The Ideal Web Site – Part 4 of a Series

The Ideal Website is Attractive Enough

Effective Internet marketing follows the 80/20 rule; where 80% of your investment is ‘Super SEO’ (promoting the hell out of your website and brand online) and where only 20% is the website itself.

• A pretty website without top rankings on Google, Yahoo! and MSN is pretty much useless.

• An award-winning website without traffic just plain sucks.

• A drop dead gorgeous website that does not convert visitors into qualified leads or customers has failed as an advertising and marketing medium..

An attractive website is only worth a damn when it provides a positive return on your investment.

Are we against sexy design and design awards? Absolutely not! My own epiphany came about seven years ago when one of our clients received a beautiful award for the website we developed for them. My customer called me to congratulate me on the design achievement, but then lamented over the site’s poor performance on the bottom line. I reminded him that we had proposed an aggressive SEO and online marketing campaign but he had declined. On further reflection I realized it was my fault. I’m the internet marketing professional, I know what really matters when it comes to ROI and I hadn’t absolutely insisted on a program to drive traffic to their site. I had allowed the client to invest their entire online marketing budget on an award-winning design and there had been nothing left for assuring the site had traffic or the ability to convert traffic into customers.

A good website is ‘attractive enough’ that visitors feel they are dealing with a solid, reputable company.

When search engine rankings and other sources of traffic are in place, and the site is generating enough sales to more than offset the cost of the design, it may be time to revisit the design with a facelift. If your site isn’t in the top ten ranking positions for all of your primary keyword search terms, put your money into SEO, not a flashy media presentation few people will ever see.

The Ideal Web Site – Part 3 of a Series

The Ideal Website is Search Engine Friendly

Over 80% of the traffic on most successful websites will come from being listed on the first page (top-10) on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The rest of your traffic will typically come from PPC (pay per click) advertising, inbound links from theme related websites and being listed on the second or third page of the top three engines. If your site isn’t listed in the first three SERPs (search engine results pages) your site should be considered ‘invisible’ to the Internet.

Most sites aren’t search engine friendly. They don’t rank well because they don’t deserve a top position. They have very little content and the content they do offer isn’t considered of much value to searchers. Typical ‘toot your own horn’ ad copy on the home and about us page, tables of prices, forms, Flash photo galleries, JavaScript widgets, most short description shopping cart pages, etc. are not good content.

Search engines love fresh unique content that is rich in naturally occuring keywords, internally linked to other theme content in the site. Content should be added at least weekly or even daily. Great content encourages naturally occurring links from other theme-related websites and trackbacks from blogs. Over time a website or blog will accumulate hundreds or even thousands of posts and/or articles.

Developing quality content involves a commitment. Many companies have several bloggers or a designated writer. If your company does not have anyone with the time to create content on a consistent basis, there are SEO copywriting services and web content writers that will help make your site search engine friendly.

The Ideal Web Site – Part 2 of a Series

The Ideal Website Targets the Right Keywords

One of the biggest mistakes website owners make is attempting to achieve top rankings for keywords that are unlikely to provide a return. For search engine marketing, keywords fall into three categories: generic keywords, branded keywords and regional keywords. The stiffest competition is in the generic keywords.

If you entered the keywords ’storage products’ into Google today you’d see over sixty-one million pages indexed. That’s a lot of competition. In the top five you’d find Rubbermaid. For a company with almost unlimited marketing resources very generic keywords may be worth pursuing. We have a client in the Vancouver area. By choosing regional keywords we have been able to secure the top position on Google for ‘vancouver storage products’. The amount of traffic received for their SEO dollars has proven to be a good investment. Pursuing top rankings for ’storage products’ with the budget we had to work with would have been a poor investment, with little or no returns. If you entered ’spacesaver storage canada’ today you would discover that these branded keywords also returned a #1 ranking for our client.

Whether you’re pursuing organic rankings or pay per click traffic, selecting the right keywords can be one of the primary decsions that determine your online success. Keyword analysis is the starting point.

The Ideal Web Site – Part 1 of a Series

Last week a client asked me to define the ideal website, based upon my 11+ years in the web development and SEO business. I don’t always include all of these components in a proposal or even include them in our own sites. However, if I had to describe a site that would be perfect, where client budget and their personal design tastes and requested features weren’t a factor, here is my definition of the perfect website:

The Ideal Website Delivers a Solid Return on Investment

As a business marketing investment, your website is not on the world wide web as a cultural art experience or to provide free information resource; it’s advertising. Advertising that is effective generates plenty of sales, and it represnts a solid business investment. A business website should bring in more than one dollar in profit for every dollar invested. If it doesn’t your Internet marketing sucks.

Developing a ‘web presence’ without revenue and a positive cash flow is ridiculous and bad business.

The Ideal Website Has Plenty of Qualified Traffic

The greatest myth in Internet marketing is: If you build it they will come. I think that only worked in Field of Dreams . Web design, without a solid marketing strategy, perfectly executed, is only going to produce a business liability. (What else would you call an advertising project that costs more money than it ever generates in revenue.) Over 90% of all websites fail. They have little or no traffic. And the few visitors they receive do not convert into customers.

I attended an SEO conference a while back and one of the speakers opened with, “A butt ugly website with a lot of traffic and effective conversion strategy will always outperform a drop dead gorgeous Webby-winning site with little or no traffic. Some of the ugliest sites on the planet have generated millions of dollars in revenue.”

Bounce and SEO

High bounce rates can hurt your search engine rankings. A bounce is a visitor that takes a quick look and then returns to the search engine to try the next search result. A high bounce rate is an indication that tweaks need to be made in order to more effectively engage the visitor. Google and other search engines take bounce rates into consideration in their algorithms. Why include a website into the top 10 search results when the visitors come right back to try again? The relevance of the site for the keyword search terms comes into question when that happens.

Your ultimate goal is to convert a visitor into a loyal visitor or customer. A loyal visitor or customer is someone who visited your website, likes it and found the information they were looking for. They then returned more than once, probably bookmarking the site in their Favorites. After a few visits they made a purchase, requested information or clicked through on an affiliate link, and they will probably do so again in the future. To accomplish this the site must be user friendly. It must be easy to navigate, easy to search and demonstrate to the visitor that they will find what they are looking for from the home page forward.

Real customers are already actively searching for what you sell on search engines. They are looking for information to help them make a quality purchase decision. They need to be converted into a customer. Effective analytics can provide the conversion ratio information needed to tweak your web site for improved results you can see on the bottom line.

Get your FREE first SEO consultation.

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Increase Your Rankings With Long Term Domain Registrations

Google and other leading search engines rank websites that are registered for long terms higher. A five or ten year domain registration represents a higher level of commitment to providing quality content. If your domain is up for renewal you may consider the five year term renewal. Besides you save money.

Tossing the Dog a Bone – Death of a Website

Want to fail in Internet marketing? Just ‘toss the dog an occasional bone’.

Most website owners will spend big money on their website. That’s like paying out top dollar for a pure bred dog with papers. It’s a beautiful site with matching branding, pretty graphics and maybe even an award or two. They paid good money for it and they’re justly proud.

After site launch they’re surprised when the site doesn’t bring in a stream of new business… sales… profit. Their web designer mentions site submissions and optimization, so they throw one or two hundred dollars after it to get the traffic they hoped for. That’s just like tossing a bone to a dog that doesn’t seem to love you in appreciation for how much you spent to buy it.

If all you do is toss it an occasional bone you’ll be burying that pedigree dog very soon. The same goes for the many ‘dead’ websites that stink up the Internet.

How do you gain your dog’s undying love and reap the rewards for your investment? You select quality nourishing food and put out fresh filtered water twice a day. You groom your dog. You get all its shots and make sure it is protected from fleas and other parasites. If it’s sick you take it to the vet. You buy it toys, a leash and collar, a dog house or basket… and the list goes on. You hate to see your dog so alone, so you put it in doggy day care when you’re at work. In no time at all the cost of your dog is many times the original purchase price. You take it for daily walks and spend time playing with your pet in the park. Your reward is an energetic, healthy dog that jumps out of its skin with happiness to see you. People compliment you on what a fantastic dog you have.

Apply the same devotion to your web site and you’ll have a flood of visitors and a large percentage of them will convert into customers. SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet marketing are very time consuming disciplines.

You can learn to do it yourself, but expect to invest a staggering amount of the time you currently put into your business and personal life. SEO training and keeping up to date, plus day to day marketing, tracking results… it’s a big job. Or instead, you can leverage time by hiring seo professionals. The life of your online marketing and business are in their hands, so this may not be the place to look for a bargain.

If you give your dog two weeks of intense love and care and then neglect it for a year the results will be less than satisfactory. Websites also respond best to ongoing love – analysis, tweaks and fine tuning by an SEO. Search engines look for regular articles, posts and page additions and an ever increasing list of theme-related sites that back link to your site.

The purchase of a dog is only the beginning of the investment. If all you do is toss it a bone after the purchase, it will die and stink up the neighbourhood. Continue to invest into it and you will reap the benefits for years to come. Web site owners who realize that the original design of their website is only the beginning and continue to invest into their site each month with will receive the results they were hoping for.

Related Post: How Much Should You Pay for SEO?

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Technorati Tags: bad seo, ineffective seo, internet marketing failure

Shorten Your Time in the Google Sandbox

Not everyone agrees, but the Google Sandbox does exist. Any seasoned SEO professional will have noticed that a brand new domain is not going to respond to optimization efforts as quickly as one that’s at least six months old. I’m not going to get into that debate here.

The Google Sandbox is an algorithm filter that appeared about March 2004. Your site may be indexed within a few weeks of submission, however, it likely won’t rank for any keyterms for several months. This waiting period is what SEOs refer to as the sandbox.

Google is protecting the interests of established sites with quality content and backlinks. If any upstart website could topple the content kings in any given month the Internet would be a very volatile place indeed

Google loves sites where fresh, relevant content is added on a consistant basis. A new domain/site has no track record for content development. Google also takes ‘votes’ from other sites, by way of one-way links, into strong consideration. A new site is unlikely to have very many legitimate back link votes within a month or two of launch.

With a new site there are a few shortcuts. While developing a client site, providing budget permits, we create and place five to ten pages of quality content on the site. We want to show the search engines that your site is about quality from the start. We believe that the design of your site should be a secondary concern and that design can always be tweaked later on. Google wants to know about what you have to offer them in terms of content, so we show them.

We then begin devoping backlinks to the five to ten content pages. We write and publish articles about topics related to your business and website. We write articles that will help build backlinks and advertise your site at the same time. The article links will contain anchor text that promotes your keywords and deep link to your original content pages. We then begin distribution of the articles to theme-related websites, blogs and article resources.
It is important to time our submission to Google right after a PageRank update. Planning a time frame for your site’s indexing is important. Updates happen roughly every three months. We plan your site launch and indexing for the time immediately after an update. If we launch in the middle or towards the end of an update, we’ll miss out on any links we have worked on. It will be at least another three months before we can earn some PageRank, so we need to plan your site launch time wisely.

It’s best if Google finds you site by way of a link from a high PR site. We locate a site with a good PR (4, 5 or 6), that doesn’t have many links going out and get them to link to your site. Google will then index your content pages as fast as we can post them. How do we get a high PageRank site with your theme to link to your site? In most cases we must pay them. SEO is advertising and advertising costs money.

Another strategy for getting a top-5 ranking for site launch, and bypassing the sandbox, is to buy a mature domain that’s indexed well. We Google your keywords to locate a website with a great name, quality backlinks and good PR. We then look into the site’s monetization and projected conversion. If the site’s not making much money for the owner chances are they’ll be very open to a reasonable offer for their domain. Where possible, we develop the new content with the same URLs as the previous site to capitalize on the past owner’s hard work.

Related:

The Sandbox – It’s Existence and How To Reduce Your Time Inside

Technorati Tags: google sandbox, mature domains, aged domains, seasoned domains

Design For Your Users, Not Google

SEO web design must target two audiences with every design decision. Here are some things to consider when developing a site that is both user friendly and search engine friendly.

1. Use as much HTML text as possible. Search engines adore plain text. They don’t view images or video files, listen to audio files or read Flash, so minimize their use in your site design. Use external style sheets and JavaScript whenever practical to pare the HTML down to almost pure text.

Another thing to consider is that some sites make users log in to view certain content or use a form to find content. Logins and forms are bad. The crawlers do not know how to log in to your site or fill out a form in order to view your content. The only content to hide behind a login and robots.txt file is very confidential content you never want indexed.

2. Make your URLs understandable. This means creating URLs like www.colewiebe.com/seo-web-design.html instead of www.colewiebe.com/articles/2007-06-14-article27.html. The first URL is “user friendly”, and it is also “search engine friendly”. The search engines will read more meaning and relevance into the first URL than the second one.

Also, when using the first URL in a blog signature or email, it is clear where the link is going, so click-throughs will increase.

3. Structure your site carefully. Make your site as ‘flat’ as possible. Strive for the magic 3 clicks to whatever content your user is looking for.

4. Design your site for your users, not the search engines . As much as possible treat search engines as if they were human beings manually scouring your site for content to index. If it is easy for humans to find what they are looking for on your site, logic dictates that the spiders will also find what they are looking for and index it.

Search engine crawlers can’t read Flash menus and often have difficulty with JavaScript pull-out menus or roll-overs. Consider basic HTML text links in your menus. Footer links can help make a poor navigation system easier to spider.

5. It has often been said that content is king. The search engines job is to index “relevant” search data. When the search engine starts producing “irrelevant” results web users will quicly move onto another engine. Therefore, poor content, poor ranking.

You’re after the triple win. When you develop amazing content the search engines win because they can provide first rate content on the first page of their search results. Other webmasters win when they become recognized as a major resource in their niche by linking to a site like yours. You win by having qualified traffic that builds your business.

Technorati Tags: seo web design

Why Searchers Click Where They Do

Web searchers click on page links because they expect the pages will satisfy their needs.

Navigational searchers expect to land at the right site. Informational searchers expect to find in-depth information on a specific subject. Transactional searchers expect to be one step closer to taking action.

No matter which approach they take, they will do it very quickly. Most searchers will select the first promising link on the number one page of search results. This process will take less than five seconds.

Searchers tend to favor organic (natural) search results to pay per click results, selecting them 60% of the time.

How do you increase click-through?

No matter what the style of searcher, they click search result links that contain the exact query words they are looking for in the title or description snippet.

For informational and transactional searchers, brand names, trusted information sources, reviews and comparison information will encourage a click. For transactional inquiries, the offer of low prices will enhance click-throughs.

The process

The first step is gaining top search engine rankings. This means first page for your keyword terms, preferably top-5 positioning. The second step is to tweak your site so that the titles and descriptions appearing in your organic search results get click-throughs. And thirdly, you want to analyze where your traffic is going, then tweak the site’s content and traffic flow to convert visitors into buyers.

Technorati Tags: click-through, increasing click-throughs, organic search results, natural search results

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