Good SEO Companies Diversify.

January 15, 2008 on 9:57 am
Filed Under:SEO, Web

Mike Grehan recently wrote a column titled, “The Diminishing Value of the SEO Shop” which, as doomsday-ish as it may sound, is actually pretty accurate in it’s foretelling of where the industry will probably head.

When I started doing SEO, back in they day, it wasn’t even called that. In fact, I don’t recall it even having a name other than “our static pages”, meaning link-heavy directory-style pages whose content didn’t tend to change.

While our ideas, tactics, and their implementation were ever-changing, the bulk of the SEO that we did was a fire-and-forget missile (lock onto the target, launch and then wait for the “BOOM”). Monitoring and analysis was ongoing, but the SEO efforts were really only changed in minor ways every 6 months or so.

Finding myself in an industry where I was referring to myself as an “SEO” more and more, I also found that I was doing more and more to enhance what I was offering in terms of SEO. At times, it went beyond optimising for search engines and into the usability and functionality aspects of a site, though the line item on the invoices was still “Search Engine Optimisation”.

Our company now finds itself unique among our competitors as we’ve broken out that secondary step of optimising a website into something that we call, for now, Web Analytics, with a tagline that should be something along the lines of, “Optimising for Search Engines is only the first part, you’ve got to have a web site that people like too.”

Jex Analytics has a focus on the bigger picture in a time when there just doesn’t seem to be a name for it yet other than Web Consultants, and even that can lend itself to ambiguity.

The point is, regardless of what you call it, it all comes down to making a site as successful as possible (making the most money really). Grehan may sound as if he’s bagging on the purely SEO firms, but he’s not. What he’s actually saying is that, much like our SEO tactics of, “Experiment, Analyse, Adjust” we, as businesses, need to do the same.

When it’s time to optimise a site web consultants, SEO experts, web analytics experts or whatever you wish to call them, need to think more about the bigger picture and less about the nuts and bolts of how to get a site’s rankings to improve.

Rankings, Traffic, and PageRank are all important things (well, the latter may depend on who you talk to) but the fundamental tenet that anyone interested in success should cling to is simple:

Have a Good Website.

The unspoken thought following this is, of course, ‘and then hire us to make it better‘.

Dear Google Claus…

January 3, 2008 on 9:16 am
Filed Under:SEO

I honestly and sincerely thought that I had been an extra good boy this year. I played by all the rules, was patient and kind, and was rewarded accordingly.

That is, until Christmas Day.

As you well know there’s a certain key phrase that’s been quite good to us over this past year, bringing in folks looking for a good quality service, Search Engine Optimisation in Perth, Western Australia.

For some reason, instead of a shiny new bike or even the gift of continuing Goodwill and Good Fortune, I got a great big ol’ lump of coal. Our ranking for two of our most important phrases dropped from Page Numbering ONE way down to Page of the Number THREE.

That’s not particularly in keeping with the Christmas Spirit now is it?

What is it that I can do? Should I blog more? Should I get more inbound links? Give more to charity?

I suppose I’ll just do my best, and continue plugging along and following the rules and just hope that you were trying to teach me some sort of lesson about not taking something so good for granted.

Lesson Learned. And it’s a Brand New Year! Let’s start it off with a bang, eh?

Please?

Sincerely Yours,
Jex Analytics

John Wayne Says it Best.

November 13, 2007 on 10:12 am
Filed Under:Web

One of my favourite Old West SEOs, Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim is currently teasing me with a contest of some variation, and this is my effort at entering…

For starters, I open up about 10 SEO blogs every day, religiously, and sometimes even extend that into another 12-15.

These folks seem to get it right most days and always seem to offer some sort of insight into a realm that I either A) hadn’t quite thought of yet or B) HAD thought of but hadn’t documented my thoughts about.

This is a fantastic opportunity for networking as I can now comment on the uniqueness and brilliance of the things I previously hadn’t thought of or at my own brilliance for agreeing with the things I had thought about (but hadn’t written about yet).

Win-win, I do believe. Either way I get to sound brilliant. My comments, as any of the folks above can attest to, aren’t always brilliant, I accept this, but when brilliance is less than graspable, reach for funny.

So, Why do I read Marketing Pilgrim Every Day?

Simple, it’s a quick and easy way to either expand my mind in a new direction or expand it in an established direction, all while dropping my name in the mix and making some new friends.

That, and the immortal words of The Duke:

Good Bloggers Know.

November 12, 2007 on 12:14 pm
Filed Under:SEO

Bill Hartzer wrote a great column titled, “Corporate America Can Learn a Lot from Bloggers” in a recently received email newsletter from SearchDay (from Search Engine Watch) and I thought I’d use his insights and advice to further my own stance on blogging.

From an SEO standpoint, blogging is great, but not the be-all/end-all that many think it is. I recommend it for my clients as a way to boost their SEO absolutely, but that isn’t the sole reason I do it.

As you can probably tell from this blog, I’m a firm proponent in using a blog as a way to reach more users in a much more informal manner than the rest of my site. Search Engine Optimisation will get a site to #1 in Google if done correctly, but without a few different ways to engage that user, they’ll never convert to customers.

One quick look at my user traffic and I can tell you which folks came through because of some markety-type text on one site and some informally-written braindump ranting on another.

The point is, and Bill’s point as well, is that blogging is about networking, rubbing e-elbows with each other, and getting our name out there. Without networking, most small businesses would never make it, and of course… there wouldn’t be much of an Internet then would there?

An example of a Jex Analytics blog for SEO purposes.

The Google Dance

October 26, 2007 on 4:13 pm
Filed Under:SEO

It’s no secret that everyone in the Search Engine Optimisation line of work would love to get their hands on perhaps the industry’s Biggest Secret, the Google Algorithm.

The Google Algorithm is, in simple terms, how they decide who to put at the top of YOUR search and why.

Clients are constantly asking me why certain sites are above them for certain searches or better yet, why their site’s position in the results pages shifts somewhat randomly and sometimes drastically.

While I am not privy to this vaunted algorithm, 99% of the time there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Our own site’s ranking has fluctuated wildly lately and I have traced this back to the exact day after our site redesign was launched:

Google Rankings Graph

As you can see from the graph above, we had secured the #1 position in Google for quite a considerable time (this graph covers about 3 months) and then dropped out of the Top 100 altogether.

This wasn’t a time to hit the Panic Button though, for experience has taught us that this is only a part of the Google Dance, where a site can relaunch and then see wide fluctuations in rankings over the course of the next few weeks, or even months.

Despite the fact that only the aesthetics have changed while the content (and even most of the code) remained the same, Google was still unsure of our site enough that they dropped us for a brief bit.  They just needed some time to ensure that we remained an authority on Web Analytics, Web Consulting and Search Engine Optimisation before they’d let us regain our spot at the top.

All part of the Google Dance.

I’m happy to say that we have since stabilised at the #1 position again and will definitely hold it for the foreseeable future.

Personal Productivity.

August 29, 2007 on 10:20 am
Filed Under:Articles

As I sit and look at the SEO forums I belong to as well as some of the groups that I’m in, I notice that a fair amount of the posts are created during “working hours” and are not necessarily of a work-related nature.  I hear about Facebook becoming an issue in offices to the point that access has to be restricted.

Productivity.  That’s always what we’re on about in today’s work environment.  How to raise it, how to keep it optimal, how to keep us all in the black.  When I think back to my office days, whether they were spent sitting in an actual office or in a cube, I used to pride myself on my productivity when I knew that others were sluffing off.

I still wasn’t this pinnacle of purity though, I would check my personal emails and I kept track of the visitor traffic on my blog(s), I would even occasionally visit sites that didn’t have anything to do with my work.

It seems to be a relatively accepted part of our lives these days, that our workers will take a certain amount of time to spend on personal endeavours, and that we’ll let them in order to keep their sanity.  I was never told this though, quite the contrary, and I felt constantly guilty about it.

The truth is, is that even if I’m spending all my time on client projects and work-related exploits, the bottom line is really about whether or not I’m making the company any money.  It isn’t really about my sanity, or my high level of loyalty or expertise, and it isn’t about whether or not I’m willing work hard.  My worth to the company really boiled down to what I was worth in the “profit” column.

With one notable exception, my entire career has been this way, and now that I’m working from home, on my company, I am beginning to fully realise the benefit of some personal time.  Sure, when its your small business, the lines between work hours and personal hours are frequently blurred enough to the point that your taking the laptop to bed at night a bit too often (and on a Saturday… for shame).

But, the benefits are immeasurable.  I get to pick my kids up from school and not sweat what time it is or how long we have when they ask me if we can play at the park on the walk back home.  I get to spend almost an entire day looking after the baby and looking after my wife when she’s had a particularly involved trip to the dentist.  These are things that I would have to “take a day off” for normally.  Time spent that I wouldn’t be paid for.

I got so sick of the message being sent that I was really only valuable to “the company” if my butt was in a chair in that office.  It was, and still is, so illogical to me to think that I am of any more value at a “company” desk where I am not necessarily working, than if I am wherever I choose to be.  Be that at home, at my home desk, or in my bed or at the park.

I can truthfully say that even though I’m not at my desk, working, working, working, for the duration of set Working Hours, I have never been more productive in my life.

There’s not a day that goes by that I am not truly grateful for the chance to be “productive” on my own terms.  For I am a good worker and I have a high level of expertise and I am productive.

But my life is much better now.

Practicing what I preach

August 20, 2007 on 12:39 pm
Filed Under:SEO, Web

I’m on several popular SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) forums, and on several my signature is something along the lines of, “Optimising for Search Engine’s is only the first part, you’ve got to have a site People like too.”

Like most people I know, I am famous for giving fantastic advice while following very little of it myself.

It’s the same pitfall just about any web design firm runs into, in that they are so busy making everyone else’s sites look great, they forget about theirs.  I’m well into optimising this site for Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs) but have fallen a bit short on making it a quality place for those referrals to go.

Well, I’m waving the white flag on this design, and am enlisting the aid of the hardcore professional designers.  Contact me if you’re interested and we’ll talk turkey.

I’m thinking I should continue focusing my energies on what I am best at, optimising a site.  Though that can actually include design, or at least design advice, it is also writing, writing, writing.

Oh, and off-site optimisation is important too, as I have just noticed that I have helped propel a pseudo-partner/competitor to #1 in Google for a highly sought-after phrase.

Having a great website really isn’t that difficult.

August 17, 2007 on 10:37 am
Filed Under:SEO, Web

Jonathan Hochman wrote an interesting article on Search Engine Watch, “How to Get More Pages into Google’s Index” which I read upon receiving via email, and then followed it up with a thread on a popular SEO forum, which I also read.

He’s hit upon something here, and I’m both excited and terrified that it seems like such a revelation to many of those that I know in the industry. The fact that good, clean code can help with the indexing of your site is something that seems so obvious to me that I almost worry about those that would overlook something like that.

If it all basically boils down to making you money or, in more markety terms, “having a successful website” then there are a few basics that, when done well, will ensure this. Clean coding is but one of them.

A successful website involves many things and differing viewpoints will tell you any manner of these things. From highly complex back-end programming to the just-plain -Harry-Potter-style magic of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

To me it’s a few simple things that are simply done well. Of course, that can technically be applied to almost any job, career, relationship, or Life for that matter, but I’m not going to bust out my incense and start chanting just yet.

Build a good site.

Make it visually appealing and send a message or create a mood that will ensure a quality user experience. Uffda, that was more markety jargon wasn’t it? Make a good site that people like being on. There you go. Make things easy to find and make them things that people want to find.

Start with a good design and then create good code.

Heavy <table> code and MS Word-created <img> tags that go on for miles are to be avoided like the plague. I would suggest nothing but a few JS includes and a couple of CSS includes at most with each of your design elements (menu, content, logo, etc) in <div> tags.

Optimise every image as much as you can, whether it’s with Photoshop’s “Save for Web” feature or whatever is handy, and try to keep each individual image file around 10K or under. Then, check that the whole page doesn’t “weigh” more than 40-50K or so. Do this by saving the page as a file and checking its size. I’m sure there are heaps of sites out there that will measure your page size and download speed for you as well.

Usability is key.

Now set up your architecture, making sure that all the pages you want are in the proper spot and under the right category. For SEO purposes, name them accordingly. If you’ve done your keyword research and you know what you’re shooting for, then name the page that exact phrase. If you’re selling magic beans, have a page whose filename, meta title, heading and menu text are ALL “Magic Beans”.

Set up your content. Content, in this case, is basically just text with some images. People LOVE images, so put pictures and graphs and such anywhere that they’re relevant, though not excessively. No more than 3 or so in any of your body copy provided you’ve got substantial body copy.

Information is everything.

Write, write, write. Use the marketing material from your brochures or from your copywriter or make it up on your own (have someone else edit it though, heh). Make it useful to your users and not just to yourself or your existing customers. Remember that that majority of your users will probably never have heard of you, though this doesn’t mean that they want your whole history on every page (or even the homepage). They want to know what YOU can do for THEM and they want to know it quick.

Get together your site content and stick it in there. Then, for optimisation and for usability’s sake, go through and find relevant mention of your other pages and/or topics and link to them. When you reference another skill or product of yours, link to that page using the text that matches it’s name. NEVER use “Like Giants that sing lumberingly retarded songs? Click here for some magic beans.” Use “Magic beans are what you need if you’re down with giants who sing and then snore.”

Remember, of course, to use the keywords that you are targeting throughout your body copy. A basic rule that I follow is to target only one keyword phrase per page. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t include the other targeted phrases on the same page (”Web Marketing” should be on it’s own page but definitely shows up on the “Search Engine Optimisation” page as well). Use your targeted phrase liberally but not manically. If you’re spamming, they will find out.

Get a blog going, on your site, and write in it as much as you can. At least once a week, but daily if at all possible. YOU are the one that wants to stand apart from your competitors right? Then sound like you stand apart. Sound like an expert in whatever you are selling and spread your knowledge across your site for your visitors to enjoy. This will bring more qualified traffic than a good Pay-Per-Click campaign, in my experience.

That’s basically it for the setup. The rest focuses on getting good, quality links from reputable sources, folks that think you are worthy enough to send their visitors to, and then making sure that they stick around long enough to become clients/customers.

Now… is it working?

This is where the Web Analytics and Web Consulting parts come in. Again, like most of this, you can do it yourself, but as with the plumber, the mechanic and my accountant, it’s just a better deal to pay someone else with the knowledge, tools, and experience to handle it.

Web Analysis will tell you if you’re actually making as much money as you can off the visitors that you have to your site (if you’re converting them into clients/customers). While for some, the answer will always be “you CAN’T make enough”, the idea is still to find areas that could use improvement and improve them.

Web Analytics will give the data and the analysis, and the Web Consulting will give you some solutions. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s a good idea to ask someone else to have a look at things and use their fresh perspective, combined with their relative objectivity, to look for things that you can change (Hell, I’ve moved the “Add to Cart” button from one spot to another and almost doubled the Conversion Rate).

That’s really about it, or at least as much as I can think of right now and fit in this entry. You can see that having a successful site really isn’t that hard, though you’re probably thinking what I’m thinking:

Why don’t we ALL have them then?

Another post, another time.

Visitor Traffic - Highly Qualified or High Volume?

August 16, 2007 on 9:42 am
Filed Under:SEO, Web

Both can be quite good, but you have to have a plan.

My first official Search Engine Optimisation gig was with a big company in Golden, Colorado. We sold online reports on doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes based on data from Medicare and other sources. When I started the project, we had about 40 different landing pages on a few different sites, all pointing to the home page of the main site, and about 700,000 doctors in the database.

I eventually built a customised page for each and every one of those doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes. Including category and organisational pages, it came to 1.4 million pages, and up to 800,000 of them were indexed within 3 months. It was awesome.

High Volume Visitor Traffic

The plan was to get the traffic first and then work on the conversions. With such a large-scale project, that was what made the most sense, and we eventually were able to “cash in” with our optimisation efforts with better user tracking and streamlining the checkout process, enabling users to buy a report with around 4 clicks.

Not every business has that kind of time and effort available though. Even though everyone loves more traffic, if it’s not targeted and qualified traffic, it is really only good for their numbers. Everybody LOVES great numbers, and it looks great on my Success Stories but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re making any money off of my efforts.

Start with a plan.

Before you spend any real money on networking and marketing your site, start with an idea of who exactly you want to bring to your site. 10,000 hits a day are great, but if only 3 of those result in sales, your conversion rates are going to suck.

Highly Qualified Traffic

By targeting for more specific traffic, either via Social Media sites or even Pay-Per-Click Advertising, you significantly raise your chances of a higher conversion rate. If you’re bringing in 100 visitors, but you got them from sources that have already qualified them (to a certain extent) then 5 sales makes your Conversion Rates look a whole lot better.

SEO isn’t just about Higher Traffic numbers, Targeted Traffic, or even the ensuing Conversion Rates. It’s about a plan, and that’s what you need to start with.

Figure out who you want on your site, then go out and get them.

The Age of Un-accountability.

August 15, 2007 on 9:33 am
Filed Under:Web

I never would have thought that I would live to hear a politician credited with inspiring some accountability, but in “Al Gore and Web Analytics“, Jason Burby wrote about how seeing Gore’s film on Global Warming got him thinking about people taking more risks in their objectives, and being accountable for the outcome.

This really hit home for me, having had the majority of my career experience in a large company and experiencing first-hand the many ways that the buck can be passed.  To this day I still wonder what it was exactly that kept me around that place, when I would routinely challenge our extremely busy Project Manager to a game of “horse” on the Nerf hoop and actually shot the VP in the chest with my Nerf Dart Gun.

I suppose if I had to think about it, it was the fact that not only did I push the boundaries of some of my more ambiguously directed projects, but that I was also 100% accountable for each and every facet of them.  More often than not, probably because the Bad News makes headlines, it seemed that I was in that Project Manager or VP’s office, explaining why we had a significant drop in Google traffic, or why certain report sales were down

It was only well after I left, and was putting together my references and resume, that I realised how much money I made that place with my constant and ever-expanding SEO project.  Quite simply, they would have been idiots to let me go and, testament to their good natures, instead kept me on in spite of my childish and distracting habits (which were so much damn fun I thought I would wet myself some days).  Hell, these guys even gave me bonuses and profit-sharing!

Upton Sinclair, and Jason Burby, are right.  If you don’t know or care about something, and aren’t PAID to do either, then you probably aren’t going to take it upon yourself to do anything differently.

“Think outside the box and take full accountability” is about as cliché-laden as you can get.

But does that mean it isn’t 100% true?

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