Don’t waste your email signatures! Create a value proposition and design a call to action for your email signatures.
I had this idea a long, long time ago while at a previous company and could never convince them to do it. So, now that I own my own company I’ve done it. I’ve also done some research and concluded that this works. The bottom line is, you never know who will be looking at your email - it just could be someone looking for your services, or someone who knows of someone else looking for your services.
So, if you have a special offer (if not, create one) and then have your designer (or ours) create a nice graphical cal to action for it and include it in your email signature. Use this as the signature template for all of your staff. Before you know it you’ll be exposing your special offer to all of the people your staff emails on a daily basis. Guess what. It cost you next to nothing and I guarantee at some point you’ll get a lead from it.
Don’t overlook the simplest opportunities to brand your company and spread your value proposition. You never know where that next lead will come from!
What information though? We’ve put together this very simple list of services every web master should set up on their websites. The data you get from these tools will allow you to understand what’s exactly what’s happening with your site from a visitor and search engine perspective.
Once you’ve set your site up with all of these services you’ll be armed with enough data to really manage your website.
The three webmaster sites from Google, Yahoo! and MSN will help you understand how their spiders are interacting with your site and you can inform them of the pages in your site via the sitemap.xml file.
The Analytics will tell you everything that the users are doing on your site, where they are coming from, what keywords they are using to find you, and even how qualified a visitor they are via the bounce rate. You can even track conversions, and see where in the world they are coming from. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes analytics data!
The Robots.txt file won’t give you any data - but it will prevent the search engines from accidentally indexing those private spreadsheets only meant for management :)
Finally, clicktale and crazy egg will help you understand in greater detail how users are interacting with your site. For example, we discovered that a particular headline for testimonials looked a lot like a link and people were trying to click it. So we made it a link and satisfied their needs!
So why would you not want all of this information? Almost all of it is free and available to you, so go set it up and get informed! It’s your business after all!
A while ago I started reading a quality PPC/SEM blog called Apollo SEM. The blogs author, Jameszol recently received a letter from a California based web development firm with a similar name demanding they change their name as it was in violation of a their trademark. I won’t go into the details but encourage you to read the letter he received here about an apparent trademark infringement on the name “Apollo.”
It seems that after a consultation with a lawyer, Apollo SEM is completely in the right and, should they choose to keep their name, brand and continue on with business as usual.
Instead, Apollo SEM will be seeking a new name and brand and walk away from the situation entirely. Right decision? You be the judge but I would be that Jameszol and his partners will earn a lot of respect and credibility in the industry for this ballsy move.
The funny part, I would bet they might even rank for the term apollo interactive one day soon.
To the guys at the other Apollo firm - consider a phone call next time, it goes a lot further to win someone’s respect than a letter from a lawyer.
Updating your website on a regular basis is the key to remaining current and retaining visitors and generating new traffic. Replacing your site without careful planning from a Search Engine Optimization perspective will do you a lot of harm.
In the last few months we’ve come across clients who have recently updated their websites and unfortunately did not take the time to carefully prepare for the upgrade from a Search Engine Optimization perspective. Why? It’s not their core competency and most (but not all) designers / developers are not interested in Search Engine Optimization.
What’s the big deal you may ask? What is there to be aware of and consider?
That’s the million dollar question which we’ll answer here for you today. As your website ages, and you continue to do your “marketing things” such as press releases, partnerships, case studies etc… your website is:
carefully being crawled and indexed by the search engines
being linked to by 3rd parties including partners, news sites, press release sites and other interested parties
being book-marked by visitors to your site
generating organic traffic (free) from the search engines
generating free traffic from referring sites (those 3rd parties linking to you)
ranking in the search engines for keywords that are drawing in qualified (and poorly qualified) traffic to your site
receiving credit (PageRank - from Google) for all of the links to your site and content being written about you
This is just a small but important list of the things happening around and about your site that most businesses pay virtually no attention to. These are all important factors to take into consideration when updating your site.
What should you do to prepare for updating or replacing your website?
While the list is not exhaustive, and I am sure our readers can make some additional recommendations the following list covers off the most important aspects in our opinion.
Install an analytics program (Google Analytics is free and easy to use) on your site if you have not done so already. If you are just now adding analytics wait at least one month before doing any work on your site and then proceed to point 2.
Review your analytics to understand and document which pages of your site receive the most page views, which keywords are drawing in traffic with a low bounce rate and which keywords are drawing in traffic with a high bounce rate (but where the keyword appears to be relevant), which search engines and referring sites are sending you traffic.Compile all of this information in a format that you can easily refer to such as a text document, or spreadsheet.
Use Yahoo! Site Search to identify the back-links to your site. You can only get details on the first 1000 back-links. Export this list to a TSV file using the feature provided on the site and store it with the information from step 2.
Produce a site map of your current website using any drawing tool you can think of including Visio or a hand drawing. Now, this next part takes a little while to do but it’s crucial. For each keyword that is sending you traffic identify which page in your sitemap the traffic is landing on. You can get this information by drilling down on the keyword data in Google Analytics, or by going to the search engines and searching on the keyword and then identifying which page is ranked for that phrase (this latter approach is much more time consuming). Rank the keywords in order of the number of visits to the page.On your drawing you should rename the pages after the highest ranked keyword. For example “blue-widget.html”. This will ensure that the page is just a little more optimized for that keyword going forward. Also, rename any other pages in your site (new or old) after keywords you want to try ranking for in the future.Once you’ve finished this exercise you will have a solid understanding of which pages in your website are ranking for keywords that are “actually” drawing in traffic, you’ll know which keyword is pulling in the most traffic for each page and you’ve increased the optimization on those pages.
Begin Your New Site Creation
Now that you have solid understanding of how your site has been performing you are free to re organize as you see fit. Always be certain to create new pages of content that address the keyword topics you want to rank for, name the pages after the most important keyword and be sure to write unique titles, descriptions H1 and H2 tags and of course the body copy.
On the home page of the site make sure you are linking directly to the most important pages in your site. For example, if you have three core products or services, you should have them listed on in HTML text (not in a javascript drop down) on the home page using their names as links, “my best service 1″, “my best service 2″, “my best service 3″.
Once you’ve finished creating your site, and before you deploy it you must identify all of the pages in the site which have new names and permanently during the deployment redirect (301 redirect) the old page names to the new ones. If you’re site is on a unix server you can do this in the .htaccess file, or in IIS on a windows server. Either way - you should seriously consider this crucial step because it will:
Allow the search engines time to update their index with your new pages without sending visitors to 404 pages on your website.
Pass all of the value from all of the old links to your site to the new pages in the site
Will prevent you from losing existing back links from 3rd party sites to specific pages in your site that are no longer there. Other webmasters are usually (and they should be) testing for broken links and removing them or correcting them on their sites.
In Conclusion
Having taken these steps, you should feel pretty comfortable that you have not lost any organic or referral traffic from the search engines, or referring sites and have produced your site in such a way that will most likely increase in rankings for the most important keywords vs dropping in rankings!
Sit back and relax - then have a look at your analytics in a few weeks to see what’s happening now!
Note: You should only take these steps if you’re relatively certain that your website is already well indexed, has many backlinks and already receives a decent amount of traffic that you want to preserve. If this is not the case, then you can simply start fresh, but do pay attention to the keyword, copy writing and file naming points in this discussion, and don’t worry about the permanent redirects.
Comments
If you have information that you feel is missing from these directions we’d love to hear about it. Please post them in the comments and we’ll update the directions and we’ll include a contributors list with full attribution and links to your site.
I’ve created a custom Google search just for the Security Now podcast show notes hosted at www.grc.com.
As an avid listener of the Security Now podcast with Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson, I decided to produce a Google custom search engine just on the www.grc.com domain so that you can easily search the show notes hosted there.
Please feel free to use the form here on this post, or you can go to the home page for the “Security Now Show Notes” Google custom search.
We started seeing this last week and it looks like it’s fully launched. It’s the 10 pack of listings in the Google map at the top of a local based search. The new format includes ten listing in addition to telephone information.
Our PPC pros have also noticed this in local pay per click based ads as well. I’m OK with the format as it certainly is more useful to end users. What do you think?
Search Engine Optimization should also consider conversions!
Many search engine optimization companies will disagree with me on this point because they don’t want to confuse their services (getting a site ranked for certain keyphrases) with the more difficult objective of converting the ensuing traffic into leads. The funny thing is, no matter how clear you make it to an SEO buyer that they are paying only for rankings, they will ultimately (perhaps months later) judge the success of the service not on the rankings but on how much it’s improved their business. If it’s not turning into more leads and of course more business then there is a very high probability that they will cancel their SEO services because in their mind it’s not working for them. This leaves the average SEO fuming mad because for petes sake - they delivered the services that were sold!
Let this be a lesson! Search engine optimization companies should seriously consider focusing more effort on helping clients convert the traffic that is being produced by the search engine optimization process. Some of the things that can be done to improve conversions are:
ensure the website is professionaly designed and accurately reflects the target audience
provide clear value propositions and calls to action in key scanning positions
place an 800 or local number in the header of every page in the site
place a small contact form (with some kind of incentive) on every page of the site either in the left or right hand column
consider using a click to call service on the phone numbers
always answer questions of privacy at every opportunity to convert the traffic - that means on contact forms, next to the submit buttons
install analytics and setup a Goal to track conversions on the contact forms
install a phone tracking system like WhoCalled? to track telephone conversions
This is just a partial list for the sake of this discussion. Implementing these items will go a long way to helping your customers websites convert all of the great traffic your search engine optimization efforts are sending to the site. If you make this a focus of your monthly services your customers will be satisfied and will continue wanting to improve their site over the long term.
If you’re buying search engine optimization services from an agency or individual SEO and they are not consulting with you on converting the traffic, you should seriously consider switching to one that does. It’s in your best interest to get the best value you can, and that means capitalizing on the traffic being sent to your site. That’s the whole point of search engine optimization and search engine marketing in general!
What are most small businesses looking for in a search engine optimization company?
Having been in the web development and Internet marketing business for over a decade I’ve had the extreme pleasure of working with a diverse set of clients from entreprenuers to Fortune 500s. Clearly all companies are looking for a competent vendor to outsource their work to. However, once you get past the basics of competency you enter into another realm of criteria which many suppliers overlook. It’s trust.
Once a small business has found a short list of competent suppliers to choose from they start evaluating these other factors with trust being at the top. The small business needs to know that they can “trust” the supplier to:
do the work requested of them in a timely fashion
keep the clients best interests at heart
not deceive them in any way
The small business will choose to work with the supplier that they can trust the most. What better way to do business? By keeping a clients best interests at heart regardless of how the relationship goes will ensure that the client is happy, and in the end will result in more business down the road. Trust is a crucial component of any business relationship and it should not be taken for granted.
According to the Yahoo! Search Blog they are in the process of updating their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms.
This is the first update for Yahoo! in 2008. Hopefully we will not see to much of a detrimental impact. In fact, we’ve often seen improvements across our clients during Yahoo!’s updates.
As usual we urge clients not to panic if they drop in Yahoo! as these updates usually work themselves out over several weeks regardless.
If you have questions about this - please email us, OK!
Yahoo! is experimenting with displaying results from Delicious along with the regular search results.
I love it when companies try new things. It means they are innovating even if it’s a small incremental innovation. In this case it’s Yahoo! They bought the popular Delicious book-marking service a few years ago and are just now experimenting with including results from Delicious with the regular search results.
While this is still an experiment it could really make a big difference for clients wishing to rank well in Yahoo! By having your content well book-marked in Delicious you can start to see more traffic from Yahoo! to your site.
We’ll keep you posted on the results of this experiment as it evolves over the next several weeks and months.
Don’t waste your email signatures! Create a value proposition and design a call to action for your email signatures.
