SEO

Recently I was able to make a trip to Hawaii and meet with Sergio from the PEK Interactive San Diego office. After two years in Japan it was good to see a team member I speak with on a daily basis but had not seen for awhile. We discussed the changes in the industry and how to help client receive more return in investment for their online campaigns. We were able to meet with two of our Japanese clients there and discuss their online plans over the next year.

Sergio and I were able to meet with Java programming guru Dave Thomas and discuss the latest developments on high performance content management systems. Dave is also an expert Unix administrator so it was great to discuss new database and server setups.

Sergio and I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. SEO Hawaii, Dave Zuls briefly and discuss the similarities and differences of the SEO and web design industry in Hawaii, the mainland and Japan. It was good to meet someone that I see often in the forums and respect. Hopefully we will meet again at one of the search engine or online advertising conferences.

Thank you Hawaii for the great business trip and the aloha spirit we enjoyed.

We have a client with a great website but the firm keeps buying more domains for certain pages or themes from the main site. Here is an edited extract of my email to them:

One idea about the domain names. I think it is good to buy domain names related to the business. But as far as marketing in the search engines, I think it is a bad idea because it makes your online marketing a lot more difficult.

Instead of having one main site that ranks well and all our marketing effort goes into improving the quality and search engine ranking of that one site, we have to worry about marketing five [this client's] sites (or more). It becomes much more difficult, time consuming and expensive. Also Google and Yahoo punish sites with duplicate content, so we would need to remove most of the [product A] info (for example) from the main site and move it to the new [product A] site. Then I need to rank the new [product A] site for all the related keywords, to compete against other competitor sites and also against our other [this client's] sites that have same related keywords.

I have one client here in Japan that has 15 sites for their main business. They originally called me wondering why all the sites are ranked poorly and they have trouble finding leads through their sites. The 15 sites are competing against each other for the same keywords and phrases so they cannot get any traction against their real competitors. We are working with them to combine all those sites into one site under one domain name. Then they can focus on making that one site the best in their market.

The only time I would recommend having multiple sites is if you have a new product or service or business that is very different from your core business, for example if you offered [product A] for pro baseball players. Then the marketing copy, images, look and feel, etc. would be very different. We have a customer that is a successful retailer of hunting, fishing and camping products. They also sell law enforcement equipment to the local police, CHP, FBI, etc. The law enforcement marketing message is so different from their camping and fishing pitch that it warranted a different site which we built in a sub-domain of the main site.

Another company that has done this successfully is Pfizer. They have a separate site for each drug but since the marketing for those sites is different, (viagra vs. migraine drugs) and they have the budget to do it, it makes sense. In contrast, Honda has all their USA marketing under one domain name but they do use sub-domains for models: civic.honda.com , accord.honda.com, racing.honda.com, etc. They do not use a lot of different domain names to market online.

…Sorry for giving this as unsolicited advice but I think it is a mistake to built these mini sites. We can always buy domain names then point them to the main site but in my experience building these mini sites will dilute your power online to build [your] brand.

I think there are good specific reasons to buy domains and set up mini sites for side businesses, but I think there is an idea that it is a good practice to build sites to compete against your other site, which I disagree with. The only exception is if you have a huge marketing budget to pull off top ranking for many sites.

I sent this email to one of our web design clients. The site was a bilingual English and Japanese site. It wasn’t the best email I have ever written but I thought it summarized my feelings about the importance of good content and increasing conversions….

Thank you for your mail. There are two things I try to keep in mind is that the company’s material is very familiar to someone in the company, but for the outsider they might understand quickly what you mean. If you meet them face to face you can see they do not understand by their body language, but online you will never know. People will quit the site, if they do not understand within about 8 seconds. Marketing online is very brutal, it has to be very very good just to have a chance to have them contact you.

With our PEK site, everything is very familiar to us. All the terminology in the site, we use everyday but sometimes site visitors do not understand what we are talking about because they are not familiar with these terms (SEO, SEM, PPC, RSS, etc). So we had a non PEK person that is a proofreader go through it and made changes and recommendation so that an ordinary person would understand our text as well as a web professional. I think it is easier to read now and people can see the benefit immediately on each page. Our site needs a lot more work but we are trying to improve it each week (just like our competitors do). My mother is a property manager and manages huge budgets, tens of millions of dollars. I often call her and ask her to read a new page on our site and tell me what it means. If she can’t answer quickly, I know other business mangers won’t understand it either and we need to rewrite it if we have any chance to sell that product or service.

There are a lot of terms on [your] website, which I have no idea what it means, which is ok if there is another place on the site for me to read about some benefits and features for non [this kind of products] engineers. But now there is no place for that. The home is more of a history of the [product] and the company rather than a benefits statement telling me about the ROI of the product, how I will save money, save the Earth, etc. I think it would be wise to have a good proofreader, that not only understands engineering but can explain it to non engineers, go through the site.

Also some of my Japanese friends read the Japanese site and said it was hard to read or a little boring. So it might need a proofread by a non [company] member in Japan too to make it easier to read for non engineers, for example business buyers. I am not sure if [the boss] has someone he is working with for marketing advise in [the city], maybe they can recommend someone with experience or success writing online. The reason is again that most web users will only give a site 8 seconds before deciding to stay or go, so the text needs to be really good.

There is a really good book about writing for the websites, called Net Words: Creating High-Impact Online Copy by Nick Usborne. You might want to pick it up and give it a read as you travel. Then just keep practicing rewriting content the homepage. As the content improves, you will see that the time spend on the site will increase (Google analytics has that stat) as people become more interested in the product. I know you are very busy so it might be a lot of investment of time but marketing online requires it.

I hope this is helpful.

Thank you,

Jeff

The Open Directory Project also called DMOZ has been down for a week. The forms to submit a site are not working.

DMOZ is used by Google as its directory. So for sites that want to rank well organically in Google, it is important to be listed.

The DMOZ garners a lot of criticism because it takes so long to be included or that it is reported that DMOZ editors accept bribes to include sites in their human edited directory.

Bill Hartzer posted an excellent article at WebProNews about SEO for corporate websites. He goes over the most important items, including: the home page, product pages, news, articles, leadership and ROI.

Although your corporate website does not allow customers to purchase products or services online, your company can benefit greatly from optimizing your website for the search engines. Ranking well in the search engine results will not only increase your business’s brand awareness, it will bring increased sales leads, which will lead to increased ROI from your corporate website.

First, he recommended that the corporate homepage have paragraphs of text and links to the most important pages in the site.

Second, the article mentions that on the product and services pages, each page should be unique. These pages should also include several paragraphs of text with targeted keywords in that text.

Product or services pages can help bring in sales leads for your company. When potential customers are looking for a product or service the company sells, they typically turn to search engines. When they find your product or services page listed in the search engines, the visitor will come directly to your product or service page. They’ll typically take a few seconds to glance at what you have to offer; its at that time when you need to give them some sort of action to take.

Mr. Hartzer also argues that the company news and events pages are an important way to increase brand awareness and generate leads. He makes a great recommendation about trade shows:

Oftentimes people search at the search engines for trade shows they’re going to attend. By including separate web pages about each trade show the company is going to attend or exhibit at, there’s a good chance that people searching for that trade show in the search engines will see the page on the corporate website mentioning the fact that the company is attending; this can lead to company and brand awareness as well as potential sales leads. If someone is searching for the trade show then they’re interested in that particular industry; so those types of visitors to your corporate site are extremely targeted and valuable.

Corporate websites offer an excellent way to market the company as an industry leader. Including articles from the company’s experts will increase the website’s credibility. Additionally having information about the company’s executives is helpful for those who search for this information. Each leadership page should have it unique title and description.

The article’s concluding paragraph is a must read for corporate or “in-house” SEO:

By making a few changes to your corporate website that dont sacrifice its quality and good looks, you can make your corporate website pay for itself by turning it into a serious lead generation tool. Not only will your corporate website be found at the top of the search results, it will be seen as an industry leader and start to show up everywhere for your company’s most important keyword phrases, the phrases related to your products and services. And not only will the corporate website be found more often in the search engines, it will increase your company’s brand awareness.

RSS and Search Engines. Search engines are always watchful for fresh content. Google, Yahoo and MSN will generally reward sites that provide new content on a regular basis. For example, if I write an article every week and place it on my web site. I then link to that article from my home page and from my news or articles page. That article is made available to others as an item in my RSS file. People who use RSS readers like My Yahoo! or other news aggregators can read, then link to the article from their website.

I have now syndicated my content for others to view. This is a great way to improve or maintain your search engine rankings by naturally getting incoming links. Every time you write a new article it will be instantly available to thousands of webmasters, with a link back to your website.

There could be several reasons a site is not ranking well in the search engines. Here are some possible reasons.

One is the navigation. Did your web designer include a java script or flash menu on the new site? Search engines do not like java script or flash menus. If the search engine “spider” or “bot” looking for new content discover a java script or flash menu, it will usually skip it and look for other content. When it skips the menu, it misses the rest of the website pages (unless a different navigation path is provided).

Another reason is a lack of content or content that is placed in images or Flash media. Some web designers love to do this. Google, Yahoo and MSN do not read the text imprinted on images or included in Flash movies. If a website has all of it’s text placed in images, it will be hard to find that content included in the search engine results. Make sure website content is in regular text.

Lack of incoming links. An incoming link is like a vote for a site. The more links, the more popular the site will appear to the search engines. It is incorrect to think that if I build a site, naturally it will be popular and rank on the first page of Google without any effort. Having other websites link to yours is a very crucial step to having the site rank well in the search engines.

This is a very simple overview. These search engine optimization issues are further discussed here.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. RSS enables distributing and gathering content from sources and websites, including newspapers, magazines, and blogs. RSS is a popular format for this syndication. Another popular format is Atom.

Business websites can use RSS to easily create and distribute news feeds that include links, headlines, and summaries.

My Yahoo, MSN and AOL users can setup RSS feeds to gather headlines of interest automatically.

PEK Japan uses both RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds to distribute its news, SEO articles and usability discussions. RSS systems setup for PEK Japan clients have received positive reviews from customers and customer’s clients.