Stoney deGeyter founded Pole Position Marketing in 1998 working from a home office and has since turned it into a leading search engine marketing business with a small team of seasoned Reno SEO and marketing experts. Stoney pioneered the concept of Destination Search Engine Marketing which is the driving philosophy on how Pole Position marketing helps their clients expand their online presence and improve online conversion rates.
Stoney is a moderator at the Small Business Ideas Forum, a regular contributor to the Search Engine Guide blog and has a monthly column on Search Engine Land. He posts his SEO and business insights at the E-Marketing Performance blog where you can also find his e-books: E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing and Marketing your Website Online and Keyword Research and Selection: The Definitive Guide to Gathering, Sorting and Organizing your Keywords into a High-Performance SEO Campaign.
Stoney is married with five wonderful children and, if away from the computer long enough, enjoys riding his dirt bike, watching DVDs, reading books and spending quality and quantity time with the family.
This week I've been looking at the speakers from Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. I first covered a handful of featured speakers and then moved on to the search marketers themselves. Here are four more search marketers and an quick review of how well they brand themselves in the search results.
Monday I discussed several of the featured speakers from Search Engine Strategies and looked at their search results branding for their names and businesses. It turned out not to be as enjoyable as I had hoped as all of them have very high visibility. Not that I wanted to point out anybody's faults, but hey, that's kinda the fun. Today I want to look at several of the search marketers themselves.
Since it seems everybody does their own recaps of the sessions they attended at Search Engine Strategies, I like to take a different approach. Last year I ran a two-part series covering just a handful of the session speakers. I looked at how well each branded themselves in the search results of Google. This yearI wanted to start with the list of SES's Featured Speakers.
My list of reasons why I won't be bringing home any schwag from Search Engine Strategies.
It seems to me that if the search engines are confident that they are providing strong, relevant results to a query, that they would want to provide more results than just 10 to each searcher.
So many people are obsessed with Google. And as far as that goes, there is good reason to be. Google is the largest search engine that gets the most searches and delivers far more traffic than any other engine. But I'm not one to watch Google on a hyper-obsessive level.
Google indexes flash, but so what? There is still not much there that can be optimized with any kind of effectiveness.
Recently Google started blocking several of the big-name rank checking software used by many in the SEO industry. This, of course, sparked the debate on whether SEO firms should be bothering with providing ranking reports to their clients. I have to say, I'm conflicted on that issue.
Its important to answer the question "why?" Why go through the hassle of of building a Destination Website? Obviously, there are thousands of successful online businesses that don't operate anything that could be considered a "Destination". If they are successful, should you really go through the extra effort yourself?
While we cannot make a few tweaks here or there to our websites and suddenly expect to be deemed as credible, there are things that we an do to help build the perception of trust in the minds of our visitors.
Creating a very distinct voice for your website is really about giving your website a personality. You can have great copy that lacks a clear voice that can be heard. But by creating a voice that can be heard clearly and distinctly through each written word on the page you are increasing the level of engagement with your visitor.
In non-competitive areas, achieving top rankings often doesn't take much effort. But when you're targeting keywords in more competitive fields you're going up against other websites that have already established themselves in that space. Many of those competitors are are, in fact, the authority for those keywords....
Your business is not just competing with businesses in your area, but quite possibly you're competing with businesses all over the world. And if you're not unique or remarkable in any way, if nothing that sets you apart, then you're just another one of a million other businesses doing the same thing.
The design of a website is an important aspect of building a destination that people want to return to time and time again. But don't go out and spend all kinds of money for the most current, up-to-date website design with all the whistles and bells. Stop for a second to truly consider what kind of website design you really need.
Running SEO campaigns that don't address usability concerns is like running radio and TV promos to drive people to a store that is unfinished. The traffic being driven may not be a total loss, but you certainly aren't getting the full value out of each customer. Many won't find what they are looking for, others will be frustrated trying to check out, and some may turn around the moment they walk in the door. Usability addresses those issues to ensure each customer has a good experience on your website.
There are a number of different types of expert information that can be developed for your webiste as a means of providing your visitors with additional, quality content. Depending on your site, some types of types of expert information are more applicable than others and not all will be a good fit for you. Each site must be evaluated to determine what kind of expert information will best serve the audience's needs and expectations. By finding ways to add additional expert information to your site you'll begin to build a site that can stand up above the competition.
If you can't be considered as an expert on your subject, what reason is there for someone to make a purchase from you or subscribe to what you offer? For most people, they want to find people who they are confident know their information inside and out. If I'm not confident that you'll be able to answer my questions intelligently, I'll move on to someone who can.
Most site's rely on marketing alone to increase traffic. Marketing drives traffic and traffic is really nothing more than more eyeballs on the site. The site still has to do it's job in selling the product or service you offer. And it has to do it effectively if you want to be profitable. Building a Destination Website rockets you beyond the competition in several key areas.
One of the things many businesses struggle with is how to really make their site stand out. Many of us have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of online competitors. Some are serious competition, some not-so serious, and some not yet even on the radar, but will soon become major players for "our" space. The truth is, everybody wants to be #1 and there is only one #1 position. So, how do you stand out among them?
SEO isn't about "getting" top rankings. Getting rankings leaves open the implication that you're achieving a result that you don't necessarily deserve. Destination SEM focuses on building a website that is truly exceptional in meeting your audience's needs and actually earns top search engine positions.
Search engine optimization should be about how helping businesses succeed online with search engine exposure being a component to achieve success, but not the measure of success itself. But where SEO and other forms of offline advertising differ is that SEO cannot stand alone from the core business. It is intertwined. The "rankings at all cost" mentality needs to be thrown out like last month's leftovers that's made its way to the back of the fridge. It's a stale and moldy strategy that simply stinks up the web.
While back I wrote an article about how having a search engine friendly website does not make it search engine optimized. The article discussed how many web developers promise to "search engine optimize" the websites they develop. While I don't mean to discount the value of a good web developer (I rely on them heavily) many developers really know no more about SEO than than they do about pluming. Sure, they can plunge a blocked toilet, or write some decent titles and meta descriptions, but there is so much more to SEO (and plumbing) than that.
I think I stress too much about our clients' performance of their optimization campaigns. Or perhaps I just create too much work for myself. See, all these years I've been working 10-12 hour days to help my clients increase their exposure in the search engines for some pretty important phrases. But just recently I found out that I've been targeting all the wrong keywords!
When making changes to my website I always take the time to view them live on the web before closing up my editing software and patting myself on the back in self-satisfaction of a job well done. Even with minor changes, I like to view them one last time to make sure my changes didn't cause any shifts in on-page display, or I didn't inadvertently create an error somewhere that inadvertently jacked everything up (believe me, it's happened more times than I can count!) But regardless of how careful I am to double check my work, there is one thing I almost always overlook; verifying that my site looks good in the "other" browser.
When I only have about 65 characters to work with in a title tag (that which is visible on the search engine results pages), should I use any of that valuable real estate to display my company name?
When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can't read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. So we rely on ALT attributes to convey proper meaning. ALT text is an important aspect of both usability and SEO. Here's how to do them properly.
Yesterday I discussed code bloat by looking at how we can move style sheets and JavaScripts off the page in order to clean the coding up quite a bit. I this third post about cleaning up bloated code I wanted to address Tables and other typical causes of bloated HTML.
I started a conversation about how code bloat can effect your site's performance with the search engines. This post maps some specific types of code bloat and very briefly--and non-technically--show you how you can eliminate the bloat to improve your pages performance for both visitors and search engines.
Here is another round of questions submitted to me during a Website Architecture webinar I gave a couple months back. I wasn't able to answer most of these questions before or during the presentation so I've been answering them in this Q&A series. This post covers questions regarding session IDs, repetitive vs. duplicate content, robots.txt files, navigation text, and maintaining link juice after a site re-design. Let's get to it....
There are a lot of little things that can junk up your code, but, for the most part, the search engines don't really care. It doesn't matter to them if your HTML validates or if you keep your code "clean" or not. When it comes to analyzing your pages for search engine rankings, none of that really matters a whole lot. But when it does matter, it matters a whole lot.
Moving your site to a new domain is remarkably similar to moving to a new physical address. In some cases it's much easier, you don't have to pack up, or load or unload a U-Haul truck, but there are other considerations that you have to take into account to make sure your visitors continue to find you after an online move. One of the primary areas of concern is making sure the search engines not only continue to deliver traffic to your new location, but you don't lose all your search engine rankings in the process.
One of the areas of confusion that many have regarding paid links is knowing when a paid link is really a paid link, and when is a paid link penalized. in their attempt to eliminate all forms of paid links from affecting their natural algorithmic search results Google has left one giant loophole in the paid link witch hunt: paid directory links.
I'm continuing to work my way through questions submitted during a webinar I gave on Website Architecture. This post covers questions on URLs, breadcrumb navigation, CMS, Database driven sites, 301 and 302 redirects, navigation, heading tags, broken links and HTML theft.
Site navigation can come in many different flavors. There isn't just ONE way to do it correctly. If there were then every site would have navigation that looked exactly the same. So while navigation can vary greatly between sites and industries, there are certain navigational elements that should be implemented to ensure solid usability and effective website architecture.
In-site link implementation can make a considerable difference in how effective your optimization campaign is. Or isn't. While your site's primary and secondary navigation is extremely important, you shouldn't make that the only way for visitors to get around your website. Here are some inter-site linking strategies that will help your visitors while also assist with your search engine optimization efforts.
There are advantages and disadvantages to using both absolute and relative links. Here I will explore the differences between the two, outline some pros and cons and also provide some additional information on how you can create hyperlinks in your site that will ensure that all links to your content remain in tact and properly functioning.
This is a continuation of the questions I was asked during a webinar presentation on website architecture. Before and during he presentation I was submitted over 70 question and each week I've been answering a handful of them. This article covers questions about Wordpress, password protected pages, iframes, multiple paths to content, and filenames.
Yesterday I posted some thoughts on When, Why and How to Construct a Meta Description Tag. While it's relevance in terms of rankings is rather limited, there is still some intrinsic value to implementing a good description that will appear in the search results.
Meta description tags get a bad rap. They are often either considered to be more valuable than they really are, or dismissed as near irrelevant. The truth is that the meta description can be useful but it's on the lower rung of importance when it comes to the on-page elements considered by the search engines. So while not a whole lot of time needs to be invested in creating workable description tags, I'll give you a few pointers on what you need to consider.
Building a website gives you a lot of options when it comes to how to set up your internal linking structure. Different areas of your site or web pages may require different linking strategies, but regardless on what kind of internal linking strategy you implement, you want to make sure that it helps you achieve your search engine optimization goals. I'm going to break internal linking into three categories: The search friendly, search un-friendly and search meh-friendly link.
Continuing my Q&A series on Website Architecture, these questions were presented to me before and during my webinar of the same topic. We have some more good questions and answers today that I'm sure you'll find valuable. This session is largely about keywords in domain and file names with an interesting question on nameservers.
When a website goes into development most of the attention is usually paid to the design elements. But what often doesn't get enough attention is the site's directory structure, which plays an important part in your SEO campaign.
One of the easiest ways to lose visitors from your site is through broken or invalid links. In business, it is pretty much well known that it requires less of a financial investment to keep a customer than it does to acquire a new one. The internet is really no different. Once you get a visitor on your site, or get them wanting to be on your site, it takes less investment to keep them there than it does to go bring in another new visitor. Therefore it is important to do whatever you can to keep acquired visitors on your site helping them move through the conversion process.
More Q&A regarding website architecture. Questions answered regarding books for beginners, SEO techniques and how they have changed, pro's and cons of CSS, different types of architecture and favicons.
Buying up alternative domains can help people find you when they type in the wrong domain in inadvertently, or when they are just randomly typing in keywords in the address bar.
I remember when favicons first started to appear, it was like, hey, how cool is that. But now they are so common that I hardly notice them anymore. Well, no, that's not exactly true. I do notice them, and like them, it's just that I'm not surprised to see them anymore. But I AM surprised when I don't see them.
More website architecture questions answered including questions on website submission, viral marketing, content and moving a website.
Last week I answered some questions related to my Website Architecture webinar that I'll be conducting today. More questions were submitted in the last week and I've provided my answers to a few here.
I don't think that the Hx tags are near as important as many people think. But I do believe they play an important role in putting the page hierarchy into expression. Improper usage of HX tags can throw the site hierarchy out of alignment, as well as your search engine optimization efforts.
In this installment I'll provide one of the best permanent fixes to inadvertent duplicate content that is common with business websites. The implications of this can be pretty significant depending on the size of your site.
How you set up your internal linking structure plays a significant role in whether you set yourself up to appear if you have duplicate content on your site or not. Some things we do without thinking, setting ourselves up for problems ahead. With a little foresight and planning, you can prevent duplicate content issues that are a result of poor internal link development.
When it comes to issues of duplicate content, one of the most frequent offenders is the "printer friendly" page. Just about any kind of site can benefit from creating printer friendly versions of their pages, but improper implementation of these pages can wreak duplicate content havoc on your site.
The last thing you want is someone out there twittering in your name. Maybe they have good intentions for you, but maybe they don't. In either case, they are out there engaging in the community saying things that may appear to be official company communications.
I'm gearing up for a 1-hour webinar that I'll be doing for SEMpdx next week. I've got more information on that below, but the SEMpdx crew asked their members to submit some questions that they would like to get answered during the presentation. Instead of waiting, I thought I'd go ahead and answer the questions here:
Duplicate titles is something we often see on newly developed websites or content management systems that don't allow proper control of individual pages. While I get how when developing new websites the title tag can get overlooked, I'm amazed that people develop web software that still doesn't take title tag customization into account.
There is no better way to create an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site than to force session IDs onto each visitor (and search engine). Typically, session IDs are used for tracking a single visitor's navigation path through the site, including the adding or removing products from the shopping cart. They are great for tracking purposes, but really, really bad for search engines and inbound linking.
When shoppers can access secure and non secure versions of the same page, then likely the search engines can as well. This creates almost a complete duplicate of your site, one secure and one non-secure version. It's essential to tell the search engines what to think, especially when it comes to which pages of your site should or should not be included in the index.
Registering multiple domain names is, and should be, common practice for businesses wishing to protect their brands. Once purchased, what you do with these domains can have a positive or negative impact on your main URL. Here are some tips on how to set up alternate domains to prevent the search engines from seeing duplicate content.
Product categorization can play a significant role in how both search engines and users are able to access your products. There are two important things to consider when determining how to categorize your products. 1) Is each product assigned to the most appropriate category or categories? and 2) is multiple categorization creating duplicate content? The first issue frustrates your users and the second the search engines.
There are two kinds of duplicate content: content that is duplicated on multiple websites and content that is duplicated on multiple pages of a single site. I believe the search engines treat each differently and, of course, there may be different standards applied to duplicate content within each of these two main differentiations, depending on the cause and instance.
The value of the Hx tag is much the same as the value of your main points in an outline for a book or paper. Your outline shows your main topics and sub-topics. These are often then used as section headings in your final draft.
There are two important questions that every business needs to be able to answer: What's in it for me? and Why should I buy from you? The first questions, when answered correctly, helps sell your product or service, but it doesn't necessarily close the deal. In order to get the deal sealed and money in hand you have to be able to answer the second question sufficiently....
Performing a complete website review is rarely easy. I've found that you can start a site analysis intending to spend just a few minutes looking over it only to find that it quickly spirals into a multi-hour marathon of research. Complete website reviews can be time consuming and often produce many more hours of work beyond that. Many people want to rush into the marketing without realizing that the website itself is part of the marketing process. This is a shame....
As more and more users gain access to the web it becomes increasingly important to ensure that your website is accessible to all, not just a few. Just as businesses must comply with the American Disabilities Act to ensure proper access to customers with disabilities, businesses should do all they can to make their websites accessible to all users regardless of the means in which they access the site. And of course not all accessibility issues involve meeting the needs of the disabled. What must be considered is the growing number of users that now access websites through non-traditional means, whether it be mobile phones or with images turned off. These users can still be your target audience and ensuring your site can be used through alternate avenues is essential to capturing that audience.
Rarely does SEO bloat happen all at once, but it's usually an accumulation of edits and tweaks made over the course of several months or even years. This is what makes it particularly damaging to your marketing efforts.
Sites that are designed to sell products and/or services must go the extra mile to enhance the visitor's engagement with the website. Shopping cart abandonment (shoppers abandoning their carts before deciding to pay for the "items" they've added to their cart) can result in a significant loss in potential sales. But much of that can be reduced when the shopping process is streamlined and geared for shopper satisfaction. The selling process--from initial interest to the very last checkout page--must be able to grab shopper's attention and proceed to drive them through to the finalization of the sale. But even...
Trust is a key usability issue when it comes to running a successful online business. Most people automatically view web businesses with a bias against them compared to their brick and mortar counterparts. Your ability to convince your visitors that yours is a trustworthy business is one of the key components to getting visitors to convert into customers. Creating a website that conveys trust can be tricky. There are rarely any answers that are always "right" for every visitor. There are, however, several factors that have universal appeal to the weary shopper.
Getting links is great, but as search marketers we should be looking far beyond that. We should not be so much as trying to get other websites to link to us (that's certainly a welcome result) but we should instead be working on getting exposure, in whatever format that comes in.
Last February (2007), I had a diabolical plan to become a household name in the SEO community. Here I was, a guy who has been in SEO for almost ten years and remained a relative unknown. Sure, I made a few friends here and there and have been slowly building my reputation, but who would of thought 12 months ago that I would be able to snag an interview with one of the biggest names in the SEO. And that's not me interviewing the big name, mind you... that's the big name interviewing me!
Since the "purchase" is the ultimate conversion, it is imperative that you remove as many obstacles from the customer's research-to-buy cycle as possible. Providing your visitors the key ingredients in their shopping experience creates a smooth and worry-free transaction process. The easier it is to shop and buy the more customers will overcome the natural hesitations that many feel before they commit by hitting the final "complete order" button.
While it has taken many years for SEO to be considered a marketing function within the business community, I sometimes wonder if the pendulum has swung now too far away from SEO being a function of the IT department. SEO is very different from traditional marketing.
Think of all the ways that companies use branding to build awareness of themselves or to promote their social awareness and customer service values. A few things come to mind such as greeters at the entrance of your my favorite store, go-green awareness issues, charity drives that "give back" to the community for every purchase made, TV screens playing music videos or news as you wait in line, and the list goes on. None of these things lead directly to conversions but they do lead to higher company awareness and the good old fashioned fuzzy-feelings we get when we...
Not every site needs, nor should have, an on-site search feature. But those that do must be sure that the search isn't just an after-thought. It needs to be more than something to add because you think visitors want it. Adding a search function is not necessarily good for on-site usability. Implementing a search function improperly is often a greater source of frustration than not having one altogether....
When putting the framework for a solid optimization campaign you have to spend some time evaluating various aspects of your site. This evaluation gives you an idea of any shortcomings the site has, what will be required to overcome the competition, and will then allow you to map out an effective strategy for success. But there is more to the evaluation than just looking at how the website currently performs in the on- and off-page analysis.
How engaged a customer is with your website will determine whether they can be persuaded to buy, comment, download or submit their information for you to follow up on. Customer engagement goes beyond just getting the customer's attention, you must keep their attention. This can be done by providing your visitors near immediate gratification.
To do that you have to first know who your audience is, know what they seek and then also know their purpose for being on your site. Knowing all this then lets you work toward meeting the needs of your target audience. But it also means taking things a step further and building a relationship with them. The ability to build a relationship with your visitors can be crucial to driving them through the persuasion process. Relationship building starts the moment the visitor hits the website.
Whether you are putting together a proposal for a client or assessing your own needs, you need to be able to accurately predict how much time, energy and effort will be necessary to build a successful SEO campaign. Of course, in order to predict the time involvement you need to first know the strengths and weaknesses of the website which will then help you determine what will need to be done to accomplish your goals and make the site a viable competitor.
Not every site needs a site map, they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both engines and search spiders.
Your website's privacy information and security settings can be significant hurdles when it comes to gaining trust with your visitors. Establishing trust is paramount to enticing visitors to make that final commitment, whether that be making a purchase, choosing to provide their info, or simply making initial contact with you. Your job is to make sure your visitors feel confident that their information is kept safe and will not be used for nefarious means, or anything other than what they fully expect. While providing assurances are nice, those assurances only go so far as what actually happens. Be sure that your small print reinforces what your visitors already expect to find in regards to how their information is used.
Every SEO campaign has to start somewhere. Any good plan; whether you're building a home, preparing for a family vacation or looking to optimize your website for search rankings, starts with research. Before you are ready to optimize your first piece of code you need to understand the landscape around you, which means you need to know the condition of your site as it currently is, and the goals you wish to achieve over the course of your campaign.
Sites that require users to log in to access certain information and/or purchase products add an additional layer of potential complication to the usability process. To avoid potential visitor confusion and the possibility for errors, it is important that any login process requires little or no thought on the part of the site visitor. Once logged in, you must be sure that visitors are able to find the information they want and expect to find. My Account pages need to provide visitors with access and ability to view and change personal information, as necessary.
Every day we get businesses coming to us looking to improve their search engine rankings. They want to talk about an SEO campaign but one quick look at their site and we see that SEO may not be the right approach for them. Usually in these cases the site needs a complete usability makeover.
The other day I received an email from a client noting that some of his Yahoo rankings have slipped as of late. They are still ranking strong on Google as well as MSN and heck, many of their Yahoo rankings are still very strong. But there was, in fact, some slippage and the client was concerned. Well, first we know that there is more to web marketing than top rankings. In fact rankings are just a small piece of the bigger web marketing pie. I know that and you know that, but for whatever reason, we all still have to deal with clients that refuse to accept that. But that's a story for another post. So what do you do in this situation? I know for a fact that the client's business has seen 100-200% growth year over year since we started working with them oh-so long ago. They obviously see the big picture, but they still come back looking at rankings. And Yahoo rankings at that.
For many business owners, writing can be a daunting task. Sure we know our products and services inside and out and putting what we know into words is easy enough, but that's about as far as it gets. Is that enough to sell? Sure. Could more be done to sell better? You bet!
Depending on the nature of your site, Help and FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions) can span a few or many pages. Building up these sections of your site can greatly enhance your visitor's experience with your website. These pages are often sought out by shoppers who are looking for just a bit more information to help them feel confident about their purchase. Building comprehensive Help and FAQ pages gives your visitors confidence that you're there to provide them the information and help they need to be comfortable purchasing from you. Solidly built pages can often reduce visitor confusion, lessen support call frequency, and create higher conversion rates as more shoppers are satisfied and confident that you can meet their needs.
Not every site needs, nor should have, an on-site search feature. But those that do must be sure that the search isn't just an after-thought. It needs to be more than something to add because you think visitors want it. Adding a search function is not necessarily good for on-site usability. Implementing a search function improperly is often a greater source of frustration than not having one altogether.
There is a distinct difference between editing a site for search engines and making edits for visitors. Traditionally in SEO, adding keywords to a web page falls under the category of editing for search engines. But many don't realize that adding keywords to your copy can and should be a function of making the site function better for visitors. The copy of your website falls very distinctly into the marketing realm of website management. Yes, search engines look at copy too, and adding certain keywords can help you achieve search engine rankings rankings, but each page needs to appeal to your readers first.
While search engines are important, keep in mind that your visitors are even more important. When making edits to your site always consider the implications on both your human visitors and the search engines as well. Every change you make will have either a positive, negative or neutral effect on your human visitors and the search engine spider. You need to know ahead of time the effect any particular change will have and use that as a basis for determining if its worthwhile or not.
Forms are one of your primary points of contacts with your visitors. While many visitors still use email or even the telephone to contact you or to place an order, the vast majority will contact you first via your web forms. Forms that are broken or improperly implemented cause frustration and can greatly reduce your conversion rate for leads and sales.
Customers who, by all means, appear to be ready to make a purchase are often found abandoning their shopping carts before they complete their online transaction. In many cases this is part of the normal online shopping experience as the shopping cart is just used as a place to collect items of interest but which the user has no real intent to purchase. But all too often it is a failure of the shopping cart page itself that leads visitors to abandon their items which they do, in fact, wish to have.
A properly built web site will ensure that the search engine spiders are able to access all pages of your site with more importance placed on the more important pages. It will also insure that the human visitors are able to accomplish their goals, either finding the information they came for and/or purchasing your product or service.
To be effective, your website must implement product pages that are able to satisfy each of your visitor's needs. But information isn't enough either. While providing necessary information, these pages must be convincing enough to entice your visitors to move through the purchase process -- on your site rather than on a competitor's website.
Can a proper balance between optimizing for spiders and humans be struck? Can you achieve the perfectly optimized web page for search rankings, while also maintain a perfectly optimized page for your audience? No, but since perfection is unattainable, what you can do is find the most effective balance between being both user friendly and search engine friendly.
Along with the About Us page, your Contact Us page is one of the most important and crucial pages on your site to get right. In fact, the Contact Us page could be considered the absolutely most important page. Even if the rest of your site succeeds in the goals, if visitors fail to find the information they need to contact you then you will bring their shopping experience to a screeching halt.
While looking at every last minute detail of SEO is advantageous, it is effective only to a point. One can't get mired into trying to get every last little detail right all of the time. To do so often comes at the expense other important things. Instead of focusing on the big picture, you're mired in the little things that don't provide the return you may have imagined.
I'm not the first one to chime in on this topic, mostly because I've gone both ways and I can make pretty valid arguments from either side. But I've finally settled it in my mind which is "best". Full RSS feeds are better than summary feeds. Let me tell you why...
I had an alternate title for this post: "Ask not what Google can do for you, but what you can do for Google". We're moving into a new age where we have to pay closer attention what Google does -- despite what Google says.
For many sites, visitors that find their way to your About Us page tend to have a somewhat higher conversion rate than those that don’t. Potential customers that do visit this page are showing a bit more than a casual interest in what your site has to offer and are looking for additional signals of trust.
On the web it is impossible to have a conversation without content. That is why content will never truly be dead. Every word written, every blog post, article, instant message, forum post, etc/ (the list goes on and on) is done via content. But content, outside of community, is not a conversation, it's merely a one-way communication. To paraphrase an old philosophical riddle, if someone communicates and no one is around to hear (or read) it, is he really saying anything at all?
Your home page is the single most crucial page of your site. This is the page that will be the primary entry point for a majority of your visitors. It is also the page that sets the stage for the rest of the site giving visitors a birds-eye view of who you are, what you're about, what you can do for them, what you offer, and how they get the information needed.
During the design phase of building a website all too often we find that the end result is really nothing more than what somebody decided "looked good". In some cases it's a combination (or compromise) of what a handful of individuals have determined to be "good enough". What many fail to realize is that web design and visitor usability go hand in hand.
These figures can't (or can, depending on how you look at it) be ignored.
Last week, as I recounted my story of a troubled client, I got to thinking about this question. In the world of SEO, where do the lines of responsibility fall? When is the SEO responsible for failure and when is it the client's fault? Or can lines be drawn between them so easily?...
The content of your website is your #1 sales tool. Pictures, tools, and other fun stuff can be important in making your site visibly and functionally appealing, but it is the content that sells. Well written and user focused content allows your visitors to "find out" more about your products and services, as well as how your company will be able to meet their needs.
I recently made a mistake. I took on a client without first having fully vetted them and their prospects for success. Several months later, with a more accurate picture of the situation, things are not looking so bright....
Last month I posted about Barnes & Nobles tedious process for unsubscribing from their email newsletters. It was so complex that I honestly couldn't even figure out why I was receiving emails to begin with. By all appearances I was not subscribed to anything. This was confirmed after a couple of submissions to tech support, they also told me that I had already unsubscribed. Phew! But that's not the end of the story....
A site's navigation structure is extremely important in providing a rich, friendly user experience. Well designed and implemented navigation assists in the process of helping visitors identify sections and pages of the website that interest them and then in moving them in that direction. If you're able to implement a solidly developed navigation system on your site you'll also be providing strong visual cues to the depth of content you have available. This alone can be an immediate first-impression indicator of trust.
A while back there was quite a bit of scare mongering going around the SEO industry about how reciprocal links were dead. I had a potential client once tell me that so-and-so-big-name-in-the-SEO-industry told them that reciprocal links were dead. I've said this before and I'll say it here again. There is nothing wrong with reciprocal links.
I like to create systems for everything that I do and SEO is no exception. While not every aspect of search engine marketing can be programmed, categorized or easily referenced, (I have a mighty team to handle that stuff!) the bulk of the work can at least be outlined into a handy check list.
In my last article I declared that content was dead and community was the new king online. The title of that post was a bit of an overstatement which wasn't backed up by the rest of the article. (It was a link bait-y title, but yet another example of community ruling content. But I digress.) In the article I found some stats that some have used to re-declare (yet again) that "content is king" but I went on to show how those stats really didn't say that at all. I wanted to go a bit further in today's post while...
Motivation is a funny thing. You can try to encourage people by telling them the benefits of this, that or the other, but sometimes it's just not enough. You've got to make them "feel" it. If you craft your message right, you can do just that using words only.
In the last of my four part series about lessons learned from Blockbuster's Total Access program, I'll explore the need to make sure you're giving site visitors enough information to make the sale.
I can hardly bring myself to say the old cliche about content being... well, you know. I think it's one of the original cliche's in the SEO industry. And as redundant as it has become, for whatever reason we keep hearing it over and over again. And every now and then a new studies pops up seemingly proving proving, once again, that content is... uh, good....
Blockbuster provides a perfect real-world example of a company struggling to get it right. Sometimes they get the DVD in the tray and sometimes they don't. (That analogy sounded better in my head!)
Every week I receive weekly emails from Barnes and Noble telling me about books that are being released and other such stuff that I'm not interested in. The other day I decided to go ahead and click the "unsubscribe" button and be done with it all. If only it were that easy....
While high-speed access is far more common today than it was just a couple of years ago, web technology has also gotten more advanced. With each new whistle and bell added to your website, with every new feature, wait time is added in your page downloads. So high-speed access or no, you still have to make sure you keep your download times in check and therefore reducing wait time for your site visitors....
Last week I started looking at the branding savvyness of a handful of speakers at Search Engine Strategies, San Jose. There was no way I could go through each and every speaker so I narrowed the list down to those who spoke in sessions I attended. Here I continue through the list (alphabetically) and will provide an additional bonus: me. Yeah, I got my own set of branding issues which I uncovered once I started looking into some of the others here. But before I rip me a new one, let's continue...
While I was live blogging the search engine strategy sessions last week I was often in a hurry to find links to each presenter's website. Come to find out it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. In some cases I was able to find a speaker's company name fairly easily with a quick Google search. But other times I was left actually guessing to make sure I got the right company....
What happens when a company asks users to spend a great deal of time filling out a "customer experience" survey, but fails to offer anything up in return?...
Blockbuster figured out how to leverage their offline properties for their online rental service, namely the local Blockbuster Video store. Instead of putting your movie back in the mail to be shipped back, you can now take your movie, which you received in the mail, directly to the local Blockbuster store....
There is a lot that goes into developing good content for websites, and there are a lot of schools of thought into how to develop text that is "just right" for search engines and customers alike. We've heard all the arguments about content before. "People don't read, they just look at the pretty pictures." "Lots of text is needed for SEO." "Not everybody skims text, some like to read word for word." "Not everybody reads word for word, some like to skim and scan." On the surface these appear to be quite contradictory points, but they are not. In fact,...
There is a lot more to SEO than often meets the eye, but sometimes the SEO eye isn't enough to make a good optimized page great. While the actual SEO work can be pretty straight forward, it's the additional effort in making the page user-friendly and has the ability to drive visitors to conversions....
A few weeks ago one of my employees ran across co.mments.com, a free, web based comment tracking tool. It's turned out to be a very nice one-size fits all solution to keeping up with any comments on any blog post, whether I've commented there or not....
MIVA is updating their records... and in the process giving all of their contacts access to over 1200 email addresses. Early this morning I received an email from MIVA and there it was, right in front of me, over 1,217 email addresses staring at me in the TO box....
One of the things we've been trying to wrap our head around is the concept of writing content for both personas and the personality of site visitors. We battled with this for several days, trying to distinguish properly between a persona and a personality. I was finally able to boil each down into a few words that made it easy for us to see the difference....
Do you ever get the feeling that there are super cool websites out there that you have not discovered? Sites that everybody is talking about, except to you? Well, fret no longer, young Internet Junkie. Time Magazine, in partnership with CNN.com has issued their report on the 50 Best Websites for 2007....