Divergence - Easy Gets Easier, Hard Gets Harder

We are seeing technological divergence in all areas of the web, including SEO. The easy things get easier, while the harder things get harder.

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.

Abbreviations or Full Names for SEO?

Do you use the whole name, or the abbreviation for SEO? Or do you use both? And if you use both, where do you use which?

The answer, like so many things in SEO, is both simple, and complex. The short answer is, It Depends.

If the keyword is a location, use both, and it does not really matter where you use which one, overall. Just use one or the other, in a natural way, through the site. Search engines though, are now generally smart enough to know that Wyoming and WY are the same thing.

If it is a company abbreviation, only use the abbreviation if it is commonly searched on. Otherwise, you may be better off using the full name - it has more impact.

Other common abbreviations are best used alternately with the full name - the key to this is to not overdo. Don’t get repetitious in your desire to load the page with BOTH terms. If it does not read naturally, then you did not do it right!

Think in the way that your site visitors are most likely to think, and then use what they are most likely to use. Provide alternates, but do not feel obligated to give them equal weight. It isn’t worth running analysis over - keep it natural, and use common sense first.

When Did Customers Become Cattle?

“Drive traffic to your site!!!”

“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.

Recession SEO

Coping with an economic downturn in business has two aspects in preparing:

1. Make sure you are in good shape now. If there are things you know you need to do to stabilize your business, get them done. Those in better shape will more likely weather the storm without serious consequence.
2. Watch for changes in your stats, and be ready to react if you experience a downturn for two months in a row that is not due to typical seasonal changes.

SEO is first, about common sense. Doing what gets the biggest results for the least amount of effort, first. Recession does not change that rule. Nor does it change the fact that you optimize for people first - in fact, it makes that issue even more important.

As competition for customers gets more aggressive, you can expect your competitors to pay more attention to the finer points. This means it will be harder for you to maintain a position.  You may have to utilize ethical back door tactics more than before, or you may need to move to the next level of SEO sooner.

You can also expect more of your competitors to resort to “negative seo”. This is when they do things to HARM your site, rather than doing things to elevate their own. You cannot pinpoint who is doing it, nor can you prove that they have harmed you, so if this happens, there may be no recourse. Until Google decides to protect site owners against this kind of tactic, the possibility will be there.

The one thing you must NOT do, is panic, or get desperate. Desperate people make foolish decisions, and SEO is a field where there are all sorts of invitations to make those unwise decisions! Do not make any attempt to manipulate search engines. Your goal is to increase the accuracy of  the indexing - through honorable tactics.

Be willing to put in some work building a reputation, and be patient in allowing your business to build momentum. Those factors are part of every business, but during economic hard times, it may be harder to gain that momentum - so watch your stats for TRENDS. You should see gradual increases if you are marketing and optimizing properly. If your results plateau, then it is time to reassess.

Remember that the end goal is not just TRAFFIC, it is HIGH QUALITY traffic, that delivers paying customers. Anyone who tells you that SEO does not affect site conversions does not understand how to do it properly - Good SEO takes customer conversion into account, and seeks to target visitors who want what you have, and to create good copy which appeals to people first.

It is inevitable that the web world will become more aggressive in the coming months, even without the high likelihood that we are heading for economic hardship. Smart business owners will get their websites in shape now, and then watch their stats for signs of change, so they can catch and adjust early when it may be relatively inexpensive to do so.

Don’t Say “Welcome”

I’ve encountered numerous sites which have opening text which reads something like this:

Welcome to our store! We have a lot of really great products for you to browse through. Please come in and look around, we’re really glad you’re here!

Bad text. For SEO, and for people, that text just used three sentences to say absolutely nothing of value.

The goal in the first sentence is to tell people why they can benefit from being there, not to ramble about YOU.

“Welcome” is a useless word in the web world, for the most part. Businesses that earn, don’t, as a rule, use it. There are a limited number of words that you have, with which to catch the attention of your reader, and impact the search engines, and those words primarily fall within the first heading, and the first paragraph of the site. You’d better use them wisely, to get an effective message across. “Welcome”, is about how YOU feel. The first sentences should be about how THEY feel.

I’m not talking about telling them WHAT to feel. I’m talking about giving a high impact message that helps IDENTIFY with their needs, and that lets them know quickly whether they’ve come to the right place or not.  That involves keywords, to be certain, but it also involves appealing sentences that give those keywords meaning to the reader.

On a website, “welcome” IS an important MESSAGE. But it isn’t something you SAY. It is something you indicate by getting to the point, by being considerate and giving them what they came looking for in a fast, intuitive, and logical manner. “Welcome”, then, becomes less of a WORD, and more of a way of thinking - comfortable navigation, pleasing colors and arrangements, words and graphics that give a cohesive message and help the visitor get what they want easily.

Your website should, in fact, welcome the visitor in, make them feel valued, and cared about. So make sure your first sentence gives that message by appealing to their needs and desires. Get to the point - with high impact, meaningful phrases. This will increase the value to search engines, and help to convert visitors to customers more effectively as well.

Leveraging Location in SEO

I’ve seen all extremes where location on pages for SEO is concerned. Some people ignore it entirely, others emphasize it over anything else. The issue is not as simple as saying there is one rule for every site, because there isn’t.

Whether or not location is important as an aspect of SEO depends largely on your business focus. If you cater to a local customer base, then location is very important. If you cater to a national, or international customer base, then it is less important.

Sometimes, when you have a dual customer base - local for those who prefer to work with someone local, and national or international for those who are willing to work long distance, it is a matter of balancing location references.

Consider - if I emphasize Wyoming in my website too much, I may in fact get traffic for people looking for a Wyoming Web Designer. But I may lose national clients who see the word “Wyoming” and assume that we do not serve clients elsewhere. Not a good thing!  Especially since the potential for Wyoming clients is so much smaller than the potential for national ones - this is taking into consideration that Wyoming clients will convert more easily than national clients. Wyoming is just not a populous state.

It is also important to avoid placing location over product. You are not selling your location, you are selling a product. That has to be clear on the site.

Search engines will pick up on a location that is mentioned only once on the page, once in the description metatag, once in the keyword tag, and once in the title tag. If you have several towns, in addition to a region, then mention the primary one, or maybe two, in all of those places, and then list the others on the page in a “we serve” listing. That is enough.

There is no need to put it into alt tags, repeat it on the page anywhere else (other than where it is conversationally relevant), or give any further attention to it.

There are also times when you do NOT want to mention location, except on your contact page. This is when you have a business that does not have local relevance. Many do not. We have several clients who sell various types of jewelry through an online store. They have no storefront. Location is not an enhancement to their website. Another of our jewelery website clients has a storefront in a nearby town. For her, since her website also gains walk-in customers for her store, the location is important.

Using the location helps to give you better search engine traffic when people search on your terms, combined with a local area name. Competing nationally or internationally is harder than competing locally.

It isn’t a magic bullet, but it can get additional traffic for sites that have a local presence, especially in crowded and highly competitive marketing arenas.

The Pure Power of SEO

She had hired an “SEO expert” to optimize her site. She had decent placements for her product in her area on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, but wanted to take her business to the next level.

The “expert” devised a plan that would, in her opinion, improve the rankings. The plan consisted of the following:

• Take out all meaningful content, and replace it with keyword strings. Location was emphasized in these strings. The product was only peripherally mentioned.
• Put in alt-tags with the location in every one. Each product now had nothing but a list of cities in it!
• Change the title tag, and description metatag to nothing but keyword strings.
• Put bullet points into the pages like “order info” and “company info” which had nothing but keyword strings in them.
• Create a folder for each city, and put a new site page into each folder, with the name of that city on the page and in the page filename, with no content but keyword strings.

Now, we’ve been saying that Google penalizes for keyword stuffing. This entire plan was nothing but keyword stuffing.

The lady called me on recommendation from one of her associates. She explained that her Google traffic had dropped, and the quality of customers was much poorer, and her conversion rate had dropped. The tactics used by the other person on this website hurt EVERY aspect of performance in the site.

We developed a plan to clean up the site. The first step was to remove the keyword strings from the home page, and to put in some meaningful indexable content. All location references were deleted except for a tactful mention in the title tag of the two primary locations, a proper mention of several of the locations within the description tag, and a listing of delivery locations in the menu sidebar on every page. We did that one step, then started working on global changes offline. The home page was the only thing changed initially.

Within a week, she noticed that her business was picking up. She was getting Google traffic again, and she was getting calls from the class of customers she was aiming at, instead of the lower quality customers. Site traffic is up, site conversions are up.

She is looking forward to the changes to the other pages, to see what happens when each page is properly optimized instead of being the victim of keyword stuffing. So are we - because times like this prove to us the value of what we do.

Googling an SEO Pro

So how do you find an SEO pro? Personal referral is the best way, because if you know someone who got results, then their pro most likely knows what they are doing.

If you Google for an SEO expert, you’ll get all kinds of results - some valid, some not. Being at the top of the listings does not mean they are the best. It may mean only that they have the most money, or that they managed to optimize best for the terms you happened to put in.

The SEO arena is VICIOUSLY  competitive. A very hard arena to rank well in. It is easier to rank for regional listings than generic ones, or on various peripheral topics related to SEO.

If you choose to Google an SEO expert, please LOOK at their website! It should have some obvious characteristics:

• The writing should be professional. It should not sound like it was written by someone who does not speak your language natively. SEO is ALL about language use, so make sure they use it well.
• Their site should not have senseless repetition.
• The site should be logical.

Sometimes  SEO and Web professionals are like the cobbler whose kids were the last to get shoes. Sometimes the websites of professionals are neglected, not because they are bad at their job, but because they are busy. So be sure to look at the sites of a few of their clients as well.

Remember, if someone offers an “optimization package” without specifying what it contains, you aren’t going to get what you need.  A real pro will look at your site before they ever quote you a price for repairs!

Prioritizing SEO Tasks

SEO can be a complex, and very involved process. It can also be a very expensive process. When a budget is limited, where do you put the effort first?

Typically, there are things that do a lot, for little effort. Then there are things that do a moderate amount, for moderate effort. And there are things that do very little, but take a great deal of effort to accomplish.

In prioritizing SEO, it only makes sense to do the easy effective things first, and to save the harder stuff that gains less for later. To determine what that is, we figure the initial cost or  time involved, and we figure the likelihood of it coming back to us within a year. If it is likely to do so, then the effort or expense is likely to be justified.

The SEO equation varies some from site to site, and target market to target market. Still, there are some things that we can generalize about. One of those, is which things should be done (assuming nothing has been done) and in what order.

1. Good content. Make sure every page in the site has high quality content that is indexable by search engines.  This is relatively expensive in comparison to other tactics, but it is CRITICAL. If you can do nothing else, do this. If you must pay for one page at a time to be edited, do it. Nothing else will help you nearly as much as good content.
2. Title tag. Pretty much the next most important thing. A good one can help your site, a bad one can hurt it. An indifferent one won’t do either.
3. Good site and link structure. The links from page to page, and their categorization is the next most powerful SEO on-page factor.
4. We then get down to a plethora of elements such as top text, meta tags, alt-tags, formatting, filenames, and other minor factors. These are things that are generally done, not because they are powerful, but because they are easy to do, and they add up to a reasonable amount together.

There are other things far beyond this - but the benefit to cost ratio declines to the point where they are not affordable to many startups or struggling businesses.

You’ll notice that backlinks are not on that list. This is because they are so time and resource intensive that getting them is typically something that a business owner has to either pay for, or do, over the long term. They should be done, consistently, alongside any other SEO work that is being done.

It is impossible to make a complete list of SEO priorities in order. But the above list is designed to help site owners understand what will make the biggest difference, and which elements will give them the best return on investment.

Article Marketing and Bad SEO

What is it about article marketing that makes people lose their common sense? I’ve seen so many BAD articles passing themselves off as marketing articles, which accomplish nothing more than giving the business a black eye!

Bad writing does not benefit anyone! The purpose of article marketing is to get backlinks beyond the sphere of your own influence. It isn’t just about getting links into an article directory - if it were, then it would be more efficient to place directory links - faster, and less tricky to get right!

The real power in article marketing comes from the viral aspect - people who LIKE the article can pick it up and reprint it. Nobody reprints garbage!

In order for it to work, the article has to be GOOD. It has to be interesting, have some style, state an opinion, make the reader laugh, or SOMETHING that is unique and useful. If it is just another excuse to stuff some keywords into a bunch of text, you might as well not bother!

An amazing number of SEO shysters out there are bamboozling site owners into thinking that bad writing has value. C’mon folks, if you cannot stand to read it, you are wasting your money! If you are paying for links or article marketing, READ the articles! If they don’t impress you, then DON’T pay for them!

Keyword stuffing is somehow still being passed off as article marketing. So is just plain poor writing - no purpose, no point. And a lot of it is perfectly accurate, but absolutely boring and unoriginal - the same as 10,000 other articles written for the same purpose. That won’t work either!

If people aren’t impressed with the writing, they won’t come to your site from the links in the signature line. If the article isn’t exceptional, nobody will reprint it. Bad writing is a waste of money, and harmful to the business in other ways as well. Make sure you know what you are getting, because there is, unfortunately, more bad writing out there than good!

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