WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES phần 9 pptx

Always give descriptive supporting text to outbound links. This is handled through the anchor text (the words between the <a> tags) and the value of the title attribute. This content boosts the ranking opportunities of the site benefiting from the link, which in turn will help the originating source. For example: <a href="http://erl.wustl.edu/" title="Electronic Radiology Laboratory investigates digital imaging technologies for radiology departments"> Electronic Radiology Laboratory</a> External strategies Once a website’s markup and structure have been cleaned and polished for optimization, it’s time to pursue the external strategies that will give the domain the support it needs to help reach the first page of search engine results. Implementing external strategies can take just as long (if not longer) as internal strategies, and will likely be the focus of the SEO campaign for a long time, simply because of the iterative cycle of fine-tuning and measuring. Grabbing a high ranking does not happen overnight. In fact, for especially competitive arenas, patience is not a virtue—it’s a requirement. Building incoming links Above all else, there is one primary tactic for building search engine karma: incoming links. Google was revolutionary in the respect that its PageRank system largely based its results on the popularity of the site, which essentially boiled down to how many links were point- ing to the domain. Since then, every search engine has copied this model. Today, the secret ingredient to Google’s ranking system is mired in millions of lines of highly secure algorithmic code, stored on black boxes in rooms where only the most priv- ileged employees have access. There is not much the world knows about this secret sauce. But the one thing experts, pundits, and casual passersby do know is that a website’s rank- ing is based on more than just the quantity of incoming links—there is a subset of tests that determine each external link’s value: 1. The anchor text: This is the text that is contained between the <a> tags. It should be relevant and descriptive; for example, <a>staffing for nurses</a> is a lot more valuable than <a>click here</a>. 2. The title attribute: The title attribute describes the link in question; it reinforces the anchor text with a phrase that lets the user know exactly where they are heading—for instance, <a href="http://www.rockstarmedicalstaffing.com" title="Rockstar Healthcare Staffing provides staffing for traveling nurses">staffing for nurses</a> . 3. Context of the link: A link sitting within relevant material is seen as more valuable than one floating out in space. Context also goes beyond surrounding text. For instance, a link coming from a medical staffing blog or directory is a lot more valu- able than a link coming from the designer’s portfolio site: the first is pertinent, the second is peripheral. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION 305 13 8393CH13.qxd 8/7/07 1:53 PM Page 305 4. The search engine value of the referring site: If the site does not perform well in search engines, it is not recognized as an influence, and its link is worth less than that of a high-ranking referrer. This is easiest to qualify in terms of PageRank. A site with a PageRank of 5 is worth far more than a PageRank of 4, and getting a few links from sites with PageRank of 6 or more can do wonders. 5. Age of link: Believe it or not, search engines look at not only the age of the site as an indication of authority, but also the age of the link. Not every link is going to be perfect. In fact, the chance of meeting all of these criteria is slim, and there are times when you will have to settle for whatever you can get. A lot of companies may not have immediate access to highly ranked sites from which to aggregate incoming links, so they will have to start small, building a referral network through some footwork. The following subsections give some places to start. Directories. Directories are a great place to start in an SEO effort. There are many to work with, they are generally reliable, and the message can be controlled by the submitting company. Directories are manually edited by a real human, meaning that duplicate or spammy sites do not get listed, but it also means that the submission process can take awhile. Some directories are free, while inclusion in others requires payment. The most well-known directory is Yahoo, and was the company’s founding model until it became apparent that search was the future. There are a zillion other directories on the Web, 17 each claiming some type of niche or specialty, and almost all are pining for sub- missions in an effort to build their own search engine status. For SEO campaigns, there is one place to start: dmoz.org, shown in Figure 13-7. This is the home of the Open Directory Project (ODP), where an army of editors oversees the largest collection of website listings under one roof. Dmoz is commonly used by major search engines for descriptions and other information—in Figure 13-5, both MSN and Yahoo source www.nhai.com’s description from the ODP, not the description provided in the site’s metadata. Press release and article sites. Almost every company produces some volume of content that is intended for public distribution. This includes articles, press releases, how-to instructions, and more. Traditionally, this content has been relegated to the corporate site, waiting for people to stumble upon it through a search. While it is good practice to host this material, distributing the text via the broader Web helps cast a net of content that not only builds interest and name recognition in the authoring company, but builds a network of incoming links as well. WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES 306 17. www.seocompany.ca/directory/free-web-directories.html is a good list of directories; www.best-web-directories.com is also a good source. 8393CH13.qxd 8/7/07 1:53 PM Page 306 Figure 13-7. The ODP attempts to catalog the Web through a manual editorial process. Take press releases. Certainly every public company writes and publishes them—they are a staple of the investment media’s diet. While it’s a good practice to publish press releases on the website for casual browsers to discover, and while there is a chance a release may get picked up by an online or printed publication, the wait-and-see model is anything but efficient. Complement this effort with proactive publishing on external press release web- sites, such as the following: PRZOOM ( www.przoom.com) Free-Press-Release.com ( www.free-press-release.com) PR Leap ( www.prleap.com) Press Method ( www.pressmethod.com) OpenPR ( www.openpr.com) ClickPress ( www.clickpress.com) UKPRwire (UK only) ( www.ukprwire.com) Pressbox (UK only) ( www.pressbox.co.uk) Some of these require the creation of an account, but almost all will allow a link back to the corporate homepage. These are positive incoming links. The content is relevant to your site, and most of these sites rank well in search engines by themselves. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION 307 13 8393CH13.qxd 8/7/07 1:53 PM Page 307 In addition to press releases, a company might staff writers that regularly produce indus- try articles, from industry commentary to breaking news to instructional media. Although this is great content for the host site, there are many third-party websites dedicated to republishing article content; authors can submit their material to be picked up by other websites. Full copyright is retained by the original writer, and each article is accompanied by a link back to the corporate website every time it is republished. For instance, say you worked for Rockstar Healthcare Staffing, and you wrote an article offering advice for nurses thinking about signing on with a staffing agency. This is great content, applicable industry-wide. You publish it on Rockstar’s website, and it attracts a few visitors from Google. Seeking to take advantage of the content, you submit the mate- rial to a few article sites like GoArticles 18 and Article Dashboard, 19 and the piece gets picked up several times, resulting in a pile of links back to your domain. The math is simple. If an article is submitted to one site and gets republished 25 times, that’s 25 links back to your site: (1 article) ✕ (1 site) ✕ (25 reprintings) = 25 links It does not take much imagination to make that number grow exponentially: (10 articles) ✕ (10 sites) ✕ (25 reprintings each article) = 2500 links Considering there are literally hundreds of article websites, 20 this can be a very effective way to quickly create a network of inbound links. The industry circle. Few companies operate in isolation. Every industry has its collective of forums, directories, news boards, media sites, alliances, blogs, and more. Look around at the sites people look to for expertise—the centers of information—and see if they offer the opportunity to link to related companies. The first place to look is within your own industry alliances. Many businesses list their strategic partners on their website in a centralized directory, as you can see in Figure 13-8. These listings are almost always free—provided for the benefit of the visiting prospect— but with the expectation that a reciprocal link will be provided. When marketing within the industry, always think about ways to publish a link. For instance, when posting to a forum, add a signature with the corporation’s link. Many forums are ranked highly because of their cycle of fresh and unique content, and these small but numerous links can add up over time. WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES 308 18. www.goarticles.com 19. www.articledashboard.com 20. www.wilsonweb.com/linking/wilson-article-marketing-1.htm has some of the top article sites, and www.styopkin.com/article_submission_sites.html has a list of over 500 more. 8393CH13.qxd 8/7/07 1:53 PM Page 308 Figure 13-8. Many professional companies list their strategic alliances with a link back to the partner’s website. Blogs are one of the best mediums from which to receive incoming links, but like tradi- tional media, there’s no easy way to solicit for these. In order to get the tenuous attention of bloggers, the company has to do something worth blogging about, either good or bad—new product releases, viral marketing efforts, and poor customer service can all elicit commentary. (Try to avoid negative discussion. You do not, after all, want to rank highly for the term “poor customer service.”) Links from other sites within a company’s industry count for a lot. No one knows how much emphasis search engines place on site-wide topicality, but the suspicion—if nothing else—is that the significance will only grow in the future. Submitting to search engines While a lot of effort goes into building incoming links, not much can be done about actu- ally submitting sites to search engines the old-fashioned way. MSN and Ask do not even provide the opportunity to manually suggest a URL; they rely on their searchbots to find and index websites. Because of this, the single best way to get sites listed in any search engine is to build the network of incoming links. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION 309 13 8393CH13.qxd 8/7/07 1:53 PM Page 309 Google and Yahoo, on the other hand, still provide the opportunity to submit a website. 21 There is no guarantee that a site will be picked up from this effort, but it certainly cannot hurt the process. The key is to follow the directions for each explicitly—the systems are sensitive to spamming and will mercilessly blacklist a site that even smells of devious tech- nique. For Google especially, it is a very good idea to also create an XML site map, as explained in Chapter 4. Directing search engine traffic Over time, many websites build certain directories and pages that should not be indexed by search engines because the content is not for public consumption. For instance, many hosting packages reserve the folder cgi-bin for Perl scripts, which is a server-side lan- guage used for contact forms, forums, and more. Other sites might contain private forums for members only. Many websites also include a basic statistics page located behind a redi- rect like www.company.com/stats. There is reason to shield all of these from search engines. There are two primary methods to dissuade spiders. For individual page control, the robots meta tag works best; for directories, the robots.txt file effectively directs search engine behavior. Robots meta tag Like the other meta tags described earlier in the chapter, the robots meta tag is placed with the <head> tag of an HTML document. However, instead of describing a document’s content, it acts as a traffic signal to search engine spiders, instructing them on two impor- tant directives: 1. Whether to index the content: This is accomplished using either index or noindex as values inside the content attribute. 2. Whether to follow links on a page: Similar to indexing, this is accomplished with the follow or nofollow values inside the content attribute. Consider the following example: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /> In this instance, search engines are told not to index the page and not to follow any links. The tag also understands other values, such as all (do everything) or none (do nothing). The default behavior is to index all content and follow all links, so the robots meta tag is unnecessary unless you need a search engine to restrain itself. The following example tells spiders to index the content (the default), but to not follow links. <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" /> WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES 310 21. Google’s can be found at www.google.com/addurl and Yahoo’s at http://search.yahoo.com/ info/submit.html. 8393CH13.qxd 8/7/07 1:53 PM Page 310 Google also provides developers with a meta tag specifically targeting the Google search- bot. Called the Googlebot robots meta tag, it provides a few more options applicable to just Google’s services. Here is a possible example: <meta name="googlebot" content="nofollow,noindex,noarchive,nosnippet" /> nofollow and noindex work the same. noarchive prevents Google from archiving content in its cache, and nosnippet prevents it from retrieving a blurb with bolded terms. By default, all terms are positive, so the tag should not be included unless there is a reason for Google not to do something. Robots.txt Where the robots meta tag is good for directing search engines for individual pages, a robots.txt file can provide global information for the site, as well as specific directories. When a search engine first crawls a page, it actively seeks the file robots.txt (which must be all lowercase), which is nothing more than a plain-text file. It should only exist in the root directory; versions found in subdirectories will be ignored. The file uses two variables: User-agent (defining which user agents are applicable to the rules) and Disallow (defining what directories should be passed over). The following example enables all search bots to access the entire site: User-agent: * Disallow: This is the default behavior, and the same as supplying an empty robots.txt file. Use the following to prevent all user agents from accessing any part of the site: User-agent: * Disallow: / Note the slash after Disallow; this represents the entire domain. To prevent all user agents from accessing specific directories, create a unique Disallow entry for each subdirectory: User-agent: * Disallow: /stats/ Disallow: /forum/private/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ To prevent a specific search robot from retrieving a directory, simply add its name after the User-agent. 22 User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /cgi-bin/ SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION 311 13 22. There are many user agents out there. For the curious, a complete list resides with the official specification at www.robotstxt.org/wc/active/html/index.html. 8393CH13.qxd 8/7/07 1:53 PM Page 311 A robots.txt file should be included with every website, even if it’s blank to indicate total access. It helps alleviate ambiguity with search engine spiders. Summary SEO is critical for every business that wants to compete on any level of the Web. When a company does not appear at the top of the list for critical search strings, there is a lot of potential business being left on the table, which is there for the taking for a rival that ranks higher. However, in order to be successful in organic SEO, a thorough and well-devised strategy is required, from identifying the best keywords and phrases to conducting regular review and analysis of the campaign’s performance. The actual tactics of organic SEO are numerous but incredibly effective. Focus on internal improvements first, especially in regard to metadata and content, and then build a network of quality incoming links. Patience and diligence are absolutely required in this field—those expecting instant or even predictable results will become frustrated quickly. WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES 312 8393CH13.qxd 8/7/07 1:53 PM Page 312 14 OUTBOUND MARKETING 8393CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 315 Anyone who has spent more than an hour in Marketing 101 knows that customer reten- tion is far less expensive than customer acquisition. Over time, the cost of maintaining profitable relationships with an existing customer base is far less than the buckets of dollars poured into the marketing cannon aimed at reining in new customers. In fact, the difference runs anywhere from three to ten times, depending on the study you read. Once a customer becomes a customer, they can be a gift that keeps on giving. If provided good products and services at a fair price, most people will have no inclination to switch; people like what they know, and a company that consistently delivers the goods will get repeat business. It is amazing to see how many companies, when drawing up their market- ing plans, utterly fail to remember this. The worst offenders are business-to-business (B2B) marketers. Consumer industries like retail and travel have mastered the art of customer retention, from buy-one-get-one-free coupons to elaborate direct response campaigns. But despite huge investments in direct marketing, 1 many companies still struggle to leverage the massive business opportunity sitting within their own customer base. This is not for lack of will or capital. Rather, it’s a lack of understanding of how the world at large perceives marketing attempts by a com- pany with whom they have already conducted business. Customer marketing takes several forms. Some, like working with an inside sales team, have little to do with the online world; others, like outbound marketing, rely completely on the Internet as the delivery medium. The Web has opened a lot of opportunities to direct marketers. Outbound marketing avenues like e-mail and RSS are relatively new platforms for reaching people, and if used correctly, can reap tremendous returns down the road. Unfortunately, a medium like e-mail is so littered with government regulation and so abused by irresponsible, maverick spammers that it’s often difficult to sift through the reams of advice to find true best practices. This chapter will clarify what constitutes good outbound marketing, with a spotlight on e-mail and RSS. There is much to be said (and much that has been said) about these means of communication—enough for an entire book, easily—but we’ll focus on corporate B2B marketers. E-mail newsletters When e-mail started to garner widespread adoption, it was not long before the world real- ized its capabilities as a mass media delivery platform. A moderate amount of computer equipment could blast hundreds of thousands of messages in minutes, which was a virtual miracle compared to the expensive and comparatively glacial speed of traditional printed direct mail. In one head-to-head test with direct mail and e-mail advertising, the actual cost of the e-mail campaign was a quarter of the printed version, but a higher number of WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES 316 1. According to the Direct Marketing Association, B2B spending on direct marketing advertising was $77.4 billion in 2005. 8393CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 316 [...]... less) of the width of the larger container See Figure 14-6 for sample proportions 3 29 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 330 WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES Figure 14-6 Sample widths for two- and three-column layouts There is rarely a reason to go to three columns In the interest of brevity and clarity, two are ideal, and three quickly begin to add clutter to the visual hierarchy... out of favor 335 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 336 WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES information—that is read by a feed reader Because this content is always up to date, people will aggregate many different RSS feeds into a single reader so that they don’t have to visit the websites individually Figure 14 -9 shows Bloglines, a website where users can collect and read their favorite... hard-coded display information like width, cell padding, and cell spacing Using CSS to define widths will have unpredictable results, and CSS positioning is absolutely out of the question, unless of course you enjoy the sound of Lotus Notes laughing at you 325 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 326 WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES Figure 14-4 A common two-column design for an e-mail... to as the reply/remove technique 323 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 324 WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES The footer of every e-mail should have explicit directions for unsubscribing Ideally, it should offer three methods: Reply/remove: This is the most important and by far the easiest for recipients A link to an unsubscribe area of the website: This could be a generic unsubscribe... summary.html) 317 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 318 WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES Product and service announcements: Newsletters are a great avenue for announcing new product releases or service offerings, especially when used in combination with other media and traditional advertising Regular features: Newsletters published on a schedule might have tips and tricks, employee... is meeting expectations of the recipient 318 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 3 19 OUTBOUND MARKETING 14 Figure 14-1 This e-mail newsletter contains basic but topical and useful content 3 19 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 320 WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES Writing style Copywriting for e-mail newsletters is a bit different than printed media The infinite vertical space of... people want to find on your site and in search results Keeping this stuff out there for public consumption only increases the chance of attracting more people to the website 331 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 332 WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES Figure 14-7 The newsletter archive presents content in reverse chronological order Publishing platform Finally, after all the hard... e-mail, and does not count messages that were opened more than once This number comes in two flavors: a hard integer (e.g., 4 59 e-mail messages were opened) and a percentage (e.g., the campaign had a 27.43 percent open rate) 14 HTML clicks: This tracks how many total links were clicked 333 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 334 WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES Unsubscribe and bounces:... not add any other fields to the subscription form—asking people for their name, phone number, place of birth, and most embarrassing childhood memory only complicates the process and freaks out would-be subscribers 5 14 www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm 321 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 322 WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES Figure 14-2 This company uses the prime... experience 337 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 338 WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES Implementation RSS enjoys a somewhat sordid history, where lots of people wrote lots of different versions, argued about them, and ultimately distilled their unchecked and uncooperative development efforts into three similar but incompatible formats: RSS 0 .91 : The oldest current specification RSS 2.0: . cycle of fresh and unique content, and these small but numerous links can add up over time. WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES 308 18. www.goarticles.com 19. www.articledashboard.com 20 results will become frustrated quickly. WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES 312 8 393 CH13.qxd 8/7/07 1:53 PM Page 312 14 OUTBOUND MARKETING 8 393 CH14.qxd 8/7/07 2:05 PM Page 315 Anyone. of WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES 316 1. According to the Direct Marketing Association, B2B spending on direct marketing advertising was $77.4 billion in 2005. 8 393 CH14.qxd