by Stoney deGeyter

In today's business environment, a website is absolutely necessary. It provides an avenue for people to find you and find out more about you as they sit in the comfort of their homes, while waiting in line at the grocery store, sit on the commuter train, or wherever. Unfortunately too many business take the wrong approach to how they build and market their websites.

Most companies stop their website development once the site is developed, and then move into marketing mode. The website becomes another product they have to market, rather than building a website that is the marketing vehicle for their products and services. We talk about website promotion quite a bit, which we understand is the process of getting the site visibility on the search engines. But getting people to the website is not the end goal.

The website is just another something the business must have in order to do business, but it never fully succeeds in being a tool that works for them to generate business.

Online marketing is different from off-line marketing, primarily in that you have to promote the very tool you use as a promotion for your business. With radio and TV you don't have to go out of your way to get people to listen. You run the ads and people do or don't. Websites must first be optimized in order to help improve traffic and visibility before they can be used as a business generating tool.

No wonder businesses pour thousands of dollars into traditional forms of marketing (phone book, magazines, radio, etc.,) which often produces significantly less return on the investment dollar. When it comes to properly planning and executing the development and promotion of their website, well, it's a bit more complicated.

Make Your Website Promote YOU.

With some exceptions, every website has its own unique characteristics. When building your site there really is no one-size-fits-all pattern to follow. Your site should be built to fulfill your informational and sales needs, while being effective for your target audience. With that said, there are specific components that almost every website needs in order to be an effective marketing tool.

Home Page

The home page is the online "face" of your company. It may not be the entry door for every visitor, but it is your front door and you need to make sure that you have it right. The home page should provide an all-encompassing view of what you do or offer while helping to establish trust with the new and repeat visitor.

To be effective, your home page must accomplish several things:

Establish your brand: Your home page sets the tone of the visitor's expectation. Everything from brand identity to confirmation that you can provide what they need must be established here.

Display your offerings: Visitors need to be provided a quick overview of the products, services and information they can expect to find as they dig deeper into the site.

Generate interest: The home page must do more than just provide information of what you offer; it must generate interest in those offerings. It must create a desire within your visitors to click further into the site to find out more and see how they will be benefited by your products or services.

Convey trust: Your home page can often be the first impression you give your visitors, therefore it must be able to establish an element of trust. If you come across as a slick used-car salesman, or a less-than-professional hobby site, your visitors will bolt.

About Us Page

Why do visitors go to the About Us page? Its a good question that is often ignored when web developers fill the content of these pages. Too many sites simply do not provide enough--or the right--information on this page.

The About Us page should be used to provide reassuring company information such as how long you've been in business, organizations you belongs to (chamber of commerce, BBB, etc.,) mission statement, bios of the executive staff. The information you provide on the About Us page is designed to help your visitors feel comfortable doing business with your business.

Contact Us Page

Even if you have your phone number, email address, fax number and snail mail address on every page of your website, it's still important to have a full page dedicated to this exact same information. It may seem odd, but many people looking for your contact info will ignore the information on whatever page they are viewing, looking instead for the link that reads "Contact Us."

Your Contact Us page should provide several different ways of contacting you including email, phone, and a web form. You should also include a physical address and possibly even a map. This is also a good place to display hours of operation.

Product & Service Pages

If you sell a product or a service you need pages dedicated to providing details about what you offer. Many small sites can put all their product information on the home page. This is great, but you still need to provide a page with additional details. If you have more than one product, then it's likely you need a page for each and every product or service you sell.

Product pages need to provide your visitors with everything they need to know to make an informed purchase decision. Price, style, expectations, specifications, size, benefits are all required information, depending on what you're selling. Your product page can never have too much information, provided it's laid out in a user friendly format that sells the product.

Site Navigation

Construction of your site navigation can make or break your website's performance. Shoddy and haphazard navigation schemes can easily confuse visitors causing them to make that dreaded click out of your site and onto a competitor. A properly constructed navigation can help visitors easily move from page to page finding everything that they are looking for quickly and easily.

Be consistent: Don't confuse your visitors by changing how the navigation looks or by moving its on-page location to a different area. Be consistent in it's look and placement. There are many different forms of navigational elements: main menus, sub-menus, breadcrumbs, etc. All of them should work together to create a consistent and recognizable flow as the visitor navigates through the site.

Be obvious: Make sure it is impossible for your visitors to get lost on your website. You want them to know where they are at all times and how to navigate back to the current and other main sections. Make good use of breadcrumb links as this provides your visitors a great visual indicator as well as easy navigation.

Be helpful: Large websites with many pages or products can easily create a navigational nightmare. It is essential that visitors don't have to "hunt" for what they want. This can be accomplished by providing clear section headings in your main navigation. You can also assist the visitors by including a site map that can be easily accessed and a properly function site search box.

Putting the Pieces Together

A website is far more than the sum of its parts. While all the components mentioned above are necessary to have a working site, when implemented properly each component compliments the others.

A website, like any ad made for radio, TV or newspaper, it must effectively do the job it was built for: selling. Building a website is necessary for online success, but you have to go beyond the build. Websites must be promoted effectively in order to get the visitors you need, but once there the site must then be able to do its job selling. Too often we promote the site but fail to get the site to promote the products and services we want people to buy. Before you promote your site, make sure your site promotes you.

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On June 2, 2009 Google reversed itself when it announced that the nofollow attribute (rel="nofollow") can no longer be used to redirect PageRank. Google's Matt Cutts stated that nofollow tags would now evaporate PageRank. This is a major policy change by Google's, one that impact advanced search engine optimization.

I want to discuss

What is PageRank?

What is a nofollow link?

The old Google behavior

The new Google behavior

SEO Options and recommendations

What is PageRank?


PageRank,called link juice by some, is a signal created by and measured by search engine results ranking algorithms. This is the foundation of Google's original rankings algorithm and one of the three pillars of SEO (content, site architecture and links). In simple terms, every link is a vote. A link (vote) from a page that itself has lots of links or has links from highly trusted pages possesses more influence than a link (vote) from a page with only a few links or links from low-authority pages. PageRank can come from internal and external links.

PageRank is reusable. PageRank does not disappear after a search engine weighs a page's authority. Instead, the receiving page passes much of its PageRank onto the pages that it links to. It passes 1/n of the PageRank to each document the page links to, n being is the number of document being linked to. Because of this nature, we can control the flow of PageRank to boost important pages and promote the indexing of deep content by search engines.

What is a NoFollow Link?

Google and other search engines prefer it when websites do not pass authority to other websites if

1. The link is a paid advertisement or insertion

2. The author or website administrators are unsure about the quality of a web page being linked to

Telling webmasters to not create these links would be unacceptable requirement. Yet, these types of links pollute the search engines' ranking algorithms. As a band-aid, the search engines created the nofollow tag to keep links in place, but without passing PageRank.

This is how a nofollow tag is placed into a link's HTML markup:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.examplecompanysite.com" target="_blank">Anchor Text</a>

PageRank Sculpting

PageRank sculpting is an advanced SEO technique used by 3% of web sites. Google web spam team member Matt Cutts has confirmed that, "...you are allowed to control how the PageRank flows around within your site," and, "...if you have a certain amount of budget of PageRank, you certainly can sculpt your PageRank." Advanced websites did exactly that.

In large part, PageRank determines how often Google crawls your web site, how many pages it crawls and how many pages it indexes. Every document has a limited amount of PageRank that it can pass. As PageRank is repeatedly passed from page to page it diminishes. Eventually, without external backlinks to refill the tank, PageRank runs out.

Because PageRank is a scarce resource, what you link to becomes important. Even Google's Matt Cutts suggests that web designers use internal link architecture strategically. For example, from the home page you should link to product pages with good ROI and not to pages that do not sell well.

Many sites do not adhere to a search engine friendly internal link architecture. Instead, designers want to design for people. They frequently use drop-down menus, spider menus or on-page menus to link to every possible category, sub-category and content page believing that this will create a better user experience for their human visitors.

Did you know that a designer's desire to make every important page immediately available to readers can be counter to people's normal scan-click-refine web browsing behavior?

To counter this tangle of links, SEO strategists will nofollow links that do not adhere to good architecture to stop them from wasting PageRank.

Google's Old Behavior

Google allows webmasters to choose which links pass PageRank and which do not. The most common method for controlling PageRank flow--also known as sculpting PageRank and Link Juice irrigation--was to use nofollow tags like irrigation gates. When the tag is present the gate is closed causing more PageRank to flow through those links with no nofollow tags.

Google's New Behavior

At this month's SMX Advanced conference, Matt Cutts stated, then later confirmed that using the nofollow tag will not conserve and redirect PageRank. Instead it "evaporates" PageRank. The authority disappears.

This is important because

Pages into which webmasters push additional PageRank will no longer receive those boosts.

Popular pages with user-generated content, such as blog comments, could become vulnerable. Traditionally blogs link to each comment writer's website. Now, every new comment and link will dilute PageRank a little more. This can happen in forums and wikis and other types of user-generated content too.

SEO Options and Recommendations

The best option for controlling the flow of PageRank is to employ good web page and internal link architecture. Here is one example.

Navigation

The home page links to category pages

Category pages link their sub-category pages

Category pages link to other category pages but not other category sub-pages

Subcategory pages link to content pages within the sub-category

Subcategory pages link to other subcategory pages within the same category and to the category page

Content pages link to the parent sub-category page and the parent category page

All pages link to the home page



Content - Link to any page as is appropriate to the context of your content and link to high ROI pages you want to give an extra boost to

Websites should not extend beyond five levels of depth, including the home page as level 1. Every page should be within four clicks of the home page along a breadcrumb path (Unless your website is huge)

The more trust and authority your site has, or the more PageRank you have, the more liberal you can be with your internal linking.

As far as we know it is still permissible to control the flow of PageRank and this can be accomplished by some of the same methods which were popular before the introduction of the nofollow tag. For example, links can be placed in iFrames. An iFrame is web page or web markup snippet that one can insert into a web page. When you disallow an iFrame file in robots.txt its links pass no PageRank.

I'm not going to go into all the different methods for sculpting PageRank. You should know that Google is now reading Javascript and Flash links, so you will probably want to try something different. Finally, we do not recommend methods that could be described as cloaking, such as polling whether or not cookies are enabled before displaying links. People and search engines should receive the same versions of your web pages.

As for combating the dilution of PageRank in user-generated content like blog comments, we recommend a wait and see approach. Frequent comments are a signal of quality and search engines will not want to punish content that receives lots of comments. Otherwise, sites like TechCrunch would lose their rankings. Expect an announcement from Google to clarify this.

Image by Neil Cummings

by Stoney deGeyter

I recently received an email from someone looking for some advice and a variety of topics. I thought our readers here would benefit from my response. This is the first post of a series of questions and answers touching on keywords, links, architecture and more.

We'll start off with the questions and thoughts regarding keywords and how they should be used on the page vs. how the search engines interpret them. For many outside the SEO industry keyword usage can still be somewhat of a mystery. Hopefully this information will provide some new insights or reconfirm old suspicions.

Keywords are not case sensitive for search.

This isn't entirely true. Search engines try to determine the searchers intent to deliver results best targeted for what the engine believes they are looking for. For the most part, capitalization won't matter, however if the engines can determine that capitalization of a word changes the meaning or intent of the search they may produce different results. Take for example a search for "MASH" and "mash." This is both an acronym and a word and the results are slightly different in Google.

Another example is "fat," "FAT," and "Fat." The differences on the first two searches are noticeably different. The third is only slightly different from the first but still different. Capitalization doesn't effect all results, for example a search for "Business Strategy" vs. "business strategy" produces the same results, at least on the first page of Google.

Keywords are weighted heavier if they are in the title tag or a header tag.

Keywords in your title tag are definitely weighted heavier than keywords in the body copy or anywhere else on your site. The Title Tag of each page is probably the single most valuable piece of real estate that you can use. Its also what the search engines show as the clickable link in the search results.

There is also evidence to suggest that hx tags are weighted a bit heavier than the standard formatted body copy. But this is only the case if it's done within reason. Weighting is all about differences. If all your body copy is an h2 then your keywords won't have any more value than the rest of the content. Use your Hx tags sparingly and they will be weighted accordingly.

Keywords are weighted slightly heavier if they are bolded, underlined, italicized.

I think the optimal word here is "slightly." Bolding, underlining or italicizing words can give the search engine an indication that those words are important to the reader because they are being called out differently than the rest of the text. But if you only bold the keywords you are trying to rank for then I think it's pretty easy for the search engines to discount that because you're using it as a tactic rather than as a way to serve your visitors.

But the issue of weighting also comes into play. If all your text is bolded then there is no additional weighting going on at all. That just becomes the baseline. For something to be weighted more than something else it has to be different from the rest.

What if someone searches for the plural or another form of a word but I only have the original word? For example if I have kayak on my page will come up in searches for kayaks or kayaking? If I have kayaking will that come up for kayak?

The search engines are getting pretty good at associating words together. Technically you don't need to have all the various forms of a word on the page in order for the search engines to rank you for it. An imperfect example of this is to run a search for "kayak" on Google. Scroll down a bit and you see this set of results:

In these three results, somewhere halfway down the page or so, do not have the singular version of the word "kayak" in the visible title or description in the search results, but in all cases the words "kayaking" and "kayaks" are bolded. Granted the word "kayak" does appear in the page text but you can see by the bolding that Google is smart enough to figure out the relationship in the word variations.

In some cased you don't even need the actual word on the page at all for it to appear in the search results. If the search engines determine that the content of your page supports a certain word, even if it doesn't appear, then it can still rank. Though I'd think that pages with the word would tend to outrank those without pretty easily.

Assume someone searches for red trucks. I know that if I have the words red and truck anywhere on my page that my page will come up, but will my page be ranked higher if the two words are next to each other and in the same order on my page as opposed to being separated on the page? For example if my page has "buy red trucks" on it will that be ranked higher than having ...red... in one paragraph and ...trucks... in another? I realize that if they search for "red trucks" in quotes like that then it is better to have the words on your page just as searched for but I am not referring to that situation.

If someone searches using quotes, such as "red trucks," then the engines interpret that to indicate searcher only wants to see results that use that phrase as it was searched. Typically pages that do not use those words together as they appear within the quotes won't appear in the search results at all, unless there is a distinct lack of results to display.

Aside from that, you have a better chance of your page appearing in the results if you use the words as they are searched. The problem is you never really know how anything will be searched. Keyword research will give you the most common searches, but just as many searchers will perform a search differently as those who perform the search as it is most common. Therefore it is impossible to get every combination of the searched phrases on the page.

This then gives you the option of using the common phrase on the page but also to be sure to use the words independently of each other, so much as it makes sense to do so. Don't worry about always saying "red trucks" when you can also say "our trucks come in a variety of colors, including red, which is our best seller."

At what point are keywords considered spamming. For example I have a bullet point type of list on my home page that says that I am the only "blank" in "blank" area that provides service x. The words for the service I provide and the area I am located in end up getting repeated a lot. Will I face a penalty? It reads naturally and makes sense.

I think anytime that you use a keyword or a phrase over an over again you'll suffer some. How do you determine if you are using a word too much? Look at it on the page and tell me if a visitor would find it overly redundant. If it's used properly without any hint of overkill then you shouldn't have any problems. However, if it looks like keyword stuffing to the human eye, the search engines will likely consider it keyword stuffing as well.

How the search engines look at keywords really isn't magic. It's simply comes down to giving the visitor what they want. They don't want keyword stuffing or a bunch of keywords bolded on the page. They want information that relates strongly to the search they entered. If you provide that then you're pretty much set.

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by Scott Buresh

"I want to be number one on Google for (insert hyper-competitive keyphrase here)."

It's usually the first thing we hear in terms of search engine optimization - a company wants to be in that coveted top spot on Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN. No matter the industry or specialty, when companies approach us with their desired goals for an SEO campaign, it's usually all about improving their rankings and positions ... and often nothing else. Yes, achieving first page rankings or top spots on the search engines is an incredibly desirable accomplishment to many companies who want immediate and noticeable results. But with such a considerable investment in an SEO campaign, you'd think companies in need of search engine optimization services would also be concerned with their overall ROI, especially in light of the current economy.

Vastly improved (or even #1) rankings are rather easy to achieve in an SEO campaign, even by a novice search engine optimization company. I once wrote an article demonstrating that top rankings were simple - and proved it by optimizing the article for the phrase "Leprechaun Repellent." To this day, that article, on various sites, takes up nine of the top ten spots on Google for the ridiculous phrase. The obvious question, then, is what those rankings ultimately accomplish. And so we peel back the layers of the onion until we get there.

The First Layer - Rankings

Rankings, rankings, rankings. This is by far the most popular metric for any SEO campaign. Occasionally, a search engine optimization company may not be concerned with your bottom line because it can offer guarantees and focus exclusively on achieving this goal (even though, as in the 'Leprechaun' example above, it's really not getting you anywhere significant in the long run).

Rankings by themselves mean little, and the problem with companies obsessed over rankings is that it doesn't demonstrate the usefulness of search engine optimization. For a company website, high rankings are great (and impressive for an SEO campaign), but they are just the first layer of the onion. As any good search engine optimization company will demonstrate, our goal is (and yours should be) to bring and/or improve the levels of high quality traffic to your website, meaning visitors who come to your website via a search are already reasonably interested in your products or services.

The Second Layer - Search-Engine Referred Traffic

Increasing search-referred traffic is not a perfect metric because, if visitors are not converting on your website, there's not a big value proposition to be had. Alone, the metric relies heavily on the right keyphrase selection by your search engine optimization company during the beginning phases of your SEO campaign.

Say that a farming supply company who wanted to be number one on Google for "affordable farming equipment" decided to try a different tactic while attempting to improve its search-engine referred traffic. If the website had been optimized for 'Britney Spears,' for example, traffic levels would undoubtedly be high (if the site ranked well for the term - admittedly a huge challenge), but few visitors would be converting, and business, in turn, would be far from booming. Visitors will jump ship immediately and serve as an immediate reminder of the negative impact that poor phrase selection by your search engine optimization company can have on your long-term ROI.

The Third Layer - Take Rate

Essentially, the take rate refers to the number or percentage of search-referred visitors showing interest in your products or demos (your POA or Point-of-Action). The take rate merely signifies a visitor who demonstrates an interest in your POA, for example, by clicking on a "Contact Us" link. The data you're gauging here is simply overall interest, since not all of the visitors will follow through and actually convert.

Fortunately, there are ways to improve your take rate during the SEO campaign - making the point-of-action blatant and clear on every page is usually the most effective (but overlooked) method. Collaborating with your search engine optimization company to make certain that the primary POA on your website is indeed the most desirable action that a visitor can take is of paramount importance.

The Fourth Layer - Conversion

Strictly speaking, "Conversion" is the percentage of visitors to your website that actually follow through with your POA. Once your search engine optimization company has helped you improve your take rate, you should work on getting more of those people to actually convert. Is your form too long? Do you show a prominent privacy policy promising not to use or sell personal data? Is it a quick, easy process or do people have to jump through hoops? A good search engine optimization company will be able to help you to identify the elements that are serving as barriers to conversion.

The Fifth Layer - Offsite Metrics

If a client allows it, we like to get involved in the nitty-gritty of offsite metrics as part of the SEO campaign. Though the usual search engine optimization company doesn't go this far into the process, this area alone proves invaluable to demonstrating your ROI.

By analyzing offline metrics on a granular level, your search engine optimization company can examine and report on your average dollar sale for search-referred traffic, the average dollar value of each search-referred lead, the average lifetime value of each search-referred lead, and much, much more.

A software system is usually required to report the data acquired during your SEO campaign; we use Salesforce, a leading CRM (customer relationship management) solution that can be implemented to track these statistics for you. Though it requires diligence to analyze (as well as follow leads from cradle to grave), your company can analyze which engines attracted the most visitors, which keyphrases were the most profitable, the value of customers, and retention levels.

More than Rankings

All layers of the onion, so to speak, are important to an SEO campaign, but the closer you get to the actual dollar return, the more accurate your assessment of success or failure will be. Rankings alone are no indication of success. For that matter, neither is search-referred traffic if the visitors don't take an action on the site that can lead to a sale. And when the lead finally comes in, there is no way to track the value unless you follow up with offline metrics to determine exactly how much leads from your website are worth.

These are all base metrics - many campaigns are much more involved and use thousands of different data points. But if you are new to the conversion/ROI game and are thinking about hiring a search engine optimization company, make sure that its goal is to be attuned to your bottom line.

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