Happy New Year!

Website Checkup: Errors

Take one final look at your website before you break out the champagne.

Do you have typos? Is your punctuation slipshod? Are there grammatical errors or poor word choices?







Examples like these may shock you. How, you may be thinking, could these organizations allow their websites to go out in public with this sort of thing showing?

Or you may be shocked that I would even think you'd bother to look at them and find the errors.

That's okay. You can hire people like me to find and correct your errors for you. It's not a big expense, and it will allow you to hold your head high and march into the new year free of the kind of error that makes your website -- and you -- look unprofessional.

Beyond this sort of thing, look for old phone numbers, outdated prices, links that don't work -- all those little things that you can easily overlook in the course of day to day business. In my end-of-year checkups, I found a reference on a client's site to "the chart below" -- and no chart. We had made the decision to move that chart, and had missed the reference to it left behind. The webmaster corrected the error immediately, at no charge. Your webmaster may do the same for you. A few minutes spent really scrutinizing your site is a good use of time.

Website Checkup: the Navigation

Navigation is extremely important to the success of your website. Here are some simple rules to use to check the navigation at your site:

• Have some navigation. The pre-redesign homepage above gives no clues, on this full-screen shot, about the structure of the site. As far as the visitor can tell, it's just one page.

• Put it where people expect to see it. The page above does have some navigation buttons, in the lower right hand corner. People expect to see the navigation across the top or vertically along the side, where you can see there is none.

• Make it look like navigation. There are lots of links in the sample above; the links going to the main pages of the site don't look different from the links that go offsite. In the example below, the links are a collection of icons -- it takes an extra step to figure out that they are in fact the navigation bar.

• Offer a reasonable number of choices. Five to seven navigation buttons are plenty. Ten buttons isn't navigation. Even if you have hundreds or thousands of pages, organize them into fewer choices and let people choose a path to the information they need. They'd rather do that than read through long lists.

Here are a couple of good examples:




The example above is fancier than the one below, but both of them do their jobs.





So for today, ask yourself whether your navigation looks more like the good examples or the bad examples. If you recognize elements of your site in the "befores" then it's time for a navigation makeover.

Website Checkup: the Look

While you're giving your website an end of the year checkup, be sure to look at it. It's your website, you know roughly what it looks like, and it's easy to quit paying attention. Just as your office might be looking a bit untidy or grubby and need tidying up, your website -- especially if you've been making changes yourself -- may have some visual issues.

We're not talking about art or about major design issues here. Just the basics.



The site above is just sort of random and messy. It has a couple of rows of clickable things on the navigation bar, "Some Favorite Links" with just one item, and that in bald html instead of as a nice link, a variety of things on the page with no real visual structure... This site is due for a wash and brush up. It could use a professional designer at this point, but it would be much improved if the owners would just organize and structure it.




The site sampled above has margin problems. This seems like a small thing, and it can be difficult to get right if you're trying to make your own site, but it makes a big difference to the overall look of the page. Get some space between the sections for better readability and a more professional look.




This look is so old-school that it makes your business look as though you just don't keep up. It probably also won't work on some of your visitors' computers. The owners of this site have a new one, now. If yours looks anything like this, you should budget for a redesign.




Speaking of not working, this site probably looks fine to the owners. On another browser, though, they have a mess. Check your site on several browsers before you decide you're happy with it.



The site above is so delicate and subtle that a lot of visitors won't even try to read it. The one below isn't quite as bad, but the level of contrast is still too low. Unless you're quite sure that your customers don't include anyone with limited vision, or any older people, go for strong contrast between your text and background, and use dark text on a light ground.




A little attention to these issues can give your site a cleaner, more professional look for the new year.

Website Checkup: Content

This is a great time of year to give your website a checkup. For many of us, it's a slow time, a time to set goals for the new year, a time of contemplation and reflection.

Not surprisingly, I've been doing a lot of rewrites on websites lately. And it has struck me that, while there are often specific redesigns and info updates and strategic changes involved, there are also some more general changes that any website might benefit from.

When you're looking at your own website from the point of view of the year-end check up, see whether you need a bit of a rewrite:

• Make it active. The majority of the sites I've spruced up this month have used passive voice sentences like this one:

"It is also very important to us that our patients are treated with respect and friendliness in a professional and caring environment."

Simply changing that sentence to

"We treat our patients with respect and friendliness in a professional, caring environment"

makes it shorter, more readable, and more powerful. Don't use passive sentences unless you have a good reason to. You can also use more active language. This sentence benefited from the addition of a strong verb:

"I'd gone from being able to wallop a softball to scarcely being able to hit a slow, weak ground ball toward the short stop."

"Wallop" isn't a keyword for this site, but neither was "hit," so replacing one instance of "hit" with "wallop" does no harm from the point of view of search, and livens the sentence up for the human visitors.

• Make it direct. A roundabout introduction adds nothing to your content, and can lose you the attention of your visitors. The softball sentence above took the place of an entire paragraph describing how the speaker had played sports all his life but had begun to slow down as he got older. We were able to make the point with greater immediacy and to get all the main points into the first paragraph.
  

On your homepage in particular, every word counts. Not only do you need to help your visitors make an immediate decision about whether to stay and read or not, you also have to make sure that the search engines can tell what you have to offer so they'll show your page to the right people. This sentence may be interesting, but it doesn't tell us what the site is for:

"Shop Mobbing is a recently developed shopping strategy originating in the People's Republic of China as Tuangou, which loosely translates as team buying or group buying (also known as store mobbing). "

Instead, we can start with something more direct:

"Wouldn't you like to be able to match the buying power of large companies? With Shopmobbing you can, and we'll make it easy for you."

We can still give the history of the idea later, but this opening lets our visitors know that we're a practical site with a service, not an academic introduction to an economic phenomenon.

• Make it parallel. One of the sites I worked with last week had a wonderful body of useful information, but each page had a different structure and a different look. Choosing one structure -- in this case, the statement of the problem, a bulleted list of causes, a bulleted list of the steps to the solution, and a statement of special concerns -- makes it much more readable, and more likely that visitors will explore the site fully.

One site I'm working on has pages written to teachers. Yet the instructions for the classroom activities use a variety of kinds of sentence, some apparently about the students, some to the students, and some directly to the teacher:

"Within the group, students should discuss their individual hypotheses and predictions."

"Have students independently complete, in their own words, the 'hypothesis' and 'prediction' sections."

"Test the chosen hypothesis and prediction."

Rewriting the pages to create a consistent approach allows the reader to scan the lesson more easily, making the site more useful and encouraging repeat visits.

Have a look at your website: could these changes improve your visitors' experience? Fix it up, and come back tomorrow for another quick checkup suggestion.

Is Getting a Website for Your Business Your New Year's Resolution?

46% of small business owners, according to one survey, don't yet have a website. 45% claim to think that it's a myth that everyone needs one.

I find these numbers hard to believe, frankly.

Look at some facts:

• The more a small business earns, the more likely they are to have a website. That is, more successful companies have websites. It's possible that this means that small businesses can't afford websites, but it's equally possible that those with an online presence become more successful because of it.
  
• The internet is the primary source of information in the United States. Skip a phone book listing, if you want to save. Your customers and potential customers are going directly to the web.
• 79% of consumers browse online before they do physical shopping, and make most of their decisions before they get near your brick and mortar shop.
  

So, if you don't currently have a website, you need one.

Should you make your own? This question continues to arise. In fact, in the past week, I've encountered it three times:

• A graphic designer with no web experience asked me whether I thought she should make her own site.
  
• A rapper contacted one of our team about getting a website, saying that he'd been told he should just build one himself with the aid of online instructions.
• I read an apparently serious article that recommended getting your small business website built by kids in exchange for a pizza.

Is the sign over your shop spray painted with stencils from the hardware store? Do you figure up sales on the backs of old envelopes? Or do you strive to present a professional appearance?

Here are the top three reasons to have your site professionally done:

• It will actually get done. The vast majority of the people who've told me over the past couple of years that they planned on making their own websites still don't have websites. It's harder to do than you think. Most people who try it simply give up before they get anywhere near finished. This all by itself is a good reason to hire someone.
  
• It will be done right. What does it say about your company if you have a poorly designed, ugly website with grammar and punctuation errors? This is the first contact many people will ever have with your company, so it makes sense to get it right. I've just received a new web design book from Smashing, and an initial glance shows that it includes hundreds of points, from how to adjust your text to get a nice rag to the best choices of color for clickable elements. To me, it's a perfect reminder of how complex the process is, and how unlikely DIY efforts are to be successful.
  
• It will be more cost-effective in the long run. The main reason people without the skills and training think about making their own websites is that they think they can save money by doing so. It takes about five hours to write a simple website and twenty to build it, one or two to get the site up and running, five to do basic foundational linkbuilding. Factor in discussions and decision-making, and we're saying that professionals with all needed resources will spend a full work week getting a basic website up and running. In real life, the time involved in gathering information and sending things through committees can increase that time to a month or more. DIY will naturally take longer -- possibly much longer. Can you really leave your business alone for that long?

If you've decided to let 2009 be the last year you do without a website, you might find these posts useful:

• Finding a Web Designer
• How Long Does it Take to Make a Website?
• Should You Buy Local?
• Website Evolution
• How Much Does a Website Cost?
• Factors Affecting Website Cost

As always, if you need help, please feel free to contact me.

Seasonal Online Marketing

Yesterday, in the context of creating a marketing calendar, I talked about seasonal businesses. Many businesses show a seasonal pattern, and whether to try to get as much mileage as possible during the busy season or to try to even out the oscillations in your system by marketing heavily in the off season is a strategic decision that has to be informed by the unique realities of your business.

But what about the truly seasonal business or product?

Right now I'm working with a couple of websites which are so spring-specific that there is really no way to market them for the current season.

First, here's Sweetique.com, a company distributing chocolate-filled eggshells (real eggshells, that is, filled with chocolate)



While Sweetique does make some other products that appeal to consumers year-round, this page is so completely for Easter that visitors who aren't looking for Easter items won't stay. The call to action is clearly "Order Easter eggs," so we can't expect sales till March.

The second site is Grand Getaways Passover 2010, a Passover destination site. While taking a Passover vacation (possibly with friends and family) is an undertaking that people are likely to prepare for earlier than ordering Easter basket items, we're still talking about an event that won't take place till the end of March.




Both sites offer the option of booking or ordering early, but neither will probably see much conversion for the next month or two. One of the benefits of the internet is immediacy -- but that also means that many of the things we'd usually do in the way of online marketing won't be valuable for these sites.

What's our best strategy?

• Work on rankings. We want to see Grand Getaways at the top of the page for "Passover vacations," "Passover travel," "Pesach program," and similar terms. Sweetique wants high ranks for "Easter baskets," "Easter chocolates," "Easter gifts," and other terms of that kind. Starting now gives us a good chance of being on top when consumers begin to search for those phrases, even with such highly competitive terms.
  
• Use articles. Well-written articles on these subjects can bring links and traffic. With this kind of lead time, we can pitch to online magazines and top bloggers in these areas as well.
• Get busy with linkbuilding. Intensive linkbuilding will help us reach the rankings we want, and can also get us at the places where consumers are likely to look for information once they start looking. Passover travel directories are an example of strong niche directories that are worth courting. Easter sites may not be updating soon, but their webmasters also aren't being inundated with link requests right now. This is a good time to start identifying and reaching out to sites that will want to share our sites with their visitors.
  

"Strike while the iron is hot" is good advice, but having plenty of time to heat the fire before you need to put your irons into it has its advantages as well.

Marketing Plan 2010: Make a Calendar

If things have slowed down at your place of business, it's a great time to gather everyone together and create a marketing calendar for 2010.

You can use a big paper calendar, a calendar markerboard, a paper planner, or a spreadsheet (I like the free template kindly shared by brandeo, but you might prefer to design your own). Then get your analytics for the past year or two on the screen and look for the patterns.

If you have seasonal variations, you need to make some decisions about how you want to deal with them. Some prefer to make hay while the sun shines and focus heavily on seasonal spikes. If that's the best plan for you, then plan your promotions, PR pushes, and ads for the customer's decision-making times.

You can identify these by checking the keywords in your analytics. If people start looking for election-themed bulletin board sets in September and you start selling a lot of them in late October, that gives you the window for promoting those items.

Then work backwards to the point where you have to do the work to make sure the promotions get done on time.

Other companies like to promote during the down times. If you've got as much business as you can handle at peak seasons, you can improve your bottom line significantly by reminding people of your existence during the low points. This may require diversification or at least a creative approach. If your lawn service dies off in winter, you might choose to add Christmas lighting services during your low season. If you're a musician with a big season in spring weddings, 2010 might be the year to branch out into holiday parties, bar mitzvahs, or Oktoberfest venues.

But you might also be able to position your products differently for different seasons. A patio furniture maker on the northern border has an extreme seasonal pattern going on -- enormous spring and summer traffic going down to almost nothing in the fall and winter. That's reasonable and predictable. And yet they might be able to get a bump in the fall by pitching their replacement cushions and fire pits to tailgaters, and might even move some patio furniture as Christmas gifts.

Once you've established where you'd like to see some results, work backwards to the point where you need to begin working on the promotion and write in the planning session, assignment of the tasks involved, and deadlines for the steps. If any of your promotions will involve print or the mailing of physical objects, add extra lead time.

Be sure to make a space for recording your results, too. Previous years' marketing calendars can provide useful data for future decision-making.

Your marketing calendar may change over the course of the year. However, it can give you a structure and help keep your marketing efforts on track.

Is Regular Blogging Your New Year's Resolution?

Keeping a journal -- with paper or online -- is a new habit people often take up on the first of the year. For your business, blogging is an excellent new habit. A good blog will drive traffic, increase rankings, and give you control over keywords your website couldn't get without a blog.

For most businesses, hiring someone like me to write your blog is the best plan. DIY corporate blogs often don't meet your goals, cost more than hiring a pro (your on-site people are almost certainly going to be slower, and they'll still expect to be paid for their time), and divert staff from mission-critical work.

What's more, they usually don't get posted regularly, so you not only lose the benefits of regular blog posting, but look like you're not keeping up.

If you're determined to write your own blog, resolve not only to post regularly, but to set it up to maximize your chances of success.

• Choose your blog's home wisely. You can set up a free blog someplace, or you can have your IT guy set it up at your website using blogengine.net or a similar solution. I've written before about the various free blogging platforms , but there are some strong reasons for having your blog live at your website, both for SEO and for your company's image. I have gotten excellent results for clients from free blogs, and can get top rankings and good traffic from them, but even in those cases I always think how much better it would be for those clients if they had the blogs inside their websites.
• Choose a content management system you can grow to love. I work with a lot of different systems, and I don't mind using whatever the client prefers. Still, there are some that require you to fool around with the html in order to get the results you want. There are some that won't let you get the results you want even if you can fool around with html confidently. Right now I'm working with one that requires me to scroll from side to side -- I can't see an entire sentence at one time. I'm paid by the hour, so the way that slows me down is the client's problem, but the frequent need to breathe deeply and get over the frustration of it is my problem. So try out a few before committing yourself, or discuss your options fully with your developer if you're having a custom arrangement done.
• Make a schedule. If you blog when you feel like it, you may end up going weeks between posts, and your blog won't deliver the way you want it to. I recently made a schedule for a client showing the dates, titles, and summaries of posts for the next month. You can do that for yourself. You can also commit to daily blogging, or three days a week -- but be sure to choose three particular days of the week, or it'll always be "tomorrow."

Good luck!

Your Marketing Plan for 2010: Setting Goals

"Good," as I tell my writing students, is one of those words that has so many possible meanings that it becomes almost meaningless. Just so, when you plan your marketing strategy for 2010, you can't be satisfied with saying that you want to get more out of your website, and leaving it at that.

Your goals need to be SMART:

• Specific: If you decide to do as well as possible, you have no goal. You have to define success for yourself and your website. Some of the specific elements of online marketing success can be increased online visibility, increased sales, higher traffic, increased conversions, increased interaction with customers, higher PageRank, or more high quality links.
  
• Measurable: This can be the hardest part. How will you measure something like "increased online visibility"? Determine how you'll measure the improvement you want, and quantify it as much as possible. A 30% increase in sales, or doubled traffic, or 100 more quality links -- all these are goals that allow you to recognize when you've succeeded. If you don't know how te measure some factor that you want to track, let me know and I'll be happy to help.
  
• Achievable: I have to confess that I tend to have rather lame business goals. I would achieve them within a few weeks, and have to set new ones. I also have clients who plan to increase their sales a thousandfold. Somewhere between these two extremes might be the best plan. When I sat down with our project manager, Rosie, she was able to look at previous performance and future needs and extrapolate some reasonable numbers to shoot for.
  
• Realistic or Relevant: Some people choose "realistic" for this part of the acronym, and some choose "relevant." Either way, it means that you need to have marketing goals that fit with your overall business plan and capacity. I have a client whose goal is to increase monthly traffic from 3,000 to 10,000 visits. I'm planning to help him achieve this. But for me, 10,000 visits a month wouldn't necessarily be good news. He sells a product, whereas I have a service. He has a staff and is willing to add to it. I have a small family business with a plan for small, gradual growth. The old saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for." In this case, you're planning rather than wishing, so just make sure that your marketing plan is in sync with the rest of your plans.
  
• Time-defined: While we're quoting old sayings, let's remember that "A goal is a dream with a deadline." Put deadlines on all your goals. Some may be goals for the full year. Some may be things that need to be accomplished on some particular date, and some may be milestones on the way to a larger future goal.

Write it all down. Many people advise writing this as though it were in the present. "Here it is, December 31, 2010," they'd have you write, "and I have increased my monthly traffic to an average of 10,000 visitors, reached my sales goal of $150,000, and doubled my opt-in email list. What a great year!"

In some of the examples I've shared with you here, you'll notice that people got help. This is not only what actually happened in the examples, but it's something you might want to do. An objective viewpoint, other skills and ways of looking at things, and additional information can make your goals better and therefore more useful.

How's Your Customer Service?

Hardware guy Joel just told me, "You don't have to sell software. Just support it, and it'll sell itself."

I can see taking a slightly more aggressive approach, but I definitely concur on the idea that support is essential.

Joel and I were talking about FileReplicationPro, a powerhouse of a data management solution. The makers of this stuff update it constantly, listening to what their customers want -- and paying attention also to what their customers do with it, and coming up with their own ideas for improvements based on this information. They have an enormous knowledgebase section at their website, they keep in close touch with their customers, and they offer a generous free trial. It adds up to trailblazing customer service.

And, while I think that it still makes sense to get the word out about the product, I know that one of the reasons my work for FRP is successful is because of the quality of their support. Here's why:

People talk.

Few people talk about file synchronization software, actually. I can say this with confidence because I've tried to get a good conversation on the subject going more than once.

"One of my clients syncs files between a spaceport and rockets," I say brightly, thinking that's pretty exciting. People stare at me blankly, thinking that I was more fun when I was working on goat gamma globulin.

But people talk a lot about their good or bad experiences with a company. It doesn't matter what the company does -- these conversations are about the speaker's feelings. People care deeply about their own feelings, and they're pretty interested in other people's feelings, too. At the very least, they think about how they'd feel in the same situation.

When a similar situation arises, they remember.

At this time of year, when many companies are completely focused on fulfillment (and survival), customer service has to be the primary focus.

Your Online Marketing Plan for 2010: Top 3 Moves

This may be the wildly busy time of year for you. If not, it's time to start thinking about your online marketing plan for 2010. How does your website fit into your company's overall marketing plan?

Tim Ash's Landing Page Optimization has an interesting chart showing the people who visit your website. He has them laid out like this:

NO
maybe no
maybe maybe
maybe yes
YES

The no and yes groups, he says, have already made up their minds, so it's the maybe group that you're really talking to.

People who know for sure that they don't want what you offer have come to your page for some other reason than to shop. People who know for sure that they want what you offer have come there to shop.

The rest of the people have wandered by or come over because they heard of you, or they're checking you out as a possible solution to their needs.

Here are the top three things to consider:

• Is your website doing its job? You can make all kinds of efforts to get traffic to your site, but if your website isn't doing what it needs to do, then bringing more people isn't necessarily a good thing.
• Do you have a way of keeping in touch? The people who come to your site thinking "maybe" might need a bit more contact. Do you have a way of collecting contact information, and a plan for contacting them?
• Are you visible? Whether you choose advertising, social media, or a combination of online and physical world strategies, you need to do something to make sure that people who need you can find you.
  

Visitor Expectations and Your Website

Here's the homepage of Vivid Marketing. Snazzy, eh? It's sharp looking and interesting, but the web visitor's first reaction is likely to be "Huh?"

Creative companies often have this kind of surprise at their websites. It shows creativity and looks different. The visitor, one hopes, thinks "Ah, these guys are really creative and different! That's what I need."

There's an "enter here" button -- a definite improvement over the average site like this, which appears to be waiting breathlessly to see what you're going to do. And once you enter, you see the portfolio page below.




This fits the visitor's expectations of a web page. There's the logo in the upper left hand corner. There's the navigation across the top (down the left side would also work). There's the portfolio in the center. A little skimpy, a visitor might think, but what there is looks good. Ads down the side ... we'll ignore those...

But no, those aren't ads.That's the clever, creative arrangement of the portfolio. Mouseover one of those bright squares, and you'll see details on it in the center section.




I love this for the cleverness of it, and the visitor who sits down with it for a bit will see that Vivid does everything from trade show exhibits to billboards. Nice stuff, too. They're also nice people.

The thing is, a website like this is a trade-off. They're going to lose some visitors, because people get confused and frustrated by surprising web pages. Unless they have a strong motivation to stay, they'll usually leave if they feel confused and frustrated.

On the other hand, visitors who are highly motivated -- because they have heard about Vivid in some other way and are determined to learn more about them, for example -- may be very impressed and charmed by the creativity of the portfolio.

I'd take a middle path. I'd ditch the splash page and make a home page that had a clear statement (what we offer and how you can get it) and obvious contact info. I'd add a sentence to the portfolio page, particularly since there are people who don't use mouseover, that sort of gave instructions on how to use the page. In fact, I'd get some text on that page for the search engines, if nothing else. There's room for a couple hundred words on that page.

Is that the best choice for Vivid? Maybe not. If they use more traditional advertising to draw visitors and their website serves primarily as an introduction and display piece, then they may not care about search. They may not care about the occasional new visitor, either.

Vivid is a surprising website that might want to be surprising. What about your website? If your website is a bundle of surprises, and you're selling cameras or real estate, you've got a problem. Visitors haven't come to your website to play, but to buy that camera or look for that loft. When they're frustrated in their goal, they'll very likely just leave.

As a general rule, you ought to put things where people expect them to be. If you choose to make your website surprising, make sure you have a good reason for it.

A Walk on the Dark Side

A few months back, I was hired to write content for a website. I do an average of one website a week, so this was not in and of itself particularly significant. The client sent a little data about the company (let's pretend it was a pet shop in Kentucky) and a document from their "SEO expert." The document said things like "Use the keyword for the page as an H1 header, in the meta description and keywords, in the first sentence of each paragraph, and in the last sentence of the page." There was a keyword given for each page. The keywords were things like "Greater Kentucky pet shop." In short, it was the kind of SEO advice being given a decade ago, and which now is only seen in humorous "10 Things Not to Do" articles.

I read these things with amusement and went ahead and did the keyword research and wrote nice, natural, keyword-rich text designed to appeal to human beings as well as to the search engines.

"Didn't you read the directions?" came the response.

My honest answer would have been something like, "Oh, was that real? Where the heck is greater Kentucky? And listen, I'm not that kind of web content writer."

However, I had agreed to do the job, so I wrote the stuff they wanted. Stuff like this:

"Greater Kentucky Pet Shop

Milly's greater Kentucky pet shop specializes in domestic and exotic pets. We also offer pet food, pet toys, and grooming services.

Conveniently located in downtown Louisville for all your greater Kentucky pet shop needs."

Uncomfortable though it made me, I did it. I figured it would be an interesting experiment. I could look back in a few months and see how they had done, compared with all the properly written sites I'd done in the meantime. If indeed they were showing top rankings for all the reasonable keywords, it would be valuable information.

So, having come to the point at which I'd have anticipated that the site's rankings would have settled in, I went to look at it.

It isn't live yet.

Did Milly's pet shop go out of business? Give up on the design firm they initially chose and go elsewhere? Perhaps to a company that would give them natural, keyword-rich content?

We may never know.

When Your Website Doesn't Have the Rank It Deserves

Yesterday I had a simple project for a web design firm I work with. It was quite an ordinary project: a client wants a higher rank for their chosen keywords, and we need a strategy for accomplishing that. I do this all the time.

This case turned out to be particularly interesting, though, because the company in question so clearly deserved the rankings they wanted.

Let's be honest: if you sell gears, you don't necessarily deserve the top ranking on the search engines any more than any other seller of gears. In this case, though, we're talking about the company that makes the gears, the company whose name is on the gears, the company that has been selling those gears for fifty years. And yet this company isn't even on the first page for most of the keywords they want.

Let's say they're the Acme Gear Company. And let's say that the company that's eating their lunch is the Apex Hardware Group. In fact, there are plenty of companies ahead of Acme on most searches, but Apex is consistently ahead of Acme on searches for Acme gears.

Now, Apex has been a little bit hostile to Acme. Acme has acme.com, but Apex has registered acmegears.com, acme.net, acmegears.biz, acmegearcompany.com -- everything they could think of. They've also done nice pages on their site about the high quality of Acme gears, the traditions of the company, and why Apex gears make good substitutes for Acme gears.

But Acme hasn't been minding their virtual store the way they should.

If your company is behind some strong competitors, what steps can you take?

• Strengthen your content. The search engines look at Apex, with its keyword-rich content about Acme gears, and at Acme.com which doesn't even have an "About Us" page, and they draw reasonable conclusions about who is the best choice for people seeking Acme gears. Compare your site honestly with your competitors, and make sure you're communicating well with the search engines.
• Watch your titles and meta descriptions. When a human visitor looks at the search results page for "Acme gears," she sees something like this:

Acme
acme.com/ - Cached - Similar -

Acme gears of all sizes
Acme gears for home and business use. Best prices, free shipping!
www.apexhardware.com Cached - Similar

Acme gears

Acme gears are the preferred gear style for many uses. We offer the best selection of Acme style gears. Use our handy comparison chart to order with confidence. Free shipping!
www.apexhardware.com/acmegears.html - Cached - Similar -

What will the searcher choose? Not the first one on the list. When their minimalist entry shows up lower down on the page, which is the case for most of the possible searches, Acme.com has no chance. Make sure that your meta language does its job.

• Do your linkbuilding. Acme hasn't done any linkbuilding. As an established company, they have some natural links they've gained over time as people were moved to link to them, but it's surprising to see how many missed opportunities they have -- they're not represented in the industrial directories, they're not present at the forums discussing gears, and they just generally don't have online visibility. Fixing that -- with some attention to their anchor text --would help the search engines understand what they're all about.

Notice that we're not talking here about gaming the system or duping the search engines. Acme should be the first choice when people search for Acme gears. The search engines want to give people what they're looking for. Acme -- and possibly your company, too -- just needs to cooperate.

Efficient Linkbuilding

Derek Edmond at CapeCodSEO is hosting a conversation about the number of links that can realistically be gained in a month.

A lot of important points have arisen, including the fact that good linkbuilding efforts won't show all their value within the month, the difference between linkbuilding for new sites and for established ones, and the importance of quality links.

But as I was reading, I couldn't help comparing two linkbuilding situations I've participated in recently -- not, in either case, as the linkbuilder.

First, I have a rash of spammy comments at a blog I write for a client. Someone presumably has paid some unfortunate creature to post this graffiti, and then of course my client has to pay me to find and remove it.




There are no lasting benefits to this for anyone. It's a complete waste of time and money.

And yet, at the same time, I'm currently writing for a prestigious PR7 .org site. The team I'm on will be doing 300 pages in the next month, and each page has four or five links to other sites. I'm putting plenty of time into finding the most valuable websites to link to -- not necessarily the first ones that come up at the search engines result pages, but the best and most useful sites. Not only will those sites get a PR7 link, but they can expect to gain traffic not only from the original site, but from hundreds of other high-quality sites that will link to it. Some of the people who visit will be inspired to link to the resources, too.

In other words, we've got about 1500 seriously juicy links to give out. This afternoon, I'll be looking for excellent sites on the physics of sound.

If I had a client who made violins, I could write a page that would meet the needs of the page I'm writing perfectly, and thereby get that link. Since I don't have such a client, I will instead be searching all over the internet for the perfect resource. If it happens to be at a violin shop, I won't care; I'm just looking at the quality of the resource.

Now let's compare those two options.

Comment spam comes cheap -- maybe a dollar a link. It's easy come, easy go, though, and won't bring any lasting value. So a company that chooses this strategy can expect to pay repeatedly for something essentially worthless.

Valuable content doesn't come that cheap. You have to hire someone, or take your own time and expertise, and create useful pages at your site. But a company that pays $100 for an excellent resource and gets just one really valuable link to begin with can expect to gain more links and traffic over a period of years -- as long as they keep their resource valuable and up to date, it will continue to deliver.

What's the efficient method here?

5 Ways to Get the Most Out of Christmas E-commerce

• Add a sense of urgency by announcing the last date for Christmas delivery. Many online shoppers spend lots of time shopping around. If you can get them to feel like it's time to quit browsing and start ordering, you can close the sale.
  
• Offer free shipping -- surveys say that's the most important thing to online shoppers this year.
• Make it easy: bundle things, offer to wrap, recommend items that everyone will love. Men especially value being able to get shopping done efficiently -- it's not the thought that counts.
  
• Give information. For example, studies show that mothers of large families are no better at remembering which toys are appropriate for which age group than single people are, so sorting your toys by age can help shoppers make decisions more quickly.
• Encourage shoppers to pick up a little something for themselves. Women usually do, according to the experts, so offer something she'll covet even if you mostly sell stuff for guys.
  

Above the Fold

Yesterday I rewrote a car repair site. The owner had written it himself, and had done a good job: there was plenty of useful, keyword-rich text, it sounded natural, it was easy to see what the site was about, and there was a clear call to action.

But the company wanted a higher conversion rate and a lower bounce rate.

So I had a look at the analytics, to see how people traveled through the site and where they tended to leave. I also checked out the site overlay, which lets you see where people click.

On the front page, there were more clicks at the top, but there were some people clicking on the links and pictures at the bottom. On the inner pages, there were simply no clicks at the bottom of the page at all. Chances are, we were seeing some scrolling on the homepage, and little or none on the inner pages.

This meant that a lot of the helpful and persuasive copy just wasn't being seen.

So I made some changes that increase the likelihood of visitors' staying and reading enough to make the decision to make that phone call:

• Get the important stuff to the top. While ideally you have nothing unimportant on your site, chances are there are some things that could stay nearer the bottom of the page than others. For this site, lists of the cities served were less important than the unique selling points, so I swapped them.
• Show the structure of the text. This site had three main points on its inner pages, three main reasons for the visitor to choose this company rather than another. Casual visitors wouldn't know that, because there were too many other things in between the points. Making the organization obvious to the visitor increases the likelihood that people will go ahead and read the three main points.
• Tighten the copy. After years of working hard to stretch those writing assignments to the required number of pages, it can be hard to think the opposite way. But you can often restructure sentences to keep the keywords and the important point, while shaving off some words. Ideally, you also make the sentences more active and more powerful at the same time. This way, the car repair folks can have their main points above the fold without losing any of their excellent content.
• Make it readable. In this particular case, the site needed greater contrast between text and background color. I also did away with some random capitalization (it takes longer for people to read caps than lowercase, so they can't grasp the meaning in the few seconds they give your page before deciding whether to stay or go). I used parallel structure, which makes for smoother reading. And once people are reading and finding it both easy and interesting, they're more likely to carry on below the fold.
  

When I'm writing a site from scratch, I like to keep the entire homepage above the fold, since some people won't scroll. If they're interested enough to click through to an inside page, then they're likely to be willing to scroll. Earlier this week I had a site sent back to be made shorter -- the design just won't accommodate much text, and they needed to get the word count down to about 100 per page. I performed all sorts of delicate surgery on the text -- but not on the FAQs page, because people who bother to click there will at least scan the text.

For the car repair site, the data suggested that people weren't scrolling on the inside pages as much as on the homepage. This actually wasn't a surprise to me -- the design has aspects that made me expect that. But the data really helps you know whether the page you're working on needs to have the information above the fold or not. Google Analytics helps with this, and you might also want to check out Crazy Egg, which gives more detail on this question.

Once you've made your changes, watch your bounce rate and your conversion rates, and make sure that the changes you made had the effect you wanted.

Social Media Surveys

Recent social media surveys by Abrams Research, PR News, and Business.com show some changes in the way people are using social media for business.

We know it's not advertising, but the big news is that the majority of business users seem to be catching on to that, too.

• Three quarters of the respondents used information gathered from social media in decision-making. A couple of years ago, only half the respondents used social media at all.
  
• Most online networking is with colleagues in the same field but in different companies.
• While most companies still see marketing as the main focus of social media, most individual respondents say they don't like selling at social media -- they don't want to feel marketed to.
• 83% consider online networks a trustworthy source of information, compared with 92% trusting their physical-world networks. The gap is shrinking.
  

Clearly, we can't all be marketers if no one is willing to be a marketee. But recognition that social media networking can have the same value as physical world networking (getting information, sharing knowledge with colleagues in other companies, stuff like that) can help companies get past confusing social media and advertising.

Some interesting smaller news:

• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube are the major players-- which order you put them in depends on which survey you read. I say your business needs them all, but don't miss Derek Edmond's post on niche communities.
• Website traffic and general visibility were the main rewards companies saw from their social media use. ROI was lower on the list in each case, hovering at about 15% of respondents listing it as the first metric they used in determining the value of the medium.
• While SEO/SEM is now ahead of online advertising when it comes to where companies plan to put their money, and social media is likely to be included in this cost, companies were also asked about what actual social media services they'd be willing to pay for. Facebook was the winner there, and then LinkedIn (where some people already pay) and then Twitter.
  

Trust Online

I was talking with the president of the state Security Roundtable recently, and he told me "When you go online, you're taking a chance. If you're not at one of the big companies, that is."

That struck me as interesting. The security expert and I went on to talk about how checks get stolen (and frankly, quite a few of my clients still send me checks) and local banks get robbed. "Low tech crime," he assured me, "isn't going away." And it is in fact safer to use a secure internet connection to transmit information than to use the mail. It's also not necessarily safer to work with a big company than with a small one.

But trust is one of the central issues for people whose business presence is primarily or entirely online. Many people are still nervous about connections made online, many people believe that they can tell from a face to face meeting how trustworthy a person is, and it is of course true that there are plenty of scam artists online.

Your website, especially if your customers don't have the option of coming to you and shaking your hand, has to look trustworthy.

Part of looking trustworthy online is, of course, actually being trustworthy. Positive reviews and feedback from customers, years of operation, and stuff like that are signs of trustworthiness online and off.

There are, however, things you can do at your website to show how trustworthy you are:

• Have a professionally designed website at your own domain. This demonstrates that you are a serious businessperson, not someone who has quickly thrown together a site for the purpose of running some kind of scam.
  
• The same is true for your content. "The big companies" the security expert mentioned never have grammatical errors, typos, and sloppy writing on their websites, and neither should you.
  
• Display contact information, including a physical address and the name of an actual human being. It shouldn't be hard to find out who owns the website or where they are. I have clients who want to withhold this information for innocent reasons, but it always looks very shady. It's better to figure out a way
  
• Have an "About Us" page with credentials, company history, names and faces -- elements that show that you exist as a company. If you have been in business for years or for generations, if you have licenses or certification, if you are a member of the organizations in your field, then mention those things.
• List your clients, share testimonials, link to trustworthy partners. The snide comment, "It's not what you know; it's who you know" has another side: people feel more comfortable with someone who is known to them or connected to them. If you've worked with someone your prospective customers trust, they'll find it easier to trust you.
• Strive for transparency. There are lots of factors influencing the appropriate degree of self-disclosure for a professional website, but attempts to seem like a bigger company than you are, for example, can backfire.
  
• If you take payments at your site, make sure that you have a secure connection for doing so. At a secure connection, customers' information doesn't go out into the internet at all. You can tell by looking at the address at the top of your screen. A secure connection will have "https" instead of "http."

There's an advantage to having a company name that's a household word. But it doesn't have to be a requirement for a trustworthy web presence.