Search Engine Optimization

Low Cost SEO

After years of being the misunderstood stepchild of marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) is finally getting its day in the sun. Industry newsletters increasingly feature tips from professional SEO's, explaining how to get more out of your website. The coverage has been quite thorough, ranging from meta tags and keywords through site layout and copywriting. The buzz has even reached the mainstream, and companies long content to spend advertising dollars on print or broadcast media are suddenly waking up to the potential ROI on a good website that has been properly marketed on the internet.

Which makes the amount of misinformation out there all the more surprising. Despite every attempt on the part of marketers and search engines alike to emphasize that quality rankings demand a quality site, there is still a booming business in cut-rate SEO, offering the world for just $19.95 per month. Often, these services only do submittals to the automated search engines, without even the bare minimum amount of optimization. Newcomers to the world of the internet, who just want to get some attention for their websites, are eager to take advantage of these low cost "SEO" companies, especially when they compare the prices (and promises) to those of bigger companies.

The problem is, the internet is no longer an easy sell. Simply submitting your site to Google does not mean that you will be in the top 10 results out of 589,742. Simply tweaking your meta tags or jazzing up your site title does not constitute keeping your site updated, nor are there any algorithms left out there which will take your tags on faith with nothing to back them up. Hidden text, spammed alt tags, dozens of doorway pages, and link farms with no relevance to your product or service are outdated tricks, doomed to failure and dangerous if you get caught.

We recently signed a new client after several discussions combatting the claims of one of these low budget SEO's. Our competitor presented some very impressive results, companies he had gotten a number of #1 rankings for, on competitive search engines like Google. He had accomplished these miracles purely through working on their meta tags and creating good titles. It's really hard to argue against that... unless you happen to understand the SEO world. Luckily, we do. In this case, it was as simple as sending him the link to a good keyword search results tool (both Overture and FindWhat, among others, offer good ones). We told him to look up the keywords, and he found that none of them had gotten more than 250 visitors in the past month, at most. Our new client could easily see that a top ranking in a non-competitive search term wasn't that special, and also saw that none of the "happy clients" had any ranking at all for their strong keywords.

It would make everyone's life so much easier if a simple tweak of the meta tags and routine submissions were the only requirements for successful SEO. However, it just doesn't work that way anymore, and it hasn't worked that way for a lot longer than most people realize. The internet has come of age in today's marketplace, and the standard rules apply. Specifically, one of the oldest adages in business: You get what you pay for.

SharpNET Solutions: Search Engine Marketing

Protecting Your Marketing Dollar

Internet marketing, by its very nature, is a whole new ballgame in terms of what works and what doesn't, and the rules of the game change frequently. The strategies of "brick and mortar" advertising frequently fall flat, leaving the internet marketer scrambling to come up with something innovative.

The same could be said for the client relationship, and the marketing materials themselves. After all, what are the "marketing materials" for an internet marketer? They might be a Pay-Per-Click account created for a client and managed by the marketer, they might be search engine submissions done by the company on behalf of the client, they might be email creatives, and none of these things are tangible. Further intangibles, critical to success, include the keyword research, the copy writing, the marketplace knowledge and the experience and expertise to know what to do with it all.

Sometimes, however, it's hard for the client to see exactly what they paid for. Suppose they pay for a listing on Yahoo!, and the marketer does the submission for them. The client wants to see a first page ranking for his chosen keywords, and traffic will of course explode and make him rich. Instead, he has ranking for some keywords he doesn't care about, has no ranking for some he did want, and saw only a modest response from the effort. From his perspective, the marketer has failed. Unlike print media, he can't open up the magazine or newspaper and see the ad and know that it is good. He can't see the research that goes into selecting the title and description, or the skill required to write copy that is informative, interesting, and still keyword-rich. So he is not happy, and wants to end the business relationship. He then thinks, in many cases, that he gets to keep all of the work done to date. If he hears otherwise, he sees red, and demands a refund.

The marketer who just got asked for a refund is probably also seeing red by now. He spent hours researching keywords, creating accounts, doing submissions, perhaps making email creatives. He's tried on 5 different occasions to explain to the client how the search engines work, has run ranking reports for him, and talked him through his hit tracking to prove that things are going well. After all that, the client informs him that he did a bad job and wants his money back.

How can everyone protect themselves financially? The client paid for advertising and is not getting orders. The marketer has out of pocket expenses, including up-front fees for submissions.

The best advice I can give both sides is to be as clear as possible about expectations, limitations, what is promised and what cannot be promised. So here are some good rules for each side to follow:

MARKETERS

1. Don't make promises you can't keep. This includes things like promising #1 ranking on Google for a highly competitive keyword, or promising 75,000 targeted visitors in one year for a keyword that gets 56 hits per month.

2. Don't do a "turn and burn". What does that mean? It means don't sign a contract, do the minimum possible, then turn your back on the client. Maintaining rankings and traffic requires consistent attention to how the website is performing.

3. Make known ahead of time, in writing, precisely what the client will own at the end of the contract. Will he own that new website you built? Will he take over control of the Overture account you have created and nurtured, including all those careful descriptions? If so, make sure that you are compensated for them.

CLIENTS

1. Don't expect the moon on a shoestring. Most internet marketing contracts charge much less than traditional print or broadcast media, and it's just about the best advertising ROI. Realize, though, that this is like any other form of advertising: Generally speaking, the more money you put in, the more you get out. If you're not willing to pay for a PPC, you probably aren't going to lock in all of those #1 listings.

2. Don't expect instantaneous response. We've all seen the commercial by now. The young entrepreneurs load up their website, and cheer as the first order comes in... a few seconds later, they're stunned as the orders are into the thousands. In reality, SEO campaigns almost always start slow and gradually pick up speed. Calling or emailing your marketer every other day can't speed up the search engine spiders.

3. Clarify, ahead of time, what you want after the contract is over. This saves a lot of frustration on both sides later.

Of course, since all the rules change on the internet every other day, these might change in a week too! But on the whole, I'd say it's pretty sound advice for ANY business relationship.

SharpNET Solutions Professional Internet Marketing Services

Keyword research

One of the hottest topics in the search engine optimization world these days is keyword density. It is perceived as one of the magic tools to make your site miraculously rank #1 for your top keywords, sending everyone running to your site! Traffic will jump to the millions, and your sales will jump to the multi-millions.

This is a bit overly optimistic. Now don't get me wrong: I'm a copywriter, so words are my stock in trade! And part of my job is to achieve the much-vaunted "keyword density", to help our clients. I encourage everyone to make sure they pay attention to their keyword density when creating their site content. However, there are too many sites out there that prove how hard it really is.

Rules for good use of keywords:

1. DO YOUR RESEARCH! Find out what your best keywords really are, in search engine terms. We get so accustomed to using industry jargon that we forget the rest of the world doesn't speak that way. We had one client who loved the phrase "one handed touch typing"; the problem is, nobody else ever uses that phrase. Don't waste your time optimizing a site for a keyword or phrase which gets no traffic. Conversely, understand that for an incredibly competitive term such as "debt consolidation", you are competing with literally millions of other listings; use that term, but make sure you have a few solid second choices as well.

2. All elements work together. Once you've assembled a good list of relevant keywords, you need to make sure that all aspects of your website work together. For best ranking, you need a website URL, a title, meta tag description and keywords, graphics and alt tags, and text content, all of which reinforce each other in terms of emphasizing the market you want to target.

3. Remember your audience. One final warning: Don't get so carried away with trying to impress a search engine spider that you forget your website is intended to be used by real people. If your text content makes no sense, if it is spammed, or if it is optimized for a product or service which it doesn't actually deliver, then there will be no sales.

Getting good ranking for your chosen keywords is one part science, one part art, and one part just luck, in my opinion, but your odds improve greatly if you take a little extra time to do your homework and apply some logic.

SharpNET Solutions: Search Engine Marketing

Web design considerations

I'm beginning to think that most web designers never read the marketing blogs. That's okay, when design was my primary focus, I didn't read them either, but I was missing out on so much information it kind of frightens me. I can't help thinking, from my current perspective, that a lot of time and trouble could be saved if only the average web designer knew things that the average marketer knows. This is not in any way to say that marketers have more design talents or a better artistic sense! But, there are things which can take a web design beyond the merely functional, or the artistically impressive, and make it also a great site for search engines.

Let me give you an example. One client of ours spent several thousand dollars for a custom Flash site. The Flash is really impressive. The designer did a great job, it's very effective and convincing, and great fun to go through. Of course, this site does not and cannot rank on the automated search engines. Since the primary purpose of the site was to sell the company product, you could argue that several thousand dollars was just wasted. The designer delivered exactly what he promised, it just wasn't what the company really needed.

In case any web designers are reading this blog, I'm going to quickly repeat some of the cardinal rules for a sales-oriented website. I know that these sites are not as "exciting" in some regards, but they do the job:

1. NO FLASH LANDING PAGES. We really can't emphasize this enough. Flash landing pages have no text for the search engine spiders to read, so there will be no keyword ranking. Beyond that, anyone on dial-up will probably jump to another site halfway through the 10-minute download. Finally, anyone behind a firewall probably can't see it at all, since they aren't allowed to download programs like Flash in the first place. If you're going to use Flash, make it a link to your Flash movie, from a static page.

2. Keep it simple. The same navigation and layout on all pages, and whenever possible, have every page link directly to every other page.

3. Keep it simple, part 2. Make it as easy as possible for the customer to order the product/service. Have obvious order links on every page (nice buttons saying "click here to order!" work well), make sure the prices are clearly posted, and make your shopping cart as easy to get through as possible. Three clicks to order is ideal.

Those are the framework basics. Stick with this, and your site is ahead of the game. Of course there are other considerations as well: Make sure it's easy to read (no font size=1 or 7px fonts, don't use yellow text on green backgrounds, etc); make sure it's informative; make sure it has sufficient text content.

Then apply your artistic sense. There's no reason a straightforward site can't be a work of art! Just make sure that work of art is accessible to the widest possible audience, and does its duty, and you will have achieved the perfect marriage of art and marketing!

SharpNET Solutions: Web Design

the future of LookSmart and MSN

Experienced internet users know that the internet changes more quickly than we can keep track of it. That's one of the great things about the web -- it gives us new information all the time! However, finding that information and sorting through it can be challenging, especially as the number of active websites grows into the billions.

Of course, that's where search engines come in. You go to your favorite search engine, type in your search phrase, and (hopefully) pull up a list of great websites all about what you want. Unfortunately, depending on what search engine you choose, you might instead get a list of thousands of pages of, well, garbage.

Everyone has their own favorite search engine, and their own reasons for selecting it, but one of the most popular is MSN, a portal used by people worldwide. A good listing on MSN generally means that a website will get a lot of attention, so marketers target MSN as one of their favorite engines to place well on. That means submitting through LookSmart, which is where MSN draws their primary search listings from. LookSmart is a human-edited search engine, the sites are reviewed by real people and judged on their real merits. What this has meant to MSN users is a set of search results that tend to be a lot more relevant than you can get on some other search engines.

That's all about to change, however. MSN did not re-sign their deal with LookSmart, so starting in January of 2004, MSN will probably be relying on either their own database, or on results from some other search engine. Rumors are flying, but solid information is hard to come by at this point. Internet marketers are waiting anxiously for some sign of which direction MSN is going to take, so they know what new strategies they will need for their clients.

All of this leaves the future course of LookSmart a bit in doubt, in my opinion. Although they are a search engine in their own right, they aren't nearly as well-known as bigger names like Yahoo!, Google, or MSN. MSN was their big client, and they will need to find a way to replace that revenue and that exposure. It's a tough world out there, and this one might hurt. Personally, I like LookSmart; I like their listings, and I like the user-friendliness, both for searchers and for submitters. I'd like to see them remain a strong player in the search engine world.

SharpNET Solutions: Search Engine Marketing