Who do you think the business is behind this site?
Check out this website and their whole approach to marketing. Let me know how long it is before you figure out who’s actually the big company behind the totally different approach to marketing.
Here is what stands out in looking at this as an effective marketing tool:
it is fun and colorful
it has movement – both in the rotating graphics as well as in the variable typefaces being used.
It is inviting, both from its graphics and it’s ability to share with others, and the ability to easily find information
it states what it can do for me in a non-sales format way before I ever can get to the point of finding out what I can buy from them.
It focuses on community and how we can interact locally, rather than with a big mega Corporation.
It’s quick, concise, clear, and the messaging text is easy to figure out what it’s about, then get on, get off, and move on to my next task at hand.
the navigation is easy to follow. While I usually don’t like the drop downs and chase the cursor type websites, this one is easy, because the targeted areas are large, and easy to click on, with a single layer drop-down.
I think the key here is that they are starting from a customer perspective, rather than from a corporate perspective, which is very key for any business these days, especially in working with the younger generation.
This site may or may not be the best for search engine optimization. Although it really is not clear exactly what terms they would be trying to optimize for anyways. They do rank at the top for “next door Chicago”. Which if that is their brand focus here, it is a good approach. But I imagine in the list of site objectives, SEO was lower on the list, and they are more successful in other site objectives.
Once you have these (the various other suggestions and strategies for website optimization) in place, make sure you have Google Analytics or some way to measure your traffic to determine if the problem is – not enough people getting to your site, or not enough people taking action on your site.
Google Analytics is a free resource by the wonderpeople at Google. They realize that the more you improve your websites, the more people will search because they get better answers. Plus if you make money or have success with your website (readers, subscribers, callers, or however YOU clearly define a successful website), you will invest more into the web, including marketing. Hey! Google sells some marketing with GoogleAdWords (and makes a TON!). So Google has a bunch of free tools and information to improve your traffic so they can make more money.
Every time you (or anyone) goes to a webpage, you send a request to the server of the webpage or webhost server for something – the text, an image, some flash, a sound file – whatever. In order to keep it all straight, there is also ‘who requested the info’ (so the webhost knows who to send the answer to), where you were last (to help maintain continuity and to understand where you were), time and what you asked for. Most webhosts can keep a log of all those requests and may have some programs to take those computer geek files and make pretty charts and graphs and reports. But more and more, the simpler solution that most small, medium, and large (not many gigantic) sites are using Google Analytics. A big reason medium and large sites use Google Analytics is that those log files can get real big (larger then a DVD worth of data). So trying to handle whole file can get real cumbersome even for a fast computer. Imagine a website with the average page that has 9 photos and someone usually visits 5 pages and there are 1,000 visitors a month (or 33 visitor per day)- that is over 50,000 entries for a relatively low volume site. Imagine a speadsheet with that many rows. Google has lots of computers and hard drive space to handle that, but many office computers start to get bogged down. Oh, did I mention another big advantage – Google Analytics is FREE.
Once you start getting your reports you can start to analyze what your visitors are doing when they get to your site:
Are they looking at one page and leaving?
Are they starting a shopping cart, getting frustrated and leaving?
Are they looking at your service descriptions and then looking at the prices (and leaving)?
Are they going straight to terms and conditions page or to the price page?
Are they looking at the comparison page comparing the free version and the paid version without downloading either?
These are all tools to understanding what you need to do to improve your site to meet your customers needs and improve sales. Having played detective as to why your visitors are coming and going without leaving a name or credit card number, comes the creative part – Improving the website to meet the needs of your customers. If this is your business then this part should be your passion. How to serve the customer to make them Raving Fans (Ken Blanchard) and improve your Net Promoter Score (NPS). If this is not your passion – then ask your best customers what their honest reactions are to your site while watching them navigate through it the way they want to.
I just heard that Google has reclaimed its marketshare that Bing lost while Microsoft was spending tons to launch its new revamping of its search engine.
It seems that many people checked out Bing and decided to stick with Google. Keep this in mind as you dedicate your resources on optimizing your sites for the search engines.
I was talking with an SEO expert recently who was commenting on how the whole Internet marketing industry is so Google centered, and the extreme power they have on the industry.
While I agree that the economic engine that Google engenders for anyone marketing on the web is huge, I had to kindly disagree that it was all Google and their relative power was growing. Pointing out that numbers in DM News about the amount of traffic internal (self generated rather than search engine generated) on Facebook and LinkedIn has become so substantial that it is shifting the PPC (Pay Per Click) price models. This creation of ‘internal’ traffic is a continuing movement toward user generated content (UGC). UGC is a major component of web2.0 or web3.0 (depending on whose definitions you use). But looking at the statistics of how many HOURS people spend on Facebook per day and week clearly shows that the power of people writing what interests them is very impactful on the overall web. It is no longer just what the professionals write and what Google feels we want.
The retailer Amazon recognized this shift of power from the corporation as well. Look at their Amazon.com site these days and you will quickly see 3 main sources of content:
Publisher provided – title, price, ISBN number and editors review. The facts are seldom disputed, but the ratings on the editors review show that everyone understands the publishers editor always loves it’s own book.
Mined content – pulled from the content of the book – Top phrases in the book, key words in the book, number of pages. This is content that reflects Amazon’s ability to use computers to infer real information just by counting and running programs against the data of the book. The actual information and wisdom comes from a visitor to take these snippets of information and see answers that are useful.
User Generated Content – even the rating of the editor’s review is user generated. But the other reviews and the ratings of the reviews is where gold mine of content and traffic to Amazon trumps most other retailers. More and more Amazon becomes the Wikipedia of a card catalog – UGC. It provides more information than professional abstracts and paid professional summaries found in the old dusty paper based card catalogs or their digital equivalents these days. The reviews can be biased, but the ratings and openness of them allow their value to be taken in context.
That last source – UGC is such a gold mine that Amazon went and bought a collection of it for future use – it was all the UGC about movies and TV shows – IMDB.com (Internet Movie Data Base) that was predominantly UGC (what was not was almost, as the staff generating the content were mostly paid low wages for a labor of love according to rumors).
This is all a long way of saying that UGC is one of the forces that has the potential to knock the powerhouse of Google off its throne and leave space for all of us to consider different sources of ‘truth’ and wisdom of crowds. This will affect how we optimize our sites. More and more it will be the UGC that is key. UGC are Forces beyond our control, but well within our influence. One of the many areas I have seen the models change – managing volunteers compared to professional staff. There are commonalities, but there are differences.
How have you experimented with User Generated Content and what were the results?
Ewww! I’m arachnophobic, and I don’t think I want spiders in my website. What are they anyway, what do they do, and how do they work?
But you do want spiders all over your website. You want Search engine spiders crawling all over your website. While real life spiders eat bugs, Internet or WWW Search Enginee spiders bring you visitors to your website. You do want visitors don’t you? Otherwise, why post on the web (well actually there are some good reasons, but that is a later post). Back to Search engine spiders.
Search engine spiders are computer programs that look at web pages, lots and lots of web pages. And they create the building blocks for the results we all see when we enter a search phrase at Google, Yahoo, Bing, GoodSearch or other search engines.
So how do Search engine spiders work? Well, a lot of the process is somewhat blackbox – something goes in, magic happens, something different comes out. The process is often referred to as ‘crawling a site’ as it seemingly wanders the web trying to understand what each web page is about. But I will try to shed some light on it.
The seach engines have a ‘sign up page’ where you can register one page of your website. Google’s is at Google. And Yahoo’s free submission is at Yahoo (there is paid submission, but that is another post).
The search engine then makes a list for of all the registrations.
It then gives the list to a spider. Again remember the spider is just a computer program, so this list is in essence a batch file of ‘your work for today is to look at these websites’.
Starting at the top of the list the spider ‘goes’ to the 1st page in the list. Just like you can surf all day and never leave your chair, but still travel the world, a spider never leaves Googleplex or YahooVille or the Bada-Bing.
It loads up the page from the list, just like your browser does. Only rather than looking at how it displays, it looks at the code that creates the page. You can see the code for this page (or most pages) by going to View Source in most browsers.
The spider then collects all the words and meta tags, and ALT tags and TITLE tags.
It then runs another quick program (remember the search engine is trying to look at the ENTIRE web as often as possible). This program boils this page down to what keyword phrases it is about. It also assigns a strength or rating about each phrase. So a website that is for a business in Wisconsin gets some rating for ‘Wisconsin’ because the office address is there (2349 E. Ohio Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53207). But a site that is about tourism and the history of Wisconsin (http://www.wistravel.com/history_of_wisconsin/)will get a much higher rating for ‘Wisconsin’.
It then files all these keyword phrases and ratings about them for later.
After it makes a list of all the keyword phrases and their ratings, the spider then:
Looks for all the links to other pages.
It adds these links to its list of To Do’s (‘your work for today is to look at these websites’), with additional pieces of information.
What was the page that had the link on it about in keyword phrases.
What does the information about the link say about the new page.
Is there text that is linked or is it just the URL?
Is there a linked image?
What is the ALT text about that image?
What is the image name?
What is the text around the link?
These are the clues that we as humans and the Search engine spiders use to determine what this linked page is about. It collects all that information and uses it to ‘prejudge’ what this new page is about.
The search engine spider has now ‘crawled’ one page.
After building a list of all the linked pages on this page, it starts to go look at all of these new pages, one by one. If you have 5 pages it may look at all 5 pages, if you have 5,000 pages it may look at them all. (of course it may get tired or ‘bored’, again another post). If you think of a line being drawn to each new page, including some being drawn ‘backwards’ to previous pages, you can start to envision a web of lines to all the different pages with all sorts of connections. This web is where the Search engine spider name is drawn from.
You can see that if there are other websites pointing to your site, that the spider should eventually find you. But if you are an island, and no one is linking to your site, the search engine may never find you unless you register with it. The spider is not like an airplane that is going around the ocean looking for islands. It needs to be pointed to an island at least once by someone registering the site, or another site (that the spider is visiting regularly) pointing to you.
Of course at some point the spider runs out of time for the day, and needs to return the results back to the nest to be merged with the many spiders looking at other websites. There the ratings of the different spiders web pages are all merged together and rankings are updated. This merging will also take into consideration when other websites link to your website – if a 3rd party felt your site was important enough to link to, then it is more important usually than a page that no one has linked to.
Way back in the early days of the WWW (1996-2000), spiders would actually go out at primarily at night (by California USA standards). When I analyzed the logs of different clients, I could see the spiders coming in the ‘wee hours’ of the morning.
Log files are the records that the hosting computer where your website is kept that lists every single visitor to your site. It lists when they came, what page they looked at, and where they came from. There are programs that take these logs and make them easier to understand. Some of these include Google Analytics, and WebTrends.
Now of course, the spiders are out searching around the clock in order to try and keep up with the vast changing content of most of the web. Especially the ‘good’ stuff on the web. So there is a prejudice that new content is better than old content in our ever changing world by the search engines. That is why your site’s rankings can change minute by minute, as different spiders come back home to the nest and report how a site has changed its content, or links out or links in. Other sites may have gotten better or worse for a rating of a keyword phrase. If yours has not improved, it will affect your ranking.
At some point after the spiders conquer the new website list, they will go back to websites on their existing list, and revisit and look to see if any pages have changed. The changes could be to add or delete links to other pages, or to add or delete information on that page or how it describes other pages. It updates the information is its master list and lets the ‘nest’ re-rank all the websites for the different rankings.
Hopefully that helps clarify how spiders work and why you need to be descriptive in your words to get good rankings of your website.
Your personal email is a great way to improve your site traffic, for at least two major reasons:
You are sending a personal message to someone. You should have a great deal of trust in what you say and recommend. Your signature link to a site leverages that trust.
It helps create a mindset to tailor your site to optimizing your links and ALT tags to effective communication to Google about what your pages are about.
If you can’t put a good reason in your email for someone to visit your online presence to the people you are emailing, then you are doing something wrong. Sorry to be so direct, but is it that hard to have something worthwhile to share with those you are emailing?
If you are trying to promote or market yourself and you cannot put a softsell reason to have someone visit your online presence (website, Facebook page, Linkedin page, any of your blogs, where you have posted on someone else’s blogs) then you are either too selfish in not helping others out by sharing your information, or you are way too shy about your knowledge and wisdom.
To paraphrase podcaster (et al) Douglas E Welch puts it ‘if you have one more piece of knowledge than someone else in some area’ then you are an expert.
Your expertise is what you want to be sharing through your online presence. That presence should be linking back to your website. As you share your expertise, you should ‘naturally’ be creating more content that the search engines can use to understand why you should rank high in their listings.
So the key is to be altruistic and give your expertise and wisdom away. Think about how you would ‘gently’ let others know about your knowledge and put links in your email signature. Then look at how to describe that wisdom in short snippets -
How I helped 200 people save money with xx product
My favorite flowers for clay soils in the midwest
These quick descriptions belong in your email signature. They also belong in your blog posts, comments where appropriate on other sites, and in your links to specific pages on your site. These descriptions also tell Google what your pages of content are about.
These links should not just be to your home page, but specific links to specific information on your online presence. I would recommend creating a catalog of signatures and rotate them on a regular basis so that people know to pay attention to the extra ‘nugget of knowledge’ you give in each of your emails. That little bit extra you give in each interaction with your visitors/clients/friends/community.
Start thinking about helping others with your email signature, and you can help yourself.
The concept of the HTML/and the web is lots of small chunks.
If you look at what is the ‘correct length’ of a blog post, it is often listed at 400-800 words. This is typically 5-8 paragraphs to cover a single idea in a bite sized chunk. It is a singe idea, and the blogs are set up to have each post be their own page.
So when you are designing your site, map it out by focusing on what you are trying to accomplish. Then outline your site with separate pages for each idea. Each page should have a clear purpose. This makes it easy for your visitors to understand what you are trying to communicate to them. It makes it easier to accomplish your purpose and for your visitors to be in sync with what you are trying to accomplish.
Of course, your ‘number 1′ visitor is the Google spider – so these ‘rules’ for your human visitors also apply to Google’s spider. If you design for good human readability, then more often than not, you will have good Google readability and Google will reward you with high rankings accordingly. If your page is focused on a single idea, then Google will more likely see your keyword phrases and understand your page is concerned about that and rank it higher than a page that is focused on 5-6 ideas and is crammed with various keyword phrases. Google will ‘read’ your page and rank it lower for multiple keyword phrases. There are exceptions, but trying to ‘trick’ Google these days is a hard way to build traffic, and you run the risk of Google shifting its formulas and bouncing way down.
So don’t try to boil the ocean with one fire, create separate pages that have single purposes. It is easier for your readers, it is easier for Google. It will get you more traffic.
Break up your Page
James Michener wrote novels that were great for those wanting a single summer read. They were long and full of detail. They carried a lot of ideas interwoven together. They had great plots that kept you following along for hours and hours, page after page. You got great value from all the details painting the complex pictures of his topics and themes.
But the web is not designed for reading long sections of text sequentially. It is designed for chunking – lots of breaks. Those breaks are headlines, and pages. In fact, that is how Google determines what is important – if you label something as an H1 heading-that is your headline, it assumes that those words are more important than the little footnote at the bottom of the page. The H1 heading is specific, do not just use a relative larger font for a few reasons:
It is sloppy coding that will often come back to haunt you.
Google prefers the H1 heading to clearly identify what the Heading is on the page.
It displays more consistently across the various browsers including mobile browsers.
By putting a single idea on a page, it makes it easier for the reader to plan their reading – they can see how big the page is, they can see the topic and determine how in depth you will be going for that topic. Google also has an easier time ranking your site’s page for that specific topic.
One of the challenges as an SEO specialist, when reviewing a site for a new client is gently letting the client know the difference between what a site actually says compared to what they think it says.
Many site developers assume that a graphic (especially if it is ‘cool’ and ‘stylized’) is obvious and clear in its meaning. The challenge is all the cultural assumptions that go into that communication. More importantly (from an SEO specialist perspective) is that Google and other search engines like Yahoo, and the visually impaired (including most users of smart-phones) cannot ‘see’ or understand those logos. That is why the ‘standard’ is to have text links on a site.
But even then, those links need to be complete enough and clear enough to communicate context and direction. Many text links assume you came to the site from the ‘front door’ or home page. When I send a link to friends and colleagues I send them to the page they are most looking for, which is often not the home page. Just as I don’t send them the cover of the book, if what I am recommending is in the 14th chapter.
So links that are clear and provide some context are very helpful. The easiest way to determine if you have provided enough contexts, is to ask yourself ‘would a 3rd grader understand the links and where you are going?’ If not, keep on providing more contexts, because that is about the sophistican of your 1st visitor – Google’s spider. If you don’t get Google to understand, not many others will ever get to see your site.
You can argue that Google is stupid, but when you build a better search engine that controls 73% of the market (beating Google’s current market share), I will listen. Until then, what Google says, we follow. They are the 800 pound gorilla in the room.
Besides the challenges of full intelligence in computers, Google’s 3rd grade understanding is also related to how most searches are entered. When you read actual searches, you will see most are no more sophisticated than a 3rd grade level. Therefore, Google matches the level of what its users request. I am sure this is based on the feedback to Google and to users. I know when I put in more sophisticated searches and I get back the wrong or no answer, I simplify my queries until I get the answers I want. So there is a loop where we are training each other.
As I started to say, a big challenge is what so many content developers think their words (in text not pictures/images) actually say. It is amazing how many skipped sentences there are in the final copy. Often, whole ideas get skipped. When pointed out, the response is often –‘well, they know what I mean’. Guess what, Google does not, and more than likely, neither do your readers. And if they do, can they be sure they truly understand what you intended or are they just guessing? The moral is, make sure your content is complete, and fully states what you intend to communicate.
So when designing your site, make sure the navigation and key topics of your site are understandable by a 3rd Grader and Google.
I am often asked, “What do I do first to get my site noticed on the search engines”?
Of course it is important to understand that SEO or Search Engine Optimization is best if it is an ongoing process to react to the world of other websites and changes in Google and other search engines way of ranking well. But we all want to take a pill and feel better in the morning, so here are some quick pills to take.
First, understand that Google has about 72% of all search engine traffic, so that alone says you should do whatever Google want. Second, the next 2 biggest search engines (Yahoo.com and Microsoft’s search engine-whose name seems to changes weekly) get most of the remainder traffic. Google basically sets the rules for ranking well on search engines – so lets do what Google wants.
So the question becomes – what should I do to rank high with Google.com? 3 ‘quick’ steps:
Register your domain name for at least 2 years. The reason for doing this is because Google thinks you will be around for a long time, and rates a website with a domain name registered for multiple years higher than a ‘fly by night’ one year registration. If you don’t have confidence that your site will be around for more than one year, then why should Google think you’ll be around and rate you higher?
Put a ‘good’ title on your page – a title that someone who does not know you would understand what the page is about without seeing the page.
Put a description on your page in the ‘meta’ tag section – again if you were emailing a description of the page to a stranger, that would let them know what the page is about and why they would WANT to visit it.
Domain Name registration
When Google looks at a new site, it is just like when we meet someone new. We are trying to determine if that person is worth the effort to get to know. If that person is just stopping in the office, but you do not expect to meet again (say a friend of an employee that is leaving) – you probably do not put much into getting to know them. But when the new boss (that you think will stay around till at least your next review). You prioritize her a lot higher and listen much more intently. So how does Google know a boss relationship vs. someone in the hall? One hint is how long you register your domain name. If you register for 2 years, then you have ‘signed the lease’ for at least 2 years. That sense of commitment shows Google you plan to stick around and to value over someone who did not commit.
Page Title
When creating your website page there is a line of code called the TITLE line. It can look like this:
<title>Social Media Marketing - Reputation Management, The Other Side of Social Media Marketing</title>
Notice this is not the typical ‘Home Page’ description. This is a keyword phrase and a clear benefit that includes the keyword phrase. Remember this might be the only thing that someone sees of your site in order to determine whether to visit your site. Limit to around 70 characters, because that is what most of the search engines consider, as well as visitors read before making a decision. Your business name is usually not the correct title – unless someone is searching for you by name. If someone is searching for you by your product or service, that is what your site should be about. Your website should be about your perspective customer’s needs, not about you.
‘Meta’ Tag Section
The meta tag section is the part of the website page that describes what a page is about. This area has been abused in the past 13 years as people have tried to ‘game’, the search engines. So search engines ignore most of the meta tags except the ‘description’ – this is what Goggle usually uses to describe your site in its listings. Because other people will read your description, it tends to trust it more. A sample description of a page is:
These are few quick hints. I will explain more as we go through different posts, but these are some quick hints that you should be able to implement in a day. Depending on Google, results may not show for a few weeks or more, depending on how often Google visits your website.
