Internet Marketing Clinic

Many times I have spoken about the dangers of hiring a web designer who is not oriented toward web optimization. Here is an article on web site design that does an excellent job of describing the problems that are created when you engage the wrong person to create your new site. Marketing firms and graphic designers might be very good at what they are familiar with, but web design is a different field, and many people try to use what they know from other fields without updating their understanding of the differences that are important in a different medium

Good web site design incorporates many features that only people with the right experience bring to the job. To be fair, some marketing firms or graphic designers have that experience, but, in my experience, they are few and far between! When you get the wrong person or team on the job, they will make choices that make sense in a different environment, but can cause serious problems on a web site. Those problems can range from costing you a lot more money to fix, up to and including making your site non-functional from a marketing perspective. To be specific, a good marketing web site is intended to attract traffic from the Internet, and if it doesn’t do that effectively, it is failing in its principal function!

I won’t go into the specifics any further, because Kristine does it so well in her piece, but keep the message in mind. I don’t know how many times I have had people tell me that everyone who sees their new web site loves it, and I look at it and see immediately that it will never produce any traffic from the web for their business! If what you really want is a site you can send people to because it is beautiful, that is all well and good, but most businesses are not really investing in a site for that purpose. most really intend that the site will produce a return on their investment for them by bringing in new business leads.

I just reviewed a one hour video featuring Matt Cutts (of Google) that gives a really good short course in search engine optimization. It is posted on Matt Cutts blog. Matt and his team go over all the basics of optimization in this session. It is a great overview, and points out a few tools that can be of great value to webmasters.  Most everything he mentions in this session has been covered in our clinic, but I was not aware until he pointed it out, that Webmaster Tools will check your site for the existence of malware! Something like that can be really important to know if you think you are having a problem. This is a video that is worth an hour of your time if you want to make your web site perform better in the search engines!

This information was brought to my attention by Don Parsons, who has been associated with our clinic for many years and has taught several sessions for us. Thanks, Don!

In our last Internet marketing clinic session, a question came up about site maps.

There are two kinds of site maps, and they are both important tools to achieve better rankings for your site. One is a sitemap constructed as a page on your site. This is visible to the site users, and is a convenience for them, as well as a good tool for helping search engines to find the pages on your site. Because is is for site users, it should reflect some logical order to browsing your site.

When building it, you need to think about who is using your site and what they might be interested in seeing. You want to make it easy for them to find the information they are interested in. Because it is for readers, it may not include a link to every page on your site. That could become overwhelming for users and defeat an important purpose of the page. At the least, it should include a direct link to every major page on your site.

The second kind of sitemap is specifically for search engines, and the rules for it are different. It will definitely include a link to every page on your site, no matter how big your site is. For sites over 50,000 pages, this map has to be handled differently, but most sites for small businesses need not be concerned with this issue. A definition of sitemaps and good discussion of them is available on Wikipedia.

My class notes for the evening provide more information and a link to some software for creating a sitemap for your site.

This protocol for creating and using sitemaps goes back to 2006 and has been adopted by the top major search engines, so it provides excellent coverage and should not be overlooked by any webmaster! One important point to keep in mind is that you should set up a pointer to your sitemap in your “robots.txt” file, which all search engines look at. The sitemap won’t help you if the search engines don’t find it!

I have often commented in our clinic that big brands on big sites that have big budgets don’t really rank well in search engines. I just came across a long post that takes apart several sites to illustrate the point in considerable detail.

This post analyzes several big corporate sites and demonstrates pretty clearly that they just don’t do SEO very well! From my point of view, this is great news! What this means is that people who understand how to do their SEO properly, and who are willing to put the effort into doing it, can achieve great performance on search engines without having to spend a lot of money.

Since my clinic is oriented toward small businesses, and small businesses typically don’t have a lot of money (otherwise, they would be “big businesses”, yes?), this is really good news!

As I said, the article is a little long, and may seem, to some readers, technical, but it is worth reading to get a better understanding of what you are up against when working on your web site.

We talk a lot in our clinic about the importance of linking your site properly in order to improve your search engine rankings. When you set up your links, there are some details that can be important.

For example, create your links as “absolute” links, not relative links. What that means is that your link in your code should contain the complete address to the linked page, like “http://www.your-domain-name.com/page-name.html”, not something like “…/page-name.html”.

This makes your reference clear, and will get you link credit if someone “scrapes” your page. Little things like this do make a difference if you apply the rules persistently. You get a cumulative effect from doing things the right way that can really make a difference in how your site performs!

Also, always refer to pages on your site in the same way, that is, if you use “www” as part of your domain name, always use it. Don’t refer to your site sometimes with it and sometimes without. Those would count as different links and will not give you the same benefit.

Google just called me to sign me up for a new feature of their local advertising. I talked to the rep for a while to see what the features are to see whether they might be of interest to businesses that I work with, particularly those with a local connection.

Google’s Local Business Center is a free service that Google provides that will place a marker on a map when a keyword search returns your site and other businesses in the results. I recommend signing up and creating a listing for every one of my business clients, since it is all free, and provides more opportunity to be seen and found. Creating your listing requires a Google account, which is also free, and you should be able to create your account at their local business center. From there, you can enter lots of information about your business, including a description where you can feature keyword phrases that you should be found with.

This listing will also give you statistical reports on how often your listing is presented in searches, and how often it is clicked on. This reporting is similar to their AdWords reporting, but doesn’t cost anything.

Their new feature, for which they charge $25/month, is the ability to create “tags” that will show up with your listing to make it stand out from other businesses that you are competing directly against. If you search in Google for “houston auto glass“, you should see several examples of how this can work. In this example (and, as of this date!), there are 3 listings with tags, and, each listing reflects a different option on the tag. You can see from the tags, and from the listings that accompany the tags, that one business linked its tag to it’s web site, one to a coupon offer, and one to a video. There are other options available as well. The New York Times has an article describing how one business in Houston used this tool to its advantage.

I always say that paying for any advertising on the web is strictly a judgment call and must be tested against what it produces for you in your business, but this little feature sounded interesting to me as an option to consider.

In a new blog posting, Google has just announced that they are now using site speed in their ranking algorithm.

In our clinic, we have always taught that the speed with which your page loads is an important factor in achieving a high performing web site. This announcement from Google makes it official!

In their article, they also provide links to tools to evaluate the speed of your web site. These certainly belong in your “webmaster toolkit”.

One tool, in particular, I found very interesting. The webpagetest gave me a detailed readout of the time it takes to load various components on my main clinic page.  It not only breaks down the file size, but reports the time for the initial connection to the component, the time to first result, and the time to complete the download. As a result of this one examination of a single page on my site, I will institute new practices for building my pages, and will make several modifications to the page I tested.

In this specific case, I will remove the map providing directions to the classes, and will make that into a link to another page where the map and the link to Google Maps will appear. I can easily foresee how important this kind of testing can be to showing my clients how important it can be to revise how they build some of their more complicated pages on their sites!

Google also emphasizes another of the points that we harp on in the clinic, which is that the most important factor in high ranking is good, relevant content! Join us in our free Internet Marketing class to stay up to date with the latest developments in effective marketing over the web.

I have often noted in our clinic that small businesses can compete very effectively against larger businesses with large marketing budgets by learning how to market their businesses over the web. A study by Conductor, Inc. documents the failure by Fortune 500 companies to make effective use of search engine optimization to promote their businesses. The study is available from their website by signing in to download.

The study opens with a list of what they consider to ge its “key takeaways”:

• The Fortune 500 as a group spent approximately $3.4 million per day on 97,559 keywords – yet only 25% of these keywords rank in the top 50 natural search results.
• Only 2% of the domains (not companies) surveyed showed a significant number of their terms in the top results. All of these positive domain scores were offset by other owned domains with significant visibility issues.
• 15% of Fortune 500 companies studied showed mid to strong presence for their most advertised keywords.
• 32% of Fortune 500 companies have low to mid presence.
• 53% of Fortune 500 companies have no natural search visibility for their most advertised keywords.
• Fortune 500 natural search visibility decreased with longer search queries.
• 68% of keywords were found on a landing page (e.g. www.amazon.com/cellphone) versus a top level domain page (e.g. www.amazon.com).

I have not yet absorbed the full report, but will be posting more interesting observations from there as I go through the report.

The key message here is quite clear, and that is that small businesses can compete against bigger marketing budgets by learning what works on the web and applying what they learn to their own websites!

What a surprise! I picked up the phone (actually, I listened to my voice mail) and a perky voice says to me, “Hi, this is Sharon from Google!” I never heard of Google calling people before. I am just not on that kind of list.

What the call was about, as it turned out, is they are promoting their local business center. This is the place where you can enter information about your business so it will come up on Google Maps when people search for your products or services. I have had a listing for years and recommend it to anyone with a web site and any kind of local business. It is a free service from Google.

I guess the reason for the call is that they are offering enhancements to the listing that you can pay for and they are actually informing people of that by phone (seems a little retrograde to me, but, hey, whatever works!)

I went to the site (click here for Local Business Center information) and found some new features that I had not seen before. Most interesting to me was the statistics that they provide on your listing, so you can see how many impressions you have gotten and how many clicks from those impressions. This is all available on a dashboard where you see other sites that you may have entered, say, if you have multiple businesses, or have entered site information for companies you are supporting.

Anyway, this is good information and worth your time to review just to update yourself on how the whole thing works. If you don’t have a listing for your business yet, this is a great time to set one up. Remember your keywords when you set up your business description, because that is what it is all about. This is one more way to give your business an edge that others (like your competitors) are not so astute about.

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