Unfortunately this is not a unique post, in fact it is something I have harped on about a lot before - but it seems extremely relevant to me at the moment as I have had two incidents recently where I have seen that people don’t understand the concept of keywords with regard to visitor numbers to a website and more importantly the business purpose of the website.

Let me explain; your website exists for a specific purpose, whether it is to sell bed nights for your hotel, or tours, or houses on a real estate site, or rental properties as in the case of the property development guys I had lunch with yesterday, or in the case of many sites, just as source of information. The biggest mistake is to get trapped in the game of focussing purely on visitor numbers, that is, all search engine and marketing effort you put in focusses just on increasing visitor numbers, without a commensurate focus on real website purpose - say for example selling bed nights. Let me put it another way, if Xebidy reduced the overall number of visitors to your site but doubled the number of people booking a nights stay in your hotel would you say that the search engine and Internet Marketing strategy was a success or a failure?

Hopefully, a success - the return on investment is better. So, one of the most important steps in this regard is the selection of keywords that you will focus on in your marketing efforts to attract customers to your site. This is not rocket science, identify your target market, if you sell tours in Northern Territory to 35+ age group then targeting keywords such as “backpacker bus” and “backpacker tours” is a waste of time and effort, the result is that you will have a high bounce rate on your website. That means, visitors are coming to your site from search results expecting to see some information based on their search query and instead seeing something different so therefore immediately leaving your site. Step 2, identify the search queries that your target market is using, assuming then that you appear high up in the search results page for your selected terms, the higher the search volume the better. If you can find that getting high rank results in search engines for a particularly competitive terms (say Sydney hostel) is difficult, then target more specific terms that might be easier to rank with but nonetheless are more likely to lead to conversion (purchase etc) of visitors on your site. Studies have shown that the more words a user puts into their search query the more likely they are to be a purchaser.

Finally, the keywords you select should be proprietary information, they should be your competitive advantage. If you approach your keyword phrases with a great deal research and then refining them ongoing based on your analytics, which terms lead to more sales, which terms don’t - this is not something you should be telling everyone. We can use lots of tools such as Spyfu to try and work out what competitor keyword terms are, but at the end of the day only you know your sales figures. More importantly, you should be setting up goal conversions and funnels in your analytics packages so that you can see what customers are doing on your site when they come to your site from particular search terms and identifying which ones make you money.

Let’s sum up with a hypothetical example, Bob has a tour company running backpackers around New Zealand. 40% of Bob’s market is Americans, 40% English, 10% Canadian and a smattering of other nationalities thereafter. Bob’s competitors all rate very highly for the terms Backpacker Bus and Backpacker tours - Bob doesn’t. But Bob does do well for some nice generic terms such as New Zealand and Queenstown, and even adventure travel, he has spent a great deal of money targeting these terms. But, he hardly makes any sales online - why not? Because, when someone comes to his site from the search term New Zealand they leave it again. They were not looking for a backpacker tour they were looking for information on New Zealand. Xebidy do the analyse of the search terms with Bob and discover that before his market travel to New Zealand 90% of them do not use the term Backpackers. In the US Backpackers are people that go hiking in the bush and camping. In fact, Bob discovers through his analyse of his market that most of his American market are students and that the main search terms they use are in fact budget travel, student travel and student vacation. Wow and behold, this is a long way off from “backpacker”. Bob reworks his strategy, suddenly his web sales to his America market sky rockets. He does the same for his UK and Canadian market, identifying the keywords that they use in search engines and targeting his site to match. An interesting thing occurs, Bob receives the same amount of traffic as before but from different sources. He receives less customers reaching his site for non-specific terms like Queenstown and more traffic for specific terms like “cheap bus travel New Zealand” and his sales go through the roof. The last thing he is going to do is announce to his competitors, hey I found where all the business is!

Sounds too simple? It is! But it is staggering the number of people I talk to who don’t get it. They want to target broad keywords terms that don’t generate sales, that try to be everything to everyone, and interestingly enough they don’t identify their market. The use of “bus” for companies selling tours, “hotel” for companies selling hostels and Queenstown Restaurants for a company that leases commercial space properties in Queenstown. Go figure!

Following my rant last week regarding the amount of work involved in SEO and companies that charge just $99 per month I have been inundated with queries regarding just what is Optimisation (as opposed to Internet Marketing as expressed in my post). See my post here. So, I thought it prudent to give brief summary of some of the elements I consider to fall into the on-site optimisation category.

1. Keywords and content

I have discussed before (see relevant posts here) some of the methods of researching keywords and the importance of selecting the right keywords for your website. The goal is to generate more and better quality traffic to your website. The rule is to focus on 5 to 8 keyword phrases. Your chosen keywords should be contained within the main content generously. The ideal situation is to have your main keywords at the beginning of the page and toward the end of the page. Keywords can also be made bold to emphasise them as long as this is done liberally. The most important rule however about keywords relative to the content is that the content must make sense to the reader (see my earlier posts on The Art of Writing Web Content).

2. Image Optimisation

Images should be labelled with your keywords and the alt text used to clearly identify the image using where possible your keywords. Alt text enables web readers with disabilities to have the image described to them. Search engines can’t view images either and so use the alt text to build up their database of information regarding your site. Using keywords in your alt text helps search engines build up a “picture” of your website.

3. Meta data

The use of meta data in the web page head is believed to influence search engine rankings less and less. However, there is some minimum data that should be supplied; including the author of the website, the date the website was created, the type of content (whether it is general or adult), and a description of the website. One of the biggest mistakes in meta data is to stuff lots and lots of keywords into both the keyword meta tag and the description meta tag. At the most the description and keywords should be about 250 characters long each. The text in the description meta tag may also appear in the search results so consider these carefully.

4. Title and heading tags

Earlier this month I posted a piece on the importance of links in which I discussed how a search engine page rank algorithm mimics the concept of referencing other published articles in a scientific journal or similar. As an extension of this concept search engines place weight to the structure of the document. The title of the web page therefore being considered the most important - that which draws the reader in and is most often referenced. Subsequent headings are given weight at a diminishing rate. Using your keywords in your titles tells the search engines that your keywords are important to the overall theme of your website.

5. Other optimisation techniques

There are other factors which are perhaps the most important. These mainly centre on the physical code of your website. Ensure, firstly, that search engines can index your website thoroughly. Search engines can not navigate flash (and many can not even read the content) or other fancy dynamic menus, therefore, ensure that all pages within your website can be reached through simple text based links. Text based links describe the purpose of the link better to search engines than image links (and once again you should use your keywords here). Moreover, search engines will deprecate the value of your website if they find dead links - that is, links that don’t go anywhere. Likewise, search engines do not like dynamic URL’s nor URL structures that are heavily deep in folder structures. The reason is that search engine programmers fear the search engine spider may become trapped within the website URL structure linking round and round within the site. Websites containing deep folder navigations and long dynamic URL’s (those usually containing the question mark) are often abandoned by search engines before the whole site has been indexed.

Finally, this is probably one of the least talked about elements and one of the most interesting for us at Xebidy. There are a few rules that should be applied to the development of all websites to make the search engine ready. One of the most important ones is the code to content ratio. In my opinion sites should be developed in CSS as much as possible thereby removing any formatting code from the actual web page and storing it in a separate file. Likewise any Javascript code for menus etc should be stored in a separate file. Code order can also be used to advantage. As I said before the higher that keywords appear in your content the greater weight they are given by search engines. If you main content appears higher up the coded page the more important it will be viewed by search engines. In this way if menus etc. exist in the left hand columns techniques such as relative and absolute positioning and floating the divs left and right can be used to not render the website correctly on screen without necessarily coding in strict chronological order.

These are just some of the main techniques we would use in getting your website ready for a search engine to visit and therefore index. However, as I clearly stated in last week’s rant these are only the start of any effort to increase search engine rankings and are certainly not sufficient to guarantee high rankings - nor maintain them!

Accessing your bookmarks from any computer was always a problem until the social bookmark sites such as De.licio.us and Digg.com came along. On these sites you simply create an account and save web pages to your account accessible from any website. But in practice you find that you end up saving lots and lots of web pages with no real rhyme or reason. Certainly not like the bookmarks in your browser, which are clearly labelled and highly organised into relevant categories.

I always thought the issue of bookmarks across multiple computers was a real problem, and although I have dumped lots of sites into Digg I hardly tag them with much thought. But, the other day I heard about Foxmarks via the Techcrunch blog. It seemed like the solution to all problems - a free plugin for Firefox that allowed you to synchronise your browser bookmarks across numerous computers. To make this product even more exciting Mitch Kapor (the guy who launched Lotus 123 in the 80’s) is heading it up and the stated plan is to use the intelligence of the collective masses bookmarks and ordering of these bookmarks by the user with some considered relevancy to create a human powered search engine. Perhaps this is the competitor to Google that everyone is waiting on with baited breath.

Recent interest in the launch of the Mahalo search engine, which is completely human powered, continues the debates over Google versus the rest of the world - which is ongoing and if Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) ever gets his human powered search engine off the ground it will only be even more heated. Those anti Google argue that the search results are not relevant enough to the search terms, that there are simply too many erroneous results and then there is the cheating of the results. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that purely human driven search engines can ever become a ‘real’ competitor to Google. There is a critical mass of results that need to be achieved before the search engine is usable and users very quickly lose interest in a search engine that does not have enough relevant results to provide them with what they are looking for - therefore, despite the numerous irrelevant results we are immediately drawn back to Google. I submitted Xebidy Strategic Design to Mahalo over 6 weeks ago and it still has not been catalogued - let alone many of the major serach terms that I deal with ever day in the travel industry.

To me Foxmarks provides the alternative. A human powered, automated search engine based on taxonomies created for your very own personal use and therefore with greater relevancy and consideration - unlike the folksonomies of the social bookmarking sites with are plagued with throw-away terms.

But is has been interesting watching the comments section on the Tech Crunch post as many people have bought up examples of other such products which have existed in the past or exist now. That is, cross computer bookmarks. The most obvious one is Google; first there is your personal page which allows you to create bookmarks neatly organised into categories, and then there is Google Browser Sync which is also a plugin for Firefox syncing bookmarks and even cookies if you want. Then there are a whole host of others such as Yoono, ULinkIt (which became Quiver), Smarky, and Hot Links - which dates back to 2000.

What is the difference? With the exception of Google there is a big difference. Firstly, being a plugin for Firefox Foxmarks will gain a much faster pickup than other similar offerings, and that pickup will only grow as the exponential growth of Firefox continues. Smarky is also a Firefox plugin, but in my opinion Foxmarks will outstrip it overnight because of the weight of the guys like Mitch Kapor and Todd Agulnick which will create the necessary marketing hype.

But is Foxmarks the angelic competitor to Google? No! Those that see the Google algorithm as purely a construct of Page Rank are missing a very important point. There are so many factors that go into this complicated algorithm, such as inward and outward links, traffic, onsite optimisation techniques such as keyword density, keyword positioning within paragraphs, image naming and so on and so on. If Google believes that Foxmarks creates a database of any relevance they will simply include some level of weighting for bookmarks in Browser Sync and Google personal pages - overcoming this critical mass is surely nigh impossible.

A question in today from Denis Baker at Aventure Lingusitique in Geneva - “can you have too many meta tags?”
Yes, you can have too many meta tags. The actual use of meta tags are deprecated by most search engines; and we are unsure as to their relevancy these days. There are sites with top rankings that have no meta data and sites with top rankings that do. What we are sure of is that the Google database only holds 250 characters for each meta tag - which amounts to 5 to 8 keyword phrases.

You should be targeting only that many.

An important point though is that different pages can have different keyword targets; your home page will be most generic - “study English overseas” etc., but your pages about your US schools will have different focus - “learn English in the US” - and hence variations of the met tags. Denis’ strategy of a core set, plus page specific keywords is exactly right. The core set should be quite specific and selected for search volume and competition.

I actually did some work with Denis on researching his keyword bundle. It was very interesting as his site is targeted toward French speakers and my French can get me a coffee, a beer and a lay (theoretically). What transpired though was that the language and indeed the word was irrelevant and we were able to build up a great set of keywords through following methodical steps researching search volumes and competitor numbers. Good luck with the business mate!

I read an article a while ago from Forrester Research about moving your business to a design-centric business. This article was concerned about justifying web spend and getting the whole business focused on web design for success. The article proposed that in a design-centric business news of successes in the website are spread across the whole business. It really hit home to me the other day when I was talking firstly with Bruce Thurlow the Online Manager at Adventure Tours and Oz Experience and then the CEO Ken Hart.

I have been working with Bruce for awhile now on their web strategy and recently there has been a host of real successes in the project. For example, following our keyword research we choose to focus on a keyword phrase that took in the terms “holiday package”. Not terms that you would associate with either of these companies, but terms that we discovered are researched a plenty on the Internet. Anyway, since a bit of on-site optimisation and a wait for Google to index the relevant pages, sales of packages have gone up considerably.

It is not the rise in package sales that has surprised me so much, but the lack of realisation by Ken that this increased revenue was a direct result of the effort by Bruce and his team. Most people in an organisation of any size don’t understand the website, or the mechanics of the eCommerce. As such this example bought back the aforementioned article to me that within a web project all successes no matter what size should be promoted by the team responsible throughout the company. Evangalise you successes, tell your company stakeholders, and at the end of the day justify your existence - no one else in the company will.

This just comes up so much and I thought I would use this post to reinforce it. Don’t waste time optimising your website for generic keywords or keywords that are not directly related to your product!

For example, if you run a bus company in South Australia there is absolutely no value in being in the top ten of Google for a term such as “Hostel Cairns”. A customer that types in this keyword is probably looking for a hostel in Cairns. Much more pertinent is to work out what your customers are typing into search engines to find the best way to transport themselves in your operating area and target these key phrases.

Unfortunately, this is just one example of the sort of poor keyword targeting I see everyday. As I discussed in our February article concentrate on optimising your site for only 5 to 8 keyword phrases; select these based on expected quantity of traffic they will generate; and track their performance - at the end of the day there should be just one axiom that drives your web strategy: “generate more sales!”.

In this regard a strategy that focuses on simply more traffic is a flawed marketing strategy - as I said to someone the other day, the Marketing Manager does get a promotion for achieving a number one Google rating, but they do lose their job if they fail to deliver any sales.

Well here it is!
Search Engine Optimistation and Internet Marketing

The first monthly article from Xebidy Strategic Design. So many of you have been asking for more information on Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation that it seemed natural to make this the topic of our first free monthly article. Please send it to friends or get them to join the mailing list by emailing stuff@xebidy.com

Enjoy!