Optimize Your HTML Code

Is Google passing you by? Never quite getting that deep index you need?

Google's Attention Span

For simple argument's sake, let's say your website has 30 seconds of Google's attention every month. Half a minute to spider your website, capture a copy of each page, and move on to the next website. You lose a full month if a single page of your site takes a minute to load.

Your website better be up to the challenge!

Fast Server

Are you hosting with an anonymous hosting company that you found on the web? Are you paying "$3.00 a month!" for hosting? Then you may want to test the response time of the server to see if you're saving money at the expense of a slow server.

Face it, hosting is cheap but it's not that cheap... They're making money by over-taxing the server with many more sites on the server than there should be. As a matter of fact, I found one hosting company that boasts cheap hosting of more than 15,000 domain names. It's possible that they are all on the same box.

Do the test yourself: Click here

If your home page loads slower than 3-4 seconds you have a problem.

Fast HTML

The first step to any of our Search Engine Optimization plans is to cut the fat from our client's html code. Each of our websites are developed with extensive use of stylesheets to keep unnecessary formatting code out of the individual HTML page.

A stylesheet contains all of the text, spacing and color attributes for the entire site - all in one place. This creates 2 benefits for your website:

1. Formatting is easier - A stylesheet allows you to change a formatting attribute in one place and the change instantly appears throughout the site without opening any of the HTML pages.
2. Fast loading - A stylesheet contains all of the formatting information so your HTML is more content and less formatting. Google will spend less time wading through HTML and spend more time reading your text.

Does it work?

Our team made a concerted effort to increase the response time of an established online retail website. Their home page response time fell from around 6 seconds to 1.5 seconds off the same server. That's a significant change from HTML development.

Additional benefits?

We need to keep the dial-up users in mind when we build websites. While dial-up use has decreased sharply in the last 2 years, there is still a large number of dial-up use on the web. A 5 second download on a 2meg connection is at least a 20 second wait on dial-up.

Google should dive deeper through your site and your conversions will go up if your site responds quickly to their requests.

Google Unified Search

CNN.com posted an interesting Technology story this morning and then the story quickly moved off their site. I thought it was an interesting topic so I mention it here.

Link to the story: Click here

The story doesn't appear to be written by a search engine expert so it's a little vague on some important points.

The gist of the story is that Google will combine it's various search results into one "page". The new service "will present Web sites, news, video and other results on one page."

Google's search already does this...

The story speaks strongly about new "ad" potential but it never actually speaks to the Google search algorithm.

Bottom line -It sounds to me like they are allowing AdWords advertisers to bid on terms for videos. They plan to roll out on 5/23 so we'll know more after that.

Search Translation

The end of the story introduces what we see as the single greatest improvement to search technology in 5 years: Automatic translation of search.

"The technique will translate queries in any of a dozen languages into English, find additional search results, then automatically translate those back into the language of the original query. This will give users in any supported language a broader view of information on the Web."

Now that's exciting.

Grey PageRank Bar for Supplimental Results

We are noticing a lot of grey PageRank bars on random websites these days.

A grey PageRank bar used to mean that your website was outright ignored by Google. A good-quality website with few links would receive a 0/10 rank and a site full of spam would receive a grey bar.

There is another reason to receive a grey PageRank bar these days - Supplemental Results.

It appears that Google is now displaying a grey PageRank bar on website supplemental results. (Example from CNN.com: http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9603/n_korea/)

Supplemental Results

Supplemental results are pages on your website that the Google algorithm deems as less important than your main content. The pages still seem to count in your total page count, but for whatever reason they don't appear to support your main topic so Google decreases their importance.

Supplemental pages are:

• Old,
• Short on content,
• Deeply buried in the architecture,
• Spammy,
• Rarely viewed, etc.

You can find out how many supplemental page listings you have by opening Google and typing site:http://www.YourURLHere. com . Page through to the deeper listings but you will almost certainly have a few supplemental pages.

Supplemental pages generally do not appear in Search Engine Ranking Pages (SERPs) unless the term is extremely specific to the page.

Is this a problem?

That depends. If your home page and/or your domain shows a grey PageRank bar you have a serious problem. We have only found this a few times in the last 2 years and each time the websites were complete spam.

If a small percentage of your pages are deemed supplemental then there's no real issue. Constantly update your site with fresh content and supplemental results will fall to the background.

We often hear "Google loves Blogs!"

The truth is that Google loves new content and hates spam. Create good content on your site and your site will outperform your competition.

Marketing Your Services Online

Is it possible to effectively market a service online?

We're talking specifically about services here - no physical products. We often hear that services can't be marketed online. While it may be difficult to market online the amount of competition for services such as home remodelers and cosmetic surgery says this is a lucrative medium.

Certainly services are applicable to the Internet Marketing rule but you need to be careful when applying your marketing message and judging ROI.

It's easy to judge ROI of a point of purchase website. Trap organic and PPC traffic coming in to your pages, analyze purchases for each traffic group and you have your return on investment.

Services are different.

There isn't an online reservation system or final point of purchase in your log files so your tracking tool is unable to measure specific sales. Add the fact that some services have significant price points and an extended sales cycle and you have a real battle measuring ROI.

Marketing services online is easy if you remember 3 major points:

1. Remember your market - For the most part you will do well to expend marketing energy only in those areas where you can deliver your service. A product can be shipped worldwide but a service has a short reach. You can use the Internet to market your service globally but that's rarely applicable to services.

2. Fine-tune your message - This is the easiest step of all. Use a quality analytics tool and respond to the traffic trends in your website. Create a call to action on your main services page and watch the traffic flow (conversion) through that message. Adjust your message if conversions go down or stay flat.

We rely heavily on Unica NetTracker in our office because the tool is the best we've seen at creating conversion scenarios. Find a good analytics tool and measure your conversion. Then go back and adjust your message until you get it right!

3. Relentlessly measure ROI -Roughly 1/3rd of all people who contact us for our services contact us by our online form. That means 2/3rds of our initial contacts occur in a way that is difficult or impossible to measure from our tracking tools.

a. Email - Create an email address specific to the website and offer it as an additional contact option.

b. Telephone - Get a different phone number that only appears on the website.

c. Ask the question - Ask each new client how they found you. Most importantly, write the information down so you can measure it at the end of the year.

Services are highly appropriate for the Internet and your competition is undoubtedly already taking part in the frenzy. Be smart about where you market and tenaciously measure success. Increase budget to measurable returns and cut out of low conversion efforts.