Lab Report: Long Tail Keyword Rankings

Your website has some basic keywords you should always have in mind. The websites I’m working on today have primary keywords including “kids music,” “used furniture,” “Fayetteville apartment rentals,” and “homebuilders.” We always want to include these terms in our writing for these sites, and you should always include your primary keywords when  you’re writing for your website.

However, those aren’t the only search terms people use to reach you. Our lab site, FreshPlans, has had visits via 4,485 different keywords this month.

Here are the top ten from yesterday:

This means that a bunch of people typed “gingerbread lesson plans” at Google, were offered our site, and clicked through. Slightly fewer did the same with “How the Grinch Stole Christmas lesson plans.”

What do we do with this information?

First, it’s good news for us in terms of our primary keyword “lesson plans.” Eight of the top ten search strings people used included these words, so we can feel confident that we’re doing well with this term, even though we know we’re far from top rankings for this highly competitive term. Since we also see multiple visits using the term “lesson ideas,” we should probably start using that phrase as an alternative to “lesson plans” sometimes, too.

Second, it shows that our holiday posts are indexed and working for us. Since our target market — teachers — are only in school for another couple of weeks, we needed to hit the ground running with Christmas-related lesson plans, and it’s good to know that we succeeded. When we checked our rankings for these terms, we were happy to see that we’re on the front page of Google search results for all of them.

We also notice that there are some Christmas-related terms for which we’re not being successful. We are on the front page at Google for some other seasonal searches (“Chanukah lesson plans,” for example, which is often paired with Christmas in U.S. classrooms, and “The Peterkins Christmas lesson plans,”) but not as many people are searching for these terms. There are also terms people are searching for, such as “Christmas lesson plans,” for which we’re not yet strong enough to rank well at Google.

How can we check our rankings? I used to use rank-checking software, but Google frowns on this and will even ban you from using their services if they find you using it, so I no longer do that. However, checking just by using Google to search as you normally use it won’t give you accurate results. After all, you probably visit your business website and sites related to it repeatedly, so the search engines figure you’re interested in  it and will show it to you more readily than to other people.

• Use a different browser from the one you normally use. I almost never use Internet Explorer for normal purposes, so I use it to check rankings with.
• Better yet, use a different computer. In this case, I used a public computer on the campus where I teach — a machine I had never used before. I also used IE.
• Make sure you’re not signed in. Don’t sign in with the search engine you’re using, with LastPass, or any other service that might have saved settings for you.
• For speed, use advanced settings. Both Yahoo and Google will let you set preferences so that you can see 100 results at once. Then you can just use “find” to check for your website. This gives you your rankings more quickly than paging through.

Another thing we discovered is that we have people reaching us looking for things we haven’t done yet. For example, we have people coming to us by searching for “reindeer lesson plans,” but we haven’t posted any yet. Guess what today’s post will be?

There’s more general information, too, which should be useful to us in planning what topics to cover. For example, we see that people begin searching for Christmas lesson plans immediately after Thanksgiving, but don’t continue looking for Thanksgiving lesson plans (they’re not, for example, seeking out ideas for next year before they put away their Thanksgiving books). We see that people still search for fairy tale lesson plans during the holidays. And we see, from the fact that there were 212 different keywords from the Sunday after Thanksgiving, that our audience has a lot of different things in mind, from SketchUp to science centers, as well as the most popular terms.

Dig into your website’s keyword results and see what lessons are there for you to learn.

DIY, Pie, and Your Website

We’re celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow in the U.S., and most of us will eat pie of one kind or another. Naturally, this makes me think of websites.

You might, at your Thanksgiving celebration, eat homemade pie lovingly baked by the grandmother of one of those families that goes in for competitive baking. It might be the best pie you’ve ever eaten. You might have an excellent pie from a fine professional bakery, and that could also be a high level pie eating experience. Or you might have a cheap frozen pie heated up in a way that will burn the top crust and leave the bottom crust soggy. Or a badly homemade pie with the metallic taste of lard and a watery filling.

The user experience for pie isn’t based on whether you’ve paid someone to make it, though certainly a top quality pie is likely to cost more than a bad one. It’s based on the quality of the ingredients, the skill of the baker, and how that pie is put together.

So if you’re going to build your own website with a template or theme, make sure you get a good quality template or theme. If you’re hiring a good designer to build you a custom site — or you’re a designer yourself and building a custom website –don’t spoil it by filling the site with poor quality content. If you have your own content and you’re happy with it, don’t tuck it into a badly coded DIY website and expect it to do as well for you as it would if you had a well built site.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Getting Up in the Morning

I’m working right now on an online magazine article about successful men. I do this a lot, actually; I am the resident interview-successful-men-and-write-about-them person for the magazine in question, so I do a few of these every month. In December, I do ten or fifteen for a special end of year roundup.

These guys vary widely in the stories they tell. Some grew up in poverty and some in privilege. Some have impressive resumes and some have worked at a single modest job for most of their lives. Some have heroic jobs as life saving surgeons and some run a distillery or a portable restroom company.We usually talk not only about their lives but also about their philosophies and feelings, and the conversations are apt to be surprising and far-ranging.

But virtually every single one of these men says, at some point in the conversation, something like this: “It’s great to get up in the morning and go do something you love” or “…something that makes a difference.” Feeling excited about the work that they do is, along with hard work and giving back to the community, an apparently universal characteristic of successful men.

If you write a blog, that feeling should be a source of ideas for you. What is it that you woke up excited about this morning? What made you get out of bed with a smile? Write about that at your blog. Or, if you employ a blogger, post a sentence about it as a draft or in your Basecamp file, and let your blogger write about that exciting event or idea for you.

If you don’t feel that way when you wake up in the morning, then perhaps you’re in the wrong line of work.

Define Success for Your Website

A prospective client contacted me recently asking for a list of competitive keywords I’d ranked for — that is, terms for which I’d gotten a client to the first page of Google.

That sort of thing gives you bragging rights in the SEO community, but is it really best metric for your site’s success? And if not, then what is?

Here are some possibilities:

• Ranking well for your keywords “Your keywords” being the terms your customers and prospective customers type in at Google when they look for you. You should always rank well for the name of your company, and for your specialty in your geographic area. You may or may not be able to rank well for your most general keywords. That is, I rank well for “quality copywriting” and for “SEO” in my area, but I don’t expect to be #1 at Google for “SEO” any time soon. You might not get top placement for “books” but be right up there for “parenting books” or “independent bookstores in Yourtown.”
• Looking good on the SERPs. A lot of decisions are made now before visitors even get to your site. If someone types in your company name at Google and sees your site with a strange description, several other similarly named competitors (possibly with better descriptions) and some negative reviews of your company, they may go elsewhere. If they type in one of your top keywords and see your site with a poor title and description and your competitors with multiple listings, video and image results, and enticing descriptions, they’ll very likely choose someone else, no matter where you rank. These days, you have to look good on the search engine results page as well as on your own site.
• Steadily increasing traffic If your traffic is increasing fairly steadily, you probably have a healthy website. You have to pay attention to the sources of the traffic and whether they’re likely to be your customers, though. If you have a hair salon in Teaneck, you don’t need large amounts of traffic from Germany, and it isn’t a sign of success. Equally, if you own Big Fish Plumbing, getting traffic from people searching for a fishmonger isn’t a sign of success. Well targeted trafffic, however, is.
• A healthy bottom line If your business is going well, whether that means plenty of online sales, lots of phone calls, or increasing walk in traffic at your brick and mortar shop, that’s probably a good sign that your website is doing a good job for you. Nearly all consumers do at least some of their shopping and reconnaissance work online before they buy or visit you. The days when you could judge by whether or not people mentioned that they found you online are gone; now, it’s a foregone conclusion.

You might want all these things, actually, but choose at least one to inform your online marketing strategy.

Your Logo as a Starting Point for Your Website

When you get ready to have your first website created, or perhaps a completely new website that rebrands your company, one of the best starting points is your logo.

There are other options: websites you admire, for example, can give your designer an idea of your preferences. You can begin with a great photo of your product or your building or yourself. You can begin with a template or a theme and have it customized. But your logo is one of the best starting points.

Consider the three samples above, created by Jay Jaro for GraysLland Acres llama and goat farm.

The owners ended up with a variation on the third of the samples Jay prepared, and Tom Hapgood designed an elegant website using the champagne color and elaborate script of the logo to create an upscale feel. If the farm photos were replaced with shots of luxurious hotel rooms, the site would be completely appropriate for a fine hotel. 

But the current logo couldn’t be replaced with either of the other two designs without making other changes to the site. The happy cartoon farm would be out of place in the glamorous gold, silver, and sage web design. The spare and modern black and white logo calls for something kickier, and would make the understated elegance of the current color scheme look more drab than posh.

If you have a logo already, be sure to send it to your web designer at an early stage of work on the website. Send it in a vector file if you can. If you don’t have a logo, consider beginning with that design job, or having the same person create both the logo and the web design.

Don’t have the two jobs done separately and expect to drop the logo into the web design later. Communication will make all the difference here.

What Analytics Can’t Tell You

There are lots of things that your website’s analytics can’t tell you, especially when it comes to human thoughts. The client who told me yesterday, “Here’s something that analytics can’t tell you” was referring to the buying behavior of people in his industry.  Analytics can tell us quite a bit, but there will always be information we can get better directly from human beings.

We can also get lots of misinformation from human beings. For one thing, we human beings are notoriously bad at remembering how we felt and what we thought. We’re easily swayed by emotions. And often we have no idea why we do what we do. We also all believe that we are special, and most of us believe that we are completely immune to marketing and are never swayed by merchandising, colors, or design.

So how can you make sure that the information you get from humans is reliable?

• Make sure you’re asking experts. When I ask animal scientists what they’d do if they needed some goat gamma globulin, they can tell me. Accountants probably can’t. However confidently people tell you that golfers do this or teenagers do that, you’re better off asking a golfer or a teenager. And you’re pretty much always better off not asking your relatives or designers, because they just know too much about what you’re doing to qualify as what we call “naive subjects.” Naive experts, that’s what you want.
• Don’t sway your results. When I asked animal scientists what they’d do if they needed goat gamma globulin, I said, “What would you do if you needed goat gamma globulin?” not “Would you type ‘goat gamma globulin’ if you were googling sources for blood fractions?” It’s okay to set up a situation–for example, when the scientists said, “I’d go down to the barn,” it was okay for me to ask, “Well, what if you wanted yak gamm globulin.” It’s not okay to offer answers to choose from.
• Ask enough people. We may have a lot of things in common, we humans, but we still have individual preferences. If the first person you ask invariably reads the entire About Us section of all websites carefully, or thinks that he does, then he’s not typical. You’d find that out if you asked a few more people. If you only ask that one person, though, you’ll never know that he was unusual. 
• Compare your results with your analytics. If people tell you one thing and your analytics tell you another, then there’s something wrong somewhere. Your people are wrong, your analytics are wrong, or something else is going on that you haven’t considered yet.I’ve seen several cases in which surprising data was received because analytics were installed incorrectly. Comparing the answers you get from people with your analytics data can also help you avoid overgeneralizing from a few people who feel strongly about something.

More posts on this subject:

• When Your Analytics Deceive You
• Analytics Can Be Deceptive
• Testing Your Website

Spiders, Crawling, and Internal Links

We speak of the internet as a web, and talk about the search engine spiders crawling it. That’s because the internet was originally conceived as a web of hyperlinks interconnecting everything. That’s how it generally is now, too, though it’s a bit more sophisticated than it used to be. Search engine spiders arrive at your website and crawl along all the links to find all the pages. They index the site, which is to say they make themselves a sort of map of the site, and then when someone looks for something you have, they mention you to the searcher.

It’s a great system. However, in quite a few of the sites I’ve worked with recently, I’ve found pages that aren’t linked up to anything.

Normally, you know, you have navigation on the homepage that takes people to your inner pages. You might then have further pages linked from those pages. With luck, they’re all hooked up together in a sensible way that people can easily follow. If so, the search engine spiders probably can do so, too.

But sometimes you find a page which isn’t linked up to anything else. People might find these pages through a search function at your website, or they might never find them at all. They’re not going to do you much good, though.

How does this happen? Lots of ways. Here are some I’ve seen recently:

• The page is private. If you have a secret page (press photos, prices, other things you don’t want people to be able to find by searching at Google), then you may have no links to it and that’s your prerogative. You can then send people a link to the page if you want them to see it. 
• The page is left over from the past. It had a link from some page which has been deleted, for example, and now that its parent page is gone, it’s lost in cyberspace. If you don’t need it any more, delete it too. Otherwise, give it a link from an existing page. 
• The page should have been a post. I’ve seen several orphan blog pages recently which were made by people who thought they were saving them in a way that caused them to show up automatically on a page. They weren’t. If you want that to happen, make a post, not a page.
• The site was built wrong. It’s sad but true — some sites are built without proper internal links. If yours is one of them, it won’t be properly indexed.

Examine your website, round up your orphan pages, and get them properly linked up.

How Much Traffic Do You Need?

You use analytics to keep track of traffic — the number of visitors — to your site, but how can you know whether you have a good amount of traffic or not?

Hubspot shared a set of traffic benchmarks a while back. However, they filtered out all sites with fewer than 5 visits a week, and they also only included their clients — by definition, people working on increasing traffic. Nonetheless, the numbers can give you an idea of where you stand in comparison with comparable businesses. Is that enough to tell you what your traffic goals ought to be?

Yesterday I was talking with a client whose site we’re redesigning. She’s happy with the amount of traffic she currently has, and many other people would be, too. We see lots of sites with fewer visits than hers, and we’d be happy with her numbers for many of our clients — for our own site, in fact, that amount of traffic would be plenty. For this client, though, I want to see an increase in traffic. The data for her site indicates that increasing traffic will help her reach the goals she has for her company.

Here are the factors to consider when you set your traffic goals:

• What’s your site’s job? This is probably the most important question. If your site is mostly intended to serve as your resume for people to whom you hand your business card, a few visits a day might be plenty. We’ve done some sites for companies selling products or services with high levels of complexity and exclusivity and matching high price points who really don’t need much traffic. If you sell environmental waste management machinery and one client a month is your goal, then a dozen targeted visits a day is fine. If you, like my current client, have e-commerce for a modestly priced item, then you need hundreds a day.
• What’s your conversion rate? If everyone who visits your site calls you, you need fewer visitors than you do if most visitors take advantage of your free resources and 4% actually buy. We have affiliate marketing set up at our lab site. We know that about 30% of our visitors will click through to the affiliate site, and that we have a typical 4% conversion rate once they reach the site. In practice, that means that we need 300 visitors to be sure of a sale. You need to set up goals in your analytics or otherwise track conversions to know how many visitors you need to reach your goals for your site.
• Is your traffic increasing? At our lab site we’re seeing about a 9% increase in overall traffic each week. You may be seeing monthly increases, or an increase compared with last year. If you’re seeing that steady increase combined with the total traffic numbers you need for your site’s goals within your business, then you don’t have to see huge increases.  If your traffic is stagnant, though, or decreasing, then you should be thinking about making changes.

Read our post on Website Traffic to learn about some other aspects of this metric that you should consider when you set traffic goals or decide how satisfied you are with your current traffic. If you decide that you’re not satisfied, be ready to make some changes.

Lab Report: Ordinary Time

The Christian liturgical calendar has special times like Christmas and Easter, but it also has what’s known as “ordinary time,” when nothing special is happening. This seems like a useful concept for websites, too. There are special times like redesigns, seasonal peaks and valleys, linkbuilding campaigns and press pushes, but there are also ordinary times.

We’re currently doing redesigns and linkbuilding campaigns and other special stuff for a lot of sites, but our lab site is just going along in a normal way. As you can see, we’re just about back up to the peak we reached during Back to School (though not with as steep a slope), so we’re happy with the increasing traffic.  We’re cleaning up some duplicate content issues, and we’re working to catch the next wave in our target industry, but otherwise we’re just doing normal upkeep.

Exactly what is normal upkeep?

• Fresh content every day. If you can’t do every day, aim for several times a week.If you just figure you’ll post whenever you have something to say, you’ll look one day and find that it’s been months since you last blogged or added a photo or whatever you do to keep new content coming. Make yourself a schedule and stick to it.
• Keep up with your analytics. Watch or have someone watch for you. When you have a spike in traffic, or results from a source you hadn’t considered, or the effectiveness of some of your strategies begins to wane, you need to know so you can respond appropriately.You also want to make sure that you don’t have lagging traffic or any other problems. It’s one thing to keep things perking along and another to ignore your website.
• Don’t slack off on your social media. If you only talk to people when you have a marketing push on, you’re going to look insincere. If there’s nothing major going on with you, then you have a perfect opportunity to talk with your friends, contacts, and followers about what’s going on with them. 

If you do these things, you can  feel confident about your website in between major undertakings.

Your New WordPress Site, Part 5: Plug-ins

The last basic element for your new WordPress site, now that you have your content, theme, and widgets in place, is the plug-ins.

Plug-ins are a library of code parts you can plug into your WordPress site without needing any programming skills yourself. There’s an enormous community of WP developers, so there’s an enormous number of choices for WP plug-ins.

Get started by clicking “Plug-ins” on the left hand side of your dashboard. You’ll get to the Plug-ins page, where you can add new plug-ins by clicking on “Add new” at the top of the page — it’s circled in the screen shot below.

You can search for the plug-in you want by the name of the plug-in (such as “Akismet”) or the name of the developer, or by the task you want the plug-in to do. So you can find the wonderful video plug-in by searching  for “WordPress video” if you know the name, or “video” if you just know roughly what you want.

It’s sometimes easier to find a plug-in by searching at Google or asking around at Twitter and then searching for the name. Once you find the plug-in you want, though, you simply click “install.” If you need to configure the plug-in, you’ll usually be prompted to do so, and most plug-ins have instructions and a help page or forum.

Once you have your plug-ins installed,you can control the way they work from a control panel somewhere on your site. Different plug-ins turn up in different places. The WP-ecommerce plug-in has its own control panel in the sidebar, as you can see above, while others may be under “settings” or even inside the plug-in description, as you see below. Look for words like “Options” or “Settings.”

Some are easier than others to figure out. If you find one plug-in too difficult, search for an alternative that might be easier for you to work with. Some plug-ins may be incompatible with your theme or your widgets, too, so be prepared to spend some time  experimenting.

What plug-ins do you need? We know some developers who have a whole slate of “must haves.” We’ve even seen sites where the designer has installed a raft of plug-ins just in case, and the site owner didn’t even know they were there.

I usually go with an install-as-needed approach, myself. I usually do use the following plug-ins, though:

• Akismet
• All in one SEO pack
• Hyper Cache
• NEXGen Gallery
• WordPress Video

Look those up for practice in searching and installation, and see how you like them. It’s easy to remove them if you decide you don’t need them.

Your New WordPress Site, Part 4: Widgets

Once you have some content at your WordPress site and have your theme chosen, you can add functionality to your site with widgets. Widgets are easy options that let you do things like show recent comments on the front page, add a search function, and all kinds of things that you would otherwise need programming skills to accomplish. You will also find widgets that let you add special custom functionality if you or your web pros have those programming skills.

Widgets can be found on the left sidebar at your WordPress dashboard, under “Appearance.” See the button circled on the screenshot above. If you click the Widgets button, you’ll find yourself on the page shown above. There you can drag widgets from the center of the page to the widget-ready locations in the theme.

Different themes have different widgets available. Sometimes a favorite widget won’t be compatible with a new theme, and sometimes a widget won’t work properly with a particular plug-in (we’ll talk about plug-ins in Part 5). So you’ll have to wait until you have chosen a theme to choose your widgets.

Here’s the current widget page for a WordPress site I’m working on right now. The theme hasn’t been chosen — this is an example theme I’m working with while I get the architecture settled — so no widgets have been chosen. But you can see if you compare this with example at the top of the post that the widgets and the places they can be placed are quite different in the two examples.

Good ideas for widget use:

• If there’s a widget you especially need or a place you especially want to put widgets, you and your designer should think about that as you’re choosing themes. If a search button at the top of the page is an absolute must, then you shouldn’t choose a theme that doesn’t allow that.
• Try out the widgets and play around with them. You won’t hurt your site by doing so, and you might find some cool stuff that you hadn’t thought about before.
• Then get rid of most of them. A dozen widgets festooning your site on all sides will spoil your design, I can promise you. FreshPlans has seven widgets, mostly custom, and that’s probably pushing it.

Read Part 5.

Your New WordPress Site, part 3: Themes

In Part 1, we looked at how to put content into your WordPress site, and in Part 2 we learned how to decide whether to save content as Pages or Posts. So now let’s assume that you have some content at your site. It’s time to make it look the way you want it to look.

For WordPress sites, this means choosing a theme. There are free themes, premium themes, and custom themes. A custom theme, one designed for you, can be based on a free or a premium theme. FreshPlans, the site you see above, has a custom theme based on the premium theme  “Allure” by StudioPress. Below you can see a little slide show I’ve made you from screenshots of WP sites I’ve worked on recently. As you can see, there’s no longer any need to think of WordPress sites as having one particular look.

It’s easy to install a theme, and an experienced WP designer can make your site look just the way you want it to (designers for the sites in these examples include Shan Pesaru, Jay Jaro, Tom Hapgood, Darren Moore, and Sean Sallings). You can even do it yourself if you have a bit of technical skill and find a theme you like; I made the blog for Innovative Spine Rehab which you see below.

I wanted a simple blog that would coordinate with the look of the main website, so I created a background in Phtoshop and used stock photos to make a compatible look, matching the colors and feel of the site.

We’re playing around with a theme at Josepha’s blog right now which is a full-screen slideshow, as you can seen below. This theme allows you to upload your choice of photos for the slideshow, set the colors, and end up with a dramatic look with very little effort.

The hard part of this process is not changing a few images or hiring someone to design your site; it’s choosing the theme that will work for you. There are thousands of WP themes available, and you can spend hours looking through them and still end up with a theme that doesn’t really work for you.

Let’s look at your options:

• Free WordPress themes of many different levels of quality and complexity are available all over the web. If you’re using a WordPress.com site, this is your only option, and you can only choose the themes being offered to you when you click the “Install Themes” button. Sites like Wordspop, Smashing Magazine, Camelgraph and hundreds (thousands?) of others offer you more options if you’re using WordPress.org. Free themes have the distinct advantage of being free. However, they usually have fewer options and less flexibility and do fewer things out of the box than premium themes will.You’re also likely to see other sites that look just like yours if you use a free theme out of the box.
• Premium themes cost money, but not much money. If you find a premium theme that you like right out of the box, so to speak, you can have a good design for much less than the cost of a custom design. You may still need to hire someone to install it for you, or you may be able to follow the instructions and do it yourself, but either way you can save quite a bit. I try to persuade the designers I work with to use premium themes even when they plan to go completely custom,because I’ve found that premium themes are more likely to work well with plug-ins and widgets (Parts 4 and 5 of this series). Free ones are more likely to require a lot of hacking.Woo Themes, Elegant Themes, and Theme Forest are some favorites for premium themes, but there are again lots of choices.
• Custom themes are the best, from my point of view, because you can have exactly the look you want — including the same look that you have at your current site, if you love it — and still have the advantages of the WordPress platform. You need to hire a designer and you may still need to choose a theme, though you can delegate that task to your web pro if you feel like it. Choosing one yourself may save you some money, though.

How can you pick, then? If you want to use the theme without customizing it, then you certainly have to choose one that you find attractive. However, there are more important considerations:

• What do you want the theme to do? If you want to be able to use your own header and logo, if you want e-commerce functionality, if you plan to use the site to show off your portfolio — you need to plan ahead for these things and choose a theme that does the things you want the site to do.
• Where do you want things to go? A theme is essentially a bunch of boxes you can put things in. When we made FreshPlans, we knew that we wanted to put video on the front page, that we wanted to be able to sort blog posts by category and not chronologically, and that we needed to be able to use lots of widgets and plug-ins. We didn’t need a spot for a photo gallery or intensive e-commerce. For Innovative Spine Rehab, we wanted a basic blog with big, bold pictures and nothing else on the page. These are the things you should be considering when you choose your theme.
• How much control do you want? WordPress is great for people who want complete control over their websites. It can also be great for people who want a great static homepage that they don’t have to mess with, plus a blog or forum or store that they can control. The theme you need will vary depending on which of those options you have in mind. Discuss it with your web pro before you build.

And remember, you  can always change your theme. WordPress keeps your content separate from the theme, so you can change the theme at will. You’ll almost certainly need to update the content to fit the new theme, but you won’t have to start over from scratch. Read more changing themes.

Read Part 4.

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