Extending Your Web Presence

Thursday, March 11, 2010

It is classic marketing advice that people have to hear about you somewhere between 5 and 12 times before they'll actually take action on your product. In the past, that meant that you had to pay to have your commercial on TV enough to ensure that your prospects would see it a dozen times, or that your salespeople had to contact people a dozen times.

The internet has improved things. Now, that dozen points of contact can include multiple visits to your website, repeated emails, or just seeing you around on the web.

How can you get general visibility on the web?

Your website is the most important thing here. Have a good website that says what you want to say about your company. Make it nice enough that people will want to link to you, and you'll get additional visibility with no further effort. Also make sure that you're listed in the directories your customers and prospects are likely to use.
Have a blog. Send your blog to other locations on the web, too -- it's easy to make your feed go to Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, but you can also post your relevant posts on community boards of various kinds. If this is a strength of yours, do guest blog posts. I got my first big SEO job from someone who read a guest post of mine and left a "call me" in the comments.
Use social media. There's a fantastic array of social media sites out there, and you won't be able to keep up with all of them, so choose a few that you like and find convenient. Make profiles all over the place, though, with links to your website. Do a good job on your profile and then you can ignore that site. What you want to avoid is the occasional dropping in. Posting every few months is less effective than not posting at all, since it makes you look like a slacker.
Engage in conversations. Find the forums in your niche, read them, and say something when you have something to contribute to the conversation. The Wall Street Journal wrote about me last year, after having seen something I wrote at a forum. They're not going to call you if you say, "Great post! Keep it up!" but if you make a useful contribution to the discussion, you never know who might see it.
Share your knowledge. There are a lot of places online that rely on user-generated content. Sharing what you know at such places shows your authority. So, if you have a bicycle repair shop, you can answer questions about bicycle repair at Yahoo! Answers, and show that you know what you're doing. I review things at Amazon.com, myself. I've gotten jobs from people who've read my reviews. I've also had calls from manufacturers asking if they can use my reviews in their promotional materials, which is an opportunity for me to let them know that I can write other things for them if they ever need it. Since I'm a writer, any review will show my writing ability, but you can review things in your particular niche and thereby show your expertise in your own area. Squidoo lenses, hub pages, and YouTube are other great options.

Get in the habit of doing a little visibility-building when you need a break, and you'll see results over time. Or of course you can hire someone like me to do this for your company if this isn't one of your strengths.

Labels: SEO, social media, web content

Do You Have a Good Story?

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

This is Hall Street Storage, a storage company which has been taking up almost an entire city block in Brooklyn since 1931. They're a green business -- sustainability in business being a cause near and dear to my heart, that makes me love them already -- and they are in fact the largest certified green business in New York City.

They have a commercial refrigerated storage division where they seem to corral all the stuff for downtown restaurants (they have a lot of caviar, duck livers, things like that) and a self-storage section which is getting ready to offer pedicabs to help residents of the neighborhood move their belongings with no emissions. You love them too now, right?

The story gets better. Last month, right in the middle of the month, the DOS-based computer system which they used gave up the ghost, and they couldn't even send out bills for February. They called Clevertech, a custom software developer I work with, and CEO Kuty Shalev went down there to help. He rescued their data, figured out exactly what they needed, met with them to find out exactly what they liked and didn't like about their old system -- plus the things they needed which they didn't know but which he could see because that's one of his superpowers --and he built them a new warehouse management system. It's going live today, just in time to get the bills out for March.

What's more, there was one key person at Hall Street who did all the calculations of all the prices, with pencil and paper. Clevertech developer Brad Newman was telling me about her.He had explained that the prices all had to be calculated by hand.

"Hmm," said I. "That must have meant that not everyone was able to do it. Plus having to be able to use DOS and remember all the information they weren't capturing. Didn't they have to pick and choose their workers pretty strictly?"

"Worse than that," he said. "There was this one lady who knew everything. Without her, I don't know what they would have done."

Clevertech took all the everything that this lady knew and built it into the software they made for Hall Street.

We could make a movie out of this.

These are the stories to tell at your company website. You can't talk about yourself all the time, because your readers mostly don't care. They are thinking about themselves, usually, not you. They want to know what they'll get out of what you offer. Your awards can be interesting, because they answer your visitor's question: "Will these people do a good job for me?" Your qualifications can be briefly interesting for the same reason. Beyond that? You have to capture their imaginations.

For me, the image of Kuty in that enormous green building rescuing 79 years of data while the workers stood surrounded by caviar and duck livers that belonged to ... um.... someone, and we hope our expert can remember -- well, that's worth a lot.

Check out Kuty's blog tomorrow for his side of the story, especially if you want to know the tech details. In the meantime, cast about in your mind: do you have a good story? And is it on your website already? If not, get it on there ASAP.

Labels: web content

Righting Ranking Wrongs

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

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

How Good Does Your Website Have to Be?

Monday, March 8, 2010

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

Does It Matter Where You Put Your Keywords?

Friday, March 5, 2010

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

Should Your Website Be Bilingual?

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Pickaweb has started a new subscription program, and they're offering a month free. I'm one of the people involved in the process, so I was excited to hear that they've launched. I was also glad to have the chance to ask Tony about one particular aspect of the business. Pickaweb is a UK firm, but in Spain they're Merkaweb.

As you can see, they have both Spanish and English versions of their website.

A project I'm working on for a local client also has both Spanish and English versions of the site. Their analytics shows that few people visit the Spanish language site, so Shan and I were wondering whether it makes sense to keep both, and how best to optimize the Spanish language site if they keep it running.

With any web effort, it's always important to consider whether the return justifies the use of resources, and whether those resources could be better used another way. At the same time, when an asset isn't performing as well as you'd like, it makes sense to consider whether changes in the way you're using that asset might not help it pay its way.

So I asked Tony whether he felt that it made sense to have a site in two languages.

The first question is whether you have the audience in the second language. In Tony's case -- yes, of course he does, since his second site is in Spain. In the American client's case, the lack of traffic suggests that the audience may not be there. Census data suggests that there are some 35 million people in the United States who speak Spanish as a primary language, and that only half describe themselves as speaking English "very well." But the client's B2B site may not fill a need for those who are comfortable only in Spanish. There site's analytics show the typical Monday through Friday pattern of a site that is accessed from the workplace, and English might be the usual language of the workplaces in question.

On the other hand, the use of Spanish in the United States is increasing, certainly here where our client is based, and in other areas of the country as well. Having the second language might be forward-looking if nothing else.

We thought about auto-translation as an alternative. Tony confirmed that English to Spanish auto-translation doesn't always result in natural Spanish. Merkaweb, auto-translated to English, actually does quite well, producing only one rather odd sentence on the homepage: "Protects to identity on the internet!" As pages become more complex, though, more oddities creep in. Auto-translation is certainly helpful, but a Spanish language page will equally certainly provide a better experience.

Or it can. If your translated page is poor, though, or not directed well toward your target audience, you may be doing yourself a disservice. Market research shows us that different linguistic and cultural groups in the U.S. have different buying patterns -- and different exploratory shopping patterns as well. We know, for example, that European American women are more price-sensitive in their shopping for cosmetics than Hispanic or Asian American women. Translating a web page selling cosmetics into Spanish or Japanese won't bring conversions if our focus is on how economical our product is.

In our particular case, we clearly need to do some research about the particular audience our Spanish language pages ought to be targeting. Once we have completed that research, we'll be in a position to make useful decisions about how best to use that section of our website.

Labels: web content

Words Matter

Monday, March 1, 2010

It's Words Matter week, sponsored by the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors. The difference between an almost-right word and just the right word, Mark Twain said, is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

For your website, consider this: search engines can't see your design or your images or your multimedia. I think they care about the quality of your coding, but I know that they mostly pay attention to your words. Human beings can be swayed by your images and your design, and they may watch and listen to your videos, too, but they'll remember your words.

How's the writing at your website? Is it time to admit that you need a professional?

Labels: web content

Do You Need to Know HTML?

Monday, February 15, 2010

This is html. Should you care?

It's the special language that tells your computer how to organize a web page. Not how it should look, exactly -- that's mostly up to CSS these days -- but which parts are lists and which parts are extra important, which parts should show up on the screen and which should not, where to look for images and how to decide which style to serve up on the screen.

There are those who believe that all schoolchildren ought to learn html, and those who feel that this mysterious stuff with the pointy brackets is just punctuation on steroids and should be left to the specialists.

I'm going down this afternoon to speak to Joe McCoy's students about online copywriting, so I was checking out their textbook, and I was interested to see that it contains a brief section on html.

The textbook gave instructions for making italics and bold letters, links, and lists. These are generally considered the absolute basics, the equivalent of greetings and counting in human languages. I show some of these things to my writing students, since we sometimes write online and I don't want them to be entirely at the mercy of their visual editors. You may feel this way about your website -- why shouldn't you be able to go in and fix things up a little yourself?

However, there are some problems with this.

The first and most important issue is that your designer uses CSS, or cascading style sheets, to add style to your website. This means that typing in the special html code for bold letters may not really give you bold letters on your website -- it depends what your designer told the computer to do when it sees that code. If you plan to use html, you'll need to work with your designer to make sure it does what you expect it to do.

Second, your html may not look the same on all browsers as it does on yours. That is, when you look at something with Internet Explorer, you may see something different from what people who use Safari or Firefox see. This means that you have to remember to check on all the browsers you're supporting (all the things your visitors use) to make sure you're giving everyone a good experience.

Finally, it's easy to make mistakes with html when you only know a little bit. If you forget to close a bracket or fail to leave a space where you should, you can break your website. You'll then have to hire someone to find your error and fix it for you. Not only do you need to be highly accurate, but you also have to keep up with changes. Using out of date html is very bad for your website.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't learn html. If you plan to do your own blogging and SEO, you pretty much have to learn at least basic html. In that case, plan to spend some time studying. Here are places where you can learn:

My advice: don't learn just enough html to be dangerous, and use it. Do be bold and learn enough to have control over your web pages.

Labels: html, web content

Keywords, and Why You Need Some Other Words Too

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Yesterday, I was working on a new website. I say new, but there actually was quite a bit of content already at the site. It read sort of like this:

"Maximize your bottom line and catapult revenues with proven revenue generating strategies that propel your business to the next level!"

I could go on, but you probably recognize the genre. There was a lot of this stuff. it makes me think of footprints on the beach: clearly, there was someone there at some point, it's evidence of human effort, but in minutes it's gone from your memory. It has no substance.

I rewrote it as nicely as I could and sent it off. The client wasn't happy.

What a relief.

So often, people are really fond of their horrible content. I explained that I always try to preserve people's existing content, unless I hear otherwise.

"For all I knew," I explained, "you wrote it yourself and you love it."

Fortunately, that was not the case. This was a work for hire, and a good example of a complete waste of money. I'll be throwing it out and starting over.

Have a look at your website. Have you just strung buzzwords together in a faint semblance of meaning? Or is there some substance there?

I have to admit that working on this client's site, when I thought it was his idea of how his business should be described, had given me a poor impression of the client. My sending it back to him as better-written yet still meaningless drivel probably gave him a poor impression of me, too. I think our phone conversation dispelled both those negative impressions.

But visitors to your site won't call you to see whether they've misjudged you. They'll read a little bit of your substance-free content and click right back to the search results -- no matter how high on the page your website may be.

Make sure you have something to say, and that you get it onto the web page.

Labels: keywords, web content

Stock Content on Your Website

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

I work with lots of bad web content. It's my job. But it's usually been written by the owner of the website. I completely understand why people do this. If nothing else, writing is like reading or driving -- everyone does it, and it can seem odd to people to pay for something that seems like an ordinary everyday skill.

But I've recently been encountering bad writing for hire. You can go to an article mill and pay relatively low prices for articles. One blogger explained that "quality isn't always important" when he wrote about his experiences with one of these services, and of course he's right.

The image in this post is not beautiful. I like to show you beautiful images sometimes, but in this case, since I'm writing about stock content, this very uninspired stock image seems completely appropriate. True, the pencil is a bit large compared to the paper, the writing surface is unnatural, and the whole thing is lifeless, but it was free.

So if you find yourself in a situation in which for some reason you just want a whole bunch of words, and you don't care much how good they are, you can just buy words in bulk in the form of articles. If you decide to do that, here are some things to look for that can help you get the most for your investment:

Don't accept errors. Lots of these content farm articles have no particular point to make, but there's no reason to accept grammatical errors, typos, or spelling mistakes. You can get accurate if uninspired English for a nickel a word. If you plan to pay less than that, you should just use automatically generated text, because you won't have actual people reading the article anyway.
Try for a main point of some kind. If you read many of these articles, you'll notice that they tend to be very boring. This is because they usually involve reading some factual information and repeating it ("regurgitating" is how one of my correspondents phrased it) in slightly new words. Give your cheap writer a point to make, and your article will be much better. If you're buying articles by the yard, you don't usually have this option, but it's worth shooting for.
If you find a good writer, stock up. Some article mills will let you choose your writer, though you may pay more for that. There's so much well-paying work available for good writers that anyone who can actually write well moves out of the article mill market quickly, so you should take advantage of them before they wise up and move on.

Of course, I don't use stock text, though I use stock images and stock sounds, but I think these tips will help you get the most for your money if you choose to do so.

Labels: web content

Stock Photos on Your Website

Monday, February 8, 2010

When I got this fine header in my email from graphic designer Jay Jaro, I had a moment of "huh?" I hadn't been imagining a stock photo in this image, and I wasn't sure I liked it.

Fortunately, I'd just had a conversation with designer Tom Hapgood on the subject of prejudice against stock photos. I was therefore able to step back and respond more rationally.

Do you have the same problem?

In my conversation with Tom, I'd actually been on the side of stock photos. We have a shared client who doesn't like them, but who is also having some trouble getting photos together for the site we're working on. Stock photos can be a great solution in a case like this.

I'd agreed that the client wouldn't want images of people pretending to be their workers, but suggested that we could use nature photos, like the one used below by designer Miriam Hudson-Courtney. It doesn't matter, it seems to me, whether this is some butterfly we know and love, or whether it's a complete stranger. The message is the same.

And that, I think, is the issue to consider when you're thinking about stock photos, and the source of the distaste some people feel for them.

In discussing this issue when my own site was being designed, I said quite firmly that I didn't want a shot of two models conferring seriously over a piece of paper. It seemed to me that these photos are unconvincing. Visitors don't think that the model getting way too excited over your product is really you, or really your customer. I felt that there was, in stock photos of people, an unavoidable element of inauthenticity.

A butterfly, regardless of who took the photo, is a symbol in our culture of freshness and transformation. Miriam's butterfly image is designed to say, "Look how fresh these plans are!" It is no less effective because that particular butterfly came from a stock photo site.

Let's re-examine Jay's design from that point of view. This is obviously a model -- she's standing there holding a light bulb and grinning, not something most of us do in the course of a normal day. In his other variation, which you see below, she is listening to the light bulb, or perhaps transferring its ideas to her brain through osmosis.

In other words, there is no pretense that this image represents a quick snapshot in the office at FreshPlans. It uses the light bulb, a common symbol for ideas in our culture, and an image that accurately represents the primary audience for this website: young professional women. It is as clear in its message as the butterfly.

A few months after my website went live I had a client who wanted a picture of the author and the designer of the website for the company blog. Ironically enough, designer Shan Pesaru and I made her a picture of the two of us, conferring seriously over a laptop screen. It was essentially the picture I had rejected so strongly for my website -- except that, since it wasn't a stock picture, we weren't as well lit and don't look nearly as enthusiastic. It was a snaphot in the office, and it's a good image of what I do.

I don't regret not using that stock image on my website. I've learned that many people think the models in stock images are actually the people who work for the company that owns the website, and I think there could easily have been a false impression created. I also rejected a shot of wadded up paper -- "I'm not that kind of writer," I said at the time, and I'm not. I do have a stock image, though -- antique typewriter keys. Designer Ashley Cox found an image that implied writing, worked with the design vision of the site, and didn't suggest anything that wasn't true, because no one expects me to be using a typewriter.

You can do the same for your site. When you consider using a stock image, think of what it communicates. If the image it creates in your visitor's mind is authentic, then it isn't inauthentic to to use a stock photo -- and it's very likely to be a better picture than the office snapshot.

Read more on this topic:
"Where Should You Get Pictures for Your Website?"

Labels: images, web content

Writing About a Process on Your Website

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

When people read your website, you're not there. This is hardly new information, but it has some implications. One is that things have to be extraordinarily clear.

Things have to be more clear on a website, in fact, than they do on paper.Given an instruction manual, some people will throw it away and experiment, but the others will sit down and read it. They'll expect to search around a bit for the information they need. They'll pay attention to the table of contents, compare the pictures and the text, and struggle through the hard parts.

People facing a complex process online react differently. They look first, to see if they can grab the information in some obvious place. If not, they begin randomly clicking things and scrolling. Then they give up.

No, of course you don't do this. But randomly chosen people in tests of web sites almost always do exactly what I've described. So your visitors may be doing so as well.

This means that a process needs to be explained very clearly, and in an eye-catching way.

At Shopmobbing.com, we went with cute graphics, large numbers, and arrows.This might seem like overkill, but it really isn't. Add very clear text, and you have a fighting chance.

At Joblingo.com, we again used graphics to catch the eye, numbers to show the process, and simple text. Arrows wouldn't have hurt, frankly, but this client wanted to maintain a simple, professional look.

Onsharp used a bright graphic, and bright headings to emphasize the steps of their internal process. Like the previous example, this layout takes advantage of the natural tendency (among English-speaking people) to read from left to right and top to bottom. Setting the steps out in this order helps make it clear. Each short paragraph then links to a page with more complete information. Putting all the information on one page would have separated the headings enough to lose the step-by-step visual impression. Note also that the graphic contains a call to action -- visitors who are ready to make a decision can simplify the process by getting in contact immediately.

Make no mistake -- if your words don't explain the process clearly, no amount of graphic help will fix the problem. Given clear, compelling text, though, laying the process out in an attention-grabbing way that guides visitors through the process can do the trick.

Labels: web content, web design

Search vs. Branding

Monday, February 1, 2010

What do you do when your best keywords for search aren't the best for your brand?

It's a fairly common problem. Right now I'm working on a website for a local natural foods store. Checking the keywords that bring people to their current site, the search volume on the terms related to their products and services, and their preferred brand-oriented words, I came up with a good list of keywords for them. Some were new ideas for them and some were already in their minds.

But high on the list was one term I knew they wouldn't really like: "health food store."

People looking for the things this company sells -- organic foods, homeopathic remedies, vegan packaged goods, nutritional supplements -- such people very often look for "health food store." What's more, people in the community who shop with these folks often refer to their place as "the health food store," as in, "I'm going to the health food store. Need anything?"

It seems obvious that we want to optimize for that term.

But "health food store" doesn't have the image the company wants. They're going for a more modern vibe, something that appeals to people who think more in terms of sustainability, eco-chic, fair trade, slow food, fitness, and maximizing wellness. "Health food store" has, in today's whole foods community, a little bit of a downmarket, outmoded feel.

How do we get the search benefits of using "health food store" prominently on the homepage, without interfering with the brand?

Evaluate the competition. While my client isn't the only place in town that could have a top ranking for the term, they don't have any serious competition online. The most likely competitor has a one-page website with their name and phone number (and they used tables to get the name in the middle of the page), so we can feel confident that they won't be using any sophisticated SEO techniques to fight for the rankings. We can probably get that term without being heavy-handed in its use. If my client wanted national visibility for the term, or there were several other businesses in town that deserved the top ranking locally, it would be a different story.
Use the term where it's prominent for search engines, not for people. In this case, we can slip the term into a sentence toward the beginning of the page where the search engines will recognize that it's important, but people reading will perceive it as an introductory sentence. We won't emphasize that phrase graphically, either.
Use syntax to make your point. We can say "More than just a health food store..." or "In our forty years in business, we've evolved from the first local health food store to..." Human visitors understand that we're saying we're hipper than your average health food store, but we still clue the search engines in and welcome the many people who search for that term. As always, your text needs to be authentic, natural, and useful to your visitors -- but a little subtlety works wonders.

Another common situation is when your company wants to use a term for reasons of branding which isn't being searched for much. In this case, you can use visual effects to emphasize that term, include it with the search essential keywords, and rejoice in the lack of competition -- you may just be ahead of the pack.

Your keywords need to be the things people are searching for, but you can combine those terms with the words you want for your brand, and be right on target for your customers and your company.

Labels: keywords, web content

Deciding on Web Content: Data or Gut Feelings?

Friday, January 29, 2010

Omniture's survey for 2009 found out a lot of interesting things, but one simple fact really leapt out at me.

80% of respondents made decisions about web content without using any measurable data at all.

Omniture suggests that data-driven decisions may actually form less than 20% of the total, because many people will define "It worked before" as a data set. But even if we suppose that 20% of the people who took the survey actually base decisions about web content on some information, that leaves 80% who use "gut feelings" -- and maybe creative sparks or something. They didn't mention that, but I see a lot of random inspiration among clients, so I figure that's probably part of it.

So what measurable data might you use?

Data about search. I like to look at what people are actually searching for. Google keeps track of this, and they should know. While popular searches aren't the whole story -- the greatest number of search queries may be completely unique, just as the greatest number of sentences are -- they can certainly give you useful information. For example, I'm currently writing a site for a natural foods store. Local search results show that more people search for their initials than for their full name. Their current website never uses the initials, and they're not on the front page of the SERPs for those initials. You know I'm going to change that.
Data from your customers. Looking at what people use to find your website now can be useful. That natural foods store gets very few people in via those initials -- no wonder, since they're several pages in. As we know, that doesn't mean their customers don't search for them in that way, just that they don't find what they're looking for. So it's good not only to look at the keywords that bring people to your site, but also to ask people what they look for. I find that customers often search for brand names and product names, but that retailers often think their customers will search for the name or type of their store. It's easy to check on this. Testing your site is also a good plan. And asking people why they visit your website -- combined with your analytics data, this information can guide your content in important ways.
Data from your business. Tyler Katzen of Onix Web Development yesterday suggested asking clients for the percentage of their revenue that came from each area of their business. I was impressed with his cleverness. That one bit of information covers a whole bunch of questions I usually ask people. Gather this data for your business, and compare it with your website: are you putting a lot of your space into something that doesn't actually represent the profit center of your business?

I often explain that SEO copywriting is as much math as literature, and that's the truth -- if you do it right. With 80% of businesses doing it wrong, your website can stand out for search and conversion if you make sure you're part of that 20% using metrics to make content decisions.

Labels: testing, web content

Changes at Your Web Site

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Fresh content at your website encourages visitors, including search engines. People drop by to see what's new and exciting, robots perk up and think, "Ah, that's a live site that gets updated -- I'd better go check it out!"

How can you get it?

Blog. A blog is the easiest, most convenient way to refresh your site.
Seasonal changes. Have your webmaster make changes in the look of your site to match the season. A fresh image, a timely new paragraph, even a change of icons shows that you're keeping up to date.
News. You don't have to have a blog to post some new information. Company news, changes in staff, new products, or a fresh page of tips and offers can bring in some new keywords as well as encouraging your visitors to drop by more often.

To make those changes, you'll either need to make alterations at your site by yourself, or ask your webmaster to do it. I've written before on the pluses and minuses of having a content management system at your website, so let's just look at the best ways to accomplish site changes under both circumstances.

If you make your own changes, just get comfortable at making the particular changes you want to make. You don't have to be an expert to make small changes yourself. Pay for a bit of your webmaster's time to show you how, if you need help. But you may find that it's easier than you think, especially if your designer sets up your site with you in mind.

For example, here's the code for a calendar box at a website.

If all you have to do is replace the circled stuff, it's no harder than any other typing. Grab the information between the "p"s and type in the new information. Just don't be intimidated by the fancy things around it.

If you want to be able to do this, you should convey that to your designer when you have your page built, or plan on a little time to fix your site to make this practical. Some designers write beautiful, clean code that you can easily navigate (I love working with those designers) and some write code that's more like the cables tangled under your desk, or perhaps spaghetti. If your site is built in the latter fashion, it'll need some tidying before you can get in and make your changes with confidence.

If you have changes made for you, you're probably paying by the hour. Some webmasters have arrangements where you can make a certain number of changes per month for a set fee, or allow you to buy a block of time. But time will always be the deciding factor for the cost of making changes. Save time, and therefore money, by having all your changes decided and organized before you send them in.

Don't send this:

"I think I might want to add some new pictures, and also we need to change the prices. I'm thinking that for the new year a 3% increase across the board would be fair, since my costs have risen by just about that much, and maybe we could put in something like 'Note new pricing, made necessary by increases in fuel costs' but maybe we don't have to say that especially if you change the pictures. I'll send the new pictures later, but you could go on and change the prices. But don't make the changes I told you about yesterday until I send you the new pictures, because I might not want them if I like the way the new pictures look."

Send this:

"Please replace the pictures on the Product page with the attached new images.
Also replace the first paragraph on the Pricing page with this:"

and then give the new paragraph exactly as you want it. The difference in cost between these two approaches is considerable.

Of course, you may prefer to pay your web people to take care of these things for you without your having to organize things or disentangle code. Or you may have minions who handle this stuff for you. If you're on a budget, though, you can still have updates at your site.

Labels: web content, web design

Website Content: How Much Do You Need?

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

As you may know if you always read my blog and have total recall, I teach writing to college students in my spare time. One of the questions they frequently ask is, "How long should the paper be?"

I invariably tell them, "As long as it needs to be to say what you have to say."

This is a good answer for a writing class, but it's a rotten answer to "How long should the content at my website be?" That's because there are other factors.

For one thing, you need search engines to find your site, understand what it's for, and offer it to the right people. Robots aren't as good at getting the nuances of human language as humans are, so this can require more text, and more overt use of key phrases, than content written just for people.

For another, your human visitors spend just a few seconds scanning your homepage before they make up their minds about whether to go or stay. That means that you have to write your pages to be scanned, not just to be read.

Finally, you have to work with the design, too -- not an issue for term papers.

So how much content do you need? Check out a few examples. Above is a homepage I wrote for web design firm Sharp Hue. It has 135 words, and you can see them all in that one screenshot. Nearly every single word is an essential keyword. This is a small amount of content, but it's very efficient. If you want to keep text to a minimum, you have to make sure that every word counts -- while still keeping it in the form of natural English sentences that will appeal to your readers.

I usually find that 280 words is about the minimum you can use and get excellent results. But that general figure can look very different from one site to another. The site above, with 280 words, has a traditional page of text in paragraphs. Visitors can tell immediately what this site is for, so we can give them something to read, confident that those who don't need more information will go ahead and take action without reading all the text.

This site, for web development firm Onsharp, has 317 words. It's only about 20 words more than the previous example, but the layout and graphics create a completely different effect. Their product requires a lot of explanation, so they have brief bits that lead to more detail on other pages. This allows a scannable homepage without sacrificing the information their visitors need.

Littlefish IT is another 280 word homepage (though I did a total of about 10,000 words for their site -- in their testing, they found that content really is king). They like to have an attention-grabbing intro above the fold, followed by more detail below it, which is mostly directed toward search engines. Their pages may have up to 480 words, but they're designed to satisfy the non-scrolling visitors as well as those who want more detail.

It's okay to have more than your visitors will read, as long as you've designed the page to do its job whether people read all of it or not. And it's okay to have minimal text as long as you have enough information for search engine robots to discern your purpose.

Labels: web content

Pre-qualifying Your Online Customers

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Who's your customer? Often, businesses think the answer to this question is, "Everyone in the world," but that's not true.

Yesterday, I was writing the website content for a company that sells garage organizers. Now, you can just buy a $25 bike rack from these folks, but what they really do is custom garage organization. The price point is comparable to remodeling a kitchen. They don't need to spend time visiting the homes of people who want $25 bike racks. Since they do on-site evaluation and installation of their high-end systems, they also don't need to spend a lot of time on prospects who are in a different geographical area. They need to reach homeowners in affluent neighborhoods in their own region.

The internet is open to all, though. Direct mail lets you target a specific zip code, but your website can't be targeted in that way. Instead, you need to help your visitors pre-qualify themselves.

Use the right language. In writing the content for the organizing company, I used phrases like "protect your investment" and "showcase your possessions." My examples were skis and golf gear, not mops and folding lawn furniture. Designer Shan Pesaru will use photos of high-end cars,and the alt text for his images needs to carry through the theme. The owners of the company are friendly, down to earth people, but we need an upmarket sound and look at their website. We also need to use the name of their metropolitan area, so we can limit out of town inquiries.
Plan your method of contact. Making it a little more difficult to get hold of you eliminates people who are just thinking idly about your services. The garage organizing company isn't going that far, but we are focusing on having people arrange for a visit to their homes. Providing a name, address, and phone number and giving someone permission to call is more of a commitment than giving an email address. Fewer people will contact you, but more of them will be serious about following through.
Make your intentions clear. The garage solutions company's current website focuses on the problem they solve. This is often a very good strategy: when people search online, they often search by the problem, not by the solution. However, phrases like "Let's get the mess up off the floor!" and "Don't be embarrassed to open your garage door!" don't really say "Invest thousands of dollars in the garage of your dreams." The visitor to your site should be able to tell right away what you have to offer. That doesn't have to include the price, but it should make the nature of your service completely clear.

You don't have unlimited time to follow up with web visitors, and you want to focus your attention on those who want and can afford your product or service. Help your online visitors understand those products and services well enough that they can pre-qualify themselves before they contact you.

Labels: web content

Useful Information at Your Website

Monday, January 18, 2010

Do you want more traffic at your website? In general, people will come to your website if you have things which they find useful or entertaining. Useful information, in particular, will do some good things for your site:

It can increase the number of keywords for which you rank.
It brings visitors back, increasing the chances of their becoming customers.
It increases your value for your current customers or visitors.
It increases your authority and shows your expertise.

How can you get some useful information into your website? Blogs are a great way to do this, but you can also get good mileage with static information pages. The page above is part of a site I wrote for a European optometry chain. The site has information about the company, about their special deals, and about contacting your local office for an appointment. It also has pages on eye exams and eye health. These pages bring in people who've searched for retinoscopy and tonometry -- and chances are good that some of those people will need an eye exam.

How can you add value to your site with information pages?

Make your information pages useful. Often, gathering information in one place will make your page a valuable resource even when the information on it is available elsewhere. Saving your visitors the effort of searching all over the web can lead them to bookmark your site and visit regularly. In fact, having a helpful page at your site is a way of helping your customers -- sometimes even before they become your customers. You remember the people who've been helpful to you in physical world businesses, and are more likely to return to them. The same is true for online businesses.
Make your information clear and accurate. This sounds obvious, but I think we've all seen pages that were intended to provide information, but which rambled or were too filled with jargon to be useful. Be conscious of your audience: for example, we can assume that people who need definitions of different kinds of eye exams are not themselves optometrists or even especially knowledgeable about eye care. A page like this needs to be written in ordinary English. Your page also needs to be well organized, so that visitors can quickly find the information they need. And it should be well-written and proofread, too, so that your visitors aren't distracted by errors or turned off by poor phrasing.
Use your keywords. While there are examples of web pages which have benefited their companies even without being directly related to the business of that company, this isn't the most efficient way to go. Assume that people who need your goods and services will also need information related to those goods and services. An optometrist may choose to have information pages about fashion and glasses rather than eye health, but pages that have no need to use terms like "eye exam," "optometrist," "glasses," or "optician" are likely to be less useful to the business than pages on topics that are directly related. When you're providing valuable information for your customers that may be only tangentially related to your business, make sure to include enough keywords that the page does its job. The example site here has a page explaining the rules for free eye exams available in Britain. Naturally, a lot of that page is about age limits and other legal matters. Still, the name of the company and a number of other essential keywords fit quit naturally into a clear explanation of this subject.

Answering common questions at your website has the advantage, too, that you can refer people to that page. A customer for the opticians may find it reassuring to be told, after a face to face discussion of eye health and computers, "This information is also on our website if you want to check it again in the future."

Labels: web content

Making Your Blog Look Good

Friday, January 15, 2010

Blogging is a good idea for most businesses. Your blog provides extra value for your clients, more content for the search engines, and opportunities for linkbuilding. Excellent content is what makes your blog provide these benefits for your company. But how do you make your blog look good?

First, set it up to look good from the beginning.

The blog you're reading right now was styled to match the website it belongs to, by designer Shan Pesaru. Here's another example of his, using Blogger:

Marcel Sendrea did this one, using Wordpress:

Here's one by Jay Jaro, built with BlogEngine.net:

As you can see, a blog can have just as much style and individuality as any other web page.

If you want to do it yourself, you can upload a template, as I did with this blog:

Sources of blog templates include these sites:

To use them, you download the file and then upload it at your blog platform. If you don't know what that means, save yourself some grief and hire someone to do it for you. You're bright, I know, and you can learn how, but if you just plan to do it once, for your business blog -- well, you have work to do, right?

You can also use the customization options at your blogging platform. Here's a blog at Weebly.com, using one of their templates and their simple directions:

If you happen to find options that fit your company's look pretty well, then you're in luck. If you know a bit of html, you can match the colors and fonts and so forth, and you can often upload your own image, too.

If you're not sure whether blogging is for you, and you want to try it out, this can be a good way to make yourself a free trial. If you do this with Blogger or Wordpress, your web people can bring it into your website later, and match it to your site.

Once it's built, take the trouble to make your posts look good:

Don't get carried away with the options. Multiple colors and fonts, centering some sections and justifying others, playing with text effects -- all that just makes it hard to read. Simplicity is your friend.
Do pay attention to the details. Your text should look balanced. Your images should be carefully chosen and placed. Your punctuation should not suggest junior high school note-passing (!!!!!!) Things like margins and spacing make all the difference.
Choose your images carefully. Your images should be of good quality, connected with your text, and compatible with your company's image. They should fit with the look of the website, too.

A good-looking blog won't make up for scanty or poor-quality content, but it will work with your good content to make a great effect.

Labels: blogging, web content, web design

Small Changes Make a Difference for Search

Thursday, January 14, 2010

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

Your Website: Update, Refresh, or Redesign?

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Let's say that you like the basic look of your website, but you're not getting the results you want. Do you need a new website, or can you just update it -- refresh it a bit, in other words, and keep going?

Ask yourself these questions:

How's the structure? If your site was built recently with modern code, it's not using Flash and graphics where it should have text, and the navigation works well, then you may be fine without a redesign. If it was built a long time ago, or built recently but badly, then you'll have to have it rebuilt. Your choice then is to have it rebuilt with the same overall look, or to take the opportunity to have a fresh look as well as a well-built site. Even if you've gotten carried away with the Flash or you want to move elements around to improve the user experience, you can very likely just update if the basic structure is good.
How's the design? The design of your website has to do with the main colors and where things like headers and navigation buttons are. With a well-made website, you may be able to add new elements, increase or decrease the number of words, and otherwise fool around with the site quite a bit without disturbing the design. If the design is poor, though, changing the pictures won't improve the usability.
How's the content? This is what you can readily change -- assuming your website is built well to begin with. You can have completely new words and images for a fraction of the cost of a redesign.

The problem is, you have to be able to tell.

Often, site owners think that a new picture will fix their site, when they have a poor user experience or bad code. Equally often, owners delay making improvements because they don't realize that a content update (for a few hundred dollars, compared with a few thousand for a redesign) will keep their website working well for another year or two.

Use your end-of-year site checkup to decide how much of a revamping your website needs. I'll be happy to provide a diagnosis for you if you're not sure.

Labels: web content, web design

What's Your Website's Job?

Thursday, January 7, 2010

At this time of year, I do a lot of website analysis. Looking at people's current sites lets me see how well the site is built, what problems it has with usability, and where it obviously needs changes in design or content.

What I can't always tell from looking is this: what's the website's job?

Once you answer that question, you can answer what is to me the most important question, which is simply "How well does this website do its job?"

One business owner told me that her website was "a very big, very expensive business card." This was a disparaging remark, but for some businesses, that's exactly what the website is for. I'm asking around for a CPA and I get a name, so I look for the website to get contact information and a bit of an introduction. That website doesn't sell anything, but it's a major source of business -- a super-effective business card, if you will.

If your website is your business card, then it needs a well-branded design and a clear, concise message. Here's a good example:

The unhappy business owner I mentioned above didn't want her site to be a business card, because it was an e-commerce site. Its job was to sell stuff. An e-commerce site needs compelling sales copy, appealing photos, and a user-friendly checkout system.

Some websites are intended to present their owner's credentials. A site like this needs plenty of information, presented in a scannable form.

The point is, these plans aren't interchangeable. A business card doesn't -- and shouldn't -- give a complete picture of your skills and experience. A site detailing your credentials doesn't sell products. There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all website, because different businesses have different jobs they need their sites to perform.

What's your website's job? And how is it doing?

Labels: web content, web design

Website Checkup: Errors

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Take one final look at your website before you break out the champagne.

Do you have typos? Is your punctuation slipshod? Are there grammatical errors or poor word choices?

Examples like these may shock you. How, you may be thinking, could these organizations allow their websites to go out in public with this sort of thing showing?

Or you may be shocked that I would even think you'd bother to look at them and find the errors.

That's okay. You can hire people like me to find and correct your errors for you. It's not a big expense, and it will allow you to hold your head high and march into the new year free of the kind of error that makes your website -- and you -- look unprofessional.

Beyond this sort of thing, look for old phone numbers, outdated prices, links that don't work -- all those little things that you can easily overlook in the course of day to day business. In my end-of-year checkups, I found a reference on a client's site to "the chart below" -- and no chart. We had made the decision to move that chart, and had missed the reference to it left behind. The webmaster corrected the error immediately, at no charge. Your webmaster may do the same for you. A few minutes spent really scrutinizing your site is a good use of time.

Labels: web content

Website Checkup: Content

Monday, December 28, 2009

This is a great time of year to give your website a checkup. For many of us, it's a slow time, a time to set goals for the new year, a time of contemplation and reflection.

Not surprisingly, I've been doing a lot of rewrites on websites lately. And it has struck me that, while there are often specific redesigns and info updates and strategic changes involved, there are also some more general changes that any website might benefit from.

When you're looking at your own website from the point of view of the year-end check up, see whether you need a bit of a rewrite:

Make it active. The majority of the sites I've spruced up this month have used passive voice sentences like this one:

"It is also very important to us that our patients are treated with respect and friendliness in a professional and caring environment."

Simply changing that sentence to

"We treat our patients with respect and friendliness in a professional, caring environment"

makes it shorter, more readable, and more powerful. Don't use passive sentences unless you have a good reason to. You can also use more active language. This sentence benefited from the addition of a strong verb:

"I'd gone from being able to wallop a softball to scarcely being able to hit a slow, weak ground ball toward the short stop."

"Wallop" isn't a keyword for this site, but neither was "hit," so replacing one instance of "hit" with "wallop" does no harm from the point of view of search, and livens the sentence up for the human visitors.

Make it direct. A roundabout introduction adds nothing to your content, and can lose you the attention of your visitors. The softball sentence above took the place of an entire paragraph describing how the speaker had played sports all his life but had begun to slow down as he got older. We were able to make the point with greater immediacy and to get all the main points into the first paragraph.

On your homepage in particular, every word counts. Not only do you need to help your visitors make an immediate decision about whether to stay and read or not, you also have to make sure that the search engines can tell what you have to offer so they'll show your page to the right people. This sentence may be interesting, but it doesn't tell us what the site is for:

"Shop Mobbing is a recently developed shopping strategy originating in the People's Republic of China as Tuangou, which loosely translates as team buying or group buying (also known as store mobbing). "

Instead, we can start with something more direct:

"Wouldn't you like to be able to match the buying power of large companies? With Shopmobbing you can, and we'll make it easy for you."

We can still give the history of the idea later, but this opening lets our visitors know that we're a practical site with a service, not an academic introduction to an economic phenomenon.

Make it parallel. One of the sites I worked with last week had a wonderful body of useful information, but each page had a different structure and a different look. Choosing one structure -- in this case, the statement of the problem, a bulleted list of causes, a bulleted list of the steps to the solution, and a statement of special concerns -- makes it much more readable, and more likely that visitors will explore the site fully.

One site I'm working on has pages written to teachers. Yet the instructions for the classroom activities use a variety of kinds of sentence, some apparently about the students, some to the students, and some directly to the teacher:

"Within the group, students should discuss their individual hypotheses and predictions."

"Have students independently complete, in their own words, the 'hypothesis' and 'prediction' sections."

"Test the chosen hypothesis and prediction."

Rewriting the pages to create a consistent approach allows the reader to scan the lesson more easily, making the site more useful and encouraging repeat visits.

Have a look at your website: could these changes improve your visitors' experience? Fix it up, and come back tomorrow for another quick checkup suggestion.

Labels: web content

Visitor Expectations and Your Website

Monday, December 14, 2009

Here's the homepage of Vivid Marketing. Snazzy, eh? It's sharp looking and interesting, but the web visitor's first reaction is likely to be "Huh?"

Creative companies often have this kind of surprise at their websites. It shows creativity and looks different. The visitor, one hopes, thinks "Ah, these guys are really creative and different! That's what I need."

There's an "enter here" button -- a definite improvement over the average site like this, which appears to be waiting breathlessly to see what you're going to do. And once you enter, you see the portfolio page below.

This fits the visitor's expectations of a web page. There's the logo in the upper left hand corner. There's the navigation across the top (down the left side would also work). There's the portfolio in the center. A little skimpy, a visitor might think, but what there is looks good. Ads down the side ... we'll ignore those...

But no, those aren't ads.That's the clever, creative arrangement of the portfolio. Mouseover one of those bright squares, and you'll see details on it in the center section.

I love this for the cleverness of it, and the visitor who sits down with it for a bit will see that Vivid does everything from trade show exhibits to billboards. Nice stuff, too. They're also nice people.

The thing is, a website like this is a trade-off. They're going to lose some visitors, because people get confused and frustrated by surprising web pages. Unless they have a strong motivation to stay, they'll usually leave if they feel confused and frustrated.

On the other hand, visitors who are highly motivated -- because they have heard about Vivid in some other way and are determined to learn more about them, for example -- may be very impressed and charmed by the creativity of the portfolio.

I'd take a middle path. I'd ditch the splash page and make a home page that had a clear statement (what we offer and how you can get it) and obvious contact info. I'd add a sentence to the portfolio page, particularly since there are people who don't use mouseover, that sort of gave instructions on how to use the page. In fact, I'd get some text on that page for the search engines, if nothing else. There's room for a couple hundred words on that page.

Is that the best choice for Vivid? Maybe not. If they use more traditional advertising to draw visitors and their website serves primarily as an introduction and display piece, then they may not care about search. They may not care about the occasional new visitor, either.

Vivid is a surprising website that might want to be surprising. What about your website? If your website is a bundle of surprises, and you're selling cameras or real estate, you've got a problem. Visitors haven't come to your website to play, but to buy that camera or look for that loft. When they're frustrated in their goal, they'll very likely just leave.

As a general rule, you ought to put things where people expect them to be. If you choose to make your website surprising, make sure you have a good reason for it.

Labels: web content, web design

When Your Website Doesn't Have the Rank It Deserves

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

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!
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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

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Acmeacme.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 -

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 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 -