In our last article, Effective Web Marketing: Common Sense SEO Developing an Effective Keyword Strategy, we discussed the methodology of coming up with a successful keyword strategy.  This article discussed how to keep those successes.  At the outset, you should understand that building a site that successfully attracts search engines yields neither immediate nor persistent results.  It takes time to test, analyze, optimize, and adjust web pages for the desired results.  This is only partly because search engines index your pages at infrequent and unpredictable intervals, but also because their methods for evaluating the pages are constantly evolving and growing more sophisticated over time.

In addition, the thousands of competitors (and non-competitors) using similar keywords are goring in number and sophistication.  At some point you may be competing for position with a new popular movie which has similar keywords to the ones you have used to describe your product.  And all of those competing sites want to accomplish the same thing you do: achieve high page 1 ranking for their site.

I like to tell clients to think of their website as analogous to a store front.  If a store is in a good neighborhood with lots of foot traffic (well optimized in the SEO sense), it will generate lots of interest.  But if the client  does little to promote the site or chooses a failing strategy, few people will know it’s there, or be interested even if they do come across it.  If a store with good traffic goes on the cheap and dresses the window in brown paper, and wire mannequins, few will stop to look.  And if the owner kept the window looking the same year after year, especially when other stores were changing their windows to reflect the new styles and seasons, it will attract little interest because it appears that the owner doesn’t care.  Similarly, websites need to change their content and appearance to attract new customers, and to refresh interest from the search engines.

Like Eddie Murphy’s character, Axel Foley, in Beverly Hills Cop where he’s a “biness man always poppin’ and movin””, that’s what a successful website has to do too.  Search engines like sites with new and fresh content, and so do readers.  And so do website owners, because an up-to-date site ensures that the site will be able to compete effectively.  Visualize your website as a salesman who sells your product or services.  You should expect to spend about as much on your website which you expect to draw in new customers, as you would pay a good salesman!

In the beginning of the web era, there was a school of thought that would stoke the copy with keywords, and even put invisible keywords to fool the robots, but be unavailable to the human reader.  The search engines have long since gotten wise to such scams, and now penalize sites who try such stunts.  The strategy today is to write for the readers (with a nod to scoring moderately for keyword density) and produce interesting, informative fresh copy that is of value to the user.  In the process, there’s plenty of time and space to promote your product or service.  But it’s not too different from selling in the real world:  if you try to scam the customer, he’ll eventually figure out the game and won’t do business with you anymore.

However, if you use the medium to build an honest, helpful and informative conversation with the customer, the market as a whole will be healthier, and you will get your fair share of business because you are providing extra value for the customer.

In our last SEO article, Effective Web Marketing: Common Sense SEO Choose Your Battles and Your Terrain, we made the point that a micro-targeting strategy, using the long tail principle would reward you with more visitors, and more qualified visitors to your site.  In essence, the strategy is to choose very specific key words to describe the product you are offering on any given page, and concentrate on marketing only that item on that page.  We used the example of ‘electric swizzle sticks’ instead of ‘appliances’ to capture a surer position in the search engine for those who were searching for ‘household bar appliances’.

An obvious objection might be, ‘But swizzle sticks are only a small portion of what I sell, and their profit margin is very small!’  While that’s true, there is no real limit on the number of pages you can have.  If you’re in the appliance business, you can have a separate page for blenders, another for ice machines, another for bar fridges, etc.  And each of these pages will be dedicated to the specific appliance you want to target.

You don’t need to sell everything on your home page – in fact nobody really tries to do this anymore.  In fact – every one of your pages on your site is an opportunity to sell a different product or service.  And to neglect this strategy is to condemn your site to be far down the list in search engine offerings for any product!  Now that you have adopted the long tail strategy of positioning your web pages, it’s time to get down to the fine tuning of each page that is important in getting you the results you want.
Returning to our ‘electric swizzle stick’ example, it’s obvious that not everyone who is looking for such an item will refer to it by the same name.  Some are looking for an ‘electric bar stirrer’, some a ‘drink mixer’, still others a ‘hand drink mixed’, and perhaps a dozen other terms, taking into account regional language and terminology differences.

So your job is to brainstorm with other members of your organization, and come up with a list of a dozen or so synonymous terms which you feel that the searching public might enter in the Google search box and expect to see your product.   Sit around, and try to imagine that many ways the public might end up looking for your product.  Often, this is NOT the way you refer to your product.  For instance, if your marketing folks come up with a process which uses ultrasound to hostile the molecules in a drink to make a more thoroughly mixed drink experience, it is not necessarily true that the public will be searching for that ‘ultrasound drink experience’, even though that might be the phrase that the marketers hope to make famous.

Once you have compiled your list (actually, there may be multiple lists because you may have multiple products to be found by different searches), now you have to validate and quantify your brainstorming choices.  The will require you to employ the use of one or several tools and techniques to assist you.  For organic searches (those that are NOT paid), you want to choose terms that are relatively infrequently found in web pages, and relatively frequently searched for.  So if you quantified the number of pages containing each phrase, and divided THAT number into the number of times that term had been searched for over a period of time, al other things being equal, you would select the terms having the higher quotients as your ‘favorite’ key words to optimize for.

Here are a few of those tools available on the web:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Enter a search term or terms, to display other keywords related to that term.

Google Trends:Insights into broad search patterns.

Google Insights for Search: Compares search volume patterns.

Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool: Returns related terms rated by popularity. Data is collected from the Dogpile and Metacrawler meta search engines.

Trellian Free Search Term Suggestion Tool: Ranking similar to WordTracker

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool: a wrapper for the Yahoo! keywords tool

Now, understand that there are literally billions of web pages out there, and choosing the right ones to deliver is not a trivial task.  Let’s say you have a business that sells household appliances.   Well, there are thousands of other business that are in the same line of work.  How do you get your page to the top of the list?  Don’t forget that if your page is 240th on Google’s list, it will appear on page 10 of the results.  It’s not too likely that many people will have the patience to wade through 10 pages of results and find your offerings.

One poor strategy might involve optimizing your page for another popular trending topic of the moment – say Britny Spears, or Jonas Brothers, or Barack Omaba.  That might bring a lot of traffic to your page over the near term, but not traffic that would result in folks buying an appliance from you.  Mostly, those people would visit your site expecting to get information on one of the trending topics listed above – and would be disappointed!  The search engines would also quickly find out about your rouse, and would ban you for your deception.  Don’t forget – it makes them look bad, too.

So now you can see that if you optimize your page for ‘appliances’, you will lose because Amazon,, Sears, Walmart, and hundreds of other more well-known and better capitalized businesses are ahead of you in the line.  If you optimize for one of the popular trending topics of the day, you will disappoint the user, and the search engines, and, most likely, be banished into the black hole of unindexed sites. What’s a body to do?

Well one strategy is to employ the ‘long tail strategy‘.  A hypothetical user is searching for an electric bar swizzle stick.  Consider the number of people in a month who search for ‘appliances’ – could be in the hundreds of thousands – huge competition for you; household appliances in the tens of thousands – less competition, but still unworkable; ‘household bar appliances’, perhaps in the hundreds – much better!  Similarly, if you were a dentist who wished to maintain a viable presence on the internet, simply optimizing your page for ‘dentist’ would put you in competition with  tens of thousands of other dentists.  However, if you were a endodontist in Rye, NY, or Westchester County, you would have a much better chance at being clicked on by a guy with a root canal issue in Rye, NY.

So the right strategy is to give up the very small opportunity to be seen by a rare one of the hundreds of thousands of folks who are looking anywhere for any kind of appliance or dentist for the much larger chance of being selected by a user looking for a specific product or service in an certain area – even though that population will be much smaller than the generic search.  Now there are a number of variations on this particular technique.  They vary with the size and budget of your organization, the number of goods and services you offer, and the type of business you’re in.  But this long tail technique, generically speaking, is one of the most effective search engine optimization tools available.  Please visit our website, or watch this blog for further articles on SEO (search engine optimization) and web development.

It is the main job of anyone who is engaged in search engine optimization to make that website friendly and hospitable to search engines.  Help them do their job, and do not adopt the attitude that you can co-opt them.  Ig you push that envelope too far, the engines will penalize you by deducting points from your page, or, in extreme cases, by refusing to index your pages at all.

It’s important to understand that a search engine sees ONLY text.  It can’t understand pictures, or movies, or Flash files or any graphics.  Only words and text are indexed by the search engine.  It can see code, but disregards it.  And the text which it sees, the search engine will try to put that text into some intelligent context to help assign some meaning when it matches the text to a search.  Different search engines accomplish this task in slightly different ways, but the basics are the same.

The better search engines accept site maps.  These are XML files that show all of the indexable pages (or files) on a site, along with information about the files, such as creation date, most recent update date, and its position in the site hierarchy.  These files are very helpful to the search engine in evaluating the site, and, in fact, submission of one will frequently bring about a new reindexing of the site when it is submitted.

Search engines attach more weight to text at the beginning of a page.  Text which matches phrases found in the Title of the page is assigned an especially important ranking, and text which is further down the page is assigned a diminished importance.  Some engines lose patience as they get further and further down a page, and quit indexing after a certain point.  So a page with lots and lots of javascript code near the top of the page may be thumbing its nose at the search engine, and will possibly be rewarded with a low ranking because of that.  If you must use javascript in your pages, annex that code to a separate file, and reference that file in the HTML.

Strictly speaking, not all search sites are search engines.  Yahoo!, for instance, is a directory where sites are indexed by hand by a staff of people who categorize sites.

But in the search engine category, Google is the 800 pound gorilla.  It has nearly an 80% share of the global market today, though this has shrunk nearly 3% in the past year, as Yahoo!’s share has brown from 9% to 12%.  So, obviously, it makes a lot of sense to pay attention to what Google is doing.

Google has two forms of placements in their pages.  One is AdSense, a Pay-per-Click (PPC) program where subscribers pay for each phrase they wish to advertise under.  Those paid ads appear either on the top of the google page, or on the right of the page, depending on your chosen Google page format, when a user searches for a phrase that matches the one paid for.  Each time the advertiser’s ad appears, Google charges his account an amount varying on the placement premium the PPC client has agreed to pay.

The rest of the Google pages are printed the ‘free’ or organic search results.  The objective is to construct your web page such that your page ranks high in the organic search listing.  Now the actual formula Google (and the other search engines) use to determine which sites get a high ranking, and which do not is a highly guarded secret.  And it is ever changing, and varies from search engine to search engine.  If it were publicized, everyone would adjust their web pages to accommodate the formula, thus defeating the purpose of the formula.  Not only does the ranking formulae change constantly, but the demand for those key phrases is ever changing, as is the re-working of sites all jockeying for position in the competition for high visibility.

Most users tend to favor the organic search results.

So the takeaway from this article is that prime placement in the organic rankings is a very valuable asset, but it is fleeting and ever buffeted by changes in competition, formulaic changes in the search engines, and even with rank of other pages in the website.  Second, because of all of the diverse forces at play, the placement of a website in any given search listing will fluctuate according to ALL of those factors.  So it is not possible to control your site’s placement in a search result – you can only hope to influence it.  Having said that, it is clear that search engines bestow honors on sites that produce fresh, new content that is helpful to the consumer, and that is well organized with good links.

In many cases, developers have cookie cutter templates that create sites that can be put up in a matter of days.  The average developer can put up a credible site that looks good and that will satisfy their customers’ desires for a web presence rather cheaply and profitably.  And then he will move on to the next customer with his offer to build an inexpensive website.  They have fulfilled their part of the bargain.  And in the process have not only benefited from harvesting the low hanging fruit from the client, but have left the client with an (in many cases) appealing looking site that in many cases gets in the way of the client’s attaining what he really needed in the first place: an effective tool that will enhance his marketing presence on the web.  For years, web developers have included Flash files and fancy Javascript in websites that until recently were completely ignored by search engines.  But that is only one of the many SEO faux pas that have been commonplace practice by naive ‘drive by’ web developers.

A far better approach is to settle on the marketing (SEO) strategy first, and then make the web development process serve those marketing aims.  That way, menus can be designed intelligently, and in a way that conforms naturally to the objectives of the site.  The site as a whole can be planned and developed with an eye to leading the potential client on a journey that is a surrogate to having a conversation with the client.

This is the ONLY way that endeavors of this type make any sense.  The usual way is tantamount to firing a gun before aiming it.

I organized a white water rafting trip several years ago down the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania.  Because my group of friends all lived in NJ near New York City, I arranged for everyone to stay at a charming hotel in Pennsylvania, just over the border from NJ, with the idea of completing the journey early the next morning.  As it happened, staying at the Hotel that same evening was a ‘convention’ (about 25) of various practioners of the occult and paranormal.  There were palm readers, hypnotists, phrenologists, astrologers, and all manner of strangeness.  I played piano for everybody for a while in the parlor, and afterward, the two groups mingled and discussed affairs of the day, and their respective professions.  To a man the paramormal folks seemed to be obsessed with tearing down their peers, and trying to appear to be the unchallenged spokesman of their particular branch of the field. ‘She’s a fraud’, or ‘He hasn’t discovered anything in years’ or ‘I have a new discovery which has revolutionized the field of astrology’ were typical ‘confidential’ comments made to members of our group in private conversations.  We all laughed and compared notes the next day.

So it is with our profession.There are many who claim to have the keys to the kingdom.  Whether or not they do will only be determined in the future, and someone is always changing the locks.

So in the weeks ahead, I’ll be blogging a series of articles about common sense web marketing and SEO that has proved quite effective in the past.  But today’s take away is to begin with a comprehensive plan: what you are selling, how it will be sold and marketed, what platform you will use, and how easy it will be for you to adjust your message, product listing and how to market on each of the important search engines, and social media.  You won’t need fancy software to do this. For my clients I use Microsoft OneNote for the narrative portions and to flesh out the strategies, and Microsoft Excel to keep track of the metrics and benchmarks.

Although future correspondence suggested that he really wanted me to buy something from his site, I did look at the workmanship of his site and made some, what I thought, valuable suggestions.

His site was illustrative of several common errors in web development that will have an important negative effect on the quality, and effectiveness of the site.  I have changed his colors, and eliminated all traces of the name of his site from these illustrations.  I have no intent to embarrass the owner of the site, but thought the site a good example of several rookie errors in development.  Here are two images of his site, using the same css file.  Modern sites use css (cascading style sheets) to allow efficient manipulation of the site’s appearance and behavior.  One image is the rendering of the site in a recent version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (above).  The one below is a rendering of the site using the current version of Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

The difference between the two is striking, and would have been obvious to any developer who bothered to check the appearance of the website by viewing them through the commonly used browsers of today.  Obviously, this simple (and commonly accepted)  exercise was omitted in developing his site.  This was a serious design flaw, but not the most serious.  Current market stats suggest that IE has 66% of the market, with Firefox and Safari with another 30%.  While it is arguable that IE has twice the market share of the Mozilla browsers, what marketer in his right mind would ignore  nearly 1/3 of a potential market?

The title of the home page (which was a casualty of my image editing) was ‘Figurines’.  That was the only description on the site, despite the fact that nowhere on the site were figurines advertised for sale.  Thus the site owner was squandering his most precious opportunity to have his site properly indexed in the leading search engines.

The home page was more than 50% javascript – and that javascript code was concentrated at the beginning of the file.  Modern websites use javascript sparingly, relying more heavily on advanced css techniques.  What javascript remains should be annexed to a separate file which is referenced early in the html file.  Search engines attribute the greatest importance to the beginning of a page.  Lower portions of a pages are relegated less importance in the indexing process.  So, if the early part of a page is choked with javascript, most of the SEO love that Google could bestow on that page is wasted.

Finally, there is virtually NO CONTENT or MENU on the page.  Now remember this is his HOME PAGE!  Google and the other important search engines assign their highest criteria to the content of a page.  This page is loaded with images of stuff he wants to sell, but almost no text.  Bearing in mind that text is one of the few things that search engines see well, it is no surprise that this site is not ranking well with Google, or any other search engine.

There were other issues with the site, as well.  But to go into them here would make this article too long.  Suffice it to say that the issues uncoovered with this site in the brief review presented here suggest that the odds are long against this being a successful site.  Given the expectations of revenue to be derived from a site meant for business, it is always a good investment to make sure that the site has professional appearance, and professional quality performance.