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Sunday, May 25, 2008

Support Those Landing Pages

We always hear SEO's talking about getting a page to rank. The topics are always the same - What keywords are associated with the page; where those keywords are on the page; how the various tags are constructed; how many links the site and page have. But one thing is so consistently overlooked..

What pages support the one you're trying to rank for?

Even a well constructed, movie star of a page, with a few good links to it is not likely to rank well if it does not have a great supporting cast. Each page that is the focus of an SEO effort should have a minimum of 4 pages of supporting content linked from it. More is better.

For example, if you have a site about Dalwhinnie Scotch (I just happen to be enjoying a knuckler full of the 15 year-old goodness as I write this) you'll need several additional pages of content linked by contextual text links on the Dalwhinnie Scotch page. The links could be topics/anchor text like:

distillation techniques
age of scotch
history of scotch
best scotch whiskey
what is single malt

If the Nav bar page is "Dalwhinnie Scotch" and that is the keyword that you're trying to rank for, you'll have much better luck if you have several (the more the better) supporting content pages.

The supporting pages do a couple of things. First, they establish subject matter expertise of he site author to both search bots and to users. Second, they help focus PageRank on the Nav bar page. Both of these move us closer to our goal.

When you create a set of supporting pages, be sure not to cross link them laterally into other categories on your site. This will create navigation issues for users and may dilute precious PR, when it should remain as potent as possible for the content page you're focused on.

Load up each SEO target page with supporting pages of great content. Over time, this strategy will pay off...big.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Anatomy of a Terrible Web Site

No, I have not seen it ALL, but if I haven't seen it, I've at least read about it, or so I thought. What I'm about to describe doesn't quite fit the traditional definition of spam. I think of it more like either a) grasping at straws or b) knowing just enough to be dangerous and then...being dangerous.

It all started with my trip on Tuesday to New York City. The trip was for an SEO seminar and had been planned for some time. Of course, I waited until the Friday prior to book my travel. There was a hotel that had been recommended and that I wanted to try. To save them public embarrassment and humiliation, they will go nameless - I'll call it instead the Midtown Park hotel. Here's what happened...

I found the site in Google by typing in the hotel name into the search box and, as expected, it appeared in the SERP. At least they ranked for their own name. Then I clicked into the site.

I was met with a splash page of sorts. It had a big "Enter" button in the middle of the page. I clicked. I was met with something that I thought might give me a seizure. It began with, er uh, music. The sound started with a clicking noise, then what might have been footsteps, then something like a dj scratching a record, followed by some syncopated, off-beat acid jazz. That was just the music. The screen was flashing and pulsing with different hues of reds and blacks, with words appearing and disappearing all over the page and in various font sizes and colors. One phrase read, "welcome to fashion." Uh, okay.

Immediately frustrated with the ridiculous user experience, I went back to the home/splash page. Once there, I found that there are six (6) choices the user may make: DSL Version, With Intro, Full Screen, Modem Version, No Intro, and This Window. I selected DSL Version, No Intro, and This Window.

Phew - that got me in without my grand-mal worries.

Now I was in the site. All I wanted was the phone number, which I found. But being an SEO, I decided to have a look around...

Though it stared me in the face, I had to study it for a few minutes before I really understood what I was looking at. At first glance, it looked normal - I saw the head tag and the usual title tag and meta keyword and description tags. I expected to see the flash file directly below, after all, it was clearly an all-flash site. But I didn't see that - not at all. Instead I saw this:

frameset rows="*,0" framespacing="0" frameborder="0" border="0"

Huh? A frame set? Why? It's an all flash site, right? Yep. And a framed site too. Huh?

The frame set contained two frames, a main and a pixel. All sizes were set to "0." Then I saw the noframes tag, inside which was 1030 words of content. No matter what page you go to this is the code you encounter because of the unchanging url structure that is found in the flash design.

Yes, you have it right - it is an all flash site, dropped into a framed site, presumably to feed the bots something in the noframes tag, thus avoiding the lack of content issue encountered by all-flash sites.

To make matters worse, the tagging info that is present is also all wrong. The title is "The Midtown Park Hotel :::::: New York :::::::The Official Website" and the meta description is: "Official website of New York Hotel - The Midtown Park Hotel" Then the keyword tag contains 186 words, 37 of which are the word "hotel" or "hotels" and 19 of which are the word "New York." I wonder, were they trying to rank for "New York," "Hotel," or "Official Web site?"

This site makes so many mistakes I can't even list them. Both in terms of human usability and robot spiderability, this site does it all - wrong.

Yesterday morning, I reached out the senior marketing manager who runs the site. I invited her to come to my workshop as my guest. She declined. Out of the goodness of my heart I wrote up a quick summary of the SEO mistakes on her site and sent them in an e-mail. One of my colleagues chastised me saying, "You sent her a report worth at least a thousand dollars in consulting fees." Well, probably so. But it was such an egregious set of mistakes, I had to tell her.

Chalk another one up to a probably well-intentioned designer thinking they know SEO only to fire a bullet into their foot. Bruce Clay said it best when he said, "Google doesn't care if you shoot yourself in the foot." And so it goes - the Midtown Park hotel doesn't turn up in any of the keyword searches I tried. Of course they would have no way of knowing this, what without analytics.

It's almost hard to believe. But I suppose in all great mistakes there are lessons to be learned. This is no exception. It is a case study in what not to do when building a Web site - the anatomy of a terrible web site.

An "A" for effort, to be sure. One of my sharper colleagues only gave them a B+.

Friday, May 2, 2008

Designer or SEO?

There's just too many instances of this happening for me not to address it. Here it is once and for all: Web designers are not SEOs. Not at all. Not in any way.

Okay, to be fair, I am not a designer - no way, no how. I have no graphic creativity to speak of and my design coding skills are rudimentary at best. See, I have no trouble admitting this. So why does it seem like every other designer out there thinks he/she knows SEO just because they can make a pretty Web site?

I think I am walking dangerous ground here - I am not declaring war on designers. Rather, I just want to come to an agreement that we are different creatures with totally different skill sets.

Last week, I sat there and consoled (yes, that is the right word) consoled a guy who had just dropped $9,000.00 on a new site. 600 pages of FRAMES. I couldn't believe some designer did that to him. His site has virtually no chance of ranking well. Worse, the new site is displacing one with good rankings, both are live and no coherent re-launch strategy was put into place, so any rankings he did have are quickly going the way of the dinosaur.

Yesterday I did another consultation. A Law firm. They had an old site that ranked well for a couple of good keywords. The new site was launched and their rankings disappeared. GONE.

The firm partners crafted this e-mail to me - they had done their homework. There was a grand list of questions about the design of the new site and how it may have affected their rankings.

Questions like:
  • The old site had lots of text on the main page, the new site doesn't have as much. Should we put more words on the front page?
  • Does the design software make a difference - Frontpage vs. Dreamweaver?
  • During the redesign, we put up a temporary site with the exact same content. Could this make a difference?
  • We used to have links at the top and bottom of each page, should we go back to this?

The law firm got on the phone and emplored us to help. They thought they needed a redesign to get their rankings back.

I looked at the site and guess what? It looked great. The code was super clean; static html pages; wonderful use of CSS; javascript was all kept off page in external files; lots of great content; link structure looked sound; It was a well designed site, indeed.

So what was the problem?

The problem was that clearly, the designer THOUGHT they knew something about SEO. They may well have read SEO for Dummies or some other basic guide. But the re-launch killed them.

The re-launch process made about every major SEO mistake one could make.

  • The new site was launched under a "ficticious domain" while under development
  • There were no 301 redirects done for the existing urls
  • Existing backlinks were ignored

Redirects killed the rankings star. Buggles eat your heart out.

Every single deep-link backlink now 404's out. There was a duplicate content issue with the new site and the old site - they were live simultaneously.

What's the point? The point is that this designer lost the rankings for this client. They did so because they did not have the SEO expertise to handle the site relaunch and migration. Although they have basic on-page SEO under control, this is a TINY part of what SEO is.

These are two examples of many, many examples I could provide. Since they both came up in the past week, it was worth an entry.

I'm not declaring war on designers, quite the opposite: I want them to work with us. Accept that they are not SEOs and let us do our thing. Engage us BEFORE launching a new site, so that catastrophic errors can be avoided.

Designers and SEOs are different creatures. Let's accept that and move forward!