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.

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 the last few years social media has jumped to the forefront of online marketing for many small businesses. Some business owners aren’t even bothering to market (or in some cases even build) their websites anymore.

They can just create a Facebook page.

Or a blog on Blogger.com

Or tweet on Twitter.

Or build a Google Places page.

Are we entering an age where SEO just doesn’t matter?

You can now get a local ranking on Google just by having a places page. No website needed!

When all these other avenues are available, many without all the added marketing “expense,” is SEO still viable?

The short answer is yes, SEO still matters.

SEO Still Matters

That was important so I made sure to say it twice!

There are many reasons why SEO should still be on the forefront of your online marketing efforts. I’ll make the case below, but before I do, I want to stress that I’m not trying to take anything away from Facebook, Google Places, Twitter or other social media efforts. I’m sure someone *cough@martijencough* could write a post titled “Making the Case for Social Media in an SEO World!”

But since social media is the new big “it,” I think it’s important to revisit the case for SEO, as a solid reminder as to why it still matters.

You have Ownership of Your SEO

If you own your own domain name, your website belongs to you. It’s yours.

The same can’t be said about your Facebook, Places or Twitter profiles. Whatever marketing you do on these other profiles may be building your business today, but what if any of them go out of style? (Anyone remember MySpace?)

The marketing you do TO your social media profiles is temporary at best. At any time you can be removed, be kicked off, lose your profile or see the site disappear. If your web host doesn’t like you, you get to take your site (you do have a backup, right?) and find another hosting company. You get to keep it, and no one can tell you otherwise.

That means the SEO you do for your site is also yours. All that work, effort and money invested is yours to keep as long as you keep your site hosted.

SEO Gets You Noticed by Your Customers

Social media is great for getting the word out and building your brand, educating your audience and even providing information about your services. All good. But SEO puts you in front of your buyers. Top rankings put you in front of people that are interested in what you have to offer but don’t already know about you.

One of the goals of SEO can be to get people to engage with you on your social networks. This helps build long-term relationships. But SEO gets you in front of people who don’t already know where to get what you offer. That’s why they go to search engines.

Top rankings put you front and center for searchers who have an active interest in what you do. These are potential customers, not just information seekers. This is your money audience!

SEO Has a Mighty Long Reach

Your reach with SEO can be far greater than your reach in your social networks. Sure you can build a lot of followers and friends and they can repost or retweet your content to get an even wider audience… provided they are looking at the time your tweet or post goes out.

You may have 10,000 friends and followers, but are they all looking at you moment you need them to be? If not, your message is lost.

SEO puts you in front of your audience when they search. Even PPC can fail here as ads roll in and out depending on your available budget. But with SEO, once you get those top rankings, your link is there for all the world to see.

Not only that, but the more keywords you optimize, the bigger your reach can be. Optimizing your site for well-searched keyword phrases puts you in front of a larger audience. Optimizing even low-volume phrases in large quantities can boost your reach even more while increasing your ROI. (More on that below.)

SEO is Relevant Now

Driving someone to your social media page gives them only limited amounts of information. It’s kind of a one-size-fits-all approach. Driving visitors to your site, through SEO, gives them all the information they need to make a purchase decision.

One of the beautiful things about SEO is that you can also drive each searcher to the most relevant page on your site, based on the query. That’s what optimizing is all about. Each page is optimized for a set of keywords that are most relevant the searcher. This is custom-fitting at it’s best!

SEO Focuses on the Conversion Experience

When a properly strategized SEO campaign is implemented, your website should see a boost in user experience. Your SEO should be looking further than optimizing keywords onto a page. They should be analyzing your site architecture, calls to action, internal links and conversion processes.

When your SEO focuses on the conversion experience, your site becomes much more about getting your visitors the information they need while making them confident in their purchase decision. The better user experience, the more loyal customer you create. Driving traffic to a site without considering usability can be akin to pouring water into a leaky bucket.

Your Competition is Performing SEO

Your competition is ranking for the keywords that would otherwise be driving business to your site. If you’re not competing for those keywords, search engine traffic is being diverted to them. That sound you hear is your profits going to your competition!

If your competition is investing in SEO, shouldn’t you be? If they are working hard at earning top search engine rankings, don’t you want to be right there next to (or above) them? And if your competition isn’t there today, they may be there tomorrow. Don’t let them get the competitive advantage on you.

SEO Delivers the ROI

The return on investment in SEO has been proven time and time again. It’s different for every industry and website, but in the long term, because SEO is long-lasting, the ROI validates itself. Compared to other forms of advertising, SEO can be a bargain.

The ROI on social media has yet to be fully proven. Its great for building an audience and driving brand awareness. It’s even better in conjunction with your optimization campaign, to create links and build off the SEO. As a standalone service, however, the benefit of social media is extremely limited. It’s only one piece of the marketing pie.

SEO has Extreme Longevity

SEO is (almost) forever. A page properly optimized today is a page properly optimized after the next four Google updates. On-page optimization is good for a very long time. Once you have that then you just need to continue to build your site and keep your audience interested. This is where social media, link building and content strategy really helps; they help maintain your position once your site is optimized.

This is why so many are flocking to social media. They think this is the way to get in front of your audience. And it is, but it’s only part of a smart marketing strategy. Getting your site optimized internally, and using social media and link building externally, gives you a long-lasting optimization campaign that withstands the tests of time.

Focusing on SEO, even as social media is the new, shiny thing on the block, still makes a lot of sense. If you bring in the right people to do the job, your optimization campaign should be one of the primary drivers of traffic, conversions and new customers.

Of course, you already knew all this. But it’s nice to have the reminder.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

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!

Why this is important: The site design is essentially the first impression that someone gets when they land on your site. You may have all your usability and SEO elements in place, but if the design is lacking then your visitor’s impression of you will be lacking as well. A visually appealing site can not only bolster trust and credibility, but it can make you stand out among other less-appealing sites in your industry.

Why this is important: The logo lends directly to brand identity and site identification. It also creates a certain element of appeal and professionalism in the mind of the visitor. It holds an important role in visitor assurance and navigation.

Why this is important: The browser is (obviously) what we use to view websites. The goal is to give the visitor the best browsing experience possible, but we have to keep in mind that not all browsers are the same. We must make sure to accommodate different users, ensuring that they get the most value out of the site possible.

Why this is important: The domain name is part of the identity of your business. The URL chosen can have a significant impact on brand identity and in a lesser extent, keyword ranking performance. However, how your site domain name and page URLs function can have significant impact on the crawlability of the site as well as overall visitor and traffic performance.

Just because you have a well-designed site doesn’t mean that it is sufficiently usable. The web is littered with great looking sites that have a whole mess of usability problems. But it’s also true that just because a website employs effective usability strategies that it’s not necessarily pleasing on the eyes.

We’ve all seen those direct mail-like landing pages, the ones that scroll on forever telling you just how great the product is that you need to buy. Usually they have a big red heading, some pictures, testimonials and a lot of words highlighted to draw your eye to them. As ugly goes, these pages pretty much invented the thing, but you know what, they are extremely effective. And a lot of that is in their simplicity.

But these pages are meant to do one thing, and one thing only. Get a conversion. They are designed to sell the visitor on something. On the other hand, as we have been discussing over the past couple of weeks, a Destination Website is meant to engage the visitor. Yes, they can also sell products or services, but they go about it in an entirely different way.

The design of a website is an important aspect of building a destination that people want to return to time and time again. But don’t go out and spend all kinds of money for the most current, up-to-date website design with all the whistles and bells. Stop for a second to truly consider what kind of website design you really need.

At any given time I have three FireFox browser widows open, each with their own number of open tabs. So it’s natural for me to check and verify my changes using my browser of choice. Sometimes, I even think to check my changes in Internet Explorer. Admittedly, I don’t regularly check IE when the changes are relatively minor, but always when the changes effect formatting. But that’s not the other browser I’m referring to.

We get so accustomed to our own way of surfing the web that we forget that there many other browsers and browsing experiences that may be foreign to us. Now most web designers will do their due diligence and check a site in multiple versions of FireFox, Internet Explorer, Netscape and Safari. Heck you might look at a half of dozen other browsers that most people, including myself, have never even heard of. But those are not the browsers I’m referring to either.

There are four primary “other” browsers and browsing experiences that are typically overlooked by site owners, casual webmaster and, yes, even by the average web designer. But with more and more users moving to these alternate browsing experiences, it is even more important to check your websites to make sure that they function properly for these users.

While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:

• Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
• Text immediately surrounding the image
• The overall content of the page the image is on
• Image ALT attribute in the image tag

When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.

While perusing through the Reno Rodeo website I noticed a number of issues, some little, some big, but things that they can fix that can help them build a better web experience. I thought I’d take that and turn it into a post that will allow all my readers to learn from a real-life example.

Step 1: Make ticket buying easy(ier)

It took me a bit to find it, but you can actually buy tickets online. You wouldn’t know it, though, with the header telling me to call an 800 number to purchase tickets. This image should be linked either to the tickets page on the site or to tickets.com where tickets are actually purchased.

In the top row header there is a “tickets” link, but when I mouse over there is a bit of confusion with the drop down. Do I click the main button or the “ticket sales” button? It doesn’t really matter as the information on both pages is 95% identical (duplicate content alert!). Getting rid of that unnecessary drop down will help.

Clicking either of the ticket links above I am again offered the 800 number or told I can purchase online. But how? I have to read through that first paragraph to know that I can go to tickets.com, which is actually linked, but not linked to the Reno Rodeo ticket purchase page.

Scratch that, after several passes I see that the image tells me to “click here,” which leads to the tickets.com Reno Rodeo ticket page. This shows the value in having both visual (image) calls to action along with textual calls to action. I missed the visual one all together looking for the non-existent textual link.

I did find another way to order tickets easily. Go to the contact us link at the top which has a nice “Click here” for those of us who want to purchase online. That link takes you to the actual tickets.com Reno Rodeo tickets page as well.

Step 2: Broadcast your event dates better

Event websites like this need to broadcast the date of their events in the header. Right now you have to look halfway down the page, below the Reno Rodeo News, to find the dates of the event. Put that at the top. Throw it in the logo image below the 800 number. Make it bold, loud and obvious!

Step 3: Fix your security errors

Not everybody types in the “www.” in the address bar. Normally it’s not a problem but here it is:

This is easily fixed by implementing a redirect from renorodeo.com to www.renorodeo.com

Errors like this can stop a lot of traffic from moving forward. It’s smart to check your site on multiple machines and browsers to make sure you don’t get this, or any other visitor stopping errors.

Step 4: Organize your navigation

If you look closely you can see that the navigation is organized alphabetically. Now that’s a great way to organize your Blu-ray discs, but not the best for site navigation. What they need to do here is segment their navigation. Have tasks such as Home, Parking, Getting here, etc under a common navigational header, separate from video, cattle drive, team 355 and the like. I’d have to spend more time than I’m willing right now to figure out just how to do this right, but let’s just say that it’s all wrong.

Find ways to segment your navigation into scannable chunks. Create categories based on how users are likely to be looking for specific groups of information. This makes everything easier to find and navigate to.

Step 5: Move your news more accessible

There are several problems with the “Rodeo News” that is at the top of the home page. First of all, its location is all wrong. The news box pushes the other important content down too far on the page. I say they should move this box off to the side, even outside the main content area completely. By doing that they can then have the news available on every page, not just the home page.

Next, I want to know how to get to news older than the few entries they have listed here. I don’t see any links to “more news”, but I assume that they’ve been posting news since the beginning of the event. Just give me a place to go to catch up on what I missed.

Finally, where is the RSS feed? This is 2008, anything “news” has to have a feed. This lets your true customers keep up on the goings on without having to revisit the site several times a day.

I could go on, but think this is quite enough to make a pretty significant improvement in web usability. If Reno Rodeo implements these few items I’m sure they’ll see their web satisfaction go up, if not selling additional tickets as well.

Here are some typical coding issues that can screw up your on-page optimization processes:

Today I have answered questions regarding books for beginners, SEO techniques and how they have changed, pro’s and cons of CSS, different types of architecture and favicons.

On with the answers…

Most duplicate content issues have to do with on-page content. Mass page/content duplication can often have a negative effect on how the search engines spider and index your site. While I believe the title tag is the single most important piece of real estate on your site, duplication here is likely to have the least effect on the search engine crawlers. It will, however, have an effect on rankings, but that’s another discussion. Even still, it’s a duplicate issue that absolutely must be addressed for tactical SEO performance.

Duplicate titles is something we often see on newly developed websites or content management systems that don’t allow proper control of individual pages. While I get how when developing new websites the title tag can get overlooked, I’m amazed that people develop web software that still doesn’t take title tag customization into account.

In some cases it’s just a matter of some creative programming to fix. In others it might require some significant reworking of the system, or a scraping of the system altogether. And, of course, other times it’s just a matter of taking the time to get into your HTML or your CMS and writing unique title tags for all your products and content pages. If you have a lot of products or pages, this can be time consuming, but it’s well worth the effort.

If you can pull it off with your CMS allow Titles to be automatically generated based on on-page criteria, but also give yourself the opportunity to overwrite the defaults with your own customization. This is especially handy for product pages. The default can display essentially the breadcrumb trail of categories down to the products as the default. This will ensure all your title tags are unique, to a degree. But at some point you may want to get in and create a unique title tag for more punch and better search engine rankings. Having both options will give you the greatest degree of control without having duplicate titles until you get around to customizing them.

All said and done, your titles should:

• Short, 65 characters max
• Unique for each page
• Accurately reflects page content
• Contains main keywords

Related posts on duplicate content:

• Theories in Duplicate Content Penalties
• How Poor Product Categorization Can Frustrate Shoppers and Search Engines Alike
• Duplicate Content Issues: www. vs. no www.
• Duplicate Content Issues: Domain Name Redirects
• Preventing Secure & Non-Secure Site Duplication
• Create Infinite Page Duplication: Use URL Session IDs

Ok, first of all, that’s a bad URL shown above, but aside from that, tacked on at the end there is the session ID. Both URLs pull the same page pulled open via a different browsing session. The bad stuff happens if the session IDs also get attached when the search engines come for a visit.

Since a new session ID is attached with each new visit, each time the search engine comes around they are essentially fed all new URLs. If you have only a ten page site, the second time the search engines visit they add the “new” 10 pages to the index, for a total of 20 pages. When they come around a third time they now have 30 pages in their index. Once they start analyzing these pages they find page after page after page of duplication.

An additional problem arises as site visitors start bookmarking and linking to your site. Every link they add contains their very own session ID. The search engines follow that link to your site and now you’ve got another 10 pages of duplication. If they follow another link to your site, that’s 10 more. You starting to see where this is going? Essentially you can turn a 10 page site into endless duplications.

Even with a small site you can see why the search engines would stop coming around. But if you have a site with hundreds, or even thousands of products, you find two things happen. 1) The search engines will stop spidering new pages because there is just too much duplication. 2) The engines will start dropping pages out of the index altogether.

Now this is where my lack of programming skills show. I know there are some systems that will withhold the session IDs from search engines. This still has the potential of creating problems with inbound links. I can’t say for sure how search engines handle incoming links with Session IDs in the URLs, even if those IDs get stripped once the engine hits the site. I would think the link value will pass as if the ID isn’t there, but I don’t know.

Like sex, the only guaranteed protection here is not to do it at all. There are alternate means of tracking users for whatever reason. Avoiding session IDs completely ensures that you don’t open yourself up to inadvertent site duplication.

Related posts on duplicate content:

• Theories in Duplicate Content Penalties
• How Poor Product Categorization Can Frustrate Shoppers and Search Engines Alike
• Duplicate Content Issues: www. vs. no www.
• Duplicate Content Issues: Domain Name Redirects
• Preventing Secure & Non-Secure Site Duplication

There are two basic problems with this. First, it all takes time. Until the search engines figure out which dupes should be “merged” you’re essentially splitting link flow. Two inbound links, one to each version, produce only have the power than two links both pointing to a single version.

The second problem is that you leave it to the search engines to decide which pages or site should be dropped from the index. When you let the search engines decide, you lose essential control.

I’ll probably say this in every post I make about duplicate content, so forgive me if you’ve heard it before, but the less you make the search engines think they better. When it comes to duplicate content issues, they want to be told what to think. And you can do that by not presenting two versions of the same page.

One issue we’ve come across, especially with e-commerce sites is when products can be accessed via both secure and non-secure URLs.

This issue is typically caused by poorly implemented site navigation and linking. What happens is that the shopper adds a product to the shopping cart. At that point they enter into the secure pages. But when the shopper continues shopping, instead of proceeding to checkout, they navigate back into the site keeping the https: in the browser URL.

There are a couple fixes to this. The first is to not allow your visitors to enter the secure areas of the site until they are ready to check out.

There is no reason to go secure just by adding products to a cart. The place to go secure is when they hit the checkout button. But–and this is important–if they leave the checkout process to continue shopping, they need to be placed back into non-secure pages.

This leads us to our second fix: Use absolute URLs in all site navigation and shopping cart pages.

Quick refresher: an absolute link uses the full domain name in the link:

http://www.site.com/category/product.html

A relative link only uses the path from current location to the destination:

../product.html

When using relative links if the shopper is already on an secure (https:) URL then they’ll stay on secure URLs. When you use absolute links then you are forcing the visitor to go http: instead of https:

When shoppers can access secure and non secure versions of the same unsecure page, then likely the search engines can as well. This creates almost a complete duplicate of your site, one secure and one non-secure version. Using absolute links will ensure that at no point can a regular page be accessed in secure mode, thus preventing the duplication.

Related posts on duplicate content:

• Theories in Duplicate Content Penalties
• How Poor Product Categorization Can Frustrate Shoppers and Search Engines Alike
• Duplicate Content Issues: www. vs. no www.
• Duplicate Content Issues: Domain Name Redirects

Domain Name Redirects

The first thing you need to consider after you’ve purchased additional domain names is to decide what you want to do with them. Not every domain name needs to have a site on it, though it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some kind of generic company page in place for lack of anything else. But for the most part, you will probably want to redirect all your alternate domain names to your main company site. This is especially true of many of the issues covered in the article linked above.

The question then becomes, how best to implement those redirects. There are many ways to redirect websites, most of them will often do more harm than good. One of the most common ways to redirect domain names is to “park” them and point them to your main site. How your web hosts parks domains is crucial to know, in order to make sure that the domains are redirecting properly from an SEO standpoint.

Here is an example of a improperly redirecting URL (note: the image is just for example purposes):

This is how most web host companies park domain names. Essentially, every parked domain will feed the user the content from the primary URL, but it keeps the visitor on the domain name which they typed in. This can lead to problems with branding, not to mention the duplicate page(s) created by this kind of re-direct.

Here’s what you need to know about domain redirects. This is important to be able to tell your web host, developer, or whoever else is in charge of your website. You want your alternate domains to “301 redirect” to your main URL.

A 301 redirect tells search engine spiders that the domain they tried to access has been “permanently moved” to a new location, which is your main URL. When implementing a 301 redirect both your visitors and search engine spiders will be automatically forwarded to the new URL.

If your web host doesn’t implement this kind of redirect when parking domains or doesn’t offer 301 redirecting, then you’ll have to do it yourself. The easiest way is to get a second web hosting account for ONE of your alternate domain names, and implement the 301 redirect by adding the following code to your .htaccess file :

Redirect permanent / http://www.mainurl.com

…then parking all your other alternate domain names to point to the redirected domain.

Checking for proper redirects

If you’re not sure if your alternate domain names are redirecting properly, you can do a simple check using a program such as WebBug.

Click for larger image.

This screenshot shows me that the domain www.projectinsight.com IS properly redirecting to www.projectinsight.net, returning an HTTP header of “301 Moved Permanently” which is exactly what we were looking to achieve.

Without implementing proper redirects on your alternate domain names, not only will you have duplicate websites, but you’ll likely be splitting all your link flow between each version of the site. This will potentially cut your site’s value (as determined by the search engines via incoming links) in half.

While it’s possible for the search engines to figure out that domain A and domain B are the same, you’re still forcing them to decide which of the two domains is the one you are trying to brand, and they have a 50% or greater chance of getting it wrong.

www. vs. no www.

Real quick, go to your browser and type in yoursite.com. Does the URL in the browsers address bar change to a) http://yoursite.com or b) http://www.yoursite.com?

Now type in www.yoursite.com. Does the URL in your browser change to a) http://www.yoursite.com or b) http://yoursite.com?

In both of those instances, if you answered A then you have potential duplication issues. Here is an example of one of my articles on Gooruze.com which shows the potential duplication:

Take away the www. from the URL and lo-and behold you see the exact same article:

You can see how this can become a problem, with virtually every article having its www. or non-www. twin.

The various versions are accessed depending on how each person typed in the website in the address bar to begin with (or the link they followed.) Did they type in the www. or not? You may have, I may have not. If I then bookmark the site or provide a link to it from another site, and you do the same, we’re both sending the search engines to two different pages (URLs) both of which have the same content. If the search engines spider starting from either of those links, then literally hundreds of articles will be indexed, half of which are pure duplicates.

Fortunately, this issue isn’t as bad as a lot of duplicate content issues because most of the search engines have gotten pretty good at figuring out that those pages are the same, after a bit of time. In most cases the search engines will equate the two versions, with or without the www., as being the same page(s). But it doesn’t happen right away. In fact it can take several months or perhaps more, depending on the site, for the engines to tie the two together. While some are content to wait it out, the real danger is that you are potentially handicapping your link flow and incoming link juice while you wait.

The less you have to make the search engines think the better. Even if you’re confident that the search engines have already made the connection between the www. and non-www.versions being one and the same, you never know what might change that in the future. The best strategy then is to be proactive in “fixing” this kind of duplication.

If you’re running on an Apache server then the solution is relatively simple. Simply add this bit of code to your .htaccess file in the root directory of your server:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Don’t ask me to explain it, all I know is that it works! If your site is on any other kind of server, then you’ll have to contact your web host for a fix. The .htaccess file is pretty finicky so be sure to back it up before making any changes. Once you get the updated version uploaded, give it a shot. If you type in site.com the address should redirect to http://www.site.com. Now do the same thing but with an inner page of your site. Type in site.com/page and you should be redirected to http://www.site.com/page. There you go. All set.

In much the same way, the domain name(s) you select can also be a preventative measure against someone finding you. We can use The Home Depot as an example once again. My first attempt to get to their site I typed in www.thehomedepot.com. That goes nowhere. The URL to reach them is www.homedepot.com. This is a clear case of “what are they thinking?” The last time I checked (which was today) they bill themselves as THE Home Depot, not just Home Depot. It’s right there in their logo!

Would you believe that, according to WordTracker, approximately 63 people per day search for www.thehomedepot.com? That’s a reflection only of those typing that into a search box. Who knows how many are typing it into the address bar.

Just for fun, let’s assume that twice as many people mistype The Home Depot’s URL into the address bar as do those who attempt to search for it. If we then assume that only 10% of those searchers give up after the first try, The Home Depot is losing almost 5,000 potential shoppers each year, and that, I think, is a pretty conservative figure. That may not be a lot for a company like them, but no one ever makes money by being hard to find!

URL Alternatives

While the majority of people may naturally type your URL in properly, there will always be a handful that won’t. You have to consider carefully any variations that someone else might use, including:

• Alternate spellings
• Misspellings
• Abbreviated / Long-form versions
• phonetically similar versions
• Plural / singular versions
• .net, .org, etc.
• …sucks.com, …sux.com, etc.

Home Depot got the misspelling correct. If you type in www.homedepo.com you’re redirected to their site. But again, not if you type in www.thehomedepo.com. Another missed opportunity.

A couple of years back I did an interview for an online radio station. At the end of the interview they asked me for my domain name, in which I pronounced, but didn’t spell. As soon as the interview was done I realized my error. How many different ways are there to spell “pole”? “Pull” and “Poll” both come to mind! I immediately registered those domain names and redirected them to the main site.

Minimizing the competition

By purchasing these extra domain names, you’re not only securing alternate, yet mistaken paths to your website, you are also preventing your competition from siphoning off traffic meant for you. If you don’t buy these alternates, chances are someone else will. At best, the URL will have nothing on it and just show an “unavailable” error. At worst, they’ll redirect your visitors to their own website!

How strong your branding is will be a pretty significant factor in what domain people type in when looking for you. But no matter how good it is, there are always those that will get it wrong. Are you OK losing them to a competitor? If not, then consider carefully what domain names you might want to own and redirect to your primary URL. In The Home Depot’s case, I’m sure an additional 5,000 visitors each year is worth the purchase price of any alternative URLs.