How to Handle Numbers at Your Website

My degrees are in linguistics, so human information processing is something I know a lot about. Wait! Don't leave! This is going to be useful, I promise.

The thing is, most of us imagine that everyone responds to information just as we do ourselves. It's normal to think that. Most of our information about how people think comes from how we think. This leads to wars. It also leads to problems on our websites.

Specifically, it can lead to problems with numbers.

I like numbers, myself, but not everyone does. Many people find that their eyes just slide right off the page when they see a bunch of numbers. On the internet, that means they click their "back" button and go elsewhere.

Add a percent sign or something and it's even worse -- it becomes math, and the merest hint of math gives many people a headache. For people with this particular approach to information, anything more mathematical than Only $9.95! can be an invitation to leave your website.

And yet, there are times when numbers are important information for our websites. What's the solution?

• Know your audience. If your customers are math-savvy, then they'll like those numbers. People like us find numbers and formulae a quick and efficient way to convey data, and there's nothing wrong with that. You just have to know who you're dealing with, rather than assuming that your customers will automatically share your preferences.
• Use charts. For many people who don't like raw numerical data, a nice chart sort of corrals the numbers and makes them appear less threatening. A chart makes information quicker to assimilate and clearer, even for those who like messing with raw data. As for people who really dislike numbers, they can respond to a chart as they do to a picture, and ignore the data rather than trying to escape from it. A really complex chart can be sequestered a click away from the main page, so that people who want the math can go get it without frightening the rest of the folks.
  
• Use words. Often you can cope with the issue by putting your data into prose. For example, I recently had this phrase from a client: "30%, 50%, 60% of median income of Fayetteville per one quarter of a particular year (per capita median income updated once a quarter by HUD)." It's possible to phrase this like so: "If you earn less than the average household in Fayetteville, you may be eligible for help with your rent. Call or come by our office to learn how this may affect you."
• Finesse the numbers. No, that translation into prose doesn't have the same meaning as the initial phrase. But people -- and it is a large proportion of the general public -- who can't cope well with math won't be able to get the information from the first phrase anyway. My client needs to meet with these people directly and guide them through the process and explain what it means to them. For that, she needs them to contact her -- and that's her real goal with that sentence.

I tried to find some reliable figures on the percentage of the population who are innumerate, or severely uncomfortable with numbers. Unfortunately, websites writing on this phenomenon tend to say things like "millions of Americans" or "lots of people." In deference to those readers who'd rather not see numbers, let's just stick with that.


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Client and Contractor Crossing Swords?

Actually, I never fight with clients. But I do sometimes disagree with them. And sometimes I tell them so.

This came to my mind recently when I was talking with one of my favorite local hardware guys. I'm not going to tell you his name, in case what he said was an unguarded remark that he wouldn't really want to own up to.

"Web people are crazy," he said firmly.

I am myself a web person, though I don't usually describe myself that way. I first encountered the term last Hallowe'en, at UAMS, our local medical school. I was chatting with the associate dean, and someone came in saying, "I need to take Rebecca down to the basement to meet the Web People." We made our way through a variety of creepily costumed people, on our way down to the meet the Web People, and no one else seemed to think it was funny at all.

It was at that moment that I knew I probably didn't want to become one of their Web People, much as I liked everyone. How could they not find it funny?

But I digress.

The hardware guy went on to explain his views on web people. "They ask the clients what they want!" he said with unconcealed scorn. "Clients don't know what they want!"

I gave a rueful nod.

"I'm a web person," I reminded him, "and I'm not crazy."

I felt that I was on stronger ground with this objection than I would have been had I objected to the idea that clients don't know what they want, because sometimes that's true, in a way.

I do both copywriting and SEO, and I approach the question differently in the two cases. When I'm writing for someone, I assume that they know what they want. I write the thing and send it off, and if they come back with "I don't want to reference those publications" or "I don't like the last paragraph," or "That's not the focus I wanted," or "I want more/fewer/different technical terms in there," or "I wanted 480 words and you've given me 492; please cut," or "Can't you make the part about rules-based systems sound more fun?" -- well, I do just that and send back another round. The customer, as far as I'm concerned as a writer, is always right.

In SEO, it's another thing entirely. My clients in that case are not actually paying me to enscribe their visions. They're paying me for results. I know that, however happy they might initially be with something that precisely meets their preferences, they're not going to stay happy if they don't get those nice rankings.

So when it comes to SEO, I argue with clients. Politely and respectfully, of course. But if they want something that's not going to be good for them, I'll try to talk them out of it. I want them to end up with a usable, well-optimized site, whether they happen to know what that is or not.

If they insist, of course I'll go ahead and do what they want. After all, I'm not a hardware guy.


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SEO Website Redesign #2

Today I'd like to show you a slight redesign I did with Shan Pesaru of SharpHue, Inc.

The client in this case is Courtney and Wise, Pty, an upscale painting and decorating outfit in Sydney, Australia. I'm calling this a slight redesign because we didn't start over. Michael and Joanne Peters, the kind and charming proprietors of Courtney and Wise, had an elegant website to begin with, and they liked its look. Here is the old one:



Unfortunately, while this website had its charms, it also had some real problems from the point of view of search and usability.

The first point is that it's just hard to read. Upscale painters naturally have older people in their client base. Older people find it more difficult to read text with low contrast. Chances are very good that their target customers, if they came to this page, would leave again immediately without attempting to read the page.

It also has little to catch the eye of the searcher at the top of the page -- which is what visitors will see before making the decision whether to stay and scroll down to read more. In fact, many of the most interesting parts of this site's content are actually hidden in obscure little links at the bottoms of pages.

There were also quite a few issues under the hood, as it were. The meta language had problems, the images are flash and therefore a closed book to the search engines, and there were a variety of technical imperfections that interfered with the best results from the point of view of SEO. SEOMoz has a cartoon showing Google wondering to itself, "Hmm... which page should I link to?" when faced with a choice between good design and content and "crummy" design and content, and we all know which way that decision goes.

Shan has a particular gift for search-friendly design, and I'm all about search-friendly content, so we were able to fix Courtney and Wise up with a well-optimized version of their website which maintains the original feeling but has a fresh, updated look.



As an early tester said, it now looks worth scrolling down to read.

This new look will launch soon, and traffic and conversions should rise. For this site, redesign wasn't as much about aesthetics as it was about SEO.

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SEO Website Redesign #1

There's something particularly exciting about launching a brand new website. A couple of sites I've been involved with went live this month (check out Rabbi David Fohrman's site, for example). Sometimes you can also just make a few changes -- usually fresh content and improved navigation -- and get great results.

But there is a point at which an existing website really needs a redesign. I'd like to show you a couple of examples of redesigns I've worked on lately.

Today, let's consider Clevertech, a custom software developer in the New York metro area. CEO Kuty Shalev designs software apps that keep businesses and nonprofits in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut happy and efficient.

Here's his old website:



There were some cool things about this website. For example, the part where it says "CleverTech was the accelerator" turned up a new story each time you visited the site.

Naturally, you wouldn't know that until you visited the site a few times, but it was something to admire once you caught on. Like many websites with snazzy tech elements, the site also left the search engines behind. Those words may look like text, but in fact they're not. They're images with no alt tags. When google's spiders visited, they saw nothing but the following words: "CleverTech, Technology Solutions for Business." That's the meta title. It doesn't match the content on that page (there wasn't any, from the search engines' point of view), so really the whole page was a mystery to Google.

It might be a bit of a mystery to visitors, too. And, while mystery has its charms, you really don't want it on your website. If you happened to be offered this page after typing "technology solutions for business" into your favorite search engine, you might not be able to tell right away that custom software for people in and around New York City was on offer here. You might actually be looking for IT support in Michigan or a network guy in Rome, but even if you wanted exactly what Kuty does, you might not stay around long enough to figure that out.

Here's the new one, which Kuty and Tom Hapgood of the University of Arkansas and I made:




It maintains the lowkey sophistication of the original. It has lots of content, usable navigation, and a call to action right where you need it. Both the search engines and human visitors can now tell what Clevertech does.

The new version has just gone live, and I'm looking forward to seeing some striking changes in traffic and conversions. This is one of those cases in which a redesign was absolutely the essential SEO move.

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How Green is Your Office?

We're all quite properly concerned about reducing our carbon footprints and being environmentally responsible. At home, we reduce, reuse, and recycle -- but what about at work?

Today, let's think about the office in particular.

Begin with your energy use:

• Do you use energy-efficient appliances, including your IT systems?
• Do you use energy-efficient lightbulbs?
• Do you turn off lights and equipment when they're not in use?
  
• Do you tolerate a little discomfort (within the safe levels for your equipment) to keep heater and AC use at a minimum?
• Do you use energy-efficient vehicles?
  
• Do you use GotoMeeting, Google Docs, or Adobe Connect to lessen physical travel?
• Do you walk, use stairs, and otherwise limit the amount of non-human energy used for physical travel?
• Since retail space uses almost twice as much energy as manufacturing or office space, plus the energy cost of driving to retailers, do you use e-commerce as much as possible for buying office supplies, even while using local suppliers?
  

I'm actually pretty good when it comes to energy. I work at home, so that lessens my driving, and I'm very conservation-minded. I'm good about avoiding waste, too -- but then, as I was taking that mental inventory, I thought about paper.

Paper accounts for 40% of the waste stream, and the manufacturing of paper is one of the dirtiest businesses, from an environmental standpoint.

I have to confess that I can feel somewhat smug about paper sometimes. I teach college English, and I am the most paper-light in my department. I collect, comment, and return papers by email, I use computers in the classroom, my only handout in the course of a normal semester is a syllabus (one page front and back), and I do hands-on stuff in the classroom instead of quizzes. Some of my classes are entirely online.

And of course I write for the web, so I'm not professionally responsible for much paper use. In fact, by helping people to switch to online marketing rather than relying on paper, I'm definitely helping. Working in the medium of electricity has its environmental impact, of course, but your computer is on anyway, and the savings on paper makes up for it -- right?



This is my paper. It isn't always strewn around in this untidy fashion. It's just an embarrassing coincidence that today, as I was writing about greening up the office, I happen to have an absolute welter of paper here.

Do you believe me?

Never mind. We're not talking about personal tidiness here. We're talking about paper use, and I actually have a lot of it around for someone who thinks of herself as a paper-light environmentalist. How about you?

And, more importantly, what can we do about it?

Taking it from the top, we can see that some of the paper is about basic office functions like filing and bookkeeping. Here are some online alternatives:

• Outright for simple bookkeeping, including things like quarterly estimated tax payments.
• SmartPay electronic billing system for invoicing the green way -- they're serious enough to pay for your Sierra Club membership when you join.
• Highrise, from 37 Signals, covers your client filing. I confess (since this is obviously True Confessions day) that I haven't tried this one yet, but the guys over at Clevertech are enormous 37 Signals fans, and I don't aspire ever to reach their level in office systems.
  

The next category of paper we can see is the planner. This is another function that can be done online instead of on paper. You probably already have MS Outlook or something similar. Here are some other paperless applications:

• Toggl for tracking time and projects without sacrificing trees for the purpose.
• Google Calendar for most calendar-related tasks, including sharing your calendar and integrating it into a website.
• Basecamp is an easy collaborative project management tool.
• TaDaList is my favorite online to-do list app. There's also Remember the Milk.

If you use paper for thinking (and you know what I mean, if you do it), then consider MindMap. Less stylish, but free, is FreeMind.

That leaves us at the bottom of that embarrassing picture with research.

Sometimes you have to read stuff. And much of what we read is on paper. If we keep and use books for years, then we're not wasting paper. But much of what we read is pretty ephemeral. So I'm looking into alternatives.

• Virtual magazines and online newspapers are becoming commonplace. Since someone has to pay for that stuff, you're likely to find yourself locked out of some content, compared with print editions, but there's a lot available.
  
• PDF downloads and e-books are also an option. Since we generally pay for these, you can find more and more of the books you want available in these formats. Is the experience as good as reading print? This is one of the biggest questions. It might be worth stretching the point in order to save paper.
  
• The Kindle may be the solution for readers who want to cut paper use without sacrificing the opportunity to read comfortably on the beach. Amazon sent me one as a perk for a literary gig, and I have to say that it feels like reading a book. You can't flip through pages quickly to find things, but nothing in this life is perfect. I've put it in the picture with an organizer so you can see the size of it -- quite different from e-books read on a cell phone.
  

At the very least, we can all consider using some of the possibilities here to reduce our paper use. We can make sure to reuse paper by using the backs of sheets for scratch paper and note-taking. We can get out of the habit of printing emails or articles out to read them (don't laugh; lots of people do it). And we can recycle used paper -- but without getting the idea that recycling absolves us of the need to reduce and reuse.

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Do Your Visitors Care About Punctuation?

Recently I've seen a lot of websites with one particular punctuation error.

Of course, I've seen lots of different punctuation errors, but there is one in particular that has been so prevalent recently that yesterday I burst out, "How can you trust people who misuse apostrophes so wantonly?!"

The person showing me the website looked at me with consternation. You might have done the same. After all, if everyone were bothered by the punctuation errors, then there probably wouldn't be so many.

But you might consider checking the punctuation at your website. Here's why:

• Large companies with high-ranking websites don't have punctuation errors. Whether there is causation involved as well as correlation is open to debate, but this is a fact. You just won't see those errors at the websites of highly-respected companies.
  
• People who notice punctuation errors believe that they are a sign of slipshod work. They figure that people who don't bother to proofread carefully also won't bother to tighten the lug nuts or measure accurately or follow the protocols or whatever is relevant to the goods and services they contemplate buying from you. Do you want to eliminate that whole segment of the population from your target market?
• It's not that hard to fix. If you have no one on your staff who can proofread well, then you can easily hire someone to do it for you. Making the changes takes only a minute or two for your webmaster. This is probably one of the easiest fixes you'll ever make.

The particular punctuation error that got my attention? The use of the apostrophe in "its" and "it's." Here's an example:



The basic rule is very simple: while the apostrophe is commonly used to show possession, as in "This is Rebecca's blog," for the word "it" we have all agreed that the apostrophe will only be used for the contraction "it is." Therefore, the first sentence is really saying, "Our business model is the first of it is kind in the hunting industry."

The second sentence says that "it is cost effective to outfitters." Good news there. But a couple of sentences later, we're told that "ServiceMagic provides it is member contractors..."

Now, of course I understand that the owners of this website really meant that their business model is the first of its kind, and that ServiceMagic provides something to its member contractors. But I'm not at all sure that people who aren't detail-oriented enough to master the correct use of apostrophes ought to be trusted with guns.

It's very easy to end up with punctuation errors in your web copy, either through actual misunderstanding or ignorance of punctuation rules, or just because of slips of the fingers on the keys. I think it's also easy to fix them. And worth doing.

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The Call to Action

Recently I received a document from a client listing the pages she wanted on her website. One of them was "the call to action."

The problem here is the common one of imagining our visitors coming to our website and experiencing it just as we planned it. They'll start at our homepage, we figure, then read all the information about our company and all the details about our products, and then, having seen everything we have for them, they'll make a considered decision about the best button to click on. They'll go over to our Call to Action page, of course, be called, and take that action.

This isn't actually how it works.

Consider this web page. You are seeing the entire call to action for the page: "close."



If you click on that button (and, yes, it is a clickable button, the only one, down at the bottom of the page where people must scroll down to find it -- that's another problem entirely), the page simply closes.

There is a page at this website that explains how to order. You are supposed to call the company, having perused the list of goodies on offer, and tell them what you want. You were supposed to have gotten to this list by clicking a button and having this page pop up. That way, when you click on "close," you'll return to the "how to order" page.

Google Analytics tells us that a quarter of the people who make it to this page got there first. It was their landing page. They were searching, perhaps, for some nice pig spleens, they found this page, they thought five spleens for $65 was a good price, and they were set to order -- but there is no contact information on this page, no navigation, and no way to buy that pig spleen.

Compare with this page:




These handy buttons are on each page, in the same place every time. Wherever I land in this website, I am invited to contact the company and to invite my friends to check out the website.

I am much more likely to get a fishing trip than a pig spleen.

Here's one more example.



This website offers different calls to action on different pages. The page shown, which is for individuals, should get a different group of visitors from the page for corporate visitors. There is, therefore, a different call to action.

If we look at the first, highly unsuccessful page and compare it with the other two, we can find a simple rule for the call to action on a website: there should be one. On every page. Where people can find it.

The client who wants a "call to action" page won't get one. She'll get something much more effective.

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Make Time for Blogging

In a client meeting yesterday, the idea of including a blog in the website arose.

Blogging can do wonderful things for your business. It can get you on the front page of Google for lots of long-tail keywords, it can bring people back to your website repeatedly (so they'll think of you when they need your services), it can bring search engines back to your site repeatedly, and it can provide a useful service for your customers while also demonstrating your expertise.

This particular client has a business that relies on personal knowledge, produces photogenic results, and uses a variety of popular keywords. In many ways, blogging would be a natural.

But we'd talked with the client long enough for me to think that I had better give an important reminder: "Blogs are great, but don't start it if you're not going to post regularly."

A blog with sporadic posting is worse than no blog at all. Instead of bringing people back to your website, it makes them think, "Hmm. Nothing happening here." Instead of showing off your knowledge, it suggests that you're a bit flaky.

Really, you may just be busy. Who isn't?

How can you fit a blog into your busy schedule?

• Post brief and frequent updates. If I were writing this post for a client who wanted an economical blog, I could have divided it into three posts instead of three bullet points. I'd save them all at the blog, and the client could publish them on consecutive days. You can do the same for yourself. We have a big game hunter client. People don't just decide spontaneously to go on safari -- they plan and save for months or years. This is a situation in which blogging is perfect marketing. He can post a picture a day, add a quick note -- "Sunrise over the Kalahari" -- and have a blog post for his customers to dream over.
• Write about things you know. I blog for all kinds of businesses, and one of my strengths is my ability to research and write about all kinds of topics without handholding. But it does take me a bit longer to write about keeping Xsans in sync or the minutiae of the new stimulus package than to write about writing. When you have a time crunch, write about things you know well enough for off-the-top-of-your-head writing.
• Hire it done. Sometimes, especially if you're more a Flaubert than a Spillane (Flaubert was famous for writing a paragraph or less a day, while Spillane claimed that he could write his best-sellers in two weeks), it makes sense to recognise the opportunity cost of doing it yourself and just hire somebody to do it for you. When blogging is a good marketing plan for you, you should have a blog. You should also have a good blog. But that doesn't mean that you personally should devote hours to it each day -- or even three times a week.
  

What if you just can't keep up a blog? Does that mean that you have to give up the benefits of good content?

Not at all. Add white papers or articles to your website. Post articles or press releases off your website, with links back. Add a PDF file e-book. That kind of content can stay up and continue to bring visitors without ever making you write, "I know I haven't been keeping up with my blog lately, but I've been busy..."

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How Long Should Your Web Content Be?

Since I teach writing, I'm very accustomed to those words: "How long does it have to be?"

The correct answer: "As long as it needs to be."

This is the right answer for web content, too -- with a little difference. While for a research paper or an essay, the rule is simply to write as many words as it takes you to say what you want to say, there are a few other factors for web content.

• How much space do you have? Sometimes the design factors limit the text to a very specific number of words. I often have 50 words or 280 words or some other particular number to work with. Sometimes it's even more specific: so many characters on the left and so many on the right. Or sometimes the length is more flexible, but a number of items need to have the same length of content. If the text can't be fitted to the design, then you may have to make changes in the design.
• Are you writing for the human visitors? Through testing, you can determine how much your human visitors will actually get to read -- remember that many modern computer users simply don't scroll. And many more will scroll on some pages but not on others. You can write more, either for the extensive readers in the target market or for the search engines, but it makes sense to know how much room you've got in the area that will probably be read. This isn't all that different from the traditional method of writing newspaper articles -- put the essential bits at the beginning for the headline skimmers, and go into leisurely detail later on for those who still have another cup of coffee to drink.
  
• Are you remembering your search engine visitors? The search engines want to offer your page to the people who want it. If the design decisions have left you with very little room for content, you may have a problem making the purpose of your page clear. In such cases, you may need to add some text someplace else. I have one client who has good results from thinking of each page as having two parts: a mostly graphic section at the top for human beings, and a good long text section at the bottom for the robots -- and of course any people who care to stay and read it.
  

As always when you're thinking about web content, it's essential to remember that people don't read on the web exactly the same way they read print. It's also essential to remember that content affects -- indeed is central to -- SEO. This affects decisions about length as well as other issues in web content writing.

If you don't do your own web content, knowing these things ought to help you understand why your web content writer changes up your text so much.

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Bullets and Other Scary Things

This morning I read a post at someone's personal blog about fear of bullets in blog posts. Bullets are those lists people make:

• They have a little symbol next to them, which is called a "bullet."
• They are likely to catch the eye of skimming readers
• They help people get the main points quickly.

I use bullets a lot in blog posts. They're a courtesy to the reader, actually. We writers like to think that people are reading our entire posts, hanging breathlessly upon the deathless prose we're polished up for them like so many jewels... Yes, well, actually most people reading online -- particularly at business websites, which is probably what yours is -- skim through the stuff immediately visible to them and click away to something else. Bullets help such readers find the stuff they really want to know.

The idea is to make the bullet points useful enough either to give the skimmers the info they need without their having to read more, or to encourage them to read the rest of the post. So, even if they do have a scary name, I'm in favor of them.

However, there is something else that's scary, and related to bullets, that also came up this morning: namely, code showing on the public parts of your blog.

This came up because I was blogging for a client in a new-to-me content management system, and planning to use the post for some other stuff for this client, so I wrote it in MSWord and then cut and pasted.

This is usually a bad idea, but I previewed it and it looked fine, and I was in a hurry, so I let it go.

This bad decision on my part led to an email this morning saying "That last blog post has code in the bulleted lists." This means that html code (or, as you might think of it, "that stuff with all the pointy brackets in it") was visible to readers of the blog.

That's worse than showing your bra strap. And it's one of the things that keeps people from using bulleted lists in their blog posts, too. Bulleted lists are one of the most common places for that errant code to show up. They also may look wrong in other ways: different from other bulleted lists in other posts, for example.

In my case, it was the result of my failing to check how the post looked in Internet Explorer.

By now, some of my readers are thinking, "Oh, good point -- I'd better go check on that" and some are thinking, "I thought this was supposed to be in English." If you are in the former group, then you're through here. You won't be learning anything new. You're welcome to stick around, of course.

However, if you're thinking that yes, you've noticed that sometimes your bullets don't do what you wanted them to, you should read on, because I have a solution for you.

Time for a bulleted list:

• Don't write things in your word processing program and then paste them into your blogging text box, unless you're quite sure it'll work. It usually doesn't work perfectly.
  
• If you simply have to do this -- and I know people who feel that way -- then save your document as a "Web page, filtered." You'll find this setting in the "Save as" dialogue box. Or save it in Notepad and then cut and paste from there.
  
• Once you've posted something, check it in different browsers to see how it looks. That is, open the page using Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and whatever other browsers people use to visit your website. You can find out what browsers people are using at Google Analytics.

So what if you check and discover that your bullets don't look right? If you know html, you can go into the html editor and fix them up. That's what I do, and it's worth learning some basic html if you do this sort of thing a lot. If not, then you will often find that this will work:

• Highlight all the text that's supposed to be a bulleted list.
  
• Tell the visual editor that you don't want this to be a bulleted list.
• Tell it that now you do want it to be a bulleted list.

This works most of the time, in the same way that many hardware problems can be fixed by turning everything off, unplugging it for 30 seconds, and starting it up again.

I put a dragon at the beginning of this post because dragons are somewhat scary. I mean, if you ran into a real, full-sized, fire breathing dragon, you might step back a bit, right? However, dragons are also cool. If you have found bulleted lists intimidating or frustrating or for other reasons have chosen to avoid them, you'll find that these suggestions will move them right over to the "cool" side rather than the "scary" side.

Your Competitors Affect Your SEO Strategy

I had an interesting message yesterday asking for a little light SEO help with this website, a home for the Brownies of Northwest London.

It's a cute website, isn't it?

They'd like to show up on searches for "Brownies London," "girlguides London," "girlguiding London," stuff like that. Girl Guides, for those unfamiliar with the term, are the UK equivalent of the US Girl Scouts.

I had a look at their source code and their content, and then I went to Google.co.uk and checked out the competition for the keywords they want to use.

Here's what you find when you look for "Girl Guides London": the World Association of Girl Guides followed by the official central office for the UK Girl Guides. Tough competition for a new local site.



"Brownies London" gets you the UK central office again -- and brownies, the kind you eat. Tough competition, again. Not to mention the fact that your searchers might get distracted, veer off into looking at London bakeries, and never get back to looking up the Brownies at all.



"Girlguiding London" gives you lesbian bar information. I don't know whether they're tough competition or not, but they are the kind of neighbors that make people looking for a social group for their preschool daughters change their query.


So this particular website is up against an extremely powerful competitor, a completely irrelevant term that happens to sound like them, and a controversial neighborhood.

Usually, when you find yourself in one of these situations, you work around it. Go to some other, easier search term to begin with, and work your way up to the more challenging circumstances. Since all their terms put them in challenging circumstances, the West London Brownies can't take that approach.

My recommendation for them:

• Change the meta title to get rid of the phrase "girlguide london" and "girlguiding london." They don't need to end up on the same page with bars, regardless of their personal feelings about bars, because it's not the association they want their customers to have with their product. And people searching for the Brownies probably won't scroll down this page for them -- they'll just change their queries.
  
• Add meta descriptions to all the pages, using the phrases "Girl Guides and Brownies." Right now, they have no meta descriptions.
  
• Since they're not really in competition with the other Girl Guide organizations, ask for links at the major Girl Guides websites. Also get every little Brownie and all the parents to link them at Facebook, their personal web pages, classroom pages, or whatever other online space they can command.

Have you tried typing your keywords in at Google to see who's sharing the page with you?

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An SEO Plan for Your Business

Littlefish IT Support reports that UK studies show only a third of small and medium sized businesses have an SEO plan of any kind.

I haven't found US studies on the subject, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the proportion was about the same.

You need a plan.

I was sitting down with colleague Tom Hapgood yesterday looking at some websites and Analytics. First we looked at his new site on a documentary film. His Analytics showed that people who were specifically looking for the site and knew what to look for were finding it. The keywords showed that people arrived by looking for the name of the film, the names of people involved in making the film, and so on. Visitors clicked through from news reports about the film, and there was direct traffic as well -- people typing in the URL.

That's stage one. Your customers can find your website.

Then we looked at a musician's website. This is a portfolio site, built by Shan Pesaru to use for demonstrations in SBDC seminars rather than for promoting the musician in question, so it doesn't get a great deal of traffic. But we can see from the site's Analytics that people find it by looking for the kind of thing this musician does, as well as looking for her specifically. That is, they find her by looking for "mezzo soprano" or "classical singer." They also click over from links at websites about singers.

That's stage two. People who ought to be your customers but aren't yet can find your website.

We could have looked at the Analytics for this blog, though we didn't, and we'd have seen that it's at stage three for search: people come here from searches for all kinds of things relevant to what I do. People who find me by looking for my name, sometimes spelled in some creative way, or by looking for "search engine marketing 72703" are probably clients or possible clients. People who visit here looking for "compelling content" or "how to use Google Alerts for SEO" may not be shopping for my services right now, but they might remember me in the future when they are.

The person who came looking for "Tim Graves llamas" was probably disappointed.

We didn't look at the Analytics for this blog. We looked instead at those for a client on whose new website design we're working. His current website's Analytics show pretty clearly that people finding him on the search engines have to have inside knowledge. His referring sites are not public sites. The few keywords people use to find him include his company name and his own name, but otherwise are random and not useful -- like the llamas mentioned above. Everyone gets a few of those, but a preponderance of lost people visiting your website says that you don't have a plan for SEO.

The details of your plan will vary, naturally. The best plan for you depends on your field, your level of authority in your field, what you're selling or promoting, your budget, the skills and talents you have available to you, and lots of other factors.

But at the very least, you should have a plan that covers these three steps:

• Make sure that people who are looking for you and your company can find you.
  
• Help people who need your goods and services but don't know about you to find you.
  
• Help those who aren't shopping right now but are interested in what you do to find you.

If you don't have a plan like this, I can help you. If you do have a plan, good for you -- you're already way ahead of those who have no plan.

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Why I Work at oDesk

When I was a student, I lived in a town where men who wanted work could go out and stand on a street corner in the mornings, and trucks would come by and pick them up. Women never did this, so I don't know all the details of the arrangement, but we'd hear guys in our apartment building asking each other whether they planned on going out to work, and gathering up a crowd to go stand out there together, and sure enough, trucks would come along and pick them up.

This is how I saw oDesk at first. ODesk is a freelance marketplace, a place where people who do information work can hook up with people who need information workers. It's free to sign up, and oDesk is supported by 10% of the fee for the job. In return, they offer a number of safeguards for both buyers and sellers of services, as well as the initial introduction and a virtual place to meet.

I get daily announcements of writing jobs from Indeed.com, and I initially applied for an oDesk job through one of those announcements. I was particularly suited for this job, and I'm still working on it. So, since I was signed up with oDesk, I applied for another job or two when I had free time in between clients in my neighborhood. On a slow day I could go down to the virtual street corner and wait for a truck to come along, and for me it worked well.

In fact, it worked very well. Over the holidays, when my private clients were being slow to pay and slow to send more work, I really appreciated my weekly oDesk payday. When it came time to figure out my taxes, I really appreciated my oDesk 1099 form. When I got busy enough to want to pass along some work, I appreciated the oDesk colleagues whom I could recommend to clients with confidence, secure in the knowledge that their work wouldn't reflect badly on me.

When I calculated my numbers for 2008 at the end of the year, I saw that -- even though I charge less at oDesk than I do for private clients -- the far higher percentage of billable hours there made it more profitable for me than I had realized. I decided to increase the three hours a week I'd been averaging at oDesk, and very soon I was at ten hours a week. It seems to me that highly skilled people can work as much as they care to at oDesk.

It's true that there are lots of jobs there that are completely unsuitable for me, and also that there are lots of workers there who would be completely unsuitable for you. It's an open marketplace, and everyone can come. But the clients I've worked for there have been wonderful, and some of my favorite ongoing working relationships go through oDesk. The convenience of the system for international relationships means that I get to work for people I probably would not have met otherwise.

If you're a private client of mine, you get coffee. Advice. Research. Very quick service. Personal attention. Face to face meetings and quite a bit of work off the clock. If you're an oDesk client of mine, you get to see my computer screen while I'm working if you want to, and you get a bargain rate.

For quite a while, I kept quiet about my work at oDesk. I didn't really want my private clients to see me as someone who went down to the corner on a slow day and waited for the truck to come around.

The truth is, I had misjudged oDesk. Many people do. If you need an information worker on an occasional or temporary basis, if you need someone with skills you don't find in your local neighborhood, or if you need me and you'd rather have a bargain rate than face-to-face meetings, then you should check out oDesk. If you have any questions, ask me in the comments and I'll be happy to answer.

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Testing Your Ads

I had a call a couple of days ago from the director of a new business. "I'm not sure what to do in the way of advertising," she said. "When we first opened, we had lots of enquiries, but now it's really fallen off. I'm not at all sure people really read papers or listen to the radio much any more, so I'm thinking TV, but I don't know which station would be best. What do you think?"

I almost wanted to ask if it was a trick question. It seemed sort of like calling a car dealer and saying, "I don't know what to do. I have to travel a long distance and I'm not sure I can get there by bike quickly enough. I guess I need some quicker form of transportation. Can you think of anything?"

"Do you do email?" I asked. "Do you have a website?"

There was a silence. I could hear the director mulling over this clever idea. I passed along the news that more businesses nowadays are cutting print and radio ads and increasing their use of online marketing.

It didn't really solve her problem, though. In some ways, it made things worse. If she can't tell whether people read the print ads or listen to the radio ads, or which TV station is most likely to pull, then bringing online marketing into the mix just gives her something else to wonder about.

She needs to test.

We talked about testing your website earlier in the week. Testing ads is a little different, but just as simple. Here are the steps:

• Make your call to action something measurable. For print ads, include a coupon customers need to cut out and bring in. Put a code on each ad, distinguishing one newspaper from another. For a web offer, you can set up a special email address for each source, have customers print out a coupon, or ask for a code in the subject line. For radio and TV, you can still use a special email address, URL, or code ("Tell them Jack sent you"), just make sure to announce it clearly.
• Add some urgency. You want to get the information fast enough for you to act on it. Give your special offers an expiration date -- and make it a short window. The longer they wait, the more likely it is that people will forget. "Two days only" gives you a more accurate measure of the relative effectiveness of multiple delivery channels for your message.
  
• Keep track of the results. Make a plan to collect the data accurately. Once your two days (or week, or whatever length of time you give) are up, count the responses from each delivery method, and compare. If the results are close, replicate the experiment.
  

You might be interested to know that tests of this kind show that direct mail offers with email follow up have a 50% higher response rate than the same offers without email. You might also be interested to know that people who see a coupon are more likely to visit you even if they don't actually use the coupon.

These are interesting things to know. But your own test results will be even more interesting.

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Using Testimonials on Your Website

Testimonials are great for your website. Just as news is more convincing than paid advertising, the things other people have said about you are more convincing than the things you've paid someone to write up as marketing copy.

When you get a sincere thanks or compliment from a happy customer, file it carefully and add it to your website when you're updating. If the client says it to you rather than writing it, ask, "Can I quote you?" and copy it down accurately right away. You can even ask for feedback, if you need a nice testimonial for a web page and haven't received just the right compliment yet.

Once you've gotten your testimonials file filled, use the nice words strategically. I put them on websites whenever there's a bit of space. I work with a designer who adds them to the quotes he sends to prospective clients -- just scanning the letter and tucking it into the PDF file he sends. A client of mine has a full page of testimonials on her website, and while her Analytics suggest that there's not a lot of action there, the fact that she has enough positive feedback to justify a tab on her navigation bar may well influence her visitors.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

• Testimonials can say things that would sound like braggadocio if you said them yourself. The example below is from my web content services page, and while I certainly always strive to do beautiful and brilliant work, I can hardly announce that it's my specialty. Don't waste space on your page with testimonials that echo your own marketing copy; save it for the people who say something special.

• You can still think about your keywords, though. The example below was chosen specifically because it contains a phrase we wanted to move to the homepage to improve search results.
  

• Many sites use flash to bring a variety of testimonials to the page. This makes sense, since it allows you to include more testimonials. Keep in mind, though, that your visitors -- depending how fast they read and how quickly they navigate -- may only see one. This meant, for the website below, that a visitor might only see a testimonial that said, "Thanks." We removed the weaker examples from the rotation, and added the "more feedback" link to make it clear that there were more examples -- encouraging visitors either to click, or to slow down and see more.
  

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Testing Your Website

How can you test your website, and why would you want to?

The "why" is simple: you need to know what people are inclined to do when they get to your website. You know what you are inclined to do, of course, but that's not enough. While most people tend to do much the same thing when faced with a website, we all have our own little idiosyncrasies. It is very easy to build your website to cater to your own particular idiosyncrasies, on the assumption that you are normal and representative of all the right-thinking people in the world.

It's also true that many people have an idea of what they do that's different from what they really do.

In order to overcome these perfectly natural human foibles, you can easily test your site. We're not talking about complex testing that measures where people's eyes light on the screen and the fractions of seconds it takes to respond. This is valuable, but it isn't simple or easy. We're talking about simple, easy testing that gives you a good starting point for your plans.

Here are the steps:

• Find naive subjects. "Naive subjects" means quite simply that you don't tell people what you're doing, explain things to them, or choose a bunch of web designers. Just find some random people who are willing to sit down in front of a computer and let you watch them. Cameras are fine, but you can also just hang out with them and watch. I find that people -- random people at my home, in the office, in the classroom -- will gladly do this. I haven't asked strangers in coffee shops yet, but I bet they'd do it, too. It only takes a couple of minutes, and it's painless.
  
• Observe, don't interact. Say the same thing to everyone. I like to say, "Please navigate to [URL]." Then I just watch and make notes of what they do. For example, with the website below, I found that almost half of the 25 people I tested went to the video first. About a quarter became concerned about the "login code" on the left.They dropped their hands from the keyboard, stopped interacting with the website, and asked, "Am I supposed to have a login code?" in alarmed voices.
  

• Take notes. You won't remember accurately. Trust me on this. Ideally, you'll stand there with your notebook and timepiece and write "Subject #1 looked at the screen for 5 seconds, then clicked on the video. After 12 seconds, subject said, 'Oh, I see what this is' and clicked on..."

Once you have the data, you can do some analysis. You can compare what you've observed with what your Analytics tell you, and with how you feel and the feedback you get. If only half of the people are watching your entire video, for example, then you can't have information in the video that isn't elsewhere on the page, and think that your visitors are all getting that information.

Pay particular attention to the surprises.

For example, visitors to the page in this example did not click on the buttons in the navigation bar, from left to right, as people typically do. No one did that. That's an interesting thing to know.

Even if you're not doing any redesign or updating, you might like to try a little testing on your website. You never know what you might learn.

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