Website Design and Promotion

Avoiding Search Engine Penalties

Search Engine Watch has a great two part article by Marcela De Vivo on Coping With Search Engine Penalties.

In the first part of the article Marcela mentions that many people assume they have been penalized if their site has experienced a loss of search engine rankings when in fact there are many other possible reasons for the lower rankings. Marcela gives the following examples of perceived penalties:

• host has prevented the site from being  crawled
• Server is down or having problems during crawl, so pages aren't indexed
• Robots.txt could be badly written
• Problems with crawlers
• Virtual crawling problems
• Domain name problems
• Lost links causes ranking to drop
• Rankings drop because other sites are better or have more links
• Rankings drop due to a search engine algorithm shift

Marcela also points out the recommendations Google has at it's site for avoiding being penalized:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links
• Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects
• Don't send automated queries to Google
• Don't load pages with irrelevant words
• Don't create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content

While the first part of this article examines this issue in relation to Google, the second part of the article addresses penalties by Yahoo and MSN.

While it is a good idea to be aware of some of these issues, if you write clear content on your web pages  that makes sense to your visitors without attempting to fool the search engines in any way, you probably don't have anything to worry about.

Making it Personal

An interesting thread in WebmasterWorld.com about "writing the perfect home page."  Although, as often happens in such forums, there are digressions, there are also some good tips and findings.

One point that I found interesting is that having a human face on your home page (and, I suspect on other pages of your site) is something that compels viewers. Apparently there's research to prove this and I don't doubt it for one second. Having a human face on your home page adds an element of personalness (Is that a word?), especially if you're offering a service and that face is yours. If you're not in the service industry (or not a sole practitioner), you can always use a stock photo of a person on your home page to give the sense that there are human beings behind the website and also include photos of your staff, board members, etc. in the About Us page.

Having designed websites for several therapists and healing professionals, I know their clients have felt that they've had the chance to "get to know them" before actually calling or meeting them in person. Of course, well written web copy is a huge factor in this, but having your photo also plays an important role.

A lot of us are shy about putting our picture for the "whole world to see." But, as long as it's a good photo (preferably professionally taken), nobody's going to laugh at it.

Many Internet surfers feel that being on the computer and looking at websites can be a very impersonal experience. Help visitors to your site feel more comfortable by having a human face to look at.

The Case for Having a Business Blog

In An Argument for Small Business Blogging, Chris Campbell cites some statistics on blogging:

Reported in a study by Comscore:

• 30% of US Internet users visited blogs in 2005 which is a 45% increase from 2004.

Reported in a study by Blogads:

    •     Blog readers’ median income hover between $60,000 and $90,000

    •     75% of blog readers are over 30 years old

    •     75% of blog readers are men

    •     75% of blog readers are looking for news they can’t find elsewhere.

    •     72% of blog readers never read blogs through an RSS (a method of being notified when a                   particular blog has been updated).

As Chris points out, blogging is still in it's infancy and with it's continued growth, Google's love of blogs, and everyone raving about the potential of RSS, it does seem that blogs will increasingly be of great benefit to businesses.

Read Chris' post if you are skeptical. The information he puts forth is convincing. For example, he mentiones a contest where Search Engine Optimization companies competed to get #1 on Google for a never before listed term....a blogger won.

Thinking Ahead

One thing that's important to keep in mind when designing your website (or having it designed), is to try to keep things flexible for future upgrades. Is it possible/likely that a year from now you'll need to add a new section or two? If so, is there room in your menu to add an new button to get to that section? Or will that mess up the whole design?

Vertical menus that run down the left or right side of the page generally are easier to add to (or subtract from) without effecting the overall design. Horizontal menus running along the top (or bottom) of the page can be a lot trickier, especially if you're wanting to keep the  width constant from page to page (and that's a huge pet peeve of mine — seeing sites in which the page widths vary). (See my old post on page dimensions for more on this.)

Might not be a really big deal for a small website, but if you've got an expanding business, you'll want your website to be able to grow with you!

Using Link Anchor Text to Increase Your Search Engine Rankings

Linking continues to be one of the most important aspects of achieving high rankings in most search engines, and in particular, Google. The more links leading to your site from other URLs that have content relevant to your site (and preferably a high ranking themselves), the higher your search engine rankings will be. Linking pages within your site are also valued by the search engines and help with rankings.

The words used in links leading to pages of your site are referred to as "link anchor text." Link anchor text can be used in both internal pages of your site and in links from other URLs leading to your site.

If you have a site on socially responsible investing and you were also using those words as keywords you would include them in the link anchor text from other web sites pointing to pages of your site. For example, the anchor text should read something like, "For more information go to socially responsible investing,” with the link on the words “socially responsible investing,” The search engines will value this type of link more than one that reads, "For more information on socially responsible investing go to www.thissite.com” with the link being on “thissite.com.”

You would do the same thing for linking internal pages of your web site as you direct visitors to specific pages. You can also use your keywords in the anchor text of your navigation map at the bottom of your pages.

What Does Your Shopping Support?

Found a great website — Responsible Shopper (www.responsibleshopper.org). It contains information on several of North America's largest corporations, from clothing to car manufacturers, and rates them on their social and environmental responsibility. Not surprisingly, most of the companies come out at the negative end of the spectrum or neutral at best.

The site is a wealth of information for the concerned shopper. It breaks down each corporation on their past and current issues, such as human rights, child/sweatshop labor, discrimination, cultural impact, health and safety, and environmentally-friendly initiatives. I found it to be very fair in that it acknowledges positive efforts as well as negative impacts to allow you to make an informed decision about what you're supporting with your purchases.

Looks like a big 'thumbs up' goes to Patagonia — the company is on of the few, or possibly the only one, listed which received the 'green' rating for both their "cutting edge" social and environmental policies.

Seth Rolls Out Yet Another Free Ebook

It might seem as though I am obsessed with writing about the marketing whiz, Seth Godin, recently.
I was intending to write a post about link anchor text and it's importance in the search engines, but then I visited Seth's blog (obviously one of my favorites) and  saw that he posted yet another free ebook.

After releasing his recent free ebook, Knock, Knock, focusing on building websites that work, Seth just posted an ebook called, Who's There: Seth Godin's Incomplete Guide To Blogs and The New Web. To quote Seth:

Who's There is not an ebook about how to write better or how to follow the traditional conventions about formatting and building a blog. It's not designed to sell you one service instead of another, either.

Instead, I divide the blog world into three groups and turn my attention to one. And in particular, I try to sell you hard on how building a blog asset can have a spectacular impact on you, your career, your organization and your ideas.

I promise this ebook is incomplete. I hope, though, that it encourages you to pay attention to some of the underlying forces at work on line and off.

As always with Seth's writings, very interesting and useful information... and remember, it's free.

So I will write about link anchor text in a future post. In the meantime you can download Who's There here: Download whos_there.pdf.

Jack of All Trades, Master of None?

A recent post in Treehugger about Organic Style magazine shutting down (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/09/organic_style_m.php) is at first sad to me, as I think the original concept of the magazine was a good one - promoting organic clothing, food, building materials, etc. But, it's also a lesson. The reason for the not-long-ago popular (and growing quickly in popularity) publication is essentially that it got too big for its britches, so to speak, and no one (readers, sellers) really knew what the magazine was about any more. Was it about recipes, fashion, women's issues, etc.?

There is a useful tie-in to what I see on many websites these days. I often can't tell what a website is "about" - i.e., its focus is not evident. A lot of businesses, especially smaller home-based types  and/or healing professionals try to be "all things to everyone" on their website (e.g., a therapist who lists 100 different issues that they work with). This just doesn't work. Your site will be much more effective if it helps a specific target market (for one or a few specific products/services), rather than a bit of everything.

It's fine if you've got a few sub-businesses running at one time, but in that case, I'd strongly recommend that they each have their own website, rather than integrating them all into one. You'll come across as the expert on each of those specific areas, rather than someone who's spread her/himself too thin!

Seth's Free Ebook on Website Promotion

Seth Godin just released another free ebook, Knock, Knock: Seth Godin's Incomplete Guide To Building a Website That Works. As Seth says, "It's a short take on how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively".

As the title suggests, it's not a complete guide to website marketing. However, in Seth's clever and get-to-the-point fashion it covers important core aspects of marketing your website.

For example, I love the way he summarizes the purpose of having a website:

A website can cause only four things to happen in the moments after someone sees it:

• She clicks and goes somewhere else you want her to go.
• She clicks and gives your permission to follow up by email or phone.
• She clicks and buys something.
• She tells a friend, either by clicking or by blogging or phoning or talking.

A lot of the websites on the web certainly are not focusing on the above points. Too many people's sites lack focus, try to do too many things, confuse visitors, etc.

If you want to make your socially responsible or ethical business website work better for you, you can probably pick up a few useful tips in this ebook.

You can download it here: Download knockknock.pdf