SEARCH CLINIC

Ergo the long standing definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO): “Making your site the best it can be for users and search engines.”

SEO is both as simple and as difficult that

Making something optimal by its very nature is going to be hard work. Being the best you can be at your job, your schoolwork, your relationships, or anything else is not easy. Very few people, if any, will ever be optimized, or perfect. The same is true for websites. But that shouldn’t stop you from attempting to be optimized.

Rule #1: Optimization shouldn’t turn people off
Take a bartender who has a great sense of humor, but can be sarcastic at times. While thick-skinned patrons (like me) find her extremely witty and amusing, others don’t. These folks didn’t come to a bar to be teased, thus, making this bartender not truly optimized. Or take the bartender who can never quite pour a full beer and doesn’t notice that your glass is empty until 10 minutes later. He or she is far from being optimized.

As it applies to your website: Is your website stuffed full of keywords? Is it extremely slow-loading and/or all Flash? Is it optimized for search engines, but not people?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re turning people off and therefore, your website isn’t optimized.

Rule #2: You can’t fake optimization
As it applies to a bartender: Take the one who is super-duper nice to everyone. While you might think she is an optimal bartender, she’s not; her extreme niceness comes across as phony to many. While it does fool some, and may even be optimal for them, she’s not optimized because she’s only pleasing one segment of her clientele.

As it applies to your website: Are you creating doorway pages/domains? Are you writing about “the history of whatever”? Are you using automated software to scrape articles off others websites and then mixing up the words? Are you hiring someone to write hundreds or thousands of low quality articles?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you may be faking your optimization. While it may appeal to some search engines for a time, it’s certainly not optimal, nor will it provide you with long term results.

Rule #3: Optimization is hard work
As it applies to a bartender: The optimized bartender is not necessarily perfect, but she is authentic. Everything she does on the job is to be the best bartender she can be. She works her butt off to please each and every customer the way they want to be pleased, which is no easy feat. 

The optimal bartender treats both genders equally, and quickly learns their drink preferences, where they like to sit, little tidbits about their family, etc. She also discloses bits of personal information about herself and family, but not so much as to be always talking about herself. She’s humorous and can be self-deprecating, but in good quantities. And by the end of her shift, you know she’s exhausted (it’s often exhausting just watching her!). You can bet that this level of optimization is hard work.

As it applies to your website: Like patrons at a bar, every website is different. While there are basic strategies and tactics most websites need, there’s no SEO formula that will work for each and every one. 

If you answered yes to those questions, you are probably tired! But you’re also on your way to having a successful website and business online. Congratulations! But first, go take a nap–you deserve it, and will need it before the real work begins!

A dichotomy is that SEO is both subjective and objective. The point at which a title tag, URL, or headline is “good enough” and thus moving on to the next task is warranted — that is certainly subjective. Also consider what might comprise the most optimal URL structure? Does it end in / (slash) or a file extension like .html? Again, subjective.

In my view, SEO for the most part is cut-and-dry, it’s objective. That’s because it can all be boiled down to an algorithm, and in fact, it already has. The algorithm I speak of, of course, is Google’s (or Yahoo’s, or Bing’s). 

Running algorithmic analysis on a site-by-site and a page-by-page basis will then allow you to ascertain a site’s SEO health, and more importantly, the subsequent actions required in this never-ending process known as optimization. That is data-driven decision-making, my friends, and it will be a key driver in the next stage in the evolution of SEO.

To be effective, SEO scoring has to get granular. Knowing you scored an 89 out of 100, or a B+, overall with your SEO may be reassuring, but there weren’t any next steps that followed from that knowledge. The same is true even if you individually score each of the major SEO areas of focus. 

Score the title tags, internal anchor text, keyword prominence, H1s, meta descriptions and so forth separately, and on a page-by-page basis, and now you’re talking!

SEO effectiveness can be deconstructed into its many components. It can be benchmarked against competitors. Inferences can be made, priorities can be set, content can be massaged, link juice can be directed. Consequently, the SEO practitioner relies less on their gut and more on the data to drive their actions.

My friend and ongoing client Michael runs Very Colourful Jewellery, an store for handmade fashion accessories. He recently asked me for some online marketing consulting to help him increase his conversion rate. I thought I’d share this mini-usability review to help Mike and other store owners who may be struggling with these issues.

First let’s check out detail page.

The page gets the general info down fine. It obviously matches the keywords likely to deliver visitors, and like the rest of the site, there’s shopping cart info in the top right.

    * By far the easiest solution is to offer no alternative colors. By making the color question a simple yes-or-no decision, momentum is a lot easier to maintain.
    * A better solution is to offer a very limited range of popular colors. You could probably copy The Gap and go with blue, pink, gray, red and black. This avoids leaving money on the table in the case of people thinking, “No, I don’t like the default color.”
    * Add pictures of the product in the alternative available colors.
    * Have some pretty girls model the product, and explain what size they’re wearing. Tests typically show that actual-use pictures convert better.

Shipping questions for detail pages- two common questions visitors have are:

    * When will the product arrive? (Sometimes phrased as, “When will it ship”)
    * What will the price of shipping be.

The product arrival date info is automatically estimated, which is a great piece of functionality. Unfortunately, this too is hidden in the discreet “Additional Information” box below the product image.

As to the price of shipping, this is nowhere to be found on this detail page or any others.

Normally this emphasis on the checkout is good, but in this case it will create a lot of scenarios like this:

    * Add to cart
    * Check cart info
    * Continue to checkout

Then when people move on to the billing page, the ‘Standard’ and ‘Rush’ shipping options don’t provide any more info on price.

So what?

So the net effect of this lack of information on shipping times and rates creates anxiety. Again, this slows momentum towards conversion.

Possible solutions

    * Embed a simpler calculator in a reasonably prominent part of the product detail page. For example, some of the whitespace on the right hand side could be used without affecting how clean the page looks. Of course, that’s just a hunch – you’d have to test that to know for sure.
    * Since most products have a standard weight and size, Mike could use USPS’ “If it fits, it ships” product and just automatically list shipping rates on his product detail page according to product type.

The fundamental role of a product detail page is to decrease anxiety by spelling out clearly what the product offer is. It should offer enough information to answer visitors’ questions, without overwhelming them and making them bounce.

One company had an existing site that they wanted to migrate to a new domain. A key goal was to preserve the legacy search traffic as much as possible. They selected a CMS for the project and built the site. Then they brought in the SEO firm to begin working on the site. The trouble was that the CMS was an SEO disaster, and did not allow unique title tags on each page. 

Another company was rebranding their site. They were going for a major upgrade in look and feel, and they had made a corporate level decision to target all their messaging at the “C-Suite” (CEOs, CFOs, CIOS, etc.). Based on this they made a decision to implement an all-Flash site. They created a site with a beautiful user experience, but that was virtually impenetrable to search engines. 

In large enterprises one of the big challenges is that there are many different groups that are involved in decisions. You have marketing, sales, development and the executive staff. Anyone of these groups can make decisions that are basically fatal to SEO. 

There are two ways that the problem gets worse, both of which are examples of bad decisions being made about SEO. These are:
    A- In some organizations SEO is thought of as something you do after the site is built. This is just too late. At this point the damage has already been done.
    B- The organization hires someone to do SEO work for them, and they are knowledgeable about SEO, but they are relatively junior and do not have the confidence or presence to sway the C-Suite or other decision makers.

To summarize, either bringing in an SEO resource too late, or making use of one that is too junior to have sufficient influence in the organization is a mistake you do not want to make.

How do you solve this problem? You put key people in all constituent groups in your organization (including the C-Suite) through basic SEO training. Knowledge can be a very powerful thing. Once people “get it” they are in a position to make much better decisions. Sometimes there is a tension between corporate objectives and the requirements of SEO, but these can nearly always be handled elegantly if the issues are confronted up front.

In one training session I did, I had the senior management team of a good sized company for a full morning. The group was comprised of really smart people, but with no background in SEO. During the course of that meeting we kept everything at a high level, and we covered a lot of ground. There were tons of questions and dialogue, and by the end of it all the team had gotten the basics down.

The outcome of the meeting was amazing. Historically, they had a great focus on onsite SEO (or technical SEO) but the focus on link building and web site promotion was not high enough. After the meeting decisions started to get made a bit differently. The focus on link building went way up, and the improved results on new business obtained from search engine referrals has been impressive.

The key to success

Large organizations are complex beasts, and a lot of different people have the opportunity to provide input (or directives) about the web site. Everyone is usually well-intentioned, but what you don’t know can hurt you. 

The best time to do this is as soon as possible. Decisions about the web site are made on a regular basis. Of course, there are other priorities in the organization, and those need to be taken into account. Sometimes a good time to fit this training in is in conjunction with planning meetings for site redesigns or updates. These meetings usually bring the various constituent groups together to make decisions anyway, so it’s an ideal time to provide them with the knowledge they need to make better decisions.

Training can help prevent disastrous decisions, and can also enable great decisions. Knowledge is indeed power, so make sure that those with power over your web site have the knowledge they need to be successful.

If you ask any search marketer what the main issue is when trying to optimize your website(s) for Europe they will tell you: language. But there is more to keep in mind when trying to win over Europeans.

Europe consists of twenty seven countries. If you think that means you will have to optimize for twenty seven languages, you’re wrong. The European countries which are part of the European Union together already have 23 official languages. But that’s just the European Union. Count in the rest of Europe and you can add many more.

The “problem” of focusing exclusively on languages in Europe is that its not one country, one language. It’s one country, many languages. Take the Netherlands for example. With only 17 million people living on a little piece of ground which (41 thousand square kilometers, which is about 16 thousand square miles) the official language is Dutch, but Frisian is also accepted as a official language. Next to that there are about 8 or 9 dialects, but when optimizing for websites you don’t have to take those in account.

When traveling south from the Netherlands it gets more complicated. In Belgium there are three official languages: Dutch, French and German. For the Belgians its therefore is very tempting to copy and paste the Dutch, French and German content and think you’re done. 

Getting the picture? You can probably guess what I will be saying about the countries when traveling to the south even more. How many official languages do you need to handle in France? Surprise! Only one. The French are considered to be very stubborn and very proud of their country. 

So now you get the picture: Europe has many countries and many languages. Some say there are over 200 official languages to take in account. Others also look at the dialects and then count over a 1000. So language really is a big issue when optimizing sites for Europeans.

“Ok,” I can hear you saying. “Thanks! Now I know there are many languages, so let’s get to work and translate and optimize our sites.” Stop, wait right there. There’s more…

Language is one thing, but Europe is a strange continent in which you have other things to take in account when optimizing. For one thing, there is the cultural aspect. I’m talking about the differences in culture in the way people live and think.

Last year TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was part of a panel discussing the differences between Europe and the US at the internet marketing event LeWeb in Paris. He decided to be his usual self and became somewhat “rude” when accusing the Europeans of being lazy. 

* 1. Targeting the Wrong Keywords
At the most fundamental level, SEO is about keywords. Select the wrong keywords and you could waste months optimizing for search terms no body uses. Keyword research is always worth the investment.
 

 * 4. Fresh Original Content
Content still plays a vital role in your SEO efforts. Most site owners don’t appreciate the importance of updating content and expanding content. If you have content that interests people, they’ll do your off-page SEO for you!
 

 * 7. Ignoring the importance of internal links
Beyond making it easy for visitors to navigate through your website, internal linking is also an important SEO strategy. Every link is an opportunity to add SEO value – so you can’t ignore the chance to use strong link text, and ensure your important content is easy to access.

* 10. Forgetting about conversion
Your website’s primary goal to encourage action from visitors, be that buying a product, downloading a guide etc. Remember that your web pages need to combine SEO with Marketing or you’ll struggle to justify your SEO efforts on the traffic alone.

There’s plenty more mistakes that people make when embarking on their SEO journey, but more often than not, these can be avoided by taking the time to do your research properly. This post should just be a part of the process.

Have you encountered or seen any other SEO mistakes worth noting? Then please tell us about them.

Back in 2008 Google reported that malware infected pages had increased to more than 1% of all search results. Google posted a malware statistics update last week. Malware infections have more than doubled since April 2009. Search results containing a url labeled as harmful have remained level in the range of 0.5% to 0.9%, an improvement. While the web as a whole has become more dangerous, Google’s been doing an even better job clearing their search results.

I know one reason why there’s been a dramatic rise in malware on the Web since April. A nasty malware attack has been targeting web developers to steal their passwords. Stolen passwords are used by the bad guys to automatically deploy iframe injection attacks to innocent web page.

If you access web sites via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), this attack is targeting you. 

What can be done to reduce this risk of search Armageddon?

   1. Use a more secure browser such as Chrome or Firefox with the NoScript add on for routine browsing.
   2. Don’t use any FTP program that stores passwords locally in plaintext, such as FileZilla. To date, Dreamweaver has not been reported to have been compromised. Dreamweaver encrypts passwords and stores them in the Windows registry.
   3. Consider using a Mac or Linux instead of Windows. As the most popular operating system, Windows is the most popular target for attacks.
   4. Make sure your machine and server are fully updated and patched. Turn off unnecessary services and software to reduce the attack surface.
   5. Register your site with Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center. Check regularly to see if there are any malware reports (or other issues) with your sites.
   6. If you suspect a malware infection, check Unmask Parasites,
   7. View your site’s reputation at McAfee SiteAdvisor.
   8. Reduce the number of people and computers that have access to your web server.
   9. Keep a backup copy of your web pages. In case of infection, it’s a race to see if you can fix the site before search engines (and users) discover the problem and dump you.
  10. Choose the hosting provider that has the quickest response time, not the cheapest price. If your site gets hacked, you may need their help to change all the passwords.

As the web becomes more dangerous, customers become more suspicious, reducing opportunities for everyone. Please do your part to make the web safer, and to reduce your risks.

My biggest gripe with the content management systems of today is their lack of SEO features. And I’m not just talking about meta keywords, which are a complete waste of time.

I’m patiently waiting for the day when a CMS based site can rival static HTML sites in SEO. No bones about it, hand coded sites offer complete, granular control over each page, and every single tag contained within. That’s real flexibility. Too bad they don’t scale. Therefore, the SEO practitioner is going to need a CMS that will at least be cooperative.

Which SEO features should you be shopping for in a CMS? Glad you asked. Here’s my wish list of features, broken down into critical, important, desirable and optional…

Critical CMS features
    * URLs free of tracking parameters and session IDs — Sticking session or tracking information such as the user’s clickpath into the URL is deadly for SEO. It usually leads to incomplete indexation and duplicate content issues.
    * Header tags — No H1 tags on a given page is not desirable. Too many H1 tags on the page is not desirable. Low-value content (such as the publication date) marked up as an H1 is not desirable. The article title is typically the best content to have wrapped in an H1.
    * Customizable URL structure — If the default URL structure of the CMS doesn’t suit your needs, you should be able to change it. For example, if you don’t want /archives/ in the URLs of all your archived articles, you should be able to remove it. Or if you want to reference the article name instead of the article’s database ID in the URL, you should be able to do it.
    * 301 redirects to canonical URL — Duplicate content is the bane of the existence of many a dynamic website owner. Automatic handling of this by the CMS through the use of 301 redirects is a must.

In terms of search marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is often the cost that’s cut as it’s believed that benefits take longer to realize – few quick wins.

However, dumping SEO can mean forgoing a great cheap growth opportunity.

If you’re one of the businesses re-evaluating the future of your SEO strategy, please consider the following before making your decision:

1. Ongoing Value.
The value of SEO continues well after the optimization has finished. Unlike other marketing, where the value diminishes quickly after a campaign, SEO continues to generate results.

2. Traffic is free.
While we are strong advocates of PPC (fast, guaranteed, qualified traffic), it does cost for each visitor you receive. You stop paying, and your traffic stops. SEO on the other hand provides free traffic, so your costs are easier to control.

3. Against the trend
While other businesses shy away from SEO, it’s a great chance for businesses to capitalise on marginally lower competition. It could help generate quicker results.

4. Untapped Opportunities
There are still many untapped niches in terms of SEO, especially within localised and specialist industry segments. Again this offers great growth opportunities for smart business operators.

5. Leverage the trend online
Consumers are being more frugal with their spending and the online space is where they’re doing their comparison shopping. It’s vital for your business to be in their consideration set, which is why SEO is critical. Google is where the comparison shopping begins, and where you need to be found!

Given the above benefits and the fact it’s much cheaper than other online marketing initiatives, it’s seem logical that SEO should remain in your marketing plan.

If you’re looking for help with promoting your website – check out our range of affordable search engine marketing services.