Writing for the web
Jakob Neilsen’s definitive article, How to Read for the Web, happily gives us guidelines for writing content that is optimised for search engines. It’s summarised below, and you can see immediately why it is Google friendly.
As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using
- highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
- meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
- bulleted lists
- one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
- the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
- half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
What should I budget for an ecommerce start-up?
It’s a good question that gets answered in lots of different ways. I’ve got £30k to spend on this site, and it should be better than Amazon.com is a quite frequent approach. Your web agency will always want to know what your budget is - in some ways it’s a fair question; how else can they know what they’re going to build for you.
But when you budget, you’ve got to think way beyond the site build. You should see the site build as opening the door of your new office. More often than not, clients come with an expectation that they’ll spend £8k on the website, and their Adword budget for year 1 is £2k. I’ve seen this 80/20 approach operate at all levels. It’s wrong (not Pareto, he’s never wrong). You’ve got to flip it. Spend 20% of your budget on the site build, and 80% on Adwords, link building and content work (spread this over twelve months, and don’t expect a return in year 1 - you’ll get one, but it’s nice to be surprised).
So, you’ve got a £10k budget. Spend £2k on the site, and £8k Adwords. Or, £20k on the site, and £80k on Adwords. That’s how it works.
Turning Customers into Broadcasters
In SEO and SEM we spend a lot of time filling the funnel. The more people we get to your website, the more chance we’ve got of creating a customer. If we’ve done our job properly, 10% of these visitors will turn into paying customers, so the more you fill, the more you make?
Well yes, but if you spend all your time focussing on the funnel, you will forget to make a business so spectacular, that your customers forget to flip the funnel, and shout down it to all their friends. Here’s some reasons why customers might flip the funnel when they use your e-commerce store:
1. Spectacular Fulfillment
Amazon has got this so right. When you get an Amazon delivery, you know it’s Amazon, even without the package branding. You know how to open it, you know that the book, cd, etc., will be perfectly presented. You’re content. It’s almost perfect, but its ubiquity gives smaller players something to aim at. Consider Seth Godin’s experience when he ordered from CD Baby:
Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make
sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the
crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can
buy.We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland
waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private
CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, June 18th.I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all
exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
2. Coupons
Coupons are a great way to reward your customers for re-ordering, or for flipping the funnel. Why not give your customers £10 to give away to their best friends? If your product and service is great, your customers should feel great about recommending you to their friends, and even better if their friends get cash benefit.
3. Email Marketing
I do not mean spamming your customers with useless crap. Do not send your customers context-less advertising. This is a serious misuse of email. Email is so overrun with useless communications (even internal business communications have now tipped into meaningless CC drivel that we don’t need), that your emails should be carefully crafted to be extremely useful and targeted. I really don’t mind receiving Amazon emails that have book selections that reflect previous purchases, and I really don’t mind receiving holiday offers from Expedia that reflect when and where I’m likely to go.
What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a standard file that should be installed at the root of your website. It tells search engine crawlers what to index in your site (you might have folders with protected content in, that you don’t want appearing in Google).
You can verify it exists and whether it’s working at Google Webmaster tools.
Google Analytics Data loss
You may have seen this recently on the Google Analytics login page:
System Message: Analytics Processing Delay from April 30th to May 5th
Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.
The trouble with free software is that you can’t really complain when you get this kind of loss, it just goes with the territory, and at least Google are sorting it out, almost. The worrying bit is the loss of e-commerce data, because these are the sites who live by this data.
I love Analytics. I’ll do a post shortly on how to get the most of its impressive integration with Adwords, but I can’t help but feel frustrated (and a bit paranoid) about how Google handles the data. For example, when you set-up conversion goals, you won’t see any real conversion data for 24 hours. Why is this? Are Google’s servers so slow, they can’t cope with the request for 24 hours? Nope, they’re slow enough to make sure you have to experiment with your campaigns to achieve success. Experimentation = Adspend.
Moving to WordPress
I’ve been blogging at Blogger.com for nearly two years. In general, I’ve enjoyed using Blogger.com. Its template management is easy, and I’ve enjoyed reasonable Google visibility. However, when my friend, Gary Kelly, drew my attentions to the possibilities of WordPress and TypePad, I decided it would be worth giving WP a whirl.
Gary correctly points out that the problem with the free Blogger.com is its spam content has hindered its search engine value. Many pro-blog consumers use ‘-blogspot.com’ to remove spam from their results (click here if you’ve no idea what -search term means).
Moreover, a recent study showed that 75% of Blogspot blogs are spam. If you’ve paid for a domain and hosting, logically, the author is more likely to be publishing with intent. Interestingly, this is a nice little throwback to the offline publishing world, where the high marginal costs of production have acted as a quality filter.
Moving to WordPress couldn’t have been easier. Just choose a hosting company with CPanel and Fantastico. I used BlueHost. Within minutes of registering the domain Baldysblog.com, I had clicked Fantastico and installed WordPress. Minutes later I’d imported all of the blog entries, and comments from Baldyblog.blogspot.com using WordPress’s import tool. I couldn’t be more impressed with BlueHost. For $6.95 per month (£3.50), I can host up to 5 domains, and I can install anything I like from the Fantastico interface. The next evening, I registered a new domain with BlueHost, and assigned WordPress to the new domain (naturalhealthlibrary.org - a new e-zine traffic generator for HealthSpark).
WordPress as a blogging tool is infinitely better than Blogger.com. Not least because the WYSIWYG works so well on Safari and Firefox. Frankly the Mac support on Blogger.com is embarrassing. But for me the real winner on WordPress is Brian Gardner. Brian Gardner’s WordPress themes transform WP from a blogging tool to a seriously powerful web content engine. His templates are extremely versatile, and as naturalhealthlibrary.org demonstrates, very effective tools for content propagation and SEO visibility.
The SEO value of WP is self-evident. Take a look at the category listings in the right-hand side-bar, and then look at the tag system. Plus, WP produces really precise and relevant page titles. I’ve already seen a significant increase in traffic following the move. However, the Blogger.com legacy has left me with a few problems that I’ve only partially solved.
First off, if you do the move to WP you’ll be stuck with duplicate content in the old blog. Ideally, you don’t want to delete the old blog because of all the inbound linking. Also, the WP import routine doesn’t import images, it just maps to the old images at your old blogger.com site.
I’ve removed the front page content to a new blog advertising the move to Baldysblog.com, and I’ve truncated recent posts. Ideally, I should truncate all posts, and move all images to the new domain. Anyone who can do this programatically, will earn their place in OS heaven.
SEO goes mainstream
The Sunday Times published an article about SEO last weekend. By the time the Business Section of the Times covers anything, you know it’s mainstream (at probably at the top of its growth curve). Key points of interest covered:
- Industry growing at 60% a year
- Estimated to be worth £400m in UK alone
- Google developer advocate, Matthew Trewhella, reckons there are 200 signals that determine a page’s relevance
- SEO growing, but proportion of spend to PPC is still low (£250m SEO UK last year, versus PPC £1.97 billion)
“The vast majority of SEO firms are good,” said Trewhella at Google. “But it is a constant battle. They will do one thing; we will discover it; they will do something else.”
10 minute website testing
So you’ve got a stellar web idea, you know it will work, but will the market take it? In the old economy, in fact, even last year, you would have built your site, built your brand, built your logo, ordered your stock, labels. You’ve handed over hard-earned cash to your accountant, incorporating companies, set-up bank accounts. You’ve got your fulfilment agent ready to fulfill thousands of items per day, and now you’re best part of £30k down. Now, you can do it in a hair’s-breadth. You can test market the concept with a free site from Google, Squidoo (I like this one), or if you’ve got a bit of knowledge, you could buy a template from Template Monster, throw it in with os commerce and give it a whirl. I built a test platform for HealthSpark, a new vitamins and supplements uk healthstore, using the latter route. The build time was 30 minutes, and the site will be ready to receive test transactions next week. Once you’ve got your test site live, you can run a pilot Adword campaign, and get immediate data on likely cost-per-click, and if you’re ready to fulfill, you can get customer conversion costs. Nice work.
7 handy tips from Google
Saw this on Google blog recently, and it will be useful for those of you under the hood of your sites…Googlebot can’t access my websiteWeb hosters seem to be getting more aggressive about blocking spam bots and aggressive crawlers from their servers, which is generally a good thing; however, sometimes they also block Googlebot without knowing it. If you or your hoster are “allowing” Googlebot through by whitelisting Googlebot IP addresses, you may still be blocking some of our IPs without knowing it (since our full IP list isn’t public, for reasons explained in the post). In order to be sure you’re allowing Googlebot access to your site, use the method in this blog post to verify whether a crawler is Googlebot. URL blocked by robots.txtSometimes the web crawl section of Webmaster Tools reports a URL as “blocked by robots.txt”, but your robots.txt file doesn’t seem to block crawling of that URL. Check out this list of troubleshooting tips, especially the part about redirects. This thread from Google’s Help Group also explains why you may see discrepancies between our web crawl error reports and our robots.txt analysis tool.Why was my URL removal request denied?(Okay, I’m cheating a little: this one is a Help Center article and not a blog post.) In order to remove a URL from Google search results you need to first put something in place that will prevent Googlebot from simply picking that URL up again the next time it crawls your site. This may be a 404 (or 410) status code, a noindex meta tag, or a robots.txt file, depending on what type of removal request you’re submitting. Follow the directions in this article and you should be good to go.Flash best practicesFlash continues to be a hot topic for webmasters interested in making visually complex content accessible to search engines. In this post Bergy, our resident Flash expert, outlines best practices for working with Flash.The supplemental indexThe “supplemental index” was a big topic of conversation in 2007, and it seems some webmasters are still worried about it. Instead of worrying, point your browser to this post on how we now search our entire index for every query.Duplicate contentDuplicate content—another perennial concern of webmasters. This post talks in detail about duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and also references Adam’s previous post on deftly dealing with duplicate content, which gives lots of good suggestions on how to avoid or mitigate problems caused by duplicate content.Sitemaps FAQsThis post answers the most frequent questions Google get about Sitemaps.
Google to kill off PPC?
Google has recently launched a new CPA (cost per action/acquisition) bidding tool. The Conversion Optimizer follows the roll-out of the beta programme for CPA on the Adsense network, and is the strongest indicator yet that Google is looking to move wholesale from PPC to CPA.Currently, as you know Adwords runs on a pay-per-click (PPC) model. Advertisers bid in real time for their position on the page, and pay for each click that delivers traffic to their sites. The model has several drawbacks. As many advertisers will know its easy to burn cash if you don’t optimize and track your traffic like a hawk, but the real dark side of PPC is click fraud. The CPA model removes clickfraud, because you only pay for traffic that yields. This is, of course, the bedrock of affiliate marketing.Google, however, is different from affiliate marketing, which is dependent more on relationships than technology (so, I don’t see Google’s move into this space as spelling the end of Commission Junction et al). Google’s different because it knows exactly what your site’s yielding in traffic and conversion data, and it knows what your competitors are doing. Users of Googly Analytics and Adwords will have noticed that Google’s anxious to educate you in its conversion tools, especially the monetary value of each action yielded from Google search or Adwords . I like the Adwords tracking tool, but I’d never recommend a client to add the value of a conversion into the tool. Google doesn’t need to know this data. My fear is that once Google moves wholesale in the CPA model, its effective monopoly will allow it to charge as much as it thinks you can afford, it will in effect be an international levy on ecommerce activity. Let’s hope Google can ‘do no evil’. In the meantime, I’d recommend third party tracking and bid management tools (like Webreality ATM …).