Vaughan Rowsell

Search Engine Marketing for Dummies

“how do I get my site at the top of the Google search results?” A very popular question that I come across a lot, and something every website owner wants to achieve. Well the good news is that if you follow some pretty basic rules and tips, the search engines will smile upon both you and your site, and you will have great success. Here they are:

Tip #1 – Understand why people will want to visit

The first tip is really about understanding your audience. Yep, good old fashioned marketing! You must first understand why your customers will want to come to your site. Of course, there will be some very good reasons, and these will be your products, services and the information your website provides about them. By understanding what your customers are looking for, you are better able to explain how your company will fulfil their needs.

This seems obvious huh? In fact this is not really anything specific to search engine marketing, it is more about good marketing. And so if you understand your customers well enough, this will be reflected as clear effective communication of what value you provide to them, your customers, in your website. This is important not just because clear communication is good communication, but because from this will come your most important piece of market intelligence, the best keywords to use for your search engine marketing.

Getting your keywords right is one of the most important achievements you can make on the journey to effective search engine marketing.

Bob owns a cheese company that makes a variety of delicious cheeses. At Bob’s Cheese they have just launched their new on-line shop for premium cheeses at direct to market discounted prices. They have a brain storming session for keywords and decide that one of their key phrases for on-line search engine marketing is “delicious Gruyère on-line”.

Now their cheese may in fact be delicious, and selling it on-line is indeed a bonus, but in reality most people can’t spell Gruyère and more often than not their target audience is actually looking for “discount premium cheese”. But how do they work this out?

There is a number of ways to work out the best keywords for your site. You and (if you are fortunate enough) your marketing team, are the most qualified people to figure that out. Think about your market and how they think. Here is a sure-fire way to get some good ideas on keywords if you get stuck;

Get together a group of people who represent a good sample of your target audience. Get a broad spread of people, from computer literate to first time Googlers if you can (if they still exist). Give them a simple task. Explain a product or service (without explicitly suggesting YOURS) and get them to imagine they are looking for it online. One by one get them to bring up a search engine and then watch. See what they do and what they search on. Take note of all the words and phrases used and the success the people had with each. At the end, ask them why they searched on the words they did. You may be surprised at the terminology and phrases they search on and their explanations why, but out of this exercise you should find some patterns, and a common set of words used. These will become your keywords.

Tip #2 – Use your keywords and phrases throughout your site

This is the most common approach to search engine marketing. Search engines actually “read” your pages, and so if you use a lot of keywords in the pages that people search on then the more relevant your website will appear. The more the search engines think your site is relevant, the higher in the search results you go.

Build up a collection of well thought out and relevant keywords (as per tip #1), and be sure your website talks about them. Don’t come up with too many keyword phrases, as you will need to use them all consistently throughout the content of your website. So work out your best phrases and keywords, and incorporate them into your site. Not only will this give you better chances of search engine success, but it will generally keep your website “on message”.

If you succeed in getting visitors to your site with one particular set of keywords, but your site uses different terminology or uses the keywords out of context in the page content, the visitor who found you in the search will end up getting confused and click the back button to the Google search results. This is referred to as a “bounce”, and search engines pick up on this. The more visitors bounce back from your site with a particular set of keywords, then the search engines will rank your site lower.

Tip #3 – Use your keywords not only in the page content, but in the title and URLs of your website

This step requires you to carefully design the names of the pages in your site to reflect the subject matter they are about. Search engines give you “points” for using keywords in the content of your pages, but more weight to keywords that appear in the name (URL) and title of a page. So as an example, our cheese company has just created some new pages promoting their on-line premium cheese shop. By using their primary keywords of “discount premium cheese”, they could name the page that talks about this service something like:

http://www.bobscheese.com/discount-premium-cheese.html

This would work better than say:

http://www.bobscheese.com/index2.html

which says absolutely nothing about what the page is about.

The page should have the title (that appears in the top of the visitors web browser) of “Discount premium cheese” and by using this phrase in the words on the page itself, they would score valuable points with a search engine. A search engine will understand that the page itself is something to do with “Discount premium cheese”.

To go one step further, our cheese shop could include their main keywords in the base website address itself. So instead of using the web address of:

http://www.bobscheese.com

they could register and use

http://www.discountpremiumcheese.com

So the full address to the page would become

http://www.discountpremiumcheese.com/discount-premium-cheese.html

Now not only do the keywords appear in the text of the pages, the title of the page, the name of the page itself, but they are also in the actual website address for the website.

This step may not be practical for some people as their website URL is probably part of their existing brand, and existing website. However in the case of our fictitious cheese shop, they could register a new URL of discountpremiumcheese.com and use this alongside bobscheese.com for their on-line store only, keeping bobscheese.com as their corporate website. They could then link to the new www.discountpremiumcheese.com from the home page of www.bobscheese.com and actually get rewarded for this (see tip #4 below).

This is a good tip to consider if you are starting out a new website, but with some clever thinking you could break off some of your exisitng website content under this new URL if that makes sense for what you are doing, like Bob setting up his new online shop.

Tip #4 – Get other sites to link to your site using your keywords

This is a well known approach to raising the profile of your site and raising the relevance of your website in search engines. The more links there are that point to your site, the better as far as search engines are concerned. Search engines use a technique called “spidering”, or “crawling”. This is where a little search engine software robot called a spider (on the world wide web you see) starts reading a web page. In the page it finds a link to another page or website. The search engine doing the spidering, upon finding a link then sends off another little electronic spider to follow it to find out where it goes. That spider finds more links in these pages, and sends off more spiders. The more links the spiders find, the bigger the army of spiders becomes, and while this army crawls around the web, the more it comes across links to your website from others, and each time the more “points” it gives your site. If lots of sites talk about your site, the more popular it must be, so the more relevant it becomes.

It is vitally important to have your site linked to from other sites, both for search engines and so real people can find your site, but one big mistake most people make is to not get the other sites to use keywords in the link text itself. The search engine spiders may not necessarily understand why another site links to your site. It will just find a link and think “oh here is a link, I will follow it.” But by using keywords in the link text itself, the spider can understand the link in context and understand what the link is about.

If Bob’s Cheese can get other sites to link to his site using good keywords then the search engines will associate these keywords with bob’s site. So a link like click here for premium discount cheese would give the search engine better context than just visit Bob’s Cheese. By doing this the search engine gets the idea that the link has something to do with premium discount cheese, and so associates these keywords with Bob’s site. The more sites with links like this pointing to Bob’s site the more the search engine thinks that Bob’s site is an authority on premium discount cheese.

Wrap up

So that’s it for now. Four simple tips to search engine success. There are, as always, plenty of other things you can do, but these four things will give you the most value. No voodoo or black magic is required to get your site up in the search engine rankings, just some sensible steps and a bit of time and effort, and you will get great results.

Lastly if you want instant traffic to your site then have a look at a paid advertising campaign using Google’s Adwords. You still need to work out your keywords and get your website content right, but Adwords will give you that instant traffic you desire… but more on this another time

Lessons in software development from a 3 year old

I was sitting playing with my two daughters the other day, whilst reflecting on software development (as you do) and I found myself finding valuable lessons. It could have just been my brain looking for substance in-between block building and colouring in.

Lesson # 1, The lines are more of a guide when it comes to colouring in.

My daughter Holly is a firm believer in this principle, as it is clear from our shared attempts to colour in the penguins in her book. When I would pick penguin-like colours and apply them within the penguin-like outlines on the page, Holly would grab purple and apply liberally to it’s face. At first I tried to provide guidance to show her what I thought was a more realistic application of colour, but then as Holly insisted that her way was best I began to wonder if she didn’t have a point.

Sometimes when you are writing software you do think, “wouldn’t it be cool if instead of spitting out just an invoice from this method, it could also optionally spit out a pdf too”, thus giving your penguin an extra purple head. What Holly wanted was her penguin to look different to the spec. It is okay to stray outside the lines now and then as long as you colour in the penguin.

Lesson #2, Building with the blocks too small takes longer and makes weak towers.

Building towers is one of my favorite games, and as the control freak I am I tend to hog all the blocks and make elaborately balanced block multi-plexs with appendages and pointy bits. By carefully selecting all the blocks and arranging them just so, my towers were never very robust. Meanwhile Holly had gotten fed up with me not letting her have all the blocks, and she went about making a new tower out of the coffee table, books and a doll. My tower had a million pieces, hers had six. Mine fell over with a gentle tap. Her’s didn’t.

Sometimes you should pick the bigger blocks to build with. Don’t get too carried away custom building everything or another kid will just build a taller tower in half the time.

Lesson #3, Asking “why” 100 times is annoying but valuable.

While arranging the plastic farm animals about the plastic farm, I was trying to get my daughter to put all the cows in the fenced compounds (that I had just carefully constructed).

“Why Dad?”

“Because thats where cows live”

“But why?”

“Because they do”

“But why?”

“Ahh, because they always have”

“Why?”

“good question”

So we set the cows free, and still had fun. Challenge the status quo and you may find a pleasant surprise. Just because that’s how you have always done it doesn’t make it the best way. Especially when translating business processes into new software, making a screen perform like a paper form may not make the best sense.

Lesson #4, A horse built out of twigs and playdoh, is still a horse.

I was trying to make a realistic horse with realistic muscle texture in the playdoh, a real looking mane with carefully cut wool, small beads for eyes. Holly smashed one together in under a minute, with sticks for legs, a rolled lump of doh as the body, with another making a head. She provided the accompanying neighs and whinnies and was off galloping around the garden while I was still crafting hooves. For the purpose of the exercise she had her horse and it was doing the things horses do.

Understanding when enough detail is enough means you can get your horse out faster.

Lesson #5, Cuddles are cool.

No analogy. I just love cuddles with my girls.

Tourism goes 3.0

Today we (Vianet) made an exciting announcement with Trade Me that we are building “the next big thing” in online tourism, and so we will be showcasing our tools to the New Zealand tourism industry. This is exciting for me for one simple reason. We are making online tourism work. That’s not to say people have not been doing business online until now, but we can now enable ANY tourism provider to do business online at an extremely low cost. In fact it is free other than a booking commission for successful sales of product.

People have started talking about our tools as being the web 2.0 for tourism ,but actually we are more in line with the 3.0 “movement”. Why? We not only provide simple to use online tools for anyone to use, like our LemonSqueezy booking engine, but we also aggregate our data to business partners wanting to use it, like we have done in the case of Trade Me. Secondly we manage and extend the coverage of our online network without boundaries. We make it easy for business to connect with other businesses online. A tourism operator can sell their product without barriers through retailers using our free tools. It costs nothing for the retailer and it costs nothing for the tourism operator. We maintain the technology they use, the network they participate on and we look after the relationships between us and the retailers and providers of tourism product. Retailers can focus on attracting travellers, and operators can focus on providing great experiences. We take care of the rest and so everyone can concentrate on what they are good at.

It is so simple and that’s what makes is really exciting.

Concept-u-wall

Sometimes the first step is the hardest in any journey and adding features to a software product is no different. Although I love Visio, UML diagrams, and requirements specs; they usually have too many rules and procedures attached with them. I like simple.

Quite often you can get bogged down in planning and all you really need to do is pick up a piece of paper and do a doodle. Doodles are fantastic and I am a huge fan of doodling ideas up, and quite often these doodles become the specification. In fact I am usually seen attending meetings with my jumbo sketch pad and colouring in pens. Doing a good meaningful doodle is quite hard, as you need to be able to look back on it a week later remember what the hell it was.

I have taken the doodling to the next level now and in the office we have implemented a way of organising doodles into more coherent and readily understandable ideas. Its simple, its a wall you stick doodles on with bluetac. But not just any wall, it is a “Concept-u-wall”. What is the difference? Well a concept-u-wall has these simple rules.

1. Draw a doodle of an idea or concept and stick it on the wall.
2. If the doodle makes no sense then do other supporting doodles until the idea or concept starts to make sense.
3. A doodle can be a scribble, a printout, photo or what ever. If you can Bluetac it to the wall then it is a doodle.
4. Don’t be alone. Get others to contribute to your idea, and doodle on it.
5. Any wall is a Concept-u-wall

And that is about all the rules you need. The whole idea is to get an idea progressing. Once a doodle concept has been fleshed out enough that it can become a reality then it is built and when complete it graduates off of the concept-u-wall into the real world. We also track successful concept-u-wall projects with an entry on another wall called the Act-u-wall. A small note, screen shot or title is added as evidence that the concept doodle made it.

Simple. I like simple.