Another Clever Trick from Google Analytics

I hope you use your Google Analytics regularly. They can tell you lots of useful things.

One thing that not everyone knows is that Analytics will show you what people click on at your website.


This is where you'll find that option: at your dashboard, under Content, with the label "Site Overlay."

Click on that, and you'll be able to see where your visitors are clicking at your site.



At my site, I can see that 17% of my visitors click on my "Clients" page. 10% click on my "About" page,which is just the right number. If I got any surprises here, it would tell me that something was off with my design.

This is easier than going through the Navigation summary, and great for quick checkups.

Try it on your own web site, and see what you can learn.

Your Website is Like an Elephant -- or Should Be

Do you like elephants? Lots of people do. We visit them in zoos, admire their exploits in the circus, take the chance to see them in their natural habitats when we can.

You've probably never heard anyone say, "No, I don't want to go see the elephants. I've already seen an elephant."

Even if we've seen elephants before -- even if we've seen them many times -- we still want to see them again. They're interesting. They do different things on different occasions. They cause us to think different thoughts when we see them in one context or another. Even if they cause us to think the same thoughts, they might be thoughts we enjoy and are willing to have in our minds again.

For example, did you know that elephants can swim, but can't jump? And that, according to Lao tradition, you can make elephants stampede by saying, "Big ears, small eyes" to them?

I knew you'd want to know that.

Here's the thing: people will also come back to your website, if you do a good job. You know that your customers need five to twelve contacts with you and your offer before they'll take action. If your business has a brick and mortar presence, it speeds your sales process and improves conversion if some of those contacts are between customers and your website. If your business is entirely online, then it's all the more important to encourage repeat visits.

• Have more content than people can read in a single visit. Just as we notice new things about the elephants on subsequent visits, visitors to our websites can get more out of their multiple visits. Since we also want our content to catch the eye of the web surfer spending a few seconds deciding whether or not to stay, we need to plan our navigation so that visitors can get an immediate message, and also realize that there'll be more to read when they return.
• Update your site with new content. Whether you choose to use a blog like this one, a dynamic homepage, or just go with regular updates to the pages of your website, new content brings more visits. If you update regularly, people will come by to see what's new. If you update occasionally, you can do emails, electronic newsletters, or even press releases to let people know they should come visit.
• Participate in the online community. Twitter, Facebook, and similar tools allow you to spread the word when you have something new and exciting going on. A new section at your web site, a new white paper available for download, a new product in your catalog can all be interesting news to your customers. Even a reminder of something that has been on your site for a while can bring new visitors and remind the old ones to come and check it out.

Imagine that you'd been to see elephants several times at the zoo. If there were a new baby elephant, or a chance to ride on an elephant, or you could get as close as the picture above, that would encourage you to go for another look, wouldn't it? Keep your web site fresh, interesting, and on your customer's minds, and they'll come and see you, too.

Finding a Web Designer

Last week I met with a client who brought her husband along. As we were discussing the new website we're planning for my client, he expressed some dissatisfaction with his own website.

He went with a national company that mass-produces websites, among other things. He got a "free" web design, a rudimentary template into which he has to upload his own content, and a complex arrangement in which he's at the top of the company's directory until he gets a certain number of clicks, at which point he gets thrown off the top. He pays $150 a month for this.

It's never comme il faut to diss a client's previous web people, but this guy isn't a client. He's a client's husband. That's different. So, after analyzing what he'll have paid and what he'll have gotten at the end of a year's contract with his web people, and comparing it with what he could have paid and received with a custom website, I asked him what had possessed him to sign that contract.

"They called me," he said. He knew he needed a website, and like many small business owners, he had no more idea where to find a web designer than where to find a hit man. The term "web designer" wasn't in his vocabulary, the people who made his business cards couldn't help, and looking up "computer guy" in the phone book wasn't working. Under those circumstances, a person can feel helpless enough to sign the first contract that comes his way.

I had to find a web designer recently. My usual guy isn't taking new jobs right now, and my back up guy has no free time either, so I had to search. Here are the steps I took:

• Search online for "web designer" or "web design." I added my local area to the search string, since I wanted to start with a manageable number of choices. Then I looked at the portfolios of the candidates. I looked at my Facebook friends and Twitter followers first; you might have some other method of deciding who might be trustworthy and pleasant to work with. But look at the portfolios, and ask someone who knows to check out their code for you, too. Go to the websites and make sure they work properly. Click through them and see that they're functional.
• Contact your local university or design school. This can be a good way to find someone with skills but less experience. If you can provide guidance with content and navigation, you can end up with an excellent artist at an economical price. Since I'm doing the content and navigation, my client can feel confident about that. If you're not sure how to approach that, or you don't have the time, you can have someone like me work with the designer. New graduates or advanced students are likely to be technically up to date, which is a plus, but won't necessarily be knowledgeable about SEO or copywriting.
  
• Look at freelance marketplaces. I work through oDesk sometimes, myself, and have worked with excellent designers there. Crowdspring is a source for graphic artists at which you can see and choose from designs. Freelance Designers has portfolios for large numbers of designers, along with their contact information. With any of these options, expect to spend time narrowing your choices to a manageable number. Again, this can be an economical choice, if you're willing to spend some time and prepared to offer guidance.
  
• Ask around. This option isn't going to work for everyone. I get plenty of emails from people looking for designers, and I have suggestions to offer, but you may not know anyone else who works with web designers. In this case, after sending three designers' info and estimates to the client and getting lukewarm responses to all three, I got another suggestion. An IT guy by day who enjoys dabbling in design in his free time was willing to take on a couple of projects for me. I admired his work, sent his stuff on to the client, and worked out the details. A friend of a friend can work well, but you should still examine the portfolio, get the code checked out, and use a contract.
  

These methods are likely to turn up a designer for you. Use the candidates' portfolios and a clear contract to increase your chances of success. And skim through my earlier posts on web design to get some idea of the factors you might want to consider, just so you won't feel as though you're at anyone's mercy.

Content Management Systems, Your Website, and You

My schedule this week includes three meetings with clients who are having brand new custom websites built. This is exciting: it's like having a house built for you, though of course far less expensive. As copywriter, my conversations with these clients and their designers begin with decisions about what pages they need, what kind of navigation will work best for them, their goals, and the user journey they expect for their clients.

One of the particular questions that inevitably arises is this: will they need a content management system? A content management system, or CMS, is a way for clients to make changes to their websites directly, without going through their webmasters. For example, if you have a blog here at Blogger, you can change it whenever you want. Depending what skills you have, you might need help to make it look the way you want, but you have full access to it.

So in one meeting, with the staff of a church, we were discussing the options for the pages they want for their programs. The youth minister said, "We'll be wanting to change our page all the time." The children's program director said, "Can we put announcements for the parents up? Maybe as PDF files to download?" The pastor said, "There'll be training for how to do this without screwing it up, right?"

The two developers I work with most have exactly opposite positions on whether a CMS is a good idea or not. As I've been meeting with and planning for this week's clients, I've been thinking a lot about their respective arguments, and I've reached a conclusion.

They're both right.

Fargo web designer Joe Sandin believes that a CMS is generally a good idea. Here are his reasons:

• You save money in the long run. If your developer spends four hours building a CMS into your website, and it keeps you from paying him or her to make changes for fours hours every month, then your CMS will pay for itself in the first month you're online. Do the math; this is a strong argument.
• You have greater control. I work with a lot of webmasters on behalf of various clients, and I can attest to the fact that it can be very arduous to get changes made. Kevin, who has served as webmaster for two of my clients, once took six months to make an address change. That's six months during which a brick and mortar store had the wrong address on its website while I begged Kevin to make the change. (He lives in another state; if he'd have been local I'd have dropped by his office with cake and refused to leave till it was changed.) When you do the math here, you should consider the cost of having customers go to the former place of business instead of to the new shop.
• Dynamic content is good. Without concerns about access and cost, you may freshen up your website more often. Search engines will visit you, your customers will drop by to see what's new, and you can even end up with more pages indexed.
  

Pretty well persuaded that you should have a CMS on your website? Fayetteville web designer Shan Pesaru has equally good counterarguments.

• DIY can be expensive. We've worked with plenty of clients who've had a secretary spending an entire morning getting more and more frustrated as she tried to do a website update that would take a professional ten minutes. Whatever you're paying your staff, there's no way that can be a cost-effective move compared with hiring it done.
• You have greater responsibility. Along with the control that allows you to make changes you want, you may also end up with control that allows you to make changes you don't want. Accidentally removing your header, introducing punctuation errors into your nice optimized copy, or making lots of little changes that add up to spoil the proportions of your design can affect your SEO even if you don't mind the effect.
• Stress is not good. CMS can make life difficult. You have to train any member of the staff who will be using it, you have to find time to do it -- a news page that you start with high hopes and good intentions looks pitiful when it's months out of date -- and chances are good that it won't look the way you wanted it to. After all, if you were a web expert, you wouldn't be in the business you're in, right? Small businesses are often better off having a professional take care of their website so they can concentrate on what they do best.

As I say, I have after careful thought decided that I agree with both Joe and Shan. Here are some things to consider for your own site:

• Think about the future implications. I reminded the church staff that the website might outlast them. If one of them is promoted or changes jobs, do they expect their successors to have to have the same level of technical skill they have? If your business is just starting up and you expect to have plenty of time for upkeep of your own website, are you sure you'll have the same flexibility a few months from now?
• Consider some compromises. I have access to my own website -- within reason. There are parts of the code which are in red, which means, "Rebecca, don't touch this." This is comfortable for me, though it might be stressful or excessively tempting for others. We also do some sites with integrated blogs, so the clients can play all they want with that section without worrying about inadvertently causing themselves problems in the rest of their pages.
• Think about your resources. Is your webmaster responsive about changes or a pain to work with? If Kevin were my webmaster, I'd want full access, fond of him though I am. If your business has no tech-savvy employees, or no workers with any downtime, a CMS wouldn't be a good plan for you.
  
• Get that training. Some clients feel as though being able to handle Facebook means you can handle your own website. Others are afraid to go into the admin section for fear of causing their computers to explode. Get enough training that you are comfortable doing all the things you need to be able to do to make effective use of your CMS, if you decide to have one.
  

For the church, I recommended a compromise: an integrated blog which everyone can add to, training to use it, and the option of calling me when I'm needed. Shan came up with a way to do this at no extra cost, and everyone's happy.

Your website might be better off with a CMS and a professional to use it for you. You might want full service, or you might want full access. Consider all the factors before making your decision, and you'll be happy, too.

Get My Website in the Top Ten for Google!

I keep seeing job postings like this. Often they specify that they want this done in a particular amount of time, perhaps through the creation of 500 one-way backlinks to pages of PR6 and above. They make me want to send strongly worded letters to the posters of the ads saying things like --

"What do you mean, 'top ten for Google'?" Do you want to be in the top ten for your company name? Hey, let's go for #1 if at all possible. Sometimes it's not, because your company predates the internet and there are a lot of companies sharing your name, some much bigger than yours. Then you might have to work at it. Otherwise, you should have top billing for your name very quickly, if you have a well-optimized site and a useful SEO plan.

Do you want to be in the top ten for your main keywords? Now you're talking. But it depends on what your keywords are. Choose realistic keywords, and aim for the top five, rather than trying to get the top ten for the broadest possible terms. This will send more traffic, and more useful traffic, to your website.

I also would like to ask these people about their websites. One post I saw recently comes from a company that makes a fuel tank additive. I don't know anything about fuel tank additives, but I'm quite sure that this screen shot from their website is sufficient evidence that they don't have a top-quality well-optimized site.



So I would sort of like to say to them, "This is what you're giving me to work with? And you're demanding guaranteed numbers of visits and top placement with all search engines?"

This particular company shares its name with a number of highly respectable research organizations, so they have a challenging situation, even if they are producing a really good fuel tank additive. Having a poor quality website makes their demands even more challenging.

For those who specify that they want backlinks, I might want to congratulate them for knowing the importance of links for online marketing, but I'd also like to ask them, "Have you formed relationships that will lead to links? Do you have content at your website worth linking to, or a product that people will be excited to share?" The reason search engines pay so much attention to links is that people give links to things they consider valuable. When I do linkbuilding, my goal is always that the people from whom I request links will be thrilled to hear about the website I'm introducing them to -- I expect many of them to thank me for having shared it.

That's not a wild idea. Your goods and services, and your website, should be valuable. Otherwise, there's really no reason for you to be in business, is there? But I saw a want ad yesterday asking for 1000 links in three days. It is not impossible to get a thousand links in three days, if your content goes viral -- the YouTube of Susan Boyle would be a good recent example. Your hair loss remedy product page? If it did acquire that many links that quickly, the search engines would investigate such suspicious activity. Think of it as being like meeting people -- you'll meet more people when you make an effort, and your skill level affects the numbers, but you don't meet a thousand new people on most weekends, do you? You'd need a special occasion for that.

The mismatch between the expectations revealed in these want ads and the websites of the people posting them would lead me to ask these people whether they think search marketing is a form of magic. Would they, for example, be just as happy if I sent them a Special Herbal Preparation that will catapult them to first place at in the SERPs, which They Don't Want You to Know About?

Really, these shouldn't be questions I'd ask. These should be questions business owners ask themselves, before they consider search marketing.

Do I have goods and services that are valuable to my customers? Do I have a website people would choose to visit? Do I understand that search marketing is a form of marketing, and as such requires ongoing work and a long-term commitment?

Your website, with proper optimization and good online marketing, is likely to be the most successful and cost-effective means of marketing available to you. It can be your primary place of business, or it can open completely new markets for your brick and mortar company. Let it be part of your real-world marketing plans, not a get-rich-quick fantasy.

End of rant.

The Cute Website

I was working with a client the other day, and she expressed dislike of a paragraph I'd written for her because it was "too sweet." Another phrase was "too cute."

This was my fault, certainly. She had told me that she wanted sophistication and elegance. She just seemed sweet and cute to me, and some of that seeped into the writing.

This may have been exacerbated by the fact that I'd been searching for a designer for a client who wanted a really cute website. This client dresses up her dogs. She describes herself as having "blonde moments." Nothing is going to be too cute or too sweet for this client.

I'm not cute, personally, nor am I particularly sweet. Kind, yes. A woman of integrity, certainly. Cute? No. But I have the advantage of having worked with elementary school teachers for years. At first, of course, I could hardly bring myself to say the word "Punkydoodles," but over time I learned to enthuse over polka dot borders, and from that to personal cuteness is but a step. I may not be cute, but I understand cute.

In this day and age, when clients almost all want "clean" and designers pride themselves on "less is more," it's hard to find a designer who can really do a good job on a cute website.

I was lucky enough to find one in Jeff Wain. I'll tell you about the search process another time. Right now, I want to consider this question: Can you use a cute website for your business?

• Consider your industry. My cute blonde client owns a teacher supply store. There is nothing too cute for this business. She has Pajama Party Night at her store, when all the workers wear their jammies and the store stays open late for a sale. I know, most of you are having to sit down and fan yourselves right now. If you're in an industry like this, though, you can be as cute as you want. Law office? Not so much.
  
  
  


• Can you spin cuteness your way? There's flat-out cute, but there's also ironic cute, retro cute, sassy cute. Still not right for a law office, but this custom apron maker can definitely get away with it.
  
  

• Commit to cute. If you're going to have a cute website, you're going to have to follow through. Don't go with a cute design on a momentary whim, or because a focus group said they'd like it, or because your friend/wife/a passing stranger admired it. Choosing a cute design (and really, one dressed-up dog, big-eyed child, or sparkly starburst just about pushes your site over into cuteness) and then going with businesslike language or a corporate style logo creates cognitive dissonance. The last thing you want your website to do is create cognitive dissonance.

So, if you're tempted by a pink web template or thinking that a kitten in a basket would make your site stand out among the other biohazardous waste solutions, think twice. Even three times. Then, if you really still love it, embrace your inner cutie and find a designer who can do the same.

Learn From Your Keywords in Google Analytics

If you use Google Analytics, you'll recognize this as the basic navigation bar from your dashboard. Click on "Traffic Sources" and then on "Keywords," and you'll see a list of all the words and phrases people used as search strings when they were going to your website.



So, we can see that -- in addition to more obvious things -- someone typed "technological ineptitude" into Google, saw the page below, and clicked through to my blog post about making your website friendly to less tech-savvy people. More than one person, actually. I never aspired to be #6 at Google for "technological ineptitude," but I am, and people come visit me after typing that in. I don't pretend to know what they were looking for, but I hope they found it here.




The keywords are listed in order of frequency -- that is, the number of people who typed in that word or phrase at a search engine and then clicked on your page. Within a particular frequency, they're alphabetical. So all the phrases that fourteen people used will be together in alphabetical order, and then all the ones that thirteen people used, and so on.

While there can be some amusement value (I'm still wondering why that client of mine has "bar pizza" in his GA keywords list), you can actually learn some very useful things from this metric in your analytics.

Take the case of Courtney and Wise, upscale Sydney house painters. When I started working with them, these were their top ten GA keywords for a week:




While a few people found them by looking for "painting services," after that they were getting visitors who wanted information about art. The person looking for "animal art" or "art easels" isn't looking for someone to paint a house.

Here's last week's top ten:



While the folks looking for "house painters, usa" aren't Courtney and Wise customers, the great majority of people reaching the website now are looking for the business, or for house painters around Sydney.

There are a lot of lessons here. The first is that simple traffic doesn't tell you enough. Of course you want traffic. Increased traffic is pretty much always a good thing. However, Courtney and Wise could have thousands of people visiting them while looking for art over the fireplace, and expect very little new business.

By looking at their keywords, I could see that they needed a much tighter focus, and much more relevant, targeted online marketing strategy, to make their website useful to their business.

By looking at their keywords now, they can see that we've succeeded in accomplishing this. If we hadn't, then we'd know we ought to do something different for them.

If you use a blog, your keywords can tell you what topics are most useful to your readers, or most successful in reaching new readers via search. You can see below one week's top keywords for my lesson plan blog. People reached my blog that week through about 2500 different keywords, yet it's pretty clear that fairy tale lesson plans and activities were a favorite.




Fairy tales are always a favorite for the blog in question. So, while I write there about everything from science to classroom technology to music, I make sure to keep fairy tales a frequent topic. I also make sure to keep those fairy tale lesson plan posts updated, with usable links and so on, since they continue to bring me traffic for years.

If for some reason I wanted to change the focus of that blog and bring in different kinds of traffic, keeping an eye on my keywords would allow me to fine-tune my efforts and make sure that I met that goal.

You can also search for a particular word within your results -- handy if you have thousands of words and phrases on the list. Since people might approach a topic from a number of different angles, it's good to be able to find all the variations. So, when I wanted to know whether people were looking for lesson plans using Sketch Up, I was able to answer my question even though folks used phrases ranging from "Sketchup lesson plans" to "class activities for google sketch up." Knowing that there were some people interested in the topic told me that it would be a useful topic to write on again.



Your GA keyword list can give you even more specific information if you use the "Dimension" menu. Click on a particular keyword from the list, and you can find out more about how people used that word. In the example here, we can see that a high proportion of people using one particular keyword this week were from Indianapolis. Seeing this, we want to find out -- if we don't already know -- what happened in Indianapolis this week to catch so many people's attention. Whatever it was, we'll want to repeat it.

Explore your keyword list some time. You may find, as I did, that people visit you with surprising things on their minds -- not just technological ineptitude, but "2 scary things" and "strategies for avoiding piracy" are on my list -- but you'll also get some useful information.

Stumble It!

Getting in the Mood to Write Your Web Content

With only a few weeks till the end of the semester, I asked my students to list the obstacles they saw to doing well with their big research paper.

I was expecting them to express lingering concerns about punctuation, or frustration about having to write in English when it's not their first language, or the troubles they were having in gathering all their data in an organized way.

What obstacles do they actually foresee?

Facebook.
Their social lives.
Excessive partying.
Their boyfriends and girlfriends.
Their work schedules.

As the answers came fast and furiously, it was clear that their problems with the paper were more about procrastination and getting in the mood than about any actual writing problems.

I've chosen to interpret this as meaning that they have learned so much this semester that writing is no longer a source of frustration for them, and that's great news.

What about you? If you're responsible for writing at your website, and those are the kinds of issues you're facing, what can you do?

First, let's recognize that hiring a professional is often the smart thing to do. I can probably write your whole website in the time it takes you to get your first thoughts on paper, and have something fresh on your blog every day, too; there's no point in doing this yourself unless you love it.

But sometimes you want to do a little writing, maybe a paragraph. A fresh piece of company news, a new description for a catalog item, an announcement. You figure you can do it in five or ten minutes, and keep your visitors interested while also calling out to the search engines, "Hey! Come and visit me! I have new stuff!" You don't want to hire a pro for such a small job, and you're confident that you can do this yourself.

But it's not getting done.

I have a lot of clients who find themselves in this position. Solutions?

Well, the photograph above offers my favorite solution: sit down with a glass of wine and some really charming writing gear in some inspiring locale and wait for inspiration to come to you.

No, no, I don't do that myself. I get paid to write. I have deadlines and coders waiting on me. I'm not going to fool around. I was just offering it for anyone who has the leisure.

Here are some quicker solutions:

• Write something. Anything. If you're my client, send it to me and I can probably clean it up and shoot it back to you in under five minutes, which means no charge. If you're not my client, you'll still find it easier to get it finished if you have a few words to work with -- even if it's just a bad sentence or two -- than if you're staring at a blank screen.
• Start with one word. Say you have a new shipment of a popular item in. Start with the word for the item, and then expand on that word. This will naturally lead to "New Shipment of Widgets!" Then you can expand on the newness or the shipment (size of it, maybe?) and the sheer widgetiness of the widgets till you have a paragraph.
  
• Ask yourself a question. If you need to write a quick announcement of an event, you can ask yourself "What's special about this event?" and then write down your answer. If that doesn't help, get someone else to ask you a question. You'll feel more compelled to answer it well.
  

If it's been a week and you still haven't done that paragraph, quit fooling around. This isn't your area of strength, and you should just make an arrangement with someone like me to do these things for you on a regular basis.

Scoping Out the Competition

Different businesses and different industries approach competition differently. I have a friend who sells cookware; she and her competitors get together and trade recipes. I've also worked with people who exulted when their competitors had problems, and wouldn't care to trade with customers who also went to the competition.

Whatever your attitude toward your competitors, you should get some information from their websites. You can learn a lot from it.

For example, let's say that you have an amazing new technology for cleaning medical waste.

You probably don't, I realize. Few people do. That's one reason that I'm so excited about the Ozonator, which is an environmentally friendly new way to clean up biohazardous waste. It doesn't really matter what you sell, though -- paint, tutoring, biohazardous waste management solutions, it's all the same process.

So let's say that you have a new biohazardous waste disposal system, and you want to check out your competitors. First you have to find them. Head for your favorite search engine. Use your keywords, certainly, but also get creative and try out other terms. I found redbag.com (I'm not linking to them because they automatically play an irritating video, but I appreciate their serving as my example competitor).

Use View>Page Source on your toolbar or by right-clicking on the page to find their source code, and see what keywords they're using. The place you're looking for will look like this:



Now, I don't think that people searching for "red" are necessarily looking for biohazardous waste management solutions, but your competitors' keywords can give you ideas for your own, or they can help you find more possible competitors.

I can also go ask Yahoo Site Explorer what links they have. Actually, RedBag.com had no inlinks at all, but another competitor had some:



We ask Yahoo because Google is notoriously unwilling to tell us. Yahoo isn't shy. Look at the screenshot here to see how to put in your request. Then you can use the drop down menus to narrow or expand your focus. Examining these results will tell us what kind of linking strategy our competitor is using: paid ads and directories, perhaps, or reciprocal links, or maybe lots of bloggers talk about them. If we're in luck, this will lead us to good places to ask for links. For example, if our competitors are listed by a health organization, we can write and say that we noticed they've listed So and So, but they've left us out. Will they please add us? This often works very well.

While you're at your competitors' websites, you'll want to examine them in the way you normally do examine competitors, and get the usual lessons you look for when you check out the competition. But you can also look behind the scenes, and get a little extra data that can help with your online marketing efforts. I listed a few other tools for this purpose in an earlier post on learning from competitors, if you want to read further.

Having a Web Presence When You're Going Places

A network guy of my acquaintance was saying recently that he was expecting to need more work soon. I don't seem to know any computer workers of any variety who aren't severely overworked, so it sounded kind of refreshing to me. But of course we all want regular work, us freelancers.

"Your problem," I assured him, "is that you're invisible on the web."

I like giving advice.

He explained that he had never made a website because he has always been planning to travel the world. Also to go to grad school. He figures he has another ten months before he strikes out on these adventures, and of course you register domain names for at least a year at a time, so he didn't want to bother.

Naturally, I didn't tell him he was wrong. I may like to give advice, but I don't press unwelcome advice onto unwilling people.

I'll just tell you that he's wrong.

Here's what to do with your website if you plan to travel the world:

• Have a website with a content management system. There's some controversy about the wisdom of this, and I'll blog about that some day, but if you plan to roam a lot, you should be able to make your updates yourself. If this is just not a good idea for you, then at the very least you should make sure that your webmaster is good about making changes. That way, you can change your contact information and availability easily.
• Finesse the address. It's usual to have your address on your website. In general, it makes you seem more trustworthy. However, there are times when you might not want to include a physical address. I encounter this occasionally with my local clients, because I live in Arkansas. There are ignorant stereotypes about Arkansas out there, and some people don't care to have the state on their sites. Equally, if you're a citizen of the world, you may not have a physical address, or not one you want to share. It's okay to leave it off. However, you should include that decision in your design, so it isn't obvious that you've left it out. You don't want people noticing that you don't have a physical address, especially if you don't plan to explain that decision.
• Consider taking advantage of being a Citizen of the World. While the internet allows us to appear to be in one place while we're really in another -- or several others -- people like to read about exotic adventures. If you might have some of those, then you could write about them and give yourself flair in the eyes of your customers.

While being a network guy is sort of an in situ job -- you can do some stuff remotely, but there are actual physical objects to work with -- my friend still needs a web presence. If he goes ahead and sets up his web site now, following the suggestions above, he's more likely to get that immediate work he wants. He can then be a fairly unavailable networking guy for as long as his roaming lasts, and when he settles back down, he'll have an older domain and a more established web presence than if he didn't get his site going before embarking on his adventures.

He may also find that he can care for the networks of people wherever he finds himself. A peripatetic hardware guy might have a certain cachet.

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Cultivating Natural Text Links

"In the golden chain of friendship," this Victorian card says, "regard me as a link."

The writer probably wasn't talking about hyperlinks, but her words apply. Links to your website are a friendly thing, and they're golden as far as your search rankings go.

People will link to your website just because it has good stuff and they like it. I have links like that in this blog -- just stuff I think might be useful and interesting to you.

You can get links of that kind by having good stuff at your website, and having the good fortune to have people drop by who like your stuff. Nearly all the links to my educational blog are of that kind: somebody wanted to share a lesson plan on wolves, and there I was. Most of the links from my educational blog are like that, too. Those are natural links.

You can get those natural links by having good stuff and pointing it out to people, and asking for links from them. That's definitely a place where friendship comes in. We see good stuff at the websites of people we know and like, and we link to them in a friendly way. We can even ask our friends for links for friendship's sake. We can ask total strangers for links, too, by pointing out how valuable our website could be to their readers. I do that for clients, and often have responses thanking me for pointing out that valuable resource.

But you can also sometimes put links someplace yourself. If you have a blog, or make a website someplace, you can create links which -- while natural in appearance -- are not entirely natural. You might think of them as cultivated links, or maybe cultured links, like cultured pearls.

I'll tell you frankly that I put links to my clients in this blog.

But there is a difference between a cultured pearl and a plastic bead. There's a difference between golden links of friendship, or even gold-plated ones, and base metal. Allow me to share some simple rules for getting that natural look with your text links.

• You still need good content. When I first became responsible for making an employer's online store profitable, I had a terrible time finding the kind of information I needed. It's not that information about online marketing wasn't on the web, but it was not written for people like me. It required special vocabulary to read it, and it wasn't about the things that I needed to know. That's why I write this blog -- now that I know these things, I want to share them with people in the position I used to be in. I do put links for my clients into my blog posts, but only as useful examples in useful posts. You're facing the same kinds of issues that they are, after all. You might even be one of my clients yourself. When you decide to place links in your text, don't forget the main reason you're writing.
• You still need natural language. I sometimes find myself looking at those "articles" composed of links. "Need a wedding planner?" they say, "Solve all your wedding planner needs with the best wedding planner in Grand Falls and the Grand Falls area!" Nobody's going to read that stuff. Readers say to themselves, "Ah, this is one of those articles composed of links." Then they go somewhere else. If you can't put links into your writing without sounding like that, then you should hire someone like me to do it for you.
• You need honest, worthwhile links. This point may seem like an odd one. You're linking to something for which you want links, right? Probably your own website. Naturally it's worth linking to! But think about your reader. If I'm reading your blog post or article and I click off to a link you've offered me and it turns out to be a useful addition to what I've read, I'll appreciate you. I'll come back and read some more. So, when I write blogs for people, I like to add links to other pages on their websites. But I make sure that these are useful links, and clearly identified.
  
  Here, for example, we have a link in Part II of a series to Part I of that series. Someone who has come to Part II via search might want to read Part I, and they can tell from my link's anchor text that this is where they'll end up. I also have a link to the section of the client's website that discusses how they build successful websites. That link saying "successful web sites" isn't going to take my reader to a pitch for cheap web hosting or a get-rich-quick scheme; it's an honest link. I've linked the phrase "anchor text" to one of my earlier posts on the subject, too, because I think there may be people reading this who don't know what that means, and who will find an explanation helpful. If I were going to link to a site with cheap web hosting, because sometimes that's what you want, I'd link with the phrase "cheap web hosting," so my readers would know where they were going to end up if they clicked the link.
  

If you're in a position to place links for your website, good for you. Do it. Just make sure you do it right. Then your links will be part of that golden chain of friendship, not an irritation to your readers.

Videos as Content on Your Website

We get up in the morning and read some blogs with our coffee, check the weather or the sports scores before heading to work, look up data we need for work projects, amuse ourselves on breaks with office humor --

And that link is where I found this little vignette, which is really not characteristic of PR people:

3PM Too Bad No Amount Of Concealer Will Cover Your Flame Trail
Copywriter, after noticing web designer refreshing makeup: Wow. Look at you. Got a hot date?
Web designer: No. I'm meeting people. And I've never met them in person before.
Snarky PR specialist: And you don't want them to know right away that you're a horrible person?

But I digress.

The point is, we go to the internet looking to be entertained or informed. We want good content.

As website owners, we also want good content on our websites. This is what brings both humans and search engines to our site, and makes the site pay its rent, as it were, for our businesses. When the website does its job, we can afford to keep it going and continue adding excellent content for our visitors.

More and more, we want to add video. Our human visitors enjoy it and are even coming to expect it. And yet, from the point of view of SEO, it can cause us problems. Search engines can't see what our videos are doing. There are technological advances that may solve this problem soon, but for right now, what should we do?

Here are a few ideas.

Use text along with video. For our first example, look at Rabbi Fohrman's website with the Hoffberger Institute.




Rabbi Fohrman's lectures on video and audio are the main content on this website. But see how the text introducing the video encapsulates the main point of the lecture: "The Exodus... As Americans, we believe in the fundamental equality of man. As Jews, we are taught that we are a 'Chosen People'. What does it really mean to be 'chosen'? Is this idea compatible with our American heritage?" The text on the rest of the page includes the site's main keywords.

Make multimedia an extra on the page. Sometimes the video is important and useful, but it doesn't have to be the main course. In our second example, Clevertech's page is optimized, and the video is an added feature.



It pops up when you want it, as you can see below, but doesn't prevent the rest of the page from doing its job.



Differentiate. Joblingo's video is important -- training videos are one of the company's main products -- so we don't want to be subtle about the video. It's front and center.



However, that's only from the point of view of the human visitors. If we look at the stuff the search engines see, the video is a small section in a large amount of targeted content. We can give the search engines a different experience from the humans, if you'll forgive a little anthropomorphism.

We're talking here about how the video behaves on the page, not the video itself. For more about that, visit "Using Video for SEO."

Visualizing Web Copy

Your web page is not a piece of paper. That means that things you do when you write a printed piece won't always work online -- but it also means that it can be very hard to tell what the copy will look like when it gets into the actual website.

When you arrange to have a website made or a redesign, you may have the web design spa experience: you meet with your team and talk about your project or yourself for an hour while they listen with rapt attention and take notes, and then a few weeks later you get a mockup in your email for feedback. Another couple of weeks, and your site goes live. Hurrah!

But maybe not. Maybe you're doing the copy, or at least having some interaction with the copywriter. That's when it gets difficult. You're looking at words on a screen, or maybe even on paper, and how can you tell whether they're going to work or not?

First, let me give you a peep into my mailbox so you can see the process. As a copywriter, I might meet the project at a variety of points. Right now, I'm working on one project for which the design is complete. I get pages with "lorem ipsum" -- that is, Latinate gibberish -- that show me how much room I have for the various things I need to write. I'm sending the content to the coder and the project manager.



I have another project for which I have an outline. I'm doing the content and sending it to the client for feedback and then to the designer, who will work from the content.



I have a third project for which I have to find a designer and a coder and a host, and I am currently working just with a couple of images from the client and an initial concept from one designer. Once the team is established, I'll be able to work with the designer and the client to determine what's needed in the way of content.



Clearly, the parameters are different for me, depending where in the process I come in. On other jobs, I might be working directly with the client, and never have contact with the others working on the project, or I might be helping a client who manages the site directly and doesn't have a designer or other team members.

But for the client, it can be confusing. Content sent as a text file may be hard to imagine in a website that hasn't yet been designed. Content being written specifically for a completed design may not give a client much flexibility. And some clients, faced with a website still in the initial concept stage, find themselves feeling overwhelmed by all the choices. This is one reason that some web teams like to go ahead and get the work to a fairly advanced state before bringing the client back in.

What's the best choice for your website?

• Trust your team. You picked them, you're paying them, let them do their work. Agree on points during the process at which you'll see the various elements of the project, and give clear feedback at those points. Chances are, your copywriter has done this before and will know the best points for your input -- that is, the points at which you'll be able to tell what's going on.
• Ask for clarification when you need it. If you're having trouble imagining where the different parts of the text will go, and that makes it hard for you to judge how well you like the text, ask for diagrams. Your copywriter may not be the one designing the website, but can still probably give you a sketch showing roughly where things go. A diagram like this may tell you that the text is going to be in the center box, and that may make all the difference for you.
  
• Work out ahead of time how many versions or changes you can have. My feeling is that the client should get what he or she wants. When I had my business website built, I wrote my own content, but I asked for some specific changes in the design. Still, there are reasonable limits. When, a few months later, I decided to have a couple of other changes, I paid for those further changes. If you know that you'll want to work very closely and make word-by-word changes over a long period of time, say so in advance and build that into the price.
  

Search Engine Rankings Rollercoaster

Yesterday I was working on linkbuilding for a new website, just launched over the weekend. They're in competition with their own old website, which was up for some years. Google hasn't been over to visit their homepage since they launched, but even so they're number two at Google this morning (also number three, actually -- they have one of those nice secondary insets,to a useful page I linked to here yesterday). They should be number one by the end of the week, easy.



This is how it's supposed to work. When you try to rank for keywords for which you deserve to rank, the search engines will cooperate with you and your rankings will improve.

What do I mean by "you deserve to rank"? The key thing to keep in mind here is that the search engines aren't working for you. Their goal isn't to make your business visible. Their goal is to give searchers the most useful pages. That keeps searchers coming back to them and helps the search engines sell ads, so that makes sense. Therefore, you should choose keywords that your customers -- the people who actually want to find you -- would use to search for you. Your business name, the main thing you do, the community where you do it, the subject for which you're really a useful source. Then you just point out to the search engines that you exist, by requesting links at relevant sites and so forth, and in a week or two the search engines cheerfully serve you up on the front page above the fold.

This is how it normally goes.

Not every single time, though. Right now one of my clients, a Fargo web development firm, is riding the rankings rollercoaster.

This is Fargo, North Dakota, that we're talking about here. They've had a flood followed by a freak blizzard, and even on normal days they have temperatures that sound to me as though they belong on some other planet, and now they have to cope with volatile search engine rankings, too? Doesn't seem fair.

They began as we'd expect and want them to begin, moving up within a couple of weeks for most of their keywords. But look at the bouncing around after that. This is a graph showing their rankings at Google, and the ones for Yahoo and MSN are just as volatile -- but completely different.



What's going on?

The first possibility is that they don't actually deserve those keywords. A quick rise followed by sinking is something you can see when somebody manipulates results and tricks Google temporarily, giving the site rankings it doesn't deserve. That's not the case here. This firm is not only a bona fide Fargo web design firm, they are a very good one.

The second possibility is that their competitors are working very hard on SEO, and only an equally hard push back will keep them in their proper place on the search engine results page. I've seen this before, with an e-card company that struggled constantly for top rankings, and always will, because the top players in that industry are always fighting for those rankings. This kind of situation reminds me of MMORPG rankings -- you just can't treat that as though it were a normal ranking situation.

The third possibility is that they've confused the search engines. There are signs of overall success, after all, along with the volatility. First off, the chart shows that their rankings have improved in the two months we've been tracking, and it's early. What's more, the client gets traffic with keywords like "SEO," "web development," and "web design."

Let me clarify that, because it's important. I'm saying that people type in "SEO" and "web design" at Google and end up at this client's website. Not "Fargo SEO" or "North Dakota web design," though of course those are common routes as well. Visitors have just typed in the bare term "SEO" and reached the client's website. "Web development" is actually one of the top ten keywords. These are extremely difficult keywords for a small company to rank for, and I wish I had people visiting me by typing in "SEO," let me tell you. I'm totally impressed.

The client also has been getting increases in the percentage of traffic that reaches the website through search, and specifically through search for relevant terms -- except while his town was evacuated, during which time the traffic went down a bit. So it doesn't look as though our SEO efforts have been unsuccessful. There have been a number of changes made to the web site in the time we've been tracking, the very word "Fargo" has been online a lot in other contexts, and there may just be settling going on.

The question is, what do you do about volatile rankings?

• Rethink your strategy and make changes. The experts over at SEOMoz.org caution against this. On the other hand, I'm going to recommend a couple of things for the client to consider. Making changes which are generally positive can be worth doing, if you don't overreact. At the very least, it makes sense to re-examine your strategy and make sure you're not making errors. I had the privilege of rehearsing under a conductor from the National Symphony Orchestra last week, and he said kindly to the brasses, "Always consider the possibility that you're wrong." He was talking about mismatches in pitch, but it sounds like good life advice.
• Get creative. I don't start with creative linkbuilding. Most websites will rank well for the keywords they deserve to rank for just with onsite optimization and basic linkbuilding. You can spend a lot on the more fun and interesting stuff and end up just where you would have had you waited a while. If you're in a very competitive field, though, and particularly if you're in a field like web services in which there is a lot of manipulation of search engines going on (include the hospitality industry and pharmaceuticals in that category, too), then it can make sense to do some heavier work in social media, to set up some extra websites with useful content and links back to you, or to work on some linkbait and ask your friends to Digg you.
• Relax about it. Sometimes it's not necessary to hit #1 at Google in order to meet your business goals. You have to have number one for your business name, of course, and the client I'm telling you about does have that. But sometimes you can have good results without #1 rankings. For example, I'm not #1 for "SEO Fayetteville AR" yet. My website isn't even above the fold. But look at the results for that query (on a signed-out search in my town):
  
  

Do you think I have a problem? I don't think so. The whole page is full of my name. It doesn't really matter that my website isn't yet #1. Will I be happy when it is? Of course. But until then, I plan to relax.

We'd all rather have top rankings that stay that way. But the rankings rollercoaster is a fact of life in some businesses. Just watch out for the results shown in this cartoon.

Web Accessibility

The Web Accessibility Initiative describes web accessibility this way: "Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web."

Clearly, this is a good thing. From the point of view of your business, it is as important that all your customers can access your website as it is that all your customers can access your physical place of business. The Web Accessibility Initiative folks point out, further, that standards-compliant web design is like Universal Design in the architecture of physical spaces, in that it can benefit people without disabilities as well.

Indeed, many of the items on the WAI checklist for content are things we've discussed in these pages before.

But the question of accessibility took on a particular urgency for me when I was working with Sharp Hue to develop a new website for Quality Life Associates, a non-profit working specifically with people with disabilities. QLA's clients include individuals with traumatic brain injuries and both mental and physical limitations of various kinds. Their services include vocational assistance and various kinds of support for daily living, as well as facilities designed with the principles of Universal Design.

Here is their previous website:



And here's the quick list for accessible web content from WAI:

• 1.1 Text Alternatives: Provide text alternatives for any non-text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language.
• 1.2 Time-based Media: Provide alternatives for time-based media.
• 1.3 Adaptable: Create content that can be presented in different ways (for example simpler layout ) without losing information or structure.
• 1.4 Distinguishable: Make it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background.
• 2.1 Keyboard Accessible: Make all functionality available from a keyboard.
• 2.2 Enough Time: Provide users enough time to read and use content.
• 2.3 Seizures: Do not design content in a way that is known to cause seizures.
• 2.4 Navigable: Provide ways to help users navigate, find content and determine where they are.
• 3.1 Readable: Make text content readable and understandable.
• 3.2 Predictable: Make Web pages appear and operate in predictable ways.
• 3.3 Input Assistance: Help users avoid and correct mistakes.
• 4.1 Compatible: Maximize compatibility with current and future user agents, including assistive technologies.

The old website, pretty though it was, didn't meet those criteria. The flash elements came and went too quickly for people with limited vision or tremors that cause difficulty focusing. The complex drop-down menus were hard to navigate with a screen reader, and their delicate transparent look was hard for those with limited vision to read. In fact, the overall low level of contrast was a problem for many visitors.

The site was built with flash and frames, which were not comprehensible for those using screen readers to visit the site. There were also pages requiring multiple clicks for access, another negative for those using screen readers. And there were large sections of content that had been reprinted from professional journals, which were simply too hard to understand for some of Quality Life Associates' visitors.

Here's the new website:



With a high level of contrast, simple and predictable navigation, and readily understood content, this design fits with Quality Life's slogan, "envisioning independence for people with disabilities."

Not coincidentally, it's also now easier for human visitors and search engines to figure out what QLA does. The pretty, airy look was maintained, and all the necessary information was included, but the site is now far more accessible.

What about your website? Are you accessible?

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SEO Don'ts

Recently a client asked for a list of SEO dos and don'ts. The client is a franchise operation, and they wanted to help their franchisees get the best possible results on the web. I was happy to provide a checklist of SEO things to do to get a new web page visible.

A list of don'ts was another thing entirely.

I've seen lots of SEO don'ts. Based on my experience with clients, I could give you a list, beginning with this sort of thing:

• Don't hide your keywords on the front page in letters that match the background.
• Don't place links in directories of Malaysian massage parlors if you run a pet store in Ohio.
• Don't try to get links by having quasi-English articles with no real content posted at 0 PR article mills.

Chances are, the franchisees weren't planning on doing these things. In every case, these were things done for my clients by people who didn't know any better, but still charged for their services. Or possibly by people who did know better, but dishonestly did these things and charged for them. The clients paid to have these harmful things done, but they had no idea that they were being done.

So it may be that the real list of SEO don'ts for businesspeople, rather than SEO professionals, is something like this:

• Don't hire people who guarantee you some particular ranking in some particular number of days. Not because it's impossible to achieve, but because it's considered bad form in our industry, and honest SEO professionals don't make guarantees like that.
• Don't do anything online that you wouldn't do in the physical world. If you don't have your business card up on the bulletin board at the local massage parlor, then you don't need your business listed with massage parlors in directories. On the other hand, if your business is a massage parlor, then that's exactly where you ought to be. But on your own continent, unless you make international house calls.
  
• Don't do things that sound dishonest or sneaky to you, such as hiding words on your website, because they probably are dishonest and sneaky. If you're not sure, then ask your online marketing people why they're recommending this move, and notice whether the answer sounds dishonest and sneaky.

Online marketing is all about trust. Google's PageRank is about whether or not your website is trustworthy. And there's no reason for people to send money out into the ether to you if they don't trust you. So most of the real SEO don'ts are about trying to sidestep normal growth by doing something shady.

You can feel fairly sure that the search engines are ahead of you on that.

Oh, and a poorly-designed, badly-written website is a definite SEO don't.

SEO Website Redesign #3

SEO Website Redesign #1 was about letting the search engines and the human visitors in on what the website was about, and SEO Website Redesign #2 was about maintaining the look the clients were fond of while increasing usability and optimizing for search.

Here's the third and final SEO website redesign of the series, another Sharp Hue project. In this case, the client, Midwest Medical Billing, wanted a completely new look. They also wanted to be visible in the search engines for their own business name, which they definitely were not.

This is an absolute must -- but there are so many companies sharing the name Midwest Medical Billing that our particular Midwest Medical Billing was having a hard time making it to the front page.

Here's their old website:



There's nothing particularly wrong with it. They were using a standard template and some stock images, and their site looked like all the other medical billing sites.

We fixed them up with a stronger URL, stronger and more search-friendly content, and a fresh new look.



This design has news and announcements on the front page to provide an opportunity for adding fresh content regularly, and an emphasis on modern technology and green office practices, as well as plenty of other keywords that are on the target customer's mind right now.

The new site has been up for seven days, and is #3 on Google for its company name, after languishing in the back pages for months.

Notice that there are no tricks here: it's just a good website, written and designed to be informative and appealing to both humans and search engines.

That's really all you need.

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Do You Really Have to Have a Website?

The latest research shows that Americans now are more likely to go to the internet than to a phone book.

Not younger Americans. Not urban Americans. Not tech-savvy Americans. Just Americans. The computer is now the first place we look for information.

So if you've been thinking that maybe someday you ought to have a website, or maybe when you can afford it you'll get a website, or that a website would perhaps be a good thing for your business in the future -- well, then you're working way too hard.

I was being interviewed yesterday by a nice person from a national newspaper (if you know me IRL, then you already know about this, because I was childishly pleased by it and went around saying, "How cool is that?" and stuff), and she asked me about my website.

Had I paid for it? she wanted to know. And was it worth it?

Well, yes, I paid for it. I tried not to sound as though I were saying, "Excuse me? You don't get a gorgeous website like mine for free, you know!" So I pointed out that it was built by a local company at a reasonable rate and I wrote it myself and that was a savings, but a professional website was a necessary investment for anyone planning to support herself.

It certainly has been worth it. I get most of my work through my website. It was paid for the first month I had it.

Can you do business without a website? Perhaps you can. But many of your customers will go to a competitor who has a website. The money they would have spent with you is the cost of not having a website. It is probably a good deal more than the cost of having a website.

You can do without the phone book.

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