Just a Pretty Face

Usually when I write about design, I'm talking about usability and user experience. Sometimes, though, there's an aesthetic experience that's worth mentioning.

Here's the old look at the blog for FileReplicationPro:



Businesslike, serious, highly technical. Nothing wrong with it, but you're not excited by it, are you?

Here's the new look:



There's no change in content here, apart from added images, but it just looks more like it's worth reading. The hardware guys agree.

Your Website's Contact Page

The Contact page isn't the sexy page at your website. It doesn't have the most scintillating text or your best pictures. But it's hugely important.

Consider the user journey for your contact page:

• Mandy got to your page by typing YourBusiness.com into the navigation bar on her browser screen. She reaches your page, scans the likely navigation places for "contact," clicks, types your phone number into her phone, and is gone in seconds. She's using her computer the way people used to use a phone book.
• Malcolm found your site by searching for one of your services. He read the landing page, went to your home page to learn about the company, read the "About Us" page to make sure you're the kind of company he likes to deal with, and now makes his way to the "Contact Us" page to take the first step toward hiring you.
• Majid has visited your site several times, and has also seen your competitors' sites. He has been thinking of buying one of your products, but has a question about it. He looks around at the product page till he finds the link to your contact information, and heads over to see if you have a form he can use to ask his question.

In each of these cases, a visitor expects to find your contact information easily as soon as he or she chooses to look for it -- whenever that is, and wherever they are.

The excellent book The Elements of User Experience, by Jesse James Garrett, says that visitors who don't have the experience they expect at your website feel stupid. Some, I'd venture to say, will think that your website is stupid instead of feeling that they are, but either way, it's not a positive experience.

So you can't put your contact information at the end of your sales pitch or in the footer of your homepage and think you're finished. You need to have a Contact page.

And on the Contact page, you need to have some selection of the following kinds of information:

• Your email address, with a working link so your visitor doesn't have to write it down on remember it. This is required. If you want to give a choice of addresses on your About Us page, that's fine, but your Contact page should have a default address that allows people to contact you quickly.
• Your phone number, if you're willing to take calls. The more complex your offerings, the better it is to have a phone number. The older your target audience, the more essential it is to have a phone number. And if you know that your target audience isn't very tech-savvy then you must have a phone number so they can call if the website begins to make them feel stupid.
• Your physical address. This is optional, but it's good to have. It increases your trustworthiness, and also improves your local search results.
• A contact form. Make sure that it works, by the way. I ran into one recently that wouldn't accept apostrophes, and you can guess how many visitors are willing to go back and rewrite their messages without apostrophes to satisfy the whim of that form.
  

That's it. If you want to add cool graphics to delight people who reach that page, you can. Just as your appliances could have very special-looking electric cords. But basically, the Contact page is about function.

Robot Sensibilities and Your Website

I had an alarmed email over the weekend from a client who had learned that some of her content had been flagged as "objectionable."

Not only had it been flagged, but it had been blocked from view, so I couldn't see it and therefore couldn't immediately help the client figure out what could be objectionable about it.

"Objectionable" means different things to different people. But there are many sites that will not allow publication of, or will not link to, sites with adult content, or sites that can be interpreted as including hate speech, racist or sexist content, incitements to violence, or illegal activity of any kind.

My client was quite sure she didn't have anything of the kind.

Now, these are things that are objectionable to humans. But it is often robots that make the initial judgement. Robots are notoriously bad at recognizing offensive content. Robots cannot, for example, identify naked people.

This is why humans are employed to scan through all the Web 2.0 sites where everyone can upload their own content.I read an interview once with someone who did this job (I think it was for Photobucket), and he said that by the end of the day he wished he could wash his eyeballs with bleach.

But the initial flagging is often up to a robot. And robots will "look" at a picture like the one at the beginning of this post and see a general pinkness. General pinkness, or a screen full of other colors that could be skin, are likely to be flagged in case they are photos of naked people.

After a few emails back and forth, I was able to understand the client's problem. My client, who sells clothing, had a close-up of a pink garment. The pinkness filled the whole screen. She had given it a title with the word "adult" in it. The robots, making their best guess, decided she had photos of naked people -- "adult content" -- which was in violation of the terms of the site.

I changed the title, and presumably a human came to review it, saw that the robot's guess about all that pinkness was in error, and the content was reinstated.

My client was lucky. The content in question was a blog post, and she uses a platform that quickly flags possibly objectionable content. The error could be fixed quickly. Without that heads-up, she could have lost links to other sites' robots' sensibilities.

It's yet another case in which thinking like a robot has its advantages.

Looking Under the Hood at Your Website

When you need a makeover at your website (and here are 10 signs that you do), you are likely to know it because of the things you see on the screen.

Maybe the design doesn't look fresh any more, or the information is out of date, or you've realized that your visitors just aren't having the kind of experience you want them to have.

But there are other things to look for. If you have someone like me to look under the hood for you, relax. Or if you already know html code and can recognize coding problems, you've got it under control. If not, then it's worth learning a quick and simple way to get an idea of whether your site is up to modern standards or not.

I'm not going to get technical on you. I'm going to tell you an easy way to check, using your "find" function, even if you know nothing at all about how websites are built.

First, where is under the hood at your website? You can see the code for your site by pushing "control" or "command" and then U.

Look at the head of the site, the part right at the top of the page. Here are two examples. The first one just says "html," and has only a title, no meta tags.

The second has a more complete definition of what kind of html it's using. You can find people who strongly feel that strict xhtml (like the example below -- see where it says "strict" in the first line?) is better than other kinds. You may not know or care about different forms. However, using just "html" and no more definition than that is only good for email, and is a sure sign that your site was built by an amateur.



Notice that this second example also has lines that start with "meta." Again, there are various views on what kinds of meta data a site ought to have, but you can be sure that it should have some.

One thing it certainly should have is a meta description. You can use "find" to track down "description" and see what it says. If you don't have one, if it has a long long paragraph or a lot of repeated keywords, or if it says, "Put description here," then your site hasn't been built in the best possible way.

Both examples have something saying "css," and that's a good sign. HTML and CSS are two different languages. HTML is about the meaning of the site, and CSS is about the style, or what it looks like. Using html to make a site look a particular way -- for colors, for example, or to choose a font -- is a sign of an old-fashioned site that won't perform well on modern computers.

Have a peek under the hood at your website and see how it looks. Or if you're thinking of having a website built and considering a few different designers, look under the hood at their websites and see how their work looks. A site built to current standards will work better, and longer, than a poorly-built site.

Do You Need Video at Your Website?

Video is more and more often a component of websites. I've written before about SEO for video , and you certainly should consider that aspect of video. Today, though, I'm thinking about the logistics. Do you want video on your website, and if so, how will you get it?

First, the benefits of video for your site:

• People like video. Visitors will stay on your site for the express purpose of watching your video.
• Video can be an efficient information delivery system. Fargo web design firm Onsharp made a site for a company that specializes in biohazardous waste disposal. Their product is highly technical and hard to imagine, as you can see from the very fact-dense paragraph below the video. The video has drawings that move around, plus lots of happy, puffy clouds. It makes the whole thing much friendlier to the average visitor.
  

• A video can be an economical way to present a lot of images and information. The video on this page shows a whole bunch of different logo eggs, which would have taken a lot of room as individual photos. This is also true when you need to demonstrate a product or give instructions. While space isn't always a big issue on the web, it can be.
  

• A video allows you to include sound. I've said it before about music, and I'll say it again about videos with soundtracks: give your visitors control over the sound. Don't make your rockabilly video soundtrack start playing automatically when your visitor reaches your website -- they may be listening to Palestrina already, or be at a workplace where a blare of music isn't welcome, or they may be returning to check some information and really not be in the mood to hear the whole thing over again. That said, you can provide a lot of information and ambience with music, sound effects, and speech.

So, if you've decided to add a video, how do you do it?

• Find a space on the site. Video doesn't need to take up much room, but it needs a settled place. Plan for it with your designer, or ask to have your current design updated to accommodate it. You can, technically speaking, tuck video in the way you would tuck in an extra sentence, but it won't look good.
• Write a script, or have one written. Your voiceover saying "uhhhmmm" or your video of someone stumbling over words as they try to improvise will not make the impression you want. Use a script, and practice. It's also easier to fit the video to the sound than to do it the other way around, so the script is the proper starting place.
  
• Create the video. Nowadays, you can do this yourself. With your phone, probably, and the "make a movie" button at some free picture organizing software. Will your video be as good as the $4,000 professional one? No, it won't. However, just as people a decade ago were fine with tinny little midi files on computers, people right now are largely okay with amateur video on computers. You might as well take advantage of the moment. This page shows a video made with Kodak software and uploaded via Blogger. The Sweetique eggs page above was made with Corel Digital Studio 2010 from still photos and also uploaded with Blogger. This is the easiest way for you to do it yourself.
  

You can also have a video professionally made, and have your webmaster place it for you. This will of course give you more polished results. The JobLingo website, created by Fayetteville web firm Sharp Hue, is an example of this approach, as is the EnviroSolutions site above. If your company website is an elegant, polished site, and that's important to your company's identity, then this is what you should do. Your web designer can probably recommend a professional videographer, and many web firms also create videos from still images.

• Make sure to get the text on the page. You can, and should, use alt attributes for your videos, and you should also have text on the page which clarifies what the video is about for human visitors, and also for search engines.
  

Is SEO Easy or Hard?

Sometimes people talk about SEO (search engine optimization) as if it were a mystical art of some kind. It isn't. It's good business, good communication, ordinary stuff like that. If you wanted to find a metaphor for SEO, though, I think video games would be a better choice than magic. Like video games, SEO requires speed, strategy, and focus. There's a thrill in vanquishing -- excuse me, I meant in moving ahead of a competitor in the search results. and of course an equal sense of loss when they smite -- or rather, when a canny competitor moves ahead of your company.

So is it a hard game or an easy one?

I can give you a solid "It depends" on that. Optimizing a page for search requires skills which are fairly rare, but those of us who have them don't find it a particularly hard task. When you come to the fight for top ranks on the search pages, it can be quite easy or very difficult, depending on the company and the website.

If you want to predict the level of ease for your own company, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you deserve a top spot? Is your website the most useful and authoritative resource for the keyword in question? Are you a recognized leader in your field? If so, then SEO will be a matter of pointing this out to the search engines. If you don't really deserve the spot, it's going to be hard. Changing keywords or improving your website can both help with this issue.
  
• Are there a lot of orcs out to get you? It is easier to get a top spot for custom musical arrangements for brass quintets than for SEO services. The number of players, their skill levels, and the amount of time they spend on the effort makes an enormous difference. This varies from one keyword to another.
• Do you have any special challenges? A very common company name, especially if there are competitors for the name who have a very strong presence online (I'm still working on that one that's up against a couple of government programs, Microsoft, and an Amazon offshoot), can make your task harder. Not having access to your site or having other limitations that prevent the best on-site optimization can also make things tough.

These factors affect the speed with which you can expect results, and they affect the best strategy for your online marketing. They don't make the process any less fun, though. just examine them with a realistic eye, and then go ahead.

Website Coolness vs. Usability

It often happens that once you start thinking of a thing, examples seem to spring up everywhere. I've been having that experience with the question of cool websites lately. I'm working on a new website which I particularly want to be cool. Snazzy, even.

Some of the characteristics of coolness in websites that I want to incorporate into the new website are multimedia, photographs of objects, and a sense of play. You know how you get to a website sometimes and feel like it's a place to stay and play and explore, rather than a place to get information quickly? That's what I'm going for.

Sitepoint had a great example of that in the HEMA website, a site that starts by looking quite normal but quickly changes as the cup in the picture falls over, knocking the tape down to squish the cake. In the screenshot below, the tape has just bounced up and is about to make the xylophone make funny noises. The whole thing is quite fun. Go there if you have time, and enjoy the show.



The navigation looks normal, but actually none of it works, and if I wanted to buy a xylophone from these guys, I couldn't do it.

That website is a toy. I guess HEMA must have a functional website somewhere, but that's not it.

Then there's the website pictured below, the homepage of a local photographer. When I first went to it, I was torn, because on the one hand I've been feeling quite positive toward the idea of a website where there are photos of objects which do things when clicked -- but on the other hand, I have a deadline and I really need a photographer fast.



You will notice that there is nothing on this website which assists a person in getting a photographer fast. There isn't even anything that lets you know that you have actually found a photographer at all.

Having stopped and stared at the page for a moment, I decided that I'd start with the cell phone, on the theory that a cell phone might symbolize communication and therefore include contact info.

On mouseover, the cell phone showed an email address in a snippet of html code. This obviously isn't what's supposed to happen. In fact, I have since clicked on the cell phone, and it gives a phone number and a working email link. I was in a hurry, though, so I didn't click, but just noted the email address and sent off an email -- which bounced.

Now, there are tech troubles here. There's an email problem, and code showing up where it shouldn't. You may be thinking that it's unfair to include that in a discussion of usability, but I'm going to disagree. Computers lend themselves to tech troubles, and we all know that. An email address and phone number clearly shown at the top of the page would have provided the information whether the mouseover was working properly or not, and even if I were among the sizable fraction of the population that doesn't use mouseover.

It would also have prevented problems created by varying hypotheses. After all, I might also have decided that the keys symbolized the key to entering the site (nothing happens when you click on the keys), or that clicking in the middle of the page would allow me to enter the site (you get an enlarged image of whichever project you've clicked on), or that clicking on the address label would get me contact info (nope), or that the money might symbolize hiring and offer a price list or something (it does give you a phone number).

By the time I made a few guesses and clicked on things and waited for the little surprises to load, I might have been sick of the whole thing -- I mean, I have a deadline here.

It's sort of like going to the grocery store to grab some milk and having to make your way through costumed people with food samples and a mime and a juggler and a couple of games. All of that might be fun when you're in the mood, but it slows down the milk run considerably.

For the grocery store, putting some milk in a case that's immediately visible from the door is a good plan. For a website, putting contact information in the usual spot is a good plan.

So, as I'm working on this very cool website I'm planning, I intend to think about usability ahead of coolness. Ideally, I'll end up with a site that gets the same "Oh, how cool! I'll play with this a bit!" response as these examples, without the irritation of lack of usability.

Are There Enough Digital Marketers to Go Around?

Mitch Joel is concerned about the future of digital marketing.

The internet has been for a while now the main source of information for the majority of people in the U.S. Just this year, it has also become the main outlet businesses use to share information about their companies.

And yet, the level of knowledge about how to do this is abysmally low. People in marketing often imagine that they can just take their TV or print campaigns and stick them on a webpage, and expect to get the same kinds of results. There's a widespread feeling that anyone with a copy of Dreamweaver is a web designer. And, I'm sorry to say, there are a staggering number of rapacious blackhat "SEOs" and probably more who aren't rapacious but are just plain ignorant.

Businesses find that their investments in their websites don't give them a good return, consumers get frustrated over the poor usability of the websites with the information they need, and those businesses which are actually able to do a good job online have an unreasonable advantage over those that are still poking around helplessly in the fog.

Joel says we should be recruiting at college campuses, getting the word out that online marketing is a worthy field of study.

It's a little bit like elementary school science, though. However much we believe that it needs to be taught, most schools can't teach it well because the shortage of people who know enough to teach about it is much more serious than the shortage of people who might want to study it.

On the other hand, if we're facing a shortage of nurses and X-ray technicians, then a shortage of SEO professionals may not be that serious. Your thoughts?

Computer Stress

Computers can sometimes be a source of stress.

This is partly because we're so dependent on our computers now that if they won't cooperate with us, we can be seriously inconvenienced. Partly it's because the things we count on our computers for are so complex that we usually can't fix them ourselves.

But I really think that a large part of the sense of doom that comes over us when we have computer troubles stems from the feeling of personality our computers have developed for us. My computer is my friend. It makes happy little noises and reminds me that it's time to go to the gym and brings me news from the outside world, and that's where I get most of my paychecks, too, so how can I help but be fond of it?

It's easy to feel that your computer has betrayed you.

I've been trying to fix an old phone number that keeps showing up on listings for one of my clients. I waded in confidently enough to begin with; I do that sort of thing for people all the time. This is different. I sent help tickets and visited a forum (may I just say that there were a lot of unwise emotional meltdowns going on at the forum? Don't those people know that these things turn up on their search results?), but all I found was that lots of people have this problem.

Eddie Izzard has his own approach to this sort of thing, but for the rest of us, persistence is usually key. Persistence in searching for the answer to the question, which is probably somewhere in the documentation or online at a forum. Persistence in following steps very carefully because computers only pretend to be smart and really have to be told every little thing very precisely. They will never say, "Oh, of course! I see the problem! Let me fix that for you."

And persistence in calling for help if you need it. One of our favorite IT guys tells me that the key to getting satisfaction from tech support is to use this phrase whenever you call and can't get a solution to your problem:

"Okay, thanks for trying! I'll call back tomorrow and see how it's going." Delivered in a bright, cheery, nonthreatening voice, this can motivate the most jaded IT guy to make an extra effort. The threat of a daily call from someone with a bright, cheery voice is a pretty good one.

When you use computers in your business, you will sometimes have computer problems. However, it's also true that if you have people in your business, you will sometimes have people problems. If you have machines in your business, you will sometimes have mechanical problems. I expect that if you have horses in your business, you will sometimes have horse problems.

Stop. Turn everything off. Unplug it, maybe. Turn it all back on. If it isn't fixed yet, then it's time for some persistence.

Following Up on Your Linkbuilding Campaign

We've discussed what a linkbuilding campaign is, how to plan a linkbuilding campaign, how to ask for links, and how to keep track of your linkbuilding campaign.

Now that you've finished your linkbuilding campaign, what do you do?

• Respond to the people who gave you links. This can just be a "thank you" if they've sent you a simple announcement letting you know they've added your link, it can be a link back to them if that's appropriate, or it can be the beginning of a worthwhile online networking effort. Negotiations, such as offers to provide a link if some condition is met, also deserve a response, even if it's just "I don't have authority to do this, but I'll pass it on to the owner. Thank you for your response." If I'm linkbuilding for a really valuable site, though, I'll usually respond initially with why I think my client should have the fee or reciprocal requirement or whatever it is waived, and sometimes I get that for them.
  
• Respond -- sometimes -- to the people who didn't give you links. You can always thank people for considering you if they email to tell you that you're not getting a link. If you don't hear from them at all, you could sometimes ask again. I would do this only if I really think that the link I'm suggesting would be good for both sites, and that it might be possible that they've overlooked or forgotten my request. I wouldn't send the identical thing over again. This is a case where I might say something like,

"I noticed that your list of companies offering baby equipment rentals doesn't include Baby Smart Travel. We'd love to be listed. If you've decided against listing us, we'd like to know why so we can correct the problem. Thank you so much for your time, both in reading my emails and in keeping up your very useful parenting site. I know that it's hard work, and your readers appreciate it."

I've also sometimes responded with things like,

"Thank you for your response to my link request. It's true that our company does sell things, and is therefore a commercial site, but I hope you noticed our knowledge base. It includes 84 pages of free information that I think your readers would find valuable. if you've already seen it and decided that we're not for you, then thank you very much for considering our site."

You'll notice that these responses are really obviously written by a human being. That's essential. We all hate spam, and people who get lots of link requests really hate spam. One last point here: if you get hurt and offended by rejections, give this task to someone else. I love it when I get responses saying how valuable the site I suggested is, and thanking me for recommending it, but I'm not going to pretend that's the most frequent reaction.

• Ask for updates or changes when appropriate. If someone is giving you a link, then they agree that your site is worth linking to. If your phone number or URL changes, it's completely appropriate to let them know. If they've linked to you with an image, which doesn't do you nearly as much good, it doesn't hurt to ask if they'd mind using a snippet of code which you conveniently send to them. I've even been asked to change the anchor text I've used in links -- a request like that is a little over the top for me, but I made the change, and I didn't mind, so if you're more aggressive than I, you might try it.

There you go: a successful linkbuilding campaign concluded. You should see some results in a couple of weeks, in the form of improved ranking and traffic.

Keeping Track of Your Linkbuilding Campaign

Links are important for online marketing. Search engines consider people's linking to your website a vote of confidence, and use the number, type, and quality of your links to gauge your value to visitors -- and therefore to decide where and when to offer you to searchers. Whether your site is brand new or well-established, adding links is a good thing to do.

If you're doing it yourself or having someone in-house work on it in their spare time, you may not be thinking much about keeping track. After all, only 25-40% of your requests will result in links (assuming you're being as bold as you should be), many of them won't be active for weeks or even months, and linkbuilding is already so time-consuming that adding a lot of paperwork to the process threatens to make the return on your investment marginal.

Over time, though, you'll be glad you kept track. Here's why:

• By next year, no one in the office will remember who you requested links from, and you'll have too many (if you're doing it right) just to have a quick look at your incoming links and see. Webmasters who've already given you a link, or refused you one, will be miffed when they get a communication from you that makes it obvious that you don't remember having communicated with them before. Directories won't be miffed (dmoz is an exception), but you'll have wasted your precious linkbuilding time.
• Comparing the sites that send you traffic with the list of sites you've gotten links from will give you important insights into the kind of linkbuilding that works best for you. Just seeing where you get the traffic from tells you something useful, of course, but adding the linkbuilding data adds more. For example, when I see that Google groups is sending traffic for a client, I might think I should add more links in Google groups. If I saw that they had lots of links there and only one sends traffic, I'd know that this link was a member of a different group of links for them -- links, perhaps, within a particular community, or with a particular landing page or anchor text.
• You can more easily go back and change, correct, or try again.
• You can tell how you're doing. If you get only one or two good links per hour, then linkbuilding isn't a good use of your time, and you should hire someone more effective to do it for you. Ditto for any staff member you set to the task. If you don't keep track, you'll have no idea how effective you're being.
  

How to keep track?

• A spreadsheet is the most obvious choice. Your SEO Plan has a template, if you'd find that helpful, but you can easily build yourself a form. Using a spreadsheet has the advantage of allowing you to sort the data. You can also decide for yourself what kind of data you want to track.
  
• There are software programs for the task. Raven is one of the most popular. I don't use it myself, so I'm not recommending it, but it might be a starting point if you want to go this route.
• You can use paper, too. There aren't really any great advantages to doing it this way, but if you find spreadsheets slow or difficult, don't let that keep you from keeping records.
  

Planning Your Linking Campaign

It pays to spend a little time planning your linking campaign before you begin.

First, determine your best keywords. If I wrote your site, then I'll have put your main keywords in the meta language at your website (and possibly sent them to you asking you to post them over your desk and get used to using them). If I didn't write your site, you can read "Choosing Keywords" and figure it out.

You may also want to do a linking campaign for a particular keyword or set of phrases for a particular seasonal or other timely opportunity, in which case you can read "Another Way to Look at Keywords." Either way, you should end up with five or ten phrases you want to work with for a single campaign.

Find out how you rank for those terms and make a note of it. This allows you to see whether your strategy is working, as you go along, and whether perhaps you need to alter it.

Now, use the search engine you want to target to search for those keywords. Add your geographical area if you're just beginning to work with those keywords, or if they're highly competitive. See who turns up.

This is one point at which you might discover that you've made a bad choice of keywords. I remember once thinking that "Copernicus rack" would make a dandy keyword for a client. I was wrong. I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't tried it out. You can read about more examples and detail in "Your Competitors Affect Your SEO Strategy." Adjust your list if need be.

You can now get ideas for some quick links. Use SoloSEO's Link Search Tool to speed up this part of the search. This tool will automate searches for things like "[your keyword] +suggest site" and "[your keyword] +add URL." This ferrets out the directories and links pages that welcome new links.

Remember, you only want sites that are relevant to your site, have value for visitors, and don't put you in a bad neighborhood. All links are not created equal.

Also make sure that, while you do this, you pay attention to the kinds of options you have with your key words, and the amount and kind of competition you have online.

Armed with a nice list of competitors for the keywords, you can now use Marketleap or Searchbliss to get an inside look at your competitors links. You can also do this directly at Yahoo or Google or bing, but these tools give you a quick way to get an overview. You'll be able to see what kinds of strategies your successful competitors are using.

Having chosen your keywords, checked who's looking for links on the subject, and seen what the competition is doing, you'll have a good idea of the level of difficulty of your keyword and of how other people are approaching it. Once you've done this, you should be able to put together the best plan for your linkbuilding campaign.

If not, or if going through this process takes you an excessive length of time (you certainly shouldn't spend more than an hour on it), or if you've done these things and now need something more creative to take it to the next level, you can always contact me and I'll help you.

Who Should Have Access to Your Website?

One of the decisions you need to make when you launch your new website is this: who should have access to it?

You usually have several options when you set up your website. You might choose to have a CMS, a content management system. You have this when you set up a site with services like Volusion or Word Press, and you can also have your web developer build you one when you have your site designed. You generally just need a username and password to get in.

You can also use Notepad or Dreamweaver and upload your changes to your site. For this, you need some skill or training, but not an IT department. You also need username, password, and some other information for FTP access.

There is nothing to keep you from posting the access info on your office bulletin board (physical or virtual) and letting everyone mess with the website. Nor is there anything to keep you from keeping that information entirely to yourself, or refusing it and having your webmaster make any changes you want. Somewhere in between is the option of selecting people who should have access, and having each set up and individual username and password.

There are some things to consider:

• You can easily mess up your website. I change text at my website whenever I feel like it (I use Bloggers' CMS for my blog, and Dreamweaver for the rest of the site). Anything more complicated, I hire Shan to do it for me. I know from experience how easy it is to mess up a website, and I'd rather pay to have it done right than pay to have my mistakes undone. And I'm a web content professional. If you are, say, a store owner or an attorney or a pastor, you might have fewer things you can readily change without messing things up. And it might take you a while to realize you've messed things up, too. And then when you try to fix it, you may really mess it up.
  
• Your staff may come and go. We all know at least one story about a disgruntled employee with access to a website, and the horrible things he or she did to said website. Even without that kind of drama, though, it's easy to end up with unsuspected corners of a website. At least once a month I spend a few hours of some client's time tracking down and fixing things someone from the past has done. You'd be surprised how much time it can take to find and change that leftover outdated phone number or unlinked landing page.
  
• You may want to delegate. Granted, it's easy to mess up your website. But it's also easy to update a calendar, change the featured products, or add the name of a new associate. If you're the business owner, that's probably not the best use of your time. Identifying a staff person to keep up with those things, giving access to that person, and keeping a record of some kind of both the access information and the tasks performed is going to make your life easier in the future.

Me, I keep my access codes to myself. When I'm working for clients, I treat the access codes they give me as top secret, and I don't get access if I don't really need it. For my own sites, I know exactly who has access, and to what. But I've built sites for non-profits that are very open, or have sections which are very open.

There's no one right answer. It's simply an important decision to make when you're putting your site together.

Selling at Your Blog

Blogs can do a lot of things for your business:

• Blogs drive traffic to other parts of your website.
• Your blog can show the world that you're an expert in what you do.
• Blogs allow you to interact with your customers, and let your customers get to know you.
• Your blog gives your company a personal face, even if your business is only online.
• Since people use blogs as a source of information, your blog can add value to your website by supplying information your customers want.
• Blogs can lead to links for your website -- including links that a strictly commercial site couldn't get.
• Blogs allow you to rank for keywords that you otherwise wouldn't show up for.
• Blogs keep your customers updated on news about your business.

Blogs also give you an opportunity to sell stuff. I've blogged for stores, so I know whereof I speak. You can sell a lot of stuff with a blog.

Yet people who use their blogs to sell things often fail. They decide that blogging really doesn't work. Chances are, they've done it wrong.

Selling, from the point of view of retail blogging, can't be something you do to people. People come to your blog of their own free will. They're not coming to be sold to. They're probably not coming to look at ads. If your ads are good enough to be considered art, or to go viral at YouTube, that's something else. But mostly, if you're just saying "Buy my stuff!" people don't want to see it.

On the other hand, people do want to buy things. Sometimes they even need to buy things. They've come to your blog because they have some interest in the stuff you sell, so you don't want to keep your goods a secret.

So how can you achieve that balance?

Look at private blogs. The blogs where people just write about what they find interesting and what they care about, without selling anything. They write with excitement about the cool new phone they bought. They show pictures of the cute shoes they're thinking about splurging on. They make lists of their favorite wines.

And their readers also go buy the phone, the shoes, the wines. They write about these things at their own blogs. It's great marketing.

But notice: they don't have pictures of new phones every day, with no other content. They don't show the same phone repeatedly with a new coupon code every day. They don't harangue their readers into buying the phone, or push pop-up phone ads into their faces.

When you're selling stuff with your blog, you need to show your products. You should take the opportunity to explain the great features of your product. And you can certainly offer special deals.

That just can't be all that you do.

The blog post you see a bit of below is on teaching how to tell time. There's a hands-on clock there, and people who click on it can buy it. I think I was also showing a book and an elapsed time pocket chart that day.



I was also showing how to make inexpensive classroom centers for young children, how to incorporate time-telling skills into literature lessons, multisensory lessons for learning to read analog clocks -- you know what? If you were a kindergarten teacher, you'd want to go read that lesson, even now that you know it was selling stuff.

Make your blog beautiful or useful or fun, and then go ahead and set out your wares. Your readers won't mind. They'll probably even buy.

Background Information at Your Website

In my spare time, I teach writing to college students. This may not be your idea of fun, but we all have to have our hobbies. Wednesday is our day to go over papers and discuss the most common problems of the week, and yesterday I had a great one to work with. A student wrote about misconceptions about MMA, comparing it with boxing. The paper included not just MMA, but also PRIDE, UFC, WEC, IFL, and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember.

I didn't know what any of those things meant. I had never even heard of MMA before, and I was not alone in my ignorance. Reading an essay that assured me that people mistakenly consider MMA violent just because fighters "have the opportunity" to keep beating each other up after they fall to the floor of the cage didn't clarify things for me or the other neophytes in the class, especially since said essay was sprinkled so liberally with acronyms.

Your website is not a college essay. But the point about background information is relevant to your website. In fact, the question of how much background information to include can be quite a thorny one.

I'm working with Shan Pesaru right now on a website for quite an unusual product from Sweetique, a kind of chocolate that comes in actual chicken egg shells.


When I've shown these to people in market research, there is all sorts of delighted astonishment and consternation, so I'm fairly confident that visitors to the site won't instantly grasp the concept without any explanation, any more than I now have a clear idea of what MMA might involve, apart from whomping on people on the floor of a cage.

But your homepage isn't necessarily the place for lots of detailed explanations.

Here are some factors to consider in deciding how much background information to include:

• Remember search. Being found by search engines isn't your website's most important job -- being #1 at Google won't do your business any good if your visitors just glance and leave -- but it is your website's first job. Having a terrific website won't do you any good if your customers can't find it. So your homepage content has to incorporate the terms people use when they look for the goods and services you offer. People are not currently searching for "real eggshells filled with a special blend of milk and dark chocolate with hazelnuts," so the Sweetique homepage doesn't get to rely too heavily on that content.
  
• Don't confuse your visitors. Sweetique's website can't rely on keywords like "chocolate eggs," though, because we usually mean something quite different when we use that term. People who get to the Sweetique website by searching for "chocolate eggs" were expecting egg shaped-chocolates, not chocolate inside real eggshells. We have to make sure that they understand what Sweetique is offering very quickly. So we have to include enough background info that a visitor can grasp the concept within seconds -- then, we hope, they'll be intrigued enough to stay and visit other pages and get all the details.
• Give a clear path to more details. While you need to keep the essential keywords in mind when you work on your homepage and other likely landing pages, you need to offer all the background that people need. In market research, we found that people worried about the chance of salmonella when they saw that Sweetique eggs use real eggshells. There has to be a reassuring level of detail about the high standards and the sanitation process at the German factory where these chocolates are made. It doesn't have to be on the homepage, since few people are going to be searching for that data at bing or Google, but it has to be easily accessible from the homepage. We can't have visitors leaving because they're worried about food poisoning.
  

Here's what we came up with:



You can't see all the content here (you can click to visit, if you care to), but it's carefully planned to include just the right amount of background information. The images help, too -- just remember that they can't do all the work for you.

Check out your own site -- better yet, test your site. Find out whether people new to the site but in your target demographic get confused when they read your text. See whether your test subjects go ahead and read the background info you're giving them, and whether they can easily find the answers to their questions.

If your results aren't ideal, then you know what you need to change.

Why Artists Don't Have Websites

A friend and I went to a local craft fair over the weekend. We have a lot of these where I live, with excellent potters, jewelers, quilters, soapmakers, and various other artisans displaying the things they've worked so hard to produce.

We bought a few small items, my friend and I, but we kept thinking that we'd want to buy these goods for the holidays, not right now when we were paying tuition and buying textbooks. One or two of the artists had websites so we could shop with them later, but most did not. Since only two of the vendors we saw had physical-world shops, I had to ask people why they had chosen not to have websites.

Choosing not to have a website is equivalent to choosing not to have a viable business, and I've written before on the planning to fail mentality, but "I'm not really in business" was rare among the answers I heard to the question, "Why haven't you gotten yourself a website?"

Here were the most common answers:

• "What would it cost to get a website?" Some people asked that immediately, and others jumped right ahead to "I can't afford it" without even asking. One of the artisans was selling gorgeous pottery sets, practical kitchenware with flowers and leaves and animals molded sinuously onto the edges. She sold her trays for $150, tea pots for $250, sugar bowls and cream pitchers for $55, and mugs for $25 -- two tea sets would pay for a simple website for her. "I can't do anything that costs money," she said. We asked how we could buy things from her in the future, and she assured us that she was at the fair every year. Clearly, this woman can't afford to do without a website.
• "I don't want this to become a real business." Only one artist told us this. She makes lovely soap as a hobby in her kitchen, and she doesn't want to become successful enough to have to expand. As we talked, she volunteered that she'd had gift shops approach her, and would like to be able to get repeat business from customers at the fair. I wasn't trying to sell anything, so I didn't try to tell her that you can really control your business much better with a website than by showing only at fairs, but I'll share that important truth with you.
  
• "I don't know anything about computers." Some of the artists expressed concern. "They'd ask me how many gigabytes I wanted," said one, "and I wouldn't know what to say!" While web designers actually don't ask clients how many gigabytes they want, I can understand that fear of not being able to communicate. Many businesspeople know they should have websites, but can't think what to say when they call a web firm to arrange for one. My friend assured this artist that her uncertainty was the very reason she should call me if she ever decided she wanted a website, and that's true, but fear of computer guys should never keep you from getting your business online. Shop around till you find someone you can communicate with.
  
• "There are other people with the same name as mine." This one was a surprise to me, but I heard it several times. While I do occasionally feel fleeting exasperation with clients who choose a name for their business that someone else already has sewn up for search, merely sharing your given name with someone else doesn't mean you can't succeed online. There's an actress who shares my name. She doesn't share my space at Google, though.

It happened that I was talking to artists. If for some reason I'd been among chefs, service professionals, charter boat operators, personal trainers, or professional genealogists, I expect I would have heard much the same thing in the way of reasons for not having a web site.

Here it is: you can't be in business, in the twenty-first century, without a web site. If you don't have one, I'll be happy to help you with that.

Getting Social for SEO

Unless you've been asleep for the last five years you've probably used social media networking sites. YouTube, facebook, twitter, LinkedIn: depending on your age group, your chances of participating on one of these hovers around 96%.

As social media become more important as sources of information, the importance of using them well increases. Our social media maven, Josepha, offers suggestions for using them effectively:

YouTube

YouTube, though without an internal analytics system, is fortunately very individual specific. You have a single account for your single company and you can see everyone who has subscribed to you. Not only can you see them, but you also have access to their content so you can get an idea of who you're attracting just by browsing your subs. I think that they will not be far behind Facebook in the use of internal analytics.

Facebook

Facebook has been letting us make pages for our businesses and interests for some time now, but they have recently added a way to track their use. Once you make a page for your business, you can follow your traffic and also see the demographics; how many teen girls, how many retired men, and how there are no fourteen year olds following you at all.

twitter

twitter does not yet give you a traffic tracking interface, but like YouTube the accounts are already pretty individualized. You make a single account for each company you're going to tweet for and twitter tracks how many followers you have. Poof. True, you have no idea of the demographics, but since twitter is the new water cooler, word of mouth system it allows you to cast a really wide net.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a little more difficult to use as a social media tool, simply because they require you to actually know people. What LinkedIn can do for you, though, is research. There are applications that will aggregate any mention of your company in twitter.

How to Use Them to Your Advantage

You can choose a single site, all four, or some mix of these and industry specific social sites, but once you've got your accounts all set up comes the fun part. You want to look lively, you want to be connected in the community, and you want the community to connect to you.

Tip 1 - Make your account about you. Don't make it a rehash of the corporate website. That's what the corporate website is for. These are for showing your personality, your human side.

Tip 2 - Be active. Don't tweet every five minutes or you'll lose all your friends, but do post things regularly. You can update your status once or twice a day, post a new video once a week, write a new blog entry daily. Find a nice, easy stride and stick with it.

Tip 3 - Don't drone. We all need some spice in our lives! If you're posting daily about how to chose the right paint color, then you're going to get boring fairly quickly. Choose related but different topics. Paint color one day, the difference between matte and gloss finish the next. Add a cheeky post about the decorating choices of various television shows and you're on your way!

Tip 4 - Keep it contained. The last thing you want to do is to go around friending and following anything that blinks at you. Be a little selective, grow your fan base slowly; following people who don't care what you do just for the sake of having that person on a list is not beneficial.

Tip 5 - Always check the pulse. Do be interested in what is happening with your followers. It's time consuming, yes, but we're talking about the new water cooler, word of mouth, "I have a guy" system of communication. You wouldn't ignore a friend you ran into on the street! Just because you can't see their faces doesn't mean you can ignore them.

Tip 6 - Enjoy it. I mean that. If this isn't your thing, then pass the ball to someone else. Don't post "Another thing for me to not keep track of" and then expect people to join your list of friends.

And more than all these things is to be yourself. We all like to know how the other half lives (gossip columns, anyone?), so live it up out there! Go ahead and tell us that your cat threw up on your music! Or that those chocolate eggs were fantastic (see Tip 1).

Let's not make it the focal point, though, shall we?

Cheers!

Josepha

Reaching the Bridal Market

One of the first things a girl does when she gets engaged is to run tell all her friends and family. Immediately after that, she goes online to get ideas for her wedding and start ordering and arranging things.

The bridal market is large, enthusiastic, and primarily online. If you sell to the bridal market, you need to make sure they can find you.

Wait a minute -- if you said that you don't sell to the bridal market and are about to move on, think twice. BruiseMD, a natural bruise treatment, targets athletes and moms, but that bride who got a bruise playing soccer (or in the aisles of the crowded stationery shop where she and her maid of honor were obssessively comparing 43 nearly identical rose-themed place cards) certainly wants to get rid of the discoloration before the ceremony.

Think outside the box, and you might find a bridal connection for your own business.

If so, go with it. The Knot, the #1 wedding site, claims that weddings account for $71 billion in online spending each year -- $28,000 for the average wedding and $4,000 for the honeymoon. You deserve part of it.

You can reach the bridal market, as you can reach any target market, with useful content and good products. It doesn't hurt, though, to spend an hour grabbing some quick foundational links. People do use relevant directories, after all, and your well-chosen anchor text will give search engines the hint that you can useful to people planning weddings.

Here are some sites for quick bridal linkbuilding:

• American Bridal
• Wedding Favors
• Rosewood
• DIY Brides
• Bride Couture
• Wedding Big
• Wedding Links R Us
• Wedding Celebrations
• The Wedding Planner
• A-Wedding Day
• Guides for Brides
• Top Wedding Sites
  

You can also advertise:

• Brides.com
  
• The Offbeat Bride
• GetMarried.com

Did we miss your favorite? Let us know in the comments.

Your Website vs. Web 2.0?

Social media supports your website and extends the value of your investment in that website. Crowdsourced and user-generated content are great opportunities for linkbuilding, wonderful places to meet your customers and show them what great goods and services you offer, and the ultimate in professional networking.

So where's the vs. in "Your Website vs. Web 2.0"?

It came from a question a client asked me yesterday. "If you're good enough at social media," she wanted to know, "could you do without a website?"

It's an interesting question. If your business is adept enough with Twitter, Whrrl, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Squidoo, Digg... and so forth ... then that could be your entire online presence. People searching for you could type in your name and see your Amazon lists, your Flickr and YouTube contributions, and your deviantART portfolio, and learn all about you.

There could be advantages to this:

• In general, those sites are free. You save the cost of building a website.
• You can present different sides of your business to different markets.
• You can change and update your information continually even if you have very limited technical skill.

There are also disadvantages.

• Those sites are only free if your time is free. Putting time in at a few sites is great support for your website, great for networking, and good business practice. Managing your business via forum and aggregate site is extremely time-consuming. I know people who spend most of each day maintaining their presence at multiple free sites. They aren't running profitable businesses. These two facts are connected.
• All your different sides will be visible to potential customers at all times. So will all your changes and reinventions. I'm extremely visible on the web, myself, and you could see different sides of my life if you made the effort to do so -- but my website is primary. That means that the professional face I choose to present is the main one. People who search for my business aren't going to happen upon pictures of my family unless they make an effort to find them. If you conduct your life all over the web, you have little or no control over what tops the list when people search for you, and it will change from day to day.
• Even if you maintain a consistent presence across all Web 2.0 spaces you inhabit, you still have very limited control. Some sites will allow you to show products and some won't. Some will give you the option of showing certain information and some will insist that you do. None will let you present a consistent visual effect -- especially if you have limited technical skill. Forget branding your business.
  
• Your customers will hate you. Seriously. Let's say that I discover your products on Flickr and contact you via Twitter to buy something. A couple of months later, I think what a great gift that item would make for a friend -- but I can't remember your Twitter name. I Google you and find your Ning page -- but with no website, I can't track down your products easily, and I've already spent fifteen minutes getting cross about not being able to find your website. I'm not going to make the extra effort involved in finding you.
• It shows a lack of seriousness. All businesses need websites. If you don't have a website, it's going to be hard for people to take you seriously enough to send you money.

Your business website is the foundation of your online presence. Your participation elsewhere on the web supports it. But you can't do without it. (Want some figures? Check out "Can You Do Without a Website?")

Sure They Can Find You, But Are They Looking?

We were explaining the usual SEO sequence to a new client recently.

First, we explained, we get you to where people can easily find you if they search for the name of your company. After that, we want people to be able to find you by the generic name of what you do -- locally and then further afield if you want that. Once that's solid, then we can spread out with other keywords. But first, they've got to be able to find you when they specifically look for you.

"How," she asked, "will they know that they're supposed to look for me?"

A very fair question.

Fortunately, the process of getting people visible for their business name is usually quick and easy for us.

Then, when we move on to what you do, we're using your keywords, which we've chosen at least in part according to what people are looking for.

But it's smart, when you have a new website or a new business, or even an old one, for that matter, to tell people about it.

Here are some ways to share the word:

• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and your personal bog -- plus all the other social sites you hang out at -- care about your new website. Tell them.
• Forums and blogs where you usually hang out and comment want to know about this important milestone in your life. Notice the usually part here, though,and the part about wanting to know. This comment attempting to share a website is going to get deleted:
  

August 29. 2009 20:29

Hey very nice blog!! Man .. Beautiful .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your blog and take the feeds also...

bad credit loans | Delete | Approve

And so will yours if you try to tell complete strangers who don't care at all about your website by dropping links at blogs.

• Put the URL on your business cards, bags, invoices, signs, the side of your car, and anything else that will take an impression.
• Include it in all your advertisements.
  
• Send a press release to your local newspaper announcing your new website. It might be a slow news day! Write it well, with a good and original story, and it doesn't even have to be a slow news day.
• Tell your customers. Have customer service people get the habit of saying, "You can also shop with us online at OurBusiness.com!" or "Be sure to watch our blog at OurBusiness.com -- we announce all our sales there."

By the time you've done all these things, you'll be visible at the search engine results pages.

Results of Regular Site Upkeep

While I work for private clients, I also work for a couple of agencies, helping to build and optimise websites and looking after some of their clients as I look after my own. At one of those agencies, I have a colleague named Tami. She minds the PPC results and I mind the organic SEO results, and we meet virtually sometimes on Monday mornings in our ritual mining of analytics data.

Tami calls this, "Making sure nothing awful has happened."

I like to think of it as seeking opportunities to maximize results, but it's one of those half full vs. half empty things, right?

In any case, I was there poking around among web sites that I take care of and websites that I ignore. Some people are happy with their initial results and don't care to be more aggressive about their online marketing, so there are sites in my data that get regular care and sites that just trundle along on their own momentum.

Not long ago I wrote about a single SEO case study: a company I'd had on my regular clients list for a year, with excellent results.

That's just one company, though. There are so many factors for each company, ranging from the state of the economy to seasonal changes to level of compliance, that one company can only be an indication of what can happen, not what does happen.

So I ran some anonymous numbers comparing well-built, optimized websites that were being taken care of with equally well-built optimized websites that were being left to their own devices.

I compared only one thing: traffic increase over the past month. Website traffic is not always the most interesting or important metric, but it's easily understood and easily compared. It's a neutral choice. Comparing July and August will certainly give you different results for a lawn care company than for a school supply store, but over a large number of sites, seasonal variations even out. So I simply gathered up all the numbers and took the mean increase (or decrease) in traffic for the entire population.

The good news is that the average good website increased in traffic, whether cared for or not. Some of the untended websites went up in traffic and some went down, but the average result was a 6.49% increase in traffic.

In general, healthy websites do show a gradual and steady increase in traffic, interrupted sometimes by seasonal dips. So it's good to know that a good website can survive a bit of neglect.

The other good news is that sites that were being looked after showed an average increase in traffic of 38.23%.

"Looked after" can include social media, blogging, routine linkbuilding, and keeping an eye on analytics and Google alerts. The sites generally have one to three hours spent on them each week, though some have less and some have more -- sort of like having the cleaners in.

What's the moral of the story? Simply this: spending a little time looking after your website is worth doing. If you have someone with the skills on your staff, give them an hour, or perhaps a morning, a week to do minimum maintenance. If you don't have someone with the skills, consider hiring someone.

The other take-away is that getting your on-site optimization done so you have a healthy website can be enough, even if you do nothing else, to keep you on a path of steady improvement. That's got to make you feel optimistic.