When will you see results?

When SEOs hear this question, we begin to behave like people who are legally required to give warnings. "It's impossible to guarantee particular results," we caution people. "Your results may vary. This is marketing, not magic, that we're doing here, and we all know that no marketing should be undertaken without a firm commitment to five months' worth of effort. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Side effects may include euphoria, excessive googling, and dependence on your refresh button."

We're right to be cautious. Scammers abound in SEO, and people sometimes start out with unrealistic expectations. There are also factors that aren't under our control. We can't honestly guarantee specific search results, and even awesome search results don't guarantee awesome sales.

Truthfully, the answer to "When will I see results?" is, "Who knows?"

I still like to think about the time I brought a brand-new website to #1 at Google (I think it started on page 6 or so) in a day and a half. It was moving so fast that the ranking tools literally couldn't keep up with it, and were reporting it on the second page when I could see it at #3 on my computer. The website was a little late getting finished, and it had to be demonstrated at a seminar in two days --and of course it had to come up first on Google. I put in five hours of linkbuilding, and the next day there it was, at #1. It's still there. That calls for a contented sigh, doesn't it?

I'm also glad to say that a new blog I'm working on has shown up at number one for its company initials and town in one week.

I think I've already whined about my own website taking three weeks to reach #1, though, haven't I? There was a company that took me a month, and it never really did as well for some of the keywords as I wanted it to. And there was actually one company that I couldn't get to #1 for its name -- I have good excuses for that #2 ranking, don't worry, but I'm not going to list them. Because it doesn't even matter. It's marketing, not magic, and there are no guarantees.

When asked, I usually assure clients that they should see results in a couple of weeks. That's my experience.

But results may vary. No marketing effort should be undertaken without a firm commitment to five months' worth of effort. And you have a right to remain silent.
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Are Directories Worth It?

I get these automatic announcements listing people needing a writer. Often they want something like twenty-four 500 word articles on various subjects each week in perfect English on a variety of topics for $10 a week, and they want you to know they'll be running it through a plagiarism screen, or a 300 page e-book, with the possibility of earning up to $80 if it sells well! Or maybe they need someone to write fake reviews of products under several different names, or papers with perfect grammar on a variety of academic subjects for sale to students.

But arguably the most depressing ones ask for Top Quality Linkbuilders to get Premium Quality One Way links for their dubious products at one cent per verified link. Frequently these ads specify NO DIRECTORIES.

Now, I don't know what kind of person, let alone what kind of business, can place an ad like this without shame. But they clearly are ignorant when it comes to SEO. Directories are basics of foundational linkbuilding.

For one thing, people use them. Phonebooks are directories. The internet has replaced the phonebook in most households, and folks who are going to their computers to look for something they used to find in the phone book really don't want a nice collection of articles and blog posts mentioning Italian restaurants in their town. They want a list, organized in some useful way. In other words, they want a directory.

Directories have gotten a bad name because there are so many that aren't really directories at all. That page with eye doctors in the UK, Malaysian pet stores, and Russian mail-order brides among the 171 links? Not a directory. That's just a link farm.

How can you tell which directories are worth your time? Here are some questions to ask to determine whether you've chosen a good directory:

• Is it relevant to your business? Teacher Sourcebook is a fantastic choice for my education-related clients, sending plenty of traffic even with free listings. Lists of health sites at schools and libraries were great for an alternative medicine blogger I did a linkbuilding campaign for. Directories of handmade jewelry sites will appeal to people who actually want to buy handmade jewelry. Relevant lists will not only give you more value for search, but they will also send traffic, since those are the directories people turn to most often.


• Are there humans involved? I get a fair amount of traffic from blog directories. Yesterday I submitted my blog to Bloglisting.net. Almost immediately, I had a response asking for a reply to the email. You know I do this a lot for various clients, so I get lots of "click to verify" emails, and I figured this was just one more. I wrote a thank you message, of course -- I always do, just in case a human being sees it -- and right away I got back another email. It suggested that mentioning the URL of my blog would make it easier for the writer to find it. An actual human being! This level of proof is unusual, but watch for "human edited" and other signs that sentient beings are involved in the directory. It makes it far more likely that your listing will be placed where people will find it.


• Is it a respectable site? PageRank is a good indicator at least in some cases, but actually looking at the site is strongly recommended. The student health page at a university website is so much better for your business's reputation than the Saucy Co-eds page at wurldsbestestwebsites! On a less obvious level, an actual local business directory will be more beneficial to you than a fake one -- you can tell the difference by the number of actual local businesses listed. Automatic directory submissions not only won't allow you to judge the quality of the sites you're considering, they also won't get you links at the worthwhile ones.

So put the time into getting your business listed in the right directories. Then watch to see which ones send you traffic, and consider paid listings with them.
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Commenting for Links

I've got a linkbuilding campaign to work on today, for an artist who makes steampunk jewelry, a thing I'd never heard of a week ago.

Links are like votes for the trustworthiness and usefulness of your website, so of course we all want links. And one way people get links is by leaving comments at blogs and forums. Many of these places are nofollow (that is, they don't give a vote for your site), but not all of them are. So this can be a useful strategy for the linkbuilder.

There are three kinds of comments with links.

• Real comments. After all, blogs and forums are communities. We get to know one another and have things we want to say to each other. We read things and have an addition to make to the conversation. Leaving your website along with your name in real comments is entirely appropriate. You're a member of the community, people might want to know more about you, and these links can help people find you.
• Comments intentionally left for the sake of a link. This isn't necessarily bad. "Patroller" left this comment at my post on "Website Maintenance Without Tears": "Well, I think one of the best indicators if a website service provider really can provide the service you need is to check its own site--if its site is well-designed and well-optimized. " It's a useful suggestion, too. "Patroller" has a hidden profile and left a prominent link to his or her website, so it's an intentionally-dropped link, but it gets to stay. The link is relevant and might be useful to the people who visit here.
• Comment spam. "Susan" left this comment:"I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often." Along with this content-free comment is a link to a suspicious looking insurance brokerage site. I responded, gave "Susan" a chance to correct my false impression if it wasn't spam, and then deleted that comment.

So how can you get beneficial links with comments?

• First, consider actually becoming a contributing member of the community. I post comments in a variety of communities to which I actually belong. For example, I often post in educational communities. Sure, I leave my clients' web addresses when there's a spot for a URL, but I am a real-live educator and I am actually reading and adding to the discussions. I'm entitled. And my clients, who provide actual useful goods and services for educators, are also entitled to those links. It's the difference between giving your business card to an interested person you've met and connected with, and slipping it under a stranger's windshield wiper in the parking lot. Which do you think is more effective?
• Leave helpful comments. When you can answer a question, make a useful suggestion, or offer a valuable reference, do so. Then you've earned your link. While we do sometimes want to say, "Great post!", especially to people we know (see the point above), skipping all over the internet leaving "Great post! MY LINK" is spam. And you should leave helpful comments even when you don't get a link out of it, at least sometimes. Even including a link to someone else's website that would be more useful in that particular case. If you use your real name when you do this, you may even gain some name recognition from casting your bread upon the waters in this way.
• Drop your links where they will do some good. They should do some good for the visitors, certainly. "Patroller" offers a useful service which I might want to use sometime myself. But I think that a lot of comment spam is placed by low quality linkbuilders earning a penny a post. Even if I left the comment "Susan" posted, you're not going to go and sign up with her client's shady insurance service, are you? You need to place your links where your customers might be. For that kind of website, you need a much lower level of mental functioning than we're using here. Even if you have (as I'm sure you do) a respectable business, it doesn't make sense to leave links in places where your customers don't go. Search engines will only give you credit for relevant links, anyway.

We're back again to saying you need to be honest, upright, and true with your SEO. It isn't news, perhaps, but it's still true.

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Choosing Keywords: the Basics

Recently, I've worked with two websites which had, among their keywords, the single word "quality." I've also worked with two websites which had no meta keywords at all.

This experience reminded me that I have never really discussed here the basics of choosing keywords.

I've talked about how to use keywords once you've gotten them chosen. I've talked about the value of temporary seasonal keywords. But I don't believe that I've ever said, "You ought to have some keywords, and none of them should be 'quality.'"

Probably we need to get one thing out of the way first. There are those who will tell you that putting a list of keywords into the invisible section of your website, along with your title and description, is a waste of time. This is true if you are trying to trick people into paying you for cheap Viagra. For honest people honestly selling an honest product or service, those keywords are valuable. They're a noticeable (to search engines) part of your content, and they tell the search engines what you think is most important about your website.

Herewith, three simple rules for choosing good keywrods:

• Your keywords must be things that human beings type into search pages. Can you imagine a human being sitting down and thinking, "I wonder where I can find those goods and services I need... I guess I'll just type in the word 'quality' and see if that works"? Neither can I. People type in the name of the thing they want, and sometimes the geographical location where they want to find it. They also type in particular information they need. So you shouldn't choose random words that happen to be on your web page. You shouldn't choose words that you'd like to have associated with your company in people's minds. You shouldn't choose words that strike you as meaningful, philosophically. Just pick words people who are looking for someone like you will use.


• Your keywords should be things you can compete for. Companies that promise you #1 Google rankings know that it's very easy to get #1 for some terms and very hard to do so for others -- that's the basis of their promise. I was at #1 for "glow in the dark skeleton dice" once with absolutely no effort on my part. But your chances of being #1, or even on the front page, for a term like "books" is very slim. Even if you sell books and your target customers are people so unfamiliar with books and with search engines that their first thought upon feeling a desire to buy a book is to type "books" in the box at Yahoo, you still aren't going to show up in the top left-hand triangle on the search results. "Books" just isn't a good keyword.
  
• Your keywords should be in your content. If you're being honest about your website and doing a good job with your content, then the words and phrases that make the best keywords for you will also be elsewhere on your page. I've seen many cases where that wasn't what happened. Maybe all of your text is embedded in graphics and therefore unreadable to search engines. Maybe you have a moody picture on your homepage, or a giant logo, and no text at all. Maybe your homepage talks about only one thing your company does, but there are other things you think are equally important, so you want them in your keywords. In all these cases, you're making mistakes with your content. Don't compound them by trying to let your keywords make up for the mistakes.

When I do keyword development for a client, I look at a lot of data. I ask a lot of questions, and encourage the client to ask some, too. There are some specific things that make one set of keywords better for one particular situation than another.

For example, my own clients often are savvy businesspeople who know they need a strong internet presence for success in their business in the 21st century -- but don't know a whole lot about search engines or internet marketing. I know this, because I've been there. When I was looking for an SEO expert for the store I managed, I didn't know the term "SEO," so I didn't type "SEO Fayetteville Arkansas" into the little box at Google, and I never did find anyone locally to help me.

Instead, I had to go to the trouble of becoming an SEO expert myself. So of course when I chose the keywords for my own website, I used terms like "online marketing" -- phrases that occur to people like my clients when they search for the kind of help I can offer. I think that the people who were billing themselves as SEO experts probably couldn't really have helped me, actually, since they weren't able to make their websites visible to me back when I was desperately seeking that help.

Don't make this error with the people who are looking for you. Choose your keywords well. Then use them consistently. The search engines want to help your prospective customers find you. Make it easy for them.

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Planning to Fail

I'm working on a comprehensive comparison of all the ways artists and craftspeople can achieve an online presence. I'm enjoying the research, but one thing keeps coming up.

The artists and craftspeople I'm talking with haven't calculated their profit margins. They don't know what their costs are, or what their profit is.I found this a little surprising. At first I thought it might be a disinclination to do math.

Then it hit me: they're planning to fail.

The things these talented artists say make sense only if they are figuring that they will never sell anything.

If you won't sell anything, then your best bet is to have the least possible upfront expenditure. It doesn't matter whether you lose money every time you sell something, or if your return on investment won't improve with greater sales. It really doesn't matter what kind of financial arrangements you have, or whether you even know what your costs are -- if you won't sell anything.

Their plans for getting online are the equivalent of setting their works of art out on a street corner with a hat placed nearby in case someone feels like giving them some money.

I'm not saying that their problem is that they're not willing to put up some funds. Many of them phrase it that way, but often they have put significant investments into their art, and into their online presence as well. Some are spending more than they should, even while they say they don't want to make an investment. Many spend startling amounts of time working on their self-promotion, and for the self-employed, time is definitely money.

But in many cases they're doing these things in quirky, unplanned ways. Tentative ways. Extremely unbusinesslike ways.

Ways that only make sense if they want to be ready to pull back at any moment. Ways that only make sense if they really plan to fail.

If you have any intention at all of succeeding, it's worth doing a little calculation. It might even increase your chances of success.

Accessibility and Visibility for Your Website

The website above is directed toward people with disabilities.





Here's a website for a company whose typical customer is an older adult.

See any problems?

If you don't, then you're a young (or relatively young) person with good eyesight. The pale blue website at the top, and the purple-on-purple one at the bottom are both hard to read for everyone else.



Compare the first two examples with this one. Here, black text on a white background gives maximum contrast and there is even a feature allowing readers to increase the font size.

Nowadays, I hope we all understand the importance of making our web designs as accessible as possible, using standards-compliant code so that people using special adaptive technology can use our pages just as those using common browsers can. But sometimes we -- at least those of us who are young and have good eyesight -- forget the very basic idea of high contrast.

White on black is always a safe choice, but any strong, dark color on a pale color can do the trick. Unless you're quite sure that none of your customers have any issues with vision, including simply being older, you're better off keeping your important stuff in dark text on a pale ground.

Ignoring that suggestion can mean sending your limited-vision visitors away to your competition very quickly -- long before they've had a chance to buy something cool from your cool website to give to their grandkids.

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Refresh Your Blog

We've talked before about the good things your blog can do for your business. It can bring you traffic, give you links, provide a valuable service to your customers and clients, and increase return visits to your website. A good blog is a lot like the interactions you have with the people who visit your physical place of business.

Not every blog will do these things, though. Some blogs are better at these jobs than others. So what if your business has a blog, but it's not doing what you need it to do?

A little refreshment is in order.

I've been freshening up a client's old blog while her new website is being built.

The blog was written by a worker who has now left the company, so it needs an update to reflect the new people who will be writing it. It also had some problems from a business standpoint, and needed a little work for that reason, too. In this kind of case, your first thought might be just to start a completely new blog.

However, it has been in at least a tenuous existence for years. There are pictures of clients there, and descriptions of happy times at the organization. There are things worth saving.

There are also advantages to having an established blog. People who visit a blog and see only a post or two are less likely to return. Blog catalogs and webrings may not list an obviously new blog.

The best choice in a case like this is to freshen the blog up a bit.

Here's a bit of a page from the old blog. We can see that there are some negatives here. For one thing, there are only a couple of posts a month.

We can see that, while this blog has been here for years, it hasn't been being posted to regularly during that time.

We can also see that there is some sloppy content. In this example, there's html showing on the page -- not desirable. Other posts have spelling and punctuation errors, random font variation from having cut and pasted things, and even some stuff that has been taken from other sources without attribution.

There are some technical trouble too: pictures missing and broken links.

So how do we fix all this?

• Freshen the whole blog up by getting in and editing the posts. Some should probably be deleted, but all should be proofread and have any bad links or other problems fixed. Remember, both search engines and humans consider you more trustworthy when you have clean copy. This may not be fair -- I'm not aware of any studies proving that bad spellers are bad people -- but it's the reality.


• Use your keywords. While you're cleaning up past entries, make sure to include your keywords. As we've discussed before, if you've chosen your keywords correctly, it should be natural to include them when you're writing about your business and your own field of expertise. Using the same keywords in your blog as at other pages in your website will help the search engines realize that they should offer your blog to people searching for your services. Don't forget the alt tags!


• Fill in the blanks. If posting has been sporadic in the past, you'll need to fill in with some new posts. Don't think this is dishonest in any way. Your organization had news during all those months that should have been posted. Comb your files for news stories, press releases, pictures, and information from the past. It's important to do this for the SEO benefits of having an established blog, and also so that visitors can browse through your archives and see what your company is like. Just think of it as finishing up an unfinished task.


• Make the blog match the website, or the rest of the website. Many of us use handy free blogging services, and this client was one who did so. But the blog is completely different in look and in web address from the website. There wasn't even a good link back to the company's main website. The organization is having the blog styled to match their main site (this blog that you're reading has had that done, too, by the clever people at Sharp Hue). At the very least, choose colors that match your main site, and make yourself a good link back to your home page.

Now go celebrate the fact that your old blog with its flaws can rise again as a fresh, new blog that will do your business good.

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Google Analytics Has a New Look

Google Analytics has a new look, and some cool new options, too. These are in beta testing, so you may not be seeing it yet, but it's something to look forward to if it hasn't shown up on your account quite yet.

One of the things I really like is that you can now see how your accounts are doing in terms of visitors on the first screen. You can see how this looks at left. Each account shows the visits for the current month in comparison with the previous month. You can also see bounce rate, completed goals, and average time on site at a glance.

This way, when you're in a hurry, you can just see all those nice up arrows and move on to any specific questions you're keeping track of -- or on to an early meeting or the gym, for that matter.

As for the specific questions, you can now configure custom reports. If what you really want to know is what keywords your local traffic is using to reach you, or whether new visitors go to your "about" page, just tell analytics so, and you'll get specific reports for that data.

This option gives you all the usual choices, and you can choose multiple variables, too.

You can see on the right that the report is in the familiar format, so the learning curve is very gentle.

This can be a time-saver, for sure. I think it would also be a boon for those who don't care to steep themselves in data. I know you're out there.

Going Viral

One of my clients has had a bit of online luck: an article at her website was bookmarked at one of the big bookmarking sites, and she's getting thousands of visitors a day from it. Views for that particular page are up 91,600%.

I'm calling this a bit of luck because that's what it is. The client in question is off on a cruise, the page has been at her website for years, it's been bookmarked before, but this time it just somehow caught people's fancy and traffic is taking off.

You can find advice on how to try to fake this effect elsewhere. I don't think that faking things is ever good business in the long run, but I'll tell you how to be poised for this kind of good luck, and what to do with it when it happens.

• Have good content. A keyword-stuffed ad or computer-generated article isn't going to go viral. What's more, if you have good content at your website, your visitors will find it useful and come back to visit you again, which is the whole point, whether you get that 15 minutes of internet fame or not.
• Have a call to action. I've seen this happen before. One occasion was when a lesson plan at my educational blog suddenly caught on. I was amazed. It was a last minute Leap Day lesson plan, on February 29th, and I figured it would be a help for a few teachers who had forgotten to prepare. I was in-house at the time, and my colleagues and I stood there and watched thousands of visitors arriving and wished we had been selling something. If my client weren't on a cruise, or someone else had access to the page in question, she could quickly add a contact form offering a subscription, or at least a button saying "Enjoyed this article? Visit my bookstore!" with a handy link. The best plan is to have an opportunity for conversion on all your pages, just in case. (The client is going to find a wi-fi cafe at her next port of call, you can be sure.)
  
• Have Analytics installed. My client knew about this opportunity because she is one of my clients. I watch her Analytics, and when I saw the traffic coming in from the bookmark, I alerted her and made suggestions for ways to turn these chance visitors into happy customers. Otherwise, she would never have known. Whether you use Gooogle Analytics or another type of site analysis tool, make sure you're keeping an eye on your visitors. That way, you can respond appropriately to bits of internet good luck.

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On Being a Search Engine Optimist

Yesterday, I went to visit Dr. Tom Hapgood's web design class. They're designing a website for a nonprofit organization. I'm writing the content, and we're all doing it out of the goodness of our hearts (and in the students' case, for a grade). I was of course pleased to be able to help out, and I'm looking forward to seeing their designs. The class was in the art building, so I have high hopes for creativity and innovation, and I hear they're strict about their code, too.

I was also interested to see how they handled the client interview.

I had just come from a client interview myself. I sat down with my new client and had a little heart-to-heart with her about her website. We talked about what she wanted it to do for her business, and what kind of budget she had in mind. We looked at the performance of her current website, checked out the navigation on her site in comparison with some well-designed sites and thought about the experience her customers had when they visited the old site and what we wanted them to experience when they visited the new one. I showed her the code for her current site and explained a bit about the metalanguage and how the search engines work. We discussed possibilities at different price points and what they'd do for her.

In the classroom, filthy lucre didn't enter the conversation at all, except when I mentioned the whole donations and development aspect. That made the interview quite different from my usual interviews.

The other thing that was different from my client interviews was that we hardly discussed search at all.

To me, design is mostly about search and conversions. Usability is key, of course, and I hope I always think of the humans who use a site. I can also appreciate the art -- my own website is a thing of beauty, and therefore a joy forever -- even though I leave that part to the artists. But mostly I'm all about ROI. So inevitably I brought search up at one point in yesterday's class meeting.

A clever student had asked what parts of the site should be accessible for updates.

Search engines like updates, so I also like updates. If I have access to a client's site and a little free time, I'll go in and find something to update. It doesn't really matter whether it needs updating. The point is to say, "Yoo hoo! Search engines! Something going on over here! Come and look!" So from my point of view, anything that can be updated is good.

I was expressing this to the class. Dr. Hapgood has just been reading about search engine optimization or, as he prefers to call it, search engine management.

"There are search engine optimists," he said, and then frowned. The term sounded a little odd. "People who do search engine optimizing."

I loved that. Mostly we call ourselves SEOs or SEO professionals, but I think I'd like to be a search engine optimist.

The entire class is being taught proper, standards compliant coding. They had been having a discussion of site architecture, complete with a flow chart and boxes on the white board. Dr. Hapgood mentioned punctuation. All good signs for the future of web design, I'm sure you'll agree.

The sight of all these bright young people training to be good at web design made me feel quite optimistic.

But I don't want to replace optimization with optimism. I was able to assure the students quite truthfully that a well-written, well-designed website has an advantage for search. However, we have to admit to ourselves that search engines aren't human, and therefore can't appreciate beauty, creativity, or the hard work designers put into their creations.

We have to understand the behavior of both the search engines and the human searchers. Then, with our websites both beautifully designed and skillfully optimized, we can be justifiably optimistic about the future.

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Website Maintenance Without Tears

There is a famous play called "French Without Tears," based on a really old joke which I guess wouldn't be funny to any of us nowadays. I thought of the phrase, though, when I saw an ad last night for "web design without the torture."

Just as was once the case for "French Without Tears," I think most of us get the joke of "web design without the torture" immediately.

I was trying to explain this recently to the web designer I usually work with, Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue, Inc. We were talking about web maintenance. Shan probably doesn't like the way I occasionally say disparaging things about webmasters, designers, web hosts, and others of that ilk.

"There's usually a reason for delays in web maintenance," he says austerely, doubtless thinking that I am an anti-tech guy bigot of some kind. After all, nearly all of his clients have the same webmaster: him. My clients have all kinds of different people looking after their websites.

"I don't think you understand," I said. "You never have to try to get someone to make changes at a website."

He stared at me uncomprehendingly.

"See, for most businesspeople, all contact with their webmasters is frustrating and difficult. For example, one of the first things I do with most clients is help them get their Google Analytics installed. This rarely takes less than a month."

More uncomprehending staring ensued.

In case you don't know what's involved in installing Google Analytics, I'll tell you. I email a snippet of code to the webmaster. The webmaster copies it, finds the place on the page of html where it says "body", and copies the snippet into that spot.

Yes, this normally takes a month.

Shan and I recently solved a problem for a client. Here's the timetable:

• Thursday: Client and I brainstorm about the problem and come up with a solution. I email Shan to ask him to save some time on his calendar for the client's little problem. Client gets to work on the data.


• Saturday evening: Client emails data to us.


• Sunday evening: Shan asks for a content fix to work with the new update. I write it and send it over.


• Monday morning: the website is fixed. Cost over the initial price of creating the website: nothing.

I'm not telling you this to brag. I'm telling you this because, if your experience is like that of many businesspeople, you had no idea that was normal. It is.

To put it bluntly, the industry standard for service in the web industry overall is terrible. Why?

• Many of the people doing this work are incompetent. If you were to do an internet search for advice to people starting up web design businesses, SEO businesses, and the like, you'd be amazed to see that many of them suggest going ahead and getting started with however little skill you have developed by playing around with open source software in your free time, and counting on improving as you go along. If you read the things written by people offering their services as web content writers, you'd be amazed at how few of them can write comprehensible paragraphs. The simple fact is that anyone at all can set up shop as a webhost, SEO, or designer. If you don't know much about this type of work, then you are at the mercy of whoever you choose.
• Many of the people doing this work are overworked. There is a lot of demand for work of this kind. There is also a fairly high level of crisis response in this industry. The stereotype of information workers toiling far into the night is based on reality. For a variety of reasons, your webmaster is likely to be very busy. If there are new projects backed up and perhaps a tech crisis or two going on, then your routine work may get put on the back burner and stay there.

What's the solution?

• Choose wisely to begin with. Before you pick a firm to do your web design or hosting, look at their portfolio. Ask about their training. Check their search rankings. Get someone who can read html to look at their code for you and make sure it's up to date. Ask for references. Make sure you understand what they plan to do for you; if they can't make themselves clear in their sales pitch, then they aren't going to be able to communicate well with you about problems or changes.


• Don't accept poor service. It's nice to stick with one firm, but if they aren't responsive to your needs, then it's not hard to change to another. Sometimes businesspeople stick with what they have just because it's so hard that they figure changing to another firm will be even more difficult. However, as long as consumers accept this sort of treatment, it will continue.


• Be as professional as you expect your web people to be. When you need changes, make every effort to get what you want done clear in your own mind, so your web professionals can do what you want done. Ask upfront what the charge will be, so you won't be shocked by the bill when it arrives. If you can't tell whether what you're asking for is a large job or a small one, ask how long it should take and when it will be finished. If your people are fully booked for months out into the future and you don't want to wait, let them know that you'd love to have them do the job but you don't have enough lead time and ask if they'll refer you to someone else. If you plan to stick with them in the future, say so and find out how far out they need advance notice of maintenance work.

If all this reminds you a bit of the classic advice for dealing with doctors and mechanics, you're not far out. After all, your web professionals are supposed to have specialized knowledge you don't, and to use that knowledge to serve you. Without tears or torture.

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Another Way to Look at Keywords

A client asked me a very good question: "Remember in the last couple of months when people searched for election bulletin boards, we came up third in Google? Can we make that happen with other products? Explain that process to me."

This client is still on the front page for that phrase. In fact, here are the top keywords for her catalog this month, according to Google Analytics:

1. election bulletin boards
2. halloween bulletin board
3. election bulletin board
4. election bulletin board ideas
5. presidential election bulletin boards

Later on, she has "presidential bulletin boards," "bulletin board election," and then this little grouping:

33. election bulentin boards
34. election bulletin board set
35. election theme bulletin boards

That's not all!

54. "election bulletin board"
55. 20 drawer mobile organizer
56. 20 weekly word study poetry packets scholastic k-1
57. 2008 election bulletin boards
58. 2008 presidential election bulletin board

Skip down a bit more:

97. bulletin board for election
98. bulletin board for elections
99. bulletin board halloween
100. bulletin board ideas for election time

One hundred is enough. You can see that among the top hundred keywords people used to visit this online store's catalog in the past month, 15 were about election bulletin boards. Since she has had visitors to 1,261 different pages of product, that's noticeable.

Now, I need to tell you that this client has a small store in a small town. She's not a giant chain. Her webmasters recommend that she work only on the keyword "Arkansas teacher store." But I say that, when someone in a completely different state looks for an election bulletin board, they might just as well get that bulletin board from my client as from a giant chain. And she has been shipping her election bulletin boards all over the country, too.

Looking at the Navigation Summary for just one of the election-themed bulletin boards she offers, we can see that the vast majority came from Google, searching for one of those keywords. Another significant proportion came from Google images.

Many people in SEO belittle the Google image search. People who use image search, they figure, are just coming to steal a picture, or maybe to look at it for a second. They're frivolous searchers, not real customers. I beg to differ. If you want to buy a bulletin board, an image search is a great way to find one.

And if you do a Google image search for "presidential election bulletin boards," my client's catalog is the #1 result.

Now, presidential election bulletin boards aren't going to be a big seller again any time soon. We don't want to use these phrases in the client's homepage meta language or add them to the memorized keywords she now uses in all her materials. These are temporarily important keywords. We now want, as she says, to do that with other products.

In her case, we'll want to get Thanksgiving bulletin boards, Christmas bulletin boards, probably gingerbread houses -- I'll have to ask her what she wants to sell most of in the next few weeks.

The thing is, bulletin board sets are a commodity. Any teacher store can sell you pretty much the same ones, at the same price. True, my client is particularly sweet and fun and has a really cute dog in her store, so you have good reasons to buy from her, but the search engines don't know that. They have no reason to serve up her store for a bulletin board instead of someone else's. My job is to give them a reason.

Here's how:

• Make the target items featured products at your catalog, or use whatever other methods you have available to you to make them stand out a bit. This often depends more on your particular ecommerce solution than on what's optimal, so we'll leave it at that.
• Get those target items into some useful content somewhere on the web. You can write articles, mention them in your blog, ask other bloggers to review them for you (plan to send one along to the blogger in question), or post about them at social media sites. This method works best if you do a good job on the posting and put it somewhere that actual customers who actually want the item visit. Since I write an educational blog, and also a store blog for this particular client, I ran several posts on election lesson plans at one and election bulletin boards at the other.
• Do your SEO for that content. Since I know there are lots of election lesson plans on the web at this time of year, including plenty at sites like PBS.org with whom I don't really try to compete, I went for the long tail. I've been on the front page for "Preschool Election Lesson Plans" for three months now. It's a useful post, too, and has had 2,964 views, plus of course subscribers reading it on feeds. Don't discount the value of narrowly-focused content.
• Include links, and pay attention to anchor text. I use anchor text like "election bulletin boards." I add pictures, and use alt tags with them like "election bulletin board." Not the name of the store, not "teacher supply store" (though I'm happy to say that this client is #5 at Google for that useful phrase, right under the multi-million dollar chains), not the product number. I use the keywords people are going to use to search for those products. The links go to the items at the catalog. This will drive traffic as well as telling the search engines that you have those products at your catalog.

When you do this, the search engines notice that you have the products in question. They figure they might as well offer searchers your election bulletin boards as anybody else's. You get to the top of that page for those searches.

Then you move on to the next target. Remember, we're not talking here about your basic, foundation keywords. We're talking about which of your many products you want to focus on next month. Not that the advice above won't work for your foundational keywords, too.

But think about it: if my client's store is high on search for election bulletin boards and Hallowe'en bulletin boards, is it so surprising that she's the only small rural store on the front page for "teacher supply store"? Doing this work for your temporary keywords -- seasonal items or special offers or topics you're focusing on right now at your blog -- pays off in the long run for the overall strength of your website.

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Checking Out the Competition

I have a confession to make.

Checking out the competition brings out the worst in me.

Basically, I'm a kind person. I bake cookies for the office and give to charity, and I would help old ladies across the street if I knew any old ladies who wanted that service. I'm not even all that competitive, for someone who works in marketing. I'm not a stickler for the rules in Scrabble and I don't shout at ball games.

But somehow checking out the competition leads me to say things like, "You know, you could mop the floor with them" to clients, and I can't swear that I don't have a mad glint in my eye when I say it.

It might be better for my character not to check out the competition, but it has to be done in this job. It isn't essential to go, as I do, and sneer at their punctuation or look pityingly at their links. That is optional. The important thing is to steal their strategies. Ahem, to learn from their marketing efforts.

The first step is to find your competition. You probably know who your competitors are in real life, so that's a good starting point. But your competitors on the web may be a different group of businesses entirely. You find them by typing your keywords into the handy box at the search engine and seeing who comes up. Everyone ahead of you, and everyone just below you, poised to knock you out of your place, is your competitor. Take names.

The next step is to spy around a little. Visit their websites, of course. That's the point at which I tend to sneer at their punctuation, notice the lack of updating, and look askance at their code. When it's my client's website, of course, I see these things with compassion and make notes so we can get all that fixed up. When it's my clients' competitors, it's open season for sneering. It wouldn't hurt to cast a critical eye at your own site after you've done a little bit of this. Can your competition come and sneer at your punctuation? You'll notice it more after you've been looking closely at other websites.

Then you'll want to spy around a lot. How much of this you can stand, and how much it will mean to you, depends on your level of experience and your tolerance for data. If it makes you feel like your brain is going to explode (a surprisingly common reaction when I try to send clients some really cool numbers to look at), then contact me and I'll take care of it for you.

If you can stand it, here are some websites where you can find out a lot of useful things about your competition:

• Marketleap
• Statbrain
• Compete
• seomoz

Analyze and synthesize. Remember how you studied about that in school? Gather up all that data and see what it tells you about the strategies your competitors use. Some of their approaches will probably be comfortable and new to you. Some will be things you just wouldn't do, or maybe things you don't have the budget to do. But nearly always you'll see some ideas to add to your marketing inspiration file.

Take action. You're on page eight for that keyword and the company at #1 has 50,000 more links than you do? That's a hint that you need more links. You have dubious reciprocal links and the company that's eating your lunch in the rankings has acres of good content? Another hint. Pick three of the ideas you took away from the competition and write them on your to-do list.

Next time you see those competitors at a Chamber meeting or something, tell them you liked their website. Tell them you liked the way they got those Wikipedia links and you've done the same. If you can say it without any hint of sneering, of course.

My own personal competitors? There's really only one other serious freelance copywriter in my town. I like her website, I like her work, and I like her. If I didn't do this work myself, I'd hire her. I have never sneered at her website, but I did get a couple of good ideas there.

I should probably bake some cookies for her office.

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Anchor Text and Online Marketing

I've whined a couple of times in these pages about the fact that my new professional website didn't make it to a solid #1 on Google for my name the day it launched. It's possible that you skipped right over those whinings; that's what I do when faced with whining, so I wouldn't blame you at all. But I'm really making a point here, so I'm going to recap.

My name is Rebecca Haden. My domain is www.rebeccahaden.com. The website in question is my actual website, the one that someone who was searching for me would want to find. I know that Google works hard to offer people the things they want, so I knew that eventually that website would land at #1 on Google, and after a few weeks it did so. The reason it didn't start there is, to be honest, that I was messing with the search engines.

I do SEO for a living. I'm honest about it, so I use my name when that's appropriate, and the websites that beat mine on Google were all sites for which I've done search optimization, or social sites at which I hang out, doing good for my clients, so it was just an occupational hazard.

But one particular website hung out at #1 for quite a while, and I was mystified about it. My name isn't on the website, not even as a link back to me. It isn't in the source code. I searched at length to try to find where my name could possibly be hiding on that site, and it just isn't there at all. I was mystified.

I shouldn't have been. I should have realized that I blog for that website at some professional journals, I sign my name to the blog posts, and I always include a link to that website. I also use that website and my own name when I comment at forums on the client's subject. My name was anchor text for that website at some highly respected sites.

This experience convinced me of the importance of anchor text. What is anchor text? When you create a link, you type a word for the people to see, and you place a link so that when people click on that word, they'll go to the web page you want them to visit.

For example, my professional website is about SEO services, so when you click on "SEO services," you'll go back to the homepage. "SEO services" is the anchor text for the link. When Google saw my name used as anchor text for my client's website, they decided that the website must be about me in some way.

How often, when you place a link in your blog, do you use some phrase like "click" or "here"? Now, that may not matter at all if you're not thinking about SEO, and maybe you're not when you write your blog. Maybe you don't care at all if the search engines think the site you're linking to is about "click here."

But when you are thinking about SEO -- for example, when you ask someone to place a link for you on their website -- you'll want to pay some attention to the anchor text. Here are some suggestions for ways to make the most of your anchor text:

• Arrange for relevant anchor text whenever possible. Since search engines use the anchor text of links to determine what a site is about, you'll want to have your keywords for your anchor text as often as you can. If you ask courteously, maybe even offering a snippet of code to the person linking to you to make it easy, they'll often be willing to oblige. If you're the one placing the links, then all you have to do is remember your keywords (and we've talked about that before).
• Don't get carried away. Remember, links are votes for the usefulness of your website. There's nothing wrong with asking for someone's vote. But if all the anchor texts in your links are identical, you'll lose That Natural Look (and we've talked about that here, too). When people just naturally link to you, they won't all naturally use exactly the same phrase, and they particularly won't just happen to use your favorite keyword.
• Return the favor. Once a former client noticed that I had given his site a link, and he emailed me to ask for a change of anchor text. This was back before I fully appreciated the importance of anchor text, but I'm an obliging person, so I made the change. Since then, when I link to him (which I do fairly regularly, since he has a useful website), I make an effort to use his keywords. Why not? They're natural choices for his website, so it's easy enough to use them in natural sentences. When your network sees that you make that effort for them, they're likely to make that effort for you, too.
  

Freelancing Without the Magic Words

Last night I met a woman who wanted to work freelance from her home with her computer skills. I do that, so the person who introduced us hoped that I'd be able to encourage her and give her some useful hints.

Can I just admit right off that I was hoping she'd turn out to be really good at coding and willing to do the occasional small job for me? There are things that I can do, but so slowly that it would make more sense for me to farm those jobs out, and there are also little things that I can't do (never learned .php) and yet they are too small for me to tempt any colleagues with. I was imagining her being hot stuff with the code and happy enough with my hints that she'd take little jobs... That turned out not to be the case.

I gave up that fantasy and focused on how I might be able to help her. I asked about her skills, and then got down to some serious questions about what she was doing to market those skills. Was she taking the right steps in SEO for her website? Had she signed up at freelance marketplaces to see what was in demand? Was she subscribed to any of the aggregate announcement services? Had she gone to Brainbench for certification in areas where she didn't have degrees? Was she visiting local businesses seeking small jobs to develop her portfolio and some good word of mouth?

No, actually. She wasn't doing any of those things. She was waiting for people to come to her.

Now, people do come to me. But they come to me because they see my website, read my blog or articles, see work I've done for others, or hear about me from satisfied customers.

My basic philosophy about marketing is that you should be very good at what you do, and let people know that. Then they'll come to you. I have no doubt that this woman is very good at what she does. But without some evidence of that, she can't exactly entice customers, can she?

She sighed heavily. "I guess I was hoping you'd have the magic words," she said.

"Here are my magic words," I told her: "Make yourself a website. Post certifications, a portfolio, testimonials, or whatever people in your field use to prove their abilities. Apply for lots of jobs. And if you'd like me to give you a hand with your website, here's my card."

She didn't feel better, I'm afraid. But really, that's what you have to do to get jobs as a freelance worker. The word referred first to unaffiliated knights riding about with their lances available to anyone who'd pay. So get that lance out there, shine it up, and ride around a bit. Joust in public.

No magic words required.

Using Google Alerts for SEO

It's possible that you're overlooking a useful tool in your online marketing: Google Alerts. click on that link and you'll find a simple form to fill out.





You simply type in the topic you want to follow, and Google will let you know when something new turns up on the web for the subject you've asked about.


I have all my clients listed on my Google Alerts. This means that when someone writes a blog post about one of them, I can scoot over there and leave a comment linking to their website. Don't think I'm talking about comment spam. If the writer is interested enough to mention my client, then he or she is probably interested enough to want to know about the website.


Should there be some negative content about my client, I'm on that right away, too. A random blogger who rants about the slow service they received once at your ecommerce site or place of business can do you a surprising amount of harm. If you respond positively, offering a solution to their problem, an apology, even perhaps a little gift to make up for the negative experience, you can turn all the later readers to your side.


When there's an online article or press release mentioning a client, I can make sure it includes a link, and ask for one if it doesn't. This is the type of link request that is very likely to get a positive response, and I haven't spent any extra time searching out the opportunity, either, so it's a very cost-effective linkbuilding move.


I also have alerts for other topics, particularly for narrow topics that don't have a lot of new content every day. For example, I have quite a few posts at my educational blog about our state history. Today I had a notice that there was a new website up related to that topic. That's another great chance to request a link. Since there are relatively few resources on this topic, the webmaster should be delighted to have the suggestion.


Add this tool to your SEO toolbox, and see how much time it saves you.
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