search results and faithful customers. My education blog is in this position, actually; I set it up at Xanga.com years ago before I knew better. Now it's above the fold on the front page of Google for an amazing number of popular searches and drives traffic nicely for various clients. When I move it to its own domain name, I'll have to start over with SEO to bring it back to its current level. Boy, do I ever regret that.

There are places that will charge you more than $10 a year for domain registration. If they're going to do some research and assist you in choosing the most effective URL for your business, it can be worth it. If not, then don't pay more. The main thing to remember is that it's a first-come first-served system, and there's no benefit to waiting around. Just go ahead and register that domain name.

Hosting

This is the fee that you pay monthly or annually for the space you occupy on the web. It can range from nothing at all to hundreds per month for managed hosting. ToMuse has a comparison chart for a wide variety of mass market companies, and you probably also have local options. I work with a local web firm that charges $25 a month for zero downtime and 24/7 service.

In my recent conversations, I've found that people can get very exercised about the question of hosting. Often this excitement focuses on getting the most bandwidth for the lowest price. I've worked with lots of clients who had lots of different hosting arrangements, and I'd say that trustworthiness and good service are, in real life, much more often the issue than the amount of bandwidth. I've also found that sites with free and cheap hosting don't actually perform as well as those with professional hosting. Often, too, there are multiple fees and add-ons which add up to as much as professional hosting before you finish.

Here's the thing: if you aren't prepared to pay for your business's website, then you're not in business.

Your website, whether you're an online or a brick and mortar business, is the first thing most of your customers will see, and the main way they'll know you. Some longtime business owners haven't caught on to this yet, and some brand-new businesspeople don't think this will be true for their businesses, but it's a fact of modern life.

So if you're thinking that you'll go with free hosting in spite of the disadvantages, or you're putting hours into comparing the specs on $6.95 a month hosting with $9.95 a month hosting, then it may be time for some serious thought about your business plans. It seems to me that many of the people who contact me for advice on getting a free website for their businesses are planning to fail, and hoping to put as little investment as possible into their businesses so they won't lose much when they do so.

I have a successful online business, myself, and so do my clients, so perhaps I can't really advise people who plan to fail at theirs, though I do my best to be sympathetic.

My personal feeling is that free hosting makes sense if you're not in business. Your average $5 a month plan offers you no real advantages over free hosting, so why pay? However, I have heard some cogent argments on the other side from people who plan to pay a small amount for their hobby sites. Fine. If you're in business, though, you should budget for professional hosting.

Design

To this point, we've been talking about differences of a few dollars up front or a few hundred dollars over the course of a year. When we get to the design and building of a site, we're getting into the real differences.

People responding to my post about the cost of a website included both people sharing quotations they'd had for $10,000 or more and people assuring me that they could do it themselves for free with an instruction book from the library.

Here are some things to think about:

• Overhead can affect the cost. A web firm which has to pay salaries and light bills is going to have to charge you more than a student working on the kitchen table. A web firm is also likely to have access to specialized software, copywriters, engineers, their own servers, and people with varied skill sets who can do the particular task required for your particular needs. If the bargain rate is based on low overhead, then it may not reflect poor quality work. If you don't need the benefits of the firm, choosing a freelancer instead can offer real savings. Make sure that you know exactly what the low-overhead choice is planning to do. Will they code your site as well as designing it? Will they provide the content? Will they upload the files with your host? Will they make changes in the future if you need that done? There are a lot of steps in building a web site, and unless you go with a full-service firm, those steps may not all be included in the price you're quoted.
  
• Time can affect the cost. One of the more astonishing bids sent to me in the course of the conversations I've been having came from a designer who charges slightly less per hour than I do. This designer did both content and design, though not coding, and helpfully gave time estimates in the cost breakdown. My client was concerned that the designer I'm working with and I might be overlooking something. I sat for a while trying to imagine how writing a contact form could take the same amount of time I take to write a five-page website. Eventually, I just had to admit that I didn't know why that designer was planning to take so much longer than we were. Since web design is generally done on an hourly basis, an efficient worker can save you a lot. Someone who does it badly and has to go back and do it over -- or be replaced by someone else who does it over -- can cost far more, though, so check out the portfolio.
  
• Hourly rate can affect the cost. I work with some excellent designers who charge relatively low rates because, for example, they're students or they live in an inexpensive country. I charge less myself than some others do, because I don't want to price myself too high for the small businesses I like to work with. But you have to realize that right now business is very good for people in my line of work. Everyone who is actually good at writing or designing websites has plenty of work and is being paid well. There is no motivation for us to discount, and basic economics is going to tell you that this tends to mean that prices are rising, not falling. Before you choose someone with a low rate, make sure you know why their rate is low.

Even given this information, there may not be any very obvious reason for a price difference between two firms or between two freelancers. Look at their work and check their references, and choose someone who fits your budget.

Copywriting

You can write your own web content, and many businesses do. It's usually a mistake. Writing for the web is a specialized skill, just as web design is. It's not the same as writing an email to your friends, or a print ad, or even a sales letter. And your content has the largest effect on your success with search and conversions of any decision listed in this post. "Content," as we all know, "is king."

Copywriting is also never the expensive part of a website. I write a typical website in two to five hours. Most business owners will spend far more time than that, and their results won't be nearly as good. Writing your own website is simply false economy.

My rates are typical; I've seen much lower rates for much lower quality and higher rates for people with greater overhead, but generally the rates among professional web content writers don't vary as much as the rates for designers.

SEO

As a general rule, your website is not going to be visible just because you launch it. You have to draw it to the attention of the search engines. This involves both onsite and offsite optimization.

Onsite optimization means building and writing the website in such a way that the search engines as well as the human visitors find it appealing. This makes an enormous difference to the success of your website. I see sites every day that have been built without any understanding of SEO and are therefore not doing their job.

This is a specialized skill, and you have to expect to pay for it. Clients I work with have often spent thousands of dollars on their websites and still languish on the back pages of the search results. They have to compare the loss of business over the years with the cost of having their site done properly. If you're planning a website, you can avoid the losses by having it done properly in the first place.

Offsite optimization means submitting your website to search engines and directories, engaging in social media, providing your site with rich content, and all the rest of the stuff I write about here.

You can do much of this yourself, if you have the time and the knowledge. With a good website, you should be busy enough not to have the time.

Prices for these services vary widely, too. Fargo web design firm Onsharp charges a set-up fee of $250 for on-site optimization, and monthly fees for off-site services. Fayetteville web firm Sharp Hue includes on-site optimization in the design and offers offsite optimization at hourly rates. I offer both hourly rates for specific services and monthly rates for ongoing maintenance.

There are companies offering SEO services of various kinds at various rates all over the web. The differences in prices and services are even greater than those for design. My advice, if you're shopping around, is to study up enough on the subject (reading this blog is a good start) that you can tell what's being offered to you and make a confident decision.

Conclusion

I hope this discussion has clarified some of the factors involved in pricing of websites. My advice is still the same: determine how much a new customer will bring to your business over the course of the year, and use that information to set your budget. Then you can figure out how to fit the website you need into your budget.

Labels: budget, SEO, web content, web design, web hosting

When I first started doing online marketing as an in-house SEO, one of the most difficult things for me to determine was what success would look like. What kind of results could we realistically expect? How would we know when we had succeeded?

I think this is one of the reasons that we get so focused on being #1 at Google, or on increasing traffic to a certain point (both good things, but not always the best primary goals): those things are measurable, and you can tell when you've won.

Still, it's a fair question. And a hard one to answer. Some companies get better results than others. Some companies have better products than others, or better follow-through, or perhaps even better luck. What part of your results can definitely be attributed to SEO?

Recently I had a rare opportunity to do a direct comparison of two directly comparable websites.

I've been working with A Plus Educational Supply for a full year now. When I started working with them, they had two websites: one each from the two main stock catalog companies for educational supply dealers. The two sites were comparable in importance and usefulness, similar in traffic and overall quality, and neither of them got many orders.

A Plus hired me to work on one of the sites. I found out about the other one in the course of my initial research, but they asked me to concentrate just on one of the sites, so I ignored the other.

The fortunate site got an SEO makeoever, a blog, linkbuilding, and regular monitoring and response to analytics. The unfortunate one just continued as it had been.

How do the two compare after a year?

The unfortunate one had no PageRank at all. It didn't get crawled by Google. It had no links, except one from the company that hosted it. No orders arrived through it. The domain name is still registered, but the owners let their hosting lapse at the end of the school year and it is no longer online.

The fortunate one has thousands of links and a PageRank of 3. Their sales over the past year are 600% higher than the previous year, even though this has been a very difficult year for their industry as a whole.

Interestingly enough, their traffic is not much higher than it was. Their rankings are better, and their traffic is better focused -- it's their customers rather than random visitors -- but their conversion rate is enormously improved.

The same company, the same people, the same products, the same location, the same economic conditions -- the only difference between the two websites is that one got ongoing web marketing efforts and the other didn't.

One is very successful, and the other is dead.

Labels: linkbuilding, SEO

The good people at Liquid Dispatch, Inc. have a new web design. Here's their current look:



And here's their new look, written by me and designed by Tom Hapgood:



Actually, we're fixing the content on the right to keep all the items in the bulleted list to one line of text each, but this is almost the finished version. It has a more modern look and feel, the navigation is better, and the code is up to date, but does this have any consequences beyond mere aesthetic improvement?

Notice the differences, from the point of view of the search engines:

• The new version has more content, with more important keywords in important places, so the search engines can more easily tell what Liquid Dispatch does. It's still natural-sounding, and informative for the human visitors, but it's going to be more visible.
• The whole new site is available to the search engines. The old site had sections that couldn't be read by search engines at all.
• The part of the content that is just for the search engines is now more useful. The new site has analytics installed, too.
  

The new "about us" section is going to be important for human visitors, and therefore for conversions. Since their human visitors are looking for someone to transport petroleum products and liquid nitrogen and stuff across the country, reliability matters a lot. "About us" is the "you can trust us and here's why" section. This company needs one. Fortunately, they have many strong "here's why you can trust us" statements they can make. and even more fortunately, the content for this page can quite naturally be studded with their keywords.

Combining "contact' and "price quotes" eliminates a stop-and-think moment for their visitors. All "Hmm... what should I do now?" moments have the possibility of making your visitors give up and leave instead of following through with the contact. A smooth path from first contact with your page to conversion is a must.

So the new page should bring greater visibility as well as better responses from their customers. Definitely worth doing.

Stumble It!

Labels: SEO, web content, web design

Yesterday I was working on linkbuilding for a new website, just launched over the weekend. They're in competition with their own old website, which was up for some years. Google hasn't been over to visit their homepage since they launched, but even so they're number two at Google this morning (also number three, actually -- they have one of those nice secondary insets,to a useful page I linked to here yesterday). They should be number one by the end of the week, easy.



This is how it's supposed to work. When you try to rank for keywords for which you deserve to rank, the search engines will cooperate with you and your rankings will improve.

What do I mean by "you deserve to rank"? The key thing to keep in mind here is that the search engines aren't working for you. Their goal isn't to make your business visible. Their goal is to give searchers the most useful pages. That keeps searchers coming back to them and helps the search engines sell ads, so that makes sense. Therefore, you should choose keywords that your customers -- the people who actually want to find you -- would use to search for you. Your business name, the main thing you do, the community where you do it, the subject for which you're really a useful source. Then you just point out to the search engines that you exist, by requesting links at relevant sites and so forth, and in a week or two the search engines cheerfully serve you up on the front page above the fold.

This is how it normally goes.

Not every single time, though. Right now one of my clients, a Fargo web development firm, is riding the rankings rollercoaster.

This is Fargo, North Dakota, that we're talking about here. They've had a flood followed by a freak blizzard, and even on normal days they have temperatures that sound to me as though they belong on some other planet, and now they have to cope with volatile search engine rankings, too? Doesn't seem fair.

They began as we'd expect and want them to begin, moving up within a couple of weeks for most of their keywords. But look at the bouncing around after that. This is a graph showing their rankings at Google, and the ones for Yahoo and MSN are just as volatile -- but completely different.



What's going on?

The first possibility is that they don't actually deserve those keywords. A quick rise followed by sinking is something you can see when somebody manipulates results and tricks Google temporarily, giving the site rankings it doesn't deserve. That's not the case here. This firm is not only a bona fide Fargo web design firm, they are a very good one.

The second possibility is that their competitors are working very hard on SEO, and only an equally hard push back will keep them in their proper place on the search engine results page. I've seen this before, with an e-card company that struggled constantly for top rankings, and always will, because the top players in that industry are always fighting for those rankings. This kind of situation reminds me of MMORPG rankings -- you just can't treat that as though it were a normal ranking situation.

The third possibility is that they've confused the search engines. There are signs of overall success, after all, along with the volatility. First off, the chart shows that their rankings have improved in the two months we've been tracking, and it's early. What's more, the client gets traffic with keywords like "SEO," "web development," and "web design."

Let me clarify that, because it's important. I'm saying that people type in "SEO" and "web design" at Google and end up at this client's website. Not "Fargo SEO" or "North Dakota web design," though of course those are common routes as well. Visitors have just typed in the bare term "SEO" and reached the client's website. "Web development" is actually one of the top ten keywords. These are extremely difficult keywords for a small company to rank for, and I wish I had people visiting me by typing in "SEO," let me tell you. I'm totally impressed.

The client also has been getting increases in the percentage of traffic that reaches the website through search, and specifically through search for relevant terms -- except while his town was evacuated, during which time the traffic went down a bit. So it doesn't look as though our SEO efforts have been unsuccessful. There have been a number of changes made to the web site in the time we've been tracking, the very word "Fargo" has been online a lot in other contexts, and there may just be settling going on.

The question is, what do you do about volatile rankings?

• Rethink your strategy and make changes. The experts over at SEOMoz.org caution against this. On the other hand, I'm going to recommend a couple of things for the client to consider. Making changes which are generally positive can be worth doing, if you don't overreact. At the very least, it makes sense to re-examine your strategy and make sure you're not making errors. I had the privilege of rehearsing under a conductor from the National Symphony Orchestra last week, and he said kindly to the brasses, "Always consider the possibility that you're wrong." He was talking about mismatches in pitch, but it sounds like good life advice.
• Get creative. I don't start with creative linkbuilding. Most websites will rank well for the keywords they deserve to rank for just with onsite optimization and basic linkbuilding. You can spend a lot on the more fun and interesting stuff and end up just where you would have had you waited a while. If you're in a very competitive field, though, and particularly if you're in a field like web services in which there is a lot of manipulation of search engines going on (include the hospitality industry and pharmaceuticals in that category, too), then it can make sense to do some heavier work in social media, to set up some extra websites with useful content and links back to you, or to work on some linkbait and ask your friends to Digg you.
• Relax about it. Sometimes it's not necessary to hit #1 at Google in order to meet your business goals. You have to have number one for your business name, of course, and the client I'm telling you about does have that. But sometimes you can have good results without #1 rankings. For example, I'm not #1 for "SEO Fayetteville AR" yet. My website isn't even above the fold. But look at the results for that query (on a signed-out search in my town):
  
  

Do you think I have a problem? I don't think so. The whole page is full of my name. It doesn't really matter that my website isn't yet #1. Will I be happy when it is? Of course. But until then, I plan to relax.

We'd all rather have top rankings that stay that way. But the rankings rollercoaster is a fact of life in some businesses. Just watch out for the results shown in this cartoon.

Labels: local search, SEO

Recently a client asked for a list of SEO dos and don'ts. The client is a franchise operation, and they wanted to help their franchisees get the best possible results on the web. I was happy to provide a checklist of SEO things to do to get a new web page visible.

A list of don'ts was another thing entirely.

I've seen lots of SEO don'ts. Based on my experience with clients, I could give you a list, beginning with this sort of thing:

• Don't hide your keywords on the front page in letters that match the background.
• Don't place links in directories of Malaysian massage parlors if you run a pet store in Ohio.
• Don't try to get links by having quasi-English articles with no real content posted at 0 PR article mills.

Chances are, the franchisees weren't planning on doing these things. In every case, these were things done for my clients by people who didn't know any better, but still charged for their services. Or possibly by people who did know better, but dishonestly did these things and charged for them. The clients paid to have these harmful things done, but they had no idea that they were being done.

So it may be that the real list of SEO don'ts for businesspeople, rather than SEO professionals, is something like this:

• Don't hire people who guarantee you some particular ranking in some particular number of days. Not because it's impossible to achieve, but because it's considered bad form in our industry, and honest SEO professionals don't make guarantees like that.
• Don't do anything online that you wouldn't do in the physical world. If you don't have your business card up on the bulletin board at the local massage parlor, then you don't need your business listed with massage parlors in directories. On the other hand, if your business is a massage parlor, then that's exactly where you ought to be. But on your own continent, unless you make international house calls.
  
• Don't do things that sound dishonest or sneaky to you, such as hiding words on your website, because they probably are dishonest and sneaky. If you're not sure, then ask your online marketing people why they're recommending this move, and notice whether the answer sounds dishonest and sneaky.

Online marketing is all about trust. Google's PageRank is about whether or not your website is trustworthy. And there's no reason for people to send money out into the ether to you if they don't trust you. So most of the real SEO don'ts are about trying to sidestep normal growth by doing something shady.

You can feel fairly sure that the search engines are ahead of you on that.

Oh, and a poorly-designed, badly-written website is a definite SEO don't.

Labels: ethics, online marketing, SEO

SEO Website Redesign #1 was about letting the search engines and the human visitors in on what the website was about, and SEO Website Redesign #2 was about maintaining the look the clients were fond of while increasing usability and optimizing for search.

Here's the third and final SEO website redesign of the series, another Sharp Hue project. In this case, the client, Midwest Medical Billing, wanted a completely new look. They also wanted to be visible in the search engines for their own business name, which they definitely were not.

This is an absolute must -- but there are so many companies sharing the name Midwest Medical Billing that our particular Midwest Medical Billing was having a hard time making it to the front page.

Here's their old website:



There's nothing particularly wrong with it. They were using a standard template and some stock images, and their site looked like all the other medical billing sites.

We fixed them up with a stronger URL, stronger and more search-friendly content, and a fresh new look.



This design has news and announcements on the front page to provide an opportunity for adding fresh content regularly, and an emphasis on modern technology and green office practices, as well as plenty of other keywords that are on the target customer's mind right now.

The new site has been up for seven days, and is #3 on Google for its company name, after languishing in the back pages for months.

Notice that there are no tricks here: it's just a good website, written and designed to be informative and appealing to both humans and search engines.

That's really all you need.

Stumble It!

Labels: SEO, web content, web design

Today I'd like to show you a slight redesign I did with Shan Pesaru of SharpHue, Inc.

The client in this case is Courtney and Wise, Pty, an upscale painting and decorating outfit in Sydney, Australia. I'm calling this a slight redesign because we didn't start over. Michael and Joanne Peters, the kind and charming proprietors of Courtney and Wise, had an elegant website to begin with, and they liked its look. Here is the old one:



Unfortunately, while this website had its charms, it also had some real problems from the point of view of search and usability.

The first point is that it's just hard to read. Upscale painters naturally have older people in their client base. Older people find it more difficult to read text with low contrast. Chances are very good that their target customers, if they came to this page, would leave again immediately without attempting to read the page.

It also has little to catch the eye of the searcher at the top of the page -- which is what visitors will see before making the decision whether to stay and scroll down to read more. In fact, many of the most interesting parts of this site's content are actually hidden in obscure little links at the bottoms of pages.

There were also quite a few issues under the hood, as it were. The meta language had problems, the images are flash and therefore a closed book to the search engines, and there were a variety of technical imperfections that interfered with the best results from the point of view of SEO. SEOMoz has a cartoon showing Google wondering to itself, "Hmm... which page should I link to?" when faced with a choice between good design and content and "crummy" design and content, and we all know which way that decision goes.

Shan has a particular gift for search-friendly design, and I'm all about search-friendly content, so we were able to fix Courtney and Wise up with a well-optimized version of their website which maintains the original feeling but has a fresh, updated look.



As an early tester said, it now looks worth scrolling down to read.

This new look will launch soon, and traffic and conversions should rise. For this site, redesign wasn't as much about aesthetics as it was about SEO.

Stumble It!

Labels: SEO, usability, web design