If you were banned tomorrow, would your website survive?

As Google gets harder and harder to compete within, you must also ask the question, is Google optimization always going to be the most important thing for a microbusiness?

Are there businesses now, that might actually do better optimizing for everything else, and kissing Google goodbye?

Is 1% of 50% better than 50% of 10%? In other words, if you can only get 1% or less of the traffic from a particular search on Google, and Google gets 50% of the total traffic for that term, is it wise to go after that 1% to the exclusion of all else (which some gurus do), or is it better to let that 1% go and optimize for the 50% of the traffic you could get from another search engine (or two) which get 10% of the total traffic? In some SEO issues, you DO have to make that choice (not in all), and I think that many people just ASSUME Google is going to deliver more, without factoring in competition and ease of optimization.

These are not things I am recommending, only suggesting that we ought to be thinking about them. Instead of making assumptions based on our perceptions of a year or two ago, we ought to be taking a long hard look at where Google is going, at the fact that most of the competition focuses on Google exclusively, and on the fact that Google is slowly losing ground in the American markets at least. It begs some reassessment, and a watchful eye.

Google may recover. They may decide to play by rules that at least have common sense behind them, and they may go back to a more open search engine marketing philosophy. But I doubt the second two will happen – companies rarely go backward once they start down the corporate big-brother road. If you believe, like I do, that their chances of recovery are tied directly to the second two, you may also doubt that they WILL recover their market share in the US search markets.

It is worth thinking about implications – and alternate strategies, and ways to gain a balance between new businesses and old that does not depend on Google.

No. You should not.

Not online, anyway. It isn’t as though someone might forget a hardhad or trip into a hole if they wander around and happen to stumble onto your site. In fact, if you do your job right, they’ll see what you have, and never see a sign of the new stuff until it is there – unless of course you have a sidebar announcement of an impending launch date of a new product line, or similar thing that you want to build up to, and even then, NO “under construction” pages!

Pages like that make you look unprepared. They make you look LESS professional, not more. And they don’t do any good for SEO either. I don’t know that they actually HURT, but I’d bet they do, because a search engine is perfectly able to tell when a page has nothing on it but a huge “coming soon” notice.  So they not only don’t bother indexing the page, it is conceivable that it might affect the indexing frequency or relevance of the rest of your site. It is a potential “influential factor”. They are looking for content rich sites, not space holders.

Whether it hurts SEO or not, it does for certain look bad to your customers, and influences whether they will return or not. If a page is not ready for people, don’t show it.

It is rather sad. The site owner didn’t do anything wrong. They just hired the wrong person. We call them an “SEO Vandal”. Because what they did was the electronic equivalent of vandalism. The site was destroyed by removal of all meaningful content, and the content was replaced by keyword strings, commas and all. One unintelligent act on the part of someone who had been hired to help, and now the site owner is paying for it in having to pay again to have the site redone, and in lost business.

If your site is penalized, you cannot just bring it back to where it was. You have to clean it until it squeaks. It seems that Google will ignore a site until it raises a red flag – even borderline things will be ignored until enough of them mount up, or until something really over the line occurs. If they slap it, it goes down hard. It won’t be restored to grace just by making a gesture. The whole thing has to be polished with no signs of anything borderline.

That is really hard to do. Especially in the current equivocal and changing SEO environment. When you have to get a penalty removed though, the best approach is a highly conservative one.

It means using words less aggressively than you might otherwise. It means making every single thing on the page not only completely natural, but making sure that there is no reason why anyone would ever consider that it was the least bit manipulative.

Whatever the rules usually are about how many keywords to use, set them a little lower. Whatever the standards typically are about optimization, reign them in a notch.

It is a hard thing to do. Especially for someone trained to push business to the limits to get all out of it that you can. But it is the best option.

It is far better to regain part of the lost ground than none of it. Only time can bring the whole back, and it has to happen through conservative action, and a great deal of patience.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I have never been in favor of manipulative tactics, and never will. But I am in favor of smart strategies where people can learn to do things in a way that helps their business grow on a budget – and I’m in favor of rules that do not reward people on the basis of money, instead of on the basis of merit.

So recently, with some of the things Google is saying, one has to wonder just what their goal is. And just what sort of intellectual schizophrenia is causing them to talk themselves in circles trying to explain and justify their policies! It is clear that they really have no idea of what “good” linking really is, or how to define it as opposed to “bad” linking.

Too many links is bad. How many is too many? Maybe more than 100 a month. Maybe more than that, maybe less.

Paid links are bad. Only what is a paid link? Paid directories, paid links on private sites, any link you gave something of value for, including template links, and any other kind of viral links, presumably, because, after all, where is the difference between a template link and an article byline link? Someone liked your work – they picked it up, and helped you promote your site in return. Fair, and certainly a recommendation since they’d not republish bad work. Only Google doesn’t think so.

Irrelevant links are bad. But what is irrelevant? Who is to judge that? Computers are notoriously bad at language use, and even worse when it comes to human nature. Is a homeschool link on a work at home site irrelevant? The topics do not match! But ask any homeschooling work at home mom and she’ll tell you they are very relevant!

Cross linking is bad – though I cannot see why it should be. It is natural that anyone who owns more than one site would want to leverage the marketing of one to benefit the other. To NOT do so is bad business. So Google is punishing people for being wise business owners? Sure, it can be abused – when you have 50 trashy sites with no content interlinked, that’s bad cross linking. But when you have 20 sites, each filled with high quality, custom written content, with topics that overlap, where is the abuse?

Reciprocal links are devalued. If the sites are high quality, and the links coming off them are similarly high quality, they should not be. Links are supposed to be a recommendation – a trade is a fair recommendation for a quality site. Good sites don’t link to bad ones. That means the link passed inspection and was worth recommending. And that is bad, why?

Good quality links still count. Though I don’t know what that could be… After you eliminate viral linking, link trades, directory links, cross links, anything Google’s computers think is not an exact match, and put a cap on how many you can build each month, then throw in all of the fussy and picky rules about how pages can be optimized now, and what it means is this:

A new site has no tools with which to promote itself other than paying a high price for traffic. Little sites cannot begin to catch up with the competition unless they have a high budget – which means, effectively, that they cannot hope to compete, because most have limited funds.

Google gave the impression that they were about accurate indexing of the web. That what they cared most about in a site was whether it added to the substance of the web. We now know, they only said that as long as saying it added to the substance of their bank accounts. In a shakier economy, when the easy ad dollars are gone, Google has changed from the “Equalizer” to the “Terminator”.

The web was the one place where someone could get ahead by sheer hard work and by a good idea and good ethics. If you did it right, and worked it smart, you could compete against anyone because your idea was good and your execution of it was intelligent.

No more. Google has decided that the dollar should rule. If you have a good idea, and a low budget, linkbuilding is now such a minefield of inconsistencies that you’ll need a pro to optimize your site just to have a fighting chance and getting found.

1. They all had very low marketing budgets. PPC requires that you invest a certain amount just to figure out what will work, then fine tune, then, IF you can find a successful combination, you can profit from it.
2. Most have had low “profit per order” averages. With average profit per order of less than $10, PPC will never work (some quick math shows why). It is hard to make it work unless you have a fairly healthy profit per order.
3. They could get far more bang for the buck, with long term momentum, from other forms of marketing.

PPC is easy to do the math for. By doing some quick math ahead of time, you can figure out pretty fast whether it is going to be even a possibility:

First, calculate your average profit per order. If someone comes into your jewelry store and orders a necklace and two bracelets, which cost a total of $75, and you make a 10% profit from that (remember to calculate actual profit, not just retail minus wholesale), then you made $7.50. If that order amount is average, you are out of the running with PPC, you don’t even need to go further because it is less than $10.

If the average is more than $10, then go to step two – calculate your average profit per VISITOR. That is, divide the amount of profit for a specific period by the total number of site visitors over the same period. If that is less than $.5, you are dead in the water – if it is less than $.50, then it is going to be VERY hard to make PPC work – and may still be impossible for YOUR particular industry.

Next, find out what the average keywords are going for in your market. Some are priced higher than others, so if you are in a highly competitive field, you may have to spend a LOT to get traffic. If you are in a less competitive field, you may get away with less. NOTHING goes for less than $.05 per click, but many go for MUCH higher. Base your math on a low average.

If the low average cost per click is higher than your average profit per VISITOR, then you won’t be able to make it work. At all.

You must compare it with average profit per visitor, because only a small percentage of those clicks are going to even result in sales.

There is another factor also – and that is Quality. For many small businesses, the quality of visitors from PPC is lower than from organic traffic. Some of this has to do with the quality of the ad, some of it has to do with the fact that the psychology of people who click ads is different than the psychology of people who click on organic links. But I’ve seen a PPC campaign where traffic came, but no one bought, in spite of tweaking, and that is not uncommon.

Think about it for your particular business and industry. Do the math first, and you are less likely to get burned by a neat sounding idea that wasn’t ever going to work.

This happened with desktop computing environments also – DOS was hard to use, it took someone with a high degree of skill to use it. Then GUI interfaces came along, and some tasks got easier. But the parts that made it easier, made it harder to do the deeper level stuff. With each improvement in ease of use for the non-techie, the technical stuff got buried deeper and troubleshooting got more difficult.

Websites have gone through a similar divergence. It is easier and easier to create a website. But it is getting harder and harder to create a GOOD one that WORKS. And it takes even more expertise to create, maintain, or troubleshoot the increasing layers of structure which make up a website. We can do MORE with one, but it takes a true expert to keep a professional website running underneath.

This is happening with SEO in a progressive way. Installing metatags and alt tags is now a simpler process – almost anyone can do it in nearly any web editing environment. You don’t have to know code to do it.

But getting in GOOD tags is increasingly difficult. The factors which determine good usage, and the increasing competitive issues make it more challenging to do it RIGHT – right, meaning effective.

The number of things which now affects SEO is much greater than what influenced it just three years ago. And it is growing, all the time. Hence, the divergence – the simple things are getting simpler, but the complicated things are getting more and more complicated.

I do not see this getting better. The more we rely on computers to do our work for us, the greater the need to automate complex tasks. And each automation of those tasks leads to another layer of complexity in the specializations which create that automation in the first place. Each time we make it easier for anybody to insert a bit of optimization, we increase the competition, and search engines respond by including more factors in their equations as people find it easy to use, or abuse, the new capability. Divergence will continue to increase.

Is there a solution? I don’t think so. Beyond keeping up with the more critical aspects, and keeping a finger on what makes the biggest difference in monetary returns, we can only recognize the divergence, and develop strategies to cope – to develop strategic partnerships which help us define our focus in a way that gets both sides of the job done, no matter which side we are on.

“Create a traffic funnel to drive customers to your website!!!”

We hear stuff like this daily from so called marketing “experts”. “Driving traffic” is one of the current buzzwords for marketing online, often used in SEO as a hook to get people to pay for SEO. And I have a real problem with it!

I think that it is dehumanizing. It designates site visitors as masses to be manipulated like pieces on a gameboard, rather than feeling, thinking beings. It takes the relationship and caring aspect right out of the whole marketing equation. And that, is deadly.

You drive a car – something that has no mind of its own. You drive cattle – beasts who do not possess the ability to truly reason or choose. You do not drive people! Traffic is not just numbers on a list – it is PEOPLE!

“But it’s just words.” you may say.

“It doesn’t mean that at all.” you may protest.

But it does mean that. Words have meanings – just because we repeat them frequently does not mean they have lost their meaning. When we use dehumanizing words, they impact our sense of other people. We begin to think more about numbers than about the people themselves. We lose touch with the very people we need to understand in order to market well. That becomes visible in our actions toward our customers in ways we don’t even see, because we have dulled our sense of respect through use of dehumanizing terms. They do feel it, and they do notice.

If it is just about numbers, then you are losing the greatest advantage you have as a small business owner. Corporations can do numbers far better than you can. The only advantage small businesses have is that they can do PEOPLE far better than corporations can! Why would you want to dull your sense of understanding toward those whom you are serving, when it represents the largest asset you have in the battle to win a market share from companies who can always do it faster, bigger, and cheaper than you can?

Marketing is about understanding needs, desires, and feelings. It is about meeting them in a way that works – not about manipulating, but about presenting something to an individual in a way that they can understand, then delivering on the promise. If the delivery cannot equal the promise, then the marketing is not done right!

Speaking of your customers in the same terms you use to describe cattle is not a good idea! Give them the dignity of referring to them in ways that acknowledge their differences, and which are considerate of their needs. It does filter down, they do feel the difference, and it will affect your business.

I realized about a year ago, that there are simply too many marketing tasks. You just cannot do them all! But the great thing is, that you can choose the ones that are most suitable for you, and for reaching your target market. Do those, and forget the rest.

I just can’t use Ryze, and LinkedIn, and FaceBook, and MySpace, and YouTube, and Blogging, and Twitter, and Podcasts, and Article Marketing, and Forum Posts, and FastPitch, and DirectMatches, and GoDaddy Connections, and Comment Posts, and get directory links every week, and swap links with my acquaintances, and who knows what else! I don’t have TIME for all of that!

It is really ok to not do it, just because everyone says you should! Find a way to consistently build backlinks, and stick to it. When you get comfortable with that, add another way. When you feel like there is no room to add another, it is ok to NOT add any more!

Just make sure you assess on a regular basis to see if what you are doing is working. If it is, then keep it up, or do more if you have time. If it is not, then either modify it, or drop it, and try something else. Often, HOW you do it makes a huge difference in success, so it is worth asking other people how they make it work before you drop it and walk away.

Good backlinks do help. You really need to consistently build them if you want traffic to your site. But it is ok to say that enough is enough, and to decide that something isn’t right for your business!

It is even more impressive to them when I explain that by doing their SEO right, we kill two birds with one stone – we meet two needs, without increasing costs.  And there, is one of my “trade secrets” for getting contracts of a certain type.

If you understand what makes good SEO, and what makes a page ADA compliant, it becomes immediately clear that the two needs are almost completely identical. When you follow the rule of putting people first, good optimization makes a page almost 100% ADA compliant – the exception is when you have audio or video as part of your site, where you do have to provide alternate forms of those items (generally a transcript is considered acceptable), or when you have scripts on the page that require an alternate display (usually that alternate display also helps with SEO).

Here are the basics of ADA compliance for MicroWebmasters:

1. Most obviously, use alt tags on any images that are important to the overall message of the site. Make them human understandable and friendly, NEVER use them for keyword stuffing!
2. Use text links whenever possible for primary navigation. When you must use image links, make sure you use alt-tags in the images which clearly state what the link is.
3. Avoid excessive use of Javascript, Flash, Ajax, and other scripts which would interfere with interpretation of the page by a screen reader. If you do use those items, provide an alternate way of achieving the function.
4. Make sure contact email is machine readable, or machine executable. That doesn’t mean you have to have a bare email address on your site, it means avoiding encoding of email addresses that makes them non-machine readable, or providing a good form that can be used by someone using text reader software.
5. Give your page good contrast between text and backgrounds. This probably should be listed first, but it is actually less of an accessibility issue than it is a good design issue. Dark on light is easier to read than light on dark. Avoid low contrast, “vibrating” colors, or busy backgrounds behind text.
6. Keep your text sizes readable. Too small is a strain for many people. Generally a size 10 font (14px) is about as small as you want to go. Very small text size is a strain for more than just the legally blind, it is a hardship for about half the population!
7. Use common methods to keep the page readable in unexpected situations. Make sure it is readable if the stylesheet does not load. Make sure that it is readable if background images do not load. Include other basic failsafes to ensure that it is usable if something doesn’t work the way you think it should.
8. Provide an alternate for any audio or video that are an integral part of the site. A text transcript is acceptable.

The basics of ADA accessibility are pretty simple, and are naturally present when a site has been intelligently designed and optimized. Accessibility, like SEO, comes back to text. If the site is understandable with text only, then it will help with search engines, and people with visual or auditory limitations.