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.

At Web Savvy Marketing we work on a good mix of web design projects and straight SEO consulting.  Our website design clients typically select us because our process is integrated with full search engine optimization.  The funny part is that they’re always surprised when we don’t launch the new website the minute they email their last bit of content.  We don’t launch immediately because there is still a lot of SEO work to perform.   And while we start the web design project with SEO, much of it cannot be performed until the last minute.

Why Does Website Launch Wait for SEO?

When we kick off the project and I, the resident SEO geek, perform my research and competitive analysis, I have a plan in mind for SEO.  I know what keywords I want to target and what pages I want us to write.  Then development really starts and you, the naive and unprepared client, realizes writing strong web content isn’t as easy as you think.  It’s painful plain and simple. We, the team, end up making compromises on keywords and content and we shift focus and modify our sitemap.  It happens every time.  As your SEO consultant, I stretch you as far as I can take you and attempt to reach as many keywords as possible.  You, the client, put me back in my box and reset my expectations with what your team can support.

You may think I should scale back, but I’ll disagree.  My job is to stretch your imagination and reach you beyond what you think is possible.  When you fight and cannot support it, then we’ll adjust.  I won’t accept limitations until they are true limitations.  And I’d rather stretch and reach more than what was expected then not reach at all.

Once we modify the sitemap, pages, and keywords, my SEO strategy needs to be adjusted.  I’m used to this and have no problem with it at all.  I’ve learned this is the natural progression because I’m firm on pushing you to your limits.  I just need to wait until this occurs before I put a large block of my time or my staff’s time into your on-page SEO.

When the Design Dust Settles, SEO Cleans Up

Once the last website content is loaded and we know our final page count and site structure, me and my team move in to pretty everything up.  When I say “pretty”, I mean we fancy up your content and make it page one worthy.

1.  Optimize Page Text and Headers for Keywords and Phrases

This really starts at the launch of the project, but as I stated above, these keyword focus can change some over the course of development.  Taking a step back and revisiting your targeted keywords at launch makes sure you have pages to support your keywords and more importantly, your copy supports the keyword.

I go through page by page and make sure your content uses the keyword or phrase we selected and that it is used in a natural way that is easy to read.  I also go through and double-check headers (H1 tags) and subheaders (H2, H3, H4 tags) to make sure they support the keyword and phrase for SEO and readability.

Subheaders are very important because they help break up content for the readers and for the search engines.  They provide natural breaks within the page and help point out areas of interest for those of us that scan web pages and blog posts.  I am one of those scanners, so I make sure every client website has a good mix of subheaders.

2.  Review and Update Alt Tags Images, Anchor Text for Links and Files, and Bold Text References

Alt tag refers to an alternative tag for an image. Search engines, and users with some disabilities, cannot read text in images.  The alt tag is simply used to describe the image in the event it cannot be read.  You want the alt tag to be relevant to the image and include keywords if applicable.  But you must do so only if the keyword is relevant to the image itself.

Anchor text is the clickable text that users will see as a result of a link. Good on-page SEO includes the use of keyword rich hyperlinks, however, this should only be used if it represents value to the reader.

On-page SEO best practices also includes formatting file names.  Using short and descriptive filenames with matching alt text is preferred.  These should not be full, keyword stuffed sentences.  They are best when they’re short, but descriptive.

Bold or strong text is also believed to influence search engines.  I will use this if it can both support the focusing of readers on important points and is keyword rich.  Due to usability concerns, I will not bold words just for the sake of on-page SEO.

3.  Create Page Specific Meta Titles and Descriptions

When you’re launching a new website or relaunching an existing website, it is critical that every page has a unique and hand crafted meta title and description.  Your meta title should be less than sixty characters and your description less than 160 characters.  Both should include the page’s keyword and both should provide text that sells.  The search engines will use your description (if they like it) for the search engine results page.  It is the first thing your future visitor sees about your website, so you need to make it good.  It needs to closely relate to the page and it needs to be worthy of someone clicking through to the website.

I typically create our meta titles and descriptions in Excel and do so for the entire sitemap.  Once this process is done I have my assistant, Jen, input them into WordPress.  We use two people, because Jen will always find mistakes.  When you sit and write 200 meta titles and 200 meta descriptions, you will make mistakes.  The second set of eyes helps greatly in making sure your meta is correct and without spelling or grammatical errors.

4.  Optimize Blog Entries

Blog entry optimization is important and yet it is the one item I many times almost forget.  Clients throw blog posts at me right before go-live and due to this, I frequently catch myself backtracking to make sure these are optimized.

Optimizing a blog post works the same as with the other pages, however you need to remember the value of the internal link.  Blog posts typically support the cornerstone content pages and their keywords.  What the heck is a cornerstone content page?  It is a page that is used to target higher volume and more competitive keywords.  The blog posts then support these pages by providing keyword rich inbound links.

Meta descriptions and post excerpts should be reviewed as well.  Many times these are displayed when the post is shared on social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn.  You want to make sure the intro text is descriptive and entices someone to click through to the actual post.

5.  Create Deep Links

Deep links.  For me this is where I call uncle and grab my assistant Jen.  I’ve worked on the web design and SEO of the website for weeks and I’m usually starting to get fatigued.  Jen, being the perky and WordPress savvy person that she is, takes a fresh look at the content and goes page by page to input hyperlinks to other pages.  This process helps both the user and the search engines understand what pages are most important.

It’s a Wrap

Well kind of.  You’re done with on-page SEO for now, but we’ve not yet discussed the really geeky side of SEO.  This comes in another blog post and another day.  We’ll end this post with the reminder that you’re website and content is optimized for on-page SEO, which is the land of search engine optimization, is a huge part of the battle.

Since I run into this often, I’m sure the average website owner does too.  If you’re trying to decide between updating your existing website or moving towards a full website design, I’d encourage you to ask yourself five quick questions.

1. Do You Have a CMS Package?

If you’re wondering what the heck a CMS package is, it means content management system. Which really refers to a user friendly way to update your website. And when I say user friendly, I mean easy enough that the average person could update page text, write a blog post, and modify an image.

Popular flavors of CMS consist of open source WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. I am a WordPress girl and have dedicated by firm to creating WordPress websites and supporting WordPress users. That being said, Joomla and Drupal are also good packages and both have their place in the market. Each CMS package have different niches they fill and each can be an excellent solution for creating a new website.

Do people really use CMS for website design? Yep and way more than you think. WordPress powers 14.7% of the top million websites in the world. And 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

I digressed a bit. The point I wanted to make is that CMS packages give you control over your website and your online marketing. If you’re stuck living with an HTML website that is impossible to update, then you have a problem.

2. Is Your Website SEO Friendly?

This is a huge factor if you rely on your website to generate traffic through organic search. One of the core reasons I love WordPress is because it is very user friendly. If configured properly, it will create search engine friendly URLs, alt tags, unique page descriptions and titles, XML sitemaps, and the beloved H1 tags and bolded text. All are needed for courting Google and Bing properly.  WordPress makes it very easy to stay compliant with search engine rules and helps guide you along the way.

If you can’t answer that question yourself, go to WebsiteGrader.com and see how they grade your website. My website is a 99/100. Most I query are a 50/100. If you’re less than 90, you have problems.

3. Is Your Website Functionally Robust?

Complete a list of functional desires and compare it to what you currently have in place. Can your website manage your wish list without consuming your entire marketing budget in code changes? Can you add to this functionality or do you have to turn to a high priced coder each week?

Now take your requirements list and compare that list to WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. One of these CMS solutions will meet your needs and all are excellent choices. Especially if you’re currently stuck with an HTML website.

Remember the usage numbers I provided for WordPress? You’re probably wondering why it’s so popular? There are over 15,000 plugins available for WordPress and that means 15,000 opportunities to add to the core functionality WordPress offers. Many of these are free and they usually have an easy one click install right from the admin panel. Good stuff for me and the million other WordPress users.

4. Are You in Charge of Changes?

Do you control your website? That may seem like a silly question, but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t know exactly who created their original website, where they are, or how to reach them. Another frequent compliant I hear is the developer has a 30 day backlog and a simple text changes cannot be made for 45 days.

That, my friends, is a major problem. Internet marketing is fast paced. Last year Google made 500 changes to their algorithm, which means we webmasters needed to also adjust. If you can’t get a hold of your webmaster or if you have no access to the website, you’ll fall behind on search engine compliance and you’ll also be a lager to your competition.  The goal of CMS based websites is to keep you in control.

5. Is it Easy to Use?

Assuming you are in control of your pages and you can access the backend to make modifications, is it easy to do? Can you figure out how to update text, add a page, or create a blog post? Can you add images, products, or change your navigation structure? You should be able to if your website is built within a CMS solution.

But I caution you on picking your developer and making sure they fully understand the CMS package. Back in December I wrote a blog post about my sister’s experience with selecting a WordPress designer. The post Fifteen Questions to Ask Your Future Website Designer goes into how she had a pretty blog that didn’t quite the level she was expecting. Needless to say, my development team rebuilt the entire thing for her this month because the original designer did not code to WordPress best practices. He hardcoded a ton of functionality that should have used WordPress’ user-friendly menus and widgets. It’s been eight months since she received the original design and after months and months of frustration, she is just now capable to making changes.

My sister’s project was a worst-case scenario and this is typically not the case. Generally when you hire a reputable designer for WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal – you actually receive a very user-friendly website.

Conclusion

If you answered no to any of the above questions, consider moving to a CMS.  And don’t forget to locate a reputable website designer. Review WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal to see which CMS package you like best. Ask around and review some website portfolios. You’ll find someone you like and the money will be well spent. You’ll end up with a SEO friendly website, that looks modern, and that you can actually update yourself.  All very good things.

What Lies Beneath is Always So Scary

At the end of our discussion I promised to review his website and dig further into his online presence. I’m not going to offer to help or even send a proposal, unless I know what help is needed. So I dug further and I did a fairly deep review of his website and his online activity. What I found did not make me happy.

As I reviewed his website, I realized his osCommerce site had some significant problems with core functionality. He didn’t have basic SEO features like an XML sitemap, H1 tags, SEO friendly URLs, canonical links, etc. What was worse, I realized his website only had products and all the product descriptions were duplicates of other websites’ content. So to sum it up, he had a website full of duplicate content that was also missing some fundamental SEO components. Oh what lie beneath is always so scary.

Pulling Off the Band-Aid

Sure I can help with social media, but in some cases I won’t. What? Really? You turn away business and future clients? Ah yes, yes I do. In some cases social media is only going to partially help and in most cases, the prospective client isn’t looking for partially as an outcome. He wants a game changer. He wants real results that provides real ROI. This gentleman wanted an immediate increase in traffic that would occur right before his peak season happened in October and November.

My proposal included setting up a blog, setting up social media accounts, and fixing his SEO. I quoted working with his existing webmaster to fix the website and I quoted rewriting his product descriptions so he had unique content. After reading through the proposal the prospect requested a call to discuss. Great I thought. I didn’t offend him with calling his baby (aka SEO) ugly.

Sins of the Past Always Cause a Stalemate

The discussion went okay. The prospect said the proposal was right on and the costing was completely in line with what I was proposing. Great. Yes I do think “great” a lot during the whole prospecting phase. He said he agreed that he did need everything that I proposed. But – oh why is there always a but in these calls?

A year ago this gentleman worked with another SEO consulting firm. I told him I could see that some SEO work had been done on his website. After all, all the products had unique meta titles and descriptions that used keywords and they were within character limits. The problem was he said he couldn’t tell what the SEO consultant did and that the ROI wasn’t there. He was still relying on his pay per click campaigns and they were expensive. He didn’t get ROI with the last SEO consultant, so he was hesitant to move forward with me. Snap! Not great and in fact a total bummer. Foiled by an SEO consultant I’ve never met and never will meet.

I am now at a stalemate due to sins of the past from another SEO consultant. I am saddened to say this happens a lot. This happens a lot more than any of us good SEO consultants would like. There are a lot of SEO consultants out there that stink. They have good intentions, but just don’t know what they’re doing and the clients don’t get the results they need. It is very difficult to convince someone to trust you when another, less educated you, already burned them. And I can’t blame this gentleman for being cautious. I would be too. Thus we are at an impasse, a stalemate, and what feels like a dead end.

Time for a Hard Decision

In our follow up call he asked that I review the proposal and that we take baby steps towards the end goal. What are some small things we could do to help drive traffic and could prove me as knowledgeable to him. I told him I would review the proposal and follow up. And I did. I’m sitting in New York at a conference and still thinking about this prospect.

Unfortunately there isn’t one set of tasks or changes that are going to drive the result he wants. He needs his website fixed for the missing SEO elements so Google will embrace it. Google won’t embrace it unless he has unique content that continues to grow. And he needs inbound links, which will come from blogging and social media activity. In my heart I don’t believe any of these things, set apart by themselves, will produce results. It just won’t work.

The mom in me wants to take care of his SEO and fix him. I want to heal him from head to toe. But I can’t. Social media or any small part of his proposal is a band-aid and it isn’t healing him. It is temporary and it would leave him without results.

He isn’t ready to take the leap of faith with me because his last leap ended up with him falling without a net. I get that, but it doesn’t change my view of his current situation, my desire to help, and the experienced internet marketer in me saying doing a tenth of what was proposed will not help.

It is time for me to walk away. Oh I hate when this moment occurs and I realize it is the best course of action. A business associate always says he “hates to lose” and me walking away would kill him. But winning a client and not achieving the results he wants is not winning. Well maybe in Charlie Sheen land is, but not in Rebecca land.

I am now off to write the goodbye email. The “I wish you luck” email. The “come back to me if you change your mind” email. Some may take this gesture negatively, while others may take it positively. I don’t know and I can’t control his reaction. I can only stay true to my beliefs and the business ethics by which I live.

In some cases, the social media band-aid does nothing more than cover the scary stuff underneath that will continue to sit there and fester and grow more and more ugly. While some may choose to apply this band-aid, I will not. I want to heal.

Holistic Internet Marketing is Essential

I believe in holistic internet marketing. I don’t believe there is one magic bullet that will be the saving grace for a company. I think success is based on a lot of things that come together. I’ve experienced this with my own company and with my clients. It isn’t a fabulous website that sells the masses, or an SEO wizard that finds the best keywords, or even a social media guru who brings mentions, clicks, and likes. It’s all of it, working together in harmony.

You can create the best website, but without real traffic, a pretty website provides no value. You can have an excellent SEO campaign that drives thousands of visitors a day, but with a horrible website, they won’t convert. You can make friends with millions via social media, but you have to have something tangible for them to see to make them stick. It isn’t one tactic that drives success, but a cohesive internet marketing plan that is well designed and well executed.

The Two-Headed Monster Have Arrived in New York

This morning I sat in a session at Affiliate Summit East listening to my friend Rachel speak. She was coaching new affiliates on creating a plan and getting started. I’ve always have a hard time explaining to people what Rachel does, because it isn’t something tangible like the websites I build or the Facebook pages I set up. But Rachel’s gift is to be able to take an idea and form it into a complete plan that is executable and fairly guaranteed to be a success.

I think this is one reason Rachel and I get along so well professionally. We’ve been referred to as a “two headed monster” of internet marketing and that “it’s hard to know where one stops and the other starts”. I’ll take that as a compliment, because Rachel practices the cohesive marketing that I believe in. She may not know as much as I do about SEO, but I don’t know as much as she does about affiliate marketing and startups. But together, we’re a pretty powerful force because we have a consistent view of internet marketing and the need for cohesiveness with online promotion.

You may not believe what the two-headed monster preaches, but we do and we do because both heads of the monster have the Google Analytics data, clients, and revenues to prove cohesiveness works.

Rachel has been in affiliate marketing for over a decade and I’ve been doing SEO and website design for almost as long. From our own collective years of experience, we have both learned there is no easy fix or massive rewards without a solid plan and a lot of hard work.

On Saturday morning I was drinking my coffee, surfing the web, and reading blog posts. Yes I am an SEO (aka nerd) and this is what we do on a Saturday morning. As I explored the web I happen to run across a blog post on Bing’s Webmaster Center blog. I’ll be honest, I don’t even know how I got there but I did and I was happy I did. I started reading a blog post from Duane Forrester. Then I found another and another and I was impressed. I was impressed with Duane and with Bing. It was good content, transparent, and written in a way the average person could digest. All things I love and appreciate.

I’ve been blogging for a very long time. I like blogs and I recognize good blogs when I see them. Google’s blog posts are one of the reasons why I’ve been such a Google fan. I like to know the rules and what is expected of me as an SEO consultant.

Duane’s posts are good and while they are not currently receiving the retweets and likes they should, if he keeps blogging at Webmaster Center, they will in due time.

Recent Bing Webmaster Center blog posts I found of interest were:

• You love links. We love links. Build for the right reasons.
• How To Build Quality Content
• Keyword research: a wise investment of time
• The Power of Local – why small, local businesses matter so much
• Social and Search: A Small Business Primer

All four are things I blog about and care about. I try to get others to read and care about them too. They are elements of good white hat SEO and the big part of what makes the internet awesome.

But why have the SEOs and internet marketers not been tweeting, liking, and sharing this content? I think they are like me and we’ve kind of gotten lazy. We’re getting much to reliant on Google, Danny Sullivan, and Matt McGee. All sources I love, but we need to broaden our horizons a little more and our horizons need to include a little more Bing.

While I am publically apologizing to Bing, I do think Bing still has a huge uphill battle. Bing is still recovering from the MSN flop and still trying to position itself as a true competitor to Google. But it can and I think it will. Competition is good and I welcome it.

Now I just need to get my fellow SEO consultants to pay a little more attention to the underdog.  Goliath (I mean Google), as much as I love it, needs the competition.  In the end, that competition will be good for SEOs, search quality, and the ultimate users.

That’s a lot, but there is a reason for it. I’m methodical in nature and my web design process is too. There are a lot of dots to connect and things to worry about when you launch a new website.  That doesn’t mean it has to be scary, it means it just needs to be right.

What We’ve Learned Thus Far

So far on our journey of web development, I’ve taught you to:

• Define Marketing Goals -> Successful Internet Marketing Begin With Goals
• Identify Your Target Audience -> A Box for Every Website Visitor
• Review Your Existing Website -> SEO Can’t Help a Website That Sucks
• Perform a Competitor Analysis -> Internet Marketing is a Battlefield
• Perform Keyword Research -> Keyword Research for the Average Joe

Now it’s time for us to prepare our sitemap and requirements list for the new website. I know you’re excited. This is the one step in my process that takes the most thought. But don’t be scared. I’m going to take you through it step by step.

In my last blog post we walked through performing keyword research, so you should have a great list of keywords in hand. That means it is time to create a rock solid sitemap that can support your targeted keywords and convert your traffic into revenue.

Eleven Steps for Creating a Great Sitemap and Connecting All Those Website Dots

1. Perform a Gap Analysis of Your Existing Website – Really, this simply means asking yourself what is missing. We won’t go into specifics here, but when you look at your existing website, what jumps out at you right away. Or more important, what doesn’t jump out at you, but should jump out and grab your attention?
2. List Goals and Objectives for the Website – What does the new website need to accomplish? Capture emails for a newsletter, obtain new leads, sell a product, etc.
3. Outline Potential Call to Actions and Desired Outcomes of Website Traffic – If you know what you want your website to do, then you should know what you want your visitors to do. Should they sign up for a newsletter, attend a webinar, register for a white paper, request a quote, purchase your product?
4. Identify the Path You Would Like Each Persona to Take Once Arriving at the Home Page – An earlier blog post discussed website personas and you can read the post mentioned above to catch up if needed. Since you’ve already documented your personas, consider what information you need to present to get the visitor to perform the desired action you just documented above.
5. Develop a List of Functional Requirements – You’ve defined your actions or “what” you want people to do, so you now need to consider the “how” they are going to do it. Do you need a protected directory to house high quality documents, do you need an integrated contact form to register leads, do you need an e-commerce store to sell products?
6. Develop List of Visual Requirements – Remember to consider personas here, because different genders, education levels, and personality types respond to images and visual stimulus differently. Do you need custom charts, photos, or buttons? What about a fancy web form?
7. Take Inventory – This is the really fun part, because you are probably going through content that is three years old and now that you look back, you realize it isn’t pretty. Go through your existing website and list out all content pages, files, images, and forms that you want migrated to a new website. Don’t forget your web pages should match up to your keyword list.
8. Match Content to Personas – Consider your visitor types, the products or services you offer, and what stage in the buying cycle they may be at when visiting. Now consider the inventory you just went through and match up that inventory (pages, files, images) to your personas. Don’t worry; you’re going to have gaps and holes that you need to fill. Just remember to keep looking at your keyword list and keep this in mind as you go through everything.
9. Consider New Content Requirements – You just identified new gaps in content you didn’t know you had, so now it’s time to document those gaps so you can address them one by one.
10. Develop a Website Outline – We are now creating the sitemap. You were really creating it as you walked through these last few steps, but it is now starting to come together so you can see how the pages and actions fit together to make a cohesive website. Remember, you need to have one page per competitive keyword and those pages need to align with your visitor personas. The pages also need to represent the information visitors need to see and the actions you want these visitors to take upon visiting your website.
11. Validate Your Call to Actions – You’ve already done this right? Well maybe. But I want you to go back and make sure. Think about what words you can use that are compelling enough to make someone do that action you desire. Have you given website visitors enough “meat” to make them want to do something? Internet marketing is about give and take. You need to give before you take. So before you ask for that email address, make sure you’ve given your website visitors enough reason to want to give you something in return. If you haven’t, revisit your sitemap and make sure you do.

Note of Caution: Make sure your sitemap has a hierarchy that makes sense to you, visitors, and the search engines. Do not bury content so deep that a visitor needs to click three times to reach it. Keep as much towards the top as possible, while still having a logical flow.

Connection Complete

Are you exhausted? You might be, but don’t have despair. Your new sitemap is significantly better than anything you’ve had in the past because you created it with a methodical approach geared towards SEO and converting visitors. This is excellent!

Next we’ll create a wireframe of your home page, but this is another post and another day.

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.

Google is far from forty and has a memory like an elephant. Good SEO only makes this elephant stronger.

My SEO Efforts Will Outlive Me

This concept has been overly apparent to me this last year. As I left my prior life and launched my own company I knew I could easily reinvent myself. I did and while much of me transferred from ERP Rebecca to WordPress Rebecca or SEO Rebecca, Google still sees all three. I realize I should stop whining, but I can’t. I love Google, but the elephant memory is exhausting. I spent a lot of time marketing ERP Rebecca with good old fashion SEO and looking back now I feel like I did it a little too well.

If you Google Rebecca Gill you’ll see references to Web Savvy Marketing and a bunch of social media profiles for me on pages one and two of the search results. You’ll also see my former employer at the bottom of page one and references to “ERP Rebecca Gill” and “TGI Rebecca Gill” in the suggested searches from Google. Both are me, but the old me.

In reality, my former employer’s website only has a few references to me left on it and they’re really old press releases. But in the eyes of Google, the company website is still page one worthy for my name. I suspect this is because Google still sees a lot of inbound links to their website that reference me within the page content. This was accomplished through blogging, press releases, articles in publications and so on. Well it all sounded good at the time, but ERP Rebecca will just not go away. In fact, lately I feel like ERP Rebecca will haunt me until the day I die. All thanks to Google.

Will the Real Rebecca Please Stand Up?

You’re probably wondering if I’ve just done a lousy job marketing the new Rebecca. No I haven’t. My efforts working on new Rebecca haven’t been in the works as long as the old Rebecca, but I’ve done well. It’s just that Google doesn’t forget.

Google Rebecca Gill SEO or Rebecca Gill WordPress and you’ll see there are a lot of references to the new me. A lot. But that elephant just won’t let go what it was taught years ago.

What’s the SEO Take Away?

While this conclusion is not completely scientific, it does have merit. Google places significant value on on-page SEO for providing short-term search results. However, off-page SEO significantly influences Google for providing search results with longevity.

If Google didn’t place so much value on inbound links, my old employer would no longer show up for my name because they have virtually no content with references it.  In addition, Google would not suggest users replace their generic searches for Rebecca Gill with ones that include ERP or TGI. Again this is not scientific in nature, but it does provide a little insight into how the search engine results work over a long period of time.

My Personal Take Away: Be careful what and for who you optimize because if you’re good at SEO, it will haunt you forever.

My Reality Check as a Future Accountant

My college years were self-funded. I lived off waiting tables and I paid tuition via grants and loans. My 30+ hour work weeks were spent waiting tables. My days as a server did more than just bring in money. They taught me about sales, marketing, and why I’d make a horrible accountant. I said a horrible accountant, because I’m a pretty good SEO.

One customer in particular was a Senior Vice President at Merrill Lynch. He was my regular and would even being in his family to meet me when they were in town. While he certainly helped fund my college years and I’m thankful for him generosity, I’m much more thankful for his honesty. He point blank told me I’d make a horrible accountant. He literally laughed when I told him accounting was my major and he said I was going into sales whether I liked it or not. He was right. If you read through my bio you’ll see I’ve spent most my years in some form of sales and marketing. It is who I am and it is pointless to run away from your core stengths.

Enter SEO

Sales and marketing aside, I do have slight tendencies towards OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) and I’m a somewhat anal-retentive clean freak. This is one of the reasons why I gravitated towards accounting. It balanced and it had rules. I like rules even if I don’t like people telling me what to do. Enter in SEO. I like SEO. Actually I love SEO. I’ve loved SEO from the moment I figured out what the heck it was some ten years ago. I do so because it has rules. I can ignore the rules if I choose, but then I won’t rank well with the search engines. I like cause and effect. SEO is all about cause and effect.

Oh Marketing Sherpa I wish you and SEO were around twenty years ago. You would have saved me from those horrible ACC 500 level classes that made me sleep. You would have let me find my passion well before I shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for a degree I never use. You would have saved me and liberated me from a world of numbers. I hate numbers. Oops. I hate numbers that don’t exist within search traffic estimates and Google Analytics reports and Facebook likes.

Are You an OCD Personality?

Before you launch into SEO you need to ask yourself one question: Are you OCD type personality? You need to be. The good SEOs are because we like structure and a plan and the idea of cause and effect. If you are more the “loosey goosey” type, you are my hero but you will stink at being an SEO. Your time will be better spent being creative, then in teaching yourself a skill-set that is outside that of your core strengths.

To all of my fellow OCD SEOs out there, I solute you. We are a strange and unique bunch of geeks. More importantly, we are a group who has followed our passion, embraced our core strengths, and we are usually happy people. And that, my friends, is the true level of success.

And So I Began Blogging

If you read our Who We Are page, you’ll see a comment about us being earlier adapters of blogging. I personally have been blogging for many years and I was doing it well before it was considered mainstream or cool. At the time, I was the geek who spent her time – aka wasting her time – blogging. I worked for a small software company and I was the VP of marketing. I was the marketing budget. I was paid well and my salary was the sum of our marketing budget. No advertising, no outside web firm, no SEO specialist, nothing. If I wanted something to happen I had to do it myself. So I began blogging. And blogging helped give the company a 400% sales growth in two years. I was crazy in the minds of our decision maker and president. But he let me go and he let me be free. He gave me freedom to allocate my time where I deemed appropriate. He gave me autonomy and that independence brought out the blogger in me and helped drive sales growth.

In my head and heart I know blogging is critical to internet marketing. This is especially true if you are an employee of a technology company. I was back then and the woman I spoke with a week ago is too. I know B2B tech marketing. I did it for ten years and I know what works. Blogging works and I know it. It works for B2C and it works for B2B. It just works. In today’s world, to not blog is to not market. To not blog, it to not SEO.

Blogging is powerful. I’ve written a lot content for our website but they are pages. They are static and they are, well, boring. Blogging is real. When you read one of my blog posts, you are reading me. It doesn’t matter if I’m blogging about ERP software like I did years ago or about WordPress web design like I do now. I blog about past events or about the thoughts in my head about tomorrow. I blog about real life and about what matters to me. And in many cases, this reaches out and connects with someone. It connects because it is personal and because it comes from within.

It’s why I’m sitting on my first morning of vacation, writing and working. I’m passionate about my company and what my company can do to help others. I believe in blogging, just as much as I believe in my company. I believe both can help change the world, because it helps connect with that world via the internet. To not blog, is to not market. To not blog, is to give up.

I don’t want to give up on the woman I spoke with on the phone. I sent her a proposal for SEO and it included blogging. For her company to succeed on the internet, they have to turn their stale, three year old website into a fresh, blogging machine. They need to connect with their target market, their prospects, and their future customers.

My Blog Post is My Loon Call

As I type on my Mac I hear the loon in the background. The loon and his call is one of the reasons why I awake early. I enjoy his call and his connection. I’m not a loon and my voice doesn’t have the same beauty as the loon. But I can blog and at times my blog posts do. I’ve connected with people, with strangers, and I’ve made an impact. I know this is true because I’ve found many clients and customers through blogging and I’ve been doing it for many years. I’ve gone to trade shows and encountered people who read my blog and followed me and my company because of it. And when I left my old employer to launch my own consulting company, those people – my blog readers – came with me as clients of my new company. It’s been two years since I launched Web Savvy Marketing and I still have my ERP peeps show up as new clients. I’m building a website and long-term SEO campaign for one right now. The president knew me and my marketing expertise, because he read my blog posts years ago. That is powerful and more powerful than virtually anything else you can do in marketing.

I started my consulting firm in the midst of a recession. Looking back I now see quitting my corporate job to follow my passion was a major risk. It was somewhat crazy given the fact that I lived in Michigan and our state was going through the worst economic turmoil I could ever remember. In my heart I knew my company would succeed. I knew this even though no one else did. Somehow I knew I could do it and I could find clients outside of Michigan until our local economy shifted. My husband had faith in me and I had faith in the internet. When he asked me how I was going to find clients, I told him I was going to blog and blogging would bring me clients. My husband, the good man that he is, said he had no clue what I meant but that he had faith in me and he knew I could do it. And he was right. I could and I did. The company I created on faith is growing and expanding and surpassing anything I had imagined or had hoped for originally. While my husband will attribute this to my marketing knowledge and desire to help people, I attribute this success to the power of the blog and the ability of my blog posts to connect, to inspire, and to bring forth new business.

If you look at the dates of my blog posts, you’ll see an interesting trend. I blog and publish a number of posts and then nothing. I go quiet. I go quiet because every time I blog regularly, I obtain a bunch of new clients and then I get to busy to blog for a while. Once I get these companies quoted and moving along with my team, I have time to blog again and my cycle begins again. This drives my husband insane and he tends to view it was a broken process. I view this as a success and know this trend illustrates the indisputable power of the blog post.

The Case of Harry, the DIY SEO

Over the last week I’ve been talking with a guy named Harry about his blog and upcoming website launch. Harry was connected with me via a mutual acquaintance, so I’ve been reviewing Harry’s activities and giving him free advice. This is something I typically do not do, but I like our mutual business partner and I believe in Harry’s project.

Harry has an ultra secret website project and he has been blogging in an attempt to drive initial traffic and drive interest in the big reveal. Harry knows his competition and he has an idea what he’d search for if he were a potential visitor to his future website. Harry even put those words into Google to figure out the highest volumes.

Harry, like many others I speak with, thinks he is fairly well prepared. After all, he has his 80 or so keywords in hand, he’s blogging regularly, and he is considering keyword density within his posts. Heck he’s even content tagging and sharing his posts via Facebook and Twitter. He is making progress with inbound traffic, yet none of it is actually coming through his blog posts. By why would this be the case you ask? He’s doing everything right isn’t he? No, not really.

Harry’s intentions are excellent. And as a person, I think Harry is pretty darn cool. He is trying really hard to read up and SEO topics and learn from SEO experts. Harry is the average wannabe SEO expert. Although in Harry’s case, he is actually spending a significant amount of time trying to learn SEO and he has picked up a lot of information on SEO basics.

But that is the dangerous part. Harry cannot tell good SEO from bad SEO or white hat SEO from black hat SEO. He can’t tell real SEO advice from regurgitated old SEO advice. He doesn’t know an H1 tag from a meta description or an alt tag from cornerstone content. He doesn’t know about keyword mapping or XML sitemaps. Harry knows how to blog and blog very well.

His intentions are good and he is putting in a lot of sweat and tears into the process, but he is trying to catch up and compete with SEO consultants (or entire in house teams) who have a decade or so of SEO experience. He is also trying to compete with heavy hitting websites.

I looked up the competitors Harry gave me and they’re heavy hitters. I mean they have huge traffic volumes, thousands or inbound links, and in some case millions of indexed pages in Google. Harry has a huge uphill battle. He is not only competing against an experienced SEO consultant and his in house teams of minions, his competitors already have a ton of inbound links, indexed pages, and web traffic.

So can he compete? Yes he can. He has a different value proposition, he is unique, and he has a business plan. The problem is he does not have an SEO plan. He has a list of highly sought after keywords and that just isn’t the same thing as an SEO plan. It isn’t a strategic, methodical plan to compete keyword to keyword with the big boys. It is a valiant effort, but at this point it is an effort in futility.

The Case of Rebecca, the SEO Consultant

I’ve been doing SEO and website design for about eight years. In the earlier years I made a lot of mistakes. Thankfully my industry was as new to SEO as I was and my competition was still trying to figure out SEO just like I was at the time. I muddled through, read a lot, and performed a whole lot of trial and error stuff on my own website. Then I read more, talked to some experts, and worked on some more websites.

Then shazam! I finally felt like I had it together. I didn’t just know some stuff about SEO, I actually had a very detailed project plan for building SEO friendly websites and performing ongoing search engine optimization. I really knew my SEO and better yet, I knew my SEO stuff worked. I had gone against the big boys and I had won. I had bruises and war wounds to prove it. I also had Google Analytics data to prove that I knew what I was talking about. I went to battle and I came out alive and stronger than when I went in.

Remember – my battle and my SEO journey was eight years in the making. And remember, I made a lot of mistakes along the way. While I’m confident now, I wasn’t eight, five, or even three years ago. I wasn’t until I started looking at the SEO of other SEO consultants. And then I knew I had it and I wasn’t just claiming to have SEO knowledge. I started to see SEO everywhere I went on the internet.

But What About Harry and His SEO Efforts?

I’ve tried to get Harry to take a step back. I’ve tried to teach Harry some best practices over the last week. Unfortunately, I just can’t cram eight years of SEO experience into a few emails over the course of a week. Harry, smart as he is, can only digest so much. And I, giving free advice to a peep, can only allocate so much time.

I don’t know what the future holds for Harry and his website. I know his project has some fabulous potential, but I’m currently not involved in his website project. It has been in the works for a while and I just met Harry a week or so ago. It is hard to take my 90+ step website development plan and force it on Harry and his team midstream. I would personally suggest the entire group take a time out and sit down so they can reflect and consider the ultimate goal. That goal is to go head to head with the big daddy of their industry and make an impact.

So how does Harry make an impact? To do that, they need a thorough, well crafted, and completely integrated website design, SEO, and social media plan. SEO doesn’t come before or after design, it is part of the entire process from initial thought straight through to the website’s end. It is a living and breathing plan that matures with the website, the website visitors, and the industry in which is competes.

SEO is a journey and not a destination. I’ve chosen to take this journey and dedicate my professional life to it. I believe in SEO and I truly believe with all my heart that SEO is a journey worth taking.

July 27, 2011 – Author Update on Barry the DIY SEO: Last week I met with Harry in person.  I also spoke with his team and we discussed their project and the need for SEO from start to finish.  I am now actively involved in the project and it is a massive one.  Harry is ultra cool and a mix of artist, technical guy, and good old fashion brainiac all wrapped into one.  He is my new SEO BFF and is great at jumping into ideas I present.  If our relationship continues as it has over the last week, Harry will have an awesome website that will drive substantial traffic.  Their concept for it is amazing and they simply needed a professional SEO consultant to step in and allow Harry to focus his priorities where they are really needed.

Make no mistake, internet marketing is a battlefield.  You’re going to war against a million other websites and you need to have sufficient weaponry to compete and to walk away unscathed.  You need to know your enemy, you need armor for proper defense and you need a clearly defined plan of attack to win the online battle.

When was the last time you performed a marketing recognizance mission?  Have you looked at your competitor’s website recently?  Or even their general internet activity?  I’m always surprised that many small business owners, CEO’s, or marketing executives do not make this part of their overall marketing strategy.  I do this with my own company and with ever client that contracts me to design a website or engage in an SEO project.  I want to know the websites they compete with so I know how to best position them.  I want to understand the battlefield so we can plan an effective attack.

If you are a website design client of mine I expect you to take the time to perform your own marketing recognizance mission.  Since I will be doing one for you, I expect you to do one too.  I want you to look closely at your enemy and I want you to be prepared as we enter into battle.  Why does it matter?  You need to intimately know the enemy.  Your website visitors will know your enemy, so you should too.

In previous blog posts I’ve mentioned my client questionnaire.  I ask clients to complete this before we begin our engagement.  In many cases, I email prospects the document with the proposal so they know what they are in for and so they have realistic expectations of my marketing philosophies and me as a website designer.  The vast majority of these people don’t “get” why I require this step until they review the questionnaire.  It then becomes crystal clear that internet marketing is a war and that they are currently going to battle with a toothpick and not a armored tank.

So do you have a toothpick or an armored tank?  Most likely you cannot answer this question yet, so take the time to evaluate your armor.

Review the Website Battlefield

• Identify your key direct competitors
• Identify benchmark companies within your industry
• Review competitors’ websites
• Review benchmark companies’ websites
• Identify strengths and weaknesses of the competition
• Identify strengths and weaknesses of the benchmark companies

Evaluate Your Armor and Prepare to Plan Your Website Attack

• How does your current website and online presence compare to that of your competition and the benchmark companies?
• List elements of your competitors and benchmark companies’ websites that you would like to incorporate into your new website design and build.
• List gaps within your existing content that need to be addressed and consider the timeframe and resources required to develop said content.
• Evaluate your internal resources and their ability to create a website that can address your gaps and weaknesses.
• Evaluate your budget for obtaining outside assistance for web design, build, and optimization.

Review the Online Battlefield

• Is your competitor using pay per client (PPC) ads and if so, what keywords receive the largest portion of their ad budget?
• Is your competitor’s website designed around a set of core keywords?
• How does the competitor score for these core keywords in organic search results (i.e. natural search not attributed to paid placement)?
• Is your competitor active in social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, or YouTube?
• Is your competitor actively blogging and/or guest blogging on other websites?
• Is your competitor utilizing content marketing strategies for lead generation and potential sales?
• Is your competitor actively engaged in inbound link building?
• Is your competitor utilizing a drip marketing campaign or regular newsletter campaign?
• Is your competitor active on local search directories and are their profiles optimized?

Evaluate Your Armor and Prepare to Plan Your Online Attack

• What competitor keywords best align with your organization?
• What other keywords should you consider and target?
• Can you afford a PPC campaign?
• Do you have the knowledge and staff for organic search engine optimization?
• What changes to your existing social media activity needs to take place to level-set you and your competitors?
• Do you offer any unique and authoritative content to help differentiate your from your competitors?
• How does your blogging efforts compare to your competitors?
• Are you utilizing content tagging websites and RSS feed automation?
• Do you have the knowledge and staff for a link building campaign?
• Do you have a newsletter and would this apply to your target market?
• Have you claimed your local profiles and are they optimized?

As a website designer and SEO expert I cannot completely prepare you for battle.  This is a joint effort and we need to collectively prepare for and fight the battle together.  I can help in your internet marketing war, but I’ll need you to help in this effort.

One of my first website clients was a referral from a friend.  This client was going up against some savvy competitors and I knew he had a steep climb.  I built him a WordPress website and tried my best to prepare him for the battle that lay ahead.  With his new SEO friendly website I gave him armor.  Unfortunately he failed to plan his actual attack and he didn’t even walk onto the battlefield.  He sat in his little bunker doing the same things he had done for years.  He did not take the competitive analysis I had done seriously, nor did he believe in social media optimization, inbound link campaigns, or virtually anything outside his existing practices.  One year later my friend keeps asking me why the website did not grow in search traffic.  What?  Really?

In that same time-frame I launched a website for another client who did go to battle.  In his battle he was fighting against some of the biggest companies in America who had huge internet marketing budgets and a large number of internal employees dedicated to reaching page one search results.  This client not only went to battle with my armor, he kept me on to help him plan and execute his attack.  We were a force to be reckoned with and we beat the snot out of his competition.  Everything we did had purpose, we planned our attack and executed it as planned.  His search traffic grew almost 500% in one year and he even stopped spending hundreds of dollars each month on PPC ads.  But he reinforced the armor I provided, he prepared a strategic marketing plan, he went to war with eyes wide open and he fought and fought hard.

Initially the client I feel was a failure crushed me.  At first I felt like I failed him.  But then a fellow and very wise WordPress consultant reminded me that I cannot fight a battle for a client who does not want to go to war.  There are potential clients and situations where I have to retreat because I’m trying to win a war with someone who simply wants to spend his days sleeping in his bunker.  It was a hard lesson, but a valuable one.  I try to identify those people early on and I avoid them at all costs.  We are not well matched and we have two totally different views of internet marketing.

Don’t let yourself fall asleep in the bunker.  Rise up, go on a marketing recognizance mission, plan your attack, build your armor, and go kick your competitor off of page one search results.  It is possible.  You just need to decide if you have the fight in you and then you have to rise up and fight.

In our conversation he provides obscure long-tail keywords to illustrate his SEO tactics are working. He also tells me he lacks traffic and real revenue resulting from all the time he has allocated to his SEO research and implementation efforts. He finally informs me that he cannot allocate a large budget to SEO. Hmm, I think we have encountered a conundrum.

Why is this the case? Is the small business owner really SEO savvy or is he lost in a web of SEO confusion? I’d say both. He knows enough to make him dangerous. I generally see very old SEO practices being used and many times black hat SEO tactics. Duplicate content and multiple URLs are popular trends, as are bolded words and keyword stuffing. While duplicate content, bolded words, and keyword stuffing top the list of most used tactics for the do-it-yourselfer, the bigger issue and much more difficult problems reside in the website’s architecture.

The website – typically designed and written by the small business owner – is dated and is riddled with structural issues. Content is difficult to locate, duplicated, and irrelevant to the user or keyword focus. There is no hierarchy or silos to content, the website domain is set to expire, the website lacks permanent redirects, there is no sitemap.xml file, and the in-house SEO (business owner) has never heard of Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics. Those examples are real and all are from a prospective client’s website I reviewed this week.

So what should the do-it-yourself SEO worry about? A lot. I do think it is important to mention that the do-it-yourself approach only works if you have little competition. Real SEO is done by an SEO expert who not only is immersed in SEO each day, he spends hours per week educating himself on the latest trends and algorithm changes. Since this is impossible for the small business owner, it is also impossible to expect tangible results from haphazard SEO efforts.

To Achieve Solid SEO Results, You Need to Open Up Your Website and Look Under the Covers

The following ten questions are just a sampling of architectural SEO elements. If you manage your own website and you are a SEO do-it-yourselfer, you need to know what these questions mean and the answers to each. If you don’t, you need professional assistance from an SEO consultant.

1. Have you ever done a keyword analysis?
2. Does your website have a clearly defined structure for assembling pages and/or blog posts?
3. Can you easily locate all the content available?
4. Did you include keyword usage within the meta data and unique to each page or post?
5. Do you have a robot.txt file?
6. Do you have a sitemap.xml file and has it been submitted to Google Webmaster Tools?
7. Are you using Google Analytics and do you know what your current website traffic look likes and how your visitors utilize your website?
8. How long has your domain been registered and how long until it expires?
9. Does your website have permanent redirects in place?
10. Does your website have multiple H1 tags per page?

Most likely you cannot answer these questions and you’re still hesitant to spend money on professional SEO help. I encounter this frequently and I’m asked to “justify” the cost of my SEO consulting services. When I’m asked this I think about my accountant. I have an accountant to do my personal and business taxes, even though I have an accounting degree. But I don’t specialize in accounting and I have no desire to do so. I don’t know the latest tax regulations or the ins and outs of the tax code. I don’t want to know it, which is the reason I never pursued the professional once I left college. I can no more accurately assemble my business taxes than the small business owner can perform his own SEO. My time is better spent on what I can do well, and for me, that’s WordPress web design and organic SEO.

I’ve justified the cost of my accountant (accounting degree and all), so it is really up to you to justify the cost of SEO services. And just like taxes, doing SEO wrong can be worse than not doing SEO at all.