Netmark's Search Engine Marketing Blog

In Part 2 I discussed why using some HTML editors is a bad idea.  This time, I’ll discuss what you need to consider when creating your place in cyberspace (did I really just type that?).

I’ve been developing websites for a very long time. I’ve seen a lot of changes; audio and video being added to sites, adding the design of a site using an external file, addition of JavaScript (I told you I’ve been doing this a long time). In all this time two things have remained constant- content and navigation.

How you create your site will determine three things; how a visitor finds your site, how long a visitor stays on your site and whether or not someone will like your site enough to link to it.

Content
I’m sure you’ve heard the term “Content is King”. How true that phrase is. A lot of the “O” in SEO is re-writing content, or adding content to a site. If you don’t have any content on your site, then the search engines can’t figure out where you belong in the vastness of the ‘Net, and you won’t rank well.

Search engines are only one factor in the content game. If you have content that is either lacking, or not relevant then your visitors will not want to stay on your site, and they’ll hit the back button, and find a site that has what they are looking for (known as Bounce Rate).

Structure
Equally important is the structure of the site. The site’s structure consists of two things; navigation and page layout. Knowing a few things about typical browsing and viewing habits of people will help you decide what information to put where on the page.

Let’s start with your navigation. How you link your site together will determine how people browse your site. Your navigation should help guide them, but not restrict them. You want the visitor to be able to find what they are looking for easily, and without frustration. There are two links you should always have in your navigation- a link to the home page, and a contact link.

Let’s talk about the actual page structure. Search engines like content that is in book form. In other words your site should be structured using a combination of header tags (in descending order) and paragraphs that contain your relevant content. This will make it easy for the search engines to “read” your page and understand it’s contents, but it will also do the same for your human visitors as well. Really, humans and search engine bots aren’t that different.

Most importantly, you need to take the above advice, and also consider your target audience. For instance, if you have a site that is geared towards sight-impaired people, you would want to use contrasting colors (text vs. background) with larger than normal font sizes. If you have an ecommerce site, you’ll want to stick with a white/light background.

Now if this looks like too much work, or way to time consuming, then come back next time so I can give you some tips to look for when choosing a web developer.

In Part 1 of the series, I talked about how using a HTML editor is a bad idea. In this part, I’ll expand  more on why this is a bad idea, and let you in on some trade secrets.. well, not really but it’s some really good information.

HTML Editor Limitations
We run into clients all of the time that have used a web-based editor to create their site, usually provided by their hosting company. While you may think they are providing a great service, in reality they are costing you visitors, and even a high search engine position.

In the SEO world, we use certain HTML tags and Meta tags to tell the search engines certain information about your site, so they know better understand what your site is about. For instance, having the right title tag is very important. It helps tell the search engines what the page is about, which they use to decide how relevant your site is on a given topic.

The problem is that some editors, especially the web based ones, don’t let you control the title. The title you choose for one page, is really used site-wide, which is a no-no in Search Engine Marketing.

We’ve had problems with editors not using Header tags, using JavaScript for links (which search engines can’t read) and not allowing additional pages to be added to the site. These are just a few examples of things we have run into when optimizing clients’ sites that use this type of editor. I could tell you horror stories for hours on some of the things we’ve had to deal with, and some have even resulted into a complete rebuild and server move of a site.

Problems are not just limited to the web-based editors, but some of the software based programs cause some problems also, although not as severe. Some of the problems associated with software editors is proprietary code (Microsoft Front Page), code that only works in certain browsers and just plain badly formatted code (making your file size larger, which means slower load times).

If you have to use an editor, I would recommend Dreamweaver. While it’s code could be a bit cleaner, it’s not as bad as some, and the learning curve is pretty small.

Next time: Things to consider when building a website.

We seem to spend a lot of time hopelessly trying to talk our clients out of doing massive upgrades to their site. I think we all have a little bit of the “If you build it, they will come” mentality. We’re somehow convinced that if we build the biggest, baddest, best-looking website in the world, that the search engines will be magnetically pulled to its abounding beauty and the site will be an instant success. What we should really be thinking is, “if you promote it, they will come.”

There was a great article in Practical Ecommerce by Mat Greenfield about a year ago where Mat said that many of his clients spend 90% of their web budget on design, and only around 10% on “other stuff.” It’s sad how many beautiful websites that are out there in the webiverse that will never be seen by anyone but their owner, never be graced with the smooth touch of the GoogleBot, and will eventually die without ever having the chance to fulfill the measure of their creation: making a sale.

Web design is certainly important. A great looking website can help buyer confidence and trust and can be an outstanding sales tool for your company…. as long as you have traffic. I have often said that I would rather have a Plain Jane boring site with traffic, than a maxed out Cinderella site without traffic. Perfect Example: Craigslist.org vs. Oodle.com. Both classified ad sites that provide free listings. Oodle has a great look and feel, exciting images, and “oh so sweet” web 2.0 goodness. Craigslist on the other hand has a design that could very easily land it in the web design “Hall of Lame.” So which site would you rather own? Before you answer, just in case you’re not familiar with either site, Craigslist has about a billion times as much traffic.

So how can a site like Craigslist do it? If you’ve been thinking about spending a ton of money on web-design, this would be a good time to site back and say “Hmmmm….. I wonder if web-design isn’t really as important a factor as I think it is?”

Now before I give you the wrong idea and accidentally convince you to make your website out of sticks and mud, let me clarify a little: Having a good looking website is important. Having an AMAZING looking website with every conceivable bell and whistle, animations by Pixar that jump right out of the screen, celebrity endorsements, and a flux capacitor, really isn’t important. In my experience, the biggest result of having a boatload of additional features built-in to your website is that you get to do a boatload of upkeep.

I use this analogy often: A website without marketing is like a car without gas. You can have the nicest Rolls-Royce in the world, but if you spend everything on the car and don’t have any money left to put gas in the tank, it’s just a decoration, not a useful tool. You’d be much better off buying the junkiest 3 cylinder Geo Metro you could find, and having plenty of money left over for gas.

I got my start in ecommerce back in 2000, and I initially spent about $1000 on a website. The website didn’t look very good, but it worked, and people could order on it. After having the site for about a year, I was convinced that the boring design was detracting customers from making a purchase, and that a really high-end expensive website would make all the difference. We found some really great web designers and got the site redone for about $7500. We did notice an increase in sales, but it was slim, and certainly disappointing. Unfortunately, I had to learn many lessons the hard way, but eventually figured out that marketing, not design, was the key. By mid 2002 my company was spending over $20,000 a month just in pay-per-click fees, and making a very healthy profit margin. I have no doubt that the results would have been nearly the same with the previous “boring” site design we had.

One important factor in the story above that needs mention is that we were already making money before we made a large investment in web design. Many new site owners are under the impression that they need to spend tens of thousands of dollars just to launch a site. Not so. Websites are cheap these days and maintaining them is easier than ever. You compete with the big boys in your industry NOT by having the best design, but by doing the best marketing.

So, the moral of our story is:

• Web promotion will get you more business than web design
• It’s better to start off with an inexpensive, but decent looking website, then upgrade as your profits grow
• Make sure you save a healthy portion of your web budget for marketing

Despite how convincing my arguments are, many of the people I talk to are beyond convincing and I still hopelessly ramble on to the deaf ears of people who will spend their very last farthing on a new kitchen table while their cupboards are bare. But…… if I can save just one virtual soul from the hellish nightmare of being a lonely, unloved, cobweb ridden website in a death sentence of unvisited obscurity , it will all be worth it.

Maybe I should hire a celebrity spokesperson?

Create an ” SEO Valuable” Website

Today’s search engines, such as Google, are more focused on providing “valuable” and “relevant” information in the search results. What we mean by this is that they want to provide results or sites they think are going to be the most informative and helpful to the person performing the search. So what does this mean to us? Over all, it means we need to make sure our website is valuable and loaded with information about or related to the subject at hand. Don’t expect to receive good search rankings unless your site offers detailed information about or related to the subject matter, not just images and information about your organization, product or service. We mean quality information that would be helpful to people who are searching for information about or related to your “type” of organization, product or service. Here are a couple of examples:
•If your site is an auto seller website, you might also list helpful hints or ideas about car care for certain cars or parts, with a link or two to where the searcher could learn more about that car or even purchase parts for the car.
•If your site is designed to sell expensive products, you might also offer links to companies who provide financing for those products.
The bottom line on this topic is simple: Create a website that is designed to help your visitors find everything there is to know about your products and services by either offering the information within your website or providing links to sources of additional information. Keep in mind “One stop shop.”

The robots.txt file is used to control web spiders and other web robots on how they crawl your site. More often than not, this file is used to indicate which files and folder are NOT to be crawled, but one can also include the allowable files and folders to focus on. The robots.txt file can also used to point robots to the location of an xml sitemap.  The types of files that are excluded from crawling include content of the selected directories that might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorization of the site as a whole. For websites with multiple sub-domains, each sub-domain must have its own robots.txt file. Such directories to exclude might be a “scripts” directory or an application/database directory.

A typical robots.txt look like the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/
Crawl-delay: 10
Sitemap: /public_html/sitemap.xml

There’s nothing really complicated about this file. The star next to the User-agent field indicates that the entire directory should be crawled with the exception of anything in the disallow fields. The crawl-delay field is a way to control the rate at which the spider crawl your directories, in this case once every 10 seconds maximum. The Sitemap field points to the location of the xml sitemap.

Robots.txt should not be used to make part of a site private. This method would not work because the contents of robots.txt are in clear text and available for the world to see. It’s merely a way to control the spidering of a directory.

The Internet. What began as a United States Government mechanism to communicate during times of war or catastrophic event, has turned into a way for us to communicate, conduct business and even make purchases. These activities are usually done over a subset of the Internet we have come to know as the World Wide Web.

In the early days, the amount of people who knew how to create web sites was limited. Today, about 15 years since the WWW started to blossom, the amount of people who know how to create a web page has grown, but it is still limited.

“What?” You say? “I don’t believe that.” OK, let me explain.

The advent of HTML Editing programs (both software based, and hosted-web based) has given the misconception that anyone can create a web page. While technically that is true, how effective is that web site. Really, if you have Microsoft Word, or any variation, you can take a document and publish it to HTML, and post it on a server.

I should also point out that not all HTML is created equal. The code that most, if not all, of these programs (especially MS Word) is horrific. While the browsers can read the code, it may not display properly, and it may have a very slow load time due to extra & needless code that is used by these programs.

There are several factors that need to be considered when creating a web page, some are technical, some are from a marketing perspective and others are common sense. An HTML editor doesn’t consider these things, it just spits out HTML.

In the coming weeks, I’ll explore all of the considerations needed when creating a website, and I’ll even show you choose a web designer.

If the main underlying purpose of your website is to market your organization or expose a targeted customer to your products or services, then the need to rank well AND be found on at least the first page of the Internet’s top search engines and directories is extremely important.
With that being said, the question is posed: How? How does any company, small or large, achieve reasonable search engine rankings? Some of you may already have an idea, and some of the answers may surprise you…
The first thing you will have to commit to is hard work. Like so many other things in life, achieving high search engine rankings takes a great effort. There are no free rankings in search engine optimization. Your website will need to be updated with new content regularly, keywords and key phrases must be monitored frequently, link building is a must, and, and, and….
We often describe SEO as a constant game of cat and mouse. Search Engines and Directories such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are constantly adjusting and improving their algorithms and weighting criteria, which affect how sites are ranked day to day. We, the website administrators of the world, are constantly monitoring results, researching, and adjusting our efforts to keep up with these changes.  That’s a full time job in itself…

For a continuation of my thoughts on SEO, please stay tuned in next Wednesday!

A Step in the Right Direction for SEO
Back in the day if you wanted to know the online search volume for any word you used the Overture Keyword Selector Tool.  So why do I say “back in the day.”  Because nobody uses the Overture tool anymore.  In early 2007 the tool became unsupported and the information it provided, outdated.  Then in mid-2007 our company noticed that the tool only worked on occasion.  By the end of 2007, the tool was so unreliable we were no longer wasting our time trying to access its results.  As a matter of fact, I just typed in the Overture tool URL and realized it now redirects you to the Yahoo! Small Business page.  Wow, the tool doesn’t even exist anymore.

Sure there’s Wordtracker, but please, does anybody believe that a keyword tool that uses data collected from the metacrawler search engines, Dogpile and MetaCrawler, is accurate.  The metacrawlers only represent approximately 1% of search.  What do they know about Google?  Then there are the services you have to pay for, which are OK, but I wonder how accurate the data they provide is.  I’m the kind of guy that wants to see the data from the source.  Plus it was nice that the Overture keyword tool was free.

So what do SEO’s have to rely on these days for keyword search volume?  You guessed it: Google.  The Google Keyword Tool has been around for a long time, but it’s always rated search volume with a little bar, filled with green ink, that I had to imagine was on a scale from 1-10.  The problem was that even though I could guess a keyword’s position on the scale (i.e. 3 or 4), I still didn’t know what that position actually meant in terms of search volume.  Now I do, and I was right to be to question the results.  For those of you that haven’t figured it out yet, the Google keyword tool now returns the search volume of a word instead of a bar with partially filled green ink.  The information it provides is great, but it’s really been an eye opener.  Like I suspected, the old partially filled bar system inaccurately reported results.  Take the word “SEO” for example.  Under Google’s old system, “SEO” returned a fully filled green bar.  I used to interpret this to mean 10 in terms of a scale from 1-10.  Now Google’s tool says that its average monthly search volume is 1,000,000 searches.  Now look at the phrase “SEO Tools,” which I believe was also a 10 (or very near) before the switch.  According to the Google tool, “SEO Tools” is searched approximately 18,100 times per month.  Big difference, huh.

That being said, I’m glad to see Google now reporting search the way they are.  The data is a lot more meaningful and a lot more helpful.  Sure Google’s data may be inaccurate at times, but I’ll bet it’s better than the alternatives.