Looking for a Hero

When writing ads, or things that are expected to function like ads such as a landing page for your adwords campaign or a direct mail piece or a call to action, you should think like your readers.

You shouldn't always think like your readers. If nothing else, your readers sometimes want to read something different from what they're already thinking about.

Not with ads.

If I'm ready to buy, or at least to make a decision about what I want to buy, then I'm not thinking about my subject in an abstract way. I'm not contemplating the topic philosophically, or seeking greater knowledge.

On some other occasion, sure, your visitors might just be thinking about the thing you're writing about. Dragons, for example.

On some occasions, your visitors might care to examine the various intriguing suggestions writers have proposed for how dragons might in fact be able to fly. They might want to speculate on the origins of the markedly cross-cultural dragon stories. They might be looking for cool pictures of dragons.

If they are, at that moment, about to be eaten by a dragon, then they don't give a flip about any of that stuff. They want a dragonslayer.

If you are indeed a dragonslayer, then they don't care about your mission statement, your educational background, or your features. They want to know right off that you are a dragonslayer and prepared to come right over and slay their dragon.

Let's move away from dragons. I'm feeling sorry for the dragon in the picture right now, even though it's strictly metaphorical.

Put very simply, people reading your ads or ad-like content are thinking about themselves, not about you or your product. Speak to them about their current needs and wants.

A client of mine sells software. They want a great headline for a page people will visit when they search for the term "mirror server." If someone is searching for "mirror server" and clicks on a software company's website, then they want secure data management. That's what we need to offer them. We have a lot more to say, and we can say it somewhere else. On that page, we want to give the purchase-ready visitors what they want. The others can look around, and come back to that page when they're ready.

The damsel in the picture, once she's feeling less distressed, may be in the mood to hear all kinds of fascinating tidbits about dragons or about the knight's experiences. Right now, she's just looking for a hero.

Outbound Links, Abundance, and Cake

Recently I was talking with a client about plans for his website. He caters to the tourist trade, and we were discussing a page of links to local information.

"I know you don't want to have links that take people off your website..." he said uncertainly.

It made me think about a book called How to Be a Complete and Utter Failure in Life, Work, and Everything by Steve McDermott. In it, McDermott says that people who fail "believe in scarcity... They believe that things, including money, are like a cake -- there are only so many pieces, and if I give some away to you, there's going to be less for me. Successful people believe in the exact opposite -- abundance. That there is too much to go around, and the more I give away, the more comes back to me."

Now, the client I was discussing this with is a successful person, and clearly a generous, abundance-minded person.

Somewhere, though, he's heard that you don't want to put outbound links into your website for fear that people will leave and never return.

There are two things you need to think about when you're deciding this issue. First, how good is your website?

I wrote materials for a client's presentation a while back. "I don't want people looking at the materials while I'm speaking, " the client cautioned me. I think he was warning me not to make his handouts too thrilling.

There was really only one thing to say: "If you're a good presenter, you won't have that problem." If you're a bad presenter, of course, you might as well have really thrilling handouts, so they'll ask you back anyway.

So if it seems to you that people will follow your links and never come back, then you should probably work on that website.

The second thing to think about is your reason for having outbound links. There may be occasions when you're doing it as a favor, or for a really valuable link swap, but usually, the links ought to be for the sake of your visitors. Like everything else on your website.

In this case, the client wants people from far away looking at his website and dreaming of taking a vacation with him. Having a page of useful links for people planning a vacation in his area will encourage those dreams and move them closer to reality.

Having such a page will also cause people to think of his website as the logical starting point for their vacation plans. "We went to the Ozarks," they'll say to their friends, "and it was wonderful! Go to the Sky Ridge website -- they have links to all the information you'll need."

He'll be adding value to his website, making it more appealing to visitors. There'll be linking opportunities and good word of mouth, and lots of return visits. He'll also be able to swap links with local businesses, benefiting them as well as his own business.

He's not going to list his competitors -- but he could. I recently added a link for a client to a competitors' page. They are so confident of their product that they're willing to list all their competitors, improving their search results and traffic in the process. I think my clients have the best product, but I admire that company's audacity, not to mention their generosity.

Even if you don't go that far, you may find that you can benefit a lot from well-planned outbound links. You may not be able to have your cake and eat it, but you can certainly share it and still have plenty for yourself.

Stumble It!

It's All About Relationships

Marilyn Robbins, a smart cookie from Liquid Dispatch ,was telling me about her company's goals for their online presence.

"In our business, " she said, "it used to be all about relationships. People come to us because they know us -- or they used to. Now, they go online."

I was able to assure her that it's still about relationships. It's just online relationships as well as physical world relationships.

That clerk at the chemical company, when the boss says to get a truck for the feedstocks, is just as likely to Twitter about it or IM someone for a suggestion as to call someone or to walk down the hall and ask. And when the answer comes, it may be based on someone's blog or Meetup group, but that's still about relationships.

Networking skills are just as valuable. It's a matter of getting used to a new form.

Managers who worry about people wasting time at Ning in the guise of marketing or networking could be right. People who would, a decade or two ago, have wasted time over lunch or the Chamber meeting may waste time over LinkedIn now. People who are determined to waste time are going to waste time.

But people who used networking opportunities to learn more, share ideas, and develop good working relationships at those Chamber meetings -- they'll make good use of online opportunities now.

If you've grown up with Facebook, you're probably comfortable with online networking. What if you didn't grow up with Facebook? What if, like Marilyn, you find this sort of a new idea? How can you gain the skills you need?

• Remember that it's not really different from face-to-face networking. The same skills are involved. Be your business-casual self, and you'll be just as happy in your web business relationships as in your face-to-face ones.
  
• Give up the idea that you personally won't be able to do it. Different people have different reasons for deciding they can't do it -- they're too shy, too old, too lacking in computer skills -- but believe me, you can do it. Start with just one place where you feel comfortable -- and you can shop around to find such a place. There are plenty of abandoned profiles around the web, and you don't have any particular responsibility to keep up with all of yours. Settle in and get to know people. You can add more sites if you feel like it later.
• When you think about where to start, consider trying a personal social media site first, till you get the hang of it and feel confident, and then search for the virtual water cooler where your industry hangs out. Just don't share the wet T-shirt pics at the personal one in mistaken confidence that no one from work will ever see them.
  
• Don't try to do everything. I promise you, you can't keep up with all the social media sites, any more than you could hit every single conference in your industry. You can automate some things, of course, but I don't follow-back or pay any attention to those legions that follow me at Twitter with ads vaguely related to some word I used -- do you? I thought not.
• Hire someone if you need to. I don't do social media for very many clients, but I have a couple of companies that I'll be sociable for. I can introduce you to people in my industry who do this kind of work, too. You might have someone on your staff who'd enjoy taking on this task, or you can be like Pizza Hut and hire students to hang around your office and tweet.

If you're ready to jump in, check out the list of social media sites from Trafikd for a starting point. It'll be fun.

PPC vs. SEO

I'm not an expert at pay per click. While I had a chat once with a guy who actually is an expert at it, and he assured me that it's all about the landing pages, my experience of PPC is analyzing its effectiveness for my clients, and it never seems to be doing them much good.

The conversion rate is invariably far lower than that for organic search or referrals from high-quality links, the traffic is never stellar, and the time spent on the site tends to verge on the insulting.

So my position on PPC, when I'm asked, tends to be that it's outside my realm, but it never seems to do much for the people I work with. Oh, and I'm told it's all about the landing page. Good luck.

Here's some data from SEOmoz that suggests that it's not just me (I'm quoting here -- click on the link to read the whole article):

• For every 1 click on a paid search result, the organic results generate 8.5 clicks (this is on a keyword parity basis, not counting those search results that have no paid ads)
• Based on action/conversion tracking, paid search clicks convert, on average, at 1.5X the rate of organic clicks (no surprise, since that ad text and landing page is custom optimized by the advertiser)
• From the numbers above, we can see that the opportunity from organic search is 5.66X that of paid search
• Across the board ad spending (via SEMPO):
  • 2004 was 85% PPC vs. 12% Organic
  • 2005 was 87% PPC vs. 11% Organic
  • 2006 was 87% PPC vs. 12% Organic
  • 2007 was 88% PPC vs. 10% Organic
• Spend on SEO is 1/8th of PPC
• Paid Search Agencies earn, on average 10% of their clients' PPC spend (this number may actually be low)
• By this logic, SEO Agencies earn 1/45th (1 / 5.66 x 8) as much as paid search agencies (from a direct keyword-to-conversion path perspective)

Now, SEOMoz is written for SEOs, and so the focus here is on the fact that we make less than we're worth, if you compare the value of organic improvements in search with the value of pay per click campaigns. But from the point of view of businesses, this can be good news -- SEO is cheaper and more cost-effective than PPC.

And these figures assume a higher conversion rate, too, which I have never yet seen. The actual figures for my clients would be more extreme than this.

I plan to refer people to this data when asked in future.

Only Pay If You're On Page 1!

A client shared with me a high-pressure sales pitch he's been getting from an online promotion company.

The deal is pretty simple: you pay a monthly fee of $120 dollars to stay on page 1 of the search results for Google. That is, if you're on page 1 that month, you pay. If you're not, you don't. There's a fee for the first month, to get your rankings up. After that, you pay only for results.

Doesn't that sound great?

It might, unless you know how search engines work.

While this online promotion company assured my client that Google rotates your link off page 1, and thus a continual watchful eye and "quick optimization of your link" is a must, in fact the search engines search for the best pages to offer the searcher. That name, "search engine," is a bit of a clue. The search engines then offer the best, most appropriate, most trustworthy page -- as far as they can tell -- to the searcher. The bit about rotating people off the front page is, if I may be forgiven a technical term, a lie.

No reputable SEO guarantees any particular results, any more than a pediatrician is going to guarantee your kid a particular height. It depends. However, I get most sites to the first page within a month. Some may even go to that first page within the first month all by themselves.

I like to have five to ten clients at a time, so I can look after them well. When we've met their goals, they may be finished, or they may have new goals. They may want to rank for more keywords, or they may just want maintenance. Keeping their content fresh, keeping up with their analytics, helping out with blogs or social media -- I'm sort of like having a worker who spends a morning or two a week taking care of that stuff for you.

But if I were a confidence trickster, I could offer to keep hundreds of people on the front page for $120 a month, per keyword, each. Once they were on the front page, I could take their money and do absolutely nothing. Chances are, many of them would stay there on the front page for that particular keyword. They would happily send me money for nothing every month. Those whose rankings slipped -- perhaps because a competitor got busy and did something to push them off to page 2 -- wouldn't pay me.

I wouldn't care. There are plenty more suckers out there, right?

Mind you, I'm not saying that the company my client told me about is running a scam. Perhaps they don't know any better themselves. I'm just saying what I, if I were a confidence trickster, which I'm not, could do.

Linkbuilding for Challenging Subjects

I've been linkbuilding today for two different web sites. Two very different websites.

First, there's this free teaching unit on environmental education. This is a very useful page, and I think people will be excited to have access to it. I'm sending off requests to .edu and .gov sites with a fairly high degree of confidence that I'll get those highly desirable links. I'm hanging out with environmentalists and teachers and people promoting social responsibility. I'm adding the URL to green directories and teachers' communities to which I belong.

It's just so wholesome, you can't believe it.

The other website is selling bruise treatment medication. This is also a useful thing. People have been clamoring to try it out for me. It's perfectly wholesome, harmless, and the folks who make it are nice, respectable people.

But in my linkbuilding efforts for these nice people, I'm finding myself in low places. Sites that seem to revel in revolting pictures of bruises. Sites on child and wife abuse. Sites touting quackery and snake oil.

I'm getting different responses, too. I got a notice that Squidoo lenses about pharmaceuticals will be shut down. I got scolded by Wikipedia. I'm being treated like -- gasp -- some kind of sleazy gray hat marketer.

The things I'm doing in the two cases are no different. In both cases, we're offering useful information and in both cases we're selling something. Both respectable activities. It's just that the second example is, unfortunately, in a subject area that has some rough history. Hotels are in that category, too. Nothing wrong with hotels. It's just that their industry has gotten infested by shady activity, and that makes everyone more careful.

What can you do if you find yourself in this position?

• Take the high road. It's certainly easy to follow the common paths, but it's not beneficial in this case. While you do want your environmental lesson plans to be with the other environmental lesson plans, you may not want your herbal remedies to be with the other herbal remedies.
  
• Consider other approaches. With the bruise medication, we may need to focus on cheerleaders, athletes, and dancers rather than on bruises. Doing this will get the product into the awareness of people who need it, without raising so many red flags.
• Expect the process to take longer. It's probably going to take more time and more effort to succeed with a product facing those challenges. There's no point in being unrealistic about that.
  

Every product, and every company, faces some challenges. The lesson plan, for example, is going to be easy to link and is already getting nice traffic. But the company that's offering the lesson plan, SmartPay, shares its business name with a couple of different government programs (U.S. and overseas), a Microsoft division, and a service "powered by Amazon." Talk about challenges!

Just know what you're dealing with and plan your strategy accordingly.

Stumble It!

Local Search for Tourists

I've just done SEO strategy and content rewrite for a skydiving company. Skydiving is practically a definitive example of a field in which local search is the goal. The Skydive Experience, the company in question, has a dropzone in Louisiana into which skydivers must jump. Their customers are physically present. Their travel is only up and down.

So I was not immediately pleased to see, on checking out their analytics, that only about half their visitors were from Louisiana. My first thought was that their exciting pictures and videos were bringing in people who were visiting out of sheer curiosity. Not that we mind curious visitors, but I wanted them to have more folks who might actually go out and pay for a jump.

The visitors' keywords told another story. Here are the things these out-of-state visitors were looking for when they found my client:

• "skydiving near shreveport louisiana"
• "place to skydive east texas"
• "texarkana skydiving"
• "louisiana skydive"

Far from being random droppers-in, these were people from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arkansas, Colorado, New York, and California looking for a good place to skydive while they visited the general environs of the The Skydive Experience.

Apart from being relieved, what should the skydivers do?

• Adding links for local hotels, restaurants, and points of interest would be a great service for those out of town guests. When they offer to swap links with other businesses in the area, they skydivers will be creating value for themselves, their neighbors, and the visitors.
• Photos of the local area would help tourists plan their visits, give the skydivers the chance to use the alt attribute to get some good place-names into their web pages, and bring visitors back as they dreamed about their vacations -- and planned where to go.
• Make sure their content is clear and useful to out of town visitors. "Just north of the bypass!" doesn't clarify things for the adventurers heading in from Utah. But giving the price for sport jumps for USPA licensed skydivers is a great thing to do to bring in those bold souls planning a skydiving trip across the country, even if it's not as popular a service locally.

If you're a local business that caters to the tourist trade -- or you'd like to have some tourist trade to cater to -- keep them in mind when you plan your website.

When You Don't Want SEO for Your Blog

Blogs are so good for helping people find your business site that I nearly always think of blogs in terms of search. You want to use your keywords, both your regular ones and special seasonal ones that are good for your business. You want to link back to your main website. You want to list your blog in high-quality directories and forward it to your social media accounts...

But maybe you don't.

There are times when you want a private blog.

Right now I'm working on a website for a preschool. They want a blog (we're calling it a Communication Center) where they can post pictures of the kids and their activities for parents to check in on during the day.

What a wonderful idea! It's great for parents to be able to check in, and it'll add value to the preschool in their eyes.

They don't want their children to be visible to the world.

Fortunately, this is easy to arrange. You can make a password-protected section in a website, if you have a custom blog. Just ask your webmaster or designer to set that up for you.

If you use Blogger (that's the platform we're on right now), you can do it yourself. Just go to your dashboard, click on "Settings," and you'll see a button labeled "Permissions." It's the farthest on the right. Click it and you'll get a window asking who can read the blog.



Right now, while we're working on the site, I've set it up so that only the authors -- that's me and the designer -- can see it. Once it launches, we'll switch to the "Only people I choose" option.




The owners of the preschool can invite 100 people -- the parents of the kids -- to be readers of the blog. They'll sign in with their email addresses to be able to see the blog.

Chances are, whichever platform your blog is set up on has a similar system with similar options.

How Much Does a Website Cost? Three Answers

One of my most popular posts at this blog is "How Long Does It Take to Make a Website?" The other big question people thinking about getting a usable website ask is, "How much does it cost to make a website?"

This weekend I spoke with two new clients about their website needs. Both asked those two questions. Most do.

But "How much does a website cost?" is one of those questions like "How much does education cost?" or "How much do clothes cost?" Not one of those questions like "How much does milk cost?"

At the very least, you have to be able to say, "How much does this particular website that I have in mind cost?"

I've been negotiating with designers this weekend, too, for a couple of websites I'm writing and doing the project management for. Both designers readily told me their hourly rates, and I'll tell you my hourly rate cheerfully enough, too, but without knowing just what needs doing, it's very difficult to predict how many hours a project will take.

I sent one of the designers this rudimentary diagram:

Also a site outline, and detailed specifications about images, links, color preferences, and what parts of the work I'd be doing and what he'd need to do. As you can see, no artistic talent is required for this step.

Doing this increases your chances of getting a clear estimate. It takes me about two hours to do this type of planning, and of course that's two hours you would have had to pay for anyway, whether you do it yourself, delegate it to a staff member, or have a professional do it. It also allows you to compare designers' quotes more usefully, since you can be sure that they are all talking about the same thing.

In this case, I didn't end up with a quote, though. Instead, I got one of the most common answers to the question, "How much does it cost to build a website?" That is, "What's your budget?"

If you can specify the price you're willing to pay, then the people building your website can tell you what you can get for what you have in mind.

Another client asked me on Friday, "Would it be fair to say that we'd get different results if we put more time into it?"

Yes, that would certainly be fair to say.

But skillful designers can often come up with clever ways to fit what you want into your budget, or at least ways to get a similar effect.

Often, though, people asking this question have no idea what a website might cost. They've never had a website, and don't know how to find out what they ought to pay for one. Or they've had a useless website and suspect that they've been overcharged, regardless of what they paid for it. They may have looked around the web a little and discovered that prices range from "free" to "Call us and discuss it." So what should they expect to pay? Ten dollars? Forty bajillion dollars? How can they even determine whether they can afford a website or not?

For such people, the basic answer is this: a simple business website that's good enough to do its job is going to cost you somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000, by the time you include everything.

Not having a website, or having a poor-quality website, is going to cost you lots more than that in sales.

And that's why my answer to the price question tends to be, "What's the yearly value of one additional customer who comes to you from your website?" A little calculation usually tells us that the value of one additional customer to the size of business I typically work with is going to be $2,000 to $5,000.

If, in your business, the value of one customer is $30,000, then that's what you should budget for your website. If it's $23, then you might want to ask yourself, "What would I like the yearly value of one customer to be?"

A good website will bring in far more than one new customer.

So there you have it: three possible answers to the question, "What does it cost to build a website?"

My advice to you is to calculate the value of getting one new customer this year and set that as your budget. Figure out -- perhaps with the help of someone like me -- exactly what you want in the way of a website. Then talk to web firms or designers saying not, "How much does a website cost?" but "This is what we want. This is our budget. What can you do for us?"

You'll find that a much more useful question.

Stumble It!

Ways to Collaborate with Your Professional Blogger

Here's one way to collaborate with your professional blogger: meet on the balcony with a nice bottle of wine and a couple of notebooks.

This is so rare, you wouldn't believe it. However, there are lots of practical methods for having a writer keep your company blog up to date:

• Give your blogger access to your blog and leave it to the pro. This method works best when your blogger already knows something about your field, or has worked with you for a while. Settle on a posting schedule (three times a week, for example), let your blogger know any special preferences you have (time of day to post, word counts, etc.), and relax.
• One client, when I told him we could do it that way, said, "I'm not that relaxed." I assured him that he didn't have to relax if he didn't want to. He has his staff post all the interesting things they hear during their workdays at Basecamp, and I pull stuff from that for his blog, Twitter, and newsletter. This works very well when your blogger doesn't have direct experience with the industry.
• Give your blogger topics as assignments, and have posts either sent to you or posted as drafts for your approval before they're published. Frankly, this tends to result in a blog that isn't posted regularly. Let's face it, if you had the time and inclination to come up with topics and edit the posts, you wouldn't need to hire a blogger. However, I sometimes begin with this set-up and then shift to the first style once the client feels completely confident.
  
• Have posts done in bulk and sent to you. I have a couple of clients who prefer to work this way. I'll send ten or twenty posts, and they can post them on their preferred schedule. In some cases, they save these for days when they don't have time to do their own posts. Not only does this allow you a high level of control without excessive time commitment, but it can be a very economical approach, too. I charge by the hour, but bulk blogging is so efficient that the cost-per-word can be half as much as for weekly posts.
• Have your staff write blog posts and let your blogger edit them. This is a good method when you want full control over the content, but still want a professional quality blog. This method can result in your paying far less to your blogger -- I can edit a post, even a really badly written one, in five or ten minutes. However, you still have to pay whoever's doing that bad post in the first place, and they probably can't do it as fast as a pro. This works best when you have staff with special knowledge and free time you're already paying for. Put your blogger on retainer, too, if you take this approach. No one is going to be willing to bill you in five or ten minute chunks.

The marketing value of a blog is incontestable at this point, but blogging regularly is rarely the best use of your time.Collaboration with a professional writer is the solution. Any of these approaches can make it a simple and stress-free process.
Stumble It!

Website Maintenance: the Least You Can Get Away With

At a meeting once I was talking casually with a businesswoman. She told me, as people often do, that her website just didn't do anything at all for her. I've never seen her website, but she told me that she had access to it -- that is, she could update it herself.

"Updating it regularly could really make a difference," I said. "Keeping your content fresh encourages people to come visit you more often. Since you have a CMS, you can maintain it in about 15 minutes."

"I don't have 15 minutes," she shot back grimly. Her nostrils flared. She spoke very fast for a Southerner. Her eyes had a far-away yet steely gaze, as though she were thinking about all the reasons she didn't have 15 minutes.

I didn't press it. In fact, I think I refreshed her drink for her and left her in peace.

Obviously, she's not a client of mine. But maybe you aren't either, and maybe you sometimes feel the way that woman did -- or the way the runner in the picture does. At times like that, keeping your website up to date may be the last thing on your mind.

Here's the thing: your customers are going to go to your website. Even if they heard about you on the radio and are going to walk into your place of business, they're going to look at your website first.

If your website is in a mess, it says something about your business. It says, "We're not detail oriented." "We're not up to date." "We don't really care what you think of us." "Maybe we've gone out of business, leaving our website here like the Mary Celeste. Don't bother coming to see us."

Take the 15 minutes. Here's the least you can do and still have your website presenting a good face to the world:

• Make sure it's up and running. I used to be surprised when people called to discuss how badly their websites performed and I had to tell them, "Um... it's not online. That's part of the problem." I'm not surprised any more, because it happens a lot.
• Check your analytics. Whatever you have in the way of site stats, glance at them occasionally to see whether you're getting a steady increase in targeted traffic, and to find out what your visitors seem to be looking for.
• Make sure your basic information is correct. That outdated phone number or list of staff members who no longer work for you is a problem. Change those things on your website when they change in the physical world. If that's impossible, then at least look for outdated info on your regular visits to your website. (You do make regular visits, right?)
  
• Check your links. It's helpful to provide links to your visitors, and it can even lead people to use your website as a portal to other places they want to go on the web. Having dead links defeats that purpose and makes it look as though no one lives there any more.
• Update the things that are most important in your particular industry. If you're a web designer, then your website has to be cutting-edge fresh inside and out. If you're a musician, your sound clips better be good and accessible at all times. If you're a restaurant, keep that menu current. Let other things slide, but the most important items for your brand have to be right.

If you'll do these things every week or so, you can otherwise let your website do its job on its own for quite a while before you need to pay it any special attention. And of course, if you need help, you know where to find me.


Stumble It!

SEO Temptations

'The trouble with Google PageRank," said the fellow who had designed the website I was consulting on, explaining why he was resisting the idea of installing Google Analytics, "is that it tempts people to write stilted, unnatural stuff on their websites."

It's true that people are tempted to write stilted, unnatural stuff on their websites. Some even give in to the temptation. One of the local web design companies here where I live has a homepage that says something like, "If your Fayetteville business needs a website for Fayetteville business or any surrounding Fayetteville area business..." It does sound stilted. Stupid, even.

Other firms react to the temptation in other ways. One of the competitors of Fargo web design firm Onsharp has a bizarre paragraph that goes sort of like this: "If you want to find our website, you can find it by going to your favorite search engine and typing in 'Fargo web design, Fargo web designers, Fargo web firm, Fargo...'" This is a more creative version of the above, but no less stilted and no more natural.

Does this have anything to do with PageRank? It has never been suggested that keyword stuffing (that's what you call that kind of content) improves PageRank. Google has never recommended keyword stuffing. Installing Google Analytics doesn't lead to keyword stuffing.

Good web content is written with the search engines in mind. We have to remember that they are robots, and not able to interpret complex allusive stuff. They need to have the keywords -- the things humans will type when looking for your page -- right up there where they can see them and understand them with their robot brains.

We also have to remember that the search engines don't shop with us. When humans come to your page, they don't want to see stilted language. Even if they have never heard of keyword stuffing, they're going to notice that something odd is going on at your page if you're doing it. If they have heard of keyword stuffing, they'll recognize it and know that there's something shady going on.

This is true, but again, it has nothing to do with Google. It has to do with shady practices. Some people are tempted to indulge in shady practices. Since Google's PageRank is a measure of trustworthiness, there's no reason to suppose that shady practices will improve your PageRank. People who take up keyword stuffing can't honestly say that Google tempted them to do so.

What does the picture at the top of this post have to do with SEO? Nothing. Keyword stuffing also has nothing to do with good SEO practices. If you're considering hiring a web firm that uses this tactic, resist that temptation.


Stumble It!

Writing E-Newsletters

A new study out of the UK claims that e-mail marketing brings in a 45-fold return. I haven't seen the raw data, but I find it believable. An electronic newsletter is the least expensive means available for reaching lots of clients, customers, or potential clients and customers with a strongly targeted message.

Here are some suggestions for making the most of your email newsletter:

• Make sure it looks good. The example below has been put together by a business owner using a free newsletter program. They've left in the stuff that was just there to guide them, and they've made simple grammar and punctuation errors. The information isn't organized in a useful way, and their headline isn't a good choice for the text below it. The overall effect is not professional, and with some consumers, they'll lose trust. Since this company has an ongoing service, one new customer can be worth thousands of dollars. They've saved a maximum of $100 with their DIY attempt, so this is clearly a bad business decision. Unless you actually have someone on your staff with the skills and tools to do it for you, hire a professional.
  

That doesn't mean it has to be fancy. The example below is directed toward an audience with a high tolerance for the do-it-yourself look, and this is just a plain text email. The content is good and desirable to the population, and what's being done here is all being done correctly. If you have limited technical skills to draw on (but good writing skills), then an approach like this may work better than the example above.

• Make sure it's valuable to your readers. As with most other online forms of marketing, it really can't be all about you. Your readers are thinking about themselves, not about you, so you have to be offering them some value or they won't bother to read your newsletter. The example below offers contests, projects, and information about an upcoming event, not just information on the company or blatant ads. That's true for all the examples here, and it's an absolute basic.
  

• Make sure you have a call to action. If people just read your newsletter and can't do anything about it, you haven't made good use of your newsletter. The newsletters below have links back to the company's main websites, and opportunities to download items.
  

Ironically enough, both these examples are tech companies, and both had some little technical troubles with their buttons. The moral of this story is that you should always test your newsletter before you roll it out for real.



One final reminder: don't try to send your newsletter out from your normal email account. You're very likely to be identified as a spammer if you do that, however willing your readers are to receive your newsletter, and however good your newsletter may be. It's part of the spam filter process. So go ahead and use a service. Your webmaster may offer that service, or you can look into a company like Constant Contact or iContact.

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Another Useful Tool from Google

Do you ever read those articles suggesting surprising new uses for common household objects? Well, you might not be up for encasing a cut lemon in an old onion bag and rubbing it on your marble countertops (I'm with you there), but you might like to try out a new use for one of Google's tools.

Google's Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool can be used for keyword development research, but it has another handy use as well.

It'll tell you what Google thinks your website is about. Just feed your website's URL into the tool and click the button, and you get Google's best guess about what you're doing at your website.

For example, Google has the impression that the guys over at FileReplicationPro are involved with this stuff:

backup software, file sync, data backup, file replication, server backup, file synchronization, offsite backup, pc synchronize, data replication, backup, file, software, sync, replication, synchronization

Google is correct. That's exactly what they do. Not suprisingly, they do well for search.

Here's what Google thinks I'm up to at RebeccaHaden.com:

search engine optimization, search engine marketing, search engine, internet marketing, web design, marketing strategy, marketing, seo, design, copywriter, writing

That's correct, too.

On the other hand, parenting bookstore Pages of Parenting is setting up a new website on a DIY platform, and at the moment, Google thinks they're engaged in these things:

parent class, parent resource, parenting course, parent, autism, counseling, children, child, counselor, therapist

It's not exactly false, but notice the complete lack of books on the list. For a bookstore, this isn't a good thing. Neither is it very good that Google associates the site with words like "child" and "children" -- not useful search terms for this site. Pages of Parenting needs to get enough keyword-rich content onto their new website to make sure that the search engines have an accurate impression of what they do. This will signally improve the likelihood of their being offered to someone who actually wants what they have to offer.

It's a good quick check up to see whether your content is misleading the search engines. If so, of course, you can contact me for some improved website content. In any case, it's good to know.

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Is Squidoo for You?

You know you need links. If you have good stuff to offer, you'll gain links naturally because people will link to you -- that's how it's supposed to work, and why the number of links you have is used by search engines to help determine how good your website is, and how worthy of being offered to searchers.

Still, you'll probably need to make some efforts at linkbuilding. Once you've done basic directories and asked the people who will say, "Oh, yeah, how could I have missed you?" though, gaining quality links becomes time-consuming. Analyzing the market to target websites, analyzing each website to determine how best to approach the webmaster, finding the webmaster, crafting that perfect request -- a really good linkbuilder can do maybe three in an hour, and even then you have a 25-40% success rate..

It's natural to wish there were good, ethical ways to create links yourself without having to persuade other people that your site is worth linking to.

There are such ways. One of the most fun is Squidoo.

At Squidoo, you can make lenses, which are organized directories, as the folks over there put it, of good stuff on the web.

You have a choice of modules, which are easy little forms for adding information and links. If you have a video at YouTube, or some good articles, or a useful page at your website, you can add them in and link them up. You can arrange for your Squidoo lenses to be announced automatically at your Twitter or Facebook page.

Here are some initial questions to consider when you're using Squidoo for marketing:

• What should your topic be? You can make a lens about your company or organization. Nothing wrong with that. You can also make lenses about the topics you'd like to be associated with. So my new client BruiseMD, a bruise treatment, should have its own lens, plus lenses on bruising, bruise treatments, natural remedies, sports medicine, cheerleading, last-minute wedding emergencies (they thought of that -- possibly they've actually known some groom who got a black eye at the bachelor party), fruit enzymes, and care of the elderly. There may be more, too. I'll have a look at what's already there on these and related topics and make sure that the new lenses complement rather than duplicating the available information.
• What should you include? Lenses have to be useful to be successful. I re-made a client's lens last month and increased the traffic by 333.33%, with a conversion rate six times as high as they're getting from their paid ads. How? By taking what was there -- essentially an ad -- and making it into a useful source of information. People avoid ads, but are avid for useful information, inlcuding useful information about goods and services that they need. So include your products, but also make sure there's value to the reader. If that means including links to other information sources, so much the better.
• What next? Tell people about the lens and link to it at your social media sites, and perhaps at your website, too. You can continue making more and more lenses if you want, giving your site more and more links, but you can also keep your lenses up to date and tweak them to maximize traffic. You can keep track of visitors to the lens at the Squidoo site, and you can see whether the lens visitors click through to your site with your Google Analytics. In this way, you'll have data on which to base your strategic decisions.
  

One of the great things about Squidoo is that there is a lot of help available there. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned lensmaster, you can find suggestions and support.

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How Much Do You Need to Know?

There's a persistent problem with content-based (i.e., effective) means of driving traffic to your site: the people who know about the subject aren't always the ones who can do the content.

A client told me yesterday, "The problem with these things is that they always end up putting more work on our plate."

I see his point. He makes software, and here he is fixing up his website and redesigning his user interface and putting out a newsletter (or at least overseeing people who do those things), and I'm suggesting that forum participation might be good for the company. What's more, I'm telling him that I probably can't participate usefully in a forum of hardware guys talking about his product, which I've never used and probably never will use, since I don't have my own servers.

"Usefully" is key here. Another thing I did yesterday was to sign on a new client who has been having people visit forums and drop random links for the company. I could do that for the software company, but a forum post saying, "What do you guys think about SoftwareX? Click on the link to download your free copy and try it out!" is not useful to anyone. Nor will it generate traffic. It will mostly just make you look shady, especially if you run around the internet posting it hither and yon under multiple names with accounts that have no other activity besides that. This new client is just going to have to give that up.

And yet, the people who have the knowledge to participate effectively in forums may be the very people who can't be spared to do so. The people who have the knowledge to write that newsletter may be the very ones who are least able to explain their knowledge.

What's the solution?

• Delegate what can be delegated. Another of my activities yesterday involved sorting out animal biologicals for a specialized directory. While it's true that I wouldn't, off the top of my head, be able to tell you what western blotting (mouse or otherwise) has to do with neuroscience, I'm perfectly capable of recognizing the term and knowing that the biologicals company I'm working with has the stuff. It makes more sense to have an information worker like me filling out the complex computer form than to pull a scientist out to struggle with it. Let the company's specialists continue getting those sheep livers ready for shipment, and leave the linkbuilding to someone like me.
• Collaborate on things that need your input. It takes the software maker's hardware guys several hours to write a page of copy, and it's frankly not that scintillating when they finish. However, they can spend a few minutes jotting down notes and I can write the article in twenty minutes. Not only is it cheaper to pay me for twenty minutes than to pay the hardware guys for three hours, but the opportunity cost of having the hardware guy away from his green lights for several hours can be significant -- enough so that sometimes the alternative to having me write the page is not having the page written at all. You may also find that scheduling time to answer questions is a good investment: one efficient Q and A session can provide enough information for many pages of content.
  
• Coordinate your own efforts. If your topic is highly specialized, it's possible that you're going to have to have some input into the process of creating content. That shouldn't mean that you have to write things yourself, though, if you have a writer. You should be able to shoot a quick email off when you have an idea, or when a customer asks a question, or when you notice a news report which your writer might have missed. Taking a few minutes to do this can save you lots of time in the long run. You can also give your writer access to memos or meetings, with no extra time investment. And you can put the time-consuming things on your calendar at some point when it's practical to do so, rather than trying to fit them in at busy times.
  

In the long run, it's worth a bit of effort. But lessening that effort is a sensible goal.

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Can We Talk About Usability?

One of my favorite publications on web design is .net magazine. In a recent publication, they have a nice little directory of terms for talking about usability, including "usability." "You shouldn't use [these words] when talking to users, developers, or managers," they say lightly.

It caught my attention, because I'd had a conversation on the subject with Shan Pesaru over at SharpHue. I'd sent him a link to Seth Godin's video, "This is Broken," and he came back complaining, "The word 'usability' is not said once throughout the presentation."

"Think of the audience," I said. "I write about usability all the time at my blog, but I hardly ever use that word, because my readers probably don't all use it."

It is, as .net says, jargon.

But is it really? They've got "usability" on the same list as "RITE" and "wireframe." They might be wrong. Have a look at a site redesign Shan and I did for Australian painters Courtney & Wise:



Right above you see the old site. I've given details of this redesign at "SEO Website Redesign #2" so I won't repeat them all. But I think you can see, if you compare the old look to the new one below which has just launched, that there were issues in usability.

The original look was hard to read, especially for the older customers who are very likely to want their houses painted. Contact information wasn't as obvious and navigation was less clear.



These things are about usability -- making the site more usable, better for users. That's not a concept that's only valuable for designers and engineers.

I guess I've generally called it "user-friendliness" or "accessibility." But "usability" is in many ways a more direct and descriptive word. It's worth learning. So I've gone back and tagged the posts on usability, and you can find them by looking at the tags on the right.

Perhaps, if we all learn and use this word, we might encourage recognition of the importance of usability. We might even encourage usability.

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