February 18, 2008 on 2:59 pm
Filed Under:SEO, Web
Being an SEO is great because on any given day I can be involved in several different, and pretty cool, industries. When I’ve got my research hat on and I’m working on any number of clients’ sites during the day, I may be hiring a camper van bound for Broome or I may be sizing myself for a 13th Century metal breastplate that can withstand a direct hit from a knight’s lance.
It definitely keeps things interesting, especially when conducting research.
I’ll be the first to admit that the idea of research of almost any kind doesn’t exactly excite me. My eyelids instantly and involuntarily start to droop the minute my thoughts go anywhere near data collection and the like.
And yet, it’s a fairly big part of what I do. And I’m good at it. And, once I get going on it, I secretly really enjoy it. I suppose research really isn’t that boring then is it? Someday I’ll train that part of my brain on that as well.
The opportunity to work with a client that is already reasonably familiar with Search Engine Optimisation and Search Marketing is nice, because I don’t have to explain as much and also because I can get even more of a feel for my competition and how they’ve been handled before.
This is how I found that one of the major discrepancies I’ve found between myself and many other SEOs out there is the sheer amount of research I do. Some just take client-suggested keywords, plant them strategically on their site, and gather up some relatively useless links, giving the client only what they appear to have asked for… and nothing more.
Our focus is on more than just getting you optimised and getting you out the door with your keywords and a smile. We’re about getting your site to be all that it can be (just like those ads for the U.S. Army) and part of that is making sure that we’re not accepting your money for an incomplete job. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you are on the web, you’re looking for success.
Who are you to the Web World?
Our research is what sets us apart from our competition. We make sure we know you, the client, what you’re about, what you’re trying to sell and how. We get a solid idea of the ins-and-outs of your business before we go anywhere. Then, of our own accord, we research YOU. Nothing involving fingerprints or e-stalking, of course, but we see where your site is mentioned and in what context.
Where do you stand in it?
Next, we research the marketplace in your industry. If you sell Blue Shoes, we go out and see what kind of folks also sell Blue Shoes. We want to know how they sell them, for how much, and where. If they’re doing more with what they’ve got, and they’ve got about the same as you, then we figure you’d like to know where they’re experiencing success, and therefore where you can too.
How can they find you?
Part of the research into your web presence is more than just who’s talking about you, it’s about where you are showing up for searches that lead users to your competition. Where are you in the race? Even if it’s for a search term that you don’t even want to target, we think it’s important for you to know what’s out there and where certain possibilities lie.
Your keywords are basically the last step in our research. Once we know who you are, who your clients are, we can start to figure out how we’re going to help them find you. We can compile data on 75 keywords, but if we already know that 90% of them are going to be searching on the American spelling of a certain word, then we can effectively eliminate the need to further research certain other terms.
Research, Research, Research
Though I may initially be bored with the idea, nothing excites me more than delving headfirst into a whole pool’s worth of new information through research. I love finding out new things about places that I have never been and things that I have never experienced before. I love having a diverse array of clients that offer a chance to break away from some of the tedium.
I even love the tedium, though I rarely admit it.
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‘.
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.
- Online Marketing Blog
- Matt Cutts
- SEOmoz
- Graywolf
- SEO Theory
- Stone Temple
- Marketing Pilgrim
- Stunt Dubl
- SEO by the SEA
- Tropical SEO
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:
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.
- Make it a GOOD one.
- Make it pretty.
- Make it work well.
- Make it make sense to your visitors.
- Make it have things that they want.
- Make it attractive to Search Engines.
- Figure out ways to make it better.
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.
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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