Making a List and Checking it Twice:

The holiday season is fast approaching, and now is the time to make sure your website is ready for the rush of holiday shoppers. With gas prices on the rise and many consumers having tightened budgets this year, you need to make sure your website stands out from the competition if you want the shoppers to buy from your site. To help make sure your site doesn’t end up on the naughty list, here is a brief e-commerce website Holiday Preparedness Checklist:

     • No broken images or links (The only place broken links lead 
     customers is away from your website.) 
     • Site is easy to navigate (Ask a friend or family member to place a 
     test order and give you their honest feedback.) 
     • Discontinued items removed (Few things are more frustrating 
     than finding the perfect holiday gift, only to learn it’s no longer 
     available.) 
     • Seasonal items uploaded and easy to get to (A direct link or 
     featured holiday item on the home page is a good idea.) 
     • Content updated with seasonal keyword focus (Outdated 
     content - spring specials in October? - doesn’t create a lot of 
     confidence that orders will be handled in a timely manner.)
     • Sales and promotions are prominently displayed (Online 
     shoppers love a good bargain, so make sure they can find yours.)

Now that your website has had it’s winter check-up, how’s your marketing campaign looking?

Never Stop Improving!

Has anyone else seen this line in a Request for Proposal, “project will go to the lowest bidder…”?  It appears, with variations in the wording, all over the place.  Right off the bat, this tells me that the person or company doesn’t take their business seriously, or at least as seriously as they should. 

Your web presence is your company’s face on the internet. In many cases, it is your company’s only face.  Why would you leave your company in the hands of the lowest bidder?  The web development and online marketing industry is VERY competitive.  The sites that rise to the top consistently get there because of the quality of work done on them, be it programming or SEO.  When evaluating a company for your web project, you should be looking at the quality of work the company does and the knowledge they have about the industry.  As with virtually any facet of your company, it is vital to do it right.  In an industry where the saying, “You get what you pay for” couldn’t be more relevant, you can’t afford to bet on the lowest bidder criteria.

Let us know if you have experienced anything that relates to this, whether you were the customer or the web firm.

Never Stop Improving!

There are so many SEO myths floating around out there, we thought we’d point out a great article that dicusses of few of the most common.  Check out this article:  Popular SEO Myths published at SEOChat.com.  This is a must read for anyone, whether you’re new to the field or you’ve been around the proverbial block and want to keep yourself current.  There are many more myths than are mentioned in this article, but this is a good start.  Feel free to comment below or ask questions. 

Never stop improving!

Building a website is one thing, but getting people to visit it is another thing entirely. When you’ve built a website, what is your next step? Send an e-mail to all your friends and relatives with a link? Post it on your Myspace? Well, those are a couple of steps that will get you some initial traffic, but is it the type of targeted traffic you’re looking for?

Let’s have a discussion about targeted traffic. Let’s say you sell bananas online, direct from the island of Oahu in Hawaii. You ship them fresh-picked, and they take approximately three days to get to their destinations. We’ll call them “gourmet bananas”. The people you’ll want to attract to your website will find your site how? Ideally, they’ll already be looking for bananas, or information about bananas. At a stretch, they’ll be looking for gourmet or fresh-picked or organic fruit. Possibly even Fruit from Hawaii. People who find you that are looking for this kind of product or information are what we call “targeted traffic”. Conversely, someone looking for ski resorts is probably not going to be wanting to buy bananas - well, not at the moment anyway.

So, how do you get this targeted traffic to your site? Well, first, you need to figure out how your customers are looking for your website, and get in front of them. The majority of websites are found through search engines. Most people use search engines to find information, goods and services online. Now that you know this, you need to get your website in front of these searchers!

There are a couple of ways to get in front of searchers on the search engines. You can either work on your rankings the “natural” way through SEO, or you can tweak keywords and pay for placement on the search engines.

Now, there are pros and cons to each approach.

The first factor is Time.

Natural optimization has the big disadvantage of taking a lot of time to get working correctly. Not only does the site itself need to be optimized, but relationships across the web need to be created and maintained. A level of trust needs to be built with the search engines and with other websites, and a lot of that takes time to accrue.

Paid Search results can typically be on the top of the search engines within a day. That’s a fantastic turnaround!

The second factor is cost.

Natural optimization is typically a lot cheaper than Paid results. With paid results, you’re paying every time someone clicks on a link to your site. The more competitive the keyword, the more each click is going to cost you. Some paid listings will charge you for a number of “impressions” instead of clicks - meaning you get charged every time someone even looks for your keyword phrase and your link is displayed in the listings. This can either work for or against you. If your link is not compelling enough to make someone want to click on it, then you will lose money, but if your link is worded very well, you could potentially save a lot of money using the number of impressions route.

With natural optimization, you do not pay per click. You pay for the time of an SEO person or team of persons to take care of your site’s SEO for you. (If you are the one doing the optimization, consider that you are paying yourself an hourly wage. Don’t sell yourself short and pay yourself minimum wage, when you’re doing your cost calculations! Your time is more valuable than that.)

A third factor is longevity.

While paid advertising is up on the search engines that very day, the cost is that as soon as you decide to stop paying for it, those positions are gone. With natural rankings, your site should increase in rankings over time, and you gain the advantage of people on the internet paying attention to you, and possibly linking to you on their own. What happens is that your site’s popularity will grow almost on its own, even if you stop doing anything to it yourself. However, if you stop updating and stop paying attention to your SEO, your site will start to fall in rankings. But SEO is normally done on a month to month basis, and being a little late with the payment isn’t going to make your site drop off the rankings right away. That is a big advantage over the paid listings.

Yet a fourth factor is Perception.

Customer perceptions. It was once thought that no one ever looked at the paid advertising. Then it was discovered that almost half the searchers out there didn’t even realize there was a difference between paid and natural listings. If you look at Google, it is clearly stated that the ones on top in the grey box are actually paid listings, but not everyone bothers to read that information.

Of the fifty percent of people who can tell the difference between paid and natural listings, about half of them are actually annoyed by the presence of paid listings and will not click on them. This leaves you with still 75% of the market willing to click on paid listings. What about that last quarter of the searchers? Well, you won’t get them with paid listings, but paid listings are still valuable.

What is the best way to get conversions?

Well, there is no best way to get conversions. Every market is its own situation! Someone selling aftermarket tickets to sold out shows might prefer paid listings because their listings change too quickly for natural SEO to catch up. A local gardening store might prefer natural results because their services are going to be unchanging for years to come, and they have a lot of information to put on their site. Still others prefer a mix of Paid search and Natural SEO - paid search has the advantage of letting you test out your keywords and giving you an idea of what to work towards with Natural seo, and also getting your website out in front of searcher’s eyes right away, instead of waiting for natural results to put you there. Brand recognition is a powerful tool on the web and in advertising in general.

Natural rankings and building the reputation of your site are always going to be important, but if you are forced to choose between paid results or natural, make sure you take into account the factors discussed here. You may wish to ask a professional their opinion, but try to find someone who is not biased for paid or natural search to review your situation individually.  Every site is different and cookie cutter solutions don’t do well in today’s competitive markets.

Have fun and be safe this weekend, and don’t put off any SEO changes until Monday that can be done today! The search engine spiders will be especially active tomorrow, so make sure you take advantage of that. Getting new changes indexed now is always better than later!

Have a great holiday weekend from the Mobile Penguins team!

If you are anything like me, you are addicted to the deep well of information that is the internet. You have probably included a few phrases into your regular vocabulary such as, “I’ll Google that later,” or “Well, the Internet says…” Why do people look online for their information today rather than using the routes to information that we used to use? In times past, if you wanted to know, say, the difference between an Arctic fox and a red fox, you’d go to the library and look in the encyclopedia. If the encyclopedia wasn’t as full of information as you’d like, you’d go to the card catalogue or (more recently) use a computerized search for books that had to do with foxes and then use the Dewey Decimal System to locate those books within the library. Then take those books, check them out, and read them, hoping that somewhere in the books was the information you were looking for all along.

Do you see any problems with the old system? Well, you probably got the information you were looking for, but who knows how old that information is? Maybe scientists had made discoveries with the DNA of both types of foxes to realize that they are, in fact, related, and not separate species? Or maybe the arctic fox is more related to wolves. Maybe one or the other is no longer facing extinction, and your book was printed ten or more years ago. Also, maybe you weren’t the first to want information on foxes. Are you going to wait two weeks to for the books to come back in so you can read about them? Are you going to visit other libraries? If you have a time limit, like, say, a report due in two weeks, then you don’t have the option of waiting for your book to come back. You could try asking someone who knows a lot about foxes, but if you live in Florida, what are the chances of running into an Alaskan fox trapper on the street?

When the internet was first reaching popularity, teachers told students that they would not accept papers written using the internet as a source. The reason? “Anybody can post anything on the internet”. At the time, when trust was low, that was completely valid. Now, teachers are allowing students to harvest their data from the internet, but most still require at least one library find. A problem we’re seeing now, however, is that a lot of students are plagerizing work directly from Wikipedia and printing it as their own work.

But what does this have to do with content? We’re getting to that.

The internet is so full of information, that it’s easy to forget that you need to write your own information if you’re planning on selling products online. But simply think about it - what are people doing online? Most of them are looking for information. This is still the information age. Say a person is looking for product reviews on a few different cell phones they’re thinking about buying. The best way to offer the information is to have all the specifications of each phone listed out in an easy to read format, and then offer the product reviews. Smart websites also have a compare feature, which lists out the various aspects of what a phone can do in a chart and lists each model and you can easily figure out what phone offers the features you want and their relative costs. Doesn’t that sound useful? Wouldn’t you want to re-visit that page later for reference if someone asked you about phones or why you chose the phone you did choose? If the page was kept up to date, technophiles would frequent that page rather often, checking new features and new phones. If that same page also sold phones, they’d have a nice captive audience to sell them to. Why would people buy from them versus another website that might have lower prices? Trust. If someone trusts your information, they also trust that you’re not going to rip them off with whatever you’re selling. Buying a product over the internet requires a lot of trust. Trusting that the website company is going to be there next week and next month and next year will go a long way towards trusting that the company will take your money and give you the product you want in a timely manner, and a website company that has taken the time to put together that kind of comprehensive information is less likely to disappear overnight.

Building trust with your customers and providing useful information should be the main reason you put content on a website, but now I’m going to tell you of a few more reasons to do so.

How do people gain link popularity? Reciprocal linking? Paid links? Those do work, to varying degrees, and there are certain advantages, such as getting to choose your link’s anchor text and where exactly it points to, but building links on your own in that manner is a long and labor intensive process. If you spent half that time on building out your content into something people would want to use and refer to later, you could very easily get links from all over the web from people who appreciate the work you’ve put in to your website content.  (You will hear this kind of quality content that people find on their own and want to link to referred to as “link bait”)

The disadvantage is that people could, possibly, work to link to your site using words or phrases you don’t want to be associated with, like “scam artist” or “miserable failure“. These kinds of pranks are unlikely, however, requiring hundreds of thousands of links from people of many different IP addresses to acheive, and Google claims that it can’t happen anymore due to a change in their algorythms. The only change in algorythm that would make sense to prevent that kind of Google prank would be for the search engines to verify that the keywords you are getting links from happen to also be somewhere on the content of your site, and bonus if the keywords are on the page that the link is pointing to. (thus, another reason why it’s such a good idea to build out your content.)

The best kind of links come from sites that have a high amount of authority, and it’s difficult to get links from sites like that even if your site has something of value to offer (like comprehensive comparison charts for cell phones). It’s next to impossible to get links from authority sites if you have a site with next to no good information on it. If you were an authority site, and people came to your site trusting you to have great information and links to other sites that have fantastic information, you would be very picky about what sites you would link to. If you started linking willy-nilly, you would lose a lot of trust from your regular patrons, and your site would start to lose value. These are the things that authority sites think about, and this is why it’s so difficult to get links from sites like these.

Have I convinced you yet of the importance of valuable information being presented as content on your website?

Here are a few phrases I hear quite often:

“I don’t have time to write all that!” or “I’m not a writer!” or “I don’t actually know anything about my products other than what came in the sample sales text when I signed up to be a reseller…”

If you really don’t have time or can’t, you’ll need to hire someone to write things for you. If you can’t find someone who’s already an expert on whatever products you are offering, you will need to find someone willing to research your products for you, looking up all the information and constructing a bunch of valuable text. Just ignoring the issue of relevant content won’t help your site at all. Constructing a website that has no content is just like building a car with rusty razorblades for seats. The car works but why on earth would anyone ever get in it?

What challenges have you faced when it comes to content writing?

Back in 1994, when the internet was young and search engines were new, the developers working for the search engines were trying to figure out an easy way to help their “bots” spider the web and index pages found on the web. They petitioned for “meta tags” to be accepted, and people started adding them to their websites.

The point of meta tags was that it was something you could add to your site that summarized your site without having to have it showing for the viewer. They were supposed to act like a card catalogue at the library in that they provide a good method of locating the information you are seeking.

This was a great idea, and webmasters around the world started adding keywords and descriptions to their web pages. Very soon, however, people noticed that their sites would get indexed depending on how many keywords they had in their meta tags, and how often they were repeated, thus, if your entire description, title and keyword tag was just “shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes,shoes…” etc, then you should rightly get placed on top of the search engines for the term “shoes”. Another thing people were doing, was adding terms in their keyword tag that had nothing to do with their site at all. They would notice that a lot of people would type in “sex” as a search term, and so stuff their keyword and description metas with that - even though they might be selling only shoes. The thought process was to try to trick the user into clicking on your website.

Obviously, if you’re looking for something specific, and you end up on a page that has nothing to do with what you were looking for, you’re going to be pretty angry. It seems like a rediculous strategy now, but we’ve grown up as a society online quite a bit since then.

Why would they do that? Well, the mentality grew from a few concepts. The idea is, if you get a million visitors, and 1% of them convert into a sale, then you’re making 10,000 sales. It also stemmed from the food court in the mall concept. You have an almost captive audience. They’re already in the mall, probably not done shopping, so they’ll want to come over and spend money on your food selections as well as being in the mall for whatever they’re looking for.

There are some problems with these outdated ideas. Generally, if you’re looking for something online, you are only annoyed by not finding exactly what you’re looking for. The mid-90s idea of “surfing the web” is all but dead. This is 2008. You want to know election predictions? Go online. You want to know what the weather’s going to be like today? Go online. Better yet? Google it.

So. By 1998, search engine companies were phasing out the use of the keyword meta as far as a classification of a a site. Google, reportedly, has never used the keyword meta for anything at all. The meta description is used by many search engines (including Google) as the display description in your listing. In other words, while it does not show up on your site, it does show on the search engine display, and is usually the determining factor on whether or not someone will actually click on your link. So, the description tag is very important, but only for conversion, and not for rankings.

Without using the much-abused keyword tag, how are search engines deciding what your site is about?

They look at your site’s content, for one. If your site is about shoes, then you would want to have text descriptions about your shoes. Since this is what search engines now read, it’s tempting to stuff it full of keywords, but remember that we’ve all grown up, and keyword stuffing is now considered an offense by most of the major search engines.

Something rather striking today, however, is the fact that Yahoo seems to have started supporting the keyword tag again. This is one of the reasons why Yahoo’s search results are actually different from Google’s. This means you can’t actually leave your meta keywords off your website. Yahoo itself recommends that you only add keywords that actually pertain to the page they are located on, and to not put a blanket set of keywords that affect every page of your site. Is this a revival of the keyword tag? We’ll see. It’s definitely not got much weight as far as determining what the site is about, however.

Today, we use the page Title, meta Description and meta Keywords. The page Title is still considered one of the best resources for telling the search engines what your site is about. The meta Description should be thoughtfully laid out as a lure for people making searches online for your keywords. The meta Keywords should only reflect the keywords you actually have listed on the page. You can use them as a reminder of what keywords to use when writing content for your page.

It is important to have your metas laid out correctly, even though they don’t carry much weight at the moment. They are used by search engines for various applications, and thus that makes it worthwhile to make sure they’re up to date and customized. However, it is not advised to work solely on your meta tags and nothing else. That is a surefire way to see your site’s rankings never move. There a lot of other tricks to use when working on website rankings. More on that later.

This week, Mobile Penguins was proud to move to our new location in Redmond, Washington. We are now located in a brand new office building that has a LEED Certified Green Interior, and has calculated the carbon footprint down to each individual office. We are very excited to join in the journey toward sustainability, and are pleased to show the world that even penguins can be green!

Everyone has heard the link propaganda, and how some people say that all you need to succeed in the online world is a million links. There is some truth to that, but there are ways to achieve your online success that don’t run the risk of becoming ineffective when Google decides to change their algorithms again.

Link farms will get you a million links that have nothing to do with your website and only promote one or two keyword phrases.

A good linking method will work together with other website advertising techniques to help the search engine spiders associate your links with your actual content. Linking campaigns that don’t concern themselves with your site’s content are for spam sites that aren’t intended to last longer than a year. Why? Because Google is trying to track down people who pay for links and to ban their websites from its listings.

Not getting any links, however, will not often produce the effects you are trying to get. Sometimes, if you advertise your website on television, radio or in the newspaper, you will get links naturally. Natural links are not controlled by you, but they will help the search engines to find you faster than getting no links at all.

Many people are concerned with a lack of links. And while that concern is valid, quality links, embedded in relevant content are some of the best ones for your website.

Speak to Mobile Penguins about linking. There are a lot of link theories, many of them work, some work better than others.

Mobile Penguins is proud to launch our new website. A big THANK YOU to everyone that put in their extra time and effort to get the new site up.