Primary Keywords and Search Engine Success

Website owners want to know how they can succeed in searches using many keywords rather than just one primary keyword. Usually they already are!

Here's how it works. One website can be optimized and positioned in the search engine for one primary keyword phrase. That primary keyword phrase is the phrase that delivers the greatest amount of traffic relevant to the website.

However, website statistics show us that pages from that website will usually get search engine traffic from hundreds or thousands of other keyword searches. The competitive strength the website uses to compete in the primary keyword (usually highly competitive) offers positioning in other, secondary keywords as well.

We did a study using all of our client's website statistics over a period of a year. The top five keywords (the ones you, us and your competitors monitor most frequently) accounted for about a third of the website traffic from the search engines.

The other two thirds of the traffic (TWO THIRDS!) came from other keywords - many of which sent one, two or three website visitors over the course of a year. This is the area where your website really succeeds. Having a number one position in a Google search is not what makes a website successful. No. 1 in a non-competitive search can lull the website owner into a false sense of security. It's overall competitive strength that matters because it's the bottom 100 or 1,000 keywords that really bring in the traffic.

What's the best way to succeed?

The website with the most pages generally wins. All of the pages of one site are going to be about or relating to relevant topics. If you have a hotel in Rio, all pages of that site would likely be about Rio, Brazil, and/or hotels. All of those words become a potential target for a search.

No one person would likely read every page of a 400+ page website. They will read a page about what they are interested in and it's possible that each of the 400+ pages attracts a half a dozen visitors each year at a minimum, with some attracting several thousand.

The the more competitive strength the website has, the more likely page #327 will become the target of a search because it will show up in the results of a search that few would ever think of.

There are some other ways to improve the traffic. Let's use an example where there are three important keyword phrases for one website - each presumed to deliver the same amount of traffic as the other.

One strategy would be to divide the resources available to the website into three groups - each pointing the website toward one of the three keywords. This is likely a "divide and conquer" strategy - where you have now divided your resources which allows your competition to conquer your website in the search engines!

The best strategy is to pick the one most likely to deliver the most traffic according to the research, then create pages for each of the other topics. Once those pages have been created, the linking within the website can deliver some strength to those pages.

Another option is to use a website for the conventional, or in the industry jargon, the organic results, and use an adwords campaign for the prominent secondary keywords.

It may become advantageous (more cost effective) to develop a second website that deals with the secondary keyword should it be that important to the overall success. There are some that use adwords to determine the real demand then create websites for each of the highly demanded keywords.

The one thing to remember is that one site can't be at the top of everything. There's just too much competition for each keyword that matters.

Domain Names and Search Results

The domain name is one of the lesser elements in a search result. I know that popular mythology has domain names at or near the top of the list when it comes to search engine success. Companies like godaddy.com who offer domain name registration certainly do whatever they can do to foster that myth.

The reality is that in a few cases, it can make a marginal difference, but so many other, more meaningful elements would have to be essentially "tied" for a domain name to have an impact. You can verify this by looking into a search for any community name followed by the words real estate. That's where the domain name keyword technique use seems to be rampant.

You'll see that the keywords in the domain name don't seem to impact the search results. Here's an example using Kelowna as the community:

http://www.google.com/search?q=kelowna+real+estate&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Here's vancouver results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=vancouver+real+estate&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

These are highly competitive searches and if vancouverrealestate.com, or kelownarealestate.com offered an advantage, domain names with the appropriate keywords would consistently show up near the top. It's possible that there is a community with (community)realestate.com at the top of Google's results, but that's usually due to other factors, not because of the domain name. I just used real estate as an example because it's certain that in almost every market, someone has the domain name with the keywords that match the search and that's rarely at the top.

The other factor to make note of is that a new domain name will not show up in a competitive search in Google for about nine months to a year. It will show up if you search for it, since it will be indexed, but no matter what is done with that site, it will take up to a year before it shows up where it should in Google's results.

Often, people buy domain names just to keep their competitors from getting them, but my opinion is that the best domain names are the ones that are easy to remember and easy to communicate to people on the phone! You don't want to be saying osoyoos (hyphen) bed (hyphen) and (hyphen) breakfast (dot) com even though the use of hyphens is the best way to make use of a keyword in a domain name from a search engine point of view according to all that have tested the results.

There is one caveat to this - used domain names. If you have an opportunity to pick up a domain name that had been in use for some time, that is often a valuable opportunity. Domain names that have been on the internet for a time generally have links out there on other sites pointing to them. If you get that domain name, its link strength can be used to promote your site. Each one is different, but usually, old domain names have value. The older the better!

From my perspective, domain names are generally a non-issue.

How to Create a Better Website!

If you want your website to generate more business, then you need a website that conforms to the unwritten rules of the internet. First you give, then (possibly), you receive. People want to remain anonymous until they decide otherwise.

Websites that don't work well are websites that demand information (such as your email address) without giving up anything first. Many of us tend to hoard information, because we've always been led to believe that information is power. The internet changed that, but hasn't been around for a long enough time for that to have seeped into everyone's consciousness. However, if you are not offering information, it can and will be found somewhere else.

Also, how you go about it is important. There's a subtle difference between, "Give me your email and I'll give you something in return." and, "I have something of value for you, how will I get that to you?" People can seem to spot the difference. You have to start by giving something, then you can ask for an email or other information in return for even more from them, but it starts with you.

If you want a better website, it has to have information on it that will be interesting and valuable to your website's visitors. There are website statistics for average time spent on the site. That statistic is the best measure of content that you can get and increasing that should be one of your goals for your website.

Most businesses focus on their actual business, forgetting that the visitor to their website is interested in much more than that - even if they are on the website of that business. Knowing about your business is not all that they want to know. Use that to your advantage.

If you are looking for a hotel room in a place you've never been before, certainly it's important to understand what the hotel looks like, what the rooms and rates are like, does it handle conventions, and so on. There must be pages about the hotel and its services. But if you are in charge of the hotel's website, don't stop there.

Try to think as you would if you were a visitor to that hotel or that city. If you have never been there before, you are probably also interested in what's in the general area, such as dining, and entertainment. You'd probably want to know what attractions may be nearby - museums, parks, nature areas, shopping malls and so on.

You'll probably want to know about any events may be taking place when you are staying there. It would be a disappointment to go to a place and find out the next day that you could have been at some incredible, fascinating event, and would have been there for sure if only you had known about it. There are a lot of people that don't know about special events in your town, even if you are bored with those events or forgotten about them.

If you are stuck for topics, a great place to look is a keyword service. Google offers a keyword tool that gives you an idea about what keywords are likely to generate the most traffic. You can find that tool here:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Type in keywords related to your business or your location and see what comes up in the list. Those are topics that you should pay attention to, since that's what people are searching for.

Look for some websites of businesses similar to your business, but in other cities. Particularly, look at the site that's #1 in Google. What is their site like? Do they offer you any ideas about pages that you could add to your site that would make your site better and more informative for visitors? No need to reinvent the wheel.

Back to the hotel example. If you are happy with your site as it is, and your site tells about the hotel itself, but you'd like to create some less factual, and more opinion based pages, it's not that difficult to set up a blog that allows you to publish pages to your site. You might describe a local event, or local attraction in your own words, or publish "articles" or testimonials that your customers have sent to you.

Here's an example of a blog in action. Look through the previous posts listed on the right side of the page:

http://www.cabin-rentals-of-georgia.com/blog/

A blog offers you the opportunity to add pages to your site without having special software or without having to know html code. You can just click "new post" write something, then click on save and publish. That's all it takes to

Whenever you create a page (blog or regular website page), it should be at least 200 words, even if it's a photo page. Otherwise the search engines (particularly Google) will totally ignore that page. Help your visitors, but by doing so, you are likely to help yourself by generating more traffic in the search engines with more pages on your site.

An easy way to find content for pages is to use content you find on the web after you've done a search. I'm not suggesting plagiarism, but I'm suggesting that there might be many pages that you find that you could use to help create one page of your own. Just give credit where credit is due.

One other suggestion is to translate your site into other languages. I have clients that do that and it's definitely helped generate traffic to their site. It also helped to make their site much larger (5 languages = 5x as many pages). Now, they not only get increased traffic from foreign language pages, but also their website is doing better because we've used those pages to make the original English pages stronger.

By increasing your website's size, you create more opportunity for it to draw traffic from the search engines, and, if used set up, the new pages can help to enhance the search engine position of pages that already exist.

The whole object is to use your website to feature your business, while at the same time, give visitors to your site all the information they are likely to want. Also remember that you are not just writing for one person. One person may be interested in the local nature conservatory, while another may be interested in the local nightclubs.

If you are able to give someone some interesting and valuable information, it's more likely that they'll consider doing business with you rather than your competitor who gave them nothing. There's no guarantee that people will behave like that, but generally they do. The "rules" of the internet suggest that giving is the best way to receive.

Websites, Redesigns & SEO - 10 Things to Consider

I've noticed a great deal of activity among my clients in the area of website redesign lately . For most business owners, a redesigned website is something they do once every few years and wouldn't necessarily have a lot of experience with it.

As part of my business, I'm dealing with redesigned websites on a continual basis. I thought that I might offer up some of the things to be aware of when considering a redesigned website. There's more to it than how it looks!

Overall, having an updated website a good thing. The obvious reason is that it looks good. I can tell when a website is 10 years old. Lots of others can too. There are technical advances as well as changing constraints. For instance, five or more years ago, most website designs were created for a screen width of 800 pixels, since that's what the majority of computer monitors displayed. These days, many monitors are so large that a website that's 800 pixels wide looks tiny! The 800 pixel screen is almost extinct. In the website statistics I view, monitors seem to be at least 1024 pixels wide, the standard laptop size.

Another consideration people have is what a website will look like on a small screen - such as a Blackberry or other mobile device. The advent of cell phones is making that a consideration for some. At some point, I'm guessing that all website designs will consider that, unless some other technology comes along that makes the mobile devices obsolete. Who knows? Just another reason to keep your website up to date!

Most people that are introduced to your business will receive their introduction through your website - not your sign out front. What is your website saying to people about your business? What kind of impression are they getting?

We all like to get compliments on our website. Unfortunately, those positive comments often mask the problems that exist. The people you want to get comments from are the people that can help you improve your site. The problem there is that those are the people that you are not likely to hear from - they've gone to your competitor. It's the amount of business that is turned away that you need to consider. "Why are they turning away?" is the question you need to answer.

So, what do you need in a website?

1. Image
First of all, whether you like it or not, your website will convey an image of your company to anyone that visits your site. What message is it conveying? You might need to conduct a survey to find out what impression people have of your business after viewing your website. What you need to develop a feeling for is whether the message people are receiving is consistent with the image you want to project. Don't depend too heavily on compliments when trying to figure it out.

2. Technically Sound
Will your site work with all browsers? Is there all the code on the page that there needs to be? Is there code on the page that is unnecessary? Does every feature function as it should? Can anyone (with permission) make changes to the site or was it created using some sort of proprietary system? If it's a template, can each page be unique in the head section?

The list of possible problems is almost infinite, but the main thing is to make sure it's designed by someone using up-to-date, industry standard tools. That likely rules out the daughter of your best friend's brother-in-law's next door neighbor, who's into computers.

3. Convey a Message
This is the one thing that separates the skilled from the unskilled. I used to design my own website until I realized that I'm not a graphic artist. In fact, I'm any kind of an artist! A good web design artist will guide your eye (without you really noticing) to what's important on the page. This is a vital skill requirement among those that would design your site. When this is well done, it can be worth the price of a new site all by itself. Think of the rest as a bonus!

4. What Message To Convey?
What's the best message to convey? You either need to "connect" with the website visitor - you are going to help them solve their problem - or the message needs to quickly convey why you are a better choice than any of the competitors that are usually two clicks away. What's your competitive edge? Can your competitor make the same claim? Do they make the same claim? That doesn't help you if they do.

5. Simplicity - A Double Benefit
Something else that's just cropped up in the last couple of years is the overly-complex website. Just because you can doesn't mean that you should! You have to weigh the purpose and function of the website against the type of website design required. Do you really need a database driven, dynamic website for a 20 page tourism site that only changes rates once each year? Not likely. The dynamic sites are designed for extremely large websites that are being changed frequently - product updates, pages added and subtracted daily. It's overkill for a site where the text rarely changes.

What's the additional benefit? Not only are the dynamic sites much more expensive, but the search engines prefer simple. Good ol' basic html is still the best.

If the web address of one of your pages looks like this it's not doing well in the search engines:

http://sub.domain.net/page.jsp?pageid=259855847

6. Text and Only Text
I've encountered a few websites where, once redesigned, each page is one big image. In that case, what the visitor sees is almost completely different than what the search engines see. There was a short-lived trend where a lot of home pages were one big flash file. You've seen these - it's like watching a video. Those types of websites are still common in movie trailers and unless you have a movie trailer to display, that's where they should be used - not on your site. Flash files are great to use where an image would normally be displayed. What's not good is when the whole page is one image.

Flash pages are not the only problem. I've had clients pay for a new website only to find that their new site is one big jpg image with "hotspots" for linking. (hotspots are invisible layers over a portion of an image that allow linking). Again, the web page is just one big image. The search engine spiders can't read an image, they index and respond to text. The people visiting your site might be seeing words, but if those words are images and not text then the search engines are not.

One minor and quite common variation on this theme is for the body to contain text, but the header is an image. The header (or title, or headline, or whatever) are the most important words on the page, usually containing the most important keywords. Don't make those keywords invisible. Use text in the body, in the headline, in the links, - use text everywhere!

7. Navigation
People need to get around your site. Some website designers create sites that have "tricky" navigation. It's hard to figure out, or hard to find. Abandon those! There are a lot of areas where you want to shine; where you want to differentiate your site from competitors. Navigation is not the right place for that!

8. Redundant Navigation
In my opinion, every website should have redundant navigation. What's that? There's the standard navigation available at or near the top of the page which normally is formed into the design of the website. Then, often there's redundant navigation at the bottom of the page.

The bottom navigation serves a number of valuable purposes. For one thing, it's usually text links - the best kind from an SEO point of view. Another is that it allows people visiting your site to read to the bottom of the page, then navigate to another page. Also, depending on how the 'main' navigation is set up, it might not allow the search engine spiders to pass through to each page with equal ease. The redundant navigation can solve that problem. I'd strongly recommend redundant navigation be incorporated in the design at the bottom of the page.

9. Expandable/Contractable
Your website is going to be designed with whatever text you are using today on that page. Over time, you might want to add to that page - or you may want to shorten the text on that page. No matter what you want to do with the page in the future, the website should accommodate your wishes without requiring a major overhaul of the design. This is a much more common practice than you might expect.

10. Brochure or Online Resource?
Your website designer can't come up with all of the content your site needs, but hopefully, your site will become more of an online resource for your industry, and your area than simply an online brochure for your business. If you plan to expand your site along those lines, that's something that should be taken into consideration when the website is designed - plan to expand!

If you never actually adopt and accomplish the goal of website expansion, the extra thought that went into how the site might expand in the future won't harm the site in any way.

Good Design and SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The most important elements of website design are not doing things that could harm the site in the search engines. There are not very many things that can be done to a website's design that can help it with search engine positioning (or, at least we'll make sure those are what they need to be), but lots that can create problems.

I hope this information is helpful to you.

I'll put in a plug here for Greg Fensterman. Greg's a website designer that I recommend and it was Greg who designed our site. It turned out to be exactly what we wanted, but better! You won't have to worry about any of the design factors above with Greg. Why not view his website design site - www.alaskawebcrafters.com

~ Alan

The Ol' Domain Registration Scam

The email starts out like something like this - "We received a formal application from a person who is called [insert name] is applying to register "pinnacleinternet" as their domain names and Internet brand in Hong Kong and also in Asia on 2009-02-13.

Domain names are not country specific. Domain names are global. Domain names are registered with official registrars who have the ICANN sanction. The money you pay for a domain name helps create and maintain the internet.

This scam is an attempt to have you pay money to protect your domain name which is already protected. You can safely add that email to your junk email folder.

~Alan

The Ol' Google Sitemap Scam

The email starts like this - "As I was on http://www.yourdomain.com this morning, I was unable to locate a "Google Sitemap file" on your website."

There's a reason they can't find that file. There are no links to that file, and if they don't know the name of the file, they'd never find it unless they could guess.

Of course, most sitemaps created for the search engines are given clever names, like "sitemap", but it's a ploy to make you nervous, and the purpose of the email is to make you feel like there's something that you need and don't have.

You can check your sitemap by going to your home page, then after the trailing "/" type in sitemap.xml. You'll find your search engine sitemap at that address.

~ Alan

Facebook, Twitter and Social Networking

Social Networking sites are on the minds of a lot of people these days. I was just at a conference over the weekend where Facebook was touted as the "Next Big Thing". When they talk to an audience like that, it always generates the feeling that if you aren't doing this, you are really missing out on things! The seem to be saying, "Everyone else that even thinks about doing this is generating millions of dollars of sales each month...er, day...er, hour! What? You haven't started yet? Are you insane?" Maybe that's just how it seems to me...

The part that always seems to be missing from these seminars, classes, articles etc. is the part where they tell you exactly how you can benefit from the social networks. The end result is that you are left with the notion that it would be great to have that working for you, and that there are benefits to it that you are not getting, however, there's rarely an action plan that enables you to put it to use.

I routinely get questions from clients about how they might benefit comercially from the social networks. I've read a number of articles about how to use them to your advantage. I've opened a Twitter account, and a Facebook account to find out how these might actually work for my clients.

The main object is to create a group of people with common interests. Once there's a group of people that are allowed into your Facebook profile or part of your Twitter friends or followers, then there's a number of ways to communicate with them.

In Facebook, it's Notes, Events, Groups, and Pages that, when changed or created, send a message to that whole group. In Twitter, there are "Tweets" that are 140 character messages you send to your followers that answer the question, "What are you doing?"

I'm not going to say that it's not possible to succeed in marketing using these social network tools, but their value has yet to be proven to me.

There is one gigantic problem right off the bat. There is an inherent anti-advertising "group norm" in all social networking sites. Facebook tried an unsuccessful advertising venture called Beacon which has since been dropped after much derision and criticism. There are social ads on Facebook, and they offer users the ability to interact with the ads, creating a story that goes out into their "feed", but I question the effectiveness of those ads.

It seems as if the best way to excel on social networking sites is to have a group, or following that you can interact with, sort of in the same way you'd create an opt-in list of email addresses of people that are interested in what you have to say. The marketing possibilities are now obvious. "We have a sale!"

The problem with that is the amount of time it takes to gather a group, and what is it that you can offer to people to have them be part of your group. If you can find a topic of interest that will create a large group, the marketing becomes easier. I keep wondering what the Facebook pages (or Tweets in Twitter) of a hotel owner or bed and breakfast or rafting company would be like? What would attract me to a group about a particular hotel, for example? If I did, then that hotel would be able to send me "Tweets" or messages in a number of possible ways in Facebook.

One other possibility that offers many of the same advantages as social networking is blogging. In my opinion, at this time, Blogging seems to offer the opportunity to be more successful in attracting traffic to your site than any of the social networks. It has the ability to work for you in the same way as a social network, but it may be easier to gather a group and it likely has more search engine benefits.

Search engines view words. If you were to start a blog and write in it, it's unlikely you'd write about Arizona if you are in Alaska, or fishing in Africa if you are in Montana, so most of the topics would likely be relevant to your business or your location.

Creating an interesting blog by telling stories, or providing real-life examples of things relevant to your business gives you an opportunity to find an audience. At the same time, the search engines get more "fodder" because search engines are primarily text based - even videos need the text of the titles to appear in searches. Once your site appears in more searches you get more traffic. That makes sense to me.

In summary, the inherent problem with Social network sites is the anti-commercial bias. People are there to find friends and communicate with those friends. Using it as a commercial application may work, but it is definitely not the purpose of those sites. It could also backfire. You can gather a lot of friends and then send them all a message that promotes your business in some way, but that seems like a lot of work for a marginal gain.

I'd say that you might be making more value of your time if you spend time writing in a blog, about events and even daily life where you live and work, because a lot of that will be interesting to other people that don't live where you do, don't have experience with events you take for granted, and don't know anything about you or your business.

If your website is as big as it can be, somewhat of an online resource rather than an online brochure and you have a blog, then the next step (if you have time) might be to explore the social networks and start to accumulate a group.

That's my take on social network sites at this time. Let me know if I'm out to lunch on this one.

~ Alan