Global SEO

Site-wide SEO can be added in many ways, which are then consistent on every page. Doing this helps to reinforce messages through the whole site – but there is a place for site-wide SEO, and a place for page by page optimization.

Some of the elements for site-wide optimization include:

• Navigation links. These should be the same through the site, and can be optimized in a way that helps the whole site.
• Header alt tags. It is standard for them to be the same through the site.
• Location lists – if you are specific to a regional location, you can put a single location list either at the bottom of the content, or at the bottom of either the left, or right sidebar. ONE list, no more.
• Company info – this should be either at the bottom of the right sidebar, top right corner, or the very bottom of every page with the copyright info. This can include location and an address if you want to come up in local searches.
• Your slogan, or a tagline. This may happen in an alt-tag, or a text tagline.
• CSS Formatting in the template. This is especially critical for dynamic sites, where different parts of the page have a standard formatting. Your page headings are formatted standard – make sure they are in H1 tags, and they can be easily optimized page by page. This applies to many parts of the page.

There are others as well. The point being that when you create a template, consider optimization in the mix, and when you are placing things throughout the site, think about whether they will aid in the optimization, and how you can make them do so better, without getting flagged for over optimizing.

Do not place keyword lists or other black hat elements on every page, you’ll just hurt yourself. Just optimize intelligently using sitewide items in a conservative and logical way.

The Difference Between Professional and Do It Yourself

To me, it is part of the American Dream that anyone can start a business if they are determined enough, even if they don’t have money. It takes an unbelievable amount of determination though, and a huge amount of time and grit to do it.

I’m a firm believer in Do It Yourself bootstrapping. I got where I am that way. But I also know the price. And it is a heavy one.

• The first toll it takes is learning. You don’t just have to DO the job yourself, you have to take the time to learn to do it right. And even then, there are things you won’t learn except through experience – but at least you can learn to avoid the most serious errors if you give it the time and study that it takes.
• The second is time to do it. You’ll take longer doing it yourself than a pro would.
• The third one is professionalism. You’ll never be able to do as good a job as an experience professional, and it will show in ways that you won’t be able to recognize for years. Unfortunately, your customers can tell the difference – even if they can’t define it, they can feel it.
• The fourth is effectiveness. It may be effective enough to get your foot in the door, or it may not. Some people seem to be able to pull it off, others do not. You won’t know which you are until you are a year into it. Literally, a full year. Because it will take you that long to learn how to do everything yourself, and then to see whether it will work or not. And then if it doesn’t work, you are back at the beginning – we are frequently approached by people who tried to do it themselves and find themselves a year later without any appreciable business to show for all their effort.
• The fifth, again, is time. Your business will grow more slowly. If you are doing everything yourself, and trying to run the daily operations of your business, then your business will grow more slowly. You’ll take two years to get where you could get in six months to a year with some help.
• The sixth is mistakes. You are going to make embarrassing and costly mistakes. We all do, but when you try to do everything, and learn everything (some of which you may not be highly suited to), you’ll make more mistakes. Those mistakes will cost you monetarily, and in more time – good training can keep you from making the ones that blitz your business, but many sources offering training aren’t even addressing many of those issues.

If that is the only way you can get started, then do it. But be prepared for the reality of learning it, and for the inevitable effects that you must deal with. Many people start this way, because they know it is the only way they can, and because they are determined to succeed no matter what. Others start this way out of the mistaken idea that it is cheaper, or that the things they are trying to do are easy. If they were easy, there would not be entire professions dedicated to doing them!

Nowhere is this difference more prevalent than in Web Design and SEO. These two areas are often perceived of as the “easy” things, because there are companies out there telling you it is easy. It isn’t.

Yes, you can do it yourself. But you won’t get the same results that you would if you hired competent help. So make that choice if you have to… But don’t make that choice out of the mistaken idea that it is cheaper or that it is just as effective. Do it Yourself means Compromise. If you can afford to not compromise, then your business will develop faster with the right help.

In the mean time, I’ll continue to try to educate people in how to do it themselves in the right way, and I’ll keep developing new service options to help people afford the help they need if they can’t do it themselves. Because I believe in the American Dream, even though I do know what it costs to achieve it.

What is SEO Worth?

Some small business owners gasp when they are quoted a price for SEO, even when it is a relatively low one. I can understand gasping when you really don’t have it – I mean, I’ve been there too. But to begrudge it when you CAN afford it just isn’t wise. Those who complain of the price for low end SEO are not grasping the financial picture.

• Without good SEO, a site will fail to gain traffic unless that traffic is paid for, visitor by visitor.
• The site may grow to about 200 visitors per month, then stop. That isn’t generally enough to get buyers.
• The site may bring lots of traffic, but no one may buy – because good SEO also helps get buyers, not browsers.

Usually the effects of SEO are cummulative. That means that they’ll build, month by month. So your investment (and it is an investment) yields increasing returns each month for many months.

So let’s do a little elemental math…

You want your website to earn HOW much this year?

• $200? Who am I kidding, right?
• $2000? Well, it’s something, but not enough to justify the effort…
• $20,000? That’s sounding a little more reasonable…
• More? Sure! Bring it on!

Do you really think you are going to earn more without putting something IN? Usually SEO accounts for 25-50% of the startup costs of a website, if we are talking about a low end website. It should return more than it costs, within about a year.

Our rule of thumb for our clients is that if we cannot project, with a fair degree of certainty, that a business will get at least a 200% ROI from SEO expenditures, that we won’t recommend it. But we generally expect to see far better than that. Done right, good SEO will give you more like a 10 times Return on Investment, often more.

So why would you feel unwilling to spend several hundred dollars on the basics? The simplest equation is to be willing to spend about one quarter of what you expect to earn (that is profit, not gross), on good SEM (the whole search engine equation including site optimization), the first year. In later years, that may drop some, but it won’t ever stop, because SEO does change over time, and it will need to be adjusted at least once a year, more frequently if you are in a highly competitive niche, or if you want aggressive growth.

The real trick is to get the right professional – one who can give you something that will bring a return, even if you have a low budget, and that will give you a higher return if you have a higher budget.

SEO doesn’t just pay for itself. When it is done wisely, it provides a higher ROI than almost any other marketing method, up to a point. After that point, the ROI declines. So get a pro that understands the most important things to do – the ones that bring the highest results. And then do what they tell you to do for follow up marketing.

Nothing else will give you as much, for as little.

The Problem With Flash

I’ve made my peace with Flash in some instances. It can enhance some sites, if used properly. But I still have a major problem with people offering “Flash Websites” without telling their clients what the drawback is.

There are two primary problems with Flash:

1. People don’t like it if it is used wrong. They don’t like Flash intros (they waste time), and they don’t like things that move and jump to much. That cute little button animation that makes them say “ooh” (a very short “ooh”, by the way) the first time, ends up annoying them by the 10th time.
2. Search engines can’t read Flash. That means anything in a Flash animation is invisible to a search engine. That may change someday, but at the current time, I’ve yet to see a Flash site rank for any content within the Flash animations.

So the real problems come in from the three biggest improper uses of Flash – those uses which result from a designer’s desire to do it just because they can, or a business owner’s impressionability with moving objects.

1. Intro pages. Flash splash page that serves as the home page of a website, with no meaningful content, just something that moves. That makes your home page annoying to visitors, and invisible to search engines. They don’t pay much attention to the metatags, so you can’t compensate that way.
2. Flash Navigation. That will make the REST of the site invisible to the search engines also, because they can’t see the links that lead to the other pages. Flash Navigation is a marketing killer for a microbusiness. Cutsy flipping buttons are also annoying after the first flip or two.
3. Flash Websites. When the entire site is done in Flash, you’ve just hidden your site content from the search engines. You’ve also made it unfriendly for the disabled – this is especially true if your text is hidden in a Flash animation. If your site consists of nothing but Flash, it may not even have more than one page – so it looks like a one page website with no content to the search engines – not real helpful!

If you have the money to overcome this through backlink building and other tactics, then it doesn’t matter so much (except for the accessibility issue, which is still a major concern – but maybe you have the money to stand a lawsuit too…). But if you are a shoestring startup or a struggling microbusiness who needs the biggest bang for the buck, then Flash ain’t it! It will cost you more to start with, and then go on costing you in lost traffic for a very long time.

Worth understanding how it works, because it can save you a boodle if you do.

The Tenacity of the SEO Myth

Myths start in one of two ways:

• Someone misinterprets something that was said, and determines that a totally illogical pattern must be observed. Thus we see things like the “leaking pagerank” myth – a totally illogical and rather absurd theory.
• A problem develops with the way search engines index pages, as they change their operational methods. SEO gurus quickly devise a solution, and begin publishing it about the time that the search engines remove the need for the solution. The solution continues to be broadcast by the unknowing, unthinking, or unscrupulous.

The SEO world is rife with myths, and no one has the courage really to stand up and declare them as such. There are two basic reasons for that, also:

• Greed – if they tell you it is not needed, they can’t charge you to do it. This is why many URL myths have hung on so long, many years past the point at which it was no longer an issue.
• Uncertainty – SEO is like driving a submarine with half the instruments non-functional and nothing but a 200 year old map for reference. You hope the remaining ones will tell you where the rocks are, but if they don’t, you pull out that 200 year old map in the remote hope that it will show you where they are before you hit them. Nobody knows for sure about some things, and accurate measurements are nearly impossible. So they don’t want to quit doing something just in case it did matter after all, and they don’t want to tell anyone else not to do it lest they are criticized.

Add to that the fact that SEO instruction is like feathers on the wind. You send out instructions and they cannot be recalled, even if the rules change the next week – and usually they do! So half of everybody out there is faithfully implementing old instructions.

What makes me maddest though, is when I go to a major website, and find that their SEO “guru” is not even a practicing professional – a good deal of the information they have there is so outdated that anyone following it would be wasting their time, if not actually harming themselves. We are talking MAJOR companies whom people think OUGHT to know, so they do what they say… everybody hollering not to has lower credibility.

I don’t think it is ever going to get better. But I do know we need to be on guard and make sure the information we are using is up to date, and actually promoted by someone who does this for a living, and not by someone who theorized wholesale.

We also need to remember the rules:

• People first.
• Accuracy, not manipulation.
• Common sense over speculation.

The Basics, in Dynamic Sites

Most dynamic site types have a way to put in Title Tags, Keyword and Description tags, and Alt-tags. Most also have a way of putting in Titles for links and images. And many have control over URL output, in one way or another, though sometimes that control is limited.

The trick is learning how they do it. Usually, somewhere near where you create the content for the page, there is a way to also control the tags. Image tags are controlled when you put the link in, though they are usually called “description” instead of “alt-tag”.

Usually the hardest one to control is the page title. It is often set by the name of the page or article. That is ok most of the time, but sometimes is not powerful enough.

In some, you control the title tag in other ways. It pays to read instructions for this, because of all the fussy things you can do page by page, this is one of the more important ones. Go to the forums if you cannot find it in the manual.

We’ve found that virtually all content management and cart systems that are mature enough to actually be usable, DO allow control over essential SEO functions. But you have to learn where they control them.

SEO control is no longer a reason to avoid dynamic site systems. It is a reason to learn to use them well.

Google Bowling – Have you been struck?

When you hear rumblings of negative SEO, and your rankings suddenly drop, it is easy to think you’ve been struck by someone else in the nasty game of Google Bowling. Whether you have, or have not, the solutions are the same, and you start by looking not outside, but inside, for the fix.

It is hard to tell whether someone else has played dirty unless you see a bunch of shady links to your site blossom overnight, or unless you see other sites taking the lead featuring your content, etc. But it can almost be a waste of time to look for those without first looking at your own site.

Most of the time, the root cause is on your own site. Even if someone else does play dirty, they can’t get far unless you help them out! Like the Count of Monte Cristo, who was able to bring his enemies down because of their own actions.

Look first for keyword stuffing, and second for pages that lack meaningful content. Make sure those things are not present before you start looking further afield. Then, look at backlinks that you had that might have been devalued, causing a drop in your rankings.

In all cases where we’ve been called in to address a drop in rankings, three elements were present:

1. Keyword stuffing on pages. This was often put in three or four years ago, and not removed when search engine guidelines tightened progressively. Sometimes it has been blatant and very obvious, other times it has been more subtle.
2. Lack of meaningful content on pages that should have had good content. Your site gets best traffic when all pages bring traffic in their own right, and that is dependent on good content.
3. Backlinks on low quality directories or paid directories which had formerly given a boost to the site, but which have recently been devalued.

Clean up your site first, then look elsewhere. It will do you more good, and will benefit you more long term.

Leveraging Social Networking

Is it marketing, or is it SEO? Somewhere in the realm between, lies Search Engine Marketing, which is marketing targeted at increasing search engine traffic to your site.

Social networks can help with that. People with a lot of connections or “friends” on social networks seem to get a higher advantage than those with few. That is because each time you make a connection, your link then appears on their profile too.

So it makes sense to get more connections. Only you can’t do it haphazardly or hastily, or it can hurt you. And you don’t want to abuse it, because like link exchanges, search engines will disregard what they think are unnatural patterns.

When you know someone from one social networking site, it makes sense to link up with them on others though. That’s usually pretty hard, because they don’t tell you where else they are networking.

That’s one reason we added a feature to help with that to our new network, Front Porch Folks. Because it makes sense to leverage the social networking connections of people you already know. I’m not sure how easily you can do that in other venues, especially since many of your connections will be networking on sites that charge a fee, and you can only afford so many of THOSE before you go broke! At $10 to $30 per month, you can’t afford more than two or three, and those ONLY if they work!

Social networking only helps though, if it brings people back to your website, or causes them to pick up the phone or email you to increase your business. If you find that you have a profile that is popular, but that does not help your business bottom line, then you probably have left out something critical somewhere.

Connections can help increase the pagerank to your profile, but that will only help your website if you have a countable link back to it, or if other people put your link in their profile. Not many networks have that kind of capability, but a few do.

Think about not just networking where you are, but about networking your networking. You’ll get more out of it.

Rewriting the Marketing Equation

If the rules change, sometimes you have to figure out how to write new ones. We’ve been trying to write our own from the start – trying to find unique ways to leverage advantages to overcome disadvantages.

One of the great things about SEO is that it always let you do that. We are entering a more competitive and more uncertain era, and it requires a new approach to creatively rewriting the rules once again.

We don’t know all the solutions yet, and we may never will. But social networking plays a big part, as does information marketing, which is something more than just blanket article marketing. And it all hinges on common sense, and integrity. Gee, when have we said that before.

And with that stated, I’d like to invite you to come and visit our new networking site – it is something a little different, easy to use, and will become much more.

http://www.frontporchfolks.com – Check out the folks, and come sit on the porch and get to know the neighbors.

Together, we can do what we can’t do alone.

Recession SEO

It is coming. There is nothing that is going to stop it other than national energy exploration and development, and that is going to take time, so it is going to come – don’t kid yourself into thinking that our government can, or WILL head it off, or that some democrat throwing money at it is going to help it. Too much money has already been thrown where it should not have been. It is coming, and we are going to have to deal with it, and your business is going to sink or swim based in large part on the marketing decisions that you make.

SEO is a critical web survival strategy for recession planning. It is cost effective, and it lasts when it is done right (done wrong, it has to be adjusted all the time to compensate for change, done right, it will be fairly stable and require only minor adjustments).

In planning to survive in a declining economy, you should do two things where SEO are concerned:

1. Assess where you are. This means assess your search engine positionings, and assess the on-page factors. It is absolutely critical that you assess for over-optimization, and make sure that your site is not harboring tactics which were acceptable two years ago, but which are now considered black hat – the presence of those could torpedo you overnight. Also assess to make sure that the logical and stable things have been done to your site where practical.
2. Plan for where you want to go. Implement a solid and reliable backlink campaign, content building campaign, and regular assessment plan. This will help you to adjust to changes in the market as the economic dynamics change.

Your target market is likely to shift. That may require some adjustment in your page targeting. Your competition may get more aggressive, and you may need to optimize a bit more than usual. Your competition may indulge in negative SEO tactics, which means you need to keep your site squeaky clean. Your product or service offerings may need to be adjusted for new market dynamics, or your marketing messages may need to be modified. Either one of those can result in a need for SEO adjustment.

SEO does NOT need to be expensive. It is one of the most cost effective things to do, because you get a variety of good results from each change you make, and while some ongoing adjustment and backlinking is needed, for the most part, you optimize the pages, and then let that optimization work for you for the next year or so, until it is time to tweak it. And when you tweak it, the foundation you built the first time is still there, you don’t have to do it all over again.

SEO is even more important during economic hard times. We’ll be experiencing a recession in a market environment that has never been experienced before, but we can see from the past the relationships to the current technologies, and make accurate assumptions about what is going to matter. And SEO is GOING to matter… a lot.

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