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.

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!