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.

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.

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.

Gain Insight Into the Searcher’s True Need

The catch here is that you will need data collected from your site that helps identify who searched and when they searched so that you can do some session parsing.  If you are able to sort by user ID and time, you should be able to see all of the searches they performed during a session to gain insight into what the user was thinking.  This takes you to a new level of analyzing by looking beyond just queries to how searchers refine them and how their information needs change as they perform multiple searches.  This gives you more insight into the searcher’s true need than by just looking at individual queries.  You can piece together all of the searches to get inside the mind of the searcher to understand his need and how it changes as he interacts with search results and content.

What’s a Session?

It can be difficult to determine what a single “session” is.  A good rule of thumb to follow is this: a “session” is the activity of searching for a single type of information within a specific time period.  It’s important to define it this way so that you don’t cross over sessions where information needs have changed and the user has moved on from their original information search.  Therefore, you must define a session’s time block and make sure the queries in the time block appear to be related to consider analyzing the session.  No matter what, you should determine the parameters of your analysis within the context in which users are interacting with your site.  Here is what a common search session might look like…

You can see here that the same user made a series of very similar queries within a short period of time.  It’s these kinds of sessions that can help you learn how your site search is being used and how to improve the search experience and your content.

Session Types That Matter

As is usually the case with web data, you can find yourself swimming in an overwhelming amount of it.  Therefore, you’ll want to focus in on session types that matter.  Like these…

• Sessions that include most frequent queries – Are they at the beginning, middle or end of the searcher’s session?  How does that make a difference?  What does it mean?
• Sessions that include an interesting query type – The context of your site will determine these.  They may be names, titles, product IDs, date, departments, etc.
• Sessions that end in failure – Look for patterns that signify resulting failure.

Metadata and Personas

A big barrier to successful metadata is content owners using terms that are too broad.  Look for the phrases that get people to what they want.  This helps inform those who apply metadata to your site’s content to use the same level of granularity.  Also, you’ll get insight into phrases that you should be targeting with your SEO and PPC efforts.

Lastly, if you are able to collect searcher ID demographics like age, profession, etc., you can use their search sessions to get insight into their minds to help develop your customer personas.

You can see just how much you can do with a little bit of information that takes you inside the mind of your target customer.  SSA provides you with great data to be able to do this.

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.

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.

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!

You need exposure to get the traffic that leads to new business. But, you need to be user friendly in order to convert the traffic you’re getting into new business. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Anyone who has been optimizing a site for more than a week understands the value of getting strong search engine placement. Anyone that has had top rankings for more than a week also understands that bringing in new traffic that doesn’t convert is pointless.

Why SEO is Like Government (and why government isn’t like SEO)

SEO is a lot like government. No matter how many years we’ve been at it, there always seems to be more to do. And, like a good (or bad) law, we often don’t see the effects right away. But, unlike government, SEO’s analyze the results of their work. When a bad strategy is implemented, it gets repealed. Not very often is a bad law or government program withdrawn, regardless of the “unintended consequences.”

Sigh.

But, I digress.

With SEO, there is almost always something that can be done to improve your site and your search rankings. But, after making specific changes, you must be patient enough to wait for the results of those changes. Then you can come back and compare the new results against previous results. This is the same whether you’re making changes to improve your engine rankings or to increase conversion rates.

The changes you can make to your site are virtually endless when testing is involved. But, making too many changes too quickly, without testing and comparing the results, will almost always lead to a less than optimal marketing campaign.

Making Changes that Make Sense (and a lot of cents)

When you make changes without implementing proper tracking and testing procedures, you will often get both positive and negative results (or a combination of both), but you won’t be in a position to pinpoint which of those changes were responsible for what results.

Let’s say you made two changes to your home page, one was for rankings, the other for usability. If both rankings and conversions increase, you probably have performed two winning changes. But, what if rankings went up while conversions went down?

Simple, go back and undo the usability changes, right? Not necessarily.

It may be that your optimization changes improved rankings, but negatively effected usability, despite having made other usability changes. The usability changes you made may have actually resulted in a positive improvement, but that improvement was counteracted by the optimization changes that, while improving rankings, had a larger negative effect on conversions. Performing both of these changes at the same time makes it hard to pinpoint cause and effect.

Had you performed these changes separately, say the usability changes first, you might have seen an increase in conversion rates with little or no effect on rankings. The following week you would then make your optimization changes to find that your rankings went up, but your conversions dropped to levels lower than they were previously.

Now you know what to do! You undo your optimization changes, because, in this case, better rankings reduced conversions. Since you measured and tracked the results of each change, you can easily undo the change that had the greatest negative impact and then perhaps try something different to improve rankings.

Looking for opportunities to improve your site is an ongoing process. Every change and every test gives you valuable insight into what’s working and what isn’t. If you uncover a problem, you can’t sit on your hands and do nothing. But once a “solution” is implemented, be patient and look to the results to see if it was a viable solution after all.

The Goal is Profits (not first page rankings)

In search engine marketing, there are often many goals: improve rankings, get more sales, increase conversions, drive more traffic, etc.

Profits can be achieved by improving rankings, getting more sales, increasing conversions, driving more traffic, etc. But, none of these is the goal itself. It is a means to the goal. Each of those paths can, and often do, intersect, and any of them can also lead you further away from your goal as well, if you’re not careful

When I talk about getting more conversions for less money, I don’t necessarily mean being able to spend less money, though that would be nice. But, getting more conversions for less usually requires spending more money, but paying less for each conversion.

Testing every change on your site allows you to keep making improvements in SEO, usability, conversions, etc. so that you can achieve your goal of getting each conversion at a lower cost than the month before. The way I see it, if marketing works the way it should, your marketing budget should always be increasing rather than decreasing, assuming, of course, that you can handle the increased business that the improvements continue to bring in.

Making sure you are using a measured approach to all your marketing efforts allows you slow, steady, and consistent growth in profits. When it’s all said and done, it comes back to doing all that you can to improve your business, and measuring the results to make sure that what you’re doing is working. Measuring only the end result without measuring the success or failures of the processes along the way will only result in a nice tasting goulash of a marketing campaign. Why settle for that when you can have the prime rib instead?

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.

Question 6. Which provides the greatest benefit, on-page SEO or link building?

This is a tough question to answer because both can play a significant role in the success of a site trying to get to the top of the search results.

Here’s the basic rundown. A site that isn’t linked from any other site doesn’t stand a chance in the search results. It doesn’t matter how well-optimized it is, the links matter. At the same time, a site that is well-linked, but not optimized, CAN get good search engine rankings, but performance will always be sub-par.

Links are important to get on the map, but once there, the optimization plays a much more significant role in helping establishing good rankings. But, then there comes a point, again, where a site can only be so optimized, and the links are what is needed to tip the scales.

Got that? Links > SEO > Links!

7. How important is social media in relation to SEO?

Social media marketing is becoming increasingly important to the success of a website. Search engines are now considering many different social signals when determining relevance of a website, or even a particular web page.

The main issue isn’t whether or not to use social media, its how to leverage social media properly. Many businesses are using social media, trying to get that extra advantage. Unfortunately, they are not leveraging the social media channels in a way that maximizes their efforts into an effective marketing strategy.

When utilized properly, social media can be a strong link building strategy. A well-run social strategy can cover multiple aspects of the off-page link building efforts that search engines consider when determining the value of a website.

8. How does usability factor into SEO?

Search engines don’t have access to the usability data of every website. Though, as more people install Google Analytics or Adwords tracking code onto their websites, and surfers install the Google Toolbar into their browser, Google is able to get more and more of this information and can incorporate it into their ranking algorithms (though they claim they don’t and won’t.)

Short of using that data, search engines can see visitor bounce rates pretty well. Every visitor that clicks over to a site, then hits the browsers back button, sends a signal to the search engine that the visitor didn’t find what they were looking for.

Bounce rates can certainly be an important signal to the search engines. Making sure your visitors get the information they searched for, on the first, click is imperative.

Given access to enough data, I think the engines will look more closely at on-site usability issues. If few people make it to the conversion page, the engines may determine that your site isn’t a quality or trusted site, especially if it is compared to another site that does have better conversion rates.

9. My site is perfect and I don’t want to change anything? What can I do to get better rankings?

Well, in this case, the only thing you can do is to build links, employ social media, and build content. All of these are good strategies, but they also might not be enough. Sometimes you just have to come to the conclusion that your site isn’t as perfect as you want to believe it is.

If you want your site to be keyword optimized and have a significant chance of outpacing your competition in the search results, you have to be willing to make changes. I’m not talking about keyword stuffing or anything like that, but you do have to be willing to make tweaks and adjustments in order to ensure your content delivers for the searchers and provides enough signals to the engines for your targeted keywords.

10. I keep hearing about personalized results, local results, and blended results. How does this affect rankings?

In more ways than you probably realize. There is really no such thing as a #1 ranking anymore. Every search is essentially a unique search requiring a unique set of results. This means the search you perform on your computer will produce different results than the search your friend performs on their computer, even if they are in the same room as you.

Localization, personalization, and blended results have really changed the game. Not only do you have to optimize, but you have so many more options for getting your site in front of your search audience. If you’re a local company, then you’ll likely see traffic drop as your site no longer comes up in searches outside of your local area. But, you lose audience if you’re not coming up in their personalized results. This can be good if it weeds out those who are not part of your target audience, but can also help you if it puts you in front of a more targeted group.

Blended results give you more opportunities to get noticed. Video is the big “it” right now. If you create and optimize a video, it can get you additional exposure on the first page of search results. Same with optimized images, and even mentions, from those in your social circle.

Stay tuned for the last group of five answers…

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.

To be more accurate, SEO should be called WO, or WSO: Website Optimization. That’s what I do, I optimize the website in order to help it gain more exposure, increase traffic and get more sales.

But what are we optimizing the website for?

Sometimes SEO is just like that, but the opposite. A lot of time and energy is spent on the “exterior” (search engine rankings) while ignoring the interior (building a great website.)

Most people look at their website as a whole but in reality it is a collection of many parts. These parts (web pages) are essentially individual steps on a path that should lead your visitors to a specific goal: the conversion. If your site as a whole, and web pages individually, are working properly, you should see an increase in conversion rates and sales. If anything is broken along the way your visitors are led the wrong way at the wrong time and you open the door to having them leave before they’ve reached the conversion goal.

Each entry point of your site (wherever the visitor lands first, not just the home page) needs to be treated as the starting point that will lead your visitors step by step toward the conversion goal. In order to guide your visitors from this starting point to the end point, you need to make sure each step along the way is aligned with the next; in sync and unbroken.

That’s it, you’re free to go now. The rest of this article is just stories, opinion and my thoughts that reinforce the point above. But if you need more convincing, read on.

So many times I see businesses investing thousands of dollars building their websites, tinkering with SEO improvements, or increasing/improving their content, only to neglect one of the most basic problems that may be a significant contributing factor in reducing their conversion rates: broken links.

OK, everybody caught up? Good.

So now you’re wondering what this has to do with you. Perhaps you “just” sell products. Or maybe you “just” have an information site. Or you “just” do some other thing that doesn’t require an RSS feed. In your line of work you don’t really get into the whole blogging, news headlines, audio, or video thing, so this post isn’t for you, right?

The information here has been updated to include not only the check points but also the explanations of each, so you don’t have to keep referring back to the blog posts above. I’ve also added a few points here and there, but no major overhaul or anything.

Anyway, here you go: The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, PDF!

But on this particular flight the bathroom was out of commission. The airline helpfully placed the following sign on the bathroom door:

If you missed my blog series titled Destination Search Engine Marketing or want to have an easy-to-read and print version, you’re in luck. We have created a 34-page downloadable PDF from the series of posts. Not only is the PDF fully illustrated, but it is has also been edited and updated.

The download is free and we don’t ask for any information or try to call you to sell you something else. Just click on the link above and save the PDF to your computer. That’s it. Enjoy.

The fact is, your website is being judged. Each and every visitor that comes to your site is actively weighing, measuring and perhaps even finding you wanting in how you present your information to them. Every person will judge you on how quickly they can find the information they want, how complete that information is, and whether or not all their questions get answered.