Design Search Friendly Website Content

Avoid the most common website design mistake of all time. Learn how to develop web pages that are search engine friendly!

Website Content Design Objectives
Website content design is driven by a number of important objectives that at first may seem to conflict. For example, I have written elsewhere about the importance of designing website content that matches the look and feel of offline marketing materials such as direct mail, print ads, TV or even banners.

Designing the look and feel of your web pages to match your direct mail or other advertising is an important way to give customers vital clues that they have arrived at the right place and gives customers confidence that their transactions on your site will be safe and secure.

Website Content Design Errors
Unfortunately, many designers choose to use graphics as a way to match the look and feel of web pages to other marketing materials. Choosing to create a high graphic content website is one of the most common errors seen. The choice is innocent enough… attempting to develop website content in HTML does not give much flexibility with font selection, offers little control over font size and the relationship between text and photo elements, and HTML’s layout options are boxy or static, etc. etc. etc.

Plus, many people who design content for web pages are used to developing content for print using InDesign, PhotoShop or Quark. So, they tend to choose the tools they know best.

High Graphic Content Problems
The high graphic content method (essentially designing content with large static images with text, photos, and layout) gives website designers much greater flexibility in presentation. BUT, it can be a major problem for attracting web traffic through organic search.

Pages with high graphic content load slower which is an annoyance to surfers and may cause them to hit the back button before they even see your page. This is called a “bounce” and its a bad metric. Slow page load time can also cause your page to be demoted in the search algorithms used by Google et al. to determine page rank. The search engine ranking will favor fast loading pages.
The BIG PROBLEM is that your web page has little or no text-based content for the search engines to scan, score and categorize. And if the search engines cannot read your website’s content they do not know what your page is all about and therefore do not know how to present the web page conducting searches by keyword.
Bottom line, when your customers are searching for solutions and products based on keywords and content… your pages won’t show up!

How can you fix your website?

Developing Search Engine Friendly Web Pages
Add text-based content to your web pages — you will get the best results by simply biting the bullet and adding HTML based text content to your website. This can be as little as a couple of well thought out paragraphs that contains the important and relevant keywords and information search engines need to assess the content of your web pages. This injection of text does not necessarily have to take the place of your graphic content, you can add this text-based content in addition to your graphic content and preserve the essence of your design.
Know your keywords — before you begin developing content and adding paragraphs of HTML based text do some keyword research. Determine what keywords your customers would actually use to find sites offering products and services like yours. You may be in for a surprise
If you simply cannot change the structure of your pages try this:
Use ALT Tags for Pictures and Graphics — based on your keyword research write relevant text-based descriptions and tags for your images. These elements are added behind the scenes into the code used to display your images and are not visible in your customer’s browser. So, if these tags cannot be seen why do they exist you ask? Well, these tags can be seen by visitors who change their browser setting to not display images or by handicapped visitors who are using reading software so they can have the web page contents read to them. The good thing is the search engine spiders also read them and can use them to index and categorize your web pages.
Develop Static Text Based Pages — develop content-rich pages in plain old HTML. You can mimic the content found on your graphics-heavy pages or develop new content. Remember to make these pages useful and readable. Then make sure these pages are heavily linked to the rest of your site using both internal and external links. Now, your organic search traffic will find and visit your HTML text-based pages while traffic driven from print or direct mail to a specific URL will still see your branded and graphically coordinated content.

Long Tail Keywords for Organic Search

long-tail your website’s home page is getting good ranking for the specific keyword you might think that your search engine optimization work is done… But you could be missing out on a large volume of potential traffic. You should consider the use of long tail keywords for search.

Your interests are better served by considering your website as a complete entity. Your home page can only be reasonably be optimized properly for the one or perhaps two keyword phrases. But, as you know there are potentially a lot more keyword phrases that your web site could be attracting traffic for. But, it would be unwise to try to get your home page to include all these specific long tail keywords or keywords phrases.

Long tail keywords don’t “fit” on your home page
Your website’s home page is best kept as a “storefront” for the rest of your website. Your home page provides:

the look and feel you want for your business
some basic information about your company and its products
some easy to use navigation
It’s plain to see that most good or effective home pages are not going to have a lot of content. It is simply not the function of a home page to explain everything your company does. Nor is it good practice to try to include a lot of interesting content on your home page. Rather your home page is a dashboard which visitors use to access your additional content.

Long Tail Keywords in Back-links
Even if you to get a lot of links to your home page with great long-tail keyword anchor text your home page may still not rank very well for these words or phrases. That’s because the contents of your page must correlate to the keywords in your link’s anchor text. Design-wise and user experience-wise your home page is not the ideal place to optimize for multiple keywords or long tail keywords because it will be confusing and send a lot of wrong signals.

Long tail keywords for deep links
Instead of trying to stuff in a lot of relevant keywords to your home page it is far better to create new pages with specific content matching your keyword driven links. This, in a nutshell is what is called deep linking… serious mojo for search engine ranking.

Long tail keywords for internal linking
This technique also allows you to create internal links from your home page to your content pages. These internal links serve the same purpose as external links. The anchor text used on your internal links tells the search engines crawling your site a lot about the content of the target page. This is one of the key ways search engines know what your web page is all about and therefore how to categorize and list your page in their algorithms.

Getting Video Content in Search Results

Did you know that viewership and user-generated videos have gone up nearly 48% from 2008, and you can bet it will go up even more next year!

Marketing with content is a great way to draw traffic to your site through organic search. All the major search engines have complex algorithms for crawling sites, analyzing the text-based content, indexing that content and using it to deliver relevant search results for users. But…

Video Content Left Out of Search Engine Results
This text-based approach used by Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. has left much of what we value as content out of the content game… the biggest and best example being video. If you are a business that creates video content you have probably found this to be a major frustration.

Current search engine algorithms have no way to know what the content of a video file contains. The process of deciphering the content of a video with a search engine spider and indexing algorithm would require a level of artificial intelligence not yet developed by humans.

Work Arounds for Getting Video Content into Search Results
Here are four workaround strategies you can use to get your video content to start showing up in search engine results:

Did you know that YouTube is now secretly transcribing the audio in your videos and using this data to help with relevancy in search results? You may have considered creating transcripts of your video content to get your videos to show in search engine results pages but the cost is high for the potential return. If you host your videos on YouTube not only do you save a ton of bandwidth… you may get your transcriptions free as part of the package.
Not really a search-oriented tip but a cool little improvement for your viewers. If you can add “&fmt;=18” to the end of your video link and it will display in HD when that link is clicked?
You can boost your video content’s likelihood of showing up in keyword searches by simply renaming your video file before uploading it. Most videos have file names like this “047y6708dsx.mov” Change it to a keyword or three that are relevant to your market. I have discussed this technique of writing keyword oriented file names for better search results before but it applies to video content even more. Without a transcript, the only way a search engine can determine the content of a video file is by the file name or the tags. Make sure you use these to your best advantage.
These quick tips should help you get more organic search traffic for your video content. Make sure you use these simple production level tips to boost your results.

Get More Local Customers With Search

You can have a great website optimized for your type of business with lots of great representative keywords and anchor text but does general search optimization really do you that much good when your primary source of new customers is local.

If a potential customer were to search for “electrician Raleigh NC”, The businesses are listed according to which is the closest to the center of the town. In fact, some of the businesses located closer to the center of town than you could have a terrible website or no website at all! If you are located in the outskirts local search can be a bit frustrating.

So, what can you do to get a higher rank on the results pages for local search? Try this handy checklist as a guide to get started:

Optimize your local directory listings with Google, Yahoo, Bing
Make sure to use keywords in the description.
If possible, modify the company name to include keywords (instead of Richard & Sons make it Richard & Sons Plumbing” so it shows up for “plumbing” + location.
Ask your satisfied customers to write up a quick testimonial on your Google, Yahoo, Bing listings. the more reviews you have on your local listings the better you will rank.
Add media to your listing such as video, photos, coupons as well.
Optimization your website for local search
Make sure you have your physical address in text on your website, place it on every page that is appropriate.
Write blog posts or add supplemental pages on your site that incorporate the locations of nearby suburbs or cities. You may start out with Plumbing, Raleigh but also have subpages for Plumbing, Cary or Plumbing, Apex.
Add geotagging to your site’s meta tags. Geo-tags are little known to most but are expected to have increasing importance due to the increase in GPS use by the average person on the street.
Include your address in your title tags.
Include your address in your meta description.
Optimize your links for local search
Seek out links from a website that are also located in your city or geographic area.
Register with authority sites such as the Chamber of Commerce, Yellowpages.com, Yelp etc. You may not get a link but you usually get a “citation”. These citations are not backlinks to your website, they are simply content on pages that connect you to a locality. Most likely because of the regional authority of the site you are mentioned on or having local city names located on the same page as the mention of your name. The more citations you have the better you will rank for your competitive locality.
Consider where your website domain name is registered. If you are in the U.S. make sure your domain is purchased through a U.S. company.
Consider where your website is hosted. try to locate in the geographic you are targeting or at least the same country.

Top 10 PPC Alternatives

Google is the undisputed killer-app in PPC advertising. By virtue of its size and scope, Google allows advertisers to highly leverage their activity over a huge spectrum of web users on both search engine results pages (SERPs) and contextual ads appearing on participating websites. But…

This size also means smaller advertisers can be crowded out by larger competitors with deeper pockets drive bidding up to untenable levels. However, a number of excellent alternatives exist that sometimes offer much better value for money than Adwords. By using these programs in place of Adwords advertisers can significantly increase traffic to their websites for a lot less money.

Many of these programs also have much looser terms and conditions that allow advertisers to create campaigns they could not run on Google without getting rejected. If you looking for effective alternatives to Google then take a look at these Top 10 alternatives to Google’s Adwords program that are ideal for the small time advertiser and business.

Top 10 Paid Search alternatives to Google’s Adwords

AdBrite
Clicksor
Bidvertiser
Exit Junction
Chitika
AdToll
Yahoo Publisher Network
Target Point
Fastclick
ClickThruTraffic

Note: These descriptions do not represent any form of endorsement every business is responsible for choosing the programs that best fit their needs.

AdBrite

AdBrite should be your first stop when shopping for AdWords alternatives. Small Business advertisers can use AdBrite to set ad rates and effectively reach over 370 million visitors on more than 80,000 sites all with a single campaign buy. AdBrite’s continues to grow their market share. However, most of Adbrite’s traffic is outside the U.S.

While AdBrite can provide advertisers with better ads and formats, plus you can purchase display ads directly on sites showing AdBrite ads for very cost-effective rates — something the other ad systems don’t typically do.

AdBrite offers

Text Ads
Banners
Full Page Ads
Inline Ads
BritePic (Custom interactive photo ads)

There is no obligation to purchase when you can sign up and you can play with all of their tools and experiment before purchasing any ads

Clicksor

Clicksor is another leader in the field providing CPC and CPM advertising solutions that are similar to Adwords but cheaper and possibly very effective for small businesses. Clicksor offers a wide range of ad formats including all of the standard Adwords formats plus some very effective alternatives such as pop-under and interstitial ads.

Clicksor has a large network of high-quality publishers while still offering bid prices that are significantly lower than equivalent keywords on Adwords. Like most smaller networks Clicksor is more tolerant than Google. Clicksor allows you to start advertising from just 0.3c per click.

Clicksor also has a big advantage over a number of the lower ranked alternatives on this site in that their ads are truly context sensitive. Thus as an advertiser, you can be sure that your ads show only on relevant sites increasing their effectiveness.

The ad creation and campaign control tools provided by Clicksor are rudimentary but enough for you to keep track of all of your campaign results and expenses.

Clicksor Offers:

Multiple formats available including text, image and animated ads.

Text Links
Image Ads
Flash Ads
Animation Ads
Banners
Pop unders
Interstitial Ads (NEW)
Dynamic (DHTML) highlighting

Bidvertiser

BidVertiser offers some intriguing ad formats including what they refer to as a free design. Free design lets you specify the look and dimensions of your text ads so you can stand out from the crowd. I have not investigated how well it works but imagine that it could be difficult to set up. But, if you have access to cheap graphic design then customizing could result in more cost-efficient ads.

BidVertiser can be used to drive customers to eBay listings. Once you select your eBay item the ad is created for you automatically with the minimum amount of effort. A great be if you are doing a lot of business on eBay.

Bidvertiser offers:

Pay only for the clicks you receive.
Site-Targeted pay per click advertising.
Create your ads in minutes.
Choose your geographic targeting
Closely monitor the performance of your ads

BidVertiser boasts fraud-detection system that protects its customers from click fraud, ensuring that only valid and legit clicks are counted. Each click is processed online by their fraud-detection system, using a sophisticated algorithm that is being constantly updated by the fraud-detection team.

Exit Junction (for publishers) /Dynamic Oxygen (for advertisers)

Exit Junction is not strictly an Adwords alternative but is an excellent addition other contextual advertising programs. As their name implies Exit Junctions approach is to capture exit traffic from participating sites.

Here’s how it works

A user runs a Google search and a website you are advertising on scores highly for that keyword
The user clicks the link and visits the page
When the user presses the back button to exit the page and go back to the original search results Exit Junction intercepts the back command and show a set of sponsored links that match the original Google search term.

This method is a great example of surfus interuptus and is considered by many to be very obnoxious. Use with caution. Most uses of this technique appear to lack targeting. Probably because of the type of bubusinesseshat are using them. However, I have seen some neam brand advertising in this murky underworld realm.

Chitika

Chitika offers what they call impulse merchandising. Chitika offers innovative publisher-side advertising and merchandising solutions.

Chitika can be considered an Adwords alternative only if you are selling product via e-commerce. Chitika allows you to compliment your existing PPC advertising campaigns with ads featuring specific products for sale directly through their advertisements. Instead of displaying the ‘industry standard’ advert boxes with image, video and text Chitika provides active boxes that show targeted products from your advertising campaigns. As an advertiser y,ou only pay for the click thru on the ad if someone actually purchases the product.

Chitika tracks people arriving at the participating publisher website via search engines and then converts the search engine string into a series of keywords. COOL. Then Chitika serves an advertisement featuring products deemed appropriate for the keywordsfound in the string.

Chitika is a proven channel for targeting on-line consumers and qualified buyers with appropriate merchadise on the fly as they surf.

AdToll

AdToll is an adwords alternative offering unique creatives that charge on a CPC basis. AdToll’s newest technology is the Peel Away Ad. This is a technology that allows you to advertise in the form of ads that peel away on the top right hand side of a web site. The key to this ad format is that when the mouse moves over the peel it opens in a smooth manner to reveal the advert underneath.

The new ad format allows publishers to make use of the lesser used, yet highly visible top corners of web sites and provides you the advertiser with a space to place your ads that is noticeable, intriguing to website visitors, and higly flexible with regard to graphic presentattion. Atoll’s peel away It is also a very non intrusive form of advertising.

TargetPoint

Targetpoint is an Adwords alternative with services that allow your to have absolute control over the appearance of your ads. They provide strict supervision over ad content which preserves the quality of their network and reduces CPC and CPM costs from fraudulent clicks and sites.

TargetPoint can be very choosy regarding which sites are accepted into either the advertising or the publishing programs. They are mainly interested in very large accounts and so if you are a small business owner looking for a cost effective but small advertising solution then this is probably not the best choice but does provide and alternative if all else fails.

Target Point offers:

Provides support for context-relevant, revenue-evaluated ads.
Exitpoint provides a way to show your ads to web site exit traffic.
Imagepoint allows you to use visual ads. These are known to the rest of the world as Image ads.
Underpoint provides for pop-under ad windows.
Registration is free and there is no obligation.

ValueClick

At first glance, ValueClick would appear to be one of the better alternatives to Google’s Adwords program providing a range of value ad products to advertisers along with lower CPM and CPC costs than Adwords. However, they are only interested in large customers and so most people will not qualify.

You would have thought that these companies would have learned from Google’s success and realize that the best way to make money is by targeting both small and large customers.

If you can get yourself accepted to ValueClick then you may be able to create some excellent campaigns on high profile websites. However, be prepared to pay for the privilege.

ValueClick offers:

Image Ads
Text based creatives.
Interstitial Ads
Pop-Under Adverts
InVue – a custom ad format.
ClickThruTraffic

This is not the best alternative to adwords but if you are not happy with the others listed above then try these guys. They still have a limited publishing pool which limits you ad exposure but makes campaigns significantly cheaper with bids starting in the 0.5c to 2c range.

Advert wise they offer the standard selection of context based text links, buttons and banners.

Yahoo and MSN

You probably already know about these two. Both are very similar to Google as far as offeriing a lot of tracking info an analytical tools but they are both significantly more difficult to use.

Yahoo continues to be an also-ran lagging far behind Google and getting further behind all the time. But if you want to extend your reach then give them a try. Lots of people continue to use them for search. Be prepared to pull out some hair along the way.

MSN has the potential to be a contender. They are contiuing to try new things most of which have not worked. Their newest trick seems to be serving up contextual ads not based on the content of the page but on the profile of the person doing the search. I guess they are finally going to start using all that detailed info they have been collecting about us for the past 20 years.