Content is the foundation of SEO.

The purpose of an SEO campaign is to drive visitors to your website. But why do you want to do that? So they can see your content, of course.

• Without content, you don’t have a website.
• With lousy content (visually poor, grammatical errors, keyword stuffing, lack of organization) you have a website that chases people  away.
• With ineffective content you have a website that fails to convert visitors into paying customers.
• With effective content your website becomes a powerful sales tool.

But that’s not the only kind of content that’s important. You may not have realized it, but you have off-site content, too. That’s content in other places that helps promote your brand and direct potential customers to your website. What kind of content is that specifically? How about this:

• Articles and white papers posted on other sites.
• Online press releases.
• An email newsletter. (Sign up for ours!)
• Blog posts you write that are syndicated at one or more other blogs.
• Twitter mentions.
• Mentions at other social media like Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, MerchantCircle, LinkedIn and others.
• Mentions and links from other websites related to yours.

Is your content good enough for effective SEO?

How good is the copy on your site? You have to start there because everything else drives people to your on-site copy. Is it unique? Does it provide value by providing non-obvious information and answering questions? Is it interesting to read? Is it literate? Does it funnel visitors toward a buying decision? If not, have you considered hiring a professional copywriter?

Do you have the necessary off-site copy? This is one of the most forgotten factors in SEO. You need a strong presence in as many off-site places as possible to build your link popularity and to drive more visitors to your website.

Once you’ve considered all that, you may decide you need professional help with your SEO. If so, talk to us.

The Good News

Google started to improve it’s ability to index Flash content a couple of years ago. Now it can see content within Flash files so it can index that content. And it can follow links within Flash content as well. So Google can now tell what lies within an all-flash website.

The Bad News

This will still not allow all-Flash websites to compete well with HTML web pages. Why? For one thing, Flash is too slow loading, especially for smart phones, tablets and dial-up users. This is especially disadvantageous considering Google’s emphasis on page download speed as an important ranking factor.

With a Flash website there’s still  a lack of unique URLs which means no one can link to an internal page in an all-Flash site. Instead everyone has to go through your home page and follow any necessary navigation to get to the content they’re interested in. That conflicts with Google’s current emphasis on user experience as a ranking factor. You also lose many rankings factors associated with individual page titles, link anchor text, site maps and more.

So, What to Do?

• Use Flash, but only as individual flash elements on your pages.
• Don’t embed navigation to other flash content within your Flash content.
• Construct your site with individual HTML pages.
• Be sure to take advantage of all the HTML ranking factors available to your HTML pages.

Have questions? Need professional advice? Ask us about Flash and your website’s SEO.

Katie Mack wrote about the importance of the user experience in SEO. We couldn’t have said it better:

We firmly believe that the best way to optimize your site for search engines is to optimize it for people. … People will stay longer on your site if they find content engaging and easy to navigate. You also want to encourage users to share your web content, which will naturally drive more traffic to your site from other sources.

She cites a few criteria for an effective user experience. You need content that:

• is easy to find
• has educational value
• is easy to read and understand
• invites contribution and sharing

This is especially important for websites that have lost rankings due to Google’s Panda Update earlier this year. That algorithm change gave preference to sites that provide original, relevant content that’s easy to digest and easy to share.

Google wants to highlight high quality websites and the Panda update was largely focused on that goal. Consequently, Google posted (shortly after releasing the Panda update) guidelines on what they think constitutes a high-quality website. They start out by saying:

Our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus too much on what they think are Google’s current ranking algorithms or signals

We recommend their article.

Susana Fonticoba, owner of Home & Office Computer Training, recently wrote an article about how to keep your reader’s attention when you have a long-ish document. She was referring to text documents, but her advice applies equally to web pages.

You know you just love to read a really long document – pages and pages of similar looking text —  your eyes get tired after the first few paragraphs. And what do you say at this point? I’ll just read the rest later. But you never do because it’s a hideously boring looking document.

You don’t want people doing that to YOUR documents. Wake them up by breaking it up.

Use paragraph headings – that way people can jump to the section they need. That’s where Styles come into play. Use the Heading styles to break up pages of text into smaller blocks of text they can find and read easily.

Paper documents and web pages share the same issues

It’s true: the same thing applies to your web pages, maybe even more so. Reading on the screen is more tiring to the eyes than reading something on paper.And people seem to have a shorter attention span when they’re surfing the web than they do when reading a paper document. And anyone who leaves your website because they found the content a little intimidating is a lost customer.

So pay special attention to white space. Using headings and sub-headings as Susana suggests not only breaks up the monotony of body text, but it also adds some white space around your content.

Turn lengthy lists from paragraphs into bullet lists. That another way to add some white space and make your copy look a bit more approachable. Add emphasis via italics or bold where appropriate to break up the monotony. (Just don’t use underlines on the web unless what’s underlined is a link.)

Use graphics. A nice image or two, whether photos or line drawings, with text wrapping around it goes a long way toward encouraging visitors to stick around and read more of your copy.

Good SEO can drive lots of potential customers to your website, but it takes a good user experience on your website to convert them into actual customers.

Don’t ignore the user experience on your web pages.

Google’s recent algorithm update named Panda has caused many websites to lose rankings in a big way. Most deserved it, but not all. Earlier this month, NPR ran a story about a furniture store called One Way Furniture that had been hurt badly by Panda, mainly due to its use of canned product descriptions, which they copied from their manufacturers’ listings.

Apparently Panda identified the duplicate content and downgraded the value of the pages at One Way Furniture. There are some other suspected factors at work in their rankings plummet as well. Now they’re slowly climbing back to their pre-Panda rankings through a lot of effort:

• Removing duplicate content and rewriting product descriptions
• Using the canonical HTML tag to resolve multiple URLs that point to the same page
• Proper use of 301 redirects
• Paying close attention to their page speed
• Constantly building backlinks.
• One of the things they did was to hire some new copywriters to write original product descriptions aimed at being search engine friendly, and not duplicates of manufacturer descriptions.

CEO Mitch Lieberman said

For example, a bar stool that previously used a manufacturer-supplied bullet list of details as its product description now has a five-sentence description that details how it can complement a bar set-up, links to bar accessories and sets the tone by mentioning alcoholic beverages, all of which makes it more SEO-friendly. What we’re seeing now is what is good for customers and what they see on the site is also good for Google.

Another online publication that was badly hurt by Panda, DaniWeb, published a recovery story earlier this month. They cited their own reasons for the hit and what they’ve  been doing to get out of it:

“I guess it also goes without saying that it’s also important to constantly build backlinks, It is entirely possible/plausible that Google’s Panda algorithm hit all of the low quality sites that were just syndicating and linking back to us (with no unique content of their own), ultimately discrediting half of the sites in our backlink portfolio, killing our traffic indirectly. Therefore, it isn’t that we got flagged by Panda’s algorithm, but rather that we just need to work on building up more backlinks.”

Their experience reminds us to be vigilant. Perhaps Google’s page speed factor is more heavily weighted than we thought. And maintaining fresh inbound links from reputable websites is always important.

There are a few principles that generate positive feelings in the visitors to your web site — positive feelings that are essential to converting those visitors into paying customers. Renee Shupe, the Redhead Virtual Assistant wrote a really helpful article on the subject: 5 Keys to Creating Websites That Sell.

Here they are in brief:

1. Make your web site interactive – give visitors a way to communicate with you.
2. Provide value — personally, I think this should be #1.
3. Provide easy, intuitive navigation
4. Have an attractive, professional-looking design
5. Give them a soft sell.

Renee expands on these nicely, so rather than try to explain all of them here. let us just refer you to her original article. It’s worth the read.

It’s an ancient problem. As business owners, we focus on the features we offer our customers: what do we offer them. Years of experience … proprietary techniques … specialized equipment … highly trained staff … industry certifications. That’s understandable: it’s what we have to do and offer to be professional in our business.

The problem is that’s not what our customers are looking for … or care about. They care about benefits. What can we do for them? And what sets us apart from everyone else who shows up in their search engine results?

If our web site focuses only on the features we offer, it not only will bore our potential customers, but it’s unlikely to get us high search engine rankings. Let’s face it, if you need a brake repair, are you going to search for “ASE certified technician” or “brake job”? The former is a feature, but the later is a benefit.

Noted copywriter Mistina Picciano of Market It Write writes about this problem in a recent blog post. We recommend it.

Somewhere within Google, there’s an organization known as the “Make the Web Faster” initiative. It’s based on the belief that the faster pages load in your browser, the better. People are no longer content to sit drumming their fingers while waiting for a web page to display. Slow web pages are a user turn-off, and we’ve written before about how that can affect your rankings, at least in Google. In fact, Google’s position on this is clear from this statement:

“At Google, we’re obsessed with speed – we measure it, pick it apart, think about it constantly.  It’s even baked into our quarterly goals.”

We include page download speed issues in optimization recommendations for our clients, and wrote about a tool Google created called “Page Speed” to help webmasters identify specific speed issues and which suggests how to fix them.

Recently, Google announced a great new tool – sort of the next generation page speedup technology:

We just launched a new open-source Apache module called mod_pagespeed that any webmasters can use to quickly and automatically optimize their sites. (It’s like Page Speed, but makes the changes automatically.)

Google says this new tool can double the speed of web page downloads, and do it automatically. It’s not something the typical business owner should mess with, as it’s a bit technical. But you ought to make your webmaster aware of the tool if you have any slow pages on your site. Google describes it this way:

mod_pagespeed includes several filters that optimize JavaScript, HTML and CSS stylesheets. It also includes filters for optimizing JPEG and PNG images. The filters are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who set up mod_pagespeed in addition to configuring proper caching and compression on their Apache distribution should expect to see an improvement in the loading time of the pages on their websites.

The improved user experience will contribute to your conversion rate, and the prospect of ranking higher in Google as a by-product is nothing to sneeze at. Here’s Google’s page for mod_pagespeed.

Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors on your web site who convert into paying customers, clients, or patients. In a recent article in Website Magazine, Tim Ash encourages website owners to “Keep Your Graphic Designer on a Short Leash”. Tim, CEO of SiteTuners.com a landing page optimization firm, says that you may have been led astray by your web designer. He says that because of the limitations of their unique perspective, web designers are predisposed to (inadvertently) sacrifice your conversions in the name of “coolness”.

Not all web designers fall into the “coolness” trap, as is evidenced by our strategic partners. But many do. Perhaps the most egregious form of this is web designers who design entire websites in all Flash, rendering them irretrievably invisible to search engines. But there are many other lesser evils that can be perpetrated on your poor web pages that make them less likely to drive your visitors to take the action you want them to take. Here’s a bit of what Tim says:

Unfortunately, many … pages are … a visual assault on the senses, forcing the visitor to determine what (if any) of the many striking visual elements on the page are important.

Before

Graphic designers are rarely trained in maximizing conversion. The best ones pride themselves on their ability to be non-conformists, and their ability to “think outside the box.” They are bored with standard production-oriented graphic design work and like to keep themselves entertained by doing something new and interesting on every project. Unfortunately, the goal of the design is often lost, resulting in these chaotic … pages.

Wild background colors — Many … pages use dark and dramatic color themes. Often, large sections of the page or entire backgrounds are black or fully-saturated bright colors. The color choices often create a dark and brooding atmosphere, or imply something so exotic that would only appeal to teenage male adrenaline junkies who play too many video games.

Garish text — Page text and headlines are haphazardly placed on the page and often use very large font in high contrast colors. Font sizes are often enormous, and are further emphasized by the use of edging effects, drop shadows, color transitions and needs, and fill patterns.

Visual embellishments and flourishes — Even simple page elements such as box edges are emphasized with drop shadows, glow, or other effects. Simple round discs in bullet list are replaced by colorful graphical check marks or other icons. A neutral background space to the site of the landing page is often filled in with intricate patterns or photographic images.

After

Animation or video — All other design mistakes on the landing page pale in comparison to the aggressive use of motion, animation, and video. Images and text pulsate or revolve, image slideshows use wild fly-in transition effects, intricate animation sequences draw the eye, and full-motion video auto-plays on the page. These attention-grabbing tactics are very powerful. Unfortunately, they are rarely tied to the desired conversion goal on the … page and only serve to squander a few precious seconds of limited visitor attention. Never deploy rich media on your page without first testing to determine its impact on conversion.

Tim then presented a case study illustrating the before and after versions of an important page for a national client of theirs, along with eye-tracking results. He convincingly presents the case that you need to create web pages that draw the eye and the attention of your visitor to the places on the page that will drive them to call you or buy from you.

Last November, we predicted that Google would soon factor page download speed into its ranking algorithm. Well, last month, Google announced that they had, in fact, started to use site speed as one of the 200+ signals that influence the position of a website in their search results:

“As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. [...] We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

The faster your web pages load, the more visitors of your website will stick around to see the contents of your pages. Web surfers are impatient and will often click away from a slow loading site before it finishes loading. It’s in recognition of that behavior that Google is factoring page speed into it’s ranking.

With all that said, it’s important to point out that page speed is not Google’s most important ranking signal. The end of Google’s page speed announcement contains a very important sentence: “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page.”

Here are a few tips to improve your own page speed:

• Choose a fast and reliable web host with a good connection to the Internet. A “cheap” web host may cause problems.
• Use as few images as possible on your website.
• Compress your images. Most graphic tools enable you to choose the compression rate when saving an image for the web. You don’t need to make users download a 10 megapixel photo to display it on their monitor only 500 pixels wide.
• Combine external JavaScript code files into one file. The fewer files the server has to request, the faster your web pages will load.
• Compress your JavaScript code to make the JavaScript file smaller.
• Combine external CSS files into one file and compress your CSS files.
• If your web server supports it, enable gZip compression (your web host can do that for you).
• Put tracking codes and other JavaScript snippets at the end of your web pages.
• Check out Google’s Site Speed site, which provides you with even more resources to help speed up your pages.