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?

Fish, or cut bait. Can’t we do both?

August 14, 2007 on 11:24 am
Filed Under:SEO, Web

For as much as I may preach that a good website needs good, fresh content, I realise that it is incredibly difficult to keep up on this kind of thing.

Fish or cut bait, really. The eternal question.

I suppose the best fishermen out there would have that perfect balance between the two, where they would instinctively know when to do either and squid fishing certainly makes this easier. That’s all well and good, but not only can my instincts be quite lazy, my creative mind is usually in hyperdrive.

The two don’t always work well together, but what I do find is that I don’t want to have to think too hard.

So, I don’t.

I try to frontload a heap of thinking into the activities that I have ahead of me in order to ensure that everything will be running smoothly while I take a bit of a break from thinking and take care of the more menial tedious tasks.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not working hard. I’m working my ass off, I’m just able to do it without thinking too much.

Maybe “thinking” should be replaced with “second-guessing”.

All up, I suppose that instead of fish or cut bait, I’d rather set up the rod to do it’s thing without much help from me, then I can go about the bait cutting with one eye on the fishing rod.

For my money all business, not just SEO, should be conducted much in this manner. If we’re spending all our time and efforts on constantly staying on top of one thing and then the other, we’re not going to ever grow one of those things past it’s current breadth and depth.

At the end of the day, you might catch more fish while your actually fishing, but I guarantee that I’ll catch more fish while I’m cutting bait.

Latest News, Press Releases, Blog Posts

June 14, 2007 on 12:10 pm
Filed Under:Articles

In today’s web, aren’t they all the same thing? I’ve worked on many a site, this one included, that has had sections for the fresh user-controlled content that it displayed. Some of them were labelled by department and some were labelled by relevance.

It would seem to me that anything that the company is officially sending out to relevant news agencies would be considered a “Press Release” though I’ve seen many items of this nature posted solely on the website and nowhere else. The same with “News” or “Latest News” being in one section of the website and the only difference between that content and a blog-style page is a slight change of writing style.

I have my writing styles, believe me, so I suppose that, in the interests of Usability as well as SEO, I can taylor each to write something unique for specific subjects and place them in their proper area of this site.

I suppose that my Latest News will be anything noteworthy, such as a huge partnership deal, or attendance at an industry-related gathering (beers at the pub with a peer won’t quite count I’m thinking). So, we’ll hope for noteworthy here.

My Press Releases probably won’t exist in that facility, as I wouldn’t think that anything I’d be willing to send to news-related sites wouldn’t be in my “Latest News” section. Perhaps this will involve things that are too boring to announce, like a Quarterly Report or something equally coma-inducing.

My Blog is the easy one, as I’m writing this now I will always endeavour to be straightforward and straight-shooting, even if I’m talking about Nothing in particular. It worked for Seinfeld.

Web Design is all-encompassing

June 13, 2007 on 5:24 pm
Filed Under:Web

In my many years in the industry, I’ve found that the term “Web Design” really is all-encompassing when it comes to referring to almost anything web-related.

Think about it, even if you were to utilise our services purely for SEO purposes, to do it properly we’d still need to alter your site design. HTML and CSS seem to be the best ways to optimise a site these days, and we’re good at them, but technically they involve Web Design.

Back in the day, “web design” meant that we had a guy who knew Photoshop (this was probably around v 4.0 or even 3.0) and he would make pretty pictures of websites. They were flat documents, JPGs usually, and we showed 3 of them to the client so that they may choose 1, from which we would design their site.

I lost count of the number of times that the coders had to explain to him that what he’d designed simply couldn’t be done for most browsers (this we’d even heard of CSS, of course). He knew rudimentary HTML and that was about it, with no real yearning to learn any more.

But, things change, and Web Designers now have to incorporate the whole enchilada. Photoshop isn’t something that you put on your resume any more, it’s just assumed that you know how to use it. The same with HTML and Stylesheets nowadays. If you consider yourself a Web Designer, it is pretty much assumed that you can write your own stylesheet and design a site in HTML, either from a Photoshop file or without.

HTML has even changed with the pervasiveness of WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver, people don’t even really need to understand how it all works or what each individual tag represents. Once again dating myself, but I remember writing code in Notepad, before uploading it via Command Prompt FTP, and having it break because I forgot to type the </body> and </html> tags at the bottom of my document.

How does one create GOOD Web Design these days then?

Usability is key, of course, but does a year of education involving colour schemes mean that I know what ALL of my users will like?

Nup, of course not. When I go Christmas shopping for my kids, the first thing I go for in the Toy Store is something that I’LL like, and then I think about whether or not it’s appropriate for them. My kids have enough similar tastes, that it doesn’t matter that they’re 6, 4 and 5 months, I’ll probably come pretty close to something that they’ll love.

The same goes for decent Web Design. Whether you’re wearing a “coder” hat, an “accessibility” hat, or a “design” hat, you’ll still be designing with a mindset of what YOU like first, and then your users second.

The trick, as with almost anything, is adaptability. Roll with the punches. When these two don’t match up, you absolutely MUST go with the Greater Good.

The tagline I’ve heard an SEO use is one that applies to almost any aspect of Web Design, or even the web in general.

Experiment, Analyse, Adjust.

Watch this space for those things. I like Chocolate Quatros, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to keep offering them to my child that doesn’t like peanuts.

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