Jon's In Waikiki (AKA The Waikiki Marketer)

People often forget to do regular checks on their site. For example – are you absolutely sure that every picture on your site actually shows?

I’ve learned the hard way that one wrong letter in the path can screw things up. Having a ‘broken picture’ icon proudly displayed on one of your pages can do wonders for your credibility.

Another thing people forget is to check their links. Are your outgoing links still pointing correctly?

Are there still working pages and sites at the other end of your links? You’d be surprised how often a site will delete or change the address of a page.

Why Broken Links Can Hurt Even High Ranking Sites

What can happen is your site left high and dry with a bad/broken link. It won’t kill your site, but it is a black mark in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

It gives the impression of a badly maintained site – and therefore an ‘unreliable’ one. Unreliable sites have a habit of dropping in the search engine rankings.

So – check your outgoing links periodically. 1 or 2 may – or may not – hurt you. But they add up and anything that drags your SEO down should be eliminates.

Give yourself the best chance possible – your search engine rankings are sometimes the backbone of your business. Why fool around with that?

This is old news in some ways, but the update is still happening so I consider it fair game. You may have experienced a drop in both PageRank and keyword rankings. This seems to be a bigger update than usual.

Google’s new system, introduced in the last couple of years, was supposedly to be one of ‘Constant Updating’. The idea being that we wouldn’t see the sudden catastrophic drops across the board that the search word experienced before. Businesses who have been around for a few years online can tell you stories of Google updates that came close to putting them out of business.

The lesson there might be ‘Expand your marketing to create other sources of business’ instead of ‘Google Sucks…sometimes’, but I don’t want to preach. The current concern is that this update is reminiscent of those old days, bringing mass upheavals that have affected a lot of industries.

What should you do if your search rankings dropped? Keep working on your SEO, pushing ahead. Look for anything you might have done that created problems (like selling links on your site). Don’t Panic. If you’re doing the right thing(s) you’ll probably rise back up in time. And start looking for other ways of generating business. Depending on one search engine, especially the occasionally volatile Google, puts you at their mercy for your livelihood. Think about that and plan accordingly.

I’m always surprised by sites that either do not have a sitemap (or is it site map? I never know) or hide it away. It’s like they’re ashamed of it.

They shouldn’t be, because it’s an important part of any web site. Some visitors actually look for the site map immediately on arriving.

For others it’s the first place they think of if they don’t see what they’re looking for on the home page.

So why do so many site owners make it so difficult to find. Answer: Beats me. But they shouldn’t.

Your web site should have a prominent link to your site map somewhere toward the top of your home page. And every other page, if at all possible.

It goes back to the #1 rule of site building & layout – give the visitor what they want. It’s difficult to satisfy every conceivable want and need, though.

Especially if you offer a range of products or services. So you do the next best thing as a backup – you give the visitor an easy way to find what they’re looking for.

You do that by making it simple to get to the site map page, where they’ll see everything you offer. And, if you’re smart, that page is laid out in an easy to read & understand structure.

Now – your humanoid aren’t your only market. You also have to think of your other visitors, who are just as important.

They are the search engine bots. Those guys from Google, Yahoo, Bing and everybody else in the search game today. You want to do the same thing for these visitors – make it easy to find everything, and everywhere, on your site.

That starts by putting a text link – NOT a graphic link – to your sitemap on the home page. Serve it up to them on a platter so they can go there and locate every area of your site.

It’s easy to do, yet so many sites miss this. They use a graphic link, which search engine bots can’t follow or they don’t have a link to it at all on the homepage.

Do yourself and your visitors a favor. Put that sitemap text link on your home page and make it stand out. It’s that easy.

Target is being taken to court. Is it because of employee/employer issues? No. Is it because of unsafe products they sold? No.

Is it because of alleged discrimination against a customer? No, but you’re getting warmer.

The National Federation of the Blind is taking Target to court over their web site. Specifically, the fact that they feel Target’s web site is not accessible to the site-impaired.

It’s a case that could affect retailers everywhere. After all, every store and every business has a web site.

What this all boils down to is Web Usability & Accessibility – making and constructing your web site so it is easy to understand and to navigate.

Not only by the blind, but by everyone. It’s a major point that many businesses miss. And that affects their profits more than they think.

Making your web site usable and accessible isn’t the same as adding a wheelchair ramp outside your shop. It’s much more than that.

Usability and accessibility ultimately greases the slide customers ride from entering your store down into the Checkout line.

If you can’t get behind it just from a legal obligation, surely you will appreciate it if you understand that it will affect your bottom line. For the better.

Not only does usability open the site fully to all your customer – it also will help your SEO efforts.

After all, feeding content clearly to your visitors should also make it easier for search engine bots to collect and understand it as well. It’s a win-win all around.

The implications of Target’s case aren’t clear yet. But, requiring businesses to improve their site’s usability might be one of the few things the government could get completely right.

Marketing Sherpa just came out with the results of a new survey. They polled 2500 Search Engine marketers/marketing firms and found that SEO and SEM ran neck and neck. At least with the marketers.

This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve found that search advertising, such as Google Ads, is as profitable and beneficial to business as search optimization.

Besides, as I’ve said before, the 2 can work together to create a dual front effort that can cross-pollinate. It’s win-win if you do it right.

SEM has gotten a bad name with some businesses, unfortunately. Google’s limp response to the click fraud problem is at least partly responsible. At times they made Ford’s response to the Pinto look good.

But there’s another factor in that perception – and it’s shortsightedness by the businesses themselves.

I have heard businesses over and over talk about how they won’t use Google Ads or other search advertising because ‘you have to pay for it’.

As if all the other advertising and marketing they do is free. And all the money they pay for organic search optimization is from their Monopoly game.

SEO & SEM are both great tools and great ways to get business. Both cost money. Both will pay off.

Why would you NOT take advantage of both?

In the past, optimization for images & graphics consisted of stuffing keywords into the ALT tag. This tactic was so abused that Google no longer takes the ALT tag as seriously as it once did.

Still, it’s worth using that outlet for a keyword or 2, as long as it’s done with a lighter touch.

The new SEO opportunity for images, though, is the image name. This isn’t completely a new discovery.

SEOs have been using keyword rich names for their graphics for a while – just in case it did matter in the great search engine algorithm we’re always chasing.

What IS new is the Universal Search that Google now uses as their delivery mode.

Searches can now get a mix of media in their results, including pictures, web sites, videos & just about anything else that might be relevant to the keyphrase used. The amount of ‘mixing’ you see will vary from search to search, of course.

Still, this Universal Search has elevated graphics and videos from just web site elements to something a little more important. At least in the eyes of the search engines.

They’re now given a little more weight as they just might be what the searcher is looking for, rather than an entire web site, or web page.

What does that mean for you? It means you should start naming your graphics with keywords, but with one crucial criteria – doing it only when appropriate and relevant.

Still, that opens a lot of opportunity. How do you do it right?

You must separate words, just as you would if they were written out. No words running together.

That means using a dash (‘-‘) as a divider. For example, if you sell convertibles, you might name a picture ‘Ford-Convertible.jpg’ or ‘Vintage-Mustang-Convertible.jpg’. It’s easy.

You can probably use the underscore as well ( ‘_’ ), but it can create confusion as it is overlooked often. It’s position there on the floor can bring problems you never thought of.

Trust me on this.

It looks like the other side of the coin is valid as well. A couple of posts back I wrote about studies that showed how search directly influenced offline sales.

Now, another study has come out, done by Jupiter Research.

This time, the numbers told us something interesting about offline influencing online.

According to the study, 2/3 of searchers have done searches on certain keywords as a result of exposure to offline marketing/advertising.

That makes a solid case for traditional advertising/marketing being far from dead.  Some have trumpeted the end of these outlets in the past few years, but this study has shown those funeral notices to be premature.

Even better news for offline efforts – 39% of those who were ‘influenced’ to do an online search made a purchase on-site.

That’s the kind of traffic businesses want to get.

It backs up my belief that offline/online advertising and marketing can serve each other, building both sides of the business to new heights.

2 new studies and their findings were revealed recently, one of them commissioned by Yahoo. The Yahoo study involved 175,00 subjects who were divided by their exposure, or non-exposure, to online ads.

Their demographics and ‘behavior’ patterns were identical otherwise. Very interesting data emerged that showed the strength online advertising gives to your offline sales:

> Those shown ads online did more pre-shopping, ie research, and they spent 41% more in-store than their non-exposed counterparts.

The 2nd study, by comScore surveyed 3,000 consumers. They found that these local searchers (ie people specifically looking for a store, product, service offered in their area) followed up their online research with offline contact 82% of the time.

That contact took the form of a store visit, phone call and/or purchase. Of those who made the offline follow-up, 61% of them made a purchase. That’s not a bad payoff.

The lesson here is that online advertising – whether that’s Google Ads, or Bing/Yahoo Ads’ program – bring profits and business to you offline as much, even more, than through online means.

A Google Ads campaign that doesn’t produce emails or other online interaction isn’t necessarily an unproductive effort. There’s more to online marketing than just having a website.

Google, or at least its Australian brand/version, is being sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

The allegation being made is that Google is not making the distinction between paid listings and organic listings clear enough. This will be interesting to watch as it could affect the entire industry, advertisers included.

This isn’t the first time this has been noted. Ask was notorious for piling up their paid listings before the searcher got to see the first organic one.

They took the path that said the best thing to encourage the sale of search ads was to put them in pole position. Forget down the right side – on top of the listings is where it’s at!

Though Ask has backed off from that policy, Google went the other way, though not to the extreme of the former.

Before, Google placed their ads exclusively down the right side. This was all part of their famous ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto. That motto has been taking a beating lately, what with Google’s adherence to demands from the Chinese government and other transgressions.

The placement of 2 paid search ads directly above the organic listings has been going on for a little while now. True, they do put the in a shaded box, which may represent the gray areas they now dwell in instead of the Black & White ‘Don’t Be Evil’ ones they once claimed.

With Australia’s move to sue them, this could be the end of the 2 ads above structure. Even if it is only in Australia where that takes place initially, it could spread, prompting the same change worldwide.

It isn’t clear exactly how much more valuable the real estate is above the organic listings, as opposed to the lots to the right of them. Still, the advantages of that placement are clear. If those 2 places are lost to Google through legal/government intervention, will that depress prices? Businesses probably won’t pay the same highg bid prices if the standard gain from being #1 or #2 is lost. Then again, maybe they will if the profits still come in from AdWords advertising.

Either way, it’s something to keep an eye on. Who knows – maybe your click bid price will be coming down. But your click-thru rate might come down with it.

Previously you read about that fact that Yahoo & Google had agreed on the Site Map standard; ie a Site Map file specially made for the search engine bots, usually an XML file, telling them the address of each page, when it was added, etc.

Since I blogged about that the Big 2 search engines were joined by Ask and MSN, making it more or less a clean sweep of major search engines. There may be some small holdouts out there, but they’re fringe players at best. What that means is that if you weren’t using these Site Maps before, you had better start now. You know what happens to people who don’t use the standards Bill Gates does…

A new development has happened that has made this standard even easier to use. Previously you had to go to Yahoo and/or Google and tell them where exactly the Site Map was located. In other words you had to give them the URL. I’m not sure why exactly they couldn’t find it themselves. It’s is right up there with why can’t Google understand that MySite.com & www.MySite.com are the same site? Still, they did get around to fixing the Site Map dilemma. Here’s what you do.

In your Robots.txt file, put this line:

Sitemap: LOCATION-OF-SITEMAPS-FILE

Using our previous example, you’d put:

Sitemap: http://www.MySite.com/sitemap.xml

You can give your site map a different name then sitemap.xml, but keeping it that way – simple and to the point – may be your best bet. I suggest you do this as soon as possible, even if you’ve told Google & Yahoo where the file is already. You never know what’s going to happen. Besides, as this makes it way across the Internet, to the other 1% not dominated by the Big 4, it’ll do you good. No need to thank me. I’m just doing my job.