Archive for February, 2007
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. (Wikipedia)
This definition of SEO sounds simple, but beware! Search engine optimization is a minefield, even for professionals, and although necessary to a business, should not be undertaken lightly. Below, is a brief look at the top 10 mistakes and how to correct them.
1. Non-Relevant Linkage.
External links to your site play a large part in most of the major search engine algorithms and can be considered an endorsement of your site. But if you are being linked to from sites that have no relevance to your content, then that is now considered a negative endorsement and will not raise your ranking in the search engines. Ensure all links to your pages are from relevant sites. Be wary of link builders who acquire links from gambling, pharmaceutical or adult themed sites, especially if your site is not of the same theme. Link building is as much a science as it is an art, one we take very seriously.
2. Untargeted Keywords.
The people who use search engines are ‘normal’ people who are not likely to use words used in advertising brochures. Get to know how your customers ask for your services/products and use these in your content. Often times, actual keyword research will surprise you.
3. Excessive Graphics and Flash Content.
This looks good on a web page, but to search engine crawlers it means little. Search engines are looking for content, keywords, and relevancy to the search terms. By all means have some graphics, but don’t forget the meat. This doesn’t mean Flash designed websites are bad necessarily. In fact, some big businesses do use it. For most webmasters though, Flash sites are best avoided. Unless your Flash designer does high-end websites and knows how to integrate the content and keywords within the Flash, hybrid sites combining Flash headers with HTML content will be a good option.
4. Believing all search engines are the same.
What pleases Yahoo might not necessarily please MSN or Google. Optimize your content, keywords, inbound links, and internal linking structure so that there is something for at least one of the three top search engines.
5. Multiple Search Engine Submissions.
In the very early days of search engines, this technique may have had some success, but now it can lead to slower indexing and rankings. A site with inbound links from other sites will get indexed naturally and search engine submission is not necessary. In fact, multiple submissions may be construed as an attempt to spam the search engines. The top 5 engines account for more than 90% of all activity so it is wise not to ruin your chances of ranking naturally in the search results. (comScore Media Metrix qSearch data, August 2005)
6. Incorrect Use of Title Tags.
Most people consider the title to be for their company name or product. Not so. You must include your most important search phrases within your title tag and if you do want your company name there, keep it for the end. Keep the title tag to less than 65 characters long to avoid the appearance of title tag keyword-stuffing.
7. Use of ‘Black Hat’ techniques.
Techniques such as doorway pages, hidden text, and overstuffing keywords may have had success in the past but now they will earn you penalties and could even get you banned. Avoid them altogether if you are seeking long term success. Some black hat techniques can work on a short term basis, but in the long run prove very costly.
8. Expecting Immediate Results.
SEO is an ongoing process and should be treated as such by your SEO company. Good optimization will involve building good links with quality sites and this takes time.
9. Use of Unethical SEO Consultants.
Beware the consultant that guarantees rankings with no past clients to back it up with or claims of special relationships with search engines. Many such “consultants” or “experts” will probably take your money and run. Choose a reputable SEO consultant, one who will keep in regular contact with progress reports and updates.
10. Decide to do optimization in-house.
Probably possible in the past, but now with ever increasing sophistication of search engine algorithms, this is an area best left to an expert. Furthermore, the good SEO experts usually have other income streams from their online marketing activities and a regular paycheck to work full-time simply doesn’t justify their time invested. We’ve yet to meet a good SEO who doesn’t have virtual real estate bringing in a nice chunk of cash.
What’s a poor webmaster to do? Web 2.0 changes the whole ballgame. It not only places the Internet user squarely in the middle of things, but it gives that user the means and power to create and manipulate data. Web 2.0 dramatically changes how we view and use the web. Actually, in many respects, it creates a whole new Internet.
What Is Web 2.0?
Just what exactly is Web 2.0? What does it mean? Is there a precise definition that all webmasters can get their heads around and understand? Not really, many believe Web 2.0 is just another one of those contrived buzzwords, signifying mostly marketing hype!
However, perhaps the simple definition can be found in the word “you”! Time magazine probably summed it up best by making reference to the “you” in user generated content. Web 2.0 is basically all the platforms that give us this brave new user-powered interactive Internet, generally referred to as ’social media’.
Web 2.0 can be seen or manifested in such sites as YouTube, MySpace, Del.icio.us, Digg, Squidoo… Web 2.0 uses scripting languages such as Python, Perl PHP, RSS… to construct interactive platforms that websites can use to create all this user-generated content.
Many refer to these evolving formats and scripting platforms under the name AJAX and no this does not refer to the popular cleaning agent under your kitchen sink! This AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScrípt and XML) comes from Google and takes web based interactive programs such as Google Maps, something that’s usually associated with desktop applications, but is now being applied on the web. If you have used Google Earth, you will realize how powerful and revolutionary these new applications can be, not to mention, they are a whole lot of fun.
Many point to Tim O’Reilly, the constant innovator of many technological changes on the web. O’Reilly has been at the forefront in discussions and conferences on the nature and substance of the ‘meme’ open source platforms dominating the new social media.
How all this new media plays out is anyone’s guess, but all webmasters should optimize their sites for this new Web 2.0 and take full advantage of all the SEO possibilities presented by this brave new Internet.
Here are a few SEO suggestions you can try:
1. RSS/Blogging: You must place a blog and RSS feed on all your sites. This is a fairly simple procedure to do with frëe server-based programs such as Wordpress. Having a blog and RSS feed will place your site into the whole tagging process. Each category you create in your blog will be seen as a tag by such sites as Technorati. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and your RSS feeds will get your content distributed across the web. A simple and easy way to tap into the new Web 2.0 universe.
2. Create some Google Juice!: Join as many of these highly interactive sites as you can: MySpace, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg, Wikipedia … my favorite is Squidoo, where you can create Lenses on different topics that interest you. User driven content that’s utilized by all the major social media sites. Of course, link back to your sites in your posts and creations in these user-created content havens and watch your PR ratings go way up.
3. Use Interactive Scrípts: Place interactive JavaScrípts and platforms on your own sites. Have membership forums, polls, blogs, feedback forms, user-contributions… to build unique content driven sites. Become the spider!
4. Tagging (Folksonomy): Be constantly aware of the tags (keywords) you’re creating with your blogs and sites. This can have a very beneficial effect on your traffíc and rankings. Closely relate these tags to the content on your sites and build higher rankings in all the major search engines.
5. The Long Tail: Especially important for affilíate marketers, you need to cover special niches where there is less competition and content. These narrow niches make up a large portion of the whole vast web, creating content in these unique areas will get your site included in the search engines a lot quicker and keep them there a lot longer.
6. Holistic Web 2.0: Be constantly vigilant in placing your sites in the whole ‘Interactive Game’, building links and partnerships with the important YouHubs: MySpace, Del.icio.us, YouTube, Digg, Squidoo… the more connections you have, the more your own sites will prosper.
Be The Spider!
No doubt, Web 2.0 will play an ever increasing role in the development and evolution of the web. Make sure your sites are optimized and in the ‘You’ game. Create blogs, RSS feeds, interactive forums, membership areas, user-generated content and truly make your sites interactive havens in their own right. Just remember to tag everything and your sites will reap the benefits of this new Web 2.0 generated SEO gold rush.
When you walk into a sporting goods store, does the salesperson immediately assume that you play hockey? Of course not. In fact, he’d probably never make a sale if he greeted every customer with “Hi! We’ve got some great ice skates in just your size. Would you like to see a pair?”
On the other hand, the one-size-fits-all sales pitch — “Hello, may I help you?” — doesn’t exactly entice shoppers to break out the old wallet either.
Instead, the really good salespeople are trained to discover details about the customer before trying to pitch a particular item. A question like, “Hi, how are you? What sport do you play?” is a great opening line. It gets the customer to focus on a general topic, and then persuades him or her to narrow down the choices. And a focused customer is a buyer, not a browser.
What does this have to do with your online sales? Plenty. Especially if you’d like to increase your conversion by 50 percent or more.
You see, if you focus just on increasing traffic without increasing your profit per visitor, well, you’re missing out on more money. Or more e-mail opt-ins. Or whatever it is that you do to monetize your site. Fewer clicks and more sales should always be the goal. You’ll improve those two metrics when your site successfully gets visitors to focus right away on the homepage and then proceed directly to checkout.
That’s where the “situational sell” can be your super-cybersalesperson. On a website, you can give visitors a few choices that best describe their situation, and entice them to click on the description that puts them into a specific segment of the market.
The situational sell is a way to pitch products and information strictly from the customer’s point of view. If you’re selling sports merchandise online, you would want to get customers to click on their favorite team right away, and then choose the item they want to buy. After all, a New York Yankees fan isn’t interested in looking at merchandise from the Arizona Cardinals. If you’re selling real estate, you could ask visitors if they’re buying a starter home, a vacation home, or just looking to remortgage an existing home. Think of the situational sell as pre-qualifying your visitors, before they get a chance to wander aimlessly through your site. If you pre-qualify them, you can funnel them through the sales process a lot faster.
One traffic school website who tried this tactic ended up increasing its email opt-ins by a whopping 60 percent! How did they do it? Instead of simply listing the names of the courses it offers, the website asks visitors what type of driver they are, literally. On the site you’ll see 3 boxes in a row in the main body area. Each box contains a unique headline, a photo to illustrate the idea, and a description of services within the category.
Box #1 contains the headline “New Driver?” and includes a picture of teenagers laughing and hanging out in a school parking lot. Box #2 carries the headline “Too Many Tickets?” and includes a picture of a driver getting a ticket. Finally, Box #3 has the headline “Trying to pass the state exam?” along with a picture of a recent immigrant holding paperwork.
Under the headlines, a series of links appear. This is also a great place to include your top-tier keywords. Once a visitor clicks on one of those links, he or she is guided to a page specifically geared to sell products or services to their demographic.
The beauty in setting up a ’situational sell’ website is that it’s a very flexible way to market one type of product to a wide selection of site visitors.
If you’re selling e-books or informational products, there will be different features or advantages that you’ll want to highlight, depending on the visitor. By segmenting your visitors first on your homepage, you can funnel them to specialized pitches.
The situational sell sounds logical because it is logical. But in the day-to-day minutia of maintaining a website, the big details sometimes get lost in the shuffle. Take a fresh look at your homepage and give your visitors a fresh perspective. Try the situational sell. It will make your visitors comfortable, they’ll feel as if you already understand their point of view, and you’ll most likely be rewarded with higher conversions.
While just about everyone agrees that informed key phrase selection is at the core of effective SEO (search engine optimization), many are surprised to find out that the self-same information also guides them to writing more effective sales copy.
How does researching key phrases help the quality of your sales copy? Because, by selecting the correct key phrases and building your copy around them, you’ll be answering the questions that are being asked by your potential customers.
To understand what I mean, think of why people use search engines in the first place - they’re looking for information and/or considering buying something. Every search has, at its core, a request or a question.
Connecting to your audience
Great sales copy connects with the reader. It has to. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t try to haul the reader round 180 degrees to a completely different viewpoint - it’ll lose them somewhere on the way. Instead, it has real empathy.
By following the discipline of building your copy around appropriate key phrases, you can ensure your Web site content dovetails perfectly with people’s expectations and really answers their questions.
If you’re selling holidays in Italy, for example, and someone types ‘weekends in Venice’ into Google, your optimized copy about weekends in Venice would almost certainly appeal more to your visitor than general copy selling weekends in Italy or about cruises that take in Venice.
And if it appeals more, you’re likely to sell more.
As an aside, it’s hardly surprising that most sites find they get better conversions from Organic optimization than from buying clicks from an online advertising system such as Google Adwords. Unless you’re very disciplined in matching the key phrases you’re buying, your ad text and your target pages, you’re almost certainly going to end up with a looser fit between the searcher’s needs and the site content you’re offering them.
How do your customers really think?
As a writer, I find key phrases are a fantastic guide to how customers actually think. For example, when was the last time you used the word ‘cheap’ in copy? It’s one of these abhorrent words that we must never use - corporate guidelines inevitably insist on ‘cost-effective’ or ‘good value’ or something; most copywriting gurus habitually warn us away from such words.
The problem is, for most of us, that’s how our customers think. Real people seldom use ‘good value’ or ‘high value’ or ‘competitively priced’. Time after time, our research shows people looking for ‘cheap’ and ‘low price’. Again, while you may argue that this may show people just looking for a bargain, I’d say it’s part of a larger and more important picture.
Key phrase research shows what kind of language is appropriate to our customers. If people are really looking for ‘low-cost flights’ - and they may be, given the number of times the phrase is used in the media - then we know that we can safely use that phrase in our communications. If people aren’t using it, then let’s use the expression they identify with.
If you sell large clothing, for example, you may habitually describe your clothing as ‘outsize’. I’d bet many more searches use the word ‘large’ or ‘big’. Use your industry jargon, and you may be running the risk of alienating your customers
Are you up to using everyday language?
The lesson we’ve learned time after time is that people really do use simple everyday language - and that goes for B2B as well as B2C transactions. And, to appeal to them, we should use simple everyday language, too.
But before you embrace a term like ‘cheap car hire’, make sure ‘cheap’ fits with your business and your business planning. Are you really happy to be seen as ‘cheap’? Are you ready to fight tooth and claw with your market’s most ruthless price-cutters? Do you even want customers who are looking for the cheapest?
You must be really clear why you’re choosing each and every key phrase and its implications for your business. And writing powerful copy without some of the familiar props of the copywriter’s trade is a challenge in itself. But that’s another piece entirely.
Applying key phrase research can so easily give you an unfair advantage. Make sure you seize the opportunity with both hands.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, wrote an illuminating book called Weaving the Web that I recommend all Web professionals read. Among the many profound ideas expressed are two concepts relevant here. One is the Semantic Web, which is explained as “The Web of data with meaning in the sense that a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it.” Metadata is the term used for data about data. Most Web pages today have embedded in the html code metadata that gives information about the Web page. Eventually, this information will become much more robust, allowing more intelligent searches to become a reality.
The Semantic Web may have the potential to help make the Internet an entity in its own right. Parallel processing, the connecting of computers to make super computers, has been in existence for some time now. In fact, that’s how the human brain operates, by conducting many operations at the same time.
The other fascinating idea Berners-Lee expressed in this landmark book is that his original idea for the Web involved much more of a two-way exchange of information. His original vision for the Web was one of collaboration. He wanted people to be able to post information to the Web as easily as it was to view information. Unfortunately, the latter has been embraced more readily by the general population.
But now we see the emergence of “Web 2.0″, a fairly new term that describes an innovative type of website that is built on the participation of its users. Blogs, wikis Podcasts and social networks all fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella. Today we are finally achieving what Berners-Lee had in mind all along. With websites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Squidoo, and Digg, non-technical users can now post information and contribute to the Web as easily as they can access it. The Web of the future will embrace this concept even more, causing its speed of growth to eclipse today’s rate.
It’s not difficult to see that the Web could be a vast parallel processing farm, that given enough artificial intelligence programming, the infusion of Semantic Web systems, and the constant additions from billions of intelligent beings (namely humans), it could have the potential of becoming something of a unified intelligence, a data sphere that surrounds the planet and is more powerful that the sum of its parts.
This concept of technology’s exponential growth turning onto something we cannot even imagine with the possibility of the Web becoming sentient is not new. Vernor Vinge, a retired Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University, a computer scientist and a science fiction author, wrote about the Singularity in a 1993 essay.
A super-intelligence emerging out of the Web was also written about by Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine in August 2005 and also published on KurzweilAI.com.
“. . . we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.
This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion “synapses” between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number-but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine [the Web of the future] is.”
An online search will yield many examples of bizarre concepts that existed only in science fiction later becoming reality. The Web is something that Earth has nevër seen before. It not only has the potential to connect everyone, but it can also extend every brain and grow exponentially. It may take a lot longer than anyone thinks, but eventually the Web of our future will be immensely different and much more powerful than anyone can possibly imagine today.
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