12 things you really should know about web-site optimization
by James Maas
From the very beginning in the early 1990s, the number one challenge on the Internet has been how to attract larger numbers of qualified visitors to our websites. Throughout the early boom years, one of the most popular solutions was to get massive funding, relatively easy in those days, and buy traffic by various means.
As an iconoclastic developer, with ambitions of beating the "big boys" at their own game, and more time than money, or connections to get it, I sought a less capital-intensive methodology to achieve the same results. Years of study and rapt attention to the pertinent forums, trying everything that even seemed to make sense (making many mistakes along the way, and learning much from most of them,) then carefully monitoring the results, has lead to many highly workable methodologies and tools in our web marketing bag of tricks. The results of these years of trial and error lays the foundation of our web marketing services, and the basis for the ongoing growth in traffic to your websites, and ours.
7Bends.com was launched on May 1, 2009, with most site optimization in place and submission to the directories just beginning. With a total monetary investment of less than $100, and a time investment, I'd rather not think about (in excess of 500 hours), the site has grown steadily in traffic and is moving to the front page of Google, etc. in many of the keyword categories we've targeted.
Studies show that over 90 percent of all Online users use search engines to find what they are looking for, whether products/services, or product information leading to an informed decision. The following twelve points summarize a philosophy, approach and methodology to the optimization question which is both sound and effective, along with giving some helpful insight into the industry itself.
1. It's more than just facts and figures.
The relationship between an Online business and its optimization specialist is perhaps one of the closest of business relationships. In order to be effective, an SEO must know not only the facts and figures pertaining to the endeavor, but s/he must know something of the dreams and aspirations of the business principals. Things which don't normally come out in a prospectus are often invaluable information when searching for the right fit into the complex world of the Internet. My own clients sometimes ask, due to the frequency of my calls and email in the early phases, "Am I your only client?" I usually laugh and say something to the effect that until I know your business almost as well as you do, yes, you are the only one that counts.
2. No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, or any other search engine.
Those who promise such feats will either optimize for vague search term phrases, such as, "green stunted widgets with purple Polka-dots and icing” - for which no one will ever search. Or, they are making a false claim, which they have no intention of keeping. Or, they have an inside edge at Google, something which they will loose, quickly, when the honest folks at Google find out about it. The other option, that they will take the money and run, is worth mentioning here, but I'll be polite.
3. Pay-per-Click is not SEO.
While no one would argue the effectiveness of getting increased traffic and sales through a well- planned, pay-per-click campaign, the fact remains that the conversion rates are generally low and traffic ceases the moment the "pay" stops. With a well planned and executed SEO campaign, while results may take a bit longer, they continue to produce, and in fact grow, long after the work is done and paid for. Quite often we've found that after a thorough optimization, only minor adjustments are needed, primarily related to new content and/or new sales or service technologies.
4. Content. Content. Content.
Effective, professional, optimized copy writing is the single-most important factor in any website development strategy. Search engines index websites based on the content found on each page of the site. With a thorough understanding of the language and grammatical conventions - combined with intensive research, to find and exploit the market focus - one can move a website to the upper echelon of the "SERPs" (Search Engine Results Page) in a methodical as well as ethical manner.
The simple fact of the matter is this: Expertise in any other form of writing in no way qualifies one for the type of writing required to optimize a website for the Internet. There are many sites which have less than correct punctuation, grammar and even spelling, which rank #1 in their targeted search phrases. This is not to say that I don't think these things are important, only that to be found in the search engines, they are not the most important consideration.
The flip side of this argument is equally true. Just because someone knows all the ins and outs of all of the search engines, can write algorithms in their sleep, has lunch with Dr. Eric Schmidt and is on a first name basis with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, does not in any way make them a writer.
5. Some things are just plain silly.
You don't need to submit your site to 50,000 search engines. Businesses which offer this service are suspect, at best. 85 percent of the search results on the Internet come from one search engine, which, if you have one link from an established website, or better yet, a directory, will find your site just fine, on its own. Four (4) search engines account for over 90 percent of the traffic on the web. As for any supposed benefit which may accrue from being listed in an obscure search engine in Botswana which specializes in safaris to the Kalahari Desert and receives 7 hits per day; well, you figure it out.
6. Analyze Web Logs.
Measure everything twice, then check again. While I would be the first to say that many of the procedures that make up website optimization are more art than science, one needs to take a very scientific approach to the results of the effort. This is done by methodically keeping a record of, and making analysis of the site logs. There are a number of specialized software programs which make the job easier. But, at the bare minimum, one needs to keep a close eye on the site visitors and their activity while on the site. No matter how well planned the strategy, it is largely theoretical until proven by the results, which can only be measured by the logs, and a thorough analysis of their content.
7. SEO is not witchcraft, Druidism, or shamanism.
Neither does it require any special chants, ceremonial fires, or vestments, though some of us do like to howl at the full moon on occasion. There are no "Top Secret" practices which a reputable SEO can not tell a client, a judge, or his mother, for that matter. The very nature of the Internet has always been cooperative and there is nothing about SEO that can't be learned, with a significant investment of time and money. A reputable SEO firm will give you a breakdown of just where the money goes, if requested. Be wary if you sense a secretive atmosphere or any unwillingness to answer questions. While there are technical points which might take some background to fully understand, if your consultant has a solid overview of the situation, a simple explanation should be easy enough to come up with.
8. Do-it-yourself SEO.
Yes, you can execute your own SEO campaign and find a reputable SEO firm to help plan and organize it for you. About one half of my own clientèle do some part of the actual work themselves, or have their in-house personnel do it, after discussing the goals and aims of the business/website, a thorough website analysis, comprehensive search phrase research, and focused instruction on the ways and means of achieving high SERPs. These preliminaries are followed up with a detailed program of suggestions and methods which the client can then implement themselves or hire others to perform, in-house. Average savings can be as much as 30% - 40% when compared with outsourcing the whole job.
9. Phased Implementation.
While many companies spend thousands of dollars per month on Search Engine Optimization, an alternative is available which will pay dividends to you in increased sales and leads without the high initial investment. The most important consideration is to have a reputable firm handle the initial evaluation and suggested optimization planning first. The use of the trial and error method will cost much more, in the long run and may or may not achieve the desired results. After studying the plan and establishing a workable budget you may implement the plan as finances allow.
10. Remember the old saying, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Never was this more true than in the realm of SEO. While concrete and measurable gains will always come from a well thought out and executed optimization strategy, the Internet is a competitive media and we all want to be number one. Accept the fact that a steady upward movement, over time, will place you worlds ahead of a flash followed by a crash.
11. All incoming links are not created equal.
Both the relevance to your line of business and website subject matter and the PR value of the incoming link determine how valuable they are to your own PR ranking. With Google starting the trend, nothing new there, and most of the others following close behind, the days of grabbing all the inbound links, in any way possible, are gone. Not only will low ranked and/or irrelevant inbound links not help, they will, in fact, cause a penalty. Link farms, free-for-all link schemes, automated link accumulation software, or any other fad that doesn't carefully screen the links and websites they are coming from will, in the long run, do more harm than good.
12. A thought to ponder.
At stake, in the race for the top, is the very existence of your website, your business, and quite possibly your reputation. Be wary of any shortcuts to search engine success, or less than ethical schemes that might be suggested. When it's all said and done it is you, the business owner, who bears the responsibility for any company or individual you hire. Insist on knowing exactly what the strategy is and what steps are being performed to implement it. If it seems, in the least, suspicious, ask for and get an explanation. In this case, not only is ignorance not bliss, it could very well be the beginning of the end for your business.
For more incites into the ins and outs of modern marketing, visit the Shenandoah Marketing website at http://CS-Shen.com.
Right, Wrong, or Indifferent – Website Optimization Is Here to Stay
by James Maas
There's been a lot of controversy over the years as to the need for the right kind of website optimization. Some will tell you that in order to be effective a website needs Search Engine Optimization (SEO,) and that it has to be "organic." Others will swear by the power of using the right software, looking for a coded fix-all. The web is awash in the latest/ greatest new gimmick, that by a strange coincidence, the page creator just happens to have created, discovered, latched-on-to, or otherwise gained access to this right software, worth $gazillions$, but, lucky you, if you get yours before 11:59 tonight you can have it for ONLY $19.95.
Then there are those who say that if you find the right "niche market" the world will beat a path to your door and leave their money when they get there. These too are offering to show you the way for only (you fill in the price)... I even spoke with a fellow yesterday who claimed that if you only launched new sites when the moon was full... well, that's a whole other story.
Damned if you do - Worse if you don't
Where there is less conjecture is in the dire consequences that may come about as a result of using the wrong optimization strategy. Horror stories abound of the million dollar investments that have simply gone down the drain when Google and the rest decided that the optimizers had cheated in their enthusiastic rush for the top. The early techniques of getting a website to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs,) such as link farms, cross linking, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, and the rest, have slowly been made ineffectual by the steadily rising sophistication of the search engine wiz kids, who write the algorithms employed to maintain a level playing field and assure relevant search results.
Assuming that the right traffic generating strategy is hit upon, and the work carried out effectively, what happens when the visitors start flocking to the site, and do absolutely nothing. Years ago it occurred to me that rather than just driving traffic to a site, steps had to be taken in order to assure that once there, the visitors would take the desired action and buy, sign up, subscribe, tell their friends, or whatever the objectives are that necessitated the website in the first place.
It Pays To Know
We could, perhaps, define SEO by function; we could talk about the actions which bring about the optimization. First there's research, hours of research are typically performed for each website. With such items as industry research (what's the competition up to?), keyword research (what and how big is the market for this product/service, and how many potential customers are out there?), competition research (how many others are already vying for this market?), marketing research (who else has already done this and what did they discover that I better know about too?) Many hours, days, and sometimes weeks can be spent getting a clear visualization of a strategic plan before the actual project can even begin.
After more than 15 years of putting websites on all of the different search engine's first pages, there is one thing I am absolutely certain of. To start a website without the proper research and the facts such research generates, is a guarantee that:
- nobody of any significance will ever link to your site (World's Worst Web Sites, excluded);
- nobody, except maybe your mother and a few close friends will ever see your website;
- you will never be found in the major, or even the minor search engines;
- your results will match your research (0=0);
- your business venture will fail miserably.
It's Been A Pleasure - But...
We could approach the question of website optimization from the perspective of form. Every site is constructed differently, designed differently, laid out differently, has a unique way with which it interacts with visitors, and targets those visitors differently. These are all factors that are considered during the research performed prior to laying out an optimization plan.
Architect Louis Sullivan, argued that a building's purpose should determine its design, stating emphatically that "Form follows function." Shortly after, his student, Frank Lloyd Wright argued, "Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union."
Although Sullivan and Wright were speaking of architecture as it relates to concrete and steel buildings, there's an architecture which goes into the design of a website that, when done well, echoes Wright's observation very nicely.
Good optimization will see to the writing or rewriting of the content on each page to effectively work in all targeted keyword phrases. A professional web-copywriter will be able to take the SEO recommendations for keyword usage and incorporate them into existing content in a way that reads naturally (i.e. does not look like you jammed in keywords strictly for the search engine's) and has the ability to convert your visitors into paying customers. This is no small order and if it is not performed well, the site
will remain just another pretty page that few see, and even fewer convert on. Or, worse yet, your site will attract lots of visitors but they will become confused by the copy and fly off to the next site without ever taking the desired actions (sign up, buy, make contact.)
Another function of site optimization, and one not often spoken of, is cleaning up all extraneous code on the pages. Code bloat removal, as it's so poetically referred to, is an art form in itself. It requires a thorough understanding of html along with all the rest of the coding and scripting languages which make up a modern web page, as well as the ability to move it to a separate file and importing it, when feasible, or trimming it to it's bare essentials without changing the look and/or function of the page itself. Eliminating
page code bloat can be an incredibly arduous task. Moving styles and JavaScript is only part of the puzzle. Many times, a page has to be almost completely rebuilt due to the excess amount of junk code that gets added in with the use of popular "WYSIWYG" page editing software.
To see what a search engine spider bot "sees" when it visits a web page, go to the View button on your browser toolbar. Move your cursor down to Source (Page Source in Mozilla Firefox), and left click. What you are looking at is what Backrub (Google), Sidewinder (Infoseek), T-Rex (Lycos), Gulliver (Northern Lights), and all the others "look" at when they spider a site. They read it the same way you do, from top to bottom. Notice how much code and formatting are at the top of the page and scroll down to find the content (this article). Taking all of the code and paring it down to just what's needed and then finding ways to trim that is part of what good site optimization is about. Try this on other sites you visit and you will soon understand the situation.
Rant
OK, time out! I tried not to mention specific software in this article but, hey! Have you ever wondered why Microsoft doesn't use FrontPage to create pages on Microsoft.com — even the pages that deal with the FrontPage software? Perhaps, they're trying to tell us something. I've spent literally months of my life removing and rewriting the loopy code and nonessential tags that have been produced by FrontPage editors. From an optimization standpoint using FrontPage to produce a website is akin to shooting yourself in both feet before you start to run a marathon. If Microsoft won't even use it, why would you? </rant>
Now that that's out of the way . . .
After the code bloat removal process, good optimization practices will address getting all pages on the site to validate to the professional standards set by the W3C. Validation is simply a process of ensuring that the right coding elements are used, and used correctly. This isn't a good guy - bad guy question or even a matter of not breaking the rules, it's about being accessible to everyone who uses the web. There is a growing number of the blind and visually impaired who use Voice Readers or text-to-speech software which "speak" the text on the web page. Many of the old tricks and shortcuts that web designers used in the past don't work with these, or any of the growing number of other software designed to open the Internet to all. While many validation issues are not a big problem in and of themselves, if you find it on one page, it will likely run all through the site, and can take many hours of head scratching and work to clean up effectively.
META what?
Everyone has heard about meta tags, alt and title tags, and making them all search engine-friendly, but there are few sites that actually use them to full advantage. There's so much already written that I hate to add to the plethora of information, (real and misinformation) on the subject, but I will say that the purpose of the "alt" tag is to provide an "alternative" to a graphic and not, as widely believed, to go on and on about
what a superior product you have or how wonderful your business is. For those who use 'screen reading' software (ie. the blind and visually impaired) the .alt tag should provide a description of what the, unseen by them, picture is about, giving them a better understanding of the page in general.
There are varying opinions about what should and shouldn't be included in a title tag. What is generally agreed upon is that all of the major search engines give the content of the title tag significant weight in determining what that page is all about. It's my practice to re-write the title after everything else on the page has been written, and then with an eye to using no more than two of the keyword phrases that apply to the page.
Unless you're "GE" or "Maxwell House," or intend to spend the kind of money they spent getting to be a well known brand, there is simply no reason to place your company name in the title tag. Save this important resource for the search terms that people will use to find your services/products. I know, you wanted mama to see your company name right up there in the Title Bar. It's OK with me, but it will cost you.
What About Site Maps
Site maps help both search engines and visitors quickly and easily get to the information that is important. It's amazing how simple a matter the design and implementation of a usable site map is, and how many websites either don't have one, or have an incomplete or obscure site map - an even worse scenario. If you're not sure you need one, build one anyway. Trust me on this one. If I come to your site and
can't find what I'm looking for, I'll look for a site map. If I can't find a site map, I'll look for another website. Oh yeah, that's how 90% of website visitors are. Get a site map.
The robots.txt file is another useful means to communicate with the search engine spiders about content they should or should not index. This allows the "bot" to focus its time on the good stuff and not the irrelevant portions of your site.
Good website optimization is all of these things and more. Your site will be off to a great start by following the suggestions mentioned here. And hopefully, this article will get you thinking that just maybe those "SEO firms" which offer "Complete SEO $100." or "Get Your Site To #1 In Google" $295., aren't talking about the same things that we've been discussing here. After years in the business, I've yet to give even a "ballpark" figure for an optimization campaign without thoroughly researching the needs of the client, the market being exploited, the structure of the site, and the competition for the target keywords.
Every situation is different, be wary of anyone offering a la carte optimization. Without research, an individualized plan of attack, and careful implementation, you might as well wait for the next full moon.
Marketing in a New Millenium
by James Maas
We at Shenandoah Marketing Services have been wanting to do a something to give back to our beautiful addopted community a little something of what we have learned through being full time marketers and web consultants.
While we claim no holy grail to the whole marketing game, we have through years of experience in many varied markets learned a few things that we wish to share.
Comments and questions are sought, and greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
j