Stoney deGeyter founded Pole Position Marketing in 1998 working from a home office and has since turned it into a leading search engine marketing business with a small team of seasoned Reno SEO and marketing experts. Stoney pioneered the concept of Destination Search Engine Marketing which is the driving philosophy on how Pole Position marketing helps their clients expand their online presence and improve online conversion rates.
Stoney is a moderator at the Small Business Ideas Forum, a regular contributor to the Search Engine Guide blog and has a monthly column on Search Engine Land. He posts his SEO and business insights at the E-Marketing Performance blog where you can also find his e-books: E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing and Marketing your Website Online and Keyword Research and Selection: The Definitive Guide to Gathering, Sorting and Organizing your Keywords into a High-Performance SEO Campaign.
Stoney is married with five wonderful children and, if away from the computer long enough, enjoys riding his dirt bike, watching DVDs, reading books and spending quality and quantity time with the family.
Businesses don't succeed on the basis of a product alone. Those products have to be developed, marketed and sold using sound business principles. Similarly, SEO doesn't succeed solely by what you do on the technical front, but what you do internally to build a platform that will allow SEO success to happen.
The process of organizing your keywords is similar to the process of splitting a single core term into multiple cores, only its done in a much more fine-tuned scale. With core terms you were dealing with multiple themes, or different ways to search for the same product. In this phase we are working with only a single core term and deciding how to segment literally hundreds of phrases into manageable groups that are similar in nature.
Organizing your keywords into an effective marketing strategy is the most important of the four phases of keyword research outlined in this document. While most often SEOs and keyword researchers focus on the research phases, organizing your keyword properly can truly help you create a vastly more successful optimization and marketing campaign.
The most important aspect of analyzing and eliminating keywords is to fully understand what the customer is looking for. We often see keywords through our own lens of understanding. You think about things a certain way because you are educated and trained that way. But the customer may not be educated in the same way, or at all, in terms of industry related jargon. So you have to step outside of your own thought processes and learn to look through the lens of searchers who think differently from the way you do.
As you sort through your lists of keywords, you want to be sure to eliminate phrases that won't deliver converting traffic. Whatever keywords that you keep for optimization, you want each to be able to drive the most qualified traffic, giving you visitors that are most likely to buy your product or services.
After having researched through your relevant core terms and search phrases, it's time to start the process of looking more closely at each phrase. What you want to do is separate the good keywords from the not-so good. You need to find the search phrases that will ultimately provide you with the greatest benefit in your marketing campaigns, and eliminating or sidelining the rest.
As you research out your core terms you'll notice that there are three types of results produced. The first will be a core term that returns a very small list of search phrases. Almost too small to do anything with. The second is one that produces a healthy list of phrases that you can easily organize for optimization. The third produces an extremely long list of phrases that can be broken up into several other sub-core terms and groups. We'll discuss this latter in detail.
A core term and search phrase are similar in that both will be searched and both can provide potential traffic to your site. Core terms, represent a broader topic while the search phrases are simply core terms with added qualifiers, therefore representing a narrower focus. Both core terms and search phrases will be optimized into your website to drive traffic and hopefully, be instrumental in generating strong conversion rates.
There are four different factors that you need to analyze in determining the relative importance of each core term:
Site owners often begin the research process by first going to the available tools. But you can't really use these tools effectively--or to their fullest potential--until you have some information in which to actually research out. In this step we want to take core terms that we've already discovered and plug them into the tools to help us find core terms that have still remained elusive.
Today I'll show you the research steps involved in finding good, strong core terms that will be the basis for the rest of our research, and provide us some actionable intelligence that will be used throughout the keyword research process.
Because keyword research is so crucial, a more organized approach to it is essential. Instead of starting the research process looking for words you essentially already know but are just in an unknown order, you must start the process looking for what is unknown. In order to find those unknown phrases, you have to start with a foundation that will guide you from where you are to what it is that you're trying to find, a list of keywords that can be optimized into your site.
A start to finish guide on how to find, analyze, prioritize and organize your keywords. How to create a solid keyword foundation for your SEM campaigns, whether SEO or PPC, that puts you in a stronger position for success and gives you a significant advantage over your toughest competition.
Keeping the client's expectations is no longer the job of the salesman but instead becomes the job of the project manager and/or SEO. And it has to be done throughout the life of the optimization campaign. No matter how many times an SEO tries to keep the client's expectation in order there are always clients want and expect more than they are currently getting.
I ran into a couple of unique situations a few months that really challenged me. Both had to do with unsatisfied customers demanding that we give them money back. Each situation was different and therefore handled differently with a different result. In one case, money was returned, in another it wasn't.
If SEOs can't guarantee rankings, what can they guarantee? That's a tough question, especially if one is trying to be truly honest with their clients. The prospect of offering guarantees means that everybody must be in cahoots as to what that guarantee actually means, and who it really protects.
The problem with site search on a lot of sites is that they often don't really work all that well. They'll produce good results for some searches but not for others. I've been on a number of sites testing their search only to find that there are "no matches" for exact searches on products they clearly sell. This is a problem.
Site maps provide a one-click path to any destination within the site and a way for the search engines to quickly find and index all site pages. Ensuring that your site maps function properly is an important part in ensuring your visitors can find what they want quickly and all site pages get properly indexed.
While most visitors won't read Privacy and Security pages, they do provide necessary assurances that visitors look for in terms of being able to trust you. However, when visitors do click into these pages need certain information needs to be presented to them to ensure their needs are met.
Site search is an important element of on-site usability. Both in its ability to help visitors find the information they are looking for, or by being absent if it doesn't produce accurate results. Site search must be able to improve the visitor's experience in your site, otherwise it does more harm than good.
Forms are a standard method of allowing visitors to communicate with you, including the placing orders. If forms don't work properly, frustrate your visitors or create additional roadblocks that the visitor must hurdle over, the contact/conversion rate on your site will drop drastically.
If your customers are digging through your help and FAQ pages, chances are they are close to making a decision to purchase, they just need a little extra bump. These pages are essential to these visitors seek by providing answers to questions and other helps that will push them through the conversion process.
Ensuring visitors can easily login and find the information they need is essential to providing a good customer experience. Since this is your engaged audience you want to make sure that you can keep them engaged without additional frustrations.
If visitors only add products to the cart but abandon the cart or get confused in the checkout process conversions will be low as will profit. The more proper cues you can provide that give the shopper confidence and assurances about their purchase, the less likely they will be to dump the cart or lose interest before closing he deal.
Since mini-baskets are ever-present through the shopping experience, the information here can be vital to the visitor, helping them keep track of items, total costs and links back to products already added.
Visitors place items in their online shopping basket for many reasons, one of which is with the intent to buy. But they don't always complete the purchase, often abandoning the cart with products left in it. Being able to close holes in the checkout process can increase conversion rates, getting more sales and higher return on investment.
The product page has a very singular focus: one product. It's job is to provide the visitor with the information about that product they need to be convinced that it is exactly what they are looking for. If you're product pages cannot convince visitors to buy, then you're simply dead in the water.
Being able to convince the shopper to follow through on the purchase is essential to being profitable. The visitor looks for specific cues that help them assess the creditability of the site and the security of their information. Providing these cues will help you provide a better experience that leads to deeper customer satisfaction.
Those who land on this page are showing clear intent in wanting to to get in touch with you. Providing only a few ways to contact you can alienate visitors who have a particular preference. Providing robust contact options and information ensures that you capture as many would-be customers as possible.
Studies have shown that conversion rates for visitors who have visited the About Us page increase measurably. Those who visit here are looking for a few extra elements of trust that will help them decide whether to continue on or move on. What they find can mean the difference in a conversion or the visitor leaving your site for a competitor's.
The home page is often the single largest entry-point. It is the page that gives the visitor the sense of who you are and what they can expect. Go wrong here and it can be all over before it begins.
Links and calls to action are a great way to allow visitors to navigate from page to page, finding the information they feel is important to helping them make the purchase decision. Without these calls to action many visitors will simply not know what they are expected to do next.
Great content can get lost if it's not easy to read thrown into an otherwise cluttered page. Ensuring that your content fits visually into the site is just as important as having good content to begin with. If you want the sales message to get across, your visitors will need to read it.
Content is an essential part of the persuasion process. Pretty, image-based sites may be appealing to the eye, but it's the content that appeals to the emotional and logical centers of the brain. The inclusion of content as well as the effectiveness of the writing are all crucially important to the sales process.
A strong, user-friendly and search engine friendly navigation is essential in helping people and bots through your site. You visitors need to find information quickly with minimal hunting and the search engines need to be able to follow the navigation to reach all site pages with the fewest number of jumps (clicks) necessary. If the navigation is broken or doesn't get people (or search engines) where they need to go, the performance of a site will suffer.
Website architecture can make or break the performance of a website in the search engines. Poor architectural implementation can create numerous stumbling blocks, if not outright roadblocks, to the search engines as they attempt to crawl your website. On the other hand, a well-implemented foundation can assist both visitors and search engines as they navigate through your website, therefore increasing your site's overall performance.
The site design is essentially the first impression that someone gets when they land on your site. You may have all your usability and SEO elements in place, but if the design is lacking then your visitor's impression of you will be lacking as well. A visually appealing site can not only bolster trust and credibility, but it can make you stand out among other less-appealing sites in your industry.
The logo lends directly to brand identity and site identification. It also creates a certain element of appeal and professionalism in the mind of the visitor. It holds an important role in visitor assurance and navigation.
The browser is (obviously) what we use to view websites. The goal is to give the visitor the best browsing experience possible, but we have to keep in mind that not all browsers are the same. We must make sure to accommodate different users, ensuring that they get the most value out of the site possible.
The domain name is part of the identity of your business. The URL chosen can have a significant impact on brand identity and in a lesser extent, keyword ranking performance. However, how your site domain name and page URLs function can have significant impact on the crawlability of the site as well as overall visitor and traffic performance.
My master website marketing checklist covering over 400 specific items through 23 topics. These topics include things such as website development, SEO, usability, accessibility, etc. This list doesn't cover any "how tos," which are an essential ingredient to successful online marketing, but sometimes you need to first know what to do so you can then discover how to do it.
This week I've been looking at the speakers from Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. I first covered a handful of featured speakers and then moved on to the search marketers themselves. Here are four more search marketers and an quick review of how well they brand themselves in the search results.
Monday I discussed several of the featured speakers from Search Engine Strategies and looked at their search results branding for their names and businesses. It turned out not to be as enjoyable as I had hoped as all of them have very high visibility. Not that I wanted to point out anybody's faults, but hey, that's kinda the fun. Today I want to look at several of the search marketers themselves.
Since it seems everybody does their own recaps of the sessions they attended at Search Engine Strategies, I like to take a different approach. Last year I ran a two-part series covering just a handful of the session speakers. I looked at how well each branded themselves in the search results of Google. This yearI wanted to start with the list of SES's Featured Speakers.
My list of reasons why I won't be bringing home any schwag from Search Engine Strategies.
It seems to me that if the search engines are confident that they are providing strong, relevant results to a query, that they would want to provide more results than just 10 to each searcher.
So many people are obsessed with Google. And as far as that goes, there is good reason to be. Google is the largest search engine that gets the most searches and delivers far more traffic than any other engine. But I'm not one to watch Google on a hyper-obsessive level.
Google indexes flash, but so what? There is still not much there that can be optimized with any kind of effectiveness.
Recently Google started blocking several of the big-name rank checking software used by many in the SEO industry. This, of course, sparked the debate on whether SEO firms should be bothering with providing ranking reports to their clients. I have to say, I'm conflicted on that issue.
Its important to answer the question "why?" Why go through the hassle of of building a Destination Website? Obviously, there are thousands of successful online businesses that don't operate anything that could be considered a "Destination". If they are successful, should you really go through the extra effort yourself?
While we cannot make a few tweaks here or there to our websites and suddenly expect to be deemed as credible, there are things that we an do to help build the perception of trust in the minds of our visitors.
Creating a very distinct voice for your website is really about giving your website a personality. You can have great copy that lacks a clear voice that can be heard. But by creating a voice that can be heard clearly and distinctly through each written word on the page you are increasing the level of engagement with your visitor.
In non-competitive areas, achieving top rankings often doesn't take much effort. But when you're targeting keywords in more competitive fields you're going up against other websites that have already established themselves in that space. Many of those competitors are are, in fact, the authority for those keywords....
Your business is not just competing with businesses in your area, but quite possibly you're competing with businesses all over the world. And if you're not unique or remarkable in any way, if nothing that sets you apart, then you're just another one of a million other businesses doing the same thing.
The design of a website is an important aspect of building a destination that people want to return to time and time again. But don't go out and spend all kinds of money for the most current, up-to-date website design with all the whistles and bells. Stop for a second to truly consider what kind of website design you really need.
Running SEO campaigns that don't address usability concerns is like running radio and TV promos to drive people to a store that is unfinished. The traffic being driven may not be a total loss, but you certainly aren't getting the full value out of each customer. Many won't find what they are looking for, others will be frustrated trying to check out, and some may turn around the moment they walk in the door. Usability addresses those issues to ensure each customer has a good experience on your website.
There are a number of different types of expert information that can be developed for your webiste as a means of providing your visitors with additional, quality content. Depending on your site, some types of types of expert information are more applicable than others and not all will be a good fit for you. Each site must be evaluated to determine what kind of expert information will best serve the audience's needs and expectations. By finding ways to add additional expert information to your site you'll begin to build a site that can stand up above the competition.
If you can't be considered as an expert on your subject, what reason is there for someone to make a purchase from you or subscribe to what you offer? For most people, they want to find people who they are confident know their information inside and out. If I'm not confident that you'll be able to answer my questions intelligently, I'll move on to someone who can.
Most site's rely on marketing alone to increase traffic. Marketing drives traffic and traffic is really nothing more than more eyeballs on the site. The site still has to do it's job in selling the product or service you offer. And it has to do it effectively if you want to be profitable. Building a Destination Website rockets you beyond the competition in several key areas.
One of the things many businesses struggle with is how to really make their site stand out. Many of us have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of online competitors. Some are serious competition, some not-so serious, and some not yet even on the radar, but will soon become major players for "our" space. The truth is, everybody wants to be #1 and there is only one #1 position. So, how do you stand out among them?
SEO isn't about "getting" top rankings. Getting rankings leaves open the implication that you're achieving a result that you don't necessarily deserve. Destination SEM focuses on building a website that is truly exceptional in meeting your audience's needs and actually earns top search engine positions.
Search engine optimization should be about how helping businesses succeed online with search engine exposure being a component to achieve success, but not the measure of success itself. But where SEO and other forms of offline advertising differ is that SEO cannot stand alone from the core business. It is intertwined. The "rankings at all cost" mentality needs to be thrown out like last month's leftovers that's made its way to the back of the fridge. It's a stale and moldy strategy that simply stinks up the web.
While back I wrote an article about how having a search engine friendly website does not make it search engine optimized. The article discussed how many web developers promise to "search engine optimize" the websites they develop. While I don't mean to discount the value of a good web developer (I rely on them heavily) many developers really know no more about SEO than than they do about pluming. Sure, they can plunge a blocked toilet, or write some decent titles and meta descriptions, but there is so much more to SEO (and plumbing) than that.
I think I stress too much about our clients' performance of their optimization campaigns. Or perhaps I just create too much work for myself. See, all these years I've been working 10-12 hour days to help my clients increase their exposure in the search engines for some pretty important phrases. But just recently I found out that I've been targeting all the wrong keywords!
When making changes to my website I always take the time to view them live on the web before closing up my editing software and patting myself on the back in self-satisfaction of a job well done. Even with minor changes, I like to view them one last time to make sure my changes didn't cause any shifts in on-page display, or I didn't inadvertently create an error somewhere that inadvertently jacked everything up (believe me, it's happened more times than I can count!) But regardless of how careful I am to double check my work, there is one thing I almost always overlook; verifying that my site looks good in the "other" browser.
When I only have about 65 characters to work with in a title tag (that which is visible on the search engine results pages), should I use any of that valuable real estate to display my company name?
When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can't read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. So we rely on ALT attributes to convey proper meaning. ALT text is an important aspect of both usability and SEO. Here's how to do them properly.
Yesterday I discussed code bloat by looking at how we can move style sheets and JavaScripts off the page in order to clean the coding up quite a bit. I this third post about cleaning up bloated code I wanted to address Tables and other typical causes of bloated HTML.
I started a conversation about how code bloat can effect your site's performance with the search engines. This post maps some specific types of code bloat and very briefly--and non-technically--show you how you can eliminate the bloat to improve your pages performance for both visitors and search engines.
Here is another round of questions submitted to me during a Website Architecture webinar I gave a couple months back. I wasn't able to answer most of these questions before or during the presentation so I've been answering them in this Q&A series. This post covers questions regarding session IDs, repetitive vs. duplicate content, robots.txt files, navigation text, and maintaining link juice after a site re-design. Let's get to it....
There are a lot of little things that can junk up your code, but, for the most part, the search engines don't really care. It doesn't matter to them if your HTML validates or if you keep your code "clean" or not. When it comes to analyzing your pages for search engine rankings, none of that really matters a whole lot. But when it does matter, it matters a whole lot.
Moving your site to a new domain is remarkably similar to moving to a new physical address. In some cases it's much easier, you don't have to pack up, or load or unload a U-Haul truck, but there are other considerations that you have to take into account to make sure your visitors continue to find you after an online move. One of the primary areas of concern is making sure the search engines not only continue to deliver traffic to your new location, but you don't lose all your search engine rankings in the process.
One of the areas of confusion that many have regarding paid links is knowing when a paid link is really a paid link, and when is a paid link penalized. in their attempt to eliminate all forms of paid links from affecting their natural algorithmic search results Google has left one giant loophole in the paid link witch hunt: paid directory links.
I'm continuing to work my way through questions submitted during a webinar I gave on Website Architecture. This post covers questions on URLs, breadcrumb navigation, CMS, Database driven sites, 301 and 302 redirects, navigation, heading tags, broken links and HTML theft.
Site navigation can come in many different flavors. There isn't just ONE way to do it correctly. If there were then every site would have navigation that looked exactly the same. So while navigation can vary greatly between sites and industries, there are certain navigational elements that should be implemented to ensure solid usability and effective website architecture.
In-site link implementation can make a considerable difference in how effective your optimization campaign is. Or isn't. While your site's primary and secondary navigation is extremely important, you shouldn't make that the only way for visitors to get around your website. Here are some inter-site linking strategies that will help your visitors while also assist with your search engine optimization efforts.
There are advantages and disadvantages to using both absolute and relative links. Here I will explore the differences between the two, outline some pros and cons and also provide some additional information on how you can create hyperlinks in your site that will ensure that all links to your content remain in tact and properly functioning.
This is a continuation of the questions I was asked during a webinar presentation on website architecture. Before and during he presentation I was submitted over 70 question and each week I've been answering a handful of them. This article covers questions about Wordpress, password protected pages, iframes, multiple paths to content, and filenames.
Yesterday I posted some thoughts on When, Why and How to Construct a Meta Description Tag. While it's relevance in terms of rankings is rather limited, there is still some intrinsic value to implementing a good description that will appear in the search results.
Meta description tags get a bad rap. They are often either considered to be more valuable than they really are, or dismissed as near irrelevant. The truth is that the meta description can be useful but it's on the lower rung of importance when it comes to the on-page elements considered by the search engines. So while not a whole lot of time needs to be invested in creating workable description tags, I'll give you a few pointers on what you need to consider.
Building a website gives you a lot of options when it comes to how to set up your internal linking structure. Different areas of your site or web pages may require different linking strategies, but regardless on what kind of internal linking strategy you implement, you want to make sure that it helps you achieve your search engine optimization goals. I'm going to break internal linking into three categories: The search friendly, search un-friendly and search meh-friendly link.
Continuing my Q&A series on Website Architecture, these questions were presented to me before and during my webinar of the same topic. We have some more good questions and answers today that I'm sure you'll find valuable. This session is largely about keywords in domain and file names with an interesting question on nameservers.
When a website goes into development most of the attention is usually paid to the design elements. But what often doesn't get enough attention is the site's directory structure, which plays an important part in your SEO campaign.
One of the easiest ways to lose visitors from your site is through broken or invalid links. In business, it is pretty much well known that it requires less of a financial investment to keep a customer than it does to acquire a new one. The internet is really no different. Once you get a visitor on your site, or get them wanting to be on your site, it takes less investment to keep them there than it does to go bring in another new visitor. Therefore it is important to do whatever you can to keep acquired visitors on your site helping them move through the conversion process.
More Q&A regarding website architecture. Questions answered regarding books for beginners, SEO techniques and how they have changed, pro's and cons of CSS, different types of architecture and favicons.
Buying up alternative domains can help people find you when they type in the wrong domain in inadvertently, or when they are just randomly typing in keywords in the address bar.
I remember when favicons first started to appear, it was like, hey, how cool is that. But now they are so common that I hardly notice them anymore. Well, no, that's not exactly true. I do notice them, and like them, it's just that I'm not surprised to see them anymore. But I AM surprised when I don't see them.
More website architecture questions answered including questions on website submission, viral marketing, content and moving a website.
Last week I answered some questions related to my Website Architecture webinar that I'll be conducting today. More questions were submitted in the last week and I've provided my answers to a few here.
I don't think that the Hx tags are near as important as many people think. But I do believe they play an important role in putting the page hierarchy into expression. Improper usage of HX tags can throw the site hierarchy out of alignment, as well as your search engine optimization efforts.
In this installment I'll provide one of the best permanent fixes to inadvertent duplicate content that is common with business websites. The implications of this can be pretty significant depending on the size of your site.
How you set up your internal linking structure plays a significant role in whether you set yourself up to appear if you have duplicate content on your site or not. Some things we do without thinking, setting ourselves up for problems ahead. With a little foresight and planning, you can prevent duplicate content issues that are a result of poor internal link development.
When it comes to issues of duplicate content, one of the most frequent offenders is the "printer friendly" page. Just about any kind of site can benefit from creating printer friendly versions of their pages, but improper implementation of these pages can wreak duplicate content havoc on your site.
The last thing you want is someone out there twittering in your name. Maybe they have good intentions for you, but maybe they don't. In either case, they are out there engaging in the community saying things that may appear to be official company communications.
I'm gearing up for a 1-hour webinar that I'll be doing for SEMpdx next week. I've got more information on that below, but the SEMpdx crew asked their members to submit some questions that they would like to get answered during the presentation. Instead of waiting, I thought I'd go ahead and answer the questions here:
Duplicate titles is something we often see on newly developed websites or content management systems that don't allow proper control of individual pages. While I get how when developing new websites the title tag can get overlooked, I'm amazed that people develop web software that still doesn't take title tag customization into account.
There is no better way to create an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site than to force session IDs onto each visitor (and search engine). Typically, session IDs are used for tracking a single visitor's navigation path through the site, including the adding or removing products from the shopping cart. They are great for tracking purposes, but really, really bad for search engines and inbound linking.
When shoppers can access secure and non secure versions of the same page, then likely the search engines can as well. This creates almost a complete duplicate of your site, one secure and one non-secure version. It's essential to tell the search engines what to think, especially when it comes to which pages of your site should or should not be included in the index.
Registering multiple domain names is, and should be, common practice for businesses wishing to protect their brands. Once purchased, what you do with these domains can have a positive or negative impact on your main URL. Here are some tips on how to set up alternate domains to prevent the search engines from seeing duplicate content.
Product categorization can play a significant role in how both search engines and users are able to access your products. There are two important things to consider when determining how to categorize your products. 1) Is each product assigned to the most appropriate category or categories? and 2) is multiple categorization creating duplicate content? The first issue frustrates your users and the second the search engines.
There are two kinds of duplicate content: content that is duplicated on multiple websites and content that is duplicated on multiple pages of a single site. I believe the search engines treat each differently and, of course, there may be different standards applied to duplicate content within each of these two main differentiations, depending on the cause and instance.
The value of the Hx tag is much the same as the value of your main points in an outline for a book or paper. Your outline shows your main topics and sub-topics. These are often then used as section headings in your final draft.
There are two important questions that every business needs to be able to answer: What's in it for me? and Why should I buy from you? The first questions, when answered correctly, helps sell your product or service, but it doesn't necessarily close the deal. In order to get the deal sealed and money in hand you have to be able to answer the second question sufficiently....
Performing a complete website review is rarely easy. I've found that you can start a site analysis intending to spend just a few minutes looking over it only to find that it quickly spirals into a multi-hour marathon of research. Complete website reviews can be time consuming and often produce many more hours of work beyond that. Many people want to rush into the marketing without realizing that the website itself is part of the marketing process. This is a shame....
As more and more users gain access to the web it becomes increasingly important to ensure that your website is accessible to all, not just a few. Just as businesses must comply with the American Disabilities Act to ensure proper access to customers with disabilities, businesses should do all they can to make their websites accessible to all users regardless of the means in which they access the site. And of course not all accessibility issues involve meeting the needs of the disabled. What must be considered is the growing number of users that now access websites through non-traditional means, whether it be mobile phones or with images turned off. These users can still be your target audience and ensuring your site can be used through alternate avenues is essential to capturing that audience.
Rarely does SEO bloat happen all at once, but it's usually an accumulation of edits and tweaks made over the course of several months or even years. This is what makes it particularly damaging to your marketing efforts.
Sites that are designed to sell products and/or services must go the extra mile to enhance the visitor's engagement with the website. Shopping cart abandonment (shoppers abandoning their carts before deciding to pay for the "items" they've added to their cart) can result in a significant loss in potential sales. But much of that can be reduced when the shopping process is streamlined and geared for shopper satisfaction. The selling process--from initial interest to the very last checkout page--must be able to grab shopper's attention and proceed to drive them through to the finalization of the sale. But even...
Trust is a key usability issue when it comes to running a successful online business. Most people automatically view web businesses with a bias against them compared to their brick and mortar counterparts. Your ability to convince your visitors that yours is a trustworthy business is one of the key components to getting visitors to convert into customers. Creating a website that conveys trust can be tricky. There are rarely any answers that are always "right" for every visitor. There are, however, several factors that have universal appeal to the weary shopper.
Getting links is great, but as search marketers we should be looking far beyond that. We should not be so much as trying to get other websites to link to us (that's certainly a welcome result) but we should instead be working on getting exposure, in whatever format that comes in.
Last February (2007), I had a diabolical plan to become a household name in the SEO community. Here I was, a guy who has been in SEO for almost ten years and remained a relative unknown. Sure, I made a few friends here and there and have been slowly building my reputation, but who would of thought 12 months ago that I would be able to snag an interview with one of the biggest names in the SEO. And that's not me interviewing the big name, mind you... that's the big name interviewing me!
Since the "purchase" is the ultimate conversion, it is imperative that you remove as many obstacles from the customer's research-to-buy cycle as possible. Providing your visitors the key ingredients in their shopping experience creates a smooth and worry-free transaction process. The easier it is to shop and buy the more customers will overcome the natural hesitations that many feel before they commit by hitting the final "complete order" button.
While it has taken many years for SEO to be considered a marketing function within the business community, I sometimes wonder if the pendulum has swung now too far away from SEO being a function of the IT department. SEO is very different from traditional marketing.
Think of all the ways that companies use branding to build awareness of themselves or to promote their social awareness and customer service values. A few things come to mind such as greeters at the entrance of your my favorite store, go-green awareness issues, charity drives that "give back" to the community for every purchase made, TV screens playing music videos or news as you wait in line, and the list goes on. None of these things lead directly to conversions but they do lead to higher company awareness and the good old fashioned fuzzy-feelings we get when we...
Not every site needs, nor should have, an on-site search feature. But those that do must be sure that the search isn't just an after-thought. It needs to be more than something to add because you think visitors want it. Adding a search function is not necessarily good for on-site usability. Implementing a search function improperly is often a greater source of frustration than not having one altogether....
When putting the framework for a solid optimization campaign you have to spend some time evaluating various aspects of your site. This evaluation gives you an idea of any shortcomings the site has, what will be required to overcome the competition, and will then allow you to map out an effective strategy for success. But there is more to the evaluation than just looking at how the website currently performs in the on- and off-page analysis.
How engaged a customer is with your website will determine whether they can be persuaded to buy, comment, download or submit their information for you to follow up on. Customer engagement goes beyond just getting the customer's attention, you must keep their attention. This can be done by providing your visitors near immediate gratification.
To do that you have to first know who your audience is, know what they seek and then also know their purpose for being on your site. Knowing all this then lets you work toward meeting the needs of your target audience. But it also means taking things a step further and building a relationship with them. The ability to build a relationship with your visitors can be crucial to driving them through the persuasion process. Relationship building starts the moment the visitor hits the website.
Whether you are putting together a proposal for a client or assessing your own needs, you need to be able to accurately predict how much time, energy and effort will be necessary to build a successful SEO campaign. Of course, in order to predict the time involvement you need to first know the strengths and weaknesses of the website which will then help you determine what will need to be done to accomplish your goals and make the site a viable competitor.
Not every site needs a site map, they can certainly be a good idea. Site maps provide a dual purpose: They provide search engine spiders easy access to all of your site pages and they provide site visitors easy access to all of your site pages. The difference is that search engines and visitors access your site map differently and therefore there are different methods that need to be applied to creating site map(s) that are friendly for both engines and search spiders.
Your website's privacy information and security settings can be significant hurdles when it comes to gaining trust with your visitors. Establishing trust is paramount to enticing visitors to make that final commitment, whether that be making a purchase, choosing to provide their info, or simply making initial contact with you. Your job is to make sure your visitors feel confident that their information is kept safe and will not be used for nefarious means, or anything other than what they fully expect. While providing assurances are nice, those assurances only go so far as what actually happens. Be sure that your small print reinforces what your visitors already expect to find in regards to how their information is used.
Every SEO campaign has to start somewhere. Any good plan; whether you're building a home, preparing for a family vacation or looking to optimize your website for search rankings, starts with research. Before you are ready to optimize your first piece of code you need to understand the landscape around you, which means you need to know the condition of your site as it currently is, and the goals you wish to achieve over the course of your campaign.
Sites that require users to log in to access certain information and/or purchase products add an additional layer of potential complication to the usability process. To avoid potential visitor confusion and the possibility for errors, it is important that any login process requires little or no thought on the part of the site visitor. Once logged in, you must be sure that visitors are able to find the information they want and expect to find. My Account pages need to provide visitors with access and ability to view and change personal information, as necessary.
Every day we get businesses coming to us looking to improve their search engine rankings. They want to talk about an SEO campaign but one quick look at their site and we see that SEO may not be the right approach for them. Usually in these cases the site needs a complete usability makeover.
The other day I received an email from a client noting that some of his Yahoo rankings have slipped as of late. They are still ranking strong on Google as well as MSN and heck, many of their Yahoo rankings are still very strong. But there was, in fact, some slippage and the client was concerned. Well, first we know that there is more to web marketing than top rankings. In fact rankings are just a small piece of the bigger web marketing pie. I know that and you know that, but for whatever reason, we all still have to deal with clients that refuse to accept that. But that's a story for another post. So what do you do in this situation? I know for a fact that the client's business has seen 100-200% growth year over year since we started working with them oh-so long ago. They obviously see the big picture, but they still come back looking at rankings. And Yahoo rankings at that.
For many business owners, writing can be a daunting task. Sure we know our products and services inside and out and putting what we know into words is easy enough, but that's about as far as it gets. Is that enough to sell? Sure. Could more be done to sell better? You bet!