Tagged with 'SEO'

It is common for law firm websites to speak about themselves with hyperbole.  Self-important adjectives litter the site content.  Firm’s with exceptional people are one-upped by those with truly exceptional people.  Knowledge is only valid if it is genuine. Experience, it seems comes in a variety of flavors as well. Some firms have wide experience.  For others it is deep experience.  But the most common benchmark of experience is that it be extensive.  Does your firm claim extensive experience?

Now it’s not that I don’t believe it when I read of a professional’s extensive experience. It’s just that this really doesn’t tell me anything. Worse, it doesn’t tell me anything different from the next guy who also has extensive experience. In fact, I would argue, my baseline is extensive experience. Now tell me how you’re better.

If you Google the phrase “extensive experience” there are over 6 million website pages where this value is claimed.  Using the search tool on several law firm websites, I discovered an “extensive experience” ratio of about  35% – 50% (# of appearances of “extensive experience”/attorney). So making this claim doesn’t so much separate one professional from the pack as much as it defines the pack. (Check your firm’s ratio and let me know!)

But the problem with this “extensive experience” language is not merely that it is linguistic laziness. Rather, this laziness results in failing to detail the richness, complexity and detail which this phrase references. And in so not doing, opportunities are lost for using this missing content.  You won’t be found in a search engine because, frankly, nobody is looking for “extensive experience.” And you won’t be discovered in your site search because, well, almost half of all attorneys have the same vague amount of experience. And it is all extensive.

Yes, I understand that, often, considerable descriptive detail must be concealed for privacy considerations.  Yeah, so? Content developers (copywriters) simply have to work harder to anonymize those involved. But, with a little effort, it is possible and essential to provide sufficient detail to make the stories comprehensible and relevant – and content rich.

Go the extra mile to gather the detail that elicits that sense of extensive experience. Boil it down to 3 to 5 cogent bullet points of industry and matter relevance. And post it. Your site visitor will have a better experience. This will result in more web pages consumed and possibly a longer time on the site with more opportunity for engagement. And search engines will devour the details for their ranking algorithms.  And you know how I know this? I have extensive experience.

There is a lot of voodoo associated with search engine optimization. Much of it is urban legend and legacy mis-information still circulating from the 20th century Internet. And some of it is promulgated by ersatz search engine optimization (SEO) specialists seeking only to obfuscate the fact that their craft is often simple and uncomplicated. In truth,  SEO is really a lot of fundamental blocking and tackling; just doing the grunt work that can pay dividends.

This came to mind recently when I received an email from our business partner, email service provider ExactTarget. They had a simple objective, to improve their search engine positioning in a competitive industry.  And they were pursuing this objective in a professional and forthright manner.  It is something every website manager can do so I thought I’d share their process.

In their email to me, they noted that the Duo website currently has a link to their website. This is an existing link we created to illustrate our connection to business partners with whom we are pleased to be affiliated. It just wasn’t working as hard for them as it might.  They asked us to make two simple changes:

Create a Link to the Right Page
ExactTarget noted that we were linking to http://www.exacttarget.com and requested that we change that link to http://email.exacttarget.com. Apparently they’ve created this domain because it is more keyword rich. Both links go to the same page.  “exacttarget.com” doesn’t describe anything except their trade name.  But “email.exacttarget.” includes the keyword “email” which at least provides a descriptive keyword about some of what this firm does.

For ExactTarget, they determined that the correct page that I would want to refer my site visitors would be their home page. The only thing I would add to this is the importance of obtaining links to the most appropriate page on your website – and more often than not, that is NOT the home page but an important and more relevant interior page of the site. When you request links to your site, think about the page on which you REALLY want people to enter your site. Then provide that URL.  Whenever possible, drive them to the interior of your site, not your home page, unless the home page really is the most relevant page for your anticipated site visitor.  (Note – if you don’t have a good interior page for your targeted site visitor, consider creating one. But I digress).

Link Descriptive Words – “Anchor Text”
The second thing ExactTarget requested was that we include important keywords as either part of the link or in very close proximity to the link. To make this brainless for us as well as to insure consistency of their message they suggested we use the elevator-pitch copy, “ExactTarget delivers on-demand email software solutions for permission-based email marketing.” And then they suggested we actually hyperlink the keyword phrase “email marketing” to their requested domain.   SEO folks call these linked keywords “anchor text”

Linking the descriptive keyword to the domain sends a signal to the search engines that if you are searching for “email marketing” chances are you will find what you are looking for at the place to which other websites are already linking.  Think of it as pointing, or better yet, voting. If ExactTarget can get a lot of its partners’ websites to “vote” that the right place to go for “email marketing” is “email.exacttarget.com”, the search engines will respond by giving this website prominence for this particular keyword search.

So, for example, if you help people with developmental disabilities, but what you really do is provide pediatric therapy to children with developmental disabilities, seek out your trusted partners who will put the phrase “pediatric therapy” on their site and link that phrase back to the pediatric therapy services of your website. If you’re a lawyer who does tax planning in Grand Rapids, Michigan, request the phrase “Grand Rapids tax planning” be on your partners’ sites and link to a page specifically about your tax planning services.

As I said, the concept is simple. Execution is the challenge. It all comes down to getting the blocking and tackling right.  Is anyone from the Chicago Bears organization listening?

When I’m not pondering the status of the Internet I help a graphic designer friend by writing code for her clients’ websites. One of our clients owns a hip and trendy spa that marries a massage clinic with a gallery featuring work created by local artists. As I spoke with this client, I discovered that this was more than a business for her. It is a reflection of her passion for wellness, a holistic sense of being.

In addition to her knowledge of the musculoskeletal systems she treated, she considers artwork to be a form of therapy that provides healing for the mind. When she talked about her clinic, her passion was contagious. Fairly soon I began to see the world through her eyes, and started to want what she wanted: for the world to experience total wellness.

Our conversation developed along the lines that she should capture these thoughts and release them on her website as a blog. I suggested this to the graphic designer, who immediately kiboshed this idea, saying, “When I visit a website to read about a spa, I don’t want to read a stupid blog.” So that was the end of that. I promised myself that I would not let this die.

Maybe your business isn’t a massage clinic, but you are probably as passionate about the heart of your business as my client is about hers. I’m not talking about what you do. I’m talking about your business being an extension of who you are. For your business, I believe a blog is the answer. But not a stupid blog.

Why a Blog?

When I told the graphic designer that we should incorporate a blog, her first thoughts were that it would be a collection of meaningless posts amounting to nothing more than naval gazing. I explained that she described “Twitter”, and that a blog doesn’t have to be like that. I’m sure she also thought about how managed blogs on blogspot.com and wordpress.com don’t give users explicit control over the layouts.

A blog engine is a content management system (CMS) that provides the simplest means for content entry and publishing on the planet. Engines differ in scope of features, but most users would find it easy to enter and edit articles, and installing the software on your own web host provides the ability to customize your page layouts. Most engines provide a means to install plugins and widgets that extend the functionality of the blog, adding really cool features that average website users would never have thought possible to include on their own sites.

What Do I Blog About?

My intent is not to convince you to use your blog as a marketing tool, which is the most common use for a blog after random sputtering, but rather an online repository of informational articles, discussions of subjects of interest, news and notes, and in the case of my spa friend, upcoming events and reviews of past events at the clinic.

My spa friend considers herself a “wellness practitioner”, and could write about the role ergonomics, diet, meditation, and regular treatment play in maintaining wellness. Also, their esthetician is passionate about using organic products in her treatments.  If they didn’t feel confident about writing their entries, I could have written the articles for them based on our discussions about what they were interested in.

Likewise, there are aspects of your business that you find work well, and others that are more challenging. You could use blogging as a means to elicit discussion in your search for a solution. Since I started my multifarious blogs, my topics ranged from the foibles in setting up my Tablet PC, coding websites to be compatible with the Mac, and most recently, my struggles learning to code using the ExtJS JavaScript framework. The last post elicited a comment from the development team, which gave me enough hope to continue pushing through.

How Can Blogs Help My Business?

While the impression is that blogs are a one-way, “push” communication mechanism, blogs are designed to be conversations. News sites post articles about recent events (hello—that’s a blog entry) and other users respond to that entry by posting comments. The most controversial articles incite discussion between comment writers themselves, and that adds new value to the existing content on your page. Now, instead of only reading your post on the wonders of caffeine to stimulate your dreams in sleep, readers can participate in the ensuing discussion, more than likely quoting studies of the effect of caffeine on the nervous system, the loss of REM stage activity, et cetera.

The reader community improves the quality of your content, and suddenly, your post takes on a life of its own.

If you don’t feel like you have the time nor the talent to write the quantity of quality entries you want to see on your site, you can hire content creation specialists who can blog for you. You can work out in your deal if the work is meant to be in your voice, or if the writer will receive public credit for their work. Several such services exist, and many content management specialists will contract out to them.

Frequent blog posts of consistent information quality also help your business by adding to the content from your site indexed by search engines.  Your site’s page rank is driven first by popularity—the number of external pages that link to your site, and then by currency—how recent the pages were most updated? Content quality is rated by relevance and keyword frequency—the number of pages within your site that emphasize the same subject matter.

Search engine algorithms are actually a lot more complicated than that, and change often. However the basic rule still applies: websites that contain well-written, quality content, properly structured for machines to read and index well, supported by accurate keywords and summary descriptions, rank higher in search engine indexes. While it’s not a good practice to try and fool Google, it is possible to use blog software to create a site with valuable content that drives your site to the top of the search engine index for your chosen subject matter.

And that can no way be considered a stupid blog.

Twitter, Twine, and now Twing – I have signed up for all these web applications that start with “Tw!”

Twing is a specialized search engine for deep searches within community discussion groups or forums. So if you want to find niche communities or specialized discussion, actual online conversation, about a topic or a brand, Twing offers a way to search through community content that Google or other search engines may miss. Twing sports a directory listing of different communities so you can click down through the forums that interest you (or may be of interest to your clients or customers).

Especially fun at election time and Trick-or-Treat time is the Twing Buzz Chart. Here’s a comparison of some favorite candies for Halloween – candy corn is obviously being talked about much more than the other chocolate-y goodies! The default on the site right now is comparing Obama, McCain, Biden, and Palin.

Twing was recently named one of Laptop Magazine’s Top 50 Web Tools of 2008 in the November 2008 (alas, printed edition only), and also is listed in PC Magazine’s 15 alternatives to Google’s “classic” search.

Mashable’s Kristen Nicole reviewed it when it was still in pre-beta in February 2008, with Twing:Another Funny Name for Forum Search and she noted the nice use of filters in the sidebar to filter through the results, saying “I was happy to see a rather extensive filtering sidebar that’s present for narrowing down all of your search results. Modify existing searches by category, forum name, exact phrase inclusion or exclusion, and more. This is helpful in the sense that it lets you sift through the forums without having to read through all of them.”

I’d imagine you could search for communities related products, hobbies, concepts, clubs, bands, brands, groups, events, and people. If your goal is to find others to talk to online, Twing is your site.

Updated to add: Apparently Twing is no more as reported by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch December 1, 2008. Just wanted to be sure to let readers of this entry know why the link won’t work!

OK, I hate PDF’s on websites. Don’t you just say “Argh!” when you unsuspectingly click a link only to realize that you’ve started to open your Adobe Reader application and download a PDF file the size of Alaska? And you’re working at Starbucks sharing the already-modest bandwidth with 38 other hyper-caffeinated transient workers so the download puts you into a time/space continuum?

But PDF’s have an important role on the web. And many organizations have valuable content assets that reside in their PDF documents. So not only should you use PDF’s correctly, but you also want to insure their content is indexed by search engines to help drive traffic to your site.

So, in spite of my antipathy to PDF’s, I was disturbed to read this instruction issued to several thousand professional services marketers on a recent listserv post (OMG!):

“The other important thing is to include no robots TXT on PDF’s so the engine doesn’t index the PDF as a stand alone page which is a dead end.”

Huh? Sorry. Not dead end. Dead wrong. If you use PDF documents on your website:

• Complete the document’s properties (especially the title)
• Add links to PDF documents, so that readers arriving at your PDF can always be redirected back to your website (no dead ends)
• Save files at the lowest possible Acrobat version, so that readers can easily open them, and search engines can find them
• File sizes should be kept as small as possible to avoid users abandoning the download

And, please, alert website visitors the link they are about to click is a PDF. No more “Argh!”

There it was again, the 250-word-RULE. It popped up as gospel at an industry conference seminar and espoused by a professional search marketer to the trusting throngs. So let’s debunk it again and right now:

There is no magic number of words on a web page that will help spirit your web page to the top of the search engine results. It is not 250 words or 25 words or any specific or even general number in between. The length of the text on the page does not prevent or encourage the search engines from including the page in their indexes.
 
Where’d this 250-word-rule rumor start? Perhaps many sources. But only noted search marketer Danny Sullivan is willing to take credit for making this claim last century, about 10 billion search engine algorithmic revisions ago.  And today even Danny calls this a myth.
 
Want further proof? My colleague, Fred, just posted on this blog a short diddy about some guy named Gordon Dioxide. His post is 43 words. He posted it 2 days ago. When I did a search on this name, Fred’s post was not only indexed but was the third result on the first page. So much for 250 words.

So what is the truth about word count on a page and SEO? The truth, of course, is much more complicated than the rumor. That’s why the rumor prevails; it’s simplistic, formulaic and easy to remember. But inaccurate. Or at least incomplete. The truth is messy and complicated. But here’s a practical tip. Write with your reader in mind. If a page of text is about a single idea, e.g. the phony 250-word-rule, and if you develop your idea with rich text that includes the key phrases for which you want to be found, perhaps you will be.