Gary Mattoc (c) 2007 Originally published in SiteProNews, November 19, 2007

What constitutes a good website design? Does it showcase your design prowess? Does it prove what a brilliant graphic designer you are? Does your web design fetch you designing awards? Or does your website design exist to establish a platform for you and your visitors to interact with each other unhindered by usability glitches? I think the last point is the most important factor that establishes the basic difference between a successful and an unsuccessful website.

Although the perception of good website design changes from person to person, there are some established conventions that you can follow and these conventions can make sure that your website reaches out to all possible people. When you are designing your website, especially these days, you have to be constantly conscious of the fact that there are numerous browsers and numerous devices that people may use to access your website. No longer do people browse the Internet just through their PCs and laptops; there are many handheld devices that can directly connect to the Internet and enable people to browse your website; people can even browse your website using their mobile phones. And gone are the days when people used just the Internet Explorer as their primary Internet browser.

Your website design also depends on what you are planning to showcase through your website: will it be just text or images or videos or a mixture of all these? You have to design your website accordingly. If it is merely text that you plan to publish then try to make it as less graphical as possible as people coming to your website will be interested in your text and not your images and videos. Similarly a website showcasing your Flash animation expertise will expect lots of Flash work so you needn’t worry about making your website textually accessible.

So when you are designing your website you have to take all these parameters into consideration. But does it mean that you’re always accommodating browsers and devises and do not focus on your own business, whatever that is? No, I’m not suggesting that. Just take care of the following website design guidelines and you will make sure that 95% people (well, there will always be those odd 5% who can never browse the web easily no matter what they try) surfing the Internet can access your website:

1) Create a lighter design. If possible don’t use too many graphics and JavaScripts that affect a major function of your website. For instance if there is some crucial information on your website and people need to access that information before doing business with you then don’t make that information accessible only through a JavaScript on an image file or a Flash animation. All your important text should be available only in text and even if you have to resort to using images and other stuff than make sure the textual alternative is always available.

2) Don’t use colors that cause strain to the eyes. If you want people to come to your website again and again and consume your content or do business with you then you must make their stay over your website as pleasant as possible. No matter how awesome your design looks if the color combinations are strain-full, after a while they will tire of your website and stop coming. Always take care that your background behind the text is far lighter than the text, and vice versa.

3) Create a well defined navigation. If you have multiple pages on your website then there should be a prominently defined navigation system that is easily accessible to everybody. As mentioned above don’t let your navigation depend on images, JavaScripts, or Flash animation. If possible create just a text-based navigation bar. With CSS designing you can create great looking navigation bars.

4) Design your website using CSS because then you can make your content and your navigation bar appear in a linear fashion. Since all the layout-related placements take place through CSS definitions no matter how your text appears texturally, graphically it will appear as a pleasant layout. The CSS designing techniques also enable you to dabble with intricate layouts without making your website inaccessible. CSS designing will always help you arrange your main content before the navigation link despite making it visually appear beneath the navigation bar or to the right of it.

Follow these basic web design principles and you will have a good website design to boast of. Remember that your website design is created for the sake of your visitors and not to cater to your designing whims and fancies.

The elements of good website design

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By Scott Buresh (c) 2007 Medium Blue

The future of search is unclear – what is clear is that change is rapidly happening for all of the top Internet search engines. Google as always is the frontrunner for many of these search trends, but even little guys like Ask.com are making waves. In this article, I will attempt to cover some of the more interesting search trends that are occurring today with the top Internet search engines – but I am by no means being comprehensive about the subject. Things are changing on a weekly, or sometimes even daily, basis, and future articles will cover additional developments in depth.

Universal Search
In May 2007, Google – the leader among top Internet search engines - got people talking (again) when it rolled out its latest search concept, Universal Search. Universal Search was Google’s attempt to create a single page of search results, rather than separate pages for types of results, such as videos, images, maps, and websites. When it was first introduced, many search engine optimization firms raced around exclaiming that this was one of those search trends that would change everything and that new optimization rules should be created and followed immediately.

I published an article in early 2007 in which I noted, “The problem with Universal Search is that it can muddy the results, and it can also introduce irrelevant results that a searcher cannot use.”I also wrote, “Clearly, Universal Search will change how an SEO campaign is run if it catches on. But this is a real if - users’ search habits are hard to change overnight, even if you are Google and you essentially define what searching is and how it works.”

And in fact, Universal Search didn’t quite take off the way Google had hoped. A post on MediaPost’s Search Insider by Mark Simon boldly states, “Universal Search will probably not be viewed as the greatest Google fiasco since Google Video, but it’s clear that it’s failed to deliver on the vaunted promises made by Marissa Mayer back in May.” So will we see more of Universal Search, or will it be quietly put to the side? Will other top internet search engines want to use it for themselves? Only time will tell, but it seems like Google needs to do a lot more work before users really warm up to it.

Personalization and Personalized Search
Personalization on the other hand seems to be one of the search trends working very well for Google and many of the other top Internet search engines. In an article I wrote a few months ago, I said “The basic principle behind personalized search is simple. When you go to Google and type in a search query, Google stores the data. As you return to the engine, a profile of your search habits is built up over time. With this information, Google can understand more about your interests and serve up more relevant search results.”

How to Get Number 1 Rankings on Google and Yahoo!
As it works right now, if you use a Google product (Gmail, Google toolbar, AdWords, etc.), Google is keeping track of what you search for and what websites you visit, and it’s then tailoring your results appropriately. Search for “bass,” and Google will know whether you mean the fish or the instrument. As I pointed out, though, there are major issues with search trends like personalization: Privacy issues that arise from personalized search are also a big question. The EU recently announced that it is probing into how long Google stores user information (this probe was subsequently extended to include all search engines). AOL recently committed a serious blunder when it released search data from 500,000 of its users, and it was discovered that it was fairly easy to identify many people by the search terms that they use…

Yet if nobody makes a fuss about this, then it’s very likely Google – and the other top internet search engines - will start tracking everyone behind the scenes, whether they use a Google product or not.

It’s actually already starting – right now, the cookie Google places on your machine (did you even know they did that?) will expire in two years – but they won’t really expire at all. According to the official Google blog: In the coming months, Google will start issuing our users cookies that will be set to auto-expire after 2 years, while auto-renewing the cookies of active users during this time period. In other words, users who do not return to Google will have their cookies auto-expire after 2 years. Regular Google users will have their cookies auto-renew, so that their preferences are not lost. And, as always, all users will still be able to control their cookies at any time via their browsers.

Seems it won’t be long before Google knows what you’re searching for before you do.

Expanding “Sneak Peeks”
Ask, one of the smaller of the top internet search engines, has been using sneak peeks to entice searchers for a while now. Searchers who use Ask.com can mouse over an icon next to many results and see a screen shot of the website. No clicking needed. Google, always watching for search trends, seems to have noticed, because they’ve filed a patent for expanding their own snippets. Soon searchers on Google may be able to read expanded summaries of pages, or longer clips of page text. This tactic appeals to searchers who are now demanding more and more information faster and faster from the top Internet search engines, and who don’t want to waste precious seconds clicking on a link and then on the back button to find just the right site for their needs.

Syntax Queries
When Ask was Ask Jeeves, the butler was supposed to listen to your search queries in the form of questions and then get answers for you. The problem was, this never worked exactly the way it was supposed to. Instead of answering the question based on syntax, the engine still responded to searches in the same way others did, by analyzing the words and returning a list. Jeeves was retired with a bit of fanfare, and the engine handles queries in the more traditional manner for now. But all of the top Internet search engines have continued to work on this concept, with Google again leading the way since it has the manpower and brainpower to do so. I expect that within the next year, this will be one of the search trends that the engines will want to focus on with a greater push toward answering questions rather than just returning related results.

Speech Recognition and the Mobile Market
Speech recognition is really going to be one of the huge search trends in the coming months and years for the top internet search engines. In an interview from this past summer, Peter Norvig, director of Google Research, noted, “[Google] wanted speech technology that could serve as an interface for phones and also index audio text. After looking at the existing technology, we decided to build our own. We thought that, having the data and computational resources that we do, we could help advance the field.” With speech recognition in place, one could go to Google (or another of the top internet search engines) and use a microphone to ask a question aloud, or just say some keyphrases, and get a list back immediately.

And speech recognition has the biggest benefit for top internet search engines when it comes to users of mobile devices. Let’s face it, as advanced as those keyboards may have gotten, they’re still a pain to use and it’s time-consuming to type in more than a few sentences. (That’s y txt msgs r lk ths, u c?). Norvig is on top of that too, noting, “In general, it looks like things are moving more toward the mobile market, and we thought it was important to deal with the market where you might not have access to a keyboard or might not want to type in search queries.”

More to Come
As I noted in the beginning, this is just a small sampling of the search trends for the top Internet search engines today. Google, Yahoo, and even Ask are all working tirelessly to get your business and to make search easier, faster, and more accurate. Keep checking back for future articles covering some of the other trends and following up on the ones I’ve already discussed.

Current and Future Search Trends: What the Top Internet Search Engines Are Doing

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By Scott Buresh (c) 2007 Medium Blue

The good people at Google have long maintained that there is a Chinese Wall between paid search results and organic results – that is, the department responsible for advertising is completely separate from the department responsible for organic search engine placement. The company insists that Google Adwords is a completely separate entity than the Google search engine, and nevër the twain shall meet. This all sounds very good, in theory. But do they live up to this ideal in practice?

You don’t hear Google talking much about Chinese Walls these days. This is certainly in part because they have had great difficulty gaining traction in the literal and very competitive Chinese market (headlines such as “Google Hits Chinese Wall” or even “Google Advance Halted at Great Wall of China” were commonplace). But might there be other, more nefarious reasons? Is there a reason why we hear less and less from Google about the virtual wall that separates paid search results from organic search engine placement?

What Is Google Really Doing for Its Big Spenders?

It has long been rumored that Google will provide technical assistance in achieving better organic search engine placement to those who spend more for paid search results. I know for certain that these rumors are true in at least two instances. In fact, I actually have the minutes from one of these technical assistance meetings after the company met with Google engineers. While the identity of these two companies is irrelevant, suffice to say that they are companies that you have almost certainly heard of and that they spend millíons of dollars on paid search words each year.

To be fair, based on the meeting minutes I have, the advice that the engineers gave to the company does not include anything groundbreaking. It is mostly common sense advice that a good search engine optimization firm already knows about organic search engine placement and other issues, and much of it is already covered in the publicly-available Google Webmaster Guidelines. This, however, is beside the point. Google has obviously decided that it must provide perks to its big paid search spenders to keep them happy (or rather, happy enough to not pull their advertising). Clearly, one of these perks is access to Google engineers and the ability to glean information about organic search engine placement, a luxury that smaller advertisers do not enjoy.

Organic Search Engine Placement for Sale – The New Google Reality?

From a business perspective, this makes perfect sense, of course. Big-dollar advertisers make up the bulk of Google’s revenue for paid search, and any intelligent business will take whatever steps they deem necessary to hold on to their most valuable customers. This is why larger advertisers already have a designated account representative from Google. I am willing to bet that this perk was not Google’s idea. Rather, it almost certainly stemmed from the sense of entitlement that those spending large sums on paid search felt and the fact that technical help with their organic search engine placement is what they demanded.

Unfortunately, this reality leaves an advertiser with a small budget for paid search at a disadvantage. If Google is willing to provide this secret perk to larger advertisers now, what might they do in the future? Provide price breaks to larger paid search spenders? Raise the minimum monthly spend to squeeze out smaller companies and please the larger ones? It certainly has the potential to become a slippery slope, and I am interested to see where it goes next.

One final point – since Google is willing to give advice about organic search engine placement to companies that spend a great deal of monëy on Google advertising, is the phrase “While Google nevër sells better ranking in our search results…” truly accurate? I suppose this is open for interpretation. It may be technically true, but offering advice regarding organic search engine placement straight from the horse’s mouth in exchange for millíons of dollars in monëy for paid search results isn’t far from selling rankings, in my opinion.

Conclusion

Please don’t get me wrong – I still believe that Google is the best search engine out there, I greatly admire the way that they are continually reinventing themselves, and I think they are still the target for those seeking the most benefit from organic search engine placement. They have the folks in Redmond constantly guessing and always three steps behind, and I love how they have started from humble beginnings to take on one of the biggest corporations in the world (and consistently win). I simply believe that they have played the underdog, anti-corporate card for too long, and that even if it has not outlived its usefulness, it has outlived its truthfulness. Google is now a huge multinational corporation that answers to its shareholders. To pretend anything otherwise is silly, but it seems that, for now at least, the charade will continue.

Google’s overriding principle, one that they have been happy to espouse to the media, has long been “Don’t Be Evil.” Whether they still adhere to this principle since they have become a public company is another question that is open for interpretation. If you are a smaller advertiser and feel that Google’s favoritism toward larger paid search customers regarding organic search engine placement is evil, it probably seems as though the “Don’t Be Evil” principle no longer applies. You may conclude that the principles of “Don’t Be Evil” and “Keep Shareholders Happy” are mutually incompatible, and that the latter has gained the upper hand.

Google’s Paid Search vs Organic Results – A Rickety Wall of Separation

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By Scott Buresh, Medium Blue

If you own or work with a search engine optimization company, or even if you’re just hoping to better your search engine placement, then you are probably aware of the recent acquisition frenzy that took hold among the major search engines. Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, Microsoft paid $6 billion for Aquantive, and Yahoo paid $680 million for the 80 percent of Right Media that it did not already own and another $300 million for BlueLithium. The companies purchased are all intended to help widen the advertising range of each of the engines in question, and to take advantage of increasingly sophisticated behavioral-based ad-serving technologies that the acquired companies owned.

What many people failed to realize was that when Google purchased DoubleClick, it now was also the owner of a very large search engine optimization company called Performics [a PR8, no less], which is a wholly owned subsidiary of DoubleClick.

This fact is of course raising some eyebrows in the industry. Google has consistently maintained that there is no way that people can pay for better search engine placement in the organic index, a stance that the company still claims applies despite this recent purchase. In fact, a portion of Google’s published guidelines about SEO says, “While Google doesn’t have relationships with any SEOs and doesn’t offer recommendations…” In another portion, Google says “While Google never sells better ranking in our search results…” However, anyone who hires search engine optimization company Performics is of course now paying Google for better search engine placement. It seems like a pretty black and white issue, but Google would obviously prefer that it was kept delightfully blurry.

All right, so Google owns a search engine optimization company and seems prepared to hold onto it for a little while at least. Yes, there seems to be a huge conflict of interest. Yes, there appears to be a large double standard. Yes, Google appears to have abandoned its long-standing principles regarding organic search engine placement in the interests of profít. But surely, the search engine optimization company that it bought will quickly be forced to follow the guidelines that Google has published for companies that are looking for a search engine optimization company. Right? Well, no.

What Are Google’s Options?

Let’s be charitable and assume that in the heat of the acquisition Google has forgotten to update the page of advice that it has created for website owners. This leaves only four things that can happen:
1. Status Quo: Google keeps this advice up on the page and Performics continues to provide no guarantee regarding search engine placement. We’ll call this the “hypocritical” scenario.
2. Performics gets in line: Google leaves the advice up as is and forces Performics to provide an unconditional money-back guarantee. We’ll call this the “free SEO from Performics” scenario.
3. Guidelines change: Performics maintains zero guarantees for search engine placement but Google modifies the advice to remove the inconsistencies pointed out in this article from its advice section. We’ll call this the “shareholder’s delight moneygrubber special” scenario.
4. Google spins off Performics and removes itself from the search engine optimization industry. We’ll call this the “sanity over dollars” scenario.

I’m not betting on which of these scenarios is most likely. Some time back I would have picked #4, but as I pointed out in a recent article, Google has already crossed an invisible line by offering free advice about organic search engine placement to its biggest pay-per-click spenders.

Google owning a search engine optimization company - a slippery slope, indeed. What does this mean for those hiring other companies and looking for great search engine placement? We will just have to wait and see.

A Slippery Slope: Google Owns a Search Engine Optimization Company

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Each of the following components are critical pieces to a site’s ability to be crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engine spiders. When properly used in the construction of a website, these features give a site/page the best chance of ranking well for targeted keywords.

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Keyword research is critical to the process of SEO. Without this component, your efforts to rank well in the major search engines may be mis-directed to the wrong terms and phrases, resulting in rankings that no one will ever see. The process of keyword research involves several phases:

1. Brainstorming - Thinking of what your customers/potential visitors would be likely to type in to search engines in an attempt to find the information/services your site offers (including alternate spellings, wordings, synonyms, etc).
2. Surveying Customers - Surveying past or potential customers is a great way to expand your keyword list to include as many terms and phrases as possible. It can also give you a good idea of what’s likely to be the biggest traffic drivers and produce the highest conversion rates.
3. Applying Data from KW Research Tools - Several tools online (including Wordtracker & Overture - both described below) offer information about the number of times users perform specific searches. Using these tools can offer concrete data about trends in keyword selection.
4. Term Selection - The next step is to create a matrix or chart that analyzes the terms you believe are valuable and compares traffic, relevancy, and the likelihood of conversions for each. This will allow you to make the best informed decisions about which terms to target. SEOmoz’s KW Difficulty Tool can also aid in choosing terms that will be achievable for the site.
5. Performance Testing and Analytics - After keyword selection and implementation of targeting, analytics programs (like Indextools and ClickTracks) that measure web traffic, activity, and conversions can be used to further refine keyword selection.

Currently, the most popular sources of keyword data are Overture (re-branded as Yahoo! Search Marketing), which offers data collected from searches performed on Yahoo!’s engine (with a 22-28% share). While neither’s data is flawless or entirely accurate, both provide good methods for measuring comparative numbers. For example, while Overture and Wordtracker may disagree on numbers and say that “red bicycles” gets 240 vs. 380 searches per day (across all engines), both will generally indicate that this is a more popular term than “scarlet bicycles”, “maroon bicycles”, or even “blue bicycles.”

In Wordtracker, which provides more detail but has a considerably smaller share of data, terms and phrases are separated by capitalization, plurality, and word ordering. In the Overture tool, multiple search phrases are combined. For example, Wordtracker would independently show numbers for “car loans”, “Car Loans”, “car loan”, and “cars Loan”, whereas Overture would give a single number that encompasses all of these. The granularity of data can be more useful for analyzing searches that may result in unique results pages (plurals often do and different word orders almost always do), but capitalization is of less consequence as the search engines don’t deliver different results based on capitalization.

Remember that Wordtracker and Overture are both useful tools for relative keyword data, but can be highly inaccurate when compared to the actual number of searches performed. In other words, use the tools to select which terms to target, but don’t rely on them for predicting the amount of traffic you can achieve. If your goal is estimating traffic numbers, use programs like Google’s Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing to test the number of impressions a particular term/phrase gets.

Targeting the Right Terms

Targeting the best possible terms is of critical importance. This encompasses more than merely measuring traffic levels and choosing the highest trafficked terms. An intelligent process for keyword selection will measure each of the following:

* Conversion Rate - the percent of users searching with the term/phrase that converts (click an ad, buy a product, complete a transaction, etc.)

* Predicted Traffic - An estimate of how many users will be searching for the given term/phrase each month

* Value per Customer - An average amount of revenue earned per customer using the term or phrase to search - comparing big-ticket search terms vs. smaller ones.

* Keyword Competition - A rough measurement of the competitive environment and the level of difficulty for the given term/phrase. This is typically measured by metrics that include the number of competitors, the strength of those competitors’ links, and the financial motivation to be in the sector. SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool can assist in this process.

Once you’ve analyzed each of these elements, you can make effective decisions about the terms and phrases to target. When starting a new site, it’s highly recommended to target only one or possibly two unique phrases on a single page. Although it is possible to optimize for more phrases and terms, it’s generally best to keep separate terms on separate pages, as you can provide individualized information for each in this manner. As websites grow and mature, gaining links and legitimacy with the engines, targeting multiple terms per page becomes more feasible.
The Long Tail of Search

The “long tail” is a concept pioneered by Chris Anderson (the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, who runs the Long Tail blog). From Chris’s description:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

This concept relates exceptionally well to keyword search terms in the major engines. Although the largest traffic numbers are typically for broad terms at the “head” of the keyword curve, great value lies in the thousands of unique, rarely used, niche terms in the “tail.” These terms can provide higher conversion rates and more interested and valuable visitors to a site, as these specific terms can relate to exactly the topics, products, and services your site provides.

How to Conduct Keyword Research

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By Scott Buresh

Search is a growing industry, and it seems that every day there is a new search engine optimization company in the game. However, the skills of many of these search engine optimization companies are questionable. Staying on top of the knowledge curve can be daunting, and getting up to speed more daunting still. Moreover, there are a huge variety of tactics, “safe” and “unsafe” practices (in terms of the risk of penalization), and other important business considerations that you should think about before deciding on any particular search engine optimization company.

The following is a list of questions to help you to determine if the company you are considering is deserving of your trust. In this article, we’ll focus on the tactics that search engine optimization companies might use that could put your website at risk of penalization or removal from the major search engines. Ask your potential search engine optimization company the following:
Do you show search engines anything that a visitor does not see?

There is a common tactic that certain search engine optimization companies use called “cloaking.” In simple terms, these companies use technology that enables your website to recognize when a visitor to your site is a spider and to then feed that spider specialized content designed to rank highly in search engines. This tactic violates the Terms of Service (TOS) of every major search engine. Sites that are caught cloaking are routinely removed from engines. Therefore, depending on your tolerance for risk, you may want to find a search engine optimization company that does not employ this tactic.
Do you create pages, either on my server or somewhere else, that are not built into the navigation of my site?

Another common technique that some search engine optimization companies employ is the creation of “doorway pages.” Since the term “doorway page” now has such a negative connotation in the industry, many search engine optimization companies have their own names for such pages: “gateway pages,” “bridge pages,” “targeted entry pages,” “specialized content pages,” and so on. Whatever they are called, such pages are rarely effective and also put websites at risk of penalization, as this is another tactic that violates the TOS of every major engine. If your potential search engine optimization company does not give you a definitive “no” to the above question, you may want to look elsewhere.
What is your link building methodology? Is it automated, and do you target reciprocal links?
Quality search engine optimization companies are concerned about garnering quality inbound links to your website because “link popularity” plays a big factor in rankings. If the major players at any potential search engine optimization company tell you that they do not build links, it’s time to laugh in their faces, call them lazy, and move on.

Because finding quality links from quality sites is very time consuming, many search engine optimization companies have tried to automate the process. One undesirable approach to link building is automated reciprocal linking schemes, often responding to the ubiquitous emails that are sent to anyone with a website, looking for link exchanges to boost a site’s link popularity. The danger here is that an outbound link from your site is counted as a “vote” for the site to which it links. If that site gets penalized, your site may get penalized in turn. (Google refers to this type of linking relationship as a “bad neighborhood.”) A good search engine optimization company will concentrate instead on garnering quality inbound only links to your website and adding the type of content that makes it worthy of non-reciprocal links from a variety of sites.

Do you use hidden text or hidden links?
Search engines, as a rule, do not like it when a website shows them content that is not designed for a visitor to see. However, there are search engine optimization companies that will employ hidden text (text that is the same color as the background color of a page or text that is hidden behind a graphic, for example) to try to boost that page’s relevance, and thus the page’s ranking. Other search engine optimization companies will use hidden links, typically sized down to one pixel, that lead to dozens, or even hundreds of pages that are not designed for visitors to see, known as doorway pages. This is another tactic that, if discovered, can get a website removed from search engines. If you are averse to this type of risk, make certain the search engine optimization company that you are considering gives you a definitive “no” in answer to the question.
Have you ever gotten a client’s site penalized?
If so, when was the last time?
Many quality search engine optimization companies have, at one time or another, gotten a client site penalized, either due to a change in the TOS of an engine or an oversight of some sort. If the search engine optimization company with which you are speaking tells you that it has gotten a site penalized, but that it was many years ago, this may not be such a big deal. But if the company tells you that it caused a site to be penalized last week, you should quickly procure a cross and some garlic and run screaming in the opposite direction.

While these questions do not cover all potentially dangerous methodologies, it has been my experience that shady search engine optimization companies rarely use only one illegal trick, and one of the tricks in their arsenal is almost certainly listed above. If a search engine optimization company gives you a lot of evasive answers to these questions, it may give you an idea of the type of firm that you are dealing with. Unless you are comfortable with the risks associated with the above tactics used by some search engine optimization companies, I suggest you find another vendor.
Summary of above Questions to ask a SEO Company
Above, I went over questions that you should ask your potential search engine optimization company regarding its tactics. That set of questions is critical, as before moving forward with any of the myriad of search engine optimization companies out there, you should always determine whether or not they will put your site at risk of penalization in the major search engines (leaving your website worse off than when your campaign started).

However, many people researching search engine optimization companies are unaware that potential penalization is even an issue, they are primarily interested in the results that the search engine optimization company can achieve. The below questions are designed to determine the competence of any search engine optimization company that you are considering. To find out whether any particular company is worthy of your trust in terms of results, consider asking the following:
Do you require that I make changes to my website content?
Any search engine optimization companies that answer “no” to this question are either using shady tactics or are only scratching the surface of true search engine optimization. Certainly, there are some elements that can be changed on a website that are largely transparent to the user, including title tags, meta tags, and alt tags. While making changes to these elements can create a boost in rankings, it will not give you the search engine dominance over your competitors that you desire. Remember, search engines are interested in matching content (what appears on your web pages) with search queries (the phrases that people are typing into search engines).

The problem with a search engine optimization company only manipulating the largely unseen elements is that search engines recognize that these elements are determined by the owner of the website and may not actually reflect the real content that appears on the pages. In order to perform well across the most popular engines, you must make certain that your search engine optimization company accurately addresses popular search queries within your pages. And this almost always requires changes to your content.
Will you be adding additional pages to my website?
If a search engine optimization company answers “no” to this question but answers “yes” to the question above, it likely means that it will be employing what I call the “shoehorn” approach to optimization. This means that the firm will try to shoehorn key phrases into existing pages on your website, rather than expanding your website to include new content.

The trouble with this approach is that your existing pages are unlikely to directly address the search query. When search engine optimization companies shoehorn in key phrases, they may achieve high rankings for you, but you probably won’t have many long term visitors. For example, assume that your company makes widgets and you have an “about us” page on your site that gives a brief history of your company, as well as contact information and driving directions. If your search engine optimization company optimizes this page for “custom widget pricing,” and you subsequently achieve high rankings for the phrase, it does not necessarily mean that you will see much benefit. One can deduce from the query that people are looking for actual pricing information, not information on where your company is located or when it was founded. Another web page that directly addresses their search query is just a click of the back button away.

Adding new, informational pages to your website is a standard approach for the inclusion of quality search engine optimization phrases. Think of it this way, your search engine optimization company should not be thinking, “Where can we shoehorn this phrase in?” Search engine optimization companies should instead always be thinking, “How can we best address this query with a new page?” The difference in results can be dramatic.
What will you be doing besides working on my site directly?

If a prospective search engine optimization company tells you that it will only be making changes to your site itself, this means that it will not be spending any time working on your site’s link popularity. Link popularity plays a tremendous role in determining rankings in every major search engine. Simply put, sites that have a good number of quality and relevant incoming links are held in a higher regard than sites that do not. This is because a link from another site is considered a “vote” for your site, but all votes are not equal.

Quality search engine optimization companies will spend a great deal of time looking for industry specific directories and portals where a link to your site can be added. They will also review all of your existing incoming links and make certain that the website owner has configured them in such a way as to give your site the highest chance for high search engine rankings.
Will you be adding additional pages and targeting additional key phrases over time?
This is a very important question. Even search engine optimization companies that have a reputation for providing quality initial results can fall short on this, but it is one of the most important aspects involved in improving your optimization results over time.

When your campaign is kicked off, your search engine optimization company will target an initial list of phrases. Although good search engine optimization companies will rely on readily available software to determine which phrases are being searched on most often, and common sense to determine which of those phrases will bring buyers and not “tire-kickers,” it is in all honesty an educated guess.

Forward looking search engine optimization companies treat the initial key phrases as the “testing” phase of the campaign. They track these individual phrases and find which ones are working (bringing in the people that actually buy something or take the point of action on your site that leads to a sale). Armed with this knowledge, such search engine optimization companies will regularly expand your campaign to include phrases similar to the ones that are working the best. Without such expansions based on real data, you are merely relying on the best educated guesses from the initial campaign, and not the hard data that comes from true metrics as the campaign progresses.
Can you give me references and case studies?
This one seems obvious, but there are search engine optimization companies out there who claim that their clients all wish to remain anonymous, so that it is impossible to provide any specifics. This is usually a smoke screen designed to defer proof of concept. Certainly, there are businesses that hire a search engine optimization company that wish to keep it a secret, but these are generally in the minority. Forward thinking companies generally enjoy showing off their success stories, so you should insist on seeing some real (not anonymous) case studies and talking with some references.

When dealing with references, find out how long they have been working with the search engine optimization company. If all references are less than a year old, it may mean that the company has been unable to demonstrate value over the long term, which is certainly something to consider. After all, long term value is what you should be trying to achieve from a search engine optimization company, and search engine optimization is not a one time endeavor.

Armed with these questions, you should be able to determine whether a certain search engine optimization company is worthy of both your time and your marketing money, or whether you instead will wind up with empty pockets and a useless site. Remember, high rankings don’t always mean good leads, and great key phrases are not helpful unless they are used properly on your site.
Summary of above Questions to ask a SEO Company

The first part of this article (above) was about questions to ask a potential search engine optimization company regarding the tactics that it will use to optimize your site. These questions are crucial because there are search engine optimization companies out there that will use techniques that can put your site at risk of penalization by the major engines. The second part of this article (above) covered questions that could determine the competence of a particular search engine optimization company to determine if you will be able to trust them with your business.

Now we come to the final part of this article (below), in which we will look at business assurances made by search engine optimization companies. If your prospective search engine optimization company has satisfactorily answered all of your questions as outlined in the first two articles, it may indeed be a perfect fit for your business. However, there are still some important areas that need to be covered - primarily related to business assurances and expectations.

Below I will discuss the assurances that search engine optimization companies offer, or fail to offer, from guarantees to exclusivity agreements.
What type of guarantee will you give me?

Many search engine optimization companies will tell you that they can’t offer you a guarantee at all because they don’t control the engines. Other firms will try to give you a guarantee that is rankings-centric and that is, as demonstrated in my article “Leprechaun Repellant and Guaranteed SEO Companies - The Disturbing Link”, rather useless unless the search engine optimization company can prove that all of the key phrases that will be targeted are both relevant and popular.

On the other hand, a search engine optimization company may offer you a truly meaningful guarantee in the form of one that is traffic centric and drawn from targeted key phrases. In such a case, you will approve the key phrases and the search engine optimization company will guarantee a percentage increase in targeted search traffic. This guarantee is meaningful because the firm cannot pick unpopular phrases and you will approve the phrases to be certain that they are relevant. Not all search engine optimization companies offer this type of guarantee, but it’s worth looking for one that does.
Will you work with my competitors?
Few search engine optimization companies will give you a blanket “no.” If they do, ask them to delineate. It’s rare that a search engine optimization company will block out an entire business segment, and its idea of what comprises a competitor may be much narrower than yours. Some firms will not give you any promises regarding your competition. This response is not satisfactory, as the last thing you want a search engine optimization company doing is learning about your industry from optimizing your site and then soliciting your competition, using the knowledge they have gained to benefit from economies of scale.

Other search engine optimization companies will charge you extra for exclusivity - which can seem a bit like extortion. Remember, the vendor does not have control. YOU are the one paying the bills, and any search engine optimization company that uses this policy is not worthy of your cash. Quality search engine optimization companies will ask you to submit a list of your primary competitors and will not work with any of them for as long as you maintain a relationship with the firm. Period.
How much work is expected of me?
As discussed in the first part of this article, quality search engine optimization almost always requires the creation of new content. But who is responsible for writing this content? If your company is like most, everyone is pretty busy. If you embark on an SEO campaign, will you have to pay extra for an outside copywriting resource? Will you have to give the job to an overburdened internal person?

Search engine optimization companies that are interested in taking as much off of your plate as possible will ask only that you make a resource available for a phone call and will then handle the copy for you (giving you, of course, the opportunity to approve it all). You should also be prepared to provide the firm with any marketing materials, brochures, or white papers that explain your product and your messaging. Since writing for search engines is a learned art, it is not practical to expect a new person to come in and get it right the first time. This means that if a copywriting resource is not available from your search engine optimization company, your campaign can take much longer.

Additionally, once your search engine optimization company has made all of its change recommendations, will it drop a huge document in your lap and require you to make those changes? Or will the firm instead make a resource available to do the implementation at no extra cost? Certainly, there are some sites, especially those that draw on dynamic content, where you may not want an external company coming in to make the changes (although you should still limit your search to search engine optimization companies that are capable of handling this). Simpler sites, such as those created using strict HTML, are easy to change.

Your search engine optimization company should be able to implement these changes on a test bed site for your approval before the site goes live. Much like copywriting, implementation of SEO changes is a specialty that regular designers do not often face. It is usually faster to have your firm do this, since it has handled such a task so many times before.
In Closing
Well, you’ve asked the questions, narrowed your choices, and now have to select between any of the vendors that answered satisfactorily. Of course, some search engine optimization companies will tell you whatever it is you want to hear to get your business. Your best bet is to take your time and read the fine print, and make sure that anything of particular importance to you is added to the contract. I’m not saying that all salespeople are liars, just the really good ones. But if you’re savvy and ask the right questions, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Questions to Ask Your Potential Search Engine Optimization Company

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Carrie Reeder talks about the pros and cons of pay-per-click advertising versus search engine optimization. Find out how PPC and SEO can complement each other in one’s web marketing plan and overall marketing strategy.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising & Search Engine Optimization

There are pro’s & con’s to both Pay-Per-Click advertising and optimizing for natural search engine traffic.

PPC advertising has many great benefits. First of all, you get your traffic going quickly. I have used this advantage many times. I test new products and even new websites through PPC advertising before making a decision to promote or scrap my new website or product idea.

I am a firm believer in testing new products before throwing large amounts of money into advertising. PPC advertising is a great way to do this. For example, with Google’s Adwords program, you can post your ad, pay a $5 sign-up fee and have highly targeted traffic to your website within an hour. How is that for efficiency?

Also, you can moniter your click charges and stop them before they get too expensive. By the time you have spent your budget on clicks, you should have a pretty good idea of how successful your product is going to be.

I think of PPC advertising as being the most useful when starting a new business or product. WIth PPC advertising, you can quickly and efficiently find out which keywords you need to target and which products are the most popular.

Once that testing period is over, however, it’s time to look into Search Engine Optimization. PPC advertising can be very expensive, costing hundreds, even thousands a month in advertising costs. Once you know what keywords to target, it’s time to put together a plan on how you are going to optimize your website. The drawbacks to search engine optimization is that it requires a lengthy amount of time to get your site to rank high with your keywords. That is why I suggest using this method after the testing period is over, when you already know your business will be profitable.

Search Engine Optimization is definately a slow way to get your website traffic if you plan on not using PPC traffic. It could be a long, expensive road before you even begin selling your product. Search engines can take months, even years to start pulling up high with the search engines. But, natural search engine traffic is definately the best long term way to get the majority of your traffic.

When getting your site to start pulling up in SE natural listings there are 2 main things that need to be done:

Search engine traffic requires you to submit your site to many different search engines and wait, maybe even months for them to spider your website.

I have had much better luck with another route. You can pay a fee to have your website listed in a very high ranking directory like www.dmoz.com (free), www.yahoo.com’s directory ($299), sbd.bcentral.com (only $50), or another website where your link is on a page that has a page ranking of 4,5,6 or higher. The sites I mentioned above have rankings of 8 or 9. When you have your link on a site with that high of a ranking, the search engines are spidering those sites constantly and will find your website and spider it very quickly. Not only will they find it quickly but because you are linked to a high ranking site, you will also rank higher with the SE.

When looking for backlinks, focus on sites with content related to yours and high page rankings of 4 or higher.

As for content on your site, try to include about 200-500 words of content or text on most of the pages of your site. Text makes your site bulkier. Make sure to integrate all of the keywords you want to target within the content of your site. Don’t worry about cramming the same keywords in over and over. Search engines may possibly even blacklist your site for keyword stuffing, if you try to do that.

There is a lot to know about Search Engine Optimization but, those are the 2 main factors when getting started.

In summary, when starting out, I suggest using PPC advertising for testing products and keywords. Spend time optimizing your site for search engine traffic after you have tested your products and keywords.

PPC vs SEO

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Lester Boey talks about how hiring a qualified SEO professional can help your web businesses grow. He also warns that hiring an unqualified or unscrupulous SEO can get your website banned or penalized by the search engines.

– Internet Marketing Determines Web Success –

Internet marketing is essential to the success of web sites. You can have a professional looking website but what good can it do if internet users are not able to find it when they need your products and services? That is where an internet marketing campaign comes into play.

“Your website has to magically appear before buyers when they need products and services.”

Internet marketing is similar to designing websites- it does not require much experience to do a good job, just good knowledge and a keen eye for details. It is fundamentally important for a good internet marketer to constantly update himself weekly, if not monthly, of online markets. There are many ways to market your website .

– Find A Competent and Reliable Internet Marketer –

Justify the costs of hiring an Internet Marketer - First of all, getting an internet marketer is not essential for every website. If your website is a business website or a website which you want to generate revenue from, it is good to seek a competent internet marketer to work on your website. The costs spent on your website for internet marketing has to be justified and often, they are justified by having more revenue and traffic to your web site.

Potential customers have to know that there are no guarrantees in SEO. Since everything is fundamentally based on search engines, SEO work is at the mercy of major search engines like Google. Many SEO companies tried to secure customers with guarrantees that they cannot fulfil, resulting in lawsuits or customers getting burned for hiring their SEO services.

– What an Internet Marketer can offer –

In short, an Internet Marketer oversees that your website is built properly for visibility and promoted with the best dollar spent on your internet marketing campaign. It is no good having a website and not appearing in internet searches. Your website has to magically appear before buyers when they need products and services. Internet Marketers deploy search engine optimisation techniques to make your website visible and targetted to internet users.

Internet marketing requires research and analysis effort for individual website, followed by optimisation of website. Hundreds of hours may be spent on each website, depending on the size of your targetted market. You are essentially paying for the amount of effort involved, effectiveness of your internet marketer and daily sales tracking of your website.

How to choose an Internet Marketer- Internet marketing requires constant updating of skills and knowledge. One crude way to test if your internet marketer is a genuine or fake- Ask your internet marketer about recent events that happened in his field. If he cannot answer that, he must have a genuinely good reason to back himself as a good internet marketer! At times, it is easy to fall prey into the hands of bad internet marketing companies as happened in US and other parts of the world.

It is also important for you to feel comfortable with the amount of money you are spending on getting your site popular before committing yourself to a internet marketing campaign. Internet marketing campaigns typically last a few months and requires monthly tune-ups to your website. Include the costs of an internet marketing campaign when doing your company’s advertising budget.

Hiring an SEO

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Karon Thackston talks about how to write SEO-friendly copy for your website. Find out some of the rules of thumb for creating copy for both your visitors and search engines as well.

Search engine copywriting has become an extremely important part of the overall search engine optimization process. However, in addition, search engine copywriting has developed into a misunderstood craft.

Shoving keywords in anywhere they can possibly go is not considered search engine copywriting. The process is more defined than that. Successful SEO copywriting takes planning. Any half-hearted efforts at writing copy geared strictly toward the engines will usually result in a decline in your customer’s experience at your site.

What’s the best way to write SEO copy? Starting with a plan is always a good idea. Keep in mind, these are guidelines of techniques that can be used *IF* they make sense for your site visitors. I never recommend writing solely for the search engines. In the case of search engine copywriting, the customer is truly #1.

1) Use Three Keyphrases Per Page - Not a carved-in-stone rule, the guideline of three keyphrases per page gives good variety and helps keep the copy from sounding too repetitive. I always choose keyphrases first - before I write - because they can have a direct impact on the focus of the page.

2) Have 250 or More Words of Copy - The length of your copy depends on several things: Your target customer’s preferred communication style, whether the product is new to the marketplace, if a detailed explanation needs to be given, site design and many other factors. However, the 250-word minimum gives enough room to get your message across and offer an effective level of keyword support. Remember though, it’s all about the customer. If your target customers prefer longer copy, write longer copy. If they like shorter copy, write shorter copy.

3) Write In Natural Language - “Natural language” is a term popular in SEO copywriting. It means that the reader should not be able to (or should barely be able to) detect what keyphrases the page is being optimized for. The copy should flow as if it were not written with the search engines in mind. You don’t want the copy to sound forced or stiff. When you generate ideas for the page copy, keep your keywords in mind. Ask yourself whether you can use them in the copy in such a way that they won’t be obtrusive.

4) Use Keyword Phrases In Headlines and Sub-headlines - IF it makes sense to do so. You will not blow your rankings if you have no keyword-filled

or other tags. If your headline sounds stupid with keywords in it, don’t use them. There are countless sites online that rank highly which have no keywords in the headline.

5) Use Keyword Phrases Once or Twice Per Paragraph - Again IF it makes sense. Remember what I keep repeating? None of these guidelines are carved in stone. Read your copy out loud. If it sounds stupid or forced, take out some keywords or find ways to rework them so they flow more naturally.

6) Use Keyword Phrases In Bold, Italic or Bulleted Lists - IF it makes sense to do so. Don’t automatically bold or italicize every instance of your keywords. It will make your page look stupid, and your visitors will wonder what kind of drugs you’ve been doing!

7) Do NOT Use Keyword Phrases As Substitutes For Generic Terms -
For example, do not replace every instance of the generic word “cruise” with the keyphrase “Mexico cruise vacation.” Your copy will sound ridiculous.

We offer Mexico cruise vacation packages on the most popular Mexico cruise vacation ships to the most breathtaking Mexico cruise vacation destinations. Oh please!!

8) Use Keyword Phrases As Anchor Text In Links - This is certainly not always possible. If your primary keyphrase is “Mexico Cruise Vacation,” you absolutely should not write every link to include that phrase. However, if you can include keywords in anchor text within body copy or in text navigation links, you might score a little extra credit.

9) Test and Track - Lastly, and above all, please remember, it may take some tweaking to get your page to convert the way you want it to. All customers are not the same, and all sites are not the same. All keyphrases are not the same. There is no magic bullet. You’ll have to test and track and see what works best for you.

SEO Copywriting

Technorati Tags: SEO Copywriting