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I sometimes come across wonderful businessmen, who had taken so much time and effort in deveoping their sites, so nice an structured -the wrong way- for  bot.

Bots in reality are not smart entities.  They work very hard, and the read a lot, but they do not “think”, and they do not look at a web page like we do.  So every thing we can do to make it easier for a bot to read our pages is a good thing.  (Oh, by the way, stay away from flash and fancy technologies that make it very hard (if not impossible) for the bots to read your pages)

Your site architecture is very important to the way a bot reads your site.  A bot wants to read its content, see the page title, and  see how you labeled things so it can determine its relevancy for  a given search term.  Now lets assume that your home page is a parent, and each link to an internal page is its child.  And a child could have its own child, and it can go on like that for ever - in theory.  In my opinion, sites that are shallow and wide get better spidered than tall and skinny ones!

Think about it as your file drawer,  you have 3-4 drawers, and then a bunch of folders inside.  Your site should be designed the same way.  This will let the bot decide on how your page flows, and get to the content faster.  Trust me, no one wants to go through 20 navigational clicks to get to a valve or a shoe.  3 or 4 clicks from the home page to your product detail page is ideal. 

Keep it there, and you’ll make your happy…

Here is a cool topic for my fans that are little more “sophisticato” -Yep - a new word I just invented

So here is how it works.  So you have a site with 1000 products.  Your products can be sorted brand, price, size, weight, color, etc.   A bot on the other hand, does not know the meaning of a single word on your site.  To a bot, you have a link on a  page, and links to another page, there is a title, content and other sites that are linking to that page.

So your link to for “Black Shoes” can result in a page that has a black Nike running shoe.   And, your link to for “Nike”  can result in a page that the same black Nike running shoe.  And, your link to for “Running”  can result in a page that has that same black Nike running shoe as well…

To a user, this makes sense, but to a bot, it makes its life harder.  A bot creates relevancy relationships between  pages.  Although it knows what page/ product your site has to offer about black Nike running shoe, it can not tell what page should be its (lets call it) “parent”.

Parent page is important, because it carries over the relevancy relationship.   You need pick what the natural parent for those shoes should be.  In this scenario, I say “Running Shoes”, but there is a method to this decision.

Go to the google  Keyword popularity tool.   https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

See what word has a higher search volume, and if it makes sense, make that the parent:  The other links like the Nike, Black, etc, although they are visible to the user, make them invisible to the bot.  (leave the technical side of “how to do this” to your developer..)

The other way to think about this is the root of a tree.  Your home page is the trunk, and all the other pages are a section of the root.  No root (that I know of) connects to another root.  They can extend and split, but not combine.  Same theory.

I am off to serving in the military, and this months topic is as important as SEO.  It is about what to do while you are out on vacation.  Being on the other side of the earth, you have no guarantees about what type of availability you will have for the internet, so set up a game plan!

If you are a one man shop, set an appropriate auto responder.  Also, if you are using outlook, have your outlook email all incoming mail to your gmail so that you can see what is going on..

If you have office help, then have one person (and a back up for them) email you only *urgent* issues.  My definition of an urgent issue is a matter that can not wait till I return.

This weeks message is short, and that is because  I do not have much time for internet where I am, and before you put yourself in the same situation, I wanted to give you some tips..

Cheers,

And God Bless the armed forces!

A friend of mine asked me about tracking inbound links, as he wanted to count number of links as a measure of effort by his marketing team.  Counting number of links may not be the best way to measure your marketing effort!!

Google and Yahoo pay a lot of importance to the sites that are linking to others pages.  The terminology often used to explain this is an island.  If you have a page (an island)  and I build a bridge to your island, it means that that island of yours is important and relevant to my users.  Now if my island is a big, important island, and I build a bridge to you, then the search engines say, well that new small island must be important as the big island build a bridge.

The message between the lines here are 2 fold, the first one is that the sites that are linking to you must be relevant to your content.  So getting500 links from unrelated sites do not mean anything.

The second point is that the sites that are linking to me should be reputable sites, meaning established sites, with good content, good history, and good traffic.  Creating 30 new one-page-sites and linking them to your page will not help.

My advice: Look at who is ranking high for the terms you want to target.  Visit the top 50 sites and see if they even link to other sites.  If you have some page content that you think will add value and be interesting to their uses, send them an email.  You might get a link.

But if you do not have content that would be interesting to their users, don’t bother asking for a link.  Work on creating content that will be desired by other sites!

I had lunch with a friend of a friend today, a notable investor in the Chicago community, thinking about buying some businesses.  He was thinking about buying 2 businesses, and merging them into one, under one domain name.  So his question to me was “do I just 301 the name that I no longer wish to use?”  He obviously knew about SEO more than the average business owner.  Let me paraphrase his question, and try to explain it in simpler terms.

If you ever want to  move your website address from one domain to another, you need to do a few things to ensure that you do not lose your existing organic traffic.  So if you are not receiving any organic traffic, this topic does not apply to you

If you are getting organic traffic, it means that Google and Yahoo have found your content, liked it, and thought it had relevant content for certain search queries.  (That is why you are getting the free traffic from Google, you search for a search term, and you show up in search results).  And more than likely, before or after Google liked you, some other sites might have liked your content so much that they might have  linked to your pages as well.

Now, if your old site name is oldsite.com, and your new site name is newsite.com, and if you shutdown oldsite.com and move all your content to newsite.com, and turn it on, you will lose any and all traffic to your website.

Changing your website name is not an overnight process, and for it to be done properly, here is the list of steps I suggest you make:

1-Turn on your newsite.com, make sure all content is accurate and complete, all the functionality is working properly.

2-Send an email out to all your existing customers (direct users, who directly type in your domain name than search for you online) and tell them that your site name is changing.  And feel free to take the next step, and give them an incentive (free something) for them to go to your new site and to register/fill out/do something on newsite.com

3-Look at your website stats (a.k.a. analytics) program and see the sites that are ending you traffic.  Contact these sites, and ask them to update the links they have on their site that is linking their users to your pages.  To make their life easier, I suggest you look at their site and  suggest what new page of yours they should change their link to.

4-Technical part - Free to ask your technically savvy nephew to do this for you.  Google has a system by which  you can submit urls of your site to google.  In this file, you can tell google that the url oldsite.com/blahblah.htm is not valid, and now they should replace www.oldsite.com/blahblah.com with newsite.blahblah.com.  Your nephew/niece/IT person will need to use a “tag” called 301, which mean that the change is permenant, and there for the old link should not be used again.

Do not do step 4 before doing the others.

Here are some questions that I would ask any SEO during an interview:

1-What sites have you optimized?  Where were they ranking before, and where are they ranking now?  

The idea here is not really to make a calculation of  “he took a page from ranking at 90th to 10th place, there for an increase of 80″.  The idea is that you need to let him know that you will be measuring his success, and he is going to be paid on that success.

2-Can I check your references?

Anything less than a yes is not good enough.  You need to talk to the businesses that he claims he worked with.  Sure, take the name and number he gives you to call, but I suggest you go to this clients’ site and “contact” them and ask for the person in charge of the website to call you.  This way you are not only talking to the person in charge , but you are also verifying that the contact you were given is still with the company

3-Ask him how long it will take him to do the job.  If he really knows what he is doing, he will break down the job into sections.  Content, title, image tag optimizations are done usually once (unless your content changes often).  But link building is a lengthy process, and therefore he should suggest a longer duration to finish that part.  Caution:  If he suggests that he knows a “quick-and-easy” way to get a large number of links overnight, stop and run.  This is not the SEO you want to hire.  One “good” link is better than a thousand bad links!  You are paying him to get good, quality links, from reputable sites that are related to your industry.  Any other link will not do.

4-Tell him that you will pay for performance.   Tell him that your site is now ranking 73rd for a given term, and that you’ll pay him  if he can get you to top 3, and $y for top 10.  If he can not get you to top 10, he needs to have a very good reason why.  (The only good reason is that the term you are trying to rank for is very competitive, and that you do not have enough good content to compete with the sites that are in 10 at the moment.  If that is the case, you should try to find some new terms to rank for, and have your SEO optimize you site for those pages)

5-Google his name!  If he is not showing up in any page relating to search engine marketing (especially in a positive way), it means he is probably a newbie.  All reputable SEOs have written up some kind of online content to establish themselves.  I rather pay twice as much and get someone who has published a few articles, and has been recommended by others..

Well, that really depends. If you have enough business through word of mouth and other channels, then driving more traffic to your website may not be something you need to do at the moment. However, you need to keep in mind that with time, everything changes.

Most of the new 20-35 year olds are now looking up businesses online. The traditional yellow pages are being used less and less. So of you plan to stay in business -say 10 years from now, I highly recommend that you get a web site build and make sure that it is optimized for SEO.

If you have any intention of getting a higher percentage of your business through online leads, or would like to make sure that you are visible enough that your customers find you quickly and easily, then you should SEO.

If you have a site only so that you do not have an unprofessional looking email address on your business card (e.g. @hotmail.com, @Yahoo.com or a @Google.com) address, then you do not need any SEO

Lets say you want to rank for “Chicago Plumber”. I can easily tell you that there are very large corporations out there with lots of money, doing everything they can to make sure that they rank very well for any city name + “plumber.” Like Yellow pages, online Lead generation companies, national chains with local offices etc. The best way to compete with these companies is usually by letting the search engine know that you are a “local business”. You enter your address and your business name, and you’ll see that Google has a nice reserved spot at the top of the pages for local businesses where the local business that sign up to google and submit their information is shown on a map, with links to their websites and phone numbers.

To sign up in Google, go to here:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Flocal%2Fadd%2FbusinessCenter%3Fgl%3DUS%26hl%3Den-US&service=lbc&hl=en-US&gl=US

Yahoo does not offer this service yet.

MSN: https://llc.local.live.com/BusinessSearch.aspx

Go ahead and register your site. It doesn’t cost you a penny!

Akin Tosyali

Page titles describe the search engine what this page is all about. When a search engine ranks your page for a term, this is going to be the bolded section that is first displayed to the users (followed by a text section of your page where your target term is appearing. So naturally, you want to describe what the page is about. It should be one sentence, descriptive, and should include your “target terms”, which, as you know, appear a few times within the body of the page.

Again, there are numerous geeky ways to really dive into it, but I want to keep the information short and simple. You can contact me if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Akin Tosyali

This is one of the most critical topics of SEO.  Basically, you need to answer the question; what terms do I want to rank high for? Funiture?  New Tires??

There are 2 levels of complexity behind giving an answer.   First of all, if you pick short or popular terms, it will be very hard to rank well for them.  For example, ranking well for “furniture” or “new tires” will be very tough.  That is because there are literally thousands of sites out there who have been optimizing their site for years, and it would be nearly impossible for a search engine to consider you a more relevant site then these sites.    

The second complexity is, even if you go for a longer term, the chances are there is competition there too.  (this kinda goes back to my earlier point on “Do I need SEO”, earlier you start, it usually is better.

So what you need to do is figure out a)what search terms do not have much competition, and b)what are the terms that really relate to your business, such that your site content could possible be considered to be more relevant than others.

To figure out the level of competition, I suggest using a really simple (and free test).  Typethe search query you have in mind to the search engines adn see what pops up.  If you see bunch of large corporations, it means that this sis a highly competitive term.  If you see your competitors or sites that are not that relevant,  it means that you find the terms that you have a good chance ranking for.

Since you are a business owner and not a developer, I am not going to get into the details here.  Once you have these terms, not you’ll need to make sure that your developer uses these terms often in text in your pages, in your page titles, and even in the image (names) that you will have on your site.

You should create different pages for the different terms you want to rank for, and make sure that those page are only 1 click away from your home page…