Deciding on Web Content: Data or Gut Feelings?

Omniture's survey for 2009 found out a lot of interesting things, but one simple fact really leapt out at me.

80% of respondents made decisions about web content without using any measurable data at all.

Omniture suggests that data-driven decisions may actually form less than 20% of the total, because many people will define "It worked before" as a data set. But even if we suppose that 20% of the people who took the survey actually base decisions about web content on some information, that leaves 80% who use "gut feelings" -- and maybe creative sparks or something. They didn't mention that, but I see a lot of random inspiration among clients, so I figure that's probably part of it.

So what measurable data might you use?

• Data about search. I like to look at what people are actually searching for. Google keeps track of this, and they should know. While popular searches aren't the whole story -- the greatest number of search queries may be completely unique, just as the greatest number of sentences are -- they can certainly give you useful information. For example, I'm currently writing a site for a natural foods store. Local search results show that more people search for their initials than for their full name. Their current website never uses the initials, and they're not on the front page of the SERPs for those initials. You know I'm going to change that. 
• Data from your customers. Looking at what people use to find your website now can be useful. That natural foods store gets very few people in via those initials -- no wonder, since they're several pages in. As we know, that doesn't mean their customers don't search for them in that way, just that they don't find what they're looking for. So it's good not only to look at the keywords that bring people to your site, but also to ask people what they look for. I find that customers often search for brand names and product names, but that retailers often think their customers will search for the name or type of their store. It's easy to check on this. Testing your site is also a good plan. And asking people why they visit your website -- combined with your analytics data, this information can guide your content in important ways.
• Data from your business. Tyler Katzen of Onix Web Development yesterday suggested asking clients for the percentage of their revenue that came from each area of their business. I was impressed with his cleverness. That one bit of information covers a whole bunch of questions I usually ask people. Gather this data for your business, and compare it with your website: are you putting a lot of your space into something that doesn't actually represent the profit center of your business?

I often explain that SEO copywriting is as much math as literature, and that's the truth -- if you do it right. With 80% of businesses doing it wrong, your website can stand out for search and conversion if you make sure you're part of that 20% using metrics to make content decisions.

Choosing an SEO Professional

Years ago, I worked for a company that had a website that did nothing. No one shopped there, and as far as we could tell (which wasn't very far, because we didn't know how to keep track) no one went there. The owners went to a round table discussion on websites for people in our industry, and returned with a very clear conclusion: everyone had websites, and none of them did anything.

You have to have a website, we figured, because people asked if you had one, and you couldn't say you didn't have one without looking unprofessional. But it was largely a big hole into which you poured money.

We decided to change that, at least for our company. I was chosen, since I was the marketing person, and I set about learning how to make a website do its job.

I remember how frustrating it was to search for that information. There were no books on the subject at the time, and the online information was written for specialists by specialists. What's more, SEO forums made it clear that a) there were a lot of shady characters in the business, an b) a lot of SEOs didn't have much respect for their clients. The undertone of "Stupid clients don't know anything" was unmistakable at a lot of otherwise excellent sites.

We looked for a local SEO professional, therefore, since we figured we'd be able to meet face to face and ask around. There weren't any. I had to learn to do it myself. That's why I write this blog, actually: competent businesspeople should be able to learn how to help their company websites produce a good ROI, in my opinion, without being mystified or condescended to.

Things have improved. As SEO becomes more mainstream and less mysterious to businesspeople, more information is available, and of course there are more of us SEO professionals around.

So what should you look for when you seek to hire someone to help you in this area?

• People who can and will tell you what they do. There's no reason for SEO to be cloaked in secrecy as though it were a dark art. While I think it takes a certain amount of ability, or at least an analytical turn of mind, SEO isn't mysterious. It just requires specialized skills, experience, and time that most businesspeople don't have.
• People who can distinguish between black hat and white hat strategies, and who will tell you exactly how gray they are willing to get. If they can't or won't answer this question, you may find yourself in murky waters, with potential consequences for your website.
• People who give you realistic expectations and honest information. While you want someone effective, reputable SEOs won't make guarantees. We know that there are too many factors involved for anyone to give you an honest guarantee of performance.
• People who communicate with you honestly and respectfully. There's no reason to tolerate poor communication. You have a choice.
  

Social Media and Your Staff

Recently I read about a company that has found that social media is all the marketing they need. Not the first time I've seen that, actually, but this company had a different strategy from many of the companies we read about. They relied not just on their own company-led blog and social networking accounts, but also encouraged all their staff to write about their work experiences at their own blogs and social networking accounts as well -- and reaped the rewards.

The company has its own fans, but staff members have fans, too, and their fans learn about the company through those networking opportunities.

Not an exotic idea, but how can you make it work for you?

• Negotiate some boundaries. Lots of people write at their blogs, Facebook pages, or Twitter accounts about difficult people they work with, frustrating assignments, and irritating customers. Do you want your customers to see that and know it's your company being discussed? I'm actually pretty careful when I talk about work, and always have been -- even when I just had a completely anonymous personal blog. But many people feel that these are places for free expression, about their employers as well as other aspects of their lives. And many readers are bored or made suspicious by reports about a company that are all good news all the time. And that's before you even think about ill-judged photos from Super Bowl parties. This is something to discuss before you decide to count this as part of your marketing plan.
• Support staff in their networking. One of the fears companies had (and perhaps still have, though it's not getting much press anymore) about social media was that people would waste work time on it. I've always figured that workers who would waste time on social networking were the same ones who would waste time on physical-world networking, too, or on making things out of paper clips, for that matter. Some people are more inclined to waste time than others, and that's not Facebook's fault.  But if your company website gets traffic from your staff's Spoke profiles, it makes sense to give them some time to work on those profiles on company time. 
• Consider training. Tweets about your projects, discoveries, or special offers from all over Twitter can make your company look pretty exciting. A bunch of abandoned Twitter accounts can make you look lame. A staff development workshop on how to use online networks for the benefit of the company is a good investment, and can make the difference between success and failure. Then, learn from years of research in staff development and make sure that staff members support one another's efforts. Comment at your colleagues' blogs and recommend them at LinkedIn, and online networks can provide another means of communication for your firm, as well as a marketing opportunity.
  

Changes at Your Web Site

Fresh content at your website encourages visitors, including search engines. People drop by to see what's new and exciting, robots perk up and think, "Ah, that's a live site that gets updated -- I'd better go check it out!"

How can you get it?

• Blog. A blog is the easiest, most convenient way to refresh your site.
• Seasonal changes. Have your webmaster make changes in the look of your site to match the season. A fresh image, a timely new paragraph, even a change of icons shows that you're keeping up to date. 
• News. You don't have to have a blog to post some new information. Company news, changes in staff, new products, or a fresh page of tips and offers can bring in some new keywords as well as encouraging your visitors to drop by more often.

To make those changes, you'll either need to make alterations at your site by yourself, or ask your webmaster to do it. I've written before on the pluses and minuses of  having a content management system at your website, so let's just look at the best ways to accomplish site changes under both circumstances.

If you make your own changes, just get comfortable at making the particular changes you want to make. You don't have to be an expert to make small changes yourself. Pay for a bit of your webmaster's time to show you how, if you need help.  But you may find that it's easier than you think, especially if your designer sets up your site with you in mind.

For example, here's the code for a calendar box at a website.







If all you have to do is replace the circled stuff, it's no harder than any other typing. Grab the information between the "p"s and type in the new information. Just don't be intimidated by the fancy things around it.

If you want to be able to do this, you should convey that to your designer when you have your page built, or plan on a little time to fix your site to make this practical. Some designers write beautiful, clean code that you can easily navigate (I love working with those designers) and some write code that's more like the cables tangled under your desk, or perhaps spaghetti. If your site is built in the latter fashion, it'll need some tidying before you can get in and make your changes with confidence.

If you have changes made for you, you're probably paying by the hour. Some webmasters have arrangements where you can make a certain number of changes per month for a set fee, or allow you to buy a block of time. But time will always be the deciding factor for the cost of making changes. Save time, and therefore money, by having all your changes decided and organized before you send them in.

Don't send this:

"I think I might want to add some new pictures, and also we need to change the prices. I'm thinking that for the new year a 3% increase across the board would be fair, since my costs have risen by just about that much, and maybe we could put in something like 'Note new pricing, made necessary by increases in fuel costs' but maybe we don't have to say that especially if you change the pictures. I'll send the new pictures later, but you could go on and change the prices. But don't make the changes I told you about yesterday until I send you the new pictures, because I might not want them if I like the way the new pictures look."

Send this:

"Please replace the pictures on the Product page with the attached new images.
Also replace the first paragraph on the Pricing page with this:"

and then give the new paragraph exactly as you want it. The difference in cost between these two approaches is considerable.

Of course, you may prefer to pay your web people to take care of these things for you without your having to organize things or disentangle code. Or you may have minions who handle this stuff for you. If you're on a budget, though, you can still have updates at your site.

Blogging for Absolute Beginners

I've been asked by a fellow musician to provide a true beginner's guide to blogging. "What exactly," the saxophonist asked me, "is a blog?"

This is not a guy who wants to know how to craft winning intros for the auto-posts at his main corporate blog. In fact, most of the things that I write about blogs have not been useful to him, because he doesn't know how to get started.

"Blog," then, to start at the real beginning, is short for "weblog." Initially, a blog was a list, or log, of cool sites the author had visited. Pretty quickly, though, it became on online journal. Individuals kept them as diaries, and gradually they grew into communities of related blogs, and then into a modern form of journalism. Now, they're an essential means of communication for businesses as well.

So, if you've never had a blog before, how do you get started? You need to choose a place to put your blog, and make yourself a blog -- sort of like getting a blank book to write your diary into.

Let's start with a Blogger blog. You'll need to create an account, sign in, and create a blog before you can write any posts.

Go to Blogger.com and follow the instructions. Here's a quick slideshow to show you what to expect:


Essentially, you fill in a few boxes and prove you're a human, choose a name and a template for your blog, and Blogger does the rest. Once you've created the blog (which really means that you've allowed Blogger to create a blog for you), you'll be sent to the "new post" screen. If you don't feel like posting right away, you can find your way back to it by clicking on "new post."  Here you can see what the process of posting is like:




Basically, you type into a text box. I've shown you how to get a picture from your computer into your post as well.

That's all there is to it.

Now that you've got the concept, here are some posts that might be useful:

Where Should You Put Your Blog?
Who Should Be Writing Your Blog?
What Blogging Can Do for Your Website

The Golden Ratio and Your Website

Sometimes the problem isn't what you think it is.

I was reminded of this yesterday in a couple of conversations with the owners of websites I'm working on. One is a local business person.

"I don't like words," she said grimly.

I ran quickly through the advantages of having words on a website. Then we talked about how the words on the page she was looking at would look different once they were actually on her website. Yesterday's post showed examples of how different the same number of words looks with different designs.

The second conversation was with a music production company in a big city. "It looks all cramped!" he complained about the minimalist text I'd written for his homepage. He has his own designer, so I couldn't just assure him that I knew our wonderful designer would make it look great. We had to get down to cases.

We had to talk about the Golden Ratio.

The golden ratio is an interesting number with lots of interesting math in it. If you'd rather not think about math, just look at the figure at the top of this post. Imagine it's your website's home page. See where there's a line running from the top to the bottom? If you have two divisions -- like a main division and a sidebar -- then that's about how your eye would like them to be. As you can see, there are lots of other possible divisions -- since it's a ratio and not a size of box, you can use it to create all kinds of different layouts.

The designer for the music promoter had made the divisions of the page more like what's shown below by the red line:



Your brain, for some reason, doesn't like that proportion as well. When you put the text in, the lines of text will seem too long. The paragraphs will seem too short. The whole thing will just be subtly unsettling.

The problem is not the words.

Scroll down to yesterday's post and see all the golden ratios on the websites. Then look at your website. See it?

If not, then your page probably isn't something people want to look at very much.

The designer in question made some changes, and the site looks fine now. It's good to catch these things before launching, as we did, but it's fine to fix them at any time.

Website Content: How Much Do You Need?

As you may know if you always read my blog and have total recall, I teach writing to college students in my spare time. One of the questions they frequently ask is, "How long should the paper be?"

I invariably tell them, "As long as it needs to be to say what you have to say."

This is a good answer for a writing class, but it's a rotten answer to "How long should the content at my website be?" That's because there are other factors.

For one thing, you need search engines to find your site, understand what it's for, and offer it to the right people. Robots aren't as good at getting the nuances of human language as humans are, so this can require more text, and more overt use of key phrases, than content written just for people.

For another, your human visitors spend just a few seconds scanning your homepage before they make up their minds about whether to go or stay. That means that you have to write your pages to be scanned, not just to be read.

Finally, you have to work with the design, too -- not an issue for term papers.

So how much content do you need? Check out a few examples. Above is a homepage I wrote for web design firm Sharp Hue. It has 135 words, and you can see them all in that one screenshot. Nearly every single word is an essential keyword. This is a small amount of content, but it's very efficient. If you want to keep text to a minimum, you have to make sure that every word counts -- while still keeping it in the form of natural English sentences that will appeal to your readers.




I usually find that 280 words is about the minimum you can use and get excellent results. But that general figure can look very different from one site to another. The site above, with 280 words, has a traditional page of text in paragraphs. Visitors can tell immediately what this site is for, so we can give them something to read, confident that those who don't need more information will go ahead and take action without reading all the text.




This site, for web development firm Onsharp, has 317 words. It's only about 20 words more than the previous example, but the layout and graphics create a completely different effect. Their product requires a lot of explanation, so they have brief bits that lead to more detail on other pages. This allows a scannable homepage without sacrificing the information their visitors need.



Littlefish IT is another 280 word homepage (though I did a total of about 10,000 words for their site -- in their testing, they found that content really is king). They like to have an attention-grabbing intro above the fold, followed by more detail below it, which is mostly directed toward search engines. Their pages may have up to 480 words, but they're designed to satisfy the non-scrolling visitors as well as those who want more detail.

It's okay to have more than your visitors will read, as long as you've designed the page to do its job whether people read all of it or not. And it's okay to have minimal text as long as you have enough information for search engine robots to discern your purpose.

Pre-qualifying Your Online Customers

Who's your customer? Often, businesses think the answer to this question is, "Everyone in the world," but that's not true.

Yesterday, I was writing the website content for a company that sells garage organizers. Now, you can just buy a $25 bike rack from these folks, but what they really do is custom garage organization. The price point is comparable to remodeling a kitchen. They don't need to spend time visiting the homes of people who want $25 bike racks. Since they do on-site evaluation and installation of their high-end systems, they also don't need to spend a lot of time on prospects who are in a different geographical area. They need to reach homeowners in affluent neighborhoods in their own region.

The internet is open to all, though. Direct mail lets you target a specific zip code, but your website can't be targeted in that way. Instead, you need to help your visitors pre-qualify themselves.

• Use the right language. In writing the content for the organizing company, I used phrases like "protect your investment" and "showcase your possessions." My examples were skis and golf gear, not mops and folding lawn furniture. Designer Shan Pesaru will use photos of high-end cars,and the alt text for his images needs to carry through the theme. The owners of the company are friendly, down to earth people, but we need an upmarket sound and look at their website. We also need to use the name of their metropolitan area, so we can limit out of town inquiries.
  
• Plan your method of contact. Making it a little more difficult to get hold of you eliminates people who are just thinking idly about your services. The garage organizing company isn't going that far, but we are focusing on having people arrange for a visit to their homes. Providing a name, address, and phone number and giving someone permission to call is more of a commitment than giving an email address. Fewer people will contact you, but more of them will be serious about following through.
• Make your intentions clear. The garage solutions company's current website focuses on the problem they solve. This is often a very good strategy: when people search online, they often search by the problem, not by the solution. However, phrases like "Let's get the mess up off the floor!" and "Don't be embarrassed to open your garage door!" don't really say "Invest thousands of dollars in the garage of your dreams." The visitor to your site should be able to tell right away what you have to offer. That doesn't have to include the price, but it should make the nature of your service completely clear.

You don't have unlimited time to follow up with web visitors, and you want to focus your attention on those who want and can afford your product or service. Help your online visitors understand those products and services well enough that they can pre-qualify themselves before they contact you.

Useful Information at Your Website

Do you want more traffic at your website? In general, people will come to your website if you have things which they find useful or entertaining. Useful information, in particular, will do some good things for your site:

• It can increase the number of keywords for which you rank.
• It brings visitors back, increasing the chances of their becoming customers.
• It increases your value for your current customers or visitors.
• It increases your authority and shows your expertise.

How can you get some useful information into your website? Blogs are a great way to do this, but you can also get good mileage with static information pages. The page above is part of a site I wrote for a European optometry chain. The site has information about the company, about their special deals, and about contacting your local office for an appointment. It also has pages on eye exams and eye health. These pages bring in people who've searched for retinoscopy and tonometry -- and chances are good that some of those people will need an eye exam.

How can you add value to your site with information pages?

• Make your information pages useful. Often, gathering information in one place will make your page a valuable resource even when the information on it is available elsewhere. Saving your visitors the effort of searching all over the web can lead them to bookmark your site and visit regularly. In fact, having a helpful page at your site is a way of helping your customers -- sometimes even before they become your customers. You remember the people who've been helpful to you in physical world businesses, and are more likely to return to them. The same is true for online businesses.
  
• Make your information clear and accurate. This sounds obvious, but I think we've all seen pages that were intended to provide information, but which rambled or were too filled with jargon to be useful. Be conscious of your audience: for example, we can assume that people who need definitions of different kinds of eye exams are not themselves optometrists or even especially knowledgeable about eye care. A page like this needs to be written in ordinary English. Your page also needs to be well organized, so that visitors can quickly find the information they need. And it should be well-written and proofread, too, so that your visitors aren't distracted by errors or turned off by poor phrasing.
  
• Use your keywords. While there are examples of web pages which have benefited their companies even without being directly related to the business of that company, this isn't the most efficient way to go. Assume that people who need your goods and services will also need information related to those goods and services. An optometrist may choose to have information pages about fashion and glasses rather than eye health, but pages that have no need to use terms like "eye exam," "optometrist," "glasses," or "optician" are likely to be less useful to the business than pages on topics that are directly related. When you're providing valuable information for your customers that may be only tangentially related to your business, make sure to include enough keywords that the page does its job. The example site here has a page explaining the rules for free eye exams available in Britain. Naturally, a lot of that page is about age limits and other legal matters. Still, the name of the company and a number of other essential keywords fit quit naturally into a clear explanation of this subject.

Answering common questions at your website has the advantage, too, that you can refer people to that page. A customer for the opticians may find it reassuring to be told, after a face to face discussion of eye health and computers, "This information is also on our website if you want to check it again in the future."

Making Your Blog Look Good

Blogging is a good idea for most businesses. Your blog provides extra value for your clients, more content for the search engines, and opportunities for linkbuilding. Excellent content is what makes your blog provide these benefits for your company. But how do you make your blog look good?

First, set it up to look good from the beginning.

The blog you're reading right now was styled to match the website it belongs to, by designer Shan Pesaru. Here's another example of his, using Blogger:



Marcel Sendrea did this one, using Wordpress:




Here's one by Jay Jaro, built with BlogEngine.net:



As you can see, a blog can have just as much style and individuality as any other web page.

If you want to do it yourself, you can upload a template, as I did with this blog:



Sources of blog templates include these sites:

• eblogtemplates
• btemplates
• blogfashions

To use them, you download the file and then upload it at your blog platform. If you don't know what that means, save yourself some grief and hire someone to do it for you. You're bright, I know, and you can learn how, but if you just plan to do it once, for your business blog -- well, you have work to do, right?

You can also use the customization options at your blogging platform. Here's a blog at Weebly.com, using one of their templates and their simple directions:



If you happen to find options that fit your company's look pretty well, then you're in luck. If you know a bit of html, you can match the colors and fonts and so forth, and you can often upload your own image, too.

If you're not sure whether blogging is for you, and you want to try it out, this can be a good way to make yourself a free trial. If you do this with Blogger or Wordpress, your web people can bring it into your website later, and match it to your site.

Once it's built, take the trouble to make your posts look good:

• Don't get carried away with the options. Multiple colors and fonts, centering some sections and justifying others, playing with text effects -- all that just makes it hard to read. Simplicity is your friend.
• Do pay attention to the details. Your text should look balanced. Your images should be carefully chosen and placed. Your punctuation should not suggest junior high school note-passing (!!!!!!) Things like margins and spacing make all the difference.
• Choose your images carefully. Your images should be of good quality, connected with your text, and compatible with your company's image. They should fit with the look of the website, too.
  

A good-looking blog won't make up for scanty or poor-quality content, but it will work with your good content to make a great effect.

Small Changes Make a Difference for Search

Usually, when I show you a "before" and "after," there's a big difference. Not in this case. The site above is the old look of Dr. Michael Wiederkehr's website, and the one below is the new one.





Here are the changes:

• The name of the doctor and the clinic, both things patients are likely to search for, are prominent now.
• The header is short enough to be read at a glance.
• The other information from the original headline is in a bulleted list of short phrases -- again, easy to read at a glance.
• The remaining text on the homepage combines keywords people will be likely to use with a clear, simple statement of the doctor's main message about his new clinic. The other details have been moved to an inside page for people who want to know more.
  

I'd have moved the "Online Form" section to a less prominent place, but the designer balked at that. The upper left corner is the first place most people look at a website, so I like to see the unique selling point or call to action there -- the high-rent stuff, if you will. Nonetheless, the eye-catching photo and use of color probably draw the eye to the main message well enough to overcome the drawback of the placement.

We also changed the titles, the meta descriptions, and the content on the inner pages -- again, without design changes.

The new site should be more effective for search and for visitors, without affecting the look of the site at all. As of this writing, the changes are only a few hours old and the doctor's site has moved above the fold on the first page of Google for a search on his name.

Your Website: Update, Refresh, or Redesign?

Let's say that you like the basic look of your website, but you're not getting the results you want. Do you need a new website, or can you just update it -- refresh it a bit, in other words, and keep going?

Ask yourself these questions:

• How's the structure? If your site was built recently with modern code, it's not using Flash and graphics where it should have text, and the navigation works well, then you may be fine without a redesign. If it was built a long time ago, or built recently but badly, then you'll have to have it rebuilt. Your choice then is to have it rebuilt with the same overall look, or to take the opportunity to have a fresh look as well as a well-built site. Even if you've gotten carried away with the Flash or you want to move elements around to improve the user experience, you can very likely just update if the basic structure is good.
• How's the design? The design of your website has to do with the main colors and where things like headers and navigation buttons are. With a well-made website, you may be able to add new elements, increase or decrease the number of words, and otherwise fool around with the site quite a bit without disturbing the design. If the design is poor, though, changing the pictures won't improve the usability.
  
• How's the content? This is what you can readily change -- assuming your website is built well to begin with. You can have completely new words and images for a fraction of the cost of a redesign.

The problem is, you have to be able to tell.

Often, site owners think that a new picture will fix their site, when they have a poor user experience or bad code. Equally often, owners delay making improvements because they don't realize that a content update (for a few hundred dollars, compared with a few thousand for a redesign) will keep their website working well for another year or two.

Use your end-of-year site checkup to decide how much of a revamping your website needs. I'll be happy to provide a diagnosis for you if you're not sure.

Keeping Up with SEO

Web developer Tyler Kasten asked me yesterday how I keep up with current trends in SEO. Things change all the time, he said, so how can we find time to do the homework on that?

It's true that things change. It's also true that it's hard to find the time to keep up. Here's how I do it:

• Stay in touch with the online SEO community. While there are some particularly useful sites -- SEOMoz and Hubspot are favorites of mine -- I'd say that Twitter is the single most useful tool. Follow the right people, and you'll be genned up by reading what people are talking about, without too much surfing.
• Read. You don't get the full story from the tweets of your peeps. I wish there had been books about SEO when I started working in the field. There weren't then, but there are now. I also like .net (Practical Web Design in the U.S.) and WebDesigner. True, these magazines spend as much spacetime on things like building galleries with Spry as they do on SEO, but they're up to date and open-minded. Read print and online, and you'll know more than you would just from your own observations.
  
• Learn from experience. If you keep track of your efforts and use the data, you can see what works and what's changing from your own experience. As I told Tyler, I used to think of social media as optional -- something I recommended to clients who had a knack for it. Now I recommend it to almost everyone, because I can see from the data that it's valuable for almost everyone. Designer Shan Pesaru is cleaning up all the dead ends on an upcoming project of ours with 301 redirects. We haven't always done that before (there are still some loose ends from when we moved this blog, in fact), so I'll be watching with interest to see whether it makes a difference or not. My guess would be not, for this client, but I don't make decisions based on guesses.

How do you keep up with SEO? Like any other fast-changing field, it takes effort. If you're an SEO professional, it's worth it. If you hire SEO professionals, make sure they think so, too.

Keywords in Blogging

A blog can do good things for a business:

• improve search results
• increase traffic, including repeat traffic
• provide a service to your customers

When you're working to increase visibility, you'll want to include your essential keywords in your blog copy. Obviously, if this is your primary focus, you'll be sacrificing both the benefits of having customers come back to read your blog, and of providing a service to your customers.

So how can you include your keywords in your blog posts without compromising on value to your visitors?

• Make sure you've got the right keywords. A new client is setting up a blog. They're a whole foods store, so it makes sense for them to use keywords like "whole foods," "natural foods," and "organic." These terms are very likely to turn up in their blog posts, too -- "Fitting Whole Foods into Your Budget," and "Is Organic Better?" would be very sensible and useful blog posts for them. "Cheap supplements" isn't a natural keyword for them, so they probably won't use it naturally in their blog. The best plan is not to go ahead and stuff "cheap supplements" into the blog in an unnatural way, but to leave "cheap supplements" off their list of keywords.
• Use your keywords consistently. You always have a choice of words. Another new client is a spine rehab center. A primary reason people search for spine rehab centers is for pain relief, and they usually use the word "pain." When I blog for this company, I could use "discomfort," "distress," or "soreness," but in fact I'll be using "pain." In the privacy of their computers, people in need of spine stabilization don't type "discomfort" into the search engines' search boxes. Using the same word instead of a variety of words won't make the blog posts less informative for visitors, and it will increase the chances that those back pain sufferers will find my client.
• Spotlight those keywords. The search engines will, if you do a good job, be able to see what your post is about and offer it to the people who will find it most valuable. But you can make it easy on the robots by using keywords in the title, in anchor text, and in tags and headings. If you blog regularly, you won't need any special tricks, but a new blog can get a little jumpstart by pointing out to the search engines just what is most important.
  

In order to use this advice in a practical way, you need to know what your best keywords are. Here are some previous posts that might be beneficial:
"Choosing Your Keywords"
"Another Way to Look at Keywords"
"Keywords, Marketing, and Your Brain"

Since You Asked...

I've been asked to clarify just exactly what I do with websites. Do I design and build them? Well, yes, I do, but only under duress. I got an A in my web design class, and passed my html certification, and I've built a couple of sites, but I don't think that qualifies me as a web designer. I have higher standards than that.

Essentially, I'm a web content provider. I write websites -- an average of one a week -- and other types of web content, including blogs and marketing pieces and articles and all manner of things. I also provide photographs for people, and even video if called upon to do so.

Mostly, I do this for web design firms and companies with their own IT and art departments and teams. However, about 25-30% of the people who come to me for this type of work don't have IT and art departments. So I also facilitate the building of web sites. I have a nice team and an efficient process that gets sites live within a few weeks.

Here are some of the sites I've done in this way:


with designer Jeff Wain


with designer Tom Hapgood


with designer Jon Schleuss


with designer Jeff Wain


with a template


by myself

Then I also work on existing sites, either making changes directly or sending instructions to the IT department, and I also do online marketing of various kinds.

Now you know.

What's Your Website's Job?

At this time of year, I do a lot of website analysis. Looking at people's current sites lets me see how well the site is built, what problems it has with usability, and where it obviously needs changes in design or content.

What I can't always tell from looking is this: what's the website's job?

Once you answer that question, you can answer what is to me the most important question, which is simply "How well does this website do its job?"

One business owner told me that her website was "a very big, very expensive business card." This was a disparaging remark, but for some businesses, that's exactly what the website is for. I'm asking around for a CPA and I get a name, so I look for the website to get contact information and a bit of an introduction. That website doesn't sell anything, but it's a major source of business -- a super-effective business card, if you will.

If your website is your business card, then it needs a well-branded design and a clear, concise message. Here's a good example:



The unhappy business owner I mentioned above didn't want her site to be a business card, because it was an e-commerce site. Its job was to sell stuff. An e-commerce site needs compelling sales copy, appealing photos, and a user-friendly checkout system.



Some websites are intended to present their owner's credentials. A site like this needs plenty of information, presented in a scannable form.



The point is, these plans aren't interchangeable. A business card doesn't -- and shouldn't -- give a complete picture of your skills and experience. A site detailing your credentials doesn't sell products. There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all website, because different businesses have different jobs they need their sites to perform.

What's your website's job? And how is it doing?

Your Website's Traffic

I've been doing annual reports. Traffic is the starting point for all of them, and of course everyone is happy to hear about their increases in traffic. Me, too. My traffic is up 198.92% over the same time last year. But don't stop there. Ask yourself a few more questions:

• Is it business, or is it just traffic?

I have one client who had an increase of 370.95% in 2009, compared with 2008. But he only serves local clients, and his local traffic increased by a mere 44%. That extra traffic is fine -- there can even be side benefits, such as a general increase in web visibility and prestige that could increase conversions -- but his basic traffic info suggests a higher level of success than we're really seeing.

• Are you seeing the trends?

The client below had a nice percentage of increase between 2008 and 2009, but really it's better than that. 2008 was essentially flat, while 2009 shows an upward trend (ever since they hired me) that is likely to continue if we continue making good decisions. The reality here is better than the percentage of increase would suggest.



The client below has a fairly new site, and the percentage of increase isn't that impressive yet. But the line on the graph is heading upwards. We might want to speed the process up, but the general trend suggests that we're on the right path, and shouldn't make a complete change in strategy.

• Have you broken it down?

Here's my chart for traffic from search engines.


If I look at my traffic over the whole year, I have a fairly smooth and steady increase, like the ones earlier in the post. But breaking it down by source shows a different story. My direct traffic is relatively flat. Search traffic shows a temporary peak in May when I was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, and then a nice increase between July and August that stayed high till the typical holiday drop --and even then was considerably higher than it was to begin with.

Here's a site, launched this summer, that shows completely different profiles for its three sources of traffic:





I haven't been working on this site since its launch, but if I were, I'd need to be aware of the different paths visitors were following.

When you look at your site's traffic for 2009 and make your online marketing plans for 2010, be sure to look closely enough at your traffic data to get the information you need for strategic decisionmaking.

Need more basic info about website traffic? Here are some posts you might find helpful:

Website Traffic
Learn from Your Traffic Sources
Detective Work at Analytics

Common Web Courtesy

The other day a client of mine asked if I could work with an associate of his. Of course, I was happy to. But the striking thing about this was why the organization he was introducing was eager to leave the web firm they were working with.

"The current vendors," my client explained, "talk down to members."

This isn't the first time I've heard this kind of thing, but I'd like it to be the last. Perhaps we could all make New Year's Resolutions to keep the web -- or at least web work -- courteous.

Here's the least you should expect from your web team:

• They should respect you and your knowledge in your field, whether you happen to be knowledgeable about their field or not. You will doubtless do the same.
  
• They should explain unfamiliar terms clearly when asked. Ideally, they should use normal English when they talk to you. If they slip up, though, they should be prepared to clarify whatever jargon-laced thing they've said, without behaving as though you should have known that. You, in turn, should remember that people sometimes forget they're using jargon, and speak up if you get confused.
  
• They should accept your ideas about their field, and be willing to explain what they're doing, within reason. Lots of humor among web people is about clients who have some vague idea about web practices and how much trouble they cause. Your web people should appear never to have heard of this type of humor, and not to find it funny. You, if you hear these jokes while you're studying up on what your web people are doing, should stop doing anything you recognize.
  
• They should be able to cope with cultural or geographical differences, if that happens to be a factor. Checking on your time zone, recognizing the existence of holidays, double-checking on slang they're not sure of, following the spelling conventions of your country or of your corporate handbook -- all of these are reasonable adjustments.
• They should try to work on a normal time schedule. Many web workers have very abnormal schedules, and of course there are often time zone issues to complicate matters. But when your web people say "I'll have it for you tomorrow," they should not mean midnight. Or next week. You, in return, should not get so dependent on their abnormal schedules that you think they are required by law to work nights and weekends. When I get an email at 11:00 p.m. and a "Didn't you get my email?" at 3:00 a.m., I feel nagged. Unless it's from the Southern hemisphere, in which case see the point above.

As long as clients accept being talked down to, it'll continue to happen. Together, we can stop that. It'll make the web a better place to work.

How Do Search Engines See Your Site?

Here's a site for which I recently did an analysis. Just looking at the homepage screenshot, you'd think it has a good amount of keyword-rich content.

You'd be wrong.

The items circled in black are actually graphic images. That is, we see them as words, but the builder of the site made them into pictures, so the search engines can't read them.




The stuff circled in blue is in a frameset.

So here's how the homepage looks to the search engines:




Now, the search engines can follow the links in the source code and read the content elsewhere. However, this site ranks so poorly for everything except the few words visible on the page's code that it seems clear that frames continue to be a problem from the point of view of SEO.

Since they also hamper usability (printing out the page, consistent look across browsers, etc.), it's a good plan to avoid them.