Responding to Complaints Online

We met this morning with a company suffering from online complaints. If you have this problem, you know that bad reviews can make a lot of online noise, threatening to drown out your good content. What can you do?

First, identify the extent of the problem. Do you have lots of valid complaints? Then make some internal changes and make plenty of noise yourself broadcasting those changes.

Do you have one really angry person -- a disgruntled employee, perhaps, or a customer you just couldn't satisfy -- who is spending lots of time trying to make you look bad? It's possible that contacting this individual and asking how you can make things right would help. If not, a calm and compassionate response lets readers compare your honorable behavior with that individual's hysterical outbursts, and you may get some sympathy from your readers.

Just be sure you don't get into a slanging match.

If what you have is ordinary stuff though -- you can't please everyone and some people like to complain  -- then you should find that these steps will take care of it:

• Respond. Use Google Alerts to keep track, and respond whenever there's a negative comment anywhere. Make sure you respond well: show concern, validate the feelings even as you dispute their claims, thank the complainer for their feedback, and offer a solution. 
• Replace. You don't want the complaints on the front page even if you have great responses to them. Chances are, the search engines won't choose to highlight your response, and people who don't click through won't see it. So you need to put more interesting, more current, and more valuable stuff online instead. This will move the complaints to a later search results page, where it probably won't be seen much.

 We've seen this simple strategy work over and over for our clients. The company we met with today has leftover noise from years ago; it's time to move that parade down the block and get something better in its place.

Lab Report: Adding Social Media

It's been three months since we launched FreshPlans, our laboratory site. We've been taking one SEO/SEM step a week there, to see how much difference each step makes. Normally, when we work on a site for a client, we do everything we can as fast as possible, so it's hard to sort out the effectiveness of any one step. Now, each site is different, so we can't claim that this is scientific proof of the relative usefulness of various approaches, but as a case study, it gives us some useful data.

We're getting a nice increase in traffic over time, so we're seeing a successful website overall. We added an affiliate marketing component to the site, too, so we can measure income for another very clear metric, and the income is also increasing slowly but steadily.

Our first priority from the beginning has been to have a good site with lots of fresh, good content. Experience has shown that this is always the best bet. We submitted to major search engines, and placed some very good links. All these steps improved our rankings and increased our traffic. We got to #1 at Google for the name of the site fairly quickly, and are showing for some searches. For example, we're #2 for "Classroom theme ideas" and #2 for "pirate classroom theme ideas." But we've had visitors via 1,872 keywords, so we can feel pretty good about our relationship with Google.

Once we were showing up well in search, we put some effort into the affiliate marketing aspect, playing around with ads and fine-tuning the items we offered. We set up a Facebook page and posted each new post from the site there at the Facebook page. Last week, we set up a Twitter account, and today we installed TwitterWidget at our site in place of some of the ads we had in the sidebar. You can see the new widget in the screenshot above. Here's how the page looked with the ads:

We found, and the discussion forums confirm that our experience is typical, that people pretty much ignored those sidebar ads. TwitterWidget brings in recent tweets, so we have to make sure we're saying interesting things, and hope that the widget will encourage people to follow us at Twitter, and thus to come back to our website more often. We've had 24 visits from Twitter, which suggests that it's worth our while to continue our efforts there. We've had 23 visits from Facebook, though it's had a longer period of time, so we should also keep efforts going there.

We'll keep you posted on how social media affects our metrics. We should also mention that this is Back to School, a busy time for things directed toward teachers, so we may see a good rise in traffic now and a fall in October; we always have to keep seasonal variations in mind.

How has your site been doing in the past three months? Could you take some of the steps we've taken with FreshPlans and see some of the same improvements? Or, if your site is making more progress than ours, can you share some steps you've taken that we haven't?

Your E-store: SEO or SEM?

Everyone can have a digital shop nowadays. Sites like Volusion, Interspire,and Magento let people with something to sell -- or even people who have nothing to sell but would like to -- set up shop in minutes.

The eStore sites often make it sound as though customers will then rush to buy from you, but this isn't quite true. Many sensible eStore owners have someone like me come and optimize their pages, and that's smart. But should you focus on SEM or SEO for your eStore?

Certainly, you should always do both search engine optimization, which is about making your pages the best they can be for search engines, and search engine marketing, which is about gaining links that show search engines the value of  your site. But one approach may be higher priority than another, once you've got the basics done.

I'd like to share with you two cases. The first, a bit of whose store is in th screenshot above, is a steampunk jeweler. She has a Volusion store with good results overall, but her store wasn't coming up well for the name of her company. I optimized her site at Volusion and did some linkbuilding for her a couple of years ago.

The second case is this purveyor of cute baby clothes. They have an Interspire store, which I'm currently optimizing and for which I'm also doing a linkbuilding campaign.

Everyone with an eStore should do those two things. The question is: what comes next? These two different stores need different strategies.

The jeweler has a narrow niche: steampunk jewelry. She spends a lot of time online, has a lot of visibility, and when I met her had a lot of places she sold from, too. I've met a number of artisans who spend many hours keeping up multiple online shops and multiple mini-sites. It often is not the best use of their time. In this jeweler's case, the best strategy was to put most of her eggs in one basket and get her strongest store higher on the search results for the term "steampunk jewelry." Here best bet is classic SEO -- optimizing her pages, getting quality links, and associating her online presence strongly with the keywords.Since she has a narrow niche, she can also expect good results from targeted advertising: not adwords, but ads on popular steampunk sites.

The baby boutique, on the other hand, is in a highly competitive niche. They need to have their pages optimized, certainly, but a small company selling baby clothes can't expect to get top billing on Google any time soon. What's more, the particular population they're targeting tends to respond more to the blogs and Facebook pages they follow than to advertising. Their best bet will be to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack in some way so they can show well for more specific searches, to work on visibility in their local area, and to focus their efforts on social media.

The specific strategy that will lead to success for your eStore will depend on your product, your niche, your budget, and your skills. You can have us do a free website analysis for you if you'd like some guidance.

SEO and Cathedrals

What does SEO have in common with cathedrals?

Both take time. Admittedly, SEO doesn't take as long as building a cathedral. But too often we behave as though SEO were a pre-fab trailer you could park on a lot, rather than something that has to be built steadily and gradually over time.

We're doing linkbuilding campaigns for a couple of clients right now. In our experience, a five-hour linkbuilding campaign will deliver the goods for most sites: improved PageRank, better rankings in the SERPs for keywords, and more traffic.

A couple of hours of linkbuilding a week for a couple of years will do far more. Ongoing social media, regularly updating your site with excellent content, and participating fully in relevant networks will do wonders.

SEO Makeover Success

We recently did an SEO makeover for Bill West Roofing, a roofing contractor in Kansas City. Initially, the company contacted us thinking about PPC or magic behind-the-scenes optimization. They liked their website (see below), which they'd built with the help of a friend, and didn't really want to change it. They just wanted it to perform better.

Here's the thing: online marketing with a well-optimized site always works better than attempts to shore up a poor site.

So we gave the client an estimate for making minor changes, but we also sent him a proposal to optimize the site properly. Sensibly, he decided to do it right. Here's what we did:

• First thing, we added Google Analytics to his site so we could see how things were going. We checked his rankings with the search engines, researched his competitors and the patterns of search in his town, and got to know his business. You have to  know where you're going before you set out on the journey.
• Using the results of the research, I re-wrote his content. I kept the feel of the original content, but wrote it with search and conversions in mind. I made it scannable and made sure the essential selling points were foremost. Content always includes meta tags, too, so I made sure that those were as they should be.
• Designer Tom Hapgood updated the design and code. We used the same research, plus some testing for usability issues, to inform the changes. The client had lots of input, and Tom tweaked the design to suit. The new design is similar to the old one, with the same colors and a skyline graphic, but it's more eye-catching, more readable, and more attractive. Search engines don't care about attractiveness, but human visitors sure do. 
• Josepha did a linkbuilding campaign. The full results of that won't show up for a while, but it's essential to get the site off on the right foot.

We gave it a couple of weeks to settle in, and compared the results since launch with the same amount of time before launch.

Total visits are up by 87.3%, PageViews are up by 117.53%, the bounce rate is down, time on the site is up, and we're seeing 90% new visits. Looking just at the company's service area, Missouri and Kansas, visits have more than doubled. (Wisconsin visits are up by 700%, but that doesn't do Bill West Roofing much good.) Search traffic is up by 50%, with visitors arriving via 51 different keywords since the May 18th launch.

This isn't just bragging. Of course, I'm excited by these results and happy to share them with you. But this is what I'd like to suggest you take away from this story:

• Good, honest SEO gives good results. You don't need to look for magic.

• Changes that improve user experience are also likely to improve traffic and rankings.

New Website Lab Report: Submitting to the Search Engines

One of the things people ask about new websites is, "How fast will I get to the top of Google?"

The answer to this generally has been, "Anywhere from 1.5 days to 5 months, depending."

As with all SEO questions, it depends on a lot of factors over which I don't usually have control. And of course I'm not adjusting for variables when I work on clients' websites; I'm doing my darnedest to get their sites to the top of Google.

Now I'm running my little lab experiment, though, with the educational site FreshPlans at www.myfreshplans.com. I did nothing for one week to encourage the search engines to notice my newly-launched site, apart from adding good content daily. I mentioned it here and once on Twitter, and that was about it. 32 people came to visit, some more than once. 24 of those people clicked through the Amazon affiliate ads.

After one week, the new website had climbed in rankings, hitting #1 at Google for the term in the URL, "My Fresh Plans," and #4 for "Fresh Plans," after starting at #15.

After a week, I made a Facebook page for the site and submitted it to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), as well as dropping a handful of links at logical places. Normally, I would do that immediately for a new site. However, I wanted to see what would just naturally take place without any real assistance. I plan to give it another week before doing any serious linkbuilding.

Today, one day after submitting the site to the main search engines, the placements at Google for the name of the site have not changed. However, it's now #1 for "Big Turnip lesson plans," and #3 for the coveted "Cookie Geography."

No, of course those aren't important keywords. But it shows that Google has indexed the inner pages of the site very quickly. And in fact, the analytics for the site show the change. The previous day, the only keywords bringing visitors were "Fresh Plans" and "myfreshplans." In the hours between when I submitted the site yesterday and midnight, seven new keywords were used to find the site: "Alice in Wonderland lesson plans," "fungi lesson plans," and "what are some good art projects for earth day?" among them.

19 visitors dropped by, almost half again as many as the previous day's 13 visitors. However, the day before that had brought 10, double the preceding day's 5.

The lesson here? It's worth mentioning your site to the search engines. Submit it as soon as you launch. Here are the addresses:

Yahoo!
Google
Bing
DMOZ

Don't submit it repeatedly. Don't pay someone to submit it to "the top 1000 search engines." Don't check your rankings every day unless you're doing an experiment, as I am. Not that there's anything dangerous about doing any of these things (except repeated submission to DMOZ, which, rumor has it, causes the humans there to get ticked off and refuse to include your site at all); they're just a waste of your time.

New Website Lab Report: Benchmarks

The new website I just launched -- this is an interior page, with Earth Day lesson plans -- has two days' worth of analytics now. The first day it had five visits and the second day it had seven, for a total of 12 visits from 6 unique visitors. 8 were direct visits, 3 were referrals from this blog, and 1 came via search, looking for "freshplans."

Yesterday the site was at #18 on Google for "Fresh Plans" and over 100 for "FreshPlans." Today, it's at #14 and #28 respectively for those terms. 

We've done nothing at all, except to filter my computer out of the results and mention the site here. So this is what you might expect if you simply build a good site and put it up and don't do anything in the way of search engine marketing. I'm going to give it a week before I take any steps, to establish proper baselines.

Flash: a Slice of Life

Have you ever noticed how hard it can be to get through a video?

A client wanted a blog post based on a video about new Adwords features, so I was trying to watch it and get all the information from it. There were screenshots and graphs...

Josepha IMed me to ask about macroevolution vs. microevolution.

So I had missed a screen, but it was okay -- I'd opened my own Adwords account page so I could follow along...

My son came in to discuss Descartes and his idea of the essential nature of physical bodies vs. sensory input.

Then Kuty from Clevertech appeared as an instant message.

I paused the video. I had sort of lost the thread by then anyway, and I like to be alert when I talk to Kuty. He once said to me, "You're not a developer, so you have to have things explained really simply." He meant it in a kind way, but still I try to pay full attention in case he starts in on Coldfusion or something.

It was at this point that Sean Borsodi, the new designer at Sharp Hue, emailed me to call him.

He wanted to talk about Flash. Not that this was the initial topic. It was more that he feels I'm unfair to Flash, so it's more or less always on his agenda to talk about. I wasn't taking notes, so this may not be a fully accurate transcript of our discussion:

Sean: Flash is fun and cool.
Rebecca: Granted. It's also bad for search and speed, and sometimes it's irritating.
Sean: Flash is fun. Let me show you some cool Flash things I built.
Rebecca: It's buffering...
Sean: It's the server. On all other servers it's really fast.
Rebecca: Still buffering...
Sean: Okay, go to this other really cool thing I built. See how fun it is?
Rebecca: Yes... the first time. But what if I actually wanted to buy something from these people?
Sean: Have I mentioned the cool funness of Flash?
Rebecca: Sure...
Sean: And also the fun coolness?

That wasn't really all that Sean said. In fact, he made some excellent points about Flash. Let me share them with you:

• You don't have to build your whole site with Flash to get the cool, fun aspects of it. Used in moderation, it can make your site fancy (and cool and fun) without slowing it down.
• Use html for navigation and get the text in, and then spice up other areas of the site with Flash.
• If you build them correctly, Flash sites can be updated by the client or later web workers just like html sites.
• You can have alternate content. Just as alternate text gives information about your pictures to the search engines and people who can't see those images, alternate content allows you to work around the search and access issues of Flash.
• Flash can increase the fun quotient of your site enough to keep people there longer.
• Much irritating Flash has simply been done badly, just as much irritating text content has been written badly. That's not the fault of the medium.

I like Flash in its place -- games, for example, or online toys. Sites that are themselves games or toys, or otherwise recreational. It can be terrific for educational uses -- I'd like to see it used a lot more at math education sites. And certainly, if you're selling Flash, you want some very jazzy examples on your site.

The Flash intro to your business site? When people are actively looking for something -- either a solution to a problem or an object of desire -- they want their stuff. They don't want to have to wait through your Flash. People who like and enjoy your animation may come and admire it (I like to look at Greenshires' fish sometimes, and I made Sean look at them, too), but they're not necessarily interested in the stuff you want to sell.

So, if you must have Flash, don't have it as an intro. If you must have a Flash intro, make sure it's easy to escape from it and move right on to the main navigation. Check out my post on "Website Music"  for more suggestions on this point.

I did eventually get back to the Adwords video. It was informative, but it wasn't fun, and it wasn't cool. It might have benefited from some Flash.

Analytics and Your Web Site Redesign

Industry expert Dave Taylor says that he's never arrived at a meeting about a site's SEO redesign to find clients with analytics data. Me neither, unless I bring it with me.

What kind of evidence do people bring with them?

Well, here are some comments from initial SEO site redesign discussions I've been involved in recently:

• "We should have more pictures of people. People like looking at people."
• "We need to do what [competitor] did."
• "We need something edgy."
• "We need it to pop."
• "Perhaps we need Flash?"

These may all be true statements about what these websites need. But, as Erika Andersen has pointed out, starting your meeting with statements about needs means you're jumping ahead to strategies before defining the problem or the desired outcome. It's the equivalent of saying, "Hey, let's try this!"

Starting with analytics allows you to see what's happening and compare that with what you want to have happen. For one of the sites in question, the owner defined the problem and the desired outcome by referencing the bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave the site without exploring further) from one source. He wants to keep those people hanging around the site longer. He's arranging for four pages with slight variations so he can test them.

For another, I've just installed analytics, so I'm not yet seeing a lot of information, but I can see that this 18 month old site appears to be averaging only one visit each day, and none from his service area. We can easily identify his immediate problem. Once we start bringing him some traffic, we can look at other issues, but making his site findable is clearly the highest priority.

So on the one hand we have

"In order to increase the ROI on our ad campaign with Site X, we need to improve the bounce rate for people coming from our ad by a) testing the effect of a suggested design change, and b) following through with the design that gets the best results" 

and on the other hand we have

"We need it to pop!" 

I hope the difference is obvious.

Mirror Sites

Last night Josepha and I were creating a strategy for a client who wants to do well for some new keywords. These are brand new keywords for him, related to a new section of his website, and we've just begun working on it. Still, it seemed to us that he should have been doing better than he currently is.

Accordingly, we went poking around to see if we could see anything that might be an obstacle for him.

General poking around is something worth doing sometimes. Often, when you're looking for specific information, you zoom right in on it too quickly to notice side issues that might have some value for you.

In this case, we were startled to see a mirror site.

A mirror site is an exact copy of another site, at a different URL. There are valid reasons for setting up a mirror site, most of them having to do with handling large traffic volume or international downloads. They can be set up and identified as mirror sites quite properly.

That's not what we were seeing here. We were looking at an exact copy of the original site. The code was messed up and the meta language was different (and not nearly as good, let me tell you), but the site was otherwise the same.

This is not a good thing. Occasionally, people set these up themselves, in innocence, thinking it's a good way to get more for your money. Here's what can happen, if you have a mirror site:

• You can be penalized by the search engines, if it seems that you've plagiarized or just been sneaky.
• Search engines can simply choose one of the sites as the "real" one -- not necessarily the one you'd want them to choose, either.
• Google can remove one as duplicate content or copyright violation. 

Report plagiarized sites  to Google if you find that someone has copied your site in this way. While in this case Google could determine from the underlying code that ours is the real one and the other an inferior copy, that's not always the case. Therefore, you should make certain to report the mirror site before the plagiarist reports your original site.

If you did it yourself, not realizing that this is bad form, take the mirror site down. If you want to have more than one domain for your website (again, something you can do for good reasons, including common misspellings of your business name), a 301 redirect is the correct way to handle it. Have your webmaster do that for you.

Extending Your Web Presence

It is classic marketing advice that people have to hear about you somewhere between 5 and 12 times before they'll actually take action on your product. In the past, that meant that you had to pay to have your commercial on TV enough to ensure that your prospects would see it a dozen times, or that your salespeople had to contact people a dozen times.

The internet has improved things. Now, that dozen points of contact can include multiple visits to your website, repeated emails, or just seeing you around on the web.

How can you get general visibility on the web?

• Your website is the most important thing here. Have a good website that says what you want to say about your company. Make it nice enough that people will want to link to you, and you'll get additional visibility with no further effort.  Also make sure that you're listed in the directories your customers and prospects are likely to use.
• Have a blog. Send your blog to other locations on the web, too -- it's easy to make your feed go to Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, but you can also post your relevant posts on community boards of various kinds. If this is a strength of yours, do guest blog posts. I got my first big SEO job from someone who read a guest post of mine and left a "call me" in the comments.
• Use social media. There's a fantastic array of social media sites out there, and you won't be able to keep up with all of them, so choose a few that you like and find convenient. Make profiles all over the place, though, with links to your website. Do a good job on your profile and then you can ignore that site. What you want to avoid is the occasional dropping in. Posting every few months is less effective than not posting at all, since it makes you look like a slacker. 
• Engage in conversations. Find the forums in your niche, read them, and say something when you have something to contribute to the conversation. The Wall Street Journal wrote about me last year, after having seen something I wrote at a forum. They're not going to call you if you say, "Great post! Keep it up!" but if you make a useful contribution to the discussion, you never know who might see it.
• Share your knowledge. There are a lot of places online that rely on user-generated content. Sharing what you know at such places shows your authority. So, if you have a bicycle repair shop, you can answer questions about bicycle repair at Yahoo! Answers, and show that you know what you're doing. I review things at Amazon.com, myself. I've gotten jobs from people who've read my reviews. I've also had calls from manufacturers asking if they can use my reviews in their promotional materials, which is an opportunity for me to let them know that I can write other things for them if they ever need it. Since I'm a writer, any review will show my writing ability, but you can review things in your particular niche and thereby show your expertise in your own area. Squidoo lenses, hub pages, and YouTube are other great options.

Get in the habit of doing a little visibility-building when you need a break, and you'll see results over time. Or of course you can hire someone like me to do this for your company if this isn't one of your strengths.

Righting Ranking Wrongs

Right now I'm doing some on-site search engine optimization (that is, fixing up the content) for a large and successful logistics company. They're always on those lists of Top 50 Companies and Companies to Watch and stuff like that. They're also on the lists of Best Places to Work and Green Businesses. I like to work with companies like that.

I also had a call yesterday from a small roofing company that's been in business in their town for 30 years. They pride themselves on the quality of their work and the way they treat their workers. They won't take a customer's check until the job is done to that customer's satisfaction. The caller was the son of the founder of the business. He called from his truck on a job site, with his laptop by his side. I also like to work with companies like this.

Not everyone would see what these two companies have in common. To me, though, they both are businesses that ought to be ranking very well on the search engines, and aren't. When you look for logistics, you ought to find that up and coming company. When you look for a roofer in Blue Springs, you ought to find that roofing company. People who find these companies when they search for them will be happy; they'll get exactly what they need.

In both cases, you don't find them.

While there is certainly a fun aspect to getting some bold start up to a top rank against the odds, there's even more satisfaction in getting companies the rankings they truly deserve. It makes me feel like I'm Righting Wrongs. (That's me up there on the white horse.)

So I hope that when you think about getting top rankings for your company, you think about what your company is best at. What you ought to be ranking for, because you really are the best choice for people who search for those terms. What Google would really like to be offering you for, if only they knew.

Usually, getting those rankings is mostly about fixing the problems with your website. The two companies I mentioned have something else in common: their sites have problems, both in the content on the screen, and in the stuff under the hood. Once we get them fixed up, the search engines will probably fall upon them with metaphorical glad cries.

And I can ride off into the sunset, conscious of having restored the balance of the universe, if only in a small way.

How Good Does Your Website Have to Be?

A local restaurant has finally gotten a website up, and it's one of the worst websites I've ever seen. Its spelling is so creative that -- well, it includes words like "propetisioness" and "prok." The overall quality of the writing is what you would expect of a website using the word "propetisioness." It has no meta tags at all. Its design suggests that a bunch of random images were just stuck together till the space was filled. The basic information, such as hours and phone number, aren't on the home page at all. The code is poor.

The question is: does this matter? The menu's there, the phone number is on the Contact page, I went there and called and ordered food, regardless of how bad the website might be, so who cares what it looks like?

Well, Google seems to care.

This website is below the fold for my personal search for the name of the restaurant, even though both the URL and the title use the name of the restaurant, and even though I a) live just up the road and b) have been to the site before.

Google, we're assured, doesn't penalize for bad code, bad design, or bad writing. But they don't have to make a direct penalty for these things to get in the way of good search results. Here's why:

• Google's goal is to choose quality. While there are fairly bad sites high on search for some things, a good site would quickly take their places if someone made one. In the case of this example, the restaurant's own social media accounts, as well as all the directories they're listed in, are above their own website. Google is, essentially, offering readers everything else it can find before offering this site. 
• Links to your site affect your rankings, and people don't choose to link to bad sites. I recently complained about having to link to bad math sites because I couldn't find good ones. If someone puts up a good math site, will I rush over and change my links? You know it. A bad website just doesn't entice visitors to link to it. If it's bad enough, good directories will refuse it, too.
• People who can't build a good-looking website won't be able to build you a well-optimized website. The opposite isn't always true, since there are web artists who know nothing about SEO. But someone without the skills to write and code your site correctly won't have the more specialized skills it takes to build an optimized site. The site I've been telling you about made a 14 at Hubspot's Website Grader, one of the lowest scores I've ever seen. They have a Moz rank of 0, no inbound links, and they're not indexed. The people who built this site shouldn't be calling themselves web designers.

Beyond that, there are physical-world issues connected with having a poor quality website. If you can fry chicken well enough (and this restaurant can) people who know about your chicken will come get that chicken no matter how bad your website is. People who don't know about your chicken, however, won't chance it. They'll go to the place with a website that makes the chicken look good.

Does It Matter Where You Put Your Keywords?

I've written before about the dangers of following simple formulae telling you where to put your keywords. It is more important -- and Google's Matt Cutts confimed this in his broadcast from SMX yesterday -- to have good, natural content for your human visitors than to try to game the system with arbitrary guesses about the algorithms.

Still, I always like to put the keywords right up at the beginning, where search engines can catch them quickly before they get a false impression.

Now I have some nice, current data that supports this view. I'm doing a rewrite for a client, a large third-party logistics firm. They have four pages of success stories, a good thing to have. Each story tells how the logistics firm was able to help a particular client company. Each story naturally includes a good proportion of key search terms, such as "third party logistics," "logistics solutions," "warehousing logistics," and so forth.

In looking at their analytics, I was able to see that one of those pages had significant traffic from search, while the rest had none.

All the pages had been created in the same way, with a content management system. All had messy code, some grammatical and spelling errors, and problems with layout. All had interesting points to make (at least if you're into warehousing and trasnport logistics).

What was different? Three started off with a paragraph describing the company. The one with the higher level of search traffic started with a statement about the company's logistics needs. The description came later.

By the time the search engines made it through that paragraph about beauty supplies and shea butter, they had apparently already decided that the page wasn't really about logistics.

Now, you may be wondering why the pages didn't come up for other keywords. The answer is that they probably did. Not high on search, probably, because it takes more than keywords to achieve that, but perhaps for a search on the companies being described. However, searchers then probably didn't choose to click through to a site for a third-party logistics firm -- the description made it clear that this wasn't the place to buy that shea butter preparation.

As I say, I've always favored putting keywords high on the page. I'm not trying to fool people when I write a web page; I want everyone, human and robot alike, to know what I'm talking about right away. But in this case, the analytics gives us a good data-driven answer to our question: yes, it does matter where we put our keywords. So let's get them right in the first sentence, where they'll do the most good.

When You Desert Your Website

Deserting your website is not recommended. I often see deserted websites; clients come to me after having left their websites to molder for years sometimes. Once I had a call from a guy who was disappointed with the results of his website, and I had to break the news to him that it hadn't even been online for several months.

But what if you have been good with the upkeep, and you have a good site, and you just decide to neglect it for a little while? What happens, and how quickly?

I have a client who had me write her a good optimized site and was doing basic minimum upkeep on it, and then Things Happened and she left it alone for a few months. I went on vacation, as far as her site was concerned, and she didn't do anything with it herself, either. Now we're back to caring for it, so I thought it would be interesting to share the results.

First, her rankings are fine. I often get frustrated with companies that charge you regular fees to keep your site high on the search engine results pages. If you have a good site and you deserve to rank well for your keywords, then you'll usually stay at a high ranking once you get there, until some other website comes along and does a better job than you.

There are some highly competitive keywords, and certainly if someone else is working to climb over you, you'll have to work to keep your place. But there are hundreds and thousands of keywords that you can maintain just by keeping your website online. Your company name certainly ought to be one of them.

Her traffic fell. It fell significantly, in fact -- it's down 28% compared with the same month in the previous year. Traffic to her blog fell significantly once I quit updating it for her, and it also stopped sending traffic to her website.

This isn't a given -- the educational blog I wrote for a former client continues to send almost a third of her traffic even though I haven't updated it since last summer. The links are still good, the content is still at the top of Google for a lot of keywords, and it should keep doing a good job for her as long as I keep it online.

But a company blog with updates about the company or current news won't keep doing its job for you if it doesn't have regular posting.

Regular blog posting is, in fact, all that I do for my own website (the cobbler's children have no shoes), and my traffic is up 139.50% over the same time last year.

The client in question also got good traffic from articles, and that's still a high proportion of her traffic -- but she's in a fashion-driven business, so last year's news is, well, old news. The continuing traffic from the old articles tends to be outside of her target customer base.

She did keep her ads -- some high-value paid directories and a banner ad -- and those have continued to send traffic.

Now we'll get her blog and her articles back on track, and see how long it takes to get her traffic growing again.

I'll let you know.

Advanced SEO Issue: On-site or Off-site Optimization?

First, I need to apologize for the jargon in the title. I don't write for SEO experts, after all. I write for people who want to get the most out of their company websites, whether they're up on the latest technology or not. But these are terms that make it easier to think about an important question.

When you get an SEO Strategy Report from me, it includes both suggestions for on-site optimization -- which is to say, stuff you can do at your website, or have your webmaster do, to improve your results -- and off-site optimization, which is the online marketing that can be done elsewhere on the web. The two go together like cereal and milk, and usually, it's wise to do both. The cereal and milk experience isn't the same without both elements, and you can say the same for online marketing.

But there are times when one really is more important than the other.

Take the two sites I'm working on right now.

One is a local business with little competition for search. Their current site isn't doing its job for them, and they aren't ranking as well as they should for a lot of searches. But their competitors' sites also aren't optimized for search. Once the client has a good, well-optimized site up, I'm confident that they'll surge right ahead of their competition. In fact, our proposal for them doesn't even include off-site optimization. We'll be happy to do it for them if they want it, but I think they'll get the results they want without much further effort. Google will look around for something to show their customers, see their great new site, and offer it right up with a sigh of relief at finally having something good to offer.

The other site is in a big city, in a highly competitive field. The search engines, receiving a request for their keywords, have dozens of well-optimized sites to pick from. They have to look further to determine which site to present first.

Here's where off-site optimization is most essential. The search engines will consider the number and quality of links each site has in deciding which one to serve up. Certainly, the site has to be very well optimized, or it has no chance of good rankings. But once that's done, off-site work should be the priority.

So when you're planning where to put your budget for ongoing online marketing, be sure to consider the competitive environment your website lives in online. It makes a difference.

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.
  

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.

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.

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.