I think it’s some of both and a little of all. SEO has to focus on more than just “getting rankings” and must use the knowledge of the search engines to bring together all the various online marketing elements into a singular web marketing campaign. People seem to be using the term “inbound marketing” more and more to describe this integrated approach.

Businesses today need much more than an SEO agency. They need a web marketing firm that looks beyond rankings to help clients set online growth goals, develop strategies to achieve those goals and measure the success of those strategies along the way. Those goals are achieved through a variety of online marketing channels.

SEOs must use the skills they have to provide needed recommendations to get clients the results they want, regardless of the avenue it takes to get those results. SEOs are there to help you build the most optimized, search- and searcher-friendly site possible; this attracts visitors, builds engagement and, ultimately, converts those visitors into customers.

Why Collaboration is Essential

Successful SEO is not the responsibility of any one person, but is a collaboration between the marketers, the developers and the business managers. If any one group fails to fulfill their part in the process, the success of the online marketing campaign also fails. After all, we don’t rank websites, Google does.

Over the past five years search engines have added an increasing number of signals that factor into the ranking performance of a website. Google boasts there are more than 200 ranking signals being used, and at any time there are anywhere from 50-200 different versions of the algorithm in effect. The weight of each of the search signals vary by industry, website and even the individual as locality, personalization, social networks, relevance, comprehensiveness, freshness and speed all factor in and even change on a daily basis.

It takes much more than an “optimized” website to get good rankings. It takes a great website! That means great design, great usability, great content, great customer service, great architecture, great optimization and time. You can have all the right pieces for a great website but time is still a crucial factor.

For search engines, ranking a website is about trust. The more the site is trusted in all the areas mentioned above, the better it will rank. But as with any relationship, trust takes time to build, and, unfortunately, there are no shortcuts.

Building a Great Website

Much of what Google or other search engines consider a “quality website” deemed worthy of a top ranking falls outside the scope of traditional SEO (i.e. adding keywords to the page). The SEO and web marketing team must help you set the strategy (or work with you to do so), make recommendations, and seek out ways to improve your site based on known algorithm criteria, personal experience and historical testing. These recommendations must then be implemented if you want results.

It’s not about temporarily achieving top rankings because you’ve outsmarted the algorithm, but rather to build a site that deserves top rankings because your website is better than the competition and you’ve established the trust signals to prove it. SEO firms today must be web marketing firms that do SEO (and social media, analytics, link building, etc.). The goal is to help you build a better website. No, not just a better website, a great website!

Call that SEO if you want. Some are now calling it “Inbound Marketing.” I just call it good Web marketing!

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing!

Everything you do, as a small business, has an impact on your marketing message and ability to get that message out to your customer base. How/whether you answer your phones, how you reply to email messages, what you say on Twitter/Facebook, the presentation of your website, and your ability to produce satisfied customers all play a role in your ongoing marketing efforts.

How are you perceived?

My company helps business owners build and execute their web marketing strategies. But all too often, many are missing even the most fundamental marketing and common-sense business development components. We can help them online, but lacking the offline aspects, we are simply attempting to fill a bucket that has holes in it.

Perception matters. If your potential customer’s perception of you, true or not, is less than they expect, you’re going to have trouble selling them. Would you trust a mechanic with a poorly tuned vehicle? A lawyer who drives a Yaris? A contractor with a run-down office? A landscaper with an overgrown lawn?

You might, but I guarantee you’d think twice before you do. None of these things demonstrate how well any of these business owners do their job, but the perception is, if they can’t take care of themselves, how can you trust them to take care of you?

When performing link building for our clients, they are often picky about where we get links from. So are we, but they often want to get links only from high-caliber sites, when their site is somewhere below that. In link building, people will generally only link to site’s of equal or higher caliber than themselves. If you want a link from a high-caliber site, you have to be one. Otherwise, take what you can get from those below you!

The little things matter the most

Businesses purchase online marketing because they want to increase sales. But if the SEO is doing its job but sales don’t follow, there may be something else at play. Lack of business success doesn’t always fall on the marketer’s shoulders. In fact, such woes may directly be caused by how the business is being run.

The SEO’s job doesn’t include running your business. There are a lot of things that fall outside the SEO’s area that can make or break your business success, and even your search engine rankings!

As an SEO, we routinely try to help our clients in areas that fall far outside the SEO box. We’ll provide feedback on design, programming and presentation, just to name a few. We want our customers to succeed, and sometimes that means we have to help in areas that we were not necessarily hired for.

Everything matters, and when it comes to business success, everything should be on the table for a discussion on how to improve your ROI. If your SEO thinks your design isn’t great, it may be worth discussing in greater detail, even if you love it. There might be a reason they hate it that goes beyond personal preference. If your SEO provides a recommendation on how something looks or appears on the website, it many worth noting, even if you can’t change it right away.

Little things can create big perceptions. Especially when it comes to usability issues. It’s not just website design, it’s also communication, problem resolution, response times and a whole lot more.

A picture on your website may be worth a thousand words, but perception is worth 1001. You are what you’re perceived to be. That’s true whether you believe it or not.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

But things might not always be as they appear. While it’s never a bad thing to grow in profits, ROI or a growing customer base, you may actually be paying good money to lose great customers.

I use this analogy often, so forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. But let’s pretend that you’re tasked with filling a bucket with water. The only problem is that your bucket has holes in it. You put water in, but it keeps leaking out.

What’s your solution?

You can a) add water into a bucket at a rate faster than it leaks out, or b) plug some holes.

Now, let’s say your website is the bucket, the water is your website’s traffic and the faucet is your online marketing efforts. Oh, and the holes are usability issues that cause you to lose customers before the sale is complete.

Every drop (visitor) that you let out of your bucket (website) is a lost opportunity to convert a sale. It’s a lost customer. Since you want more sales, you can choose one of the options above: a) drive more traffic to your website and hope to get more sales that way, or b) fix your usability issues to retain more customers without having to put more money into turning up the faucet (marketing).

If you choose option A (driving more traffic to your site), you’ll ultimately retain more customers by sheer volume alone, but the money spent on your improved marketing efforts are not helping you improve your ability to convert customers. It’s only increasing the number of customers you have available to convert.

Option B is a better bet. By plugging the usability holes, you are not only getting more sales, you are doing so without having to pay for any additional marketing efforts.

But there is also an option C. Fixing your usability issues while you are increasing traffic to your site. This is what any good SEO should be doing for you.

Unless you or your SEO are improving your conversion rates by plugging usability holes, you might as well be paying your SEO to send visitors away from your site. Otherwise, your visitors will be leaving just as fast as they came – with no sale to remember you by!

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Rolling out a newly optimized website is good. Checking it first is better.

Investing in SEO is good. Investing in ROI is better.

Optimizing your e-commerce site is good. Using optimized concantenation schema is better.

Quick-fix SEO is good. Long-term SEO is better.

Performing SEO correctly is good. Doing what you can quickly is better.

Keyword research is good. Keyword research and segmentation is better.

Adding keywords to content is good. Following user-friendly keyword optimization guidelines is better.

Having content on your website is good. Having unique content is better.

Being unique is good. Being remarkable is better.

Meeting your audience’s needs is good. Making your audience feel special is better.

Optimizing for your important keywords is good. Optimizing for a lot of great keywords is better.

Expecting rankings is good. Getting rankings is better.

Getting rankings is good. Growing your business is better.

Increasing traffic is good. Persuading visitors to buy is better.

Growing your business is good. Increasing profits is better.

Understanding algorithms is good. Understanding analytics is better.

Charging (or paying) for SEO services is good. Being fair with charges is better.

Writing about SEO is good. Writing about SEO while trashing Will Ferrell is better.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

In each phase of this cycle, the searcher is typing in a unique set or words or phrases. Each search is designed to provide more relevant information than the last. As the searcher learns, the search phrases reflect what they know and what new information they need.

There is value in building a website that provides information to each of these searchers, but the value in each isn’t the same. By understanding the full marketing value and potential of your website, you can build an effective sales funnel that provides each and every visitor the information they need to make the decision you are hoping for.

Your website is a pre-sell channel

Not every visitor who comes to your website is ready to buy right now. In fact, many searchers are merely curious and are looking for knowledge they don’t already have. These researchers could turn into buyers, but the chances of making a sale today are slimmer than me turning down a free lunch at Chipotle. It can happen, it’s just not likely. (Try me and find out!)

Instead of trying to force your visitors to give you what you want, why not give the visitor what they want?

Every business website should implement a variety of pre-sell strategies. If you think about it, only your product/service pages are doing the actual selling. This leaves the rest of your site to walk people through the research and shopping cycles, pre-selling them on what you offer, so that when they are ready to buy, they come you.

Your home page, product category pages, about us pages, etc., are great places to engage in active pre-selling. They provide a goldmine of opportunities. Use these pages strategically to talk about your brand, your product selection, your value, quality of service, and whatever else will give your visitors confidence in you and your products. This won’t sell any single product by itself, but it will reinforce to the searcher that you are a reputably and trustworthy site to purchase from.

Content: Enter stage right

A lot of ecommerce business owners tell me they don’t like SEOs that want to add a bunch of text on the page. Instead, they just want to push the visitors to the product. This is the right strategy for those searchers already in the buying phase of the cycle, but most aren’t. At least not yet. And those that are – they are likely using search phrases that deliver them directly to your product pages!

If you’re not writing great content for your category and sub-category pages (or are hiding it), you’re not using your website as a pre-sell tool. This leaves you only with the sales channel after the visitor has already performed all their research searches on Google. Ultimately, you’ll have missed out on a lot of potential traffic and branding opportunities that would likely have brought many of the buyers back to your site for a purchase.

Your website is a sales channel

The sales channel is where the majority of the “value” of any website comes in. It’s certainly the most trackable and justifiable. Implementing analytics and conversion testing will allow you to tweak your conversion funnel to capture more sales and generate a higher ROI.

A lot of websites focused on selling products or services fail in this area. It’s almost like they tried to recreate the magical experience of the paper catalog online. File that under ‘FoMP’ – Failure of Monumental Proportions!

Your website sales channel must express your unique value to your potential customers. This is especially true if your products are sold at any number of other outlets. Why should they buy from you instead of that other guy?

Your customers should feel you know your products better than the manufacturer does. You can do this by writing unique product descriptions and value-based headlines and using language that is customer-needs centric. Telling your customers what you or your products do is good. Telling your customers the benefit you or your products provide is better.

Building up your tips, tools and helpful article database can be an asset to the active sales funnel. If a potential customer has a question that can be answered right from your website, helping them finalize their purchase decision, you both win.

Your website is a post-sales channel

When the sale is done, the sell isn’t done!

We all know it costs far less to keep a customer than to get a new customer. Unfortunately, too many online marketers fail at pursuing the customers they already have and continue to spend, spend, spend on acquiring new ones. (A great book about this is Flip the Funnel by Joseph Jaffe.)

A good portion of your online marketing budget should be used to maintain customer loyalty. There are a lot of ways you can do this; you can provide customer loyalty and rewards cards, re-marketing through PPC, coupons and discounts for a follow-up purchase, email follow-ups with “on sale” updates, etc.

Give your customers a reason to come back to your site, or, at the very least, a reason to stay in contact with you.

Social Media: Enter stage left

A great way to do this is with regular blog updates providing helpful tips and tutorials that let your customers know you care about them, not just their wallets. Use Twitter and Facebook to engage your customers and deal with potential PR nightmares before they get a chance to take a foot hold. Make sure your website allows customers to easily contact you when there is a problem.

If you’re not implementing some kind of follow up or engagement after the sale, you’re losing thousands of dollars worth of profit. Who better to convince to buy from you than an already happy customer?

We often build websites with a singular thought in mind: selling our products or services. Unfortunately, we usually do that with a singular method–getting a sale. But we don’t think about what happens before the sale is ready to be made, or after it has been completed. We have to be willing to lay a little groundwork to build credibility, build branding, and lay the foundation for a potential sale in the future.

And once the sale is complete, why give up there? Continue to pursue the customer. Let them know just how much you appreciate them and wish to continue a mutually beneficial relationship. Don’t just focus on getting new sales. Focus on building customer relationships before, during and after the sale.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Many developers do have a solid grasp and understanding of SEO concepts and some even dig in to become tried and true SEOs as well. Those that fit this latter group are few and far between, and those from the former group know as much about managing an SEO campaign as a community organizer knows about managing a country.

Many (but not all) developers know what it means to create a search engine friendly (SEF) website. But that is not the same thing as optimizing a website for top search engine ranking performance. Think of building a website as building a car. You may have created a high-performance machine, but it’s not ready to compete in the Indy 500 when it rolls off factory assembly line!

I don’t want to discount the developer’s role in the overall optimization process. This is critical work and becomes the foundation the SEO has to build from. But SEF isn’t SEO!

You have to be SEF before you can do SEO

Many web developers who claim to know SEO really don’t know that it’s much more than throwing a few meta tags into the code. Presto! Your site is now optimized! Too bad it isn’t’ that easy.

By claiming to have a solid understanding of SEO, these developers do the entire industry a huge disservice. I’m sure no designer would like me claiming to be a web designer when my best artistic creation is a stick figure hanging from a noose. (No, I’m not being morbid. Think: H_NGM_N.) Well, neither do I like it when people with very limited SEO skills or knowledge claim to be SEOs.

Every web developer should be skilled at building websites within a very strong SEF framework. They should have a grasp of how to create a solid architecture, understand visitor usability, know how to design reliable conversion funnels and have a basic understanding of how the search engines spider/index websites. This is Web Design 101 and SEO 101, but this knowledge doesn’t get you a degree in either.

While SEF is generally (or should be) done in the development stage, SEO is continuous. If your web developer says they will SEO your website as part of the one-time design fee, you know right there that something’s not right. If they tell you they’ll create a search engine friendly or SEO-ready site, then you know you may have a developer that has a clue.

#teamwork

It is impossible to design or program a search engine optimized website. But you can design or program a search engine friendly website. The website design/development process and SEO process are two completely different strategies, though very closely tied together.

This is why it’s a good idea to get your SEO involved in the development process early. The SEO can work with the developer to ensure that the site is developed to be as search engine friendly as possible. Even if the developer has strong SEF knowledge, the SEO can make sure that everything they need will be in place so they can move forward with the actual optimization quickly and efficiently.

When you get your SEO and website developer in communication early on in the site development process, your site will be built on a strong search engine friendly foundation, laying the foundation for a successful SEO campaign.

Two roles, one desired outcome

When site development is completed on a strong search engine friendly foundation, the SEO can then begin the work of actually optimizing the site to get traffic for your important keywords. The SEO process requires hours of additional research beyond what is done in the development stages. (Keyword research and IA are important SEO factors in the development process.)

At that point, the SEO has the ball and it’s their job to run with it. There may be times when some development changes are required, as development issues are uncovered that might fall afoul of the optimization efforts, but the earlier the SEO is involved, the less frequent these should be.

It’s not the SEO’s job to to do the work of a developer, nor is it the developer’s job to do the work of the SEO. SEOs and developers have very different areas of expertise, but one area where they should overlap is in making websites search engine friendly and helping you, the customer, grow your business.

Both the SEO and the developer have a unique role to play with some overlapping skill sets. Just be careful about your expectations. If you think your developer is also an SEO, you might be mighty disappointed with the results. If you’re wondering what the SEF your SEO is doing, it may be that you don’t have an SEO at all!

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Comparing In-House vs. Outsourced Costs

The number of hours “needed” to optimize your website can fluctuate from one SEO company to the next, as will the hourly rate. Assuming that the cost of a quality SEO team runs $150-200/hour, you can see it’s not difficult to reach a monthly investment of $3,000 or more. For a lot of small businesses, this is no small chunk of change. Many small businesses will look at a $36,000 per year investment. At that rate, you could just hire a full-time employee!

While true, you also have to consider other questions as well. The main question is this: Can a single person do everything a team of experts can? Can they efficiently research, write, optimize, link build, implement proper IA to the same degree and hit expected results?

It’s rare that you can find one person who is an expert in all these things. Then throw in the education time they’ll need to not only become an expert in each of these fields, but to keep up with the latest trends and algorithm changes. You’re looking at a lot of education, time and money!

When you outsource you don’t have to pay for education time, only hours worked on your site. When you hire in-house, you have to pay for education time, materials, conferences, travel and everything else needed for a quality education. Let’s not even get into benefits, holidays and PTO!

Sometimes the hard part for the SEO provider is convincing clients to invest in our time. But this isn’t the correct approach. We should be convincing business owners to invest in their website. It’s not how much money the client pays for SEO; it’s how much return they are getting for the time they are investing into their online marketing strategies.

Cautious Spending in an Uncertain Economy

I’m as cost conscious as the next guy, but there comes a point when pinching pennies is counter productive… especially in business. When I look at various on- and off-line marketing campaigns, I don’t look at the cost so much as I look at the overall return on the investment being made (ROI). Sure, a big price tag makes me think long and hard before investing, but what I want to know is, will I get my return on that investment?

The bigger the price tag, the harder it is to jump into an unknown investment. This is just as true with SEO as with any form of marketing, but perhaps even more true with SEO because the return is not instant. SEO requires a long-term commitment before you’re going to get the results you want to see.

Making any business succeed requires an investment of both time and money. Consider this:

If you have neither time nor money, there will be no success.

If you have time and not money, success can come, but you may run out of time before it happens.

If you have money but not time, success may come, but it will be fleeting without proper preparation and planning.

If you have both time and money, success may come, but only if you have implemented a strong plan to achieve that success.

Obviously, the best option is to have both time and money and be willing to invest it, if you want your SEO to succeed.

Spend More to Get More

Growing profits means you need to get more conversions (sales, signups, proposals, customers, etc.) for less money. To achieve that often means you have to spend more, not less.

We all know that you have to be willing to spend money to make money. If you’ve seen the show Shark Tank, you know how much of their own money people often invest to get a business idea off the ground. You gotta risk it for the biscuit!

What you have to think about is whether increased spending will give you an even greater return. Spending less would be nice, but you have to get out of that mindset. Target, Walmart, Pepsi and Coke all continue to spend, spend, spend on their marketing because they know it gets results. And the second they stop spending, they know they lose market share to their competition.

If your online marketing efforts are working they way they should, your marketing budget should always be increasing rather than decreasing - assuming, of course, that you can handle the increased business that the marketing efforts are bringing in.

As a smart, savvy business owner you have to consider all your options. Pricing alone isn’t a strong enough indicator on whether you can “afford” a particular company or not. You have to consider what is being offered, the history of success the company has, the communication they provide in meeting your needs and a whole lot more. Just because it’s more expensive doesn’t mean you can’t afford it. You just have to determine if you want some kid to mow your lawn or a gardener to make your whole yard beautiful.

Follow me at @StoneyD and @PolePositionMkg.

Several years ago I wrote, “Gone are they days when SEO focused exclusively on top search engine rankings.” I wish I was right about that, but unfortunately, we still see a lot of SEOs doing just that today. Not the good ones, mind you, but still, far too many.

Today’s top-tier SEOs are getting out of the search engine ranking business entirely. Well, maybe not entirely, but they understand that there is so much more to online success than a top position for your keywords. Many clients still need convincing.

Rankings still matter to SEOs. At least they should matter. While local, personalized and historically based results are dramatically changing search results, there is still a base set of search results that all other results stem from. But SEOs that talk only in terms of getting you top rankings on the search engines should be avoided at all costs. #notjoking

SEO is one piece. It’s a big puzzle.

Achieving search engine rankings is only a small piece in to the total puzzle of online marketing. In fact, if top rankings are the only focus of the SEO, there is a significant chance that the work performed on your site will actually make things worse. Top rankings only mean so much if your visitors are fleeing your site in droves because of usability or conversion issues.

Most people don’t care if they get 100 sales from 10,000 visitors or 5,000 visitors. It’s the same 100 sales right?

Well, no, not really. The difference is that the 5,000 visitors provides a better conversion rate than the 10,000. What’s important about this is that if you are getting 100 sales out of 10,000 visitors, to then get 200 sales you must bring in an additional 10,000 visitors to your site, for a total of 20,000.

Or, you can improve your conversion rate.

Improving your conversion rate means you get more sales out of the traffic you’re already bringing in. If you improve your conversion rate to bring in 100 sales out of every 8,000 visitors, you’re now getting 125 sales from the same 10,000 visitors you were getting before! Improve it more, you might be able to get 100 sales from 5,000 visitors which equals 200 sales from the same 10,000 customers.

You see where this is going? A better conversion rate means more business. If every sale earned you just $15 in profit, you just added an additional $1500 in profit to your bottom line. Now if you were to double your traffic on top of that, your profits leap from $1,500 (from our starting numbers) to $6,000, instead of the $3,000 you would have gotten from improving traffic alone.

Top rankings add traffic. Improved usability and conversions multiply it!

Without usability, SEO Kung-Fu is SEO F-U!

SEOs must maintain a very interesting balancing act between the creative and technical. Most SEOs start on the more technical side of things. They learn code, algorithms, architecture and what makes good rankings; then they figure out how to apply these into websites. As SEOs got more and more technically advanced, the search engines did, too, in order to prevent manipulation.

Good SEOs began to realize that the battle for rankings is only a part of the struggle for business growth. While SEOs still fight for top search engine rankings, those that have invested into the marketing side of website improvement find they bring their clients far greater success.

The technical side is still hugely important, but the knowledge gained from the technical research must be implemented in an almost purely creative way. Once rankings are achieved, the site must still be able to sell to its audience.

Ranking success alone is an SEO failure

Sites that struggle only to get top rankings will ultimately fail. Maybe not in the bankruptcy sense, but in the sense that they are not maximizing their return on investment. They are spending more to get less!

The analogy I use most for this is its like trying to fill a bucket full of holes with water. You’ll be able to get water in the bucket and may even be able to get it in faster than it leaks out, but you’re consuming vast amounts of resources in order to fill it up. It’s far easier–and smarter–to patch the holes first and then start filling the bucket.

You may not be able to patch every hole right away, but patching some while working on others (all while increasing traffic) can allow you to bring in and convert more and more every day. The more traffic you bring in and the more usability issues fixed, the greater the impact your SEO campaign has.

There is so much more to SEO than just SEO. And if your SEO doesn’t know that they, IMHO, they don’t know what they are doing. Is it worth paying for top rankings if your visitors are leaving in absurdly huge numbers? Or would you be better off working with someone who can help you improve your site and get you top rankings that bring in more profits? It’s your call.

Any SEO that fails to improve usability is not really doing you any favors. At best, the usability and site conversions stay the same. At worst, they plummet due to a ranking-at-all-costs approach. There is nothing like an SEO flipping you the bird and saying it means “You’re #1!”

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

But there is more to keyword research than just the research. You have to be able organize and sort your keywords into groups that will allow you to optimize them most effectively into your website.

This post will walk you through the organizational side of the keyword research process, using a customized keyword research spreadsheet I have created to make the process easy. You still have to do the research, but this tool helps us create keyword lists for on-page optimization.

Let’s get to it.

First, you need to download and open the spreadsheet linked above. You should be on the “Phrase 1″ tab at the bottom.

If you know what your “core” phrase is, you can rename that tab accordingly. We’ll work with the phrase “battery charger” since that will give us plenty of variety to work with.

Importing Your Keywords

Before you can import anything you need to have already gathered a list of keywords from your favorite keyword tools. For this post we’ll use Google and Wordtracker.

You first need to export your keyword lists from the research tool to a different spreadsheet. Make sure your search volume is to the left of the keywords. If not, you’ll need to move some columns around until it is. For Google you can insert an extra column between the search volume and the keywords so you can copy/paste cleanly into this keyword organization spreadsheet.

Tip: When exporting from Google, be sure to select the exact match for accurate search volume numbers. You’ll then need to use find/replace to remove the brackets before importing to your keyword spreadsheet.

After you paste the keywords, be sure to select the option that allows you to keep the formatting on the current sheet rather than importing the format from the sheet you copied from.

Once you paste both sets of keywords and search volume, your sheet will look something like this:

Note: Google will let you export up to 100 phrases while Wordtracker can give you hundreds if not a couple thousand. This spreadsheet can handle a little over 2000 phrases from both Google and Wordtracker (or your favorite source) combined. To keep this post simple, I’ve eliminated all but 600 phrases.

Merging Duplicate Phrases and Data

A good number of phrases will be duplicated between your research tools. We want to merge these so the Google and Wordtracker numbers are on the same row for each keyword.

The first step is to alphabetize the keywords. To do this, click column “D” so the entire column is highlighted. Then, over on the far right on the Excel “Home” tab, you’ll see a “Sort & Filter” option. Click that and then select “Sort A to Z.”

This will create a “Sort Warning” dialogue box:

Be sure “Expand the selection” is selected; then hit “Sort”. This makes sure that the search volume numbers stay with the correct search phrase as they are sorted A to Z.

The result should look something like this:

If you look at rows 16/17, 21/22, 26/27, and 34/35, you’ll see the same phrase with a different search volume for both Google and Wordtracker. These are the duplicates we want to merge.

This spreadsheet has a cool “Merge Duplicates” button. Click that button and all the dupes will be merged together. Just like magic!

Tip: Make sure no garbage code is imported in with the keywords. If a bad text is imported into the “All Keywords” column, the merge macro can get screwed up.

Here you can see the duplicates merged together. Notice rows 16, 20, 24, and 31.

Now you want to sort by search volume. Going back to the sort button at the top, select that; then, choose “Custom Sort.”

A new dialogue box will pop up allowing you to customize your sort options. You want to sort by “Ggl” first, then by “WT” (or visa versa). You may have to “Add Level” to get the second sort option to be available.

Tip: Be sure to sort on “Values” and order “Largest to Smallest.”

Sorting by volume, you can get a pretty good idea as to what phrases are more popular than others as noted by either or both tools.

Be careful not to use search volume alone for determining keyword value. As you can see below in rows 18, 30, and 37, Wordtracker isn’t showing search volume for some substantial Google phrases. Similarly, if you were to scroll down, you’d also see quite a number of phrases that Google doesn’t record as viable, but Wordtracker does.

Note: The lack of search volume on some of the Wortracker phrases here is likely due to me having deleted any phrase that registered less than 10 in Wordtracker search volume.

Eliminating Negative and Junk Words

Anytime you import keyword lists this size you’re going to end up with a number of junk keyword phrases. This spreadsheet provides an easy way of getting them out of your way without having to delete them one by one.

First, scan your list looking for any negative words you want to eliminate. Then add those words to column A in the negative word tab at the bottom.

In this case we’ll pretend the client sells only automotive battery chargers, so the four words we typed in above can be globally eliminated.

No, go back to your research tab and click the “Check Negatives” button. Any keyword phrase that contains a negative word is automatically highlighted red throughout the worksheet!

Note: The Negative Words tab is designed for global application. Do not add negatives that are core-term specific.

If you accidentally added a negative word that does not belong, no worries. Just remove it and re-click “Check Negatives” to correct.

Important: Don’t leave any empty cells in the negative keywords list. If you remove a keyword be sure to fill in the blank spot.

If you have a lot of negative words highlighted and want to get them out of your way, the spreadsheet has a filter option that lets you hide them all. Click the filter icon at the bottom right corner of the negative column heading, then uncheck the “x”.

This will cause all the negative words to be hidden. Notice below that rows 47, 61 and 77 are now hidden.

In most cases, using negative keywords is not enough. You will need to manually go through and eliminate keywords that aren’t any good for optimization to your site. Simply place an “x” in the “No Good” column and your phases automatically highlight red.

Note: Do not manually add “x’s” to the Negative column. If you run the Check Negatives macro again these will automatically be removed. Only manually mark negatives in the No Good column.

You can then filter out all “No Good” keywords just as you did with the negative words, leaving you only with phrases that you believe are worth optimizing!

Categorizing Into Shopping Funnels

I’ve written about the Research, Shop and Buy funnels for keywords before. You need to be familiar with that before using these categories.

The general idea is that you want to categorize each keyword into one of these funnels. You can through this section in four steps, marking phrases that fit any one category at a time, or go keyword by keyword and mark the most appropriate category for each as you go down the list.

Tip: If you organize one category at a time you can hide each category when complete leaving only unassigned keywords. This can help make sure none are missed.

Once you’re done your spreadsheet will look something like this:

Assigning Keywords to URLs

Next you want to figure out which keywords should be optimized to any given page on your site. Let’s start with the “Research” funnel. Use the filter options to hide all other keywords but those.

Looking at these keywords together can help you determine which URL(s) is/are best to optimize for the keyword group. Place the URLs in the blue area at the top of the page. Start with P1 (Page 1, see above). Now go through your funnel list and add “p1″ to each keywords you plan to optimize for that page.

Note: You will likely find that not every keyword in each funnel works for a given page. You might need several unique URLs for each filter group.

As you can see, we placed “car” and “automotive” keywords on page 1, “motorcycle” keywords on page 2 and “boat” keywords on page 3.

When you’re ready to optimize, you can use the filtering option to hide all keywords except for the page you you are optimizing. Below I’ve filtered all but page 1 keywords.

Now you can back and repeat this process for the Shop, Buy and Info keyword funnels.

One last thing. If you run out of blue URL space at the top of this spreadsheet, don’t fret! You’ll notice the rows jump from 6 to 14. There are six hidden rows that will allow you to add more. All you have to do is highlight rows 6 and 14, right click and select “unhide”.

Now you want to repeat the entire process with your next core phrase! If you need more core term tabs, just copy a blank one and start afresh.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

There are countless test you can do with your website to help increase your conversion rates. A/B and multivariate tests can help you increase your conversion rate a couple of points, which can often translate into thousands of dollars of increased profits. But in all that conversion testing, trial and error, banging your head against the wall and twisting customer’s arms until they cry “UNCLE!,” there is often one overlooked piece of information that can help you dramatically improve your conversions.

That piece of information is: information. Content, to be exact!

A little information can go a long way when building relationships with your visitors–your would-be customers and bringers of the sacred sale. Building a relationship that is based on a genuine interest and possible dialogue with your customer can lead to more customers, higher sales and significant business growth. No arm twisting or head-banging needed!

Unfortunately, many websites employ the “less is more” philosophy. They see content as the barrier that prevents the customer from getting to the check out isle. Unfortunately, when you remove the content you are not removing barriers; you’re removing the associate that helps the customer find what they need.

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself in the middle of the store looking for someone–anyone–who can help me. Looking up and down isles, not finding an available employee within driving distance, I get the urge to shout, “I’m going to steal something!” just to see if anyone cares!

Your content shows them you do.

How information wins conversions

Unique content on your home, category, sub-category and product pages explains the value in purchasing your products and services. It allows you to provide the relevant information each visitor needs to know your product will satisfy their wants and needs. It gives them the emotional justification needed to commit to buying what you’re offering and make them feel like a puppy just licked them in the face while they do it!

More information on your site creates less resistance in convincing the customer to buy. Content on your site essentially greases the wheels for the potential customer to move through the various phases of the buying cycle. The more customer focused your information is, the easier it will be for your customers to justify a purchase from you.

Essentially, adding quality information to your site helps your visitors make smart purchasing decisions. When customers make decisions on little and/or incomplete information, you may get the sale today, but quite possibly the return will come in the mail tomorrow. Lacking enough product information and purchase justification on the site means you’ll ultimately lose the customer for life instead of gaining a life-long spending buddy.

Detailed information on your products and services gives you greater opportunity to create happy customers. Being up front with both pros and cons, benefits and possible side-effects, allows the customer to weigh each against that of other products or even your competitors. Short of that information you risk having an unhappy customer or no customer at all, when all that was missing was the correct information they needed to pull the trigger on a purchase.

Well-written and customer-focused content creates an open and honest relationship with your customers. The more open you are about your strengths and weaknesses, the more open your customers will be with you, as well. This will give you better opportunities to meet their needs, if not now, at some later point down the road with new product or service innovation. Even if you lose that customer today, you’ve built a bridge to bring them back to you later.

Building up a content-rich website through all levels of the buying process gives your customers reassurance that you are trustworthy and a valuable resource for them to return to. When customers trust you, they hesitate less when making purchase decisions, which ultimately leads to more customer confidence and translates into greater sales and repeat customers.

Any business looking for the long term customers: content can make the difference between no sale at all and a life-long customer. You’re essentially allowing your content to play the role of the store employee roaming the isles asking customers, “How can I help you?” If you want to get  conversions on your site, you need to think about how much content you’re giving your visitors.

If you don’t have quality, engaging, explanative and customer-focused content on your site, you’re preventing your customers from getting the information they need to make an informed purchase decision. That click you just heard is the sound of your visitors leaving because they can’t find any text that makes them confident in your products or services. That cha-ching is is the sound of your competitors’ cash registers ringing from the sales you just lost! And that crying? That’s you.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Incorrectly configured Web servers that respond with a status header value of 200, 302 or any other erroneous value can trigger duplicate content issues for search engines because identical content (in this case, the error page content) would be available under a potentially infinite number of URLs.

Some handle 404 error pages with a Non-404 Error Page. That means you direct the user to a non-404 page that returns a 302 temporary redirect to a 200 or any other server header to the search engines. I often find this “chain” of redirects when a page-not-found is triggered. Even though this may offer a good user experience, it causes many problems in the search engines. This is known as a soft 404, and is something Google advises against.  Soft 404 error pages often result in broken pages remaining indexed in the search engines, and it’s also possible that your soft 404 page could show up in search engine results. This method of handling pages-not-found is not recommended under any circumstance.

The Value of Custom 404 pages

Custom 404 pages serve several important purposes.  First, they return the correct code to the users and to search engine spiders, informing the visitors that the page they were seeking was not found.  Secondly, custom 404 pages present visitors with options about what to do next.  Without a custom 404 error page, the visitor, human or robot, is left with only two courses of action: to abandon their search or click the back button.  Neither of these are a satisfactory response to an error.

Two Custom 404 Pages to Handle a Page-not-found

User Friendly Error 404 Page — You can create a user friendly page that tells human visitors and search engine bots that the page no longer exists. Search engine bots read the 404 error header on the page and know that the old page is gone. You can also customize your 404 page to give actual visitors information on how they might find the page they were looking for. The benefit of this approach for people is that it helps prevent the loss of visitors. Another benefit is that an error page will automatically run without human intervention for all future page-not-founds. A significant drawback is that you may lose any SEO link benefit that may have been flowing into the original page.

A valid 404 error page should return a 404 header like the response below:

Server Response: http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/fake-page-name.html

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:51:46 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: www.polepositionmarketing.com/fake-page-name.html
Content-Length: 314
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

301 Redirect — This method can transfer the human visitor and search engine bot to another page on your site that is related to the original missing page. The main benefit to this method is that SEO link value can be transferred from the missing page to a similar page or back to your home page. A drawback of using this method is that actual visitors may not understand how they ended up on a different page if the landing page was not a close enough match. Another drawback is redirects need human intervention for set-up. If done properly, this is the method I recommend for handling page-not-found errors.

Web developers and SEOs often focus on the bigger picture but forget to do what we learned in Algebra: check your work.

If you’re a developer, you want to make sure the sight design looks just right and all the pieces align visually. You might also want to make sure some basic title tags are in place that accurately represent each page. SEOs need to look at things like keyword research, great keyword integration into the copy, writing keyword rich title tags, getting links and so on.

But for both web developers and SEOs, it’s the small things that can often sink a ship the fastest. Here are the three most commonly overlooked tasks when uploading new or changed content to your website:

Forgetting to Check Spelling and Grammar

More times than I can count, I’ve made only minor edits to a page only to later realize I left behind some glaring spelling or grammatical errors. It was such a small change and my quick review didn’t spot anything wrong, but sure enough, it was there. Large changes or small, errors are inevitable.

I’ve also seen new site’s roll out from the developers with spelling or grammar errors galore. Nothing wreaks unprofessionalism more than misspeled words and grammer on the site errors. Fortunately, most people will give you a pass or won’t notice a single mistake or two. But make any moore then that and you look fool!

Bottom line: spell check every change. When you add new content, update content, reword content or even remove content, a few added minutes checking your spelling and grammar pays off. Plus, you’ll save embarrassment from having someone else point it out to you, or worse, not tell you, causing it to stay on your site for weeks, months or even years!

Overlooking HTML Validation

Validating your code is not entirely important for optimization, but it will ensure that there are no coding problems that can prevent search engine spiders from properly indexing your pages.

If you’ve ever gone through the process of validating your code you have likely encountered many “errors” that really have no effect on how a page displays in your browser or the search engine’s ability to “read” the page’s content. A lot of the “errors” in HTML are completely innocuous and sometimes even pointless. Is it really worth it to add alt attributes to every image on your site, even if they are blank?

The answer to that (along with all the other sometimes inane validation errors that pop up) is: absolutely! It might take some time with the first pass validating each page, but getting those errors down to zero (or as few as possible) is worthwhile in the long run.

Why?

First, unless you run a validation check, you won’t know if you have any serious problems with the code that need to be resolved. Your code may be spiderable, but you need to know if there are any errors that might prevent the search engines from analyzing it properly.

Second, once your code is validated, after making any new change, you can quickly see if new, potentially harmful validation errors pop up. If you leave code unvalidated, you may change something that creates one or more potentially harmful validation errors and never really know about it.

Keeping pages validated eliminates a chunk of SEO guesswork.

Failing to Fix Those Damn Broken Links

Like spelling errors, broken links happen quite easily, and often without you doing anything on your end at all.

Internal broken links can happen when you or your developer move, rename or delete pages of content. Such changes require going through and changing all internal links. Don’t just stop at the navigation; be sure to specifically look for any in-content links.

External broken links happen when a site or page your are linking to has moved or gone defunct. The other site may have redesigned and moved pages around and not captured the traffic with a 301 redirect (all bad!).

Regardless of what they have done, you want to make sure you don’t send your visitors off to someplace that doesn’t exist. That makes a pretty significant statement about your ability to keep your information current and up to date (all bad x2!).

If you run a broken link check regularly (every 1-2 months), that will help you find and fix these types of errors.

While these issues generally won’t have a significant impact on your SEO campaign (with the exception of serious coding issues), they are nonetheless important. SEO is, in large part, about credibility. The less credible your site is due to broken links, spelling and grammar errors, etc., the less likely you are to get links, which help improve your credibility in the search algorithms.

Once each of these checks are performed and issues fixed, upkeep from that point doesn’t take much time at all. But the benefit of performing these checks can be substantial. When you lose credibility with your visitors, you also lose credibility with the search engines.

The goal in SEO is to develop the best site possible and give your visitors reasons to consider your site the most authoritative. More of that is always good for business.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

WTH???

Yeah, that’s what I thought. But, suffice it to say, it was a very simplified way of saying something that took me three paragraphs to explain. It’s nice to be able to add a new phrase into your vernacular (another really big word for me) that nicely sums up something that is difficult to explain.

In the plainest, simplest terms I could come up with, Concatenation Schema is just another way of saying “default content that changes dynamically based on category, sub-category, and product related information.”

How Do You Build a Concatenation Schema?

The idea behind Concatenation Schema is to develop the SEO guidelines your programmers will use to populate key areas of your site pages. These key areas can include, but are not limited to:

• Title tag
• Meta description
• Headings
• ALT text
• Body content

The first step is to figure out what your variables are. It might be categories, sub-categories, filters, titles, product names, years, makes, models, brands, styles, colors, etc.

If your site’s navigation works like: CATEGORY > SUB-CATEGORY > PRODUCT, then those are your three variables. If visitors navigate via BRAND > CATEGORY > STYLE > PRODUCT, then use those as your variables. You might have one or two more variables thrown in, depending on the type of products or services you do, but you want to try to keep it as simplified as possible.

Let’s use an example of a site that sells auto parts and accessories. Here are some examples of three different title tag schemas you could use for three different category levels:

Title Tag Schema 1

[MAKE] [PART] | Replacement [PART] for [MAKE] [VEHICLE]s

Examples:

• Ford Headlamp | Replacement Headlamp for Ford SUVs
• Dodge Floor Mats | Replacement Floormats for Dodge Trucks
• Mazda Fan Belt | Replacement Fan Belt for Mazda Cars

Title Tag Schema 2

[YEAR] [MAKE] [PART] | Replacement [PART] for [MAKE] [VEHICLE]

Examples:

• 2010 Ford Headlamp | Replacement Headlamp for Ford SUVs
• 1998 Dodge Floor Mats | Replacement Floor Mats for Dodge Trucks
• 2011 Mazda Fan Belt | Replacement Fan Belt for Mazda Cars

Title Tag Schema 3

Replacement [PART] for [YEAR] [MAKE] [MODEL]

Examples:

• Replacement Headlamp for 2010 Ford Explorer
• Replacement Floor Mats for 1998 Dodge Dakota
• Replacement Fan Belt for 2011 Mazda 6

Please note, I make no representation to the SEO value of the examples above, nor do I suggest this is the best way to format the title tags. I only mean to provide examples on how to create and use schemas.

After the title tag, we might move on to the meta description:

Meta Description Schema 1

Find replacement [MAKE] [PART]. We have everything you need for [MAKE] or other [VEHICLE] [PART]s. Free overnight delivery on orders over $300 at MyWebsite.com.

Examples:

• Find replacement Ford headlamps. We have everything you need for Ford or other SUV headlamps. Free overnight delivery on orders over $300 at MyWebsite.com.
• Find replacement Dodge floor mats. We have everything you need for Dodge or other truck floor mats. Free overnight delivery on orders over $300 at MyWebsite.com.
• Find replacement Mazda fan belt. We have everything you need for Mazda or other car headlamps. Free overnight delivery on orders over $300 at MyWebsite.com.

Meta Description Schema 2

Find [YEAR] [MAKE] [VEHICLE]s [PART]. Whether you’re looking for a [MAKE] [PART] or for any other [VEHICLE]. Free overnight delivery on orders over $300 at MyWebsite.com.

Examples:

• Find 2010 Ford SUVs headlamps. Whether you’re looking for a Ford headlamp or for any other SUV. Free overnight delivery on orders over $300 at MyWebsite.com.
• Find 1998 Dodge trucks floor mats. Whether you’re looking for Dodge floor mats or for any other truck. Free overnight delivery on orders over $300 at MyWebsite.com.
• Find 2011 Mazda cars fan belts. Whether you’re looking for Mazda fan belts or for any other car. Free overnight delivery on orders over $300 at Mywebsite.com.

Meta Description Schema 3

Find replacement [YEAR] [MAKE] [MODEL] [VEHICLE] [PART]. Whether you’re looking for a [MAKE] [PART], or [PART] for any other [MAKE] [VEHICLE], you’ll find what you need at MyWebsite.com.

Examples:

• Find replacement 2010 Ford Explorer SUV headlamps. Whether you’re looking for a Ford headlamp, or headlamps for any other Ford SUV, you’ll find what you need at MyWebsite.com.
• Find replacement 1998 Dodge Dakota truck floor mats. Whether you’re looking for Dodge floor mats, or floor mats for any other Dodge truck, you’ll find what you need at MyWebsite.com.
• Find replacement 2011 Mazda 6 car fan belts. Whether you’re looking for Mazda fan belts, or fan belts for any other Mazda car, you’ll find what you need at MyWebsite.com.

From here you can get the gist of how to continue with the Concatenation Schema for the rest of the important site elements that we noted above, plus any others that you may need.

You can also do the same with textual content; however, creating unique text is recommended for each page.

How Many Schemas Do You Need?

Most sites will require more than one set of Concatenation Schema. In the simplest terms, you would have a schema for each section of the site:

• Top category pages
• Sub category pages
• Product pages

The image below depicts a site with three categories, each with three sub-categories and nine products per sub-category. Each color represents a different schema needed.

In reality, however, it might be a bit more complex. You can’t always create a perfect schema that will cover every category of your site. In some cases you might need to create a different schema for different categories. So it might actually play out something more like this:

We just went from three distinct Concatenation Schemas to a total of 11. But, before you get your panties all wadded up, by performing SEO this way, you’ve actually reduced the total number of pages you have to “optimize.” Instead of optimizing 93 pages, you’re only creating 11 schemas. That’s a big reduction in time, even for a “small” site, such as the one depicted here.

Now imagine your own site, which has how many categories, sub-categories, and products? By building a few Concatenation Schemas, you’re able to turn a large task into a (relatively) smaller one!

In Part 2 of this series, I started discussing a customers wants versus their needs. I continue this list here.

People want to feel important; they need you to speak to their needs first.

Everybody wants to feel as if they are your most important customer. They are handing over their money to you so, in their mind, that gives them priority treatment.

Delivering a product or service isn’t enough to satisfy your customers. You have to continue to deliver results well beyond the sale. Are you following up to make sure your customers are happy with their purchase? Are you providing ways for them to get the most benefit out of their purchase? Are you handling problems quickly and efficiently, going above and beyond their expectations? These are all important questions to answer in order to make the customers believe you care.

When persuading new customers, you have to be sure to handle inquiries near instantaneously. I know when I’m shopping around, if I sent off some emails, the first reply I get often becomes the company I do business with. Those that respond late make me feel like they have more important things to worry about than earning my business. Heck, I’m trying to give them my money, the least they can do is act like they want it!

You also have to make sure potential customers can contact you easily. Again, if I can’t find a phone number (not just a form), I’m thinking they really don’t want to talk to me. Anyone who doesn’t want to talk to me doesn’t really want my business. You’d also be well served to make sure your website addresses as many needs and questions as possible, so they won’t feel as if they have to call to get their questions answered. But, in case they do, seeing that phone number sure helps give them confidence.

People want to feel good; they need you to encourage them.

For some sites, shopping cart abandonment is astronomically high. Why is that? Primarily because people need to be encouraged to proceed with their purchase. This is done both by answering as many questions and concerns on the website as possible and making sure you have an easy-to-complete ordering process.

If I’m shopping, I’ll often add my product to my basket and go through much of the checkout process, only to hesitate before I finalize the payment. In my mind I’m thinking, “should I buy this now?”, or “Is this a good purchase?”, or even “Can I afford this?” Most of these questions surface on an emotional level; sometimes rooted in fact, sometimes not. The bottom line is that a little extra encouragement can help persuade visitors through the selling process.

This encouragement can come in many forms. Sometimes it’s by streamlining the checkout process, leaving less opportunity to abandon the cart. Sometimes it’s by providing security, warranty, and return policy assurances along the way. Sometimes you can encourage your customers by giving them a little something extra as a ‘thank you’ for their purchase, perhaps a discount for their next purchase or something to pass on to a friend.

Recently I threw a couple of books into my Amazon shopping cart, but then I paused, and thought about how much I had been spending on amazon lately, so I began rethinking the purchase decision. Amazon provided the encouragement I needed. By filling out an application for an Amazon Visa card I got something like $30 off my purchase. I was sold and so were the books.

There are numerous ways to encourage your visitors to make a purchase. Brainstorm for a few new ideas and test them all.

People want to feel successful; they need you to help them win.

Everybody wants to feel like their life has meaning. This is the measure of success. Money, health, comfort, and power are all measures we like to talk about, but deep down, people want more. You don’t need health, comfort, money or power to be successful in life. Success often comes from the little victories achieved here and there that give life meaning.

Your product or service may not be able to change your customer’s destiny, but you can help him or her feel that their decision to purchase from you will help them “win” (and not in the Charlie Sheen way!)

Selling baby diapers? Your diapers can successfully prevent leakage and nasty “toxic” spills. Selling batteries? Your batteries can successfully start their car each morning and make sure they’re on time for work. Selling cleaning supplies? Your supplies can help them successfully clean their house better than ever before. These are victories your customers can relate to in their daily lives. Your customer now feels like a successful parent, successful employee or boss, or a successful friend, brother or sister or whatever.

Your product or services helped them achieve that success. You helped them win!

In order to feel like you can help them win, people need to see that you have won. It’s unfortunate, but true, that we judge people based on what we see. A lawyer in a beat up old Toyota doesn’t look as successful as a lawyer with well-taken care of Lexus. Though superficial, which one would you want to hire?

Your customers need to see that you have won. Is your website all beat-up and tattered, or is it well designed and maintained? Is your content well written or a verbal disaster? Are your products or services presented logically or just kind of thrown out there with no organization?

Like it or not, these things matter. If visitors perceive that you are successful, they will gravitate to you based on that alone. It takes “winners” to make winners!

Knowing what your customers want, and using that to give them what they need, is the basis for customer relationship building. If you are able to build a strong relationship with your website visitors, even perceptually, you will gain a significant competitive advantage.

Building relationships alone won’t make your business the most successful in your industry, as there are many other factors involved. But, relationships are a crucial factor in being able to establish and maintain long-term customers, business growth, and your own continued success. Every marketing dollar saved by not having to seek a replacement for customers that have left you is an additional dollar (plus additional sales profits) that can be spent in obtaining and maintaining new customers.

The dirty little secret of conversions isn’t really a secret at all. It’s simply about building relationships that matter. Relationships that don’t just matter to you, but that matter to your customers as well.

So, what is it that people want? How does that translate into what they need? And, how the heck does that get applied to your online business? Let’s look at some generalities of what people want and what you can do to meet their needs.

People want security; they need you to give them confidence.

It’s easy to trust a brick and mortar store where you see real people. Even if you’re being checked out by some overly-pierced and tattooed 16 year-old kid, you don’t have to worry that he’s trying to memorize your credit card numbers while he swipes your card!

This kind of confidence in the online buying process is lost due to the nature of the sit-at-home-and-shop-while-in-my-underwear anonymity that the web provides. For me, the biggest issue with buying products online is the return process. I can easily drive back to the store to make a return if I kept my receipt. But, repackaging an item for the mail is a total pain. Plus, you can’t just return it, you have to get approval to do so. Sometimes, just finding out how to report a problem is impossible! Add in shipping fees that you have to pay and, well, one can quickly lose confidence in the online buying process.

Giving your visitor’s confidence isn’t about just online security. You can’t throw up a secure certificate and think you’ve succeeded. Confidence goes into all areas of the buying process. Customers need information. If they don’t know what your warranties are, give them a link, so they can be confident in your products. If they don’t know what your shipping or return policies are, spell them out, so they can be confident in your handling of their items. If they want to know how to reach you instead of hoping their emails are not ignored, give them a phone number, and have a real person answer it, so they can be confident that you care enough about them to listen.

People want to feel special; they need you to compliment them.

I was reading a book the other day where a man was checking into a very ritzy hotel. The hotel concierge greeted him warmly and complimented him on his tastes. After all, the hotel he was checking into was one of the finest in the region! While that may seem like he’s complimenting the customer, the truth is, he’s really only complimenting the hotel. This is a great example of how businesses get compliments wrong.

People want to feel special. But, they won’t if you can’t stop talking about your own damn self!

I took on a client once and tried to help him address his audience’s need with his content. Unfortunately, all he wanted to do was talk about himself and his company. They are experts, they have degrees, they are skilled, yada yada yada, they’re not my client anymore.

I wanted them to focus the content on how the customer benefits from their services. Touting your skills and accomplishments is great, but only in as much as it is translated into a tangible benefit for the customer. In reality, the customer doesn’t care what you do, or even how you do it, they just want to know that they’ll be smarter, more successful, look better, smell better, ride longer, be safer, and so on.

Framing your content into the benefit the customer receives is the ultimate compliment. Why? Because they will make a decision that will make them smarter, more successful, look better, smell better, ride longer, be safer, etc. How do they know this? Because you’re telling them. You’re taking the service or product you provide and translating it into the long-term compliment they’ll get from it.

People want a better life; they need you to show them hope.

Will your products or services make your customer’s lives better or easier in any way? If you don’t know the answer to that (or the answer isn’t “yes”) then I suggest you get out of that business. Most people do what they love or work for companies they believe in. You should too. Because if you don’t, then you won’t be able to convince your customers that they should believe in you!

And, that is what you must do. Explain how your products are going to be good for them. Explain to your customer how life will be better once they purchase that product. This goes beyond the compliment. Compliments make people feel good, but giving them hope makes them know that the purchase is exactly what they need to solve their problems.

Illustrate the benefits, not just the features, of what you sell. The product will make them smarter (compliment) so they will be more successful (compliment) so they can reduce their debt (hope) and live financially free (hope). Your services help them be safer (compliment) so they will be alive to see their grandchildren grow up (hope). When you can give your customers hope, and make sure that is being, or will be, fulfilled throughout their relationship with you, you likely have a customer for life.

People want to be understood; they need you to listen to them.

Even before you have a chance to communicate with any customer via phone, email, or in person, your website is already communicating with them. Is your website doing all the talking or is it “listening” to your customers?

How do you know if your website is listening? Simple, does your website answer the question, what makes you unique? If you don’t know what makes you unique, then I guarantee that you have not been listening to your customers. You’re just selling something, and it’s likely just the same something as everyone else.

Your USP (unique selling proposition) is what sets you apart. This shouldn’t be based on what you think should set you apart, but what your customers are looking for that no one else is providing. When you proclaim your USP on every page of your site (no, not like a tagline, this should be worked into every page of your content!) you are letting your customers know that you have heard their concerns and have developed a solution or strategy to meet their needs.

Your USP is what makes you stand out from the thousands of other stores online peddling the same wares as you. Why should your customers buy from you as opposed to someone else? Price alone is rarely the determining factor. Creating a unique approach should come from conversations and research into what your customers are seeking and by finding solutions to problems even before your customers know those problems exist.

I’ll continue this list of wants and needs in Part 3.

But, sometimes coupons can backfire. Not for those who have them, but for those that don’t.

Have you ever been to a site where, you’ve shopped around, found what you wanted, and when you went to check-out they asked you to enter your coupon code number? WTH! You don’t HAVE a coupon! But, you know that, somewhere out there, a coupon can be found!

Every business owner knows that, in this economy, there are far more money-conscious shoppers out there than there used to be. Many are pinching pennies to such a degree that they’ll drive $1 out of their way to save $0.50 in gas (you know who you are!)

Even your average shopper may pause at the sight of a potential money saving opportunity that they may be missing. So, what’s their next move? Knowing that a coupon may be available, some shoppers will abandon their purchase and start searching for a coupon, whether that is from your site or your competitor’s. Or, they may simply realize that, if you can offer the item for less via coupon redemption, then it’s possible they can get a better deal somewhere else, and off they go in search for greener (or in this case le$$-green) pastures.

In both of these scenarios, your coupon–which was designed to earn business–just cost you business.

So how do you beat that? How do you entice visitors with a coupon, without alienating potential customers for the lack of a coupon?

Simple: Don’t allow for a “coupon” field on your order page.

I know, I know! You’re asking yourself, how else do you accept coupons online if you don’t have a coupon field? Well, let me answer that question with another question…

Who says you have to call a coupon a coupon? Why not call it an optional “transaction code”? You can call it anything you want really, just don’t call it a coupon code.

The shopper who already has a “transaction code” on hand will know that what they really have is a coupon. And they won’t be afraid to use it! The shopper who doesn’t have a transaction code won’t think they’re missing out on a better deal, and will continue with the transaction without another thought. It’s a win-win.

The trick to making this work is to make sure your coupons say something along the lines of “Enter transaction #123456″ instead of “Enter coupon #123456″.

That’ll pretty much cover it. This simply change in terminology still allows you to pass out coupons willy-nilly while not making non-coupon holders think you’re giving preferential treatment to someone else. This ensures you won’t get penny-pinchers or better-deal seekers to bolt before they finish their transaction. Everyone walks away happy!

But, too much information can also cause a handicap. It’s not too difficult to be so inundated with info. that you get information overload or conflicting advice. That leads to decision paralysis. You don’t know the right course of action to take, or you can wind up using good information to make bad judgment calls.

Some time ago, I was working on a client’s keyword research and received the following email:

We decided to optimize our website only for keywords that bring up our competitors when searched. So, what I have to do is to take every keyword that is in your research and to run a search on Google to see if our competitors are there. You’ll hear back from me early next week.

I have no doubt that if this client’s competitor jumped off a bridge, the client would follow. This is a great example of taking information you have and making a bad decision with it.

Now, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be ranked for the same keywords your competitors are ranked for. But, this cannot be your sole optimization campaign strategy.

Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s Restaurant, once said he wanted to place a Wendy’s across the street from every McDonald’s in America. A smart strategy. It follows the same basic principles as to why car dealerships all congregate together: Customers looking for one may be swayed when the see more available options.

But, here is what Dave Thomas knew about McDonald’s that I guarantee most people don’t know about their own competition: McDonald’s does a significant amount of research before building a new store in a new location. Thomas realized that McDonald’s only enters markets where they are confident their restaurants will thrive. As Dave saw it, what was lucrative for Ronald would also be profitable for Wendy!

How SEO Smart Is Your Competition?

Before you follow your competitor off that cliff, are you sure each of your competitors have performed the right research on all their keywords? Do you know that they know that every keyword they are ranking for is bringing in traffic and conversions? Have they employed research strategies that have gotten them ranking for every possible keyword that will produce profits?

More than likely, the answer is “no” to more than one of those questions. That’s not to say that any of your competitor’s don’t know what they are doing. In fact, they may have a very strong and successful online marketing campaign. But, chances are pretty good they are not doing all things perfectly.

Are there some targeted keywords that they are not ranking for? Do they know all the different ways a potential customer will search for their product or service? Are they investing time into keywords that produce little traffic or no conversions? If you don’t know the answers to any of the questions posed above, then this may not be someone you want to blindly follow when it comes to setting the course for your own online marketing efforts.

Is Your Competition Making Mistakes?

From a competitive standpoint, it’s always good to know what your competitors are doing, who they are targeting, and what areas they are venturing into. A failure to know this information can lead to developing a poor business marketing strategy. While Dave Thomas wanted to be everywhere his competitor was, he also never stopped identifying locations to put a Wendy’s that McDonald’s hadn’t yet exploited.

We often explore our own client’s competitors and see that many do not have a full grasp on what keywords they should be targeting. Part of this is ignorance. Another is the lack of insight from those running the SEO campaigns. Or it could be strictly due to lack of budget invested in SEO. Who knows.

Those that employ a “me too” marketing strategy will undoubtedly find themselves following competitors through the same mistakes, costing themselves valuable time and money. Or, in the case of the client I mentioned above, missing out on entire segments of convertable traffic solely because their competitor isn’t ranking for the same phrase.

Think about what can be accomplished (and how much money can be saved) if marketing dollars are placed into a more forward thinking marketing campaign; one that doesn’t solely focus on competitors but instead focuses on the audience. After all, it’s not your competitors who’ll be buying from you, it’s your targeted consumer.

How Budget Smart is Your Competition?

But there is one area where it may be important to follow in your competitor’s footsteps. That’s in the area of breadth and reach of the campaign. I often hear from business owners wanting to outperform their competition in rankings both naturally and paid, but they don’t want to invest the money needed to make that happen.

This is where it becomes difficult for us managing the campaigns. An SEO can only do what the budget allows. If your competition is out spending you ten to one, and they have good people managing their campaigns, there is little chance that you’ll be able to out perform them, no matter how much you cross your fingers, tap your heels together, or complain to your SEO that you’re not doing as well as you had hoped.

Money isn’t everything in SEO, but it certainly does open the door to a greater online presence and bolder optimization strategy. A bigger investment can implement broader keyword research, more targeted link building, and a more keyword and search engine friendly site. These things matter in SEO.

That’s not to say you have to match your competition dollar for dollar. Working smarter is just as good as working harder. But, unfortunately, it still takes money to make money.

Doing what your competitors do, without ever really understanding why, is a bad SEO strategy. Pay attention to what your competitors are doing, but also know why, and make sure those same goals and objectives match up with your own before following them down ANY path, including one that might require a larger investment into your online marketing campaign.

Ultimately, you want to be able to compete for business for the same keywords, provided they are the right keywords. But you also want to find and exploit areas that your competition hasn’t.

If your online marketing campaign is simply a reaction, you’ll never be ahead of them. You’ll always be playing catch-up. Instead of being the “me too” guy, you can become the industry authority, leaving the others playing catch up and trying to be like you.

One of those tasks that often takes us away from our computer monitors and into the world of post-its, index cards, and cork boards has been when working on a site’s information architecture. This can be a big task, that often requires a lot of table or wall space.

Depending on the size of the site, there can be a lot of data to sift through, so you have to be able to make notes and move things around easily. Post-its, index cards, and cork boards make for great IA tools, as they allow for easy rearranging of your data at will. But, not everybody has boards large enough to handle the big jobs. And, some of us would rather do away with the paper all together.

There are a lot of different programs you can use to go paperless with your IA outline, but the three I use are: Xenu Link Sleuth, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Those are the only three tools I need to make a good road map for a site with all of it’s architectural pieces. Here’s how:

Step 1: Find all indexed URLs

When working on a site’s IA, the first thing you need is to get a bird’s eye view of the entire site. I’ll generally use Xenu’s Link Sleuth. This program is designed to find broken links, but, among other things, it will also give you a list of all the URLs that it found in the site.

When I get the Xenu report, I’ll copy the URLs into Microsoft Word. If the site is already somewhat organized, then it might be a good idea to import it into Excel, and order it alphabetically. This will ensure that pages in the same sub-folders all end up together.

This document becomes my reference point for pages that have been analyzed and mapped into the IA, versus the pages that haven’t. Generally, I start at the top and click on one URL at a time. As each page is analyzed, I highlight it some way in the URL document.

Using the document with all the URLs works better than clicking through the website page by page. That method can be confusing, as you are lead down multiple paths and have to remember each page you’ve visited already. By using the URLs as your base of reference, you never hit the same page twice (unless you do so deliberately) and you don’t miss any URLs accidentally.

Step 2: Visualize the Architecture

The next step is to set up your PowerPoint document. I might start with something that looks like this:

This will obviously require some manipulating, as you start filling in the pages and deciding what goes where. Until this is completed, it will be a fluid document.

Sometimes it’s a good idea to have a basic plan for the main navigation. However, be willing to adjust and change as you go. What you find as you assess each page may lend to changing your navigational strategy. As you find pages, directories, and sub-directories for each group, move things around in PowerPoint to accommodate.

If you don’t know where any given page should fit into the overall IA structure, either take a guess, or come back to it. Don’t be afraid to put something in the wrong place. As you build out your IA, you’re likely to be moving things around, adding or removing categories and sub-directories as needed.

When complete, your IA might look something like this:

Step 3: Provide Notes and Directions

Step 2 gives you a nice visual layout of how the site will be structured, but it also lacks important information that is crucial to those who will be implementing the new site architecture. As you explore the site page by page, you’ll often come across a number of different types of pages:

• Keepers (pages that will stay in the new site structure)
• Duplicates (pages that are duplicates of others)
• Redirected URLs (pages that are being moved or removed)
• Missing pages (pages that the site should have but doesn’t
• Junk (pages that will be deleted)

You’ll need to decide what to do with all of these, and make sure you provide instructions, so they each get handled properly.

In addition to the visual IA that we put together in PowerPoint, I also crate a second Word document that details all of our notes and instructions. This document will contain a bulleted list of all the categories, directories, and pages. Each bullet point will contain the following information:

• Name of the page (as referenced in the PowerPoint)
• The relation of that page in the NEW IA (where it will be found)
• The current URL of the page
• Special instructions for that page

The first three are there so the developers know exactly which page is being referenced, both from the current site standpoint and the new IA standpoint. The last one is critical because it let’s the developers know what changes need to be made to ensure this page is handled properly.

Notes that might be included for some pages are: “This page needs to link to…”, “new URL should be…”, “reformat this page to match…”, “Move this page to…”, “Delete and redirect to…”, “Merge this content with…”, “Remove all links to this URL…”.

This is just a sampling of some of the notes that may be necessary. Anything goes here. If it’s relevant to the usability and architecture of the site, you can throw it in.

Not every page has special instructions, so I like to highlight these instructions in red. This allows the developers to quickly scan through, without having to read the entire document word for word.

Don’t mistake this three-step process as being an “easy” process. The real work is in determining which pages go where. You want to create the most user- and search engine friendly format possible, being sure each page is in it’s “right” place.

Once completed, you have two documents (you can ditch the original URL document that you used as a reference) to show the higher ups and development team, which will allow them to both visualize your masterpiece and implement it without a hitch.

This post started from talking about How NOT To Do An Interview: The Basics. What was originally going to be an intro paragraph turned into a full post. When this happens, I just do what I often do… take one idea and make multiple posts out of it. Love it!

What follows are 15 questions I felt were important for a business audience to know about SEO. And, now that I know what I meant when I wrote them (see introduction), I can provide the answers I intended. Here are questions 1-5:

1. What is the most important element of a successful SEO campaign?

There are a lot of factors that go into a successful SEO Campaign. There is content, keywords, titles, descriptions, usability, architecture, and link building. All of these play a significant role and cannot be ignored. But, to narrow this down into a single thing that is THE most important element to make a campaign successful is tough.

I think I’d have to go with website architecture. While this doesn’t contribute directly to the keyword optimization, it does give the search engines the best “sense” of a site. Without good architecture, your site can be keyword optimized to the hilt, but it won’t matter because the search engines are unable to read and decipher the content properly.

An unpublished book does no one any good. Getting your website content “published” into the search results is step one. Then you can worry about what kind of reach you can achieve.

2. What is the second?

The second, I would have to say is keyword research. This really goes hand-in-hand with the site architecture. You can build your site, but if it isn’t structured around the keywords that are important, you’ll either have a poorly targeted site or you’ll have to go back and re-focus your architecture accordingly.

There are a lot of layers to keyword research, but when putting together the site architecture, you only need to worry about the basics. The goal is to find the “core” keywords that people are looking for that will drive relevant traffic to your site. Map out those core terms to individual pages, and you’re well on your way to building a site that can develop a strong web presence targeting your core audience.

3. How do you determine which keywords should be optimized for which pages?

If you’ve built your site architecture right, then your keyword targeting for each page should already have been determined. In fact, your pages are built around the idea that you have keywords that people are looking for, so you’re building your site content and pages to provide the answers to the search query.

However, if your site is already built, and you’re not so inclined to go back and re-develop it with a keyword focused architecture, then you have to start at the other end and work backwards.

The best thing you can do here is to look at what your core keywords are and determine which keyword best integrates into what page. This is no small task and requires a lot of consideration.

Things to consider are: the current content of each page, ability to integrate a core term seamlessly, and to ensure that the page maintains it’s value for its original intent AND those coming in for the optimized term. If any of those aren’t 100%, then consider another term for the page.

4. What are the top three on-page factors that should be optimized?

The title tag is, as I have said many times before, one of the most important pieces of SEO real estate for a web page. If you get nothing else right, get the title right. That alone can work wonders on helping to get your pages to rank in the search results.

Next, is the content of the page itself. Your content must back up the title and has to maintain it’s keyword focus throughout. Look for opportunities to reinforce the page’s keyword topic (which should be the page topic). Don’t stuff keywords where they don’t work, but maintain a tight theme of content that provides answers for those searching for that topic.

The third most important element is internal linking. This is a factor partially covered with a solid site architecture, but also gets covered with content development. If you’re addressing a topic on one page that is covered more thoroughly on another, link the relevant, keyword rich content to the fully optimized page that addressed that topic.

Linking in this way not only reinforces the page topic for optimization purposes, but it also improves the usability aspects of your site, allowing visitors to move around based on topics for which they are needing more information.

5. You didn’t mention the Meta Description or Meta Keyword tag. Why not?

There’s a good reason for that. Neither of these play any kind of significant role in the optimization of a website. The Keyword Meta tag is 99.9% useless to all search engines. Might it be considered again one day? Perhaps. Likely? Perhaps not.

The Meta Description tag suffers a similar fate when it comes to search engine relevance, however it does play a very important role outside of optimization. Since the Meta Description tag is used in the search results, it has a unique role in helping visitors decide whether to click into your site or not.

Because of this, the Meta Description is actually pretty dang important. Not for SEO, but for click-thrus and bounce rates, both of which can effect the success of an SEO strategy.

If this post has captivated you from beginning to end, then stay tuned for the next set of five questions coming at you soon!

This series is pulled from a presentation given at SMX East. Part I of this series covered the problems duplicate content creates. Part II covered some of the causes of duplicate content. This post covers some of the solutions that will help you fix your duplicate content problems.

Quick Recap:
Part I: Duplicate Content Causes Problems. Duh!
Part II: There is No Single Cause of Duplicate Content. Don’t collect them all!

Great! Now let’s move on.

Only You Can Prevent Duplicate Content

Finally! Now we can address some of the solutions to the problems duplicate content creates.

Not all duplicate content issues are easily fixable, and some may be outside of your own control. But, those that are in your control do need to be addressed sooner rather than later. Or, you could just sit back and wait for Google to figure it all out. Don’t worry, it’s all good. Google’s got your back!

But, while you’re praying to Google for lavish blessings, I’ll be working with my clients to fix problems that are holding them back in the search results.

Search engine friendly links

In Part II, I showed you two types of links that were not very search engine friendly. The above image shows one that is. So, what’s the difference? This link doesn’t use any JavaScript and it has an “href” that points to the URL being linked to. This is mostly gibberish to those of you who don’t know HTML code, but it’s important for you to know this so you can tell your developers exactly what kind of links you need.

This is a basic HTML link. Nothing fancy. That’s not to say you can do fancy things with it, these can be embedded in CSS and some JavaScript can even be applied, but the crucial thing is that the link itself is very search engine friendly. If all your links are build like this, you will always know the search engines can spider it.

Link consistency

If you’re going to link to a page, be consistent about it. We covered how the same page can be linked in several different ways. You can implement redirects and canonical tags (which I’ll cover below), but regardless of the other solutions you put in place, be sure to be consistent in how you link to all pages in your site.

If you want to use the “www.”, then use it on every link. If you want to link to the default page without using the file name of any directory or sub-directory, then do that consistently as well. Half of the problem with duplicate content is pages being linked inconsistently throughout the site. Fix your link structure first, then work on the rest of the solutions.

Secure shopping path

In Part II, I talked about the problems that happen when visitors move into the secure area of your site. Often times these secure areas contain links back out, but maintain the secure “https” in the URL. This creates both a secure and non-secure version of the same page. A dupe. The solution here is two-fold.

First, don’t let the search engines enter into your shopping cart area. Secure or not, keep them out! There is nothing there for them to see. Second, once visitors are in the secure area, be sure that any links back out of the check out area go to the unsecure site, not secure URLs of the same pages. It’s OK for visitors to move in and out of the secure area, but what you don’t want is them (or the search engines) accessing secure pages that aren’t meant to be.

Hard code all of your links out of your secure area to be sure they are not using the secure “https” in the URL. Problem solved.

Canonical URLs

The canonical tag (or attribute. Whatever.) is the ultimate duplicate content band-aid solution for duplicate content. The search engines released this as a way to give them a “hint” about which page of all your duplicates is the one that is supposed to be the genuine URL.

This solution is only necessary if you can’t get your pages properly redirected, or duplicate URLs eliminated, via smart linking and content management implementation. It’s the ultimate “if I can’t do anything else” solution. And really, I wouldn’t worry about it unless you can’t implement any other type of fix.

The idea here is to put the tag in the head code of each duplicate page with the URL of the “proper” page. The search engines are supposed to treat it as if it is a redirect when assigning link and other values to the page.

Link to only to canonical page

If you can’t eliminate your duplicate pages and must use the canonical tag, I would also do my best to link only to the canonical version of each page. I wouldn’t rely on the search engines to transfer all your link values from the incorrect URL to the correct one. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But, if make sure your internal links point only to the canonical page, you’ve accounted for half the problem.

The other half will be external links, which redirects (see below) will handle. Linking to the canonical page ensures that all internal linking value will be passed to the proper page without relying on the search engines to get the “hint”. “Don’t make them [the search engines] think” is still the best play.

Redirect links

The absolute best solution to maintaining link value to the pages that are supposed to receive it is the use of the redirect. Whether you have deleted or moved old pages, or have duplicates with a single canonical page, using the 301 redirect (along with linking to the correct page) is the best solution available.

This doesn’t require any thinking on behalf of the search engine or the visitor, and you never have to worry about what URLs are being used in links to your site, because only the correct URL is being served. This is the Big Kahuna (along with linking to the correct page) of duplicate content and bad URL solutions.

If you don’t know how to implement redirects, talk to your developers. They should know the best solution for you, but be sure they implement a 301 redirect, and nothing less.

Duplicate content can be problematic, but implementing these solutions will do wonders to eliminating the problems and reducing the amount of online clutter your site may be producing. Once eliminated, your site should perform significantly better in the search engines, which is the goal we should all be shooting for.

This series is pulled from a presentation given at SMX East. Part I of this serious covered the problems duplicate content creates. This post covers the causes of duplicate content, and Part III will look at the solutions you need to implement to fix your duplicate content problems.

Quick recap of Part I: Duplicate content causes problems. Duh!

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s take a look at the causes of duplicate content and bad URLs so we can then learn how to fix this mess and get on with better search engine rankings!

There is No Single Cause of Duplicate Content. Don’t collect them all!

I started off this series discussing the problems duplicate content causes. I did that deliberately because, if it’s not understood that there is a problem, the causes and solutions really won’t be of great importance to the reader. But, now that we know a problem exists, we have to identify the cause so we can then fix them.

If you’re gonna kill off your duplicate content, you first have to know what causes it. Any problem, until it’s has been recognized and analyzed, cannot be properly corrected.

Redundant URLs

The image above shows an example of several URLs that can all lead to the same content. In fact, these would all be considered the home page of the website. While it’s really only one page, there are four different URLs that can be used to access this page.

The search engines can pretty easily figure out that these URLs are really only one page. But still, they tell us how to “fix” the problem by giving us a canonical URL tag that we can implement just in case.

Eventually, the engines do get around to figuring this out on their own (even without the canonical tag) but not always as quickly as we would like, and not before we already start splitting link value on the site. Any site looking to get some strong improvements quickly shouldn’t wait around for the search engines to get around to figuring the site out. Be bold! Be proactive! Recognize the problem, and fix it!

Poor product categorization

Product categorization can create a lot of duplicate content problems if not implemented correctly. With a lot of systems, every category a single product fits into creates a separate URL that each particular product can be accessed. If your product fits neatly into three categories, you now have three duplicate pages. If ten categories, 10 duplicate pages. You can see the problem here.

While I’ll save the solution for the next part in the series, product categorization can be a bit tricky. We want our products to be accessible. This isn’t shopping in a store where the product can only be in one place. The beauty of it being online is that one product can be found in multiple “isles” at the same time. The tricky part is, by doing this improperly, you may be making your products easier to find by your visitors on your site, but more difficult to find for the search engines.

Secure page issues

Most site’s don’t need to secure any of their pages, until the visitor moves into the shopping cart area. Once there, the visitors can feel safe knowing their personal information isn’t going to be accessible to prying eyes. But, once in the secure area of the site, there will often be links back out to the main site. Sometimes, these links maintain the secure “https” in the URL.

You wouldn’t think this would be a problem, right? Who cares if any of the pages, they continue to visit stay “secure” or not? The problem is that security doesn’t mean locked down. It just means your information is protected. But, regular site pages generally don’t need to be protected. Once a visitor accesses a secure page, that URL now has opportunity to find it’s way into the search engine index.

Can we say: duplicate content problem? (I knew you could.)

This opens up what can be a Pandora’s Box of secure, yet duplicate, content that makes it’s way into the engine database and begins to steal value from your non-secure pages. Not good.

Unfriendly links

There are good links and bad links. And I’m not talking about the type of site’s being linked to. I’m talking about the code used to link to pages.

I’d tell you all about good link code, but that would spoil Part III. Gotta keep the suspense somehow! But, for now, the image above shows two kinds of bad link code you need to be aware of.

Both of these codes use JavaScript to open pages. Usually this is done when you want to open pages in a new window or a pop-up type window. The second one I consider to be a bad link, yet actually can be deciphered by the search engines. The question is, will they? Maybe, maybe not. Best not to rely on crossing your fingers and making a wish. Not unless you tossed a coin in a well, because that never fails.

The first example above simply provides no way for the search engine to know what page is supposed to be pulled, unless they dig into your JavaScript files. Again, they can, but you’re asking a lot.

Session IDs

Session IDs are a mess. To give you the gist, every user is assigned an ID number that is appended to the URL of whatever page they are visiting. Yeah, you heard that right. Every user. That means that a unique URL is created for each page for every visitor that lands on your site. Got 10K visitors this month that only visited one page? You now have 10K URLs out there that could be indexed by the search engines–all duplicate.

Told you. Mess.

Session ID’s Create Duplicate Page Farms

Just to give you a bit of a visual on what session IDs do, the image above depicts a single page linking to other pages on your site. It’s all well and good with the first session, because you only have a single URL for each of those pages. But, when you get into sessions 2 and 3 and 10,000, all the same pages are now duplicate pages. A 10 page site now has 100,000 URLs that the search engines are indexing, but most of which carry the same content over and over again.

Any time a URL is forced to change based on the visitor, you’re going to have a problem. Not only do you get some duplicate content problems, but you are essentially a duplicate content farm, pumping out more and more duplicate content with every visitor that comes to your site. Each visitor essentially devalues your site in the eyes of the search engine.

Now that we’ve explored both the problems that duplicate content creates (Part 1), and several different causes, we can move to Part III to discuss duplicate content solutions.

Duplicate content is like a virus. When a virus enters your system, it begins to replicate itself until it is ready to be released and cause all kinds of nasty havoc within your body. On the web, a little duplicate content isn’t a huge problem, but the more it replicates itself, the bigger the problem you’re going to have. Too much duplicate content and your website will come down with some serious health issues.

I’m going to break this into three parts. In this post, I’ll discuss the problems that are caused with duplicate content. In Part II, I’ll address the causes of duplicate content, and in Part III, I’ll discuss some duplicate content elimination solutions.

This series is pulled from a presentation given at SMX East. Just for fun, it’s entirely Matrix-themed because, like, it’s so obscure and all.

Duplicate Content Causes Problems. Duh!

Google and other search engines like to tell us that they have the duplicate content issue all figured out. And, in the cases where they don’t, they provide a couple of band-aid solutions for you to use (we’ll get to these later). While there may be no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty”, there are certainly filters in place in the search engine algorithms that devalue content that is considered duplicate, and make your site as a whole less valuable in the eyes of the search engines.

If you trust the search engines to handle your site properly, and don’t mind having important pages filtered out of the search results, then go ahead and move on to another story… you got nothing to worry about.

Too many pages to index

Theoretically, there is no limit to the number of pages on your site that the search engines can add to their index. In practice, though, if they find too much “junk”, they’ll stop spidering pages and move on to the next site. They may come back and keep grabbing content they missed, but likely at a much slower pace than they otherwise would.

Duplicate content, in practice, creates “junk” pages. Not that they may not have value, but compared to the one or two or dozen other pages on your site or throughout the web that also contain the same content, there really isn’t anything unique there for the search engines to care about. It’s up to the engines to decide which pages are the unnecessary pages and which is the original source or most valuable page to include in the search results.

The rest is just clutter that the search engines would rather not have.

Slows search engine spidering

With so many duplicate pages to sort through, the search engines tire easily. Instead of indexing hundreds of pages of unique content, they are left sifting through thousands of pages of some original content and a whole lot of duplicate crap. Yeah, you’d tire too!

Once the engines get a whiff that a site is overrun with dupes, the spidering process will often be reduced to a slow crawl. Why rush? There are plenty of original sites out there they can be gathering information on. Maybe they’ll find a few good nuggets or two on your site, but it can wait, as long as they are finding gold mines elsewhere.

Splits valuable link juice

When there is more than one page (URL) on your site that carries the same content as another there becomes an issue of which page gets the links. In practice, whichever URL the visitor lands on and bookmarks, or passes on via social media, is the page that gets the link value. But, each visitor may land on a different URL with that same content.

If 10 people visit your site, 5 land on and choose to link to one URL, while the other 5 land on and choose to link to the other (both being the same content), instead of having one page that has 10 great links, you have 2 pages each with half the linking value. Now imagine you have 5 duplicate pages and the same scenario happens. Instead of 10 links going to a single page, you may end up with 2 links going to each of the 5 duplicate versions.

So, for each duplicate page on your site, you are cutting the link value that any one of the pages could achieve. When it comes to rankings, this matters. In our second scenario, all it takes, essentially, is a similarly optimized page with 3 links to outrank your page with only 2. Not really fair, because the same content really has 10 links, but it’s your own damn fault for splitting up your link juice like that.

Inaccessible pages

We talked above about how duplicate content slows spidering leaving, some content out of the search engine’s index. Leaving duplicate content aside for a moment, let’s consider the page URLs themselves. We’ve all seen those URLs that are so long and complicated that you couldn’t type one out if it was dictated to you. While not all of these URLs are problematic, some of them certainly can be. Not to mention URLs that are simply undecipherable as being unique pages.

We’ll talk more about these URLs in part 3, but for now, let’s just consider what it means when a URL cannot be spidered by the search engines. Well, simply put, if the search engines can’t spider it, then it won’t get indexed. The browser may pull open a page the visitors can see, but the search engines get nothin’. And when you multiply that nothin’ the search engines get with the nothin’ they’ll show in the results (don’t forget to carry the nothin’), you get a whole lot of nothin’ going on.

Pages inaccessible to the search engines means those pages can’t act as landing pages in the search results. That’s OK, if it’s a useless page, but not if it’s something of value that you want to be driving traffic to.

There are a lot of problems caused by duplicate content and bad URL development. These problems may be minor or cataclysmic, depending on the site. Either way, small problem or large, it’s probably a good idea to figure out the cause of your duplicate content problems so you can begin to implement solutions that will pave the way for better search engine rankings.

Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose).

We find that people quickly evaluate a site by visual design alone. When designing your site, pay attention to layout, typography, images, consistency issues, and more. Of course, not all sites gain credibility by looking like IBM.com. The visual design should match the site’s purpose.

First impressions are a killer. Within a fraction of a second, your visitors are making an evaluation of your credibility based on your site design alone. Just any old design won’t do anymore. Web surfers are growing accustomed to professional looking sites in just about every industry. Those that don’t “look professional” enough quickly get abandoned.

If your site has not undergone a major re-design in the past few years, it’s probably time. If your site looks like something that was built on a shoestring budget, you’re not giving your visitors much confidence in how you run your business.

While a more professional looking site may be in order, pay attention to what your industry is doing. Different industries require different styles. Don’t go with a corporate look if your competition is all artsy. Don’t create a mom and pop site when your competitors are high tech. Unless you are creating a new niche, you don’t want to vary too drastically from the “expectation” your visitors have from viewing other sites in your industry.

Make your site easy to use — and useful.

We’re squeezing two guidelines into one here. Our research shows that sites win credibility points by being both easy to use and useful. Some site operators forget about users when they cater to their own company’s ego or try to show the dazzling things they can do with web technology.

Site usability is one of the most important factors in increasing (or decreasing) your conversion rates. When it comes to good usability, everything should be on the table: navigation, colors, product placement and display, headings, add to cart buttons, and more.

Be sure that all elements of your site work together to being a valuable and useful resource. Sometimes you need more than just products, such as descriptive content, to help sell the products. The text you use is what visitors will read to be convinced that you have what they want.

Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently).

People assign more credibility to sites that show they have been recently updated or reviewed.

The primary takeaway here is to keep your content fresh and relevant. Have you ever been to a website and you could just tell the content was old or outdated? Maybe it wasn’t obvious right away, but as you browse through the site, you find certain parts of the site that don’t quite match up with others. Or perhaps you see a “Valentine’s Day Special” six weeks AFTER Valentine’s day.

Small things like this can really turn visitors off. When a visitor sees this kind of irrelevant or outdated content, it conveys that you don’t care enough about them to keep your site relevant. This leaves open a question of whether they’ll get timely service from you as well.

RSS feeds are a great way to highlight new products and information and present them to your audience. Your most loyal audience will subscribe to this feed to ensure they receive your updates.

Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers).

If possible, avoid having ads on your site. If you must have ads, clearly distinguish the sponsored content from your own. Avoid pop-up ads, unless you don’t mind annoying users and losing credibility. As for writing style, try to be clear, direct, and sincere.

This recommendation really only applies to commercial sites, not informational sites. Displaying ads on your informational sites and blogs is perfectly fine and a great way to create an additional source of income. Of course, this only goes so far. Even informational sites can lose their credibility if you have too many ads that overpower the content.

On commercial sites, displaying ads that direct your visitors elsewhere are counter-intuitive and counterproductive. You might get a small stream of “additional” income from these ads, but undoubtedly it will be at your own expense in the long run.

Commercial sites should be focused on selling one thing… your own products or services. Anything on the site that pulls visitors away or interferes with that selling process is a bad marketing strategy.

Keep your audience in mind when writing content. Don’t write above your audiences head, and don’t talk down to them either. While you won’t be able to please everybody, knowing your primary target audience will ensure that you are not insulting the larger percentage of your audience.

Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem.

Typographical errors and broken links hurt a site’s credibility more than most people imagine. It’s also important to keep your site up and running.

I recently spent four hours fixing broken links on a client’s site that had just been redesigned by another developer. This is the epitome of incompetence. We all make mistakes, but lets hope it’s not to this magnitude of colossal ineptness.

Over time, pages we’ve linked to move or disappear, or we move things around on our own sites and miss a few links in all the hubbub. These can easily be corrected with a monthly broken link check. Find and fix both internal and external broken links.

You also want to check your site for spelling and grammar errors. Blogs have a little more leeway in that department, but for a professional site, there is little room for these kinds of issues before you’re looking like amateur hour.

Before publishing new content on your website, take a few extra minutes to run the content through a spell check program. Even if you’ve made a only few minor edits, don’t assume that you don’t need to double check your work.

Just like any other form of medium, it’s best to get a third party to proofread your site’s content. Undoubtedly, they’ll find something you missed, even after you’ve proofread it several times yourself.

Website credibility goes to the heart of being able to run a profitable business. Without credibility, you can implement all kinds of marketing strategies and drive hoards of traffic to your site, but in the end, you won’t have the impact you otherwise would.

Sure, you can find more ways to drive more traffic and eek out a few more sales, but doesn’t it make more sense to improve your credibility and increase your sales without having to pay to drive new traffic to your site?

You can read even more information on building a credible website by reading my series on Destination Search Engine Marketing where I cover how to develop a website that deserves top search engine rankings.

By taking the time to make sure your website is in a credible condition, your visitors will continue to drop in to explore what condition your condition is in.

Below are the first five guidelines. I’ve provided some of my own additional thoughts and commentary and would be interested in hearing yours as well.

Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site.

You can build website credibility by providing third-party support (citations, references, source material) for information you present, especially if you link to this evidence. Even if people don’t follow these links, you’ve shown confidence in your material.

A lot of what you find on the web is merely opinion. But, when you’re operating a business, opinion doesn’t always fly. We can state “facts” until we’re blue in the face, but if you’re claiming you “provide the best”, “offer the most”, or are “more successful”, you better be able to back that up.

If you can’t find an original source to back up your claim, look for those that are most credible and aren’t known for trying to pass opinion as fact. While the original source helps, you can always take the next best thing over nothing.

Sometimes you can be your own best source. If you are writing content about how satisfied your customers are, link to a testimonial page on your site. If you make the point of how well your product or service does, link to another page that backs that up with your own research.

Finally, don’t try to link to every possible resource or verification of your claims. Find a few of the most credible, and use those. Too much and you can cause your site to lose focus.

Show that there’s a real organization behind your site.

Showing that your website is for a legitimate organization will boost the site’s credibility. The easiest way to do this is by listing a physical address. Other features can also help, such as posting a photo of your offices or listing a membership with the Chamber of Commerce.

A pretty website isn’t enough. Online shoppers are still skeptical, and unless you can provide some kind of verification that you’re legit, you’ll be hard pressed to gain any kind of traction with your audience.

If possible, showcase your professional affiliations. If you belong to a local Chamber of Commerce or the Better Business Bureau, display this information on your site. This provides an additional avenue of legitimacy verification.

Answering your phone and emails can also go a long way to building credibility, while not answering them destroys it even faster. If your visitors don’t feel as if they can reach you they may question whether you’ll be able to provide them the help and support they need.

Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide.

Do you have experts on your team? Are your contributors or service providers authorities? Be sure to give their credentials. Are you affiliated with a respected organization? Make that clear. Conversely, don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association.

What sets you apart from your competition? Is it just lower prices, or do you have something substantially unique to offer? Sometimes you don’t even have to offer anything different, it’s just a matter of presenting it in a new or unique way.

Highlight whatever knowledge or experience you and your team have. By providing information on your particular experiences, you provide a way for your audience to see that you have a solid history of performance, and that you don’t just say you can… you’ve proven it.

Provide as much information as you can on your organization, industry experience, and even case-studies, as these all work together to bolster your credibility.

Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site.

The first part of this guideline is to show there are real people behind the site and in the organization. Next, find a way to convey their trustworthiness through images or text. For example, some sites post employee bios that tell about family or hobbies.

This familiarity breeds trust and trust turns people into customers. As much as you need to provide information on your successes, you also need to provide what’s behind those successes: real people.

Anybody can talk a good game and even be knowledgeable in the product or service offered, but the people that make up your team can speak volumes about you. Even if nobody knows who you are, providing bios on the people that are your “authority team” gives your audience an opportunity to get to know them.

You don’t want to be a faceless corporation. You can avoid this by humanizing your self or your staff and giving people someone they can relate to. Don’t be “all business” in your bios. Show the personal side a bit. The more personable you are, the more genuine you appear.

People like to feel a connection to you which is also why it helps to tell about your family, your interests, or your hobbies. Your reader may have kids of the same age, which gives them something in common with you. Some might have similar interests or hobbies, or know someone who does, which again, helps them make that connection to you that is more than just someone out to make a quick buck at their expense.

If your visitors can be made to feel like you’re like them, then they are more apt to spend their money with you than some other faceless, nameless person or organization.

Make it easy to contact you.

A simple way to boost your site’s credibility is by making your contact information clear: phone number, physical address, and email address.

Simple things such as providing full and complete contact information, not just a web form, can go a long way to establishing your credibility. Give your visitors options on how to contact you in a variety of ways.

Every visitor has their own set of preferences in making contact. For some, a form is just fine. For others, they want to hear a voice. And still others will want to send off a quick email. By providing each of these options, you allow your visitors to contact you in a way they are most comfortable, and will likely establish the most trust.

I suggest that you make your phone number visible on every page. If you’re national, you need to have a toll free number.

Many visitors won’t engage with a site that doesn’t provide an “appropriate” way to be contacted. If this avenue isn’t readily available, your would-be customers may be going elsewhere.

This wraps up the first five! In my next post, we’ll cover the remaining five conditions for web credibility.

Step 1: Admit you are powerless without SEO and that your online marketing has become unmanageable.

Step 2: Believe that a power greater than yourself is needed to optimize your website for rankings and conversions.

Step 3: Make a decision to turn your website and online marketing strategies over to the care of an SEO, as you choose to hire him/her.

Step 4: Let your SEO make a searching and fearless inventory of your website.

Step 5: Admit to your SEO, yourself, and your developers the exact nature of your website’s wrongs.

Step 6: Be entirely ready to have your SEO fix these website defects.

Step 7: Humbly ask God to remove your tunnel vision and “I know better than you” biases, and trust that your SEO knows their stuff.

Step 8: Review your SEO’s list of all website marketing violations and be willing to correct those which they cannot.

Step 9: Correct all violations immediately, except when doing so will disrupt your success during critical seasons. Do those things when disruption will be minimized.

Step 10: Continue to allow your SEO to take inventory of your site and, when new issues are found, promptly fix said issues.

Step 11: Seek, through SEO/PPC and Social Media, the improvement of your conversion rates, and return on investment. Continue to build communication with your online marketer and give them the power to carry out their recommendations.

Step 12: Have a financial awakening as a result of these steps, and carry the message of value your SEO/M has provided through continuous recommendations throughout the business community.