Seo Services, LLC – Indiana based search engine optimization consultant

Poor Logic: Letting Your Competitors Hold You Back

by Miriam Ellis

Being satisfied with as little as possible may be an excellent strategy for enjoying a simple life, but it’s a recipe for disaster when it describes your approach to promoting your presence on the web. One of my favorite aspects of my job is conversing with new prospective clients about the nature of their businesses, their plans and hopes. I love hearing their stories! Sometimes, though, these conversations go nowhere because of poor logic on the part of the business owner, and no matter what I say, my own hopes dim for their chances of success on the web. Recently, I had just such a conversation.

A few weeks ago, I was called by a gentleman asking for help in improving the visibility of his local-focused business. He was an extremely pleasant man, but as our chat progressed, it became clear to me that he was very unlikely to become a client because of the following things:

1. Satisfied With A Poor Website

His relatively new website had been built in Front Page by a relative, and, it looked like it. Cross-browser alignment issues, poor structure, poor contrast, poor Usability and no real on-page SEO were the hallmarks of this homemade site, meaning that room for improvement was huge. I am so polite when I speak critically of a company’s site, but despite my mild words, he became somewhat defensive, saying he was very happy with the site and that it had been built by a professional.

2. Satisfied With Doing The Least Work Possible

The nature of the business called for the various services the company offered to be broken up into dedicated, unique pages – one for each service, optimized both for the service term + geographic region, in compliance with basic good SEO and Local SEO practices. His objection to this suggestion was that his competitors are ranking well with one page websites. This was true – lazy, one-page websites had a presence in Google’s top 10 for his keywords because no one was making any effort in the industry to do more.

When I asked how he would like to blow his competitors away, a motivated response simply wasn’t there. If his competitors were doing the bare minimum, why couldn’t he, too? The poor logic in this is obvious: what about the competitor who comes along 3 months from now and does hire me, and we oust the lazy folks from their positions with our well-built, properly optimized site? Waiting for a competitor to make the first move before you make any effort is a really strange business strategy.

3. Satisfied With Poor Copy

In trying to help this man see how his website could be improved to meet his stated goals of improving his visibility and conversions, I turned next to the minimal text copy on his few pages. Like the copy on so many business sites, it was speaking to itself instead of speaking to the site’s users – this man’s potential clients. The passive language of:

We have been in business for 10 years. We are a reliable and trustworthy company. We are proud of our customer service. We, we, we…

was as far as the copy got, never once making an offer to the user to benefit you, help you, serve you, solve your problems and meet your needs.

I explained that the copy needed to be expanded and swung in the direction of the user instead of speaking in this insular, uninviting manner, but again, I met with resistance and an explanation that he had worked very hard on the copy. I didn’t doubt this; some business owners genuinely do find it really hard to describe their business in the written word, but this is what I am here for. I explained that, as part of the redesign of his site, I could help him turn his copy into something that would showcase the benefits to the user and call him to the desired actions of making a phone call to set up a consultation. Somewhat dismissively, the gentleman expressed the opinion that this would seem like an advertisement. And, of course, none of his competitors were doing it this way.

“Well, yes,” I agreed. “Your website is an advertisement. In fact your website is a sales rep, working for your 24 hours a day. While you are working, eating and sleeping, your sales rep should be working for you, welcoming clients, answering questions, showing what you can do for them and inviting people to contact you. That’s the whole point.”

Our conversation ended with great amiability and he thanked me for my time, but it was very clear to me that I had failed to help this fellow get past the mindset of doing the least possible. I really liked this man and wanted to help him. He had come to me hoping to find a way to get more contacts and contracts and make more money. I tried to point the way, but because no one else in his town was making the slightest effort to effectively use the web to attain these kinds of goals, he remained completely unmotivated to invest time and money in the very things that would enable him to outrank his weak competitors and start hearing that phone ring more often.

There is nothing strange or new about this scenario. Fellow designers and SEOs will have sat through calls like this many times before, but it really made me think about how, in the business world, we take cues from one another, for good or ill.

If my colleagues and competitors blog twice a week, is this my permission to do no more than equal them, or should I blog twice as much in hopes of seeing twice the benefit? If my colleagues have never hosted a promotional contest, does this mean this just wouldn’t work in my industry, or does it mean I’ve got a secret weapon no one else has tested yet? If no one in my industry is on Twitter, does that mean there’s no point, or am I going to be a pioneer in using Social Media in an untapped business sector?

How you respond in your gut to questions like these likely says a lot about your drive to succeed on the web. One thing I can guarantee: every business owner reading this article would like to make more money. In the industry I took a glance at for this gentleman with whom I spoke, it would take just one person motivated to do the most, instead of the least, to wipe the competition off the map. Your industry may not be as neglected and wide open as this, but the same healthy resolve to be bold and do as much as you can is sure to serve you well.

A lax attitude troubles me, because it represents lost opportunities, but on a karmic level, I suppose it represents opportunities won for someone else. Where do you want to stand on the scale of things? Jog along with the pack or set the pace? Money’s waiting at the finish line.

Check out our small business news site.

SEO 101 – Part 4: Everything You Need to Know About Headings and Alt Attributes

by Stoney deGeyter

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are certainly no magic solution to building keyword relevance. They are merely one more baby step to creating a well-rounded optimization of a page. Adding heading tags using your keywords may or may not make a difference in your keyword rankings, but nonetheless, balanced against the rest of the page, using a heading tag properly, with keywords, is going to benefit your visitors, if not the search engines.

On the search engine front, at the very least, the Heading tags (H1, H2,… H6) can be used to tell the search engines the hierarchical structure of your page’s content.

When developing content, it’s pretty easy for visitors to see how the page breaks down, but search engines need a bit of help. The heading tags are that help.

Think of headings as you would an outline of an important paper. At the top is the Title, in this case the H1 tag. Next would be the Main points; In an outline they would be I, II, and III. In HTML you would use the H2 for all of them. Next we have our sub-points A, B and C, or the H3, and following that sub-sub-points of 1., 2., 3., or the H4. You get the point from there.

An alternate strategy would be to use your H1 for the title as noted above and the H2 for a sub-title. Then you’d start with the H3 for your main points I, II and III, and go down form there. You can go all the way down to the H6, but its rare that you have a page with so much content that this is warranted.

One of the problems I often see with heading tags is that they are used by developers for the site’s navigation. In a way it makes sense, you want to segment different areas of the navigation with headers of their own. The only problem with this is that you end up using valuable hx tags in an invaluable area and you’re diluting the effectiveness of the heading tags in your content where they would otherwise be most effective.

If your developers are intent on using hx tags in the navigation elements then make sure they stick to the lower level H5 and H6 so you can use the higher level tags in the content where they’ll make the most impact. Make certain that they don’t use the H1 tag for the logo, that’s a complete throwaway and prevents you from gaining any effectiveness with an H1 tag in your copy.

All of the tags can be used repeatedly on the page, depending on where they fall in the total hierarchy, except for the H1 tag (or H2 if you are using it as a sub-headline.) Be sure to use it only once on the page.

Alt Attributes

Alt attributes, commonly referred to as “alt tags” allow you to add descriptive text to your images. The visitors generally won’t see the alt text unless, in Firefox they mouse over the image or they have images turned off.

The alt text is meant to be a replacement for the image should the image not show. Make sure your alt text reads properly and adds something for the reader who doesn’t see the image. The text itself should describe the content or visuals of the image for the visitor. This text also provides much needed information to the search engine, especially if the image contains text. That text should be included in the image.

Using Alt Attributes in your image tags can help you in a number of ways. 1) it provides a greater context for the text on the page which can be factored into your search engine rankings. 2) It can help your images come up in image searches, which can drive additional traffic and conversions to your site.

Text-only browsers, or browsing with images turned off still happens, probably more frequently than we know. People on slow connections will often turn their images off in order to speed up their browsing experience. Without alt text, an important element of your pages won’t be available to them.

There are also a good number of visually impaired web surfers that use screen readers to deliver the content of web pages. The screen reader will read the image alt text, which means if the image is important to the visitor’s experience on the site, not having an alt attribute can be detrimental.

Finally, many people browse the web on mobile phones. These phones are almost always slower than the typical internet connection and either the phone’s browsers won’t display images or users will turn the images off so they can browse faster. This is generally not the case with smart phones, but there are still a lot of non-smart phone users out there.

The most important area to use alt tags is in your navigation. Whether it be your header, footer or side-bar navigation, any place images are used be sure to supplement them with alt text. Failure to do so could make your sit unnavigable to any visitor that isn’t seeing images.

Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags
Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes

Check out our small business news site.

Why Settle for Best Practices?

There are differences between best practices and using SEO as a means to achieve the goals of your search marketing strategy. Do you know which method your agency is using? …

Google Publishes 5 Privacy Principles

In honor of yesterday’s International Data Privacy Day, Google published its five privacy principles. They are:

1. Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services. Search history informs personalized search, but users can opt-out.
2. Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices. For example, you can chat on Google Talk “off the record” so the conversation isn’t saved.
3. Make the collection of personal information transparent. Last year, the Google Dashboard was launched to show you what info Google is collecting on you.
4. Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy. You can report privacy issues related to Street View. Google often blurs faces, for example.
5. Be a responsible steward of the information we hold. Google doesn’t sell data to other companies.

You can view the published web document on Google’s privacy principles here.

Delicious Updates Viewing Options; Adds StumbleUpon-Like Feature

Social bookmarking site Delicious has updated the ability to filter viewing options – plus added a new way to browse your bookmarks that is very StumbleUpon-like.

First up, there’s a new display options menu tucked into the top right corner of your bookmarks display. This is for when you’re viewing “My Bookmarks” – not on the main page. Here’s what it looks like:

Delicious also gave the option menu treatement to the tags section on the right sidebar in “My Bookmarks.”

Last but absolutely not least, there’s a new option to “Browse these bookmarks.” Again, this is for your own bookmarks. When you click it, you’re taken to the most recent bookmark – but there’s a toolbar frame across the top. Click arrows to browse through your bookmarks. This is very much like the new StumbleUpon – except your just browsing your own bookmarks. It will be interesting to see if Delicious expands this capability to truly compete with StumbleUpon in the future.

Look for the “Browse these boomarks” link in a blue box in the top right corner:

Here’s one of my bookmarks with the Delicious browsing frame at the top (click to enlarge):

Connect with me on Delicious, screen name nlj.

6 Google Updates to Read this Weekend

Whether you’re snowed in or enjoying sunny weather this weekend, take some time to read up on these Google updates:

Google Custom Search has made some changes to the hosted home page.

Google Analytics has made annotations available for all accounts.

Google Maps now offers personalized suggestions.

Google Image search for mobile has added Popular Image browsing.

The Google Research team blogged about building cluster applications.

Google Books updated their Home Page and Library.

Scour Launches Local Social Search

Social search engine Scour has launched a new local feature. Simply click on the new “Local” tab over the search box. Then, type in what you’re looking for and the location you’re interested in, and click “Search.”

The results page features listings down the left side and a map on the right. As you scroll down, the map travels with you – very handy.

Here’s a couple screenshots. Click on either image to enlarge or head to Scour to try it out for yourself.

Google Brings Click to Call to Mobile Ads

If you have an AdWords campaign set up to reach searchers using Google’s mobile search, you’ve got a new feature to enhance your efforts. Google is enabling click-to-call phone numbers in the ads that appear on mobile web browsers.

Smartphones allow users to click on phone numbers and a call is automatically generated. If a smartphone user is searching for a local pizza place on their mobile device, then they can now simply click on the phone number and order up their favorite pie.

Google’s mobile click-to-call ads are generated based on location. So if your company is a chain, an ad will be served up with the closest location to a user – and will contain the appropriate phone number.

In order to add click-to-call in mobile AdWords ads, simply set up location extensions and add your business phone number. Then make sure your campaign is set up to appear on mobile devices with full Internet browsers. The video below shows you how it’s done so you’ll know what to do when you’re in AdWords:

Microsoft Online Division Revenues Improve, But Remain at a Loss

Microsoft has reported its Q2 2009 earnings (Q4 for many other companies) and the news is mixed for their online services division. Revenues improved over the previous quarter, but came in at a 5% loss year-over-year.

Specifically, online revenues for Q2 came in at 1 million, compared to 9 million the year prior. Q2 losses came in at 6 million compared with 0 million in Q2 2008.

The loss was blamed on a decrease in overall online advertising revenues. However, the silver lining was that Bing brought a growth in search revenues for Microsoft.

If Bing continues to grow, then Microsoft will do well to capitalize on its strengths to build a stronger online services division. Of course, the deal with Yahoo! should help as well.

Bing Launches New U.S. Stocks and Funds Feature

Bing is making it easier for you to keep up with your portfolio and the U.S. stock market. Their new stocks and funds pages offer in-depth data on most U.S. stocks. The pages include an Instant Answer snapshot of what’s going on for a stock at the time you search.

Let’s see how Apple’s stock is doing a day after the iPad was unveiled. Type in the stock code AAPL and you’ll get the Instant Answer in the main search results:

Click on the main link and you get access to the new stocks and funds page for Apple on Bing. (Click on the image for a larger view.)