We All Make Mistakes

Very few clients have Scott’s thirst for knowledge.  They don’t understand it, or care, or have the time to listen to me ramble about SEO and website design.  Their confident my team will manage go-live and do so properly.  And we do, because we have a project plan that we walk through and I check off as the project progesses.  But not every web design firm or SEO consultant uses a checklist or project plan.  They miss things and these “things” become opportunities for their client’s competition because it is the little things that win in SEO and website design.

Three weeks ago I was researching competitors of a prospect and I discovered one of their local competitors had every page on their website blocked to search engines.  Only the home page was in Google’s index and the company was paying heavily for pay per click campaigns.  The company didn’t know their web designer or in-house webmaster left the noindex tag on all their pages.  It was everything I could do to stop myself from calling the firm to let them know.

The point I am trying to make here is that many consultants and marketing firms miss things.  We’re human and we make mistakes.  Not like a doctor leaving a medical device in a patient type of mistake, but pretty big mistakes nonetheless.  If you’re the client or the DIY web designer, you need to protect yourself.  You need to have some education and you should do a quick run through of your website before and after go-live.  And of course, well before you pay that final invoice.

Go-Live Checklist for Web Design Projects

1. Test Your Website Against All Browsers – Just when you think everything is perfect, in walks someone using IE (Internet Explorer).  Older versions of IE have produced many of grey hairs for me over the last few years.  Things tend to break in IE, so double checking the new website in it right before go-live is critical.  While not as buggy as IE, other browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Safari should also be reviewed.  They are more robust, but older versions can also be problematic. My beloved iPhone and iPad are newer arrivals and they too should be checked.
2. Add a Favicon – A favicon is about branding.  It adds a little image to the tab or window of the user’s browser and it is saved with the bookmark in a favorites list. While this isn’t a critical element, it does provide a nice polished look to your website and I have many clients who get big smiles when they see their logo pop up as a favicon.
3. Create an HTML Sitemap for Visitors – Much to my disappointment; sitemaps are ignored by many developers.  I still create one and while I don’t put it proudly in the main navigation, I do try to make it available in the footer.  Most people don’t use sitemaps, but for those of us who are impatient (that would be me) they’re important.
4. Create an XML Sitemap for Search Engines – A sitemap.xml file should be created and placed in your root directory.  This simple little file allows major search engines to easily index your website.  In WordPress, generating this sitemap is as easy as adding a plugin and clicking the generate button.  WordPress will automatically update this file with every new page or post addition or content change.  It is a simple way of reaching out to search engines and letting them know you have fresh content available for their review.  While this is simple, it is many times forgotten.
5. Prepare a Redirect File – The redirect file is the bane of my existence.  It simply tells search engines and users that an old page or post is no longer available and it redirects them to the current page or post.  It is important for usability and SEO.  So why do I hate it so much?  It is time consuming and it is one of the last things we do before go-live.  Not only do we create the redirect file for the client, we generally have to audit their existing pages and provide a cross reference between old and new.  My clients don’t know what pages they have, so I end up becoming an internet detective in my efforts to locate a complete list.  Once you have the list of old and new matched up, you simply add the directory to the .htaccess file.  Or in my case, you use a WordPress plugin like Redirection.  I love the Redirection plugin because I can upload all the links right from a CSV file.
6. Create and Review a Robot.txt File – The robot.txt file blocks spiders or instructs the search engines to ignore certain file folders on your server.  For most clients this generally means keeping spiders out of the WordPress core and theme files.  For others it may identify a protected directory of white papers or files that are restricted.  Simple, yet important for protecting your website and your high value web assets.
7. Double Check Your Submission Forms Are Working – The simple checking of submission forms may seem like a no brainer, but you’d be surprised at the amount of problems that can result from a simple contact form.  Email and forms can work differently from server to server, so you absolutely need to recheck forms after a website is moved from a development server to a live server.  One woman told me her company had broken forms for an entire year after they launched their website because no one remembered to check them.  When inquiry forms are your lead source, this is disastrous.
8. Double Check Your Meta Titles and Descriptions – Yes I know I just blogged about this in my last post (Web Design Ain’t Over Until the SEO Sings) and we’ve really already done this twice, but it I still double-check high value pages after go-live.  I use the toolbar from SEOmoz to view the meta title and description outside of WordPress just to make sure I didn’t miss anything.  And sometimes, the meta title or description that sounded great a week ago sounds incredibly stupid at launch.  So I go back and edit it just to make sure my pages are well represented in the SERPs.  This is where my OCD personality is highly visible and beneficial.
9. Double Check Your Index Settings – Didn’t I do that with my Robot.txt file above?  Well yes and no.  The robot.txt file looks at folders and is server based.  CMS packages like WordPress allow you to block search engines at a site or page and post level.  While we are in development, we have a site wide block of search engines so our clients do not run into issues with duplicate content.  Our go-live plan includes removing this setting.  That being said, not everyone has such as policy and I’ve noticed new websites blocking search engines more times than I have time to discuss in a blog post.
10. Check Your RSS Feed and Sign Up for FeedBurner – An RSS feed is a techie term for a page that lists your most recent blog posts.  You can use this feed to automatically populate other websites or profiles on the internet.  It is a must have for link building efforts.  Feedburner is a service that allows visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed via email.  It is offered by Google, it is 100% free, and it makes a great tool for building engagement.  Some people even show off the number of RSS subscribers they have as if it is a badge of honor.
11. Add Google Analytics – I virtually force Google Analytics on every client.  I set it up even if they don’t care, because I think some day they will care and I want them to have data available.  Google Analytics is a free application that tracks visits to your website and the corresponding activity.  It can tell you where people came from, what keyword they used, how long they stay, and when they left.  Good website design and SEO requires analytics.  Since GA is free and powerful, it makes a great tool.
12. Submit Your New Sitemap.xml File to Google, Yahoo, and Bing – Use Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo Site Explorer.  Doing so will not only allow for very rapid indexing of the new website, it will provide very valuable tools down the road.  I use Google Webmaster Tools every week and find it a critical tool for evaluating website and SEO success.
13. Review Speed and Performance – After your website is live on your server, you need to review performance.  You’ll be able to verify speed immediately from viewing the website live on the internet and you’ll receive performance reports from Google via Webmaster Tools.  Remember that speed alters search results and conversion rates, so make sure your website performance is up to par.  If you’re live and you’re living with poor performance, don’t be fooled into thinking it is temporary.  Some hosting companies are just horrible, so get out as quick as you can.

DIY Designers Take Note

Winning (not the Charlie Sheen kind) isn’t easy.   Most people are not like my pal Scott and their minds do just magically sponge up SEO knowledge.

Each week I receive calls from a lot of DIY website owners.  Virtually every time my heart goes out to them, because they’re really trying.  But trying and succeeding are two different things.  Website design and SEO is hard work.  Competing on the internet is difficult and there are reasons why most websites get virtually no traffic.

If you are considered the average Joe and you’ve undertaken at DIY website project, take a moment and reread the above list.  If you’ve reviewed my thirteen items and you only “get” about five of them, you’re setting yourself up for failure.  Take the time to research them further and postpone your website launch until you’ve made sure you’ve thoroughly covered your to do list.  If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the list, then seek out a professional.  The few hundred dollars you spend for the last minute help will be well worth it in the end.

Whether you’re the DIY website designer, a marketing manager, or a small business owner – double check your website and efforts at go-live and make sure you and/or your website design firm have everything in working order.

But keyword research doesn’t have to be some big crazy formula.  I read a lot of SEO articles and blog posts and the internet is full of great content and advice for performing elaborate keyword research.  While this works, the activity of keyword research doesn’t have to be so convoluted that the average person can’t do it. It just needs to be a methodical.

I’ve worked with or developed both large and small websites.  Some have 20 keywords and some have 2,000 keywords.  Regardless of the volume of keywords or web pages, my process remains the same because it is scalable.  More importantly, it is a process that the average person can perform.

Fifteen Steps to Developing a Targeted List of Keywords

1. Write down keywords and/or phrases you would use to search the internet for your products or services.
2. Now go to Google and input those terms into the search box.  Look at the bottom of the page of search results and review what Google is suggesting as “related” search terms.  Write down those words too.  You can also look to your left on the page to see if Google is suggesting “something different”.
3. Your next step should be a visit to Google’s Insights for Search, which shows related terms and trends for a given search term or word.  Input your top keywords and document anything of interest.
4. Now consider your existing website.  Go to your Google Analytics account (if you have it) and review your keyword traffic for the last year.  Don’t just look at high volume traffic, but also consider the lower volume traffic that you’re not doing very well on from a search standpoint.  Document any keywords that you would like to score well on in search.
5. Next you should head over to Google Webmaster Tools and look at your Search Queries.  Similar to that of the Analytics data, don’t just look at keywords your performing well on.  Look at everything and document any words or phrases that you should score on.
6. Now visit your competitors’ websites and write down any keywords and/or phrases your competitors are targeting.  If you’re not sure what these are, look at their page titles, sitemap, and actual page URLs.  Note this will only work if your competitors have a good SEO strategy.
7. By now you have a fairly long list of keywords.  We need to see how these fit into the real world of search.  If I’ve learned anything over the last nine years of SEO work, it’s that I don’t know what people search on.  I can only make assumptions and then validate my thoughts against actual search volumes.  I validate my suspected keyword list in Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool.  To do this, all you have to do is input your list of potential keywords into the box and let it rip.  You can either go broad with results or narrow it down to exact.  Just make sure you stay consistent.
8. As I pull my keyword volumes, I put them into an Excel spreadsheet and I create one very large list.  I don’t pay much attention to volume at this point, because I don’t want to get distracted.  I just keep loading up the list with keywords, volumes, and competitiveness.
9. Now that I have my list of potential keywords and volumes, I set is aside.  I walk away and move onto something else, because at this point I’m fairly burned out on keyword research.  When my mind has cleared, I return to revisit my list.  If the list is really long, I remove any keywords on the list that are below a certain level of volume.  If I have thousands of keywords, my pain threshold may by 500 searches per month.  If it is a small list, this may be reduced to 50.  It is very relative and based on the industry and target market.
10. The next step is to score each word for relevance.  You need to look at each work and think about it’s relevance to your actual products or services.  You can give this a high, medium, and low or you can use a number scale.  Whatever works is fine, just make sure it clearly shows which words are important and which words are irrelevant or less important.
11. Once I’ve scored my list of relevance, I create a weighted score for each keyword.  I typically take the relevance score and multiply this by the actual volume.  You don’t have to get overly fancy; you just need to be able to see a combination of relevance and traffic volumes.
12. Now I start ditching keywords.  I’d like to say I don’t, but I do.  I’ve been going this for so many years, I can just “see” issues or anomalies.  I see trends and I can see if something is just not right.  Maybe the keyword has other unrelated meanings (you can check this my Googling it) and the traffic volumes are distorted.  In other cases, it could be it is so broad it just doesn’t work.  This is where I start overriding my client’s wishes and I do so because my instincts tell me to do it and they’ve hired me because of my experience.  So far no one has fired me for this practice.
13. Now I take a step back and I look at the list.  What keywords have strong volumes, are closely matched to the client’s offering, and are not polluted with excessive targeting by competitors.  I view this as “picking your battles”, which is similar to what I do with my kids.  You can only win in so many places, so you have to target what is important.  This comes back to my gut.
14. Now I pick three really competitive words with good volumes that I believe we can win on with effort.  Long-term effort and not overnight effort.  These are our big boys and the words we will hammer until we win. Note that the number of three could be 100 if your website is much larger.  Again, this process is varied based on industry, geography, and target market.
15. Next I pick about seventeen secondary keywords.  These are long tail or less competitive words that are still good, but not necessarily the biggies.  These phrases we’ll be able to win on quicker, but they won’t have as high of volumes as the three we just picked.  Just as I mentioned above, this number varies.  It may be seventeen or it may be 2,000.
16. Finally I go through the list to see what is left.  I try and assign these to blog posts, tags, or categories.  Wherever possible, I provide clients with suggestions on possible titles for blog posts so we are capturing the keywords.

Okay I had 16 steps.  I tried really hard to stay at fifteen, but it didn’t quite work.

Now What?

So you have your list of keywords.  Now what?  Now you have to take a step back and look at that list and decide if you can create web pages to support the keywords.  If you compete in any level of ca ompetitive environment, you’ll need to have only one or two keywords focused per page.  In other words, for every keyword you need a page of content.  And not only do you need web content, you need to be able to weave those pages (aka keywords) into a sitemap that makes logical sense.

If this is your first go around at this process, you probably don’t have a list that can easily be whipped into a logical sitemap.  That is okay.  Just revisit the last three steps and adjust.

This is Your Plan of Attack

You have a list, which means you have the start of a plan.  This list and your future sitemap should be the basis for all internet marketing activity.  From your company or personal profiles on social networks to your inbound links on press releases, you need to consult this list.

And remember, you need to revisit your list and this process, because people change and search traffic trends shift.  Remember Web 2.0?  Well no one talks about it anymore and it has morphed into social media.  If you browse my website you’ll see references to Web 2.0 have gone away and social media is all over my website.

The important point is that you have a list of keywords and the start of a real plan. Congratulations!  You’re off to a great start.

Who’s Taking Care of Fido?

In my house I take care of the family dog. I’m not a big fan of our English Lab, but I’m still the one who makes sure he is fed, watered, and let in and out four hundred times a day. I am the caregiver even if I’m far from a dog lover.

I much prefer my three cats, which pretty much take care of themselves. Fill up the food bowls and call it good. Not only do my cats bath themselves, I can leave them home alone for an extended period of time. The dog, well, not so much. He is work and he needs maintenance and attention every day.

I’ve heard the more love you give your dog, the better relationship you’ll have with the animal and the more benefit you’ll obtain. I’ve yet to practice this advice myself, but I do believe it is true and I absolutely believe your website is the similar. Just like the family dog, someone has to take care of your website, nurture it, and love it. If you don’t love and nurture your website, no one else will either.

A lot of my web design clients tend to believe the websites I build will continue to improve over time. Well that’s true, but only if they are nurtured. No website, or dog for that matter, can flourish without care. Go-live is just the beginning.

Loving Your Website After Go-live

On Friday’s call I started whipping out objectives or to do items for the client. They were overwhelmed a bit, but this will pass. We’ll get a plan together and we’ll give their website the continued love it’s been missing.

Today I reflected on that conversation and I thought the list I gave the client would make a good blog post and learning opportunity for other companies. Below is a sampling of my laundry list of to do items.

1. Bounce Rates – After 30 days of activity you have enough traffic to provide insight on visitor trends. Once you’ve reach that milestone you should review your website’s bounce rate (bounce rate refers to people leaving your website immediately upon entry) to see if you are retaining visitors. Don’t just look at the overall bounce rate, look at individual pages. Start with the pages that have the highest bounce rates and work down. Consider the keyword traffic and the content. Is the content to dry, boring, is it text heavy, is it vague? Fix whatever you deem to be the problem.
2. Keywords – How are you doing on keyword ranking and actual traffic from these keywords? Review Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to see what is happening. Webmaster Tools will show you what searches you show up on and Analytics will show you want happens when someone clicks through to your website from those keywords. Set a priority of action items based on your most coveted keywords down to nice to have keywords.
3. Link Building – Search engines look at inbound links as authority and reputation. You need inbound links to a variety of your pages to be able to score ranking on competitive keywords. No inbound links means no SEO love from Google. Most people forget about this requirement. I encourage people to create a keyword to page sitemap and use this for their long-term link building efforts.
4. Fresh Content – Search engines and visitors want to see fresh content. It gives both a reason to return to your website. Fresh content means adding and/or updating existing pages and adding new blog posts on a regular basis. How often will depend on your niche and your internal resources. Whether it is three times a week or once every three weeks, make sure you continue to add something fresh.
5. Comment Moderation – Monitor comments and respond promptly to anything left by your visitors. Clean out the spam, approve real comments, and provide a thoughtful reply. If you don’t care enough to moderate, your visitors won’t care enough to comment or even read your posts.

Who’s to Blame for the Stinky Dog?

My dog is hyper, stinky, and I literally have to segregate him if new people arrive for fear he will pee all over them. I suspect some of this would change if I spent more time loving him and making a real effort to improve his behavior. As much as I hate to admit it, I give my website more love then the family dog. While my website traffic grows, my dog just grows more and more annoying to me. Yes my dear readers, that was more painful for me to write than it was for you to read. The truth does hurt sometimes and it is obvious that I need to give my dog more love and attention.

The point is this – it is my fault. Without love and attention, my dog isn’t going to change anymore than your website traffic and conversions will skyrocket.

Both my dog and your new website need nurturing, love, and ongoing attention.

If you’re the average small business owner, you know enough about organic search engine optimization to make you dangerous. You know a little about SEO (search engine optimization) and you periodically check your keyword rankings to make sure you are still sitting on page one. Did you know these results are not necessarily the real results Google shares with the average visitor?

Google is now using what is called Personalized Search. Their new algorithms change search results based on what websites you have previously visited. While this is great in some cases, it proves very misleading in other cases.

I was on the phone with a prospect the other day and he mentioned he was sitting on page one for his top three keywords. Well, not so much. He was sitting on page two or three, but he thought he was on page one, because he visits his website more than other websites within the results. Thus his view of his website and his search rankings are a bit skewed and not nearly as accurate as some may believe.

As an SEO consultant it drives me crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I love Google and I all the new functionality and gadgets they offer. That being said, their little feature called Personalized Search distorts reality for many who have no idea Google is morphing results based on a user’s search history.

So how do you really know where you stand? Google’s Webmaster Tools gives you a list of your top search results and where you stand for a particular period of time. I also pay close attention to actual visitor traffic through you guessed it, Google Analytics. Did I mention I like Google? Between the two you will have a much clearer image of your current rank than what your own search can provide. There are also a variety of tools you can purchase to help keep you informed, although since I work with a lot of smaller companies with limited marketing budget, I tend to steer towards free open source packages.

The take away here is to not jump to conclusions on your keyword ranking before you’ve done a little research beyond that of Google’s search box. I start each day with a review of client keyword rank and traffic in Google’s Webmaster Tools and Analytics. Between the two I have a good idea of where we stand or what we need to work on for improving traffic and conversions. It is part of my morning coffee and a ritual I do even on the weekends.

Still confused about Google’s Personalized Search? You can learn more at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html.

October 2010 Update: Google now allows you to turn this feature off.  Thank heavens!  Just visit Google’s help article titled Personalized Search: Turning Off Personalization.

Ms. Moskwa then points to the FAQ section of the forum that states PageRank is one of Google’s 200 plus criteria for performance, but that it is only updated a few times a year so it should not be a focus of SEO consultants.  The FAQ continues with a suggestion of focusing on Google Analytics and a website’s actual performance.

So PageRank is not fully dead, just not nearly as important as solid and unique page content.  In the end is this news at all?  Didn’t we already know content was king?