compass pointing direction

Today I figured I’d at least try to round-up some ways you can inspire yourself with some blog topics. Hopefully the research pique’s my interest in topics that target my desired audience.

Your Direction

While it’s fairly obvious to some it’s still worth mentioning that the first item you need to do is define your audience. It’s just like defining your target market in a business (and ultimately is probably the same thing). For me my target market is:

1. Looking for someone to build their website
2. Has a preference for WordPress as a platform
3. Owns a small to medium-sized business and is interested in web marketing
4. Wants to build a long-term relationship and continually work on iterating their site

Secondarily my audience is also:

1. Programmers for applications (mainly Rails) that are looking for a designer or front end coder

I place them in that order currently because most of my income comes from the first set of people. Yes I may not find all of the traits I’m looking for in each client but they need to have a few to be in my target market and thus my target for my blog.

They Want to Know

So since I have an idea of whom I should be writing for I now need to try to figure out what items they’re likely to search for when wanting a website built. Some topics may include:

• Why use WordPress instead of Drupal, Blogger, Joomla…
• I thought WordPress was just a blogging software
• What’s the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
• How important is site speed? How about in SEO rankings
• What type of questions do I ask a web designer when I’m trying to figure out who to hire?
• Do I need to hire a big agency or can a solo freelancer do the job?
• What type of process should I expect during a web design project?
• How do I get good SEO on my Blog posts

Yeah I’m giving away ideas here. Feel free to jump off my list and write some of your own items for your site.

Writing Your Content

So you’ve got a list, now you just need to write stuff down. Best practice when starting out is to just write. don’t think about how it will sound just get the gist of the content down on the page. Once you’ve got it written then edit it. Don’t worry about using the latest and greatest tool. If you use MS Word and know it, use it. If all you have is NotePad, TextEdit, that’s fine just get the words down.

Edit it

So it’s down now. Read it, re-read it, and read it again. Tweak it each time. Blog posts don’t need to be long but they need to contain good content. Your blog post is done when you can’t take anything else out. It shouldn’t ramble or be filled with meaningless fluff.

Really that’s all you need to do to get some content on your site. Sure you can add images, and using the correct markup for the site will help maximize the SEO benefits of the content but I’ll address that next time.

SEO image

It’s All Wrong

I’m not sure where this dumb idea about SEO being all in code and trickery came from but the fact is that this is wrong. Sure a well coded site using current best practices is a huge leg up in gaining search engine ranking but if there is no original, good content on the site there is nothing to be crawled by search engines.

Good Content!

I think back about one client who had lots of content on their site. They put up something new each day. It was relevant to their field even. Unfortunately it sucked. All they did was grab a news story that related to search terms they wanted to rank for and put the headline on their site with the first paragraph from the article. Sometimes they added a link to the original source. The article was followed by a link to their contact form.

While this is content, and it is published regularly, it’s not good original content so ultimately they’re just wasting their time. SEO comes from good original content.

I Now Refuse

Unfortunately with the client I list above about 4 months later they came to me complaining that they still weren’t ranking for the search terms they wanted to rank for and started blaming me for it. When I asked if they were writing at least one original article a week I was told:

In a perfect world we’d take the time for that, but it’s just not going to happen.

This has lead me to one response to clients when we start talking about SEO. As soon as they start to talk about it I ask if they’re going to write original content at least once a week. If I get any other answer than “Yes” I tell them to stop talking about SEO. If you give me no original content to work with there is nothing I can do.

SEO is not magic. It’s good content, Good Content, GOOD CONTENT

The Right Way to Think About SEO

When you think about SEO you need to be thinking about a long term plan for how you’re going to achieve ranking for search terms. It’s not instant pay off, but a long term commitment to produce good content.

I currently like to cite the paddling site I run with a friend. I’ve been heavily involved in the site for 3 years. The first design/code I did for the site sucked. I can live with that reality. I was new to WordPress and hadn’t dug into SEO much so the markup was not well suited to identifying content to search engines.

I only rebuilt the site last year and while we did see some increase in repeat traffic and see more people clicking on more articles with the redesign, we really didn’t see an increase in search engine visitors. We see about 1000 people a day come directly from search terms. Having talked with a number of other paddlers running sites we’re far and above the highest in about 90% of the cases.

We out rank local stores for purchase specific search terms. I don’t even sell anything.

We have accomplished this with approximately 100 articles. When we want to rank for a new search term, or better for a current one, we come up with 3 or 4 articles to write that would pertain to the term then sit down and write them. Then we wait a few weeks and guess what, we start seeing people come to our site via the terms we wanted to rank for.

That’s my big secret.

Just Stop

So stop thinking that some company can come in and help you move from not ranking at all to ranking number 1 on Google for a term. Sit down and get some original content on the site. Do some work instead of expecting someone else to do it for you. Stop being lazy. Setup a long term plan and follow through on it. Sure it’s not easy but it’s what needs to get done.

failed business man stapled to wall

No the management doesn’t sit in the office and say “Let’s start a website and make sure it tanks and costs us needless money.” But they do sit there and decide to only go half way with solutions that rely on going all the way.

The Fail

The biggest example I have worked with is a great retail store that I did a bunch of SEO work for. We were ranked 1 or 2 on the search engines for some very generic search terms. When you searched for manufacturers of goods we carried we were ranked just below the manufacturer. We were the first place you could actually buy the product.

The problem is that the web store had a huge limiting factor that meant despite all of the good SEO work they only saw a maximum of 20 orders completed in the busy months. I happend to also know that competitors were seeing ten times those web purchases without the good SEO during the slow months.

The reality was that it didn’t matter how good the SEO was for the company. With no way to let customer purchase online it was a waste of their money. Eventually I told them that. We talked about the limiting factors of the web store and came up with a range of options to help fix or totally fix the problem (ranging from 2,000 to 20,000 in price on a monthly in store sales of 250,000 in busy months) and they just simply weren’t willing to let their website succeed.

The Conclusion

It’s all well and good to want a web presence but if you are going to jump into the web be willing to jump in with both feet. Don’t start a project only to do it half way and force the first half to fail. The conclusion to the above story is that they got me to stop working on SEO and now they’re on page 10 and still have a mostly non-functional online store.

What is the Conversion Optimizer?

At it’s core the conversion optimizer helps you bid more effectively on adwords. It takes all of the info that gets generated by an adwords campaign and analyzes it all to adjust your bids on keywords for situations that bring better conversions for you.

Where Conversion Optimizer Shines

Regular adword campaigns allow you limit your campaigns by country, city, state or neighbourhood (though this IP detection is not always effective). Google Conversion Optimizer adds more to just that general segmentation. Over time conversion optimizer learns what regions, search strings… yeild better conversions for your site. As it learns what terms…have a higher conversion percentage on your site it adjust your average bids higher so that you come up more often for those things (note: you still set your maximum and it doesn’t go over that figure).

The example given int he presentation dealt with a surf shop that advertised for ‘surf board’ and for ‘ocean sports.’ As one would think they saw lots of good ROI on the term surfboard and some ROI on the term ocean sports. When they turned conversion optimizer on they saw a big increase in ‘ocean sports’ as the tool learned what types of sites to display the add on and what exact queries meant people were really looking for a surf shop. This fairly broad search term ended up having a very high ROI as conversion optimizer learned more and more when to feed their add out (with little increase in average payment for adds).

Some Caveats

As with anything that uses historical data to tailor results the bigger your data set the better the campaign is tailored. So over time you campaign could yeild more conversions for the same or lower pricing. Tieing in with this it was suggested that you just start a normal adwords campaign and after a number of weeks (no firm number mentioned) turn on the conversion optimizer.

You also can’t make large changes to your campaign and have the conversion optimizer maintain its effectiveness. You can add a few keywords and maybe take one or two out but when using conversion optimizer it is best to make changes slowly over time so that it stays effective. If you have to make large changes for a campaign it is best to turn off conversion optimizer make the changes let it run for a few weeks and then turn it back on.

Finally conversion optimizer requires that in the last 30 days you have had 30 conversions and that you have conversion tracking turned on. Now if your campaign regularly has 30 conversions in 30 days but for a period or two it drops to 24 (the number mentioned in the presentation) you should still be using conversion optimizer. It will still have a large data set from the other recent 30 day periods to act on.

Other resources I used when writing this post:

• Google Conversion Optimizer Main Site
• How to Get the Most out of Your Advertising Budget?
• Google Adwords Learning Centre: Lesson 3c: Language & Location Targeting
• What is Conversion Tracking

On some sort of regular basis you should take your site to the dentist though. In this instance I would equate the dentist with an outside consultant hired for a site evaluation.

As you continue to work with the same content it becomes harder to bring fresh eyes to the site. It’s harder to see the problems on a site because there is a reason, at least as far as your concerned, that it is laid out that way. In many ways having the same people always looking at the site to evaluate it is kind of like everyone patting each other’s back to tell them how good a job they are doing.

Back to the teeth comparison. I have always thought my teeth were healthy. They’re straight, and clean and don’t hurt. Then I went to the dentist and my teeth that looked good to me ended up being in need of a overhaul. It took a specialist to look at my teeth and see the bad parts. It takes a specialist to fix the problems.

There are problems on any long term site. New information gets added to the site that wasn’t originally planned for. The site become a little inbred and has poor elements scattered throughout. It’s hard to notice this when you work with it everyday though.

Specialist

Like going to a doctor that specializes in teeth your website will benefit from getting specialists to do a site evaluation on a regular basis. Maybe with the new wave of social media you decide that you should be more open to your users so you hire a social media consultant to give that aspect of your marketing an overhaul.

If your users indicate that it’s hard to find things on your site you should hire a user interface specialist or accessibility specialist to do a site audit. They can help you become more user friendly thus increasing the interaction on your site.

Git er Done

It’s all well and good to hire these specialists and get the recommendations from them but it does you no good to do nothing with the recommendations. Just as it would have done me no good to go for a check up and then not go back to face the drill. It may be painful, we are invested in our work, and it may cost a fair chunk of change but the important thing is that at the end of the day we have a healthy site that serves our users better.

Prep Work

The first thing  a good web designer should provide you with is a creative brief before they quote on the project. A creative brief will ask you a bunch of questions about what pages you need on your site, what sites you like and should be used as design reference, what sites you consider your competitors, who your target market is, and what content will be going on each page. All of this information will allow the designer to quote on your site accurately so that both of you are on the same page.

What if you don’t get asked these questions? It doesn’t mean that the web designer is a bad one but it may mean that they will not be prepared for all of the things you want on your website. If that happens then the relationship will be strained on both sides. You will both assume that you are on the same page and you won’t be. You as the client may expect a very complex form on your ‘contact’ page while the designer may expect that all you need is a basic three field form. Both of you will be frustrated by the lack of understanding of the other.

With the information gathered in the creative brief the designer should then take the time to survey your competitors to get a better understanding of your market. Without a good survey of your industry the designer will be unprepared to really design a site that is good for your users, and ultimately the site if for the users not for you.

Build for SEO

A good web designer should also be building your site with on page SEO in mind. On page SEO makes sure that you have proper heading tags, alt tags on images, and that you have all of the appropriate meta tag information. I would also expect them to set up a proper 301 redirect so that if people type in your site address without www at the beginning they will be sent to the version with www at the beginning. If they don’t do this both sites will be viewed as different sites and that will hurt your search engine ranking. This initial set up is not a full SEO plan for your business but a firm foundation for you to continue with a good plan to maximize your search engine results.

Web Standards

Your web designer should build your site to proper web standards from the start. Not only does this provide you with a site that is easier for search engines to read it also sets up your site for easier changing in the future. While I’ll admit there are some valid reasons not to have a site that validates to the W3C spec there should be a good reason that this is done. Accidentally capitalizing a break tag is not a valid reason to fail W3C validation.

Accessibility

Finally a web designer should take your target market into account when implementing accessibility on your site. If you are getting them to design a site for video gamers then it you can safely assume that they will have the latest plugins for Flash, and Javascript. While if they are designing a site that is marketed at the elderly it is safe to assume that they may not be the most technically savvy of users and you should build to suit their needs, which in not necessarily with the newest and greatest technology. If you just try to have the newest technology in your site without addressing how this will affect your end user you are doing them a disservice. Your web designer should build the site for your users not for themselves or for you.

Have Something Worth Linking to

Before you start working to generate links evaluate your content. Do you have appropriate landing pages for customers? Are you hard or soft selling on the site? Is there even any good content there for customers?

I am a web designer. I do web design for small and medium business. I write about web design for small and medium business. I hope that you find good content here for your business but I’ll admit I have a  motive too. I want you to read this and hire me. Is there good free information here for you so you won’t have to hire me? Sure, but I specialize in what I do. While people may be able to take a step forward in their web management there is a ceiling that a business will hit and they will have to decide whether to hire a freelancer or an in house person.

If they picked up a bunch of their hints from me then they are more likely to come back to me for some paid work as well. So do I have content worth linking to? Yes I do. If you don’t have content on your site that others need why would they link to you?

Start with the Easy

Once you have some content on your site that is worth reading, start by knocking off the easy avenues for link generation. If you participate in any forums put a link to your site in your signature it they let you or at least on your profile page. I don’t find that this will drive a lot of traffic to your site but it is a simple starting point. Every time I start a new site that I plan to do some advertising for I add it to the signatures in any forums I participate in. I generally try not to put to many in but two or three are alright so evaluate what needs to be in there for each forum. I have different sites on my signatures depending on the nature of the forum.

What About a Contest

A great way to get other blogs or sites linking to you is to run a contest. Many times companies will contact bloggers or site admins and offer them a give away. They do for the publicity and the blogger is happy to write the content also because of the publicity. This type of link generation is called linkbaiting and is a great way to get people talking about your site and your content.

Let the contest run over a month and really advertise it. Use Twitter, forums, facebook… to get people talking. Lots of blogs will link to you because they want to share your contest with their readers. You may be surprised sometimes how popular a blog is that links to your little contest.

Share the Love

This post is about link love and how to get it. So why would I now suggest that you give it to others? If people are always giving you links and never getting anything back then the love could start tailing off. Now I am not suggesting that you link to your direct competition but what about a business that would offer complimentary services? What about a contest run on another site? Offer up the love to others will make it more likely that they will be sending links your way in the future as well.

Remember a good SEO plan takes time it doesn’t happen over night so you need to be patient and keep up the hard work. The day will come when you have more clients than you know what to do with and that will pay for all of the time spent up front.

1. Content Management

Use a content management system. If you are getting a new site built then insist on some sort of content management system. It will cost you more up front than an entirely static site. You will no longer have to run to the designer each time you need to change your hours of operation or your prices. That also means you won’t have to pay them for every little change. A content management system will also allow you more control over the SEO of your site.    

A good content management system will also have a number of SEO items built in. Look at the title of this post and then look in your url bar in your web browser. Notice that they match. Having a url that is readable and not full of question marks and = signs can make a big difference in the traffic that your site gets.

 

2. Take the time to do it right

Alt tags. Alt tags are the alternate tags found on images. If you don’t have alternate tags on your images search engines can’t tell what the picture is of. If the search engine can’t tell what the picture is of it just ignores it and you loose the possible boost that could be gained by the presence of an alt tag.

 

3. Figure out who you want to market to and write appropriately

If you are a Motel in a small town known for it’s fishing and want to get more fishermen to stay at your motel make sure you talk about the great fishing in the area. Yes I realize that you are a hotel and don’t actually offer fishing in your parking lot but with content written about fishing in the area you are more likely to appear in a search about fishing in the area. If they are searching for ‘fishing and motel’ you are even better positioned to be a primary hit in your area.

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