Websites About Tough Subjects

Not all websites can be about pleasant things. Life isn't all about pleasant things, businesses don't all specialize in pleasant things, and there are times when you really can't just add a picture of a puppy and leave it at that.

Right now, I'm working on a website for a company that provides home health equipment. The truth is, people needing home health care may be feeling some stress, and even some distress. People don't rent hospital beds because they saw one in a sexy commercial, and bedside commodes aren't going to be the stuff of cool flash intros.

If your business provides caskets, or crime scene cleanups, or adult diapers, you have some special challenges in creating a lovely website.

• Avoid euphemisms. Our first thought in these cases is usually to go with euphemisms. Instead of "raised toilet seats" we consider saying things about "comfort." But no one is going to Google "comfort" when they need a raised toilet seat. go ahead and do your keyword research in the usual way, and call a spade a spade.
• Acknowledge the concerns. While you're being forthright, admit that there are things to worry about, and take the opportunity to be reassuring. We know that arranging for your parent to have a bedside commode is likely to come along with stress and worry; we can use sentences like these to stress the benefits of the service while acknowledging the difficulties customers may be facing:

"We know that this may be a challenging time for you and your family. You shouldn’t have to worry about the quality of your home health care equipment, or about being able to use it correctly." We then move neatly on to the high quality and excellent training our company offers.

• Let images do some of the work. We're gathering up images of happy older people kissing in their wheelchairs, people wearing portable oxygen systems while they play golf, and bright young people romping beatifically with crutches. Designer Tom Hapgood can choose happy colors to offset the sometimes somber nature of the products and services we're showing. None of this will confuse the search engines, which pay attention only to the words. Our alt text for these images will be "wheelchair" and "portable oxygen systems" and "crutches." The look is strictly for the human visitors.
• Be especially thoughtful about usability. When the users of your site are likely to be ill, upset, or distracted, it becomes particularly important to make the navigation easy and obvious. Accessibility also becomes even more essential.

Care is required for effective web content about tough subjects. Fortunately, if it's your business, working with tough subjects has given you some skills and compassion that will help you write the content, or convey the needed mood to your copywriter.

Refresh Your Blog

We've talked before about the good things your blog can do for your business. It can bring you traffic, give you links, provide a valuable service to your customers and clients, and increase return visits to your website. A good blog is a lot like the interactions you have with the people who visit your physical place of business.

Not every blog will do these things, though. Some blogs are better at these jobs than others. So what if your business has a blog, but it's not doing what you need it to do?

A little refreshment is in order.

I've been freshening up a client's old blog while her new website is being built.

The blog was written by a worker who has now left the company, so it needs an update to reflect the new people who will be writing it. It also had some problems from a business standpoint, and needed a little work for that reason, too. In this kind of case, your first thought might be just to start a completely new blog.

However, it has been in at least a tenuous existence for years. There are pictures of clients there, and descriptions of happy times at the organization. There are things worth saving.

There are also advantages to having an established blog. People who visit a blog and see only a post or two are less likely to return. Blog catalogs and webrings may not list an obviously new blog.

The best choice in a case like this is to freshen the blog up a bit.

Here's a bit of a page from the old blog. We can see that there are some negatives here. For one thing, there are only a couple of posts a month.

We can see that, while this blog has been here for years, it hasn't been being posted to regularly during that time.

We can also see that there is some sloppy content. In this example, there's html showing on the page -- not desirable. Other posts have spelling and punctuation errors, random font variation from having cut and pasted things, and even some stuff that has been taken from other sources without attribution.

There are some technical trouble too: pictures missing and broken links.

So how do we fix all this?

• Freshen the whole blog up by getting in and editing the posts. Some should probably be deleted, but all should be proofread and have any bad links or other problems fixed. Remember, both search engines and humans consider you more trustworthy when you have clean copy. This may not be fair -- I'm not aware of any studies proving that bad spellers are bad people -- but it's the reality.


• Use your keywords. While you're cleaning up past entries, make sure to include your keywords. As we've discussed before, if you've chosen your keywords correctly, it should be natural to include them when you're writing about your business and your own field of expertise. Using the same keywords in your blog as at other pages in your website will help the search engines realize that they should offer your blog to people searching for your services. Don't forget the alt tags!


• Fill in the blanks. If posting has been sporadic in the past, you'll need to fill in with some new posts. Don't think this is dishonest in any way. Your organization had news during all those months that should have been posted. Comb your files for news stories, press releases, pictures, and information from the past. It's important to do this for the SEO benefits of having an established blog, and also so that visitors can browse through your archives and see what your company is like. Just think of it as finishing up an unfinished task.


• Make the blog match the website, or the rest of the website. Many of us use handy free blogging services, and this client was one who did so. But the blog is completely different in look and in web address from the website. There wasn't even a good link back to the company's main website. The organization is having the blog styled to match their main site (this blog that you're reading has had that done, too, by the clever people at Sharp Hue). At the very least, choose colors that match your main site, and make yourself a good link back to your home page.

Now go celebrate the fact that your old blog with its flaws can rise again as a fresh, new blog that will do your business good.

Stumble It!

Understanding Alt Tags

The content that greets visitors to your website is enormously important. The stuff "under the hood" -- the meta language that human visitors don't see -- is also important. We've discussed keywords here before. Once you've gotten your description and keywords set up, you should also think about your alt tags.

Alt tags are descriptions of images. People with limited vision can hear them and know what pictures are on your website. At some pages (like the example below) you can see them when you put your mouse over a picture.

They also tell the search engines, which cannot see pictures, what images are on your page. When people do image searches, alt tags tell the search engines what to offer the searchers.

Many of you have never heard of or thought of alt tags, and many more don't bother using them. This explains the weird stuff you get offered when you do image searches.

Taking the time to create good alt tags can do good things for you:

• They help clarify what your page is about. When you use your keywords in your alt tags, search engines get another opportunity to identify your page with those keywords.
• They let you add keywords that don't fit into your visible on-page text. A jeweler client of mine makes lots of different kinds of jewelry. A list like "pendants, bracelets, earrings" wouldn't fit with the style of her website, but descriptive alt tags on her photographs let her include all those words. The painters I work with could list all the suburbs they serve, but again such a list wouldn't fit the upscale design of their site. By using the locations of the houses in the alt tags on their images, they can include the place names.
• They can draw a different group of customers. While SEOs may complain that most searchers who come to see images just bounce right away again without shopping, I think that isn't always true now, and is changing. As more of us use alt tags well, image searches will become more useful and popular. One of the most popular searches at my educational blog this summer was for "monkey bulletin board." I was top at Google image search, and visitors not only clicked through to look at the bulletin board more closely, but went on to visit the client whose products had been used to create it. Since my blog is about lesson plans, the people who visited through image search were different from the ones who came to the same post through regular search.

So what's a good alt tag? We're talking about keywords here, and the same things I've said about keywords before still apply:

• They have to match the content. Often, web designers will just use the basic keywords of the site. I've even seen the page descriptions being used. This looks shady. If you have a picture of a pendant, the alt tag should call it a pendant, not "first class handmade jewelry." A stock photo of a laughing child should not have your company name. Think how you feel when you do an image search and turn up pictures that seem completely irrelevant to your search. Don't do that to your potential customers.
• They ought to be related to your overall purpose. You can use a picture of a cute puppy and label it "cute puppy." This could bring people to your website. However, unless your goal is to have lots of random visitors with no interest in your goods and services, this isn't going to get you the return on your investment that you want.
• They should be things people are actually searching for. As with all your keywords, the words in your alt tags should be terms that your customers and potential clients might type in at the search engines. If people looking for your services won't be searching for "Five years in the same location" (and they won't), then that shouldn't be your alt tag. Use a word or phrase that someone will actually search for, and you increase your chances of being found enormously.

How do you create alt tags? It's easy. Go to the HTML of your page and find the image. It will begin with "a href..." Then there'll be a string starting with "src" and then you'll see "alt=" That's the place to put your alt tag. You can just type in "cute puppy" or whatever you've decided on in place of whatever follows the term "alt=" even if it's an empty space. This may be the kind of task you let your webmaster do for you. In that case, you should be able simply to ask to have your alt tags changed.

Then just watch your site statistics and see how many more people are visiting you through image search.

Stumble It!