KEEP YOUR CLIENTS SATISFIED TO KEEP YOUR CLIENTS YOURS

Managing Customer Care:

“It’s easier to keep a client 

than find a new one.”

Yeah, it’s an old cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s true. The key to long-term site success is an expanding customer/client base – repeat buyers of your goods or services.

Keeping the customer satisfied, especially for web-based businesses, isn’t a walk in the park but there are things you, as webmaster, can do to manage client care, keeping the customer satisfied and coming back for more.

1. Maintain an accurate order tracking system.  If you use a delivery service like FedEx or UPS, you’ll get tracking software with your account. But, if you’re trucking 37 ceramic figurines to the post office every day, you’ll need an order tracking system – preferably one that can identify “downstream” problems like: “Hey, you’re going to run out of hula girl bobble heads next Thursday. Time to reorder.”

2. Stay involved. You may be using a drop shipper to manage inventory storage, shipping and handling, and it’s not always easy during the rush of the day to check tracking data – even if you’re shipping out of a spare room. Track all problem orders yourself.

3. Provide updates to the buyer. An auto-responder as soon as the problem is identified with an opt out box to cancel the sale. You may lose that one, but your straightforwardness and ease of use will make a positive impression.

Federal law requires that orders must be filled within 30 days, after which the buyer is no longer obligated to pay. Don’t ship without renewed buyer approval.

4. Provide US-based customer support 24/7. In this global marketplace, someone is always buying, and someone always has a question. Also, empower telephone reps to accept returns with the customer’s receipts. This saves on call-backs and significantly lowers buyers’ stress levels.

5. Use dynamic pages designed specifically for each visitor.  Best example? Amazon. My home page is different from your home page based on our past buying histories. All of this data is stored in Amazon’s database and when I log on, I’m bombarded with recommendations based on items purchased five years ago.

But Amazon stills calls me by my first name. That’s nice.

6. Last key point. Overdeliver. If prudent, drop a personalized email or even make a telephone call. People are really pleasant when the company CEO calls and promises satisfaction.

The whole point of quality customer care is to create word of mouth (WOM) viral marketing. Treat your customers or clients right, and viral WOM will do the rest in growing that client base bigger and bigger.

editor@webwordslinger.com

LOCAL SEARCH: WELCOME TO DICK'S HARDWARE STORE

LET 'EM KNOW

YOU'RE RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER

Localized SEO:

How to Contact Your Neighbors

Sure it makes sense for worldwide conglomerates to establish and grow a presence on the world wide web. Their clients are global so of course they want to be seen globally. But what about the small business owner? Does the world wide web make sense for Dick’s Hardware on Main Street? Especially since Dick isn’t set up to handle mail orders on a worldwide scale?

It is. SEO localization is happening. More and more small business owners are signing up with web hosts and creating small sites to provide information for local buyers. These business owners aren’t interested in making a sale in Mozambique but they are interested in creating and expanding their businesses to the people in the community. Here’s how to do it effectively.

You Can’t Control a Search Engine (Very Much)

Let’s stick with Dick’s Hardware for a moment. Dick may sell electric generators in his small town hardware store but he doesn’t want to sell them to people living in time zones where it’s tomorrow today. He wants to reach the people in his home town. Dick wants to reach the local market and tell that market segment about what’s on sale that week.

However, if a search engine user in Mozambique types in “electrical generators,” Dick’s Hardware in Anytown, USA may well show up on page 106 of the SERPs. There’s not much Dick (or the guy in Mozambique) can do about it. Search engines aren’t intuitive. Search engines don’t know that shipping a generator to Africa would cost more than the generator itself. Think of search engines as “savants” – extremely intelligent in one area (locating letter strings), not so bright in all other areas (making good decisions based on those letter strings).

Localizing Your Site

Localization is the practice of narrowing a market demographic to a specific geographic area. That area could be a small town, a metropolis, a state, country or region of the world.

So how do you reach the residents of your community without pulling in traffic from another hemisphere? Well, localization takes several forms, none of which is difficult even for the start-up web site owner.

Localization techniques include:

• online marketing protocols
• geo-centric SEO
• directory submissions
• PPC advertisements
• web-based ‘telephone’ books
• language and dialects
• images
• mapping

Online Marketing Protocols

Search engines don’t just spider your selected keywords. These crawlers examine everything – site text, HTML description and title tags, in- and out-bound links, embedded text links, site maps – your whole site.

So, it’s not enough to simply add your local zip code to your HTML keyword tag. It should be added to all meta data to ensure that spiders ‘know’ you’re local not global. This meta data is part of your HTML code – the underlying support for your site and it provides a great deal of useful information to spiders – including your location.

Your location should also appear throughout the text of your site – as part of the home page header, and in bodies of text on different site pages.

Geo-Centric SEO

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should exclude your location from your keyword set. In fact, it should be at the top of the list and should include the name of your community and your state (or province or region). Why? Because search engines will give greater weight to those first few keywords, and if one of them is the name of your community, your site will pop up at the top of the SERPs of any search engine user looking for local outlets and using ‘local’ keywords.

Directory Submissions

Sites like craigslist.com and angieslist.com are ideal outlets for local businesses seeking to establish a web presence. These directories, along with larger directories like the Open Directory Project, will better clarify where you’re located and what you do. What’s even better about these directories is that your customers can add their opinions of your goods or services. So, if you’re good at what you do you’ll pick up extra testimonials from happy customers.

On the other hand, if you’re terrible at what you do you’ll get slammed in these directories, and should probably consider a different line of work. No amount of online exposure is going to help if you’re really bad at what you do.

Pay-Per-Click

Using PPC programs, like Google AdWords, enables you to cherry pick where you want your AdWords to appear. You can limit their appearance to those search engine users who actually enter the name of your community as part of their search so you aren’t wasting money with useless click-throughs from someone half a world away.

Another advantage? AdWords employs a bidding system with more frequently used keywords going for a higher PPC than lesser used keywords. So, by bidding on keywords that include the name of your community – hardware stores anytown usa – you’ll get those critical keywords for less than if you were trying to reach a global market with your online advertising campaign.

Web-Based Telephone Books

Type in ‘telephone books’ into Google’s search box and you’ll see just how many of these resources are available to the local merchant. Some of the most popular of these guides include: yellowpages.com, yellowbook.com, whitepages.com, superpages.com and, on this day, approximately 64,700,000 more online phonebooks categorized by location, activity or products.

It will cost money to take a listing in some of these telephone directories. You can add images and business information, just like the yellow pages in your regular telephone book if you have the cash, but it’s not essential. However, it is essential for the local business to get listed in the local, online telephone directory. More and more people are turning to the web to access local businesses and you want your business to be accessed – a lot.

Where You Want to be Listed

We mentioned a few on-line telephone books previously. In addition to those mentioned above, make sure your business and address are listed in all of the following: MSN Yellow Pages, Switchboard, Yahoo! Get Local, AOL Yellow Pages, Insider Pages, Yelp.com, CitySearch, DogPile, Windows Live, MetaCrawler, AltaVista and Google Local.

Language and Regionalisms

If your business is located in the U.S., obviously you want your site text to be in English – American English. UK English employs different spellings (humour vs. humor, e.g.) and uses different words to describe different things (gasoline versus petrol), and if you don’t know what ‘bubble ‘n’ squeak’ is, you don’t know UK-ese.

The same rules apply within different regions of the U.S. In some places, those large sandwiches are called subs, submarine sandwiches, torpedoes, hoagies, po' boys, grinders and other dialectic variations.

If you order a milk shake in Virginia you get milk, ice cream and flavoring all mixed together. If you order a milk shake in Maine, you just get the milk and the flavoring. If you want the ice cream, you’d better order a frappe in Bangor.

As a small business owner, you know the local dialect. Use it on your site, within your meta data, PPC ads and other advertising outlets.

Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. Include pictures of your store’s or business’ exterior. Many people will recognize it because they drive by it everyday. That’s a good endorsement right there.

But also include images of local landmarks – the statue on the town green, the local swimming hole or a long shot of Main Street. These pictures tell people your local and that you know the area – a big plus.

Mapping

With global positioning systems (GPS) becoming more and more popular, whether the GPS is in an Audi or on a computer screen, a map showing how to get to your business is always helpful – especially for buyers from a few towns away.

Google Earth, the world view provided by satellites, lists street locations, telephone numbers and even a push pin icon to identify the location of your business. The easier it is to find you, the more sales you’ll make.

Submit your business information to Google – including street address – and have a push pin added to show where your shop is.

Think It’s Too Much Trouble?

Your local competition doesn’t and you don’t want to be the last one listed. Yes, it takes some time to hook up with all of these directories and PPC programs but your competitors have already taken the plunge (check it and see) and, the fact is, you’re missing out on one of the best marketing opportunities available to the small business person operating at the local level.

Find a reliable, low-cost web host (less than $100 a year), design your site yourself (it’s really easy), launch your site and start getting hooked into to the local online grid. And keep at it. There are more and more local directories coming on line all of the time so list and list often.

You’ll be amazed at what the W3 can do for your small business in your small community.

And you’re going to love that growing bottom line.

Need some tips on going local. NP. Call me. We'll talk.

Webwordslinger.com

5 Quirky SEO Tips

5 Quirky Tips for Web Site Optimization:

Little Things Mean A Lot

Okay, you’ve just gone live with your retail site, selling services or products over the web. You’ve joined an “elite” community of one billion other web sites and you’re trying to figure out how to make a little noise in the loudest, most omni-present marketplace ever there was. The world wide web. The W3. The big game. The show.

Hate to burst your bubble but you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you to build your unknown site to profitability. Here’s a sobering fact: 94% of all web ventures implode within 12 months of launch. Most of these, of course, are undercapitalized from Day One, lack any sort of business plan and lack management that knows how the digital marketplace functions. It’s nothing like the 3-D world in which a local store drops a weekly quarter-page advert in the local Picayune. So, even if you’ve been marketing since mirror balls were all the rage, you’re in a new ball park now.

And every little bit of your web site and everything you do to market and monetize your site will be tracked, scrutinized, policed, monitored, recorded and stored by mindless bots that crawl the web. Your new venture has to be bot friendly and human eyeball friendly. Tip the scales too far in one direction or the other and your site isn’t optimized – optimized for search engine indexing or optimized for improved conversion ratios. In other words, you could be doing better.

Little Things Mean a Lot

No “so-called” SEO expert has a clue how search engines assess the quality and topicality of a site. Lots of theories but, in a recent study of Google ranking factors, 31 SEO pros were asked to rank various factors such as site accessibility and quality of inbound site links.

Of the two dozen or so ranking factors assessed by the panel of experts, not one single ranking factor received 100% consensus as a critical factor in how and why a site is spidered, assessed and, finally, cataloged in the SE index.

Tons of theories, lots of debates (some quite heated on SEO blog sites) and plenty of “sure-fire” strategies to “Get you on page 1 of Google.” Big whoop. Want to see your site on page one of Google? Use your URL as your search words.

Okay, enough ranting. There are some strategies that, under testing using Google’s own diagnostics and metrics, seem to have a positive effect on site performance. Small sites improve in reach (number of visitors factored with number of page views) in a matter of weeks and large sites see PR improvement and some of that link love all site owners are after.

It’s not the big things that separate you from web-based profits. On the W3, often it’s the little things, the quirky tactics, that make the difference between a site that looks good to spiders and humans. In other words, a successful site.

Five Quirky Tips for Improving Site Performance – All FREE

Of course, you have to do the big stuff. Create the site’s content architecture, choose the site’s look, create user-friendly navigation and all of the other macro-design elements that define a quality site, regardless of the product or service.

And, if you have deep pockets or an extensive knowledge of Flash animation and design or CSS technology, you can create a site that has visual impact – zip, zing, kaboom – even if you’re site sells rat traps in bulk. This is all pretty much the standard in the Era of Web 2.0.

But once the big stuff is taken care of and you’ve priced the creation of a Flash-based site (if you have to ask you can’t afford it), there are some small, quirky kinds of things that seem to have an impact, at least on traffic and reach rankings.

So, before you take that second mortgage on the farm to pay a hotshot site designer, try these steps. They don’t cost anything and there’s at least a consensus among SEO pros that these strategies help, or at least, they can’t hurt site performance. You decide.

1. Embed an ultra-optimized page deep in your site. This page will be indexed by search engine bots and, because it’s optimized for bots and not people, it’ll simply be a page of HTML code optimized for bot consumption only.

To a human, this page is meaningless code with tags and HTML conventions designed as bot bait to rank highly with search engines. This is the page that will appear on the first or second SERP – the link on which visitors will click. But wait, visitors don’t want to look at code. They want pizzazz or understated elegance or shock value.

So, when a visitor clicks on the deeply-embedded, ultimately-optimized site page, s/he is immediately redirected to pages designed for human consumption. This way, you can focus on perfectly optimizing one page for SERPs while developing other pages for human views.

Ahh, but bots don’t like redirects, right? They indicate something suspicious. Wrong. Redirects are used all of the time. When you post to a blog thread, you’re often redirected to a “thank you for you submission” page before returning to the blog itself. Bots encounter redirects all the time. Just make sure your super-optimized bot bait agrees with the rest of the site’s content.

You will get slammed if the redirect takes a professional CPA from a link promising the latest in CPA news (whatever that may be) to your faux flower on-line boutique. That’s a bad idea. However, if the redirect stays true to the site text, it’s an acceptable practice by consensus of SEO professionals.

2. Embed text links. One of the most difficult things for a new site owner to do is to get all site pages indexed. You may have 200 pages on your site, but if only five of them have actually made it into the search engine index, you aren’t getting your due.

Easy to fix if you don’t abuse the practice. Bots follow links. Keeps ‘em moving forward instead of spidering the same page in perpetuity. You don’t think bots are smart do you? They follow links.

Create an intra-site link structure that will lead the spider deeper and deeper into your site, but be careful. An overabundance of these embedded text links is confusing to humans.

Try at your own risk: If you believe in tempting fate, you can create links that don’t appear to humans but do appear to bots. Simply create the link then change the color of the type to the color of the text that surrounds it. Humans don’t know there’s a link there unless they accidentally mouse over it. But bots will find those links. Of course, you may also get slammed for trying to deceive visitors, but some SEOs do employ this quirky tactic with success. Toss of the coin, here. Your call.

3. Use your prime keywords in headers. HTML code offers a range of type sizes from

to

which is like 20-point type in the real world. Any way, sprinkle your top five keywords in headers. This gives more weight to the keyword and makes it easier for bots to decide what your site is all about.

Word of caution: Everything in moderation. There’s a debate raging (okay, it’s not raging) among SEOs about the use of this tactic. If overused, it’s called header stuffing and it’s as bad as body text with a 10% keyword density.

4. Italicize, underline and bold keywords. Yep, it’s a little thing but spiders do give more weight to these indications of content value or differentiation. Quirky, incremental and free. And while a step like this won’t set your site on a jet-fuelled rocket ride to page 1 of search engine SERPs, it’s the compilation of these little things that do have an impact on site performance with both SE spiders and site visitors.

5. Do NOT use the same keywords as the stiffer competition. Yes, this runs counter to every SEO download e-book you read. All the SEO pros tell you to go with the keywords that work for successful sites. But consider the logic behind that strategy.

Let’s say you’re a car dealer – a regional business trying to reach a geo-specific demographic. If you use the same keywords as CarMax and all of the other leaders in this market segment, your site will be buried under dozens of links to bigger and better known competitors.

Instead, employ “second tier” keywords – lesser used keywords. They won’t be used as often by search engine users but when they are, your site, optimized for these second tier keywords, show up on page 1 of Google’s SERPs. You can even use Google’s Keyword Generator to develop a list of lesser-used keywords. You eliminate the bigger competition. The trade-off is fewer search engine users entering the magical combination of keywords to bring your site to the top.

Another tactic is to employ “long-tail” keywords – keyword phrases. In the case of our car dealer above, a keyword phrase like “quality used cars Portland Oregon” will deliver local traffic to both the dealer’s site and to the dealership.

Conclusion? Don’t follow the conventional wisdom. It’s so…so conventional. Be creative. Don’t think outside the box – eliminate the box completely.

HOW TO WRITE GREAT SITE TEXT WITHOUT GETTING HURT

"THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE RIGHT WORD AND THE "ALMOST" RIGHT WORD IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIGHTENING AND A LIGHTENING BUG."

MARK TWAIN

How to Write Great Site Text

Without Hurting Yourself

With the do-it-yourself web site construction tools available today, anyone with an opposable digit can design an attractive, professional-looking site complete with dancing animations, way cool graphics and even video downloads. Easy.

What’s not so easy is writing site text that sells - text with sizzle, as industry insiders like to say. And if you think what you remember from 8^th grade English is going to get you through, it’s not. The world wide web has changed everything, including the way we communicate in writing.

They’re, their & there

Do you know which one is a possessive? Which one’s a contraction and which is an adverb? If not, you’ve just met your first problem.

Site text that’s loaded with spelling errors is not a site that instills trust, at least not in literate visitors. Grammar and punctuation are a different story.

In fact, the traditional rules of grammar and punctuation are ancient history on the Internet. Most of us were taught (though few remember) to never start a sentence with the words ‘And’ or ‘But’. Remember that? Well, throw that rule out the window. Not only do the conventions for developing site text accept sentences that start with ‘And’ or ‘But’, today it’s even okay to start paragraphs with these once-forbidden words.

But (See?) gross misspellings, improper use of words and garbled sentences aren’t going to cut it. Visitors click, they look, they leave when your text is confusing, loaded with goofs and knee-deep in typos. It’s not coolness; it’s careless.

What’s the purpose of the text?

Some text is intended to persuade the visitor to buy something or perform the MDA – the most desired action. Other text, like what you’re reading now, is intended to inform, elucidate and even educate. Can the two be mixed?

Sure. Informational text can sell a concept, the importance of your products or the value of your services. Conversely, sales copy often imparts a lot of useful product information. So, before you set pen to paper (or sit down at the keyboard) know the purpose of the text you’re writing – to sell, to inform or some combination of the two.

Who’s going to read the text?

The same text that appeals to senior citizens isn’t going to appeal to the neighbor’s 16-year-old skate-boarding, head-banging, green-haired kid. Before you write a single word, determine the ideal reader – your perfect customer or client. Serious businessperson, well-trained medical professional, hunting enthusiast or a shredder like the neighbor’s kid? Then, target the tone of the text to something that appeals to your market demographics.

Your Most Valuable Digital Property

It’s the home page of your site, above the fold. The space visitors first see without scrolling. Your most powerful text belongs right here.

Start with a compelling or intriguing headline – something that absolutely captures visitor interest. Words like ‘Discover’, ‘Save’, ‘Protect’ and ‘Free’ are all words that tend to attract attention. There are plenty of others. In fact, you can find books that tell you how to craft text for every page of your new site. Check out anything by Internet sales poo-bah, Dan Kennedy. He’s a god to many on-line business owners, though there are others with differing theories of what constitutes good site text.

10 Tips for Laying Out Site Text

1. Avoid long paragraphs. Break up the text into smaller blocks.

2. Use single sentences to highlight key points. Use bulleted lists for groups of important points.

3. Visitors scan web pages, they don’t read them. Provide headings and subheads to draw the reader’s eyes to the specific information they’re after. This also helps SEs determine what your site is all about.

4. Use negative (empty) space around text to make it stand out.

5. Place product descriptions close to product pixs. Product descriptions should be detailed and 100% accurate to reduce time processing returns.

6. Keep it simple. The average American reads at an eighth-grade level so don’t pull out the thesaurus to impress readers with your extensive vocabulary.

7. Provide visual clues. Dark blue text indicates a link. Mouse-over boxes also indicate links. Make sure all links are clearly labeled to avoid sending the visitor down the wrong search path.

8. Don’t use SEO text within graphics. Spiders can’t read graphics, only letter strings.

9. Select a simple font, one that’s easy on the eyes. Also, avoid placing yellow text against a white background, or gray text against a black background. If it’s hard to read, it won’t be read.

10. Finally, make sure to include a call to action on every page, usually toward the bottom of each page so it’s the last thing readers see. A call to action is something like “Call today” or “Act now before it’s too late.” The call to action is motivational text. It also provides directions on what the reader should do now. “Don’t’ delay. Call today”.

Write like you talk.

If a customer asked you to describe the benefits of your products, you could rattle off a dozen selling points, no problem. But sit down at the keyboard to write out those selling points for the home page and you freeze up. Writer’s block or plain old brain freeze.

So, don’t try to write it. Try to “say it” in writing. Forget spelling. Forget everything you were ever taught. Instead, sit down and type the exact words you’d say to a customer, face to face. This’ll make writing a million times easier. More importantly, it will make a personal connection with visitors, making them feel as though you’re talking just to them.

Good writing in the first draft; great writing in the final draft

No one gets it perfectly the first time. Shakespeare, Hemingway, Tolstoy – all the greats got that way through the constant writing, re-writing, editing and proofing of their text. That’s just the way it works and though it’s not a great deal of fun, it’s absolutely necessary.

Edit. Then edit again. Smooth out a sentence here; replace a word there. Bounce it off your friends and business associates to make sure you’ve captured the right tone for your market, you’ve hit all the key selling points, you’ve laid out the text for easy visitor scanning and you’ve proofed everything for errors that erode visitor confidence.

Visitors don’t expect transcendent prose that lifts their spirits and opens new paths of enlightened thought. They want the facts and the information in bite-sized, easy-to-digest nuggets.

So, give the customers what they want and watch your conversion rate climb.

CAN A MACHINE DETERMINE CONTENT QUALITY? PEOPLE CAN'T EVEN DO IT!

Sometimes metrics deliver mixed signals that can lead to assumptions that are like totally bogus.

Quality content makes Google bots happy, and metrics glow.

Bask in the glow of quality.

BOYCOTT CONTENT SPAM

How Does Google Measure Quality, Any Way?

64% Of Search Engine Users Want to Know

Google owns search engine marketing with 64% of all search traffic, and seems to be solidifying that position by, not only providing directions to content, but by being the content provider as well. Type in the flavor of the week in Google’s query box and up pops links to print content, but now Google offers a “Watch Video” button (where vid-clips are an option, of course) keeping you on Google. No more YouTube. Google finds and provides the content.

But Google doesn’t just want content. It wants good content. (Maybe they should check some of the garbage on YouTube?) Fresh content. Green, informative content that hasn’t appeared already on 100 different sites. Naturally, this hasn’t prevented the sewer rats of the W3 from purchasing software that “generates” (in the broadest sense of the word) content.

There are lots of tools that’ll jiggle your nouns and verbs, and the text looks new to a spider but it’s going to leave a human reader wondering what planet the author came from. Software like spam site generators (create site and content by the long ton), automated text generators (just add words in no particular order) and scrapping tools to spread this hackneyed tripe is the cheap way to go. Ah, but you are wrong, grasshopper.

Content is NOT King

Every SEO and SEM professional will tell you content is king. Not true.

Even these so-called professionals confuse quantity of content to quality. Content generators can crank out pages by the ream but a lot of it is going to be gibberish – at least to human readers. Spiders gobble up letter strings so as long as those strings taste different, you score for the green.

Other site owners buy 100 cheapie articles at a buck a piece, written by an outsource in Bangalore. These articles sound as though they were written by ESL writers and I wouldn’t bet a nickel on authenticity. When you’re getting a buck for the piece, double checking isn’t a high priority.

Google defines quality content as “…link-worthy content which is original, conceptually unique and serves as a useful resource for information.” The Mighty Google continues,”…it refers to the text of your website. Though keywords matter in your page copy, your page should not look like a keyword studded page [designed for] search engine robots. You should write for your site visitors focusing on readability and usefulness.”

Now, that’s what Google says. Right from the company’s own site. But it appears that Google talks a good game, but those Google spiders ain’t so smart.

What is Quality Content?

Even Goog-people are a little vague on this one. Informative? According to whose criteria? Conceptually unique? There hasn’t been a new idea since eBay. Useful resource? How does a search engine evaluate whether the information is useful.?

It can count the number of bounces, but that’s not a measure of usefulness. It can determine if visitors go to other sites in search of other information. Okay, that doesn’t demonstrate that the first site had insufficient and/or unreliable information. The visitor could simply continue his or her search so no judgment calls here.

In fact, the only barometers of content quality that search engines have are social book marking sites and cookies. Without digg.com, no one would ever notice that piece on refraction you worked so hard to produce and upload.

The point is, search engines are limited in determining quality. Quality is 100% subjective so what’s quality to one person is “classy” (said in a Brooklyn accent while chewing gum) to another reader. It’s amazing, if the reader likes the piece, chances are s/he agrees with the opinions or views expressed. Vice-versa, too.

So Does This Mean You Can Ignore Content Quality?

Not quite, genius.

Spiders may not be able to tell the difference between Hemingway and me, but readers sure can and readers have come to expect quality content:

• Content that is accurate. (site your sources and stop making up stuff).
• Content that does NOT sell; it informs and teaches.
• Content that is written for the reading and skill levels of the ideal visitors.
• Content that isn’t simply a cut and paste job. Inject some of you into what you write. It makes it more…personal.
• Short and sweet. If I wanted to read a book I wouldn’t be sitting at this computer.

Forget the spam generators, the robo-writers and the dollar an article guys, NOT to appease the search engine gods but to keep your visitors on-site longer. Oh, and it’d be real swell if they book marked your site, too.

Now, they’re regulars and it’s all because your wrote it. Straight up and from the heart. Now that’s something Google won’t tell you, but it will grow your revenues. The fact is, people are surprised to find good content on the web (there’s so little of it) that when they do, they bookmark the site and keep coming back…

…exactly what you want them to do.

If you're building your first web site, or simply contemplating the possibilities, drop me line and welcome to the jungle. We're all trying to manipulate the machine.

Webwordslinger.com

Buying LInks: Is It A Good Idea?

You can buy anything on the W3 - even inbound links - something search engines love. But is it a good idea to pay for in-bound links?

What do you think?

Links Buying:

Traction or Tricks

If you’ve been in the search engine marketing business for more than five minutes you know the importance of links – in-bound links pointing to your site. Search engine spiders like sites that are plugged in and linked up. In fact, you can buy links at auction where you can create auctions, bid on links from higher ranked sites and create some web buzz about your site that keeps showing up as a link off sites with the same topics.

You Don’t Have to Start at the Beginning

Starting an online business is a time-consuming chore for many people. It’s the adventure of a lifetime for others. If you don’t have the time or inclination to start from Point A, but would rather start at Point B, you can buy existing web links from highly-ranked web sites – everything from a newsweb with a page rank 8 (PR8 and excellent) to a blog with a traffic rate of 35,000 hits a day.

.

One important point to bear in mind during links auctions. There’s no deal you can’t walk away from so don’t be afraid to walk.

Links Quality

First off, if you are planning on placing a bid on 1,000 links it’s nice to know something about the businesses behind those links. Now, because the sellers of these links are webmasters themselves, you can be pretty sure you won’t link to a bunch of porn sites when you buy 100 links targeted at hardware shoppers. Even so, do the spade work and check on who you’ll be linking to should you win the links auction.

Now, not all links are created equal and, in fact a bunch of low ranked links farms can pull a PR8 right down into the gutter so conducting research is essential before buying or bidding on a links bundle. 1,000 junk links won’t do you as much good as 100 quality links. And the only way you can determine the quality of the links you’re buying is by checking the seller’s website on Alexa (see below) to see who’s hooked in. Buy quality links, even if you get fewer of them.

You can also bid and buy a link on a homepage with 95,000 natural backlinks. Your association with a site that maintains that many backlinks connects you to those 95,000 online clients. Instant, online networking.

It’s a Snake Pit

Be careful. The buying and selling of site links completely lacks any kind of legal oversight so getting ripped off is an unpleasant possibility, unfortunately. After all, we’re dealing with something as ephemeral is back links to your site and that’s a lot different than buying a house that you can actually stand in.

The best way to avoid rip offs is to work with a reputable company – one that’s been in the web links sales business longer than last week. Serious digital brokers perform their own due diligence before posting an offering so you can assume some protection going with a reputable company.

Other protections you should take and research you can do:

• Again, check the site links on alexa.com. You can learn about links popularity, site changes and all inbound links in one place.

• Check the site with Whois, the site owner directory to determine if the links seller even has the right to sell those links. Are you going to buy a house from someone who may not even own it? Of course not.

• Ask for a current list of outbound links. You can find this information (some of it) using Alexa but you don’t know what you don’t know so checking to see that the links owner is a straight-up guy or gal goes a long way in the peace of mind department.

• Draw up a contract. If you’re buying a PR8’s links inventory, know which party is responsible for what. And, if there’s something you don’t understand or your legal representative doesn’t understand (remember, the W3 creates buzz words faster than a beehive), then take that walk. There is no deal from which you can not take a hike, so if anything sounds or feels hinky, you don’t need the headaches.

Buying links can turn a PR2 into a PR6 or PR7 if you go with a reputable links auction house (Google it for options) – one with a good history. It doesn’t take long for bad news to spread across the web so, with a bit of research, you’ll become adept at buying useful and productive backlinks – links that generate real site traffic, FAST.

It’s a growing industry and as more and more web users buy online, it’s only going to grow faster and bigger – much bigger. So, if you’ve got the capital, buy 100 quality, embedded text links.

Then watch your traffic grow.

SEO No-Nos That'll Get Your Site Slammed by Google

It's Not Nice To Mess

With Google

Search Engine Traps:

Don’t Get Snared

Most of us know a bit about search engine optimization (SEO). We know the importance of a solid list of keywords. We know the importance of certain HTML tags. Maybe we’ve even added a site map and submitted it to Google’s site map reader function – the fast track to being recognized by Google.

There’s plenty of information on how to optimize your site but no where near as much info on what not to do – what search engines don’t want to see. And many of these search engine “traps” are in common practice so the simple fact is, you may have actually taken steps to improve your site optimization only to diminish site quality in the “eyes” of search engine spiders.

SEO rumors run rampant on the web and spread like wildfire. One blogger posts that Google doesn’t like the color red and the next thing you know 100,000 webmaster are reworking their color schemes. But there are some activities that Google itself will tell you to avoid. Here are some tips from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s SEO spam squashers and if anyone should know what not to do it’s this guy.

Duplicate Content

Cutts mentioned a problem site that he’d encountered. It was owned by an on-line entrepreneur who also owned almost two dozen other web sites all, more or less, selling the same products.

No problem owning and managing 20-something web sites (good luck with that) and certainly nothing that would raise suspicions on the part of a Googlebot. But bots (also called spiders or crawlers) have become much more than letter string munchers. They’re little automated detectives, today.

Cutts pointed out that this site owner used the same content on many of his sites. The bot even discovered the same pages appearing on different sites. A money saver, to be sure, but, man, did this site get slammed.

Another example (not from Matt Cutts). A doctor put up a web site on women’s health topics with a strong emphasis on good pregnancy health. The site was well designed, the owner had a back-end maternity store and he was getting between 10K and 12K hits a day. And, he ranked number two or three on Google’s SERPs so he was generating a lot of organic traffic. Sweet.

Then, one morning, Doc log’s on and discovers that his PR has all but vanished, he’s no longer on Google’s first page and organic sales have all but disappeared. Devastating.

So, he hires an SEO expert who analyzes the site top to bottom and can’t find anything unusual. But, this SEO talks with his client and discovers that the doctor had been writing informational articles for his web site and had decided to syndicate them to other sites through URLs like ClickBank and GoArticles. So, his beautiful original content lost all of its value to the home site because it was now duplicate content, and it took months to correct the problem. Who knows how many dollars were lost.

The point? Something as simple as syndicating content with links pointing back to your site can get you squashed like a Googlebug – even though you thought your SEO strategy was sound. In this case it wasn’t.

Bottom line, original content scores points. If you own more than one site, don’t recycle content and never use the same pages on different sites. SE bots will notice quickly and your moves to cut costs will also cut your chances for SEO success.

Elephantine Site Maps

In general, creating a site map is a good thing to do. Submitting that site map to search engines is also a good thing to do. It’s like sending a search engine spider a personal invitation to stop by and check out your cool self.

Problem. If your site has hundreds or thousands of pages, that site map is going to be huge – way huge – and frankly, bots ain’t bright so a gigantic site map may confuse these crawlers to the point where they don’t know what you’re about.

Problem solved. Break that huge site map into spider-sized portions. You can place all of these site maps into one XML file for easy spidering but you won’t overload the limited capacities of SE bots.

Yes, create a site map. (Check out site map generators.) It’s good for visitors and for spiders that follow links when crawling a site – links that appear on your site map. Just keep the size of the site map manageable for the minimal “minds” of site crawlers.

What Works for Google Gives Yahoo a Headache

True. Each search engine has its own weighting algorithms and its own set of indexing protocols. Example: your site might have a problem with Yahoo spiders because your uppercase URLs that appear on site pages won’t sync with Yahoo’s requirement for lowercase URLs according to Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

There are two ways to go here. First, if you’re a coder, create separate submissions for the big three search engines: Inktomi (MSN), Yahoo and Google. This requires that you carefully review submission guidelines, rework the site, submit it for consideration (or re-evaluation) and keep your fingers crossed.

The other alternative is to buy a site map generator. These software packs won’t break the bank (many under $100 and you can even find some OSS versions, though not recommended) and they take the hassle out of site submission.

You or your designer create one, generic site map. The software then formats the single site map to meet the demands of Google, Inktomi, Ask and literally dozens of other search engines, large or small.

If you wait long enough, spiders will find you but (for real) there are stories of sites being overlooked for months and even years. So, make sure your site map is properly formatted for each specific search engine before submission.

Link But Not Too Fast

Google’s recent patent application for its new algorithm (before Orion comes on line) indicates that the search engine is taking a closer look at inbound links to a site.

In the past, lots of inbound links indicated a quality site – one that other, similar sites would reference to their own visitors. Of course, this was abused. Links would be added for a month or two then disappear. Google’s new algo also watches the growth rate of in-bound links. If it sees too many too quickly it will raise a flag and tag your site as suspect.

Site link growth should happen naturally over a period of time. Vary anchor text to give links a more “natural” look and avoid what Google calls “burst link growth” which smacks of search engine spam. On the web, no one grows that fast. Slow and steady wins the race.

Avoid Session IDs

Eliminate session IDs from URLs. Long URLs are a challenge for the URL-challenged bot and are very likely to cause bot confusion and either a partial indexing or worse, mis-indexing by the search engine. Here’s how Google puts it in its own guidelines:

“If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a simple text browser, then search engine spiders might have trouble crawling your site.”

- Google Site Guidelines

Too Many Websites

There are people earning a living by building websites, adding a bit of informational content to get the attention of crawlers and loading up these sites with Google Adwords – those contextual ads you see on some web pages. Ads by Goooogle.

If all you’re doing is building sites to generate Adwords revenues, you aren’t really providing a service to visitors and search engine spiders don’t like that. Not a bunch of links to other sites, spiders want visitors to access information quickly and, if possible, right off the SERPs without any secondary clicks to other sites. Even Googlebots don’t like to see lots of Google Adwords links on every page of every site you own. Spiders want relevant, useful content, helpful to the visitor, not a page with a bunch of links – even if they’re Google-sponsored links.

Avoid Private Whois Listings

Whois is the directory of site ownership – who owns what domain. You can choose to keep that information private but it looks suspicious to spiders that crawl this directory regularly.

The perception is that those with numerous private listings have something to hide. Maybe yes, maybe no. But as far as spiders are concerned, too many private Whois listings can hurt you by adding certain search engine filters to your site when indexed at HQ.

The key to SEO is to recognize that it’s a process and there are some short cuts but not many and unless you know precisely what you’re doing you could end up hurting your SEO rather than helping it.

Read the protocols of Google and Yahoo. (Inktomi’s protocols aren’t readily available.) Make sure that your HTML is properly formatted, that content is informational and useful to visitors and that inbound links don’t happen too quickly and that every link has some relevance to the subject of your site.

It takes time to optimize a site – it’s a process, not a goal. Be patient and play by the search engine rules. To do otherwise is simply shooting yourself in the foot – and you know that’s got to hurt.

Looking for some understandable advice about search engine optimization for your new web biz? Drop me a line and let's have a look.

Webwordslinger.com