Tag Archives: search engine

Mar 23

Outreach gets people to your meetinghouse / Hospitality keeps people returning.

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Over on Twit­ter feed came a tweet (h/t revrevwine):

seo - Google SearchTo trans­late, SEO is “search engine opti­miza­tion,” the often-huckersterish art of trick­ing Google to dis­play your web­site higher than your com­peti­tors in search results. “Usabil­ity” is the catch-all term for mak­ing your web­site easy to nav­i­gate and invit­ing to vis­i­tors. Com­pa­nies with deep pock­ets often want to spend a lot of money on SEO, when most of the time the most viable long-term solu­tion to rank­ing high with search engines is to pro­vide vis­i­tors with good rea­sons to visit your site. What if we applied these prin­ci­ples to our churches and meet­ing­houses and swapped the terms?

Out­reach gets peo­ple to your meet­ing­house /
Hos­pi­tal­ity keeps peo­ple returning.

A lot of Quaker meet­ing­houses have pretty good “nat­ural SEO.” Here in the U.S. East Coast, they’re often near a major road in the mid­dle of town. If they’re lucky there are a few his­tor­i­cal mark­ers of notable Quak­ers and if they are really lucky there’s a highly-respected Friends school nearby. All these meet­ings really have to do is put a nice sign out front and table a few town events every year. The rest is cov­ered. Although we do get the occa­sional “aren’t you all Amish?” com­ments, we have a much wider rep­u­ta­tion that our num­bers would nec­es­sar­ily war­rant. We rank pretty high.

But what are the lessons of hos­pi­tal­ity we could work on? Do we pro­vide places where spir­i­tual seek­ers can both grow per­son­ally and engage in the impor­tant ques­tions of the faith in the mod­ern world? Are we invi­ta­tional, bring­ing peo­ple into our homes and into our lives for shared meals and conversations?

In my free­lance days when I was hired to work on SEO I ran through a series of sta­tis­ti­cal reports and redesigned some under­per­form­ing pages, but then turned my atten­tion to the client’s con­tent. It was in this realm that my great­est quan­tifi­able suc­cesses occurred. At the heart of the con­tent work was ask­ing how could the site could more fully engage with first-time vis­i­tors. The “usabil­ity con­sid­er­a­tions” on the Wikipedia page on usabil­ity could be eas­ily adapted as queries:

Who are the users, what do they know, what can they learn? What do users want or need to do? What is the users’ gen­eral back­ground? What is the users’ con­text for work­ing? What must be left to the machine? Can users eas­ily accom­plish intended tasks at their desired speed? How much train­ing do users need? What doc­u­men­ta­tion or other sup­port­ing mate­ri­als are avail­able to help the user?

I’d love to see Friends con­sider this more. FGC’s “New Meet­ings Tool­box” has a sec­tion on wel­com­ing new­com­ers. But I’d love to hear more sto­ries about how we’re work­ing on the “usabil­ity” of our spir­i­tual communities.

Jun 09

DiMeo Blueberry Farms & Nursery

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DiMeo Blueberry FarmsThe DiMeo fam­ily owns and oper­ates sev­eral of the largest blue­berry farms in the world, right here in the “blue­berry cap­i­tal of the world”: Ham­mon­ton, New Jer­sey. They have an exist­ing web­site that is hand-edited. We cre­ated a sec­ond site using Word­Press.
On launch it has much of the same con­tent as the other site, but arranged into posts and cat­e­go­rized and tagged for search engine vis­i­bil­ity. It also high­lights the DiMeo Blue­berry Farms’ Face­book, Twit­ter and Youtube out­lets. I’ll be inter­ested to see how it gets picked up by search engines and how vis­i­tors start to use it



See also: DiMeo Blue­berry Farms on Mer­chant Cir­cle, Youtube, Face­book and Twit­ter.
Jul 01

What to look for in SEO consultants

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This is part of my Beyond SEO series where I look at the myths and real­i­ties behind search engine opti­miza­tion, with prac­ti­cal tips about pub­li­ciz­ing your site and build­ing your per­sonal brand. Read all of my Beyond SEO arti­cles.

The Google blog asks for user input into what makes a good SEO and reports that they’ve just rewrit­ten their page that warns against rogue SEO artists and gives rec­om­men­da­tions about what to look out for. It starts with their def­i­n­i­tion

SEO is an acronym for “search engine opti­miza­tion” or “search engine opti­mizer.” Decid­ing to hire an SEO is a big deci­sion. Make sure to research the poten­tial advan­tages as well as the dam­age that an irre­spon­si­ble SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agen­cies and con­sul­tants pro­vide use­ful ser­vices for web­site owners.

The blog asks “how would you define SEO? What ques­tions would you ask a prospec­tive SEO?” I’ve been doing a lot more opti­miza­tion for clients lately. What’s par­tic­u­larly fun is run­ning across the work of the SEO scam artists their com­pe­ti­tion have brought in. I’ve seen many instances where the other SEO firm has stepped over the bounds of fair prac­tice and been penal­ized by Google.

Google’s job and our job

I’ve always taken the approach that it’s Google’s job to give peo­ple
the most use­ful and rel­e­vant return for their search and our job to
make sure we have use­ful and rel­e­vant mate­r­ial and arrange it in such a
way that Google can access it.

SEO is impor­tant but only in the
con­text of smart web design and a coher­ent and well thought out
inter­net mar­ket­ing strat­egy. Firms that claim to do SEO
with­out check­ing the ana­lyt­ics data and con­sult­ing with the client
about their busi­ness strat­egy will not help the site in the long run.

What your SEO expert should be doing

I would agree with most of Google’s rec­om­men­da­tions of what to look out against. But what to look for? A quick list would include:

  • A SEO con­sul­tant that looks at ana­lyt­ics data before mak­ing any changes. If the client doesn’t already have Google Ana­lyt­ics run­ning on the site I install it and wait a month before doing any­thing. I do that because you want:
  • Quan­tifi­able results. You should be able to see shift­ing use pat­terns if the opti­miza­tion is work­ing. The inter­net gives us pre­cise fig­ures and it’s often very easy to demon­strate the value of the work you’ve done. Clients should have full access to the ana­lyt­ics and be trained enough to be able to inde­pen­dently ver­ify the results.
  • A con­sul­tant that fre­quently answers ques­tions with “Hmmm…, I don’t know.” No one knows what Google is doing. You try some­thing, then you try some­thing else. Any­one who claims to know every­thing is scam­ming you.
  • Some­one who looks at your entire busi­ness model and asks hard ques­tions about your inter­net strat­egy. What do you hope to accom­plish with your site. Are there spe­cific goals that we can measure?
  • Think about your Inbound and Out­bound strate­gies. Google will send peo­ple your way if you have use­ful mate­r­ial so think about what com­pelling con­tent you can offer the uni­verse. And once peo­ple come to the site you have to make it com­pelling for them to stay a while, sub­scribe, etc.
  • The SEO con­sul­tant should make you sweat: any­one who says they can sig­nif­i­cantly boost your site with­out you hav­ing to lift a fin­ger is fool­ing you. You will almost always have to add com­pelling con­tent and it will take you com­mit­ting staff time to the project (a good devel­op­ment team will look for ways to make this fit into your exist­ing staff rou­tines so that it’s as pain­less as possible!).

Any oth­ers sug­ges­tions for what to look for in poten­tial SEO consultants?

Sep 28

Talking like a Quaker: does anyone really care about schism anymore?

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Over on my design blog I’ve just posted an arti­cle, Bank­ing on rep­u­ta­tions, which looks at how the web­sites for high-profile cul­tural insti­tu­tions are often built with­out regard to nat­ural web publicity–there’s no focus on net cul­ture or search engine vis­i­bil­ity. The sites do get vis­ited, but only because of the rep­u­ta­tion of the insti­tu­tion itself. My guess is that peo­ple go to them for very spe­cific func­tions (look­ing up a phone num­ber, order­ing tick­ets, etc.). I fin­ish by ask­ing the ques­tion, “Are the audi­ences of high brow insti­tu­tions so full of hip young audi­ences that they can steer clear of web-centric marketing?”

I won’t bela­bor the point, but I won­der if some­thing sim­i­lar is hap­pen­ing within Friends. It’s kind of weird that only two peo­ple have com­mented on Johan Maurer’s blog post about Bal­ti­more Yearly Meeting’s report on Friends United Meet­ing. Johan’s post may well be the only place where online dis­cus­sion about this par­tic­u­lar report is avail­able. I gave a plug for it and it was the most pop­u­lar link from Quak­erQuaker, so I know peo­ple are see­ing it. The larger issue is dealt with else­where (Bill Samuel has a par­tic­u­larly use­ful resource page) but Johan’s piece seems to be get­ting a big yawn.

It’s been super­seded as the most pop­u­lar Quak­erQuaker link by a light­hearted call for an Inter­na­tional Talk Like a Quaker Day put up by a Live­jour­nal blog­ger. It’s fun but it’s about as seri­ous as you might expect. It’s get­ting picked up on a num­ber of blogs, has more links than Johan’s piece and at cur­rent count has thir­teen com­menters. I think it’s a great way to poke a lit­tle fun of our­selves and think about out­reach and I’m happy to link to it but I have to think there’s a les­son in its pop­u­lar­ity vis-a-vis Johan’s post.

Here’s the inevitable ques­tion: do most Quak­ers just not care about Friends United Meet­ing or Bal­ti­more Yearly Meet­ing, about a mod­ern day cul­ture clash that is but a few degrees from boil­ing over into full-scale insti­tu­tional schism? For all my bravado I’m as much an insti­tu­tional Quaker as any­one else. I care about our denom­i­na­tional pol­i­tics but do oth­ers, and do they really?

Yearly meet­ing ses­sions and more entertainment-focused Quaker gath­er­ings are lucky if they get three to five per­cent atten­dance. The gov­ern­ing body of my yearly meet­ing is made up of about one per­cent of its mem­ber­ship; add a per­cent or two or three and you have how many peo­ple actu­ally pay any kind of atten­tion to it or to yearly meet­ing pol­i­tics. A few years ago a Quaker pub­lisher com­mis­sioned a promi­nent Friend to write an update to lib­eral Friends’ most widely read intro­duc­tory book and she man­gled the whole thing (down to a totally made-up acronym for FWCC) and no one noticed till after publication–even insid­ers don’t care about most of this!

Are the bulk of most con­tem­po­rary Friends post-institutional? The per­cent­age of Friends involved in the work of our reli­gious bod­ies has per­haps always been small, but the divide seems more strik­ing now that the inter­net is pro­vid­ing com­pe­ti­tion. The big Quaker insti­tu­tions skate on being rec­og­nized as offi­cial bod­ies but if their par­tic­i­pa­tion rate is low, their recog­ni­tion fac­tor small, and their abil­ity to influ­ence the Quaker cul­ture there­fore min­i­mal, then are they really so impor­tant? After six years of mar­riage I can hear my wife’s ques­tion as a Quaker-turned-Catholic: where does the reli­gious author­ity of these bod­ies come from? As some­one who sees the world through a sociological/historical per­spec­tive, my ques­tion is com­ple­men­tary but some­what dif­fer­ent: if so few peo­ple care, then is there author­ity? The only time I see Friends close to tears over any of this is when
a schism might mean the loss of con­trol over a beloved school or campground–factor out
the sen­ti­men­tal fac­tor and what’s left?

I don’t think a dimin­ish­ing influ­ence is a pos­i­tive trend, but it won’t go away if we bury our heads in the sand (or in com­mit­tees). How are today’s gen­er­a­tion of Friends going to deal with chang­ing cul­tural forces that are threat­en­ing to under­mine our cur­rent prac­tices? And how might we use the new oppor­tu­ni­ties to advance the Quaker mes­sage and Christ’s agenda?